23 Valerii Nefedov, *Poeziia Ivana Bunina: Etiudy* (Minsk: Vysheishaia shkola, 1975), p. 132. See also Oleg Mikhailov, *I. A. Bunin. Ocherk tvorchestva* (Moscow: Nauka, 1967). In contrast to Nefedov, Mikhailov (pp. 4–5) suggests that 'Bunin completes the whole page in the development of Russian culture, although according to his social inclinations, he himself does not have successors'.

24 Iurii Azarov, 'Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Bunina nuzhno podgotovit′ k ego 150-letiiu', *Russkii mir* (22 October 2010), para. 13, http://www.russkiymir.ru/ publications/87865/?sphrase\_id=704486

but was attributable to other writers, including Blok, Briusov, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gor′kii.25 The assertions made by Bunin's contemporaries continue to be referenced later in the Soviet period. Oleg Mikhailov highlights Blok's praise for Bunin's depictions of nature, and Nefedov relies on Gor′kii to provide a reason why Bunin's poetry should not be omitted from the Russian literary scene.26 The replication of criticism produced by Bunin's contemporaries has continued since 1991, with works such as *Klassik bez retushi: Literaturnyi mir o tvorchestve I. A. Bunina* (*A Canonical Author Without Retouch: The Literary World on the Creative Work of I. A. Bunin*), offering readers a clear picture of what other poets thought of Bunin's poetry at the time when it was written.27

Arguably, the difficulties associated with where to place Bunin in the canon of Russian poetry have arisen from the fact that he tends to be somewhat forgotten as a poet. As N. G. Mel′nikov illustrates, this was common, even during Bunin's lifetime: 'Bunin, as a poet, was simply forgotten about, and it happened more than once. The names of Blok, [Innokentii] Annenskii, [Nikolai] Gumilev, [Anna] Akhmatova, [Vladislav] Khodasevich, [Osip] Mandel′shtam, [Boris] Pasternak, and several others were listed, and no one mentioned Bunin'.28 The somewhat unfair lack of recognition that was afforded Bunin's poetry did not go unnoticed. Andrew Colin argues that 'there is no reason to penalize the man because he happened to combine two very rare gifts — that of a first-rate poet with that of a first-class novelist', and Gleb Struve feels that Bunin's poetry is 'an indispensable part of his artistic self-expression; and some of his best verse […] is not inferior in quality to the best of his prose'.29 Bunin himself continually felt the need to reassert his credentials as a poet, and his status as a poet is often reiterated in post-Soviet discussions about him.30

25 Tvardovskii, p. 10. Tvardovskii points out that Bunin was held in great esteem by Blok and Briusov, by Chekhov, 'who spoke very favourably' of him, and by Gor′kii, who 'acclaimed Bunin's talent in the most lavish terms ever applied to him'.

26 Mikhailov, *I. A. Bunin*, p. 65; Nefedov, p. 131.

27 Mel′nikov, *Klassik bez retushi*, 2010.

28 Georgii Adamovich's comments attributed by N. Mel′nikov, 'Vvedenie — Izbrannye stikhi 1929', in *Klassik bez retushi*, pp. 333–39 (p. 333).

29 Andrew Guershoon Colin, 'Ivan Bunin in Retrospect', *The Slavonic and East European Review*, 34 (1955), 156–73 (pp. 167–68); Gleb Struve, pp. 423–36 (p. 423).

30 Nikita Struve's comment attributed by A. V.: 'In his soul, he was a poet, and not a novelist'. A. V., 'Novaia shkola — novye traditsii', *Nezavisimaia gazeta* (13 September

Although it appears to be something of a struggle to find a place for Bunin in the canon of Russian poetry, and the need to remind readers that he was a poet as well as a prose writer persists, it could be argued that without the contributions of Bunin's contemporaries and the critics and poets that have followed them, it would have been far harder to begin to identify where Bunin fits into the Russian poetry canon. Leaving aside the ideological dimension of the various assessments of Bunin's work, it is clear that Bunin was highly esteemed by other writers, even though their views on his poetry differed. It is on these arguments that canon formers are constructing the post-Soviet canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry, and it appears that they share the views of their predecessors: Bunin's poetry is worthy of note. Furthermore, it demonstrates the role that the poet-based model of canon formation plays in the process of establishing Bunin as a canonical figure. However, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, there is some difficulty in drawing a clear distinction between the poetbased model of canon formation and the institutional model. The next section of this chapter will outline the role of the institutional model in the process of canonisation.

In the context of the institutional model, the teaching of a writer or work at school or university level is fundamental to the reinforcement and the reproduction of a canon. Owing to the sheer quantity of texts that were no longer subject to state censorship and the publication of material printed in Russia for the first time, the school curriculum required substantial reworking in the early 1990s. In this instance, Bunin is not a straightforward example. In spite of his status as an émigré writer, some of his works had been available to Soviet readers since the mid-1950s and to Soviet students in the 1970s.31 However, it was not until the first post-Soviet decade that Bunin's prose and poetry

2001), para. 1, http://www.ng.ru/education/2001-09-13/10\_korotko.html; Vasilii Peskov, 'Buninskie mesta', *Komsomol*′*skaia Pravda* (25 October 2002), para. 31, http:// www.kp.ru/daily/22662/21472; Liza Novikova, 'Poeticheskoe stolpotvorenie. Ob′′iavleny pretendenty na Buninskuiu premiiu', *Kommersant′* (7 August 2007), para. 1, http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/793345

31 N. N. Shneidman, *Literature and Ideology in Soviet Education* (Toronto: Lexington Books. D. C. Heath & Co., 1973), p. 77, p. 95. Shneidman notes that Bunin's poem 'Gustoi zelenyi el′nik u dorogi' is included for independent reading at grade four, and 'Gospodin iz San Frantsisko', various poems, and 'Pesn′ o Gaiavate' are included at grades eight to ten for home reading.

became a more permanent fixture of the school curriculum. In 1997, a number of Bunin's short stories and poems appeared on the syllabus for grades five to nine, when educational professionals had to teach two or three poems from ten suggested in the curriculum.32 On the syllabus for the upper grades, Bunin's poetry and prose appeared in the section 'Literature of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century', where five poems were suggested for study.33 However, in 2004, there were substantial revisions to the inclusion of Bunin's poetry. In grades five to nine, Bunin's poems were omitted from the curriculum, and just two of his stories were to be studied.34 In the upper grades, at both foundation and profile levels, a number of Bunin's poems had to be studied, along with a selection of stories.35

Despite the changes to the study of Bunin's poetry in the curriculum, his verse is included in a number of approved textbooks. At the lower

32 Ministerstvo obshchego i professional'nogo obrazovaniia RF, 'Ob obiazatel′nom minimume soderzhaniia obrazovatel′nykh programm osnovnoi obshcheobrazovatel′noi shkoly' (18 July 1997), section titled 'Iz literatury XX veka', http://www.businesspravo.ru/Docum/DocumShow\_DocumID\_52815.html. Children in grades five to nine of school are aged between ten and fifteen.

33 Ministerstvo obrazovaniia RF, 'Obiazatel′nyi minimum soderzhaniia srednego (polnogo) obshchego obrazovaniia' (30 June 1999), section titled 'Iz literatury kontsa XIX–nachala XX v.', http://www.businesspravo.ru/Docum/DocumShow\_ DocumID\_71939.html

34 Ministerstvo obrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 'Standart osnovnogo obshchego obrazovaniia po literature', Federal′nyi komponent gosudarstvennogo standarta obshchego obrazovaniia. Chast′ I. Nachal'noe obshchee obrazovanie. Osnovnoe obshchee obrazovanie (2004), section titled 'Russkaia literatura XX veka', http://window.edu.ru/resource/259/39259/files/09.pdf. The documents can be downloaded from Edinoe okno dostupa k informatsionnym resursam, http:// window.edu.ru

35 Ministerstvo obrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 'Standart srednego (polnogo) obshchego obrazovaniia po literature. Bazovyi uroven′', Federal′nyi komponent gosudarstvennogo standarta obshchego obrazovaniia. Chast′ I. Nachal'noe obshchee obrazovanie. Osnovnoe obshchee obrazovanie (2004), section titled 'Russkaia literatura XX veka', http://window.edu.ru/resource/276/39276/files/29. pdf. Ministerstvo obrazovaniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 'Standart srednego (polnogo) obshchego obrazovaniia po literature. Profil′nyi uroven′', Federal′nyi komponent gosudarstvennogo standarta obshchego obrazovaniia. Chast′ I. Nachal'noe obshchee obrazovanie. Osnovnoe obshchee obrazovanie (2004), section titled 'Russkaia literatura XX veka', http://window.edu.ru/resource/277/39277/files/30.pdf. The documents can be downloaded from Edinoe okno dostupa k informatsionnym resursam, http://window.edu.ru. Taking a subject at 'profile level' in the final two years of secondary education indicates specialisation in particular subjects which are studied in greater depth; other subjects which pupils must follow, but in which they have not chosen to specialise, are taken at 'foundation level'.

grades, the discussion varies in its depth. The grade five textbook edited by Buneev and Buneeva includes a single poem by Bunin, 'Zmeia' ('Snake'), alongside a number of other single poems by other poets.36 In the grade six textbook, edited by Aleksandr Kutuzov, seven of Bunin's poems are included. Six comprise part of the chapter titled 'Journey Three: To the Homeland' ('Puteshestvie tret'e, na rodinu') and the poem 'Sviatogor i Il′ia' ('Sviatogor and Il′ia') appears alongside Gumilev's 'Zmei' ('Dragon') in the section 'epic motifs of Russian poetry'.37 By the time students reach grade nine, the textbooks contain far greater contextual detail about the events of the twentieth century and the impact that they had on literature. There is no criticism of Bunin's emigration; the decision to leave is attributed to the 'animosity' that Bunin felt for the Revolution; and in spite of his feelings toward the new regime, Bunin's love for Russia remained and the sadness which he felt on abandoning the country in 1920 is highlighted.38 Despite the commentary on Bunin's life in emigration, there is no sense that his works should be read any differently from those penned by writers who remained in Russia after 1917: 'within the country Soviet literature was created; beyond Russia's borders was the literature of the abroad. […] But the main thing not to forget is this non-unified sea of works carried the name of Russian literature'.39 Indeed, according to the textbooks, the position that Bunin holds in twentieth-century Russian literature is that of the 'last Russian classic'.40 Beyond grade nine, the study of

36 Rustem Buneev and Ekaterina Buneeva, *Shag za gorizont. Uchebnik-khrestomatiia po literature. 5 klass. Kniga 2*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Balass, 1998), II, 306–15; Buneev and Buneeva, *Shag za gorizont. Uchebnik-khrestomatiia po literature. 5 klass. Kniga 2*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Balass, 2004), II, 210–17.

37 *V mire literatury. 6 klass*, edited by Aleksandr Kutuzov (Moscow: Drofa, 1996), pp. 72–77, pp. 192–93; *V mire literatury. 6 klass*, edited by Kutuzov (Moscow: Drofa, 2005), pp. 87–92, p. 222.

38 *Literatura. Uchebnoe izdanie. 9 klass*, edited by Tamara Kurdiumova (Moscow: Drofa, 1998), p. 315; *Literatura. Russkaia klassika (izbrannye stranitsy). 9 klass. Uchebnikpraktikum dlia obshcheobrazovatel*′*nykh uchrezhdenii*, edited by Gennadii Belen′kii (Moscow: Mnemozina, 1997), p. 278; Buneev and Buneeva, *Istoriia tvoei literatury, Uchebnik-khrestomatiia po literature. 9 klass. Kniga 2*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Balass, 2005), II, 169. Belen′kii points out that 'even at the very beginning of his emigration, [Bunin] expressed his longing for his paternal home', p. 278, a sentiment echoed by Buneev and Buneeva, who emphasize that 'during his entire life, Russia was [Bunin's] greatest and fondest love', p. 169.

39 *Literatura*, edited by Kurdiumova, p. 313.

40 *Literatura. Russkaia klassika*, edited by Belen′kii, p. 279.

Russian literature is no longer compulsory. In the textbooks for those pupils who choose to continue studying literature, Bunin's poetry is, in many instances, included by the editors.41 Unsurprisingly, the level of contextual material that accompanies Bunin's prose and poetry in the textbooks for pupils in grade eleven is far more detailed than it is at the lower grades. It is also interesting to note that there is emphasis on the fact that Bunin 'proved himself equally brilliant as a prose writer, a poet, and a translator', publishing his lyrics and prose in the same collections.42

In several textbooks, the promotion of Bunin as a canonical writer is supported by the use of critical assessments by scholars and by other authors. Just as Tvardovskii did in his introduction 'O Bunine' ('About Bunin'), Gennadii Belen′kii draws upon comments made by Bunin's contemporaries, thus he quotes Blok's assertion that 'the wholeness and simplicity of the verses and Bunin's outlook so valuable and unique that we have to […] acknowledge his right to one of the chief positions in contemporary Russian poetry'.43 Furthermore, by quoting from Tvardovskii's introduction, Belen′kii contributes to the process of canonising what Tvardovskii has said about Bunin: 'Bunin could not have become that which he became in poetry if he had only followed classical examples. And it is not correct, when it is said that his poems were one-dimensional and monotonous […]'.44 This further illustrates the challenge in distinguishing the boundaries between the institutional model of canon formation, and the poet-based process of canonisation. Clearly, the institutional model of canon formation draws upon the assessments of the poet-based model for validation thus revealing how the ideas promoted by individual writers are perpetuated.

