Category Archives: Soviet Aspirations and Environmental Disasters

Nature in Collusion with “The Enemy”

While reading the portion of Alexievich’s book for class, I found myself returning to the question we discussed when reading Shalamov’s short stories: which side is nature on? Is it colluding with the “enemy” or whoever is bringing the most pain to a large group of people? Or is it siding with the victim? In “A Child’s Drawings,” Shalamov accuses nature, “Nature in the north is not impersonal or indifferent; it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here” (Shalamov, 136). In this work, Shalamov reveals the cruelties of this northern environment and of the Soviet government in subjecting even an innocent child to these horrors to the point where this cruel corner of the world was all he knew: “The child saw nothing, remembered nothing but the yellow houses, barbed wire, guard towers, German shepherds, guards with submachine guns, and a blue, blue sky” (Shalmov, 138).

Alexievich presents a variety of different views, many of which also express a sense of betrayal towards nature and humanity in the aftermath of the disaster. Simple acts of sustenance were suddenly dangerous: “We’d always lived off our potatoes, and then suddenly—we’re not allowed to!…They advised us to work in our gardens in masks and rubber gloves” (Alexievich, 26). In this case, it seemed that nature and the government were colluding to deprive citizens of their food, nourishment, and homes. One person recalls, “The order of things was shaken. A woman would milk her cow, and next to her there’d be a soldier to make sure that when she was done milking, she poured the mild out on the ground…The farmers were raising their precious potatoes, harvesting them very quietly, but in fact they had to be buried” (Alexievich, 37). Now the soldiers are enforcing the new order, despite the fact that it is the radiation in the ground and animals that would harm these people. Although they are only trying to help, and keep the populace healthy to a degree, it nonetheless appears that nature and the soldiers are conspiring to spread hunger and attack the populace. The situations in the two authors’ works originate under very different conditions, as Shalamov describes an purposefully derived method of imprisonment and Chernobyl was an accident; yet the parallels indicate a distrust of the government and the truly confused and disastrous times for a large swathe of the Russian population.

Silent Darkness versus Natural Imagery of Sound and Movement in the works of Zabolotsky and Rasputin

In his poem “I Do Not Look For Harmony In Nature,” Zabolotsky uses imagery of the river’s stillness and the sunset’s silence when describing the pain and isolation he feels amidst the dark Russian forest. The dark waters that grow quiet and “drop into exhaustion” are said to magnify a sense of pain for the narrator (Zabolotsky 177). Here, it seems that darkness and desolation transcend the boundary between nature and man through the elements of the environment itself: “human pain rises” up to the narrator “from the dark waters” around him (177). However, this is a passive and weak sense of connection between man and nature compared to man-made components of the landscape, which have expressive description, such as “glittering turbines, voices of labour, electric power,” and “construction” (177). It is man’s artificial impact, namely factory and production that supply the energy to the setting of this piece, rather than the silence and darkness of the natural environment.

In contrast to Zabolotsky, Valentin Rasputin characterize the Russian waterscape by the natural sounds and lively movements of its constituents in “Baikal.” These sounds and movements successfully transcend the boundary between man and nature. “Crying seagulls, falling snow,” and “fish playing in lavish abundance” are three distinct images that independently speak to the liveliness of nature around Lake Baikal (Rasputin 191). These sensory elements have a direct effect on Rasputin’s colleague, and in a similar sense to the still, dark images that cause pain to Zabolotsky’s narrator, transcend the boundary between man and nature, yet do so more actively by “lifting his spirits” (191). Whereas nature pales in comparison to industrialization in “I Do Not Look For Harmony In Nature,” and thus falls short of reaching harmony with man, an opposite result is achieved here, as Baikal, “created as a mystery of nature not for industrial requirements,” functions more actively in transcending boundary and thus inspiring the Colleague. It seems that Lake Baikal and its natural movement and sound extend far beyond the stifled attempts of Zabolotsky’s setting, largely due to the energy of nature itself, rather than the artificial energy of man’s industrialization in Zabolotsky’s poem.

