New Russian Poets: 1953 - 1968

By Marion Boyars

A collection of poetry from Russian dissidents, and those part of the great poetic revival after Stalin was removed from power. A re-examination of the national conscience followed Stalin's death, when 14,000 people gathered in Moscow to hear a group of young poets reading their work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marion Boyars
• Release date: Mar 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780714524900

Book preview

The New Russian Poets

1953–1968

Selected, Edited and Translated

by GEORGE REAVEY

MARION BOYARS

LONDON – NEW YORK

Contents

Title Page

Introduction: The New Russian Poets and the Crisis of Belief

BORIS PASTERNAK

Hamlet

Insomnia

ALEXANDER TVARDOVSKY

The Statue’s Sundered Plinth

LEONID MARTYNOV

Hercules

Birds in the Sky

Leaves

Love

Cold

They Still Fear

In the Land Where Tanks

On the Shore

The Destruction of the World

VICTOR BOKOV

I Love the Verbs You Use

The Rivers All in Flood

Music

BORIS SLUTSKY

My Comrades

Physicists and Lyricists

Dante’s Tomb

Horses in the Ocean

YEVGENY VINOKUROV

Forget-Me-Nots

And in a World

Adam

I

Autobiography

ROBERT ROZHDESTVENSKY

Uninhabited Islands

I Departed

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

There’s Something I Often Notice

A Career

Freshness

The American Nightingale

Babii Yar

The Woman and the Sea

The Song of the Overseers

Art

Mayakovsky

Yes and No

Letter to Yesenin

In Memory of the Poet Xenia Nekrasova

Coliseum

BELLA AKHMADULINA

Fifteen Boys

The Volcanoes

The Boat

In That Month of May

Don’t Give Me All of Your Time

December 

BULAT OKUDZHAVA

Childhood

Ballad about Don Quixotes

Man

A Paper Soldier

Ah, You Azure Globule

This Will Happen

All the Earth

Protect Us Poets

Don’t Believe in War

Leningrad Music

VICTOR SOSNORA

And Fir Trees Clanged

Midnight

Sharp Frost

ANDREY VOZNESENSKY

Pregnant You Sit

First Ice

Wedding

Taiga

Parabolic Ballad

Goya

Second Dedication

Antiworlds

Introductory: Open Up, America

New York Bird

The Beatnik’s Monologue

Oza (Parts IV, V, VI)

From the Author and Something Besides

Arrested Motion

Laziness

Six Strophes with Irony

NOVELLA MATVEYEVA

I, He Says, Am No Warrior

You Wish for Miracles

The Gutters 

LEONID GUBANOV

The Artist

IVAN KHARABAROV

I’m All of Rough Bark

Christmas Tree

YURY GALANSKOV

The Human Manifesto

IOSIF BRODSKY

Fish in Winter

The Monument to Pushkin

The Sky’s Black Vault

I Threw My Arms

Thrushlike, The Gardener

All Things in the House

The Wheelwright Died

Original Russian Sources and Bibliography

Notes

By the Same Author

Copyright

The New Russian Poets and the Crisis of Belief

1. THE RUSSIAN POET AND HIS HAMLETIAN PREDICAMENT

Since the Golden Age of Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), Russians have always taken great pride in their poetic achievement as the art closest to the national heartbeat, to the emotions and aspirations of their ideal national selves. It was only in the nineteenth century that they began to discover and revel in the beauty, musical enchantment, and genuine validity of their own language which, thanks to Pushkin’s having forged a more supple and musical verbal medium, soon ended the hegemony exercised until then by the French language and literature as the staple diet of the educated minority. But the ascending Russian Muse also began to assume the enigmatic features of the long-suffering Mother Russia. This was certainly the case in the poetry of N. A. Nekrasov (1821–1877). The Russian poets early developed a sense of mission, which is already present in some of Pushkin’s work. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes in his Precocious Autobiography: The poets of Russia were always warriors for the future of their native land, for the triumph of justice. The poets helped Russia to think…. The poets helped Russia to struggle against her tyrants.

Behind the figure of Mother Russia often appears a sort of Hamletian ghost of mumbled guilt and whispered retribution whom the poet-son cannot help but overhear and interpret as a call to duty. The predicament the poet may then find himself in can be summed up as follows:

I fear to say the change is for the better;

To say it’s for the worse is dangerous.¹

Behind his facade of beauty and lyrical impulse lurks a shadow, the poet soon discovers. It may be the Stepfather shadow of a Tsar Nicholas I or a Joseph Stalin, or it may be the shadow of a gunman. Thus, behind Pushkin stand Nicholas I and the Baron D’Anthès; behind Lermontov, Captain Martynov. Both D’Anthès and Martynov killed their poet-adversaries in duels. Prophetically, in Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin chill-hearted Evgeny had to destroy the lyrically warm, romantic poet Lensky. In Pushkin we have again the unpredictably dynamic and brutal image of The Bronze Horseman,² a personification of the ruth­less State that can arbitrarily trample an individual to death. These are poetic images, ghosts out of the past, perhaps, but they are none the less real in the sense that they are dire images that have haunted Russian poetry up to the present day. Thus, in a recent poem Lermontov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko writes:

1. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Letter to Yesenin.

In Russia poets are born

With D’Anthès’ bullet in their chests.³

In another untitled poem on the same theme, Bella Akhmadulina

With what shall I console those stricken

by the trifling superiority of evil?

Those renowned, defeated poets,

who lost their lives in vain?⁴

She finds that their salvation lies in an eternally established order, in which the triumphing boor is sentenced and con­demned.

Two other poets of tragic destiny—Mayakovsky and Yesenin—haunt the imagination of many of today’s young Soviet poets. In his reverse time passage in Oza, Andrey Voznesensky sees the bullet Flying out of Mayakovsky’s heart….⁵ In his Mayakovsky poem,⁶ Yevtushenko asks what that poet would have done in the year 1937, the year of the Big Purge under Stalin and concludes that he would not have kept quiet even if he had been spared. Indeed, he left us some bullets in that re­volver, Yevtushenko comments, bullets to use against crass­ness, hypocrisy, and vileness. It should now be clear even from these few examples that the ghosts of the past can have a very real and immediate significance for the Russian poets of today whose conscience has been doubly roused by the revelations about Stalin’s crimes. Thus, the ghostly note of retribution sounds in the lines:

2. A poem of Pushkin’s