Sacred Stories: The Religious Imagination of Worker Poets in Fin-de-Siècle Russia
by Mark D. Steinberg
A version of this paper is forthcoming in the book Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in modern Russian Culture (Indiana University Press). It is based on research that went into the book Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Cornell University Press, 2002), a copy of which is in the European University Library.
Two paradoxical stories connect in this chapter: manual workers who wrote poetry and a religious language that was not necessarily the language of religion. Both are stories about suffering and searching, and their interpretation in a sacred key, marked by emotional pathos and a sense of transcendent meaning, by faith but also by doubt. These are stories about language—its irrepressibility and power. And these are stories about boundaries, about the porosity and ambiguity
of hermeneutic boundaries in people’s experiences of the world, in their experience of the transcendent, and in our own categories and definitions, especially of the elusive boundaries of secular and sacred [1].
In the early years of the twentieth century, hundreds of working-class Russians, with little formal schooling, found themselves inexplicably “driven,” by their own accounts, to express themselves in verse (though also, less often, in fictional prose, criticism, and reminiscence). The language with which they wrote was rich in religious images, tropes, and narratives. They wrote of their own lives, and of the world and its meanings, as a “way of the cross” and “path of thorns,” as “crucifixion,” and as “martyrdom.” They spoke of awakening to “sacred truth” and of the promises of redemption and salvation. Few of these writers meant by this language literally to interpret life according to Christian theological belief—we know from their biographies that most were avowedly secular Marxists. But neither was this mere metaphor, pointing entirely to something beyond itself, emptied of all referential sense of the original. “It is absolutely impossible,” it has been suggested, “to empty out words filled to bursting,”[2] especially when words are full of the long human effort to give
meaning and sense to life and even imbue it with awe and hope. I find the same resistance to “emptying out” in the pervasive use of religious vocabulary and images by worker-poets. Sacred symbols and metaphors, it has long been argued, have a distinctive power to express deeper, mysterious, and sacramental structures of meaning in the world, and to voice, with all necessary multiplicity and paradox, the otherwise inexpressible. [3]
In Russian workers’ poetry, the symbolic language of the sacred, however much the intended narrative concerned this world (the Christian Latin meaning of saecularis is to be of or pertaining to this world and this time), served in just such a way to read the disjointed fragments of everyday experience as part of a meaningful and purposeful narrative, a coherent conception of existence and time. Where, in this language, secular and sacred begin and end is characteristically ambiguous. Most important, this was a discourse, though formally atheological, that drew deeply on the sensibilities and emotions of religious language, especially the pathos of Christ’s Passion, in order to articulate a sense of awe before the world, to voice the imagination, and to dream of salvation. At the same time, and for many inescapably, however much they sought to flee it, this was an emotional pathos that expressed a deep sense of melancholy and dread, though not one that can simply be reduced to secular skepticism.
This language, in the hands of workers, cannot be fully understood apart from the peculiar story of their lives. Worker-poets well understood that writing poetry—especially continually and even obsessively, as they did—was a strange and transgressive practice. They often painfully felt the contradictoriness of their position at the boundaries of physical labor and mental creativity, of class and cultural difference. Indeed, their position as proletarian authors was full of the unease and power we have come to associate with liminal and hybrid identities. The hyphen that helps to name such identities, Jacques Derrida has suggested, is often a bridge that does not bridge, a “silence” that cannot pacify “a single torment” or ease “wounds.” [4] It is also a linguistic sign of transgressive reach. Worker-poets, we find in their writings, felt both this torment and this daring. This awkwardness and transgressiveness is an essential part of the story of the language of the worker-
poet. These worker-poets may also be seen as archetypal “strangers,” much as the linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva has described in writing about the hyphenated experiences of immigrants but also about the essential, psychological, strangeness stirred by other, more inward, paths of cultural and social leaving “home” and wandering. Kristeva characterizes strangers as marked by feelings of “solitude, even in the midst of a crowd,” by an “interior distance,” by the
occasional pleasures of solitude and melancholy, by nostalgia (the “melancholy love of a vanished [or, I would add, yet to be] space . . . and time”), and by the ultimate drive to “make oneself for oneself” rather than for others. [5] This applies well to the experiences of many Russian worker-poets, though also of many contemporaries who felt no less strange (perhaps painfully lost, perhaps exhilarated, perhaps both) amidst the characteristically modern displacements of Russian life at the
fin de siècle of the tsarist imperial order in Russia. And this strangeness is inseparable from what drew them to the language of the sacred. Kristeva’s suggestion that “a secret wound . . . drives the stranger to wandering” [6] is a useful
metaphor. Of course, it is not only a metaphor. We know that Russian workers were in fact physically harmed by their working-class lives and that many literally took to the road to find work, to improve their life, to see what lay beyond home. But these workers also made it clear that they felt “wounded” and “wandered” in much more subtle ways. Preoccupied with the self (the individual, the inward person, lichnost’) and with the soul (dusha, dukhovnost'), workers wrote constantly about the natural dignity of each human being and the suffering of the self, especially the worker’s self, from the “insults” and “humiliations” society daily heaped upon it. [7]
In search of explanation and answer and hope, they set out on a path of “wandering” that they themselves often
viewed as essentially "spiritual" (dukhovnyi). The biographies of worker-poets are filled with obsessive reading, preoccupation with self-improvement and self-perfection, intense exploration of their own inward feelings, and a search for universal “truth.” Writing itself was a form of wandering—across the boundaries of identity (the “bridge” from a person defined by labor to one defined by cultural knowledge and practice) and across terrains of meaning. These “wounds,” and
the “wandering” to which they led, can be seen as analogous to one of the central narratives and functions of religion: the promise and the journey of suffering and healing, but also the search to know God. This chapter, at its heart, concerns such a story, though one that is never freed of ambiguity in defining the boundaries of secular and sacred languages, nor the uncertainty, especially when formal religious faith is absent, of the ultimate promise of healing, nor the sense of
ultimate inaccessibility of full knowledge of truth. Spiritual upheaval The plebeian religious voice I explore in this essay was an inseparable part of the revival of religion, spirituality, mysticism, and myth in Russia during the last decades of the old regime. [8]
Writing about another age (our own) marked by the “return of the religious,” Derrida has pointed to the upheaval of the sacred, especially of sacred language, as a “volcano,” or a fiery “abyss,” that refuses to be “dominated, tamed, instrumentalized, secularized.” [9]
In 1908, the Russian poet Alexander Blok spoke of just such an upheaval of the “elemental,” of emotion, fear, and fury,
breaking through the “crusted lava” of civilization. [10] For many Russians of the fin de siècle, like Blok, the spiritual ferment of the age seemed so immense that an explosion, much like that of a volcano, was certainly approaching. [11] And the spiritual ferment among the Russian lower classes was one of its most potent, and potentially most explosive, signs.
Contemporaries and historians have often written of the loss of faith and decline in religious practice, as well as a rise of anticlericism, among urban workers in Russia by the turn of the century and after. [12] Memoirs by workers, including worker-writers, typically profess atheism. The Orthodox church itself acknowledged the growing influence of secular mentalities among the urban classes, against which, in the latter years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, it organized a sustained public campaign of religious talks, sermons, and mission work. [13] But the secularization of urban workers should not be over-simplified. Alienation from the established church—common, though far from universal—and even crises of faith led often not toward secularism and atheism, but toward alternative forms of religious faith and enthusiasm. In the 1870s, for example, as Reginald Zelnik has shown, the “seductive power” that student radicals often
had among workers who participated in their circles resulted partly from a syncretic joining of social and political dissent to religious fervor and sacred moral purpose. [14]
The same seductive effect was visible in the mass influence among workers, on the eve of 1905, of the movement led by
Father Georgii Gapon, who similarly voiced social protest in a religious idiom and fostered a charismatic atmosphere of moral fervor and sacred mission. [15]
After 1905, as among the educated—and reflecting the same dissatisfaction with an established church that poorly satisfied spiritual, psychological, or moral needs—we see a continued revival of spiritual and religious searching among the urban lower classes. Unorthodox religious movements—though many of their followers rejected accusations of sectarianism and saw themselves as seeking only to renew and restore the true Orthodox faith—proliferated in urban areas, especially in working-class neighborhoods. These included followers of deviant Orthodox movements such as the moralistic and charismatic "Brethren" (brattsy) or the “Ioannites” (who venerated Father Ioann of Kronstadt), widespread
sympathy for Tolstoy's religion of ethics and spiritual feeling but shorn of church dogma and ritual, followers of individual mystics and healers, adherents of newly established sects such as the “free Christians” or the “sons of the apocalypse,” older Russian groups like the skoptsy (castrates) and khlysty (flagellants), and growing evangelical and Baptist congregations. [16] These movements represented more complex, and perhaps more troubling, challenges to religious orthodoxy than secularization. In many of these movements, religious feeling alongside fervent morality was a defining feature, and central to their appeal. The brattsy were typical. Founded in St. Petersburg in the mid-1890s, when the former fish and bread trader Ivan Churikov began converting the urban poor to a life of sober self-mastery, it spread, especially in the post-1905 years, to Moscow and other cities, as large numbers of artisans, workers in shops and factories, domestic servants, petty tradesmen, salesclerks, laborers, and the unemployed flocked to their meetings. The ethical teachings of the brattsy were much the same as that of other dissident religious movements of the day as well as of the missionaries and temperance advocates of the official church: stop drinking, live moral lives, keep your families together, and stop the violence between spouses and against children, in order to honor God and live with a dignity befitting human beings, who carry within themselves the flame of the Holy Spirit. They went beyond the messages of the established church, however, in preaching the possibility of salvation in this life. Their appeal reflected in large measure the way the message was expressed—its linguistic, ritual, and performative presentation. The Brethren spoke, it was said, in simple and direct language, with real sympathy and understanding for the sufferings of the poor, and with deep spiritual passion. The worker-writer Mikhail Loginov, who clearly admired this movement and was likely a participant, underscored this difference: “In the churches they instruct the common people with Orthodox teachings, which are absorbed, like any teaching, by the mind,
but leave people’s feelings untouched. ‘Brother’ Ivan knew how to set fire to the emotions: he created not a new teaching (verouchenie), but a faith, which, in the words of Christ, can move mountains.” [17]
Their meetings had the atmosphere of a revival rather than of an Orthodox service—the congregation was exultant and active, continually interrupting the preaching with shouts of agreement, repetition of the preacher’s phrases, and song, [18] and meetings often featured moving testimonials by "sisters" and "brothers" who were saved from lives of drink, sin, and despair. [19]
The Brethren offered common people not “cold preaching . . . which does not touch listeners hearts and is soon forgotten,” but a moral and spiritual vision proclaimed with charismatic passion promising the inward experience of personal transformation, even “rebirth” as full “human beings.” [20] A “feeling for faith” [21] as much as theological belief itself was central to the Brethren’s message and appeal. Among the growing number of lower-class adherents to Protestant and “sectarian” communities, and among followers of Father Ioann of Kronstadt, who had sought to restore fervency and the presence of the miraculous in liturgical celebration, stories of conversion and faith speak similarly of the centrality of emotion, morality, and individual rebirth.
