New Russian Poets E-Book
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- Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A collection of poetry from Russian dissidents, and those part of the great poetic revival after Stalin was removed from power. A re-examination of the national conscience followed Stalin's death, when 14,000 people gathered in Moscow to hear a group of young poets reading their work.
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The New Russian Poets 1953–1968
Selected, Edited and Translated
by GEORGE REAVEY
MARION BOYARS LONDON – NEW YORK
Contents
The New Russian Poets and the Crisis of Belief
1. THE RUSSIAN POET AND HIS HAMLETIAN PREDICAMENT
Since the “Golden Age” of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), Russians have always taken great pride in their poetic achievement as the art closest to the national heartbeat, to the emotions and aspirations of their ideal national selves. It was only in the nineteenth century that they began to discover and revel in the beauty, musical enchantment, and genuine validity of their own language which, thanks to Pushkin’s having forged a more supple and musical verbal medium, soon ended the hegemony exercised until then by the French language and literature as the staple diet of the educated minority. But the ascending Russian Muse also began to assume the enigmatic features of the long-suffering “Mother Russia.” This was certainly the case in the poetry of N. A. Nekrasov (1821–1877). The Russian poets early developed a sense of mission, which is already present in some of Pushkin’s work. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes in his Precocious Autobiography: “The poets of Russia were always warriors for the future of their native land, for the triumph of justice. The poets helped Russia to think…. The poets helped Russia to struggle against her tyrants.”
Behind the figure of “Mother Russia” often appears a sort of Hamletian ghost of mumbled guilt and whispered retribution whom the poet-son cannot help but overhear and interpret as a call to duty. The predicament the poet may then find himself in can be summed up as follows:
I fear to say the change is for the better;
To say it’s “for the worse” is dangerous.1
Behind his facade of beauty and lyrical impulse lurks a shadow, the poet soon discovers. It may be the Stepfather shadow of a Tsar Nicholas I or a Joseph Stalin, or it may be the shadow of a x“gunman.” Thus, behind Pushkin stand Nicholas I and the Baron D’Anthès; behind Lermontov, Captain Martynov. Both D’Anthès and Martynov killed their poet-adversaries in duels. Prophetically, in Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin chill-hearted Evgeny had to destroy the lyrically warm, romantic poet Lensky. In Pushkin we have again the unpredictably dynamic and brutal image of “The Bronze Horseman,”2 a personification of the ruthless State that can arbitrarily trample an individual to death. These are poetic images, ghosts out of the past, perhaps, but they are none the less real in the sense that they are dire images that have haunted Russian poetry up to the present day. Thus, in a recent poem “Lermontov,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes:
1. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Letter to Yesenin.”
In Russia poets are born
WithD’Anthès’ bullet in their chests.3
In another untitled poem on the same theme, Bella Akhmadulina
With what shall I console those stricken
by the trifling superiority of evil?
Those renowned, defeated poets,
who losttheir lives in vain?4
She finds that their “salvation” lies in “an eternally established order,” in which “the triumphing boor is sentenced and condemned.”
Two other poets of tragic destiny—Mayakovsky and Yesenin—haunt the imagination of many of today’s young Soviet poets. In his “reverse time” passage in “Oza,” Andrey Voznesensky sees the bullet “Flying out of Mayakovsky’s heart….”5 In his “Mayakovsky” poem,6 Yevtushenko asks what that poet would have done in “the year 1937,” the year of the Big Purge under Stalin and concludes that he would not have kept quiet even if he had been spared. Indeed, “he left us some bullets in that revolver,” xiYevtushenko comments, bullets to use against “crassness, hypocrisy, and vileness.” It should now be clear even from these few examples that the “ghosts of the past” can have a very real and immediate significance for the Russian poets of today whose conscience has been doubly roused by the revelations about “Stalin’s crimes.” Thus, the ghostly note of retribution sounds in the lines:
2. A poem of Pushkin’s centering round the Falconet statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg.
3.DenPoezii. M, 1965.
4.Struna. M, 1962.
5.Molodaya Gvardia, No. 10, 1964. Also in Part IV of “Oza” in this volume.
6.Yunost, No. 4, 1965.
