One of the central phenomena that may be tracked throughout the supernova of global literary modernism is the dissolution of the self, or, in the words of Roland Barthes, “the death of the author.” The implications of this on Russian modernism arevariegated and complex, both semantically and as a matter of historical fact. The figurative “death” proposed by Barthes is often literal death in Russian modernism, especially if we consider the fate of a poet like Osip Mandelstam. To understand this dissolution of the self, one might think of Rimbaud’s famous formulation: “Je est une autre” (roughly translated as “‘I’ is an other.”) This revolutionary statement problematizes the idea of selfhood, as well as the authorial practice of “I.” What happens when we put “I” in quotation marks? Can we say the same for “death”? The history of Russian modernism is punctuated by suicides, many of which can be linked to a crisis of self that is due to both external pressure and internal fissures. The death of the author in Russian modernism plays into the mythologies and biographies of its writers in unexpected ways, making the discourse between art and life irresolute and liminal, and leaving finally peculiarly paradoxical modernist monuments in its wake.
At the end of the nineteenth century, before true catastrophe struck, there was a crisis in language and identity that had already begun to proliferate and was merely expounded by the pressures of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Authors responded in different ways to the challenge of writing imaginative and meaningful literature in this time of state-censorship and unfreedom. While the Soviet union during the NEP era was not entirely codified and granted a limited degree of creative freedom to talented authors, with Stalin’s consolidation of power at the end of the 1920’s and Maxim Gorky’s subsequent declaration of “socialist realism,” many Soviet authors, particularly those with a strong sense of individuality, innovation, or critical thought, were forced to write the work they cared about “for the desk drawer,” and thus experienced within themselves an irrevocable split. There was the work produced for the state, and the work producedfor themselves and perhaps a small group of friends. The split between private and public was central to the post revolutionary crisis in language, and forced authors such as Olesha, Zoshenko, and Platonov to veil their criticisms of the regime by using the language of Soviet propaganda to subtly question its iconoclastic ideological logic. We might classify this kind of writing as subterranean dissidence. The pre-revolutionary crisis of language had much to do with the apocalyptic expectations of the fin de siècle period and the sense that the fissures in Russian society were growing too great to be contained, and that a sort of Second Coming was to arrive and cleanse Russia of her sins.During this highly charged period it seemed as if there was a battle for the very heart of the language itself. The Symbolists sought to use the specificity of language and semantics to tap into a spiritual world beyond the corporeal and illuminate the deeperforces driving Russia’s destiny, while simultaneously trying to merge their lives with the art they produced in expectation of some kind of absolution. The Achmeists rejected the “wooly” language of the futurists, striving for absolute clarity and elegance of form in their poetry that reflected the Hellenistic roots of the Russian tongue. The Futurists were the most radical of all, opening up the language by infusing it with vital street slang, more exclusively Slavic elements, and a plethora of neologisms. These are trends that appeared not only in literature but in painting as well, with artists like Filonov, Goncharova, and Malevich among others pushing the boundaries between object and subject, representation and abstraction, and between the self and the historical forces that would seek to destroy it.
No poet epitomizes the chaotic dynamism of this period quite like Vladimir Mayakovsky does. In addition to revitalizing the Russian language, twisting and expanding it, he created a powerful and original language of the self. Mayakovsky’s autobiography is entitled I, Myself, a double affirmation of the self that at the same time suggests “a discontinuity [that] results from a kind of fear that there might be an ‘I’ which is not ‘myself.’” We here find ourselves back in territory that Rimbaud has previously mapped out, albeit in a radically different historical context. Still, both Rimbaud and Mayakovsky’s “I” are under the pressure of the modern, and willfully so (it was Rimbaud in his A Season in Hell who wrote: “one must be absolutely modern”). The link between the two can be found in Russian symbolism, which was in its turn inspired by the French movement of the same name. Russian symbolists, and Alexander Blok in particular, had an idea of “self-fashioning,” in which they would write their work at the same time that it would write them.
Svetlana Byom, in her illuminating study of the personal mythologies of modern poets, Death in Quotation Marks, writes of the “self-fashioning” aesthetics of symbolist poets. Speaking of the Russian formalist critic Yury Tynyanov’s take on Blok’s work, she writes: “In the example of the poet Alexander Blok, whose major literary theme is Blok, Tynyanov traces how style becomes the man, how style invites personifications (olicenija), which then transgress the boundaries of literature and are transferred to the person.” We should here remember the multiple meanings of style, both literary and otherwise. Pre-revolutionary Mayakovsky in particular was something of a dandy, hisstyle (the mythic-yellow blouse) being very much a part of his poetic and public persona.Indeed, the mythology (and self-mythology) of Myakovsky’s life is inseparable from his poetry. In the critic Boris Tomachevskii’s words, “poets become living heroes—their biographies become poems.” Poets, therefore, exist in an eternal state of becoming.
