Whose Kliuev, Who is Kliuev? Polemics of Identity and Poetry

The poet Nikolai Kliuev (1884–1937) has fascinated and provoked to polemics successive generations of Russian readers, attracting to this day treatments that range from the hagiographical to the denunciatory. In his own lifetime he elicited strikingly diverse reactions from those who came into contact with him or who read him. In many cases, those reactions, both hostile and favourable, sprang not only from contrasting perceptions of the poet’s own individual identity, but also and especially from opposite conceptions of the cultural identity of Russia itself, with reference to which the poet himself self-consciously constructed aspects of his poetics and his literary image. When Kliuev ‘returned’ in full to the libraries and book stores of Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, he and his works once again became an arena of violent dispute in which opposing camps fighting to claim the national cultural heritage and its meaning disputed ownership of Kliuev as part of a large, even grandiose agenda of cultural ideology. The stories of him and his work thus provide eloquent testimony to the fault lines discernible in national culture during and even after the twentieth century, and the reiteration of disputes across several generations provides vivid evidence both of continuity and, on closer inspection, also of change and dislocation in the ways in which Russia and its culture are imagined. The persistence into the present of mythological constructions of Kliuev’s life and persona, at least some of them now patently contradicted by widely available evidence, testifies also to a very strong desire among many commentators on Russian culture to demonstrate the existence in the recent, but materially remote, past of the country of an authentic and