Dmitrii Maksimov’s Seminars on Blok

Dmitrii Maksimov, © Institut mirovoi literatury RAN.

Dates: 1945–1975

Place: Leningrad

Description:
Dmitrii Evgen’evich Maksimov’s seminars on Aleksandr Blok (Blokovskii seminar) represent one of the most significant contributions to Russian academia in the twentieth century (1904-1987). A professor at the Leningrad State University (LGU), an expert on Russian Symbolism, an eminent specialist on Blok and a poet in his own right ^[1], Maksimov was born into a family of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsiia. He was educated in the intellectual milieu of turn-of-the-century Russia, experiencing first hand the culture of the epoch to which he would devote a lifetime of research and teaching.
His seminars on Blok have a prominent place in the overall framework of Maksimov’s career on account of the large following they gained and the importance they had for those who attended them. Their genesis can be traced to 1940 when Maksimov was employed as a lecturer at the Pokrovskii Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad  (cf. Kupriianovskii 1989: 9) but from the post-war years onwards, the seminars became increasingly linked to the Faculty of Philology at the Leningrad State University where they were held, with some interruptions, for about twenty years. Given the potentially unorthodox subjects discussed, the seminars inevitably attracted the attention of the authorities controlling Academia. The seminars’ focus was the Symbolist poet after whom they were named, but their outlook was broader and included other poetic voices from the Silver Age, which did not win easy approval from the censors. Official acceptance, however, was never their aim and the participants often openly defied Soviet restrictions, which in the post-war period – first in the years of the zhdanovshchina and then in the period of the “Anti-cosmopolitan campaign” – were particularly oppressive, especially in Leningrad (cf. Druzhinin 2012a: 7-8; Sabbatini 2015b: 28).
At the State University the seminars had two main phases: a first short phase initiated by Maksimov in the academic year 1945-1946 (cf. Kamenskaia-Mints 1989: 11) when lectures were held once a week and attended by about fifteen people, including students, doctoral candidates, alumni and poets who were entrusted with compiling bibliographical reviews on Blok and writing papers on specific aspects of his or other authors’ work from the modernist period. The meetings were more than didactic events in that they evoked the ambiences of the Symbolist reunions of the early 20^th century (cf. Maksimov 1989: 575); debate was encouraged before final reflections were given by Maksimov himself (cf. Kupriianovskii 1989: 9; Kamenskaia-Mints 1989: 11-14). Among those who attended these first seminars, was the future scholar Z. G. Mints, a brilliant student of Maksimov’s who went on to play a leading role in the dissemination of his teachings at the University of Tartu (cf. Lavrov 2006: web).
Maksimov’s focus on pre-revolutionary poetic themes at a time when an official, ideological concept of literature was increasingly promoted to the exclusion of all other modes of literary expression, is indicative of significant intellectual courage  (cf. Kupriianovskii 1989: 6).  However, towards the end of the 1940s, when the conflict between “ideology and philology” grew more acute, it became impossible to pursue a non-ideological approach to literature and in 1950, Maksimov left the Leningrad State University and moved of his own accord to the Pokrovskii Institute, where he taught until 1956 (cf. Paiman 2000: 533; Sabbatini 2015a: 204). During this period, his research shifted to the Romantic era, with particular regard to the work of Mikhail Lermontov (cf. Markovich 2007: 255) and the seminars on Blok were officially suspended although they continued clandestinely in Maksimov’s private flat (cf. Kamenskaia-Mints 1989: 14).
In 1957, with the advent of de-stalinisation, Maksimov returned to the Leningrad State University and to the didactic and research projects he had previously been forced to shelve. In this less restrictive academic climate, his studies returned to focus on Blok, and his seminars on the author resumed and continued until the end of his career in 1975 (cf. Azadovskii-Lavrov 1994: 588; Sabbatini 2015a: 204, 208). The regime’s mistrust of Maksimov did not entirely fade, but there was a greater tolerance than during the Stalinist period and it was at this time that the activity of the seminars came to full fruition (cf. Kupriianovskii 1987: 214). Maksimov continued to introduce younger generations of students to Russia’s literary past that risked being “squandered” if it did not play an essential role in their education: “We continued to need Blok, to see him as a great poet. He was necessary, probably, both for some last conversations with our conscience, and for understanding the approaches to ‘aesthetic consciousness’ of our own time” (Maksimov 1986: 379).
In this phase, alongside the approach of the 1940s, a new type of activity was introduced described by Maksimov as a “walk among different poetics” (progulka po raznym poėtikam), which involved in-depth studies and textual analyses of single poems (cf. Al’mi 2007: 35; Bel’kind 2007: 202), although the aspect most appreciated by students remained the debate and free interchange of thoughts with their professor. New attendees in this second phase included V. B. Krivulin, S. G. Stratanovskii, T. S. Bukovskaia, K. М. Butyrin, L. V. Vasil’ev, A. S. Kushner, K. M. Azadovskii, V. L. Toporov, E. A. Kumpan, L. N. Stolovich, S. S. Grechishkin and others, while former participants, such as the Z. G. Mints and established scholars, such as B. F. Egorov and V. Ia. Propp also took part (cf. Sabbatini 2015a: 207; 2020: 45).
This list contains many of the future exponents of Leningrad’s “Second Culture”, whose poetic identity was influenced not only by masters such as G. S. Semёnov, D. Ia. Dar, T. G. Gnedich, and E. G. Ėtkind, but also by the symbolist and modernist traditions they came into direct contact with thanks to Maksimov’s seminars (cf. Dolinin-Severiukhin 2003: 11; Sabbatini 2015: 206-207). Maksimov’s teaching has had a deep historical and cultural significance. Moreover, his didactic methods were closely connected to his approach as a scholar which was animated by a genuine vocation for research rather than “vulgar sociologism”. In following this goal he laid the foundations for a solid non-ideological scholarship of Symbolism that continues into our own times (cf. Egorov 2004: 46-47; Lavrov 2006: web). He also connected poetic generations in a way that was to prove decisive for the USSR’s independent culture, and promoted the natural mechanisms of literary evolution that Stalinist ideological-cultural policy had tried in every way to halt (cf. Sabbatini 2020: 12). Maksimov’s seminars provided a fertile soil that guaranteed the preservation of modernist poetic traditions and ensured their vitality and development in the Soviet era.
Maksimov died at the dawn of perestroika, when the Silver Age had ceased to be a forbidden subject. One of his former students described him as having accompanied the nascent literary generations up to a precise point along the crucial path of recovering a prosperous poetic epoch from oblivion (cf. Galanina 2007: 129).

