The Silver Age.
(From the 1890s to 1917)
The period from the 1890s to 1917
was one of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism,
aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism,
apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements
combined with each other in improbable ways.
Primarily an age of poetry, it also produced
significant prose and drama. Russian Symbolism,
which was influenced by French Symbolist poetry and
the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), is
usually said to have begun with an essay by Dmitry
Merezhkovsky, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh
techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury” (1893;
“On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New
Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature”). A poet
and propagator of religious ideas, Merezhkovsky
wrote a trilogy of novels, Khristos i Antikhrist
(1896–1905; Christ and Antichrist), consisting of
Yulian otstupnik (1896; Julian the Apostate), Leonardo da Vinchi (1901; Leonardo da Vinci), and
Pyotr i Aleksey (1905; Peter and Alexis), which
explores the relation of pagan and Christian views
of the world.
Vladimir Solovyov
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov,
Solovyov also spelled Soloviev (b. Jan.
16 [Jan. 28, New Style], 1853, Moscow,
Russia—d. July 31 [Aug. 13], 1900,
Uzkoye, near Moscow), Russian
philosopher and mystic who, reacting to
European rationalist thought, attempted
a synthesis of religious philosophy,
science, and ethics in the context of a
universal Christianity uniting the
Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches
under papal leadership.
He was the son of the historian
Sergey M. Solovyov. After a basic
education in languages, history, and
philosophy at his Orthodox home, he took
his doctorate at Moscow University in
1874 with the dissertation “The Crisis
of Western Philosophy: Against the
Positivists.” After travels in the West,
he wrote a second thesis, a critique of
abstract principles, and accepted a
teaching post at the University of St.
Petersburg, where he delivered his
celebrated lectures on Godmanhood
(1880). This appointment was later
rescinded because of Solovyov’s clemency
appeal for the March 1881 assassins of
Tsar Alexander II. He also encountered
official opposition to his writings and
to his activity in promoting the union
of Eastern Orthodoxy with the Roman
Catholic church.
Solovyov criticized Western
empiricist and idealist philosophy for
attributing absolute significance to
partial insights and abstract
principles. Drawing on the writings of
Benedict de Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, he
regarded life as a dialectical process,
involving the interaction of knowledge
and reality through conflicting
tensions. Assuming the ultimate unity of
Absolute Being, termed God in the
Judeo-Christian tradition, Solovyov
proposed that the world’s multiplicity,
which had originated in a single
creative source, was undergoing a
process of reintegration with that
source. Solovyov asserted, by his
concept of Godmanhood, that the unique
intermediary between the world and God
could only be man, who alone is the
vital part of nature capable of knowing
and expressing the divine idea of
“absolute unitotality” in the chaotic
multiplicity of real experience.
Consequently, the perfect revelation of
God is Christ’s incarnation in human
nature.
For Solovyov, ethics became a
dialectical problem of basing the
morality of human acts and decisions on
the extent of their contribution to the
world’s integration with ultimate divine
unity, a theory expressed in his The
Meaning of Love (1894).
* * *
Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
(Russian: Влади́мир Серге́евич Соловьёв;
January 28 [O.S. January 16] 1853 –
August 13 [O.S. July 31] 1900) was a
Russian philosopher, poet, pamphleteer,
literary critic, who played a
significant role in the development of
Russian philosophy and poetry at the end
of the 19th century. Solovyov (the last
name derives from "соловей", "solovey",
Nightingale in Russian) played a
significant role in the Russian
spiritual renaissance in the beginning
of the 20th century. Solovyov is said to
have died a pauper, homeless.
Life and work
Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow
on 16 January 1853, in the family of
well-known Russian historian Sergey
Mikhaylovich Solovyov (1820–1879). His
mother, Polixena Vladimirovna, belonged
to a Ukrainian-Polish family, having
among her ancestors a remarkable thinker
the 18th century Hryhori Skovoroda
(1722–1794).
In his teens Solovyov renounced
Orthodox Christianity for nihilism
though later Solovyov changed his
earlier convictions and began expressing
views in line again with the Russian
Orthodox Church. What prompted this
radical change appears to be Solovyov's
disapproval of the Positivist movement.
In Solovyov's The Crisis of Western
Philosophy: Against the Positivists he
attempted to discredit the Positivists'
rejection of Aristotle's essentialism or
philosophical realism. In Against the
Postivists, Solovyov took the position
of intuitive noetic comprehension,
noesis or insight stating consciousness,
in being is integral (Russian term being
sobornost) and has to have both
phenomenon (validated by dianonia) and
noumenon validated intuitively.
Positivism according to Solovyov only
validates the phenomenon of an object
denying the intuitive reality people
experience as part of their
consciousness. Vladimir Solovyov was
also known to be a very close friend and
confidant of Fyodor Dostoevsky. In
opposition to Dostoevsky's apparent
views of the Roman Catholic church,
Solovyov has been rumored to have
converted to Roman Catholicism four
years before his death. It could be said
that he did this to engage in the
reconciliation (ecumenism, sobornost)
between Roman Catholicism and Eastern
Orthodoxy, a reconciliation that
Solovyov outspokenly favored, but
Solovyov himself always maintained that
he was still a Russian Orthodox believer
and that he had never left the Orthodox
faith. Solovyov believed that his
mission in life was to move people
toward reconciliation or absolute unity
or sobornost.
Influence
It is widely held that Solovyov was
Dostoevsky's inspiration for the
characters Alyosha Karamazov and Ivan
Karamazov from The Brothers Karamazov.
Solovyov's influence can also be seen in
the writings of the Symbolist and
Neo-Idealist of the later Russian Soviet
era. His book The Meaning of Love can be
seen as one of the philosophical sources
of Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata
(1889).
He influenced the religious
philosophy of Nicolas Berdyaev, Sergey
Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Nikolai
Lossky, Semen L. Frank, the ideas of
Rudolf Steiner and also on the poetry
and theory of Russian symbolism, viz.
Andrei Belyi, Alexander Blok Solovyov's
nephew, and others. Hans Urs von
Balthasar explores his work as one
example of seven lay styles that reveal
the glory of God's revelation, in volume
III of the The Glory of the Lord (pp.
279–352).
Sophiology
Solovyov compiled a philosophy based
partly on Hellenistic pagan philosophy
(see Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus) and
also early church Patristic tradition
along with Buddhism and Hebrew
Kabblahistic elements (i.e. Philo of
Alexandra). Solovyov also studied
Gnosticism and seemed to be heavily
influenced by the gnostic works of
Valentinus. Solovyov's religious
philosophy was syncretic and fused many
of the philosophical elements of various
religious traditions with that of the
Eastern Orthodox church and also
Solovyov's own personal experience of
the Sophia. Solovyov described his
encounters with the entity Sophia in his
works the Three Encounters and Lectures
on Godmanhood among others. Solovyov's
fusion was driven by the desire to
reconcile and or unite with Eastern
Orthodoxy these various traditions via
the Russian Slavophiles' concept of
sobornost. His Russian religious
philosophy had a very strong impact on
the Russian Symbolist art movements of
his time. Solovyev's teaching on Sophia
have been deemed a heresy by ROCOR and
condemned as unsound and unorthodox by
the Patriarchate of Moscow.
Sobornost
Solovyov sought through his works to
create a form of philosophy, that could
through his system of logic or reason,
reconcile all various bodies of
knowledge or disciplines of thought. It
was Solovyov's goal to fuse all
conflicting concepts into a single
systematic form of reason. It was this
complete form of philosophy that
Solovyov presented as being Russian
philosophy. That based on the central
components of the slavophile movement,
all forms of reason could be reconciled
into one single form of logic. The heart
of this reconciliation as logic or
reason was the concept sobornost
(organic or Spontaneous order through
integration) which is also the Russian
word for catholic. Solovyov sought to
find and validate the common ground and
or where various conflicts found common
ground and by focusing on this common
ground to establish absolute unity and
or integral[9] fusion of opposing ideas
and or peoples.
Criticism
Solovyov is extensively criticized
by Dmitry Galkovsky in the 1988
philosophical novel The Infinite
Deadlock. Galkovsky cites Solovyov's
early adoption of nihilist views, and
later renunciation of them, as evidence
of Solovyov's opportunism. He also
characterizes Solovyov's writings on
theocracy as a "parodic hybrid of
slavophilic nationalism with Western
nihilism." In Galkovsky's radical
interpretation, Solovyov emerges as an
impostor whose primary goal was to
create a caricatured form of religious
conservatism that would draw audiences
away from more "authentic" nationalists
such as Yuri Samarin.
Quotes
"As long as the dark foundation of
our nature, grim in its all-encompassing
egoism, mad in its drive to make that
egoism into reality, to devour
everything and to define everything by
itself, as long as that foundation is
visible, as long as this truly original
sin exists within us, we have no
business here and there is no logical
answer to our existence. Imagine a group
of people who are all blind, deaf and
slightly demented and suddenly someone
in the crowd asks, "What are we to
do?"... The only possible answer is,
"Look for a cure". Until you are cured,
there is nothing you can do. And since
you don't believe you are sick, there
can be no cure."
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Dmitry
Merezhkovsky
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, (b.
Aug. 14 [Aug. 2, Old Style], 1865, St.
Petersburg, Russia—d. Dec. 9, 1941,
Paris), Russian poet, novelist, critic,
and thinker who played an important role
in the revival of
religious-philosophical interests among
the Russian intelligentsia.
After graduation from the University
of St. Petersburg in history and
philology, Merezhkovsky published his
first volume of poetry in 1888. His
essay O prichinakh upadka i o novykh
techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy
literatury (1893; “On the Causes of the
Decline and on the New Trends in
Contemporary Russian Literature”),
sometimes erroneously described as the
manifesto of Russian Symbolism, was
nevertheless a significant landmark of
Russian modernism. At the beginning of
the 20th century he and his wife,
Zinaida Gippius, organized
religious-philosophical colloquia and
edited the magazine Novy put (1903–04;
“The New Path”).
With his trilogy Khristos i
Antikhrist (1896–1905; “Christ and
Antichrist”), Merezhkovsky revived the
historical novel in Russia. Its three
parts, set in widely separated epochs
and geographical areas, reveal
historical erudition and serve as
vehicles for the author’s historical and
theological ideas. Another group of
fictional works from Russian history—the
play Pavel I (1908) and the novels
Aleksandr I (1911–12) and 14 Dekabrya
(1918; December the Fourteenth)—also
form a trilogy. Merezhkovsky’s favourite
method is that of antithesis. He applied
it not only in his novels but also in
his critical study Tolstoy i Dostoyevsky
(1901–02), a work of seminal importance
and enduring value. His Gogol i chort
(1906; “Gogol and the Devil”) is another
noteworthy critical work.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 had a
radicalizing effect on Merezhkovsky.
Together with Gippius and Dmitry
Filosofov he published the anthology Le
Tsar et la révolution (1907; “The Tsar
and the Revolution”) while living in
France. After Merezhkovsky returned to
Russia in 1908, he became one of the
most popular Russian writers. He
published extensively in newspapers and
became known as the advocate of a “new
religious consciousness.”
Merezhkovsky enthusiastically
welcomed the first phase of the Russian
Revolution of 1917 but saw the
Bolsheviks’ rise to power after its
second phase as a catastrophe for
Russia. He emigrated in 1920. After a
short stay in Poland, he moved to Paris,
where he lived until his death. His
later works include the novels Rozhdenie
bogov (1925; The Birth of the Gods) and
Messiya (1928; “Messiah”) as well as
biographical studies of Napoleon, Dante,
Jesus Christ, and Roman Catholic saints.
Merezhkovsky was of the opinion that
Russia should be freed from Bolshevism
at any cost, which is why he welcomed
Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in
1941 during World War II. During his
lifetime Merezhkovsky’s authority among
Russian émigrés was great. His works
began to be published in Russia again
only in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
as the Soviet Union began to collapse.
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Symbolists
The Symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher
reality. The first wave of Symbolists included
Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), who translated a
number of English poets and wrote verse that he left
unrevised on principle (he believed in first
inspiration); Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), a poet and
translator of French Symbolist verse and of
Virgil’s
Aeneid, who for years was the leader of the
movement; Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), who wrote
decadent, erotic, and religious poetry; and Fyodor
Sologub, author of melancholic verse and of a novel,
Melky bes (1907; The Petty Demon), about a sadistic,
homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher.
Three writers dominate the second wave of
Symbolism. Eschatology and anthroposophy shaped the
poetry and prose of Andrey Bely, whose novel
Peterburg (1913–22; St. Petersburg) is regarded as
the masterpiece of Symbolist fiction.
