Literature - St Petersburg - page 452

Blok and Bely, who both lived in St Petersburg, were the most renowned writers of
the Symbolist movement. While Bely was well known and respected for his essays
and philosophical discourses, it is his mysterious novel Petersburg for which he is re-
membered. Its language is both literary and musical: it seems the author was paying
as much attention to the sound of his words as to their meaning. The plot, however
difficult to follow, revolves around a revolutionary who is hounded by the Bronze
Horseman (the same statue that harasses Pushkin's character) and is ordered to carry
out the assassination of his own father, a high-ranking tsarist official, by his revolu-
tionary cell. Many critics see Bely's masterpiece as a forerunner of Joyce's far later
modernist experiments in Ulysses , even though Petersburg wasn't even translated in-
to English until the 1950s.
Blok took over where Dostoevsky left off, writing of prostitutes, drunks and other
characters marginalised by society. Blok sympathised with the revolutions and he was
praised by the Bolsheviks once they came to power in 1917. His novel The Twelve,
published in 1918, is pretty much a love letter to Lenin. However, he later became
disenchanted with the revolution and consequently fell out of favour; he died a sad,
lonely poet in 1921, before his fall out with the communists could have more serious
consequences. In one of his last letters, he wrote, 'She did devour me, lousy, snuffling
dear Mother Russia, like a sow devouring her piglet'. The flat where he spent the last
eight years of his life is now a museum ( CLICK HERE ).
REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE
The immediate aftermath of 1917 saw a creative upswing in Russia. Inspired by social
change, writers carried over these principles into their work, pushing revolutionary
ideas and ground-breaking styles.
The trend was temporary, of course. The Bolsheviks were no connoisseurs of cul-
ture; and the new leadership did not appreciate literature unless it directly supported
the goals of communism. Some writers managed to write within the system, penning
some excellent poetry and plays in the 1920s; however, most found little inspiration in
the prevailing climate of art 'serving the people'. Stalin announced that writers were
'engineers of the human soul' and as such had a responsibility to write in a partisan
direction.
The clampdown on diverse literary styles culminated in the early 1930s with the
creation of socialist realism, a literary form created to promote the needs of the state,