Mayakovsky Square poetry readings

Last updated

During the 1950s and 1960s, Mayakovsky Square in Moscow played an important role as a gathering place for unofficial poetry readings, and subsequently for expressing cultural and political dissent in the post-Stalin era.

Contents

Precursor

On July 29, 1958, a monument to Vladimir Mayakovsky was unveiled in Moscow's Mayakovsky Square. At the official opening ceremony, a number of official Soviet poets read their poems. When the ceremony was over, volunteers from the crowd started reading poetry as well. The atmosphere of relatively free speech attracted many, and public readings at the monument soon became regular. Young people, mainly students, assembled almost every evening to read the poems of forgotten or repressed writers. Some also read their own work, and discussed art and literature. [1] :172 Among the young poets who read their own work to huge crowds in Mayakovsky Square were Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, who walked a thin line between being able to publish in the Soviet Union and representing a spirit of youthful protest. They were alternately reproached and disciplined, but tolerated. [2] [3] The spontaneous gatherings, however, were soon stopped by the authorities. [1] :116 [4] :172

Gatherings in 1960-61

Выйду на площадь и городу в ухо
Втисну отчаянья крик!
...
Это - я,
призывающий к правде и бунту,
не желающий больше служить,
рву ваши черные путы,
сотканные из лжи!

I'll go out on the Square
and into the city's ear
I'll hammer a cry of despair!
...
This is me
calling to truth and revolt
willing no more to serve
I break your black tethers
woven of lies!

Manifesto of Man by Yuri Galanskov, 1960

The gatherings at Mayakovsky's statue were revived in September 1960, again as poetry readings, but this time with a more openly political character. They were organized by biology student Vladimir Bukovsky with a small circle of university friends, but gathered momentum quickly and were soon taking place regularly. [5] :60 The Square and statue became known to some as "Mayak" (lighthouse). [6]

Usually several hundred people gathered each occasion in the square. The participants in the 1960-61 readings included the "veterans" of two years before, as well as a new layer of young people. Poetry by Nikolay Gumilev, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam was read. Soviet Nonconformist Art and works by formalists were also circulated.

Nonconformism and samizdat

Among the participants were both those interested in pure art, and those inspired by dissident politics of various stripes. [4] :272 Many of those gathering in the square insisted on the right of art to remain "free of politics". Others were drawn to the readings because of their social implications. [2] [4] :272 This included an oppositionist student movement which had already begun to develop immediately out of the shock of Khrushchev's 1956 report on Stalin's purges. For these, like Bukovsky and his colleagues, "the right of art to be independent was merely one point of opposition to the regime, and we were here precisely because art happened to be at the centre of political passions." [1] :118

The circle of students who had organized the Mayakovsky Square also began publishing unofficial poetry in the first samizdat ("self-published") journals. They published their own poems but also those of Nikolay Zabolotsky, Dmitri Kedrin and Marina Tsvetaeva. Poet and journalist Aleksandr Ginzburg managed to get out three issues of Sintaksis before he was arrested for the first time in 1960. In November 1960, Vladimir Osipov produced one issue of a journal called Bumerang, which was modeled on Ginzburg's work. A third samizdat journal, Feniks-61 , was produced by Yuri Galanskov in 1961. [5] :59–60

Usual punitive measures for these activities included expulsion and blacklisting from institutes. The active participants of the gatherings were regularly subject to searches. Fights were provoked in the square, and sometimes the monument was cordoned off during the usual meeting times. [4] :272 The readings at Mayakovsky Square became the incubator not only for a new generation of poets but for a generation of dissidents. Vladimir Osipov, one of the organizers gatherings and a later dissident, stated that "it seems it is impossible to find a famous dissident from among the young, who thundered at the end of the sixties and the first half of the seventies, who would hot have appeared at that time [in the early sixties] on Mayakovsky Square, who did not spend his youth there." [7]

Final readings and arrests

The atmosphere was tense in the extreme and plainclothesmen were ready to pounce at any moment. At last, when [Anatoly] Shchukin started reading, they let out a howl and made a dash through the crowd in the direction of the statue... A gigantic fist-fight broke out. Many people had no idea who was fighting whom and joined in just for the fun of it... The police were generally unpopular anyhow and on this occasion I feared that the crowd would overturn the police car and kick it to pieces. But somehow or other the police succeeded in bundling Shchukin and Osipov into a car and extricated it from the crowd. Shchukin got fifteen days “for reading anti-Soviet verses” and Osipov ten days “for disturbing the peace and using obscene language”... This episode alone indicates what an extraordinary time it was.