As we know, Russian socialists and even many Marxists engaged in their own way with the philosophical and spiritual trends of their time and often shared in this turn toward the spiritual, toward complexly intertwining supposedly secular and sacred languages. Non-Marxist socialists, like their counterparts in Western Europe, freely drew upon Christian ethics and the symbolism of Christ, at least to strengthen and legitimize their arguments among the believing poor, but often sincerely. The suffering and self-sacrifice of Jesus and especially his moral defense of the poor were constant themes in popuist socialist rhetoric. [22]
Marxists too found use and value in sacred images, moods, and ideals. And it was the perception of the power of sacred emotion that was most essential in this religious turn. The Bolshevik “God-builders” (Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and others), especially, came to view deterministic materialism as psychologically nurturing passivity before blind fate while depriving people of the religious illusions that once gave them hope and a source of moral judgment. In response they argued for the importance in any collective movement of appealing to the subconscious and the emotional, of harnessing the inspiring force of the sacred. In Lunacharsky’s words, socialism needed to recapture the power of “myth,” to create a “religious atheism” that placed humanity where God had been but that shared with theistic religions passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil and from the finality of death. [23]
Worker-writers shared the perception that ideas must touch the emotions to be of consequence. They filled their texts with hyperboles, metaphors, and symbols partly because these spoke most powerfully the language of emotion. And they found the symbolic language of the sacred especially resonant. According to Fedor Kalinin, who had been a worker student of the God-builders, worker-writers were inspired by a distinctively proletarian epistemology that understood, out of everyday
experience, that the world cannot be understood with rational reason alone, but required emotional intuition and knowledge. [24] Religious idioms and images were appealing partly because they were so familiar, a part of workers’ world, especially their emotional world, since childhood. In autobiographies, including those written after 1917, worker-writers often testified to the strong influence in their youths (and the warmth of feeling for these memories), of religious stories,
especially the lives of the saints and martyrs and the Gospels, religious festivals, and the music, scents, and ritual of the liturgy. Some sang in church choirs or read the Psalter at funerals. Some went on pilgrimages—among these to sites where the boundaries between secular and sacred were vague, as to Tolstoy at Iasnaia Poliana—or even spent time in monasteries. [25]
However, most worker-writers considered themselves to have become modern and secular. Certainly, for some, religious language expressed actual religious knowledge and faith (of course, the extent and forms of personal belief among workers remains necessarily obscured to us). Many certainly felt that the story of Christ’s Passion, and the promise inherent in Christianity that suffering was a meaningful sign of coming salvation, was (or, at least, was hoped to be) literally true. But most worker-writers had at least superficially rejected the faith of their parents and youths and insisted that true knowledge was secular and materialistic and the beliefs and rituals of the Church were mere “superstition.” And yet they often held onto religious imagery and language, and even a religious sensibility. Only partly did this involve translating religious images into a secular (typically socialist) setting: dreaming of an earthly paradise, for example, or insisting on Christ’s socially subversive message. More often, the boundaries of secular and sacred were less neatly preserved. Religious motifs and language were complexly compelling as an emotionally meaningful way to interpret the world and to envision change, even in the absence of formal “belief.” As the worker-poet Sergei Obradovich would later put it, symbolic language best reflected truths that were best understood through the emotions. [26]
Religious language remained a potent symbolic language precisely because it so powerfully revealed, in Mircea Eliade’s description, “a structure of the world that is not evident on the level of immediate experience,” raising stories of the everyday to a more elevated, numinous sphere, and reaching toward the universal. [27] The wounded self A vivid vocabulary of spiritual affliction pervaded the writing of worker-poets. They wrote constantly of grust’ and pechal’ (sadness), skorb’ (sorrow), gore (misery, grief), muka, muchenie (torment, martyrdom), stradanie (suffering), and toska (melancholy, anguish, longing). As a naming of the “wound” that “drives the stranger to wandering,” and of the wandering in which boundaries of secular and sacred were continually crossed and blurred, toska was particularly telling and pervasive. Toska is difficult to translate, its meaning a multilayered pastiche of longing (for something lost or not yet found), nostalgia (the yearning, as Svetlana Boym has defined it, not only for a lost or non-existent place but for a different time), and melancholy (which Kristeva has defined as “exquisite depression,” as “making love with absence”). [28]
Toska was an essential, even defining, component of the pervasive strangeness these writers expressed—feelings (as Kristeva has described in defining the stranger) of “interior distance,” a “passion for solitude” (and for its pain), a “baroque” love of words and speech. The toska of the stranger also entailed insistent “dreaming” about “a beyond,” about “another land, always a promised one.” [29]
More tangibly, like Albert Camus’ archetypal stranger, Meursault, they were “never at one with men, nor with things.” [30] This was especially true of the industrial environment and the working-class men amidst which they lived. The landscap of cities and factories was the proletarian’s “home,” which, Marxist intellectuals argued, shaped workers’ spirits and won their unique class “love.” Yet very often this modern landscape felt cold and alien to workers, leading them to dream of some “beyond.” This was not simply a matter of poverty and long hours of labor. Worker-poets pointed to a more subtle spiritual alienation. Mikhail Gerasimov, a metalworker, miner, and railroad worker (and probably the best known and most accomplished Bolshevik worker-poet of the time), was attracted by the city’s “flash of bright colors / and noise of street pleasures,” but also felt here that he had become “a stranger to own inward self” (dushe svoei chuzhei). [31] Others wrote similarly of the industrial city as a “prison” for the self, with its “high, cold, and gloomy” walls, its “stone corridors,” blocking out the warmth and light of the sun. [32]
Factories and their machinery, the most immediate physical environment for workers, seemed especially cold and empty spiritually. The semi-autobiographical hero of the metalworker Aleksei Bibik’s novel of industrial life, for example, saw “in the soulless din of the factory . . . inward indifference and even insolent unbelief. It seemed to him that there was something here that was strange [strannym] and needless. And he waited for it to die.”[33]
The human beings with whom these workers shared the modern city stirred an even deeper sense of estrangement and desire for a “beyond.” In the “huge and alien” city, it was said, even “streets crowded with people” felt empty and “cursed,” peopled by the “gloomy and soulless crowd,” by strangers filled with “hatred” and “enmity” for one another.[34] Vladimir Kirillov (who had come to city work, and activism as a Bolshevik, from a village in Smolensk province), saw that the people of
the modern city looked at one another with “uncomprehending gazes” and “all wear masks on their souls.” [35]
A trade unionist, commenting in 1910 on an “epidemic” of suicides among workers, blamed not poverty or unemployment (objective conditions were relatively good) but workers’ feelings that modern life was a “big, dark, empty, and cold barn.” [36]
The spiritual condition of the human life of the city was made still worse by pervasive “vulgarity” (poshlost’), “dissoluteness”
(raspushennost’), and “debauchery” (razvrata). [37] The degraded world of workers was an especially painful, and preoccupying, danger; the spiritual ills of urban life was not limited to the decadence of the bourgeoisie. The overwhelming experience of the “thinking worker” amidst his class “comrades,” wrote the Marxist printing worker Ivan Dement’ev (“Kubikov”), was the “feeling of being alone. . .amidst the gray and backward mass.” Seeing “in what filth the soul of man is stewing,” the awakened worker feels like “an alien creature among these people.” [38] This spiritual “filth” was the subject of a great deal of writing by workers, who endlessly expressed their dismay, even disgust, at the pervasive drunkenness, swearing, and cruelty they saw all around them. They were nauseated by the smells of lower-class life—the village, the factory, the tavern, the street. And they expressed a deep sense of alienation and loathing before the “savage manners” and crass tastes of ordinary workers: widespread “drunkenness, violence, and depravity,” “indifference” to “self-betterment,”wasteful and harmful time spent in taverns, and a “darkness and chaos” that pervaded the life of common people. [39] The very vocabulary with which “thinking workers” judged everyday working-class life expressed their moral disgust and alienation: they wrote of widespread poshlost’ (self-satisfied vulgarity), razvrat (debauchery), raznuzdannost’ (licentiousness), nechesnost’ (dishonesty, dishonor), skandal (scandalous behavior), deboshirstvo (rowdy disorder), pakosti (trash, depravities, obscenities), and nravstvennia khalatnost’ (moral apathy). [40]
Every day, “thinking workers” had to struggle in such an environment to “defend their inner world from being spit upon.” [41] As a result, they had become “cultural loners” (kul’turnye odinochki). [42]
Many even felt a sense that their inner self had become a stranger to their own social self: as the miner and poet Aleksei Chizhikov wrote, the “workers’ soul,” no different in essence from the soul of even a tsar, was “imprisoned in a rough worker’s hide.” [43] The depth of estrangement in this writing bordered on a sort of cultural and moral nausea.
