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!

A Passport to Propaganda in Poetry

By the 1930s, the new Soviet Union was already unrecognizable from the fledgling society that rose up after the Russian Revolution of 1917. With Lenin’s death, pure Marxist ideology fell by the wayside as Stalin steadfastly increased the state’s power and moved toward pure authoritarianism. This trend gradually spread to cover all segments of society, including art. Although they were often tolerated in the years immediately after the Revolution, any artistic ideas that could be interpreted in a subversive way were quickly and efficiently stamped out. The fin de siècle and symbolist ideas present in the artistic landscape of pre-revolutionary Russia were replaced by a state sponsored style and theme: Socialist Realism.

In its essence, Socialist Realism painted the state in the best light possible, creating a cultural representation of a perfect Soviet Society. This is exemplified perhaps nowhere better than in Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “My Soviet Passport”. The poem is the ultimate distillation of Soviet Realism: it paints the Soviet state and nation as supremely righteous and enviable, while managing to diminish countless other nations at the same time. Mayakovsky begins the poem with “I’d rip out / bureaucracy’s guts / I would .” This is the epitome of pure, socialist rage against capitalism and the bourgeois, although it is ultimately ironic and misplaces. The Soviet government itself would go on to be highly bureaucratic. The Soviet citizen the poem is written from the perspective of notices special treatment being paid to travelers from Great Britain and the United States. The narrator depicts the customs agent as bending over backwards to please and pay respect to the citizens of these great, capitalist societies. It is an extremely unflattering portrait of deference being shown to undeserving old British “uncles” and “lanky Yankees”.

The passport collector’s reaction to the sudden appearance of a Soviet passport under their nose is very different from their reaction to that of any other nation. It is one of shock, awe, and disconcerted reverence. The officer handles it like a “bomb” and a “snake”. These are not pleasant descriptions, but are definitely empowering ones to a Soviet citizen who wishes for reverence and respect from the global community. As a new nation with an untested form of government, the USSR desperately wanted acknowledgement and respect from other nations,  and probably desired the inspiration of a small amount of fear. In a small way, this parallels the version of America that many of our President Elect’s supporters hope will solidify in the coming years. Through his realist poetry, Mayakovsky paints a strong young Soviet Union, one that already has a vaunted position on the world stage. This was obviously intended to place some artificially constructed pride of country in a reader’s heart, as well as providing validation of a powerful and fear-inspiring society.

By the end of his study of “The most valuable of certificates” (the Soviet passport), Mayakovsky makes no pretense about the poem’s true intention. With a burst of nationalistic sentiment that would surely have pleased the state censors to no end, Mayakovsky brings the poem to a close. “Envy me / I’m a citizen / of the USSR!” he writes. In a front to back reading, the poem’s true intention may be clearer, yet its goals are never subtle when read in any manner. Whether it be through fear or genuine ideological fervor, Mayakovsky does an excellent job of promoting the new government’s most central ideals.

Strange new world

Cement presents an ambiguous, nuanced picture of life after the Revolution. One example is the change in the relationship between Gleb and Dasha. She has changed in the time he was at war, become a person who considered herself equal to all other people as a result of the communist ideology:

“It was not by fighting in the war, not by carrying a food-sack on her back and not by doing a woman’s daily chores that she had learned this. No—her spirit had been awakened and forged by the collective spirit of the workers…”

Although she says that she changed because of hardship, and witnessing her own strength in forging through it. Either way, her respect for herself demands an answering shift in his view of her, completely changing the dynamic of their relationship.

“It was not simply his wife standing before him now, but a human being who was equal to him in strength…”

This implies, of course, that before he (and other men) didn’t consider their wives exactly human, with the same rights as men. For Gleb, the change is unwelcome, although to us it looks like a sign of feminist progress. Either way, it’s clear that society was changing in ways that not all of the revolutionaries expected or sought—some positive and some devastating.