The Fires that Forged Socialism

Nature, to the burgeoning Soviet Union, is a means to a righteous end. The documentary “Magnitogorsk: Forging the New Man” shows the idea that, when combined with the hard work of men, natural resources can be used to change the world. This is summed up early in the documentary when the narrator says that “In 1932, the Soviet Union was characterized by two things: idealism and action. The goal: victory for mankind. This idea is shown throughout the film, specifically in the words the subjects of the film and the narrator choose to use, such as using metaphor to combine industry with nationalism: “Workers brigades are building furnaces for our glorious nation” or how Magnitorosk is frequently defined through its “magnificence” and “strength”.

Viktor Kalmykov, the prolific worker profiled early in the film, is described as a “new man forged by socialism.” The use of the word ‘forged’ is significant because it ties his work manipulating elements of nature to the idea of birthing a new world. An idea central to the Soviet ethos and one creates a complex precedent for how humans are supposed to interact with nature. These terms are not implying a symbiotic relationship, instead they are saying that humans can use nature to make a better world for everyone. While this involves man’s dominion over nature, it is still an idea distinct from a more Cartesian capitalist ethos, where nature is meant to be manipulated for personal gain. No, in Magnitorosk the humans manipulating nature almost seem to mirror nature itself, acting not as individuals thinking primarily of themselves, but rather as parts of a larger process, all working together to keep the Soviet world progressing.

This is complimented by Zabolosky’s perspective in I do not look for harmony in nature, as this poem shows a perspective of nature as something that is not profound on its own, it is described as something that is “puny’ and “weary”, This characterization neatly fits into the narrative of Mangitogorsk, that the grandness of nature is not inherent to the natural world, but rather is created by how humans choose to manipulate it.

Mayakovsky’s Conflict

After reading the Mayakovsky poems, I did a little research about his political views. I found many of his poems ambiguous in interesting ways given the subheading “Soviet Aspirations and Environmental Disasters.” I was not surprised to find out that Mayakovsky had a very complicated relationship with the soviet state— he was a strong soviet supporter, specifically he was a big fan of Lenin, yet he also questioned the state’s involvement in cultural censorship.

I saw this conflict in the poems assigned. Where I believe the most obvious contradictions appear are in his poem “Vladimir Mayakovsky Rented a Dacha One Summer; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” He begins the poem with his contempt for the sun. He shows this anger through his frustration with the sun’s constant rising and setting: “The next day he would rise again/ to flood the world with light./ This happened day after day after day:/ what a load of… rubbish!” (97). The sun clearly represents more than just the physical sun because, after the speaker loses his patience and calls the sun a “parasite,” the speaker and the sun engage in a dialogue. Though at first the speaker is angry at the sun, the tone of their conversation quickly changes: “I end up sitting comfy, chatty,/ absolutely normal./ I talk about that,/ I talk about this,/ how work’s driving me crazy (nearly)” (98). The different tones of conversation I believe emulate Mayakovsky’s relationship with the Soviet State.

Mayakovsky’s “Love” also shows the complexity of his relationship with the Soviet State. Though the poem is entitled “Love,” the body of the poem argues a relationship more complicated than positive love. The speaker describes himself as “a melting July pavement,/ where she throws her kisses like the butts of cigarettes” (10). That line transitions into the third and most disturbing stanza:

Come on then, walk out on the city,
go naked in the sun, you dumb fucks!
Pour drunken wines into wineskin-titties
pour, rain-kisses onto your coal-cheeks.

This stanza portrays what I think might be Mayakovsky’s relationship to the Soviet State as an incredibly turbulent relationship.

