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But could he find a rhyme for 'improved muzzle velocity'?

21/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Kalashnikov: 'happy man.' ( )

The Russians, those great lovers of language, recently honoured one of their most famous citizens, a failed poet.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, however, was dubbed a "Hero of Russia" on his 90th birthday not for his mediocre verse (free, blank or otherwise), but for another creative endeavour that turned out to have quite an impact.

Kalashnikov invented the AK-47 assault rifle, which in the second half of the 20th century became the weapon of choice among the armies of every Soviet client state from Latin America to the Middle East.

"I wrote poetry in my youth, and people thought I would become a poet," he told his admirers, according a wire-service report of the ceremony.

"But I didn't become one. There are many bad poets out there without me. I went along a different path."

This story is rife with ironies. For one, Kalashnikov's 90th birthday was Nov. 10, and it was celebrated in Moscow while the rest of the world marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, a structure the AK-47 helped to prop up.

For another, despite his PhD in engineering, Kalashnikov did continue to write poetry. He is said to have published at least a half a dozen volumes, though it's unlikely any have been translated into English. (Probably a mercy, too.)

The whole idea of an engineer being attuned to poetry seems counter-intuitive. It up-ends our stereotypes of both disciplines.

Aren't poets impractical klutzes who can barely operate a can opener? Don't engineers tend to be guys who have trouble writing their names?

Perhaps we shouldn't think this. The University of Manitoba's current president, David Barnard, has a doctorate in computer science (an anti-poetic discipline if there ever was one), but he's also a published poet known for spouting verse at every opportunity.

And though the humanities like to take ownership of the notion of human creativity, the inventions of applied science are every bit as creative as any musical composition or painting. Meanwhile, the concepts of pure science, from Darwin's natural selection to Einstein's relativity, have unquestionably altered civilization as much as, say, the "inventions" of democracy or capitalism.

The AK-47 name, by the way, is the Russian inversion of "Kalashnikov's Automatic." The "47" refers to the year he designed it.

Today in Russia, the Kalashnikov surname is as much a prideful national brand as Kellogg's Corn Flakes, the Phillips screwdriver and Hershey's chocolate are in the U.S.

The inventor, alas, had to be content with fame. It's doubtful the Communist system conferred upon him patent rights and the attendant millions.

This hasn't seem to bother Kalashnikov. He told a Russian newspaper that he was a "happy man."

"Of course, like anyone else, there are things to regret," he said. "But I can say one thing: I would not have chosen to lead my life any other way if I had had the opportunity."

Would humanity be better off had Kalashnikov stuck with rhyming couplets? Perhaps if the Soviet Bloc had had no access to an inexpensive automatic weapon, communism would have collapsed sooner in the sights of American M15 and M16 rifles.

Unlike, say, Alfred Nobel, who invested his dynamite fortune into funding peace and literature prizes, or Robert Oppenheimer, who had second thoughts about the value of his work on the atomic bomb, Kalashnikov made no apologies.

"I created a weapon to defend the fatherland's borders," he said. "It's not my fault that it was sometimes used where it shouldn't have been. This is the fault of politicians."

One wonders if he has immortalized these views in a poem.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 C5

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