Russian Poetry: The Lives or the Lines?

Abstract

I need hardly say this, but will nevertheless ask for your indulgence while I do so, that to be elected President of the MHRA is a great honour for me personally. There is a broader and much more important reason why I am gratified to have been elected. Many misfortunes have come the way of Russia in recent years, and they continue to accumulate, to the Schadenfreude of the foreign media and the discomfiture of people such as myself who are professionally and personally committed to Russia and the Russians. As a result, foreign interest in the academic study of the country has tended to diminish rather than the opposite; our society seems to worship success, even the pseudo-success of the Soviet era, in its time and after, and disdainfully loses interest when less pernicious things seem to be going wrong. In the political world, and in the academic world that reflects it more and more directly, a tendency has begun for Russia to be marginalized. Influential people increasingly seem to want to exclude Russia from Europe, and especially from its principal political articulations, which begin with the EU. The idea that Europe ends at the Vistula, which seems to have been gaining ground in the decisions of politicians and even, alas, in the mind of the general public, is for me and my fellow Russianists not simply an absurdity, but a dangerous absurdity.1 It is mainly for this reason that I am delighted to accept the earnest of Russia's being included that has been made by the MHRA through my person. I am going to talk today about Russian poetry, a subject that has preoccupied me throughout my academic career. I want to begin by identifying the idea about it that seems to me to be more widely held than any other; I shall go on to argue that this idea is misleading, in the sense that it distorts the way Russian poetry is approached, by academics in particular, and to explore what might be the principal reasons for this; I shall conclude by suggesting a change of emphasis that might perhaps improve things. I am speaking of the idea, crudely stated, that in Russia, poetry matters more than it does anywhere else. I need to qualify this formulation immediately, switch to the past tense, and say that poetry used to matter more, especially in the Soviet period, since the situation has changed in the last ten years.2 Knowledgeable people have been saying since his death, for example, that Joseph Brodsky was the last Russian Poet with a capital 'P', and that there is now a wasteland or a backwater where poetry used to be on the