Perceiving the revolution within the framework of his favorite archetype of «Retaliation» Block wanted to remain loyal to his nation and his motherland. Probably for some time after the revolution, he still believed that the great Revolt of the liberated spirit would once come to an end, that kindness, reason and justice would triumph in Russia… However, his worldview by that time seems more likely to be tragic and full of eschatological premonitions. Block predicted the triumph of terror and chaos over everything that was dear to him in Russia. Night and blizzard are the images dominating in «The Twelve».
Right after finishing «The Twelve» Block, still staying under the influence of his revolutionary euphoria and partially also under the influence of the pan-slavist ideology, presented his famous «Scythians». Written on behalf of the Russian nation (or maybe nations, including also the Asian minorities of the empire), his poem «Scythians» is addressed, of course, to the Europeans, the «enemies of Russians». However, here the poetic foresight (as in case of «The Twelve») played a bad joke with the author. He hardly could suppose that it was he and all his close friends who were doomed to die in the murderous embrace of the Scythians. He just could not realize yet that the hatred of these wild hordes infuriated by the ardent chants of the bolshevist shamans was focused already not on the «beautiful Europe» but on their fellow citizens. Therefore, «Scythians» by Block should be regarded as a kind of involuntary prophecy, a fruit of poetic insight and divine foresight. The revelation in a rational form — the understanding of the revolution as a tragedy, as a «crash of humanism» came to him later, on the verge of death.
However, his brave acceptance of the «challenge of time» never could assume a total perish of the elite culture in which the October revolution seemed to have resulted. A poet of sweat dreams and dark premonitions, Block failed to understand reality. As a matter of fact he has driven himself to the crash of his ideals followed by death, which was just another example of a strong kenotic trend in Russian culture.
In the years of revolution and civil war, a free choice of many men of letters who preferred staying in the Bolshevist Russia to the emigration was hardy motivated by sympathy towards the ruthless new rulers but rather by their determination to «suffer together with the compatriots», «to drink the cup, prepared for Russia», «to take pain together with the country». The awful deprivations, moral torments and possible physical tortures are interpreted as peace-offerings to the Liberty in the name of the «Russian idea».
Osip Mandelstam, preparing eagerly for the martyrdom in the near future, engages in a painful dialogue with his age, which he envisages in the image of the Apocalyptical Beast. The poet cannot and does not want to resist the Beast, ready to make all possible offerings and sacrifices to the cruel idol. Not without a sigh of satisfaction, he prepares himself like a lamb for slaughter, which follows from many poems of that period. Trying to justify the cruelty and cynicism of his time as the properties of a transitional period to the new golden age of culture, Mandelstam in his «Humanism and Contemporary Time» (1922) indulges into a fervent apology of the Bolshevist dictatorship, predicting the new dawn of culture after a short period of prevailing barbarity, and his prophecy as regarded from the XXI century, seems a naive and perilous self-deception.
Boris Pasternak, who longer than others had been avoiding the storms of the epoch and who had been loyal to the new rulers, was hit by the Heavenly Revenge late in his life when he didn’t expect it. It was nobody else but Pasternak who deeply respected Stalin’s genius and approved his «right for evil deed». It was Pasternak, who shut his eyes at the bloody terror exterminating his comrades and colleagues one by one. Eventually God’s punishment hit his Christian soul when the most terrible years of terror seemed to be over.
This list can be easily continued, and it reveals a strange regularity. The poets of the great talent, who directly cooperated with the bloodthirsty rulers, paid for this with their lives. Those, who had taken a wait-and-see position, were punished in accordance with the measure of their sins. The poets who had rejected the revolution and had been living a hard life far from their native country never had to face such tragic destinies.
Very few of those who stayed in Soviet Russia managed to withstand the unbearable pressure and avoid the temptation of conformism. Maximilian Voloshin, who had survived the hurricane of the revolution in Koktebel (Crimea) during the Civil war wrote a tragic series of poems in which he mourned Russia and predicted great disasters. He honored the memory of the deceased Block and of Gumilyov executed by the Bolshevist authorities in the poem with a symbolic title «At the Bottom of the Hell». Not long before it, Khlebnikov died exhausted by wanderings and the best representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were thrown out of the country on «the ship of philosophers» (which in fact saved their lives and souls).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since long ago, they were going to put an end to the old world, to throw away the classics from «the boat of the modern times» and to reconstruct mankind, though they could hardly dream that history would really give them this opportunity. The Futurists were neither Bolsheviks, nor Mensheviks, nor Social-Revolutionaries but they were extremists by definition. It means that they were ready to support any victorious extremist party. It was exactly what they did after the October revolution. They did not care much that their activities could turn out to be unnecessary and incomprehensible for the victorious proletariat.