Electrification

Zoshchenko paints two different caricatures of “village idiots” in his satirical stories “The Wedding” and “The Earthquake”. Volodka of “The Wedding” fails to recognize his own wife, and proceeds to embrace a young woman who is not, in fact, his wife. He acknowledges that he was, indeed, “a bit hasty” and that he “had never really taken a good look at his bride”. He sees his failures as merely minor errors, mistakes any smart, though confused, young fellow could have made, but her relatives think otherwise. They “ganged up and kicked him out on the staircase” after having already “popped him on the head with a bottle”. Both sides of the argument behave in an uncivilized fashion.

 

In “The Earthquake”, Snopkov the drunk sleeps through an earthquake, and then proceeds to wander “In nothing but his underpants”. Zoshchenko inserts himself into this story at the very end: “The author is raising his voice energetically against drunkenness. The sting of this literary satire is aimed precisely against drinking and against alcohol”. He, sarcastically, inserts this neat moral at the end of the story, offering a mockingly simple solution to a problem that one “village idiot” deals with. After discussing the classic characters and story lines, Zoshchenko has established a picture of old, rural Russia for the reader.

 

He offers an image of a more modern Russia as well, challenging our notion of progress. In “Poverty”, “electrification” simply serves to illuminate the narrator’s problems and state of life, rather than ameliorate any issues that he might be dealing with. Zoshchenko establishes the past as more satisfying than the present / future because this “progress” only brings new problems. Using this language to look at our two “village idiots”, I could say that they are both living in a world before “electrification”—a world whose problems are so old and so worn in that they are practically hidden.

Narrative Knapsack

One of the major themes that comes up again and again in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry the conflict between the narrator’s ‘two selves’: there is the self that he physically presents to the Red Army fighters around him, that of a bespeckled Odessa Jew, and there is the self of his ideation, the craved self, the self that would ‘wear’ Savitsky’s envied “steely strength and youthful complexion.” My First Goose is the tidiest encapsulation of this struggle, and has been discussed through this lense elsewhere.

I would like, rather, to focus on how Babel uses ‘object vignette’ to explore this theme within the structural constraints of the dispatch-story form. The Rabbi’s Son is short, coming in at barely three pages. The narration flits from memory to present, from descriptive prose to epistle. An economy of space is needed: every object counts, every object must be drenched in meaning.

At the risk of oversimplification, Elijah as a character is more of a collection of objects that tell a story than anything else. His belongings do not merely add color to the narrative: they are a secondary narrative, of Jewishness versus ‘Red manhood,’ of the spiritual versus the physical. Maimonides the religious philosopher is juxtaposed with Lenin the materialist, Lenin’s skull is iron, Maimonides’ portrait is the dull silk of religious vestments. Agitprop leaflets are annotated in ancient Hebrew verse, and the narrator is rained on by the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges alike. The messages inscribed in Elijah’s body and possessions extend to images of physical decay and eros: his sexual organs are “the stunted, curly-covered virility of a wasted Semite.” The Rabbi’s Son is the last story in the Red Cavalry cycle: the narrator has run out of room, and tripartite transformations such as in My First Goose are made impossible. All of his contradictions and pain and double-selving must come out concisely, tumble out of a dying man’s kit, a biography in mixed-message paraphernalia. The contradictions, however, are two large to be contained in the ‘object vignette’: the narrator can “scarce contain the tempests of [his] imagination,” his body is aged, and death brings brotherhood more quickly than can be reconciled.

Postscript: Red Cavalry might be my favorite work of Soviet literature ever. I recommend the whole collection wholeheartedly! The Odessa Tales are great too.

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.