Aleksandr
Blok, who wrote the lyric drama Balaganchik (1906;
“The Showbooth”), is best known for his poem
Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve), which describes 12
brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led
by Jesus Christ. The principal theoretician of the
Symbolist movement, Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949),
wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist
philosophy.
Konstantin Balmont
Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont
(Russian: Константи́н Дми́триевич
Ба́льмонт) (15 June [O.S. 3 June] 1867 —
December 23, 1942) was a Russian
symbolist poet, translator, one of the
major figures of the Silver Age of
Russian Poetry.
Biography
Balmont was born into a noble family
near Vladimir. In 1886, he entered the
Moscow University, but was expelled the
next year. He started poetic activity in
the end of the 1890s, and became famous
in 1905 after having published several
compilations of poems. In the end of
1905, he illegally left Russia for
Paris, traveled extensively, and
returned to Moscow only in 1916. He
accepted the February Revolution
enthusiastically, but was against the
October Revolution of 1917, and left
Russia for Germany, and subsequently for
France in 1920. He spent the last twenty
years of his life in emigration and in
poverty. He died in 1942 in
Noisy-le-Grand, a suburb of Paris.
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Valery Bryusov
Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov
(Russian: Вале́рий Я́ковлевич Брю́сов)
(December 13 [O.S. December 1] 1873 –
October 9, 1924) was a Russian poet,
prose writer, dramatist, translator,
critic and historian. He was one of the
principal members of the Russian
Symbolist movement.
Biography
Valery Bryusov was born on December
13, 1873 (recorded December 1, according
to the old Julian calendar) into a
merchant's family in Moscow. His parents
had little do with his upbringing, and
as a boy Bryusov was largely left to
himself. He spent a great deal of time
reading "everything that fell into [his]
hands," including the works of Charles
Darwin and Jules Verne, as well as
various materialistic and scientific
essays. The future poet received an
excellent education, studying in two
Moscow gymnasiums between 1885 and 1893.
Bryusov began his literary career in
the early 1890s while still a student at
Moscow State University with his
translations of the poetry of the French
Symbolists (Paul Verlaine, Maurice
Maeterlinck, and Stéphane Mallarmé) as
well at that of Edgar Allan Poe. Bryusov
also began to publish his own poems,
which were very much influence by the
Decadent and Symbolist movements of his
contemporary Europe.
At the time, Russian Symbolism was
still mainly a set of theories and had
few notable practitioners. Therefore, in
order to represent Symbolism as a
movement of formidable following,
Bryusov adopted numerous pen names and
published three volumes of his own
verse, entitled Russian Symbolists. An
Anthology (1894-95). Bryusov's
mystification proved successful -
several young poets were attracted to
Symbolism as the latest fashion in
Russian letters.
With the appearance of Tertia Vigilia
in 1900, he came to be revered by other
Symbolists as an authority in matters of
art. In 1904 he became the editor of the
influential literary magazine Vesy (The
Balance), which consolidated his
position in the Russian literary world.
Bryusov's mature works were notable for
their celebration of sensual pleasures
as well as their mastery of a wide range
of poetic forms, from the acrostic to
the carmina figurata.
By the 1910s, Bryusov's poetry had
begun to seem cold and strained to many
of his contemporaries. As a result, his
reputation gradually declined and, with
it, his power in the Russian literary
world. He was adamantly opposed to the
efforts of Georgy Chulkov and Vyacheslav
Ivanov to move Symbolism in the
direction of Mystical Anarchism.
Though many of his fellow Symbolists
fled Russia after the Russian Revolution
of 1917, Bryusov remained until his
death in 1924. He supported the
Bolshevik government and received a
position in the cultural ministry of the
new Soviet state. Of his activities at
this time, Clarence Brown writes:
Bryusov's review [of Osip
Mandelstam's Second Book, 1923] is not
so much a review as it is a subtle donos,
an act of political informing. When one
considers his infinitely superior gift
as a poet, Bryusov is an even more
distasteful personality than Sergey
Gorodetsky. His embrace of Bolshevism
and the new order of things was more
fervent by far than that of Mayakovsky,
the unofficial poet-laureate of the
Revolution, and his personality
incomparably more devious. ... He
invents the name 'Neo-Acmeist' for
'certain circles' (not further
specified) by whom Mandelstam had been
made 'exceedingly famous,' and
designates him as their teacher. ... No
one without access to a large research
library today could possibly discover
the identity of these utterly unknown
people, Mandelstam's 'disciples.'
According to Nadezhda Yakovlevna,
however, they were 'the most
compromising people he could think of.'
It was to be understood that Mandelstam
was not an isolated antagonist of the
'new reality' - he stood at the head of
a concerted effort. What Gumilyov [who
had been executed for alleged
participation in an anti-Soviet plot in
1921] had been, Mandelstam now was.
Literature
Prose
Bryusov most famous prose works are the
historical novels The Altar of Victory
(depicting life in Ancient Rome) and The
Fiery Angel (depicting the psychological
climate of 16th century Germany).
The latter tells the story of a
scholar and his attempts to win the love
of a young woman whose spiritual
integrity is seriously undermined by her
participation in occult practices and
her dealings with unclean forces. It
served as the basis for Sergei
Prokofiev's opera The Fiery Angel.
Translation
As a translator, Bryusov was the first
to render the works of the Belgian poet
Emile Verhaeren accessible to Russian
readers, and he was one of the major
translators of Paul Verlaine's poetry.
His most famous translations are of
Edgar Allan Poe, Romain Rolland, Maurice
Maeterlinck, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine,
Ausonius, Molière, Byron, and Oscar
Wilde. Bryusov also translated Johann
Goethe's Faust and Virgil's Aeneid.
During the 1910s, Bryusov was
especially interested in translating
Armenian poetry.
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Zinaida Gippius
Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius,
(Russian: Зинаи́да Никола́евна Ги́ппиус;
1869, Belyov - 1945) was a Russian
symbolist poet and author. She was
married to philosopher Dmitriy
Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. Their union
lasted 52 years (despite Gippius'
probable lesbianism[citation needed])
and is described in Gippius' unfinished
book Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Paris. 1951;
Moscow., 1991). She was a freemason.
Emigration
Merezhkovsky and Gippius hoped for the
demise of the bolshevik rule, but after
they learned of Kolchak's defeat in
Siberia and Denikin's defeat in the
south of Russia, they decided to flee
Petrograd. On 24 December 1919 together
with their friend Dmitry Filosofov, and
secretary V. Zlobin, they left the city
as if going to present lectures to the
Red Army regiments in Gomel, while in
actuality, in January 1920 they defected
to the territory occupied by Poland and
settled for a while in Minsk. Here the
Merezhkovskys lectured to the Russian
immigrants and wrote political pamphlets
in the Minsk Courier newspaper.
The tragedy of the life and work of a
writer, destined to live outside of
Russia is a constant topic in the later
works of Gippius. In exile she remained
faithful to the aesthetic and
metaphysical mentality that she acquired
in the pre-revolutionary years while
involved in the Religion and Philosophy
Assembly and Religion and Philosophy
Society. She was preoccupied by mystical
and covertly sexual themes. She was also
an alert, if harsh literary critic and
connoisseur of poetry, who became known
for dismissing many of the Symbolist and
Acmeist Russian writers. This made her
unpopular with the younger generation in
her time, but she is now recognized as
one of Russia's most important women
writers.
In exile Gippius republished several
works which had previously been
published in Russia. A collection of
stories Nebesnye slova was published in
Paris in 1921, a book of poems Stikhi:
Dnevnik 1911-1912 was published in 1922
in Berlin, while in Munich a book by
four authors (Merezhkovsky, Gippius,
Filosofov, and Zlobin) Tsarstvo
Antichrista (The Kingdom of the
Antichrist) came out, where the first
two parts of Peterburgskiye dnevniki
(St. Petersburg Diaries) were published
for the first time, and with an
introductory article by Gippius "The
Story of my Diary."
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Fyodor
Sologub
Fyodor Sologub (Russian: Фёдор
Сологу́б, born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov,
Russian: Фёдор Кузьми́ч Тете́рников;
March 1 [O.S. February 17] 1863 –
December 5, 1927) was a Russian
Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and
essayist. He was the first writer to
introduce the morbid, pessimistic
elements characteristic of European fin
de siècle literature and philosophy into
Russian prose.
Early life
Sologub was born in St. Petersburg
into the family of a poor tailor, Kuzma
Afanasyevich Teternikov, who had been a
serf in Poltava guberniya, the
illegitimate son of a local landowner.
His father died of tuberculosis in 1867,
and his illiterate mother was forced to
become a servant in the home of the
aristocratic Agapov family, where
Sologub and his younger sister Olga grew
up. Seeing how difficult his mother's
life was, Sologub was determined to
rescue her from it, and after graduating
from the St. Petersburg Teachers'
Institute in 1882 he took his mother and
sister with him to his first teaching
post in Kresttsy, where he began his
literary career with the 1884
publication in a children's magazine of
his poem "The Fox and the Hedgehog"
under the name Te-rnikov.
Sologub continued writing as he
relocated to new jobs in Velikiye Luki
(1885) and Vytegra (1889), but felt that
he was completely isolated from the
literary world and longed to be able to
live in the capital again; nevertheless,
his decade-long experience with the
"frightful world" of backwoods
provincial life served him well when he
came to write The Petty Demon. (He said
later that in writing the novel he had
softened the facts: "things happened
that no one would believe if I were to
describe them.") He felt sympathetic
with the writers associated with the
journal Severnyi vestnik (Northern
Herald), including Nikolai Minsky,
Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitry Merezhkovsky,
who were beginning to create what would
be known as the Symbolist movement, and
in 1891 he visited Petersburg hoping to
see Minsky and Merezhkovsky, but met
only the first.
Early literary career
In 1892 he was finally able to
relocate to the capital, where he got a
job teaching mathematics, started
writing what would become his most
famous novel, The Petty Demon, and began
frequenting the offices of Severnyi
vestnik, which published much of his
writing during the next five years.
There, in 1893, Minsky, who thought
Teternikov was an unpoetic name,
suggested that he use a pseudonym, and
the aristocratic name Sollogub was
decided on, but one of the ls was
omitted as an attempt (unavailing, as it
turned out) to avoid confusion with
Count Vladimir Sollogub. In 1894 his
first short story, "Ninochkina oshibka"
(Ninochka's Mistake), was published in
Illustrirovanny Mir, and in the autumn
of that year his mother died. In 1896 he
published his first three books: a book
of poems, a collection of short stories,
and his first novel, Tyazhelye sny (Bad
Dreams), which he had begun in 1883 and
which is considered one of the first
decadent Russian novels.
In April 1897 he ended his
association with Severnyi vestnik and,
along with Merezhkovsky and Gippius,
began writing for the journal Sever
(North). The next year his first series
of fairy tales was published. In 1899 he
was appointed principal of the
Andreevskoe municipal school and
relocated to their premises on
Vasilievsky Island; he also became a
member of the St. Petersburg District
School Council. He continued to publish
books of poetry, and in 1902 he finished
The Petty Demon, which was published
partially in serial form in 1905 (in
Voprosy zhizni, which was terminated
before the final installments). At this
time his "Sundays," a literary group
that met at his home, attracted poets,
artists, and actors, including Alexander
Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Alexei Remizov,
Sergei Gorodetsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Leon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and
Sergei Auslender. Teffi wrote of him at
this period:
His face was pale, long, without
eyebrows; by his nose was a large wart;
a thin reddish beard seemed to pull away
from his thin cheeks; dull, half-closed
eyes. His face was always tired, always
bored... Sometimes when he was a guest
at someone's table he would close his
eyes and remain like that for several
minutes, as if he had forgotten to open
them. He never laughed... Sologub lived
on Vasilievsky Island in the small
official apartment of a municipal school
where he was a teacher and inspector. He
lived with his sister, a flat-chested,
consumptive old maid. She was quiet and
shy; she adored her brother and was a
little afraid of him, and spoke of him
only in a whisper. He said in a poem:
"We were holiday children, My sister and
I"; they were very poor, those holiday
children, dreaming that someone would
give them "even motley-colored shells
from a brook." Sadly and dully they
dragged out the difficult days of their
youth. The consumptive sister, not
having received her share of motley
shells, was already burning out. He
himself was exhausted by his boring
teaching job; he wrote in snatches by
night, always tired from the boyish
noise of his students...
So Sologub lived in his little
official apartment with little icon
lamps, serving his guests mint cakes,
ruddy rolls, pastila [fruit candy], and
honey cakes, for which his sister went
across the river somewhere on a horsecar.
