Olga Bergholz in the Literary Field: Path to the Legitimation of Status

Abstract

The study examines the position of O. F. Bergholz in the literary field of the 1930s and the struggle for legitimization of the status of the Leningrad poet in the early 1940s. The purpose of the paper is to determine the place of the poetess in the literary process of the 1930s and to identify the factors (dispositions) that contributed to her successful creative realization during wartime. In the 1930s, despite the «consecration» of M. Gorky, of Bergholz's first books, she became an object of attacks and repression: she was in a situation of alienation from the writer's environment due to the “Averbach case”, and spent six-month in prison isolation following trumped-up charges of counterrevolutionary activity. It was not that Bergholz fought for a strong position in literary field, but for the mere survival in it. After the repressions and prison, the theme of human suffering came into focus of the poetess's attention; she came to be inclined to view the blockade hardships of Leningrad residents. Bergholz's habitus, her author's strategy aimed at “helping people mentally”, correlated with the tasks of wartime. The reader's expectations for support not by the “poetry of conditional formulas”, but by a simple and “relieving” word coincided with Bergholz's aesthetics. The blockade texts moved her from the periphery of the literary field to its forefront. The poetess expressed the joint traumatic experience in a form of “letters” and “conversations” with a lively, personal intonation; let the Leningrad theme manifested in a new style (“barely poems”); opened readers` eyes on “themselves”; she conveyed the existential experience of a person on the verge of death and saw the heroism of the Leningraders as a psychological issue (how to escape “dehumanizing”). These factors allowed her to achieve the legitimate status of the besieged Leningrad`s poetess.