SOURCE: "Bagritsky's 'February'," in Lot's Wife and the Venus ofMilo: Conflicting Attitudes to the Cultural Heritage in Modern Russia, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 77-97.

[In the following excerpt, which was originally published as a section of the chapter "The Secret of Art: Two Soviet Myths" in Lot's Wife and the Venus of Milo, Thomson argues that Bagritsky's autobiographical "February," his final work, expresses a surprisingly ambivalent attitude toward the pre-Revolutionary past.]

In the early part of his career Bagritsky was known as an ardent advocate of the continuity of poetic culture, with a reputation for a detailed knowledge of even the most recondite and unfashionable poets of the preceding epoch. In his later years, however, partly as a consequence of his hardening political attitudes, he seems to have moved towards a total repudiation of the past. His last poem, 'February,' presents a strange synthesis of these contradictory impulses.

The first indication of Bagritsky's changing attitude to the past occurs in his poem 'Cigarette Packet' ('Papirosnyy korobok', 1927). The poet has been chain-smoking late into the night, and as he sinks into an uneasy sleep, a picture of the Decembrist poet Ryleyev on a cigarette-packet catches his eye. Gradually this casual impression turns into a monstrous nightmare, which spawns the figures of the other Decembrists. Bagritsky is terrified, and he tries to drive out the unwelcome visitors, but Ryleyev tells him:

You are ours for ever! We are with you everywhere …
Our solidarity is assured for all eternity.

As the nightmare continues, Bagritsky is forced to undergo the flogging which they underwent and to experience all the horrors of the Tsarist past. As dawn comes, however, the figures of the nightmare reveal themselves to have been only the trees and currant-bushes of his garden. Bagritsky calls in his son and tells him:

Rise up then, Vsevolod, and possess everything, rise up under the autumn sun! I know: you are born with pure blood in your veins, and you stand on the threshold of great times! Listen to my bequest: when I am gone from song and the wind and my fatherland, you must cut down the pines in the garden, and leave no trace behind, and root out the bush of blackcurrant!

And on this uncompromising and problematical note the poem ends. The evils of the past have vanished with the coming of day; nothing but healthy fruits and vegetation remain in their place. But this is not the conventional image of the beneficent and progressive workings of history; for here the fruits are seen as contaminated by the roots. Where almost all other Soviet writers would proudly place themselves in the Decembrist tradition, Bagritsky sees only the horror and the demoralization; Russian history is a long nightmare that must be obliterated if a new and healthier race is ever to inherit the world.

Where [Velimir] Khlebnikov [in his poem Night Search] had punned on the name Vladimir—'vladey mirom' (possess the world), Bagritsky echoes him on the name Vsevolod—'vsem voloday' (possess everything), but gives it precisely the opposite meaning. Khlebnikov's words were addressed to the past—the dead can keep their culture; Bagritsky's are addressed to the future, which will contain everything but the past. Khlebnikov places the words near the beginning of his poem, and then proceeds to question them, before finally showing that the words contain an ironic truth: the past has taken with it something that the future wishes too late that it had acquired; in Bagritsky the episode occurs at the end of the poem as its climax and moral.

The poem is a startling one, but in the following poems, 'My Origins' ('Proiskhozhdeniye', 1930), 'The Last Night,' ('Poslednyaya noch', 1932), 'A Man of the Outskirts' ('Chelovek predmest'ya', 1932) Bagritsky returns to this vision of the past as a loathsome nightmare which has no place in the future. It is in this context that the poem 'February' makes its extraordinary bid to settle accounts once and for all with the past.

The poem is, strictly speaking, unfinished (the poet died of tuberculosis early in 1934) and it appears that he had intended to insert some 'lyrical interludes' into the work. It is hard to believe that these would have enriched the poem any further; if anything they would have diluted it. As it stands it is already a self-contained and unified work of art.