In his noteworthy text, “Literature and Biography,” Tomachevskii theorized that every poet has a “documentary biography” that should be of little interest to the discerning reader and a “biographical legend” that is connected to their work. As we progress we will see the problems that arise in separating out these two types of biographies, Vladimir Mayakovsky being a prime example of this. Mayakovsky took the roleplaying of the Symbolists and Futurists as far as it could go, to the point where his entire being was channeled into a high wire act in which his poetry was only the most important element, inseparable from his actions and ideologies. Boris Pasternak, his friend, perhaps said it best: “in contempt of acting a part he played at life.” The only way for Mayakovsky to bring the curtain down, then, was to kill himself.
Mayakovsky’s most noteworthy early lyric poetry consists of the “autobiographical” cycle “I,” and the long poemas “The Cloud in Trousers,” and “The Backbone Flute.” Critics generally consider these to be his strongest works; perhaps not coincidentally, these are the works he composed before the revolution, before giving himself whole-heartedly to the newly established Soviet state. “The Cloud in Trousers” is love poetry that disdains the typical lyric imagery of flowers, moonlight, and delicate ladies, often alluding to the “burnt flesh,” “shrapnel,” and “wounded soldiers” of the Great War, as well as the cacophony of the modern urban cityscape. Despite this seeminginvasion (or superimposition, to borrow a cinematic term for a technique that would become popular with Russian avant-garde directors of the 1920’s) of the outside world onto Mayakovsky’s supposedly intimate love poetry, we discover that it is ultimately he is describing the violent landscape of the self. Yet, as we read ever more closely, the boundaries between the two—between the landscape of the city and the landscape of the self—begin to disappear entirely.
In one of his first published poems, “I,” Mayakovsky boldly opens by writing: “On the pavement / of my trampled soul / the steps of madmen / weave rude crude words.” Here the pavement of the city is used as a striking metaphor for his “trampled soul,” trampled as if by the clamoring urban masses. Yet Mayakovsky, who from a youngage renounced nature for the excitement of modernized technology, actually celebrates this urban chaos: “After electricity I lost all interest in nature. An unperfected thing.” Inthe last work of the cycle, “A Few Words about Myself,” Mayakovsky again metaphorically externalizes his soul: “That is my soul yonder / in tatters of torn cloud / against a burnt-out sky / upon the rusted cross of the belfry.” Here he does not personify nature, but rather has nature personify him. In this first cycle of poems, Mayakovsky links his self to the most sublime and powerful forces in nature; he has tea with the sun and equates himself with Napoleon and Jesus; yet, these lyrical gestures paradoxically make his self non-existent. Through his use of metaphor in poems like “I” and “A Few Words About Myself,” Mayakovsky simultaneously makes himself into everything and nothing.
In this early cycle of poetry and subsequently throughout his work, Mayakovsky often leaves the word “I” to hang alone as its own line, alienated from the rest of the text(surrounded as it is by white space). This formal conceit reflects the deeper implications of Mayakovsky’s use of “I.” The tensions in his “I” are perhaps pushed to their furthest extreme in “The Cloud in Trousers,” where he writes: “I feel / my ‘I’ / is much too small for me. / Stubbornly a body pushes out of me.” Here Mayakovsky puts “I” in quotation marks, questioning its very nature. This process of self-alienation is violently physical in Mayakovsky’s work: “I’ll brace myself against my ribs. / I’ll leap out! Out! Out!”Mayakovsky often represents himself as a force that is much too powerful for his physical body. This is Mayakovsky’s way of expressing his romantic torment, while also illuminating the burden that he placed upon himself to be the revolutionary-poet, a hero of his own poetry, brash, confident, “handsome and twentytwo years old.” This image, however, is not sustainable, and even in his early work Mayakovsky already seems at a breaking point: “I shall plunge headfirst from the scaffolding of days. / Over the abyss I’ve stretched my soul in a tightrope / and, juggling with words, totter above it.” Note the agency Mayakovsky gives himself in this passage. He stretches his own soul to the breaking point, sustaining his identity with nothing but the words of his poetry, below him an abyss of nonbeing.
