Twentieth-century Russian Poetry

TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY E DITED BY K ATHARINE H ODGSON , J OANNE S HELTON AND A LEXANDRA S MITH Reinventing the Canon To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/294 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. ONLINE SURVEY In collaboration with Unglue.it we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used. We really value your participation, please take part! CLICK HERE Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry Reinventing the Canon Edited by Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2017 Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith. Copyright of each chapter is maintained by the author. 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Anna Akhmatova and Moisei Nappelbaum are represented by FTM Agency, Ltd., Russia ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-087-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-088-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-089-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-090-1 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-091-8 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0076 Cover image and design: Heidi Coburn All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Notes on Contributors vii 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry and the Post-Soviet Reader: Reinventing the Canon Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith 1 2. From the Margins to the Mainstream: Iosif Brodskii and the Twentieth-Century Poetic Canon in the Post-Soviet Period Aaron Hodgson 43 3. ‘Golden-Mouthed Anna of All The Russias’: Canon, Canonisation, and Cult Alexandra Harrington 63 4. Vladimir Maiakovskii and the National School Curriculum Natalia Karakulina 95 5. The Symbol of the Symbolists: Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon Olga Sobolev 123 6. Canonical Mandel′shtam Andrew Kahn 157 7. Revising the Twentieth-Century Poetic Canon: Ivan Bunin in Post-Soviet Russia Joanne Shelton 201 8. From Underground to Mainstream: The Case of Elena Shvarts Josephine von Zitzewitz 225 9. Boris Slutskii: A Poet, his Time, and the Canon Katharine Hodgson 265 10. The Diasporic Canon of Russian Poetry: The Case of the Paris Note Maria Rubins 289 11. The Thaw Generation Poets in the Post-Soviet Period Emily Lygo 329 12. The Post-Soviet Homecoming of First-Wave Russian Émigré Poets and its Impact on the Reinvention of the Past Alexandra Smith 355 13. Creating the Canon of the Present Stephanie Sandler 393 Bibliography 425 Index 471 Notes on Contributors Alexandra Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. Her research focuses primarily on modern Russian poetry and literary culture, in particular the career of Anna Akhmatova, and she is currently writing a monograph on Russian literary fame and the phenomenon of literary celebrity. Alexandra is also working on a longer-term project, The Poem in the Eye: The Visual Dimension of Russian Poetry , which investigates Russian poetry from the seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the different ways in which poems prompt the reader to visualise, and the varied relationships that exist between Russian poetry and the visual arts. Her publications include The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors (2006) and ‘Anna Akhmatova’, in Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland (eds.), Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (2012). Email: a.k.harrington@durham.ac.uk Katharine Hodgson ’s research focuses on twentieth-century Russian poetry, particularly the complexities faced by writers during the Soviet period, and how attitudes towards the cultural legacy of the USSR have evolved since 1991. Katharine has published extensively on the topic, including with Alexandra Smith, The Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry Canon and Post-Soviet National Identity (2017) and Voicing the Soviet Experience: the Poetry of Ol ́ga Berggol ́ts (2003). Between 2010 and 2013 Katharine led a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth- Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008’ (http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/ modernlanguages/russian/research/russianpoetrycanon), which has enabled her to examine how the twentieth-century poetry canon has viii Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith been revised in recent years. This book is the fruit of this productive collaboration. Email: K.M.Hodgson@exeter.ac.uk Aaron Tregellis Hodgson is currently writing his doctoral thesis, entitled ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream, or the Mainstream to the Margins? Joseph Brodsky’s Canonical Status in the West and Russia in the post-Soviet Period’. His doctoral research is funded by the AHRC as part of the project ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008.’ Email: aaron.hodgson87@gmail.com Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. He has written widely about Russian Enlightenment literature, Pushkin, and modern poetry. He is completing a book about Mandel ′ stam’s late poetry called Mandelstam and Experience: Poetry, Politics, Art . He has edited and introduced new translations of Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time and Leo Tolstoi, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories , both for Oxford World’s Classics. Email: andrew. kahn@seh.ox.ac.uk Natalia Karakulina completed her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her thesis ‘Representations of Vladimir Maiakovskii in the Post-Soviet Russian Literary Canon’ assembled evidence from a range of post-1991 publications to show how Maiakovskii’s position has been affected by the wide-ranging rejection of writers strongly associated with the official Soviet culture. The thesis contributes to the body of research analysing the development of the Russian literary canon in the post- Soviet period. Email: N.Karakulina@exeter.ac.uk Emily Lygo is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. Her main research interests are Russian poetry especially of the Soviet period, Soviet literary politics and policy, literary translation in Russia and Anglo-Soviet relations. Her translation of Tatiana Voltskaia’s Cicada: Selected Poetry & Prose was published in 2006. She is also the author of Leningrad Poetry 1953–75: The Thaw Generation (2010), and The Art of Accommodation (2011). Email: E.F.Lygo@exeter.ac.uk Maria Rubins is Senior Lecturer in Russian Literature and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London. She works on Russian literature and cultural history of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from a comparative and ix Notes on Contributors interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, her research interests include modernism, exile and diaspora, national and postnational cultural identities, the interaction between literature and other arts, canon formation, postcolonial, bilingual and transnational writing, Russian- French cultural relations, and Russian-language literature in Israel. Her most recent book is Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (2015; a revised and expanded Russian translation is forthcoming from the NLO Publishing House, Moscow). Email: m.rubins@ucl.ac.uk Stephanie Sandler is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her research centres mainly on poetry and cinema. Stephanie has written about Pushkin and myths of Pushkin in Russian culture, and about the contemporary poetry of Russia and of the United States. She has a long-standing interest in women writers and in feminist theory, and her work also draws on psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual studies, and post-modernist theories. Stephanie is also a translator of Russian poetry. Her publications include Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989); Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (2004); and three edited collections: Rereading Russian Poetry (1999); Self and Story in Russian History (2000; with Laura Engelstein); and Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (1993; with Jane Costlow and Judith Vowles). Email: ssandler@fas.harvard.edu Joanne Shelton has undertaken research into the role of educational institutions and publishers in the canon formation process. She has collated information for entry in the searchable bibliographical database of the ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008’ project, which was designed to show quantitative changes in the prominence of a given poet in post-1991 publications, and the extent of his or her appearances in textbooks and literary histories. Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include literary and film theory, critical theory, Russian literature of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and the history of ideas and the interaction between literary and visual modes of artistic expression. Alexandra is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian x Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton and Alexandra Smith Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006). She has also written numerous articles on Russian literature and culture, as well as European and American literature. Currently she is working on several publications related to the AHRC project ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry, 1991–2008’, in which she participated as Co-Investigator. Email: Alexandra.Smith@ed.ac.uk Olga Sobolev is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She researches Russian and European culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Olga’s recent publications include From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s (with Angus Wrenn, 2017), ‘Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Russia’, in Leonee Ormond (ed.), The Reception of Tennyson in Europe (2016), ‘The Only Hope of the World’: George Bernard Shaw and Russia (with Angus Wrenn, 2012), The Silver Mask: Harlequinade in the Symbolist Poetry of Blok and Belyi (2008) and articles on Leo Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov, Boris Akunin and Viktor Pelevin. Email: o.sobolev@lse.ac.uk Josephine von Zitzewitz is presently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Slavonic Studies, Cambridge University, having previously held a lectureship at Oxford University. She is working on Leningrad samizdat , with a particular focus on samizdat journals, the networks that formed around them and their function as early social media. Her monograph on samizdat poetry, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974–1980: Music for a Deaf Age was published in 2016, and she has written several articles on poetry and late Soviet culture. Her second interest is translation, and she envisages a new project bringing together young Russian poets, scholars and translators. Email: jhfv2@cam.ac.uk 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry and the Post-Soviet Reader: Reinventing the Canon Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith The aim of this collection is to investigate the state of the Russian twentieth-century poetic canon in the context of socio-political changes triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 