The poem is set in Odessa, where the unnamed narratorhero has returned on leave in the middle of the Great War. The ensuing action falls into three distinct episodes. In the first the hero tries to gain the attention of a girl he has always dreamt of hopelessly, and is contemptuously rejected. The scene then shifts to the immediate aftermath of the February revolution; the hero takes part in the storming of a police-station, and soon becomes a military policeman himself under the new regime. In the final episode he leads a raid on a private house suspected of harbouring some bandits; it proves to be not only that but a brothel as well, where the hero discovers the girl of his dreams in bed with an unknown officer. He arrests him, sends his men out of the room, and then rapes the girl himself. The poem ends with the hero's attempts to explain his actions.

This final episode is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it is not altogether surprising that it was based on an event from Bagritsky's own life, that took place soon after the November revolution:

All this actually happened to me, just as I describe it. Yes, the schoolgirl and the search. I hardly added anything at all, but what was essential for the idea. First, the bandits we were looking for, turned out not to be in the house.

Second, when I saw this schoolgirl, with whom I had once been in love, and who had now become an officers' prostitute, well, in the poem I send everyone out, and jump on the bed on top of her. It was, so to say, a break with the past, a settling of accounts with it. In actual fact I was completely bewildered and couldn't get out of the room fast enough. That's all there was …

For all Bagritsky's disclaimers these changes are not minor ones. It is worth looking at the poem in some detail to see why they were 'essential'.

The poem combines two distinct themes, the hopeless and envious love of an adolescent boy, and his identification with the revolutions that will destroy the society that has frustrated his love; in the final episode these two motives are brought together as the two sides of a single coin. The connection between them is the compromised reputation of the culture of the past: apparently infinitely beautiful and desirable, the girl finally turns out to be only a prostitute in an officers' brothel, a Venus of the cities of the plain. The hero's attempt to 'possess' and 'master' her is an allegory of the revolution's attitudes to this dubious heritage.

From the start the narrator feels an outsider, desperately insecure and unsure of himself. He is a Jew, like Bagritsky, who changed his real name Dzyubin to something more suggestive of the Red revolution (the root 'bagr-' means 'crimson'). His childhood too, as so often in Bagritsky's autobiographical writings, is depicted as a time of deprivation without any happiness or freedom or love:

I never loved as I should have done, a poor little Jewish boy.

But, as the self-pitying tone suggests, and as the narrator himself is uneasily aware, it is not just a matter of deprivation, but an inner flaw, a lack of any confidence and savoir-faire, both social and sexual, that cripples him. As he explains in a sour mixture of self-disgust and envy:

I never spied like the others through the chinks of the bathing huts. I never tried to accidentally pinch the girls … Shyness and vertigo sapped my strength.

Shy and friendless as a boy he becomes a passionate ornithologist (again like Bagritsky himself), with an extensive library and a collection of singing-birds, and throughout the poem ornithological imagery stands for an easier, rosier existence where the difficulties of this life will no longer alarm or threaten. But, typically, when he tries to describe his ideal future, he can picture it only in terms of specific childhood details that are not imagined, but remembered:

I must find a corner in this world, where a clean towel hangs on its nail and smells of mother, where the soap lies ready by the tap, and the sun streaming through the window does not scorch the face like a hot coal…

This atmosphere of homely comfort (and particularly the dislike of bright lights) recurs again and again as a criterion by which to evaluate the hero's state throughout the poem. One might have expected such values to be condemned as nostalgic or bourgeois or at least unCommunist; but no! this is what will one day be restored, with the difference that today's outsiders will then be the insiders, with all that that implies in the way of selfpossession, power and authority.

Now returned from the front the hero sits on the Odessa boulevard in his military uniform, hoping that at last he will be admitted to the magic circle from which he has been excluded:

And now I am like an equal among them. If I want I can sit, if I want I can stroll, if I want—and there isn't an officer close by—I can smoke …

His service at the front has earned him (at least in his own eyes) the right apparently to equality with these more fortunate citizens. But he is still not their 'equal', only 'like an equal'; and his backward glance for an officer casts doubt even on that.