This “wound” led to “wandering.” Worker-poets, in the face of this world, became, by their accounts, seekers and wanderers in search of higher meaning in life. The bakery worker Mikhail Savin, writing in 1909, wrote that he felt so out of place amidst “the prose of everyday life” that he preferred “living in dreams, drunk with poetry, and the thirst for light.” [44]
The glassworker Egor Nechaev similarly felt that the world around him was a “prison” in which the only comfort was an
inner fire, his “best friend,” calling him to an unknown future. [45] Aleksei Mashirov (a Petersburg-born metalworker and a Bolshevik) described a worker sitting alone in his cramped room after work, trying to ignore the “laughter and tears of carefree fellows” on “the other side of the wall,” reading by the “pale light of a lamp.” [46]
They wandered in search of meaning through books and inward thoughts, but also literally. Their memoirs are filled with stories of traveling around the empire in search of work (a few even worked in western Europe or sailed the seas as merchant marines). Very often, these were described as spiritual journeys in search of “the meaning of human life.” [47]
For some, this was explicitly the purpose of the journey. Ivan Nazarov, for example, recalled that he was so disgusted with the crass everyday world of workers and bosses in his native Suzdal that he fled to a monastery and became a monk; but not finding there the answers he was seeking, he went into the world and began “wandering” (peredvizhenie). [48]
Aleksei Solov’ev, a construction worker, wrote of “fleeing” the “petty and monotonous” life of the urban working-class to “tramp around old Rus’” (brodiazhit’ po Rusi), though he soon discovered that he preferred the phantoms of literature to the real people he met on the road, and therefore turned to a more inward journey.” [49]
Such spiritual wandering, as these workers certainly knew, was part of a familiar cultural tradition in Russian culture, much of it on the ambiguous boundary of secular and sacred, of wandering artists (peredvizhniki), literary wanderers like Gorky and Tolstoy, roaming religious mystics (stranniki), lay preachers, pilgrims, and the vast genre of popular literary and folk tales of questingvagabonds, heroes, and saints.
For worker-poets, especially those who embraced socialist ideologies, the journey for meaning was a search to explain suffering—a theodicy. This suffering was often quite tangible. Workers’ poetry was filled with images of suffering easily constructed out of the raw materials of lower-class life: childhoods ruined and lost, brutal conditions at work, filthy housing, poor food, hunger; even escape into sleep and dreams was “tortured by exhaustion.” [50] Death, mainly premature death,
figured prominently in writing as in life. We see workers dying in factories when crushed by machines, dying of hunger and of disease associated with poverty, dying young and innocent. And when they died, one poet suggested, black blood would flow from their mouths, a sign of lifelong suffering. [51]
Suffering, of course, is interpretation. Physical injury, hinger, disease, and death are primarily material facts. Suffering is a category through which such facts are perceived, valued, and represented. In this sense, the poetics of suffering was an act of witnessing. As in much Russian literature, the discourse of suffering was hyperbolic, an expression of pathos. But it was also symbolic, an expression of meaning. Symbolic language, we know, universalizes the particular and points to deeper structures of meaning in the world, to less visible truths. Existential facts, transubstantiated into meaningful images by being inscribed into poetry, become, in this sense, sacramental—physical signs of a more meaningful reality. Workers’ heightened sense of the value of the self, and the estrangement of self from both matter (the physical world of modern industrial life) and man (especially the working-class man), which we see in much worker writing, was such a story of revealed meaning, offered with great pathos. These feelings and meanings, however, remain elusive and even ambiguous.
Moral stories In part, images of suffering in workers’ poetry echoed the Christian interpretation, underscored repeatedly in the liturgy, of suffering as the necessary lot of sinful man. Thus, workers repeatedly portrayed their lives as “a harsh way of the cross filled with suffering” (tiazhelyi krestnyi put’ stradanii), a “path of thorns,” along which one must “bear one’s heavy cross” and drink to the depths from the “overflowing chalice of suffering.” [52]
However, most worker-poets, especially those influenced by radical ideologies, tended instead to read suffering as moral wrong, as evil, but also as bearing within itself, as repeated allusions to Jesus’ own suffering implied, the promise of
redemption and deliverance. Contrary to those who have argued for the overwhelming weight of a deeply-seated Russian cultural inclination toward self-abnegation and passive acceptance of suffering—the alleged “long-suffering” essence of the Russian soul, which one author has even called an essential “moral masochism” [53] —Russian culture has long nurtured also a quite different narrative of suffering as possessing the power to transcend itself and redeem the sufferer. As
narrative and argument, suffering was often understood not simply as about the fate of a sinful earthly world, but also, in kenotic emulation of Christ’s Passion, [54]as an elevating, empowering, and, above all, critical moral practice, and as a path to transcendence and salvation. It was not necessary to retain Christian canonical belief to find the structure and pathos of this Christian narrative compelling, though this hybrid language of suffering complicated rather than simplified the relation between secular and sacred, and the boundaries of each, in images and stories of suffering.
Representing suffering was often a critical moral practice: a condemnation of the harm to human beings caused by modern conditions of life. For some, this moral interpretation was explicitly cast within religious teachings and spiritual values. Admiration for Lev Tolstoy as a voice of spiritual and moral criticism of the status quo was one expression of this critical Christian moral vision. Although Tolstoy had been excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox church in 1901, he
remained widely admired for his popular moral writings and for his own sufferings. His death in 1910, during his own journey of pilgrimage, wandering, and escape from everyday life, evoked an outpouring of praise for his role as a moral prophet. “Your books became for us a Gospel,” wrote one poet in the trade-union paper of the St. Petersburg metalworkers’ union to the recently deceased writer, “thank you for every sacred word.” [55] Numerous worker-poets wrote of Tolstoy as a “sun that has set,” a “prophet of labor and love,” a “titan,” a “genius,” and a “demigod,” who spoke “sacred words that will remain eternal,” and at whose unmarked grave pilgrims gathered and even the trees bowed low in honor. [56] Radical intellectuals, including Lenin, [57] nervously advised workers to embrace Tolstoy’s ideals cautiously. The editors of the newspaper of the Petersburg metalworkers’ union, for example, recommended that Tolstoy should be appreciated “not as a Christian teacher, but as a great artist and tireless seeker of truth and justice [pravda], as defender of the oppressed,
opponent of inequality, and fighter for free thought.” [58] However, many workers made it clear that they were attracted precisely to Tolstoy’s search for deeper spiritual truth (istina) and his teachings of spiritual love. Mikhail Loginov—who became a writer and journalist after many years of tramping and odd jobs, and appears to have been one of those workers who turned away from the established Church but not from Christian belief—devoted the last years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-one to promoting among the urban poor a socially critical morality, imbued with Christian
imagery. The truth (istina) that Christ taught, Loginov insisted, has been “lost amidst human contrivances and rites,” hidden from people just as the “Gospels are hidden from people behind heavy silver and golden covers and clasps.” The message taught by Christ—though also by Buddha and Mohammed, Loginov added—is “love of humankind, which alone can save the world from its senseless and cruel life.” Loginov called on workers and the poor to awaken from their dark lives of
“coarse swearing, fights, and drunken carouses” to “godly light and truth.” Addressing the rich, he accused them of “sacrificing to Mammon,” and quoted the scriptural threat, “he who does not work shall not eat.” Like Tolstoy, Loginov repeatedly insisted that the spirit of God is within each person: if you recognize this inner spirit it will “make you free, as you were created to be.” [59]
Other lower-class writers, also possibly still believers, often agreed openly with those who criticized the Church for the preponderance of religious form over feeling and thought, and especially for its neglect of true Christian ethics. This, of course, was also the message of the religious “sectarians” whose influence among urban workers grew dramatically after 1905. Many worker-poets shared this critical view of proper religiosity. “My God is not dressed in gold / Nor ornamented with diamonds / On the walls of churches and towers,” wrote the textile worker Sergei Gan’shin, “My God is love and light.” [60]
Candles should be lit, Mikhail Loginov argued, not to “illuminate the cold and dark walls of a cathedral,” but on “the altar of justice” in the name of people. [61]
Were Christ to return now to the world and see the current state of Christian faith and practice, it was often said, “He would be ashamed for people” and saddened. His wounds would bleed at the sight of rich cathedrals standing complacently beside prisons where men “suffering for the truth” were bound in chains. [62] If one had to insist on the boundaries between secular and sacred thinking, it can be said that secular notions of social justice were affecting sacred vocabularies. But
it is more useful to speak of a dialogue in which each infused the other with meaning, even for “believers.”