41 A. V. Barannikov, *Russkaia literatura XX veka. 11 klass. Khrestomatiia. Chast*′ *I.*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1997), I, 8–10; Iulii Lyssyi, *Russkaia literatura XX veka. 11 klass. Praktikum* (Moscow: Mnemozina, 1998), pp. 6–33; Sergei Zinin and Viktor Chalmaev, *Literatura XX veka. Khrestomatiia. 11 klass. Chast*′ *I*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Russkoe slovo, 2005), I, 5–11.

42 Vladimir Agenosov, *Russkaia Literatura XX veka. 11 klass. Chast*′ *I*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Drofa, 1996), I, 167; Lyssyi, p. 12.

43 *Literatura. Russkaia klassika*, edited by Belen′kii, p. 280. See also *Literatura*, edited by Kurdiumova, p. 315. Kurdiumova draws upon Tolstoi's words to exemplify the point that Bunin's contemporaries admired his work.

44 *Literatura. Russkaia klassika*, edited by Belen'kii, p. 281. (The translation of Tvardovskii's quotation here is mine, rather than that of Shartse and Zheleznova (1979)).

It is interesting to note that the critical work included in Belen′kii's textbook is all dated prior to 1991, which raises the question: does the inclusion of this material represent some sort of reconciliation with past assessments of Bunin's work, or is it simply a reflection of a lack of post-Soviet material about Bunin? Given that this particular textbook was published in the mid-to-late-1990s, it is not unreasonable to suppose that new works about Bunin were not widely accessible, especially given the declining print runs of the 1990s. However, continued recognition of Soviet-era criticism might suggest a form of compromise, whereby contemporary critics and textbook editors accept the limitations of works produced prior to 1991, and take from them sections that remain relevant, while rejecting those parts that no longer apply.45 It might also suggest that post-Soviet editors are aware of the ways in which literary hierarchies develop and recognise that comments made by Bunin's contemporaries were reiterated by Soviet-era critics, who may themselves have been endeavouring to perpetuate a canon that was not distorted by ideology.

Mike Fleming points out that there are at least two reasons why a writer appears on the school curriculum.46 In the first instance, there are the 'traditional criteria for forming the canon [that] have primarily been associated with notions of quality, selection of those texts or authors which are considered "the best"'.47 Secondly, Fleming suggests that 'other related criteria were to do with selecting texts thought to be representative of a particular period, style or genre or those which have had an impact on culture historically and those which are thought to have a particular national significance'.48 Arguably, Bunin's inclusion in the curriculum has more to do with Fleming's second point about

48 *Ibid*.

45 This rejection of Soviet-era assessments of Bunin's work can be seen in *Literatura*, edited by Kurdiumova, p. 315, when it is stated that 'abroad, the work of the writer did not lose its brilliance or its unbreakable connection with the Motherland. In emigration Bunin remained one of the most remarkable and brilliant of Russian writers', which is in direct contrast with Tvardovskii's suggestion that Bunin's emigration caused 'the premature and inevitable depreciation of his creative strength' (pp. 11–12).

46 Mike Fleming, 'The Literary Canon: Implications for the Teaching of Language as Subject', in *Text, literature and 'Bildung'*, edited by Irene Pieper (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2007), pp. 31–38, http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Prague07\_ LS\_EN.doc (p. 33).

47 *Ibid*., p. 33.

representation than it has to do with his comments about quality. Bunin fills a gap that might otherwise be empty at the beginning of the twentieth century. His works demonstrate a link between the poetry and prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following the traditions established by nineteenth-century writers, such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Fedor Tiutchev.49 Instead of following the 'aesthetic views and creative practices' of poets, such as Briusov and Blok, Bunin chose to 'put up an impenetrable wall against all fads and fashions […]', thus, the inclusion of his poetry provides an alternative to the experimentation that was taking place in literature at the beginning of the 1900s.50 By selecting Bunin to represent the writers of the Russian emigration, his works help to fulfil the post-Soviet desire to bring together literature's different pasts and to overcome the division between émigré and Soviet literature.51 The fact that he lived for an extended period outside Russia and continued to write in emigration provides an example of how Russian literature survived in exile. In addition, his rejection of Nazism and alleged contemplation of a return to the Soviet Union in the post-war period were no doubt in his favour when textbook and curriculum compilers came to evaluate which writer should represent the émigré community of the first wave.52 In terms of being of 'particular national significance', Bunin was a prizewinner within pre-revolutionary Russia and internationally, when he became Russia's first Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1933.53 In spite of the Soviet-era condemnation of this award, a post-Soviet reconciliation with the honour appears to have taken place, demonstrated by the frequency with which Bunin's victory in this competition is mentioned. Whatever

49 Tvardovskii, p. 28. The suitability of Bunin's poems for children, the particular time in which he was writing, and the literary traditions that he sought to follow might also mean that he is used by those interested in the agenda of cultural elitism and the desire to promote pre-revolutionary values. My thanks go to the editors of this chapter for highlighting this point.

50 Tvardovskii, p. 10, p. 28.

51 My thanks go to the editors of this chapter for highlighting this point.

52 Sergei Shapoval, 'Otdushina dlia politika', *Nezavisimaia gazeta* (14 February 2003), para. 9 of 16, http://www.ng.ru/saturday/2003-02-14/13\_lukyanov.html. It has been suggested that, when it comes to the inclusion of Bunin in poetry anthologies intended for a wider audience, Bunin's support of the Soviet Union during World War Two and his 'brilliant review' of Tvardovskii's 'Vasilii Terkin' are reasons to include him*.*

53 Fleming, p. 33.

the reasons for Bunin's inclusion in the school and university curricula, it is quite clear that the state and those responsible for education at all levels view him as a canonical writer, whose works, both prose and poetry, should be studied by younger generations.

The notion that Bunin's work should be considered part of a canon of Russian literature is further supported by the recognition that he received from elsewhere within the institutional model of canon formation. Although the spheres of influence of literary prizes, institutions of higher education, and publishers might be considered more limited than the school curriculum, each of these three components of the institutional model has a significant role to play in canon formation. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature no doubt helped to reinforce any claim that Bunin might have had to a position in a canon of Russian literature. After all, as Horace Engdahl points out, 'the Nobel laureates have inevitably come to be seen as forming a kind of canon'.54 Bunin's works came to be 'regarded as belonging to an elite order and ranked accordingly'; he 'no longer risked being forgotten'.55 Although Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 'the strict artistry with which he […] carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing', it should be noted that his prose was widely recognized as having poetic elements, thus it could be argued that his prose would not have been so distinctive, and worthy of acclaim, if it had not been for his earlier poetry.56

In the awarding of prizes there seems to be something of a blurring between the institutional model of canon formation and the poet-based model. In the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, once a writer has been awarded the accolade of Nobel Laureate, he or she is entitled to

54 Horace Engdahl, 'The Nobel Prize: Dawn of a New Canon?' (2008), p. 1.

55 *Ibid*.

56 'The Nobel Prize in Literature 1933: Ivan Bunin', Nobelprize.org, [n.d.], http:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel\_prizes/literature/laureates/1933. Tvardovskii (p. 27) suggests that Bunin's writing had a 'clearly pronounced individuality' and 'musical organisation'. He argues that 'the music of [Bunin's] prose cannot be mistaken for any other writer's' and that one possible reason he was able to achieve such a 'distinct rhythmical identity' was because 'he wrote poems all his life'. Tvardovskii (pp. 27–28) goes on to cite Bunin, who asserted that 'prose writing should adopt the musicalness and pliancy of poetry' and points out that Bunin had his poetry and short stories published together in his collections in order to 'emphasize the fundamental unity of poetry and prose'.

nominate other writers for future awards, yet the award is made by an institution. The awarding of literary prizes in the honour of a particular writer also distorts the boundaries of the canon-forming process. For example, in the case of the Ivan Bunin Literary Prize, founded in 2004, the awarding institutions seek to establish a winner in the contest for 'the revival of the best traditions of [Russian] literature'.57 The institutions awarding the prize include *Moskovskii gumanitarnyi universitet* (the Moscow University for the Humanities), *Obshchestvo liubitelei rossiiskoi slovesnosti* (The Society of Lovers of Russian Literature), *Natsional*′*naia institut biznesa* (The National Institute of Business), *Natsional*′*nyi soiuz negosudarstvennykh vuzov'* (The National Union of Non-State Universities) and *Institut sovremennogo iskusstva* (The Institute of Contemporary Art), which clearly involves academic establishments as well as those that might include writers or poets.58 In 2007, the committee awarding the Bunin Literary Prize decided that, because 'Bunin considered himself foremost to be a poet', the prize should be awarded to a writer whose achievements lay in the sphere of poetry, thereby perpetuating a particular aspect of Bunin's work.59 Once again, the institutional model of canon formation draws on the poet-based model. While the use of literary prizes as a means of perpetuating a canon might be viewed as belonging to the institutional model of canonisation, the process followed in order to make such awards relies, at least in part, on the traditions of the poet-based model, whereby the assessment of, or a link to an individual writer, helps to shape the canon.

Although the role that universities play in shaping the canon might initially appear to be less influential than that of the school curriculum or literary prizes, on closer examination it is clear that such institutions contribute much to the development of the canon. A number of academic conferences have been held as part of commemorative events dedicated to Bunin and his work: a conference in 2010 was held

57 'V stolitse vruchili literaturnuiu premiiu imeni Ivana Bunina', Newsru.com (24 October 2005), para. 3, http://www.newsru.com/cinema/24oct2005/bunin.html

58 Aleksandr Alekseev, '350 tysiach rublei za talant: Ezhegodnaia Buninskaia premiia smenila format', *Rossiiskaia gazeta*, 15 April 2008, para. 7, http://www. rg.ru/2008/04/15/premia.html

59 Igor′ Il′inskii, 'I. A. Bunin i sovremennaia poeziia: Press-konferentsiia, posviashchennaia ob′′iavleniiu konkursa Buninskoi premii 2007 goda' (2007), para. 5, http://ilinskiy.ru/activity/public/bunin/2007

to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Bunin's birth, and followed earlier conferences; marking Bunin's 125th and 135th anniversaries, and another celebrating 75 years since Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The occurrence of several Bunin conferences over a number of years demonstrates that there is continued scholarly interest in his work, and that he therefore has a legitimate claim to a place in the canon of Russian poetry.60 Of course, the reach of such academic conferences is likely to be somewhat restricted, but the work at these gatherings is relevant to the process of canon formation on a wider scale because it contributes to other areas of the university's remit that have wider public influence. The activities of the centre 'Buninskaia Rossiia' ('Bunin's Russia'), established in 2010 at the I. A. Bunin Elets State University, exemplify the multifaceted role that institutions play in shaping the canon. In addition to the 2010 conference, the 'Bunin's Russia' was also involved developing a cultural programme.61 While the academic study of a writer's works might be the point at which canon formation starts and the validation of a writer's place in the canon begins, it is the way in which this research is more widely disseminated that really demonstrates the role that universities play in the institutional model of canon formation. Indeed, the aims of the 'Bunin's Russia' to 'organiz[e] and coordinat[e] academic research and cultural enlightenment linked to the study of the creative legacy of I. A. Bunin, and other writers, academics and public figures from the region', perfectly encapsulate how academic establishments operate

60 *I. A. Bunin i XXI vek: materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 140-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia pisatelia*, edited by E. Atamanova, N. V. Borisova, A. M. Podoksenov (Elets: Eletskii gosudarstvennyi universitet im. I. A. Bunina, 2011); *I. A. Bunin i russkii mir: materialy Vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 75-letiiu prisuzhdeniia Nobelevskoi premii pisateliu*, edited by Elena Atamanova *et al.* (Elets: Eletskii gosudarstvennyi universitet im. I. A. Bunina, 2009); *Ivan Bunin: Filologicheskii diskurs: Kollektivnaia monografiia k 135-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I. A. Bunina*, edited by E. Atamonova (Elets: Eletskii gosudarstvennyi universitet im. I. A. Bunina, 2005); *I. A. Bunin i russkaia literatura XX veka: Po materialam mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi 125-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I. A. Bunina* (Moscow: Nasledie, 1995).

61 Nauchnyi tsentr 'Buninskaia Rossiia', 'Itogi deiatel′nosti nauchnogo tsentra "Buninskaia Rossiia" v 2010 godu', Buninskii tsentr (2010), p. 1, p. 13, http:// www.elsu.ru/bunincnt\_osnov\_rezul.html The painting exhibition later moved to Moscow, see '"Khudozhniki-Buninu". Raboty sovremennykh khodozhnikov', Muzei Rossii (2011), http://www.museum.ru/N41906

within the institutional model of canon formation and how they seek to shape the canon using a variety of methods.62

The contributions of academics to events, such as those designed to commemorate the various anniversaries of Bunin's birth, help to generate interest in Bunin among non-specialists, which is particularly important in relation to the somewhat more commercial aspect of the institutional model of canon formation, that is, to publishers. The role that publishers play in terms of canon formation is further complicated because it is hard to identify whether publishers are responding to a demand from readers for a particular writer, or whether the publishing industry is choosing to make a particular writer more readily available. Bunin's poetry has been published throughout the 1990s and 2000s, though not as extensively as some of his prose works. The differences in print run since the mid-1980s are substantial, but unsurprising. In 1985, a collection of Bunin's poems was published in a print run of 500,000 copies, by 1990, this had dropped to 400,000 copies. In 1999, this figure had dropped to a mere 7000 copies, and by 2007, a collection of Bunin's poetry was published in just 5000 copies.63 Although such a figure may appear very low when compared with the print runs of the late Soviet period, the average print run for a book in 2012 was 4624 copies.64 Of course, the number of copies printed does not equate to popularity, neither does it guarantee that the material is read. However, in the post-Soviet period it is possible to assert that the figures for the print run do indicate the relative popularity of an author, not least because publishers want to make money, and achieve maximum sales figures. Publishers are also more readily able to reprint any texts that sell better than expected, ensuring a rapid response to reader demand.

