“Words can kill, words can save,” warns the Russian poet Vadim Shefner. And words which assume the form of a poem especially carry weight. They can convey profound meaning. The old English proverb that goes “Sticks and stone can break my bones but names will never hurt me” sounds unconvincing. It rings hollow. Names do hurt!
Valentina Vasilevna believes in the lines of Vadim Shefner. She writes from experience that “Many mothers who call their children idiots, morons and stupid, don't understand what trauma they can inflict on a child. For example, my girlfriend couldn't dance because at home they mocked her by calling her “begemot” (Engl. hippopotamus). And many women decide not to marry because they are told, “Who needs an ugly person like you? You will never marry."
Valentina who is inspired by the poet Vadim Shefner appeals to people to use words to save people. We should insist, “'Don't shoot but save people with kind words!” For the whole history of poetry demonstrates that words do matter. Words do things! They have an impact. Words are not always just words or entail empty rhetoric. The wrong word can set off a heart attack or drive someone to suicide.
Stanislavsky wrote in his work “Building a Character” that when some person mentioned the mere word toothache to a person the listener immediately felt the immense pain of the toothache he had experienced in the past. Stanislavsky also wrote, “The word 'onward' when inwardly colored by patriotic emotion is capable of leading whole regiments to sure death.” He argued that the word 'love' ceases to be an empty sound when the speaker lets his genuine feelings, thoughts and imagination give life to the word.
How we use words with the homeless certainly cannot be underestimated. With the right words we might profoundly assist some homeless people.
Now of course there are some people who don't wholly agree. They don't see the value of poetry. They can dismiss poetry as pretentious, pointless and even torture! They don't deem poetry of any value because it has no utilitarian or commercial value. A poem won't feed you, they reason.
Many Russian school children curse Russian literature teachers for forcing them to learn whole poems by heart. The words of those poems are not always directly related to the experiences of the students, are viewed as irrelevant and a distraction from more pressing matters. Learning a poem becomes equated with passing a test or exam.
So poetry becomes associated with forced study or even a stifling atmosphere. For some students, words don't save but are like the bars of a prison school classroom.
A Russian philosopher Dmitry Pisarev demanded that poets should be utilitarian and argued that…
“We certainly do not say to the poet ‘make boots’ or to the historian ‘'Bake pies’ but we definitely demand that the poet, and the historian, as a historian, each according to his speciality, bring true utility” {pages 89-90, Pisarev, ‘The Realists,’ from Russian Volume 2 of “Russian Philosophy,” Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965}.
With this strict demand on poets you can see how many poets might come under pressure and assault.
Many poets are also accused of being fraudsters and liars. Umberto Eco even comes out with this absurd accusation.
However, a more serious objection comes from a poet Joseph Brodsky claiming that most people are not poetic at all and that poetry only resonates with a small elite {less than 1 % of the population}. Brodsky stated in his lecture 'An Immodest Proposal' that "Throughout what we call recorded history the audience for poetry does not appear to have exceeded 1% of the entire population. The basis for this estimate is not any particular research but the mental climate of the world we live in. In fact, the weather has been such that, at times the quoted figure seems a bit generous. Neither Greek nor Roman antiquity, nor the glorious Renaissance, nor the Enlightenment provides us with the impression of poetry commanding huge audiences, let alone legions, or battalions or of its readership being vast."
What are we to make of those claims? Certainly we have to acknowledge the limits of poetry. Poetry is no panacea for the world's ills. And you can encounter bad and pretentious poetry. It is not always easy for many people to make a connection between poetry and their direct experience. But these difficulties do not in themselves suddenly render poetry irrelevant or worthless.
It is easy to obtain such an impression when people treat poetry as some high-brow commodity reserved for a special elite and beyond ordinary people. There are some persons who view ordinary people as being too stupid to comprehend poetry. A rather snobbish and elitist view of poetry can alienate many people.
