This fascinating study aims to make a case for Maximilian Voloshin as a figure who might embody a new identity for Russia as a tolerant, free, and open society. Its appearance shortly after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 is timely: Voloshin and his legacy are strongly attached to Crimea. The theme of Russian national identity is also highly relevant; Landa shows how Voloshin's poetry evokes a Russian national identity that is as messianic as the Eurasian Russia envisioned by currently influential thinkers, but is founded in notions of reconciliation and continuity rather than hostility and separation.
The book is structured in two parts. The first, much larger part, investigates the poetry Voloshin wrote in response to the 1917 revolutions and the Civil War, while the second considers the contemporary relevance of the poet and his work for Russian identity. The title suggests, perhaps, that greater emphasis is to be placed on the latter topic. Given the limited scholarly engagement with Voloshin in the west, however, and the likelihood that most readers of this work will have only a glancing familiarity with his poetry, the detailed exploration of the creation and reception of Voloshin's works, set in the historical and cultural context of revolutionary Russia, is an essential foundation for what follows. The poems which Landa discusses in particular detail remained unpublished in Russia from the early 1920s to the late 1980s; an appendix supplies these texts both in the original Russian and in English translation.
Landa explains how Voloshin's thinking about Russia's destiny and his own role as a poet relate to the religious ideas he drew from the Russian Symbolist movement. His embrace of the notion of the poet not just as prophet, but as theurge, who through his words helps to realize God's will in the world, is shown to be central to his approach in representing revolution, revolutionary terror, and civil war. Like many of his Symbolist contemporaries, Voloshin believed Russia would pass through a violent revolutionary apocalypse and emerge transfigured to lead the rest of the world to salvation; unlike most of them, he did not see the February Revolution as the start of a new spiritual era but as the prelude to far greater violence, and so, Landa argues, he was prepared to respond immediately to the October Revolution not as a catastrophe that ruined his previous messianic dreams, but as part of the journey towards salvation. Yet, as Landa points out, Voloshin's poems on the Red Terror in Crimea show that he could not always find ways of endowing sustained acts of brutality and degradation with redemptive significance, preferring to give a voice to the victims rather than seek a purpose in their killers' actions.
The first part of the book illustrates clearly the characteristics which might make Voloshin an appealing figure for those hoping to construct a twenty-first-century identity for Russia which would emphasize continuity while enabling a cathartic acknowledgement of the “painful complexity” (163) of the Soviet past. Voloshin avoided taking sides; his poems, as Landa shows, were read, published, and admired by those on both sides of the Civil War, offering a vision of at least some hope for a Russian nation in the future. A particularly interesting aspect explored in Chapter 2 of Part One is Voloshin's role as a “poet of Russia.” It examines his engagement with readers in the Civil War years, from whom he solicited comments, to whom he both recited his poetry and provided commentary on it at public lectures, and who circulated his work in ways that, Landa argues, anticipated samizdat. The public comes to the fore once more in Part Two of the book, which includes material taken from online discussions of the religious significance of Voloshin's poetry from a forum for Orthodox believers, showing that the poet's nonconformism appealed not just to the educated urban population, but also to more conservative-minded people in small towns and villages.
The second part of the book, dealing as it does with very recent developments in contemporary culture, suggests a possible travel direction rather than a destination description. Its conclusion points to a sharp distinction between the Russian President's view of Crimea as Russia's own Holy Land, and Voloshin's view of it as a place that represents a dream of the “spiritually enlightened, multinational, and cosmopolitan Russia” (190). Landa's study is to be welcomed for its careful engagement with a poet who modelled such inclusiveness in his own life and writing.