62 Natalia Borisova, 'Buninskii tsentr', Eletskii gosudarstvennyi universitet im. I. A. Bunina, [n.d.], para. 2, http://www.elsu.ru/news/2899-o-centre-buninskaya-rossiya. html

63 For examples of print runs, see I. A. Bunin, *Stikhotvoreniia* (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1985), http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/4235774; I. A. Bunin, *Stikhotvoreniia* (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1990), http://www.ozon.ru/ context/detail/id/5041243; I. A. Bunin, *Stikhotvoreniia. Perevody* (Moscow: Olma-Press, 1999), http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/7446534; I. A. Bunin, *Stikhotvoreniia*  (Moscow: Profizdat, 2007), http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/5529353

64 'Uglubliaiushchiisia krizis: knigoizdanie Rossii v 2012 godu', Rossiiskaia knizhnaia palata, [n.d.], p. 2, http://www.bookchamber.ru/download/stat/stat\_2012.zip (see file titled knigi\_2012 in zip folder).

The relative popularity of Bunin's poetry can also be measured by the inclusion of his works in poetry anthologies. In 1994, Bunin's work was included in the section 'Vne grupp' ('No affiliation') in *Serebrianyi vek russkoi poezii* (*The Silver Age of Russian Poetry*), with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.65 Bunin's poems feature in *Strofy veka. Antologiia russkoi poezii*  (*Stanza of the Century: An Anthology of Russian Poetry*); in *Russkaia poeziia. XX vek. Antologiia* (*Russian Poetry. Twentieth Century. An Anthology*); and more recently, in *Russkie stikhi 1950–2000 godov. Antologiia* (*pervoe priblizhenie*) (*Russian Poetry of the 1950s–2000s. An Anthology* (*The First Approximation*)).66 However, the number of Bunin's poems included in each of these anthologies has varied. In *Strofy veka*, nine of Bunin's poems are included, whereas twenty-three appear in *Russkaia poeziia. XX vek. Antologiia*. In contrast, Bunin is represented in *Russkie stikhi 1950–2000 godov* by 'his twelve-line poem "Night" (Noch′) and occupies one page', while other Nobel Laureates, Pasternak and Iosif Brodskii, are given seven and ten pages respectively.67 Once again, when it comes to the compilation of anthologies, a blurring of the boundaries between the poet-based and institutional models of canon formation occurs. In instances where an anthology has been compiled by a poet, literary hierarchies are clearly at work. While the compiler's agenda might not be immediately obvious, the decision to include one poet over another, or the relative space allotted to each poet may give the reader an understanding of the compiler's personal view of poetry and poets within the hierarchy of Russian literature. Of course, this assumes that the poet-compiler (or the academic-compiler) has enjoyed the freedom to create the anthology as he or she sees fit. In reality, there may be greater input from the publisher, who might have an understanding of

65 *Serebrianyi vek russkoi poezii*, edited by K. F. Nesterova (Moscow: IMA-Kross, 1994), pp. 419–27.

66 S*trofy veka. Antologiia russkoi poezii*, edited by Evgenii Evtushenko (Minsk and Moscow: Polifakt, 1997), pp. 46–53; *Russkaia poeziia. XX vek. Antologiia*, edited by Sergei Fediakin *et al.* (Moscow: OLMA Press, 1999), pp. 48–52; *Russkie stikhi 1950– 2000 godov. Antologiia (pervoe priblizhenie)*, edited by I. Akhmet′ev *et al.* (Moscow: Letnii sad, 2010), p. 4.

67 Sergei Mnatsakanian, 'Bratskaia mogila', *Literaturnaia gazeta*, 35 (8 September 2010), para. 8, http://www.lgz.ru/article/N35--6289---2010-09-08-/Bratskaya-mogila13774/. Of course, numerous factors might affect a poet's inclusion in an anthology. Perhaps each poet is given a certain number of pages, or the anthology might focus on work written between certain dates or on certain themes.

which poets a reader likes and who he or she expects to be included in an anthology dedicated to a particular era or subject.

In addition to the views of individuals and the actions of institutions, Bunin's place in the canon is supported by extra-literary material and events, i.e. by the 'Bunin institution', including museums and statues, commemorations of his life, and articles about Bunin that appear in the current press.68 Bunin's establishment in the wider canon of Russian literature has been reflected in material printed in newspapers. It is possible to categorize the articles into three groups: articles which inform the reader of some anniversary and/or event commemorating Bunin's life; articles that use Bunin or his work as the starting point to discuss a topic that is not directly associated with the poet or his publications; and finally, articles that appeal to the general interest of readers.69 Articles, such as 'Otkrylas' vystavka, posviashchennaia 140-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Ivana Bunina' ('The Opening of an Exhibition Dedicated to Ivan Bunin's 140th Anniversary'), 'Buninskie iabloki' ('Bunin's Apples'), and 'Gospodin iz Efremova: BUNIN 140' ('The Gentleman from Efremov: Bunin is 140'), simply detail events linked with the 140th anniversary of Bunin's birth.70

For some writers, Bunin's works provide a source from which they can explore other newsworthy stories. Vladislav Korneichuk's article

68 For details of museums dedicated to Bunin, see Inna Kostomarova, 'Muzei I. A. Bunina v Orle', Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870–1953), [n.d.], http://bunin.niv.ru/ bunin/museum/museum-orel.htm and 'Muzei', Bunin Ivan Alekseevich (1870– 1953), [n.d.], http://bunin.niv.ru/bunin/museum/museum.htm. Details of statues and other memorials to Bunin can be found on the Russian-language Wikipedia page, sections 4 and 5: 'Bunin, Ivan Alekseevich', Wikipedia, http://ru.wikipedia. org/wiki/Бунин,\_Иван\_Алексеевич

69 This does not include all of the instances when Bunin, or references to him, are quoted in an unrelated context, such as being an example of a famous person who received mostly '2s' at school: 'Kak pravil′no delat′ uroki', *Izvestiia* (16 February 2006), para. 25, http://izvestia.ru/news/311276. However, even such references are relevant because of the way in which they demonstrate an assumed familiarity with who Bunin was.

70 'Otkrylas′ vystavka, posviashchennaia 140-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Ivana Bunina', *Rossiiskaia gazeta* (22 October 2010), http://www.rg.ru/2010/10/22/ bunin-anons.html; Ol′ga Glazunova, 'Buninskie iabloki', *Rossiiskaia gazeta* (28 October 2010), http://rg.ru/2010/10/28/reg-roscentr/bunin.html; 'Gospodin iz Efremova', *Literaturnaia gazeta*, 42–43 (27 October 2010), http://www.lgz.ru/article/ N42-43--6297---2010-10-27-/Gospodin-iz-Efremova14296/

about reading in the provinces of Russia provides one such example.71 His article 'Kniga v provintsii i ee chitateli' ('Books in Russian Provinces and their Readers') is about the announcement made by the *Federal*′*noe agenstvo po pechati i massovym kommunikatsiiam* (Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications) about the adoption of a national programme of reading, but he bases his investigation into what is being read and how it differs from the Soviet period in Elets, Bunin's hometown. An article such as this, or those which mention events commemorating Bunin, serve his canonical status in an interesting way — they reinforce his biography in the mind of the reader, reminding him or her about Bunin: who he was, what he wrote, and his key achievements. In contrast, an article written by Sergei Baimukhametov does little to reinforce Bunin's biography and instead relies upon the reader's knowledge of Bunin and his works to understand the main points raised in the article.72 Writing in 2000, Baimukhametov acknowledges the tenth anniversary of the first publication in the Soviet Union of Bunin's *Okaiannye dni* (*Cursed Days*) and uses it to discuss the responsibility that the Russian aristocracy should have taken for the 1917 Revolution.73 Arguably, such an article demonstrates just how strong Bunin's place in literature already is. Baimukhametov relies on readers to understand the reference to Bunin's *Okaiannye dni* in the title of the article 'Ekho okaiannykh stoletii' ('The Echo of Cursed Centuries'), and to see how it relates to the argument he is presenting.74 Tat′iana Marchenko's article details the Russian writers nominated for the Nobel Prize between 1914 and 1937, and why, in most cases, they did not win.75 The focus of the article is not Bunin, but the Nobel Prize and the Russian nominees prior to World War Two, yet Bunin's victory no doubt provides the impetus for the article and offers the reader interesting details about the selection process for the prize, as well as identifying other Russian writers who could have been the first Russian winner.

71 Vladislav Korneichuk, 'Kniga v provintsii i ee chitateli', *Nezavisimaia gazeta* (3 August 2006), http://www.ng.ru/tendenc/2006-08-03/4\_kniga.html

72 Sergei Baimukhametov, 'Ekho okaiannykh stoletii', *Literaturnaia gazeta*, 28–29 (12– 18 July 2000).

73 *Ibid*.

74 *Ibid*.

75 Tat′iana Marchenko, 'Izbranie i ne', *NG Ex Libris* (11 May 2000), http://www.ng.ru/ ng\_exlibris/2000-05-11/3\_nobellius.html

Of those articles that are of interest to the general reader and focus primarily on Bunin and his life or work, that by Sergei Fediakin marks the 130th anniversary of the writer's birth and discusses a selection of reviews of Bunin's work from the 1920s and 1930s.76 Veronika Chernysheva's article also looks back at the different reactions that Bunin's contemporaries had towards him.77 In these two articles, the reader is shown that Bunin commented on other writers and their work, and was reviewed himself. Just as others involved in the formation of the canon draw upon the comments of Bunin's contemporaries, so too do journalists, further reinforcing the significance of the poetbased model in shaping and perpetuating a particular canon. Yet, it is interesting to note that both of these articles present a relatively balanced view of Bunin, allowing the reader to choose which of the poets' arguments they would rather follow. In contrast to these articles which draw on comments made by other authors to deliver a particular picture of Bunin, the article 'Buninskie mesta' ('Bunin's Places') details journalist Vasilii Peskov's trip to various villages where Bunin spent his formative years and discusses the efforts that those living in these places are making in order to ensure that Bunin and his connection with these towns is not forgotten.78 The personal element of recounting a relationship with Bunin and his work also comes through in 'Moi Bunin' ('My Bunin'), which details how Mikhailov's interest in Bunin arose and how this influenced his future research.79 Mikhailov concludes by saying that he 'always strove to write books about Bunin not as a "dry herbarium" directed at a small group of specialists, but for a wide readership', demonstrating his passion for Bunin's texts and reinforcing the sense that they should be read.80 Perhaps the more personal element of these stories encourages readers to see Bunin not as inaccessible, as the 'last of the Russian classics', writing about a time far removed from

76 Sergei Fediakin, 'Dali Ivana Bunina', *Nezavisimaia gazeta* (24 October 2000), http:// www.ng.ru/culture/2000-10-24/7\_bunin.html

77 Veronika Chernysheva, 'Nesovremennyi i nesvoevremennyi', *Nezavisimaia gazeta*  (12 November 2004), http://www.ng.ru/style/2004-11-12/24\_bunin.html

78 Peskov.

79 Oleg Mikhailov, 'Moi Bunin', *Literaturnaia gazeta*, 50 (14 December 2011), http:// www.lgz.ru/article/N50--6350---2011-12-14-/Moy-Bunin17885/

80 *Ibid*., para. 20.

contemporary Russia, but as a writer whose work remains relevant and enjoyable in the twenty-first century.

The discussion of Bunin in newspaper articles suggests that, to a part of society, he has become a relatively well-known figure. However, Bunin is not recognizable only to those who read the paper. In 2008, viewers of the television programme *Imia Rossiia* [*sic*] (*The Name: Russia*) voted Bunin among the top fifty most notable Russian personalities.81 From an initial list of 500 names, Bunin scored more than 76,000 votes.82 However, the question must be asked: does selection from a list of 500 names mean that Bunin is finally established in the canon, or does it mean that his name is simply familiar to people who may or may not be interested in his work? It is possible that films of Bunin's life, such as *Dnevnik ego zheny* (*The Diary of His Wife*) and the documentary *Okaiannye dni. Ivan Bunin* (*Cursed Days. Ivan Bunin*), went some way to raising his profile with screen audiences who later voted in the *Imia Rossiia* [*sic*] poll.83 Any commentary that covered the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bunin's Nobel Prize victory might also have reminded viewers of his relevance to the history of Russian literature.

