Unfinished Portraits Of Powerful Ideas: Kenneth Brecher

Kenneth Brecher, executive director of the Sundance Institute, speaks at the 2009 Skoll World Forum’s opening plenary. In his talk, “Unfinished Portraits of Powerful Ideas,” he talks about the significance of poetry and tells a powerful story about Stalin asking a woman to write a poem praising him in exchange for releasing her son.

With: Ken Brecher
As an anthropologist I'm fascinated by what brought you here to this moment. To being a self identified social entrepreneur, how did this happen to you? Did you hear the call or the twitter? Is there a gene? Was it something you read or a film you saw before the age of 16 did you know you where worn before you could admit to your parents?

Perhaps this was the role of travel and work in far away places to meet people whose lives and values and needs seems somehow more real than your own. Along your individual journey, to this moment, did anyone happen to mention that you going to have to work harder than you could possibly have ever imagined.

There is something about a gather of social entrepreneurs which reminds me of the crews that were recruited in the 19th and early 20th century for expeditions. Your work reminds me of the advertisement that Sir Ernest Shackleton placed in the London Times in 1907, when he was looking for a crew to sail with him to the South Pole.

'Wanted men for hazardous journey: low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in the event of success.' He actually once... actually gave preference to orphan's because he felt if they were lost, there would be no parents to mourn mind. Whatever force or person or impulse that brought you to social entrepreneurship, whatever it was did anyone ever happen to mention that there might not be enough resources to do what had become your life's work that some part of you would always be trying to strike the right balance between inspiration, and bookkeeping, between being in the field and being at home, finding the time to write, to read, to stay focussed, to let go.

An outsider trying to figure out who you are, what common traits or origins or parents by truely define a social entrepreneur might do well to begin by saying there is an irresistible imprinting, which compels you to come to the same geographical lattitude this place at the same moment of seasonal change, save the last week of March every year.

And for whatever reasons, I'm grateful that we're in this particular room the Sheldonian(sp?) Theater. In 1664, when Christopher Wren(Sp?) [xx] it was a complete break from the Gothic architecture of the past. the building was based on Serilo's engraving of the D shaped [xx ] of my sellers, either of my sellers in Rome from the first century AD.

The Roman building had no roof but did have a temporary [xx] which were brought out when required By weather the brilliant solution renews was a geomatrical flat floor roof. A series of treasures which are held in place by their own weight the roof of powers must declare an market texture. [xx] has at times used it for storing thousands of books.

It is, i am happy to report, inspected about every one hundred years. The painting on the ceiling was done by Charles II court painter, Robert Streeter and the allegorical story depicted shows truth descending upon the arts and sciences and expelling ignorance from the university. The sheldonian is used for avoiding honorary degrees, the first honorary degree given by the University some say any University was awarded to lay in Woodville in 1479.

Degrees were used by the University as an attempt to Honor and obtained the favor or influence of men with great prower. Would always the brother-in-law the king, Edward the fourth. The encaenia, as it is called, is the University's annual honorary degree giving ceremony. Degrees are awarded to leading figures from arts, politics, science and business.

Etiquette demands that the recipients of honorary degrees remain silent. Honorary degrees have gone to just about every great, powerful person. Queen Elizabeth the First came here four times because she loved giving them to her favourite men. Tsar Alexander the First, after the Napoleanic wars received an honorary degree.

Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, twenty-one of the twenty-three British Prime Ministers who attended Oxford University as students, have been given honorary degrees in this room with the exception of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. They've been awarded to Nelson Mandela, to Jimmy Carter, to Bill Clinton, to Voslev Hovel.

One of the degrees went to a Russian poet, a woman, called Anna Akhmatova. Her first book of poetry was published when she was in her early 20s and was an immediate success and was reprinted thirteen times. Young people learned her verses, and Prokofiev set the lyrics to music. She was startlingly beautiful.

At 5ft 11inches tall, dark hair, live and feline, her green eyes were compared to those of a snow leopard. Poems were written about her, and she helped launch a new poetic movement in Russia that called for clarity and restraint. She was twenty-eight years old at the time of the 1917 Russian revolution.

She was 32 when Stalin arrested her husband on charges of plotting against the Government. From 1925 to 1940 there was a ban on the publication of all of her poetry. In1935 married again. Her husband, an art critic and historian of Western art, was arrested, and sent to the Siberian prison where he later died.

She began work on her most famous poem, Requiem, dedicated to the times in which she lived. It was written between 1935 and 1940, but it wasn't allowed to be published in Russia until 1987. Akhmatova's friend, Nadezda Mandelstam, described it well; "We all belong to the same category marked down for absolute Destruction.