Redefining the Human-Nature Power Dynamic

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Vladimir Mayakovsky Rented a Dacha One Summer; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next” focuses on the theme of human’s exerting power over nature and upsetting a natural order that had existed up until the industrialization of the early 1900s in Russia. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator expresses his dismay with the summertime conditions of the countryside, describing it as “a mazy heat” as if there were a “hundred and forty” suns (97). He also observes that “past the village was a hole where the sun sank surely, every evening without fail, slowly and securely,” creating a sense of natural regularity and inevitability that humans have no control over (97).  However, this power dynamic of the narrator consistently being subjected to the sun’s rays changes when he calls the sun a “parasite” and bids it to come into his house (98). Once the sun enters the house, the narrator thinks to himself “I’ve forced the fires of heaven back for the first time since creation,” implying that he has the unusual power to control nature that no one has ever possessed in the past (98). The fact that the narrator shouts at and makes demands of the sun highlights a shifting power dynamic from one where the sun has unrestrained power over all people to another where people are at least on the same level as the sun (or nature as a whole).

While the first half of this poem points towards the balance of power tilting towards the humans in their relationship to nature, it is interesting how the narrator and sun engage in conversation and become friends. At the end of their conversation, the sun claims they have become “like a couple of brothers,” which curiously suggests that the narrator’s gain of power in relation to nature allows him to see eye to eye with the sun and better understand it. By engaging directly with nature, even from a place of self-perceived authority, the narrator realizes how both he as a poet and the sun have the important job of lighting the “shadowy walls” of the world (99). The core message remains ambiguous as the narrator surprisingly makes demands of the sun (which may relate to industrialization becoming a formidable force against nature), all while they both achieve a higher level of clarity and understanding through their close interaction.

Advancement or ‘Grotesquification?’

Mayakovsky’s poems, Zabolotsky’s poems, and the film Magnitogorsk all convey imagery that flips traditional beauty on its head.

In Magnitogorsk, the transformation of the steppe into a heavily polluted, industrialized landscape is most obviously portrayed. As we hear one story after the next of the difficult labour, hazardous working conditions, coercion, death, misery, and environmental destruction associated with the building of, and continued living conditions in Magnitogorsk, it is no challenge to see that exact human history reflected in the scape of grey, pervasive smoke stacks and industrial apartments. Similarly, Zabolotsky and Mayakovsky’s poems depict the deformation of traditionally beautiful concepts of nature, love, and music into a grotesquely human-influenced aberration.

In “Could You?” and “Love,” Mayakovsky shows how humans can belittle grand concepts. The poet speaks of “the ocean’s vicious cheekblades/ in a dish of aspic.” and asks, “could you/ play a nocturne/ on a flute you’ve made from sluicepipes?” Although the ocean is so powerful and “vicious,” “life’s dull self-portrait” only portrays its ocean in a plate of human food. Likewise, a nocturne on a flute may be traditionally meaningful and beautiful, but to play it simply on sluicepipes (water channel pipes) estranges and “bizarre-ifies” them. In “Love,” Mayakovsky also contradicts the reader’s potential expectations from a poem about love. He fills the poem with grotesque images like “swampy muck…something red squirmed on the tracks… kisses like the butts of cigarettes…”

Zabolotsky’s “The Mad Wolf” shows how the wild and natural form (as described by the Bear) are devolved into madness as the wolves and chairman seek human intellect, occupations, and advancement. We see the complexity of how the wolf (“The Mad One”) thinks through his desire to become a (more human)  philosopher/scientist/writer, actually seeks to become a plant (closer to nature). Later, the wolves of different occupations all show their excitement to find happiness through industrialization. All of these images of the wolves and bears (typically majestic animals) seeking out human qualities are very strange. Though on the surface, they may seem to praise science that “sparkes like a water-spout,” the setting of the story allows us as readers to see how ridiculous the concepts of advancement are.

While all these works depict how human influence estranges natural/classical beauty, it’s interesting to note what different points in time they were written. Mayakovsky wrote in 1913, while Zabolotsky wrote in the 1930s, and Magnitogorsk depicts the persistence of hardship through decades and generations.

