Catherine Eisner: Polonium

Definition: Dramatic Irony.

A plot device in which apprehension of events or motives is the god-like privilege of the audience but not within the grasp of characters in the unfolding events who may, indeed, never survive the action of the drama to achieve such self-knowledge.

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As I wrote in Dramatic Irony, Part 1: ‘It is not for me to glibly remind ourselves of how tragic events in our national life adhere to Aristotelian definitions of classic drama conducive to the terror and pity essential for the cathartic experience Aristotle prescribes to purge our congested emotions.’

Polonium was discovered on 18 July 1898 by Marie

Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie, the result of

extraction from uranium ore pitchblende (Uraninite),

its identity revealed by its strong radioactivity.

It was named for Poland, Marie’s homeland.

Again, I simply juxtapose two events for spectators, god-like, to apprehend undercurrents of portents and their fulfilment.

Portent 1. The September 7th 1939 entry in Comintern General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov’s Diary quotes Stalin’s very clear views about Poland: ‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances would mean one bourgeois fascist state less.’

Scorched Earth.

It’s only now that we – the onlookers who behold the distorting mirror of history – only now we who can see the fated pattern resolve itself in the looking glass.

Consider the tragic drama of betrayal that unfolded in Nazi-occupied Poland, in August 1944 – the Warsaw Uprising – when Polish partisans unaided defended their capital against the besieging German forces.

Treachery? Yes.

Calculated betrayal by their ostensible Allies. Yes.

Because on the 1st of August, the day of the Uprising, the Soviet advance was halted at the east bank of the Vistula by a direct order to the Red Army from the Kremlin. Hindsight let’s us give credence to the case that Stalin benefited from Soviet non-involvement in the failed relief of Warsaw, because future opposition to his military objective to eventually control Poland as a Soviet state was effectively removed by permitting the Nazis to destroy the loyal Polish nationalist partisans. This Soviet objective was completed indirectly when, in the aftermath of the Uprising, the Nazis enacted long-laid plans to raze Warsaw to the ground, destroying up to 90 percent of its buildings as an egregious act of reprisal following capitulation.

It was a scorched earth policy that played into the hands of their adversaries, the reinvigorated Soviet oppressors of Poland. (We remember Stalin’s threat, ‘‘Doing away with Poland in conducive circumstances . . . ’)

As Stalin foretold, dependence on Soviet hegemony required the total annihilation of the Polish Underground State, with the entire Polish population repressed or purged by operational groups of the NKVD, the USSR’s ruthless instrument of military counterintelligence and state security, and forerunner of the KGB.

Victims of Polonium poisoning: Irène Joliot-Curie, the

daughter of Marie Curie who first isolated Polonium;

Alexander Litvinenko, Russian defector and former officer of

the Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the NKVD.

Poison du temps : Divine Vengeance Postponed.

When we read of the depredations of the NKVD from their betrayal and subjugation of the Polish nation, how then can we interpret the well nigh mythical comeuppance meted out to those mutinous descendants of the NKVD – officers of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) – who betray their Kremlin masters?

For FSB defectors, the poison du temps is evidently Polonium poured from a deceptively innocuous teapot, the modus operandi for the despatch of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

And, if Litvinenko was the first to be publicly exposed as a victim of Russian state sanction by means of this sinister contrivance, then can we be certain that, since 2006, there have not been any number of other intended deaths as condign punishment hastened by the Curies’ Poland-inspired deadly poison at the hands of FSB-trained assassins?

The biter bit?

The Robe of Nessus.

Should we then reconsider the tragic death of Marie Curie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie in 1956 as a mythological precursor of Litvinenko’s death? In that year of her death another national uprising in defiance of Russian dominance, in an echo of Warsaw’s fate, was viciously crushed by Soviet tanks and troops . . . Hungary.

Portent 2. Irène became the first confirmed victim of lethal Polonium, having been accidentally exposed to hazardous levels of radioactivity when, ten years earlier, in 1946, a sealed capsule of the chemical element exploded in her laboratory, the tragedy occurring only two years after the razing of Warsaw.

By birth Marie Curie, Irène’s mother, was a Varsovian.

Like her mother, Irène received the Nobel prize (1935) for her researches into the phenomena of radioactivity, in her case profound discoveries that significantly advanced the efficient production of radioactive materials, the bedrock of new techniques in curative medicine. Yet, for Irène, the price she paid for the bestowal of that matrilineal wealth of knowledge was death.

And should we seek correlatives to explicate this fatal chain of events then perhaps we should reflect on two myths.

According to one account by an early Greek poet, Medea – sorceress and accomplished adept of pharmakeía (medicinal magic) – killed her children by accident then buried them alive in the Temple of Hera, believing this would make them immortal. Certainly, for Irène, immortality followed a tragic accident due to her mother’s arcane researches, with its aftermath crowned by the same Nobel laureateship that had honoured her mother.

The Robe of Nessus: wrapped in embrace of fire.

Or should we seek further for an agonised protracted death of divine retribution then let us remember the tragic end of Hercules, who in retribution for infidelity in his amours receives the gift of the Robe of Nessus, raiment stained with the envenomed blood of the centaur Nessus whom Hercules had killed, which enwraps the warrior in an embrace of fire, whereat, to escape this unbearable unending pain, he builds a funeral pyre and immolates himself.

Are there concordances here, one wonders, in the history of Polonium as an instrument of divine vengeance deferred; because, in the case of another treacherous warrior (according to the verdict of the FSB), the agony before death would be prolonged for three weeks of slow progression that is the penalty of acute radiation poisoning.

Polonium’s Three Weeks, therefore, is the measure for the slow retributory death of an officer of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation at the hands of his own treacherous fellow FSB servicemen.

Compare . . .

Poland’s Three Months was the period that followed the capitulation of Poland’s capital on October 2nd 1944 to Germany, while treacherous so-called Allies, the Soviet forces and their operational units of the NKVD, waited calculatedly on the east bank of the Vistula, during which time vengeful German forces demolished much of what was left of the city of Warsaw and deported 650,000 Polish civilians to labour camps, thus clearing adventitiously the stage for repossession of the city by the USSR to declare the nation as henceforth under the Soviet heel.

Revanchist Polonium . . . the rare gift of the expiatory ill-fatedness of myth.

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Catherine Eisner

Sunday, 27 July 2025

Revanchist Polonium: Vengeance Deferred. (Dramatic Irony. Part 2.)