While moral anger at the ethical passivity and hypocrisy of the church led some to sectarian and Protestant movements, many strayed onto more distinctive, even individual, paths. The newspaper of the union of sales-clerical workers of Ekaterinodar, for example, featured the story of a young worker who had elaborated his own religious philosophy and practice. Interpreting the Gospels “in his own way,” he transformed his workplace (a shoe store, a strikingly profane image even if it were not the actual site of this transformation) in his imagination into “a monastery” where he would practice a godly life of humility, honest labor, and just relations to others. [63] But many were led away from religion altogether, precisely in the name of the religious principles that made Church practice hypocritical:
“I cannot pray to one / Who cannot hear the howl of the poor / . . . Who cannot hear the cry of the oppressed / Who is alien to misery and tears. / I can pray no more / To one who is friend to the rich. / I no longer believe! I will not!” [64]
Many worker-writers fashioned a critical ethics out of religious teachings, whether or not they continued to “believe.” The biblical narrative of creation, fall, searching, incarnation, and salvation became a metaphor for interpreting the world, as it did for many Russian intellectuals. And the story of the Passion—the exemplary union of materiality and divinity, of profane and sacred, in which the boundaries were especially ambiguous, but the promise of redemption unwavering—was
particularly compelling. Egor Nechaev emphasized Christ’s life of poverty and labor, his simple and honest speech, his willingness to speak truth to power, his sacrificial death in defense of love. [65] The Moscow weaver and poet Filipp Shkulev imagined himself at Christ’s resurrection, sharing in the joy and renewal, hearing the “song of great love,” but also feeling his own heart “burn from pain / Seeing how everywhere the common people are suffocating, / In evil, struggle, and blood.” [66]
For others, like Sergei Gan’shin, the Easter celebration of Christ’s resurrection was a time for people to “disperse the darkness” by singing out, like the singing of church bells, the message of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”[67] Pondering their own hardships, worker-writers often drew on sacred moral teachings. The printing worker Sergei Obradovich, as a soldier in the trenches during the first world war, writing between battles verses and fragmented thoughts in a diary made of pieces of folded paper, cursed war as an evil that “makes people insolent and sour, [and] makes people forget
the commandments of love and charity.” [68]
Above all, worker-poets spoke of seeking and standing for “truth” (pravda) as a moral universal: for “Eternal sacred / Truth: martyr and brother.” [69] And beside truth, as in the new “temple” (khram) that Sergei Gan’shin imagined, stood “peace, love, and beauty.” [70] Salvation Even before the revolution inspired an imaginative leap toward millenarianism, secular conceptions of freedom and transformation of the world were intermixed with mythic and even mystic dreams of salvation. Although some placed their hope literally only in the “kingdom of heaven after death,” [71] more common were expectations of earthly deliverance from suffering. But very often, these secular dreams (“of or pertaining to the world”) were constructed of transcendent and sacred materials. Like the hero of the metalworker Aleksei Bibik’s 1912 novel of working-class life, many
worker-writers and poets saw the awakened worker as not only concerned with people and with changing the conditions of life but as drawn to “look at the stars” and to gaze within—and these divergent directions of sight were all intimately connected. [72]
Very commonly, worker-poets imagined themselves and their fellow sufferers as on a journey from suffering to deliverance, described with language steeped in the images and sensibility of the Passion. And though this language was “secularized” in its application to the world, it was a language—as Derrida has suggested, elaborating on Gershom Sholem’s comments on languages of the sacred—characteristically too full to be “emptied out” of its spirit of sacred passion and perception. The Bolshevik metalworker Aleksei Mashirov (“Samobytnik”) was inclined to view the hell of the factory as a place of “prayer” in which he was clad in “verigi” (the heavy chains worn by religious ascetics for penance and to chasten the flesh). [73]
Workers often wrote of the suffering common people, and especially of themselves, as living through “martyred days” upon their own hard “way of the cross.” [74]
And death, the most liminal and potentially sacred moment in human life, was easily viewed in transcendent terms. At the end of a life of suffering, death too could be linked to Christ’s passion. In a poem by the Bolshevik worker Mikhail Gerasimov, this symbolic association was made literal in the portrayal of a worker killed in an accident in a foundry:
A sudden cry. A figure lay
Crucified on the golden sheet,
Embraced by serpentine flames,
Burning on a fiery cross.
He died amidst the noise of machines;
The pig iron boiled, the steel glistened.
But shackled to his smoky throne,
A bloodied angel thrust forward into the distance. [75]
The Passion, itself an elaboration of the Biblical messianic narrative, embodied, especially as its appeared in workers’ writings, the promise of deliverance from evil and suffering. Certainly, some workers still grounded such belief in theistic faith: “no doubts are in one’s soul / and with a heart at peace one believes in God.” [76]
But most often these were stories about secular hopes that were “filled to bursting” with the pathos and transcendent feeling of the sacred. Most generally, worker-poets wrote of their optimism in the future, their “faith” in change, their certainty that all obstacles would be overcome. [77]
This faith was often cast in religious language and imagery, even by self-identified Marxist proletarians. For example, a church bell heard in the distance could be understood as the sound of “a bright divine muse,” a “symbol of tears and misery,” that awakened the spirit to be ready for new battles for a new future. [78] This spirit was conveyed repeatedly with symbolic images of the coming physical transformation of the world, driven by cosmic forces: approaching dawn, the rising sun, the force of wind, streams cutting though granite, spring rains and rebirth. [79]
Hints of apocalyptic redemption were common, though nothing like what would be heard in the years following the 1917 revolution. Worker-writers imagined, using familiar and potent symbols, an apocalyptic time of tempests, thunder, and catastrophes, followed by a new heaven and a new earth. Many wrote of a coming “golden time,” of faith in an approaching age when the “miracle of goodness” will triumph, of a time when crowds will emerge from “the depths of melancholy
longing and barrenness” (iz nedr toski i proziaban’ia) to meet “the sacred truth” of the coming new world free of suffering and oppression. [80] An exiled trade unionist offered this catechism of faith from the far north: “I believe in the coming eternal happiness / I believe in the poetry of life, in goodness and love / I believe that after the storms and thunder / The burning sun will appear again.” [81]
As in much millenarian thinking, the coming of the new age was expected to reunite the dead with the living. Aleksei Gastev, writing while in exile in Siberia in a poem published by the Petersburg metalworkers’ union, characteristically envisioned the dead rising to join the struggle and even to lead the revolution: “We are coming! We cannot but come; the dark specters of fighters struck down not long ago now arise; the living traditions of the past, fathers felled by wounds, stand up. We follow.” [82]
Many wrote if saviors. Believing workers were likely to look to the promised second coming of Christ, though often with a radically apocalyptic spirit and a secular presense and physicality. Filipp Shkulev, for example, described Christ returning to earth with a message of revolutionary deliverance from suffering: finding the people in agony—“harsh ranks of gloomy faces,” and chains rattling in “gloomy prisons,” framed by the golden cupolas on “rich cathedrals”—Christ, with blood seeping from his wounds, comforts a man bowed in lament and prayer, “Do not cry / A time will come, when the haughty butchers / As in an ocean seething with waves / Will be repaid in blood.” [83]
More “secularized” workers were likely to seek new saviors. Thus, the glassworker Egor Nechaev “prayed” to “freedom” that, “in the dark of night” when his “eyes are breaking with tears” and his heart “can no longer endure the sorrow,” she would come as a “savior” to “touch the sores” on his body with her “healing hand.” [84] (Freedom is linguistically feminine in Russian, but the gendering of this image may also have drawn on the familiar cultural association of salvation with both the abstract “divine feminine” and the Mother of God.) Very often, worker-poets saw themselves as possessing mysterious salvific powers. Ideas about the special mission and power of the writer were widespread in Russian culture. And poets from the common people, creating literature with little formal education, had additional reason to see themselves as having been given a sacred “gift.” [85]
Many writers from among workers and peasants claimed that a “mysterious force” (nevedomaia sila) had compelled them to write. [86] Egor Nechaev, for example, spoke of the appearance of a “delightful fire” that burned in his mind calling him to a “distant unknown.”
In hours of labor and in brief sleep,
Through the noise of machines and the talk of people,
It always, God knows from where,
Appears to me like a best friend:
Here in the tendering whisper of a wave,
There in the rebirth of spring. [87]
Ideas about the sacred value of writing and the mysterious power that inspired it were often bound up with notions of worker-poets coming to the people as saviors. Some saw themselves as gentle redeemers, able to give comfort to the “sorrowing people” through “simple prayers” of catharsis and “quiet joy.” [88]
Others, especially the more politicized like Vasilii Aleksandrovskii, imagined themselves coming to the people, like the Christ of the gospels, not with peace but with a sword:
I will be there, where backs are bent,
Where labor is profaned and defiled,
Where cries of grief are heard
Amidst the noise and roar of machines.
I will be there, where children perish
In the grasp of rough labor,
Where unbearable need
Casts its nets.
I will instill in them indignation,
Protest and bitter vengeance against their enemies,
I will give them new thoughts
And instinctual distant desires.
Each are within me, and I am in everyone.
If you are bold enough, then together
We will penetrate the Mysteries of the World (Tainy Mira),
And from there take everything. [89]
The entwining of the secular and sacred, of the worldly and transcendent, is captured not only in the narrative of the savior who is in and of all people, inspiring the suffering with “instinctual distant desires,” but in the promised knowledge of the “Mysteries (Tainy) of the World,” which echo the physical embodiment of the sacred in the sacraments (tainstva), mysteries simultaneously seen and unseen, present and transcendent, knowable and ineffable. Wings often grew on the bodies of human saviors. Aleksei Gastev, in a prose poem that appeared in 1913 in the newspaper of the Petersburg metalworkers’ union, of which he was then a leader, envisioned, if only metaphorically, the winged transfiguration of revolutionary workers as the struggle advances:
Higher still, yet higher! In the smoke of victory, we dash from the highest rocks,
from the most treacherous cliffs to the most distant heights!
