In Gogol and Raika, Shukshin depicts a universally relatable series of childhood memories, while also presenting the harsh, painful, and frightening realities of war-time life. First of all, the conversational form of the narration allows a heightened sense of connection between the reader and the narrator. It almost feels like a diary entry, in which the narrator reflects on these distinct childhood memories, but then, occasionally inserts his “present-day” self using parentheticals. In the first of many such parentheticals, the narrator remarks, “(To this day your heart shudders when you remember the live, quivering tug of the tow rope in your hands and the way it slaps against the water when it begins to ‘pull’).” The specificity of these details are such that only the narrator himself, or someone who has very similar experiences would entirely understand. Yet, having this level of intimate look into the narrator’s combined childhood and present-day thought-processes creates a strong sense of investment in the narrator for the reader. I assume the narrator is Ivan Popov, a fictional (?) character based off of Shukshin’s (though this is only an assumption and I might be completely off on that).

As the narrator progresses through his story, he does not follow a linear path. Rather, like in a conversation, or as in a diary entry, he weaves along a rather tangential path, until it all comes together for the most extreme of endings. We’ve read countless stories that end in one surprising, and often dark last paragraph; this seems to be a pattern.

I am interested in the connections between the various key images in this narrative. From the very beginning, we sympathize with and relate to the young boy who will do anything to read, and who cares so deeply for his cow Raika. As relatable and happy-spirited, and optimistic of a character Viy is, there is no shortage of dark and brutal imagery:  the starving “endlessly sad cow’s eyes,” the inescapable cold, the “anxious, terrible night,” (which takes place even in his fantasy for the future joyous spring), the image from “Viy,” of a woman “sitting up in her coffin,” and lastly, the cow “with her intestines hanging out of her belly.” All of these horrific images and fears seem to be contained in the ominous “dark corner,” which the narrator avoids when seated atop his stove, and yet conquers after an expedition with his mother.

Other remaining questions – the cow returns to her family to die – what do we make of this? What about the dog that scares his mother?

Matryona’s Homestead differs from our readings in the past couple of weeks in that it goes further than the surface level and shifts the more apparent aspects of Russia that have changed (industrialization, deforestation, etc.) and explores more historical details, such as village life and culture. For me, Matryona represents the traditional villager of the time – hard working, never complaining, acting often out of selflessness – all despite her ill health and old age. Although she is deeply attached to her home and feels that it has supported her through much of her life, she follows suit of the drunken villagers and helps deconstruct her very own home. Matryona was a lovely woman yet her selfless acts were taken for granted and exploited by her fellow villagers, which follows with the fact that village life in that time was exploited and restructured by the ruling communist power.

Ignatich mentions that he wants to live in a peaceful and wooden part of Russia but is disappointed when he fails to find this on the collective farm school where he is assigned. Evident by the factory smokestacks polluting the air and the drunken villagers, and between the misuse of logging and wide-spread industrialization, the Russia he wanted seemingly no longer existed. Our theme for tomorrow’s class, fittingly, is “The village in Soviet prose of the Thaw period”. I did some research and found that village prose was a movement in Soviet Russian literature beginning during the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ (the decade following Stalin’s death where the Soviet Union experienced some freedom from the repression and censorship they experienced after the revolution), that focused largely on representing rural village communities and their struggle during this time.

Specific to village life, this traditional aspect of Russia was exploited and reorganized, but I get a sense in this piece that while many aspects of village life were forcibly changed, there is still a sense of community and traditional life that they are holding on to. This could be seen in the sustained selflessness and kindness of Matryona regardless of the exploitative villagers, or even more so in Vanya’s deep love for reading in Gogol and Raika. He writes that regardless of the hardships of winter, the coldness and hunger, he holds on to his one passion: reading books to his Mama and Talya. This is a small yet significant way of maintaining some sort of joy in a not-so-joyous time.

