more refined than her poems drawing on rural folklore.) However, the poem is marked by the stylistic features that characterized Modernist pieces in the folkloric style: fixed epithets (‘gold-winged fire’); negative constructions (‘not wicked, not kind’); and the use of parallelism (see particularly the ‘hem’ and ‘shoes’ of lines 9–10). At the same time, the poem was a self-portrait, a statement of the poet’s right to defy convention, to exist beyond the official scripts of ‘birth and marriage certificates’.
The fact that Modernists’ work in the folk style was much closer to authentic rural popular culture than the writings of the Russian Romantics was one reason why the early twentieth century also saw poetry by actual members of the Russian lower classes enter the literary mainstream for the first time. Where nineteenth-century ‘peasant poets’, such as Aleksey Koltsov, had been incidental curiosities, their twentieth-century successors, above all Nikolay Klyuev, were formidable aesthetic and intellectual presences. Klyuev fused the dialect and natural phenomena of the far North, his birthplace, with esoteric Eastern philosophy, the theology of sects such as the Flagellants and the Self-Castrators, and citations of epic from Finland to North America. His was an extraordinary and individual artistic vision, where death was ‘a squall/rumbling on foam-filled wagons/to life’s outer shore’, where the classical muse was replaced by a skylark, or a whale breasting the Arctic swell, and where Lenin, a ‘cedar frost in Spring’, was evoked as emotionally as ‘the crystal voice of whooper swans’. For his part, Klyuev’s contemporary and sometime comrade-inarms Esenin, though a less considerable poet, was, forty years after his death, to become the most popular poet in Russia, with a poem that lamented the loss of youth vanishing ‘like white smoke from the apple trees’ sung to the guitar in millions of hostels and private flats.
By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed
themselves in folk lexis and in popular tradition. The proletarian poets of pre-revolutionary worker journals and post-revolutionary Proletcult groups inclined to a stylistically conventional late Romanticism of foundry sparks and burning furnaces. And Socialist Realism made incumbent on writers the use of a style that would be ‘accessible to the mass reader’ rather than based on the putative language of that reader in his or her pre-educated state: this curtailed experiments in skaz in prose and poetry alike. By the time that literary adventurousness resurfaced again, in the 1960s, the majority of the Russian population was living in towns, and rural Russia (transformed by mass literacy, radio, and later television) was no longer the storehouse of ‘folk culture’ it once had been. But skaz of a Zoshchenkian kind (based on urban popular speech) began to enjoy some popularity again, particularly among writers not publishing in Soviet official sources (where prohibitions on use of ‘obscene language’, that is, the swear-words found in just about every sentence of real popular speech, meant that street language could appear only in bowdlerized form). It was employed not only in neo-Realist studies of the Soviet and post-Soviet underworld, but also in texts of greater literary and philosophical ambition, such as Yuz Aleshkovsky’s revenge narrative, The Hand (1980), in which the narrator’s disgust at the official who purged his family during collectivization juxtaposes the miraculous beauty of the man’s possessions to their owner, apostrophized as ‘you heap of shit’.
Much of the discussion in this book has emphasized the centredness of Russian literary tradition, as expressed in the demands made by generations of critics that writing should serve a serious purpose, and in the dominance of an enduring canon of great writers celebrated by memorials, informal commemorations, and by successive educational systems. In Chapter 6, I argued that this centredness placed women writers at the borders of their culture, made them provincials in terms of the literary heritage, as it were. This chapter has shown that centredness had its limits. To be sure, Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inhabited an imperial mindset, one in which
non-Russians were often seen as colourful ethnographical exhibits, as examples of quaint or amusing otherness. Yet at the same time, the geographical peripheries of empire, in particular ‘the East’, could serve to unsettle reflective Russians’ conviction of their own identity, leading them to question the nature of distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. And in the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for the exotic inside Russian culture became common, with folklore now seen as a repository of attractively barbaric themes and language, rather than a store of material that had to be ‘genteelized’ before it could be admitted to polite culture. This transformation of the standing of folklore in turn allowed writers from beyond the educated male elite (peasants, women, ethnic minorities) to profit from their own marginality, to exploit a situation where ‘provincialism’ (in the transferred sense used above) became a mark of distinction, rather than a sign of inferiority.
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Chapter 8
‘O Muse, be obedient to the command of God’
The spiritual and material worlds
Monuments don’t turn out well in Russia (the ones to Nikolay Gogol and so on). That’s because the only tolerable kind of monument we seem to be able to build is a chapel, with an icon lamp perpetually burning for ‘the servant of God Nikolay’.
(Vasily Rozanov, 1913)
In Pushkin’s writing generally, God is not usually as prominent as he is in ‘Monument’. Notable, for example, is the omission of any aspect of Christian belief or practice from Evgeny Onegin, including even the Lenten fasting and Easter feasting that would have been annual events in the household of a real-life Larin family. (In the 1850s, a British visitor to Russia described Holy Week as a time when ‘the only sound that from time to time broke the mournful stillness which reigned throughout the house was the monotonous voice of the priest’.) A carefree Voltairean in his early days, Pushkin was later embarrassed by his youthful godlessness (as is indicated by his attempts to remove his irreverent poem about the Virgin Mary, The Gabrieliad, from circulation). Yet he also belonged to a generation where the eighteenth-century mistrust of religious ‘enthusiasm’ was strong. Unlike his sister Olga, a fervent believer and the author of religious poetry in French, he did not incline to explicit statements of faith. To be sure, the theme of imminent death figured largely in his later poems, some of which, such as ‘Whether I wander along the noisy streets’ (1829), see choosing a resting-place as
the only way in which the will may be exercised. And several poems of 1836 juxtapose worldly power and religious feeling, which latter draws in the lyric hero despite his strong sense of personal sin (as the critic Sergey Davydov has argued, there is strong reason to suppose that these poems, including ‘Monument’, may have formed part of a poetic cycle round the theme of Holy Week).