Maximilian Voloshin's Poetic Legacy and the Post-Soviet Russian Identity

M. Landa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137477859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.

P A R T 1

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The Bolshevik Revolution

C H A P T E R 1

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The Years of Apprenticeship

When Ivan Bunin met Voloshin in Odessa occupied by the Volunteer Army in 1919, in the midst of the raging Civil War, the former recalled his profound surprise both at Voloshin’s new poems about Russia and his new popularity:

He read here a lot of new poems about all kinds of terrible events and people, concerning both ancient and contemporary Bolshevik Russia. And he kept surprising me: he stepped so far forward both in writing and reciting poems, he became so strong in both. But while listening to him I could not help being disturbed. What kind of “magnificent,” self-loving, and, considering the time and place, sacrilegious eruption of words! And as usual, I kept asking myself: whom does he look like, after all? He looks fierce to me, his pince-nez shines seriously, everything in his body is seemingly lifted, inflated, the ends of his rich hair, separated on two equal sides, curl into rings, the beard is wonderfully round, little mouth opens in it so graciously, but thunders and howls so resonantly and powerfully. A burly peasant of the Russian serfdom? Priapus? A catodon?¹

Bunin’s other recollections of Voloshin are more sympathetic, but several important issues caused Bunin’s tone to change to sarcasm. To be sure, Bunin had mixed feelings about both Voloshin’s views on Bolshevik Revolution and his new popularity. Yet, instead of addressing what he found disturbing, he satirized the poet’s appearance. Who was Voloshin, after all, asked Bunin? He answered this question by likening the poet to Priapus, a minor Greek fertility god and humorous personage of Roman erotic art, or a whale that could swallow his listeners like his Biblical counterpart swallowed Jonah. In other words, Voloshin was not to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, while trying to take Voloshin off the podium of the poet-prophet of Russia, Bunin still conceded Voloshin’s new success in “writing and reciting poetry.”

Compare Bunin’s account to that of one of Voloshin’s listeners in Yalta a few months earlier, when the Bolsheviks had just ceded Crimea to the White Army. A young woman, writing incognito with the name, “Neizvestnaia” (The Unknown) recalls:²

M. Voloshin arrived with non-Russian punctuality, exactly at the appointed time, and, easily carrying his large agile body, quickly ran through the crowd to the stage. We were disappointed at first sight of him: overweight body and large beard made him look like a Russian merchant. But as soon as his soft melodious voice resounded and his ardent, powerful poetry flowed, the hearts of his young listeners were conquered . . . When he read “Dmetrius-Imperator” and poems on Sten’ka Razin and Pugachev that sounded very revolutionary, the audience went completely crazy. They applauded, shouted, stomped their feet, rushed to the poet on the stage, lifted him in the air, and threw flowers on him.³

Both accounts bring our attention to the poet’s perceived unromantic physique mythologized in accordance with the memoirist’s reactions to Voloshin’s poetry. But what disturbed Bunin, greatly appealed to Neizvestnaia and many Russian readers during the Civil War. They were enthralled by how Voloshin talked about the terrible events and people of Russia’s past and present, and what Bunin called above the “‘magnificent,’ self-loving, and, considering the time and place, sacrilegious eruption of words.” What was both disturbing and appealing about Voloshin’s poetry were his depictions of violence, whether in the Russian past or in the present revolution, along with his self-appointed mission of a poet-prophet of Russia. These two themes played important roles in Russian views of history and national identity at the turn of the century, shaped public responses to the Bolshevik Revolution, and gained new relevance during the Civil War, as Voloshin’s post-revolution popularity testifies.

Voloshin’s readiness to assume the status of the poet-prophet of Russia in the poems he wrote immediately after learning about the Bolshevik Revolution, and his readers’ willingness to accept his spiritual authority were based on an important modernist intellectual tradition that prepared both Voloshin and the Russian public for the advent of the revolution. In a way, there was already a scenario set in place for the case of the revolution both for the poet who wrote about it and for the subject matter of such poetry.

The Symbolist Poet-Theurge

Russia’s political and literary history in the preceding two centuries reinforced a popular belief in the major role of literature in the process of Russia’s national self-identification. Russia’s exposure to the European social thought initiated by Peter I, and the rise of national consciousness in the aftermath of Russia’s victory over Napoleon culminated in Decembrist aristocratic revolt against absolute monarchy and serfdom in 1825.⁴ After suppressing the revolt, Nicholas I unleashed reprisals that were unusually cruel for his time and established police control of all public expression, in particular targeting the writers. His high regard for writers’ ideological power was shared by the public. Russian readers expected their writers to take a moral stand against serfdom, absolute monarchy, and Russia’s lack of civil rights, as well as romanticize national values and the oppressed serfs. All major Russian nineteenth-century writers at some time in their lives were exalted by the literary critics as prophets of Russia. All of them believed, to various degrees, in this high vocation regardless of their social views.

