Here is your Tsar, forgive…

As I watched the opera excerpts, I was immediately struck by a number of things: first, the costumes. The aesthetic feels truly Russian and the splendor of the Tsar and his men surrounding him, backed by a massive church bell, is a striking image. Delving deeper, I was fascinated by the begging of the commoners, urged on by the always conniving boyars, pleading with Boris Godunov to rule over them. The way Boris looks down at the peasants reaching after him is a bit terrifying, paired with the divine worship the Tsar receives “throughout Russia”.

Once again, as many of our texts and films have shown, religion permeates every aspect of life — blessing the new Tsar as a sort of deity himself, the monks discussing internal strife and the benefits of leaving the “world of sin”… There is an immense amount of respect held for monastic life. Moving on, can we talk about the monk’s discussion of Ivan’s son’s death?! It was like another perspective on that famous portrait; I loved it.

Lastly, I was very interested by the dying words of the Tsar to his son, as he ushered him into an era to come that would not be easy to reign over. The pose of the Tsar dying in his son’s arms was a strangely pleasing parallel to the earlier discussion of Ivan IV (and of course how his relationship with his firstborn played out). It was a truly painful scene (“o cruel death, you torment me!”) complete with an absolutely dramatic death that seems to be key.

Apologies if this is not my best or most succinct writing, but this opera made for a good sick-in-bed watch!

They Who Rise Again

As has been reiterated numerous times during class, Russian culture is obsessed with what it means to be “Russian”. It is an ironic and cyclical phenomenon. As the Russian citizen ponders their identity, they are including themselves in the long Russian tradition of doing so, and asking such broad cultural questions. It is unsurprising, however, to see several common elements emerge when analyzing the collective Russian psyche. Chief among those is an incredible resilience of spirit, and the belief that triumph is  won through sacrifice. Many instances of Russian history have established and cemented these themes. It is often in the darkest of night that the Russian spirit truly reveals itself, and prevails.

Perhaps most famous among Russia’s  triumphs was the halt of Nazi Germany by Russian forces just 5 miles from Moscow. Until this point in World War II, the Red Army had lost hundreds of thousands of men to German rifles, and thousands died from starvation. Previously, and almost equally well known, Napoleon encountered much the same narrative in his invasion of Russia. The Russian Army essentially sacrificed itself in a climatic battle outside of Moscow, taking with them a large percentage of Napoleon’s force. The French were only able to hold Moscow for a few months, until the Russian Army crawled back from the grave and expelled the intruders west of the Dnieper. Tchaikovsky chronicled this musically in The 1812 Overture.

Themes of sacrifice before triumph lie deeply in the Russian literary canon, a direct result of an extensive history of such. In Tale of the Destruction of Riazan, the Russians suffer catastrophic defeat, losing one prince and city after another. The extent of the loss is exhibited explicitly, when it is written “Prince Ingvar Ingvareveich found his fatherland devastated, and learned that all his brothers had been killed by the impure, lawbreaking Batu.” Later, however, Ingvareveich rises above his loss when he “Took the throne of his father […]. And he restored the land of Riazin and he erected churches and monasteries.” Ingvareveich, after assuming the throne, is also described as a “great joy for the Christians”. The text emphasized the unyielding character of the Russian spirit, and the eventual triumph of Russia and her Christendom over all invading forces. The famed Russian film director, Eisenstein, uses these themes in overwhelming fashion in his seminal  Alexander Nevsky,  which depicts the titular hero’s victory over invading Teutonic Knights. In its purest sense, the aforementioned theme is nowhere more present than in Sergei Prokofiev’s score for Alexander Nevsky. The score moves from utter despair to incredible triumph, perfectly encapsulating a central element of Russian identity over the last one thousand years.

Trauma and Identity in Russia’s History

When discussing the Mongol Invasion in Russian literature, there is a common and reoccurring theme of sadness and grief. The very first line of the poem “On the field of Kulikovo” mentions the river, nature itself, is grieving: “The river opens out, crawls grieving on its way.” However even in this oncoming tragedy that will result in the defeat and subjugation of the Russian lands and people, the chroniclers of history and the poets use this terrible event to create a heroic and common identity amongst the Russians. In the Tale of the Destruction of Riazan, characters are propped up against the Mongol horde who then become heroes, like the great and giant Eupaty the Fearless. Characters like Eupaty, who courageously struck back against the Mongols and an emphasis on faith and Christianity, more specifically the defense of christian lands becomes a common theme during tales of the Mongol invasion. This then cultivates a specific Russian identity of faith and fearlessness where no soldier flees the battlefield and fights on against the invaders with no foreseeable chance of success. In the Tale of the Destruction of Riazan, Emperor Batu says this of the Russian people: “[…] never have we seen such courageous heroes […]. They do not think about death and fight bravely and courageously on their horses.” In this account, the defeat of the Russians is only due to the insurmountable numbers of the Mongols.