The Muse is the child of compassion,
buthatred is her nurse …7
2. A FEW REFLECTIONS ON RUSSIAN POETRY AND THE IMPACT OF “SCIENCE”
If poetry is the soul of myth, then prose must be the foster parent of science. It is no accident that English prose began to develop in the age of Newton. Nor is it chance that Russian prose criticism and fiction began to assert themselves as imported from Europe. The spread of Russian critical thought and the rapid flowering of the Russian novel with Gogol and Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy, seemed to arrest the progress of Russian poetry for almost half a century, though a number of poets, such as Tyutchev, Fet, and Nekrasov, continued to write. There was also the increeping tide of philosophical and political systems (Positivism, Socialism, and eventually Marxism), and scientific ideas (the natural sciences, Darwinism, the new physics), and the first rumblings in Russia of an industrial revolution. In the nineteenth century Russian society, which was still rather archaic in many respects, was faced with the task of absorbing and digesting too many ideas in too brief a space of time. As history has so far demonstrated, this society, in the process of changing into the Soviet Union, opted for a Russian version of Marxism as a more controlled and more exclusive way of digesting Western civilization. It selected to import and absorb slowly Western industrial technology and to export rapidly its own brand of political ideas and techniques. The imposition of a Marxist system under a one-party rule was to have a grave effect on the course of Russian poetry, for it was claimed that Marxism was a “science” and that literature should be subordinated to its social directives.
7. Yevtushenko, “Lermontov.”
xiiIn retrospect, we can already observe the impact on Russian poetry of the natural sciences and of Positivism in Turgenev’s famous novel Fathers and Sons (1862). The “Nihilist” characters (Bazarov and Arcady) in the novel have a certain blunt way of questioning “established values” from the position of “science” and “utility,” a critical attitude reminiscent of the social philosophy of the Russian critic P. I. Pisarev (1840–1868), the author of “Belinsky and Pushkin,” “The Realists,” and other provocative essays in the days when it became fashionable to say that “a pair of boots was of more use than the Sistine Madonna.” They also have a very definite attitude of positive contempt for poetry which can be seen in the following passage:
Arcady came up without a word, though with a look of affectionate pity on his face, gently took away my book as he might have taken it from a child, and put another one in front of me, a German one. … He smiled and then went out, carrying off my Pushkin.8
The “German” book in this case was a “scientific treatise, StoffundKraft by Büchner. Written in the early 1860’s, the passage from Fathers and Sons reads almost like a parody, a gentle parody of what might have happened not so gently in 1930, when the obligatory book might have been Marx’s Das Kapital, Gorky’s Mother, or The Problems of Leninism by Stalin, or in 1938, when it would have been Chapter IV of The Short Course (The Historyof the C.P.S.U.[B]), the chapter on “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” which was written by J. Stalin himself and in which he argues that “the science of history … can become as precise a science as, let us say, biology….” He insisted also on “the unity of theory and practice,” which was precisely the lever that was to be applied to literature and the arts in order to make of them the reflex of the general line of Communist social development. This no doubt was the culmination of a fanatical nineteenth-century acceptance and worship of a limited notion of science as the ultimate solution for all human and social problems.
But despite the “scientific” onslaught on him, Pushkin was to survive. In 1880 Dostoyevsky delivered his famous address on Pushkin as the national poet of Russia; and within twenty years xiiia strong poetic revival had begun. The poets associated with it were Bryusov, Blok, Ivanov, Biely (Symbolists); Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam (Acmeists); Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky (Futurists); Pasternak, Yesenin, and others. The revival was to last almost thirty years, a revival the consequences of which are still being felt and absorbed, even after several decades of Stalinist repression, by the present generation of Soviet poets. Pasternak and Akhmatova, as we know, survived into the 1960’s and played an important part in the post-Stalin revival of poetry and Pushkin himself, after having been again “thrown overboard from the boat of contemporaneity,” this time by the Russian Futurists in 1912, was to find himself officially rehabilitated and propagated for national purposes in 1936. Since then he seems to have become the second-best-selling author of pre-Revolutionary vintage throughout the Soviet Union. However, it is not Pushkin’s now official status that explains his continuing sway over millions of Russians. He is, indeed, the national poet and has an appeal and power all his own, “a quality of song” and “an unfettered diction” that can still make him an inspiration as well as a pleasure. It is not therefore surprising to find Yevtushenko in 1965 invoking Pushkin—as well as Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok, Pasternak, Yesenin, and Mayakovsky—in his “Invocation Before a Poem” at the start of his long, extraordinary poetic work The GES atBratsk,9 in which he attempts with varied success to grasp the many-sided aspects of his Mother Russia as she historically is and was.