But the notion that only less than one percent of the population appreciates poetry does not stand up to scrutiny. The historian John Prebble rightly claimed, “Man's being is poetic…”' as did the German philosopher Heidegger. Just go out and observe very young children at nurseries. Children are actively playing and experimenting with words and showing their adoration of nursery rhymes. The rhythm and rhyme inherent in poems has a soothing and pleasant impact on listeners. A poem which is recited with melody and harmony consoles people. It can calm many people down….
This is what the Australian poet David Wanbrough told me while he was reciting poems to the dying in a hospice.
Let us not snobbishly claim there is no poetry in nursery rhymes! Of course, if you narrowly restrict poems to a particular genre or definition, it will appear as a minority interest. But poetry manifests itself in nursery rhymes—and in the lyrics of countless songs, puns, prayers, fairy tales, and riddles.
The Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael found that whole Scottish villages in the Highlands would attend ‘ceilidhs’ to listen to music, and hear stories and poems being recited. A ceilidh is an event where local people would gather to dance, sing, tell stories and recite poems for entertainment.
At the time of William Shakespeare ordinary people would flock to the theater to listen to his plays. And a lot of this prose reads like poetry! If poetry just appeals to one percent of the population how do you explain the popularity of Konstantin Simonov's poem “Wait for Me” with so many soldiers serving at the front during the Great Patriotic War? The poem “Wait for Me” is a plea by a soldier for his wife or girlfriend to remain loyal to him while he serves at the front so he can better survive.
The historian Orando Figes wrote, “Because it was written from the feelings of one person, it became necessary to millions, with the noise of battle everywhere, with shouting officers and barking commissars, people needed poetry to speak to their muted emotions; they yearned for words to express their sorrow, anger, hatred, fear and hope that agitated them.” A group of soldiers wrote to Simonov in 1945 stating, “Your poems live in our feelings... They teach us how to act with other people, especially with women, and for that reason they are loved by all of us. You alone have managed to express our deepest thought and hope” {pages 400- 4001 of Orlando Figes “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia,” London: Penguin, 2007}.
1.But it is worth detailing three ways in which the words of poetry really matter. The history of Scottish, Irish, and Russian folklore provides much evidence of how a poem was not just seen as a poem but was used as a charm, talisman, and spell to protect soldiers from being killed in battle. There are stories of Highlanders going into battle at Culloden in 1746 under the protection of 'a sain' and surviving a volley of shots. Macleod of Bearnary had gone into battle wearing a shirt blessed with the 'Death lifting saint of Saint Patrick.' The bullets simply bounced off his body when they hit him. In his work “The Carmina Gadelica,” the Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael diligently collected and recorded such charms.
During the war many soldiers went into battle with a written amulet with the written words of the 91st Psalm to protect them. In Russia this is the 90th psalm. If you read Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago you 'll come across the part where a Russian cadet survives being killed by the Red Army because he had worn an amulet with the 90th psalm in Slavonic.
I myself have come across many stories of how Russian soldiers survived the Great Patriotic War by using such charms. It is interesting to note that many soldiers believed that Simonov's poem “Wait for Me” could be used as a charm to protect them if they wrote it down and recited it!
So when Vadim Shefner stated words can save people some war veterans would readily agree!
Vadim Shefner
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2. Stanislavsky, the father of method acting, regarded poetry as very real and relevant to our everyday lives. In fact, he viewed the Russian poet Pushkin as the founding father of the Russian theater. In his works “An Actor Prepares,” and “Building a Character,” he quotes again and again the famous phrase of Pushkin: “Sincerity of emotions, feelings that seem true in given circumstances—that is what we demand of a playwright.” The same words also applied to actors. For the greatest playwrights and actors are not 'liars' but on the contrary the most honest people.
The whole works of Stanislavsky are attempts to preserve the purity of the words, and cleanse the theater of all pretentiousness, posing, egoism, and showing off. For him, a genuine artist is not motivated by fame, fortune or even popularity but by acting honestly, authentically and excellently from the soul. For him, poetry was a means to correct the crude and mechanical speech that characterized much of our everyday life not only in the theater but on the streets. He states, “In ordinary life we meet with mechanical expressions such as 'How do you do?' 'Pretty well thank you!’ or 'Goodbye, best of luck!'
