Columns

Alexander Dolitsky: To understand Russia, take a moment to read some Russian poetry, the soul of its culture

February 23, 2022

By ALEXANDER DOLITSKY

History teaches us that nations, in some ways, are like people. While having many things in common, each is unique. As with people, a nation’s behavior is often understood in terms of the psychological attitudes and style that characterize its personality.

A failure to understand cultural complexity of a nation’s psychological behavior in the historical context creates tensions between governments and often leads to political conflicts.

From the mid–1980s through the 1990s, I taught several academic courses at the University of Alaska Southeast, namely: “How Soviets View the World,” “Russian Character in Russian Literature,” “Russian History,” and “Russian Language.”

The central focus and objective of these courses, in addition to the subject matter, was to explain to my students that every culture, including Russian/Soviet culture, must be understood in the context of its history, literature, arts, music and peoples’ psychological behavior. In almost every class I recited Russian poetry in order to cultivate students’ interest in Russian literary creations. Indeed, Russian poetry is a soul of Russian culture and a key for understanding Russian psychological behavior.

Considering the significant decline of interest in poetry in the West, including the United States, the growing interest for books of verse in East European countries, including Russia, is still an unusual phenomenon. For the Russians, poetry means hope. In poetry, the reader may find support for his/her faith in such human values as dedication, dignity, honor, fortitude, heroism and loyalty.

Modern Russian poetry has absorbed the finest traditions of the 19th century (e.g., Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov) and the early 20th century (e.g., Block, Fet, Mayakovsky, Yesenin) schools.

In modern Russian poetry, the accent on ideology and morality remains as strong as ever. The historical reason for the ideological poetry is the emergence of a new socialist society and, therefore, interest in psychological poetry had grown tremendously during the Soviet period of Russian history (1917-1991). In fact, Russian literature and art have always been well-known for probing the innermost recesses of the individual’s behavior.

The idea of the revolutionary transformation of life runs through the whole of Soviet poetry (1917-1991). Soviet poetry carries a message of friendship, loyalty and brotherhood. It stands up for the world’s essential values such as motherhood, creativity, honesty, love, the joy of communion with nature and peace between all peoples.

Three prominent Russian/Soviet poets have had a tremendous influence in Russian culture. They are Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Yevgeniy Yevtushenko.

Anna Akhmatova, 1889–1966, is associated in the reader’s mind with the tragedy of a lonely soul seeking understanding and sympathy. Akhmatova’s WWII time and postwar poetry, however, speaks of patriotism and human dignity. Her writing is simple and her dreams are perfectly presented so they become tangible. Shortly before she died, Anna Akhmatova received an honorary degree of Oxford University.

The Russian Soil

In all the world no people are so tearless,

So proud, so simple as are we.

In lockets for a charm we do not wear it,

In verse about its arrows do not weep,

With Eden’s blissful vales do not compare it,

Untroubled does it leave our bitter sleep.

To traffic in it is a thought that never,

Not even in our hearts, remote, takes root.

Before our eyes its image does not hover,

Though we be beggared, sick, despairing, mute.

It’s the mud of our shoes, it is rubble,

It’s the sand on our teeth, it is slush,

It’s the pure, taintless dust that we crumble,

That we pound, that we mix, that we crush.

But we call it our own for ‘twill open one day

To receive and embrace us and turn us to clay.

Boris Pasternak, 1890–1960, was a son of a well-known painter in Russia. He was educated in Germany and later became a poet of world stature. His early poetry was quite complicated, but his later style was simple and clear. By using his own original syntax, he revealed the essence of phenomena and brought out their philosophical content with great skill. Pasternak is the author of the classic novel “Doctor Zhivago” and one of the best Russian translators of Shakespeare and Goethe. He lived a very modest and dedicated life and only in the 1970s did Soviet officials recognize his works.

It’s unbecoming to be famous

It’s unbecoming to be famous.

It isn’t that lifts aloft.

Maintaining archives tends to maim us.

Hoard manuscripts and you are lost.

The aim of art is self-discharge

And not the clap-trap of success.

It’s shameless to be looming large

For merits which are but a guess.

Live on through life without imposture,

Live so as in the final end

To hear the love-call of the future,

Expanse and distance to befriend.

Hiatus—leave them in your fortune

But not by any means in papers.

Although the process be a torture,

Let whole chapters of life escape us.