So too his knowing appraisal of the girl's escorts serves only to emphasize his own isolation:

I knew all her acquaintances by sight; I knew their mannerisms, smiles, gestures, the way they slowed their steps when, with your chest, your hips or your hands, you deliberately try to feel the disturbing softness of girls' skin through its fragile covering. I knew it all…

For he knows this only with the knowledgeability of jealousy. The use of the impersonal second person singular ('when you try') may seem for a moment to come from direct experience, but it is contradicted by 'their steps'; and so the final 'I knew it all' creates instead the impression of second-hand knowledge, the knowledge of an observer, an outsider, not a participant.

All the frustrations of his adolescence, his unhappy childhood and his poor background, his sense of exclusion from the 'world in which people play tennis, drink orangeade and kiss women', seem to crystallize in the figure of this girl. Alien and hateful though this world is, the narrator still wants to become part of it. Finally he screws up the courage to address her:

I salute her, as if she were my commanding officer. What can I say to her? My tongue mutters some drivel: 'Permit me … Don't run away … Please, may I accompany you? I have served in the trenches …'

In these lines Bagritsky conveys the insecurity of the speaker; even his mention of his time in the trenches is not a boast, but a pathetic plea for consideration: 'Surely I deserve a reward?' Not surprisingly she dismisses him:

'Go away at once', and with her hand she points to the crossroads … There he stands at the crossing for the maintenance of order, like a whole empire of ribbons, polished buttons and medals, wedged into his boots, and covered on top with a gendarme's cap, around which doves out of Holy Writ and stormclouds, whorled like snails, circle in the intolerable radiance, so yellow that it hurts—a potbellied policeman, gleaming with fatty sweat, stuffed full since breakfast of ham-fat and bulging with vodka …

For a moment the individual frustration of the narrator seems to have passed into a social protest. The unattainable world of beauty and luxury symbolized by the pretty girl is allied to a smug and apparently impregnable ruling caste; words such as 'Empire' and 'Holy Writ' turn the policeman into a symbol of the power and authority of Imperial Russia. The girl that he desires becomes identified with all that he hates. But what these lines contain is not so much social protest as frustration masquerading as social protest; it is the T of the poem who describes the scene, and the last one and a half lines, deliberately set off from the rest, make no pretence at objectivity (the hero does not speak to the policeman or go any nearer to him); they are made to look like an afterthought, an insult hurled from a safe distance and under the breath. Here in a single image is the nub of the situation, the rebel and the culture he loves and hates.

The second episode moves to the historical and political plane. It opens with an enthusiastic political meeting:

People come in from the February night, grimacing in the light, bumping into one another, shaking the frost off their coats; and now they're all in with us together, talking, shouting, raising their hands, cursing and weeping.

The outsiders seem to have become insiders at last (they have 'come in' from the 'night'); they feel confident, on the winning side, in the majority. The T has become happily absorbed into the 'we', and the revolutionaries set off to attack the police-station. The timid, insecure hero can now feel himself a real man:

My body floods with the blood of manhood, the wind of manhood blows around my shirt. Childhood is over. Maturity has begun. Bang your rifle-butt on the stones! Off with your caps!

The hero's body floods with 'manhood', not in the usual sense of the Russian word, 'manly stoicism', which is hardly applicable in this situation of aggression, but in the more basic meaning of virility. Yet the childish gestures with rifle-butt and cap contrive to undercut these claims of manhood and maturity. It is as if the hero were still looking over his shoulder for reassurance: 'Is this how real insiders behave?'.

The revolutionaries take over the police-station without meeting any resistance, and they demand to see the Inspector. When they meet him they are taken aback by his effusiveness:

Smiling, melting, swooning with cordiality and graciousness and the sheer happiness of meeting the delegates from the committee … And we—we just stood there, shifting from one leg to the other, our heels muddying the fantastic horses and parrots embroidered on the carpet. Of course we were in no mood for smiles. That's enough, hand over the keys, and clear out of here. There's nothing to negotiate. Good-bye … We set about taking things over. We wandered around all the corridors. […] We found a prisoner's teapot, tinny and rusty, and drank our first tea of victory, the tea of freedom, out of it, slurping and burning our lips.

