At the dizziest turns of Russian history — the Decembrists’ failed uprising in 1825, the 1917 revolution and civil war, World War II, the short-lived “thaw” of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union’s collapse — poetry has played an outsize role in public life, a phenomenon Yevgeny Yevtushenko, one of the thaw’s leading poets, described with his most famous line: “A poet in Russia is more than a poet.”
Russia’s great poets, from Alexander Pushkin onward, were keenly aware of their status and influence — and the best of them were rewarded with incredible fame and celebrity. During the “thaw,” Yevtushenko and his peers filled stadiums. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was lucky enough to catch readings by later luminaries such as Alexei Parshchikov and Dmitry Prigov; although their poetry was never particularly accessible, they still drew crowds in the high hundreds.
Surely something as momentous as Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine would trigger a poetic explosion? This is the time for taking sides, for statements, for the kind of decisive clarity that saw Pushkin personally censored by the czar, Georgy Ivanov tossed into lifelong emigration, Josef Brodsky sent into hopeless exile — or, on the other hand, a time for the ideological fidelity that won Vladimir Mayakovsky or Robert Rozhdestvensky the official seal of approval without really making them happy. A time to shine on either side of a jagged national divide.
What happened has been subtler — and sadder.
As a seven-year-old, I attended a weekly poetry workshop at Moscow’s Young Pioneer Palace: My mother had an irrational belief in my poetic gift, which I think I recognized even then as merely an ability to spew forth verse rather like ChatGPT does today. The workshop was run by Tatyana Nikologorskaya, a minor traditionalist poet whose own work was wistful and breathlessly emotional. Her star disciple, a few years older than me, was Igor Karaulov; she would often hold him up as an example to us kids.“He owns the land who is ready to lie down in it, and air is the fugitive’s lot,” began a poem that I read on Igor’s Telegram channel in late 2022. Today, he is one of the leading lights of “Z-poetry” — a literary movement named after the Z symbol of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” and fostered by novelist Zakhar Prilepin, an ex-soldier and rabid supporter of the Ukraine invasion.
I’d lost sight of Karaulov for many years until, in the 2010s, he surfaced as a venomous pro-Putin columnist holding a Kremlin-sized grudge against the “liberals” who had seized the literary commanding heights in the 1990s. He hadn’t seen much success as a poet, although he had been published — no prestigious prizes, no large print runs, no following. Now, the tables have been turned — the old elite, the Jews, the liberals are on the run.
“When artists consider themselves as an elite, as the chosen ones, they necessarily come into discord with their country, their values diverge from the people’s values,” Karaulov wrote in a column for the Kremlin-friendly Vzglyad website. “The creative milieu needs to be thoroughly shaken and stirred… Today, the creative person is needed primarily on the front lines and in the new Russian regions.”
The Z-poets try to muster Simonov’s righteousness, but that doesn’t come easily when you are on the side of the attackers.
Karaulov admits on Telegram that he’d hardly be able to lift a submachine gun, but he’s ready to fight tooth and claw for the territory the retreating enemy is freeing up in Moscow’s clubs and bookstores; he’s even happy to read his verse as close to the front lines as they’ll let him come.
“A social lift has finally switched on for poets on February 24, 2022,” poet Vsevolod Yemelin told Novaya Gazeta. (Yemelin, whose politics are eclectically left-wing, hasn’t taken this “elevator” himself.) “You know how the rhyming folk live in Russia. You go to a poetry festival a couple of times a year, a few people clap, they pour you a vodka, but the rest of the time you just sit there getting bored.” He continued:
Then suddenly, out of this funky, boring life, you’re on New Year’s Night TV, Margarita Simonyan shakes hands with you, important state officials applaud you. Suddenly it transpires that you can be the modern-day Konstantin Simonov, the modern-day Olga Bergholz, they’ll put you on TV and let you tour the country.
Margarita Simonyan, head of the RT propaganda channel, was one of the earliest promoters of “Z-poetry”; the channel published an anthology of the verse before any of the professional publishers did. Her idea was to revive the mood of World War II-era Soviet poetry. Olga Bergholz was the tragic voice of the Leningrad siege; Simonov, wildly popular and promoted by the state during and after the war, wrote both lyrical verse (“Wait for me and I’ll come back, only really wait”) and harsh propaganda (‘Kill at least one of them, kill one as soon as you can”).