8. Ivan Turgenev. Fathers and Sons. Tr. by George Reavey. A Signet Classic. New American Library, N.Y., 1961. p. 52.
It is pointless and unrewarding to interfere either “scientifically” or politically with the poet, whose instinct, intuition, and imagination are a better touchstone as to what is best and most fit for the time he lives in, assuming he has an ear for the language and rhythm of his day. But as a modern Russian poet has said, “All the tyrants of Russia have always feared poets as their most dangerous political enemies. They feared Pushkin, then Lermontov, then Nekrasov.” Poems of praise and joy have their place if felt and experienced, but they cannot be the poet’s only contribution to the age he lives in. In the days of the so-called “cult xivof the personality,” sycophantic praise of Stalin became obligatory. A pseudoclassical style hedged in by dogmatic requirements and sugared with a tyrant’s praise and exaggerated claims is hardly the answer to the challenge of an epoch that is revolutionary in more ways than one. To have condemned, destroyed, and largely frustrated at least three generations of poets, by labeling them “formalist” and “subjective,” or even “traitor,” as the Stalinists have repeatedly done, is sheer madness and an inexcusable waste of human and national resources. Poets of quality and vision are not so easily come by, and what they have to say is hardly ever immediately obvious. And the artistic tastes of politicians are more often crude and moralistically superficial. Thus a good many poets of “the Silver Age,” those born in the 1880’s and 1890’s, who represented a generation of the highest quality, were needlessly hampered or sacrificed in the years 1918–1953. So were many others who emerged only in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Others again were lost in the 1940’s. One is not likely to forget the Stalinist purges (1936–39), or Zhdanov’s brutal assault against the arts in 1946,10 or the final gathering fury of the anti-cosmopolitan drive (1948–53), which was directed against “Western influences” and internationally minded Soviet Jews.
9.Yunost, No. 4, 1965. Literally “The Hydroelectric Station at Bratsk.” Bratsk is the site of this gigantic undertaking in Siberia. Three poems from the “Bratsk” cycle are included in the anthology.
The yardstick with which those who were accused of being “formalists” and “subjective” have been drubbed since 1934 (there were other yardsticks before) was that of “Socialist Realism,” which has been defined as
the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.
This statute of the Union of Soviet Writers (that single Union which replaced in 1932 all other groupings of writers) is still on the books. Even though Stalin’s death and the subsequent revelations about his duplicity were followed by a crisis of belief and a xvperiod of critical re-evaluation, persistent efforts have been made to apply this statute more strictly, particularly in 1956–57, 1959, and in 1962–63. These attempts have brought discomfort or temporary disgrace at various times to a number of writers. But it has been found that certain Soviet poets and novelists are now on the whole more resilient and resistant, and that the statute on Socialist Realism cannot be really made effective without the threat of dire physical compulsion. When applied at gunpoint in 1936 and 1946, it nearly killed off what remained of Russian literature. This now seems unthinkable. Yet the rather arbitrary procedures at the trials of Iosif Brodsky in Leningrad in 1964 and of Andrey Sinyavsky and Yury Daniel in Moscow in 1966 are a sign that coercion against writers can still be exercised.
10. This began on August 14, when a Central Committee resolution condemned the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad. The poet Anna Akhmatova and the short-story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko were violently attacked and later expelled from the Writer’s Union. The attack spread to Pasternak and many other writers and composers.
The dogmatists still exist. They favor the simpler integral solution. They still believe in the “scientific” validity of their utopian prescription and they regard art as merely a secondary, reflected activity—a view of art which the Central Committee had summed up in its Decree of August 14, 1946: “Soviet literature … is a literature for which there can be no other interests than those of the people and of the state.” But in the post-Stalinist Russia of today such an absolute principle, though it had been restated in a slightly different way by Nikita Khrushchev, is much harder, perhaps impossible, to enforce.
Thus, there are the scientific dogmatists and the dogmatic scientists, who are only too willing to issue prescriptions for or decrees about poetry in the Zhdanov 1946 manner. But, in the Soviet “atomic society” of the 1960’s there are also scientists of another sort who are far from being narrowly orthodox. There are now Soviet physicists who enjoy and collect the type of “formalist” painting and poetry which the “dogmatists” abhor and try to suppress by labeling their authors as “the lackeys of bourgeois ideology.” Thus, recently, Professor P. L. Kapitza of the Institute of Physical Problems tried to attract attention to an officially neglected painter of talent, a certain Anikeyenok from the Tartar city of Kazan. This artist was accused of not painting according to the “rules” and of being “a frightful example of what can happen to an artist when he departs from the path of Socialist Realism.” In this case, however, KomsomolskayaPravda came to the defense of the artist: “His unusual style and search xvifor original forms of expression frighten those who should be helping to direct and support originality and individuality among young people.”11 This Soviet newspaper would therefore seem to support what a young poet had written some ten years ago—“I want art to be as diverse as myself.”12 But in the past ten years the poet has been severely reprimanded many times for daring to show his diversity. That Komsomolskaya Pravda has ventured to make its above statement—and we must recall that Sergey Pavlov, the head of the Komsomol, has been up to now one of the most vehement critics of the new poetry and the new art—may very well be due to the fact that the Kazan artist in question was defended by a physicist, i.e., a scientist of repute who is probably held in more respect than a young poet. Indeed, in a poem entitled “Physicists and Lyricists,” Boris Slutsky, a poet included in this volume, ironically says as much:
Physicists are somehow much in honor;
Lyricists are somehow pushed aside.
