I think this poem portrays a man’s response to the passing of time with nostalgia and grief in coping with growing older and inevitably insignificant. In the poem, the narrator refers to his age as a beast that has experience in both the older and new centuries. The poem reads:

 “A creature, as long as life persists/ Must bear its backbone and exist/ And a wave rolls and plays / Down invisible vertebrae/ Like a child’s soft cartilage/ The era of the infant earth / Life’s brainpan has been offered up / Like a sacrificial lamb”(56).

I think these lines of the poem may serve as a criticism of society in the 20th century. These lines show that the most recent century is born without any knowledge from the past, making it as pure as “a child’s soft cartilage.” 

The poem also address blood springs from the throat of earthly things (56). The blood of life is not as fruitful as how the beast remembered the older century. For me, I feel that there is an air of nostalgia that Mandelstam addresses. If time continues to pass, and if age expands with the passing of years, there is a natural wave of human emotion like grief and longing. There is also a heightened sense of fragility and weakness involved with the “building blood from earthly things.”(56).

As the poem continues in its descriptions of the beast and temporality, Mandelstam brings about an air of renewal and hope.  He writes, “And once again the buds will swell/ And nature will explode in green/ But your spinal cord is snapped / My wonderful but sorry age” (56). He emphasizes the rebirth of a new century while also acknowledging that the body will not be able to keep up with the changes brought by a new age. Nonetheless, he remains in awe of life’s eternal change. I believe that he is also saying that life is beautiful and ruthless. Although life has created humans, there is still the presence of apathy and indifference for death.  

Pasternak’s poetry is undeniably introspective, asking the viability of choice and progress and challenging the notion that we have complete agency over our lives. He asks this through metaphors, namely those of an actor on a stage and of a train on the tracks, likening them to life. His Hamlet poem has an actor explaining how he felt during the play; acting out a character that someone else had laid out for him, yet being happy to play the role. He laments that the play will go on in a preordained sequence, with the ending set in stone and the path just as unchangeable and apparent. These lamentations relate to the narrator’s view of life; that we are born in order to play a role in our society, and our end and means of reaching the end is laid bare and inevitable. This notion is reinforced with the closing line “to live is not like walking through a field,” meaning that you don’t have complete mobility to decide how you live, but you’re following a set of tracks.

The idea of a track for an end destination is especially apparent in his work My Sister Life, which takes place on a train. The train is meant to represent this set course of life, as trains have to follow an unmoving track in order to get to their destination. In this train is a multitude of passengers, each asking “is this my station” when they are awakened by the howling of the breaks. This is meant to represent how we all have different endings, but we are all headed there on the same set of paths, and we’re just waiting for our turn to reach our destinations. The narrator of My Sister Life chases after the train, but it’s too fast, leaving him behind. I may be reading into this too much, but with the rampant metaphors regarding fate, I read this as a commentary that some people are on a different path in life, and sometimes people aren’t meant to share the same fate, and are destined to be apart. That being said, I also believe this poem alludes to industrialization and political changes, but in the context of Hamlet, I also read My Sister Life as an allegory for predefined fate.

While reading the various poets assigned, I was  intrigued by Tsvetaeva’s poems, in particular how she directly inserted herself into the poems and how she personified poetry itself.  

From the first poem we were assigned titled “For my poems”, I was immediately struck by how Tsvetaeva is addressing her work directly–speaking to her poems as they were her children.  In addition I was struck by a seeming role reversal in “For my poems”, as it seemed like the poems themselves were overpowering Tsvetaeva rather than her creating them. She remarks, “Poems storming inside me, invading like some tiny demons” and that she wrote down these poems when she “did not know I was a poet”. To me, this created an intimacy between the poet and her work I have not experienced, and it made the poems even more impactful to read.  

Going back to my comment about how it seemed as if Tsvetaeva thought of her poems as ‘children’ I was validated and further intrigued by her poem titled, “Every poem is a child of love”.   However (and I think this poem would be fascinating to discuss further), she compares her poems to a “waif born illegitimately…set at the mercy of the wind”–what does she mean by this? Again, I think further discussion on this poem would be fascinating. In all, I just found Tsvetaeva’s commentary on her own poems interesting and it was unlike other poems I have read.

