Article

Name: «Boris Savinkov Is My Brother»: The Poetics of Courtroom Procedure and Marina Tsveataeva’s Author’s Projections

Authors: S. Yu. Kornienko

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University

Abstract: The paper deals with the aesthetic aspect of how the émigré literature reflected the «Savinkov story». Fragments of the court transcript of 1924 and a very literary speech, full of the recognizable decadent and modernist formulae, were published by all the leading Soviet and émigré press and provoked a wild reaction of all the agents of the political field. The trial's theatrically constructed «turn» – the unyielding Savinkov unexpectedly acknowledging the Soviet authority – and the following uproar in the media, produced a wave of journalistic texts and drew into discussion of the Savinkov and «savinkovschina» phenomenon a number of influential writers and journalists, sometimes with opposite oilitical and wasthetic views. Marina Tsvetaeva’s statement surprisingly includes Savinkov in the pantheon of «brothers» where she used to put her literary associates. Possible origins of Tsvetaeva’s ideas about her personal kinship may include the émigré press, but also personal impressions of their common acquaintances. For example, Maximilian Voloshin had many contacts with Savinkov. Voloshin, as well as Tsvetaeva later on, imagined Savinkov as his personal «mirror», an embodiment in a radically different person of the principles of his own nature (this projection is centered around the idea of veing outside all parties, both political and aesthetical). Voloshin sees Savinkov as a politician of a Caesarian or a napoleonic type, with a «bomb» inside. In his poem «Ropshin» (1915) he designs his hero’s image according to the aesthetics of the synthetic modernism, combinig contradictory character traits (exterior coldness and interior passion), arts (sculpture and pencil study), historical and cultural layers (the «iron» 19th century and Renaissance – the 16th century, «the times of the last Valois»). Conjunction of the caesarism-bonapartism with aristocratic qualities, already reflected by Voloshin in 1915, becomes a mainstream line in the reflection around Savinkov in 1924. The widest span of the émigré press – from the Berlin SR paper «Dni» to the Belgrade right-wing «Novoye vremya» – shows along the expected mutual reproaches for symbolically «nurturing» Savinkov as a politician a unique consensus in the aesthetic field. And when the numerous journalist describe Savinkov’s qualities that allegedly predestined his treachery, those qualities echo the personality type created by the particular literarty movement: from nietzscheanism, immoralism and individualism to artistry, «immeasurability» and panaestheticism. Anti-Savinkov campaign thus becomes anti-modernist. This disposition was probably why Tsvetaeva’s intuition prompted her not only to refrain from finding herself among self-punishing modernists but to put Savinkov, already dead by that time, in the core of the national identity.

Keywords: Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Savinkov, literary field, political field, reception of modernism, discussions in the Russian émigré literature

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