Author Archives: John Sweeney '20

The Russian Soul: Internal vs. External Frameworks

Two post-soviet retrospective works present a clash between internal and external perspectives. In “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII,” Victor Pelevin presents a life form whose thoughts and aspirations are trapped inside it’s external frame; correspondingly, its aspirations are held in check by its external environment, at least temporarily. In “Night,” Tatyana Tolstaya presents a middle-aged retarded man who feels that he lives a double life inside and outside of his own head. This tension perhaps symbolizes the fractured nature of the Russian spirit as the Glasnost era came and went; the external framework of Russia lacked certainty or stability, yet there was newfound hope and eagerness for the potential future.

“The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII” presents this idea in a very abstract and deconstructionist form. While the garage, as well as Numbers 13 and 14, try to convince Shed Number XII of its utilitarian value, hardened by reality, Shed Number XII looks inward for its hopes. Seeing a bike’s freedom and ability to travel, Shed Number XII aspires to take such a mobile form. Ultimately, this transformation for the sake of liberation requires the destruction of external structure. Much like dismantling of the Soviet Union, the fire that burns the sheds rids a restrictive structure that holds an expressive longing in check. The result may be a make-shift bicycle or a tumultuous Gorbachev era and transition to capitalism, but the potential to reach new heights has been set free.

“Night” focuses on a much more human and personal depiction of this conflict between internal and external purpose. Tolstaya writes that “Alexsei Petrovich has his world, the real one, in his head. There everything is possible. And this one, the outer one, is wicked and wrong.” Although Alexsei Petrovich and his mother depict vulnerability in the midst of traumatic transformation, the focus on Alexsei’s internal being marks a shift from societal roles to the consciousness of the individual. In his own world which stems from his internal individuality, Alexsei can envision himself a great writer. When he ventures into the outside world, however, he is lost. The external world still cannot hold his adventurous spirit. He can aspire, yet can’t yet see, suggesting that the new and hopeful day of Russian liberation is yet to come and still lies outside of his (and the mysterious Russian soul’s) grasp. Alexsei seems to realize this as he writes down his “newly found truth: Night. Night. Night…”

Deception Takes Its Toll

In Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, nothing good comes from deception. Throughout the movie, Katerina, Lyudmila, and Antonina devise lies or hold back truths, yet all of these yield negative results: why do they do this? Although the initial setting and home of the women is a worker’s dormitory, these women stand out because they take on roles that seem ahead of their time; they are liberated much more so than many women were at the time of the film’s setting in 1958. The elusiveness of the truth, although it is frustratingly largely self-imposed, serves as a barrier to their freedoms in this film both from the situations developing as a result of the dinner party and in Katerina’s relationship with Gosha 20 years later.

In hopes of finding proper men to court and  brighter futures, Lyudmila convinces Katerina to throw a dinner party wherein the ladies pretend to be daughters of Katherine’s professor uncle. Unfortunately, this deception ultimately leads to turmoil for both Lyudmila and Katerina. Lyudmila develops a relationship with the hockey star, Sergei (who stays with her even after learning of her true identity) as a result of the dinner party, yet he turns to alcoholism later and becomes a nuisance for her even after they have divorced. Katerina suffers too, as she meets Rudolph, who leaves her after impregnating her and learning that she has lied to him. Antonina is the only character to develop a long, stable, healthy relationship, which arose from authentically before the dinner-party.

Despite all these negative results, all three women appear to find professional success and remain a striking level of independence given traditional Russian values. Katerina becomes a factory manager, yet when she meets Gosha and learns of his traditional values, she neglects to tell him of her status. This sharp juxtaposition between female strength and family deference both serves as the conflict for the second half of the movie and provides the viewer with uncertainty at the conclusion of the movie. Are Katerina and Gosha really a good match for one another? Although Lyudmila reminds Katerina that “Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears,” while Katerina is crying because of Gosha’s disappearance, Katerina gives in because of her dependence on a glimmer of happiness that has entered her life after so many years of fierce independence on her part. If nothing else, the film perhaps suggests that such an aversion to tears is unsustainable. Where this leaves Katerina as a symbol of Russian womanhood, however, remains unclear.

Hope and Acceptance Under Stalinism

While literary figures such as Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam presented the bleak realities and oppression of the Stalin era, they also were able to detail the ways in which an unjust reality forced them to adapt. This involved both a tactful acceptance of life under High Stalinism and the maintenance of hope. These two aspects helped drive Akhmatova and the Mandelstam’s to produce authentic artistic works that detailed the progression of the conscious under Stalin’s tyrannical rule.

Nadezhda Mandelstam details the two arrests of her husband Osip in 1934 and 1938 in her book Hope against Hope. Her and her husband’s preparedness is striking, as she explains, “We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, ‘What was he arrested for?’ but we were exceptional.” She later claims that Akhmatova would answer, “‘What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!'”  if anyone asked “What for?” In this way, Mandelstam reveals that some of those who knew themselves to be at risk had internalized the external threats that they faced into internal logic. How then, could they maintain the motivation of hope to carry on?