And ducking down into obscurity,

Conceal your steps beneath its cloak.

So landscapes sometimes hide their purity

Beneath a veil of fog or smoke.

Though others will retrace in hot

Pursuit the imprints of your feet,

Remember: you yourself must not

Distinguish triumph from defeat.

Not even by the slightest fraction

Must you your proper self transcend.

Just be alive, in thought and action,Alive and always to the end.

Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, 1933–2017, was a leader of the contemporary Soviet and Russian poets. He was especially popular among the students and young people. Yevtushenko poetry is patriotic, dramatic, and imbued with a sense of civic responsibility. Yevtushenko traveled a great deal around the world, representing the former Soviet Union in a highly patriotic and heroic fashion. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, he lived and taught poetry in the United States.

Say, do the Russians want a war?

Say, do the Russians want a war?

Go ask our land, then ask once more

That silence lingering in the air

Above the birch and poplar there.

Beneath those trees lie soldier lads

Whose sons will answer for their dads.

To add to what you learned before,

Say—Do the Russians want a war?

Those soldiers died on every hand

Not only for their own dear land,

But so the world at night could sleep

And never have to wake and weep.

New York and Paris spend their nights

Asleep beneath the leaves and lights.

The answer’s in their dreams, be sure.

Say—Do the Russians want a war?

Sure, we know how to fight a war,

But we don’t want to see once more

The soldiers falling all around,

Their countryside a battleground.

Ask those who give the soldiers life,

Go ask my mother, ask my wife,

Then you will have to ask no more,

Say—Do the Russians want a war?

Indeed, current U.S. administration in Washington D.C. must take cultural, historic, and psychological behavior factors into consideration in order to achieve an effective and peaceful outcome in dealing with today’s Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Alexander B. Dolitsky was born and raised in Kiev in the former Soviet Union. He received an M.A. in history from Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Ukraine, in 1976; an M.A. in anthropology and archaeology from Brown University in 1983; and was enroled in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College from 1983 to 1985, where he was also a lecturer in the Russian Center. In the U.S.S.R., he was a social studies teacher for three years, and an archaeologist for five years for the Ukranian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he settled in the United States. Dolitsky visited Alaska for the first time in 1981, while conducting field research for graduate school at Brown. He lived first in Sitka in 1985 and then settled in Juneau in 1986. From 1985 to 1987, he was a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and social scientist. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast from 1985 to 1999; Social Studies Instructor at the Alyeska Central School, Alaska Department of Education from 1988 to 2006; and has been the Director of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center (see www.aksrc.homestead.com) from 1990 to present. He has conducted about 30 field studies in various areas of the former Soviet Union (including Siberia), Central Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and the United States (including Alaska). Dolitsky has been a lecturer on the World Discoverer, Spirit of Oceanus, andClipper Odyssey vessels in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. He was the Project Manager for the WWII Alaska-Siberia Lend Lease Memorial, which was erected in Fairbanks in 2006. He has published extensively in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology, and ethnography. His more recent publications include Fairy Tales and Myths of the Bering Strait Chukchi, Ancient Tales of Kamchatka; Tales and Legends of the Yupik Eskimos of Siberia; Old Russia in Modern America: Russian Old Believers in Alaska; Allies in Wartime: The Alaska-Siberia Airway During WWII; Spirit of the Siberian Tiger: Folktales of the Russian Far East; Living Wisdom of the Far North: Tales and Legends from Chukotka and Alaska; Pipeline to Russia; The Alaska-Siberia Air Route in WWII; and Old Russia in Modern America: Living Traditions of the Russian Old Believers; Ancient Tales of Chukotka, and Ancient Tales of Kamchatka.

A few of Dolitsky’s past MRAK columns:

Read: Neo-Marxism and utopian Socialism in America

Read: Old believers preserving faith in the New World

Read: Duke Ellington and the effects of Cold War in Soviet Union on intellectual curiosity

Read: United we stand, divided we fall with race, ethnicity in America

Read: For American schools to succeed, they need this ingredient

Read: Nationalism in America, Alaska, around the world

Read: The case of the ‘delicious salad’

Read: White privilege is a troubling perspective

Read: Beware of activists who manipulate history for their own agenda

Read: Alaska Day remembrance of Russian transfer

Read: American leftism is true picture of true hypocrisy