1 This introductory essay sets out the larger context of cultural evolution in which the alterations to the poetry canon, to be discussed in the chapters that follow, took place. It explores developments in Russian culture during a period which has seen both the dramatic disruption of links with the past, as well as the rediscovery of neglected aspects of the twentieth century’s cultural legacy. The process of reshaping the poetry canon is complex and multifaceted. This Introduction will focus on three main aspects related to canon change. It will start by considering the particular challenges posed by the mass of forgotten or previously unknown poetry from different parts of the century which became available over a short period 1 The chapters in this book grew from a series of workshops at which contributors gathered to share their ideas and discuss how they might develop their work for publication. These workshops, held at the University of Exeter in December 2011, the University of Edinburgh in July 2012, and the University of Exeter in January 2013, were supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which the editors of this volume gratefully acknowledge. © 2017 K. Hodgson and A. Smith, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0076.01 2 Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith of time. The following section will explore the relationship between the poetry canon and identity, looking at the influence of nostalgia on shaping perceptions of poetry associated with the Soviet past, as well as of the modernist poetic legacy of the early years of the century. After focusing the discussion on poets and poetic groups, the introduction then explores the role of literary criticism in canon change, considering how particular strands in twentieth-century Russian criticism have helped to form the poetry canon. Just as has been the case for the poetry canon, the canon of literary criticism has seen considerable change in recent years with the recovery of formalist thought, which has in turn influenced the way twentieth-century poetry has been perceived. The concluding part of the Introduction outlines the diversity of the emerging canon, as illustrated in the individual chapters that follow, and considers the more inclusive, less dogmatic approach to canon formation that seems to have developed since the early 1990s. Raw Materials for Revising the Canon During the last century the Soviet state sought to exercise far-reaching control over all aspects of culture, with unprecedented levels of state intervention in education and scholarship, literary criticism, and the publication and distribution of reading matter. Activity across all these fields contributes to the shaping of literary canons as a set of works and authors that are accorded exemplary status by, for example, their inclusion in educational syllabuses, literary histories, and anthologies. In the Soviet Union censorship meant that at any given time the works of certain authors could be deemed unpublishable, withdrawn from libraries, excluded from critical and scholarly discussion. The work of authors who had emigrated became largely inaccessible to most readers inside the country; some who remained in the Soviet Union were made subject to publication bans, while others preferred not to engage in the negotiations with editors and censors which were an unavoidable part of the process of getting their work published. The return to ‘pre- Gutenberg’ era culture in the 1920s and 1930s, when manuscripts were hidden, or shared only with a few trusted friends, was followed by the post-Stalin development of underground seminars, writers’ circles, and 3 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry and the Post-Soviet Reader journals, and the growth of self-published samizdat literature. 2 In the last decades of the Soviet Union’s existence there were steps towards creating a more inclusive poetry canon as some previously marginalised figures were brought back into the mainstream. From the late 1980s, however, as a result of the relaxation of censorship, and then its complete abolition, readers were faced with a hugely expanded accessible canon of twentieth-century works. 3 Émigré poets were published once more and countless texts emerged from the archives and the underground, at the same time as the state relinquished its monopoly control over cultural life. Now that the mechanisms that had maintained the reputations of some, suppressed others, and permitted only a partial knowledge of other poets’ output had been dismantled it was plain that the late-Soviet poetry canon, as expressed in literary histories and textbooks of the previous decade, was in need of an overhaul. In the Soviet Union the process of forming selective canons was monopolised by official state- controlled institutions; attempts to propose an alternative view of the canon through different channels were severely restricted, and were possible only in the later Soviet period among a small number of poets and readers active in unofficial underground culture. As the state set aside its role as cultural policeman, and so removed the underground’s reason for existing, the task of defining the shape of the poetry canon was now open to all comers. Whatever their opinions on the content of the canon, they had a common goal: to reshape a canon that had been constructed to serve the state’s narrow ideological ends. While this process is still at a relatively early stage, it is possible that individuals are able to exercise particular influence, though this is likely to decrease as more numerous and varied agents become involved. Partisan promoters of certain schools of poetry, of particular 2 Nadezhda Mandel ′ shtam refers to the 1930s as a ‘pre-Gutenberg era’ in her memoir Hope Against Hope , translated by Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1970), p. 192. 