Author Archives: aljohnso

Longing for the “old” Russia in Sergei Esenin’s selected poems

With the theme of the countryside and village life in times of change in mind, while reading Esenin’s poems I sensed a certain longing for the Russian homeland before the changes occurred and a certain resistance toward the industrialization and deforestation that was rapidly altering the natural state of the country. “Hey there, Russia, mother country…” really captured this resistance. The last stanza reads:

 If the heavenly host should beg me:

“Come to live in heaven above!”

I shall say: “Don’t give me heaven

But the Russia that I love.”

Using religious metaphor to emphasize the poet’s desire for the Russia that he once knew, by turning down the theoretical offer of the Lord to return to Heaven, we get a glimpse of the sadness and longing the poet feels. A similar idea is portrayed in “It can’t be dispelled, can this sorrow…”. The third stanza read:

Familiar views and expanses

By moonlight now seem not so fine.

Ravines … tree-stumps … bare slopes have saddened

These Russian horizons of mine.

What the poet once appreciated about their homeland is now less attractive and is seemingly “unfamiliar”. After describing the new landscape, the poem reads in the sixth stanza:

All of this is what we call the homeland,

Because of all this we meanwhile

In rainy days cry and drink vodka

While waiting for heaven to smile.

This stanza really conveys how disheartened the people of Russia are through the changes brought upon their once worshipped homeland. Lastly, the poem “The disquiet of vaporous moonshine…” directly references the industrialization and deforestation of the Russia countryside and village land by referencing “things made of steel and of stone” and the soil-tilling, primitive plough, and poplar and birch trees suffering anguish in the fifth stanza. The sixth stanza really stuck out to me:

For myself, I don’t know my own future…

I’ve no place in the new life, I feel,

Yet still wish to see poor drab Russia

A prospering country of steel.

These lines accurately portray the loss of identity and belongingness residents faced as a result of industrialization and deforestation. Suddenly people are unsure of their future and the role they play in their rapidly-changing homeland.

Man vs. Man

We’ve discussed extensively the boundary between man and nature and how such boundaries have been bridged. In this sense, we’re talking about domestic vs. natural, or humans vs. animals. My favorite example of this is evident in Pasternak’s “Sister my life…”. Through his involvement with the “Futurism” movement, he embodies a positive perspective toward the future as he details the merging of the human and natural world. While present in much of the works we have read, the merging of the human and natural world was not present in Kata Pride Brown’s Saving the Sacred Sea. Typically it is nature that plays victim to man, such as in the case of deforestation or industrialization, but it seems like in this piece, nature is posing the problem to man. No longer do we see man vs. nature but more man vs. man, battling for domination and power. The Foreign Agent law was designed to target specific NGOs who “had been especially meddlesome in the affairs of the state and business elites” (184). More generally, Brown states that “law was created to serve as a weapon of the state against its opponents” (182), but it is evident through this notion of legal nihilism that laws such as The Foreign Agent law is used as a weapon against its very own people. For me, this piece had less to do with the problematic dynamic between man and nature and more to do with the conflict among humans.

Symbolism in Platonov’s ‘Among Animals and Plants’

I waded through ‘Among Animals and Plants’ without really capturing the overarching theme, the topic that unites all of the story’s complex parts. I caught the first glimpse of a theme on page 161 when Platonov describes Fyodorov’s longing for the world beyond his village, stating that, “Out there was science, fame, higher education, the new Moscow Metropolitan railway, while here were only animals, the forest and his family…”. Throughout the story, the reader is reminded of Fyodorov’s desire to see the larger and more developed world. He expresses a hunger for breaking away from his small village life surrounded by animals and plants, wanting to break into the world of theater, science, fame, and the new Moscow Metropolitan railway that he hears about on the radio. Each time he brings up this different world, he compares it to his own – a depressing life with nothing to do but work and worry. We see his longing in the many instances he uses his imagination to better the dull and meaningless situation he’s in. On page 168 Fyodorov dreams up an entire world to identity unknown passengers on the train, delving deep into a fictional story about the woman’s bloody and tear-saturated handkerchief. On the following page, he describes his reading tactic of starting a book in the middle or end pages to avoid the monotony of the beginning, as the writer “is just thinking”. All of these instances combined, I had a grasp on the fact that Fyodorov was unhappy in his life, yearning for something more creative, exciting, and rewarding.

Scanning the story over once more, a quote on page 162 caught my eye: “Next a choir of young girls’ voices began a song about heroic socialism, about happy people, about interesting life…the sense of the music remained clear: people should live in bliss, not in need and torment”. The key word here is “heroic socialism” and once I caught on to that, I was able to understand living in “bliss” to mean existentialism and conversely, living in “need and torment” to represent the current socialist state of Russia at that time. With this, I found that overarching theme, then coloring the way I understood the metaphors I didn’t originally pick up on. For example, I was confused by the extreme anger Fyodorov felt toward ants at the beginning of the story, claiming that “They spend all their lives dragging goods into their kingdom; they exploit every solitary animal, both big and small, that they can dominate; they know nothing of the universal common interest and live only for their own greedy, concentrated well-being” (156). Fyodorov’s view of the ants is simply a reflection of what he sees in himself, and accordingly, his disapproval of socialism.

Something seemed off to me the first time I read this story – Fyodorov was clearly unhappy but I wasn’t able to pinpoint why. Taking into consideration the political climate of the time, it makes sense that Fyodorov feels unfulfilled, craving the freedom to dictate his own development in a socialist world.

 

Childhood, a Garden

I really appreciate how Tolstaya uses the narrator (a young woman), the imagery of a vast, beautiful garden, and Pasha’s affair with Margarita to tie in notions of youthfulness among both life and death. Tolstaya starts off by using the garden as a metaphor for childhood: “In the beginning was the garden. Childhood was a garden. Without end or limit, without borders and fences…”. With this lyrical style of writing, Tolstaya is able to capture the essence of the gardens in his long, detailed descriptions, and bring in the themes of innocence and curiosity characteristic of childhood. Later in the piece, Tolstaya writes of Pasha’s journey to the garden after a day of work, “…hurries to his Garden, his Paradise, where evening peace comes from the lake…”. By capitalizing “Garden” and “Paradise” the reader is forced to acknowledge and respect the role of the garden in Pasha’s life and in this piece more broadly. She later writes of the garden as an experience that transports Pasha “into the land of lost youth, the land of hopes come true…”. This ties back the idea of the youthfulness and the simplicity that the garden brings to even adult life.

The garden – childhood – does not present Pasha with any “borders” and “fences” and has proven to have no “end” or “limit”, as he revisits it each time he returns to the garden. This piece ties in perfectly with the theme for today’s class, The 20th-century nostalgic pastoral. The pastoral is often depicted by a peaceful and beautiful landscape that has been tamed or maintained by humankind. A garden is the perfect example of this. Additionally, there are themes of nostalgia in Tolstaya’s piece as she discusses the beauty of childhood from the perspective of the narrator and of Pasha.