[In the following review, MacFadyen argues that synthesis is the unifying theme of Shvarts's oeuvre and the poems in Zapadno-vostochnyi veter.]

To talk of Elena Shvarts as the most commanding female voice in contemporary Russian poetry is not to risk much. She was born forty-nine years ago in Leningrad, and while remaining outside Soviet institutions of both higher learning and professional literature, she garnered increasing respect through the medium of samizdat. Now long since projected into the relative security of regular publications (in terms of both time and normalcy), she is increasingly spoken of as the “third” clear voice that sounds at the century's close, following those of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.

The second of these suggested kinships is more instructive. Shvarts is sufficiently younger than the generation of Brodsky, Kushner, Rein, et alia to experience an increased sense of distance or breach between herself and the interrupted line of prerevolutionary Russian verse. In a 1990 interview with Valentina Polukhina she says, “I was raised on the idea there was some sense of cultural chasm, an abyss lying between us and the start of the century.” The two poets Shvarts hears clearest across the Soviet wilderness are Tsvetaeva and Khlebnikov, but both seem to exacerbate her sense of abyssal isolation. Khlebnikov's fascination with the inexorable, incomprehensible workings of historical cycles and Tsvetaeva's sense of unity with elemental forces combine in Shvarts's poetry. The result is an odd marriage of participation in the timeless ebb and flow of a universal dynamism together with a sense of insignificance before their omnipotence.

That marriage is neatly defined by the title of her latest collection [Zapadno-vostochnyĭ veter], containing poems from 1981 to January 1997: “West-Easterly Wind.” One force, from two different places, is sensed by a foreign object between them—and falsely delineated (through the “science” of geography) as having definable, divisible points of origin. Shvarts's geographic location can be expressed temporally also. She is at the tail end of a Western tradition that values rationality and formal conservatism; simultaneously, though, she prefaces a younger generation that tends toward more abstract philosophies and the disruption of form—emphases that Russian canon has always viewed as Eastern. Such a dichotomy expresses itself in the poem “Arboreal Cathedral” of 1996: “In the pulpit stood an oak, / With hard and haggard arms / It raised the forest's soul, / As the flame in an azure chalice.” The cathedral is built around the tree (the tree was there first), or the forest has (re)claimed a human space. The rude intrusion of nature into humanity is shown most violently in “Vital Lightning”: “The Maiden strolled across the Bay / And did not notice how—at once— / The visage of space was contorted / And a celestial tick appeared. / Lightning thrust a glance / Into her, struck with its crimson / Quill, slid along / Her spinal column.”

In “Balkan Ballad” of 1996, a vague and distant fire also ravages matter, perhaps in a rustic hearth, perhaps in the aftermath of a mortar attack. In either event, an unbearable heat has overcome otherwise stable forms: “From below [in the valley] nimble / Slender smoke flows. / From below it leads the curse / Upward—to the heights—a guide.” In wartime or peace, the “curse” here is combustible, finite matter, either wood or flesh. Despite material loss, the references to ascent and a “guide” suggest the acquisition of a positive alternative, and here we see the Khlebnikovian aspect of Shvarts's verse: awe before a greater force, albeit one somehow invoked by the willful processes of writing. In a small text from 1996, the poet (unconvincingly) berates a serpentine, arboreal force that plows up her spine: “You have to serve me, / Fulfill the law, / Goblin-dragon / With your sweet smirk … You will help, Chinawoman. / When you crawl beneath my throat, / I feel glad, tickled and vile.”

This awful interplay between the “curse” of physicality and surrender to an unnerving, unruly (and hopefully better) alternative surfaces in Shvarts's “Car Poem” of December 1995. After the poem's conclusion, after the ordered thoughts of an ordered text, there is an appended “P.S.,” as if a troubling afterthought had slipped through the disguise of rational processes to express another, more persistent and irrational concern: “P.S. / Along the bed of an erstwhile canal / I slither in a disc-legged fish. / Trams, people, buildings slip by. / Where is the road taking me?” The two possible destinations are a bog or “radiance” (siian'e), which suggests a competition between cumbersome flesh and weightless light, with the aforementioned “flow” of smoke scribing an upward line to mark the sacrifice of mass. The linear, one-way riverbed that Shvarts is traveling appears to be governed by an overarching “spirit” (dukh) that transcends the more subjective experiences of soul and body. The poet's complex worldview becomes a little clearer when expressed as a hierarchy, as in “Blind Spring” (1996): “I sigh heavily—Oh, / Upward, and in reply / The spirit presses down upon my soul / As if fur.” Comforting, though somewhat imposing and claustrophobic. Once again, speech—or at least noise—is playing a key role in this process, one traced across several poems which together document the workings of this dukh.

Here is a hint of Shvarts's worldview, between generations and traditions. The often socially committed, ethically driven existential responsibilities of Russian, post-Hungarian Revolt verse are not appropriate. The subsequent or alternative isolation of an individual in society is expanded to metaphysical dimensions; hence her significance (and originality) as a poet, as a bridge phenomenon. This notion of bridge, however, whether sociological or spiritual, does not imply freedom, just as the Balkan smoke does not remain intact as it swirls away from its abandoned “flesh.” Shvarts feels painfully the bonds of physicality to whatever insights that physical frame may gain from pushing a pen across an existential carte blanche: “He whispers to the light wind: Amen— / A word for man to free God. / But God will never free him, / Man has no farewell word, / Though no one needs God here, / Like a heart to an invalid.” The dukh (whether specifically Christian or more synthetic) is a product of conversation, of an uneven dialogue. The earthbound speaker must surrender his or her mortal words of praise to an entity that offers no guarantee of release.

Synthesis, in several senses, is the key word to Shvarts's position in the canon, her esthetic, and this collection. It may come in the fairy-tale format of relations between a narrative poem's dramatis personae, each representing a given faith, or as an extradoctrinal elemental force: “Jews, Christians, / Pity prodigal March. / It bites, grows young, / And kisses the roots of grass.” Perhaps the most lyrical and direct expression of this desire to synthesize or “span,” one that will no doubt contribute to her significance as the compartmentalizing processes of literary history take hold, is the earliest poem of the book. Between two fields, two faiths, sits a “large sea gull” that leans both ways. “Oh, if only it could join / All faiths as one, as one / And bristling as a sun, / Fly up as a large mace.” The symbol of authority is stolen from the two-headed eagle (the bird of the horizontal plane, of imperial geography) and given to the homeless sea gull that transcends the distinctions between winds from East or West. It flies up on the vertical axis that creates the unity of Shvarts's worldview.