The dead (Russian) poets society

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

RUSSIA loves its poets -- doesn't it? Look at the euphoria attending this year's bicentennial celebration for Alexander Pushkin. That's proof, isn't it?

Not necessarily.

We in the West have been treated to a barrage of Pushkinalia this year, the 200th anniversary of his birth: reverent stories of how his country estate has been tarted up for the fetes, teary Russians reciting his poetry for foreign reporters, rapturous reviews of the $18 million British film version of Pushkin's brilliant novel-in-sonnets, ``Eugene Onegin.''

All this merely extends the stranglehold Pushkin has held on Russian letters for nearly two centuries. Schoolchildren still memorize Pushkin's genealogy, women have an opinion about the fidelity of his wife, men debate the death of Onegin's Lensky over vodka. And ordinary Russians leave flowers -- wrapped in tinfoil or with water in jam jars -- wherever his ubiquitous image is found.

So Russia loves its poets -- yes? Yes, indeed: when they are six feet under the ground and reliably pushing up daisies. Even better if they die a dramatic death: Pushkin suffered mortal wounds in an 1837 duel, defending the questionable honor of his wife.

Without taking a leaf from Pushkin's laurels, let us consider how the veneration of the dead has displaced a living tradition of poetry in Russia -- and perhaps here in the United States as well. Concealed under a high tide of cliches and stereotypes, such reverence for dead writers keeps us from examining the turbulent undercurrents of our own contemporary literature.

Like the Russians, we seem to retreat from living writers struggling to speak to us in our own language, in our own times. Indeed, most of us do not even know who our contemporary poets are. For psychological safety, we turn to the dead, buried and certain.

As the late American poet and critic Randall Jarrell noted, ``The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: It doesn't even know that he is there.''

But certain events can put a poet on the map. In this century, one could argue that a show-stopping suicide -- today's equivalent of Pushkin's fatal duel -- is the best career move a poet can make. Would Sylvia Plath be a household name without it?

But back to Russia. Contrary to this year's PR campaign, Pushkin's influence on Russian literature has not been an unequivocally healthy one.

Said the late, exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, ``During the Soviet period, literary life passed to a great degree under the banner of Pushkin studies . . . the only flourishing brand of literary scholarship.''

Even today, ``you can open any magazine and see Pushkin's style -- just from how the lines look,'' says Andrei Ariev, co-editor of one of the most prestigious Russian literary journals, Zvezda. ``Those who followed Pushkin's style -- they are not great poets at all.''

Pushkin was a liberal aristocrat reinvented by the Soviets as a proto-socialist. It's been said that everywhere he stepped -- which was a good many places in czarist Russia -- has been commemorated in a monument or a museum, from Kiev to Odessa to Pskov.

And yet post-Pushkin Russia has produced some of the best poetry of the world. The very small handful of poets who survived to write poetry under the bloody and soul-crushing Soviet regime are at last finding the public recognition that eluded them in their lifetime.

One has a sense that modern-day Russians are scrambling to make museums of the neglected fragments that they can find -- a spoon in the basement of the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum, for example, one that the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century might have used.

More frequent are the plentiful wall plaques on streets throughout Russia, a minimalist postmortem recognition for the poets and writers who were squelched, driven to their deaths and exiled during this century: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and others.

The point is not to flay the dead horse of Soviet persecution, but to note that Russia merely provides a pathological extreme of a more universal disorder: the animal preference for the familiar, comfortable and conforming over the risky, innovative and experimental. Unguarded, our aesthetics drift inevitably to the lowest common denominator.

Euphemism and cliche help us to disguise this process from ourselves, and short-circuit a living dialogue with the art and ideas of our own times. A cliche, after all, is as safe and certain as the opus of a dead poet.

So what does it really mean when Russians fill a sports arena for a poetry reading?

``They are resonating with some saccharine view: `He had a noble heart,' '' scoffs Ellendea Proffer, whose Southern California-based Ardis is an important publisher of Russian literature.

The West has its own cliches -- that of the ``great Russian soul,'' or the ``suffering Russian'' who is thus enabled to create great art. Take this typical view of the Pushkin bicentennial in the Times of London: ``Russians tend not to do things by halves. A romantic and fatalistic people, they are not prone to petty gestures or banal emotions. Throughout their suffering they have managed not only to maintain their dignity, but also fiercely to preserve their immense culture.''

Really? This would have been cheering news for Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet's widow, whose memoirs systematically portray the petty and banal actions -- not to say mean-spirited, cowardly ones -- of Russian bureaucrats, writers and common citizens during most of this century.

The fierce preservation of a culture -- where it was preserved and not destroyed -- lay in the hands of a few exceptional people paralyzed by a constant, degrading terror of the knock on the door.

Like most cliches, the ideal of the suffering artist hides dangerous lies in its penumbra. Our fascination with suffering -- the suffering of others, that is -- is one of the means by which it is allowed to continue.

So whenever we opine about the ``great Russian soul'' and its love of poetry, or the importance of suffering in the role of poetry, we are participating in the banalization of our own thinking. And we are participating in the process by which poets of this century were sent into exile and to their deaths.

As Brodsky said -- and he ought to have known -- ``It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsvetaeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted.

``Basically, talent doesn't need history.''

Ironically, Brodsky, too, has his own little plaque now, unveiled at the poet's St. Petersburg home on Liteiny Prospect a few months after his death in 1996. ``Joseph Brodsky was an honored citizen of St. Petersburg,'' said Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, perhaps forgetting that the poet was twice evicted from St. Petersburg -- once to a labor camp near Arkhangelsk, and the second time into permanent exile.

``Now many poets imitate Brodsky,'' laments Alexei Purin, poetry editor of Zvezda, ``which is just as silly as poets imitating Pushkin for 100 years.''

It gets worse: Now that there are no barriers on what Russians can read, ``they read trash. Like us,'' says Proffer. ``I'm not sure they're going to withstand the onslaught of TV and movies. Like us.'' Like us, they are drifting to the lowest common denominator.

So as we in America raise a glass to the Russian bard this bicentennial year, let us ponder whether British poet Ted Hughes' ``Birthday Letters'' would have been a national bestseller if it had not been immediately followed by the dramatic obituary of the poet, and if its subject had not been his late wife, Plath. And let us recall that, despite the much-ballyhooed current ``revival'' of American poetry, most of us could not name three living American poets, nor cite four lines of poetry written . . . well . . . since the death of Robert Frost.

Cynthia Haven (cynthiahaven
@yahoo.com) is a Stanford-based author and journalist. She wrote this article for Perspective.

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