In the face of the mocking courtesy of the Inspector the assurance of the new rulers crumples, as is suggested by the broken lines, the abrupt changes in tone, from the embarrassing sense of being out of place and dirtying the carpets to the peremptory commands and the peculiar aimlessness of their activities after the takeover. Somehow the old regime's secret has escaped them. They are insiders to all appearances, but the imagery still hints that they are not masters but captives; the doors are closed behind them, and they drink their tea from a prisoner's teapot. Society has been turned upside-down, and the former insiders have been evicted, but the new masters are depicted as squatters, without any sense of permanence, and the confident assertion of the last line reads ironically because of the triviality of the actual gesture—drinking tea. As at the end of Night Search the revolutionaries seem to have won everything except the one thing they desired most of all.

The new regime is installed, and the narrator becomes assistant to the local commissar. Surrounded by the visible trappings of power, he wishes that his down-trodden Jewish forebears could see him now in his hour of triumph. But this need to justify himself by a challenge to the past shatters all his pretensions to maturity and self-assurance. He has become an insider only to find himself once again a prisoner, looking out through the windows at the world continuing without him:

Nights on end I sat in damp guard rooms, gazing out at the passing world, foreign to me like elements of an alien nature.

In the final and culminating episode the hero and his men raid a house which is suspected of harbouring bandits. The scene in which they burst into the house is in many ways parallel to their takeover of the police-station, a similar mixture of timidity, self-consciousness, bewildered admiration and brutal violence:

I went up to the door on my own. The lads, gripping their carbines between their knees, squeezed themselves flat against the wall. Everything was just as in a nice decent house—a lamp with a deep blue shade over the family table […] a bust of Tolstoy on the cupboard. All the solidity of domestic comfort in the warm air […] everything was quite in order. We burst in like a tempest, like the breath of the black streets, not wiping our feet or taking off our coats …

One might have expected the hero and his revolutionary sailors to be enraged and extra-suspicious rather than impressed by this picture of bourgeois culture. Do they recognize it perhaps as an incarnation of the ideal culture towards which they too aspire?

I entered and stopped in amazement. The devil take it! What a blunder! What sort of thieves' kitchen was this—just some friends sitting over a cup of tea. What was I doing interrupting them? I too would like to sit in comfort, converse about Gumilev, and not wander through the nights like a spy, bursting into respectable families in search of non-existent bandits.

Because of the reference to Gumilev this passage might seem to be ironic (as it would be in most Soviet writers), but it is difficult to see any irony here. There is none in the narrator's tone: he is still fascinated by these bourgeois ideals, and quite willing to accept their right to exist like this, provided they break no laws. He even feels guilty at interrupting this cultural idyll.

But at this point one of the sailors recognizes the officers as the bandits they were looking for and tells them to put their hands up. The revolutionaries then proceed to search the house, and discover that it is a brothel. In one room they find the supposedly inaccessible girl naked in bed, and a man in his underclothes beside her. For a moment he brandishes a gun, and then he winks: 'Oh, the whole fleet's come! This little cannon's not much good against them. I surrender.'

The two faces of the bourgeois world fuse into one: the glamorous and unattainable culture of the bourgeoisie proves to be no more than a den of bandits and prostitutes, yet it still retains all its glamour and superiority. There is a striking stylistic contrast between the easy capitulation of the winking officer and the clumsy and embarrassed manner of the victorious revolutionaries. As in Night Search, even in defeat and humiliation, the old class still possesses its secret intact. And as in Night Search the secret is in the eyes.

