Russian Poetry

Introduction

For Russians, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, “Poetry is born from the torment of the soul.” Russia is a vast land, bordered on the north and south by the Baltic and the Black Seas, on the west by the Carpathian Mountains, and on the east by the mighty Volga River. In the thousand-year history of Russian literature, no natural barrier has preserved the Russian people from the agony of invasion, and Russian poetry has become unbreakably forged to their historical suffering.

The poetry of Russia’s youth

The earliest ancestors of the modern Russians, the agricultural East Slavs, settled the inland plateau of the thirteen-hundred-mile Dnieper River and were preyed on during the ninth century by the Varangians, piratical Scandinavian merchants who founded petty principalities around Kyiv. Under Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, their loose confederation was converted to Byzantine Christianity in 988 CE, an immense religio-cultural invasion that consolidated its position in Russia by introducing the Old Church Slavonic alphabet based on the spoken dialect, importing Byzantine Greek forms as literary models, and assimilating native pagan elements into religious ritual. Although Old Church Slavonic served as the chief vehicle of Russian literature from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, it choked off exposure to the classical Humanistic heritage of the West and rigidly identified church with state, fortifying the autocracy of Russian rulers.

Russia’s earliest poetic form was the vernacular and formulaic bylina (plural byliny; literally, things-that-have-been). These oral epics celebrated mythological figures and, more frequently, human heroes in groupings that resembled the Arthurian cycles. In the Kyivan byliny cycle centered on Grand Prince Vladimir, the hero Ilya becomes “a symbol of the self-consciousness of the people,” according to Felix J. Oinas in Heroic Epic and Saga (1978). Novgorod, a northern city belonging to the Hanseatic League, had a byliny cycle whose central figure was Aleksandr Nevsky, prince and saint, who repelled the Livonian and Teutonic knights. The Galician-Volhynian byliny cycle records the strife between this area and its western neighbors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Oinas remarks, the byliny of patriarchal Russia “captivated and thrilled people of all walks of life until the nineteenth century,” inspiring later poets with traditional Russian ideals.

During the twelfth century, the disintegration of feudal Russia set the bitter groundwork for the Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1240 and the imposition of the “Tartar yoke.” Slovo o polku Igoreve (c. 1187; The Tale of the Armament of Igor, 1915) is Russia’s first written poetic achievement, a stirring blend of the aristocratic warrior spirit and a call to self-sacrifice in defense of the Land of Rus. The poem poignantly and accurately predicts the great defeat to come: “O, how the Russian land moans, remembering her early years and princes!/…in discord their pennons flutter apart.” Based on the Novgorod Prince Igor’s unsuccessful attempt in 1185 to dislodge Turkish Polovtsian usurpers from the lands near the Don, and startlingly modern in its complex imagery, allusion, and symbolism, The Tale of the Armament of Igor has sometimes been considered an imposture since its discovery in the early 1790s. Alexander Pushkin claimed, however, that not enough poetry existed in the eighteenth century for anyone then to have written it, and more recent scholars concur.

Until 1480, the Mongol tribute was paid by a Russia brutally severed from the West and struggling to unite itself sufficiently to cast off the hated Tartar yoke. Little national strength was left for poetry. Looking back from 1827, the religious philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev observed, “At first, brutal barbarism, then crude superstition, then fierce and humiliating bondage whose spirit was passed on to our own sovereigns—such is the history of our youth.”

From Dark Age to Golden Age

Kyiv was destroyed in Russia’s literary Dark Age under the Tartars, and Russian culture was dominated by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, whose ruler Dmitri won a victory over the Tartars at Kulikovo, memorialized in the fifteenth-century Cossack epic Zadónščina (beyond the river Don). Ivan II at last drove the Tartars from a unified Russia in 1480, less than a generation after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, and Moscow became the “third Rome.” Imperial power was inseparable from Orthodox belief, and Ivan II, wed to a Byzantine princess, regarded himself as the sole genuine defender of the Orthodox faith. His grandson and namesake, Ivan IV, popularly known in the West as Ivan the Terrible (more accurately, the Awesome), a talented political polemicist, practiced heinous excesses in the name of personal absolutism. After Ivan murdered his oldest son, his line died out, and for the next generation civil disorder was exacerbated by crop failures, famine, and plague. Finally, in 1613, delegates from all the Russias elected Mikhail, the first of the Romanov czars.

During the post-Ivan Time of Troubles, literature in Russia was confined to Old Church Slavonic, though the people clung to folktales and Russianized Western romances. Under the first Romanovs, every Western form of literature except theology began to be translated and widely promulgated with the advent of Russian printing in 1564. In 1678, Simeon Polotsky, tutor to Czar Alexei’s children, introduced a syllabic verse system, solemn and even pompous, that dominated Russian poetry for a century.

Westernization accelerated under Peter the Great, who, during his reign from 1682 to 1725, reformed every aspect of Russian civilization. The czar personally directed this mammoth invasion of Western thought, but he enforced its adoption by ruthless, even barbaric means. Peter’s unprecedented debasement of the Church removed schools and literature from religious control, and from 1708, all nonreligious texts were published in a simplified Russian alphabet rather than in Old Church Slavonic. West Russian syllabic verse, originally panegyric or didactic, became fashionable among Peter’s courtiers as an instrument of amatory and pastoral poetry, in imitation of French and German models. Peter’s reformations were implemented at enormous cultural cost. The secularization of literature contributed to the dangerous rift opening between the general population and Peter’s sophisticated nobility, who largely abandoned the language and the folklore of the exploited populace.

In the thirty-seven years of political upheaval that followed Peter’s death in 1725, the first four greats of Russian literature imposed French classical standards on Peter’s simplified Russian language. All writers imported Western literary forms and theories while employing at the same time traditional Russian materials.

Prince Antioch Kantemir (1708-1744) is widely considered the first Russian writer to “blend life and poetry in his works.” Kantemir served as Russian ambassador to London and Paris, and as a confirmed neoclassicist concurred with Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux that the highest of literary forms were the ode and the satire, which he used to attack reactionary Russian political and social elements. Kantemir’s language is realistic, but his satires are framed in the imported syllabic verse dependent on fixed accents, a form of versification unnatural to the Russian language. Kantemir’s less talented and nonnoble contemporary Vasily Trediakovsky (1703-1769) freed Russian poetry from these unnatural constraints by introducing a syllabo-tonic system based on equal bisyllabic metrical feet, a rhythm found in the Russian popular ballad.

Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), a peasant poet, achieved scientific fame abroad and returned to found the University of Moscow in 1756. Lomonosov’s Pismo o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva (1739; letter concerning the rules of Russian prosody) set stylistic criteria for poetry: a “Noble Style,” employing Old Church Slavonic elements, used for heroic poetry and tragedy; a “Middle Style,” for ordinary drama; and a colloquial “Low Style,” for correspondence, farce, and everyday usage. Lomonosov’s syllabotonic odes exhibit conventional patriotic themes, but as Marc Slonim has noted, Lomonosov’s meditations are “still living poetry.” With Lomonosov, the aristocratic poet Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov (1718-1777) established the principles of Boileau and Voltaire as paramount in Russian letters.

Russia’s most famous empress, Catherine the Great, who ruled from 1762 to 1796, ranked herself with Peter the Great and consciously patterned her dazzling reign upon his. After the abortive Cossack uprising (1773-1775) under Emelian Pugachev and the sobering example of the French Revolution in 1789, Catherine tempered enlightenment with political conservatism. She extended education into the middle class and encouraged a fivefold increase in published translations from the major European languages. She also imported many foreign artists and sponsored secular music.