The relative success of Bunin in a televised poll suggests that the activities of the 'Bunin institution', along with the various canonforming models, to secure him a place in the minds of the public, have been effective. But to what extent can Bunin's place in the canon of post-Soviet Russian poetry be attributed solely to the processes of canon formation discussed in this chapter? Although the institutional model of canon formation appears to hold the widest influence over

81 '*Imia Rossiia* [*sic*]. Istoricheskii vybor 2008', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http://top50. nameofrussia.ru

82 'Bunin Ivan Alekseevich', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http://top50.nameofrussia. ru/person.html?id=62; 'Blok Aleksandr Aleksandrovich', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http://top50.nameofrussia.ru/person.html?id=106; 'Vysotskii Vladimir Semenovich', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http://top50.nameofrussia.ru/person. html?id=63; 'Esenin Sergei Aleksandrovich', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http:// top50.nameofrussia.ru/person.html?id=68. Blok received 86,991 votes, Vysotskii 429,074, and Esenin 781,042 to achieve places in the top 50. No twentieth-century writers or poets were among the top twelve. Pushkin and Fedor Dostoevskii were the only writers, coming fourth and ninth respectively. See 'Rezul′taty Internet golosovaniia', Telekanal 'Rossiia' (2008), http://www.nameofrussia.ru/rating.html

83 *Dnevnik ego zheny*, dir. by Aleksei Uchitel′ (Goskino Rossii, 2000); *Okaiannye dni. Ivan Bunin*, dir. by Aleksei Denisov (Vserossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia televizionnaia i radioveshchatel′naia kompaniia; Studiia istoricheskogo dokumental′nogo kino, 2007), http://russia.tv/brand/show/brand\_id/10345

Bunin's place in the canon of post-Soviet Russian poetry, it is clear that the comments made by other poets play a fundamental role in Bunin's canonisation. The function of the Bunin Institution has also changed. In the first instance, it appeared to operate as a means of canonising Bunin, of highlighting him as a poet whose work was worth noting. Over time, this role has evolved into one of maintenance, ensuring that Bunin does not lose his position in the literary hierarchy. In addition, the more the canonisation of Bunin has to do with the events of his life and less to do with the works that he wrote, the more complex the discussions become.84 It is hard to deny that the various canon-forming models play a significant part in the canonisation of Bunin, yet it seems that other factors are relevant. Was it simply that the time at which Bunin was living and the circumstances of his life make him relatively unique, and thus his inclusion in the canon has been by default rather than by selection? If such an assertion, which ignores his literary output, were true, it would be unlikely that Bunin's works would have retained a place in the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry. For many, Bunin fills something of a gap at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries; he occupies a niche as the unrivalled 'last of the Russian classics'. His refusal to follow the literary trends of his contemporaries sets him apart and this is clearly one of the reasons why he is included in the school textbooks. Furthermore, he has been constructed as a representative of the first wave of the emigration. In the search for reconciliation between 'returned' literature and that written within the Soviet Union, Bunin represents a certain aspect of Russian literary history that post-Soviet academics and critics are trying to renegotiate. The fact that he was sympathetic toward the Soviet cause during World War Two and allegedly considered returning to the Soviet Union may have strengthened his position as the chosen representative

84 See Aleksandr Kondrashov 'Gody okaianstva, ili Zagadka N.B.I', *Literaturnaia gazeta*, 33–34 (27 August 2013), para. 13, http://www.lgz.ru/article/-33-34-6427-27-08-2013/ gody-okayanstva-ili-zagadka-n-b-i. Kondrashov provides something of a review of the series of programmes about Bunin broadcast by the television channel *Kul'tura*, in which he highlights the points where he disagrees with the way in which Bunin's life is discussed by the narrator of the programme, Natal'ia Borisova Ivanova. For example, in response to Ivanova's suggestion that much fell to Bunin's lot, including the 1905 revolution, World War One, and the events of 1917, Kondrashov argues that 'considerably fewer trials fell to Bunin than to the majority of the Russian people'.

of this first wave of Russian émigré literature. However, in this instance, as Azarov points out 'Bunin is of course considered the "first" Russian émigré writer, but here we could also name a few others who were no less significant to Russian culture: Alexander Kuprin, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Boris Zaitsev, Ivan Shmelev…'.85 Arguably, all of these factors have also contributed to his canonisation. Clearly, the processes of canon formation are complicated and there can be little doubt that other factors have an influence on those responsible for forming the canon, as well as those who perpetuate it. It seems impossible to attribute successful establishment in the canon to just one process, and while the works of the writer are significant, they cannot be considered in isolation from the writer's life and the point in time in which he or she lived, nor indeed, from the lives of those responsible for (re)evaluating literary works included in the canon.

### 8. From Underground to Mainstream: The Case of Elena Shvarts

*Josephine von Zitzewitz*

This chapter examines the popularity of Elena Shvarts (1948–2010) in the 1990s and 2000s. Shvarts began her poetic career in the literary underground that flourished in Leningrad in the 1970s and 1980s. Experimentally minded poets, many of whom had made their first steps inside official structures designed to promote the evolution of Soviet poetry, were then largely excluded from the official cultural process.1 Their creativity found an outlet in the underground, variously known as second or unofficial culture, an alternative structure that grew into an extremely fertile creative environment, and in the practice of *samizdat*. The organisational structures of literature in the underground often closely emulated the official literary process. Periodicals, the most popular form for circulating *samizdat* from the mid-1970s onwards, resembled 'thick' literary journals, down to organisational details such as dedicated section editors and submission procedures.2

1 Emily Lygo's *Leningrad Poetry 1853–1975: The Thaw Generation* (Berne and New York: Peter Lang, 2010) details the interdependence of the 1970s underground and efforts undertaken by the literary authorities to foster young talent.

2 The 'thick' journals, so called because each issue consisted of several hundred pages, began to appear in the nineteenth century. They were periodicals which appeared several times a year, combining the publication of new works of literature with articles on a range of topics including literature and the arts, social and political questions, and comment on current events.

The Leningrad underground quickly established its own canon of household names. The members of this canon were often also its makers: many of those who performed their work at innumerable semiprivate happenings were involved in the editing of the *samizdat* journals in which these works were subsequently published.3

This chapter argues that apart from Shvarts, none of the poets from her circle fully succeeded in making the transition from being a poet of the 1970s who found retrospective recognition but was mostly read and studied for her connection to the underground, to an agent in the literary process of the new Russia. I take 'Shvarts's circle' to mean a group of poets of the Leningrad underground whose style can be defined as neomodernist. Several features unite them: their understanding of the role of the poet essentially follows the Romantic model, where the poet is an outsider to society with prophetic gifts and poetry is a quasi-spiritual activity. They strove to be recognised as belonging to the classical Russian tradition, which they regarded as part of the European cultural heritage. Their style exhibits many similarities to that of leading Silver Age poets, with whom these representatives of the Leningrad underground were in intense intertextual dialogue. Moreover, the unofficial Leningrad poets formed a tightly-knit group the members of which promoted each other through *samizdat* journals and readings, in allusion to the practice of the Silver Age poets (and indeed that of nineteenth-century Russian writers before them).

In the appendix to this chapter I have collated comparative data for Shvarts and four poets who, aesthetically and institutionally, belonged to the same circles of the Leningrad underground: Viktor Krivulin, Aleksandr Mironov, Oleg Okhapkin and Sergei Stratanovskii. They were established in the underground canon of the 1970s and 1980s, a status that is now confirmed by multiple scholarly works and repeated inclusion in anthologies. Stanislav Savitskii, following Efim Etkind, refers to Shvarts, Stratanovskii, Okhapkin and Krivulin as the

3 A full list of Leningrad journals and information about their authors and editors can be found in *Samizdat Leningradа 1950е-1980е. Literaturnaia entsiklopediia*, edited by D. Severiukhin, V. Dolinin, B. Ivanov and B. Ostanin (Мoscow: NLO, 2003). Among the names that come up numerous times as both editors and published authors are Dmitrii Volchek (*Mitin Zhurnal*, *Molchanie*), Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (*Chasy*, *Mitin Zhurnal*, *Predlog*), Viktor Krivulin (*37*, *Servernaia pochta*), Boris Ivanov (*Chasy*, *Klub-81*), Sergei Stratanovskii (*37*, *Dialog*, *Obvodnyi Kanal*), Tatiana Goricheva (*37*, *Zhenshchina i Rossiia*).

'Leningrad school'.4 Some published juvenilia notwithstanding, all poets made their debut in the official Soviet and Russian press during the last years of *perestroika* and the early 1990s; as such they were part of the wave of 'lost literature' that reached the general reader with a twenty-year time lag. All these poets continued to write into the 2000s. Krivulin died in 2001, Okhapkin in 2008, Mironov and Shvarts in 2010. Stratanovskii remains active today.

My criteria for defining canonicity in relation to this group of poets are naturally contingent.5 They are: 1) the number of book-length collections published that do not contain primarily work from the 1970s and 1980s, indicative of the fact that a poet has an established readership eager to read new work and/or that their name is significant enough to draw in new readers, and thus that they are considered a viable investment by a publishing house; 2) the existence of a published collected works; 3) single-author collections published in translation (I have limited my enquiry to translations into English); they indicate that a poet is regarded as representative; foreign editors are unlikely to be interested in publishing translations of work by a minor writer; 4) scholarly interest in both Russia and the English-speaking world — academics play an important role in canon formation because it is they who decide which writers to include in school and university curricula. Shvarts is dominant in all four categories.

The comparative publication data offers scope for empirical analysis as well as speculation. Neither is my main objective for this chapter. Instead, I understand this data as evidence that Shvarts belongs to the canon of the new Russia in a way that her peers do not, and proceed to a discursive exploration of potential reasons for her enduring success.

4 Stanislav Savitskii, *Andegraund: Istoriia i mify leningradskoi neofitsial'noi literatury* (Moscow: NLO, 2002), p. 20.

5 Such criteria are always contingent: Per-Arne Bodin in *Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness* (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2009) justifies his choice of poets for a chapter on 'Contemporary Russian poetry and the Orthodox Tradition' (Shvarts, Ivan Zhdanov, Sergei Stratanovskii, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitrii Prigov, Nina Iskrenko) by defining the canonicity of his authors in the following terms: 'Poets have been selected on the basis of ratings lists: winners of the Andrej Belyj Prize and poets published by the prestigious publishing house *Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie.* I have also used the website *Vavilon*, which includes a broad spectrum of modern Russian poetry. All of these writers are thus already acknowledged as poets by the Russian public' (p. 283).

As Frank Kermode has pointed out, extra-textual factors play an ever greater role in canon formation.6 This is reflected in the twopart structure of my discussion: Part One considers qualities that are inherent to Shvarts's poems (without the attempt to make judgements about 'literary quality'), while Part Two focuses on contextual factors.

The defining features of the discourse on Shvarts in the West were established early: Barbara Heldt's article in *World Literature Today*, written in 1989, two years after Shvarts published her first official book-length publication in Russia, a year after she gave her first reading in the main hall of the Leningrad Writers' Union and straight after her first trip abroad to read at a poetry festival in London, praised Shvarts's poetry as 'highly original' and positively ignorant of the rules of patriarchal culture.7 Nine years later Shvarts was included in Neil Cornwell's seminal *Reference Guide to Russian Literature* (1998), a fact that proves she had attracted a significant amount of attention from Western scholars by this point. Michael Molnar, the author of her entry, identified Shvarts as originating in the 'second culture' of Leningrad but calls her one of the 'leading poets of the post-war generation', indicating that her relevance is not limited to and by her immediate socio-political surroundings.8

#### Part One: Textual Criteria

#### Shvarts and the Poetic Tradition

A juxtaposition of texts written by Shvarts in different decades reveals no significant changes in either voice or subject matter. Such continuity of style and vision was possibly a result of the fact that Shvarts's work was never defined by her situation as an underground poet. The underground does not feature explicitly in her texts, neither as subject nor backdrop, as it does, for example, in Viktor Krivulin's poems of the

6 Frank Kermode, *Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon* (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See p. 15 ff. for how the focus of academics has been shifting away from purely literary factors.

7 Barbara Heldt, 'The Poetry of Elena Shvarts', *World Literature Today*, 63: 3 (1989), 381–83 (p. 381).

8 Michael Molnar, 'Elena Shvarts', in *Reference Guide to Russian Literature,* edited by Neil Cornwell (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998), pp. 737–38.

1970s. She also largely dispenses with hidden references that require a reader initiated into the same cultural context. Her unchanging voice means she could seamlessly build on the reputation she had established with her early work, a factor that was almost certainly conducive to her increasing fame. In her post-Soviet collections, new work sits alongside poems written significantly earlier. To give an example, the volume *Zapadno-vostochnyi veter* (*West-Easterly Wind*, 1997), which brings together several shorter collections, consists almost entirely of works written in 1996, but also features some poems from the early 1980s, 'Probuzhdenie' ('Awakening', 1983), 'Na progulke' ('On a Walk', 1981), and the previously published cycle 'Vozdushnoe Evangelie' ('Air Gospel', 1982). Were it not for the dates given, the reader would not notice that he is dealing with poems written in different decades and different political systems.

Shvarts always has been an openly spiritual poet, defining poetry as 'a way of reaching the non-material (spiritual) by semi-material means'.9 The setting in which she pursued her spiritual quest was her native city of Leningrad-Petersburg. Like other poets of her generation, such as Iosif Brodskii and Krivulin, she preferred the outskirts of the city to the grand imperial facades, but her predilection for marginal spaces was not limited to geographical settings; she also favoured the outskirts of society over a well-ordered world. Often, she found transcendence in the dirt beneath her feet, and in scenes of violence and debauchery, as in 'Kak eta ulitsa zovetsia' ('What this Street is Called', 1982):

Ты ломок, тонок, ты крошишься фарфоровою чашкой, в ней Просвечивает Бог, наверно. Мне это все видней, видней. Он скорлупу твою земную проклевывает на глазах, […] Играя вниз, С «Славянкой» падает с обрыва мой Парадиз.10

I, p. 135

9 'A Poetics of What is Alive' ('Poetika zhivogo', 1996), in Elena Shvarts, *Sochineniia*, 5 vols. (St Petersburg: Pushkinskii dom, 2002–2008), IV, 272–75 (p. 274). All references to Shvarts's works are to this edition and will be given by volume and page number, where appropriate directly after the quotation unless otherwise stated.

10 Shvarts's insistence on finding vestiges of sacredness is shared by many contemporaries, most famously Venedikt Erofeev in his *Moskva-Petushki* (1973).

 I see this more and more clearly. He is pecking through your mortal shell for all to see, […] off the precipice it falls, playing the 'Slavianka', my Paradise.

The same preferences characterise her post-Soviet work:

[…] волки следят за мерцаньем игры Звёзд, выплывающих снизу, глубокие видят миры. […] Если это звезда, то её исказила слеза. В ней одной есть спасенье, на неё и смотри, Пока Крест, расширяясь, раздирает тебя изнутри.