Andrey Voznesensky is another poet who has been particularly concerned with the situation of the poet in an age of automation, robots, and nuclear physics. In his long complex poem “Oza” (1964), he develops a dialogue between a lyrical poet and a physicist whose notebook is found “in a drawer of a night table in a hotel in Dubna.” But the poem has also many digressions, such as a satiric piece on the insufferable influence of Stalin—“No more shall we be asphyxiated/in the drooping smoke of his gray hair.”—and a parody of Poe’s “Raven,” where there is a confrontation between a poet’s aspirations and delight in life and their vulgar negative:
How impress upon him the low cur,
that we’re not living here to croak—
but to touch with our lips the wonder
of a kiss or a running stream!
It may also be remarked that the reactions of the Soviet press these days can sometimes be unexpected. Only a few months ago xviithe editor of Pravda could be observed advocating in print a more liberal or, let us say, sensible attitude to the arts as against the more orthodox opinions expressed in Izvestia. Pravda actually printed the statement that “Communist criticism must rid itself of the tone of literary command.” This argument is a sign of a healthy diversity of opinion even in official circles. However, in this particular case the author of the above opinion was removed to another post. Thus, whatever the outcome, we are at least made aware of a strenuous tug of war going on in every field of Soviet endeavor, and there is growing alarm that the younger generation has outgrown the stale clichés of the old-type propaganda. And there is the great potential audience for the new poetry, which offers a freshness of language and a novelty of image that had long been lost.
11. This incident was reported in the New YorkTimes of June 4, 1966.
12. From “Prologue” (1957) in The Poetry of YevgenyYevtushenko. Ed. and tr. by George Reavey. October House Inc., New York, 1965.
3. THE NEW ATMOSPHERE—POETRY AND IDEOLOGY AFTER 1953
By the “new Russian poets” here, I mean those poets who have helped in the ’fifties or are still helping to create a new atmosphere in Soviet poetry. This atmosphere is compounded of a new outlook on life and the restoration of an abandoned poetic tradition. This restoration involves, above all, the rehabilitation of previously neglected or persecuted poets, such as Nikolai Zabolotzky, Boris Pasternak, Leonid Martynov, and the publication of the works (and commentaries upon them) of those poets of the Silver Age and the ’twenties and ’thirties who were almost entirely eliminated from Soviet letters—poets such as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Sergey Yesenin, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Andrey Biely, i.e., those poets who had been thought to be too “subjective,” “formalist,” or “alien to the Soviet way of life.” The new outlook is made up of a new sense of history, awareness of the need for personal responsibility, an acuter critical attitude, and a deeper insight into the emotions of the ordinary man.
Poetically, this outlook consists in a renewed joy in the rich possibilities of language and form, and in a reawakened interest in a more varied subject matter, which does not exclude the inner world of man. All this implies a keener, fresher, more direct scrutiny of the world as well as the exercise of a freer imagination xviiiin apprehending the realities and the mysteries of man, society, and the world. The word “mystery” may strike one as provocatively antimaterialistic in the present Soviet context, but modern physics, chemistry, biology, and science as a whole, in contrast to the more limited nineteenth-century realism, are tending to make the universe increasingly mysterious. A number of young Soviet poets have begun to realize this too.
In a brief survey of the Soviet poetry scene today one cannot help but notice a growing excitement and competitive tension in the arena of poetry, which have been missing since the 1920’s. But even more than that, poetry today has spilled over from a more restricted habitat into the streets, the public squares, the concert halls, and even the stadiums. The peak was reached when an audience of 14,000 listened to poems being declaimed by young poets in a Moscow stadium in 1962. The authorities became alarmed at this excessive popularity of the free-wheeling versifiers, and some restrictions were imposed upon the more public gatherings such as those in Mayakovsky Square. These public manifesttaions may be said to have begun with the institution of Poetry Day in September, 1955. As a corollary of this celebration, an annual almanac, DenPoezii (The Day of Poetry), was founded in 1956. Since then the tradition of Poetry Day and Den Poezii has spread to Leningrad and other cities as far away as Tbilisi and Alma Ata.
A number of magazines were founded or revived in the middle ’fifties, all of which opened their pages to the poets. Among them were: Yunost (1955), Molodaya Gvardia (1956), Moskva (1957), Voprosy Literaturi (1957). A number of almanacs, such as Literaturnaya Moskva (1956) and Taruskiye Stranitzi (1961), also appeared to enliven the scene. They published selections of poems as well as some of the latest prose and pages devoted to the hitherto neglected poets. Thus LiteraturnayaMoskvaII printed batches of Tsvetayeva’s and Zabolotzky’s poems. To enliven the scene still further, a series of subterranean mimeographed almanacs—Syntaksis I, II, III (1959–60), Phoenix I (1961), Cocktail (1961), Sphinxes (1965)—appeared in limited editions of about 200 copies, each issue containing the work of poets who were not being printed in the established magazines. Some of the underground magazines were seized by the authorities and their editors xixarrested. Poems by Okudzhava, Akhmadulina, Brodsky, Kharabarov, and Slutsky have been first presented in this form.