Betrayal

The role that the environment plays in “I do not look for harmony in nature”, and the tone in which it is described, is very different than what we’ve seen in past readings. I have found that most pieces represent nature as very strong and persistent in the face of all the disruption it faces. In this poem, however, I felt less of this “hope” I felt in the past, feeling more of the hopelessness of nature coming through. Not only has nature become unidentifiable to humans, as Zabolotsky makes clear in explaining that he no longer even bothers searching for harmony in nature, but also that nature can no longer identify itself. Zabolotsky writes that the black water is now “weary of its vigour”, “its bodily movement”, and “its massive labors”, seemingly trying to express that the hopelessness we often see in humans regarding the environment has reached nature itself. A force once so in balance and in harmony can no longer recognize its new form and purpose, an idea that reminds me of Professor Breyfogle’s lecture. The role of water around Lake Baikal was created to maintain itself and the wildlife depending on it. All of a sudden this purpose was shifted to supporting factories and working endlessly to work toward hydroelectric power. If we were to personify the water within Lake Baikal, we might imagine that altering its purpose so drastically could make it unable to identify itself, similar to how nature is depicted in Zabolotsky’s “I do not look for harmony in nature”. I see themes of betrayal in both of these instances, the industrialization of Lake Baikal and the transformation of nature in Zabolotsky’s poem. The waters of Baikal, the wildlife inhabiting it, and even the residents of the area we’re betrayed by the forced industrialization; and, too, the narrator in Zabolotsky’s poem loses a connection with nature, and nature itself almost loses a connection with itself.

Industrialization Interrupting the Hum of Life

In the film, Magnitogorsk and the poem, “I Do Not Look for Harmony in Nature,” there is a strong tension between nature and industrialization. In the film, this first presents itself in the creation of the labor-camp type developments at Magnitogorsk mining and smelting ore. In these camps, especially for those of persecuted kulaks, the new environment in the empty steppe is much harsher than they are accustomed to and this causes lots of sickness and death. Later in the film, a female scientist describes the perils of child rearing in this environment, polluted as it is by the ore smelting. In addition to lack of funds, which contributes to poor nutrition, she fears that the air and toxicity of the environment would negatively impact the life of any children she has. Because of this, she voices her decision to not have children at all. Thus, in this film, the environmental damage is interpreted through threats to human health.

In Zabolotsky’s “I Do Not Look for Harmony in Nature,” his description of the surrounding world conveys hopelessness and lifelessness, “It is a world of sleep and unreason / The heart hears no concordant music / in the obstinate chanting of the wind” (Zabolotsky, 177). The environment and nature surrounding the speaker lacks soulfulness and cheer. Readers quickly find the reason: industrialization. Limiting the “wild freedom” of nature, “glittering turbines…electric power, human construction” lays at the base of this lifelessness, even as Russia moves towards a more technologically advanced society. That is, as we heard in Professor Breyfogle’s talk on electric power in the middle of nowhere and the factories and industries that rose around it. Yet Zabolotsky presents industrialization as something antithetical to harmony within nature.

Cycles of Power and Cycles of Pain: Symbolism of the Peg Leg and Borzya in Shukshin’s “Harvesting”

Shukshin’s “Harvesting” recounts the exhaustive farm-work of a teenage boy under the abusive power of Ivan Alekseich, a fictitious chairman of a collective farm during Soviet Russia. This week’s blog post, inspired by last week’s class comments on the restrictive and communal nature of Soviet Russia, will thus attempt to analyze the symbolism of various images and scenes in Shukshin’s piece, such as Borzya’s visceral response to the chairman’s peg leg, and the chairman’s reaction to higher authority, i.e. the committee representative.

