Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Reinventing the Canon

—Michael Pursglove, East-West Review, 16:2 (2017), 36-37

CHAPTER I

Katharine Hodgson, Alexandra Smith, Joanne Shelton, ‘Introduction: a canon under construction’

The introduction outlines the circumstances surrounding the reconfiguration of the Russian twentieth-century poetry canon since the early 1990s, and explores the complex factors at work in a process which has not resulted in widespread consensus, but that has underlined the extent of the cultural dislocations brought about by the years of Soviet control. These include spatial dislocations, as poets were exiled or emigrated; some enjoyed worldwide recognition, even as their work was unobtainable at home. There were temporal dislocations too, as works unpublished for decades after their composition finally emerged into print. Institutional and other structures with a potential to help shape the canon underwent dramatic transformations during the Soviet period. The academy and publishing were conscripted to impose the state-approved version of the canon; individual poets and groups of poets found their opportunities to propose their own canons and assert their own canonical status severely curtailed. In the post-Soviet era an array of previously isolated canons–official, underground, emigre, created by critics abroad–emerged in a new and uncertain cultural environment, exposed to the conflicting agendas of a publishing market and competing literary groups. The ways in which the poetry canon is being reshaped reflect contemporary concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural tradition through a narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation demonstrates the canon’s post-Soviet mutability and multiplicity.

CHAPTER II

Aaron Tregellis Hodgson, ‘From the margins to the mainstream: Joseph Brodsky and the 20th century poetic canon in the post-Soviet period’ 

This title alludes to one of Brodsky’s early poems (1962), and seems almost prophetic, marking his rise from near obscurity to fame in post-Soviet Russia. The chapter contextualizes Brodsky’s rise in post-Soviet Russia, as well as investigate the literary and extra-literary mechanisms at play in his canonization. The two parts of the chapter mirror the two stages of Brodsky’s canonization in Russia, using both a quantitative and qualitative methodology. The first part focuses on the immediate post-Soviet period, tracing Brodsky’s initial reception and noting the importance of such criteria as his biography, awards, and the de-Sovietisation that was taking place at the time. The second part concentrates on his posthumous reception and canonization, and aims to demonstrate that since Brodsky’s death in 1996 there has been a change in the post-Soviet Russian poetic canon to incorporate him.

CHAPTER III

Alexandra Harrington, '”Golden-Mouthed Anna of All The Russias”': Canon, Canonization, and Cult’

This chapter argues that Akhmatova's pre-eminent status in the contemporary canon rests not only on poetic talent but on extra-literary factors and processes which have elevated her to a form of secular sainthood. It explores the role played by biographies, critical studies, museums, and iconography in organising and generating her 'meaning' as cultural icon, and discusses the auto-canonization and self-mythologization strategies she employed to cultivate the paradoxical image of herself as victimized martyr and triumphant survivor. Akhmatova has become a compelling role model and icon for the post-Soviet intelligentsia, having successfully inscribed herself into a hitherto almost exclusively male tradition of Russian poet as heroic fighter against tyranny through a form of passive resistance which her gender made available to her. The chapter culminates in readings of two poetic works which have a particular canon-making thrust, 'Nas chetvero' and Poema bez geroia, and proposes a way of accounting for the canonical status of Akhmatova's major cycle Rekviem through its mnemonic qualities.

CHAPTER IV

Natalia Karakulina, ‘Vladimir Maiakovskii and the national school curriculum’ 

This chapter investigates the way the most canonical Soviet poet Vladimir Maiakovskii is represented in the post-Soviet school curriculum, looking at material from textbooks, teaching supplements, final exam questions etc. After a brief outline of Maiakovskii’s place in the Soviet school curriculum, the chapter analyses changes in his representation during the early 1990s when classic Soviet authors were sidelined, as well as more recent shifts which have restored Maiakovskii to the position of a major Russian poet. Since the late 1990s Maiakovskii’s love lyrics, largely ignored in the Soviet curriculum, have come to the forefront, and teachers have created an image of Maiakovskii which contradicts his Soviet legend, representing him as an insecure and tragic figure. The chapter argues that in spite of claims that this version is historically accurate, students at school are offered a one-sided representation of Maiakovskii which avoids discussion of the complexities that characterised the poet’s life and convictions.