> 'Bol′shaia elegiia na piatuiu storonu sveta' ('Great Elegy on the Fifth Side of the Light') (1997), I, p. 270.

Wolves observe the twinkle in the game of stars appearing from below, they see profound worlds. […] If this is a star, it has been distorted by a tear. It alone holds salvation, so look at it while the widening Cross tears you up from within.

Shvarts is commonly identified as a Petersburg poet, a writer whose texts are steeped in allusions to other texts and who is drawing on two centuries of location-specific literary tradition, both during her underground career and after.11 One key to the Petersburg myth according to Shvarts is the five-poem cycle *Chernaia Paskha* (*Black Easter*, 1974). It exemplifies how Shvarts uses literary tradition in order to create a complex web of associations for her own images.12 The result is a highly individual, idiosyncratic representation of the city and its literary myth,

11 For example by editor and translator Michael Molnar in his foreword to the bilingual volume *Paradise* (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993), pp. 9–10.

12 For a detailed account of the Petersburg myth see Solomon Volkov's *St. Petersburg: A Cultural History*, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996).

although the shadow of Dostoevskii looms large. Just as Dostoevskii's city, Shvarts's Petersburg alienates individuals from both nature and from each other, engendering illness and madness though the resulting duality within the person and society. The cycle, which contains few explicitly religious references apart from its title, establishes Shvarts's vision of Petersburg as a site for spiritual quest by making explicit the 'permeability' of her native city. At the same time, her religious vision is revealed as profoundly pessimistic: none of her attempts to touch upon that which lies beyond the material world is successful; transcendence remains forever outside the poet's reach. This is particularly evident in the second poem of the cycle:

2. Где мы?

[…] Я думала — не я одна,– Что Петербург, нам родина — особая страна, Он — запад, вброшенный в восток, И окружен, и одинок, Чахоточный, всё простужался он, И в нем процентщицу убил Наполеон. Но рухнула духовная стена — Россия хлынула — дурна, темна, пьяна. Где ж родина? И поняла я вдруг: Давно Россиею затоплен Петербург. И сдернули заемный твой парик, И все увидели, что ты– Все тот же царственный мужик, И так же дергается лик, В руке топор, Расстегнута ширинка… Останови же в зеркале свой взор И ложной красоты смахни же паутинку О Парадиз! […] В тебе тамбовский ветер матерится, И окает, и цокает Нева.

Where are We?

I thought — and I am not alone, that Petersburg, our motherland, was a special country, It is the West, thrown into the East, encircled and all alone, Consumptive, with a perennial cold And the site where Napoleon murdered the pawnbroker. But the spiritual wall has collapsed And Russia gushed in, evil, dark and drunk. Where is my motherland? And then I got it: Russia flooded Petersburg long ago. And tore away your borrowed wig, for all to see that you have remained that very same regal peasant same facial tic axe in hand your fly undone… Stop, rest your gaze in the mirror wipe away the web of false beauty Oh Paradise! […] The wind from Tambov curses inside you And the Neva burrs and gurgles.

Shvarts names the city, but the reader would recognise it anyway from the breathtaking array of references: the city features as Peter the Great's 'Paradise' and the capital conceived as a window to the West; we are familiar with the scourge of tuberculosis in the damp, cold climate from countless nineteenth-century literary texts, including Dostoevskii's *Crime and Punishment* (Sonia Marmeladova's stepmother is consumptive). The reference to *Crime and Punishment* thus reinforces the central theme of fatal 'duality', embodied in Dostoevskii's novel by the protagonist, Raskol'nikov, whose very name implies schism. Finally there is the Neva, a landmark well established as shorthand for Petersburg. More pertinently, in the context of a destructive, even apocalyptic, flood the Neva invokes Pushkin's *Bronze Horseman*, the foundation text of the Petersburg myth, which forever linked the image of the city to catastrophe and the destruction of the individual.

Most Petersburg references in the poem cited above hinge on the figure of Peter the Great who, as the 'regal peasant', a Russian emperor irresistibly drawn to the West, embodies the duality that is intrinsic to the city and makes it susceptible to the incursion of elements that do not belong to the realm of the rational. The refined, Western features that Peter and his city are proudly parading are vulnerable to the onslaught of forces beyond Peter's control. His own 'borrowed wig' is torn off to reveal an uncouth Russian peasant who, wielding an axe, once again invokes Dostoevskii's Raskol'nikov, who committed murder after persuading himself he was a Napoleon, a man standing above the law of morality. Ominous foreboding is a trait of many Petersburg texts. In Shvarts's poem, however, the catastrophe has already happened. Russia has flooded Petersburg, the site that epitomises alien, Western, influence. 'Russia' represents more than the accumulation of unsavoury national stereotypes as displayed by the violent peasant with his fly unbuttoned. It is an external force, an amorphous flood, breaking down and submerging the cultural values that constitute the city's 'spiritual wall'. These values are Western in essence, and literary culture is foremost among them, as the web of literary associations in this poem demonstrates. By presenting culture as a *spiritual* bulwark, now breached ('the spiritual wall collapsed'), Shvarts forges an inseparable connection between culture and spirituality, in effect identifying the two. Culture as an entry point into, or even replacement for, lost spiritual values is a trait that links Shvarts firmly to her contemporaries.13

The Petersburg Shvarts presents to her readers is as much a spiritual landscape as an actual geographical site. The map to this spiritual landscape is contained in the cycle's title. The collocation *Chernaia Paskha* (*Black Easter*) is a contradiction in terms. Easter, the feast which in the Christian tradition commemorates the resurrection of Jesus from

13 For statements to this effect see, for example, Viktor Krivulin, 'Peterburgskaia spiritual′naia lirika vchera i segodnia', in *Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsensurnoi literatury*, edited by B. Ivanov and B. Roginskii (SPb: DEAN, 2000), pp. 99–110; Ol'ga Sedakova, 'Muzyka glukhogo vremeni', *Vestnik novoi literatury*, 2 (1990), 257–63; 'A Dialogue on Poetry: Olga Sedakova and Slava Yastremski', in *Poems and Elegies*, edited by Slava I. Yastremski (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), pp. 11–20.

the dead, is associated with the colour white, symbolising hope. In the northern hemisphere, Easter coincides with spring, the season in which nature renews itself. Shvarts negates this message when she paints her Easter entirely in black.14 Her Petersburg has become the site that resists the resurrection, a site where the all-encompassing pain of crucifixion, of Good Friday, reigns supreme ('Мы ведь–где мы?–в России, / Где от боли чернеют кусты' ('Where are we after all? In Russia / where the shrubs blacken with pain'), 'Where are We?'). Blackness is woven into every lyric of the cycle, with the fifth and final poem ending on the ultimate triumph of death over life. There, the poet encounters Life and Death in the guise of two old women but fails to tell one from the other. Consequently, her Petersburg remains confined to its mortally wounded (collapsed, submerged) present state, without hope of transformation. Literary culture, its greatest hope, is doomed, too, as it is no longer a 'spiritual wall', a stepping stone towards transcendence. In a final pessimistic note, Shvarts presents the literary word, 'Slovo', spelled with a capital S to recall its original kinship with the Logos, the creative Word of God, as powerless: 'Бумагу Слово не прожжет, / Но поджелтит края' ('The Word can't burn through the page / it merely singes the edges').15 The literary word fails to transform the world of which it is a part, remaining firmly bound to its material realm, the page, rather than transforming the page into flame.

The cycle *Portret Blokady cherez zhanr, natiurmort i peizazh* (*A Portrait of the Blockade through a Genre Painting, a Still Life and a Landscape*) was written twenty-five years later, in 1999, yet exhibits a number of striking similarities. The most obvious is the setting of Leningrad/Petersburg, once again presented as both a geographical and a spiritual landscape. *Portret Blokady* too, is a work in which Good Friday fails to give way to Easter, negating any hope for transformation.

14 A similar negation of spring and new life can be found in Innokentii Annenskii's short poem 'Chernaia vesna' ('Black Spring') (1906), in *Stikhotvoreniia i tragedii*  (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990), p. 131.

15 'Obychnaia oshibka' ('An Ordinary Mistake'), vol. II, p. 83.

3. Смещенный пейзаж. Лестница, двор, церковь. (бумага, уголь, воронья кровь) За этой сырой синей краской — желтая, за ней зеленая, До пустоты не скреби, не надо, Там штукатурка и испарения ада. На, жри, картофельный розовый цвет. Больше у тебя ничего нет, кость моя, блокада! […] А во дворе человека зарезали без ножа Запросто просто. Из раны, дымясь, вытекал голос. Он пел о горчичном зерне и крошечке хлеба, О душе крови. Под слабым северным сияньем Желваками ходило небо. Блокада жрала Душу, как волк свою лапу в капкане… Великая пятница. Пустая голодная церковь. У дьякона высох голос, он почти неживой, Тени гулко выносят плащаницу– Священник раскачивает головой: 'О, теперь я прозрел, я понял– Ты очнулся от смерти больной, Тебе не поправиться, погибель всем вам'. Кровь моя стала льдяным вином, Уробор прокусил свой хвост. Зубы разбросаны в небе Вместо жестоких звезд.

Misaligned Landscape. Stairs, Yard, Church. (Paper, Coal, Raven's Blood)

Behind this wet blue paint comes yellow and then green Don't scrape down to the void, really don't There you find plaster and hell fumes.

There, eat, the colour pink, like potatoes. That's all you have, my bones, the blockade! […] In the court yard they stabbed a man without using a knife All too easy. His voice flowed from the steaming wound. He sang about the mustard seed and a crumb of bread, About the soul of blood. Under the pale Northern light The sky is grinding like a set of jaws The Blockade devoured The Soul, like a trapped wolf chewing his own paw… Good Friday. An empty, hungry church. The deacon's voice has dried up, he is hardly alive, Shadows are bearing the shroud of Christ — The priest shakes his head: 'Oh now I see, I understand — You woke up from death as a sick man, You won't get better, you are all doomed'. My blood turned into icy wine, The ouroboros bit through his tail Teeth are scattered in the sky In place of the merciless stars.

As in *Chernaia Paskha*, Leningrad is evoked in *Portret Blokady* through references, in this case the Blockade of the winter of 1941 (the Blockade lasted from 8 September 1941 to 1927 January 1944). And once again, the city is described as permeable to outside forces, inexplicable and sinister ('There you find plaster and hell fumes'). The poem depicts a post-apocalyptic landscape in which the violence of the Blockade has annihilated respect for human life — the basis of all culture — as well as culture itself. In the first poem a crowd indulges in an act of cannibalism — something that happened during the Blockade but had been a taboo subject during the Soviet period. In the second poem somebody boils a pet cat for food. In this third and last scene we witness the gratuitous stabbing of an innocent man whose final song, replete with references to Gospel teachings, links him to the figure of Jesus. The identification of culture, in a broad sense, and spirituality is central to this cycle, and the explicitly Christian imagery of the final lyric lends it a poignant religious gravity.

 But the pivotal image is 'The blockade devoured the Soul'. It fulfils a similar function to the collapsed spiritual wall we saw in *Chernaia Paskha*, marking an apocalyptic event. The Blockade — an event particular to Leningrad — has devoured the human soul, and the consequences are more catastrophic than the Blockade itself. While Leningrad remains mired in the stern Blockade winter, with no hope of spring, its spiritual expanse is locked in the pain and death that is Good Friday. Once the soul is dead, Easter and resurrection become impossible. *Portret Blokady* ends on an eerie Good Friday celebration in an anthropomorphised, *hungry*, church. A clergyman diagnoses Christ's resurrection as failed, foreboding the death of all humanity. The Easter message, which promises fullness of life to those who believe in the risen Christ, is thus once again turned on its head.

*Chernaia Paskha* and *Portret Blokady* are Petersburg poems that broaden the traditional association of the city with apocalypse and destruction to include a sense of desolation that is explicitly spiritual. Concerns that are contemporary and/or the poet's own, above all the fascination with madness and violence, are given weight by the vicinity of tradition. This weaving together of the traditional and the topical, the highbrow and the vulgar, and the old and the new, is a typical feature of Shvarts's poetic vision, on the level of imagery as well as poetic technique. Shvarts's trademark style, exemplified in the examples above, comes close to the type of versification known as 'raeshnyi stikh' used in folk theatre, in which lines carrying varying numbers of stresses are brought into formal cohesion through strong and memorable rhymes at the end of each phrase. The dazzling variety and vitality of her rhythmic features she explains with her dream 'to find a rhythm that would change with every change in my train of thought, with every new emotion or sensation'.16 In combination with her characteristic imagery, this technical device makes her voice instantly recognisable; however, the idea of rhythm mirroring thought was suggested by Osip Mandel′shtam in 1933.17 Rhyme used as the glue for rhythmically diverse poems was a common occurrence in futurist poetry.18 Her versification thus exhibits the same combination of eccentric individuality and reassuring gestures towards her literary predecessors that characterises her lexicon and choice of subject matter.

In fact Shvarts, an outspoken adversary of free verse, which she vilified as 'an abattoir — bad prose'19 richly orchestrated her poetry, using the devices of cycle, stanza, line, rhyme and rhythm in a traditional manner. We can thus read her poetry successfully with the help of the usual hermeneutic tools honed by reading Russian poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This makes her work instantly accessible, giving her a definitive advantage over more experimentally minded peers such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, whose experiments with free verse have few, if any, predecessors in Russian poetry, or the notoriously opaque octaves of Mikhail Eremin.

Shvarts's multilayered references to Russian and European predecessors will earn her the appreciation of the discerning, erudite poetry lover who is able to decode them. The provocative power of her images, capable of shocking the reader, and perhaps specifically created in order to shock, can make us momentarily forget that these images nevertheless remain poetic images in the classical sense. As such they stand for themselves, remaining accessible even when their resonance with the Russian tradition is lost. Shvarts's reliance on images rather than subtle variations of language alone also minimises translation loss, making her an attractive candidate for publication in a foreign language.

