Australian Slavonic and East European Studies (Formerly Melbourne Slavonic Studies) Journal of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association and of the Australian Association of Communist and Post-Communist Studies THE CHANGING CANONS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY Special Issue on Russian Poetry edited by Alexandra Smith and David N. Wells Volume 31, Nos. 1-2 2017 Australian Slavonic and East European Studies Editor: Dr Robert Lagerberg, University of Melbourne Guest Editors: Dr Alexandra Smith, University of Edinburgh Dr David N. Wells, Curtin University Deputy Editor: Assoc. Prof. Stefan Auer, University of Hong Kong Editorial Board Assoc. Prof. Judith Armstrong, University of Melbourne Dr Julie Fedor, University of Melbourne Dr John McNair, University of Queensland Dr Lyndall Morgan, University of Queensland Prof. Marko Pavlyshyn, Monash University Dr Alexandra Smith, University of Edinburgh Dr Ludmila Stern, University of New South Wales Dr David N. Wells, Curtin University Assoc. Prof. Kevin Windle, Australian National University ASEES is a refereed journal which publishes scholarly articles, review articles and short reviews on all aspects of Slavonic and East European Studies, in particular, language, literature, history and political science, and also art and social science. Arti- cles should have a maximum length of 8,500 words and review articles 4,000; they should be submitted to the editor electronically, preferably in .doc (Microsoft Word) format. All articles submitted for consideration should conform to the style guidelines set out in the ASEES web page. ASEES replaces Melbourne Slavonic Studies, founded in 1967 by the late Nina Christesen, which ceased publication with Volume 19, 1985. Back issues of most volumes are available for A$20.00 per issue plus GST. Recent volumes of ASEES are available online at: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/soll/research/research-publications/european- studies/asees-journal and http://miskinhill.com.au/journals/asees/ Indexes to all volumes of MSS and ASEES are available at http://www.arts.uq.edu/slccs/ - follow the links to Publications, ASEES and Indexes. ii ASEES is normally published in one combined issue per year: the current sub- scription price is A$35. ISSN-0818 8149 Published by the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Telephone: +61 3 8344 5187 E-mail: [email protected] Web: http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/soll/research/research-publications/european- studies/asees-journal ASEES © The Publishers and each contributor, 2017 We are currently accepting articles for Volume 32 (2018). An electronic copy (in Mi- crosoft Word format) should be sent to the editor by 1 August 2018. Papers received after this time will not be considered for publication in Volume 32. ASEES Volume 32 (2018) will appear towards the end of 2018. iii ANZSA Office bearers of the Australia and New Zealand Slavists’ Association are: President: Dr Marika Kalyuga, Macquarie University Vice-Presidents: Assoc. Prof. Kevin Windle, Australian National University Dr Mark Swift, University of Auckland Secretary-Treasurer Dr David N. Wells, Curtin University AACPCS Office bearers of the Australian Association of Communist and Post-Communist Studies are: President: Assoc. Prof. Roderic Pitty, University of Western Australia Secretary/Treasurer: Dr Anna Taitslin, University of Canberra Executive members: Prof. Leslie Holmes, University of Melbourne Mr Tony Phillips, University of Melbourne Assoc. Prof. Hans Hendrischke, University of New South Wales Assoc. Prof. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Monash University Dr Lynne Alice, Deakin University iv CONTENTS THE CHANGING CANONS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY ALEXANDRA SMITH AND DAVID N. WELLS Reconfiguring the Canon: The Changing Contexts of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry ……………………………….................................................. 1 ALEXANDRA SMITH Constructing the Modernist Vision of Time: Tsvetaeva’s Rendering of Bely’s Dynamic Worldview in A Captive Spirit ............................................... 7 OLGA SOBOLEV The Representation of Alexander Blok in Soviet Cinema ............................. 49 OLGA VORONINA From the Altar to the Forum: the Post-Soviet Transformation of Russian Literary Museums ............................................................................. 81 ZAKHAR ISHOV Joseph Brodsky’s ‘December in Florence’: Re-interpreting Exile with the Shadow of Dante ................................................................... 129 D.N. AKHAPKIN Цикл Иосифа Бродского В Англии: подтекст, многозначность, канон …………………………………………………... 