Supreme Tragedy

The formidable Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” This quote does much to categorize Russian poetry during the second, third, and fourth decades of the 20th century. Political tumult and changes marked this period so drastically that it is almost impossible to divorce art from the Russian Revolution and the young Soviet Union. Many poems between 1918 and the 1930s were focused on the current political and social themes of the time, usually related to the Soviet Union, yet there are a select few that appear rather innocent. Even so, it is veritably impossible to analyze a poem from 1918 without the thought “How is this not about the revolution” entering the brain. Some poems, like Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poems Grow” initially seem to have to political subtext. However, with closer analysis, and a passing understanding of Tsvetaeva’s life and Russian history, the innocent and purely artistic facade of the poem melts away. In the first stanza, Tsvetaeva writes:

Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses,

Or beauty of no use to a family.

To all the wreaths and apotheoses,

One answer: –From where has this come to me?

Although seemingly about the craft of poetry, Tsvetaeva is writing about her own life. The poem was written in August 1918, almost a year after the revolution. Around this time, as a result of the upheaval of the revolution, the city of Moscow (Tsvetaeva’s home) was plunged into a deadly famine. Marina Tsvetaeva made a brutal decision: placing her young daughter in an orphanage in 1919 in the hopes she would survive the famine. She would die there of starvation. When read in the context of these events, the poem takes on an entirely different meaning. When Tsvetaeva writes “Or beauty of no use to a family”, she is literally talking about poems not being something concrete that can be eaten or bartered. The first line “Poems grow in the same way as stars and roses” is her expression of helplessness in the face of the artistic and poetic muse. Poems come to her, yet she has no way of converting verse into a way to save her starving daughter. The last line is her bewilderment at the relentlessness of her creativity. She wonders why she has the ability to create  poetry, and marvels at the way poems “grow” inexplicably. These are not happy thoughts, though. Her gift is great, yet ironic: it gives her no way to feed her family. In the end, her poems served only as personal comfort. Her daughter Irina died alone and abandoned in 1920. Her mother could only scream into the void.

 

 

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.

Disconnect and Decay

Of all the poets we read for today, my favorite and the one that struck me the most with her language was Anna Akhmatova. She was the one that for me managed to convey great meaning within her poems without getting muddled in a vague and all encompassing language that poets tend to use. She paints a distinct setting for her words to center around, this can be seen in her works, “In the Evening” and “Evening hours at the Table.” She uses the setting of the garden and the dining table in these poems respectively to then elaborate on the themes of disconnect between man and woman in her own personal experience (in the context of the narrative of the poem).

I read many of these poems by Akhmatova to be a continuation of the burgeoning female tradition in writing that we discussed last class with the writing of Zinovieva-Annibal. This, I believe, cam be witnessed by the afore mentioned poems. “In the Evening” provides this contrast of friend and lover, possessiveness and passion. The man in the poem has “no passion in his touch,” despite being her “true friend;” in his eyes, she is merely a possession for his lust, most significantly in the word “horsewoman,” referring to the sexual. The disconnect and the refutation of the conventionalities of traditional gender roles is exemplified in the last stanza: “The violins’ mourning voices, / sing above the spreading smoke, / ‘Give thanks to heaven: / you are alone with your love for the first time.” The pairing of love with the mourning voices of the violin is a clear indication of the true nature of this pairing as an unequal and possessive relationship.

The ideas of decay, passing of time, and the passing from the old to the new is a recurring theme throughout her poems as well. This is present in her poems “I have come to replace you sister,” and “How terribly my body has changed.” The idea of decay that she explores is the gradual loss of the ability to distinguish art and beauty in the world. There is nothing beautiful in this decay, and the old must be swept aside for the new.  In the first poem mentioned, the old can “longer understand the bird’s song,” or “notice the stars or summer lightning.” The new, however, is able to do all those things and “was like a white banner, / … like the light from a beacon.” The theme of there being no beauty in death and decay is also portrayed in the second poem mentioned, where there are no thunderclaps or thunderbolts or a loud joyous voice from the angels to mark her death. This then idealizes youth as being the epitome of beauty and inspiration able to discern true are and beauty and is able to transpose them on the page.

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.