What is this secret? And how can it be acquired? And what is the justification for acquiring it? These questions are raised in the final lines of the poem. The hero challenges the girl:

1. 'Well, do you recognize me?' Silence. Then in anger I blurted out: 'How much do I pay you for a session?' Quietly, not moving her lips, she said: 'Take pity on me! I don't want any money …' I threw some money at her. I plunged in, without pulling off my boots or taking off my holster, or unbuttoning my tunic. Straight into that abyss of down and blanket under which all my predecessors had struggled and panted—into a dark and phantasmagoric torrent of visions, yelps, shameless movements, darkness and fierce light.
2. I am taking you because my generation was timid, because I was shy, because of the shame of my homeless forebears, because of the twittering of a chance bird. I am taking you as vengeance on a world from which I couldn't escape.
3. Receive me into your empty depths, where even grass cannot take root. Perhaps my nocturnal seed will fructify your desert.

Spring showers will come, and a wind from the South, and the love-calls of swans.

The three sections indicate the successive stages in the hero's interpretation of what has happened in the act of 'possession', and they recapitulate the main themes of the poem, and indeed the three main attitudes to the problem of the culture of the past.

In the first stage he is concerned simply to possess and humiliate; all the gestures are violent and brutal. If one's ideal turns out to have been a prostitute all along, one might as well treat her the same way oneself. There is no 'secret' to be sought or redeemed in this 'possession'. But the very crudity of his assault leads him into the same old trap. Far from possessing the past he begins to wonder if he has not been possessed by it; the imagery is of being sucked in and swallowed up by darkness. Is there any significant difference between his actions and those of his predecessors?

In the second stage the tone changes dramatically: from action to introspection, from self-assertion to selfjustification, from aggression almost to apology. Even the word 'vengeance' is so modified by the 'shy' and the 'timid' of the first two lines that it sounds impotent. The transition is extraordinary: the unattainable ideal has been caught in the act of collusion with the class-enemy, and the hero finds himself apologizing for his anger. He addresses her for the first time as 'tu', and without any mockery or contempt.

In the final section the situation is reversed, or rather restored. The hero addresses the girl once again in the tones of a diffident lover: 'receive me', 'perhaps'. Hateful though this old world is, the hero still wants to renew its vitality. But why does he call her a desert? in that case she wouldn't be worth possessing. Surely throughout the poem this ideal has been depicted as a secret inaccessible garden of elegance and beauty, of self-assurance and good taste, into which the hero time and again brings his muddy boots. Culture, upper-class whore that she is, needs only to throw herself open to the masses, and all will be forgiven. Because, surely, the desert is the uncultured postrevolutionary society. The culture of the past does not need the present to bear its fruit; it is the present which needs the secret of the past.

Of course, Bagritsky did not actually behave like this, or think of these arguments at the time; in some embarrassment he ran straight out of the room. Wasn't this in fact the normal, healthy and correct response? If the whole episode was, 'so to say, a break with the past, a settling of accounts with it', it is strange that Bagritsky should have felt the need to rewrite it this way: to turn a non-event into a rape, a 'complete break' into a desperate plea for continuity. Why should one have any truck with 'mastering' and 'possessing' such social undesirables? In Night Search the revolutionaries had come gradually to a grudging admission of the merits of the class-enemy. In 'February' the supposed merits of the girl are stripped away one after another, until nothing remains, but she still remains uniquely desirable.

If in the works of other Soviet writers the intellectual hero often seeks (in vain) for renewal through a union with an illiterate peasant-girl, in Bagritsky the homeless revolutionary tries to establish and legitimize his inheritance by raping a bourgeois girl in an officer's brothel. The successive arguments of the hero to the girl are metaphors for the changing attitudes of the revolutionary generation to the culture of the past: first, a violent and destructive assault, then the envious aspirations and self-justifications of the frustrated and deprived outsider, and finally the half-hearted suggestion that perhaps between them they could improve the genetic stock. Partly because of this the final two lines of the poem with their evocation of a springtime idyll, complete with birds and all, are so unconvincing. These images have throughout been associated with escapism and self-defence, not of a new understanding. The hopes of the final lines, as of the whole poem, remain a pathetic, unattainable vision.