1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution - looted wine and revolutionary ostriches

In the versions of Alexander Blok’s “The Twelve” that are not rock operas, the marauding Reds do some looting:

Open up the cellars –
treat the thirsty fellas!

Those lines, from the Dralyuk and Chandler translation found in 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), have a little jolt now because of the highly instructive way this anthology is organized.

The book is a collection of poems, fiction, and whatnots addressing the 1917 revolution.  The pieces are organized thematically – and what themes!  The first section titled “Stolen Wine,” is about the looting and destruction, by smashing or glugging, of wine cellars, some of them massively valuable.  A narrow concern, I first thought, but it was a live political issue, an action filled with symbolic meaning – what is the Revolution doing; what is it for?

And it produced poems, like this terrific fantasy of wine-flooded streets by Marina Tsvetaeva:

The moon in a cloud of wine. – Who’s that? Stop!
Be my comrade, sweetheart: drink up!
Merry stories go round:
Deep in wine – a couple has drowned.  (tr. Dralyuk)

In a Tsvetaeva or Mandelstam collection, I doubt the wine would stand out, but six poems in a row make the point.  And then the image, the issue, recurs throughout the book, as in the Blok poem.  Clever; useful.

These interconnections run through the anthology.  The banner that opens “The Twelve” reappears in Mikhail Prishvin’s “The Blue Banner” – they were published on the same day! – as does the looting theme.  A merchant buys a crate of tea at a bad time to be carrying goods around Petersburg.  The wine cellar theme appears, too, as the merchant dreams himself towards death, marching first “to the wine cellars where the Red Guards are shooting off the drunkards for the third day straight” (194).

The loose, almost conversational Prishvin story is translated by Lisa Hayden, better known here as Lizok.  I know nothing more about Prishvin than is contained in the introductory material.  One of the many benefits of a good anthology – new writers.  Only one piece seemed of purely historical interest, the six pages of apocalyptic religious ranting by Vasily Rozanov.  Good to know such things existed, but six pages was plenty.

Everyone has been reading Teffi lately.  Her pieces are highlights.  “Every bit of him is tightly stuffed, like a leather football, squealing and cracking at the seams, but unable to fly into the air unless it is kicked” (126) – that’s Lenin.

Newspaper boys were nipping about among the queues, together with vendors of sbiten and fried pies.  Michel wanted to try one, but I talked him out of it – such filthy things, smelling of tallow candles.  (134)

The characters are in line, waiting to be guillotined.  Satire so brutal no one wanted to publish it.  But given the circumstances, I am amazed anyone was publishing anything.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, from “To Russia”:

Here I come,
an ostrich from a distant land,
wearing these feathers: stanzas, metres, rhymes.
I foolishly try to bury my head,
dig it into my clinking plumes…
Exotic, outlandish,
I might as well vanish
under the fury of all Decembers.  (tr. James Womack)

I guess I will take the next couple of days off.

A poet’s speech begins a great way off - some Marina Tsvetayeva

One way to pin down a poet is to read her poetry on poetry.  This is Marina Tsvetayeva, who frequently wrote poems about and to poets, in 1923:

A poet’s speech begins      a great way off.
A poet is     carried far away by speech
By way of planets, signs, and the     ruts
Of roundabout parables…  (from “The Poet,” I, p. 35)

Those gaps are one of Tsevtayeva’s signatures, one of the ruts she digs into her poems to make her readers twist their dang ankles.  The poet – I mean The Poet – “confuses     arithmetic and weight,” “altogether refutes Kant,” and “burn[s] without warming.”

Tsvetayeva writes about Moscow and Prague, Akhmatova and Blok, love affairs and exile, with great intensity, her matter personal and intimate but hardly confessional.  Meaning, even the deepest grief, is pushed through language and imagery.  Her long “Poem of the End” (1924) is about the painful end of a love affair in Prague.  It begins with the couple still together, but the poet is uneasy.

A single post, a point of rusting
    tin in the sky
marks the fated place we
    move to, he and I

on time     as death is
    prompt     strangely
too smooth the gesture of
    his hat to me  (I, 48)

The river is “a strip as colourless / as a slab for corpses,” his laughter is like “that cheap tambourine,” and so on.  The metaphors, one after another, do much of the emotional work.  Once I decode the language, the poet’s anguish seems more direct.  Maybe it is a confessional poem.

A post.  Why not beat my forehead to
    blood on it?  To smithereens!  We are
like fellow criminals, fearing one
    another.  (The murdered thing is love.)  (7, 58)

This is a specific scene in a specific place (the man has broken up with the poet; they have returned to the site of the first line), but I found that it took several tries for the scene to emerge, to close the distance Tsvetayeva creates.

Or, said another way, I thought a lot of her poems were pretty hard.

Some poems are closer to pure metaphor, pure description. 

Readers of Newspapers

It crawls, the underground snake,
crawls, with its load of people.
and each one      has his
newspaper, his skin
disease…
…  No face, no features,
no age.   Skeletons – there’s no
face, only the newspaper page.  (1935, p. 35)

Even though the poem ends with a cry against “news/papers’ evil filth,” it’s a funny poem.   I see that two more of my favorites are from the same time.  The passengers in the rattletrap “Bus” “were like / peas in boiling soup,” “shaken / in vibrato, like violins” (91).  Tsevtayeva’s “Desk” is her “most loyal friend,” her “loaded writing mule”:

And when     my body will be laid out,
    Great fool!  Let it be on you then.  (89)

How Marina Tsvetayeva wrote like she did under the constraints she faced, what a mystery.

My book of Tsvetayeva is the 1981 edition of Selected Poems translated by Elaine Feinstein with the aid of numerous collaborators.