16 'A Poetics of What is Alive', p. 275.

17 'The internal image of a poem is inseparable from the countless changes of expression that flicker across the narrator's face when he speaks and is agitated'. Osip Mandel′shtam, 'Razgovor o Dante' (1933), *Sochineniia*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), II, 214–54 (p. 216).

18 Maiakovskii heightened this effect by setting out his poems as 'stepladders', forcing the reader to pause in certain places.

19 'A Poetics of What is Alive', p. 275. Also in 'Interv′iu s Elenoi Shvarts (1990)', in *Iosif Brodskii glazami sovremennikov. Kniga pervaia (1987–1992)*, edited by Valentina Polukhina (St Petersburg: Zvezda, 2006), pp. 226–46 (p. 229).

It seems that Shvarts has managed to position herself at the advantageous crossroads of tradition and innovation, as if following the advice of Aristotle, according to whom the perfect poetic style combines rare and commonplace words.20 It seems thus appropriate to conclude that Shvarts's choice of subject matter, lexicon and style, in combination with the fact that her voice did not undergo major changes and was already mature and recognisable by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, were vital factors contributing to her post-Soviet fame.

#### Part Two. Contextual Criteria: Three Keys to Shvarts's Work

Having established the general picture, I will use the remainder of this chapter to delineate three specific areas of Shvarts's work and life that may afford us further insight into why she was privileged over her peers when it came to entering the post-Soviet canon. These areas are the use of her underground credentials, gender and its reflection on her work, and her extra-literary persona.

#### Shvarts as an Underground Poet

Literature in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia was more than just literature. The radical intelligentsia of the nineteenthcentury looked to writers for moral leadership; literature thus became a platform for political and ethical debate.21 The Bolsheviks followed in this tradition when they attempted to utilise literature as a tool for forging the new Soviet man.22

20 'A diction that is made up of strange (or rare) terms is a jargon. A certain infusion, therefore, of these elements is necessary to style; for the strange (or rare) word, the metaphorical, the ornamental, and the other kinds above mentioned, will raise it above the commonplace and mean, while the use of proper words will make it perspicuous'. Aristotle, *Poetics*, chapter XXII, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/ poetics.3.3.html

21 These views are summarised by Vissarion Belinskii in his 'Letter to N. V. Gogol′' (1847), in N. V. Gogol′, *Polnoe sobranie sochinenii*, 14 vols. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1937–1952), XIV, pp. 500–10.

22 Compare the statement that 'writers are engineers of the human soul', popularized by and attributed to Stalin, who used it in 1932 at a meeting with Soviet writers. In fact he was quoting the novelist Iurii Olesha. See http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ dic\_wingwords/1087/Инженеры

This concept of literature invests the written word with an enormous degree of power, and explains why different authorities, and the Soviet regime in particular, operated a tight censorship regime. As Svetlana Boym has observed, the quasi-religious cult of the poet as voice of truth thrives on political oppression.23 In this sense, the underground poet is the quintessential Russian poet, a Romantic outsider who is persecuted by the state for the sake of the 'truth' he or she has to tell. Underground culture added a further notion to this myth, namely that of the (underground) writer as the preserver of authentic literary culture in an age that was doing everything to stifle this culture with a barrage of tendentious and formulaic prescriptions.24 It is precisely this commitment to literary authenticity (cynics might point out that it is a cliché, and one that has been peddled relentlessly by the underground poets themselves) that now, more than thirty years later, makes the underground so attractive as a topic of research, both in the West and, increasingly, in Russia itself. For the first ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union it was researched predominantly as a sociocultural phenomenon, and most of those who wrote about it were former underground writers themselves.25 This has changed now. Primary sources are readily available, and enough research has been carried out to enable a new generation of scholars to examine the poetry written by

23 Svetlana Boym, *Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet* (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 120.

24 In their theoretical and critical writings many underground writers made conscious use of this stance. Relevant examples, published in *samizdat*, are Boris Ivanov, 'Kul′turnoe dvizhenie kak tselostnoe iavlenie', 37, 19 (1979); 'K materialam 2-oi konferentsii kul′turnogo dvizheniia', *Chasy*, 24 (1980), 256–78 and A. Kalomirov (a pseudonym of Viktor Krivulin), 'Dvadtsat′ let noveishei russkoi poezii', *Severnaia pochta*, 1: 2 (1979). After the fall of the Soviet Union, the same people developed this direction of research: V. Krivulin, 'U istochnikov nezavisimoi kul′tury', Zvezda, 1 (1990), 184–88; 'Peterburgskaia spiritual′naia lirika vchera i segodnia', in *Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury* edited by Boris Ivanov and Boris Roginskii (St Petersburg: DEAN, 2000), pp. 99–110; B. Ivanov, 'Evoliutsiia literaturnykh dvizhenii v piatidesiatye-vos′midesiatye gody', in *Istoriia leningradskoi nepodtsensurnoi literaratury*, pp. 17–28.

25 As is evident from one of the first collections devoted to this topic: *Samizdat. Po materialam konferentsii '30 let nezavisimoi pechati. 1950–80 gody'* (St Petersburg: NITs 'Memorial', 1993).

underground writers as an integral part of the evolution of twentiethcentury poetry.26

Her provenance from the underground lends Shvarts's poetry a certain amount of credibility by default. She is a 'serious', 'true' poet who has suffered for her 'truth' by being deprived of a broad readership for twenty years. She is also part of the 'underground mainstream', with both her texts and her lifestyle following certain established models. At the same time, she exhibits the same obsession with literary culture, expressing itself in highly complex imagery and a proclivity for intertext and citation that Mikhail Epshtein identified as the trademark sign of one of the major currents of Russian postmodernism ('metarealism').27

However, Soviet underground poetry is notoriously opaque and inaccessible to Russian readers of post-Soviet generations (let alone Westerners) who lack the requisite referential framework. I have argued that one of the factors that makes Shvarts a supremely accessible poet is her independence from the underground paradigm as subject matter. Her quasi-religious vision of poetry did not depend, as did that of Krivulin, for example, on the late Soviet context as a setting in which persecuted poets could be likened to the early Christians hounded by the Romans; nor was her lyrical 'I' the quintessential 'underground man/poet' who features so prominently in the work of Krivulin. This fact, in conjunction with Shvarts's otherwise impeccable underground credentials, makes her a convenient deputy figure, capable of standing in for the entire underground in the eyes of readers and non-specialist scholars.

#### The Perspective of Women's Studies

Shvarts's gender provides us with an additional angle from which to approach her work, namely that of women's studies, and it is this angle that has shaped Western scholarship of Shvarts from the beginning.

26 These scholars include Marco Sabbatini (Italy), Stephanie Sandler (US), Emily Lygo (UK), Iuliia Valieva (Russia), Aleksandr Skidan (Russia), Stanislav Savitskii (Russia).

27 Mikhail Epshtein, *Postmodern v russkoi literature* (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 2005), p. 127 ff. For a recent study of the phenomenon see A. A. Zhitenev, *Poeziia neomodernizma* (St Petersburg: Inapress, 2012).

Shvarts has found entry in several anthologies — scholarly as well as poetic — that are specifically dedicated to female Russian writers.28 Anthologisation is an important step towards canonicity: it signifies that a writer is considered exemplary enough to be included in a representative sample. Poetry anthologies are read by more people than individual collections; this is likely to be even more significant in the case of foreign poets. In picking up an anthology, the reader implicitly accepts the editor's choice of material.

Shvarts's gender-specific poems are a magnet for academics: she grapples with the persona of the female poet. The author of the first significant article on Shvarts in English, Barbara Heldt, identified Shvarts's poetry as feminine in a way that defies the patriarchal order and mocks the tradition of the woman poet, especially in attitudes towards her body.29 Shvarts introduces this thematic field with imagery that seems highly topical from a feminist point of view, centring as it does on violence, often of a sexual nature. A prime example is the cycle 'Grubymi sredstvami ne dostich′ blazhenstva' ('You Won't Reach Bliss by Rough Means'), with its subtitle 'Horror eroticus', which presents male sexuality as inherently demonic and violent:

> Верно, хочется тебе Деву разломать, как жареную курицу, Как спелый красный апельсин, И разорвать, и разодрать, И соком смерти напитать До самых жизни до глубин. Разве ты виноват?

> > II, p. 90

28 Academic anthologies in English that mention Shvarts include: Catriona Kelly, *A History of Russian Women's Writing, 1820–1992* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and *A History of Women's Writing in Russia*, edited by Adele Barker and Jehanne Gheith (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). A comprehensive literary anthology is *An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets*, edited by Valentina Polukhina and Daniel Weissbort (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005). N.B., though, footnote 491: the first time Shvarts was 'canonised' in any context was her inclusion in *Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology*, edited by G. S. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993), 246–57.

29 Heldt, 'The Poetry of Elena Shvarts', pp. 381–83.

True, you want to break the girl open like a fried chicken, like a ripe red orange, tear her to pieces, split her and soak her with the juice of death down to the deep recesses of life. Is that really your fault?

This is not merely an example of *chernukha*, the preoccupation with the dark aspects of life that features prominently in the work of women writers such as Liudmila Petrushevskaia who gained prominence in the later 1980s and 1990s. The all-encompassing, grossly exaggerated violence of these lines borders on the vision of a madwoman; it is plausible that the aim of these lines is neither a description of actual circumstances, nor, in fact, gender politics. Instead, the poet delights in challenging taboos, a feature pioneered by Shvarts's heroine Marina Tsvetaeva.30 On the other hand the demonisation of male sexuality, which is presented here as exclusively driven by subconscious urges aiming at the violation and subjugation of the female, alongside a proliferation of phallic imagery ('Против воли–тупое жало / Вздымается из брюха кинжалом / И несет томительную смерть' (Against your will the blunt sting / rises from your belly, dagger-like / bringing agonising death)) evoke the theories of Sigmund Freud. While psychoanalysis was no longer a new or unchallenged approach either in the 1970s or in the 1990s, it might have had a greater impact on Soviet/Russian readers, to whom this discourse had not been readily available for a long time. Popular in the experimental early 1920s, psychoanalysis was discredited after Lenin's death and denounced in 1929; Freud's works were not published after 1925.31

A scene that is more emphatically centred on domestic violence can be found in 'Where are We?', the second poem of *Chernaia Paskha*, already discussed above:

30 The adolescent Shvarts adored Tsvetaeva, stating that she wished to be like her: 'Diaries' ['Dnevniki'], Sochineniia vol. V, p. 346. The adult Shvarts hailed Tsvetaeva as the most technically accomplished poet in the Russian language (Polukhina, 'Interv′iu s Elenoi Shvarts', p. 233).

31 For details see Martin Miller, *Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Вот пьяный муж Булыжником ввалился […] Он весь как божия гроза; «Где ты была? С кем ты пила? […]» И кулаком промежду глаз Как жахнет. И льется кровь, и льются слезы.

II, p. 78

My drunk husband barges in like a rock […] and thunders like the wrath of God: 'Where have you been? With whom have you been drinking? […]' And his fists lands between my eyes. Blood flows, and so do tears.

This scene doubtlessly constitutes an instance of *chernukha.* Yet again we have to concede that the depiction of circumstance is not the poet's main or sole aim. As we have already seen, the cycle of which this scene forms part provides concentric circles of broader context. The inner circles of context are national or religious, owing to the setting and the Easter theme given in the title. All these associations are encompassed by the widest contextual circles, which is literature: *Chernaia Paskha* is a modern-day Petersburg text that ingeniously develops the traditional notions of the genre, received through the work of Dostoevskii, Gogol′ and others — and the question of the power and/or impotence of literary culture in late twentieth-century Russia.

Everyday life is rarely the focus of Shvarts's gender-specific poems. Some of them are downright otherworldly (for example 'Vospominanie o strannom ugoshchenii' ('Memory of a Strange Treat', I, p. 54), in which the heroine tastes a friend's breast milk). Her woman poet is a mutable heroine who usually appears in the guise of a first-person lyrical 'I'. Wellknown poems that employ this device include 'Tantsuiushchii David' ('Dancing David', I, p. 79), 'Elegiia na rentgenovskii snimok moego cherepa' ('Elegy on an X-Ray of my Skull', I, p. 28) and many others. This first-person narrator tempts us to read the texts as autobiography. Yet we learn close to nothing about Shvarts from her poems; in this she sharply differs from her Silver Age predecessors Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, who displayed a similar narcissistic fixation on the persona of themselves-as-poet, but supplied plenty of (carefully edited) personal detail.32 I will use Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva as points of comparison for the following discussion, perhaps unfairly prioritising these most famous among women poets and forfeiting the opportunity for a more nuanced analysis of Shvarts's female poetic lineage. Yet there are good reasons for choosing these two figures — their rank among Russia's main poets of the twentieth century is undisputed, they were unabashedly feminine voices who refused to be belittled as *poetessa*, and last but not least Shvarts had strong opinions on both of them (see notes 667 and 688)33.

