Manan
Dear Kostya
My dear Kostya, my brightest light, my most beloved,
Your eyes may beam with the intensity of ten suns
Or flood with the torrents of ten harvests,
Yet you endure, nourished with naught but purity and innocence.
You will see the barley rise, as your sister could not,
As it did before a fallen spirit, brimming with spite,
Set ablaze the countryside, our humble plots,
And consumed not just the grains, but also my first light.
I remember the last Yuletide, streets aglow
As Masha and Misha, Vasya and Vova, the village children
Stood caroling, wishing us a fruitful plow.
That year stood sixteen, this year only ten.
But wait dear Kostya! Stay a while. You must endure!
Damp Mother Earth shan’t let the spirit unfettered fly.
You shall cease to wither
And take your first steps amongst the rye.
The above poem is written from the perspective of a mother speaking to her newborn son during a time of drought and famine. Droughts, which were not uncommon in the Russian countryside in the 19th century, often resulted in starvation and death in significant numbers. Even without the presence of a drought, it was not uncommon for children to die young due to medical issues that could not be addressed. Mary Matossian expresses this reality through the characters she creates in her essay, “The Peasant Way of Life,” in order to paint a picture of a typical peasant family. For instance, she uses the character of Marya Ivanov to exemplify the frequent loss of children that many families had to bear, writing that she “has three children, but she gave birth to three others who died in infancy. Her daughter-in-law Anya lost a baby last summer” (Matossian 22). The dire situation of the peasants was further worsened by the socioeconomic gap that existed between themselves and the educated. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky writes that “the entity known as imperial Russia consisted of two separate worlds: the world of the educated and that of the illiterate, of government and society on the one hand and of the masses on the other…of the exploiters and the exploited” (263). Peasants, as the exploited party, received little to no aid during times of famine.
The Russian peasant in the 19th century therefore became extremely familiar with death, which also plagued them in the form of military drafts. It was observed that the willingness to accept death seen amongst members of the army had its origins in their lives as peasants. Riasanovsky asserts this, writing that “It has been generally recognized that the Russian soldiers knew how to die….Interestingly, this ability to face death…was also noted by some of the greatest Russian writers, including Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, as a remarkable trait of the common people of Russia” (267). As part of their culture, “The peasants tended to regard time as cyclical, passing through an endless round of death and rebirth” (Matossian 40). In the face of this cyclical nature of life, the “Russian peasant sought immortality through the survival of his offspring” (Matossian 22). This “immortality,” or the preservation of a family line, was very fragile due in part to the frequency of infant deaths. The mother, “a symbol in Russian culture of endurance and healing love” (Matossian 17-18), seemed to be one of the strongest spiritual forces in the face of such crisis and loss. The poem explores the symbolism of the mother as well as the pain of losing a child due to forces outside one’s control in the world of a peasant.
References
1. Matossian, Mary. “The Peasant Way of Life.” The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Ed. Wayne S. Vucinich. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1968. 1-40. Print
2. Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. “Afterword: The Problem of the Peasant.” The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Ed. Wayne S. Vucinich. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1968. 263-284. Print