Mandelstam speaks of her role to represent something more eternal than the current turmoil that she faced. She claims: “Terror and depotism are always short-sighted.” Through frustration and suffering, Mandelstam persevered because of what she explains as the says is the task for which she has lived. She had to preserve the constrained consciousness of Osip and of the oppressed art of life under Stalin. This task proved to sustain her, as she explains, “There was nothing I could do to alter M.’s fate, but some of his manuscripts had survived and much more was preserved in my memory. Only I could save it all, and this was why I had to keep up my strength.

In “Introduction,” Anna Akhmatova says of the time, “It was a time when only the dead / smiled, happy in their peace.” The mission of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and so many others was to capture this smile for subsequent generations to see. First they had to accept the ill-fated status of their own individuality. But the hope to capture their own suffering and artistic pursuit for sake of future peace kept them on their course.

Glorious Grief

Works of Soviet expression both at the time of the 1917 Revolutions and beyond reveal the juxtaposition of two sentiments swirling around the actual uprising: glory and grief.

The speaker in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1917 poem, “Our March” conveys a sense of acceleration of the Russian spirit. “Too slow, the wagon of years, / The oxen of days — too glum / Our god is the god of speed / Our heart — our battle drum,” the speaker says. As this drum and rhythm pulled the rebellion on with strong force, power systems began to break down easily and quickly. As Thompson notes in the textbook, the tsarist regime fell quite suddenly due to a loss of ingrained obedience and gratitude within the people. Between the February and October revolutions, sense of urgency accelerated more under the Bolshevik slogan “Peace, Land, and Bread.”

This acceleration contrasted with the disheartening stagnation that Mayakovsky writes of, and that was expressed in the movie, Forward March, Time!. The speaker declares that there was “never a land of greater grief” than Russia. Yet, glory appeared on the horizon. The speaker of “Our March” exclaims, “Rainbow, give colour and girth / To the fleet-foot steeds of time.” This defiant idea that time could stomp out grief is further expressed in the refrain in Forward March, Time! with the words, “Move on, my land… Many things worn out be erased!” The “geniuses gone” and other oppressive forces will give way to the unleashed expression of grief from the common people, and it will be glorious. “Nameless heroic crowds” emerge around the grieved and impoverished populace.

Although this rainbow may have ultimately proved an illusion, glory and pride remain even after grief returns. The heartbeat still marches on passionately, even if it goes nowhere good. Mayakovsky perhaps expresses the enduring defiant sense of glory best in “My Soviet Passport,” when the speaker finishes the poem saying, “I pull it / from the pants / where my documents are: / read it — / envy me — / I’m a citizen / of the USSR!

Separation from Self: The Plight of the Silver Age Poet

The social upheaval in the Silver Age of poetry in Russia contains a central contradiction: loyalty to country and loyalty to self-expression. Throughout works of that era, poets express longings for a motherland, although she has deviated or not yet reached her proper course. Yet the lost self-expression of liberation entering the Soviet era seems to block access to these genuine longings of Silver Age poets, leaving them with no comfortable existence.

Marina Tsvetaevna writes of the natural emanation of creativity in “For my poems,” as the speaker proclaims, “Poems storming from me, invading, like some tiny demons / The sanctuary where sleep and incense twine.” The speaker laments, however, that although the desire for expression has invaded his or her consciousness, such thoughts lack an outlet. “My always unread lines!” the speaker calls out, “For my poems, stored deep like wines of precious vintage, / I know a time will come.” Writing in 1913, this sentiment foreshadowed the Soviet era, when such expression became more vigorously blocked or punished externally by the government in addition to stagnated by an absence of self-realization.

The rise of the Soviets in large part prohibited  a return by writers to their stored poems and thoughts, as well to their authentic and nostalgic sense of Russia itself. In his poem, “Leningrad,” Osip Mandelstam presents a longing for a home that no longer exists. “Petersburg, I don’t yet want to die: You have the numbers of my telephones.” Although he has returned to St. Petersburg, the Soviets have transformed it into Leningrad, and in doing so have shattered the connections that the speaker in “Leningrad” has to his or her past self, sense of place, and poetic thoughts. The speaker proclaims: “I returned to my city, familiar as tears, / as veins.” The speaker still feels a connection to his or her Russian blood that signifies his or her origins. Yet this familiarity does not match actuality. The unleashing of Russian blood and sense of self now becomes suicidal. Marina Tsvetaevna expresses this in her poem, “I’ve opened my veins,” in which the speaker cries out: “I’ve opened my veins: unstoppably, / irrestorably, life spurts in sheets.”

As Russia entered the Soviet period, many Silver Age poets found a betrayal of their bloodline and suicidal expression to be unavoidable. After leaving Russia, Tsvetaevna returned to Moscow and had to endure espionage charges against her daughter and husband, resulting in her husband’s execution, and the suicide of Tsvetaevna herself in 1941. Osip Mandelstam wrote of the burden of separation from self in his poem, “Tristia,” which reads, “I’ve studied well the art of separation / In nighttime tears, in wild-haired wails of grief.” The burden was very real and dangerous for many Silver Age artists and poets entering the Soviet age, and some, like Tsvetaevna, failed to survive the separation.