All this varied activity in the domain of poetry indicates the pressure of a new, restless, and less hidebound generation of poets, as well as an increasingly alert public not only ready to respond but eagerly expecting some fresh poetic statement, free from official jargon, that might throw some light on their doubts and aspirations after the demise of Stalin. It was the atmosphere of The Thaw, as Ehrenburg called his timely novel, the opposite of the sort of world Leonid Martynov describes in his poem “Cold”:
An experiment was made
To freeze all things—
To castsuch grayness
On everything,
So that each town
Might be chained in chill …
Already in the December, 1953, issue of Novy Mir (the literary monthly then, as now, edited by Alexander Tvardovsky) there appeared an article by V. Pomerantzev in which he argued against tendentiousness in Soviet literature. Its title “On Sincerity in Literature” struck what was to become a keynote of the decade—the new poet or novelist must be sincere and outspoken, no stooge or hypocrite. Pomerantzev also argued for a greater variety of theme. Yevtushenko’s line, “Then let us be extremely frank,” pointed in the same direction. Naturally, Pomerantzev was strongly criticized on all sides, but his plea was supported by some writers. But this natural and belated trend was immediately labeled “nihilistic,” and the editorial board of Novy Mir was eventually reprimanded by the Praesidium of the Writers’ Union for its “errors” in not opposing “all manifestations of apolitical, formalistic and non-ideological” activity.
But this measure could not arrest the gradually rising tide of those who clamored for a broader base and a freer hand for writers. True, between 1955 and 1957 the authorities tried to put the brake on again. It was the time of Dudintsev’s Not By BreadAlone, Yevtushenko’s “Winter Station” (1956), and many other works which were thought “to distort Soviet reality.” It was also xxthe time of the Twentieth Party Congress (1956) and the Hungarian Revolt, in which writers had played an important part, and general unrest among the satellite Communist parties. As one Soviet literary historian puts it, “… never has Socialist ideology experienced such a furious onslaught on the part of its ideological opponents…. Revisionists of all sorts tried to exploit the criticism of J. V. Stalin’s cult of personality by attacking Communism…. In various countries articles appeared directed against Socialist Realism … against the Party control of literature….” In official eyes, a section of the Soviet intelligentsia was likewise becoming ideologically affected. The authorities became alarmed, and by 1957 Nikita Khrushchev in person began to intervene and restate the ideological principles that were supposed to guide the development of Soviet literature. But Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 about Stalin’s misdeeds only fanned the flames of unrest in the long run. It took five or six years more for poems like Yevtushenko’s “Babii Yar” and “The Heirs of Stalin,” Tvardovsky’s “Tyorkin in the Other World,” Ehrenburg’s People, Years, Life, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day inthe Life of Ivan Denisovich to appear. It was in this troubled atmosphere that Boris Pasternak published his Doctor Zhivago abroad, after failing to get it accepted by the editors of Novy Mir.
In general, it may be said that, despite periodical “braking” from on high or the persistent sniping by antagonistic conservative critics, the base for Soviet writing has steadily widened. The controls are still there, but they are usually not applied with the same frightening rigor as they were previously. It is not my intention here to give a minutely detailed account of a decade of closely engaged struggle between the liberal and conservative camps in Soviet literature. To do so would only obscure the positive image of the new poets. Several excellent studies of the ideological aspects already exist, and they may be consulted by anyone wishing to delve further into this bloodthirsty world of verbal throat-slitting.13
13.Politics in the Soviet Union. Seven Cases. Ed. Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin. Harcourt Brace & World Inc. N.Y., 1966; Priscilla Johnson.Krushchev and the Arts. M.I.T. Press. Cambridge, 1965; SovietLiterature in the Sixties. Ed. Max Hayward and Edward L. Crowley. Frederick A. Praeger. N.Y., 1964.
xxi
4. THE TIME FOR RE-EVALUATION: DOUBTS AND ASPIRATIONS
Today we are undoubtedly witnessing a revival of Russian poetry. I call it “Russian” advisedly, because “Soviet” is a broader term that also comprises the Union Republics, and I am not in a position at present to judge how far the poetic revival has spread to Uzbekistan or Turkmenia, though it may well be manifesting itself already in Georgia, that Caucasian land of sophisticated poets and wine lovers. One thing may be indicative. The Georgians in Tbilisi have in the recent past published poems by Pasternak, Akhmadulina (“Rain”), and others—poems which were not printed at that time in Moscow.