She told us privately, "I'd love to ride
on the outside of the horsecar sometime,
but my brother won't let me. He says
it's unseemly for a lady."... Those
evenings in the little apartment, when
his close literary friends gathered,
were very interesting.
Fame and marriage
At the time of the 1905 Revolution
his politically critical skazochki
("little tales") were very popular and
were collected into a book,
Politicheskie skazochki (1906). The
Petty Demon was published in a
standalone edition in 1907 and quickly
became popular, having ten printings
during the author's lifetime. Sologub's
next major prose work, A Created Legend
(1905-1913) (literally "the legend in
the making," a trilogy consisting of
Drops of Blood, Queen Ortruda, and Smoke
and Ash), had many of the same
characteristics but presented a
considerably more positive and hopeful
description of the world. "It begins
with the famous declaration that
although life is 'vulgar . . . stagnant
in darkness, dull and ordinary,' the
poet 'creates from it a sweet legend . .
. my legend of the enchanting and
beautiful.'"
His increasing literary success was
tempered for him by his sister's
tuberculosis; in 1906 he traveled with
her to Ufa Guberniya for treatment, and
in June 1907 he took her to Finland,
where she died on June 28. The next
month he returned to St. Petersburg and
retired after 25 years of teaching. In
the autumn of 1908 he married the
translator Anastasia Chebotarevskaya
(born in 1876), whom he had met at
Vyacheslav Ivanov's apartment three
years before. Teffi wrote that she
"reshaped his daily life in a new and
unnecessary way. A big new apartment was
rented, small gilt chairs were bought.
The walls of the large cold office for
some reason were decorated with
paintings of Leda by various painters...
The quiet talks were replaced by noisy
gatherings with dances and masks.
Sologub shaved his mustache and beard,
and everyone started to say that he
resembled a Roman of the period of
decline." He continued publishing poems,
plays, and translations; the next year
he traveled abroad for the first time,
visiting France with his wife, and in
September the dramatized version of The
Petty Demon was published.
Between 1909 and 1911 The Complete
Works of Fyodor Sologub were published
in 12 volumes, and in 1911 a collection
of critical works appeared, containing
over 30 critical essays, notes, and
reviews by famous writers. In 1913 he
presented a lecture, "The Art Of These
Days," that was so successful in St.
Petersburg he took it on tour all over
Russia. In 1914 he started a magazine,
Dnevniki pisatelei (Writers' Journals),
and went abroad with his wife, but the
outbreak of World War I put an end to
the magazine. In 1915 two collections of
his stories and tales were published in
English, and in 1916 The Petty Demon,
all translated by John Cournos.
Sologub continued touring and giving
lectures, and in 1917 he welcomed the
February Revolution. During the summer
he headed the Soyuz Deyatelei Iskusstva
(Union of Artists) and wrote articles
with a strong anti-Bolshevik attitude.
He was opposed to the October Revolution
but remained in Petrograd and
contributed to independent newspapers
until they were terminated. In 1918 he
spoke on behalf of the Union Of Artists;
published Slepaia babochka (The Blind
Butterfly), a collection of new short
stories; had a play produced in Yalta;
and joined the Petersburg Union of
Journalists. But by the end of the year,
because of Bolshevik control of
publishing and bookselling, he did not
have any outlets for his writing. Lev
Kleinbort wrote of that period: "Sologub
did not give lectures, but lived by
selling his things."
Even though he was in principle
opposed to emigration, the desperate
condition in which he and his wife found
himself caused him to apply in December
1919 for permission to leave the
country; he did not receive any
response. Half a year later he wrote to
Lenin personally, again without result.
In mid-July 1921 he finally received a
letter from Trotsky authorizing his
departure, and he made plans to leave
for Reval on September 25. But on the
evening of September 23 his wife,
weakened by privation and driven to
despair by the long torment of
uncertainty, threw herself off the
Tuchkov Bridge and drowned. His wife's
death grieved Sologub for the rest of
his life, and he referenced it often in
his subsequent writing. (A poem dated
November 28, 1921, begins "You took away
my soul/ To the bottom of the river./ I
will defy your wishes/ And follow you.")
He gave up any thought of leaving Russia
and relocated into an apartment on the
banks of the Zhdanovka River, in which
his wife had drowned.
In 1921 the New Economic Policy was
begun, and from the end of the year his
books (which had been published abroad
with increasing frequency, notably in
Germany and Estonia) began to appear in
Soviet Russia. In December Fimiamy
(Incense), a collection of poems, was
published; the next two years more
poetry collections and translations were
published (Balzac's Contes drolatiques,
Paul Verlaine, Heinrich von Kleist,
Frédéric Mistral), and in 1924 the
fortieth anniversary of Sologub's
literary activities was celebrated at
the Alexandrinsky Theater in Petersburg,
with speeches by Yevgeny Zamyatin,
Mikhail Kuzmin, Andrei Bely, and Osip
Mandelstam, among others. In April of
that year he was elected the honorary
chairman of the Division of Translators
in the Petersburg Union Of Writers, and
two years later he became the chairman
of the board of the Union. He had
literary gatherings in his apartment,
attended by such writers as Anna
Akhmatova and Korney Chukovsky. His new
poems, which had a classic simplicity,
were appreciated by those to whom he
read them, but they were not printed
anymore.
Death and legacy
In May 1927 Sologub became seriously
ill, and by summer he could leave his
bed only rarely; his last poem was dated
October 1. After a long struggle, he
died on December 5. Two days later he
was buried next to his wife in Smolensk
Cemetery.
While Sologub's novels have become
his best-known works, he has always been
respected by scholars and fellow authors
for his poetry. The Symbolist poet
Valery Bryusov admired the deceptive
simplicity of Sologub's poetry and
described it as possessing a Pushkinian
perfection of form. Innokenty Annensky,
another poet and contemporary of Sologub,
wrote that the most original aspect of
Sologub's poetry was its author's
unwillingness to separate himself from
his literature.
The Petty Demon
The Petty Demon attempted to create
a description of poshlost', a Russian
concept that has characteristics of both
evil and banality. The antihero is a
provincial schoolteacher, Peredonov,
notable for his complete lack of
redeeming human qualities. The novel
recounts the story of the morally
corrupt Peredonov going insane and
paranoid in an unnamed Russian
provincial town, parallel with his
struggle to be promoted to governmental
inspector of his province. The
omniscient third-person narrative
allowed Sologub to combine his Symbolist
tendencies and the tradition of Russian
Realism in which he engaged throughout
his earlier novels, a style similar to
Maupassant's fantastic realism.
Realistic elements of The Petty Demon
include a vivid description of
19th-century rural everyday life, while
a fantastic element is the presentation
of Peredonov's hallucinations on equal
terms with external events. While the
book was received as an indictment of
Russian society, it is a very
metaphysical novel and one of the major
prose works of the Russian Symbolist
movement.[citation needed] James H.
Billington said of it:
The book puts on display a Freudian
treasure chest of perversions with
subtlety and credibility. The name of
the novel's hero, Peredonov, became a
symbol of calculating concupiscence for
an entire generation... He torments his
students, derives erotic satisfaction
from watching them kneel to pray, and
systematically befouls his apartment
before leaving it as part of his
generalized spite against the universe.
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Andrey Bely
Andrey Bely, pseudonym of Boris
Nikolayevich Bugayev, Bugayev also
spelled Bugaev (b. Oct. 14 [Oct. 26, New
Style], 1880, Moscow, Russia—d. Jan. 7,
1934, Moscow, Russian S.F.S.R.,
U.S.S.R.), leading theorist and poet of
Russian Symbolism, a literary school
deriving from the Modernist movement in
western European art and literature and
an indigenous Eastern Orthodox
spirituality, expressing mystical and
abstract ideals through allegories from
life and nature.
Reared in an academic environment as
the son of a mathematics professor, Bely
was closely associated with Moscow’s
literary elite, including the late
19th-century philosopher-mystic Vladimir
Solovyov, whose eschatological thought
(concerning the world’s purpose and
final resolution) he absorbed. Carried
by his idealism from harsh reality to
speculative thought, Bely completed in
1901 his first major work, Severnaya
simfoniya (1902; “The Northern
Symphony”), a prose poem that
represented an attempt to combine prose,
poetry, music, and even, in part,
painting. Three more “symphonies” in
this new literary form followed. In
other poetry he continued his innovative
style and, by repeatedly using irregular
metre (the “lame foot”), introduced
Russian poetry to the formalistic
revolution that was brought to fruition
by his aesthetic colleague Aleksandr
Blok.
Bely’s first three books of verse—Zoloto
v lazuri (1904; “Gold in Azure”), Pepel
(1909; “Ashes”), and Urna (1909;
“Urn”)—are his most important
contributions to poetry. Each of them
stands out for an original view of the
world: the first generates a new
mythology; central to the second are
images of the despair of Russian life; a
somewhat ironic philosophical lyricism
is used in the third. In 1909 Bely
completed his first novel, Serebryany
golub (1910; The Silver Dove). His most
celebrated composition, Peterburg
(published serially 1913–14; St.
Petersburg), is regarded as a baroque
extension of his earlier “symphonies.”
In 1913 he became an adherent of the
Austrian social philosopher Rudolf
Steiner and joined his anthroposophical
colony in Basel, Switz., a group
advocating a system of mystical beliefs
derived from Buddhist contemplative
religious experience (see
anthroposophy). While in Switzerland
Bely began writing his Kotik Letayev
(1922; Kotik Letaev), a short
autobiographical novel suggestive of the
style of James Joyce. Eventually, Bely
left Steiner’s group for personal
reasons, but he remained attached to
anthroposophical ideas to the end of his
life.
In 1916 Bely returned to Russia,
where he witnessed the entirety of the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Initially,
like Blok, he welcomed the Bolsheviks’
ascent to power. His enthusiasm was
reflected in Khristos voskrese (1918;
“Christ Is Risen”), a novel in verse in
which Bely renders contemporary life in
mystical terms as a “revolution of the
spirit.” Between 1918 and 1921 he worked
in Soviet cultural organizations, and
during that time he helped found the
nonpartisan Free Philosophical
Association (Volfila). The novel in
verse Pervoye svidaniye (1921: The First
Encounter) resurrects the events of his
youth.
In 1921 Bely traveled to Berlin,
where his already strained marriage
collapsed and where he was subjected to
Steiner’s enmity. Bely also began
writing his memoirs, which were
published later in three volumes: Na
rubezhe dvukh stolety (1930; “On the
Boundary of Two Centuries”), Nachalo
veka (1933; “The Beginning of the
Century”), and Mezhdu dvukh revolyutsy
(1934; “Between Two Revolutions”). In
1923 Bely returned to Moscow, where he
wrote a trilogy of novels set in Moscow,
; he also wrote literary criticism and
revised his early works. Bely’s prose of
the 1920s reflects his interest in form
and in complex plot construction. In the
early 1930s he tried to become a “true”
Soviet author by writing a series of
articles and making ideological
revisions to his memoirs, and he also
planned to begin a study of Socialist
Realism. In 1932 he became a member of
the Organizational Committee of the
Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. Yet in an
idiosyncratic way he managed to combine
these activities with his attachment to
anthroposophy and Russian Symbolism.
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Yuri Annenkov
Illustration for
the Poem "Dvenadtzat" by Alexandr Blok
1918
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Aleksandr
Blok
"Dvenadtzat"
("The Twelve")
llustrations by Yuri Annenkov
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (Russian:
Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Блок, 28
November [O.S. 16 November] 1880 – 7
August 1921) was one of the most gifted
lyrical poets produced by Russia after
Alexander Pushkin.
Family and influences
Blok was born in Saint Petersburg,
into a sophisticated and intellectual
family. Some of his relatives were men
of letters, his father being a law
professor in Warsaw, and his maternal
grandfather the rector of Saint
Petersburg State University. After his
parents' separation, Blok lived with
aristocratic relatives at the
Shakhmatovo manor near Moscow, where he
discovered the philosophy of Vladimir
Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure
19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and
Afanasy Fet. These influences would be
fused and transformed into the harmonies
of his early pieces, later collected in
the book Ante Lucem.
He fell in love with Lyubov (Lyuba)
Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (the great
chemist's daughter) and married her in
1903. Later, she would involve him in a
complicated love-hate relationship with
his fellow Symbolist Andrey Bely. To
Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry
that brought him fame, Stikhi o
prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the
Beautiful Lady, 1904). In it, he
transformed his humble wife into a
timeless vision of the feminine soul and
eternal womanhood (The Greek Sophia of
Solovyov's teaching).
