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Imagination Governs the World
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14519 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1988 |
5,922 Words |
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Michael Scammell
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A CAPTIVE LION
Elaine Feinstein
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987
304 pp., $19.95
THE SELECTED POEMS OF MARINA TSVETAYEVA
Elaine Feinstein, trans.
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987
112 pp., $12.95
The tragic history of Russian literature since the October Revolution mirrors the melancholy progress of the country itself. From the very first days after the Bolshevik coup, and during the civil war that followed it, the literary community was split three ways. For every poet--like Blok and Mayakovsky--who supported the Reds from the outset, there were equally talented writers (e.g. Bunin, Ivanov, Gippius) who threw in their lot with the Whites and emigrated when the Whites were defeated. Many more, including Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak, to name just a few, while not terribly sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, were unable to bring themselves to accept exile. They decided to await events and to become, as Leon Trotsky later dubbed them, "fellow travelers."
In the case of these ambivalent writers, patriotism and attachment to the language eventually prevailed. In 1922 Akhmatova even boasted of her decision not to leave and expressed pity for the exile's lot. Yet the "bitter wormwood" she detected in "alien bread" had already invaded her own diet and was to remain an inescapable ingredient until the end of her days. The fatal moment of illumination for her, as for so many others, had come the preceding year with the summary execution of her ex-husband, Nikolai Gumilyov (also a fine poet), for alleged counter-revolutionary activities. The sacramental shot fired anonymously in one of the numerous basements of the Cheka reverberated through the Soviet literary world like the tolling of a bell and sent a new wave of emigrating writers into the indifferent and unwelcoming arms of Western Europe.
The symbolism of this grisly event, however, was brushed aside by the majority of those who stayed, who, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, allowed hope to triumph over experience. Even when the popular peasant poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925, there were plenty to aver that it was a personal, not a political, tragedy. And although this was a much harder view to sustain when Vladimir Mayakovsky, unofficial pet laureate of the revolution, put a bullet through his head (having earlier, as he put it, "stepped on the throat of his own song") in 1930, it was not until the following decade, when Stalin's purges swept hundred of writers into the labor camps, that Russian literary men saw their worst nightmares realized.
Mandelstam, who had courted danger with a fierce poem lampooning Stalin, was to perish unrecognized (and probably insane) in a remote corner of Siberia. Akhmatova narrowly escaped arrest, but both her second husband and her son (by the murdered Gumilyov) were sucked into the maw of the gulag. Writers and critics who showed the slightest signs of public resistance were either imprisoned or simply killed, and a dark night descended on Russian culture such as it had not known since the Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century.
The fate of the writers
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