Messages from the Lost

From the time of the composer Anton Rubinstein’s acquiring for Russian artists the touchingly bureaucratic title of Free Artist, until the Bolshevik Revolution, the arts in Russia were practiced with something of the dignity of European custom. True, an occasional offender was caught and banished to Siberia, and a great many artists preferred to live abroad, but for the most part the end of the century was as free a time for the artist as Russia has ever seen. Just after the Revolution, the arts burst into a gaudy and jubilant springtime. Agitprop trains as brightly painted as peasant bedspreads, laden with books, paintings, movies, and poets, took the good news to the provinces: Russia was free and so was the Russian artist. Goncharova, Larionov, Tatlin, Malevich, Kandinsky—the first abstractionist of them all—commenced a renaissance, and with them composers and architects, poets and dramatists. But in less than two years a chill began to set in. The new bureaucracy, it was clear, was to be a tyrant who would make czar-dom seem by comparison a fussy and puritanical uncle.

One of the most talented of the new Russian artists of this period was the poet Osip Mandelstam. His poetry has been translated by various Westerners over the past few years, and his subterranean reputation has surfaced with increasing frequency since l’affaire Pasternak. It was known that he disappeared into thin air around 1938. The Russians delicately pointed out that he had been given his choice of concentration camps, and the official view of his death is recorded by Ilya Ehrenburg; namely, that Mandelstam died of ill health while reciting a sonnet of Petrarch before a cozy fire.

GD

About the Author

Guy Davenport

Featured Tags

From the time of the composer Anton Rubinstein’s acquiring for Russian artists the touchingly bureaucratic title of Free Artist, until the Bolshevik Revolution, the arts in Russia were practiced with something of the dignity of European custom. True, an occasional offender was caught and banished to Siberia, and a great many artists preferred to live abroad, but for the most part the end of the century was as free a time for the artist as Russia has ever seen. Just after the Revolution, the arts burst into a gaudy and jubilant springtime. Agitprop trains as brightly painted as peasant bedspreads, laden with books, paintings, movies, and poets, took the good news to the provinces: Russia was free and so was the Russian artist. Goncharova, Larionov, Tatlin, Malevich, Kandinsky—the first abstractionist of them all—commenced a renaissance, and with them composers and architects, poets and dramatists. But in less than two years a chill began to set in. The new bureaucracy, it was clear, was to be a tyrant who would make czar-dom seem by comparison a fussy and puritanical uncle.

One of the most talented of the new Russian artists of this period was the poet Osip Mandelstam. His poetry has been translated by various Westerners over the past few years, and his subterranean reputation has surfaced with increasing frequency since l’affaire Pasternak. It was known that he disappeared into thin air around 1938. The Russians delicately pointed out that he had been given his choice of concentration camps, and the official view of his death is recorded by Ilya Ehrenburg; namely, that Mandelstam died of ill health while reciting a sonnet of Petrarch before a cozy fire.