Category Archives: Unit 9: The Silver Age and Revolution

Isaac Babel’s Dispirit Masculinity

Though I enjoyed the Zamyatin excerpts, I much preferred the Babel readings, “The Rabbi’s Son” and “My First Goose”. Though each one is quite short and only allows an in medias res snapshot of a moment, both works demonstrate a raw dedication to specifically Lenin’s works as well as a desolate sense of masculine existence.

In “The Rabbi’s Son”, we watch a young man die on a “wretched mattress”, the victim of gruesome war and subject to his gender. As a man, he was forced to leave his mother’s side: “When there’s a revolution on, a mother’s an episode,” (193). The concept of drafting young men into threatening certain-death warzones is depressing, especially in this story. The rabbi’s son is beaten down, slowly dying, dishonorable and weak amidst his Lenin leaflets and Hebrew texts. Reduced to a fading light, masculinity killed “my brother”.

Similarly, in Babel’s “My First Goose”, we see the protagonist’s affected mask of masculinity, battling with his glasses, as he interacts with his new crowd of soldiers, gruffly establishing himself among them. The most interesting interaction of gender roles, I thought, was between the man and the Landlady. When he asserts himself over her, even in the gruesome slaying of a goose (“The goose’s head burst under my boot and its brains spilled out”), she seems numbly unshaken: “Comrade… I could kill myself,” (208). The interaction proves to me a desolate desensitized regard for gender roles in the throes of war.

In the slumberous fog

(Like many of us, I’m still getting over sickness, so I’m sorry in advance if this isn’t the most coherent or insightful post.)

I adored these poems. The two that struck me most were actually two of the additional poems Professor Gillespie emailed us (which I hope I’m allowed to talk about here!)

He tries to tell her about the giraffe, its stunning beauty and grace, its élan. The passage in which he describes it does seem life-affirming, does seem like it might have the power to lift sadness.

But it won’t work:

“But you have been breathing this slumberous fog much too long,
You wil not believe, not in anything, save for the rain.”

His listener has been breathing the “slumberous fog” of Russia for such a long time that it is impossible for her to envision any other reality. Still, he ends by repeating his first line about the giraffe as she weeps—although he know it won’t help, he knows that she is lost in the mist so the words about Africa mean nothing to her. But he repeats them anyway, perhaps because he doesn’t know what else to do.

And perhaps this poem is still so striking here and now because those circumstances are not unique to Africa and Russia. All of us know what it’s like to be so immersed in our current sadness that we can’t believe in anything else, that stories about a different brighter world are fantastical and useless.

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.

Lyrically Fated

Among the myriad of lyrical poems assigned for Friday, Pasternak’s were my favorites, especially following the interesting discussions we had today. With the hopeless tone set by stories like The Last Rendezvous and Will, I was in the perfect mindset for the poem entitled “Hamlet” (from Dr. Zhivago). The final stanza resonates:  “And yet the order of the acts is planned, the way’s end destinate and unconcealed. Alone. Now is the time of the Pharisees. To live is not like walking through a field.” The dejected realization of destined human struggle is heavy and poignant.

This concept tied in nicely, I thought, with Akhmatova’s two works “I have a certain smile” and “When a Man Dies.”  The speaker grapples with the smile, an inherently beautiful human trait, a symbol of life and vivacity, and how a “certain” smile can mean different things to different people. A smile is one of the most profound symbols of love: “I don’t care that you’re brash and vicious, I don’t care that you love others.” This declaration proves a beautiful prelude to the latter poem, as the speaker ponders the only time humans break from their mortal shackles, their lyrical fate written from birth, is in death: “His eyes look in a different way, his lips smile a different smile.”

The shift of these tones represents a gorgeous self awareness.

The Darkness of the Days Ahead

Alexander Blok’s poems begin with an obvious patriotism and love for Russia, but an equal recognition of the suffering and turmoil of the years.

“Russia, my beggarly Russia,

your grey huts in their clusters,

your songs set to the wind’s measure

touch me like love’s first tears.”

“If they seduce you and deceive you,

you’ll not be broken or collapse;

though suffering may overshadow

the beauty of your face perhaps…”

The unrest might overshadow Russia’s beauty, but Blok seemed to believe that nothing essential about the country, nothing that he loved, would change.

His poems, through the years, grow somewhat darker. He foretells the apocalypse, war, villages burning. In such times, when peasants were hopeless and starving and the government brutally oppressed protesters, it would have been impossible not to feel this darkness. In the face of so much loss, death, and suffering, even the revolutionaries did not seem hopeful or idealistic but rather desperate.

“How often we sit weeping—you

and I—over the life we lead!

My friends, if you only knew

The darkness of the days ahead!”

However, his attitude toward the country never changes.

“Centuries pass, villages flame,

are stunned by war and civil war.

My country, you are still the same,

Tragic, beautiful as before.

How long must the mother wail?”

It remains beautiful, despite all this horror. He still loves it unquestioningly, although there is something of despair in the final line—this poem was written in 1916, later than most of the others we read; at that point, patriotism for the war had evaporated as it dragged on and living conditions became worse and worse for those who survived. But even this catastrophe was not enough for Blok to succumb completely to despair or anger. Russia, in the midst of this, is “tragic”—but still beautiful.

Gilded Symbolism

I was fascinated with Alexander Blok’s A Puppet Show. Blok employs a great deal of keenly timed symbolism that adds immense comedy and social critique.

Color plays a large role in Puppet Show to convey differing contexts in ridiculous situations throughout. For example, the audience witnesses two couples demonstrate the wide spectrum of romantic interaction. The pallid couple — “Our sleepy story is so quiet. You closed your eyes without sin” — juxtaposed with the “whirlwind of cloaks” black and red couple that busts onto the scene saying, “Watch out, temptress! I’ll remove my mask! And you’ll find out that I am faceless. You swept away my features, and led me to darkness, where my black double nods to me, nods to me,” (28-29).

Better yet than this comical comparison is the third couple, the female half of which merely repeats the final word said by her male companion. This interaction killed me. “O, how captivating your words are! Sayer of my soul! How much your words say to my heart!” (30).

The third person symbolic discussion of death and the end of the world continued into the poem A Voice From the Chorus: “You will be waiting, child, for spring – and spring will fool you. You will call for the suns rising – and the sun will lie low. And your shout, when you start shouting, silence will swallow,” (68). The seasonal symbolism is haunting, personifying spring and nature as heartlessly ignoring a child’s cries for help.

Maybe I am overtired, but this play confused me. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but a good bit went over my head. Blok: 1. Price: 0.