Russian tsars responded with intimidation, silencing, and coercion of the writers who were gaining much popular recognition. The writers and poets, who brought about some of the best Russian literature we know today, were routinely exiled to areas far away from cultural centers or incarcerated, some spending years in Siberian labor camps and settlements. They were banned from traveling out of Russia or back to Russia, sent to die in active service on Caucasian frontlines or on dangerous diplomatic missions. Some were even subjected to the psychological torture of mock execution, as in the famous case of Dostoevsky. Once they died, the government considered them even more dangerous, as demonstrated by the case of Pushkin whose burial was carried out in secret by the police. Providing cultural commentaries both on the nineteenth-century persecution of writers and the modernist angry reaction to it,⁵ Voloshin wrote in 1924 in his poem “Russia:”

Волы в Тифлис волочат “Грибоеда,”

Отправленного на смерть в Тегеран;

Гроб Пушкина ссылают под конвоем

На розвальнях в опальный монастырь;

Над трупом Лермонтова царь: “Собаке -

Собачья смерть”—придворным говорит;

Промозглым утром бледный Достоевский

Горит свечой, всходя на эшафот . . .

И всё тесней, всё гуще этот список.⁶

Oxen drag “Griboed”⁷ to Tiflis.

He was sent to his death in Tehran;

Pushkin’s coffin is exiled under heavy guard

On a horse cart to a monastery-prison;

Above Lermontov’s corpse, the tsar says to his court:

“A dog’s death to a dog”;

On a chilly morning, pale Dostoevsky

Burns like a candle as he climbs the scaffold . . .

And this list keeps getting tighter, denser.⁸

In self-defeating fashion, state persecution further exposed the evils of despotism and elevated the status and purpose of Russian writers’ to the level of martyrdom. As a consequence, the nineteenth-century image of the Russian writer-prophet became inseparable from Russia’s social problems, and, with the rise of the revolutionary movement, linked to the circle of violence between state and opposition.

In the early 1890s the new and highly influential artistic movement of Symbolism started the epoch of Russian modernism characterized by the explosion of experimentation in art, philosophy, and religious thought and known as the Silver Age (1890s–1920s).⁹ As D. S. Mirsky pointed out, Symbolism played a much larger role in Russian literature than did its French counterpart in French literature. This is because it “raised the standard of excellency” in Russian poetry and literature in general after “the stagnation of ‘60, ‘70 and the hectic blossoming of ‘80.”¹⁰ Russian Symbolism was also more than an art movement. It was, as Bernice Rosenthal called it, a “surrogate religion” that started as a “religion of art” and developed into various forms of “религиозный поиск” (religious or spiritual search) practiced by a vast number of modernist artists, and thinkers, between 1900 and 1917. ¹¹ A new, experimental, and largely religious art movement, Symbolism, emerged at a time when the latest discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry, and physiology had promoted a scientific approach to social problems, and positivism became the leading and only accepted scientific worldview.¹² The belief that science was the only true means of cognition was accompanied by the crisis of religion and proliferation of alternative religions, mysticism, and the occult in Europe and Russia.¹³

The Symbolists reconciled the opposition between science and religion in their artistic theories, elevating art to the high status of both. They appropriated realist and positivist claims on the true depiction of life and the writer’s high pedagogical status, declaring that art is a better tool for exploring reality than nineteenth-century positivist science. The Symbolists believed that art eternally hints at the presence of mystery in the world and, therefore, art was the closest to discovering this mystery. As the foundation of art, a symbol “with its nature of multiple expression, polysemy and darkness of its last depth,” corresponded to the structure of the world more than anything else, and so art offered the best means to penetrate the material world.¹⁴ In addition to their cognitive claims concerning metaphysics, the Symbolists absorbed and popularized through their theoretical and literary writings the most burning social, religious, and philosophical ideas of their time, producing a powerful ideology that influenced Russian national and historical consciousness at the turn of the century. The Symbolist ideology would persist in various forms during the Soviet epoch, long after the end of Russian modernism.

Its central tenet was the divinization of the image of the poet as a “theurge,” collaborator of God, demigod, or divine agent whose poetic word could magically change life and Russia’s historical reality. The Symbolists’ views of the artist and artistic mission added a religious aspect to Friedrich Nietzsche’s rebellious and superhuman artist who goes against the grain of the common way of life.¹⁵ The forefather of Russian Symbolism, a poet and religious philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev offered an alternative to Nietzsche’s Übermensch in his concept of “Godmanhood:” evolution of the world as the history of the human reunification with God. The principles of Soloviev’s Godman and Nietzsche’s Übermensch were based on the philosophers’ respective views of death and the meaning of human life. Following philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov’s prediction that future scientists would be able to eliminate death and resurrect the dead, Soloviev believed that humankind can and should hurry to overcome death by achieving physical resurrection.¹⁶ For Soloviev, the path to physical resurrection lay in moral and spiritual self-perfection modeled on the Christian ideal.¹⁷

Soloviev, whose personality was larger than life, provided Symbolists with a native example of a superhuman artist-philosopher.¹⁸ Through his poetry, philosophical writings, and mythologized persona and biography, he introduced into Russian literature the concept of the poet as a theurge, and the idea of art as religious revelation. Theurgic art, according to Soloviev, had the mystical power to change the world and create new reality, society, and human beings. The poet-theurge has semi-divine dimensions as he is a collaborator of God and creator in his own right.¹⁹ Soloviev’s theurgic function of art gave theoretical grounds to the social direction of Symbolist art. In his article “Symbolism as a Weltanschauung,” (1903), for instance, Andrei Bely theorizes that the Sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   The Bolshevik Revolution
• Part II   The Dissolution of the USSR
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index