Additionally, I thought that Tsvetaeva’s blatant allusions to herself in her poems was interesting as well, particularly in “Much like me” and “Longing for the motherland”.  Her use of first-person as well as detailed descriptions almost make it seem as though we are entering Tsvetaeva’s mind as her perspective in her own voice from her own point of view is being presented to us.  I found that technique resulted in a different, much more stimulating experience while reading her poems.  I felt as though I was actually beginning to experience something in someone else’s mind. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but I thought the relationship she establishes between herself and her work is extremely powerful.

After reading the selected poets for Wednesday’s class, I was particularly drawn to Akhmatova because of how effectively she communicates her messages. Her poems are much easier to read and flow nicely, especially when compared to the other poets. For example, “I taught myself to live simply” was a poem that particularly struck me because of the time we are living in now. Her personification of worries in the first stanza emphasizes her active role in living more simply; needing to walk every night to tire them out is a powerful way to describe this coping mechanism. Her description of what I presume to be autumn in the second stanza is also very moving. The rustling of burdocks and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster is a beautiful description of the setting in which she writes. However, to Akhmatova, this is about life’s decay and beauty, not her immediate surroundings. She finishes the poem with a powerful line about hearing birds land on her roof occasionally, claiming besides that, it is so quiet she would not hear a knock on her door. The way she writes makes it clear how she taught herself to live simply.

“Sleeplessness” continues the trend of inviting the reader to resonate with her. The first stanza describes the onset of this, as she “catch the distant sound of footsteps. Your words lullaby me well, they haven’t let me sleep for three months!” The slow approach of the trouble with sleeping, personifying it, gives the reader something to relate to. When she exclaims, “You’re with me, with me again sleeplessness!”, it almost portrays the frustration with the inability to sleep. She knows its motionless face, that of an individual lying still in bed but not able to start dreaming. The stream of consciousness she presents makes this poem, like many of her other works, very relatable. Akhmatova’s simple word choice but intense image formation, through various literary techniques, gives readers of her poems a way to relate in a capacity that other poets cannot.

I would like to resume a discussion set forth by Liam about the role of peasants in the works of various Russian Avant-Garde artists. An interesting departure from previous portrayals of the Russian peasantry arises in the development of unique visual arts symbolism. Previously, we have encountered a few archetypes in relation to the portrayal of peasants in high visual art. A common 18th- and 19th-century trope was the romanticization of peasant life, as seen in works such as Venetsianov’s “Reapers” (1820s). We also do have a number of works like Repin’s “Barge Haulers on the Volga” (1873) that emphasize the grueling and obsolete labor endured by the lower classes, drawing attention to human suffering and corruption. Both styles emphasize the humanity of the peasants and strive for realistic proportions and expressions, allowing other elements and principles of design (i.e. lighting and composition) to distinguish their finer purpose. A divergent tradition of flat, stylized humans surfaced in folk art around the same time; such works generally have less to say about the conditions of labor or humanity of laborers.

This style and its analogies in neighboring societies seems to be the inspiration for Chagall. In “I and the Village” (1911), similarly stylized images of a man with a scythe, an upside-down dancing woman on a rooftop, and a woman milking a goat appear. Given that the composition similarly incorporates images such as a cross necklace, cathedral, and the tree (certainly a sacred symbol, especially if construed to be the tree of knowledge of good and evil from the fruit) into the composition, it would seem as if the peasants adopt a similar symbolic status. It is important to account for the fact that this status is not akin to reverence as in icons or ascended existence  as in symbolist art. I find the juxtaposition of the man with the scythe and the dancing woman striking. It seems to stand for the duality of labor and spirit in Chagall’s village life, or perhaps the succession of images from the woman milking the goat to the dancing woman form a daily chronology. In either case, the man with a scythe is not a laborer — he is labor. “Sukkot” (1916) also incorporates peasants, although their participation in the Jewish holiday amid farm labor is pretty neutral,  a piece of the experience rather than the experience in-of-itself. Much later on, “The Farmyard” (1954-1962) features a peasant woman. What is most notable about this example is how the woman is detailed in the same palette as the background, whereas the animals incorporate brighter colors and striking textures. These decisions speak to the peasant as perhaps an anchoring figure: an immediate source of context and a piece of the experience, but not a central message.

