Conclusion

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. Part of the purpose of this study has been to recover a sense of the range and scope of the work of just one of the writers generally thought to be part of the world of official Soviet literature. Berggol′ts is known first of all for her wartime poetry; that work deserves to be placed firmly in the context of her writing before and after the war. Its importance should not be denied, but it should not be seen as a sudden, unprecedented outburst of creativity. In its exploration of Berggol′ts's writing, this study has shown that life and art became tightly entangled in her poetry and prose; the poet's own conviction that the two should be intimately connected is demonstrated by her texts. Yet it would be wrong to lose sight of the fact that we have been dealing with literary texts which must be viewed in relation to other literary texts. While much of what Berggol′ts wrote displays its connection with events in her life and in the life of her society, her writing also reveals its awareness of how others wrote. Russian literary tradition and the poetry of her contemporaries helped to form Berggol′ts's work.

Writing memory: intertextuality and intra-textuality

This chapter explores the web of intra-textual allusion that connects the most diverse of Berggol′ts's works. The intensely self-referential nature of her writing, particularly after the Second World War, suggests that the poet's creative response to contradictions she could not resolve was to embark on a continuing and open-ended process of self-refashioning, striving towards but never achieving wholeness. Berggol′ts's writing on the Leningrad siege is situated within the context of her work as a whole, rather than being analysed in isolation. This close study of the work of a single author will, it is hoped, provoke readers whose interests include Russian poetry, the literary history of the Soviet period, other ‘official’ writers in the Stalin era, and women's writing into reassessing the cultural heritage of an era that can seem remote and impenetrable.

Genre in Berggol′ts’s writing of the 1950s

This chapter looks at the writer's responses to her cultural context on the level of genre, examining her work in narrative verse, verse drama and autobiographical prose. It examines the following works: the 1950 narrative poem ‘Pervorossiisk’, the 1954 verse drama Vernos ť (‘Loyalty’), and the autobiographical prose account Dnevnye zvezdy (‘Daytime stars’), which appeared between 1954 and 1959.

Life and works

This chapter sets out a chronological account of the poet's career, her publication history and critical reception during her lifetime, and situates her among her contemporaries. It outlines the main trends in the critical treatment of Berggol′ts's work after her death.

The poetic self

This chapter looks at the poetic self in Berggol′ts's writing as a literary construct, informed not purely by biographical experience, but by literary tradition and other texts. An outline of Berggol′ts's views on lyric poetry is followed by a discussion of how the poetic self is constituted in her work, and an exploration of the multiple and conflicting discourses which construct the ‘I’ in her early writing, as well as of the preoccupation with contrast and contradiction in her poetic self-representation during the 1930s and 1940s. The rest of the chapter focuses on Berggol′ts's exploration of the possibilities for creating a unified poetic self which is capable of assuming a representative role as the voice of a generation. The whole discussion is informed by the question of the female poetic voice and its associations within Russian literary culture.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses the poetry of Ol′ga Berggol′ts. Unable to pretend to accept the values of the Stalin era without reservation, Berggol′ts combined in her poetry idealistic enthusiasm and Party loyalty with feelings of doubt and disillusion which question everything the Soviet establishment purported to stand for. The chapter then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to explore ways in which the poet sets her own individual emotions and experience at the core of her writing, while retaining a strong sense that those emotions and experiences were shared by her readers. The study contends that Berggol′ts succeeds in giving voice to the complexities of the Soviet experience, and that her engagement with these complexities has contributed to critical neglect of her writing.