Catherine, who wrote widely herself, indelibly marked Russian literature by naming Gavrila Derzhavin (1743-1816) as her poet laureate. Nikolai Gogol called Derzhavin “the poet of greatness” who dominated Russian literature for more than thirty years. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), however, accused Derzhavin of thinking “in Tartar,” a pungent assessment of Derzhavin’s sacrifice of Russian syntax in favor of voicing his deistic and epicurean love of the sublime. Derzhavin’s stylistic duality presaged the dismemberment of the Russian classical order; he pioneered Russian civic poetry, which burgeoned in the nineteenth century with Kondraty Rylevyev and Nikolai Nekrasov, and he left a sensually concrete language to the flamboyant oratorical poets of the twentieth century, his legacy as well to his immediate followers, who taught Pushkin.

The harsh fate of the prose writer Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802), however, indicates that Catherine did not practice what her humanistic love of letters preached. On calling for the empress to amend Russian social sins, especially serfdom, Radishchev was exiled to Siberia and later committed suicide. Despite heavy risks in a censored land, Radishchev, whom Pushkin called the “foe of slavery,” was widely read by youthful poets well into the nineteenth century.

By 1800, historical research in Russia was uncovering folk literature, and young Russian poets were intensely discussing the unification of aesthetic principle with cultural heritage. Though rapidly Westernized under Peter and then Catherine, Russian literature now was straitjacketed by state, not Church, censorship, and the democratic ideals that emanated from the West were difficult to implement in Russian poetry. Into this complex literary milieu loomed the shadow of yet another invader: Napoleon Bonaparte.

Prior to the disastrous Napoleonic invasion in 1812, the country had passed through the lunatic reign of Catherine’s son, Paul I, who despised revolutionary ideas and attempted to beat them out of his people. After Paul was strangled in 1801 with the scarf of a palace guards officer, Paul’s son Alexander I, whom Napoleon called “the cunning Byzantine,” liberalized government, education, and literature, and writers began to hope for emancipation from the state.

Just as the novelist and historian Nikolai Karamzin had begun to use sentimentalism in prose, launching the pre-Romantic movement in Russian literature between 1791 and 1802, the poet and translator Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) sounded the first poetic notes of the Golden Age. Zhukovsky believed that “translators of prose are the slaves of their original text, whereas the translators of the poets are the rivals of the poets themselves.” Zhukovsky thus established a tradition that has ensured the excellence of Russia’s poetic translations, such as the Russian Iliad of Zhukovsky’s contemporary, Nikolai Gnedich (1784-1833), described by Slonim as “probably the best in the world.” Zhukovsky’s original poetry is highly subjective. He identified poetry with his virtue, and his lyric melancholy caused one of his contemporaries to observe, “Happiness would break his lyre’s most beautiful string!” Later, under the influence of German Romantics such as Friedrich von Schlegel, Zhukovsky celebrated human sentiment in melodic diction and transitory impressions that introduced the enchantment of Romantic idealism to Russian verse. The young Pushkin praised Zhukovsky’s captivating sweetness, and twentieth-century Symbolists such as Aleksandr Blok revered Zhukovsky as their predecessor.

At the same time, however, bureaucratic Russian conservatives were furiously striving to preserve the Noble Style in Russian poetry and stamp out all vestiges of “that vile and foul word—Revolution!” As Slonim has noted, “A literary problem was, as is always the case in Russia, assuming the character of an ideological clash.” Complicating the literary scene, the profound strain of classicism so eloquently displayed in Gnedich’s Iliad dominated the poetry of Konstantin Batiushkov (1787-1855), who called himself “The bard of earthly happiness.” Batiushkov was a modernist in form and diction, but he reveled in the mere joy of being, claiming that perfect happiness is attainable only by youth, physically capable of experiencing the heights of ecstasy. Batiushkov’s delicate Latinate sweetness inflamed the youthful Pushkin, who rejoiced at his mingling of classical themes with sensual delights.

Pushkin’s early poetic mentors, Zhukovsky and Batiushkov, soon fell from Russia’s literary firmament—Zhukovsky abandoning poetry for the court of Alexander I, and Batiushkov, his closest friend, dying mad after serving as a Russian officer between 1812 and 1815. This period was marked by an internal struggle between Russia’s conservatives, allied against the “infernal sophistication of French enlightenment,” and the liberals, who believed that the victory against Napoleon had been won by the Russian people, not their leaders.

Alexander Pushkin

Growing up during this crisis, Pushkin became, as Thaïs Lindstrom says, the Russians’ “comrade in life…whose stanzas, recited with universal familiarity and pleasure, crystallize Russian life in the language of the people.” Pushkin took pride in both his ancient Russian aristocratic family and his descent from “Peter the Great’s negro,” the Abyssian engineer General Abram Hannibal. Pushkin’s earliest poems date from 1811, and while he was still attending the new lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, the established poets Zhukovsky and Batiushkov came to consider him their poetic equal. Pushkin steeped himself in Russian and French literature, and at his lyceum graduation in 1817, he swept into the glittering debauchery of St. Petersburg, savoring wine, women, gambling, and dueling.

Because Alexander I had outgrown his youthful liberalism even before 1812, the Russian Army, sadly not for the last time, had been greeted by brutal government police as it returned victorious from the West in 1815. After the czar had become hypnotized by “exalted prophetesses,” the uneducated General Arakcheyev, whom Pushkin called a “brutal and treacherous hangman of freedom,” dominated Russia for a period characterized, in Alexander Herzen’s words, by “servility, coercion, injustice everywhere…serfdom solid as a rock, military despotism, silence and whips.”

Russia’s youth, many of whom had been exposed to Western revolutionary ideals during the Napoleonic Wars, responded with what Slonim describes as “a revolt of words in a country where silence was compulsory.” In 1817, a group of young Imperial Guards officers formed a secret Union of Salvation, the True Sons of the Fatherland. Their efforts culminated eight years later, on December 14, 1825, in the ill-fated Decembrist uprising. “Even if we fail,” wrote the poet Kondraty Ryleyev, “our failure will serve as a lesson for others.”

Remembering the Decembrists, Herzen recalled, “The cannons on Senate Place awakened a whole generation.” Pushkin and his contemporaries were secretly familiar with the long historical poems of Ryleyev (1795-1826), who sacrificed family and life to the Decembrist cause. Ryleyev cited the democratic ideals of the Cossacks and the ancient Slavs, writing, “I know that death awaits those who are the first to fight the despots, yet self sacrifice is the price of freedom.”

Such youthful idealism permeates Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Liudmila, 1936), Pushkin’s first long poem, a romantic epic written under the sign of Byron. It captivated an immense audience, and Pushkin received a portrait of Zhukovsky inscribed, “To a victorious pupil from a vanquished master.” Alexander I was less enthused about Pushkin’s revolutionary epigrams, however, and the poet was exiled to the South for four years, a period inspiring his Caucasian verse tales. In these works, Pushkin moved from the stereotyped Byronic hero to a three-dimensional protagonist, the conception of which formed the nucleus of his monumental novel in verse, Evgeny Onegin (1825-1832, 1833; Eugene Onegin, 1881), begun in 1823.

After an unfortunate love affair that resulted in his expulsion from the Russian Civil Service, Pushkin spent a period under house arrest at his mother’s estate, Mikhailovskoe. During this time, he fell under the spell of William Shakespeare, after whose chronicle plays Pushkin patterned his Boris Godunov (1831; English translation, 1918), a towering attempt to banish French classicism from Russian literature. Lindstrom believes that Boris Godunov “recognizes and stresses the power of a faceless, formless mass of common people to alter the course of history.”