Our study of the Mighty Five left me with the sense that the “Russian Sound” which composers such as Mussorgsky strove to attain seemed to include a strong directive towards melodic music. The music of the mighty five, especially Mussorgsky, seemed to sometimes shirk complexity in favor of powerful, emotional tunes which make sense to the ear and require little logical analysis or appreciation for the nuances of musical theory.

I have always been interested then in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring because it does not make any immediate sense to the Ear. It is often atonal and, though it is explosive and brassy at times like some of the works of the quintessentially bombastic Mussorgsky, it is so complicated as to verge on utterly Alien. It truly is an “Avant Garde” piece of music, especially placed within the context of the evolution of Russian music. It seems to be a departure from the work of the mighty five just as much as the work of the Mighty Five were a departure from more “Western” music.

The Firebird seemed to be somewhere in between the Mighty Five and the Rite of Spring. It is doused in the best parts of both worlds. It has some atonal and elusive moments, and yet ends with a movement with a simple harmony that repeats over and over again, becoming more emotionally charged with each recursion. It was indeed Avant Garde, but still had a more profound sense of logic and direction. Indeed, unlike the Rite of Spring and mushc like some of the works of the Mighty Handful, the Firebird seems to be a tonal poem.

In sorting through the burst of colors that were the symbolist paintings, Kustodiev’s Portrait of Tsar Nicholas II was the one that intrigued me most. While it’s not the most technically astounding painting of the bunch, what caught my eye was the way Kustodiev took the basic portrait of a monarch and flipped it on its head through color and composition.

One of the first things you notice about Portrait of Tsar Nicholas II is the light, vibrant color palette that Kustodiev used. This is quite the opposite of classic portrait painting, especially when it comes to painting the Tsar. Previously, the portraits of royalty had used dark, muted color palettes. When color was used, there were really only a few vibrant colors, which popped out from the rest of the muted paintings. Kustodiev, however, used many bright colors, so much so that the black on Nicholas’ hat stands out as the most muted piece in the painting. While many of his contemporaries also used bright color palettes, Kustodiev’s decision to use those colors on a royal portrait was unique, bringing liveliness to a type of painting that was usually muted.

The other striking aspect about this painting is the composition, namely Nicholas’ central placement, facing the viewer head on, which is very unique among portraits of royals. Classic portraits of Tsars and other royals have the subject at an angle to the viewer, but the orientation of Nicholas makes the viewer feel as though they’re speaking with him. That’s how it struck me at least. While many of the older portraits feel impersonal, this portrait personifies him, kind of taking Nicholas off of his pedestal and putting him at our level. This is partly because, before this painting, the only subjects that would face the viewer head on would be peasants or common folk, such as in Ivanov’s A Girl From Albano Standing in a Doorway. The city in the background is another way the composition varies from other portraits of Tsars, which often had a plain background, or depicted them in some palace. Much like the colors, the city adds life to a type of painting that typically fell flat.

With the color and the composition, Kustodiev’s portrait of Nicholas II redefined what a Tsar’s portrait was, updating the classic category of royal portrait painting to fit in with the wave of  symbolists in Russian art.

The works of the Symbolist Art in Russia were very intriguing because there were so many styles used in the works assigned. The use of vibrant colors, cubism, and depictions of beautiful landscape contributed to the variety of works. Although, the illustrations of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman, caught my eye because we read it earlier in class.

There are three illustrations of “The Bronze Horseman” by Benois that similarly display the themes of Pushkin’s story. First, the bronze horseman in the illustrations is depicted much larger than Yevgeny and seems oversized in the image. This represents the Russian state and the power it possesses. Second, there is a storm in every image showing the natural disaster theme of the story. Third, the symbols of black and white signify the love and death in the story. Yevgeny looses the love of his life and in turn this leads him down a path to his death.

The 1904 illustration seems to be distinct from the other two due to the simplicity of the work. Yevgeny and the Bronze Horseman are the only parts of the illustration with fine detail. Also this illustration is set right at the start of the chase whereas the other two depict Yevgeny being chased by the horseman.  The last illustration also stood out to me due to the coloring while still having the contrast between light and dark colors. I would be interested to know when this work was composed because it has the most detail with the shadows and sun. I couldn’t figure out the symbol of the sun. What does the sun symbolize and how do the shadows contribute to that?