Tag Archives: Individualism

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…”

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.

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.

Individualism in Petersburg

The satirization of power structures looms large over the works of “The Nose,” “A Guide to a Renamed City,” and Lietenant Kizhe. In the midst of a new city, St. Petersburg, that incorporated aspects of all of Europe, and an increasingly centralized and powerful political structure, wherein collectivism and obligation to the state was of paramount importance, I’d like to focus on the concept of the individual. How is he or she presented in each of these works, and to what extent does he or she matter?

Lietenant Kizhe both opens and closes with a sleeping Tsar. Paul’s unawareness positions him as the center of ridicule in the movie, yet also makes a statement on the importance of an individual: namely, that there is none. The individual is merely a scapegoat for the masses in Lietenant Kizhe. When faced with exile, Count von Pahlen and his uncle uphold the fictional character of Kizhe. Yet, when the guardsmen send Tsar Paul an insulting letter, they have no individual to load there problems unto. Tsar Paul claims that a “state is lonely without faithful servants.” Ironically, his one faithful servant is no more than an apparition in Tsar Paul’s world, where personal connection and individualism counts for less than nothing when compared with rules, positions, and respect. Thus the film presents a lonely reality, not because of the absence of society, but because of the absence of an individual.

Joseph Brodsky claims that St. Petersburg “is the city where it’s somehow easier to endure loneliness than anywhere else: because the city itself is lonely”. This is not because there is an absence of people or culture, but rather because there is an absence of an individual identity for the city. It is split between Leningrad and Peter, many different Western influences, capital or disconnected city.

In “The Nose,” by Nikolai Gogol, we see the effects of a part dismembered from a whole, on an individual anatomical scale. Kovalyov loses his nose and subsequently loses his identity as a confident man looking for a promotion and young ladies to seduce. The Nose is able to completely break off from the whole and hide as an individual. To what extent does this mean that the part needs the whole, or that the whole needs the part? Furthermore, how much does the individual need the state? How much does the state need the individual?