3 The terms ‘accessible canon’ and ‘selective canon’ (below) are taken from Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, New Literary History , 11: 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn 1979), 97–119 (pp. 98–99). For more on Fowler’s approach to categorising types of canon, see Olga Sobolev’s chapter in this volume, pp. 123 – 56 (p. 130). 4 Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith individuals, and of rival ideological outlooks were able to enter the arena alongside experts and enthusiasts who were concerned to present a broadly inclusive picture of the century’s poetry, as well as publishers who were facing new market conditions and having to deal with the question of what readers might be prepared to buy. The spread of the internet in Russia has made it possible for anyone with online access to read and respond to a wide range of material. Educational institutions also have their part to play, as do the state educational authorities who issue guidance on what is to be studied, in influencing ideas about which poets and works should be considered canonical. Participants in the process of canon formation are far more numerous and diverse than they were before 1991. The canon-forming process in Soviet Russia involved only limited numbers of agents; it was, moreover, disrupted and delayed by the effects of decades of censorship. Significant legal and institutional changes at the start of the 1990s helped to clear a path for major cultural shifts. One particularly important development was the emergence of free speech, legitimised by a new media law approved by the final Soviet Parliament in 1990 and by the new Russian government in 1991. In the words of prominent Russian media expert Nadezhda Azhgikhina, this law ‘represented the greatest achievement of the liberal legal experts of the perestroika era’. The emergence of free speech in the Russian media paved the way for a large-scale rediscovery of previously censored or suppressed works of literature and cinema, as well as artefacts created in the Russian underground and by émigré artists. In the opinion of Frank Ellis, the official abolition of censorship was the most important factor in accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union and in changing the role of literature and of the author in Russian society. The Russian literary landscape changed significantly once readers could gain legitimate access to a wide range of different voices, especially when extensive online resources grew up alongside print culture, to create a vast, integrated information space. 4 A particular challenge confronting those involved in reconfiguring the canon was presented by the great number of poems that had emerged many years after they had been written, to be received in a dramatically 4 Frank Ellis, From Glasnost to the Internet: Russia’s New Infosphere (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 125–137. 5 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry and the Post-Soviet Reader changed cultural context. In the process of canon formation it is hardly unusual to see the reputations of authors change significantly over time. Aleksandr Pushkin, though celebrated in his own lifetime, was relatively neglected in the mid-nineteenth century, and his position as Russia’s ultra-canonical writer was secured only after a revival of his reputation starting in the 1870s. 5 It is much less common to see unknown authors, or formerly well-known poets whose work has been forgotten, brought in to the canon after several decades in obscurity. Some poets, such as Mariia Shkapskaia and Zinaida Gippius, made a brief re-appearance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it seems that they have yet to establish themselves in the canon, while those who, like Anna Akhmatova, had secured their canonical status in the later Soviet period, have retained it. Other, younger poets, for example Dmitrii Bobyshev, seem to have remained on the margins for reasons that are difficult to explain; Bobyshev may simply have been overshadowed by his famous contemporary, Iosif Brodskii. Part of the problem may be the fragmented way in which the ‘unknown’ poets have been received, separated from the context in which they created their work. The large twentieth-century poetic legacy that had come to light by the 1990s had not been subject to the kinds of processes involving contemporary would-be readers, publishers, and critics that contribute to the formation of canons. The task of assimilating such a volume of material went beyond simply integrating unknown or forgotten poets into an existing literary-historical narrative; the emergence of so much ‘new’ material made it clear that the existing narrative was fragmented, disjointed, and full of gaps caused by the deliberate suppression of information, or by straightforward lack of knowledge. The state of affairs in literary history that became clear by the 1990s mirrored the situation in broader accounts of the nation’s history. The process of rediscovering suppressed aspects of twentieth-century Russian history had made a tentative start during the post-Stalin Thaw period. This process resumed in the mid-1980s and quickly gathered pace, revealing numerous omissions and distortions in the official version. Attempts to supplant a familiar and reassuring version of the past with one that offered strange and disturbing perspectives were 5 Andrew Kahn, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin , edited by Andrew Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–7 (p. 5). 