Though he declared himself wholly dedicated to the state, we see in many of Mayakovsky’s post revolutionary poems a dissonance between his love and the communist mission of the state; if his ‘I’ is too big for his own body, his love is too big for the state. One must remember that Mayakovsky allotted most of his waking hours towards the production slogans, jingles, graphic art, and murals for the regime; his private life seemed restricted to his romantic affairs, and his letters show signs of strain during the moments when state affairs impinged upon his ability to have personal ones—most notable is the case of Tatiana Yakovlev, a Russian émigré living in Paris. In December of1928, Mayakovsky was not allowed a visa to return to Paris to see Tatiana, and described his mood as such: “I am being torn, chopped into pieces; people are being ripped away from me.” This from a poet who consistently decreed that his entire being was devoted to the state. It is perhaps not coincidental that this was the same year he composed “The Bedbug,” a play laced with conflicted ambiguity and satire. During this time, Mayakovsky’s mood of disillusionment was growing palpable.
In the post-revolutionary poems, Mayakovsky began to use the pronoun “we” with increasing regularity, so as to fuse his sensibility with that of the burgeoning state, yet even in these poems, “I” reappears and often conflicts with the surrounding verse. Eventually, the tensions between “we” and “I,” between “I” and “myself” grew to be too much for Mayakovsky, and on April 14th, 1930, he shot himself in the heart. There has been some controversy surrounding the death (recent scholarship suggests it might have been the work of the NKDV—but this ambiguity between political, personal, and romantic suicide in itself says much about the man and his work) and the suicide note thatwas left behind. Part of a final unfinished poem entitled “Past One O’clock” was used in the note. Part of the poem reads thus: “now you and I are quits.” It seemed, despite his other love affair, Mayakovsky was still hopelessly in love with Lily Brisk, for he returned to her in his life and thought again and again; he could not tear himself away. It is likely this feeling came more from the sense of a poetic ideal (we might think of Blok’s relationship to Lyubov Mendeleeva) than anything else. To this day, some speculate that Mayakovsky’s suicide was because of his unrequited love for Lily. At the same time, the section drafted for the suicide note reads: “Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind. / Now life and I are quits. Why bother then / to balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.” This difference is key, for it changes the inflection of Mayakovsky’s suicide from the Romantic to the basis of his very identity itself (yet perhaps Mayakovsky’s love wasthe basis for his true identity). Mayakovsky’s poetic and personal identity is also inextricably tied to politics; there is a sense here that Mayakovsky will no longer attempt to balance his internal passions with the needs of the state—the daily grind here seeming to allude to the endless bureaucracy and philistinism of the regime.
It is just as tempting to look at Mayakovsky’s suicide as the final ending to a self-mythology that he constructed. Just as Pushkin and Lermontov, the Romantic heroes with “biographies” par excellence, predicted their own deaths by duels in their fiction,Mayakovsky predicted his own death by suicide thirteen years before it happened: “it might be far better for me / to punctuate my end with a bullet.” In that same poem, “The Backbone Flute,” Mayakovsky writes that he is “staging [his] final performance.” This is just as startling a prediction, and perhaps illuminates the nature of the suicide as the only way Mayakovsky could stop acting and end his act: a life in which poetry, politics, and identity were inextricably bound to the poet hero’s “I.”
Mayakovsky’s life was a stage (just as the world is), something he was well aware of from the outset. This is Boym on an early autobiographical play that the poet composed: “Mayakovsky’s art and life are often seen as a continuous performance on the stage of history, too large and too public for ‘just a poet.’ Mayakovsky himself in his early tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky created a theatrical frame and a hyperbolic scale for all future portraits… the only enduring requirement is to make the hero—the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—monumental and immortal.” Mayakovsky did make a monument out of his life, giving him no alternative but to kill his “myself” and leave just an eternal, ever ringing “I” to resound in halls of poetry’s future history. He addresses nothing less in his final unfinished poem: “In hours like these, one rises to address / The ages, history, and all creation.” Here, the period at the end of “creation” is the bullet the poet used to end his own creation: himself.
It is instructive to contrast Mayakovsky’s poetry to that of Boris Pasternak, for though the two men were friends, their work in many ways is quite different. In his autobiography, Safe Conduct, Pasternak himself proposes that Mayakovsky and he are “impossible doubles.” On this idea of the two poets as alter egos or opposites, Svetlana Boym writes: “Mayakovsky’s opposite and double is Pasternak himself, an impersonal and untheatrical ‘pure poet.’” The idea of “pure” poetry is something that has been explored in depth by the Russian formalist critic, Roman Jakobson. Being a Russian émigré of the same generation as many modernist writers, Jakobson was especially equipped to empathize with their historical, cultural, and linguistic position. In hislandmark study, Languages in Literature, he defines the differences in Pasternak and Mayakovsky’s poetry as such: “By comparison with Mayakovsky’s poetry, [in Pasternak’s work] the first person is thrust into the background.” Mayakovsky’s work is linked with metaphor and Pasternak with metonymy; both poets use these techniques to express themselves, but to vastly different results.