We have no wings?
We will! They will be born in an explosion of burning wish. [90]
Repeatedly, worker-writers envisioned themselves symbolically in flight returning to earth as saviors. Egor Nechaev wished that he were an eagle or the sun, bringing happiness and freedom to the world. [91]
Sergei Gan’shin described himself as “an eagle from the skies . . . from which my mighty voice / like a tocsin” rings out for victory “in the great and sacred struggle.” [92]
And Aleksei Mashirov portrayed awakened workers like himself coming to the people in inspiring flight: as birds in a black sky, as flashes of summer lightening, or as a “meteor falling into the deep abyss”—a redeeming sacrifice illumining the way for others. [93]
However metaphoric, winged human flight inescapably gave the ideas represented—escape, freedom, struggle—a mythic quality. Flight, of course, is a potent symbol, a dream of transcendent power and freedom, of a mystical break with the universe of everyday experience. Its roots lay equally in Christian tradition and older mythic cultures, as well, it has been argued, in the human subconscious. “Magical flight,” as Eliade termed it, may be one of the most universal religious
tropes, in which the boundaries of the everyday and the material world, and even of time and space, could be penetrated and transformed. Appearing in the myths and sacred lore of many cultures, and especially in shamanistic practices, magical flight can denote freedom from monstrous and evil forces, a link between the profane and the sacred, a mysterious understanding and power, and transcendence above the physical bonds of the human condition. [94]
In a more secular vein, Nietzsche’s super-man (widely influential in Russian culture) was “an enemy of the spirit of gravity,” who would “one day teach men to fly.” [95]
And Maxim Gorky, whose works were well-known among writers from the lower classes and was himself influenced by Nietzsche, also mythologized flight as transcendent and emancipatory. [96]
In other words, flight was a metaphor that was not easily “emptied out” of the qualities of the sacred that filled it “to bursting.” With images of flight, these writers typically blurred the line separating secular notions of civic and social emancipation from transcendent and mystical visions of transcendence, redemption, and salvation. This was not a stylistic inconsistency, but a reflection of perceptions and attitudes that themselves may have been unstable and ambiguous, but could not avoid reaching for images (and answers) that lay beyond the everyday and the profane. No exit The reach for transcendent meaning and the promise of deliverance, however, sometimes came up empty-handed. Certain knowledge of the world, especially in the absence of canonical faith, often remained elusive. Suffering often remained a narrative unmoored from the telos of certain salvation. Instead, a number of worker-poets articulated a tragic view of life’s meaning and course. At best, this was a philosophical sense of the tragic, a view of suffering as inescapable and inevitable, but
also as elevating the human spirit and deepening the soul. This was the philosophical tradition that looked back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both influential in fin-de-siècle Russia, but also to Russian writers like Dostoevsky. Nietzsche, for example, argued that tragedy enables people to see “something sublime and significant” in their “struggles, strivings, and failures,” in order ultimately to know, especially in the face of the modern knowledge that we are all ultimately destined to extinction, that “the individual must be consecrated to something higher than himself.” [97]
This tragic sense, implicit in much of the writing about suffering by worker-poets, would be even more starkly voiced, including by Marxist workers, after the path of thorns that came with war, revolution, and civil war. The metalworker Nikolai Liashko, for example, writing in 1921, described modern existence as an essentially tragic but vital experience. The explosive furies of change in modern life, he maintained, have thrown humanity into an “abyss”: For some it is heaven in the abyss, for others hell. But no one is indifferent. . . . Wonders grow into horrors and horrors into wonders. To enumerate the changes would fill thousands of pages, and to describe them would fill millions of pages. Unexpected pains and joys, emptiness and profound meaning, versatile coping, spiritual breakdown, tragedies of immense weight appearing at every
step. People sicken, go mad from exhaustion—but really live! [98]
Andrei Platonov—the most accomplished and renowned Russian working-class author—would offer much the same philosophical argument: “Despair, torment, and death—these are the true reasons for heroic human action and the most powerful motors of history.” [99]
This philosophical sense of the tragic was too optimistic for some, however, especially before the heroic romanticism of the years of revolution and civil war. If, as one worker-poet suggested, by virtue of their position in the social world, workers “drank to the very bottom the bitter cup of truth,” [100] that truth was often a nagging philosophical and historical skepticism. This was a more common sense of the tragic, or even what might be called an existentialist sense (though the term was not yet in use) that there was no exit, no redemption—only “man” alone in the present world. Many worker-poets voiced their anxiety that there was no exit from the iron cage of human life as it was. They described shattered hopes for a “bright life,” growing feelings of anguished melancholy and depression (toska), knowledge that it was pointless to “ask for happiness,” and a deepening sense of the meaninglessness of life. [101]
Even socialist workers—notwithstanding the promises of redemption that ideology offered—often could not sustain faith. The young socialist metalworker Vasilii Aleksandrovskii wrote of troubled thoughts while sitting beside a dying friend: death
appeared here not as a moral symbol of an unjust social order nor as a promise of deliverance, not even into rest and oblivion, but as only the final marker of life’s grim course, of “dark, faceless dread / concealed somewhere, beyond the gloom.” [102] Mikhail Gerasimov, a Bolshevik, admitted feeling himself (in an unpublished poem) to be beyond meaningful suffering: “My soul . . . can now love no more, nor suffer / It is dead and empty.” [103]
These reflections often expanded into more explicitly existential despair over life’s meaning. The awakening of nature in springtime, for example, could be viewed not as a sign of hope but as only a reminder of the “melancholy, pain, and bitterness” in one’s “weary soul,” or of the truth that life’s hardships “have no reason.” [104]
And these writers would sometimes admit to doubts that any savior would ever come. Egor Nechaev, especially in poems collected in his gloomily titled volume of 1913, Vechernie pesni (Evening songs), spoke of people (perhaps of himself) whose “prayers go without answer / Hopes perish without trace,” for whom “rays of hope and the flame of faith in God
/ long since burned out.” [105]
Like so many of these proletarian poets, Sergei Obradovich, a socialist worker whose verses appeared in many labor journals, and who on many occasions wrote of heroic struggle and faith in the future, succumbed to dark thoughts about existence:
I thought to myself: in this world of vanities
I am a hollow and superfluous thing,
Nothing and unnoticed
Beneath the weight of suffering and misfortune . . .
Loving all that the soulless world despised,
I called upon death as if it were joy,
And, in that indifferent darkness, in anguished doubt,
I sought an answer to my question:
Is there a place where life shimmers,
Or are we fated to suffer forever?
There was no answer. [106]
Even in the midst of the revolution, worker-writers found themselves subject to such existential doubt. The Marxist literary critic Aleksandr Voronskii, surveying workers’ writing of the first years after October, noted the startling amount of “melancholy [toska], sorrow, and solitariness, a tendency to dreaminess, to phantasms, to reveries and daydreams, to contemplativeness.” [107]
Indeed, toska, both by name and in spirit, continued to pervade workers’ poetry, as they wrote, amidst the heroic struggles and sufferings of 1917-1921, of loneliness, exhausted searching, autumnal sadness, and hearts weighed down with melancholy. This sensibility could even be reified into a sort of natural phenomenon, as in Andrei Platonov’s image of “toska frozen in the sky.” [108] Like Sergei Obradovich, many “called upon death” in the face of the silence that met their questions about meaning. Thus, a worker-poet and pianist active in local club work in provincial Kostroma (he claimed to love music as a way to express the “sorrows” of his “soul”) wrote of his fascination with “the darkness of eternity” that lay beyond the end of life. [109]
A feeling for the sacred The vocabulary, imagery, and pathos we see in much worker writing may be viewed as epiphanic,
as writing in which the sacred is made manifest, though without necessarily insisting on the literal truth of the images or stories evoked. What is the meaning of the sacred so translated and displaced? The suggestive metaphor “spilt religion,” applied originally to Romantic art, too simply envisions religion as a vessel, or as contained in one, that can be spilled, and the secular world as a similarly bounded material that can absorb that “other” substance. [110]
Neither is it adequate to interpret workers’ use of religious vocabularies and images, even their narrative representation of human existence as a mythic journey through suffering toward deliverance from affliction and evil, as merely a functionalist device, a way to communicate with the still religious common people (a tactic long employed by Russian socialists). Neither, I think, is enough to speak of this language as simply the residue of faith, or empty linguistic habit, vacated of original referents and meanings.