It is perhaps too early to pass judgment on the quality of the post-1953 poetic revival. To do so, one would have to compare the new poets with the more seasoned veterans of the Silver Age who did part of their work in pre-Revolutionary days. The majority of the new poets are in their twenties, thirties, and forties, and they have started publishing only in the last decade. There are, of course, some older and more established figures among them—Leonid Leonov and Alexander Tvardovsky, for example—whose later work and aspirations seem to fit in better with the post-Stalinist times. But there can be no doubt about the seriousness, talent, and enthusiasm of the new generation of poets. They are not only developing individual themes (though they have some themes in common) and techniques, but some of them are also showing an extraordinary grasp of poetic language and form at the risk of being dubbed “formalists.” Courage is another prerequisite in which many of them are not wanting. Without courage it would be difficult to stand up to and maneuver among the ideological pontiffs. Yevtushenko’s confrontation with Khrushchev on December 17, 1962, illustrates this point: “The time is long past when only the grave straightens out the hunchbacked.”
Kornei Chukovsky, the distinguished author and erstwhile translator of Walt Whitman, some months ago said this about the poetic revival:
For me, there is great personal satisfaction in the fact that poetry is again the leading genre in Russian literature. As in the days of xxiiAlexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russians are seeking and finding in the work of our poets a reflection of their own emotions and beliefs, the foremost of which is a deep hatred of all forms of falsehood. There is a bountiful harvest of talent in our poetry today. I never dreamed I would live to see it in such a great renaissance….14
This statement of Chukovsky’s helps to explain the wide impact the new poetry is having in editions of from 50,000 to 150,000 copies, whereas most of Pasternak’s editions in the old days never exceeded about 20,000.15 The Russians, always an emotional people, have gone through enthusiasms, terrors, purges, bloody war, and a final deflation of many ideals including the reductioadabsurdum of a hero-father image to the “cult of the personality.” In 1962 Stalin’s body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum. Many statues to him were also torn down. It is of this that Alexander Tvardovsky seems to be speaking in his poem “The Statue’s Sundered Plinth”:
The statue’s sundered plinth is being smashed,
The steel of drills is sending up a howl.
The special hardset mixture of cement
Was calculated to endure millennia.
The time for re-evaluationcame so soon….
This is no statue of Ozymandias swallowed by desert sands. It is a statue “reduced to scrap by human hands,” a symbolic shattering of so much blind faith among those who did not realize the full extent of the corruption and machinations involved in the Leader’s ruthless way of running and foreshortening the lives of others.
“Re-evaluation came so soon….” Yes, there was need of it. Need of criticism. Of salutary doubt. Even skepticism. Of irony, the weapon of the unbeliever. Why had so many innocent men and women been butchered, starved? Why should Jews be persecuted in the Soviet Union too? Jewish doctors falsely accused of monstrous plots? Why should poets be driven to suicide? Why should modern art, even impressionism, be considered degenerate xxiiiand made a mock of? Was Socialist Realism a reality? Why should so many lies have been propagated? Why so much sheer hypocrisy? Was the Revolution dead?—These and a host of other disturbing questions assailed not only the young poets but much of the population as well. Doubts there had to be, but not everyone could live by doubt. Purification there had to be. A restoration of belief even if only in a purer language. It was necessary to rediscover some Russian virtues outside of militant puritanism, to rediscover feeling, warmth, compassion. The Russian landscape too. The poet knows what he does not want to be. But he is also determined “to be.” Only by being can he do something to repair the damage, to cleanse what is rotten, to make up for deception and betrayal. What can he do? He can at least defend innocence, the integrity of art, expose injustice, inveigh against corruption. Lyricism in itself has a certain quality of innocence. Boris Pasternak’s “Hamlet” lyrically confronts the universe and sees himself involved in “a drama of duty and self-denial,” a sort of ritual of self-sacrifice to protest the vicious circle of corruption and hypocrisy:
14. “Visit to Peredelkino.” New YorkTimes Magazine Section, January 30, 1966, p. 37.
15. The most recent—1966—edition of Pasternak’s Stikhi (Verses), a selection of his poems, numbers 100,000 copies.
I’malone. The Pharisees swamp all.
Living is no country stroll.
Andrey Voznesensky, on the other hand, asks in “Oza”:
Will the trochee, silver flutist, perish
As trout have died when blocked by river dams?
The voices of those who have suffered blend with the voices of those who still have hope. Therein lies the essential drama and the rekindling power of the new Russian poetry as it struggles to rise to new human heights above the welter of conflict and falsehood, and above “the daily grind” against which Mayakovsky’s “boat of love” had crashed, and renew itself in the purer “running stream” of lyrical energy.