Blok's few relatives currently live
in Moscow, Riga, Rome and England.
Blok's early poetry
The idealized mystical images
presented in his first book helped
establish Blok as a leader of the
Russian Symbolist movement. Blok's early
verse is impeccably musical and rich in
sound, but he later sought to introduce
daring rhythmic patterns and uneven
beats into his poetry. Poetical
inspiration came to him naturally, often
producing unforgettable, otherworldly
images out of the most banal
surroundings and trivial events (Fabrika,
1903). Consequently, his mature poems
are often based on the conflict between
the Platonic vision of ideal beauty and
the disappointing reality of foul
industrial outskirts (Neznakomka, 1906).
The image of St Petersburg he crafted
for his next collection of poems, The
City (1904–08), was both impressionistic
and eerie. Subsequent collections, Faina
and the Mask of Snow, helped augment
Blok's reputation to fabulous
dimensions. He was often compared with
Alexander Pushkin, and the whole Silver
Age of Russian Poetry was sometimes
styled the "Age of Blok". In the 1910s,
Blok was almost universally admired by
literary colleagues, and his influence
on younger poets was virtually
unsurpassed. Anna Akhmatova, Marina
Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir
Nabokov wrote important verse tributes
to Blok.
Revolution in rhythm
During the later period of his life,
Blok concentrated primarily on political
themes, pondering the messianic destiny
of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910-21;
Rodina, 1907-16; Skify, 1918).
Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he
was full of vague apocalyptic
apprehensions and often vacillated
between hope and despair. "I feel that a
great event was coming, but what it was
exactly was not revealed to me," he
wrote in his diary during the summer of
1917. Quite unexpectedly for most of his
admirers, he accepted the October
Revolution as the final resolution of
these apocalyptic yearnings.
The Twelve (1918)- Fragment
Night is charcoal.
Snow is white.
Squall after squall
Makes it harder to keep one upright.
Squall after squall
Is over the whole world!
The wind sweeps up flurries, white
crumbs of rice,
Under the snow is ice.
How treacherous -
Each passer-by
Is slipping, poor wretched!
Blok expressed his views on the
revolution in the enigmatic The Twelve
(1918). The long poem, with its
"mood-creating sounds, polyphonic
rhythms, and harsh, slangy language" (as
the Encyclopædia Britannica termed it),
is one of the most controversial in the
whole corpus of Russian poetry. It
describes the march of twelve Bolshevik
soldiers (likened to the Twelve Apostles
who followed Christ) through the streets
of revolutionary Petrograd, with a
fierce winter blizzard raging around
them. The Twelve alienated Blok from a
mass of his intellectual followers (who
accused him of appallingly bad taste),
while the Bolsheviks scorned his former
mysticism and aesceticism.
Yuri Annenkov.
Blok
on
his deathbed
Disillusionment and death
By 1921 Blok had become
disillusioned with the Russian
Revolution. He did not write any poetry
for three years. Blok complained to
Maksim Gorky that he had given up his
"faith in the wisdom of humanity". He
explained to his friend Korney Chukovsky
why he could not write poetry any more:
"All sounds have stopped. Can't you hear
that there are no longer any sounds?".
In a few days Blok became sick. His
doctors requested him to be sent for
medical treatment abroad, but he was not
allowed to leave the country. Gorky
pleaded for a visa. On 29 May 1921, he
wrote to Anatoly Lunacharsky: "Blok is
Russia's finest poet. If you forbid him
to go abroad, and he dies, you and your
comrades will be guilty of his death".
Blok received permission only on 10
August, the night before he died.
Several months earlier, Blok had
delivered a celebrated lecture on
Pushkin, whom he believed to be an
iconic figure capable of uniting White
and Red Russia. His death and the
execution of his fellow poet Nikolai
Gumilev by Cheka in 1921 were seen by
many as the end of the entire generation
of Russians. Nina Berberova, then a
young girl, recalled about the mood at
his funeral: "I was suddenly and sharply
orphaned... The end is coming. We are
lost."
Symbolism of Alexander Blok
Alexander Blok, on all accounts one
of the most important poets of the 20th
century, envisioned his poetical output
as composed of three volumes. The first
volume contains his early poems about
the Fair Lady; its dominant colour is
white. The second volume, dominated by
the blue colour, comments upon the
impossibility of reaching the ideal he
craved for. The third volume, featuring
his poems from pre-revolutionary years,
is steeped in fiery or bloody red.
In Blok's poetry, colours are
essential, for they convey mystical
intimations of things beyond human
experience. Blue or violet is the colour
of frustration, when the poet
understands that his hope to see the
Lady is delusive. The yellow colour of
street lanterns, windows and sunsets is
the colour of treason and triviality.
Black hints at something terrible,
dangerous but potentially capable of
esoteric revelation. Russian words for
yellow and black are spelled by the poet
with a long O instead of YO, in order to
underline "a hole inside the word".
Following on the footsteps of Fyodor
Tyutchev, Blok developed a complicated
system of poetic symbols. In his early
work, for instance, wind stands for the
Fair Lady's approach, whereas morning or
spring is the time when their meeting is
most likely to happen. Winter and night
are the evil times when the poet and his
lady are far away from each other. Bog
and mire stand for everyday life with no
spiritual light from above.
Musical Settings
Blok has been an inspiration to many
Russian composers. For example, Dmitri
Shostakovich made a late song-cycle for
soprano and piano trio, Seven Romances
of Alexander Blok, and Arthur Lourié a
choral cantata, In the Sanctuary of
Golden Dreams. Alexander Blok was one of
the most favourite poets of Georgy
Sviridov, such things as "Petersburg" (a
vocal poem), "Nightly Clouds" (cantata),
"Songs From Hard Times" (concerto) were
written on the Blok`s poetry.
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Vyacheslav Ivanov
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov
(Russian: Вячеслав Иванович Иванов)
(February 16 (28), 1866–July 16, 1949)
was a Russian poet and playwright
associated with the movement of Russian
Symbolism. He was also a philosopher,
translator, and literary critic.
Early life
Born in Moscow, Ivanov graduated
from the First Moscow Gymnasium with a
gold medal and entered the Moscow
University where he studied history and
philosophy under Sir Paul Vinogradoff.
In 1886 he moved to the Berlin
University to study Roman law and
economics under Theodor Mommsen. During
his stay in Germany, he absorbed the
thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche and
German Romantics, notably Novalis and
Friedrich Hölderlin.
In 1893 Ivanov met Lydia
Zinovieva-Annibal, a poet and
translator. Having both received an
Orthodox ecclesiastical divorce, they
married 5 years later, first settling in
Athens, then moving to Geneva, and
making pilgrimages to Egypt and
Palestine. During that period, Ivanov
frequently visited Italy, where he
studied the Renaissance art. The rugged
nature of Lombardy and the Alps became
the subject of his first sonnets, which
were heavily influenced by the medieval
poetry of Catholic mystics.
Poet and Classicist
At the turn of the 20th century,
Ivanov elaborated his views on the
spiritual mission of Rome and the
Ancient Greek cult of Dionysus. He
summed up his Dionysian ideas in the
treatise The Hellenic Religion of the
Suffering God (1904), which traces the
roots of literary art in general and the
art of tragedy in particular to ancient
Dionysian mysteries.
Somov's frontispiece for Ivanov's
book Cor Ardens (1907)
Ivanov's first collection, Lodestars,
was published in 1903. It contained many
of his pieces written a decade earlier
and was praised by the leading critics
as a new chapter in the Russian
Symbolism. The poems were compared to
Milton's and Trediakovsky's on account
of their detached, calculated archaism.
In 1905 Ivanov made his triumphant
return to St Petersburg, where he was
much lionized as a foreign curiosity. A
turreted house where he and
Zinovieva-Annibal settled became the
most fashionable literary salon of the
era, and was frequented by poets
(Alexander Blok), philosophers (Nikolai
Berdyayev), artists (Konstantin Somov),
and dramatists (Vsevolod Meyerhold). The
latter staged Calderon's Adoration of
the Cross in Ivanov's house. The poet
exerted a formative influence on the
Russian Symbolist movement, whose main
tenets were formulated in the turreted
house.
According to James H. Billington,
"Viacheslav the Magnificent" was the
crown prince and chef de salon of the
new society, which met in his seventh
floor apartment "The Tower," overlooking
the gardens of the Tauride Palace in St.
Peterburg. Walls and partitions were
torn down to accommodate the increasing
numbers of talented and disputatious
people who flocked to the Wednesday
soirees, which were rarely in full swing
until after supper had been served at 2
A.M.
Beyond widowhood
His wife's death in 1907 was a great
blow to Ivanov. Thereafter the dazzling
Byzantine texture of his poetry wore
thin, as he insensibly slipped into
theosophy and mysticism. The poet even
claimed to have had a vision of his late
wife ordering him to marry the daughter
by her first marriage. Indeed, he
married this stepdaughter in 1910; their
son Dmitry was born 2 years later.
Anna Akhmatova
According to an autobiographical
sketch written by Anna Akhmatova, Ivanov
first met her in 1910. At the time,
Akhmatova was still married to Nikolai
Gumilev, who first brought her to the
turreted house. There, Akhmatova read
some of her verse aloud to Ivanov, who
ironically quipped, "What truly heavy
romanticism. A short time later, Gumilev
left his wife for a big game hunting
holiday in Ethiopia. In the aftermath,
Ivanov tried very hard to persuade
Akhmatova to leave her immature husband,
saying, "You'll make him a man if you
do." Moreover, Akhmatova indignantly
recalled that Ivanov would often weep as
she recited her verse at the turreted
house, but would later, "vehemently
criticize," the same poems at literary
salons. Akhmatova would never forgive
him for this. Her ultimate evaluation of
her former patron was as follows, "Vyacheslav
was neither grand nor magnificent (he
thought this up himself) but a 'catcher
of men.'"
Translator and scholar
Upon their return from an Italian
voyage (1912-13), Ivanov made the
acquaintances of art critic Mikhail
Gershenzon, philosopher Sergei Bulgakov,
and composer Alexander Scriabin. He
elaborated many of his Symbolist
theories in a series of articles, which
were finally revised and reissued as
Simbolismo in 1936. At that time, he
relinquished poetry in favour of
translating the works of Sappho,
Alcaeus, Eschylus, and Petrarch into the
Russian language.
After 1917
In the abysmal years following the
October Revolution, Ivanov concentrated
on his scholarly work and completed a
treatise on Dionysus and Early
Dionysianism (1921), which earned him a
Ph.D. degree in philology. The new
Communist government didn't allow him to
travel outside the Soviet Union until
1924.
Blok has Died
A collapsed door in the deaf wall,
And the heaps of overturned stones,
And piled upon them scrap metal,
And the depths that unfurl below.
And white ashes fanned by the wind –
That's all: God's voice, “The dead will
rise.”
Vyacheslav Ivanov. 10 August 1921
Emigration
From Azerbaijan he proceeded to
Italy, where he settled in Rome. In
Rome, Ivanov found employmen as
professor of Old Church Slavonic at the
Russicum. Ivanov was received into
the Russian Catholic Church in 1937. In
an interview for the Russicum's
newspaper, Ivanov argued that, prior to
their Great Schism, Latin and Byzantine
Christianity were "two principles that
mutually complement each other." He
climaxed with the words, "The Church
must permeate all branches of life:
social issues, art, culture, and just
everything... The Roman Church
corresponds to such criteria and by
joining this Church I become truly
Orthodox." His last collections of verse
were the Roman Sonnets (1924) and the
Roman Diary (1944). Many other poems
appeared posthumously.
Ivanov died in Rome in 1949 and was
interred at the Cimitero Acattolico, not
far from the graves of Karl Briullov and
Alexander Ivanov.
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Acmeists and Futurists
In the second decade of the 20th century, Symbolism
was challenged by two other schools, the Acmeists,
who favoured clarity over metaphysical vagueness,
and the brash Futurists, who wanted to throw all
earlier and most contemporary poetry “from the
steamship of modernity.” Among the Acmeists,
Nikolay
Gumilyov (1886–1921), who stressed poetic
craftsmanship over the occult, was executed by the
Bolsheviks. Already an accomplished creator of
superb love lyrics in these years,
Anna Akhmatova
produced densely and brilliantly structured poems in
the Soviet period, including Poema bez geroya
(written 1940–62; A Poem Without a Hero) and
Rekviyem (written 1935–40; Requiem), which was
inspired by Soviet purges and was therefore
unpublishable in Russia. From 1923 to 1940 she was
forced into silence, and in 1946
Akhmatova and
Zoshchenko became the target of official abuse by
the Communist Party cultural spokesman Andrey
Zhdanov (1896–1948). Some consider
Osip Mandelshtam
(1891–1938), who died in a Soviet prison camp, to be
the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century. Many
of his difficult, allusive poems were preserved by
his wife, Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899–1980), whose
memoirs are themselves a classic.