Pasternak’s magnum opus, Doctor Zhivago, his life’s work and only novel in an oeuvre otherwise defined by brilliant poetry, covers the entire span of his generation from 1905 revolution to World War II, weaving together the stories of over a hundred characters. Our protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, is a young doctor with strong, if somewhat unorthodox, spiritual beliefs. While comforting his aunt on her deathbed, Zhivago provides an antidote to self-alienation: “You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are.” For Zhivago, and perhaps Pasternak as well, the beauty of consciousness is that it is made of external impressions and so can sustain itself on life, thus making the teleology of death irrelevant (perhaps reducing it merely to “death.”) In Yuri’s words:“consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t stumble. It’s like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you’d have a crash.” For Pasternak, the poet and the novelist, one resolves the tremendous issues of self-hood, of self-mythology, of persona and personae, by focusing their own consciousness outwards, sensitively and with scrutiny. In Pasternak’s work, careful observation and generosity of vision is key. This is a position that inherently leads to dignity and respect in both ones thoughts and deeds. In the same passage, Yuri Zhivago also exclaims: “it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people.”
This externalization of identity can be found in Pasternak’s poetry in a more direct form. Though Jakobson writes that “in Pasternak’s poetry, images of the surrounding world function as contiguous reflections, or metonymical expressions, of the poet’s self,”it is clear in reading the poetry that Pasternak is just as dependent on that exterior world for stimuli as it is reliant on him to be shaped into a poetic vision. With this knowledge, we should regard the metaphor of life being Pasternak’s sister as central to his work. The poem titled with this metaphor opens as such: “My sister—life today floods over / and bursts on everyone in spring rain” (12). In this poem, Pasternak is standing at the trainstation of the Kamyshin branch line and reflecting on love, among other things. He writes: “my heart pours onto every platform / scattering coach doors over the endless plain.” (12). Here Pasternak’s heart “pours” like spring rain over every platform of the station that he so carefully observes. Dissolving himself entirely into the exterior world, Pasternak thus finds himself. Overall, Pasternak seems to have found a more stable way than Mayakovsky to sustain his “I.” Thus, they are “impossible” alter egos and tragic friends.
Anna Gorenko (she later christened herself with the dramatic moniker “Akhmatova”—from the family name of her maternal great-grandmother who was descended from Tatars of the Golden Horde—so as not to upset her father, who did not want to “disgrace his family name with a poet”) grappled with her selfhood in a different manner than both Mayakovsky and Pasternak. As with the other poets under discussion, she was born of a generation destined to see unprecedented change, violence, and upheaval. In the poem “Let the voice of the organ again burst forth,” from her fourth collection of poetry, Anna Domini, she summarized her life experience with brutal concision: “Seven days of love, seven terrible years of separation, / War, revolution, a devastated home.” This statement is crucial to grasp for an understanding of Akhmatovain that her love (and Akhmatova loved and felt quite passionately) had to content with historical forces that threatened to sweep her away like a violent current.
In her cycle of “Northern Elegies” Akhmatova likens her own life to a river: “I, like a river, / Was rechanneled by this stern age. / They gave me a substitute life. It began to flow / In a different course, passing the other one, / And I do not recognize my banks.”Particularly noteworthy here is the use of the pronoun “they,” suggesting to us that external circumstances (i.e. the revolution and the rise of Bolshevism and then Stalinism) forced her to live a “substitute life,” in which flowing like a river she could no longer recognize her self (“her banks”). Here, Akhmatova transforms personal and historicaltragedy into a powerful metaphor that expresses the estrangement from the self that these events brought on. The image of a river is powerful because it suggests many things:agency or consequently complete lack of it (depending on whether or not one is the river or in the river), eternal and ephemeral time, and the Neva, which was to figure so prominently both Akhmatova’s life and work.
One of the central features of Akhmatova’s self-estrangement came from her self-imposed silence. Due to the subversive nature of Akhmatova’s poetry, she dared never to keep any of her writings, but rather would memorize them along with a small coterie of friends and colleagues (including the legendarily acute memorizer, Lidiya Chukovskaya)and then burn her manuscripts (obliterating all evidence of her writing, Akhmatova wrote for the void of memory and future hope rather than “for the desk drawer”). Thus, we see the motif of silence emerge often in her work. In the seventh elegy, she writes: “I have been silent, silent for thirty years. / The silence of arctic ice.” This silence simultaneouslymakes her powerless and, paradoxically, imperious and all-powerful, like ice or a river.Indeed, the speaks of a silence that is “part of everything” and can be “heard everywhere.” Akhmatova’s choice to remain silent for so long is part of what gives her a unique integrity as a poet under Stalinism, giving her the upper hand a regime whose agenda lay in splitting talented poets open in order to make them perform for the state. Akhmatova’s silence under these conditions is synonymous with her monumentality.