What is a person thinking of while he is saying those automatic words? He is subject to neither the thought, nor the feeling essentially contained in them. They just pop out of us while we are absorbed by entirely different interests. We see the same in school. While a pupil is reciting something he has learned by rote he is often thinking of his own affairs and the mark the teacher will give him {page 95, Konstantin, Stanislavski, “Building a Character,” London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012}.
3. Poetry can serve as a kind of therapy. My colleague Oksana Chebotareva stated her mother reads the poetry of Sergei Yesenin to keep up her spirits. Her mother relishes and learns by heart his poems. Such poems often move her to tears because she feels the poet holds up a mirror to the difficult events of her own life. Oksana told me "She reads poetry by heart to prevent any dementia as well as to counter her depression."
The journalist Martin Sixsmith who visited Sergei Yesenin's grave in the Vagakovskoe Cemetery in Moscow recalled, “And even today when I know that whenever I go there, a troupe of Moscow down and outs {British English for homeless} eagerly recite for a little vodka money.”
What is it about Yesenin's alluring appeal? Well, he not only wrote brilliant verse with a perfected technique but there was a sincerity about everything he wrote. When he wrote a poem about feeling sorry for a homeless dog he really meant it. He readily admitted to being a hooligan and drunkard. He wrote about what matters most such as love, friendship, all kinds of problems as well as the beauty of the Russian countryside. “I might be a hooligan and a drunkard but I have never put people up against the wall and shot them," he mentioned. In one poem “Hold” he wrote, “Listening to the loud bicker, I tried to stop my worries by drowning myself in liquor.” In another poem he said with great insight into suffering “Well which of us on board a mighty ship has never brawled, nor barfed, nor fallen down? There are not many of them that will not despair when they are about to drown.”
With lines such as these you can see why many of the homeless could see Yesenin as one of them. Indeed, in some poems Yesenin refers to himself as either feeling homeless or a forever wanderer. The sense of being abandoned, shunned and deserted by past friends was often expressed by his later poetry.
Now perhaps the homeless who recite his poems won't stop drinking. Nevertheless, when they recite his poems they can become animated and alive by looking much younger. For a moment they are splendid street performers!
Perhaps Yesenin would wink and nod understandably.
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Recommended reading:
1. Constantin Stanislavsky, “An Actor Prepares,” and “Building a Character,” Bloomsbury Academic, translated by Elizabeth Reynolds. London and New York: Hapgood, 2013. Those books are gems. You don't have to be a would-be actor to read them. Anyone who is interested in poetry, culture and the theater as well as the history of Russia will appreciate them.
2. Orlando Figes, “The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. London: Penguin Books, 2007. He provides an excellent background to Simovov's poem “Wait for Me” and writes how some soldiers used it as a kind of talisman to protect them in battle.
3. Martin Sixsmith, “Russia: A 1000 Year Chronicle of the Wild East. London: BBC Books, 2011. Despite the odd title, Sixsmith's reference to Yesenin makes this a good read !
4. Christopher Scott Thompson, “Highland Martial Culture: The Fighting Heritage of Scotland. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press, 2009. This book provides detailed written charms and poems used by soldiers to protect themselves before going into battle. This work is a rare gem for those who like Scots culture.
5. “Russian Philosophy, Volume 2,” The Nihilists, The Populists, and critics of Religion and culture. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965. This book is most likely found in a library or a second hand bookshop. The chapter where Dmitry Pisarev speaks in his own words on poetry is revealing.
6. Valentina Vasilevna, “The Power of Words: Uninvented Stories,” number 12, March 2023, Saint Petersburg. This wonderful article is in Russian but is inspired by the poet Vadim Shefner whose words clearly resonates directly in the life of the author!
7. Joseph Brodsky, “On Grief and Reason: Essays.” New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. This poet always had something fascinating to say! For people who study literature this is a must!