SEER, Vol.85,No.2, April2007 Whose Kliuev, Who is Kliuev? Polemics of Identity and Poetry MICHAELMAKIN THEpoet Nikolai Kliuev (I884-I937) has fascinated and provoked to polemics successive generations of Russian readers, attracting to this day treatmentsthat range from the hagiographicalto the denunciatory. In his own lifetime he elicited strikinglydiverse reactions from those who came into contactwith him or who read him. In many cases,those reactions,both hostileand favourable,sprangnot only fromcontrasting perceptionsof the poet's own individualidentity,but also and especially from opposite conceptions of the culturalidentity of Russia itself,with referenceto which the poet himselfself-consciouslyconstructedaspects of his poetics and his literaryimage. When Kliuev 'returned'in full to the librariesand book stores of Russia in the I98os and I990s, he and his works once again became an arena of violent dispute in which opposing camps fightingto claim the national culturalheritage and its meaning disputedownershipof Kliuev as part of a large, even grandiose agenda of culturalideology. The storiesof him and his work thus provide eloquent testimony to the fault lines discernible in national cultureduringand even afterthe twentiethcentury,and the reiteration of disputes across several generations provides vivid evidence both of continuity and, on closer inspection, also of change and dislocationin the ways in which Russia and its cultureare imagined. The persistence into the present of mythological constructions of Kliuev's life and persona, at least some of them now patently contradicted by widely available evidence, testifies also to a very strong desire among many commentatorson Russian culture to demonstratethe existence in the recent, but materiallyremote, past of the country of an authentic and Michael Makin is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. This article is a considerably revised and expanded version of a paper originally presented at the conference 'Negotiating Cultural Upheavals: Icons, Myths, and other Institutions of Cultural Memory in Modern Russia, 1900-2000', Ohio State University, 13-15 April 2000. Research for it has been supported by an IREX short-term grant, and by funding from the University of Michigan. The author thanks the numerous Kliuev scholars who have assisted him in his research, in particular Sergei Subbotin, Aleksandr Mikhailov, Elena Markova and Liudmila Kisileva. He is also and especially grateful to the Director of the Vytegra kraevedcheskii muzei, Tamara Makarova, for her frequent help, to the former Headmaster of the Koshtugi village school, Fedor Kostitsyn, and to Tat'iana Kostitsyna and other teachers in that school, for their assistance in his research on the village. 232 WHOSE KLIUEV, WHO IS KLIUEV? unique combinationof elements constitutinga kindof authentic,popular , Russian national spirituality.The hostilitywith which that position is opposed by others indicates the degree to which the discussion engages powerful ideological concepts, while the fact of the discussion itself illustratesthe continued intensity with which Russian poets and Russian poetry are read and rated in public discourseabout culture. Kliuev was a 'new-peasant poet' (indeed, he was a 'new-peasant poet' before the term was coined), who came from a relativelyremote part of rural northern Russia but, although certainly a 'peasant' in terms of the broad social and legal definitionsof late-imperialRussia, he probablyhad little or no directexperienceof subsistenceagriculture while growingup, and his main directcontact with village life afterthe late I9IOS was during severalsummersspent on vacation in the Viatka region.' Nonetheless, his associationsboth with the north and with the land were essential features of his self-presentationand of the claims, explicit and implicit, made in his works. Kliuev was born near thie southernend of LakeOnega, almostcertainlyin the villageof Koshtugi (in present-day Vytegra region, Vologda oblast ).2 In the same area (althoughin a differentvillage, where his fatherwas the landlord of a wine store) he also spent most of his childhood and youth, and then lived in the nearby small town of Vytegra for several years after the Bolshevik Revolution. So it is not surprisingthat the Russian north figuresprominentlyin hisverse, and equallyprominentlyin the identity he projected as a mature author;yet the specific characteristicsof the north are often subordinated in Kliuev's work to an expansive and universalist agenda, sometimes with an expressly 'orientalist' slant (Bombayand Tibet are, he claims, explicitin the vernacularcultureof By far the fullest account of Kliuev's...