Tag Archives: identity

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…”

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.

Confession

To be candid, I grappled with the readings this week (blame it on break, I suppose). Though I enjoyed the Gogol story, I struggled to thematically connect it to the other readings in a clear way. To me, “Diary of a Madman” reads as an ironic juxtaposition to the Chaadaev writing. Gogol’s story highlights alienation and mental disintegration over time, as well as a struggle between who the narrator truly is and who he presents himself as. Perhaps most interestingly is the representation of Poprishchin through his dating system: “Don’t remember the date. There was no month either. Devil knows what’s going on”; eventually,  his date is upside-down and right-side-up. The sheer absurdity of this story contrasted with the hyper-Russian-centric responses from Chaadaev and Pushkin demonstrates a sad disconnect in the conversation of Russian cultural domination. “Apology of a Madman” is immensely inspiring: “It is a wonderful privilege to be able to contemplate and judge the world from the height of independent thought, free form unrestrained passions and petty interests which elsewhere disturb man’s view and pervert his judgement,” (314). That is one hell of a sentence. The pride so deeply rooted in this Russian identity is unfaltering, as echoed in Pushkin: “Russia will rise, a joyous, dazzling constellation, will leap from sleep to life and fame; on tyranny’s stark wreck the nation will write for evermore our name!”

Again, I struggled with the conflicting tones of the Gogol story and the Chaadaev/Pushkin combo. However, the arguments asserted by both were vastly striking.

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.

“Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

This seems like a period where the originality of Russian culture is distinct. Perhaps because the music we’ve listened to in the past was religious music, all of it was highly influenced by European art, attempting more or less to imitate it. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about European folk music in the 19th century, but many of these folk songs had a distinctly ‘Russian’ sound to me.

The same thing was true of the Moiseyev dance. Instead of an attempt to imitate or borrow the classical forms of ballet and such from European culture, it was unique, different from any other sort of folk dancing I’ve ever seen. The costumes look almost stereotypically Russian, unmistakable. This could be another example of the divide between the peasants and their folk culture, and the nobles trying to emulate other forms of artistic expression. But these recordings demonstrate that folk culture was eventually recognized as being valuable as well. Moreover, it’s impossible to completely divide culture into ‘folk culture’ and ‘high culture’ with no overlap or influence in both directions (look at Gogol’s writing!). Just as pagan themes were adapted to fit the narratives of Christianity instead of destroyed completely, so ‘folk culture’ continued to have a strong influence on the Russian identity.