A Gogol for the 20th Century

Nikolai Zabolotsky, one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia, remains little known in the West. Part of his obscurity stems from the fact that his poetry is difficult to categorize. The last link in the Russian Futurist tradition, Zabolotsky was also the first significant poet to come of age in the Soviet period. He endured eight years in labor camps and exile as an anti-Soviet poet, only to be taken to task by Western critics for having abandoned the modernism of his early verse. Unfortunately, the politics of his life have tended to cloud the extraordinary originality of his poetic voice.

Zabolotsky’s poetry can be divided into three distinct periods: the daring verbal experiments of his early work (1926-1928); the visionary poems of his middle period (1929-1938); and the more conventionally philosophic verse of his post-imprisonment years (1946-1958). The poems in his 1929 volume of verse, Stolbtsy (Scrolls), typify the early phase as they carry the reader on a strange circuit of Leningrad, in which waking and dream states, the real and the unreal, merge into one. Leningrad’s elite reading public found Zablotsky’s voice new and exciting, and his book sold out almost immediately.  But critics faulted him for what was perceived as his depiction of a timeless vulgarity from which there was no escape. This marked the beginning of a press campaign against Zabolotsky, where he was repeatedly attacked for the alleged mockery of his verse.

Zabolotsky’s middle phase is most notable for three long dramatic poems in which his philosophy of man’s role in nature begins to enrich lyrics still marked by striking verbal experimentation. “Torzhestvo zemledeliya” (“The Triumph of Agriculture,” 1929-30), “Bezumny volk” (“The Mad Wolf,” 1931), and “Derevya” (“The Trees,”1933) serve as a microcosm of his poetic world. But critics called the masterly “Triumph of Agriculture” a “kulak poem,” and the government printing house suppressed his second volume of verse. In an effort to survive, he turned to children’s poetry and translation.

Zabolotsky’s late poems attempt to express the nature of the entire universe, to show the vital connections among all things, those both seen and merely felt. Filtered through the poet’s artistic consciousness, different eras and ideas reverberate throughout his verse, and readers can find traces of philosophy (Grigory Skovoroda and Nikolai Fyodorov), science (Kontstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky), Russian poetry (Gavriil Derzhavin, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Velimir Khlebnikov), and painting (Pavel Filonov and Kazimir Malevich).

Most of these references were not part of Zabolotsky’s early education. Ironically, the Soviet regime that was his undoing also afforded him the opportunity to escape his provincial background and move to the city, where he encountered new ideas.

Born on a farm outside of Kazan on April 24, 1903, Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky was the oldest of six children. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father an agronomist. At the age of ten he entered the Urzhum Practical High School, where he wrote his first poems.

With the Revolution, new prospects appeared, and in the spring of 1920 he left for Moscow, where he enrolled in the Faculty of History and Philology at the First University. But Moscow was suffering from extreme food shortages, so early in 1921 Zabolotsky returned to the relative plenty of Urzhum. Once there, however, he found the provinces too dull, so after a few months he left again, this time for Petrograd, where he enrolled in the Department of Language and Literature at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute. During this time Zabolotsky met two remarkable poets, Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, who helped bring him into the literary world. He began making public appearances with them, and in 1927, along with some other writers, formed the OBERIU, or Association for Real Art. With its slogan of “Art as a Cupboard,” emphasizing the inseparability of art and more prosaic aspects of life, the OBERIU represented a last burst of individualism in an increasingly restrictive environment.

During the 1930s, Zabolotsky was largely unable to publish his own poetry. In March 1938, he was arrested and subsequently sentenced without trial to five years in a labor camp for “Trotskyite counter-revolutionary activity.” He returned to Moscow in 1946, broken in health and in spirit. Even so, he worked hard to write poetry again, and some of his most beautiful verses date from this period. Zabolotsky died on October 14, 1958.

Nature, and man’s relationship to it, was one of Zabolotsky’s greatest concerns, and his poetry can be seen as the pursuit of an elusive harmony in nature. His best poems are remarkable for the depth of their insight, as well as for their linguistic brilliance. Joseph Brodsky aptly summed up Zabolotsky’s place in Russian literature: “Zabolotsky has done for Russian literature of the twentieth century what Gogol did for the literature of the nineteenth. All of us at one time or another came under his spell.”  RL