Even Pushkin, a most uncommon man, found himself restricted severely by the Russian government. His poems had been found in the Decembrists’ possession, and although he was allowed to live in Moscow again in 1826, censors reviewed all of his work before publication and secret police constantly monitored his words and actions. He continued work on Eugene Onegin, completing it in 1833. Regarded as his masterpiece, it is widely considered to be the greatest single work in Russian poetry, and generations of Russians have memorized passages from it.

Pushkin became infatuated with sixteen-year-old Natalie Goncharova and married her in 1831, after which he was constantly short of money. Their opulent St. Petersburg lifestyle detracted seriously from his writing, but Pushkin still produced remarkable lyric poetry and prose novellas in his last period, as well as the great dramatic poem Medniy vsadnik (1841; The Bronze Horseman, 1936), in which he accurately predicted Russia’s eventual enslavement by totalitarianism. He died in a duel involving his lovely but vapid wife.

Pushkin’s works, which Russians claim to be untranslatable, have influenced all the Russian arts—music, ballet, sculpture, and painting. Pushkin left Russian literature its modern language, a profound fusion of popular idiom and elegant expression that sublimely weds sound to meaning. He bequeathed to world literature one of its most magnificent apologiae for the dignity of humanity, making poetry a living instrument of humanistic values. Gogol called him “an astounding and perhaps a unique phenomenon of the Russian spirit,” embodying “what the Russian may become two hundred years hence.” Pushkin’s most fitting memorial, however, appears in his own rendition of Horace’s “Exegi monumentum”:

I shall long be loved by the people

Because I awakened their goodness with my lyre

And in my cruel country celebrated freedom

And appealed for mercy for the downtrodden.

For the multitude of other brilliant writers of Russia’s Golden Age, Pushkin’s creativity was, in Gogol’s metaphor, “a fire tossed out of the sky, from which lesser poets of his day, like candles, become alight.”

Other Golden Age poets

Evgeny Baratynsky (1800-1844), an intellectual and classicist, lacked Pushkin’s sprezzatura, that attribute of genius which makes the most difficult achievement appear effortless. A poet with a strong metaphysical bent, Baratynsky decried the decay of human vitality that accompanies industrialism. Nikolai Yazykov (1803-1846) contributed intoxicating rhythms to traditional Russian poetic recitation. Alexei Koltsov (1809-1842) based his Burnsian lyrics on Russian folk life, while more progressive poets of the 1830s, notably Aleksandr Poleshayev (1805-1848) and Prince Aleksandr Odoyevsky (1802-1839), rejected Pushkin’s classicism completely and stressed the emotional impact of poetry. Odoyevsky, who died as a private soldier in the Caucasus, is chiefly remembered because Mikhail Lermontov, the most widely recognized heir to Pushkin, wrote an elegy for Odoyevsky that is often cited as the most beautiful in the Russian language.

Mikhail Lermontov

A Eugene Onegin with a touch of the demon, Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) was demoted and exiled in 1837 for circulating manuscript copies of a poem on Pushkin’s death, attacking “base lovers of corruption” who dared to “strangle freedom, genius, glory, and hide within the shelter of the law.” Lermontov had an unhappy early life. His mother had died young, and he was separated from his father by his wealthy grandmother, an unhealthy situation reflected in several of his poems. A precociously talented child, Lermontov matured into an unappealing young man who admired Lord Byron deeply, seeing in the English poet a reflection of his own passionate revolt and Weltschmerz. Lermontov nevertheless realized their essential difference: “No. I am not Byron; like him I am a persecuted wanderer, but mine is a Russian soul.”

While attending Moscow University, Lermontov was influenced deeply by secretly obtained works of the revolutionary Decembrist Ryleyev. At that time, Lermontov wrote an uncanny prediction of Russia’s future: “The dark day of Russia will come when the crown of the Czars will fall, when the mob, oblivious of its former allegiance, will spread death and blood far and wide.” Such musings continued to obsess him even after he joined the Imperial Guard Hussars in 1832, though he abandoned himself to the dissipation of St. Petersburg. Just as eagerly, he welcomed his exhausting, dangerous Caucasian exile, where he began his most successful novel, Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time, 1854). Lermontov’s patriotic historical epics, influenced by the contemporary popularity of byliny collections, and his romantic monologue “Mtsyri” (“The Novice”), the tale of a religious novice who prefers freedom to the futile safety of the monastery, were all written in the Caucasus.

Almost all of Lermontov’s important poetry was produced in the last four years of his life. He was pardoned in 1839 and became a celebrity in St. Petersburg. The novelist Ivan Turgenev remarked, “There was something fatal and tragic about Lermontov…grim and evil force, passion, pensiveness, and disdain.” Lermontov’s fury at the vacuousness of society appears in biting satire, as in “Smert Poeta” (“The Death of a Poet”), where, Coriolanus-like, he spurns the mob, and the powerful “New Year’s Night,” where he contrasts his early vision, “the creation of my dream, with eyes full of an azure fire,” with his present disillusionment. Again he was exiled, and after a brief fling in the capital, he wrote as he left for the South, “unwashed Russia, land of slaves, of slaveholders, of blue uniforms and of the people whom they rule.” Not long after, Lermontov dueled with a fellow officer over a woman and was killed at the first shot.

Like Pushkin, Lermontov shed his romantic postures early and adopted a vivid realism. Lermontov’s style, unlike Pushkin’s chiseled classicism, resembles “verbal masses molten into indistinguishable concrete,” according to D. S. Mirsky, who sees Lermontov’s “Valerik,” “a letter in verse,” as “a link between The Bronze Horseman and the military scenes of War and Peace.” Nicholas I is said to have commented on Lermontov’s end, “A dog’s death befits a dog,” but later critics rank Lermontov as one of Russia’s greatest poets. Lermontov gloried in his “proud enmity against God,” as “the Cain of Russian letters,” and a melancholy rebellion lies at the heart of his finest works. He wrote, “There are words whose sense is obscure or trivial—yet one cannot listen to them without tremor,” a quality of poetic expression used by the Symbolists at the turn of the century.

Perhaps Lermontov’s greatest work is his long narrative poem Demon (1841; The Demon, 1875), composed between 1829 and 1839; his appeal to his countrymen lies above all in his “strange love” for Russia, as seen in “My Native Land,” a peculiarly Russian response to “the cold silence of her steppes, her poor villages, the songs and dances of her peasants.” For outsiders, the enigmatic life and abrupt death of this talented and tormented young poet seem to sum up the brief glory and the eloquent sunset of Russia’s poetry in the first half of its Golden Age.

Slavophiles versus Westernizers

Although the glow of Pushkin’s literary gold, subtly blending Romantic and classic elements, lingered through the 1840s, prose realism soon became the literary ideal in the harsh atmosphere inflicted on Russia by Nicholas I, determined to stamp out revolutionary liberalism at home. Discipline worthy of Ivan the Terrible was imposed on the Russian army, whose common soldiers served twenty-five-year terms. The czar’s secret police dominated the country’s political life, while “censors were unleashed on Russian literature like a pack of bloodhounds,” according to one contemporary. Paradoxically, in the thirty years of Nicholas’s rule, writers and philosophers flourished. Herzen wrote, “We devoted ourselves to science, philosophy, love, military art, mysticism, in order to forget the monstrous shallowness about us.”