Examining the work animals present in “The Cow” and Cossacks of the Kuban can reveal many conceptualizations of the interaction with humans and nature at this period of Soviet rule under Stalin. In “The Cow,” the young Vasya and his father treat the cows as primarily work animals, valued for such actions, “He liked everything about the cow…her large, thin body which was the way it was because, instead of saving her strength for herself in fat and meat, the cow gave it all away in milk and work” (247-48). His father too appreciates the calf for the services rendered, asking rhetorically, “What do we want with a bull calf?” and thereby expressing his disdain for a male animal that is too young to work and can’t produce milk and therefore is best put to use as a source of meat and income (254). Of course, the animal is such the perfect worker that Platonov chooses it to represent the ideal of a communist worker, but the idea that even a cow could fill this role of labor and proffering more than it keeps for itself (and then being torn apart emotionally and then literally because of these sacrifices) suggests that Platonov and/or the Soviet regime view people as not that far off from animals and a source of pure labor above all else.

Similarly, in Cossacks of the Kuban, the main work animals are horses, bred both for racing and transport. The contrast in the beginning of the film between the horses and the oxen, the latter of which pulling a load of humans and watermelons and thus plodding along slowly but surely, emphasizes the difference between the beasts of pleasure and those of labor. The oxen are like the hardened peasants, used to a life of hard work, unlike the galloping horses that compete in races and carry the single individuals of prominence in their seemingly flighty, yet elegant ways.

The horse, the ox and the cow are both animals that have been domesticated through many years of labor on the human’s side and the result is a blending of these work animals and the working humans that employ them. I’d like to talk more about the cow’s death and the symbolism there of it dying on the railroad tracks, hit by a train and the symbolism of the horse race as the pinnacle of the drama of the two love stories, but I’m not 100% sure of my ideas (and what exactly they are) and would rather discuss them in class instead.

In this week’s reading, I found it very helpful to historically situate the works of Russian poet Sergei Esenin, as I feel that chronological context allows for a deeper textual extrapolation of his rhetorical choices, such as his frequent use of the passive voice. In fact, I noticed that he often  omits verbs altogether. After some historical analysis, I found that using passive voice to describe a series of images (rather than the traditional succinct narrative connected by tasteful verbs we often see in Russian Romantic works) is indicative of Russian Imaginism— the literary movement that Esenin himself helped found, alongside scholars Anatoly Marienhof and Vadim Shershenevich (Hirsch, A Poet’s Glossary, 2014). This movement quickly followed the Revolution of 1917— the fall of Emperor Nicholas II, and the rise of The Soviet Union. At this sensitive time juncture, there formed workers’ councils— called soviets—that protected workers’ rights and attempted to give power back to the newfound proletariat. (Klein, “Soviet”,1920).

Throughout all this research, I often found the word “grassroots” repeated over and over, referencing not only the soviets and their constituents, but also referencing the general public’s re-adaption to subsistence agriculture (Carmichael, A Short History of the Russian Revolution, 1964). Reading about subsistence agriculture, or farming focused entirely on the goal of self-sufficiency, revealed various aspects of Esenin’s pieces that I had not originally noticed. For example, most of his selected poems deal with pastoral themes regarding Russian countryside. Many of them begin and end with stream-of-consciousness depictions of desolate farmland. I think that each of these scenes tells a different story, and it is the overall negation of verbs that depicts the void of emotion that poor farmers felt due to economical and agricultural strife during this chronological tipping point.

To begin, I think that “Land of mine in dire neglect…” perfectly introduces us to the superimposed, verb-less phrases used by Imaginist writers when documenting Russian countryside at the onset of the Revolution of 1917. Purposefully trite remarks about a “country run to waste,/ Fields of hay unmown as yet,/ Monastery, estate” (Esenin 2-4) offers the reader a sense of the sad, barren countryside. The sun’s rays are deduced to “foam as shadows fall,” and bright sunset becomes a “tinge,/ Mould of dove-grey hue” (8, 11-12). It seems to me that there is a strong sense of vapidness and desolation described here, despite the lively depictions of “crows” weaving past “windows” (14). There is something backwards here—(much like the backwards syntax, i.e. “crows past windows weave”): despite the liveliness of the crow scene, there is still a large sense of disjointedness that is complemented by Esenin’s truncated, unusual images and their awkward, forced juxtaposition.

Furthermore, it is at the end of this poem that the connection between Russian life and a “fairytale,/ A legend of the past” (17-18). What I take from this ending (up for interpretation) is that the economical and agricultural strife that I mentioned before, along with the constant degradation of the farming class during the 1910s, resulted in a sense of desolation and anguish across Russian farmland/countryside. The quotation “a legend of the past” leads me to think that Esenin attempts to perhaps suggest a nostalgia for the past, i.e. an agriculturally and economically easier time in Russia.  I think that it could be the impending revolution and the grassroots dialogue has caused a vacant and distraught environment for not only Russian farm-country, but more generally, the Russian working class.