The Madman’s Self-Deception

Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” both feature protagonists who descend into madness while chasing such morally empty objectives as lust, respect, and fortune. Throughout the path to their eventual insanity and institutionalization for insanity, the symptoms of madness present themselves in a way that degrades the subjects. Madness is not a wild release for the protagonists in this story; it is much more of a reminder of the realities that Aksenty in “Diary of a Madman” and Hermann in “The Queen of Spades” are dissatisfied with. In fact, while Aksenty and Hermann lose their grip on reality through the distortion of insanity, their self-deception also reinforces their position in reality in cruel fashion .

Arksenty Ivanovich Poprischin is a social servant who aims to achieve power and dignity even though he greatly underachieves. He places the blame for this on his boss, the Section Chief, yet  he also sees a path to liberation through the Section Chief’s daughter, Sophie. Arksenty falls in love with her, comparing her to a little bird with whom he could cast aside his personal insecurities. Arksenty’s madness eventually conceives of a dog who writes letters. Arksenty reads the letters, and they reveal Arksenty’s irrelevance to Sophie, her love with another man, and general insults about Arksenty’s appearance. If these letters are an invention of Arksenty’s crazed mind, why do they further degrade him? Even if the letters had been real, his madness now supplies an innocent, objective figure (Madgie the dog) to deliver insults to Aksenty. Either way, the letters seem to reinforce his position of irrelevance which he hopes to transcend. In this way, Arksenty’s madness misleads his ultimate goals by delegitimizing them.

In Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” Hermann also misleads himself in the midst of his obsession with discovering the secret of the card game fero. Hermann feigns love for Lizaveta in order to chase an empty and corrupt wealth. He wants to gain access to the countess’ secrets that were born out of necessity and gifted to the countess only to alleviate her from poverty. After his armed appearance shocks the countess to death, Hermann’s mad consciousness punishes Hermann for his shallowness; the wink of the countess’ corpse and her appearance as a ghost to reveal the card game secret only pit Hermann against himself. He misleads himself into thinking that he possesses a secret, and then through this arrogance he loses his final card game and goes insane.

Madness, through all of its distortions, imprisons the protagonists in their own sad realities in these stories. This raises some questions: Is this punishment for their moral shallowness? If so, why is such a punishment self-inflicted, and what does it say about the way Russian society viewed insanity?

Eluding Happiness

In the 1958 movie production of the opera Eugene Onegin, Onegin answers, “I am stronger to happiness,” when responding to Tatyana Larina’s love letter. He, just as Tatyana expected, derides Tatyana and condemns her for her lack of self-control, regarding himself as too wise to value frivolous joy . Tragically, over the course of the opera, Onegin eludes both self-control and happiness.

What does this say about how young or fleeting love was viewed in Russian culture and by Pushkin? Both Vladimir Lensky and Tatyana Larina are struck by love’s spontaneity in the first portion of the opera. Lensky proclaims that he does not fear eternity, yet by the second half of the play he has renounced his love for Olga. Tatyana expresses her adoration for Onegin, asking, “are you my guardian angel?” However, she also expresses fear and shame at her expressiveness, and in the final scene of the play, even subdues her admission of love in favor of stability. She deliberately chooses to elude her desires for happiness, if those are to be equated with her lingering love for Onegin. Likewise, Onegin destroys the only sources of happiness in his life. He trifles with Tatyana’s feelings for him and with Vladimir’s feelings for Olga and as a result of these actions, finds himself in a duel with Vladimir wherein Onegin kills his best friend. Ultimately, this opera presents an even bleaker message than many Russian movies and stories. In most tragedies happiness is absent in reality, fate, situations, etc.; In Eugene Onegin happiness knocks on the door of characters, only to be rejected and eluded by them.

The False Search for Love

Alexander Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Liudmila” continues and adds to the recurring theme of false love and the corrupting search for amorous connection in Russian culture. The The Snow Maiden presents a kind of twisted utopia that values love as a sacrificial means to provide the sustenance that society needs to function; it centers on the search for false love. In contrast, “Ruslan and Liudmila” focuses on the superficial quest from both a male and female perspective; it centers on the false search for love.

A Finnish sorcerer presents the story of his own quest for love to Ruslan, who has had his wife Liudmila taken away from him by mysterious means. The old sorcerer laments his years lost trying to prove himself worthy of the maiden Naina’s love. His attempts as a shepherd, warrior, and finally sorcerer exemplify the futility in searching for love, for none of these endeavors can help forge a connection. Naina’s love, or the force of time, is always a barrier. The old man relays this story to Ruslan, who seeks to cement his legitimacy as Liudmila’s husband by finding her. The sorcerer, however, tells Ruslan that fate will take care of his concerns. Furthermore, through his tale, the old man implicitly cautions Ruslan not to try to make the acquisition of love and marriage a matter arrived upon by free will. By the end of the excerpt, one message about love rings clear: love can only come about by fate, not by free will.