Visionary or campaigner: Nikolai Zabolotsky's philosophical poetry from the twenties to the fifties

Nikolai Zabolotsky's (1903–1958) nearly forty-year poetic career embraces an entire epoch in Russian literature. He became famous for his challenging avant-garde experiments, later turned into an adherent of “official” poetry, survived through imprisonment and exile and finally was renowned as a classic of Soviet literature. An original poet, Zabolotsky was also an insightful philosopher, an adherent of Naturphilosophie. His works, due to his contradictory philosophical and poetic principles, never fitted into stereotypes of Soviet or western literary criticism. In search of its own clue to understanding Zabolotsky's philosophical concept, this thesis takes a new look at the controversy surrounding the poet's intentional (or unintentional) satirizing of the regime. It provides further evidence that the source and core of the poet's conflict with the authorities lay in the basis of his philosophical system, which was not completely congruent with the official philosophical doctrine of Marxism-Leninism. The thesis also regards Zabolotsky as a representative of Russian cosmism, uncovering previously unknown links with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers A. Sukhovo-Kobylin and A. Gorsky, in addition to examining Zabolotsky's well-known ties with N. Fedorov, V. Soloviev, V. Vernadsky and K. Tsiolkovsky. A further projection of Zabolotsky's philosophical concept against a historico-political background enables us to present arguments against the simplified understanding of the poet as a harmless “visionary” and a utopian thinker (Goldstein, 1993), and in defence of his complex position as an opponent of the regime. Zabolotsky's philosophical poetry is equally perceived as a poetic philosophy, i.e. an expression of philosophical concepts in a poetic idiom. An attempt is made to prove that the principle of metamorphosis is not only the core of Zabolotsky's philosophical concept but also his specific literary device and a poetic model. Our investigations rely on a textual and contextual analysis, which includes Zabolotsky's major works, such as Stolbtsy (Columns, 1929), the long poèmy “Torzhestvo zemledeliia” (“The Triumph of Agriculture,” 1929–1933), “Bezumnyi volk” (“The Mad Wolf,” 1931) and “Derev'ia” (“The Trees,” 1933), as well as the poems previously neglected or studied only superficially, among them “Ptitsy” (“The Birds,” 1933), “Skazka o krivom chelovechke” (“The Tale of the Little Crooked Man,” 1933), “Nachalo zimy” (“The Start of Winter,” 1935), “Rubruk v Mongolii” (“Rubrucius in Mongolia,” 1958), and others. Parallels are drawn with certain works of A. Blok, J. Brodsky, N. Kliuev, O. Mandelstam and B. Pasternak. Special attention is paid to the topics of the poet and his lyrical hero, the eroticism of his early works, the development of female imagery, and the position of the poet in the literary process from the twenties to the fifties, as well as in twentieth-century Russian literature in general. This approach allows us to observe a complete trilateral construction of Zabolotsky's philosophical poetry (urban cosmism—rural and nature cosmism—historical cosmism). It elucidates the unique role of Zabolotsky as creator of a separate poetic-philosophic trend and demonstrates the extraordinary appearance, existence, and survival of a divergent philosophical concept within a totalitarian system.