“The Russian Bayonet” in the Russian Literature of the 18th-20th Centuries: The Magic Weapon of the Empire

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.