Nikolay Gumilyov
"Poems"
Nikolai Gumilev during his senior years
in gymnasium
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov (Russian:
Никола́й Степа́нович Гумилёв, April 15
NS 1886 – August 1921) was an
influential Russian poet who founded the
acmeism movement.
Early life and poems
Nikolai was born in Kronstadt, into
the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev
(1836–1920), a naval physician, and Anna
Ivanovna L'vova (1854–1942). His
childhood nickname was Montigomo the
Hawk's Claw. He studied at the gymnasium
of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Symbolist
poet Innokenty Annensky was his teacher.
Later, Gumilev admitted that it was
Annensky's influence that turned his
mind to writing poetry.
His first publication were verses
I ran from cities into the forest (Я
в лес бежал из городов) on September 8,
1902. In 1905 he published his first
book of lyrics entitled The Way of
Conquistadors. It comprised poems on
most exotic subjects imaginable, from
Lake Chad giraffes to Caracalla's
crocodiles. Although Gumilev was proud
of the book, most critics found his
technique sloppy; later he would refer
to that collection as apprentice's work.
From 1907 and on, Nikolai Gumilyov
traveled extensively in Europe, notably
in Italy and France. In 1908 his new
collection Romantic Flowers appeared.
While in Paris, he published the
literary magazine Sirius, but only three
issues were produced. On returning to
Russia, he edited and contributed to the
artistic periodical Apollon. At that
period, he fell in love with a
non-existent woman Cherubina de Gabriak.
It turned out that Cherubina de Gabriak
was the literary pseudonym for two
people, a disabled schoolteacher and
Maximilian Voloshin, and on November 22,
1909 he had a duel with Voloshin over
the affair.
Like Flaubert and Rimbaud before him,
Gumilyov was fascinated with Africa and
travelled there almost each year. He
hunted lions in Ethiopia and brought to
the Saint Petersburg museum of
anthropology and ethnography a large
collection of African artifacts. His
landmark collection The Tent (1921)
collected the best of his poems on
African themes.
Guild of Poets
In 1910, Gumilyov fell under the spell
of the Symbolist poet and philosopher
Vyacheslav Ivanov and absorbed his views
on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov
in his celebrated "Turreted House". His
wife Anna Akhmatova accompanied him to
Ivanov's parties as well. Gumilyov and
Akhmatova married on April 25. On
September 18, 1912, their child Lev was
born. He would eventually become an
influential and controversial historian.
Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism
of Russian Symbolism, then prevalent in
the Russian poetry, Gumilyov and Sergei
Gorodetsky established the so-called
Guild of Poets, which was modeled after
medieval guilds of Western Europe. They
advocated a view that poetry needs
craftsmanship just like architecture
needs it. Writing a good poem they
compared to building a cathedral. To
illustrate their ideals, Gumilyov
published two collections, The Pearls in
1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was
Osip Mandelstam, however, who produced
the movement's most distinctive and
durable monument, the collection of
poems entitled Stone (1912).
According to the principles of
acmeism (as the movement came to be
dubbed by art historians), every person,
irrespective of his talent, may learn to
produce high-quality poems if only he
follows the guild's masters, i.e.,
Gumilev and Gorodetsky. Their own model
was Théophile Gautier, and they borrowed
much of their basic tenets from the
French Parnasse. Such a program,
combined with colourful and exotic
subject matter of Gumilyov's poems,
attracted to the Guild a large number of
adolescents. Several major poets,
notably Georgy Ivanov and Vladimir
Nabokov, passed the school of Gumilyov,
albeit informally.
War experience
When World War I started, Gumilyov
hastened to Russia and enthusiastically
joined a corps of elite cavalry. For his
bravery he was invested with two St.
George crosses (December 24, 1914 and
January 5, 1915). His war poems were
assembled in the collection The Quiver
(1916). In 1916 he wrote a verse play,
Gondla, which was published the
following year; set in ninth-century
Iceland, torn between its native
paganism and Irish Christianity, it is
also clearly autobiographical, Gumilyov
putting much of himself into the hero
Gondla (an Irishman chosen as king but
rejected by the jarls, he kills himself
to ensure the triumph of Christianity)
and basing Gondla's wild bride Lera on
Gumilyov's wife Akhmatova. The play was
performed in Rostov na Donu in 1920 and,
even after the author's execution by the
Cheka, in Petrograd in January 1922:
"The play, despite its crowd scenes
being enacted on a tiny stage, was a
major success. Yet when the Petrograd
audience called for the author, who was
now officially an executed
counter-revolutionary traitor, the play
was removed from the repertoire and the
theatre disbanded." (In February 1934,
as they walked along a Moscow street,
Osip Mandelstam quoted Gondla's words "I
am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she
repeated them in her "Poem without a
Hero.")
During the Russian Revolution,
Gumilyov served in the Russian
expedition corps in Paris. Despite
advice to the contrary, he rapidly
returned to Petrograd. There he
published several new collections,
Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally
divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918),
whom he had left for other woman several
years prior to that. The following year
he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a
noblewoman and daughter of a well-known
historian.
Later poems and death
"Despite the hard experiences of
real travels and battles, he remained,
to the end of his life, a schoolboy
entranced by the Iliad of childhood -
the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
Tom Sawyer. He never outgrew the
influence of Mayne Reid, Alexandre
Dumas, père, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard
and others." In 1920 Gumilyov co-founded
the All-Russia Union of Writers.
Gumilyov made no secret of his
anti-communist views. He also crossed
himself in public and didn't care to
hide his contempt for half-literate
Bolsheviks.
On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by
Cheka on allegation of participation in
monarchist conspiracy. Most literary
historians agree that it was not a Cheka
fabrication, and Gumilyov was a likely
conspirator. On August 24 Petrograd
Cheka decreed execution of all 61
participants of the Tagantsev
Conspiracy, including Nikolai Gumilev.
The exact dates and locations of their
execution and burial are still unknown.
According to Rayfield's book 'Stalin
and his Hangmen', the murder of Gumilev
grew out of the consequences of the
Kronstadt Rebellion. The sailors of
Kronstadt, in Petrograd, had protested
against the new Bolshevik state in 1921.
Rayfield asserts that the Cheka blamed
the intellectuals of the city. A Chekist
named Iakov Agranov came up with a plan
to attack them. He tricked a local
professor into performing dissident
acts, then arrested the professor and
forced him to name 300 'conspirators'.
Agranov told him none of the named
people would be killed. However, 100
were killed, and Gumilev was one of
these. After appeals from Gorky and
others, Lenin agreed to pardon a small
number of the condemned, but the Cheka
officer in charge carried out the
execution order so quickly that the
pardon came too late.
Hayward, in an introduction to a book
of Akhmatova's poetry, writes that the
execution placed a stigma on Anna and
her son with Nikolai, Lev. Lev's arrest
in the purges and terrors of the 30s
were based simply on his being his
father's son.
Gumilyov's direct influence on
Russian poetry was short lived. The
sentiment is best expressed by Nabokov,
who once remarked that Gumilyov is the
poet for adolescents, just like Korney
Chukovsky is the poet for children. His
most durable verse, written in mystical
strain, appeared in the collection The
Pillar of Fire (1921).
Although "banned in the Soviet times,
Gumilyov was loved for his adolescent
longing for travel and giraffes and
hippos, for his dreams of a
fifteen-year-old captain" and was "a
favorite poet among geologists,
archaeologists and paleontologists." His
"The Tram That Lost Its Way" is
considered one of the greatest poems of
the 20th century.
When Mikhail Sinelnikov was asked to
study the archives of the late Mikhail
Zenkevich, the last of the Acmeists -
his teacher - he "found piles of
secreted verse, an unpublished novel,
manuscripts which Pasternak brought to
the old master to be critiqued, the
poems and letters of his friends.
According to Sinelnikov, "at the bottom
of a wide box lay a copy of Izvestia
Petrosovieta with a list of people
executed in connection with the
Tagantsev case. The type was barely
legible, more like wisps of old wool.
Some names, those of Zenkevich's
acquaintances, were ticked off.
Gumilyov's name was underlined in red."
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Anna Akhmatova
"Poems"
"Requiem"
Iconography
born June 11 [June 23, New Style], 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near
Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire
died March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow
pseudonym of Anna Andreyevna Gorenko Russian poet recognized at her
death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature.
Akhmatova began writing verse at the age of 11 and at 21 became a
member of the Acmeist group of poets, whose leader, Nikolay Gumilyov,
she married in 1910 butdivorced in 1918. The Acmeists, through their
periodical Apollon (“Apollo”; 1909–17), rejected the esoteric
vagueness and affectations of Symbolism and sought to replace them
with “beautiful clarity,” compactness, simplicity, and perfection of
form—all qualities in which Akhmatova excelled from the outset.
Herfirst collections, Vecher (1912; “Evening”) and Chyotki (1914;
“Rosary”), especially the latter, brought her fame. While
exemplifying the best kind of personal or even confessional poetry,
they achieve a universal appeal deriving from their artistic and
emotional integrity. Akhmatova's principal motif is love, mainly
frustrated and tragic love, expressed with an intensely feminine
accent andinflection entirely her own.
Later in her life she added to her main theme some civic, patriotic,
and religious motifs but without sacrifice of personal intensity or
artistic conscience. Her artistry and increasing control of her
medium were particularly prominent in her next collections: Belaya
staya (1917; “The White Flock”), Podorozhnik (1921; “Plantain”), and
Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922). This amplification of her range, however,
did not prevent official Soviet critics from proclaiming her
“bourgeois and aristocratic,” condemning her poetry for its narrow
preoccupation with love and God, and characterizing her as half nun
and half harlot. The execution in 1921 of her former husband,
Gumilyov, on charges of participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy
(the Tagantsev affair) further complicated her position. In 1923 she
entered a period of almost complete poetic silence and literary
ostracism, and no volume of her poetry was published in the Soviet
Union until 1940. In that year several of her poems were published
in the literary monthly Zvezda (“The Star”), and a volume of
selections from her earlier work appeared under the title Iz shesti
knig (“From Six Books”). A few months later, however, it was
abruptly withdrawn from sale and libraries. Nevertheless, in
September 1941, following the German invasion, Akhmatova was
permitted to deliver an inspiring radio address to the women of
Leningrad [St. Petersburg]. Evacuated to Tashkent soon thereafter,
she read her poems to hospitalized soldiers and published a number
of war-inspired lyrics; a small volume of selected lyrics appeared
in Tashkent in 1943. At the end of the war she returned to
Leningrad, where her poems began to appear in local magazines and
newspapers. She gave poetic readings, and plans were made for
publication of a large edition of her works.
In August 1946, however, she was harshly denounced by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party for her “eroticism, mysticism, and
political indifference.” Her poetrywas castigated as “alien to the
Soviet people,” and she was again described as a “harlot-nun,” this
time by none other than Andrey Zhdanov, Politburo member and the
director of Stalin's program of cultural restriction. She was
expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers; an unreleased book of her
poems, already in print, was destroyed; and none of her workappeared
in print for three years.
Then, in 1950, a number of her poems eulogizing Stalin and Soviet
communism were printed in several issues of the illustrated weekly
magazine Ogonyok (“The Little Light”) under the title Iz tsikla
“Slava miru” (“From the Cycle ‘Glory to Peace' ”). This
uncharacteristic capitulation to the Soviet dictator—in one of the
poems Akhmatova declares: “WhereStalin is, there is Freedom, Peace,
and the grandeur of the earth”—was motivated by Akhmatova's desire
to propitiateStalin and win the freedom of her son, Lev Gumilyov,
who had been arrested in 1949 and exiled to Siberia. The tone of
these poems (those glorifying Stalin were omitted from Soviet
editions of Akhmatova's works published after his death) is far
different from the moving and universalized lyrical cycle, Rekviem
(“Requiem”), composed between 1935 and 1940 and occasioned by
Akhmatova's grief over an earlier arrest and imprisonment of her son
in 1937. This masterpiece—a poetic monument to the sufferings of the
Soviet peoples during Stalin's terror—was published in Moscow in
1989.
In the cultural “thaw” following Stalin's death, Akhmatova was
slowly and ambivalently rehabilitated, and a slim volume of her
lyrics, including some of her translations, was published in 1958.
