Russian literature. A short introduction

more refined than her poems drawing on rural folklore.) However, the poem is marked by the stylistic features that characterized Modernist pieces in the folkloric style: fixed epithets (‘gold-winged fire’); negative constructions (‘not wicked, not kind’); and the use of parallelism (see particularly the ‘hem’ and ‘shoes’ of lines 9–10). At the same time, the poem was a self-portrait, a statement of the poet’s right to defy convention, to exist beyond the official scripts of ‘birth and marriage certificates’.

The fact that Modernists’ work in the folk style was much closer to authentic rural popular culture than the writings of the Russian Romantics was one reason why the early twentieth century also saw poetry by actual members of the Russian lower classes enter the literary mainstream for the first time. Where nineteenth-century ‘peasant poets’, such as Aleksey Koltsov, had been incidental curiosities, their twentieth-century successors, above all Nikolay Klyuev, were formidable aesthetic and intellectual presences. Klyuev fused the dialect and natural phenomena of the far North, his birthplace, with esoteric Eastern philosophy, the theology of sects such as the Flagellants and the Self-Castrators, and citations of epic from Finland to North America. His was an extraordinary and individual artistic vision, where death was ‘a squall/rumbling on foam-filled wagons/to life’s outer shore’, where the classical muse was replaced by a skylark, or a whale breasting the Arctic swell, and where Lenin, a ‘cedar frost in Spring’, was evoked as emotionally as ‘the crystal voice of whooper swans’. For his part, Klyuev’s contemporary and sometime comrade-inarms Esenin, though a less considerable poet, was, forty years after his death, to become the most popular poet in Russia, with a poem that lamented the loss of youth vanishing ‘like white smoke from the apple trees’ sung to the guitar in millions of hostels and private flats.

By and large, though, it was intellectual writers looking for alternative material, including a significant group of upper-middle-class women (Zinaida Gippius, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsvetaeva) who immersed