A council of workers called the St. Petersburg Soviet was created in this chaos. The symbolist poet, Alexander Blok, whose own estate had been vandalized and later burned, initially embraced the October Revolution because he was interested in “the soul of the revolution.” But he believed it resided in the barbaric masses. Anna Akhmatova is regarded as one of Russia’s greatest poets. I have always loved poetry, its power and resonance in the human heart; and I have always had an affinity for the Russian poets, especially those of the October Revolution of 1917, how they used their words to further that revolution.. My meager study is cursory at best, a mere dip in a great sea of verse. Officially approved writing (the only kind that could be published) by and large sank to a subliterary level. Vladimir Mayakovsky, the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Protest” - From "Poems of Purpose," published in 1916, this poem embodies the spirit of protest no matter the cause. The French Revolution (Excerpt) poem by William Blake. 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution is a collection of literary responses to one of the most cataclysmic events in modern world history, which exposes the immense conflictedness and doubt, conviction and hope, pessimism and optimism which political events provoked among contemporary writers - sometimes at the same time, even in the same person. Sometimes considered an outlier, Pasternak’s novel is two things at once: a mesmerizing love story set against a truly epic historical background and a perceptive and well-observed look at the Russian Revolution from a remove. After a brief period of relative openness (compared to what followed) in the 1920s, literature became a tool of state propaganda. '1917: Stories and poems from the Russian Revolution' book cover. The revolutionary events of the year 1917 were a watershed moment in Russian history, causing profound and irreversible changes to the country’s political, social, and economic life, as well as taking an immeasurable human toll. Mayakovsky, whose father died while Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow with his mother and sisters in 1906. Clockwise around from left above: Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvinskaya) / …
After emigrating during the revolution, her name was erased from Russian literature. One of the most important Russian poets of the second part of the twentieth century, Arsenii Tarkovsky (1907-1989)—father of the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky, and mentor of Ilya Kutik in the late 1970s—once told Kutik about the time he was given a crocodile-skin bag of Stalin’s poems to translate, and why he thought Stalin had spared fellow writer Boris Pasternak. These my poems… "The astonishing role of Russian women in the revolution and the rights that they achieved was a source of inspiration and wonder. To speak up and show your bravery against those who cause suffering, Wilcox's words are timeless.
The first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in literature had no illusions about the Revolution.
See also: Poets by Nationality | Contemporary Russian Poets | Russian Women Poets Russian Poets Born: 1701-1800 | 1801-1900 | 1901-1950 | After 1951 In addition to poetry, she wrote prose including memoirs, autobiographical pieces, and literary scholarship on Russian writers such as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. But as she predicts, her works did find their way back, years after her tragic and abrupt death. Clockwise around from left above: Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Kuzmin, Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvinskaya) / …