After 1958 a number of editions of her works, including some of her
brilliant essays on Pushkin, were published in the Soviet Union
(1961, 1965, two in 1976, 1977); none of these, however, contains
the complete corpus of her literary productivity. Akhmatova's
longest work, Poema bez geroya (“Poem Without a Hero”), on which she
worked from 1940 to 1962, was not published in the Soviet Union
until 1976. This difficult and complex work is a powerful lyric
summation of Akhmatova's philosophy and her own definitive statement
on the meaning of her life and poetic achievement.
Akhmatova executed a number of superb translations of the works of
other poets, including Victor Hugo, Rabindranath Tagore, Giacomo
Leopardi, and various Armenian and Korean poets. She also wrote
sensitive personal memoirs on Symbolist writer Aleksandr Blok, the
artist Amedeo Modigliani, and fellow Acmeist Osip Mandelshtam.
In 1964 she was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize, an international
poetry prize awarded in Italy, and in 1965 she received an honorary
doctoral degree from Oxford University. Her journeys to Sicily and
England to receive these honours were her first travel outside her
homeland since 1912. Akhmatova's works were widely translated,
andher international stature continued to grow after her death. Atwo-volume
edition of Akhmatova's collected works was published in Moscow in
1986, and The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, also in two volumes,
appeared in 1990.
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Osip Mandelshtam
"Tristia"
"Poems"
Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam,
Mandelshtam also spelled Mandelstam (b.
Jan. 3 [Jan. 15, New Style], 1891,
Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in
Poland]—d. Dec. 27, 1938?, Vtoraya
Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia,
U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]), major Russian
poet and literary critic. Most of his
works went unpublished in the Soviet
Union during the Stalin era (1929–53)
and were almost unknown outside that
country until the mid-1960s.
Mandelshtam grew up in St. Petersburg
in a cultured Jewish household. After
graduating from the elite Tenishev
School in 1907, he studied at the
University of St. Petersburg as well as
in France at the Sorbonne and in Germany
at the University of Heidelberg.
His first poems appeared in the
avant-garde journal Apollon (“Apollo”)
in 1910. Together with Nikolay Gumilyov
and Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam founded
the Acmeist school of poetry, which
rejected the mysticism and abstraction
of Russian Symbolism and demanded
clarity and compactness of form.
Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo
in his manifesto Utro Akmeizma (“The
Morning of Acmeism”). In 1913 his first
slim volume of verse, Kamen (“Stone”),
was published. During the Russian Civil
War (1918–20), Mandelshtam spent time in
the Crimea and Georgia. In 1922 he moved
to Moscow, where his second volume of
poetry, Tristia, appeared. He married
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina in 1922.
Mandelshtam’s poetry, which was
apolitical and intellectually demanding,
distanced him from the official Soviet
literary establishment. His poetry
having been withdrawn from publication,
he wrote children’s tales and a
collection of autobiographical stories,
Shum vremeni (1925; “The Noise of
Time”). A second edition of this work,
augmented by the tale “Yegipetskaya
marka” (“The Egyptian Stamp”), was
published in 1928. That year, a volume
of his collected poetry, Stikhotvoreniya
(“Poems”), and a collection of literary
criticism, O poezii (“On Poetry”),
appeared. These were his last books
published in the Soviet Union during his
lifetime.
In May 1934 he was arrested for an
epigram on Joseph Stalin he had written
and read to a small circle of friends.
In addition to describing Stalin’s
fingers as “worms” and his moustache as
that of a cockroach, the draft that fell
into the hands of the police called
Stalin “the murderer and peasant
slayer.”
Shattered by a fierce interrogation,
Mandelshtam was exiled with his wife to
the provincial town of Cherdyn. After
hospitalization and a suicide attempt,
he won permission to move to Voronezh.
Though suffering from periodic bouts of
mental illness, he composed a long cycle
of poems, the Voronezhskiye tetradi
(“Voronezh Notebooks”), which contain
some of his finest lyrics.
In May 1937, having served his
sentence, Mandelshtam returned with his
wife to Moscow. But the following year
he was arrested during a stay at a rest
home. In a letter to his wife that
autumn, Mandelshtam reported that he was
ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok.
Nothing further was ever heard from him.
Soviet authorities officially gave his
death date as Dec. 27, 1938, although he
was also reported by government sources
to have died “at the beginning of 1939.”
It was primarily through the efforts of
his widow, who died in 1980, that little
of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam was
lost; she kept his works alive during
the repression by memorizing them and by
collecting copies.
After Stalin’s death the publication
in Russian of Mandelshtam’s works was
resumed.
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The two most important Futurist poets were
Velimir Khlebnikov and
Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through
numerology and developed amazingly implausible
theories about language and its origins. His verse,
which is characterized by neologisms and
“trans-sense” language, includes “Zaklyatiye smekhom”
(1910; “Incantation by Laughter”) and Zangezi
(1922).
Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic
bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity
characterize his inventive long poems, including
Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers). After
the Russian Revolution in 1917, which he ardently
supported initially,
Mayakovsky “stepped on the
throat” of his song to produce propaganda poems. But
he also satirized Soviet bureaucracy in the witty
“Razgovor s fininspektorom o poezii” (1926;
“Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry”).
As a dramatist, he is best known for
Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1913), in which he played the lead role,
and Klop (1929; The Bedbug), in which a philistine,
along with a bedbug, is resurrected into the banal
communist future of 1979. Having written a poem
about the suicide of the peasant poet Sergey Yesenin
(1895–1925),
Mayakovsky later shot himself, leaving
a brilliantly ironic suicide note with a poem
explaining that “love’s boat has smashed against
daily life.”
Velimir Khlebnikov
Velimir Khlebnikov (Russian: Велими́р
Хле́бников; first name also spelled
Velemir; last name also spelled
Chlebnikov, Hlebnikov, Xlebnikov),
pseudonym of Viktor Vladimirovich
Khlebnikov (9 November 1885 (28 October
1885 (O.S.)) – 28 June 1922), was a
central part of the Russian Futurist
movement, but his work and influence
stretch far beyond it.
Khlebnikov belonged to the most
significant Russian Futurist group
Hylaea (along with Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Aleksei Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, and
Benedikt Livshits), but had already
written many significant poems before
the Futurist movement in Russia had
taken shape. Among his contemporaries,
he was regarded as "a poet's poet" (Mayakovsky
referred to him as a "poet for
producers") and a maverick genius.
Khlebnikov is known for poems such as
"Incantation by Laughter", "Bobeobi Sang
The Lips", “The Grasshopper” (all
1908-9), “Snake Train” (1910), the
prologue to the Futurist opera Victory
over the Sun (1913), dramatic works such
as “Death’s Mistake” (1915), prose works
“Ka” (1915), and the so-called
‘super-tale’ (сверхповесть) “Zangezi”, a
sort of ecstatic drama written partly in
invented languages of gods and birds.
Khlebnikov's book Zangezi (1922).In his
work, Khlebnikov experimented with the
Russian language, drawing upon its roots
to invent huge numbers of neologisms,
and finding significance in the shapes
and sounds of individual letters of the
Cyrillic alphabet. Along with Kruchenykh,
he originated zaum.
He wrote futurological essays about
such things as the possible evolution of
mass communication ("The Radio of the
Future") and transportation and housing
("Ourselves and Our Buildings"). He
described a world in which people live
and travel about in mobile glass
cubicles that can attach themselves to
skyscraper-like frameworks, and in which
all human knowledge can be disseminated
to the world by radio and displayed
automatically on giant book-like
displays at streetcorners.
In his last years, Khlebnikov became
fascinated by Slavic mythology and
Pythagorean numerology, and drew up long
"Tables of Destiny" decomposing
historical intervals and dates into
functions of the numbers 2 and 3.
Khlebnikov died of paralysis while a
guest in the house of his friend Pyotr
Miturich near Kresttsy.
A minor planet 3112 Velimir
discovered by Soviet astronomer Nikolai
Stepanovich Chernykh in 1977 is named
after him.
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Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky,
(b. July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893,
Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire—d.
April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia,
U.S.S.R.), the leading poet of the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the
early Soviet period.
Mayakovsky, whose father died while
Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow
with his mother and sisters in 1906. At
age 15 he joined the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and was
repeatedly jailed for subversive
activity. He started to write poetry
during solitary confinement in 1909. On
his release he attended the Moscow Art
School and joined, with David Burlyuk
and a few others, the Russian Futurist
group and soon became its leading
spokesman. In 1912 the group published a
manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu
vkusu (“A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste”), and Mayakovsky’s poetry became
conspicuously self-assertive and defiant
in form and content. His poetic
monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was
performed in St. Petersburg in 1913.
Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky
completed two major poems, “Oblako v
shtanakh” (1915; “A Cloud in Trousers”)
and “Fleyta pozvonochnik” (written 1915,
published 1916; “The Backbone Flute”).
Both record a tragedy of unrequited love
and express the author’s discontent with
the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky
sought to “depoetize” poetry, adopting
the language of the streets and using
daring technical innovations. Above all,
his poetry is declamatory, for mass
audiences.
When the Russian Revolution of 1917
broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly
for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as “Oda
revolutsi” (1918; “Ode to Revolution”)
and “Levy marsh” (1919; “Left March”)
became very popular. So too did his
Misteriya buff (first performed 1921;
Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a
universal flood and the subsequent
joyful triumph of the “Unclean” (the
proletarians) over the “Clean” (the
bourgeoisie).
As a vigorous spokesman for the
Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed
himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921
he worked in the Russian Telegraph
Agency as a painter of posters and
cartoons, which he provided with apt
rhymes and slogans. He poured out
topical poems of propaganda and wrote
didactic booklets for children while
lecturing and reciting all over Russia.
In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy
on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin.
After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the
United States, Mexico, and Cuba,
recording his impressions in poems and
in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye
otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; “My Discovery
of America”). In the poem “Khorosho!”
(1927; “Good!”) he sought to unite
heroic pathos with lyricism and irony.
But he also wrote sharply satirical
verse.
Mayakovsky found time to write
scripts for motion pictures, in some of
which he acted. In his last three years
he completed two satirical plays: Klop
(performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning
the type of philistine that emerged with
the New Economic Policy in the Soviet
Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad
on Jan. 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a
satire of bureaucratic stupidity and
opportunism under Joseph Stalin.
Mayakovsky’s poetry was saturated
with politics, but no amount of social
propaganda could stifle his personal
need for love, which burst out again and
again because of repeated romantic
frustrations. After his early lyrics
this need came out particularly strongly
in two poems, “Lyublyu” (1922; “I Love”)
and “Pro eto” (1923; “About This”). Both
of these poems were dedicated to Lilya
Brik, the wife of the writer Osip
Maksimovich Brik. Mayakovsky’s love for
her and his friendship with her husband
had a strong influence on his poetry.
Even after Mayakovsky’s relationship
with Lilya Brik ended, he considered her
one of the people closest to him and a
member of his family. During a stay in
Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a
refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he
wanted to marry but who refused him. At
the same time, he had misunderstandings
with the dogmatic Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers and with Soviet
authorities. Nor was the production of
his Banya a success. Disappointed in
love, increasingly alienated from Soviet
reality, and denied a visa to travel
abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.
Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the
most dynamic figure of the Soviet
literary scene. His predominantly
lyrical poems and his technical
innovations influenced a number of
Soviet poets, and outside Russia his
impress was strong, especially in the
1930s, after Stalin declared him the
“best and most talented poet of our
Soviet epoch.” In the 1960s, young
poets, drawn to avant-garde art and
activism that often clashed with
communist dogma, organized poetry
readings under Mayakovsky’s statue in
Moscow. In the Soviet Union’s final
years there was a strong tendency to
view Mayakovsky’s work as dated and
insignificant, yet, on the basis of his
best works, his reputation was later
revived.
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Sergey Yesenin
Sergey Aleksandrovich Yesenin,
Yesenin also spelled Esenin (b. Oct. 3
[Sept. 21, Old Style], 1895,
Konstantinovo, Ryazan province,
Russia—d. Dec. 27, 1925, Leningrad), the
self-styled “last poet of wooden
Russia,” whose dual image—that of a
devout and simple peasant singer and
that of a rowdy and blasphemous
exhibitionist—reflects his tragic
maladjustment to the changing world of
the revolutionary era.
The son of a peasant family of Old
Believers, he left his village at 17 for
Moscow and later Petrograd (subsequently
Leningrad, now St. Petersburg). In the
cities he became acquainted with
Aleksandr Blok, the peasant poet Nikolay
Klyuyev, and revolutionary politics. In
1916 he published his first book,
characteristically titled for a
religious feast day, Radunitsa (“Ritual
for the Dead”). It celebrates in church
book imagery the “wooden Russia” of his
childhood, a world blessed by saints in
painted icons, where storks nest in
chimneys and the sky above the birch
trees is a bright blue scarf.
