Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Just so in poetry, the sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical functions of skaz intertwined: folklore was no longer kept at one remove but used in order to assault old concepts of appropriate behaviour and expression. Tsvetaeva’s verse tale The Tsar-Maiden, for instance, was a transexual narrative representing the love of an aggressive, manly princess for a mild-mannered young princely aesthete; The Swain showed the union of a peasant girl and vampire-lover as a sublime erotic experience. For Tsvetaeva, as for several other Symbolist and post-Symbolist women poets, appropriation of folklore was a means of breaking away from the constraints of ‘women’s poetry’ in a traditional sense – poetry of unhappy love, elegant narcissism, and self-effacing creativity. Her poem ‘The Muse’ represented a woman at the borders even of rural society, a vagrant, perhaps even a drab and an outlaw:

No birth, no marriage certificates,

No forefathers, no ‘bright falcon’ [i.e. young man].

She goes tearing along,

Such a distance away!

Under the dusky eyelids

[Glows] gold-winged fire.

With a wind-beaten hand

She snatched – and forgot.

Her hem trails in the dirt,

Her shoes gape apart.

Not wicked, not kind,

But far-off: her own woman.

Without ‘certificates’ (of birth, of marriage), without a man to ensure her respectability, and with her hem trailing in the dirt (a proverbial image of sluttishness in the sexual sense too), Tsvetaeva’s Muse could not have been more different from the decorous muses, with impeccable literary credentials, that figured in Akhmatova’s poetry. What is more, here, as in Tsvetaeva’s work as a whole, the polarization between ‘acceptable’ rural folklore and ‘vulgar’ urban folklore that ran through much work by other nineteenth-and early twentieth-century writers broke down. (Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s imitations of the ‘vulgar’ genre of street ballad in her poetry of the early 1920s were considerably 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-in-arms 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.