Article

Name: The Great War and Siberian Memory: Georgy Vyatkin in an American Poetry Anthology of 1916

Authors: A. B. Ustinov, I. E. Loshchilov

“Aquilon” Books & Publishing, San Francisco, USA; Institute of Philology SB RAS, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Siberian Writers and Siberia in the Russian Literature of the 20th Century

Abstract: The essay is dedicated to a rather extraordinary episode in the literary biography of the Siberian poet Georgy Vyatkin (1885–1938), when one of his poems was translated by the American social worker Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950) and published in 1916 in the magazine “The Russian Review.” The authors carefully reconstruct political and ideological contexts of this publication, directly linked to the United States’ entry into the Great War. They pay special attention to the literary and social activities of Alice Stone Blackwell. They discuss what place Vyatkin’s poem “To the Descendants’ took in Vyatkin’s literary biography in the time of the Great War. In 1914 he became a front-line correspondent for the Kharkov newspaper “Utro.” By 1915 he was drafted as a “ratnik” (soldier) by the army, and further served as an assistant within the medical and nutritional detachment under the command of another poet, Sasha Chernyi (Alexander Glikberg; 1880‒1932). Throughout the Great War, Vyatkin created an œuvre of literary works in verse and prose, which also includes his poem “To Descendants,” that was published in the magazine “Europe’s Messenger” and translated into English. Vyatkin revised some of his war poems after the Revolution, and adapted them to the circum- stances of the Civil War, from the perspective of the “White” press. At the same time, he became the Secretary of the War Archives Commission, which was created in 1918 under the leadership of the folklorist Ivan Ulyanov (1876–1937), who collected evidence of the modern memory of the Great War.

Keywords: “War Archive,” The Great War, Poetry Translations, Siberian Poetry, Georgy Vyatkin, Sasha Chernyi, Paul Fussell

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