# Poetry of Joseph Stalin

* This article is part of a series aboutJoseph Stalin
Personal
Early life
Residences
Antisemitism
Death and state funeral
Bibliography
Pre-leadership
1905 Tampere conference
1907 Tiflis bank robbery
1906 Bolshevik raid on the Tsarevich Giorgi
Russian Revolution
Russian Civil War
Polish-Soviet War
Rise to power
Leader of the Soviet Union
Tenure
First five-year plan
1930–1933 famine
Great Purge
Death dates of victims
World War II
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Tehran Conference
Yalta Conference
Potsdam Conference
1946–1947 famine
Excess mortality in the Soviet Union
Political ideology
Stalinism
Comparison to Nazism
Marxism–Leninism
atheism
Works
Poetry
"Anarchism or Socialism?"
"Marxism and the National Question"
"Foundations of Leninism"
"Dizzy with Success"
"Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia"
"Ten Blows" speech
Alleged 19 August 1939 speech
Falsifiers of History
Stalin Note
The History of the Communist Party
1936 Soviet Constitution
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Order No. 227
Order No. 270
"Marxism and Problems of Linguistics"
Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
Legacy
Cult of personality
Neo-Stalinism
De-Stalinization
Anti-Stalinist left
Awards and honours
Eponymous places
Statues
Black Ribbon Day :
vte :
Before he became a Bolshevik revolutionary and leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was a promising poet.

## Literary career

Like many Georgian children, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili – who would later call himself Stalin – grew up with the national epic, The Knight in the Panther's Skin. As a child, Jughashvili knew the poem by heart and passionately read the other popular poems of the time, notably those by Raphael Eristavi, Akaki Tsereteli and – once he learned Russian – Nikolay Nekrasov.
At the Orthodox Seminary of Tiflis, where he was enrolled beginning in 1894, Jughashvili read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman. He also started writing Romantic poetry in Georgian. In 1895, at the age of 17, Jughashvili's work impressed the noted poet Ilia Chavchavadze, who published five of them in his journal, Iveria, attributed to the pseudonym Soselo.
One of these poems, "Morning" (dedicated to Prince Raphael Eristavi), begins:
    "The pinkish bud has opened, Rushing to the pale-blue violet And, stirred by a light breeze, The lily of the valley has bent over the grass."
Once Jughashvili entered revolutionary politics, and became Stalin, he stopped writing poetry regularly, telling a friend it took too much time.
In 1907 he used his prestige as Soselo to obtain information from an admirer needed for a bank robbery. During the Great Purge, he edited a Russian translation of the Knight in the Panther's Skin (by a Georgian intellectual he released from prison for that purpose) and competently translated some of the couplets himself.
Stalin published all of his work anonymously and never publicly acknowledged it. When Lavrentiy Beria secretly had Boris Pasternak and other noted translators prepare a Russian edition of Stalin's poems for the ruler's 70th birthday in 1949, Stalin had the project stopped.

## Reception

In his biography of Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore notes that the poems in Iveria "were widely read and much admired. They became minor Georgian classics, to be published in anthologies and memorised by schoolchildren until the 1970s (and not as part of Stalin's cult; they were usually published as 'Anonymous')." Montefiore adds that "their romantic imagery was derivative but their beauty lay in the delicacy and purity of rhyme and language".
Robert Service, another Stalin biographer, describes the poems as "fairly standard for early 19th-century Romantic poetry", and as "very conventional, ... very standardized and rather self-indulgent".
Stalin's poems have been translated into English by Donald Rayfield.