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Sons, Lovers, and the Laius Complex in Russian Modernist Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Abstract
In this introduction to the articles written by Jenifer Presto and Stuart Goldberg that focus on the psychosocial tensions between Russian modernist poets of slightly different generations, Sibelan Forrester explores the distinct options of filiation and affiliation as ways to imagine or describe poetic choices, modeling textual relationships on the familial or genetic, with the interest in personal psychology characteristic of the period. These modes of thinking are reflected in creative writing, diary entries or poetry, as well as in scholarship. The anticarnal bent of Russian symbolists, particularly of Aleksandr Blok, springs from the religious philosophy of the time. Imagining poetic creation as maternity turns out to be less threatening—at least, for a male poet—than treating it as paternity, which raises other concerns too close to home. Both Presto and Goldberg suggest that Blok rightly considered the Acmeists, especially Osip Mandel'shtam, a threat to his own poetic intentions.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2004
References
Epigraph taken from Mariia Shkapskaia, Stikhi(London, 1979), 99.
1. Harold, Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry(Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar.
2. Among substantial works of feminist scholarship on Russian literature, see Adele Marie, Barkerand Gheith, Jehanne M., eds., A History of Women's Writing in Russia(Cambridge, Eng., 2002)Google Scholar; Catriona, Kelly, A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820-1992(Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Marina, Ledkovskaia-Astman, Charlotte, Rosenthal, and Mary Fleming, Zirin, eds., Dictionary of Russian Women Writers(Westport, Conn., 1994)Google Scholar; Marsh, Rosalind J., ed., Gender and Russian Literature: New Perspectives(Cambridge, Eng., 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomei, Christine D., ed., Russian Women Writers(New York, 1999)Google Scholar.
3. Lévinas is cited at length in Teel, D. C., “Excessive Children: Textual Filiation and the Command of the Other,”in Kiyoshi, Tsuchiya, ed., Dissent and Marginality: Essays on the Border of Literature and Religion(New York, 1997), 126-50Google Scholar.
4. A symbolist's diary, of course, might not be as private as we expect today: the veneration of Golden Age and realist writers taught Silver Age authors that a certain level of fame would eventually expose their most private papers to the public. In addition to the usual functions, Blok's diary could let him plant his “most private” thoughts and concerns for future readers, confident that they would eventually be found and published unless he later chose to destroy them.
5. To quote Fedor Dostoevskii's Underground Man, “They won't let me be good!“
6. Presto notes David M. Bethea's judgment of Marina Tsvetaeva in Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile(Princeton, 1994), as well as Alyssa Dinega's thoughtful revisitation of the issue in A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva(Madison, 2001). The weight of this issue for many commentators underlines the power of gendered assumptions in evaluating a writer's biography.
7. “Da, govoriat, chto eto nuzhno bylo” (Yes, they say that it was necessary), “Ne snis' mne tak chasto” (Don't come so often into my dreams), and “Uzhe nesterpimo dyshit“ (Azrail already breathes unbearably), Shkapskaia, Stikhi, 67 and 100.
8. Many female modernists, especially symbolists, did not choose to have children. Susan Rubin Suleiman summarizes “the motherhood myth,” the idea that a woman may have either children or creative work, since they satisfy the same urges and consume the same energies, but cannot expect both. Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in Shirley Nelson, Garner, Clair, Kahane, and Madelon, Sprengnether, eds., The (M)other Tongue:Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation(Ithaca, 1985), 358 Google Scholar.
9. Anna Akhmatova's son with Nikolai Gumilev, Lev, was raised mainly by his paternal grandparents.
10. Page du Bois's Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women(Chicago, 1988) outlines Aristotle's position in a reading diat bears on Russian symbolists as well (especially Viacheslav Ivanov), given their attention to classical culture.
11. Gilbert, Sandra M.and Susan, Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination(New Haven, 1980)Google Scholar, especially introduction and chapter 1. The “Woman Writer” in their title is Anglo-American, but the book's arguments also illuminate Russian women's writing in the nineteenth century.
12. “Alia” (1913) and “Ty budesh’ nevinnoi, tonkoi” (You'll be innocent and slender, 1914), in Marina, Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh(Moscow, 1997), vol. 1, bkGoogle Scholar. 1, 189-90 and 203.
13. In a 1913 review, Sofiia Parnok objects to the pretensions of highly cultured acmeists to be human beings in an original state of nature, noting, as did Blok, their inability to lay down cultural baggage. Parnok (as “Andrei Polianin“), “V poiskakh puti iskusstva,” Severnye zapiski, 1913, nos. 5-t﹜! 227-32, esp. 228.
14. See Luc, Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins: Russian Romantic Verse Tales and the Idealized Woman(New York, 1997)Google Scholar.
15. Tsvetaeva, “Akhmatovoi” and “Gibel’ ot zhenshchiny: Vot znak,” both in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, bk. 1, 303-10 and 258.
16. Blok's status as a symbolist poster boy is legendary, and his reputation still flourishes. For a recent example, see Ian Frazier, “Letter from St. Petersburg: Invented City, Peter the Great's Vision, Three Hundred Years Later,” The New Yorker, 28 July 2003, 40: “the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok, whose women fans were so crazy about him that they used to kiss the handle of his front door. “