"To Become a Soviet Fet": Unofficial Poetry and the Russian Nature Lyric Tradition

A key feature of post-WWII Soviet uncensored poetry is its complicated, often ironic relationship to the older lyrical traditions enshrined by official Soviet culture. One such tradition is Romantic nature poetry, with its emphasis on contemplation, rapture, and other forms of expressive subjectivity and authenticity. These forms, however, seem problematic in the Soviet 1960s and 1970s. This talk examines a body of work by poets associated with the Lianozovo group – Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov and Yan Satunovsky – that repeatedly evokes Afanasii Fet, the foremost practitioner of 19th-century lyric expressivity and attunement to nature. What motivates this unexpected connection? Fet emerges as shorthand for nature poetry and Naturgefühl more generally, and as a symbol of its irrelevance and unsustainable escapism. The lecture sets Lianozovo’s dialogue with Fet against the backdrop of his reception by earlier poets and contrasts it with references to Alexander Pushkin’s nature lyric in the work of Leonid Aronzon, an unofficial poet of a very different formation, whose allusions, by contrast, seek to re-enchant the contemporary world.

Luba Golburt is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination(University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and has published articles on Enlightenment and Romanticism, as well as on modern Russian poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. She is currently working on a book-length study of the Russian nature lyric tradition and is co-editing, with Catherine Ciepiela and Stephanie Sandler, the Oxford Handbook of Russian Poetry.