Poetry, freedom, and revolution - Russian poetry - 1789: An Idea That Changed the World

UNESCO Courier, June, 1989 by Sergei S. Averintsev

Poetry, freedom and revolution

Far from the tumult of the streets of Paris in the fateful year of 1789, lay Moscow, rather like a small country town with its steep streets glittering with golden domes and crosses. Moscow, that highly orthodox and patriarchal capital city, before the fire of 1812 still had reminders at every turn of days long before Peter the Great.

In the entrance hall of the aristocratic mansion of Piotr Alexandrovich Soymonov, innumerable candles gave off a festive glow. They were the work of the daughter of the house, a sensitive and intelligent little girl, not quite seven years old. Her father was surprised--why all these candles? She told him the reason: "In honour of the storming of the Bastille and the release of the poor prisoners!"

This little girl did not, however, throw in her lot with the Jacobins. Sofia Petrovna (1782-1857), whose married name was Svechin, belongs to the history of nineteenth-century Catholicism. She eventually left Russia because of her religious convictions, and for decades her Paris salon was a meeting-place for the cream of the Catholic intellectual elite: the liberals Montalembert and Lacordaire, the Spanish traditionalist Donoso-Cortes, and many others.

With her phrase "the release of the poor prisoners" the child went straight to the point and hit on what was to be the central theme of Russian life and culture for the next two centuries. Barely a year after the storming of the Bastile, and not unconnected with the fear and panic spread by the events in France, the writer Aleksandr Radishchev was arrested because of his book Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which, like the Revolution itself, was a radical postscript to the philosophical thought of the Enlightenment. On the road to exile, Radishchev wrote the following lines, full of black humour:

To blaze a trail where none has trod before For the fiery daredevils of the written word, for the pure in heart, for Truth, I go in fear To Siberia, to prison and to chains.

His premonition was correct. The trail was blazed for many like him, and along it marched a succession of new "daredevils of the written word", to use his blunt, old-fashioned expression. This, too, is one of the hallmarks of Russian culture. A century later, the journalist Vladimir Korolenko declared that at the gates of heaven every Russian writer would be asked how many years he had spent in prison for the sake of truth. And his contemporary, the literary critic Vengerov, wrote a book with an eloquent title: The Heroic Nature of Russian Literature. From the arrest of Radishchev to the repeated exiles of Pushkin, the conscription of Pozhelayev and the jailing of Dostoevsky, to the execution of Gumilyov and the fate of other twentieth-century writers condemned to the camps, the line runs clear and unbroken.

The example

of Andre Chenier

The Russian people saw the poet primarily as a martyr. How many Russian laments have been composed, from Pushkin to Osip Mandelstam, on the exile of Ovid? But the Roman poet was the victim of the Emperor Augustus, and his fate was less tragic than the fate of those involved in the greater tragedy arising from the tangled web of the Revolution and the rifts caused by its intrinsic contradictions.

One poet of 200 years ago, who in the Russian poetic tradition founded by Pushkin is imbued with the martyr's special significance, is Andre Chenier, the great poet of revolutionary France. Chenier, the citizen-poet, was inspired by the Revolution and condemned to death by the Revolution, which sent him to the scaffold just before the end of the Terror as a last expiatory victim to be swallowed by the abyss before it closed as in the ancient legends. Such a man was Andre Chenier, or "Andrei" Chenier, as Pushkin called him in the fashion of the day, to be imitated by twentieth-century poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. In Russianizing his name, Russian culture adopted him.

Familiarity with the work and ultimate fate of Chenier, both in France and abroad, had to wait until 1819, when the first collected edition of his poetry was published. And scarcely six years later, the year of the Decembrist uprising in Russia (1825), Pushkin wrote the long poem Andre Chenier. At the time, throughout Europe, tears were being shed over Byron's death; and yet Pushkin, for whom Byron had meant so much, neglected his memory to answer the call of Chenier, who had entered the kingdom of the dead "from the blood-stained block", "in terrible days".

At the heart of the poem lies Chenier's monologue before his execution. Pushkin's voice is in total unison with that of his hero, emphasized by the fact that Pushkin quotes from his own writings in the course of the monologue. There is no serious divergence of views between the two men, as Pushkin explains briefly and eloquently in his notes on the poem. A poet, simply because he is a poet, is bound to love Liberty, and in particular that aspect of freedom which the Revolution proclaims as essential: