A Russian poet died in North Carolina, on Friday. His name was Naum Korzhavin. He wrote three poems that all Russian readers of poetry can quote, and many can recite by heart. Of his ninety-two years, he spent forty-five living in the United States (forty-three of them in Boston, until the death of his wife, Lubov, two years ago; he then moved to Chapel Hill to be near his daughter). Still, he was one of the most significant Russian poets in a century that tragically called forth a lot of poetry.
Korzhavin was born Naum Mandel in a secular Jewish family in Kiev, in 1925. As he pointed out in a memoir, this was eight years after the Russian Revolution, but still a few years before collectivization destroyed life as it had been known in Ukraine, at the cost of millions of lives. Korzhavin’s earliest poems were filled with nostalgia for a revolution whose spirit had already vanished. In 1944, while Soviet newspapers and most Soviet people extolled the heroism of the anti-German offensive, Korzhavin wrote a poem called “Envy,” in which he lamented the unheroic nature of his generation. Written when Korzhavin was nineteen, “Envy” would remain one of his best-known poems.
Three years later, Korzhavin, a student at the Literary Institute in Moscow, was arrested, in the middle of the night, in his dormitory. Some said that Korzhavin was arrested for a poem critical of Stalin. Others said that he fell victim to Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign against what Soviet papers called “cosmopolitanism.” When Korzhavin wrote about the arrest, forty years later, he described it primarily as absurd. When the secret police woke him up and demanded to see his poems, he recalled, he had nothing to show them: he kept his manuscripts with friends, not because he felt that he had anything to hide but simply because he was incapable of maintaining his own papers. Once he faced his interrogator, he wrote, he subverted the script by earnestly asking what he had done wrong. “I really wanted to know what happened—and what if I had made a mistake and this man knew what it was,” Korzhavin recalled. “Thus I won this idiocy contest. My cultivated sincere idiocy prevailed over his professional idiocy.”
Korzhavin was deemed “socially dangerous,” and sentenced to internal exile. He didn’t return to Moscow until the mid nineteen-fifties. He was thirty-four when he finally graduated from college. He had grown disillusioned with the revolutionary myth and the entire Soviet project. It was only a matter of time before his poems and public statements got him forced out of the Soviet Union. Korzhavin landed in Boston in 1973.
Some of his lesser known but most searing poems narrate his decision to go into exile.
These are lines from an untitled poem written in 1972. (All translations are mine and literal; in the original, most of Korzhavin’s poems rhyme.) Two years later, in Boston, he wrote in another untitled poem:
The poem went on to describe the strange language and “strange kindness” that beckoned the author, who rushed toward them but could never quite make it because he was “full of the past.” This fullness of the past was not, however, the same as homesickness; the poet was not homesick, in the sense that he did not wish to return to his old life. That life, he wrote, had ceased to exist, as had the country in which he had lived it.
Korzhavin’s was a brutal predicament, of which he was mercilessly aware. Unlike many émigrés, he did not conceive of exile as temporary. As he described it, his life in the Soviet Union had not merely become untenable but had been lived to the most bitter of ends. Emigration was the best of all possible outcomes, which made it all the harder to swallow. “It’s better than having every step feel like a watershed,” he wrote of life in America, in a different 1974 poem. “But it’s as though I hadn’t lived half a century on earth.” He described feeling alternately incompetent and disappointed in his new country. “Here they have a precise method even for such a thing as feeling poetry,” he observed of the regimented and—he complained—exceedingly cheerful American culture, in a 1977 poem called “Letter to Moscow.”
In the late nineteen-eighties, during Gorbachev’s perestroika, Korzhavin was able to visit the Soviet Union several times. In 1990, he put together a collection of his poems for publication in the U.S.S.R.—only his second volume to be published in his native country. As he did with most of his books, Korzhavin gave this one a temporal title: “The Time Given.” (Previous books had been called “Years,” “Times,” and “Intertwinings,” and the next one would be called “At the Turn of the Century.”) In his introduction, Korzhavin explained his decision to make the collection an incomplete one, omitting some of the poems written during the Stalin era. He wrote that he did not edit out any poems that mentioned Stalin in a positive way—in fact, he included a couple of those: they might have been embarrassing, but they were sincere. What he decided to omit were poems that were in any way disingenuous.
“Moral-esthetic mistakes are the main thing that I can forgive neither myself nor any of my writing,” he wrote. “To me, they represent a vice of a primarily esthetic nature . . . No one survived Stalinism without a loss. Unfortunately, that is reflected in this book, too.” What Korzhavin lost was not only his country, but also the ability to publish his poems in the time to which they addressed themselves. Though Korzhavin might not have been one of Russia’s great poets, he was one of its most observant, and given to reacting in verse to the flow of history. But for most of his life his reactions could not be read by most of the people he was addressing.