CHAPTER V

Olga Sobolev, The Symbol of the Symbolists: Alexander Blok in the changing Russian literary canon’ 

The focus of this chapter is a comparative analysis of Alexander Blok’s critical reception within the framework of the Soviet and post-Soviet literary canon. Blok was the only Symbolist author successfully inscribed in the Soviet literary paradigm, thus presenting an indicative example of so-called ideologically driven canonisation – when the legacy of an author is reduced to art with a social function and he becomes a mouthpiece for a specific social group. The Soviet authorities represented Blok as a harbinger of revolution, while intelligentsia circles promoted his image as a refined aesthete. A more holistic outlook can be traced in post-Soviet times, but the main emphasis still remains inseparable from the configuration of the socio-political field: the prominence of Gnostic trends in Symbolist writing, highlighted by the revisionist spirit of the 1990s, has recently been replaced by a growing interest in their theosophical platform, in the line with the consolidation of the national idea in Putin’s Russia.

CHAPTER VI

Andrew Kahn, ‘Canonical Mandel′shtam’ 

Mandel′shtam’s recognition as a premier Russian poet developed posthumously and largely outside the Soviet Union. The deepest record of engagement with his legacy lies in the world of Anglo-American letters, by writers and critics including Henry Gifford, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Robert Lowell, Donald Davie and Joseph Brodsky. This chapter analyses this material as evidence of why the history of Mandel′shtam’s reputation spheres has significant implications for how we think about the mechanisms of canon-formation and poetic afterlives. The specific development of Mandel′shtam studies, with its critical views on his poetic technique, and the question of his poetic difficulty, will feature only as a subsidiary treatment to the main narrative of reputation building. The larger tendencies that emerge as patterns in this reception emanate from convictions about poetry and the role of the poet. To a large degree, the story is part of the chapter of Russia abroad and the recovery of silenced voices in the diaspora.

CHAPTER VII

Denis Akhapkin, ‘Joseph Brodsky and the Russian poetry canon’ 

This chapter shows how Brodsky constructs his own version of the Russian twentieth-century poetry canon and builds his own work into this canon. Since the mid-1960s, the poet uses subtexts and allusions in his own poems to create an implied image of the canon, which he makes explicit in his essays. In his poems Brodsky suggests his own position in the canon, as he reframes and transforms quotations from what he considers canonical Russian poems of the 20th century, creating a sense of something familiar which makes readers want to find out the origins of the text. Brodsky’s canonical thinking is clearly demonstrated, too, in his efforts to set out a definitive list of poets and texts in something approaching ‘Brodsky’s canon’, which, because of the poet’s popularity and authority among Russian readers, has had a significant effect on perceptions of the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry.

CHAPTER VIII

Joanne Shelton, ‘Ivan Bunin and the process of establishing his place in the post-Soviet canon of twentieth-century poetry’ 

This chapter explores the post-Soviet canonisation of the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ivan Bunin. Although he is more widely recognised as a prose writer, Bunin’s poetry is featuring more widely as part of the canon of Russian poetry of the twentieth century. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which the re-canonisation process has taken place and argue that the institutional model of canon formation, coupled with the ‘Bunin institution’, is currently having a more significant impact on Bunin’s canonicity than the poet-based model of canonisation. Furthermore, the chapter will seek to establish whether Bunin’s re-canonisation can be attributed solely to these models of canonisation, or whether other factors, such as good fortune or representativeness, have also influenced his canonical status.

CHAPTER IX

Josephine von Zitzewitz, ‘From underground to mainstream: the case of Elena Shvarts’

This chapter examines the enormous popularity of Elena Shvarts (1944 – 2010) in the 1990s and 2000s. Shvarts began her career in the Leningrad literary underground of the 1970s, which was then marginalised, but now recognised as one of the canonical trends in late 20th century Russian poetry, a judgement confirmed by numerous academic studies that define the Leningrad underground as integral to Russian postmodernism. This chapter argues that Shvarts was the only member of her peer group (Viktor Krivulin, Sergei Stratanovskii, Oleg Okhapkin and Alexander Mironov) who also entered the canon of post-Soviet Russia, instead of being only canonised as a 1970s underground poet. This is indicated with the help of a comparative bibliography of critical writings on these five poets; the subsequent sections are devoted to the analysis of key features of Shvarts’s poetics and person that might account for her accessibility and relevance beyond the Soviet context.