173 JOSEPHINE VON ZITZEWITZ Self-Canonisation as a Way into the Canon: the Case of the Leningrad Underground ............................................................................... 203 v GEORGINA BARKER The ‘Complicated Relationship’ of Il´ia Kutik and Homer ………..…….... 235 REVIEW ARTICLE KEVIN WINDLE Of Diplomats and Spies: A New Book on the First Soviet Consul in Australia and the Petrov Affair .................................................... 271 REVIEWS Jim Hlavac, Three Generations, Two Countries of Origin, One Speech Community: Australian-Macedonians and their Language(s) (Peter Hill) .... 289 S. Evdokimova and V. Golstein (eds), Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky: Science, Religion, Philosophy (John Cook) .................................................... 293 Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881 (Sasha Grishin) ........................................................................... 296 OBITUARY In Memoriam: Thomas Poole ................................................................................... 299 Notes on Contributors ……...................................................................................... 303 vi ALEXANDRA SMITH AND DAVID N. WELLS RECONFIGURING THE CANON: THE CHANGING CONTEXTS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY Literary canons, in the sense of ‘a shared understanding of what literature is worth preserving’,1 are created and constantly revised in the light of changing perceptions of what literature is ontologically and in relation to the societies within which it exists, and in response to the languages, methods and technical approaches that writers adopt at any given literary-historical moment. Nowhere is this competitive drive to create a ‘usable past’ more evident than in the Russian literature of the twentieth century. The focus of the years before the October Revolution on mutually contradictory Symbolist, post-Symbolist and Futurist agendas gave way to divergences between Soviet and émigré writing on the one hand, and Soviet and dissident writing on the other. The post-Soviet literary space of the 1990s saw a further rejection of the past and often a return to earlier models. Each reinvention saw the development of its own narrative and its own canon. The most self-conscious and pervasive of these reinventions, the birth of So- cialist Realism in 1932, was explicitly entwined with the Stalinist leadership’s at- tempts at social transformation and the creation of the new Soviet person. As David Hoffmann notes, ‘in addition to its policy of industrialisation, urbanisation, and mod- ernisation, the Stalinist government sought to instill socialist values in all members of society and to transform human nature itself’. This attempt at human transformation, argues Hoffmann, ‘represents a particular socialist version of the more general En- 1 Ohmann, Richard, ‘The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction 1960-1975’, in: Hallberg, Robert von (ed.), Canons, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 397. ASEES, Vol. 31, Nos. 1-2 (2017): 1-6 ALEXANDRA SMITH AND DAVID N. WELLS lightenment impulse to remake and improve society’.2 At the same time, Hoffmann points out that the declaration of the 17th Party Congress in 1934 that socialism had been built should not be seen as an assertion simply that old forms of artistic expres- sion had been mechanically replaced by new ones. The achievement of socialism in fact encouraged the selective use of the past – of traditional institutions and culture – to support and further the new order. As Hoffmann writes: ‘Monumentalist art and architecture, formerly instruments of the old order, now helped legitimate the new so- cialist order and symbolized its accomplishments. Patriotic appeals, elsewhere used to foment bourgeois nationalism, in the Soviet Union inspired defense of the socialist motherland’.3 Yet although the ethics of socialist realism remained dominant through- out the Soviet period, in fact Soviet culture was by no means monolithic, as has been made clear in several studies on Stalinist and post-Stalin cultural developments.4 The situation observed by Gerald Smith that an official canon of poets was constructed by the Union of Soviet Writers bureaucracy and by loyal critics and aca- demics who promoted it through textbooks and the broadcasting media5 implies that the existence of strict boundaries between official and unofficial writing, even if these varied over time, was clear to writers and readers alike. As Smith notes, the official poetic canon manifested itself in the Biblioteka poeta (Poet’s Library) series. This be- 2 Hoffmann, David. L., ‘Was There a “Great Retreat” from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered’, Kritika, 5.4/2004, 653. 3 Ibid. 4 See, for example, Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Walker, Barbara,