I'm Beginning to Sound Like a Crank

So once again I'm starting with an article that I'm somewhat ambivalent towards. Dwight Garner of the New York Times uses the occasion of Voznesensky's death to celebrate the good ol' days of Russian poetry and smugly lambast modern Russian culture which seems to ignore its poets with the same casual shrug as American culture.

I can't fault him for that - I've got a lot of those same feelings. What irks me is the scapegoat he finds for this abandonment of poetry as the voice of the people:

"Russian poetry in 2010 has lost most of the awful things it once had to push and grind against — happily for its poets, perhaps, and perversely less happily for its verse. And surely the country’s poets are less read for some of the same reasons they are elsewhere, including the distractions of Yandex (the Russian rival to Google) and Odnoklassniki (the Russian answer to Facebook)."

Guess what? It's the lack of oppression, plus those young kids and their darn gadgets that's ruining Russia. I'm sure it has nothing to do with subtle and insidious repression of the press by a government that's the Diet Coke of Soviet Communism. (Same taste, fewer calories.) Can't be the so-called "brain drain" whereby gifted intellectuals realize they can actually feed their families by moving to a country that pays its teachers. Not to mention that most of the poets he celebrates were blacklisted, banned or executed and their works existed primarily in samizdat or self-published typewritten manuscripts passed around like contraband from one freedom-starved hand to another. 

How big an effect on the culture at large did these giants of Russian literature actually exert? You've gotta remember that history gets written by the winners and a lot of great "approved" Soviet verse (notably Mayakovsky) gets chucked by the wayside in favor of Gumilev, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko and others who had run-ins (sometimes fatal ones) with the Law.

On top of that, it's the singing poets, the "bards" like Galich, Okhudshava and Vysotsky who were the real superstars. These bards usually had voices that make Bob Dylan and Tom Waits sound like Frank Sinatra or Barry Manilow. Their guitar playing skills were limited to some diatonic minor 7th chords and finger-picking. The LYRICS was the key: lots of melodies and chords were interchangeable, that's not what people were paying attention to. It was the presentation and the poetry that really fired the imagination.

So Garner is setting up something of a straw man here. But I do grant him this much: he recommends a book I just bought, a bilingual anthology called Contemporary Russian Poetry which so far looks pretty kickin'. Down the line I'm sure I'll be including some good excerpts, but for now here's one of those Golden Oldies of Russky verse. I think me and all three of my brothers had to memorize it at one time or another.

The Captive

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, Translated by I.Zheleznova

A captive, alone in a dungeon I dwell,
Entombed in the stillness and murk of a cell.
Outside, in the courtyard, in wild, frenzied play,
My comrade, an eagle, has punced on his prey. 


Then, leaving it, at me he looks as if he
In thought and in purpose at one were with me.
He looks at me so, and he utters a cry.
"'Tis time," he is saying, "from here let us fly!


"We're both wed to freedom, so let us away
To where lonely storm clouds courageously stray,
Where turbulent seas rsh to merge with the sky,
Where only the winds dare to venture and I!.."