Pyotr Chaadayev, the religious philosopher who was the first Russian dissident to be forcibly confined in a madhouse, claimed in 1837, “There is something in our [Russian] blood that repels all true progress,” and he defined the opposing positions in Russian thought that have persisted until the present. Slavophiles determined to expel all foreign ideologies and Westernizers such as Chaadayev, seeking Russia’s salvation in imported liberalism, clashed in an atmosphere of ferocious governmental repression in a land that was 90 percent illiterate. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), poor and desperately ill, became Russia’s first and most influential literary critic, still cited today in the Soviet Union as “a great teacher.” Belinsky called literature “the vital spring from which all human sentiments percolate into society,” and he insisted that “he who deprives art of its rights to serve social interests debases the reader instead of elevating him.”

Belinsky’s fellow believer in Western ideals, Herzen, looked to Russia’s “naturalness of peasant life” and “our remarkable ability to assimilate foreign ideas” for his country’s rebirth. From his exile in Europe, Herzen propagandized against the czarist government, while Belinsky defended theRussian natural school of literature, whose chief concern was social problems and whose leading representative was Nikolai Gogol. Herzen and Belinsky initiated Russian Socialism, while Mikhail Bakunin, later Karl Marx’s opponent in the First International, promulgated revolutionary anarchism.

As Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Leo Tolstoy were shaping their immense contributions to the world’s great fiction, creating amazingly diverse panoramas characterized by acute political, social, and psychological analysis, Russian poetry developed along two distinct paths. One group espoused art for art’s sake as an escape from everyday Russian reality, submerging themselves in stylistic simplicity, folk emotionalism, and Belinsky’s dictum that poetry was “thinking in images.”

Nikolai Nekrasov

In contrast, civic realism in poetry found its voice in the works of Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878). Nekrasov’s father had turned him out of the house because of his obsessive desire to become a man of letters. “Famished every day for three years,” he managed to become the foremost publisher of Russia’s new realistic school of fiction. A contemporary remarked that if the ceiling collapsed on a soirée given by Nekrasov’s mistress, “Most of Russian literature would have perished.”

Nekrasov chose to “sing of your suffering, O my people” in intensely emotional language and innovative metrical usage. His most important work was a satiric epic, Komúna Rusí žit’ chorošó? (1870-1874, 1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, 1917), which traces the wanderings of seven peasants through “wretched and abundant, oppressed and powerful, weak and mighty Mother Russia.” His “Reflections Before a Mansion Doorway” observes unequivocally, “Where the people are, the moan is.”

Because of Nekrasov’s message and his immense popularity, the government allowed only one edition of his works during his life. He felt the disparity between his peasant sympathies and his wealthy position keenly, and he was large enough in spirit to recognize and encourage his talented contemporary Fyodor Tyutchev, who pursued pure art. Though Tyutchev was overshadowed during his lifetime by Nekrasov, the Symbolists of the Silver Age claimed Tyutchev as their spiritual ancestor.

Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873) was Tolstoy’s favorite poet, and like the great novelist, Tyutchev was a fervent Slavophile who, despite his noble rank, wrote, “I love poetry and my country above all else in this world.” While a diplomat in Germany, he was profoundly affected by the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and Tyutchev’s poetry shows the influence of a dualistic universe in which a Manichaean chaos and the “all-engulfing, all-pacifying abyss of the cosmos” dominate human existence. For Tyutchev, a Schopenhauerean affinity between love and death was inherent in human nature, a confirmation for Dostoevski, too, of dark tendencies he recognized in his own writing. Tyutchev’s four hundred short poems range from a perverse joy in destruction to a sublime desire to be “diffused in the slumbering Universe.” His oratorical fervor continued the tradition established by Derzhavin of public poetic performance, and Tyutchev was the “last great master of the High Style,” in which Old Church Slavonic rhetoric is supreme. Marc Slonim calls Tyutchev, after Pushkin, Lermontov, and Nekrasov, “the fourth great leader of Russian poetry…the profound interpreter of cosmic mysteries.”

Toward the Silver Age

Except for Count Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy (1817-1875), a popular neo-Romantic poet in the German vein who opposed civic poetry bitterly and sought to reestablish the old norms of art, the 1860s and 1870s were dominated in Russia by fine poetic translations, not native Russian poetry. The costly Crimean War (1854-1856), a shocking waste of Russian lives brought about by the neglect and shortcomings of Russian leadership, had drained the nation’s spirit. Russian prestige suffered a mortal blow through the ill-advised conduct of this war, and Alexander II and his government reluctantly faced the necessity of domestic reform. After taking the throne in 1855, Alexander freed the forty million Russian serfs in 1861, two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but taxes and land payments created tensions that resulted in many peasant uprisings throughout 1862. “The plague of Russian life” had ended, though, and the zemstvos, new self-governing bodies, relieved enough of the pressure on Russia’s lower classes to maintain the status quo until 1905.

After 1865, Alexander’s policies became more conservative. He was stalked and at last assassinated in 1881, ironically on the same day he had granted the zemstvos a larger voice in government, as the liberal intelligentsia had urged. Alexander III, his son, threw all reform proposals to the bitter winds from Siberia, increasing police powers, tightening the noose of censorship, and persecuting religious minorities, especially the Jews. His creation of a police state at home, coupled with his expensive and unsuccessful foreign ventures in Europe and Central Asia, made his reign a dismal time for literature. The last vestiges of the Golden Age had faded, and the Silver Age was waiting to be born.

In the 1880s, drought and poor agricultural practices resulted in massive famines and epidemics throughout Russia. Capitalism was fortifying a formidable industrial expansion, but the lives of ordinary Russians became increasingly miserable. Political theorists envisioned a necessary alliance of the peasantry, the workers, and the intelligentsia, and a new form of Russian populism began to become part of the country’s cultural atmosphere, tinged by more ideas from the West, the doctrines of Karl Marx.

The precise date of the beginning ofmodernism in Russian literature is uncertain. Some critics date the period from the publication in 1893 of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s lecture O prichinakh upadka: o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy lityeratury (on the origins of the decline of Russian literature and on new currents in it), a theoretical work that announces the principles of Russian Symbolism. Others believe modernism began later, with the turn of the century or even with the 1905 Revolution, which Merezhkovsky and his wife, the poet Zinaida Gippius, supported. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, however, concluded the modernist period in Russia, just as it decisively ended the Russian monarchy forever.

In the 1890s, young Russian artists began to look inward, reassessing their values and redefining the function of the artist and his or her art. They became absorbed in the creative individualism evident in translations of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan George, the English Pre-Raphaelites, and the French Symbolists, especially Charles Baudelaire. Merezhkovsky and others protested against the radical intellectuals who had been dominating Russia’s literary life and pronounced a new cultural dogma involving Western-style humanism, Russian tradition, mysticism, intuition, mystery, and myth—a spiritual obbligato to the strange goings-on of Grigory Rasputin at the Imperial Court.

At first, the new writers were dismissed as Decadents, but their successors became the spokespersons for a remarkable explosion of Russian art and literature, a conscious transmutation of Pushkin’s Golden Age later known as the Silver Age of Russian letters. More Russian philosophical works appeared between 1890 and 1910 than during the part of the nineteenth century up to that point, and an abundance of small literary magazines provided an outlet for poetry and criticism.

