The Russian civilization developed a culture rich in poetry. It was a culture that came to a roiling boil with the Silver Age, roughly the first two decades of the 20th Century (Todd lxviii), then came to a wall of near-crushing silence with Josef Stalin's ascension to power. But Russian poets did not stop talking, and the Silver Age never died. Russian poetry of the Silver Age remained a living inspiration to Russian poets up through the end of the communist era.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes with excitement of his 1972 "Adventures": smuggling to the West the poems of Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) in the handbag of movie star Marina Vlady (Yevtushenko li). Fifty year-old poems treated like the lyrics of a rock star pop song - and feared by the Soviet government with the danger of a bomb!
At first she turned the whole thing to a joke,
Then understood, and started to reproach me.
Shaking her lovely head from side to side (Blok, "At First" 1-3).
The Silver Age reached a dead end and died in the 1920s, in the wake of revolution expected then to shake the world. The thought police of nascent Stalinism despised the multi-movements comprising the cadres of Silver Age poets. The new elite promoted their own ideal of socially conscious poetry: Socialist Realism.
If one looks only at the idealistic arguments and excludes the cynical self-service of political maneuvering, to a certain extent Socialist Realism made sense. The Silver Age poets were a motley crew: Acmeists and Formalists, Futurists/Ego-Futurists/ Cubo-Futurists - more - all in resistance to the Symbolists, who themselves were hardly united.
In the face of Silver Age frivolity - continuing throughout the ugly hardships of the Great War and the Russian Revolution - the single-minded clarity of Socialist Realism held a certain attraction of purity to those poets who had tasted a life outside their own society and felt an obligation to it. In ...