The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Recall how Nyurka had clung to her mother and begged for love and for grapes, speaking like an ordinary little girl, without ideology. Nastya, living in a novel written five years later, is anothersort of being,sunk immeasurablydeeper into the Stalinist period of re-education and transformation. Her mother dies early in the book, after which Nastya announces to her adoptive collective that at first she “didn’t want to get born,” she was afraid her mother would be a bourgeois, but “as soon as Lenin came, I came too” (p. 62). She goes to school and learns to chant and to compose letters, one of which she sends to her protector: “Liquidate the kulak as a class,” she writes. “Regards to the poor kolkhoz, but not to the kulaks” (p. 84). Instead of signing her name on a document, she signs a hammer and sickle (p. 119). All these childish gestures are somehow both comic and awful. When Nastya dies one night of a chill, the minuscule remaining energy of the pit-diggers dissipates. For she was the forward-looking emancipated one, already living in the future; the adults were the emotional relics, held back by matter and weariness, hoping to learn from

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her example. If Nyurka’s death in Cement is the price exacted for her parents’ collective idealism, then Nastya’s death in The Foundation Pit is no longer a meaningful communal sacrifice, only a private elegy.

The “right to the lyric” in an Age of Iron

If judged by Gorky’s 1934 speech, socialist realism in literature would appear to be a doctrine designed for the longer forms of prose. Lyric poetry, with its personal addressee, contemplative texture, attention to subtle shifts of emotional state, and intense respect for privacy, could hardly recommend itself in this era of large, heroic narrative forms. But in fact, the smaller poetic forms flourished, although the official function they filled was not that of the Golden or “Silver” Age. The lyric was respected as efficient, earnest, truthful, euphonic speech. When overtly non-political, it was free to be sentimental. A vigorous campaign for the “right to the lyric” was mounted in the mid- to late 1930s, which peaked around three jubilee celebrations: the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death in 1937, the 150th of Byron’s birth in 1938, and the 125th of Lermontov’s birth in 1939.22 A socialist realist climate took naturally to hyperbole and heroic extremes. The huge event of World War II, its “aboveground” moral simplicity, to a certain extent clarified and unified public poetry. The most exquisite lyric cycle of the Stalin years, however, could not be made public: the “Requiem” of Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), inspired by her son’s arrest, written in 1935– 43 but not published in its entirety in Russia until 1987. This sequence of ten short, compact, painfully concrete poems, framed (or insulated) by a preface, dedication, prologue, and epilogue, begins with the poet waiting in a prison queue, promising to give voice to the Terror, and ends with that same woman cast in bronze by the banks of the Neva. The cycle passes through every lyric register, from denial through lament, protest, folk ditty, chant, and elegy. In the penultimate poem, “Crucifixion,” we see Mary silent near the Cross that bears her dead Son, with Magdalene sobbing and the Disciple turned to stone – but the Mother stands apart, “no one dared look at her.” At the deepest reaches of dissidence and grief, one is beyond being watched or seen. We recall in Blok’s Tw e l v e the image of Jesus Christ, garlanded by white roses but invisible in the storm, leading the Red Guards to some unknown (yet possibly blessed) destination. The end point of this twentieth-century Russian journey can be sensed in Akhmatova’s Golgotha tableau.

One final image might be added to this poetic sequence on sacrifice and appropriate vision, from “Hamlet,” the first of the “Poems of Yury Zhivago”

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