This is less spillage of religion into “other” spheres, than interpenetration, dialogue, and plenitude (in Bakhtin’s terms), even “presence” (in liturgical and sacramental terms). Of course, we cannot entirely know what workers believed or what they felt. We must be cautious of the hazardous allure of imagining transparency and lucidity (which, arguably, is precisely the
foundation of the canonical faith we know to be so in doubt among many worker-poets). Workers’ religious language was likely many things at once (or at different moments), including device and residue. But it is abundantly clear that some words and images and narratives, especially sacred ones, are so imbued with accrued meanings and feelings that they are “impossible to empty out.” Something like what Bakthtin called a “feeling for” the sacred, however restless, elusive, and
unbounded it may have been, has to be recognized. Feeling, in fact, was at the heart of workers’ poetic language. Worker-poets created a discourse rich in emotion and sentiment, filled with much the same pathos that filled the religious language on which they so often drew. When the Marxist Vasilii Aleksandrovskii declared himself feeling “close to the newborn God” as Christmas approached, this was a matter not of Christian faith but of an admittedly mysterious spiritual pleasure—“a sharp knocking within my soul / from where I do not know”—at feelings evoked by glistening silver snows, winter stars, and “trembling nature.” [111]
In Sergei Gan’shin’s imagined temple of truth and love, the altar was illumined “with the fire of feeling,” in this case of the feelings of insult and injury felt by the people. [112] It would not be an overstatement to speak of a cult of feeling in workers’ writings. Fascinated with the feelings inspired by their own suffering and dreaming—reading (and literally writing) these as holding transcendent meaning—strong feeling acted as a source of both pain and pleasure, as the ultimate
measure of truth. As the “worker-philosopher” Fedor Kalinin maintained in an essay published in 1912, “the intellectual can still think for the young [working] class, but he cannot feel for it.” And feelings most mattered in seeking the true. Non-proletarian intellectuals could analyze the “external facts and phenomena” of “political economy,” Kalinin acknowledged, but true knowledge of the world (the ability, in Vasilii Aleksandrovskii’s phrase, to “penetrate the Mysteries of the World”)
demands an emotional understanding that derives from experience [113] —from the fact, as it were, that workers “drank to the very bottom the bitter cup of truth.” In many ways, this was a sacramental cup.
Feeling is central to the constitution of the sacred, it has often been observed. Religion, it has often been argued, fundamentally involves the use of stories and symbols to evoke moods linked to transcendental interpretations of life—to see meaning in the chaos of existence, to name the good and predict its triumph, and to give form to potent feelings of mystery, awe, and the sublime. This emotional spirit is essential: there is no sacred, and hence no religion, without the play of sensibilities, passions, nostalgias, and imagination. [114] When Russian worker-poets wrote in a religious idiom, theirs too was a complex way of speaking in universalizing terms about sacred moral right, of articulating things sublime and mysterious, of voicing faith in deliverance—of “seeing,” “flying,” witnessing, and perhaps saving. It was a type of witnessing, of reaching beyond rational and material expressions of meaning to view the world much as literal religion does—as
marked by the presence of mysterious structures of meaning. This may have seemed to only adequate language to voice the otherwise inexpressible and inexplicable. Indeed, with the fading power of formal theological belief, the force of sentiment and emotion, of the feeling for faith, may have become all the stronger. When a worker viewed the cruel and often senseless reality of his life, even if only metaphorically, as a religious journey, it may have become, if not kind or rational, at least emotionally understandable and bearable. Suffering was ennobled and valued as a sign of moral goodness; one’s tormentors were damned; and affliction was made to contain the promise of salvation.
But not always. Religion is also about uncertainty and unknowability. Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, and others have similarly emphasized that religion, especially Orthodoxy, tends toward apophasis, the mystical theology that insists on the ultimate unknowability of “God,” the impossibility of rationally comprehending the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of the divine. [115]
Worker-poets, with all the pathos of religious feeling, also often hesitated before the certain knowledge and faith in the future that was so central socialist ideology and struggle. And, at least at times, many felt that their searching remained without end, without exit—that they heard “no answer” to their questions about life’s meaning and direction. Crucifixion, or apocalyptic images of storms, blood, and death, did not necessarily bring certainty of resurrection and salvation.
At best, sometimes, suffering could become precious and powerful as a mark of sanctifying and dignifying experience—the pleasurable pain of the wandering “stranger,” the melancholy (tosklivyi) love of an always anticipated sacred place and time.
[116]
Endnotes:
1 An earlier discussion of worker-writers and of their language of the sacred can be found in Mark Steinberg, Proletarian
Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Ithaca, 2002). Like most books, not all was interpretively settled and complete. I have taken this opportunity to think further about this language. On definitions of boundaries of “the religious” see the Introduction to this volume. I am grateful to the participants at the conference “Sacred Stories” for their many thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to participants in the University of Chicago’s Russian Studies Workshop and the University of Illinois History Workshop.
2 Letter of Gershom Sholem to Franz Rozenzweig (26 December 1926) quoted and discussed in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York, 2002), 191-227 (Sholem refers to the attempt to secularize the sacred language of Hebrew).
3 Mircea Eliade, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” in Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, eds., The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (Chicago, 1959), 98-102; Clifford Geertz, “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 126-141.
4 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford University Press, 1996), 10-11, cited and discussed in the introduction by Gil Anidjar to Derrida, Acts of Religion, 9.
5 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York, 1991), esp. chap. 1.
6 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 5.
7 See Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, chap. 2.
8 See the Introduction.
9 Derrida, “The Eyes of Language,” in Acts of Religion, 191-227 (quotation 198).
10 Aleksandr Blok, “Stikhiia i kul’tura” (December 1908), in Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi: Dialog poetov o Rossii i revoliutsii, ed. M. F. Pianykh (Moscow, 1990), 396-405.
11 Blok, “Stikhiia i kul’tura,”400-404.
12 For example, L. M. Kleinbort, “Ocherki rabochei demokratii,” part 2, Sovremennyi mir (May 1913):169-170, and M. M. Persits, Ateizm russkogo rabochego, 1870-1905 gg. (Moscow, 1965).
13 See, for example, Gregory Freeze, "Counter-reformation in Russian Orthodoxy: Popular Response to Religious Innovation, 1922-1925," Slavic Review 54:2 (Summer 1995): 305-339; Gregory Freeze, "Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of Modern History 68 (June 1996): 308-350.
14 Reginald E. Zelnik, “‘To the Unaccustomed Eye’: Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the
1870s,” Russian History 16:2-4 (1989): 313-326 (quotation 315).
15 S. I. Somov, “Iz istorii sotsialdemokraticheskogo dvizheniia v Peterburge v 1905 g.,” Byloe, 1907, no. 4: 33-34; Gerald Surh, “Petersburg’s First Mass Labor Organization: The Assembly of Russian Workers and Father Gapon,” Russian Review 40:4 (October 1981): 436-40.
16 See, for example, N. Tal’nikov, “Sektanty v Peterburge (iz nabliudenii i vpechatlenii),” Peterburgskii listok, 24 December 1907 - 5 November 1908 (a periodical series of articles); A. S. Pankratov, Ishchushchie boga (Moscow, 1911); the series of articles on the problems of popular urban sektantstvo in the St. Petersburg church journal Tserkovnyi vestnik (for example
1910, no. 37 (16 September): 1150-52; no. 50 (16 December): 1586-87; 1912, no. 38 (20 September): 1193-95; 1916, no. 21-22 (12-19 June): 485-492); A. S. Prugavin, “Brattsy” i trezvenniki (Moscow, 1912); A. I. Klibanov, Istoriia religioznogo sektantstva v Rossii (Moscow, 1965); Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park, 2000), esp. chap. 6; Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom (Ithaca, 1999); Heather Coleman, “The Most Dangerous Sect: Baptists in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 1905-1929” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1998).
17 Dumy narodnye, no. 6 ([6 March] 1910): 1.
18 Pankratov, Ishchushchie boga, 52-53.
19 For example, A. M., "U trezvennikov," Malen'kaia gazeta, 1 (14) October 1914.
20 Dumy narodnye, no. 3 (13 February 1910): 4.
21 The phrase is Mikhail Bakhtin’s. See discussions in Susan Felch and Paul Contino, eds., Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (Evanston, 2001).
22 For some examples, see Jay Bergman, “The Image of Jesus in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The Case of Russian
Marxism,” International Review of Social History 35 (1990), 222-26; Deborah Pearl, “Tsar and Religion in Russian volutionary
Propoganda,” Russian History 20:1-4 (1993): 81-107.
23 A. V. Lunacharskii, “Ateizm,” Ocherki po filosofii marksizma: filosofskii sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1908), esp. pp. 115-116, 148-157 (see also articles by other contributors to this collection); idem, Religiia i sotsializm, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1908 and 1911). See also George L. Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago, 1968), chap. 4; Robert C. Williams, Artists in Revolution (Bloomington, 1977), chap. 2; idem, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics (Bloomington, 1986), chap. 5; Jutta Scherrer, “‘Ein gelber und ein blauer Teufel’: zur Entstehung der Begriffe ‘bogostroitel’stvo’ und ‘bogoiskatel’stvo,’” Forschungen zur osteuropaeischen Geschichte, vol. 25 (1978): 319-329; idem, “L’intelligentsia russe: sa quete de la ‘vérité religieuse du socialisme,’” Le temps de la réflexion 1981, 2: 134-151.
24 See, for example, F. Kalinin, “Tip rabochego v literature,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, 1912, no. 9 (September):96-97, 106.
25 For example, P. Ia. Zavolokin, ed., Sovremennye raboche-krest’ianskie poety (Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1925), 41-42, 62, 168. See other sources cited in Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 231.
26 S. Obradovich, “Obraznoe myshlenie,” Kuznitsa, no. 2 (June 1920): 24-25.
27 Eliade, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,” 98-103.
28 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), xv; Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 10
29 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 5, 10, 12, 13, 21, 27.
30 Albert Camus, L’Etranger (1942), quoted in Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 27.
31 M. Gerasimov, “V gorode,” in Pervyi sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei (St. Petersburg, 1914), 51.