We are first introduced to interactions between the chairman and Borzya, the “infinitely good-tempered scamp of a dog,” when the chairman meets with his farmhands Sanka, Ilyukba, Vanka, and Vaska, to scold them each for their workplace laziness (Shukshin 231). Note that Borzya, instead of being introduced as the farm dog, is identified with the plural personal pronoun “our” (231). Already, we get a connotation of sharedness and communism that often goes hand-in-hand with descriptions of “the kolkhoz” during Soviet Russia. Even the dog, a seemingly unimportant character, is shared communally. That said, the part of this passage that I want to pay closest attention to is the moments amidst Alekseich’s berating of the four teenage workers when he notices his higher committee representative. Fear of the representative and his impromptu arrival propels the chairman out of his chair in order to demonstrate a more attentive and administrative demeanor. Recall that before the chairman began his scolding, Vanka reveals that the “chairman [Alekseich] is simply incapable of flying into a rage on demand” (231). Instead, Alekseich usually delivers a “wishy-washy,” indirect scolding (231). Beating-around-the-bush implies that Alekseich’s strict control is not initiated entirely by his own reactions and sentiments. If they were, their delivery would be more natural and succinct. Instead, his “wishy-washy” suggest uncertainty, especially since he often becomes distracted by independent, unrelated thoughts such as “the quails … [that] destroy all sorts of larvae …” (231). To me, this uncertainty implies that he himself represents a second-hand funneling of power from some other, more authoritative force. Perhaps, this force is the representative, for as soon as he enters, Alekseich “leap[s] to his feet,” and “start[s] banging his fist on the table and shouting” (231). Clearly, the prominence of the committee representative evokes a more aggressive and authoritative façade from Alekseich.

Furthermore, right after the sudden shift of Alekseich’s authoritative tone due to the representative’s arrival, we see the only interaction between Chairman Alekseich and the communal dog Borzya, specifically: the chairman’s trampling of Borzya’s tail, and his subsequent obliviousness to Borzya’s painful cries. Naturally, Alekseich’s peg leg and its inability to sense its position like a normal human foot would perfectly explains why Alekseich would not feel Borzya’s tail underneath him. However, what strikes me as odd is that even after Borzya “let[s] out an otherworldly howl,” the chairman still remains oblivious, and instead of realizing Borzya’s pain, “shout[s] over the dog” (232). Alekseich’s peg leg— and its lack of spatial senses—justifies his initial disregard of Borzya, the communal dog. However, Alekseich still fails to acknowledge Borzya after Borzya clearly expresses a perceivable vocal gesture. For a generally attentive chairman, that had even “caught sight of” Vanka after descent into the rye, I am surprised that he Alekseich remains undisturbed by Borzya (229). That said, I think this outright ignorance is purposeful on Shukshin’s part, as if to say that all sense and emotion is subservient to the perceptions of authority. The fact that the chairman cannot feel Borzya’s tail is understandable, but the fact that the chairman cannot hear Borzya’s cries conveniently while the chairman performs for the representative, suggests that another force is at work here—similar to how the unplanned and convoluted delivery of Alekseich’s scolding suggests the indirect authoritative force of the representative. Also, it is ironic how that in each of these cases, relaying of discipline comes indirectly: the committee representative never explicitly states anything to Alekseich, and Alekseich’s neither purposely steps on Borzya’s tail, nor does he directly nor fervently scold the four teenagers. However, when power is present, i.e. the committee representative, Alekseich becomes a completely different person that angrily scolds his workers and even potentially injures Borzya with purpose. And Borzya, this symbolic dog representing the ownership of the entire community, aimlessly writhes in pain. There is something ironic about the image of this dog biting at an animate peg and thus biting at his own tail. Further, this illustration of the Borzya, a conduit for the entire community, (if you will), biting his own tail, suggests a sense of self-sabotage that is almost comical, evidenced by a unanimous uproar by the peasants, “rolling on the ground with laughter” (233). As readers, we see an illustration of Borzya (the community), responding to oppressive authority (the chairman) who himself does not primarily harbor his own anger, but rather channels the sentiments of more superior authority (the committee representative). In sum, we are left with two cyclical processes: the funneling and subsequent magnification of power and control from high society down through local superiors in Soviet Russian, and the aimless self-sabotage that occurs when the masses fight back against this exponentially strengthened power and control.

In sum, I hope that my analysis, though up for extensive interpretation, lends meaning to some of the symbols in Shukshin’s “Harvesting—” specifically the working class community and its apparent entrapment beneath the “communist” yet obviously authoritative power chain. I personally believe that this reading of Shukshin’s piece could perhaps initiate a dialogue regarding the inextricable connection to power and authority in a society that is meanwhile run by and intended for public’s greater good.