Selvinsky’s <i>Ulyalaevshchina</i> in 1924–1927

Abstract

A detailed reconstruction of the history behind the creation and publication of I. Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina, a narrative poem about the Russian civil war in the Urals, following the 1917 revolution. Composed in 1924, Ulyalaevshchina was first published in 1927 and then underwent numerous alterations by Selvinsky, to a detrimental effect. The 1920s–1930s saw four publications of the poem as a separate book; the poem was considered a masterpiece of Selvinsky’s and of contemporary Soviet poetic output in general. However, its subsequent publications in the 1930s were unofficially vetoed up until the early Thaw years, when, in 1956, the poem was published again upon radical redrafting by the author. The scholar makes a meticulous comparison between various archive versions of Ulyalaevshchina, comments on textual juxtapositions and finds that the poem, conceived as a ‘verse novel’ about the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik pillaging of rural settlements during the food confiscation campaign (prodrazvyorstka), was intentionally rewritten by Selvinsky as an exemplary Soviet epic, which could not but damage the poem’s quality and intonation.