6 Katharine Hodgson and Alexandra Smith not perceived as the straightforward matter of establishing an objective and accurate historical account. How the past is remembered within a culture involves not just the need to preserve knowledge of it, but the emotional connections that exist with the culture of that past. The encounter with an unsettling history in the late 1980s and early 1990s evoked conflicting emotional responses: this ‘new’ past did not always sit comfortably with people’s memories of their own lived experience. Moves towards reshaping the previous century’s poetry canon have elicited a similarly mixed reactions from post-Soviet readers. There is an ambivalent attitude towards the poetry of the socialist realist tradition, in which nostalgia sits alongside unease about its open didacticism and aesthetic of accessibility. The poetry canon is one of the constructions that represents what a society considers worthy of being remembered, and contributes to the creation of a shared identity in the present. As the canon evolves in a shifting and unpredictable landscape, it expresses a complex relationship between the present and past as elements are foregrounded, neglected, or discarded. The canon has its own part to play in a wider social process of constructing collective memory, which is pieced together through the countless actions of individuals and institutions as they respond to cultural change, and, in turn, stimulate further such change. For a nation undergoing a reshaping of its recent history, at the same time as experiencing dramatic social and political change in the present, it is not surprising that such extensive upheavals have contributed to anxieties about modernity as much as they have encouraged excitement about the creative possibilities of cultural transformation. The sheer quantity of material that became available to Russian readers in a post-censorship, digitally connected world presented its own problems. In the early 1990s they were able to access a mass of virtually unknown literary texts from various decades of the twentieth century, but had little help in making sense of their relative cultural significance, particularly when works of high literature appeared on the same internet sites as texts aimed at mass entertainment. The ever- increasing volume of materials available online created an environment in which an expanding archive of digital cultural artefacts offered the resources from which selective canons might be drawn, rather than selective canons as such. At the same time, the role of literature, and of the poet in particular, began to change significantly. Michael Wachtel 7 1. Introduction: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry and the Post-Soviet Reader aptly identifies as a defining feature of Soviet-era culture the special role that was ascribed to poets: ‘in a society that controlled all sources of information, people looked to literature as a secret source of wisdom and a moral compass’, and the dissident poet, capable of outwitting the totalitarian regime, was often perceived ‘as a cultural hero unimaginable in the West’. 6 In the post-Soviet period, however, the familiar roles of the poet as martyr and prophet withered away, paving the way for a new role for the post-Soviet poet as an entertainer competing with television sitcoms and Hollywood films. 7 There was a proliferation of performances of Russian poetry both on television channels and internet sites, but no clear guidance for viewers about the cultural value of these recordings, or whether they should be treated purely as an eccentric collection of archival materials. Nevertheless there are indications that the Soviet notion of culturedness continued to make itself felt, even in the new, commercially focused world. 8 Twentieth-century Russian poets often featured in advertisements for services, goods, and restaurants, signalling to consumers that at least some of the companies involved in the post-Soviet market valued high culture. For example, several advertisements for Slavianskii Bank contains references to the poetry of famous Russian modernist poets including Aleksandr Blok, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandel′shtam, and were nominated for a prize for the best video advertisements of the last twenty years. 9 While the boundary between high and mass cultural products became blurred, so too did temporal boundaries, when works created during the Revolutionary period emerged alongside writing from the Soviet underground of the late 1960s and 1970s, together with new texts by contemporary authors. Mark Lipovetsky recognises the difficulties created by the simultaneous appearance of the work of 6 Michael Wachtel, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 10. 7 Ibid. 8 As Vadim Volkov points out, in 1936 the Komsomol press in the Soviet Union launched a campaign promoting the notion of culturedness that was linked not only to attending the theatre and cinema but also to the ‘mastery of a correct, literary speech — manner’ associated with reading good literature. See Vadim Volkov, ‘The Concept of Kul′turnost ’: Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process’, in S talinism: New Directions , edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick (Routledge: London and New York, 2000), pp. 210–30 (p. 223). 9 ‘Bank Slavianskii, Poety: Mandel ′ shtam, Pasternak, Blok, Pushkin’, http://www. sostav.ru/columns/mmfr20/nominantCard.php?IDNominant=125