CHAPTER X

Katharine Hodgson, ‘Boris Slutskii: a poet, his time, and the canon’ 

While the bulk of Slutskii’s poetry remains little known, he is represented in the canon by poems emphasising his role as a chronicler of the Soviet experience, and so risks being seen as a figure of limited relevance in the post-Soviet age. This chapter explores three dominant themes in post-Soviet discussions of Slutskii’s significance as a poet: his allegiance to the Communist Party, his Jewish identity, and his poetics. It investigates the extent to which changes in the canon have made it possible to read Slutskii outside the interpretative models that have dominated his reception so far. It assesses whether the most prominent view of his work as testimony to the upheavals of his times has been challenged, or at least supplemented by the view of Slutskii as the link between the early twentieth-century avant-garde and the Soviet underground, and of Slutskii as both a Russian and a Jewish poet.

CHAPTER XI

Maria Rubins, ‘Transcending the national canon: Russian poetry in inter-war France’ 

Focusing on the Paris Note group of Russian émigré poets that was formed in inter-war France, this chapter investigates the relationship between the younger émigré poets, who shared a distinctly transnational, hybrid and deracinated identity, and the Russian canon, master narrative, and poetic tradition, and considers how European and French poetic canons and cultural trends shaped the Paris Note poets’ aesthetic self-definition. It traces their revision of the classical Russian canon, as reflected in their meta-discourse and intertextual allusions in their verse, as well as the parameters of Paris Note poetic canon, as articulated by the mentor of the group, Georgii Adamovich, and as interpreted in the praxis of the younger émigré poets. The chapter will examine the place occupied by the Paris Note poets, for many years excluded from publication in Russia, in the revised twentieth-century poetry canon.

CHAPTER XII

Emily Lygo, ‘The Thaw generation poets in the post-Soviet period’ 

By the 1980s, the canon of poets for the Thaw generation had largely settled, and included poets already established before the Khrushchev Thaw such as Tvardovskii, Martynov and Tikhonov and poets who began publishing and became well known during the Thaw, principally Evtushenko, Voznesenskii, Akhmadulina, Okudzhava and Rozhdestvenskii. This chapter examines various ways in which this canon of this younger generation has been reconfigured since perestroika, examining contrasting representations not only of the canon of poets but also of the narrative of poetry in this period. Drawing on evidence from school and university syllabuses, anthologies published in the West and Russia, and criticism and comment of influential figures, it argues that the differences between conceptions of both the canon and the significance of Thaw poetry for Russian literature reveal that there is still much uncertainty about the status and value of Soviet literature in the post-Soviet period.

CHAPTER XIII

Alexandra Smith, ‘The post-Soviet homecoming of First-Wave Russian émigré poets and its impact on the reinvention of the past’ 

This chapter focuses on the post-Soviet reception of the poetry of Russian émigré authors, examining the visibility of poets such as Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Georgii Ivanov and Nabokov in the contemporary Russian cultural landscape. It draws on Edith Clowes’s emphasis on the impact of spatial categories on the process of formation of a new national identity in the post-Soviet period, and develops Greta Slobin’s views on the importance of the First Wave Russian emigration to Russian cultural trends in the 1990s-2000s, when the recovery of émigré literature became associated with the quest for a new national identity. This quest was entwined with various forms of nostalgia, including imperial, orthodox, and post-communist. The chapter focuses on the widespread popularity of Tsvetaeva’s poetry, autobiographical fiction and essays in the post-Soviet period and argues that Tsvetaeva’s own striving for a national unity and the opposition to Soviet ideology embedded in her works enabled her to become a living link between today’s Russia and pre-revolutionary Russia, images of which are presented in Tsvetaeva’s works in an elegiac and romanticised manner.

CHAPTER XIV

Stephanie Sandler, ‘Creating the canon of the present’ 

Canonizing poetry at the moment of its creation may be a fool’s errand, but some important benefits arise from trying to do so. Two key features of current poetry are aesthetic openness (poems that absorb traits from other artistic formats), and multiple forms of border-crossing (poems that originate in multiple national tradition). Such poems now abound, but they existed earlier, if less prominently. Work to canonize the present can thus shine different lights on the past. The chapter also offers a provisional structure to canonize the present. It suggests five organizing rubrics, and offers examples of each: language crossings and quasi-translations; the role of audiences outside Russia in canonization; visual poetry; story-telling to the point where narrative overtakes poetic traits; and performance poetry. Among the poets featured are Eremin, L’vovskii, Brodsky, Kaminsky, Aygi, Mnatsakanova, Stepanova, Svarovskii, Fanailova, Barskova, and Prigov.