Russian Literature In the 19th and 20th Centuries

How Russian Literature may have developed and progressed in this century had there been no October Revolution in Russia, no Lenin or Stalin, no Soviet Union, and no sweeping censorship of Soviet Writers and the Russian intelligentsia, is of course impossible to tell. What is certain is that the truest and most compelling record of the Russian people and their history in this century, and in the Soviet period that followed the Revolution, is in the poetry and prose of those who experienced it. History can be revised by Communists and Capitalists alike, until we wonder what has become of the truth, but the poetry and novels of Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Bely, Akhmatova, and others ring true above and beyond what the censors leave out and the revisionists put in. No one who reads Doctor Zhivago, Petersburg, Requiem, or The Cloud In Trousers, can doubt that these voices are authentic. 

The great Russian writers of the Twentieth Century were alive during the pre-revolutionary days in Russia and during the Great Terror. They witnessed and experienced the time, the people and the events of which they wrote. Except for their literary genius and poetic sensibility they were ordinary people, living through extraordinary times, trying to survive the harshness of Stalin's regime and to save the lives of their family and friends. Not all were successful. Akhmatova's husband, Nikolai Gumilev, was executed by the Soviets . Mandelstam died in the Gulag. Esenin, Tsvetaeva, even Mayakovsky— the darling of the Soviets— took their own lives. Anna Akhmatova was forbidden to publish and was expelled from the Soviet Writer's Union. She survived by doing translations, primarily of Asiatic languages, a vocation which she described as akin to "eating one's own brain". Her poetry exists today because of samizdat, the practice of underground publishing by memorization, copying by hand, and passing along the forbidden verses from one person to another. The Russian people kept alive her works, as they did the works of so many others, because they loved poetry for the beauty and truth that was in it. The Soviet leaders knew and feared the power of literature, as had the tsars before them. They used censorship as a tool of state and took it to extremes that the tsars had never achieved.

I am limiting my selections of Russian poetry and prose on the Translations page to five writers from whose work I have done translations: Anton Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Osip Mandelstam. 

Sketches 

The Seagull

I chose Anton Chekhov as a representative of Nineteenth Century Russian writers for several reasons. He offers a bridge, however narrow, between the 19th and 20th centuries (he died in 1904), and he is extremely approachable and accessible as a person because of his playfulness and because of the notebooks he left and the letters that survive him. Perhaps more important to me personally, he is the father of the modern short story, a fact that is as little known to many today as is the fact that he had a delightful sense of humor, revealed primarily in his short stories. He was also, like Pasternak in the 20th Century, an early spokesman for the rights of women in Russia.

Chekhov was born in 1860, the son of a former peasant, and began medical school in Moscow in 1879, completing his degree in 1884. It was while he was a medical student that he began writing short stories to make ends meet, some of them very short indeed to fit the space requirements of the newspapers and magazines that published them. In 1888 Anton, who had been having hemorrhages for some time, admitted to a friend in a letter that he had tuberculosis. He died at a health spa in Germany at the age of 44. Despite his rather brief life, Chekhov wrote (in addition to his plays) what may have been hundreds of short stories and sketches, many of which have been lost and perhaps some of which may yet be discovered in old newspapers and journals in someone's trunk or attic.

Anton was a handsome man, looking nothing at all, in most of his photographs, like he does in the well-known photo that shows him with a goatee, wearing pince-nez and looking rather stern (a picture which he hated). He was a prodigious womanizer in his youth and had affairs with some of the well known actresses of his day. He made attempts from time to time to avoid sexual activity because he was afraid that he was becoming addicted to sex. He married a German actress, Olga Knipper, in 1901. Olga was by his side when he died, in 1904. On his deathbed Chekhov was given a glass of champagne by a German physician, a professional etiquette among doctors of that time when attending a colleague for whom no hope remained. Anton drank the proffered glass, said "I haven't had champagne for a long time," turned on his side and died almost immediately.

For those who may not be familiar with Chekhov's short stories, I recommend the following: The Black Monk, The Duel, The Steppe, The Lady With A Dog, and The Student. (the last two come as close to being perfect short stories as any I have read) The best of Chekhov's plays are The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya (my personal favorite; see also Louis Malle's Vanya On Broadway, which is available on video)  See also http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/chekhov.htm.

The Nightengales

There is a good deal of agreement in literary circles today that Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva (named in the order of their birth), are among the very best of the Russian poets of this century. They were all born in the period from 1889 to 1892, during the reign of Tsar Alexander the III, and share so many similarities of art and circumstance that they are often grouped together. All four were friends and, in some cases, lovers during their lifetimes, and occasionally the subject of one another's poems. Two, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, were from St. Petersburg. Pasternak and Tsvetaeva were from Moscow. Pasternak's father was a well known artist and professor at the Moscow School of Painting. Tolstoy and Scriabin (from whom Boris learned the principles of music composition) were visitors at the Pasternak home during Boris's youth. Through his father, Boris also met Rilke, who deeply influenced his poetry. His mother was at one time a concert pianist, encouraged and approved of by Rubinstein, who gave up her career for her family.

