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231 Chapter Five Poetry of destruction and the destruction of Poetry: Klyuev’s Late Lyric Poetry and the “Razrukha” Cycle KLYUEV’S L ATE LYRIC P o ETRY not only addresses directly both the personal circumstances of the poet himself and the general circumstances of Russian society of the time, but is also very much shaped, and even mutilated, by those circumstances. Its reception, too, is determined by the situation in which the poet found himself and by the context in which it was first widely read—long after its composition, and, indeed, long after the death of the author. Particularly illustrative of these points is the cycle “Razrukha” (“destruction”), although many other later lyric works fulfill the same and similar paradigms. “Gagar’ya sud’bina,” as has been seen, marks the beginning of the period when not only for Klyuev but also for many Russian authors (and perhaps for most major Russian authors) “pre-Gutenberg” conditions shaped the composition and transmission of their work, and totalitarian attention shaped the course and often the ending of their lives. For some authors not only publishing but also writing became very difficult. Klyuev, too, suffered a period of agraphia. According to the dates in Serdtse edinoroga, the poet, it will be recalled, wrote no lyric poems between 1922 and July 30, 1925, the date of “Ne budu pisat’ ot serdtsa” (522–23), nor are there any poemy from this two-and-a-half-year period. Thus the end of his Vytegra years marks a clear and decisive break in his career. Klyuev’s travails in the later 1920s and the 1930s have already been outlined: his poema Derevnya, published in 1927, and his collection Izba i pole, published the next year and containing only two previously uncollected poems, mark, to all intents and purposes, the far boundary of his life as published author. Between 1928 and Klyuev’s death in 1937 only four publications of his verse are recorded.1 of these, two are publications of “Matros” (1918; “Sailor,” 388–89), and a third consists of the four-poem cycle“Stikhi iz kolkhoza” (1932; “Verses from a Collective Farm,” 583–87), his last attempt to win favor with secular authority. Chapter Five 232 But Klyuev’s estrangement from the printed word had begun earlier. The appearance in print of new work by the poet was very rare after his extensive publications of 1922 and 1923 (the collections L’vinyi khleb and Lenin, and the poemy Chetvertyi Rim and Mat’-Subbota). The consequences of Klyuev’s divorce from the printing press have already been outlined, and it should be emphasized again that they were fundamental not only in shaping that late poetic output but also in determining its survival and transmission (or otherwise), and in its contextualization when eventually published. In other words, not only does totalitarianism inevitably transform the thematics of poetry and the psychology of composition, but it also transforms the very physical substance of verse, which becomes quite different as a direct result of the sociopolitical environment. In these circumstances poetry also becomes even more different from prose than in more “normal” conditions, since the possibilities of performance and oral transmission (through memorization) still available to it—however dangerous—give it dimensions of existence largely denied to prose. Meanwhile, the individual poetic utterance may well become more isolated from the overall body of a poet’s work, and the subsequent retrieval of individual lyrics becomes even more difficult than the recovery of extant but unpublished works of prose. Even today the full profile of the poet’s output in the years between his move from Vytegra to Leningrad in 1923 and his death in 1937 is not entirely clear. The fact that the vast majority of his new works in that period existed only in manuscript or typescript not only during his lifetime but also until the late 1960s (and a significant minority beyond that decade) guarantees that at least some have been lost forever, while others exist in multiple , sometimes unreliable, versions. Moreover, as a poet who continued to work but whose professional existence lay largely outside the boundaries of the world of printed literature, Klyuev operated within literary parameters that were quite different from those of most modern writers in the first world. The distinguishing criteria of “finished/unfinished” and “public/ private,” for example, have far less clarity in these new circumstances. on the other hand, it is clear that despite the pressures applied upon him or created...

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