Notes

[1] Maksimov wrote poetry throughout his life, although it remained largely confined to his private sphere. The small circle of those who knew his verses includes poets such as A. A. Akhmatova, B. L. Pasternak, N. A. Zabolotskii, and K. K. Vaginov, who Maksimov knew and esteemed. Some poems were published under the pseudonym Ignatii Karamov (sometimes Ivan Ignatov) in the early 1970s in tamizdat, in issues 79, 87, 88 of “Grani”. A first volume of his poetry was published in 1982 in Lausanne by L’Âge d’Homme, still under pseudonym, but without the author’s supervision. The first poems bearing the author’s own name circulated posthumously via samizdat, most notably in issue 11 of “Obvodnyi kanal” and issue 75 of “Chasy”, accompanied, in the latter case, by a preface by S. G. Stratanovskii. A second volume, edited by K. M. Azadovskii, was published in St. Petersburg in 1994, in the post-Soviet era.

Cecilia Martino
[31^st December 2022]

Bibliography

Cited sources

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Sitography

• Andrei Belyi Tsentr – Arkhiv samizdata, Maksimov Dmitrii Evgen’evich, https://samizdat.wiki/Максимов_Дмитрий_Евгеньевич, online (last accessed: 31/12/2022).
• Russkaia Virtual’naia Biblioteka, IGNATOV Ivan (Dmitrii Evgen’evich Maksimov), https://rvb.ru/np/publication/02comm/01/ignatov.htm, online (last accessed: 31/12/2022).