Given the predominance of men in the poetic canon, readers are more used to looking at the world, and at women (especially women-asobjects) through the eyes of a male poet, but Shvarts, just as Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva had done before her, inverted the gendered perspective, instead evoking a world seen through the eyes of the gifted female. This is particularly evident in her bold re-imagining of poetic inspiration in 'Ia rodilas′ s ladon′iu gladkoi' ('I was Born with an Unlined Hand', I, p. 110), where the female poet replaces the male poet's muse by the grammatically and behaviourally masculine 'Fatum', who tries to inscribe her virgin hands with a challenging fate, and with poetry. This poem exhibits clear parallels with Tsvetaeva's long poem 'Na krasnom kone' ('On a Red Steed', 1921), where the gentle muse takes the guise of a fierce knight who demands of the poet self-sacrifice and submission to the poetic calling.34 A less well-known version of the male muse we find in Anna Radlova's 'Angel pesnopeniia' ('Angel of Song', 1922).35

Some of Shvarts's first-person narrators are elaborately crafted fictional alter egos, with their own history, in whose names Shvarts

32 Examples that can be traced back to events in the respective poet's life include Akhmatova's 'Rekviem' (on her son's arrest and Gulag sentence) and Tsvetaeva's cycles of love poetry, e.g. 'Georgii' (to her husband Sergei Efron), 'Poema kontsa' ('Poem of the End') (to her lover, Konstantin Rodzevich), and 'Provoda' ('Wires') (to Boris Pasternak).

33 Shvarts, 'Diaries', p. 346.

34 Marina Tsvetaeva, *Stikhotvoreniia i poemy* (Moscow: Ripol Klassik, 2002), pp. 621–25.

35 Anna Radlova, *Bogoroditsyn korabl', krylatyi gost', povest' o Tatarinovoi* (Moscow: 'Its-Garant', 1997), pp. 83–84.

produced entire collections.36 One of them is 'Kinfiia', purportedly a first-century Roman poetess whose 'poems did not survive, nevertheless I shall try to translate them into Russian' (II, p. 5) and who shocks her readers with a graphic description of imaginary patricide in poem two of the cycle. A similarly colourful alter ego is Lavinia, heroine of Shvarts's most important religious work, the cycle *Trudy i dni Lavinii, monakhini iz ordena obrezaniia serdtsa. Ot Rozhdestva do Paskhi*  (*The Works and Days of Lavinia, a Nun in the Order of the Circumcision of the Heart: From Christmas to Easter*, 1984)*.* Lavinia is a nun, and as the purported author of the cycle, she is by definition also a poet. The cycle is presented, in best Romantic manner, as a 'found manuscript': it is preceded by a letter from a fictitious editor and a lyric by Lavinia's fictitious sister, explaining how this cycle came into being. *Trudy i dni Lavinii* includes elements of biblical motifs that Shvarts adapted to create a birth myth of the female poet. In 'Temnaia rozhdestvenskaia pesn' ('A Dark Christmas Song' (poem eleven, II, p. 174)), a child is born in the desert. Yet this child is not Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, but Mary herself, who then, curiously, joins Venus, Roman goddess of love, in the Christian heaven. 'Leviafan' ('Leviathan' (poem thirteen, II, p. 176)) is an adaptation of the story of Jonah and the whale (Jonah 1–2). The Leviathan, a (grammatically) masculine figure, invites the heroine to 'enter my womb'. He swallows her and she rather enjoys the ride in his belly until the monster goes into labour and expels her in a fountain of blood. In the Old Testament, the expulsion from the belly of the whale marks the beginning of Jonah's path as a prophet. Shvarts is harnessing this notion for her heroine Lavinia: the whale is thus giving birth to the woman poet, her birth marking her as special.

Lavinia's tremendous energy and prophetic gift are inspired by an irrational source; she exhibits traits of the Holy Fool, driven out of the convent by her fellow nuns because of her erratic behaviour: 'Выгоняли меня, говорили: "Иди!  / Save your soul where you want, sister / But we, sister, are horrified by you'.

36 These poems were collected in the aptly titled volume *Mundus imaginalis* (St Petersburg: Ezro, 1996). Not all of them were female: the 'Estonian poet' Arno Tsart, became a pseudonym under which Shvarts published two *samizdat* collections in the early 1980s. See http://libverse.ru/barkova/dyrochka.html

(poem 52), II, p. 206). While Lavinia exhibits a particularly prominent prophetic desire tinged with madness, evocative of Anna Barkova's 'Durochka' ('The Fool', 1954),37 this trait is common to most of Shvarts's first-person narrators. By creating female versions of the Holy Fool, both Barkova and Shvarts invoke a literary archetype: the Holy Fool has been a staple figure in Russian religious literature since the Middle Ages; subsequently he entered secular literature as the quintessential outsider who challenges established structures.38 In donning the mask of the Holy Fool, Shvarts thus claims her place within a tradition that is explicitly linked to extravagance and the exploration of taboos, be they political, religious, social or sexual. Consciously or not, she thus created a female genealogy of influence, appropriating and developing techniques used, once again, by Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, who habitually highlighted the female poet's involvement with that which is considered taboo. The familiarity with taboo is often indicated by the presence of folk motifs, as in Tsvetaeva's 'Akhmatovoi' ('To Akhmatova', 1921, not to be confused with her earlier eponymous cycle), a poem with a gypsy theme evident in lexicon and the song-like rhythm. Akhmatova with the raven plait ('chernokosyn′ka') is addressed as a woman familiar with black magic ('chernoknizhnitsa'), and assonance and consonance between the two lend weight to the poem's suggestion that Tsvetaeva's famous colleague might indeed be a gypsy sorceress.

The use of named mythical figures as a mouthpiece is yet another trait Shvarts inherited, consciously or not, from Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. All three poets lent their voice to mythical female heroines whom the usual sources describe as passive and silent.39 To give just

37 Available at http://libverse.ru/barkova/dyrochka.html

38 For a study that considers the roots of the tradition but also includes secular literature and culture is S. A. Ivanov, *Blazhennye pokhaby: kul'turnaia istoriia iurodstva* (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul'tur, 2005). Also Ewa M. Thompson, *Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture* (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987). Per-Arne Bodin is focusing on the application of the tradition in contemporary Russia: *Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness: Studies in Postsoviet Russian Culture and the Orthodox Tradition* (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2009). Marco Sabbatini argues that for holy foolishness can be seen as a form of inner emigration among underground poets: 'The Pathos of Holy Foolishness in the Leningrad Underground', in *Holy Foolishness in Russia: New Perspectives*, edited by Priscilla Hunt and Svitlana Kobets (Bloomington: Slavica Publishers, 2011), pp. 337–52.

39 A contemporary English poet who exploits a very similar device to great effect is Carol Ann Duffy, the British Poet Laureate, with her collection *The World's Wife* (London: Picador, 1999).

two select examples, both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva re-imagined a Hamlet story in which Ophelia, rather than suffering in silence, answers back to Hamlet.40 In turn, Tsvetaeva and Shvarts each produced their own version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, allowing Eurydice to expound on her reasons for remaining in Hades. These reasons are particular to the individual poet's vision, and they have little to do with the disobedience Orpheus exhibits in the source myth.41

Unsurprisingly, the poems centred on the female voice in literature are particularly attractive to scholars studying Russian literature from a feminist perspective.42 The gender aspect thus broadens academic interest in Shvarts's work, which in turn heightens the poet's chance of being considered canonical.

#### Zhiznetvorchestvo and Celebrity Culture

A poet's popularity depends to a not insignificant degree on the way they present themselves to their readers. Pushkin's tragic fate moved his audience; Silver Age figures such as Akhmatova or Maiakovskii invested considerable effort in their self-presentation. In other words, it is not enough to write good poetry, it is also necessary to be attractive, intriguing and in some ways newsworthy. Shvarts was aware of the impact of a poet's personal myth on his or her reception. While she stated that it was the forces around the poet, rather than the poet herself, who created this myth, she certainly offered her readers plenty of relevant material.43

In the remainder of this article I will give a brief overview of ways in which Shvarts staged her own persona. It is clear that the celebrity of Shvarts, whose reluctance to read in public dates back

40 Akhmatova's 'Chitaia Gamleta' ('Reading Hamlet', 1909), in *Sochineniia*, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), I, pp. 21–22; Tsvetaeva's 'Ofeliia-Gamletu' ('Ophelia to Hamlet', 1923), in *Stikhotvoreniia i poemy*, p. 373.

41 Tsvetaeva's 'Evridika-Orfeiu' ('Euridice to Orpheus', 1923) celebrates death as a state free of attachment and sexual passion, and introduces an uncomfortable notion of incest, presenting Orpheus and Eurydice as siblings (in *Stikhotvoreniia i poemy*, p. 384). In Shvarts's 'Orfei' ('Orpheus', I, p. 154), Orpheus's doubt in his beloved's reality leads to her decision to slip back into the underworld.

42 For example, Catriona Kelly discusses birth-myth poems in her chapter on Shvarts in *A History of Russian Women's Writing*, pp. 411–22.

43 For a statement to this effect see Polukhina, 'Interv′iu s Elenoi Shvarts', p. 239.

to her underground days, was not a product of present-day Russian popular culture.44 Russian celebrity culture now is little different from its Western counterpart and driven by TV shows, glossy magazines, performance and (self-)publication on social media and platforms such as YouTube.45 There are writers who exploit the media age very successfully, often by supplementing traditional poetry with a performance aspect. One of Shvarts's contemporaries who managed the transition to the new media age, and who arguably reached canonical status precisely because of his media presence, was the extremely versatile Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov, the central figure of Moscow conceptualism in the late 1970s and 1980s.46 A contemporary example is the omnipresent Dmitrii Bykov with his hugely successful *Grazhdanin poet* (*Citizen Poet*) project, or younger performance poets such as Andrei Rodionov or Vera Polozkova.47 Shvarts's media presence was minimal; she relied entirely on traditional channels of publication. Traditional are also her modes of self-presentation, which have their precedent in modernist *zhiznetvorchestvo*, the fusion of life and text*.* 48 Shvarts created her public persona — who bore traits of the *femme fatale*, the mystic seer, and the holy fool — through a process of self-mystification that strongly resembles the techniques employed, once again, by Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.49

44 'Kratkaia istoriia dopotopnykh chtenii' ('A Short History of Antediluvian Readings', III, pp. 193–96) details Shvarts's dislike of public readings. For a visual impression of a younger Elena Shvarts reading her poetry see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TOaJnTqpzhk. Recordings of her readings can be found at http://asiaplus.ru/cgi-bin/mp3.cgi?id=30&sid=492884ca-027b-4202-8bf8-32dc9b1fb547

45 A study touching on some of these points that is not yet entirely out of date is Birgit Beumers's *Pop Culture Russia!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle* (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005).

46 Some of the wide variety of his work can be appreciated on http://prigov.ru

47 Polozkova promotes herself via social media, including Zhivoi Zhurnal (Life Journal), Facebook and VKontakte. Her official page on VKontakte mixes the private and the public, featuring family photographs as well as poems and multimedia files of her performing her poetry. See https://vk.com/vera\_polozkova. For a film portrait of Polozkova, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GVlDslpLBA

48 A good description of *zhiznetvorchestvo* can be found in *Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age*, edited by B. Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 3 ff.

49 See Catriona Kelly, *A History of Russian Women's Writing*, p. 210 for a definition of the process of self-mystification in Akhmatova's case.

When asked what Shvarts looks like, readers will recall a beautiful, sad-eyed young woman, never smiling, who looks into the camera defiantly, sometimes drawing on a cigarette and overall resembling a film noir heroine.50 These are the images of Shvarts that precede each of the volumes of her *Sochineniia* (*Collected Works*); it seems significant that she should have chosen the iconic pictures of her youth, although by the time the *Sochineniia* came out she was well into her fifties.51 Shvarts professed that she could not stand Akhmatova, whom she met when she was a young woman.52 Yet when looking at the photographs by which Shvarts became known, it is Akhmatova's pictures, and her policy in using them, that come to mind — a striking profile, an enigmatic gaze into the distance.

The richest source of self-mystifying material is her autobiographical prose, published in two collections entitled *Vidimaia storona zhizni* (*The Visible Side of Life*, 1997) and *Opredelenie v durnuiu pogodu* (*Definition in Foul Weather*, 2003). These collections consist of anecdotal, witty, bitesized vignettes that are rarely longer than one page. They give the impression of being diary entries, especially the pieces in *Vidimaia storona zhizni*, a collection which begins with the poet's childhood. However, the episodes were in all likelihood written retrospectively; they are

50 Elena Shvarts is known to have had a professional picture taken once a year (interview with Kirill Kozyrev, executor of Shvarts's estate, July 2015). A Google search for 'Images' of 'Елена Шварц', in Cyrillic, will give access to many of these iconic images, plus other similar ones, taken by friends, which have proliferated in works by and about Shvarts, e. g. the encyclopaedia *Samizdat Leningrada* and the translated volume *Paradise*. The above-mentioned picture of the sad-eyed woman drawing on a cigarette illustrates Darra Goldstein's essay 'The Heart-Felt Poetry of Elena Shvarts', in *Fruits of her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Woman's Culture*, edited by Helena Goscilo (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe), 1993, pp. 239–50 (p. 240). This photo is particularly striking when contrasted with the photograph of Iuliia Voznesenskaia (p. 229), a contemporary and acquaintance of Shvarts.

51 For an analysis of the role of photography in the creation of celebrity, see Leo Braudy, *The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & its History* (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), in particular pp. 491–99. See also Chris Rojek, *Celebrity* (London: Reaktion, 2008). Beth Holmgren's essay 'Gendering the Icon: Marketing Women Writers in Finde-siècle Russia', in *Russia-Women-Culture*, edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 321–46, provides a useful history of women writers' portraits.

