Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (review)

Barbara Walker has written an ambitious and engaging book. She writes deftly, and she is always cognizant that her goal is not simply to create a historical record, but to engage other human beings and prompt them to explore the meaning of the historical record. The book opens with a direct address to the reader: "All day long you see a trickle of pilgrims climbing up and down the hill about a mile outside of town . . . ." The pilgrims are visiting Voloshin's grave above the Crimean village of Koktebel', and the reader follows along by means of Walker's prose (1–2). The next chapter opens with the statement, "Approach Maximilian Voloshin from almost any direction at all, and you will find a woman in your path" (24). This is, and is not, as titillating as it might seem, for although Walker gives Voloshin's female partners their due, she makes it clear that the first and overwhelmingly predominant woman in this context is Voloshin's mother, Elena Ottobal'dovna. Walker approaches the mother-son connection judiciously, neither denying the predictable Freudian overtones nor overstating them. Even without Freud, the unusually strong attachment and pronounced ambivalence in the relations between mother and son are clear enough. Here, as elsewhere, Walker's research is exemplary. She has exploited a wide range of secondary sources and archival materials and taken the opportunity to work closely with the preeminent Voloshin scholar Vladimir Kupchenko. Although the book is far from light reading, Walker's ability to relate to the people about and for whom she writes, along with the inclusion of numerous previously unpublished photographs in the text, make the volume a pleasure, even fun, to read.

Walker sets herself several goals, none of which involves a typical study of "life and works" of the given figure. She rightly notes that Voloshin failed to live up to the promise of his boyhood to become a "second Pushkin," and that he is, in fact, a minor poet who neither is, nor arguably deserves to be, widely recognized specifically for his literary gifts. Rather, she states,

he is known and loved among member members of the Russian educated elite for reasons that remain hidden from the uninitiated, above all for his contribution to the internal cultural history of the Russian intelligentsia at a vital moment in its development: that is, to the organization, values, and self-conception of a social group that has struggled mightily with those aspects of its history over the past two hundred years.

(2)

The book, therefore, is as much about an important segment of the literary intelligentsia of the time as it is about Voloshin as an individual. In this context, Walker provides an interesting discussion of the role of the social, intellectual, and political "circle" (kruzhok) in Russian history, and of the Russian symbolists and their circles in particular. The transition of the intelligentsia from its relatively unformalized pre-revolutionary manifestation to a bureaucratically connected, specifically Soviet social and cultural phenomenon, with the combination of chafing and dependency that came to be the hallmark of the new class, provides the larger context of the study.

In a chapter entitled "Voloshin and the Modernist Problem of the Ugly Poetess," Walker explores Voloshin's role as a mentor to female poets, his most successful effort being the case of Marina Tsvetaeva and the most intriguing being the case of "Cherubina de Gabriak." The latter was actually the fictional creation of Voloshin and Elena Dmitrieva, herself the "ugly poetess" of the chapter title. A young and ambitious modernist poet, Dmitrieva ardently desired to see her poems published in the journal Apollon. She apparently cut an unprepossessing figure and, moreover, annoyed the editor Sergei Makovskii and others with her habitual visits to the editorial office. As Walker puts it, when the journal continued to reject Dmitrieva's poems,

Voloshin instigated a masquerade in the Symbolist spirit...