32 P. Zaitsev (a shoemaker who briefly published and did most of the writing for this magazine for the common reader), “Sapozhnik ia,” Kolotushka, no. 4 (Easter 1911): 2; Sergei Gan’shin, “Ia syn stepei,” Zhivoe slovo, no. 18 (May 1913): 6; M. T-ts [M. A. Loginov], “Gorodskiia kvartiry,” Zvezda iasnaia [Zvezda utrenniaia], no. 6 (29 February 1912): 2.
33 A. Bibik, K shirokoi doroge (Ignat iz Novoselovki) (St. Petersburg, 1914), 30. See also I. Sm. “Zhizn’ cheloveka v raznykh
vremena,” Rabochii po metallu, no. 24 (14 November 1907): 3-4; A. Zorin [Gastev], “Rabochii mir: s parizhskogo zavoda,” Zhizn’ dlia vsekh, 1910, no. 7 (July): 144.
34 M. Artamonov, “Taet,” Metallist, 1914, no. 4/41 (1 April): 5-6; S. Gan’shin, “Ia syn stepei,” Zhivoe slovo, no. 18 (May 1913): 6; P. Zaitsev, “Sapozhnik ia,” Kolotushka, no. 4 (Easter 1911): A. Dikii, “Bezrabotnye,” Edinstvo, no. 6 (15 June 1909): 3.
35 V. Kirillov, “Gorod,” Stikhotvoreniia 1914-1918 (Petersburg [sic], 1918), 26.
36 Syryi, "Pomnite o samoubiitsakh," Golos portnogo, no. 3 (10 July 1910): 3-4, 8.
37 Kvadrat [I. Kubikov], “Kul’tura i prosveshcheniia,” Pechatnoe delo, no. 8 (27 June 1909): 5; M. Tikhoplesets [M. Loginov],
“Epikuritsy,” Zvezda iasnaia [Zvezda utreniaia], no. 6 (29 February 1912): 5-6; idem, “Shirokiia natury,” Dumy narodnye, no. 5 (27 February 1910): 2; Balailaika, 1910, no. 12: 1; Metallist, no. 10 (11 February 1912): 4; Nadezhda, no. 2 (26 September 1908): 6; M. Volkov, “Obzor pechati,” Narodnaia sem’ia, no. 4 (19 February 1912): 12-14; S. Gan’shin, “Krest’ianka,” Zhivoe slovo, no. 20 (May 1913); M. Gerasimov, “U vitriny,” Prosveshchenie, 1914, no. 1 (January): 6.
38 Kvadrat [Dement’ev-Kubikov], in the Menshevik newspaper Novaia rabochaia gazeta, no. 5 (13 August 1913): 2.
39 For example, the writings by M. Savin and M. Chernysheva in Balalaika (1910-11); Blizhnyi, “Prosvetimsia liudi,” Rodnye vesti, 1912, no. 4 [Easter]: 3; Dumy narodye, no. 2 ([February] 1910): 1; Zvezda iasnaia [Zvezda utreniaia], no. 6 (29 February 1912): 2-4; Zvezda utreniaia, no. 17 (23 May 1912): 2; M. T-ts [M. Loginov], Dumy narodye, no. 1 ([February] 1910): 2.
40 See sources cited in Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination, 85-89.
41 Kvadrat in Novaia rabochaia gazeta, no. 5 (13 August 1913): 2.
42 G. Deev-Khomiakovskii, “Kul’turnye ugolki i kul’turnye odinochki,” Drug naroda, 1915, no. 2 (31 January): 10-11.
43 Aleksei Chizhikov, letter accompanying verses submitted to Pravda by the miner, March 4, 1914. RGASPI (former Central Party Archive), f. 364, op. 1, d. 315, l. 1-3 (quote page 4).
44 A. A. Tiulenev, ed. Gallereia sovremennykh poetov (Moscow, 1909), 11.
45 Nechaev, “Moia pesnia,” Vechernie pesni: stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 1914), 79-80.
46 Mashirov, “Posle raboty,” Pravda, 8 November 1912, and Pervyi sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei, 160.
47 Mikhail Kiriushkin, autobiography, in RGALI, f. 1068, op. 1, d. 72, l. 1.
48 RGALI, f. 1068, op. 1, d. 106, l. 23-24.
49 Zavolokin, ed., Sovremennye raboche-krest’ianskie poety, 214.
50 On destroyed childhoods, see Egor Nechaev, “Moia pesnia” [1906], Vecherniia pesni: stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 1914): 79; idem., “Sirota,” Dolia bedniaka, 19 July 1909; M. Chernysheva, “Ne prigliadite kartiny...,” Balalaika, 1910, no. 18: 2. On tortured sleep, see F. Gavrilov, “Son,” in Proletarskie poety, vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1935), 197-201; E. Nechaev, “V bessonitsu” (1906), Vecherniia pesni, 98; S. Obradovich, “Bezsonnoiu noch’iu,” Severnoe utro (Archangelsk), no. 52 (6 March 1913): 2; M. Gerasimov, “Zavodskaia gudok,” Pervyi sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei (St. Petersburg, 1914), 91-92.
51 [Chechenets], “Nevol’niki truda,” Nash put’, 1911, no. 17 (23 May): 8-9; S. Bruskov, “Smert’ byvshago cheloveka,” Rodnye vesti, 1912: no. 3: 2-3; M. Chernysheva, “Zaveshchanie,” Dumy narodnye, no. 7 ([13 March], 1910): 5; F. Shkulev, “Pil’shchik,” Narodnaia mysl’, no. 2 (February 1911): 107; Bruskov, “Smert’ byvshago cheloveka,” Rodnye vesti, 1912: no. 3: 2-3; S. Obradovich, “Bezsonnoiu noch’iu,” Severnoe utro (Archangelsk), no. 52 (6 March 1913): 2 (a cutting in RGALI, f. 1874, op. 1, d. 2, l. 8); E. Nechaev, “K ditiati,” Zhivoe slovo, no. 20 (May 1913): 6; N. Dodaev, “Trud,” Zhizn’ pekarei, 1914, no. 1/4 (10 March): 2.
52 G. Deev-Khomiakovskii in Drug naroda, 1915, no. 5-6-7 (no month indicated): 2-3; S. Drozhzhin in Drug naroda, 1915, no. 5-6-7: 13; A-ch, “Ternistyi put’,” Samopomoshch’, vol. 2, no. 1 (18 December 1911): 6; S. Aleksandrov, “K dnei rabochego pechati,” poem sent to Pravda 10 June 1914, RGASPI, f. 364 (Pravda), op. 1, d. 337, l. 1; I. Kolkii, “Stikhi rabochego,” poem (unpublished) sent to Pravda 10 June 1914, RGASPI, f. 364 (Pravda), op. 1, d. 319, l. 3; S. Popov, “Pesn’ gore i nuzhdy,” Chelovek, no. 1 (13 February 1911): 14-15.
53 Anna Feldman Leibovich, The Russian Concept of Work: Suffering, Drama, and Tradition in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia (Westport, Conn., 1995); Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York, 1995).
54 The classic accounts of Russian “kenotic Christianity” are Nadejda Gorodetzky, The Humiliated Christ in Modern Russian
Thought (New York, 1938); and G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), chap. 4.
55 Nash put’, no. 19 (3 December 1910): 3.
56 Balalaika, 1910, no. 21: 2; I. Kornev, “Velikaia mogila,” Chelovek, no. 2 (6 March 1911): 5-6.
57 V. I. Lenin, “L. N. Tolstoi” (16 November 1910) and “L. N. Tolstoi i sovremennoe rabochee dvizhenie” (28 November 1910), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenie, vol. 20 (Moscow, 1961), 19-24, 38-41.
58 Nash put’, no. 10 (3 December 1910): 1-2.
59 Dumy narodnye, no. 1 (1910): 1-2; no. 3 (13 February 1910): 1-; no. 5 (27 February 1910): 2; Zvezda utrenniaia, no. 16 (16 May 1912): 2. Loginov alludes to John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth (istina) and the truth shall make you free.”
60 S. Gan’shin-Gremiacheskii, “Moi Bog . . . ,” Dumy narodnye, no. 1 (1910): 5. See also editorial on page 1.
61 Zvezda utrennaia, no. 9 (25 March 1912): 2.
62 F. Shkulev, “Khristos,” Narodnaia mysl’, no. 1 (January 1911): 14; Dumy narodnye, no. 5 (27 February 1910): 1. See also E. Nechaev, “Patriot,” Ostriak, 1910, no. 70, in U istokov russkoi proletar’skoi poezii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1965), 113-114.
63 A-ch, “Ternistyi put’,” Samopomoshch’, vol. 2, no. 1 (18 December 1911): 6-7.
64 S. Gan’shin, “Ne mogu,” RGASPI, f. 433 (Zvezda), op. 1, d. 91, l. 3.
65 E. Nechaev, “Khristos,” Vechernie pesni, 124-125.
66 F. Shkulev, “V den’ Voskreseniia,” Zvezda utrenniaia, no. 9 (25 March 1912): 3-4.
67 S. Gan’shin, “Svetloe utro,” Zhivoe slovo, 1913, no. 15-16 (Paskhal’nyi): 5.
68 RGALI, f. 1874, op. 1, d. 185, l. 26 (entry of 23 November 1916).
69 M. Savin, “Pravda,” Bulochnik, no. 3 (12 March 1906).
70 S. Gan’shin, “Postroim Khram,” Vpered!, no. 157 (14 September 1917): 3. See also, Drug naroda, no. 2 (31 January 1915): 16.
71 A-ch, “Ternistyi put’,” Samopomoshch’, vol. 2, no. 1 (18 December 1911): 7. See also D. Bogdanov, “Na cherdak,” Narodnaia mysl’, no. 2 (February 1911): 130.