The tension in Akhmatova’s work lies in the unresolved conflict between this ideaof wholeness and a deep sense of personal alienation. Being estranged from her work, as she necessarily had to be, Akhmatova also became estranged from herself; for, as we have discussed: a poet is their work. In another of the elegies, Akhmatova muses: “How many poems I didn’t write.” Indeed, in her work she often feels a longing for things that were never allowed to occur: “That life that never took place. / In this year, such and such would have happened, / In that year—that: travelling, seeing, thinking / And remembering, and entering into a new love / As into a mirror” (512). This retrospective longing is emphasized by her use of “would have,” which qualifies this chain of non-events that all culminate in the final self-reflexive image of a mirror.
In addition to her imposed estrangement from her poetry, Akhmatova was also forcefully estranged from the ones that she loved, her son Lev Gumilyov being frequently arrested by the authorities and her partner, the famous art-critic, Nikolay Punin. Akhmatova’s grief over these circumstances is the theme of a good deal of her later work, particularly her “Requiem.” In the work, she grapples with her pain by trying to displace it from herself: “No, it is not I, it is somebody else who is suffering. / I would not have been able to bear what happened.” The only way for Akhmatova to survive her own grief is to separate herself from “I.” This necessity to estrange herself from her own essence is a pledge that Akhmatova proceeds with throughout the poem: “I must kill memory once and for all, / I must turn my soul to stone, / I must learn to live again—” Akhmatova here wishes to make her self immortal at the same time that she wishes to cease to exist. Perhaps this is not such a paradox after all. The only monument to the grief of her past is her verse. Special attention should be paid to the causal chain that Akhmatova sets up here; by immortalizing her soul in stone she will be able live again. “I will not lie down in my own grave,” she writes at one point, as if hoping to elide her destiny by escaping herself, or possibly to die immediately in someone else’s grave. This same complexity applies to Akhmatova’s language of living again; she may be talking about trying to live again in this world, or she may be speaking of living again after death. In short: resurrection. What is poetry if not the consistent resurrection of life in verse? Unlike other modernists who actually committed suicide (one might think of Esenin who wrote his own suicide in rhymed meter with his own blood), Akhmatova only “kills herself” in verse, and does so in order to live again (or simply to live), and ultimately, in order to live forever. These contradictions are all present in her work.
Akhmatova’s relationship to personal agency is complicated, for in her work she consistently mediates between destiny and choice, between “I” and “we.” Her verse elegantly holds these conflicting currents together like a river between to opposite banks. In her “Northern Elegies” she writes: “This is when we decided to be born, / And timing it perfectly / So as not to miss any of those pageants / Yet to come, we bid farewell to non-existence.” Here Akhmatova is speaking about her tumultuous generation whom we have discussed, and their pre-destined place in history. Here agency is granted as she, along with her generation “decide” to be born, despite the terror that they will witness. This sentiment points to Akhmatova’s tenacity; she was to play her role on the world’s stage, even if she would have to endure immense suffering to do so.
Akhmatova expresses again and again in her poetry the fact that she must go on playing her role, as painful as that may be. In the seventh elegy she writes: “Who could have thought up such a role for me? / Allow me for a moment, O Lord, / To begin to become like someone else.” These words echoes her grief stricken language of the “someone else” that “must” be experiencing what she is in fact undergoing, while also pointing to her theatrical frame of reference, even for the most personal matters. On this topic, the poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote: “The comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one’s chances of weathering the drama of history.” Note Brodsky’s language of both history and personal life as a “drama.” As with Mayakovsky, life and history are very much a stage for Akhmatova. The idea of her playing a role on the world’s stage recurs often in her work, and theatrical metaphors abound particularly in such works as “Poem Without a Hero,” which uses the modernist Mariinsky Theatre as one of its primary settings. As in modernist theater, Akhmatova simultaneously her self through her own theatrical mask, while also allowing herself enough distance to express in poetry the “metaphysics” of her personal and historical situation. As Brodsky has keenly observed, Akhmatova achieves this through a complex interweaving of personas: “Half self-portrait, half mask, their poetic persona would augment an actual drama with the fatality of theater, thus probing both her own and pain’s possible limits.” If Mayakovsky made himself into everything and nothing, Akhmatova makes herself into everybody and nobody.
In the poetry she composed in the bloody four year civil war following the October Revolution, Akhmatova links her decision to stay in Saint Petersburg despite the carnage and chaos and grief that will be wrought there with the impulse to monumentalize the city: “The holy city of Peter / Will be our unintended monument” The use of “our” and “we” here reflects Akhmatova’s hope that her work will stand as a monument to the collective of Saint Petersburg. For her, it is poetry that may keep the city alive in a time where it seems to be dying. She writes: “Loving our city / And not winged freedom, / We preserved for ourselves / Its palaces, its fire and water.” Verse can preserve a city and its literary history in memory, but in Akhmatova’s decision to merge life and verse, it is not enough for her simply to write about the city, she must leave it. To depart Saint Petersburg for Akhmatova would be tantamount to a betrayal not only of her self, but also of all Russia. In this way, she equalizes “I” and “we,” making them inextricable.