52 'Today I went to see Akhmatova. I thought she was a saint, a great woman.  She sees nothing apart from herself' ('Diaries', V, p. 346). The dislike was mutual; Akhmatova's impressions of Shvarts are published in Emily Van Buskirk, 'Lidiia Ginzburg on Elena Shvarts', *Slavonica*, 16: 2 (2010), 139–41.

stylistically homogenous and present a consistent, highly stylised image of the first-person heroine.53 While they are doubtlessly intriguing, the entries do not divulge factual information about Shvarts's life, or inner life for that matter; the reader does not have the usual impression of getting closer to the poet, however deceptive this impression might be. Some of the pieces (e.g. 'Neskol′ko osobennostei moikh stikhov' ('A Few Peculiarities of My Poems')) treat Shvarts's vision of poetry, but they describe rather than explain, in stark contrast to the essays of Shvarts's friend Ol'ga Sedakova, for example, which evince an almost scholarly interest in the reasons for writing in a particular way. The function of Shvarts's prose is fundamentally different — her vignettes are the primary instrument with which she 'ghosts' her persona, fine-tuning the light in which her readers see her.54

An unkind reader might be tempted to point out that the elements of the poetic myth to which Shvarts pandered have been over-used by Russian poets throughout the ages to the point that they have become clichés. The first of these clichés is the romantic image of the poet-asseer, whose gift makes her stand apart from the crowd (see Pushkin's 'Poet i tolpa' ('The Poet and the Crowd', 1828)). Shvarts's exalted vision of poetry as a quasi-religious practice reinforces the cliché: 'I regard the composition of verse as a sacral, sacred act'55 and 'I have always looked to the poet giving a reading as a priest'.56 The consistency with which Shvarts promoted this version of herself is remarkable: in the prose piece 'Luch' ('The Ray') she describes how she came to faith (*poverila*) as a teenager when a ray of light fell onto her temple, elevating her to a new level of cognition. Later, she saw a miniature of King David in prayer, with a ray touching his temple, and too it as an illustration for what had happened to her — she had come into contact with the divine (III, pp. 229–30). In an earlier poem, 'Bokovoe zrenie pamiati' ('The Lateral Vision of Memory', 1985) the same ray of light is explicitly identified as

53 Shvarts's actual adolescent diaries, published posthumously in *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie*, 115 (2012), and subsequently in volume V of her *Sochineniia* (2013), reveal that she began honing this style very early in her life.

54 Aleksandr Ulanov identifies Shvarts's autobiographical pieces as a 'portrait of the poet as romantic genius who is not a normal human being', http://magazines.russ. ru/znamia/1998/4/nabl1.html

55 Polukhina, 'Interv′iu s Elenoi Shvarts', p. 235.

56 'A Short History of Antediluvian Readings', III, p. 194.

poetic inspiration. We find a similar image in the prose piece 'Sumerki' ('Twilight', III, p. 185).

The emergent child-prodigy theme falls in the same category of cliché, and once again Shvarts seems to follow in the footsteps of her prominent predecessors — both Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva published their first collection at a precocious age. However, writing poetry from a tender age was common among Soviet poets, including many of Shvarts's underground peers. The cult of literature in the Soviet Union facilitated this: many children and young people in the 1960s attended writing circles at school, at the Young Pioneers, and later at university.57 In Shvarts's own description, which should be read with the necessary degree of critical distance, her status as an outcast, marked by her peculiar understanding of narrative and poetry, was cemented while she was still a child. When she told other adolescents at a poetry seminar (of all places) about a freak accident her mother had, falling into the Neva, the other children refused to believe her, 'having decided that my madness had reached a new stage' indicating that she already had a reputation for being out of her mind.58 When she read her own poetry for the first time as a young pioneer, the other children reportedly laughed at her. The teacher alone sat still, with tears streaming down her face comforting the distraught Elena with the magic words 'don't pay attention to them, they have no idea. You are a real poet'.59 Now that we have access to Shvarts's adolescent diaries, we can see that she used this technique long before she became a fully-fledged writer: 'Not long ago Iu. A. and I went to see two old ladies. They love my poems. They prophesied I would be famous'.60 This is a very powerful act of self-certification: rather than calling herself an accomplished poet outright, Shvarts quotes other people's appreciation of her gift, directing the light of other people's authoritative scrutiny at her craft. For an underground poet — a writer who, as a result of the authenticity of her gift and the integrity of her character, will be scorned by the literary establishment — this kind of validation assumes particular poignancy.

57 See Lygo, *Leningrad Poetry 1953–75*; entries on individual poets in *Samizdat Leningrada*. Details are also given by Aleksandr Skidan in his introduction to Shvarts's diaries in *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie*, 115 (2012), 236.

58 'The Cruiser' ('Kreiser'), III, p. 176.

59 'First Reading' ('Pervoe chtenie'), III, p. 188.

60 'Diaries', V, p. 318.

There is an another aspect to Shvarts's public persona, one that exploits her gender. The persona she presents in her prose is a highly strung *femme fatale*, confirming what her photographs suggest: an unpredictable whirlwind with a penchant for histrionics and scandal. We get a taste of this in vignettes such as 'Zhestko nakazannyi antisemit' ('A Harshly Punished Anti-Semite'), in which she pours boiling water on the belly of an artist who had insulted a Jewish guest (III, p. 203), and 'Izbienie slepogo' ('Beating Up a Blind Man'), where friends struggle to break up a fist fight between her and a blind, male acquaintance (III, pp. 214–15), and most shockingly, in 'Bog spas' ('God Saved Me'), where the poet relates: 'it was night, I was drunk and desperate and standing on the roof of a nine-storey house, on one leg and on the wrong side of the barrier' (III, p. 217). Upon examining more closely the scene as Shvarts describes it, we might conclude that it lacks substance: we are not given any reason for the existential despair other than her drunkenness. The dramatic gesture of the act (the first association most people will have with a person on a roof is that of a suicide) and the similarly dramatic title are out of tune with the rather banal context — yet another drunken party among the literary bohemia. But the episode adds another facet to the poet's already complicated personality. The effect seems to conform to an observation made by James Hopgood with regard to the behaviour of saints (and performers who become secular quasi-saints): 'the human desire and "impulse" to find and fashion what is desired in the other often settles on someone outside normal bounds'.61

Her exalted feminine antics and her attractive exterior notwithstanding, Shvarts's behaviour was in many aspects more typical of the male poets that dominated the Leningrad underground.62 In the male bastion that was underground literature, most women tended to play the role of muse, facilitator and preserver, following in the footsteps of Nadezhda Mandel′shtam, who preserved her persecuted husband's poetry for posterity. One example is Tat'iana Goricheva, Krivulin's former wife. Herself a keen translator and prolific religious philosopher, she is nevertheless best known for her role as hostess of

61 In the introduction to the volume *The Making of Saints: Contesting Sacred Ground*, edited by James F. Hopgood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), p. xv.

62 A visual impression of this dominance can be gleaned from the group photos at the back of *Samizdat Leningrada*.

innumerable get-togethers of the literary boheme, co-founder and editor of the *samizdat* journal *37*, and later, after her forced emigration in 1980s, of the publishing house *Beseda* in Paris, which introduced many *samizdat* poets to a wider public.63 Another example is Alena Basilova, the wife of Leonid Gubanov, who was a poet in her own right but is described as someone who contributed to the underground as a hostess, someone who made her flat available to Moscow's underground poets.64 Shvarts, on the other hand, was a full-blown participant, an active agent rather than a facilitator for others. She drank and smoked heavily, failed to turn up for readings and was known among her friends for her proclivity for 'scandals and blows'.65 She also publicised her notorious love life, thus claiming a male domain as her own. A few such episodes she describes laconically in 'Pazukhin-Shafer' how she got married aged twenty, 'myself not knowing why', while another friend, himself in love with her, had to wake her up for the wedding and drive her to the registry office; she then goes on to describe domestic life with her new husband, including a graphic scene of domestic violence when he almost strangles her in a fit of jealousy (III, p. 209). The gender inversion that we can see in her poetic perspective and behaviour, contrasted with her striking appearance, may paradoxically have helped her storm the bastion and become one of the few female underground voices who was truly heard — without allowances being made for her gender: a real *poet*, not a *poetessa*.

#### Conclusion

Shvarts's entry into the poetic canon of post-Soviet Russia was the result of her producing a large body of new, first rate poetry. The discussion above demonstrates that she had an advantage over her underground peers because her work was more accessible to a general readership; at the same time her poetry, as well as her personality, were

63 Beseda produced thirty issues of the eponymous literary journal; it also published single author collections of the Leningrad samizdat poets, introducing many of them to a broader readership for the first time. Shvarts's first official collection, Stikhi, was published by Beseda in 1987.

64 For details see http://rvb.ru/np/publication/sapgir5.htm#67

65 Evgenii Pazukhin, 'Antisotsium', in *Sumerki 'Saigona'*, edited by Iuliia Valieva (St Petersburg: Samizdat, 2009), pp. 163–70 (pp. 168–69).

unusual enough to stand out and attract attention. Shvarts could not be pigeonholed as an underground poet. At the same time she was tarred with the underground brush; this paradox is at the centre of her fame. She was not a poet of the media age; her celebrity was old-fashioned and in essence close to that of the highly popular prose-writer Viktor Pelevin, who professed in the year 2000 that he never gave interviews and avoided literary circles, maintaining that an author should be famous for his books alone, and he seems not to have changed his stance.66 While Shvarts did not take elusiveness to the same (carefully staged) extreme, in the final analysis her own status is similarly grounded more exclusively on literary merit. Her eccentric personality and the inclination to perform it notwithstanding, she remains a highbrow writer who appeals to literary readers rather than those seeking entertainment or acute political commentary. As such, she may be one of the last poets to enter the canon as 'classical' poets who were not famous for anything else. Time will tell whether she can maintain that position.

66 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/apr/30/fiction; also http://pelevinlive. ru/17

Unofficial Leningrad Poets: Selected Comparative Bibliography

\*Shvarts is one of the very few underground writers who had Collected Works published and, what is more, during her lifetime. One of the few others who have achieved this extent of 'completeness' is Shvarts's Moscow-based contemporary and friend Olga Sedakova. Two Leningrad poets whose Collected Works were published posthumously are Leonid Aronzon (*Sobranie proizvedenii*, 2 vols, SPb: Izd. Ivana Limbakha, 2006) and Roal′d Mandel′shtam (*Sobranie stikhotvorenii*, SPb: Izd. Ivana Limbakha, 2006), but both died before underground culture reached its zenith in the 1970s.

#### Selected Publications on the Leningrad Underground as a Literary Phenomenon, in Chronological Order

### 9.  Many of the significant events of Soviet history played an important role in his life and creative development, especially his experiences as a soldier between 1941 and 1945, his rise to fame as a poet of the post-Stalin Thaw, and his efforts to understand the phenomenon that was Stalinism. Slutskii was intimately bound up with his times. His role as a chronicler of the Soviet experience was underlined by the publication of many previously unknown poems from his archive in the final years of the Soviet Union's existence. Gorbachev's *glasnost*′ policy prompted a confrontation with uncomfortable aspects of the past: the poetry by Slutskii that appeared for the first time in the late 1980s spoke about Stalinism, guilt, anti-semitism, the brutal cost of victory. Daniil Danin wrote in 1990 that: 'Boris Slutskii was organically — to the core of his being and poetic gift — made for an era which he did not live to see'.1

This mass of previously unpublished work meant that earlier assessments of Slutskii needed to be revisited. On the basis of what was available in 1978, Deming Brown described him as someone who:

seems a model of what the Soviet poet is expected to be — patriotic, affirmative, down to earth, fully committed to the Revolution, and one who stresses the moral value of hard work, self-sacrifice, and social

1 Daniil Danin, 'Khorosho ushel — ne oglianulsia', *Voprosy literatury*, 5 (2006), 168–79 (p. 168).

dedication. At the same time he manages to preserve an air of wary independence, of striving to expand the limits of orthodoxy, which places him unmistakably in the liberal camp.2

In the poetry which emerged from Slutskii's archive there was ample confirmation of the inner tensions that Brown had detected earlier: the 'discontent of a strongly frustrated moral sense' and fears about 'the destructive effects of rigid institutions on the human soul'.3 The circumstances in which the poet's unknown work came to light made it inevitable that the post-Soviet reception of Slutskii was dominated by his role as a chronicler of his times. G. S. Smith wrote that:

his work stands indisputably as the most valuable body of individual poetic testimony to the experience of the Russians under Soviet rule, comparable in importance to that of Solzhenitsyn and Grossman in prose. He was the best poet it was possible for him to be in his place and time.4

In his appreciation of Slutskii, Evgenii Evtushenko claims that 'a great poet embodies his epoch', and Irina Plekhanova describes Slutskii as 'one of the most vivid poets of the Soviet epoch'.5 The identification of Slutskii with the Soviet era, which has a strong foundation in the poet's work, can, however, be seen as a limitation. For Stanislav Kuniaev, as for Evtushenko, Slutskii was 'a poet of his epoch', but his significance is diminished as a result: 'I never considered him a great poet, for a great poet is always higher, more profound, more significant than his time'.6

The version of Slutskii that has been canonised by repetition is one that, as Marat Grinberg puts it, privileges 'the Soviet variable in his

2 Deming Brown, S*oviet Russian Literature Since Stalin* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 88.

3 *Ibid*., p. 89.

4 G. S. Smith, 'Soldier of Misfortune', in Boris Slutsky, *Things That Happened*, edited and translated and with an introduction and commentaries by G. S. Smith (Moscow and Birmingham: Glas, 1999), pp. 1–23 (p. 23).

5 Evgenii Evtushenko, 'Obiazatel′nost′ pered istoriei', in *Boris Slutskii: vospominaniia sovremennikov*, compiled by Petr Gorelik (St Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva, 2005), pp. 377–83 (p. 379); I. Plekhanova, 'Igra v imperativnom soznanii: lirika Boris Slutskogo v dialoge s vremenem', *Voprosy literatury*, 1 (2003), 46–72 (p. 47).

6 Stanislav Kuniaev, *Poeziia, Sud*′*ba, Rossiia*, 2 vols. (Mosow: Nash sovremennik, 1991), I, 231.