Until 1903, the Russian literary scene was dominated by the Decadents’ reaction against realism. They were led by Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), sometimes called the Peter the Great of Russian literature. After translating Maurice Maeterlinck and Paul Verlaine at the age of fourteen, Bryusov “sought a new body for the new art” in synaesthesia, “the subtle ties between the shape and the scent of a flower.” The keynote of the landmark anthology Russkiye simvolisty (1894) is the slogan, “The personality of the artist is the essence of art.” In 1903, Bryusov and his mesmerized followers founded Vesy (first published in January 1904), which became the most important Russian Decadent literary periodical and preached such Baudelairean themes as erotic nihilism and Arthur Rimbaud’s dérèglement des sens (“disorder of the senses”).

Konstantin Balmont (1867-1943), the other great Decadent, a public performer as Bryusov was not, became “the Poet” of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russia. Balmont drew a large and mostly youthful following at his public recitations. He was a spontaneous poet whose first poetic credo, “Words are chameleons,” developed into Nietzschean vehemence by 1903: “I want daggerlike words and lethal moans of death.…Who equals my might in song? No one—no one!”

“Moans of death” erupted throughout Russia with the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), followed by the 1905 Revolution, which started on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22. The following October, after months of turmoil, Nicholas II granted some civil liberties and the democratic election of a duma (legislative assembly). The czar’s manifesto split the revolutionaries into three major camps: the Octobrists, satisfied with the czar’s action; the Constitutional Democrats, liberals who wanted far more power invested in the Duma; and the Social Democrats, who had organized a Soviet (workers’ council) at St. Petersburg and attempted to force additional reform by strike. The czar put them down, trying to stamp out the revolutionaries and limiting the power of the Duma in late 1905. Counterrevolutionary forces in the Second and Third Dumas (1906-1912) prevented any advancement of liberalism prior to World War I.

After 1903, the Decadent movement in literature had an older faction and a younger one, the original Decadents being more occupied with social and political themes and the new Symbolists turning to the neo-Romantic inspiration of Lermontov and Tyutchev. Most critics agree, however, that no stated doctrinal differences distinguished the two groups in the prewar period, and that they lived harmoniously with each other in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

A startling manifestation of the Decadent movement appears in the work of the Satanist poet-novelist Solugub (the pen name of Fyodor Teternikov, 1863-1927). He regarded modern humanity as a horde of living dead, and he believed a poet inhabited a shadowy limbo, where, sorcerer-like, he had to make himself the only credible god in a universe as evil as its creator. His nihilism is somewhat restrained in his lyrics, which he compares in “Amphora” to a fine vase carried so carefully that no drop of the venom it contains is spilled. In his later years, he abandoned poetry for a perverse fictional vision of human debasement.

An antidote to Solugub’s horrid view of humankind was offered by the metaphysical Weltbild drawn from the cult of Dostoevski at the end of the nineteenth century. The diverse works of Merezhkovsky and of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) depart from Decadent nihilism and seek individual concepts of “Godmanhood,” an absolute achieved through Sophia, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the archetypal Eternal Feminine. The German Neoplatonic idealism that had fostered the creativity of Lermontov and Tyutchev influenced many of the Symbolist disciples of Solovyov, who accepted the notion of the poet’s intermediation between God and humans, conveying to ordinary mortals his experience of the ideals of Truth and Beauty reflected in the principle of Sophia. Solovyov himself accepted Christ’s incarnation as proof of humanity’s redemption. He believed that despite all of history’s evils, humanity will at last attain divinity, and his concept of the Divine Sophia appeared frequently in his own verse, although he occasionally treated the symbol lightly, as in his long poem Tri svidaniya (1898; three encounters). Solovyov hoped for the reunion of all Christian denominations, and during his last years, he preached salvation through collective effort. Solovyov’s teachings indelibly marked the entire religious movement connected with Russian Symbolism.

Each of the Symbolist triumvirate, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, and Aleksandr Blok, owed a profound spiritual and artistic debt to Solovyov’s definition of poetry as the “incantatory magic of rhythmic speech, mediating between man and the world of divine things.”

Ivanov (1866-1949) considered all of human culture the path to God, and he believed that artistic intuition grasped symbols in the ordinary world that reflect the “real” reality of God. Hence the artist, having been given greater gifts, has the responsibility to lead men to the Divine Presence.

Bely (the pen name of Boris Bugayev, 1880-1934), whose strong enthusiasms bordered on the pathological, incorporated Solovyov’s doctrine of Divine Wisdom in his lyrics Zoloto v lazuri (1904; god in azure), but within a few years, he had become the leading Russian disciple of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy. An important novelist as well as a poet, Bely embodied the mixture of mysticism, diabolism, and obsession with the special fate of Russia that was so characteristic of his time.

Aleksandr Blok

Despite the considerable achievements of Ivanov and Bely, Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) was the culminating figure of the Silver Age. His lyrics place him with Pushkin and Lermontov, and his ideals remain a rare blend of ecstasy and despair. The young Blok experienced a supernatural vision of a “beautiful lady from Beyond,” the Solovyovian Sophia, who inspired more than 240 of his lyrics. In “Gorod” (“The City”), however, set in St. Petersburg’s “artificial paradises,” disillusionment shattered Blok’s Romantic dreams, and in “Nezna Komka” (“The Stranger”), one of his most powerful poems, his ideal woman appeared as an expensive prostitute. Such blasphemous irony caused Blok’s break with the Moscow Symbolists. After 1906, Blok continued to suffer from his irreconcilable inner conflict; he wrote, “I see too many things clearly, soberly,” and he hurled himself into intense experiences, trying to reconcile art and morality at the same time that he was frantically avoiding confrontation with himself. By 1909, he had become infatuated with his “beloved fatal country,” and his lyric cycle “On the Battle of Kulikova Field” celebrates the fourteenth-century victory of the Russians over the Tartars.

Just prior to August 1914, Blok predicted in poetry Russia’s “road of the steppe and of shoreless grief,” and following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, in a Rilkean “dictated” composition, Blok produced his masterpiece, Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve, 1920), a poetic vision of a revolution that would cleanse Russia and redeem its soul from its long agony. By 1921, however, representatives of every segment of Blok’s postrevolutionary world, from Communist officials to his old intellectual friends, had ridiculed The Twelve, and Blok died convinced that “Vile, rotten Mother Russia has devoured me.”

Innokenty Annensky

Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909), the Russian poet who links the Decadents and the Symbolists, devoted fifteen years to translating the works of Euripides. Not surprisingly, his own themes were beauty, suffering, and death, the absolutes of a futile human existence that could be ennobled only through art and love. Annensky’s finely honed meters and rhythmic effects influenced both the Symbolists and the Acmeists, the next major poetic group in Russia.

Acmeist poets

The Symbolists’ nebulous Westernized ideals did not prevail for long against the literary realism being promoted by Maxim Gorky in the relatively stable bourgeois climate of Russia between 1910 and 1914. Acmeism was born in 1912, a movement primarily based in St. Petersburg and resembling the controlled, concrete Imagism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The three major Acmeist poets, Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam, despite significant differences in style and message, concurred that “we want to admire a rose because it is beautiful, and not because it is a symbol of mystical purity.”

Nikolay Gumilyov (1886-1921), leader of the Acmeists, had a “bravura personality” that blossomed in physical danger and exotic landscapes. In his 1912 article “Acmeism and the Heritage of Symbolism,” he stressed the Greek meaning of “acme” as “the point of highest achievement,” as well as Théophile Gautier’s rule, “The more dispassionate the material…the more beautiful will the work come out.”

