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.