Georgy Chulkov

Georgy Chulkov Poems

Georgy Chulkov Biography

Georgy Ivanovich Chulkov (February 1, 1879 - January 1, 1939) was a Russian Symbolist poet, editor, writer and critic. In 1906 he created and popularized the theory of Mystical Anarchism. Chulkov was born in Moscow in the family of an impoverished Tambov nobleman. He studied medicine at Moscow University in 1898-1901. After joining a revolutionary student organization, he was arrested in December 1901 and exiled to Amga in the Yakutsk region of Siberia. He was amnestied in 1903 and was allowed to settle in Nizhny Novgorod, where he lived for a year. In 1904 Chulkov moved to St. Petersburg and became the de facto editor of Novy Put' (New Path), a literary magazine published by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. When the publication of Novy Put' was suspended in January 1905 during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Chulkov moved to Voprosy Zhizni (Problems of Life), its replacement, where he worked with its editors Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Lossky until it folded in December 1905. In 1906, Chulkov edited Fakely (Torches), an anthology of Symbolist writing, which called on Russian writers to: abandon Symbolism and Decadence and move forward to "new mystical experience". Later in the year Chulkov followed up with a "Mystical Anarchism" manifesto. Russian poets Alexander Blok and especially Vyacheslav Ivanov were supportive of the new movement while Valery Bryusov, the editor of the leading Symbolist magazine Vesy (The Balance), and Andrei Bely were opposed to it. Chulkov published a number of novels, poems and short story collections between 1906 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when he joined the Russian army. After the war and the Russian Civil War that followed, Chulkov returned to writing, but found it difficult to publish poetry and fiction under the new Soviet regime: for example, his unpublished poems made fun of Marxism. After 1922 he concentrated on literary criticism and Russian history. Between 1925 and 1939 he published books about the Decembrist revolt, Fyodor Tyutchev, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Don Quixote and the Romanov dynasty in the nineteenth century.)

The Best Poem Of Georgy Chulkov

Purple Autumn

Purple Autumn unloosened her tresses and flung them
On the heavens and over the dew-heavy fields.
She came as a guest to the old, silent house,
Singeing the grasses with red;
Through the garden she moved,-
Up the balcony; scarcely she touched
The fragile old rails.
She pushed the door-panel softly,
Softly she entered the room,
Sprinkling the rugs with her sun-yellow dust,
Dropped a red leaf upon the piano. . .
Ever after that hour, we heard her unceasing, her tireless rustling,
Rustle and stir and soft whisper.
And our hands suddenly met
With no new words, new and forever false.
As though we had hung a wreath of red roses
On a black, wrought-iron door
Leading into a vault
Where lay the rotting body
Of a beloved dream.
Autumnal days were upon us,
Days of inscrutable longing;
We were treading the stairs
Of autumnal passion.
In my heart a wound,
Like the lamp of an ikon,
Burned and would not be quenched.
The cup of autumnal poison
We pressed to our lips.
By the serpentine garden path Autumn had led us
To crepuscular lilies
Upon the pale, sand-humbled pond.
And over the lilied waters and in the roses of evening,
We loved, more superstitiously.
And through the dark night,
On the languorous bed,
At the feet of my love,
I loved death anew.
The minutes rang tinkling like crystals
At the brink of an autumn grave:
Autumn and Death drunkenly clinked their glasses.
I pressed my thirsty lips
To the feet the ikon-lamp burnished,
I drank the cup of love.
Burned by the fires of sins,
Stretched on the cross of lusts,
Shamed, being needlessly faithless,
I drank the cup of love.
In the hour of ineffable dalliance
I sensed the whisper
Of autumn pain, of autumn passion.
And kisses like keen needles
Burned and pierced,
Weaving a wreath of thorns.

Georgy Chulkov Comments