Sunday 9th November 2014, 7.30 for 8 pm
The Chapel in the Garden, East Street, Bridport, £6 entrance
This Sunday, 9th November, sees the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Little remains, we hardly need reminding, of the euphoria across Europe which greeted that moment. Politicians left and right cannot show themselves scornful enough of the European project. Ambivalences there always were, but does it now risk coming unraveled altogether? Economic crisis, mass migration, organized crime – suddenly they are all down to EU membership. The view eastwards is even more troubling.Ukraine had no sooner opted for more Europe than it found itself embroiled in the kind of armed conflict not seen on European soil since the Yugoslav war.
Diverging from the news narrative, Horatio Morpugo’s talk will address the situation in Ukraine as entirely of a piece with the wider crisis of European confidence. Whilst there for the New Internationalist earlier this year, he visited Berdychiv, the birthplace of Joseph Conrad. Russian novelist Vasily Grossman was born in the same town, as was the Yiddish novelist, Der Nister. Morpurgo will explore the little known ways in which, through the works of these writers, Berdychiv has fatefully marked not only Ukrainian but English, German, Polish and Russian consciousness. He will also examine how this might inform the way we view the crisis in that country and its implications for the rest of Europe.
Horatio Morpurgo has been writing on European affairs for almost twenty years, with particular reference to Central and Eastern Europe. A regular contributor to the New Internationalist, his work has also appeared in the London Magazine, Edinburgh Review, Areté, PN Review, Dissent, Resurgence, the Ecologist, Le Monde Diplomatique and others. He was active in the campaign to establish a Marine Protected Area in Lyme Bay and has written widely on the environment as well as on social movements, from the tuition fees protest to Occupy LSX, Tahrir Square and the Maidan.
‘what loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing’
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