Akhmatova's father was a naval engineer who eventually abandoned his family and who later asked his daughter (who up until this time was known as Anna Gorenko) to take a pen name if she was going to write verse— but all four poets had good educations, Pasternak at university and the other three at gimnazii, state schools similar to high schools in the United States, with an emphasis on Latin, ancient Greek, and classical culture. Mandelstam went to a well known private school in St. Petersburg, which Vladimir Nabokov later attended as well. 

When the revolutions of 1917 took place, all four poets were in their mid to late twenties. Like their contemporaries during this time of upheaval and the social and cultural transformations that followed it, their lives were never to be the same again. It was only after the revolution that they fully matured as artists. 

Akhmatova was able to maintain an icy aloofness in her poetry as in her life, along with a clear poetic vision and a cold, smouldering passion, which may partly account for Zhdanov, Stalin's censor, referring to her as "half-nun, half-harlot". She and Pasternak were the only two of the four poets and friends to survive beyond 1941, Anna due to her toughness, resiliency, and luck, and Pasternak because of an uneasy amnesty extended to him by Stalin, who apparently saw Boris as someone to be spared because of his artistic reputation. 

In the late 1930s Akhmatova spent seventeen months in all waiting with hundreds of other visitors outside the prison in Leningrad, in hopes of seeing her son. One day, as Akhmatova recounted in her 'Instead of a Preface' to Requiem, a woman nearby recognized her. "Can you describe this?" she asked. Anna answered, "I can," and 'a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been [the woman's] face.' 

Marina Tsvetaeva, the baby of the group, had a background similar to that of Pasternak. Her mother was a pianist and her father was a professor of art at Moscow University and the founder of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts. Of the four poets she was perhaps closest in temperment to Pasternak, yet she was also quite unlike the others. Volatile, emotional, passionate, tempestuous, and eccentric, she knew from an early age that she was a poet and lived her life with poetic passion, extending her genius to everything she did. Unlike Akhmatova,she was capable of writing brilliant erotic poetry.

While Akhmatova might remain aloof in her expressions of passion, perhaps sobered by her personal acquaintance with death, Marina embraced even the grim reaper, mourned for herself and for others with passion, celebrating the pain of life as well as its joys. She was a poet's poet, deeply immersed in life. Fiercely patriotic, she wrote poems praising the exploits of the Whites during the Revolution. When her husband emigrated to Paris in 1919, she followed him, only to return to the Soviet Union at the height of the Great Terror in 1937. (see also "1937: Stalin's Year of Terror, by Vadim Rogovin) She suffered the fate of many patriots during Stalin's reign of terror. Her husband, like Akhmatova's, was shot, her sister was arrested and sent to prison, and her daughter was arrested and spent nineteen years in the Gulag. Marina, unsuccessfully attempting to support herself by doing translations, hanged herself in despair in 1941. (Pasternak, characteristically and unfairly, as he had done after Mandelstam's death, blamed himself for not doing enough to help Tsvetaeva survive) Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Marina's poetry is being published in Russian once more and is enjoying great popularity in her homeland.

Although Boris Pasternak is best known outside of Russia for Doctor Zhivago, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958, he was best known in his own country for his poetry, and is considered one of the truly great poets of the world. He wrote lyrical poems about nature and love, exceptional for the arresting images that makes them linger in one's mind. He made his reputation as a poet early in life and, like Akhmatova, underwent a long period of censorship during which little or nothing of his work was published in the Soviet Union . He broke the long silence with his novel, first published outside the Soviet Union, and was punished for this by the threat of expulsion if he left Russia to accept the award. In a poem written in 1959 he asks, What am I? A murderer, a criminal, that I have made the world weep at the beauty of my country? He died a year later, at Peredelkino. (for an example of Soviet repression of Pasternak's works see "The Pasternak Attack", by David Remnick, in The Washington Post, 3/9/88)

Osip Mandelstam was a classicist who wrote complex poetry that drew many of its images and themes from Greek mythology. Strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, he wrote finely balanced poetry that combined what were often disparate themes with a resulting harmony that was unsurpassed. Perhaps because of the intricacy of his form, Mandelstam's poems do not always translate well. An early friend and lover of Tsvetaeva's, he was, like her, a brilliant essayist. The hapless and politically naive Osip, almost certainly because of a poem he wrote about Stalin (see We live, not knowing.. on the Translations page), was sent to the Gulag in the late 1930s, where he died in 1938. His wife, Nadezhda, safeguarded his poems and wrote a two volume memoir of her husband and their life together that today is almost as well known as his poetry. 

These lines from one of Mandelstam's poems are haunting: There is no hope for the heart that still burns with nightengale fever. Pasternak, in a similar vein, wrote a poem in 1931 that both anticipated and looked back on his career from the viewpoint of life in the Great Soviet: O if I had known the way of it/When I was beginning my career/That poetry with bloody death/Gushes from the throat and will murder you/All jokes with such a state of things/I would have turned down flat.

Pasternak died in 1960. Akhmatova, the tough-minded survivor, lived until 1966.