Again, Joseph Brodsky has written deeply and insightfully about Akhmatova. Onher use of pronouns, he writes: “Those ‘civic’ poems were but fragments borne by her general lyrical current, which made their ‘we’ practically indistinguishable from the more frequent, emotionally charged ‘I.’ ” In this way, he argues, Akhmatova’s “civic” poems are shot through with a remarkable intimacy while her “personal” poems use language that is epic and removed. Further, he writes: “the poems about the homeland and the epoch were shot through with almost inappropriate intimacy; similarly, those about sentiment itself were acquiring an epic timbre. The latter meant the current’s widening.”The “current” can be seen as the river of Akhmatova’s life. She both is the Neva in her poems, and nothing besides its majesty. In this way we can see a link between her exploding intimacy onto a large canvas of things and Pasternak’s personification of objects to express emotion in metonym.
And so we return once again to the importance of rivers in Akhmatova’s poetic canon as well as her personal life. The Neva… “May the melting snow stream like tears / From my motionless lids of bronze, / And a prison dove coo in the distance, / And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on.” This moving passage, which concludes Akhmatova’s “Requiem”, alludes to many different elements of Akhmatova’s life and work. First, we remember the metaphor of her own life as a river, and then the importance of the Neva both for the centrality of Saint Petersburg and for Akhmatova’s personal mythology. Then of course, there is the “prison dove,” cooing for Lev and Punin, both of whom were imprisoned in the Kresty (literally the “crosses”), which sits on an embankment next to the Neva River. In 2006, a stone monument to Akhmatova was erected across from the prison, in some ways fulfilling her dream of turning her soul (her verse) into stone.
Even more than Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva was the tragic “poetess” of the so-called Silver Age. Often living on the brink of starvation, Tsvetaeva consistently struggled to find work to support herself and her children. Very little of her work was published in her lifetime. She was forced to emigrate to Paris in the twenties and did not return to her homeland until the late forties. The pain of separation (from the daughter she left behind in an orphanage during the civil war and who subsequently perished due to starvation) can be felt in her poem dedicated “To B. Pasternak” (during this time, Tsvetaeva was also exchanged in correspondence with Pasternak as well as the great poet R. M. Rilke, who was at the end of his life). She writes: “Versts, spaces… / Not disunited – they disarrayed us. / Across the slums of the globe’s range / As if orphans, we’re disarranged.” This image of orphans is charged with multiple meanings. The Russian people are all, in a sense, orphans of the Russian revolution—Tsvetaeva seems to say in her consistent use of “us” and “we” throughout the poem. At the same time, the word“orphan” cannot help but recall the proverbial orphan hood of the child she left behind, who was indeed left at an orphanage.
In “To B. Pasternak,” Tsvetaeva strikingly illustrates her sense of estrangement, guilt (in itself a form of self-alienation), and sorrow. These emotions are reflected formally in the poem, with its varied and punning use of the prefix “dis.” She uses this prefix to create these words: “dis-tances,” “dis-pelled,” “dis-persed,” “dislocated,”“displaced,” “disjoined,” “display,” “dismay,” “discord,” “disorder,” “distorted,”“disconnected,” “disbanded,” “disunited,” “disarrayed,” and “disarranged.” The formal structure of the poem realizes the full extent of Tsvetaeva’s estrangement, which ispolitical, romantic, and personal in its implications. Most of all, she is estranged from herself. In her poem, “To that which once made all the difference,” Tsvetaeva writes that her soul was “born in a nameless place.” She is at once speaking about Russia and her own utter alienation in the world, wherein there is no place for her. Thus is the tragedy of Tsvetavea, a woman of immense poetic gifts who should have been cherished in her homeland but instead was forced to live in various states of degradation and exile for most of her existence.