Yesenin welcomed the Revolution as
the social and spiritual transformation
that would lead to the peasant
millennium he envisioned in his next
book, Inoniya (1918; “Otherland”). His
roseate utopian view of Otherland was
still informed by a simple ethos—the
defense of “wooden things” against the
vile world of iron, stone, and steel
(urban industrialization). In 1920–21 he
composed his long poetic drama Pugachyov,
glorifying the 18th-century rebel who
led a mass peasant revolt during the
reign of Catherine II. In 1919 he signed
the literary manifesto of the group of
Russian poets called the Imaginists (see
Imaginism). He was soon the leading
exponent of the school. He became a
habitué of the literary cafés of Moscow,
where he gave poetry recitals and drank
excessively. A marriage to Zinaida Reich
(later the wife of the actor-director
Vsevolod Meyerhold) ended in divorce. In
1922 he married the American dancer
Isadora Duncan and accompanied her on
tour, during which he smashed suites in
the best hotels in Europe in drunken
rampages. They visited the United
States, their quarrels and public scenes
duly observed in the world press. On
their separation Yesenin returned to
Russia. For some time he had been
writing the consciously cynical,
swaggering tavern poetry that appeared
in Ispoved khuligana (1921; “Confessions
of a Hooligan”) and Moskva kabatskaya
(1924; “Moscow of the Taverns”). His
verse barely concealed the sense of
self-depreciation that was overwhelming
him. He married again, a granddaughter
of Tolstoy, but continued to drink
heavily and to take cocaine. In 1924 he
tried to go home again but found the
village peasants quoting Soviet slogans,
when he himself had not been able to
read five pages of Marx. Tormented by
guilt that he had been unable to fulfill
the messianic role of poet of the
people, he tried to get in step with the
national trend. In the poem “Neuyutnaya
zhidkaya lunnost” (1925; “Desolate and
Pale Moonlight”), he went so far as to
praise stone and steel as the secret of
Russia’s coming strength. But another
poem, “The Stern October Has Deceived
Me,” bluntly voiced his alienation from
Bolshevik Russia. His last major work,
the confessional poem “Cherny chelovek”
(“The Black Man”), is a ruthless
self-castigation for his failures. In
1925 he was briefly hospitalized for a
nervous breakdown. Soon after, he hanged
himself in a Leningrad hotel, having
written his last lines in his own blood.
Yesenin and Duncan
A prolific and somewhat uneven
writer, Yesenin had a true gift of song.
His poignant short lyrics are full of
striking imagery. He was very popular
both during his lifetime and after his
death. Frowned on by Communist critics
and party leaders, who feared the
debilitating effect of “Yeseninism” on
the civic dedication of the young, he
was long more or less out of official
favour. Editions of his work that became
available (1956–60) attested to his
continued popularity. His complete works
were published in 1966–68.
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Others
Celebrated in their day, the fiction writers Leonid
Andreyev (1871–1919), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870–1938),
and Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) now have faded
reputations. But
Ivan Bunin, who became the first
Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
(1933), wrote superb works both before the
Revolution and as an émigré after it. Especially
noteworthy are his dark novella Derevnya (1910; The
Village), which is relentlessly critical of
Russians, and his Zhizn Arsenyeva (1930; The Life of
Arseniev, or The Well of Days), a fictionalized
autobiography. Maksim Gorky became the official
founder of Socialist Realism. Western readers now
appreciate his three-volume autobiography Detstvo
(1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915–16; In the
World, or My Apprenticeship), and Moi universitety
(1923; My Universities) and his Vospominaniya o Lve
Nikolayeviche Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo
Nikolaevich Tolstoy). His highly tendentious novel
Mat (1906; Mother), a model for Socialist Realism,
and many other works divide characters
simplistically into two groups—progressive and
virtuous or reactionary and vicious.
Leonid
Andreyev
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev
(Russian: Леонид Николаевич Андреев, 21
August [O.S. 9 August] 1871 – September
12, 1919) was a Russian playwright and
short-story writer who led the
Expressionist movement in the national
literature. He was active between the
revolution of 1905 and the Communist
revolution which finally overthrew the
Tsarist government.
Biography
Born in the Oryol province of
Russia, Andreyev originally studied law
in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but
abandoned his unremunerative law
practice to pursue a literary career. He
became police-court reporter for a
Moscow daily, performing the routine of
his humble calling without attracting
any particular attention. His first
story published was About a Poor
Student, a narrative based upon his own
experiences. It was not, however, until
Gorky discovered him by stories
appearing in the Moscow Courier and
elsewhere that Andreyev's literary
career really began.
Andreyev, by Ilya Repin, 1904
From that day to his death he was one of
the most prolific writers in Russia,
producing short stories, sketches,
dramas, etc., in frequent succession.
His first collection of stories appeared
in 1901, and sold a quarter-million
copies in short time. He was hailed as a
new star in Russia, where his name soon
became a by-word. He published his short
story, "In the Fog" in 1902. Although he
started out in the Russian vein he soon
startled his readers by his
eccentricities, which grew even faster
than his fame. His two best known
stories may be "The Red Laugh" (1904)
and "The Seven Who Were Hanged" (1908).
His dramas include the Symbolist plays
The Life of Man (1906), Tsar Hunger
(1907), Black Masks (1908), Anathema
(1909), and He Who Gets Slapped (1915).
The Life of Man was staged by both
Stanislavski (with his Moscow Art
Theatre) and Meyerhold (in Saint
Petersburg), the two giants of Russian
theatre of the twentieth century, in
1907.
Idealist and rebel, Andreyev spent
his last years in bitter poverty, and
his premature death from heart failure
may have been hastened by his anguish
over the results of the Bolshevik
Revolution. Unlike his friend Maxim
Gorky, Andreyev could not make peace
with the new order. From his house in
Finland he addressed manifestos to the
world at large against the excesses of
the Bolsheviks.
Aside from his political writings,
Andreyev published little after 1914. A
play, The Sorrows of Belgium, was
written at the beginning of the War to
celebrate the heroism of the Belgians
against the invading German army. It was
produced in the United States, as were
the plays, The Life of Man (1917), The
Rape of the Sabine Women (1922), He Who
Gets Slapped (1922), and Anathema
(1923). A popular and acclaimed film
version of He Who Gets Slapped was
produced by MGM Studios in 1924.
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Aleksandr Kuprin
Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin, (b. Sept.
7 [Aug. 26, old style], 1870, Narovchat,
Russia—d. Aug. 25, 1938, Leningrad),
Russian novelist and short-story writer,
one of the last exponents of the great
tradition of Russian critical realism.
Educated in military schools, he
served as an officer in the army, a
career he soon abandoned for a more
lively and diversified life as a
journalist, hunter, fisherman, actor,
and circus worker. Literary fame came
with Poyedinok (1905; The Duel), a
realistically sordid picture of the
emptiness of life in a remote military
garrison. Its appearance during the
Russo-Japanese War coincided with and
confirmed a national wave of
antimilitary sentiment. Kuprin wrote
prolifically; his subjects might be best
described by the title of one of his
best known stories, Reka zhizni (1906;
“The River of Life”). He is a fascinated
and an undiscriminating observer of the
stream of life and especially of any
milieu that constitutes a world of its
own—a cheap hotel, a factory, a house of
prostitution, a tavern, a circus, or a
race track. His best known novel, Yama
(1909–15; Yama: The Pit), deals with the
red-light district of a southern port
city. It dwells with enthusiasm on the
minutiae of the everyday life of the
prostitutes, their housekeeping,
economics, and social stratification. As
Kuprin’s spokesman in the novel puts it,
“all the horror is just this—that there
is no horror! Bourgeois work days—and
that is all. . . .”
Kuprin’s style is extremely natural.
He picks up the slang and argot that is
peculiar to his subject and describes
everything with zest and colour and with
a goodness of heart that compensates for
any shortcomings he may have in
originality or intellectual depth. After
the Revolution, Kuprin became one of the
many Russian émigrés in Paris, where he
continued to write, although exile was
not fruitful for his essentially
extroverted, reportorial talent. In 1937
he was allowed to return to the Soviet
Union.
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Vladimir Korolenko
Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko,
(b. July 27 [July 15, Old Style], 1853,
Zhitomir, Ukraine, Russian Empire—d.
December 25, 1921, Poltava, Ukraine),
Russian short-story writer and
journalist whose works are memorable in
showing compassion for the downtrodden.
Korolenko was expelled from two
colleges for his revolutionary
activities. In 1879 he was exiled to the
Yakut region (now in Sakha republic) of
Siberia, where he encountered the
tramps, thieves, pilgrims, and social
outcasts who were to figure prominently
in his stories. Released after five
years, he published his best-known
story, “Son Makara” (1885; “Makar’s
Dream” ), which conveys with sympathetic
insight the world of a Yakut peasant.
During his editorship (c. 1900) of the
influential review Russkoe Bogatstvo,
Korolenko championed minorities and
befriended younger writers, including
Maksim Gorky. Unwilling to cooperate
with the Bolshevik government, he
retired after the October Revolution in
1917 to Ukraine, where he worked on an
unfinished autobiography, Istoriya
moyego sovremennika (1905–21; “The
History of My Contemporary”).
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Ivan Bunin
Russian author
born Oct. 10 [Oct. 22, New Style], 1870, Voronezh, Russia
died Nov. 8, 1953, Paris, France
Main
poet and novelist, the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for
Literature (1933), and one of the finest of Russian stylists.
Bunin, the descendant of an old noble family, spent his childhood and
youth in the Russian provinces. He attended secondary school in Yelets,
in western Russia, but did not graduate; his older brother subsequently
tutored him. Bunin began publishing poems and short stories in 1887, and
in 1889–92 he worked for the newspaper Orlovsky Vestnik (“The Orlovsky
Herald”). His first book, Stikhotvoreniya: 1887–1891 (“Poetry:
1887–1891”), appeared in 1891 as a supplement to that newspaper. In the
mid-1890s he was strongly drawn to the ideas of the novelist Leo
Tolstoy, whom he met in person. During this period Bunin gradually
entered the Moscow and St. Petersburg literary scenes, including the
growing Symbolist movement. Bunin’s Listopad (1901; “Falling Leaves”), a
book of poetry, testifies to his association with the Symbolists,
primarily Valery Bryusov. However, Bunin’s work had more in common with
the traditions of classical Russian literature of the 19th century, of
which his older contemporaries Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov were models.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Bunin had become one of
Russia’s most popular writers. His sketches and stories Antonovskiye
yabloki (1900; “Antonov Apples”), Grammatika lyubvi (1929; “Grammar of
Love”), Lyogkoye dykhaniye (1922; “Light Breathing”), Sny Changa (1916;
“The Dreams of Chang”), Sukhodol (1912; “Dry Valley”), Derevnya (1910;
“The Village”), and Gospodin iz San-Frantsisko (1916; “The Gentleman
from San Francisco”) show Bunin’s penchant for extreme precision of
language, delicate description of nature, detailed psychological
analysis, and masterly control of plot. While his democratic views gave
rise to criticism in Russia, they did not turn him into a politically
engaged writer. Bunin also believed that change was inevitable in
Russian life. His urge to keep his independence is evident in his break
with the writer Maksim Gorky and other old friends after the Russian
Revolution of 1917, which he perceived as the triumph of the basest side
of the Russian people.
Bunin’s articles and diaries of 1917–20 are a record of Russian life
during its years of terror. In May 1918 he left Moscow and settled in
Odessa (now in Ukraine), and at the beginning of 1920 he emigrated first
to Constantinople (now Istanbul) and then to France, where he lived for
the rest of his life. There he became one of the most famous Russian
émigré writers. His stories, the novella Mitina lyubov (1925; Mitya’s
Love), and the autobiographical novel Zhizn Arsenyeva (The Life of
Arsenev)—which Bunin began writing during the 1920s and of which he
published parts in the 1930s and 1950s—were recognized by critics and
Russian readers abroad as testimony of the independence of Russian
émigré culture.
Bunin lived in the south of France during World War II, refusing all
contact with the Nazis and hiding Jews in his villa. Tyomnye allei
(1943; Dark Avenues, and Other Stories), a book of short stories, was
one of his last great works. After the end of the war, Bunin was invited
to return to the Soviet Union, but he remained in France.Vospominaniya
(Memories and Portraits), which appeared in 1950. An unfinished book, O
Chekhove (1955; “On Chekhov”; Eng. trans. About Chekhov: The Unfinished
Symphony), was published posthumously. Bunin was one of the first
Russian émigré writers whose works were published in the Soviet Union
after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
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Maksim Gorky
Maksim Gorky, also spelled Maxim
Gorki, pseudonym of Aleksey Maksimovich
Peshkov (b. March 16 [March 28, New
Style], 1868, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia—d.