In The Scythians, they author calls back to an ancient nomadic tribe that used to inhabit the south of Russia that were famed for their battle prowess and seems to claim them as Russian heritage, following the tradition as stated above, however the way he mentions the Mongol Invasion is confusing to me. He seems to be using the event of the invasion as a poetic device to shed the violent tradition of Russian warriors, but beyond that the passage remains unclear to me.

I am not the first, nor the last, warrior.

“I am not the first, nor the last, warrior” is a deceivingly simple sentence. It stands out in a sea of complicated imagery pertaining to animals and aching descriptions of the Battle of Kulikovo. The first time I read it, I understood its sentiment to express “I am neither the first warrior, nor the last warrior”. This humble sentence echoed Theodosius’s “meek” and pious words and choices in life. It speaks to the warriors of the masses, to those who stand on both sides of the battlefield’s lines. It didn’t feel particularly unique in its message: “I am one of many who have come before me, and many who shall follow, here and around the world”. The next time I read it, I interpreted it completely differently. I read it as “I am not the first or last, warrior”, as if it were addressing an individual warrior. This interpretation establishes this poem as an open letter, with a specific audience–those warriors who leave their sobbing mothers and familiar homes, with the risk of never being able to return to them. The thing that both interpretations have in common is that they don’t specify the roots of the warriors. Rather than politicizing this battle and demonizing the “other side”, he writes about all warriors and the loss that they each are experiencing. Blok furthers this notion when he writes, “Rival swords clash in the wake of the wind” at the end of section IV. Instead of humanizing the people holding the swords, or establishing them as rival warriors, he describes them as “rival swords”, detaching the individuals from the violence they are engaged with. This separation contributes to the notion of this poem acting as an open letter to all warriors, rather than to a specific set of them. The multiple interpretations of the line “I am not the first, nor the last, warrior” sets the tone for the poem’s reflection on war and loss, directed towards the warriors, rather than establishing a battle cry or a call for vengeance.

Scratch a Russian, Find a Paradox

When we began this class, Fyodor Tyutchev’s question confronted us- “What is Russia [?]” Questions of national origin and national ‘character’ (a term that, while reductive, proves useful when examining how an idea is expressed in cultural productions) pertaining to Russia take on a multiplicity of complicated and oft contradictory forms. Is Russia the ‘Europe of Peter the Great’, or is it an ‘Asiatic’ anomaly, stamped with the legacy of Tataro-Mongol occupation? While both of these definitions are problematic, I will narrow in on the second, and examine how the notion of the ‘Asiatic’ is engaged with in two works-Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Scythians, and Sergei Eistenstein’s 1938 epic Aleksander Nevsky.

In the first stanza of the poem, Blok appears to be making an unambiguous statement on Russian identity- “Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, Asiatics, with greedy eyes slanting!” Russia is explicitly positioned as a crossroads of cultures, and given a world-historical mission as a “shield” dividing the ‘hordes’ of Asia from Europe. The nature of the synthesis between the ‘Scythian’ and the ‘shield’ is obscured and, to the ‘Oedipus’ of the European tradition, inscrutable. Russia is a “Sphinx”, a sensuous and bloody dualism, the bearer of a “love as sets our hot blood churning” for the fruits of European culture, yet with a capacity for the violence of the steppe. Europe’s rib-cages burst beneath the “impulsive ardor” of Russian adulation, a legacy of the ‘Mongolic’ stamp left by “breaking in wild horses to the rein, and taming slave-girls to our grip.” Blok acknowledges the Petrine tradition of borrowing, yet ‘others’ Russia as an entity capable of receding before Europe, presenting an ‘asiatic mask’ when betrayed. She does not leave without first offering an olive branch, an invitation to “hammer [your] swords into ploughshares”, to accept Russia’s call “To peace and brotherhood and labour”. Here, perhaps, is an echo of the Slavophiles, of Nikolai Danilevsky’s ‘Slav Role’ as distinct from the West, yet capable of serving as a guiding light.

Eisenstein’s film offers a radically different engagement with concepts of the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Russianness’. Much of what is said (and left unsaid) in the film can, of course, be attributed to the exigencies of producing a film about beating back the Germans in 1938-priests are occult and cruel, the rich are incapable of leadership, and many of the Teutonic helmets bear a curious resemblance to stahlhelms. Putting all that aside, I want to draw attention to a scene towards the beginning of the film, when Prince Alexander rejects the offer to join the Golden Horde. To the entreaty of the Mongol dignitary Alexander responds with a proverb (containing the folksy da nye of the peasant idiom, but the role of the peasants in Alexander Nevsky is a topic for another blog post)- “It’s better to die than to leave your homeland.” The Tatar is rejected, and Russianness, through connection to native land, is affirmed. As the Mongols march off, an old man suggests that Prince Alexander fight them. In the face of the German onslaught, the Prince cautions patience- “with the Mongols we can wait.” In Blok’s poem, the confrontation and contradiction of the Russian with the ‘Asiatic’ is foregrounded, reveled in. Alexander Nevsky brings a very different notion of Russianness to the table-the Mongol will remain unconfronted, the asiatic mask tucked away.

