Orthodox Poets of the Soviet Era: Aleksandr Solodovnikov, Vasily Nikitin, Sergey Averintsev, Elena Pudovkina

Abstract

The article explores the work of Orthodox poets during the Soviet era, particularly focusing on Aleksandr Solodovnikov, Vasily Nikitin, Sergey Averintsev, and Elena Pudovkina. It formulates a general principle of the poetic style of these authors as the principle of soul, word, and world transformation, realized through prayerful and confessional expressions. The distinctive feature of the resurging Orthodox poetry in the 20th century primarily lay in its pursuit of maximum immediacy, simplicity, and originality, deliberately transcending “literariness,” which was particularly burdensome for individuals of the 20th century. In turn, the analysis reveals that due to this aspiration for the primacy of the word, it unexpectedly proves to be far more complex than it appears at first glance. It carries not only profound meanings of Orthodox faith but also the deep tradition of Christian “literariness” in the best sense of the term—an active continuity with the texts of predecessors, reaching back to ancient Russian and Byzantine heritage. Moreover, it strives to reproduce the spirit of the Gospel’s word, as far as it is humanly possible. Literary creation for an Orthodox person is justified and beneficial only when it constitutes a part of their spiritual self-improvement and transmits the experience of this work to others. It represents the work of soul transformation by the grace of God, captured in the word. Spiritual poetry is traditional not only in content but also in form, oriented toward classical poetry of the 19th century as its model. In cases when it diverges from this model, it does not tend toward the modernism of the 20th century but, conversely, delves into the deep archaism of the early centuries of Christianity, sometimes directly aligning with the structure of the Gospel’s word and canonical church hymns. This is logical since the breakdown of classical poetic structure in the 20th century was a consequence of secularization—the despiritualization of the world and language. Accordingly, the reverse process inevitably led to the revival of the style of classical poetry and even its earlier form—the church poetry.