The astonishing thing, the astonishing things is not that so many of us went to concentration camps died there but some of survived, caution did not help. Only chance could save you. Akmativa [sp?] was terribly poor unable to her poems. She had no means of earning a living. She lived mainly on a diet of black bread and sugarless tea.

During a period when a poem and a scrap of paper To avoid death sentence to write maintain absolute certainty about the importance and significance of Poetry. The poems of requiem composed at this time were learned by heart by friends, committed to memory as she recited them. Her friends remembered going going out late at night in the empty street streets, repeating the poems over and over, terrified they would forget a word or get something wrong.

She was extremely thin, and frequently ill. In March 1938, Akhmatova's son Lev was arrested and for seventeen months was kept kept imprisoned in Leningrad. The only crime was being the child of his parents. She would get up from bed and go stand, sometimes in freezing weather and the long lines of people waiting outside the prisons.

When it was your turn you would say the name of the prisoner, and then after what could be a very long wait a voice would say, dead, sick, unknown or sometimes sentences to ten years without the right of correspondence, which was the euphemism for executed by firing squad. She described herself. I spent 17 months standing in prison lines in Leningrad.

One day somebody recognized me. There, standing behind me, was a woman with blue lips. She suddenly came out of her stupid so common to us all and whispered in my ear. Everybody then spoke in whispers. Can you put this into words can you describe this and I said yes I can, in that a fleeting smile.

smile passed over what had once been her face. A message reached Akhmatova that Stalin might be willing to spare her son if she wrote a poem praising him. She wrote it and her son was sentenced to death. but then those who sentenced him were purged, they were shot and his sentence committed to exile.

She had been more or less in continual disfavor since 1925 and many in Russia believed that she was long dead or perished along with the other poets and intellectuals and artists. In fact on 1941 during the Siege of Leningrad, Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent and there.she began writing poem without A hero was a 32 year project.

She returned to Leningrad after the war, where her popularity was immense. She was once again denounced by Stalin, denounced by Stalin and was accused of poisoning the mind of Soviets. She was called by Stalin half a nun and half a harlot, no publication was allowed. In 1956 the rose was east from present camps may be 10 years later we decided that she could be loved to travel abroad.

Oxford, to this place, to the Sheldonian theatre that she came. In the spring of 1965 preparations were for made for to accrue to mark to go to England to receive the honorary D Lit - Doctor of Literature conferred upon her by the University of Oxford. She was told by her doctors that due to her serious heart conditions it will be too risky to travel by plane.

She decided to saved the journey by boat and train. she was frightened for health was not upto it there was never any question of not coming when she reached over despite. The fact that she had an entry visa. The English immigration officer demanded a letter of invitation as well. At the Sheldonian Theatre, wearing the scarlet gown, of a doctor of literature, standing in silence, dressed in black she advanced slowly on the arm of a young companion.

She was required to climb a high staircase, when they awarded her the degree just behind this partition, but she was too weak. At that moment the University broke a long standing tradition and it was not [xx] who ascended the staircase, but the leaders of the University who descended to her. She returned to Russia and died less than a year later on the 5th of March.

Her body was taken to the cathedral of St. Nicholas that See Fair and The Church was mobbed crowds of people, thousands of people who had trying to see her for the last time, on the case of many of the young, see her for the first. Profound another great Poet Joseph Nebrasky said at certain periods of history only poetry is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise could not be retain by the mind.

For popularity enable toTo speak for the nation, as well as to tell it something that it didn't know. The Leningrad Studio of Documentary filmers recorded the entire funeral. Shortly afterwards, the film was confiscated, and the people who made it demoted, and disappeared. I believe that what drove her forward, and sustained her under the most terrible conditions, at times living like a beast, unable to count upon food or shelter, in constant danger; was the [xx] find and express the truth.

These were the truths that she found, by bearing witness. In a famous document called the 'Minnesota Declaration', the film maker Bernard XX, speaks of what he describes as the extadic truth, which is mysterious, ecstatic, and can only be reached through the imagination. he declared, facts are for accountants.

This other truth, the ecstatic truth, so evident in Akmativa's poems, speaks of the subjective inner world experience and it is by its very nature transformative. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin was with Akhmativa that day in this room, and what he later said he learned from her, how he described her might be a description of your work, and perhaps of you.

A formulator, who by means of his or her tool, in Akmativa's case, the word can bring order out of chaos and in doing so, fulfilled the highest human function, not a visionary, but with a strong sense of reality. Her approach to those who feel that a single individual can never stand up to the march of history, a reproach to those who feel that a single individual can never stand up to march of history.

An embodiment of the past who can console the present and provide hope for the future. Thank you.
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