Tag Archives: Moscow and Petersburg

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.

What’s in a Name? Ontological Crisis!

Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is a masterpiece-the trouble is that it, like any masterpiece, has far too much worth unpacking for this humble blog post to cover. I will start with a small detail; I will enter through the servant’s door, Frol Skobeev’s coin jingling in my petticoats.

Throughout the poem, St. Petersburg is called by four different names. In the third stanza of the Prologue, it is Petra tvoren’e (creation of Peter), in the sixth stanza it is grad Petrov (city of Peter). In the first stanza of Part 1 it is Petrograd (Peter-city), in the fourth it is Petropol’ (Petropolis). With each name change, her aspect changes as well- from a strict and beautifully-ordered object of love, to the unshakeable death-knell for the elements, back to a November-kissed darkened city, and finally (and most dramatically) to ‘Triton, immersed up to the waist.’ The city is mutable and protean, stamped with Peter’s mark, yet failing to settle into one shape.

The effect of this on the reader (this reader, to be precise) is one of untethering. Pushkin gives us a poetic description of the city in the Introduction, but without a stable identity to pin it on, both the description and the city seem to escape the realm of the concrete. The city is a spatial non-sequitur, and only when the flood comes, bringing with it human tragedy and the destruction of concrete physical objects, can she be pinned down and transformed into a backdrop for small-scale grief-it is significant that St. Petersburg is given no further names in Part 2 of the poem, as Evgenii contemplates his loss and slips into madness.

Is it any wonder, then, that Petersburg has developed around itself a myth of unreality, that for Herzen it “disappears from my eyes in the fog”, unique and elusive in being “the embodiment of the general abstract notion of a capital city”? The idea of St. Petersburg being an ‘unreal city’ is not my own-it is a complex (and fascinating!) cultural trope, which we will discuss next class. It is interesting, however, to observe the small tweaks in language that can buttress this unreality-a syllable here, an allusion there, and St. Petersburg recedes into the night…*
*Read Andrei Bely’s Petersburg for this and more.