In Z-poetry, both of these strains have been revived and sometimes bizarrely intertwined. Here’s one from Ukrainian-born Anna Dolgaryova, another Z-poetry star:
The little fir says to her mom, her little branches atremble,‘They say we’ll become coffins and go down deep in the earth.’‘No, no, dear child, we’ll be crosses along the highwayOn which the enemy will be crucified.’
Death and victory are, of course, the common themes. The Z-poets try to muster Simonov’s righteousness, but that doesn’t come easily when you are on the side of the attackers. In the most recent Z-anthology, Resurrected in World War III, Vladislav Artemov has a poem about killing an enemy soldier that provides the kind of justification apparently needed in a fratricidal war:
He rolled down to the river, he sighed and went quietHe was actually a decent soldierBut he fought for them, for the others, the foes,So to me, he was an enemy, not a brother.
The better-known Z-poets — mostly marginal characters from the same literary bars and parlors once frequented by liberals, too — are not necessarily appreciated in eastern Ukraine, where the fighting is taking place. The Russian-speaking Donbass has its share of pro-war poets, most of them doing actual fighting. ”Dear ‘Z-poets’, as you call yourselves, especially poets from behind the lines who are biological men,” poet and novelist Natalia Kurchatova wrote on her Telegram channel. “Your daily news-inspired verse make the peaceful residents of Donetsk mad. And the fighting men don’t give a s**t about that verse — it might as well not exist.” The post inspired both indignation and soul-searching among “poets from behind the lines”; the pro-war poets of the occupied Ukrainian region have published an anthology of their own, but, compared with the relatively slick product of their Moscow-based brethren, it’s much rougher around the edges.One of the Z-poets actually on the front lines, Dmitry Artis, signed up to fight at the age of 49. He wrote this:
Crater upon crater is what the bastards left behind,The plain looks as though it’s been turned inside out,But we’ll smooth out this earth, we’ll stroke it like brothersWith our charred Russian tank.
This kind of poetry is modestly successful. According to the publisher, Piter, Resurrected in World War III has sold more than 7,000 copies — a success for a poetry book by current Russian standards, which even liberal book critic Galina Yuzefovich has been forced to recognize. She attributes it to the novelist Prilepin’s social network reach. Group readings by “Z-poets” fill up bookstores, libraries and small clubs. These are not the kind of audiences Yevtushenko and his peers commanded in the 1960s. They don’t measure up to the late 1980s readings I attended, either. But these particular poets had never seen so much interest, so they are encouraged and full of enthusiasm about being the new, patriotic literary elite.
As for the old elite, Karaulov wrote on Telegram, “They haven’t so much fled as died away like autumn leaves when the wind grows strong. We have stepped into a new world, it will be scary, merry, chaotic, but we’re alive in it. As for them, they rushed to places where they think their old world will be preserved. But there will be no old world for them there, either.”
Quite a few in the pre-war Russian literary establishment would disagree with Karaulov: To them, he and his ilk are the zombies. “I consider the poetry of the Z-poets nonexistent, a verbal hallucination,” Georgy Urushadze, who last April quit his long-term post as a director of several Russian literary competitions in protest against the invasion, wrote on Telegram. “Those who sing praises to war are either scoundrels or fools.”
Before the war, dividing lines weren’t as clear cut. Alexander Delfinov, the poetry slam hero who, like me, lives in Germany and whose inventive, edgy stoner poetry I’ve often enjoyed both live and on the social networks, recalled in an interview how he had been shortlisted for a minor poetry prize in St. Petersburg in 2019. Karaulov ran the show, handled the invitation and the tickets. The Ukrainian-born Z-poet Dolgaryova beat Delfinov for the prize. He heard her for the first time as she recited her verse: “I understood immediately that it was war propaganda — and I’d supported it by taking part in the competition. I said nothing, I was confused, didn’t know how to behave. It was a mistake.”
