Nikolai Klyuev: Time and Text, Place and Poet

1. Lives of the Poet: Klyuev’s Life, as Lived, Imagined, Re-created, and Disputed

9 Chapter One Lives of the Poet: Klyuev’s Life, as Lived, Imagined, Re-created, and disputed T H E R E A R E M A N Y WAY S to tell a life story, but the most satisfactory lives often begin or are begun with death. death brings with it the need and the possibility to tell the story from the end to the beginning —funeral eulogies and obituaries provide ample evidence of that need, while scandalous biographies of the famous, when recently deceased, make frequent use of the possibility. It seems that death inspires confidence that a life can be told in full—or at least that, of the transitory patterns a living person creates or into which a person can be fitted during the business of being alive, many can finally be excluded in favor of one or more dominant and recurrent patterns. death is also, of course, convenient in guaranteeing the absence of the subject, who might take issue with the patterns identified by others. Although it is an illusion that death has indeed set life in its final and irrevocable pattern—even the lives of most of us, unremarkable people, change pattern time and time again after death as they are reviewed, retold, rethought—at the very least, death provides a moment of certainty and finality in the story. For most citizens of “developed” countries, even during exceptional periods such as wartime, death also has a mundane social clarity. The material evidence—the presence of the deceased, and the accompanying documentation, which sets in motion the familiar social and religious rituals— assures one of the private and public facts of death, and reinforces the need to begin the retracing of a life story. Although less ritualized, the moment of birth is given equally reassuring clarity by the mechanisms of modern, secular society—hospitals, nurses, doctors, birth certificates, birth announcements. In a word, most people in the “first world” today can be proved to have been born at a particular time and in a particular place, and can or will be attested to have died with equal clarity of geography and chronology. Russia, as is so often the case with such generalizations, is something of an exception. Still predominantly a peasant country in the early twentieth century, and several times in that century the site of overwhelming and often violent change, Russian experience often defies the personal certain- Chapter One 10 ties of life and, especially, death that are usually accessible in other parts of modern Europe or North America, and very often in other parts of the world. This is especially true of the millions of victims of the Soviet period who disappeared into the Stalinist Gulag or perished during the Second World War. In many instances, all trace of them was lost; in other cases, people turned out not to have died at all, yet they returned home to find the circumstances of their own personal lives changed beyond recognition in their absence (spouses had begun new lives; children they hardly knew had grown up quite independently of them, and so on). And this is but one of the most dramatic examples of the ways in which constructing an ordinary, unremarkable life in twentieth-century Russia involved uncertainties largely alien to many otherwise culturally comparable countries. Equally familiar and shocking to any observer of that country are the uncertainties associated with many of the key moments between birth and death, moments which have the familiarity and illusion of organic patterning elsewhere: housing, family, career, to name three of the most vivid examples. But even in Russia, where these matters are more problematic, death brings both the need and the possibility to clarify the course of an individual ’s life. And this is especially true in the case of those whose lives have been far from ordinary. The writers of Soviet Russia had, when alive, the privileges and strains of intense attention from their readers and from the state; when dead, they often (and, as the century wore on, increasingly) received the equally intense attention of scholars and other authors devoted to the project of creating some kind of certainty out of the multiple uncertainties and lacunae which comprised the known life stories of so many. Yet notwithstanding such attention, the end point from which such investigations are typically begun could remain elusive. only the death of the Soviet Union itself rendered possible the discovery of the truth about the deaths of many of...