5. THE INDIVIDUAL POETS. THEIR STYLE AND THEME
It is clear at a glance that the new poets use a variety of forms. It is certainly not any particular poetic form that unites or distinguishes them from their immediate predecessors. They are freer xxivto experiment with form and to use various combinations. The two extremes are, perhaps, to be found in Bella Akhumadulina and Andrey Voznesensky. Akhmadulina has tended on the surface to keep to the pattern of classical rhymed stanzas, but her meter is more subtle and broken than would appear at first sight. But in her longer poem “My Genealogy” we also find her using more varied forms. Voznesensky, on the other hand, has moved very rapidly from the comparative simplicity of his earlier lyrics to an increasingly complex form of presentation. He was complex enough in his “Digressions,” but in “Oza” he went a step further from the standpoint of form, producing a hybrid of alternating passages of verse and prose. His verse, already varied enough, now ranges from simple narrative and love song to philosophical comment, parody and satire. His verbal texture is tricky; he is fond of manipulating verbal roots and using a great deal of assonance and alliteration. Victor Sosnora of Leningrad, a poet of smaller range, to date, is another who manages to create a sort of impasto of verbal effects that reminds one of the language-delving and language-recreation once carried on by Victor Khlebnikov (1885–1922), officially a Russian Futurist, but in reality a deeply Slavic, fanatic lover of the word, a sort of wilder, stranger Gerard Manley Hopkins. In some of his earlier poems, Ivan Kharabarov also has some of the same dense textural verbal quality and, in form, there is some similarity between him and Sosnora.
In Leonid Martynov and Yevgeny Vinokurov we see two poets of different generations, who yet have some affinity in their simplicity of language and clarity of form, as well as in their attitude of restrained commentators upon life and history. They both also tend to be somewhat abstract. Yet there are essential differences. Martynov, who suffered from repression in the Stalinist era and who wrote many poems without being able to publish them, emerged in 1956 with his Verses, which then had considerable repercussions. His later poems, though still restrained in tone, are much freer in form, but his lines are meticulously and economically architectured. In simple but carefully chosen words he makes almost wry but still lyrical comments on various aspects of life including those which are of the greatest concern to all thinking Russians. His work has increased in popularity and he has exercised a considerable influence on the xxvyounger poets. Vinokurov, a war veteran, is also steadily attracting an ever wider audience. His comments on life are distinctly more philosophical, even metaphysical, yet he manages to combine his philosophy with a concrete sense of everyday life. From being mainly concerned with his war experiences, like so many others, he is becoming increasingly interested in people or “characters.” His form might be called spontaneous and transparent. One is hardly aware of it. His vocabulary, again, is simple. One is never arrested by any strange combination of words or syllables. There is no rich texture and seldom a striking image; and yet a song comes through and, with it, the image of a situation and, beyond it, a question is raised. In Stalin’s time, his poetry might have been condemned as “idealist,” as was Pasternak’s esthetic and autobiographical essay, Safe Conduct, in 1931.
Victor Bokov, another victim of the past, has turned out to be a very natural and pure lyricist of deeply Russian feeling and language. He is no modernist and does not pursue form for its own sake. His domain is the countryside; nature, his companion. He is essentially a nature poet, though he also writes of love and war. He is personally much appreciated by poets like Voznesensky and Yevtushenko.
Novella Matveyeva, the second woman poet to be included in this anthology, is very different, both in the form and content of her poetry, from Bella Akhmadulina. She lacks the latter’s classic polish, sense of irony, and lyrical coolness. She tends to write rather longer lyrics in a somewhat freer form. She plunges into and gets wrapped up in her subject. Her language is denser and she likes using lyrical refrains which are also images. Her world is a childhood world, a world of dreams, memories, and quick impressions. In her dream-like “Hypnosis,” however, she shows herself capable of writing a long sustained poem of meticulously elegant description of a tropical scene, which brings to mind a Douanier Rousseau landscape.
To read Bulat Okudzhava is to experience a warm, friendly feeling. Here is a poet, who has been through the hell of war and still loves life and song. He sings of love and ordinary people. He also sings of war, but not to glorify it as his “Paper Soldier” will demonstrate. He is outspoken and sincere. He has a sense of varied rhythm, and his form is plastic and adaptable.
