Tag Archives: National Character

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?

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.