Anna Akhmatova

Often likened to Rudyard Kipling’s, Gumilyov’s virile style could not have differed more strikingly from that of his wife for eight years, Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). Akhmatova’s earliest poetry, mostly small lyrics that sang of the woman’s inevitably unhappy role in love, was extremely popular immediately upon publication, and her work has since completely overshadowed Gumilyov’s. Even today Russian readers memorize Akhmatova’s poetry, and she remains Russia’s foremost woman poet, unforgettably uniting passion and asceticism. Periodically suppressed by the Soviets, Akhmatova’s work has endured; among her greatest works is the cycle Rekviem (1963; Requiem, 1964), her lament for the victims of Joseph Stalin’s purges.

Influence of the political state

Russia’s human losses in the twentieth century defy comprehension. The agony of World War I, closely followed by the February Democratic Revolution and the October Bolshevik Revolution, both in 1917, combined with the ravages of the civil war, cost millions of lives. Later, the famines, the collectivization of agriculture, and the purges of the 1930s established a dark backdrop for the staggering losses, estimated at twenty to twenty-five million lives, that the Soviet Union sustained during World War II.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the consequent establishment of the Soviet state enormously affected Russian literature, although seldom in Russia’s history, if ever, has literature enjoyed the freedom of expression provided by Western democracies. In the Soviet era, works of prose and poetry have often been surreptitiously circulated in samizdat (editions) and clandestinely shipped abroad, to become tamizdat (literally, three-published) works in less restricted societies. The cost of the human devastation suffered by Russians during the century, however, is reflected in the estimates of those lost in Stalin’s prison system, the “Gulag Archipelago,” where hundreds of writers perished among countless numbers of their countrymen.

In response to the phenomenon of Soviet Communism, too, literature of the period after the 1917 Revolution evidenced two major tendencies. Those writers who remained within the Soviet Union and functioned within its intellectual and artistic borders often turned to apolitical themes or those acceptable to their government, in both cases revealing glimpses both accurate and distorted of life within their country; commentators such as Ronald Hingley observe that the distortions sometimes provide the truest insights. Writers who dissented from official Soviet positions eventually exported either their works or themselves, and from exile their writings occasionally found their way back to their native land, to circulate at considerable risk among readers of Russian samizdat.

Indeed, the tyranny of the Soviet state has produced three distinct “waves” of emigration. The first emigration, the largest of the three, took place during the decade following the 1917 Revolution. Among the many Russian poets who emigrated at this time, perhaps the foremost were Marina Tsvetayeva, who later returned to the Soviet Union, and Vladislav Khodasevich, who died in exile. The fate of Khodasevich (1886-1939) is particularly representative. Little read in the West, Khodasevich, like many émigrés, has suffered from what the critic and translator Simon Karlinsky calls the “Western self-censorship”—the conviction, inherited from the thirties, that a Russian writer who resides outside the Soviet Union cannot be of any interest to a Western reader. The second emigration, following World War II, brought to the West fewer writers of note, but the third wave, beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, has carried with it a host of brilliant writers, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, and the poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996).

Osip Mandelstam

Among the poets who have remained in the Soviet Union, the finest invariably have suffered persecution at the hands of the state. No loss to the world of poetry seems crueler than the death of Akhmatova’s friend and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), who perished in a Far Eastern transit prison, bound for the mines of Kolyma beyond the Arctic Circle. Nadezhada Mandelstam retrospectively described her husband’s spirit as endlessly zhizneradostny, which approximates the English phrase “rejoicing in life.” Mandelstam never bowed to political pressures; he was an admirer of classicism in the oratorical style of Derzhavin and Tyutchev, a Jew more aware of Russian tradition than the Russians themselves were. “I am nobody’s contemporary,” he wrote, because as an inveterate Westernizer he yearned for world culture. His solemn and exquisitely crafted poems were his conscious effort to achieve “pure” poetry, often employing little-known historical detail and a “sprung” rhythm somewhat resembling Gerard Manley Hopkins’s metrical experiments. Like Akhmatova, Mandelstam was forbidden to publish under Stalin, and his mental and physical health collapsed under torture. What sustained him so long as his frail constitution could endure was his concept of poetry as a moral obligation to his countrymen: “The people need poetry that will be their own secret/ to keep them safe forever.…”

Futurist poets

The Acmeists’ contemporaries, the Futurists, opposed literary and artistic tradition with a zeal that owed a considerable debt to Nietzsche. In 1912, their manifesto, “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu” (“A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste”), presented Russian readers with an extreme literary case of shocking the bourgeois. One of its authors, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), described himself in his important poem Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Pants, 1965), as “the loudmouthed Zarathustra of our day,” and his associate Velimir Khlebnikov (1895-1922), a linguistically experimental poet, rejected all emotional emphasis derived from previous ages from his powerful poems. Russia, he insisted, had “amplified the voice of the West as though transmitting the screams of a monster,” and he explored new symbolic uses of language to rouse the world from its petrification.

Aleksei Kruchonykh (1886-1968) provided Futurism with its most famous poem, “Dyr bul shchyl” (1913), written in words that have “no definite meaning,” that is, in zaum (transrational language), which he and Khlebnikov pioneered. Zaum is akin to abstractionism in art in that it is intended to have a direct evocative power without a specific, definable referent, and it was one of the most avant-garde innovations in Russian poetry. Kruchonykh wrote quite a number of usually short poems in zaum and published them in primitive-looking handmade manuscript booklets. The zaum “opera” Pobeda nad solntsem (pr. 1913; Victory Over the Sun, 1971), which in St. Petersburg rivaled the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris of the same year, was one of the signal Russian avant-garde events of the age.

Although the Moscow group of Futurists was most prominent and inventive, the St. Petersburg group included Vasilisk (Vasily) Gnedov (1890-1978), who became famous as the author of “Poema kontsa” (1913, “Poem of the End”). This proto-minimalist poem consisted of a blank space on a page where a text was supposed to be. Gnedov performed it with a silent gesture to much acclaim.

Just after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Futurists dominated Soviet cultural life briefly, mainly through the achievements of the dynamic Mayakovsky, who, like Nietzsche, called forcefully for the destruction of the old world and the invention of a new one to supercede it.

The Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky’s contemporary, claims that Mayakovsky’s chief accomplishment was the broadening of verse semantics, building an oratorical language that changed the very syntax of the Russian language. Mayakovsky’s ego and his anarchic inclination feasted on the Bolshevik Revolution, but in “Homeward” (composed in 1925) he wrote, “From poetry’s skies I plunge into Communism.” In 1930, openly critical of Soviet bureaucracy, Mayakovsky committed suicide, which he described as “my final performance.” The Soviet Union has enshrined Mayakovsky with their supreme poets, praising his declaration of the artist’s obligation to the state. Mayakovsky’s savage individuality is said to have stamped poets as diverse as Brodsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Andrei Voznesensky.

Folklore and Russian heritage

Diametrically opposed to Mayakovsky’s idiosyncratic poetic style is that of Sergei Esenin (1896-1925), a “peasant poet” who harked back to Russia’s traditional past, its rich folklore, and its Orthodox religion. Esenin, a poet from the people, founded the Imaginist school of poetry between 1914 and 1919. His personal excesses led to a self-image he described in Ispoved’ khuligana (1921; Confessions of a Hooligan, 1973), and his unhappy marriages, first to the American dancer Isadora Duncan and then to Tolstoy’s granddaughter Sofya, contributed to his final breakdown. He attempted to write political poetry on contemporary topics, but near the end of his life his work was filled with nostalgia for the past and sadness at the fate of his home village, and his later poems made him the voice of many of his countrymen in their disenchantment with Soviet policies. After his suicide in 1925, Esenin’s work was out of favor with the Soviet government, but he has since been fully rehabilitated.

Marina Tsvetayeva

Something of Mayakovsky’s originality and force and something of Esenin’s tender devotion to his Russian heritage meet in Russia’s inneres Mädchen, as Rainer Maria Rilke called Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941), Akhmatova’s friend and only rival as Russia’s most famous woman poet. At eighteen, Tsvetayeva described her poetry as “torn from me like droplets from a fountain…their themes made up of youth and death.” She emigrated to Paris in 1921, outraged at events in Russia, but she and her family returned in 1939 on the eve of war. After her husband, a Soviet secret agent, was shot by the government as a traitor and one of her children was sent to a labor camp, Tsvetayeva hanged herself in 1941.

As a daughter of the Russian intelligentsia, she wrote for this audience. Her intricate romanticism, like Rilke’s, verged on the mystical, and she shared with him, as his long 1926 poem to her reveals, an awareness of “the other world” and the possibility of a new myth that would lead humankind to a better future. Akhmatova hailed Tsvetayeva’s creative vitality in one of her last poems, a tender memory of “A fresh, dark elder branch/ Like a letter from Marina.” Tsvetayeva, like Boris Pasternak, was one of the outstanding idealists in Russian poetry. Her impressionistic technique and elliptic imagery show evidence of Pasternak’s influence, and she once remarked that he was the only poet among her contemporaries whom she considered her peer.

Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), child of a gifted musician and a famous painter, synthesized the classical tradition in Russian verse, the musical qualities of the Symbolists, and the near-telegraphic style of the mature Tsvetayeva. Pasternak wrote poetry early, at first attracted and soon repelled by the flamboyant Mayakovsky. Pasternak found his own voice in Sestra moyazhizn (1922; My Sister, Life, 1959), a collection that immediately established him as one of the leading poets of his generation.

In his autobiographical sketch Okhrannaya gramota (1931; A Safe-Conduct, 1949), Pasternak wrote, “Focused on a reality which feeling has displaced, art is a record of this displacement.” A sense of the artist’s isolation pervades Pasternak’s life and work. As Max Hayward has suggested, Pasternak believed it essential “by responding submissively to high and lonely destiny…to contribute in some vital way to the life of the times.” Already during World War I, Pasternak had pondered his “contribution,” later to become his novel Doktor Zhivago (1957; Doctor Zhivago, 1958), the record of the Russian intelligentsia caught in the savagery of those revolutionary times. For writing the novel, Pasternak was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and forbidden to accept the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel closes on “The Poems of Doctor Zhivago,” in which Pasternak reaffirms the Christian sanctity of his poetic mission: “If Thou be willing, Abba, Father,/ Remove this cup from me.”

Absurdist poets

It was not until the 1980s that the Russian reading public became fully aware of the work of a small group of absurdist poets from the 1920s and 1930s who named themselves Oberiu (Association for Real Art), the existence of which was declared in a 1928 manifesto. The leading figures in the group were Daniil Kharms (Yuvachov; 1905-1942), Aleksandr Vvedensky (1904-1941), and Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-1958), the primary drafter of the manifesto. Zabolotsky was able to publish one book of poems, Stolbtsy (1929, columns), but the other two were able to publish only a few individual poems and stories for children. Their work, which included plays and, in the case of Kharms, short prose sketches that have since become famous, involves totally unexpected, illogical, and sometimes tautological twists of action, imagery, and thought, such as “The sun shines in disarray,/ and the flowers fly in their beds” (Vvedensky) and “This is This./ That is That./ This is not That./ This is not not This./ The rest is either this or not this./ All is either that or not that” (Kharms). They reveal a philosophical depth beneath an absurd, often nightmarish surface. The group ran afoul of the Stalinist regime, and Kharms and Vvedensky both died in prison. Their work has come to be perceived as a major literary movement and the last gasp of the pre-revolutionary Russian literary avant-garde. It became extremely popular among young intellectuals.

Post-Stalin era

The cooperation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union during World War II dissolved in Cold War tension during the 1950s, but after Stalin’s death in 1953 a degree of artistic freedom was temporarily achieved by Russian writers. An amnesty decree a month after Stalin’s death led to the release of prisoners who had survived the rigors of the gulag, and the Writers’ Union restored the membership of Akhmatova in 1954. By 1955, the “thaw” had occasioned the posthumous rehabilitation of many writers who had died in the camps and prisons; this revisionist movement reached its peak with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, denouncing Stalin. Despite the suppression of Doctor Zhivago, the thaw lasted long enough to permit the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963), but soon thereafter Leonid Brezhnev ousted Khrushchev from power. After Brezhnev’s accession in 1964, literature in the Soviet Union was subject to rigid Stalinist controls, and one after another, the most talented Russian writers emigrated to the West or were forcibly exiled.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union continued to exhibit an immense thirst for poetry, attested by the immense popularity of such poets as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. Both rose to prominence in the early 1960s as spokespeople for liberal forces during that time of the thaw.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017), as the first poet to enunciate the shift in mood in his country, gained considerable acclaim at home and abroad for his revelation of Soviet anti-Semitism in “Babii Yar” (1961) and the effects of Stalinism as a social force in “Nasledniki Stalina” (1962; “The Heirs of Stalin”). Yevtushenko has used his travels abroad in several volumes of his works, such as the poetic drama Pod kozhey statuey sbobody (1972; under the skin of the Statue of Liberty). Certain of his more personal poems are reminiscent of Esenin’s candor and nostalgia, but Yevtushenko’s “novella in verse,” Golub’ v Sant’iago (1978; A Dove in Santiago, 1982), a tale of a tormented young art student in Chile at the time of the Augusto Pinochet coup, reflects the tragedy of a talented individual who is caught between his politics and his art.

Andrei Voznesensky

Like Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010) survived the artistic restrictions imposed first by Khrushchev in 1963 and subsequently by Brezhnev and his successors. Voznesensky’s histrionic style of poetic delivery, modeled on Mayakovsky’s, made him popular with large and youthful audiences, while American critics have praised his imagery and originality. One of his translators, W. H. Auden, has cited the broad range of Voznesensky’s subject matter as evidence of his imaginative power. Although Voznesensky was the object of articles in the Soviet press accusing him of intelligibility and “supermodernism,” he was able to continue publishing. He published a number of works after the breakup of the Soviet Union and organized provincial poetry festivals before his death in 2010.

Poems “to remember”

The stream of samizdat and tamizdat poetry that emerged from the Soviet Union bears the self-imposed charge: “to remember”—to memorialize the victims of Stalin’s gulag, and to speak out against the punishment of dissenters in labor camps and psychiatric hospitals. Poets who dissented against the Soviet government had to choose between writing “for the desk drawer,” exile, or death, as the fate of Yuri Galanskov (1939-1972) demonstrates. In 1956, when the Hungarian revolt was suppressed by the Soviets, Galanskov gathered a samizdat collection of protest poems. After he set forth his “Human Manifesto,” “calling to Truth and Rebellion…a serf no more,” Galanskov was held in a Soviet special psychiatric hospital; he later died in a labor camp for his role in the human rights movement within the Soviet Union. The themes of samizdat and tamizdat poetry reflect the mediocrity of everyday Soviet life, the horrors of war, and the martyrdom of earlier poets such as Tsvetayeva, who perished under Stalin. Occasionally, too, this clandestinely exported poetry is quietly illuminated by the folk values of Old Russia, as in Gelb Garbovsky’s “To the Neva”: “I will come back, no matter what, even if, when I do return, I’m dying.”