xxviRobert Rozhdestvensky, one of the pioneers of the middle 1950’s, has done much traveling in the Soviet Union, and this is reflected in his various cycles of poems. He writes of love and travel, and occasionally touches upon civic issues. His poems tend to be long, because he splits the lines into word and phrase patterns, a style of writing developed by Mayakovsky and Asseyev. He has been severely criticized in the past, but is perhaps today not the pioneer he used to be. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is undoubtedly the best known of the younger poets of this decade. He is the only one of them to have written and published an extremely interesting and revealing Autobiography. He is a poet of great energy, courage, and extreme determination. His poetic work is growing by leaps and bounds. As a poet, he combines a strain of personal, more intimate lyricism with what he feels to be his civic mission of exposing and castigating those who foster injustice or hide corruption. He can be a Hamlet-gladiator in the Coliseum in Rome or he can argue with Khrushchev and roundly tell off the leader of the Komsomol (“Letter to Yesenin”). His form is varied; his texture thinner or richer. His content can be appealing or provoking. He can not only be a militant tribune, but also a moody lyricist as in his recent poem “The Sigh”16:
And now I’mtired.
I’vebecome shutin,
I have ceased to trust.
At times, when in my cups,
I almost catch myself exploding.
But no explosion comes,
only a sigh …
Iosif Brodsky is perhaps the strangest and most isolated of the poets. In a sense, everything is still ahead for him. By some he is considered the most promising of Soviet poets. He certainly has rich technique for one so young. It is to be hoped that he will soon be released from his banishment. He is a poet of strange imagination. Both his city and his countryside are ghostly. His feeling of loneliness is alarming. And yet his rich and peculiar talent must be allowed to flourish.
16.Den Poezii. M. 1965
xxviiIosif Brodsky is certainly an exception on the Soviet scene. So, in another way, is Yury Galanskov, whose formally Mayakovskian “The Human Manifesto” is outwardly the most rebellious poem in this collection. The poem is hardly typical of other Soviet work, and could only have been published in one of the “underground” magazines—in this case Phoenix I. Leonid Gubanov, the youngest of all, is just beginning to publish. In his latest poems he seems to be influenced by Khlebnikov. He has already been in trouble. It is to be hoped he has a strong backbone.
The themes most of these poets have in common are the memories of war and suffering, Russian nature, a sense of compassion for the ordinary man, a renewal of the love theme, hatred of falsehood and corruption, a desire to find a new justification and ideal for the Revolution, and the need to insist on the integrity of the artist.
In an Anthology such as this, which suffers from the limitations imposed upon it by the bilingual texts, it has been impossible to include a number of other new poets of interest and quality (Yuna Moritz, Naum Korzhavin, Vladimir Tsybin, David Samoilov, Tamara Zhirmuskaya, Rimma Kozakova, and certain others, for example). This omission may later be repaired.
george reaveyNew York, May, 1966
THE NEW RUSSIAN POETS: 1953 to 1966
BORIS PASTERNAK
1890–1960
As a poet, Boris Pasternak can be seen in the light of at least four rather distinct periods. His first period (1912–23) culminated in the twin volumes My Sister Life and Themes and Variations. In his second period (1923–32), Pasternak attempted to grapple with the Russian Revolution as an historical event (in his 1905,Captain Schmidt and The Waves). The third period (1932–53), that of On Early Trains and Spacious Earth, a period also full of silences, consisted of his attempt to resolve in his own way the problems arising out of the Stalinist insistence on the platform of Socialist Realism. This was the period of collectivization, the purges, the war, the Zhdanov restrictions and the drive against cosmopolitanism. For all its terrors, this protracted period of apparent frustration but intense inner concentration laid the foundation for Pasternak’s ultimate international fame (the DoctorZhivago novel and the Nobel Prize 1958). But Pasternak also produced new cycles of poems (the Zhivago and the Rift In TheCloud cycles), which were different in theme, tone and technique from his earlier work. Thus, as from 1954, Pasternak re-emerges in a new light as an influential poet of the Fifties. This is what justifies his inclusion in this anthology of New Poets. The intensely dramatic “Hamlet” poem illustrates not only his new theme and style, but also his impact on the younger generation—the poem was included in one of the “underground” magazines in 1961. The second poem, “Insomnia” (1953) was published posthumously and shows that the full extent of Pasternak’s later work is not yet known.—Pasternak was born in Moscow. His father was a distinguished portraitist and illustrator. By 1912, Boris Pasternak had decided to be a poet after exploring the possibilities of music and philosophy. He was to prove an essentially lyrical poet. His later poetic development was considerably delayed owing to the mistaken zeal of the dogmatist critics.
HAMLET
Talk is hushed. I tread the boards.
Leaning on the post of the door,
Distantly I catch the stir
Of what’s happening in this age.
Darkly night admonishes
With a thousand lenses trained.
Abba Father, if Thou wouldst,
Bear this chalice past my lips.
I adore Thy strict design,
And consent to act this part.
But another drama’s playing:
So, for once, may I be spared.
But the acts have been ordained,
Irreversible the journey’s end.
I’m alone. The Pharisees swamp all.
Living is no country stroll.
1954
