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12 “A Path of Thorns”: The Spiritual Wounds and Wandering of Worker-Poets Mark D. Steinberg Two paradoxical stories connect in this essay: manual workers who wrote poetry and a religious language that was not necessarily the language of religion. Both are stories about suffering and searching, and their interpretation in a sacred key, marked by emotional pathos and a sense of transcendent meaning , by faith but also by doubt.These are stories about language—its irrepressibility and power. And these are stories about boundaries, about the porosity and ambiguity of hermeneutic divides in people’s experiences of the world, in their experience of the transcendent, and in our own categories and definitions, especially of the elusive boundaries of secular and sacred. In the early years of the twentieth century, hundreds of working-class Russians, with little formal schooling, found themselves inexplicably “driven,” by their own accounts, to express themselves in verse and, although less often, in fictional prose, criticism, and reminiscence.1 The language with which they wrote was rich in religious images, tropes, and narratives. They wrote of their own lives, and of the world and its meanings, as a “way of the cross” and “path of thorns,” as “crucifixion” and “martyrdom.” They spoke of awakening to “sacred truth” and of the promises of redemption and salvation. Few of these writers, in their use of this language, meant literally to interpret life according to Christian theological belief; their biographies tell us that most of them were avowedly secular Marxists. But neither was this mere metaphor, pointing entirely to something beyond itself, emptied of all referential sense of the original . “It is absolutely impossible,” it has been suggested, “to empty out words filled to bursting,”2 especially when words are full of the long human effort to give meaning and sense to life, and even imbue it with awe and hope. I find the same resistance to “emptying out” in the pervasive use of religious vocabulary and images by worker-poets. Sacred symbols and metaphors, 304 “A Path of Thorns” 305 it has long been argued, have a distinctive power to express deeper, mysterious , and sacramental structures of meaning in the world, and to voice, with all necessary multiplicity and paradox, the otherwise inexpressible.3 In the poetry of Russian workers, the symbolic language of the sacred, however much the intended narrative concerned this world (saecularis, in the Christian Latin, means to be of, or pertaining to, this world and this time), served in just such a way to read the disjointed fragments of everyday experience as part of a meaningful and purposeful narrative, a coherent conception of existence and time. Where secular and sacred begin and end in this language is characteristically ambiguous. Most important, this discourse, although formally atheological, drew deeply on the sensibilities and emotions of religious language, especially the pathos of Christ’s Passion, in order to articulate a sense of awe before the world, to voice the imagination, and to dream of salvation. At the same time, and for many inescapably, however much they sought to flee it, this was an emotional pathos expressing a deep sense of melancholy and dread, but not one that can simply be reduced to secular skepticism. This language, in the hands of workers, cannot be fully understood apart from the peculiar story of these workers’ lives. Worker-poets well understood that workers writing poetry was transgressive.They often painfully felt the contradictoriness of their position at the boundaries of physical labor and mental creativity, of class and cultural difference. Indeed, their position as proletarian authors was full of the unease and power we have come to associate with liminal and hybrid identities.The hyphen that helps to name these identities, Jacques Derrida has suggested, is often a bridge that does not bridge, a “silence” that cannot pacify “a single torment” or ease “wounds.”4 It is also a linguistic sign of transgressive reach. Worker-poets, we find in their writings, felt both this torment and this daring.This awkwardness and transgressiveness is an essential part of the story of the worker-poet’s language. These worker-poets may also be seen as archetypal “strangers,” much as the linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has described in writing about the hyphenated experiences of immigrants but also about the essential, psychological, strangeness stirred by other, more inward paths of cultural and social leaving “home” and wandering . Kristeva characterizes strangers as marked by feelings of “solitude, even in the midst of a...

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