Joseph Brodsky

The most famous poet-exile was Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), who felt himself to be a poet by the grace of God and therefore for whom no other social role was necessary. A native of Leningrad, in the late 1950s, he became associated with the circle of young poets around Akhmatova and was recognized by her as a significant new talent. Though his poems were apolitical, his independence of mind caused him to be arrested in 1964 for “parasitism,” that is, not having a legally approved job, and he was sentenced to five years of internal exile in the north. Released in a year, he was ultimately forced into exile in the United States, where he spent most of the rest of his life teaching, writing, and reciting his poetry, which he did with a unique intensity and melodiousness. In 1987, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1991, he became the United States poet laureate, the first nonnative to be so honored. Although he did not complete high school, his poetry is characterized by the erudition of someone steeped in classical learning and world culture. It has a philosophical depth and complexity of imagery comparable to his favorite English Metaphysical poets and modernists such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. His verse forms are basically traditional, but within them he created an unusual degree of lyrical tension. His typical themes are loneliness and suffering, death and salvation, often ventriloquized through some famous historical or mythological figure in a moment of realization or crisis. Though he had the opportunity in the late twentieth century to visit and even return to Russia, he chose not to do so, but instead to die in exile and to be buried in Venice.

The underground

Parallel to the public existence of poetry in the post-Stalin period represented on one hand by Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, and on the other by Galanskov and Brodsky, there was a more private, underground development that occurred in formal and informal poetry circles. Formal circles centered around officially sponsored clubs and seminars in which senior poets mentored younger aspiring poets. This was in part a subtle way for the authorities to keep an eye on the younger generation, but in the better groups, for example, those led by Mikhail Svetlov (1903-1964) and Kirill Kovaldzhi (1930-2017), some talented poets did find useful mentoring and occasional outlets to publication. More important were the informal groups of the underground. One of the earliest of these, the Nebyvalisty (Unprecedentists, 1939-1940) headed by Nikolai Glazkov (1919-1979), who coined the term samizdat, actually began before the war at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute as a continuation of Futurism. Though the group soon dissolved, Glazkov, and for their part Kruchonykh and Pasternak, were able to serve as personal mentors to several generations of younger poets. SMOG (Youngest Society of Geniuses), also in Moscow but in the early 1960s, like the Nebyvalisty, was not noted for the innovativeness of its members’ poetry, but rather for their unrestrained behavior. It did include one lyric genius in the mold of Yesenin, Leonid Gubanov (1946-1983). On the other hand, the Lianozovo school, which centered around the suburban Moscow barracks apartment of Evgeny Kropivnitsky (1893-1979), fostered poets of genuine originality and innovation. Among them were Vsevolod Nekrasov (Kholin; 1920-1999), Genrikh Sapgir (1928-1999), and even the scandalous Eduard Limonov (1943-2020), all of whom emerged as major literary figures in the glasnost period. In Leningrad in the late 1950s, the Philological school, which included Vladimir Ufliand (1937-2007), Lev Losev (1937-2009), Aleksandr Kondratov (1937-1993), and Mikhail Yeryomin (1936-1991), was one of the first such underground groups. A monumental contribution to an awareness of this period, especially in Leningrad, is Konstantin Kuzminsky’s nine-volume Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry (1980-1986).

Bard poetry

Along with the poetry underground there developed another trend that had its roots in popular and folk song, namely, the guitar poetry of the so-called bards. These poets chose to set their texts to melodies with simple guitar accompaniment and sing them in private gatherings and around campfires. The recognized founder of this trend was Bulat Okudzhava (1924-1997), who began to compose such songs immediately after World War II. With the advent of readily available tape recorders in the 1960s, Okudzhava’s songs became well known and popular throughout the Soviet Union, despite the lack of official recordings. Other important figures in this genre were Aleksandr Galich (1918-1977), whose songs developed a social protest edge that resulted in his being exiled abroad, and Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980), whose broad-ranging themes and personae made him immensely popular with all levels of Russian society, a popularity that only increased after his untimely death from heart failure. What distinguishes the work of the bards from popular song is the high quality of the poetic text itself, which can usually stand on its own as fine poetry, regardless of its musical aspects.

Poetry of freedom

With Gorbachev’s accession to power in 1985 and his introduction of a policy of glasnost, official censorship began to be reduced. By 1989, it was virtually eliminated, producing an ever-increasing wave of poetry publications. Initially, much of this was past work that finally emerged from the underground to reach the general reading public. Soon, new voices and new work by older generations began to flood the public sphere, creating an impression of postmodern Babel. Where earlier there had been only a handful of published poets worth reading, there now were dozens, if not hundreds, with a range of orientations and styles. Parallel with this was a sharp decline in popular interest in poetry. What had been a narrow and exciting passageway to freer speech was made to face competition from a deluge of popular entertainment and the unfettered news media. At the same time, however, poetry has enjoyed a major flowering. Attempts to categorize the new poetry into trends such as metametaphorism and conceptualism are useful to some extent but do not do justice either to the richness and complexity of the situation or to such unique major figures as Gennady Aygi (1934-2006), Viktor Sosnora (1936-2019), Aleksandr Kushner (b. 1936), Ry Nikonova (1942-2014), Lev Rubinstein (1947-2024), Ivan Zhdanov (b. 1948), Olga Sedakova (b. 1949), Nina Iskrenko (1951-1995), Timur Kibirov (b. 1955), and Vitaly Kalpidi (b. 1957), to name just a few. Moreover, with the freedom to travel, publish, and distribute books, the separation among Russian poets living throughout Russia and those living abroad has been eliminated. The landscape of modern Russian poetry more and more resembles that in the West.

Among the numerous twenty-first-century Russian poets, Philip Nikolayev (b. 1966) has contributed many notable works, including Monkey Time (2003), a Verse prize winner, and Letters from Aldenderry (2006). Yevgeny Chigrin's (b. 1961) works, such as The Invisible Guide (2021), Water Trees (2022), and Swampfire (2024), became well-known works across the globe. Other influential authors include Vladimir Gandelsman (b. 1948), Katia Kapovich (b. 1960), and Dmitri Vladimirovich Chorny (b. 1975).

Bibliography

Blok, Aleksandr. Us Four Plus Four: Eight Russian Poets Conversing. UNO Press, 2008.

Bunimovitch, Evgeny, editor, and J. Kates, translator and editor. Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology. Dalkey Archive Press, University of Illinois, 2008.

Cornwell, Neil, editor. A Reference Guide to Russian Literature. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998.

Cornwell, Neil. The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature. Routledge, 2022.

Goldberg, Stuart. An Indwelling Voice: Sincerities and Authenticities in Russian Poetry. U of Toronto P, 2023.

Hingley, Ronald. Nightingale fever: Russian poets in revolution. Routledge, 2021.

Kates, J., editor. In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. Zephyr Press, 2000.

Maslenikov, Oleg A. The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists. U of California P, 2023.

Mirskij, Dmitrij P. A History of Russian Literature: Comprising ‘A History of Russian Literature’ and ‘Contemporary Russian Literature’. Routledge, Taylor et Francis Group, 2021.

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, compiler and translator. Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry, edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. Harcourt, 2008.

Polukhina, Valentina, and Daniel Weissbort, editors. An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets. U of Iowa P, 2005.

Wachtel, Michael. The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry. Cambridge UP, 2004.

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, et al., editors. Twentieth Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, an Anthology. Anchor Books, 1994.