State of Russian Speech
Arsenij Tarkovskij (1907–1989) is regarded as one of the
influential Russian poets of the 1950s–1970s. At the same time
his citizenship
(gra&zhachek;danstvo) in the
state of Russian speech
(der&zhachek;ava russkoj
re&chachek;i), as Tarkovskij himself defined it in a poem composed
after Stalin's death, presented a considerable personal challenge for
the poet. (Besides, his original poetry couldn't pass Soviet
censorship until the mid-1950s). In order to acquire this citizenship,
he had to transcend his own mixed cultural heritage and be able to
deal with the recurring sense of linguistic and geographical loss and
emotional displacement which chased him all his life.
Tarkovskij was born in the South Eastern Ukrainian city of Elisavetgrad in a family which descended from the Arab Muslim &shachek;amxals (princes) of the city of Tarki who ruled Daghestan since the VIII century CE. Tarkovskij's immediate ancestors, however, were Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian Polish gentry.
Deep attachment to Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian culture and
languages together with the memories their Daghestani origin and a
pronounced political liberalism, constituted the essence of
Tarkovskij's family heritage. In his sixteen-line masterpiece,
It was the time when they were not yet at war with Germany
&ellipsis;
(Togda e&shachek;&chachek;e ne voevali s Germaniej,
1966), he describes this heritage as a pre-catastrophic, mainstreamly
cosmopolitan and dominated by mania of ignorance.
The
end of a superficially optimistic existence came with the year 1914,
when all European nations, including Russia, entered a grim period of
wars, revolutions and utopian dictatorships. It was his family's
multiple cultural allegiance that provided Tarkovskij with a sense of
inherited displacement: linguistic (although Russian was spoken at
home), geographical, even ethnic.
My paper explores some of the mechanism which—under the
double pressure of the state of Russian speech
and
changing political climate in the USSR (from the officially
internationalist
empire of Stalin to
Xru&shachek;&chachek;ev's thaw
and growing national
awarness)—were employed by Tarkovskij the poet to overcome the
inherited state of cultural separation and to accomodate himself to
his new role as accepted poet during liberalization.
E.g., the archaic opposition of one's own
(svoj) and
alien
(chu&zhachek;oj) was transformed in Tarkovskij's
mature poetry into oppositions of everyday
vs. extraordinary,
commonly shared
vs
individualistic,
and natural
vs. supernatural.
Also, references will be made will to
the evolution which Tarkovskij underwent from the 1920s.