Since the war, Delfinov’s poetry has been growing darker. Consider this intentionally primitive rhymed story of a Russian soldier who has returned from Ukraine and now can only drink and beat his wife:
It was April still when he came home to the wifeWhat happened there at war, who cares, just forget itHis memory is all ripped up in shredsIt rears up like a monstrous two-legged catThe guy in glasses that he’d shotKeeps following Seryozhka.
Even the voices of some previously apolitical poets such as Vera Polozkova, one of the few writers of Russian verse who regularly saw five-figure print runs, have grown more stringent than those of any on the Z-side. Here’s Polozkova, who now lives in Cyprus:
My Russia is Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah today,It has pushed me, a grinning freeloader, awayAnd it clutches a mirror in its clawsWaiting for hell to break open in the glass.
Others have taken refuge in bitter sarcasm. The poet and performance artist Gherman Lukomnikov, an heir of the conceptualist school that flourished in the 1980s, managed to publish an irreverent collection of short poems in a provincial literary journal in Russia:
‘I’m in the dragon’s maw, it looks like I’m not dead.’ —‘Here’s to a peaceful palate over your head!’
A large group of antiwar poets have published — what else — an anthology of their own, called Last Days Poetry, which was presented in Moscow on the same day as Resurrected in World War III and drew a smaller crowd. And the poetry magazine Prosody published an entire issue dedicated to escapism in 2022 Russian poetry; nowhere in the issue does the war get a direct mention, though some of the writers appear to hint at it — unless I’m reading too much into verse such as this, by Dmitry Anikin:
We looked for the road back but the way back is flat and dead,There’s no forgiveness for us and no one to beg it for,There’s no God for those who’ve forgotten themselves!There are no Russians except the ancients down in the ground!
Escape is illusory in today’s Russia, though. Three young poets arrested in September for reciting antiwar verse in a Moscow square sit in pretrial detention. Artyom Kamardin, Alexander Daineko and Yegor Shtovba may go to prison for six years for “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” None of the three belonged to the literary elite, and the poems they shouted out did not shine with literary quality: “Kill me, irregular fighter! You’ve already tasted blood, you’ve seen your brothers in arms dig graves for a brotherly people.” But better poets’ resistance from afar, their linguistic tricks, their technical mastery, even their genuine despair somewhere in the European Union feel shallow as the three rot in jail, unknown to foreigners and most Russians alike, unread and unheard.
The Z-poets try to muster Simonov’s righteousness, but that doesn’t come easily when you are on the side of the attackers.
After a year that decisively split Russian poetry into two camps — just as the revolution and civil war did 100 years ago — no voices have emerged on either side that could resonate beyond relatively tiny audiences. Karaulov and his bunch are evil kids in an abandoned candy shop that once traded in Russian culture, and they have little to replace what used to be on the shelves at Russia’s previous turning points. Their fleurs du mal are stunted by the envy and desire for revenge that underlie them; for all the gruesomeness, they are as timid in many ways as any of the “escapist” verse: They are designed to sanctify a war so obviously unjust that even personal sacrifice cannot whitewash it.
“I understand the drive and all that — but I don’t believe them,” Yemelin said of the Z-poets. “In 1941 there was a war that you had to believe in. And here these folks are writing about a special military operation in which everybody’s lying, and they’re adding more lies. They’re caught in a whirlwind of lies and of their success at these lies.”
As for the emigres, the mockers, the fugitives into their inner world, the best that can be said of them is that they aren’t evil. Few of these poetic voices were raised against the Putin regime before, when it was relatively safe and when the worst could perhaps still be prevented. The seeds of what this year did to Russia, to its culture, to the Russian language and to the Russian identity were sown years ago, and no poet stepped up to take on the traditional prophetic role. Like the Russian military, Russian culture is taking a beating because of its mediocrity: Surprised by a turn of events that would have been an opportunity for heroes and geniuses, it has produced in response only various flavors of whimpering.
Now that may be harder for Russian society to recover from than just a military defeat.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
• Biden’s Escalation in Ukraine Is About Diplomacy, Not Victory: Hal Brands
• Forget ‘Autonomy’ — Europe Needs the US: Andreas Kluth
• Western Tanks Will Give Ukraine a Fighting Chance: Editorial
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
