Poetry Is Like A Bird

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers”

writes Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010)

With the recent death on June 1 of the great Russian writer Andrei Voznesensky, a poet from the era of the post-Stalin thaw, I wondered what our own Mercer County Library might offer for those wishing to explore Russian poetry – for certainly this is literature written far outside of our own American borders. It turns out that in addition to various Russian poetry anthologies, we have books that reflect the lives and works of several of the most important Russian poets of the 20th century - Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Osip Mandelstam.

Poet Anna Akhmatova (1989-1966) suffered much – including the indignities of censorship and the arrest and imprisonment of her only son. During her lifetime, she was rarely officially published. Still, Akhmatova never went into exile, but continued to live in Russia and witness the events about her. We have a biography Anna of All the Russians and a collection of her Poems. One of her most well known poems, Requiem, invokes the voices of women whose loved ones are most likely in the notorious prison camps of the Gulag Archipelago:
Seventeen months I’ve pleaded
for you to come home.
Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.
My terror, oh my son.
And I can’t understand.
Now all’s eternal confusion.
Who’s beast, and who’s man?
How long till execution?

As for Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), you can read a selection of her poems in English translations online at the Poetry Foundation. The library has a biography, The Death of a Poet: the Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva and a collection of poems, Poem of the End: Selected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry. Born in Moscow, Tsvetaeva became one of the most important 20th century Russian poets. Her life was as dramatic as her era – after one son joined the White Army, a brief affair with Mandelstam, and a daughter’s death from hunger during the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva emigrated to Europe in the early 1920’s. There, in correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak, she sustained her creativity, finally returning to Russia in 1939. A surviving daughter was then sent to labor camp. After evacuating to a city on the Volga to escape the invading Germans, Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. Her work is noted for unusual syntax, passion, and treatment of woman’s experiences during the terrible years after the Russian Revolution.

The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (also spelled Mandelstham) (1891 -1938) was born in Warsaw, raised in St. Petersburg, studied at the Sorbonne and the University of St. Petersburg, and published his first collection, Stone (1913) under the influence of Russian Symbolism. Later he gravitated to the school of Russian Acmeism – a more direct and intuitive style. His second book Tristia (1922), made his reputation. But in 1933, Mandelstam, a nonconformist and critic of the state, wrote his infamous poem Stalin Epigram, criticizing the regime. This "sixteen line death sentence" reflected the horror s of the Great Famine, (caused by Stalin's collectivization of farms) and the drive to exterminate the peasant kulaks. Six months after its publication, Mandelstam was arrested. The poet was sentenced for counter-revolutionary activities to various work camps and died in 1938, in the Gulag Archipelago.

Speaking of The Stalin Epigram, check out the wonderful new historical novel with the same name by Robert Littell that movingly dramatizes the tragic fate of Mandelstam and is a portrait of this era of Russian history. You probably want to read the poem itself, so here it is (as translated by W. S. Merwin)

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home

- Karen S.