Nikolai Klyuev: Time and Text, Place and Poet

Conclusion

325 Conclusion KLYUEV WR oTE his last poetry in the year of his death— 1937. But almost seventy years later, in 2006, a major late work (Kreml’) was published for the first time. It is often said that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. The same can be said for the biographies and even bibliographies of many of its dead authors. Klyuev, whose self-conscious (but also organic) mutability is so evident in his poetry, prose, and constructed identities, continues to change for reasons quite separate from any literary program. Klyuev is also, as the preceding pages have attempted to demonstrate, a very paradoxical poet, and the paradoxes of his life and works are nowhere more evident than in his last years. That his last surviving works should be so interrelated and form such contrasts with one another effectively demonstrates many of those paradoxes. At the same time, each of those late works—Pesn’ o Velikoi Materi, “Razrukha,” Kreml’, and his final lyric, “Est’ dve strany: odna — Bol’nitsa”—eloquently testify to the story of Russian culture in the twentieth century (and three of them are entitled to prominent places within the Russian canon), but remain largely ignored by scholars and readers—another characteristic paradox of Klyuev’s story. This study began with claims both of uniqueness and of typicality for Klyuev; it was proposed to look at Klyuev both in “philological” and in “culturological ” terms; and a wider readership was called to attend to both poet and poetry, as significant for immanent and historical reasons. The preceding pages have taken the patient reader across many territories within Russian cultural history and through detailed examinations of complex issues of textuality and interpretation within the smaller but by no means easily mapped terrain of Klyuev’s poetry and prose. Repeatedly, Klyuev’s story has articulated the story of his country in the last century, while his work has often communicated a markedly individual view of that country, that period, and that story. of all the authors labeled “new-peasant” or associated with early twentieth-century ruralism, Klyuev is clearly the “most modernist,” as is in- Conclusion 326 dicated by many of his most striking characteristics: his very wide referential framework bespeaks a “yearning for world culture” from within the olonian izba; his literary self-consciousness, intermittent playfulness, interest in complex, compound formal structures, evident and profound preoccupation with language, and even his presentation of the vatic powers of poet and poetry align him with major figures from Blok to Tsvetaeva, while his sexual orientation and literary treatment of that orientation both seem to be a perfect fit with the Russian “Silver Age.” Yet no other modernist figure is close to Klyuev in literary stance—his mythologization of the peasant world has nothing in common with his modernist confrères; his approach to popular religion and his claims to be associated with it are quite different from what is found in Bal’mont, Bely, Kuzmin, and others; his lexicon and his approach to the word evidently have at least something in common with some of the new-peasant poets, and scholarly claims to see in his poetics traces of premodern approaches to discourse should not be dismissed lightly; nor should his “archaism” be relegated to the generally negative category of “stylization ,” although there are certainly moments of stylization in his work. As for his identity, his created lives, and his presentation of himself, it is entirely characteristic of the problems he poses for readers that it often seems best to see his position as simultaneously self-conscious, acquired, culturally provocative , and also expressive of the most fundamental elements in his poetry and person. Finally, and to put it most bluntly, his martyrdom, the fact that he died both for his literary stance and his homosexuality, and that his final known work reiterates that he is the “singer of the olonian peasant house,” while his penultimate known work had renounced precisely that role, provide a striking summary of the paradoxes and ultimately tragic conjunction of literature, life, and Soviet power that define Klyuev’s story. Given the claims made for Klyuev here, it is appropriate to conclude these discussions by addressing an obvious question: if he is so interesting and so worth reading, why is he not read more widely (after all, other “difficult ” poets have many enthusiasts)? The answer, perhaps, lies in a combinantion of circumstances. As has been pointed out, Klyuev had no successors (for that matter, he had...