June 14, 1936), Russian short-story
writer and novelist who first attracted
attention with his naturalistic and
sympathetic stories of tramps and social
outcasts and later wrote other stories,
novels, and plays, including his famous
The Lower Depths.
Early life.
Gorky’s earliest years were spent in
Astrakhan, where his father, a former
upholsterer, became a shipping agent.
When the boy was five his father died;
Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to
live with his maternal grandparents, who
brought him up after his mother
remarried. The grandfather was a dyer
whose business deteriorated and who
treated Gorky harshly. From his
grandmother he received most of what
little kindness he experienced as a
child.
Gorky knew the Russian working-class
background intimately, for his
grandfather afforded him only a few
months of formal schooling, sending him
out into the world to earn his living at
the age of eight. His jobs included,
among many others, work as assistant in
a shoemaker’s shop, as errand boy for an
icon painter, and as dishwasher on a
Volga steamer, where the cook introduced
him to reading—soon to become his main
passion in life. Frequently beaten by
his employers, nearly always hungry and
ill clothed, he came to know the seamy
side of Russian life as few other
Russian authors before or since. The
bitterness of these early experiences
later led him to choose the word gorky
(“bitter”) as his pseudonym.
His late adolescence and early
manhood were spent in Kazan, where he
worked as a baker, docker, and night
watchman. There he first learned about
Russian revolutionary ideas from
representatives of the Populist
movement, whose tendency to idealize the
Russian peasant he later rejected.
Oppressed by the misery of his
surroundings, he attempted suicide by
shooting himself. Leaving Kazan at the
age of 21, he became a tramp, doing odd
jobs of all kinds during extensive
wanderings through southern Russia.
First stories.
In Tbilisi (Tiflis) Gorky began to
publish stories in the provincial press,
of which the first was “Makar Chudra”
(1892), followed by a series of similar
wild Romantic legends and allegories of
only documentary interest. But with the
publication of “Chelkash” (1895) in a
leading St. Petersburg journal, he began
a success story as spectacular as any in
the history of Russian literature.
“Chelkash,” one of his outstanding
works, is the story of a colourful
harbour thief in which elements of
Romanticism and realism are mingled. It
began Gorky’s celebrated “tramp period,”
during which he described the social
dregs of Russia. He expressed sympathy
and self-identification with the
strength and determination of the
individual hobo or criminal, characters
previously described more objectively.
“Dvadtsat shest i odna” (1899;
“Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”), describing
the sweated labour conditions in a
bakery, is often regarded as his best
short story. So great was the success of
these works that Gorky’s reputation
quickly soared, and he began to be
spoken of almost as an equal of Leo
Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.
Plays and novels.
Next Gorky wrote a series of plays
and novels, all less excellent than his
best earlier stories. The first novel,
Foma Gordeyev (1899), illustrates his
admiration for strength of body and will
in the masterful barge owner and rising
capitalist Ignat Gordeyev, who is
contrasted with his relatively feeble
and intellectual son Foma, a “seeker
after the meaning of life,” as are many
of Gorky’s other characters. From this
point, the rise of Russian capitalism
became one of Gorky’s main fictional
interests. Other novels of the period
are Troye (1900; Three of Them), Ispoved
(1908; A Confession), Gorodok Okurov
(1909; “Okurov City”), and Zhizn Matveya
Kozhemyakina (1910; “The Life of Matvey
Kozhemyakin”). These are all to some
extent failures because of Gorky’s
inability to sustain a powerful
narrative, and also because of a
tendency to overload his work with
irrelevant discussions about the meaning
of life. Mat (1906; Mother) is probably
the least successful of the novels, yet
it has considerable interest as Gorky’s
only long work devoted to the Russian
revolutionary movement. It was made into
a notable silent film by Vsevolod
Pudovkin (1926) and dramatized by
Bertolt Brecht in Die Mutter (1930–31).
Gorky also wrote a series of plays, the
most famous of which is Na dne (1902;
The Lower Depths). A dramatic rendering
of the kind of flophouse character that
Gorky had already used so extensively in
his stories, it still enjoys great
success abroad and in Russia. He also
wrote Meshchane (1902; The Petty
Bourgeois, or The Smug Citizen), a play
that glorifies the hero-intellectual who
has revolutionary tendencies but also
that explores the disruptions
revolutionaries can wreak on everyday
life.
Marxist activity.
Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived
mainly in St. Petersburg, where he
became a Marxist, supporting the Social
Democratic Party. After the split in
that party in 1903, Gorky went with its
Bolshevik wing. But he was often at odds
with the Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.
Nor did Gorky ever, formally, become a
member of Lenin’s party, though his
enormous earnings, which he largely gave
to party funds, were one of that
organization’s main sources of income.
In 1901 the Marxist review Zhizn
(“Life”) was suppressed for publishing a
short revolutionary poem by Gorky,
“Pesnya o burevestnike” (“Song of the
Stormy Petrel”). Gorky was arrested but
released shortly afterward and went to
the Crimea, having developed
tuberculosis. In 1902 he was elected a
member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, but his election was soon
withdrawn for political reasons, an
event that led to the resignations of
Chekhov and the writer V.G. Korolenko
from the academy. Gorky took a prominent
part in the Russian Revolution of 1905,
was arrested in the following year, and
was again quickly released, partly as
the result of protests from abroad. He
toured America in the company of his
mistress, an event that led to his
partial ostracism there and to a
consequent reaction on his part against
the United States as expressed in
stories about New York City, Gorod
zhyoltogo dyavola (1906; “The City of
the Yellow Devil”).
Leo Tolstoy and Gorky
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Anton Chekhov and
Gorky
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Stalin and Gorky
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Exile and revolution.
On leaving Russia in 1906, Gorky
spent seven years as a political exile,
living mainly in his villa on Capri in
Italy. Politically, Gorky was a nuisance
to his fellow Marxists because of his
insistence on remaining independent, but
his great influence was a powerful
asset, which from their point of view
outweighed such minor defects. He
returned to Russia in 1913, and during
World War I he agreed with the
Bolsheviks in opposing Russia’s
participation in the war. He opposed the
Bolshevik seizure of power during the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on
to attack the victorious Lenin’s
dictatorial methods in his newspaper
Novaya zhizn (“New Life”) until July
1918, when his protests were silenced by
censorship on Lenin’s orders. Living in
Petrograd, Gorky tried to help those who
were not outright enemies of the Soviet
government. Gorky often assisted
imprisoned scholars and writers, helping
them survive hunger and cold. His
efforts, however, were thwarted by
figures such as Lenin and Grigory
Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin’s who
was the head of the Petrograd
Bolsheviks. In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky
into exile under the pretext of Gorky’s
needing specialized medical treatment
abroad.
Last period.
In the decade ending in 1923 Gorky’s
greatest masterpiece appeared. This is
the autobiographical trilogy Detstvo
(1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh
(1915–16; In the World), and Moi
universitety (1923; My Universities).
The title of the last volume is sardonic
because Gorky’s only university had been
that of life, and his wish to study at
Kazan University had been frustrated.
This trilogy is one of the finest
autobiographies in Russian. It describes
Gorky’s childhood and early manhood and
reveals him as an acute observer of
detail, with a flair for describing his
own family, his numerous employers, and
a panorama of minor but memorable
figures. The trilogy contains many
messages, which Gorky now tended to
imply rather than preach openly:
protests against motiveless cruelty,
continued emphasis on the importance of
toughness and self-reliance, and musings
on the value of hard work.
Gorky finished his trilogy abroad,
where he also wrote the stories
published in Rasskazy 1922–1924 (1925;
“Stories 1922–24”), which are among his
best work. From 1924 he lived at a villa
in Sorrento, Italy, to which he invited
many Russian artists and writers who
stayed for lengthy periods. Gorky’s
health was poor, and he was
disillusioned by postrevolutionary life
in Russia, but in 1928 he yielded to
pressures to return, and the lavish
official celebration there of his 60th
birthday was beyond anything he could
have expected. In the following year he
returned to the U.S.S.R. permanently and
lived there until his death. His return
coincided with the establishment of
Stalin’s ascendancy, and Gorky became a
prop of Stalinist political orthodoxy.
Correspondence published in the 1990s
between Gorky and Stalin and between
Gorky and Genrikh Yagoda, the head of
the Soviet secret police, shows that
Gorky gradually lost all illusions that
freedom would prevail in the U.S.S.R.,
and he consequently adjusted to the
rules of the new way of life. He was now
more than ever the undisputed leader of
Soviet writers, and, when the Soviet
Writers’ Union was founded in 1934, he
became its first president. At the same
time, he helped to found the literary
method of Socialist Realism, which was
imposed on all Soviet writers and which
obliged them—in effect—to become
outright political propagandists.
Gorky remained active as a writer,
but almost all his later fiction is
concerned with the period before 1917.
In Delo Artamonovykh (1925; The
Artamonov Business), one of his best
novels, he showed his continued interest
in the rise and fall of prerevolutionary
Russian capitalism. From 1925 until the
end of his life, Gorky worked on the
novel Zhizn Klima Samgina (“The Life of
Klim Samgin”). Though he completed four
volumes that appeared between 1927 and
1937 (translated into English as
Bystander, The Magnet, Other Fires, and
The Specter), the novel was to remain
unfinished. It depicts in detail 40
years of Russian life as seen through
the eyes of a man inwardly destroyed by
the events of the decades preceding and
following the turn of the 20th century.
There were also more plays—Yegor
Bulychov i drugiye (1932; “Yegor
Bulychov and Others”) and Dostigayev i
drugiye (1933; “Dostigayev and
Others”)—but the most generally admired
work is a set of reminiscences of
Russian writers—Vospominaniya o Tolstom
(1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich
Tolstoy) and O pisatelyakh (1928; “About
Writers”). The memoir of Tolstoy is so
lively and free from the hagiographic
approach traditional in Russian studies
of their leading authors that it has
sometimes been acclaimed as Gorky’s
masterpiece. Almost equally impressive
is Gorky’s study of Chekhov. He also
wrote pamphlets on topical events and
problems in which he glorified some of
the most brutal aspects of Stalinism.
Some mystery attaches to Gorky’s
death, which occurred suddenly in 1936
while he was under medical treatment.
Whether his death was natural or not is
unknown, but it came to figure in the
trial of Nikolay I. Bukharin and others
in 1938, at which it was claimed that
Gorky had been the victim of an
anti-Soviet plot by the “Bloc of
Rightists and Trotskyites.” The former
police chief Genrikh Yagoda, who was
among the defendants, confessed to
having ordered his death. Some Western
authorities have suggested that Gorky
was done to death on Stalin’s orders,
having finally become sickened by the
excesses of Stalinist Russia, but there
is little evidence of this except that
it was characteristic of Stalin to frame
others on the charge of accomplishing
his own misdeeds.
Viktor Govorov.
A.M.Gorky
Reads on October 11, 1931 to J.V.Stalin, V.M.Molotov and K.E.Voroshilov
His Fairy Tale "A Girl and Death"
Assessment.
After his death Gorky was canonized
as the patron saint of Soviet letters.
His reputation abroad has also remained
high, but it is doubtful whether
posterity will deal with him so kindly.
His success was partly due, both in the
Soviet Union and to a lesser extent
abroad, to political accident. Though
technically of lower-middle-class
origin, he lived in such poverty as a
child and young man that he is often
considered the greatest “proletarian” in
Russian literature. This circumstance,
coinciding with the rise of
working-class movements all over the
world, helped to give Gorky an immense
literary reputation, which his works do
not wholly merit.
Gorky’s literary style, though
gradually improving through the years,
retained its original defects of
excessive striving for effect, of
working on the reader’s nerves by the
piling up of emotive adjectives, and of
tending to overstate. Among Gorky’s
other defects, in addition to his
weakness for philosophical digressions,
is a certain coarseness of emotional
grain. But his eye for physical detail,
his talent for making his characters
live, and his unrivaled knowledge of the
Russian “lower depths” are weighty items
on the credit side. Gorky was the only
Soviet writer whose work embraced the
prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary
period so exhaustively, and, though he
by no means stands with Chekhov,
Tolstoy, and others in the front rank of
Russian writers, he remains one of the
more important literary figures of his
age.
Ronald Francis Hingley
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