Tag Archives: Russian Revolution

Daytime Stars: A poet’s memoir of the Revolution, the Siege of Leningrad, and the Thaw

Today’s guest blogger is Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, translator of Olga Berggolts’s memoir Daytime Stars.

Olga Berggolts was a prominent, often outspoken Soviet poet, who is hardly known in the English-speaking world. A citizen of passionate Soviet loyalty, she was arrested and tormented during the purges of the late 1930s. During the World War II siege of Leningrad, the former prisoner became the beloved voice of Radio Leningrad, an official figure whose moving poems, grounded in her own devastating losses, resonated with her fellow citizens and brought her literary fame. In the wake of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, she was among the first writers to challenge the orthodoxies of Socialist Realism.

Berggolts began her memoir Daytime Stars immediately after the dictator’s death. In lyrical, often deeply personal prose, she expresses both idealistic enthusiasm for the Soviet project and doubt, even despair, about its outcomes. For Anglophone readers of Soviet literature, it is, I think a revelation, undermining our cold war inflected tendency to divide Soviet writers into official party hacks and heroic truth tellers persecuted by the regime.

Central to Berggolts’s Soviet identity was her self-conscious effort to speak not as an individual, but as representative of her generation — the generation born in the early 1900s that came of age along with the Revolution. The “daytime stars” of the title stand as a metaphor for her own efforts to speak her generation’s truth, to tell of its triumphs and its sorrows. She writes that as a child she learned about daytime stars. Outshined by the sun, they could be seen reflected in the still waters of deep wells. Try as she might, she never managed to see them. Still, she believed in them, and sought as a poet to make visible what was hidden: “I want my soul, my books, that is my soul open to all, to be such a well that reflects and holds within itself daytime stars — people’s souls, lives, and destinies.”

Completed in 1800, the Kalyazin Bell Tower was partially submerged in 1939 under the reservoir created by the Uglich dam. Berggolts saw the tower on her 1953 trip to Uglich. (Photo by author)

To tell the story of her generation, she returned just after Stalin’s death to Uglich, the Volga town where she lived in evacuation during the famine years of the civil war (1918-21) and which she associated with the purest idealism of the Revolution. Her return took her through the Moscow-Volga Canal. Opened in 1937 to much fanfare, the canal was a product of Stalinism’s commitment to modernization and a monument to its brutality. Berggolts could not acknowledge — perhaps did not know — that some twenty thousand of the convict laborers who dug the canal died during its construction. But she lamented the project’s devastation of the landscape: The rising waters of the reservoirs constructed along the canal and the Volga submerged the “fairy-tale beauty” of the region’s ancient Russian towns.

Entering the Volga through the last lock of the Moscow-Volga Canal (Photo by author)

Traveling the canal and visiting Uglich today, the Stalinist past is almost invisible. The cathedral of the Epiphany Monastery, where Berggolts lived during the civil war, and which in 1953 she found in a state of disrepair, its blue domes turned black, its stars rusted, now gleams in its former glory. But the living past remains visible in Berggolts’s luminous memoir. Its story of the generation that grew up under Lenin and fought and suffered in World War II still resonates in contemporary Russia.

Cathedral of the Epiphany Monastery, Uglich (2018, photo by author)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor of history at West Chester University and the author of International Communism and the Spanish Civil War, Small Comrades, and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995.

 

A Russian Revolution Reading List

In this centennial year of the Bolshevik Revolution, here is intriguing reading on political and cultural facets of the revolutionary era (1914-21).

AN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT IN BOLSHEVIK RUSSIA
DeWitt Clinton Poole
Edited by Lorraine M. Lees and William S. Rodner

“A fascinating edition of US diplomat DeWitt Clinton Poole’s oral account of his experience in revolutionary Russia from 1917 to 1919. . . . His views of the early Bolshevik government, like those of other Americans who were there, are critical as the centennial of the Russian Revolution approaches. Highly recommended, all levels/libraries.“—Choice

“A historical treasure trove for an era that will never be short on paradoxes, colorful characters, brutal conflict, and harrowing circumstances. Poole, one of the last American diplomats in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and before recognition in 1933, was a cool, detached observer of events, and rather prescient in his predictions.”—Russian Life

 

THE BODY SOVIET
Tricia Starks

“The Body Soviet is the first sustained investigation of the Bolshevik government’s early policies on hygiene and health care in general.”—Louise McReynolds, author of Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era

“A masterpiece that will thoroughly fascinate and delight readers. Starks’s understanding of propaganda and hygiene in the early Soviet state is second to none. She tells the stories of Soviet efforts in this field with tremendous insight and ingenuity, providing a rich picture of Soviet life as it was actually lived.”—Elizabeth Wood, author of From Baba to Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia

 

FAST FORWARD
The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910–1930
Tim Harte

“The book is well-written and richly illustrated. It is a pleasure to read both in the old-fashioned slow way and to browse in the accelerated fast-forward mode. This highly stimulating study responds to a long-standing need to address speed as an aesthetic category in modern Russian art and constitutes a very welcome and important contribution to the field.”—Nikolai Firtich, Slavic Review

Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters.

 

WHEN PIGS COULD FLY AND BEARS COULD DANCE
A History of the Soviet Circus
Miriam Neirick

“A beautifully written, compact history of the Soviet circus.”—Janet M. Davis, author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top

For more than seven decades the circuses enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Soviet Union. How did the circus—an institution that dethroned figures of authority and refused any orderly narrative structure—become such a cultural mainstay in a state known for blunt and didactic messages? Miriam Neirick argues that the variety, flexibility, and indeterminacy of the modern circus accounted for its appeal not only to diverse viewers but also to the Soviet state. In a society where government-legitimating myths underwent periodic revision, the circus proved a supple medium of communication.

EPIC REVISIONISM
Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger

“Platt and Brandenberger have collected first-rate contributors and produced a coherent and powerful volume that amplifies what we know about the uses and abuses of history in the Soviet 1930s.”—Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Chicago

“A boon to graduate students and a delight to aficionados of Soviet culture.”—Jeffrey Brooks, John Hopkins University

 

 

RUSSIA’S ROME
Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940
Judith E. Kalb

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia’s Rome provides the first examination of Russia’s self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state.

“Gives a new and significant context to the work of some of Russia’s major poets and prose writers of the early twentieth century. Kalb’s main contribution is to show that the interest in the Roman Empire was not an incidental part of Russian literature in this period, but a genuine obsession.” —Michael Wachtel, Princeton University