If I had more space in this blog post, I would love to comment on various other sentiments communicated through the unusual series of images in Esenin’s “Song about a Dog,” “The Hooligan,” “It can’t be dispelled…,” and “The disquiet of vaporous moonshine…” Still, this shorter poem “Land of mine…,” along with our analysis, nonetheless shows how that even though subject matter can denote a certain narrative, the methods that the author takes to express that narrative can potentially alter (or perhaps even reverse) the greater meaning of the text. Weaving crows and a lively snowstorm were both utilized in “Land of mine in dire neglect…” however the overall sentiment achieved in this piece was sad and desolate, due mostly to the sentence structure. In fact, restating this example reminds me of our class discussion on Tuesday about Russian writer Turgenev, and how his elongated sentence structure in “Forest and Steppe,” for example, expresses a long and fluid movement through the Russian countryside. In each of these pieces from both last class and today, meaning follows form, whether that is the sad, barren pre-revolutionary countryside, or the long fluid depiction of the thriving agriculture of Russia nearly seventy-five years before Esenin and his pieces. Each moment in history can be complimented effectively through not just the literary works produced during that time i.e. Russian Imaginism, but more importantly, as a product of the modes and styles in and through which those works were crafted!

Please let me know if you noticed any other interesting literary techniques evolving throughout our selected pieces. Perhaps, it would be interesting to see if there is any simultaneous historical context that could potentially strengthen our textual analyses. Would love to hear from you!

The darkness, the more common occurrence of the thinning veil between the living and the dead mimics the rarer All Saints’ Day. Turgenev’s “Bezhin Meadow” emphasizes this mysterious and haunting time. The first suggestion of death weighing on the narrator, “a bulging game bag cut into my shoulders mercilessly,” counters the victory of a successful hunt with the burden and pain of carrying the dead around with him (24). This theme continues as the five boys, as many youths around a campfire are wont to do, tell ghost stories based in Russian mythology. The first tale of a water nymph, a rusalka, also takes place at night when a traveler loses his way. Some researchers, such as Ivantis in Russian Folk Beliefs, report the belief that the rusalka and other household spirits are actually the dead who have continued residence on this earth. The melding of worlds does not stop at the living and the dead, but also the future and the past: “you can see a living man too. I mean one whose turn it is to die in that year” (39). And the evidence of the accuracy of these portents is portrayed as steadfast, between the Ivanshka Fedoseyev that died in the spring and the ominous ending of the story in which the narrator notes that Pavlusha “died the same year” as when he heard the dead boy calling his name from the water (48). Interestingly, the Russians in this story take a rather fatalistic approach to these omens, “No use running away from your fate, is it?” which recalls many Greek tragedies like Oedipus that reinforces the accuracy of said prophecies (46).

The bridging of life and death arises again in Turgenev’s “Forest and Steppe” as he recounts, “You breathe in peace with every breath, yet a strange unrest comes upon the spirit…all the time images and faces of the beloved, dead or alive, keep coming to mind” (395). The black and blank night acts as a tapestry on which the mind projects these images, called forth by the haunting, cloying emptiness of night. Pushkin takes a darker turn in his poem, “When Lost in Thought” when he contrasts, “slimy graves awaiting with a yawn” and “some ancestral village keep, / Where all the dead in solemn stillness sleep” (200:13, 20-21). The chilling assumption in the latter that in the graveyard he stumbles upon, the dead are not as restful as one would hope (or expect). These reflections on Russian perceptions of the afterlife and the joining of the past and the present in the form of the living and the dead reveal the ongoing prevalence of folk beliefs merging with Christianity.

Note: I would have liked to delve deeper into the idea presented in the last sentence based on the conflict and comingling of Christian values and pagan beliefs. Examples include the use of the cross to ward off the rusalka and the changing views towards the spirits (the “evil” water nymph and forest demons in contrast with the helpful and omniscient wolf in “Ivan and the Grey Wolf”). This is a theme I found to be quite prevalent in Ivantis’s Russian Folk Beliefs and found quite interesting and compelling.