Remembrance and Invention: Poetry and Memory in Modern Russia

Abstract

oetry and memory: the expanse covered in modern Russian history by these two terms is vast indeed. The three articles collected beneath this rubric in the present issue of The Russian Review may serve us, though, as a kind of shorthand guide to the extensive territory that poetic memory has been called upon to span in the Russian literature and culture of this century-from the recuperation of ancient myths by modern poet-dramatists in Silver Age Russia to the commemoration of one great poet by another in the early years of Stalin's terror to, finally, a postwar poet's efforts to revitalize a bruised and battered native tradition by turning the untapped poetic resources of modern Anglo-American verse to distinctly Russian purposes. In each case, memory functions not only to recuperate what has been forgotten or insufficiently remembered, but to create something new in the process of swerving from the esteemed original. Tomas Venclova's elegant essay examines Silver Age transformations of the classical past in the light of modern Russian cultural mythologies. Venclova carefully roots Fedor Sologub's and Innokentii Annenskii's creative revisions of ancient Greek tragedy in their individual efforts to reshape nineteenth-century Russian cultural myths of the poet. These revisions begin, as so much else, in Pushkin, where the semantic field of statue/shade is still, mythopoetically speaking, of a piece. Building on the scholarship of Jakobson, Venclova demonstrates that Sologub's use of the myth of Protesilaus and Laodameia in Dar mudrykh pchel (The Gift of the Wise Bees) is essentially symbolist in its emphasis on shade as pure signification and absence, while Annenskii's use of the same myth in his lyric tragedy Laodamiia is the opposite-proto-acmeist in its dependence on the leitmotif of statue as an embodiment of the signifying world of art that broadens and immortalizes life.