Русское мессианство. Профетические, мессианские, эсхатологические мотивы в русской поэзии и общественной мысли

Analyzing thoroughly the «Russian Idea» in its historical retrospective, Voloshin makes many sharp and subtle observations. His speculations about the features of the Russian national character in many aspects coincide with Berdaiev’s and other famous thinkers’ conclusions. Moreover, it contains an amazingly actual prediction about the countries of the West considering and analyzing Russian experience to improve their own image.

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The old culture had to occupy the «last scale of the staircase» in communist Russia. Lenin who seriously had planned to eliminate representatives of the «old world» culture and Stalin who nearly managed to implement Lenin’s legacy, both needed a more flexible ideological staff than the intellectual elite of the Silver Age. Most of the artists and writers who stayed in Russia felt it very sharply. Proletariat dictatorship personified in Lenin’s totalitarian junta that assumed the monopoly right not only for power but also for thought control in an enslaved country, was not going to share the glory and privileges of the victors with anybody else.

The Bolshevist rulers did not need the renowned bards of the Silver Age. They demanded different songs — but those songs were not ready yet. Demyan Bedny and some other newly emerged poets in their rhymed pamphlets only outlined the main trends of the forthcoming poetics. For some time, while the slogans of proletarian culture revolution haven’t acquired yet the most aggressive and obscurant shape, the country like a giant laboratory was open for the avant-garde innovations. This unique artistic venture was doomed from the very beginning as it was alien to the social experiments performed over the nation by the Bolshevists. Nevertheless it remained in history as a sole example of the Great Utopia implemented on a huge scale.

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The so called peasant poets (Esenin, Oreshin, Klyuiev) and the Futurists attracted by the Great Utopia, were the only men of letters in Russia who joyfully and unconditionally greeted the October revolution with its millions of human hecatombs. Assuming themselves as the prophets of a new faith, they, unlike their fellow poets, had no doubts about their choice.

Esenin, a son of a Russian peasant, was expecting a new Kitej-Dreamland which began taking shape on the horizon with the advent of the revolutionary discord. He dreamed about a communal paradise, where everybody would live by the fruit of soil acquired in the process of joyous labor. No wonder that after the February revolution he became close with the new authorities and then accepted the Bolshevist Soviets with enthusiasm. He welcomed the red terror, assuming that it was carried out by the «common people» in the name of highest justice. Esenin imagined a bright future in the form of a fairy «land abundant with milk and honey». With his earnest faith in «Doomsday» he turns to God, whose name he nevertheless would often ignore indulging in various kinds of sacrilege. His poem «Inoniya» and some other symbolic poems of the time predict the advent of Messiah in purely Esenin’s pathetic style imitating the Books of Prophets of the Old Testament.

However, many of Esenin’s poems were of blasphemous nature and revealed more likely a pagan revolt or a rufifan’s challenge to the Christian dogma than pure faith. The atrocities of the Civil war, the awful famine an especially the dramatic decay of Russian peasantry strongly frustrated the sensitive poet. Soon he realized that the revolution was not going to defend the interests of the farmers, and whose interests it was defending he just couldn’t understand. Seeing that Kitezh-Dreamland of his favorite myths is not likely to appear in Russia in the near future, Esenin was confused and depressed. Disillusioned, he was looking for solace in his poems, wine, drunken brawls, accidental affairs, marriage, again in the poems, wine and brawls, and finally — in death.

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The Futurists, against their own will, played a dubious role of the founders of early Soviet culture and ardent supporters of a new totalitarian social system. They created a myth of the graceful and long awaited socialist revolution. They shaped this myth into poetic form, popularized and promoted it in the masses. Ironically, the Futurist prophets of the forthcoming paradise on earth were destined to become the priests of the bloody Bolshevist regime.