Suffering: a Sign of Shame or a Badge of Honor?

In our readings for Session 5, I found the theme of Russian suffering to be the focal point from which religious and nationalistic undertones arose. More specifically, the depiction of such great suffering seemed to pose the question: should Russians be proud or ashamed of the causes and realities of their past hardship?

Within the language Tale of the Destruction of Riazan, suffering seems to be a both an shelter and a result of Russian sin. In section five, as Prince Ingvar begins to complete the task of burying his relatives who have been killed by Batu and the Tatar warriors, the response in the text to these “untimely deaths” is that “all this happened because of our sins”. However, earlier in section three, the author writes a slightly different response to the utter destruction of Riazan: “this happened for our sins.” Is this difference merely do to translation? If not, suffering for sins conjures the phrase, “Jesus died for our sins,” and would seem to signal to Russians that they should be proud of and grateful for their ancestors and religion for absorbing the ugly suffering of the sins of all Russians. If, however, the Mongol invasion occurred because of the sins (perhaps too much bloodthirst or fighting between princes) of those living in the Kievan Rus society, modern Russians would have reason to be ashamed of their predecessors.

In Alexander Blok emphasizes nationalistic pride from Russian suffering in The Scythians. He boasts that, “We, like obedient lackeys, have held up / a shield dividing two embattled powers — / the Mongol hordes and Europe.” John Thompson directly refutes this point in our textbook, claiming that the Russians had nothing to do with stopping the advance of Mongol expansion to the West. Nevertheless, from reading The Scythians, Russians may be compelled to regard their ancestors’ suffering with patriotic pride. I look forward to discussing further the Russian perspective on suffering with particular respect to their founder’s hardships at the hands of the Mongols.

 

 

Post for Session 4

The background reading was once again helpful in understanding the text. The reading focused on the domination of Russia by the Mongols and the toll it took on the people of the country, which prepared me for the melancholic ending of the Lay.

The importance of the ruler to the Russians is clear throughout the text, as at the end: ‘”It is difficult for a head to be without shoulders. But it is also difficult for the body to be without the head.” And so it is difficult for the Russian land to be without Prince Igor.’ This could be connected to the authoritarian history of Russia, often less democratic than the west.

Another interesting theme in the Lay was coexistence of Christianity and paganism. Throughout most of the text, Russia’s pagan gods and the forces of nature are frequently invoked and revered, until Christianity is mentioned at the very end: “Igor rides along the Borichev to the Church of the Holy Virgin…Hail to the princes and the armies who fight for Christendom and against the infidel hosts.” The reference to the Kumans and other enemies as “infidels” is the one constant, whether the Lay appears devoted to Christianity or the pre-Christian religion. This goes along with the themes we already discussed in class, of previous authors being devoted to the church but still wishing to glorify Russia’s pagan past.

The opera seemed very fitting for the text, with its beauty and grandeur and melodrama.

“The Golden Stirrup”

Once again, the background reading provided excellent perspective and oriented me historically (which I needed).

The Lay immediately struck me with the very inciting nature of the questions asked in the invocation. Without losing the name-heavy tendency, The Lay immediately invoked wild imagery with reverent depiction of Russian rulers (Yaroslav, Mstislav). Bird metaphors dominated the introduction, and I found myself taken with this inspiring figure, riling up his army with words. It reminded me of Julius Caesar. The essence of Russian pride was eminent and the language conveys the splendor of Prince Igor: “Then Prince Igor set his foot in the golden stirrup and rode into the open prairie” (172). I am still very curious who The Lay would have been intended for, audience wise, because the work fluctuates with its tone — sometimes the animal imagery is triumphant, other times it is dark and looming. Overall, the language was heartbreaking: “The wine of this bloody banquet was drank to the last drop. The Russians gave their guests to drink from the same cup. They died for the Russian land” (176). I enjoyed the opera paralleled with this reading because they both matched in grandeur and melancholy, which seems entirely Russian to me. It was very interesting to listen to the opera & simultaneously read.

Welcome to our class blog!

We are going to have a great semester together exploring the riches and riddles of Russian culture. This blog is a place for you to test your ideas, be creative, and engage with your peers on questions ranging from the artistic to the political. Welcome to RUS 2240! I look forward to your contributions and your comments!  – Professor Gillespie