72 Bibik, K shirokoi doroge, 40. See also S. Gan’shin, “Odinochestvo,” Rodnye vesti, 1912, no. 3: 1.
73 Samobytnik [Mashirov], “Vesennye grezy,” Voprosy strakhovaniia, 30 July 1916, reprinted in Proletarskie poety, vol. 3
(Leningrad, 1939), 26; idem, “Posle raboty,” Pravda, 8 November 1912, reprinted in Proletarskie poety, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1936), 88.
74 E. Nechaev, “K rodine” (1907), in U istokov, 98; D. Bogdanov, “Na cherdak,” Narodnaia mysl’, no. 2 (February 1911), 130; G. Deev-Khomiakovskii in Drug naroda, no. 5-7 (1915): 1-2; I. Golikov, “Bog v pomoshch’,” RGALI, f. 1068, op. 1, d. 41, l. 15.
75 M. Gerasimov, “Krest,” in Sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei, ed. M. Gorkii, A. Serebrov, and A. Chapygin (Petrograd, [1917]), 3.
76 M. Zakharov, “Nastroenie,” Rodnye vesti, 1911, no. 3(4): 7.
77 Chechenets, “Pesnia rabov,” Rabochii po metallu, no. 22 (10 October 1907): 3; Zorin [Gastev], in Kuznets, no. 7 (14 February 1908): 4; N. R-tskii [Rybatskii], “Pesnia pariia,” Edinstvo, no. 8 (10 August 1909): 3; Obradovich, “K svetu,” Ekho (March 1912): 2; I. Cherdyntsev and N. Dodaev in Pervyi sbornik proletarskikh pisatelei, 132, 143. Many examples can be found in Soviet anthologies, such as the three volumes of Proletarskie poety (Leningrad, 1935-1939) and Poeziia v bol’shevistskikh izdaniiakh, 1901-1917 (Leningrad, 1967).
78 M. Tsarev, “V lesu” (1915), Proletarskie poety 3: 36-37; S. Gan’shin, “Slyshite-l’?” Vpered!, no. 115 (25 July 1917): 5
79 See, for example, poems by Aleksei Mashirov (Samobytnik), such as “Ruch’i,” “Na rassvete vesennyi zori,” “Grebtsy,” “Vesennyi dozhd’,” most of them first printed in Pravda in 1912 and 1913, reprinted in Poeziia v bol’shevistskikh izdaniiakh, 218-219, 227, 304; P. Zaitsev, “Sapozhnik ia,” Kolotushka, no. 4 ([Easter] 1911): 2; A. Pomorskii, “Vesennyi zvon,” Zhizn’ pekarei, no. 2 (29 June 1913): 4; Aleksandrovskii in Novaia rabochaia gazeta, no. 31 (13 September 1913): 2.
80 I. Volodinskii, “Dumy naborshchika,” Nashe pechatnoe delo, no. 18 (21 February 1915): 5; I. Golikov, “Blagoslovi,” RGALI, f. 1068, op. 1, d. 41, l. 13ob. See also E. Nechaev, “Starik,” Vechernie pesni, 96-97.
81 O. R-n, “Iz ssylki,” Edinstvo, no. 4 (23 April 1909): 3.
82 I. Dozorov [Gastev], “My idem!” Metallist, 1914, no. 1/38 (January 13): 3-4.
83 F. Shkulev, “Khristos,” Narodnaia mysl’, no. 1 (January 1911): 14. See a similar poem by S. Gan’shin in Narodnaia sem’ia, no. 3 (16 January 1912): 1.
84 E. Nechaev, “O svobode” [1907], Vechernie pesni, 94-95.
85 Narodniki, no. 1 (1912): 2.
86 M. Gorkii, “O pisateliakh-samouchkakh” (1911), in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 24 (Moscow, 1953), 105-108.
87 E. Nechaev, “Moia pesnia,” Vecherniia pesni, 79-80 (also U istokov, 92).
88 V. Korolev, Vsem skorbiashchim, 5-6.
89 V. Aleksandrovskii, “Novye pesni,” Nashi pesni, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1913), 11.
90 I. Dozorov [Gastev], “My Idem!” Metallist, 1914, no. 1/38 (13 January): 3-4.
91 E. Nechaev, “Pesnia nevol’nika,” Vechernie pesni, 151, and U istokov, 98-99.
92 S. Gan’shin “Orel,” a manuscript poem sent to Maxim Gorky, 1914, in Arkhiv A. M. Gor’kogo, RAV-PG, 37-13-1; “Orlam,”
Vpered!, no. 121 (1/14 August 1917): 2.
93 A. Mashirov (Samobytnik), “Zarnitsy,” Proletarskaia pravda, 18 September 1913, and “Moim sobrat’iam,” Prosnuvshaiasia zhizn [rukopisnyi zhurnal] (1913), both reprinted in Proletarskie poety, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1936), 89-90.
94 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (New York, 1960), 75-84, 99-110.
95 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1966), 192. Tak govoril Zaratustra was first published in Russia in 1898.
96 See, especially, his “Pesnia o sokole” (1895) and “Pesnia o burevestnike” (1901).
97 Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), quoted in Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times (New Haven, 1993), 295-297, 417. On the influence of Nietzsche, and especially of his Birth of Tragedy, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Princeton, 1986), and idem., New Myth, New World: From Neitzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 1-112. For an early, and influential, discussion of affinity more than influence, see Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy” (1903), in Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche (Athens, Ohio, 1969).
98 N. Liashko, “O byte i literature perekhodnogo vremeni,” Kuznitsa, no. 8 (April-September 1921): 29-30, 34.
99 A. Platonov, “Zhizn’ do kontsa,” Voronozhskaia kommuna, 25 August 1921.
100 A. Smirnov, “Dumy proletarii,” V bure i plameni (Iaroslavl’, 1918): 57.
101 For example, the many poems by V. Vegenov that were the featured literary works in Novoe pechatnoe delo in 1911 and 1912; S. Obradovich, “Zhizn’,” Sever Rossii (Arkhangel’sk), no. 1 (23 August 1913): 3; S. Gan’shin, “Tiazhelo na dushe,” manuscript poem sent to Maxim Gorky, 1914, in Arkhiv A. M. Gor’kogo, RAV-PG, 37-13-1; I. Volodinskii, “Dumy naborshchika,” Nashe pechatnoe delo, no. 18 (21 February 1915): 5; Vladimir Korolev, Vsem skorbiashchim (Iaroslavl, 1915), 5-6, 46.
102 V. Aleksandrovskii, “Pered razsvetom (M.E.K.),” Novaia rabochaia gazeta, no. 9 (18 August 1913): 2.
103 M. Gerasimov, “V dushe rany zazhili davno,” RGALI, f. 1374, op. 1, d. 6, l. 10 (unpublished poem).
104 S. Popov, “Vesna,” Chelovek, no. 4 (24 April 1911): 32.
105 E. Nechaev, “V bezsonnitsu,” “Starik,” “V Tiurme,” Vechernie pesni, 96-98, 110 (reprinted in U istokov, 93, 94, 97.
106 Obradovich, “Bezsonnoiu noch’iu,” Severnoe utro (Archangelsk), no. 52 (6 March 1913): 2 (a cutting in RGALI, f. 1874, op. 1, d. 2, l. 8).
107 Voronskii, “O gruppe pisatelei ‘Kuznitsa,’” 126.
108 A. Platonov, “Toska,” Zheleznyi put’, 1919, no. 9 (April): 13, and “Nad golubymi ozerami...,” Krasnaia derevnia, 5 May 1920 (quotation); V. Aleksandrovskii, “U zhertvennika,” Tvori, no. 2 (1921): 4; Vlad. Korolev, Povozka (Buguruslan, 1921); and many of the writings in the journal Kuznitsa—for example the poems by Poletaev and Kirillov in issue no. 7 (December-March 1921) and Poletaev’s “Vorobei i roza” in no. 9 (1922): 17. A poem by Proskurin titled “Toska” was the subject of discussion at one of the Sunday Conversations at the Moscow Proletcult Literary Studio in 1919. Gudki, no.5 (May 1919): 30.
109V. Zafran, “U roialia” and “Boi,” Sbornik Kostromskogo proletkul’ta, no. 1 (1919): 41-42..
110 See T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, Herbert Read, ed. (London, 1936), 41. I am grateful to Laura Engelstein for this suggestion. This limitations of this metaphor was emphasized by Sarah Stein in the discussions at the conference “Sacred Stories.”
111 V. Aleksandrovskii, “V noch’ pod Rozhdestvo,” Zhivoe slovo, 1913, no. 51-52 (December): 6.
112 S. Gan’shin, “Postroim Khram,” Vpered!, no. 157 (14 September 1917): 3.
113 F. Kalinin, “Tip rabochego v literature,” Novyi zhurnal dlia vsekh, 1912, no. 9 (September): 96-97, 106.
114 See especially Clifford Geertz, “Religion As a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), esp. 89-103; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, 1959), and Myths Dreams and Mysteries, esp. 74, 107.
115 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (first published in French in 1944) (London, 1957). See the
discussion, in relation to Bakhtin’s “feeling for faith,” in Randall Poole, “The Apophatic Bakhtin,” in Felch and Contino, Bakhtin and Religion, 151-175.
116Kristeva has written of “those who transcend: living neither before nor now but beyond, they are bent with a passion that, although tenacious, will remain forever unsatisfied. It is a passion for another land, always a promised one.” Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 10