The symbolists dominated the literary scene until 1910, when internal dissension led to the movement's collapse. Their beliefs and writings were challenged by two different poetic groupings, the Acmeists and Futurists. The Acmeist school of poetry rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian symbolism and demanded concrete representation and precise form and meaning, combined with a broad-ranging erudition (classical antiquity, European history and culture, including art and religion). The Acmeists, whose outstanding members included Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelshtam, were associated with the new St Petersburg journal Apollon and the poets of the older generation who stood apart from the dominant symbolist poets of the day. The Futurists, on the other hand, wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry "from the steamship of modernity" and thus to free poetic discourse from the fetters of tradition. The two most important Futurist poets were Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its origins; his verse is characterized by neologisms and "trans-sense" language. Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive long poems.
VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)
Leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the eariy Soviet period
From his youth repeatedly jailed for subversive activity, Mayakovsky began writing poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he became the spokesman for Futurism in Russia, and his poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant. As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party he produced declamatory works saturated with politics and aimed at mass audiences, including "Ode to Revolution" (1918) and "Left March" (1919), and the drama Mystery fiouffe (performed 1921). Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide at the age of 36.
In the years immediately after the 1917 Revolution a brief period of relative openness was enjoyed. Many writers turned to prose, particularly the short story and the novella. Some were inspired by the recent revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918-20): these included Pil- nyak (The Naked Year, 1922), Babel (Red Cavalry, 1926, a formally chiselled and morally complex cycle of linked stories about a Jewish commissar in a Cossack regiment), and Mikhail Sholokhov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Others described life in the new Soviet Union with varying degrees of mordant sarcasm: the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, the comic novels of llya XIf and Yevgeny Petrov, and the short novel Envy (1927) by Yury Olesha fall into this category. Boris
BORIS PASTERNAK (1890-1960) Russian poet and prose writer
Pasternak studied music and philosophy and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education. His early poetry, though avant-garde, was successful, but in the 1930s a gap widened between his work and officially approved literary modes, and he supported himseif by doing translations. The novel Doctor Zhivago (I9S7; film, 1965), an epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the revolution and its aftermath, was a best-seller in the West but until 1987 circulated only in secrecy in the Soviet Union. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but he was forced to decline it because of Soviet opposition to his work.
Pasternak, a Futurist poet before the revolution, published a cycle of poems, My Sister - Life (1922), and the story "Zhenya Luvers's Childhood" (1918).
The lull in the storm was short-lived, however, and it soon became clear that the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 would radically change Russian literature. From the mid- 19205, literature became a tool of state propaganda. Officially approved writing (the only kind that could be published) by and large sank to a sub-literary level. Censorship, imprisonment in labour camps, and mass terror were only part of the problem. Writers were not only forbidden to create works that were dissident, formally complex, or objective (a term of reproach), but they were also expected to fulfil the dictates of the Communist Party to produce propaganda on specific, often rather narrow, themes of current interest to it. Writers
OS1P MANDELSHTAM (1891-19387) Russian poet and critic
Osip Mandelshtam was a major Russian poet and literary critic. He was born in Warsaw in 1891 and grew up in St Petersburg. His first poems appeared in the avant- garde journal Apollon in 1910. It was partly the apolitical stance of Mandelshtam's poetry, together with its heavy intellectual demands, that led to his estrangement from and eventual denunciation by the official Soviet literary establishment. In 1928 a volume of his collected poetry and a collection of literary criticism appeared: these were his last books published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.
In May 1934 Mandelshtam was arrested for an epigram he had written on Joseph Stalin and was sent into exile. In 1938, the year after his return to Moscow, he was arrested again. In a letter to his wife, Nadezhda, that autumn, he reported that he was ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nothing further was ever heard from him. The Soviet authorities officially gave his death date as 27 December 1938, although he was also reported by government sources to have died "at the beginning of 1939".
were called upon to be "engineers of human souls" helping to produce "the new Soviet man".
The decade beginning with Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s was one of unprecedented repression. Censorship became much stricter, and many of the best writers were silenced. In 1932 all independent literary groupings were dissolved and replaced by an institution that had no counterpart in the West,
ANNA AKHMATOVA (i889-1966) Russian poet
The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was recognized at her death as the greatest woman poet in Russian literature. Her brief, finely chiselled lyrics brought her fame at the outset of her career, but from the 1920s she was forced into years of silence, emerging again into public life only from the 1940s; publication of much of her work had to wait until the 1960s, and full recognition, at least on an international scale, until the 1980s.
Akhmatova was born in 1889 near Odessa, Ukraine. At 21 she joined the Acmeists, adding to the school her own stamp of elegant colloquialism and the psychological sophistication of a young cosmopolitan woman. During the Soviet period her former husband, Nikolay Gumilyov, was executed, and her son, Lev, and her third husband, Nikolay Punin, were arrested for political deviance in 1935. No volume of her poetry appeared in the Soviet Union until 1940. Her public life became limited to her studies of Pushkin.