revolutionary romance in poetry and in life
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February 16 marks the 90th anniversary of the death of Eduard Bagritsky, the main revolutionary romantic of Soviet poetry. The status of a classic prevents us from considering the hidden drama of his fate – the drama of a poet in love with exploits, adventures, blood and passion, and a person completely alien to them in life.
Eduard Bagritsky is a poet who is loved in his youth, at eighteen or twenty years old, and then they are a little embarrassed by this love. Two peaks of its popularity: mature Stalinism (from the early 1930s to the Great Terror) and the early Thaw (late 1950s and early 1960s) – eras that seem to have little resemblance to each other, but have a common feature – a slight infantilism that requires half-knowledge of real cruelty, eyes closed in delight.
In the post-Soviet era, Bagritsky found himself pushed to the periphery of the canon. Two or three good articles that have been written about him in recent decades have a general intonation – apologetic, slightly arrogant, justifying: yes, this is our youthful love, yes, a dubious figure, yes, cheap romance, but still a talented poet. In the cultural consciousness, Bagritsky has just such an image – an overgrown child prodigy, a romantic and life-lover who passed away young – an image that does not quite correspond to reality.
The teenager Bagritsky appears on the Odessa literary scene in the mid-1910s. He immediately becomes a leader among local young poets, gaining fame as a genius, but, it seems, primarily because he is better suited than others for this obligatory role in any literary company. He comes up with all sorts of group fun, confidently and authoritatively talks about poetry, masterfully improvises – he can compose a sonnet on a given topic in five minutes. In the poems he wrote over the next 10 years, Bagritsky masters the manners of almost all significant contemporaries – from Severyanin to Khodasevich. It doesn’t really matter whether these poems tell about Creoles and pirates or about the Fourth Congress of the Comintern; they are clever, witty, but they have no shine, no voice of their own. It is amazing how in the mid-1920s a talented versifier transformed into a great poet.
Bagritsky was entirely born of Odessa – its sea, ethnic mix, criminal atmosphere. Hence the charming irregularities of his language, the fascinating syncopated rhythm. However, he begins to write his real poems when he leaves Odessa for Moscow, which is foreign and alien to him. The hometown myth begins to work only when the source of inspiration is unavailable, turning from background into fantasy. At the time of the move, Bagritsky was 30 years old. He is no longer a very young and very sick man. He has suffered from bronchial asthma since childhood, but in his mid-twenties he already understands that he has little time to live. In the proximity of death, he creates all his best poems, full of youthful fire.
First of all, Bagritsky remained in history as a singer of the sublime, world-transforming revolutionary violence. In his poems, he presented himself as an active participant in campaigns and battles, but did not hide at all that all this was a fair exaggeration. In the army, he worked as a clerk, political instructor, and agitator; he was a bit cowardly, did not take part in battles, and, it seems, was completely unsuited to military affairs (at a later age, he was passionate about hunting, but according to all evidence, he was a very poor shot).
This contradiction has often been noted, but there are a number of similar ones. Bagritsky, like few others, knew how to sing of lust, animal passion. In life, according to the recollections of those close to him, he was not a womanizer; he started affairs more out of bravado or boredom, never giving in to feelings. He described the food with pleasure – lush hams, tender lard, juicy watermelons; in practice, he suffered from food neuroses, could not tolerate most foods, and never ate in front of strangers. Voluptuousness and gluttony were as alien to him as the fearlessness of a warrior. Bagritsky was not everything he imagined himself to be in his poems.
The culminating episode of his dying poem “February”: the young hero-commissar and his comrades cover the thieves’ house and see there a high school student with whom he was hopelessly in love before the revolution; she became a prostitute, and the hero rapes her without taking off his boots and holster. This violence is a ritual act: impregnation by a poet of the world, by a revolution by history, by a Jewish boy by Russian culture. Bagritsky actually served in the people’s militia, the story described actually happened, but he himself told his friends that the bandits were not there, and when he saw the fallen object of his passion, he was embarrassed and hastened to retreat. In poetry, something desirable happens that does not happen in life.
The point here is not at all a matter of lies or banal sublimation. Bagritsky was a hostage to the modernist myth, in which the poet’s poems and his biography are parts of one text, reassuring each other. The creators and heroes of such myths were his idols – Gumilyov, Blok, Pasternak, Mayakovsky. Bagritsky tried to work according to the same model. The problem is that by nature he was not a romantic of life, but an escapist romantic. The world of his poems, wide open to the fury of the winds – the world of tramps, smugglers, commissars – was alien to him. That’s why it was necessary to leave Odessa, grow old, and start dying: the impossibility of an adventure or a feat then became a final fact and precisely because of that, a source of poetry.
The main problem for connoisseurs of Bagritsky has always been the poem “TVS” with the famous monologue of Dzerzhinsky: “If he says “lie,” lie, if he says “kill,” kill,” etc. A masterpiece and at the same time an apology for terror, the triumph of revolutionary ethics over humanistic ethics. Meanwhile, this is an extremely frank text. Dzerzhinsky here is a ghost appearing to the sick hero in a feverish delirium. His voice is the voice of another world, in which the poet is in love, to which he does not belong, into which he wants to escape, like into a dream, from his small life and small death.
The paradox is that all this, seemingly inaccessible, was very close. Having finally abandoned the heroes of his youth, Till Eulenspiegel, the sailors of the Flying Dutchman and other book romance, in his later texts Bagritsky presented today’s reality as a distant fantastic reality. Including the reality of the violence that so fascinated him, actually spilled around. Here his deeply personal characteristics resonated with the demands of the era. Bagritsky died just on the eve of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, which proclaimed the socialist realist method (the congress honored the poet by standing up). But in his very practice there was something consonant with the stakes of socialist realism: the present, presented as ideal, everyday life as a revolutionary feat. Therefore, Bagritsky easily turned into a socialist realist classic. Unlike his closest friends, Isaac Babel, Yuri Olesha, who were in a much more tense relationship with the era, he perceived reality with its conflicts and contradictions as an abstraction, material for fantasy. Therefore, he knew how to show how utopia, a different, higher world, is found right here and now. “The Death of a Pioneer” is about this – his most famous, most worn-out and, perhaps, truly, his best text.
A series of substitutions occur in this poem. Valentina Dyko, the daughter of the Bagritsky householder, really died of scarlet fever, but the whole story with the mother begging the girl to kiss the cross was with another girl – a pioneer named Verushka, whose death Bagritsky witnessed during one hunting expedition. (To the end of her life, Valya’s mother hated the poet who had glorified her for the sake of a catchphrase. Her father was repressed, and there is a possibility that the poem played a role here.) However, the heroine, Valya-Verushka, of course, represents an idealized mirror for Bagritsky himself. Such a mirror could not be the executed Commissar Kogan from the “Duma about Opanas” that brought him fame, Dzerzhinsky or any other active hero dying in office. The story of a dying communist child provides an opportunity to reenact death from disease as death in battle. It’s just a fight that didn’t happen, but that definitely would have happened.
In this “would”, in the subjunctive mood of a dream – bloody, but because of its unattainability, still alluring – the action of all Bagritsky’s poems unfolds. Here is the charm of his poetry in both senses: its charm and its seduction.
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