Another case of émigré literature (which should never be overlooked in any discussion of Russian modernism) is quite different from Tsvetaeva; against all odds and despite all losses he is triumphant rather than tragic. That case is Vladimir Nabokov. Hiswork also grapples with estrangement and alienation within the self, but this preoccupation manifests itself differently from the other authors we have examined thus far. Speaking, in his autobiography Speak, Memory, of his forced estrangement (due to the Bolshevik coup) from the birch forests and manors of his childhood, from the stable, humane world that he grew up in, from his mother, and of his early loves, Nabokovwrites: “these are the things that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood. The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds.” Nabokov is not denying his own pain in this passage, but rather using his characteristic resiliency and humor to inflect his language with an imaginative image that belies the “severance” that he underwent. And Nabokov was indeed grateful that he was forced to leave Russia, vowing never to return and claiming he remembered it “perfectly.” In his introduction Speak Memory, Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd poses America as the solution, for Nabokov, to the problem of exile. For ultimately, exile is not merely about geography, but time. We are all exiled from the Eden of our childhoods, and to be separated from one’s homeland is to feel the pain of this exile even more acutely. Nabokov then, proved himself to be an exception to every rule, saving himself through wit, genius, and the ability to laugh at and diminish the cruelty of the totalitarianism he lived through.
Osip Mandelstam is an author who remained in the Soviet Union, like Akhmatova and Pasternak, even during the era of high Stalinism. A poet of genius and sensitivity, he could not “adjust himself” to the temperament of a regime which he hated. In his “Stalin Epigram” he wrote acerbically witty verse that cut the dictator down to size. In the wake of his arrest (after which he brazenly read the poem to the authorities, knowing they would not dare repeat the words to their dear leader) and subsequent release, Mandelstam knew that he was on severely thin ice, and so agreed to compose an Ode to Stalin. Observing this work carefully, we discover perhaps the epitome of self-estrangement inthe language of Russian modernism.
From the beginning, Mandelstam cannot bring himself to compose a straightforward ode, and so proceeds: “Were I to take up the charcoal.” The emphasis is my own, for I would like to highlight the future imperfect tense with which Mandelstam commences the poem. “Cautiously and anxiously” he writes, “I would,” “I want to,” and “I would want to” without whole-heartedly, sincerely sketching in a portrait of the all-powerful leader, this false father of the Russian people. This is a figure that Mandelstam must necessarily sacrifice himself to depict: “I learn from him not to spare myself.” To expedite this process, Mandelstam attempts to evoke the muses of creation while simultaneously referring to himself in the third person: “[O] artist!” This has the further effect of Mandelstam attempting to remove himself from the ode, as if drawing over his features with charcoal to hide them. In the poignant ending to the ode, Mandelstam hopes to disappear entirely in order, perhaps one day, to live again (we have examined a similar impulse in Akhmatova: “The mounds of human heads recede into the distance: / I am there diminished, I’ll not be noticed any longer, / but in gentle books and in children’s games / I shall be resurrected to say the sun is shining.” If Mandelstam was to be resurrected, it was only to be in his verse.
In his ode to Stalin, Mandelstam speaks not directly as himself, in his own poetic voice, but reflexively, as someone who is only capable of praising Stalin withoutsincerity. And yet, a certain kind of paradoxical sincerity is thus apparent in the work, in that it captures the anxiety of depicting Stalin and Mandelstam’s inability to do so.Indeed, the ode did not save him, for he was still sent to the Gulag where malnourishment eventually forced him to perish. His will however, as a sort of “holy fool” of Russian poetry, remained intact, even without a standing grave to his name.
I would like to conclude this exploration not by discussing another poet, but rather a novelist, whose work exemplifies, in a completely unconventional manner, this sense of identity crisis that not only Russian poets but many Russian people themselves were experiencing in the post-revolutionary years. This author is Andrey Platonov. Starting his career as a bright young man and an enthusiastic (this was before Stalin made enthusiasm a state-enforced emotion for the entire population) proponent of communism, after witnessing the instability and chaos of the civil war years, Platonov took it upon himself to work with his hands for the regime. He became and electrical engineer who helped the digging of countless damns, while also overseeing many water redirection projects. In the late twenties, with the announcement of Stalin’s Five Year plan, Platonov was a witness to the collectivization of all agriculture and saw first-hand a process that was misguided to begin with go horribly awry.
Platonov’s great novel The Foundation Pit uses the structure of myth and folklore to deal with this process. In the second half of the novel, which deals with collectivization, Platonov reveals the peasantry as the soul of the countryside, and embodies their souls in the image of horses. He then creates a strange reversal in which a group of horses act as if collectivized, while the peasants who are supposed to be so deteriorate to the point of nothingness, losing their humanity. The implication is clear. As the proletariat protagonists of the novel wander through this village, trying to collectivizeit, they encounter many destitute peasants along the way. One of them exclaims: “Now I’ve detached myself from my soul.” Another one says: “I’m lying here all empty, my soul’s departed out of all my flesh… I’m frightened I’ll fly away.” From exclamations like these we see that the process of collectivization and the forced termination of a long-standing way of life has irrevocably estranged the peasants from themselves. There is a commonality here between the split that emerges in the hearts and souls of the peasants, the historical reality of the writers who were censored by Stalin, and the émigrés who were forced to leave their beloved homeland due to the persecution of Bolsheviks. All must bear the sorrow of their split souls, all must bear the sorrow of their hearts, which in Maria Tsvetaeva’s words, “have been cut like decks of cards.” It is this sense of cutting, splitting, and splintering that is crucial to the understanding of Russian modernism.
The Foundation Pit depicts a strange and almost post-human landscape in which every character is indeed split. Both workers and peasant characters become dehumanized. It is implied that both groups (the proverbial halves of the hammer and the sickle) are buried in the foundation pit for the unrealized communist utopia at the end of the novel. The loss of the self can be witnessed most acutely and totally in the character of Nastya, the orphan of a bourgeois mother and an abusive stepfather, whose entire identity is supposed to be tantamount to “the future of the state.” She seemingly has no individuality (when first asked to give her name, she replies: “I’m nobody”), and simply regurgitates slogans (such as “liquidate the kulaks as a class”) that she hears spewed from the radio (Platonov takes pains to directly link the two). The epitome of this pattern of behavior occurs when she symbolically signs her own name as a hammer and sickle. And yet, at the end of the novel Nastya’s personal trauma reemerges and the worker’s utopian ideal is destroyed. Quite literally, it is buried underground, with Nastya and her mother in a coffin at the bottom of the pit.
I’ve purposely restrained myself in the use of examples for Platonov’s text, which is so rich in this kind of language that it can be discovered on virtually every single page of the novel. In other words, one example speaks for the whole book in terms of the thematic content we are here trying to outline. A word, however, must be given to Platonov’s unusual after forward to the novel, which reads like a disclaimer to the authorities as well as a pained and masked note to himself. Crucially, Platonov refers to himself as “the author.” Distancing himself from the work, he writes that he, “the author”was perhaps misguided making some of the choices that were made. This distancing is subsequently undermined however by his repeated use words like “alarm” and “concern,” demonstrating the genuine emotion that undergirds the novel, and does indeed come from both “the author” and himself.
We began by examining the modernist suspicion of “I” and saw how, in the work of Mayakovsky, “I” carried within it self-alienating tensions that could not be sustained. In Pasternak, we saw the dispersion of “I” onto the outer-world, its sublimation and merging with it. In Akhmatova we saw “I” become “we” and vice versa. Still, for a time Russian modernists ultimately expressed themselves in the first person, as conflicted and as blurred as that could get (Pasternak had an autobiography, Tsvetaeva a diary, and so on). Despite the symbolist fascination with masquerades, and the general modernist preoccupation with masks, mirrors, and doubles, these multiplicities of identity were role-play. There was still an “I” to be found somewhere behind the smoke screens of identity, theatricality, and self-mythology, something that is perhaps no longer true by the time we reach the era of the great terror, of Platonov’s novel, and of Mandelstam’s Stalin Ode. The final era of Russian modernism is that in which “I” is no longer possible.
Russian modernism has multiple “endings,” each one precipitated by the death (and often suicide) of an author. Symbolism died with Blok of a weak heart in 1919. Russian modernism as a whole perished when Sergei Esenin slit his own wrists in 1924. And again in 1930 when Mayakovsky put a bullet in his heart. Russian modernism also perished with Osip Mandelstam in the Gulag in 1938. And again when Tsvetaeva hung herself in Elgba in 1941. And yet, paradoxically, it lived, and saw something of a resurrection during the thaw under Krushev in the 1950’s and again during the Glasnost era of the late 1980’s, when for the first time, many works of literature that had long been repressed began to emerge. It was then that the Russian people learned not only about the great artists who had been silenced, but also about their own history and the full extent of the terror and repression that had characterized the Soviet regime.
One could make the argument that it was Joseph Brodsky who truly resurrected Russian modernism once again when he accepted his Nobel Prize in 1987, stating that he alone had no right to accept the award, instead speaking as “we,” on behalf of all the Soviet writers who would never have been allowed the chance to receive such a prize. These are writers like Pasternak, who had to turn down the Nobel in 1958 so as not to be dispelled from his country. These are writers such as Brodsky’s three other largest figures of inspiration: Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. And so the works of these poets and writers stand as monuments to the imagination as well as the spirit of artistic and human individuality. Indeed, these author’s “deaths” (self sacrificial and otherwise) have allowed them to live on in collective memory. Svetlana Boym has written perceptively that: “the death of the author can be seen as seen as a proclamation of his immortality, the erection of a peculiarly modernist monument.” When thinking of monuments, one might recall the never completed monument to Lenin, that statue which was to stand atop the tallest structure in the world, with an arm outstretched to the vast sky. Instead Akhmatova’s statue stands proud and etched along the Neva, which flows, like everything, eternally out to sea.
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