Russian poetry

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: Acmeis

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as instruments of the state must sacrifice some part of their soul, no matter how benevolent the arrangement. Throughout the 1920s, the aesthetics of Socialist Realism became codified by bureaucratic-minded apparatchiks into rigid definitions that had to be adhered to if one wished to remain published. The Silver Age poets who could not make the transition to Socialist Realism gradually disappeared from the pages of printed literature. Those who made the transition knew that something inside them had died. History notes that Blok died of a broken heart and Mayakovsky of a self-inflicted bullet in the head. The wind gathers storm clouds above the sea's gray plain (Gorky, "Song" 1-2). Had they lived long enough, Stalin might have eliminated Blok and Mayakovsky himself. The most tragic phase of Russian civilization came to pass when the paranoid rule of the Georgian dictator was finally consolidated in the late 1920s. The account of atrocities implemented at his directive surpass numbering; the culture of the Russian people was almost among Stalin's victims. Great figures in the arts disappeared throughout the 1930s, as Socialist Realism became an activist tool for government censorship. Even Maksim Gorky (1868-1936), t

Category: Literature - R