Vladimir Bukovsky on the 1961 Mayakovsky commemoration [1] :121

On April 14, 1961, the Mayakovsky Square group organized a reading specifically to commemorate the anniversary of Mayakovsky's suicide. The commemoration turned out to be the largest and most eventful gathering in the square. It coincided with a holiday to celebrate Yuri Gagarin's space flight, and the square was filled with bystanders, many of whom joined the crowd around Mayakovsky's statue out of curiosity. The meeting was broken up.

Many of those involved in the readings were arrested in the summer of 1961. Vladimir Osipov, Eduard Kuznetsov and Ilya Bokshteyn were soon after convicted under article 70 “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for allegedly attempting to create an underground organization. Osipov and Kuznetsov received seven years in labor camps, and Bokshetyn five years. [1] :142–54 [4] :272 Vladimir Bukovsky was interrogated twice in spring 1961, and thrown out of university that year. [5] :60

By the autumn of 1961, news of the readings in Mayakovsky Square had begun to filter out to the foreign press, and an open campaign began to crush them. The KGB brought snowplows to the Square and circled them around the Mayakovsky statue to prevent the readings from taking place. After a final gathering on the opening day of the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October of the same year, the readings were officially banned. [2]

Revival in 1965

In 1965, the gatherings in Mayakovsky Square were briefly revived again by a new youth group called SMOG. The acronym could be deciphered as the Russian words "boldness, thought, image and depth," or "the youngest society of geniuses". The SMOGists expressed a trend of 1964-65 toward greater organization among literary dissidents, as compared to the more unstructured and spontaneous readings of the early sixties. For them, concerns for literary freedom were mixed with a political interest in the Russian revolutionary tradition from the Decembrists to Lenin, and in other leaders who had opposed Stalin, such as Trotsky and Bukharin. [2]

On April 14, 1965, SMOGists organized what they described as a "literary-political" meeting to commemorate the anniversary of Mayakovsky’s death. They used the symbolism of the occasion to make a series of demands. Among their demands were the official recognition of SMOG by the Writers' Union. [2] [8]

Despite the introduction of new articles in the Criminal Code in the wake of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, directed against "group actions which violate public order", a last SMOGist demonstration took place on September 28. The participants were beaten, and the members of SMOG decided to stop the meetings. [8]

Revival in 2022

On 25 September 2022, 33-year-old poet Artyom Kamardin recited a poem opposed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in what was now called Triumfalnaya Square for which in the following year he, attendee Yegor Shtovba and another participant, Nikolai Dayneko, were given severe prison sentences. [9]

Cultural references

The film Moscow Does not Believe in Tears from 1979 references the gatherings. Poet Andrei Voznesensky is seen reciting his poem Antiworlds on the square.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samizdat</span> Underground publications in the Soviet bloc

Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladimir Mayakovsky</span> Russian and Soviet poet (1893–1930)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladimir Bukovsky</span> Russian-British human rights activist (1942–2019)

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, well known at home and abroad. He spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union during Brezhnev rule.

Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Ginzburg</span> Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident

Alexander "Alik" Ilyich Ginzburg, was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident. Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps. In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eduard Kuznetsov (dissident)</span> Soviet dissident and refusenik

Edward Samoilovich Kuznetsov is a Soviet-Israeli dissident, refusenik, journalist, and writer. One of the leaders of the 1970 Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, Kuznetsov's case drew international attention following his death sentence. As a result of global protests, his sentence was commuted to fifteen years' imprisonment.

Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin was a Russian-American poet and mathematician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Natalya Gorbanevskaya</span> Russian poet, translator and civil rights activist

Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya was a Russian poet, a translator of Polish literature and a civil-rights activist. She was one of the founders and the first editor of A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982). On 25 August 1968, with seven others, she took part in the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 a Soviet court sentenced Gorbanevskaya to incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. She was released from the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital in 1972, and emigrated from the USSR in 1975, settling in France. In 2005, she became a citizen of Poland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pavel Litvinov</span> Former Soviet dissident

Pavel Mikhailovich Litvinov is a Russian-born U.S. physicist, writer, teacher, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident.

<i>They Chose Freedom</i> 2005 Russian film

They Chose Freedom is a four-part TV documentary on the history of political dissent in the USSR from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was produced in 2005 by Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vadim Delaunay</span> Russian poet and dissident (1947–1983)

Vadim Nikolaevich Delaunay was a Soviet poet and dissident, who participated in the 1968 Red Square demonstration of protest against military suppression of the Prague Spring.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyudmila Alexeyeva</span> Soviet-Russian human rights activist

Lyudmila Mikhaylovna Alexeyeva was a Russian historian and human-rights activist who was a founding member in 1976 of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and one of the last Soviet dissidents active in post-Soviet Russia.

The glasnost meeting, also known as the glasnost rally, was the first spontaneous public political demonstration in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. It took place in Moscow on 5 December 1965 as a response to the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. The demonstration is considered to mark the beginning of a movement for civil rights in the Soviet Union.

SMOG was one of the earliest informal literary groups independent of the Soviet state in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Among several interpretations of the acronym are Smelsot', Mysl', Obraz i Glubina, and, humorously, Samoe Molodoe Obshchestvo Geniev.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dubravlag</span> Soviet labor camp

The Dubravny Camp, Special Camp No.3, commonly known as the Dubravlag, was a Gulag labor camp of the Soviet Union located in Yavas, Mordovia from 1948 to 2005.

Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse was a group that was founded by Soviet dissident Viktor Fainberg in April 1975 and participated in the struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union from 1975 to 1988.

In 1965 a human rights movement emerged in the USSR. Those actively involved did not share a single set of beliefs. Many wanted a variety of civil rights — freedom of expression, of religious belief, of national self-determination. To some it was crucial to provide a truthful record of what was happening in the country, not the heavily censored version provided in official media outlets. Others still were "reform Communists" who thought it possible to change the Soviet system for the better.

The Trial of the Four, also Galanskov–Ginzburg trial, was the 1968 trial of Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky and Vera Lahkova for their involvement in samizdat publications. The trial took place in Moscow City Court on January 8–12. All four defendants were sentenced to terms in labour camps. The trial played a major part in consolidating the emerging human rights movement in the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Nikolaevich Osipov was a Russian writer who founded the Soviet samizdat journal Veche (Assembly). The journal is considered to be an important document of the nationalist or Slavophile strand within the Soviet dissident movement.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Bukovskii (1978). To build a castle: my life as a dissenter. London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Sundaram, Chantal (2006). ""The stone skin of the monument": Mayakovsky, Dissent and Popular Culture in the Soviet Union". Toronto Slavic Quarterly (16).
  3. Volgin, Igor (1997). "Na Ploshchadi Mayakovskogo materiaizovalos' vremya". In Polikovskaia, Liudmila (ed.). My predchuvstvie… predtecha…. Zveniia. (Google Books)
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Alexeyeva, Lyudmila (1987). Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights. John Glad, Carol Pearce (trans.). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN   0-8195-6176-2.
  5. 1 2 3 Boobbyer, Philip (2005). Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia. London.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, London and New York, 1988, p. 147.
  7. Mikhail Kheifets, “Russkii patriot Vladimir Osipov,” Kontinent, 1981, No. 27, pp.159-212 (p.176)
  8. 1 2 Batshev, Vladimir (1997). "Oni peredali nam svoii opyt". In Polikovskaia, Liudmila (ed.). My predchuvstvie… predtecha…. Moskva: Zvenia. ISBN   9785787000023.
  9. Gozzi, Laura (2023-12-28). "Russian poets get jail sentences for anti-war poetry reading". BBC News . Retrieved 2023-12-28.

Bibliography