... the Soviet poet Arkseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989), as a Red Army war veteran and amputee, was well-qualified to write on the devastating effects of world wars, Stalin’s Purges and state control of dissident writers. It seems we are back where we started.

Solar Eclipse 1914 takes us to Arkseny Tarkovsky who was born in Yelisavetgrad (formerly the Soviet Union but now Kropvnytskyi, central Ukraine). For film buffs, a delightful way into poetry is via his celebrated son Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror which includes some voice-over of his father reading his own poems, allowing Russian and non-Russian speakers alike to capture what Peter France in the blurb describes as their “dream-like potency of suggestion”.

In spite of the horrors of war, Tarkovsky maintains a degree of optimism in his poetry. This is due to a sustained, metaphysical stance in the Russian tradition of Tolstoyan pantheism, with the individual and nature part of a timeless continuum: “a world of secret correspondences” (‘In the Woodman’s Hut’) and time as transcendent. As part of the generation influenced by Silver Age poets one can hear half-echoes of Boris Pasternak’s ‘When the Weather Clears Up’ in Tarkovksy’s lines that read also as manifesto:

His awe at the world starts out with life-affirming nature poems, where he looks as through a magnifying glance at seemingly insignificant details: “I…dare not displace / this miniature pharaoh’s / resting-place” (‘Moth’). And even when merging it with the war context he maintains this sense of wonder: “… I fashioned / these birds with my very own hands / like the dead gripping day in the trenches / while we, with our bayonet gashes, / slept on in the trenches till day.” (‘Pigeons in the Square’).

The collection’s crowning pinnacle is the superb title poem which recalls the total eclipse of the sun that took place at the start of World War One just as Russian was invading East Prussia. Tarkovsky takes this childhood memory of receiving the gift of a rifle shell by a deserter – itself an interesting merging of kindness and war – at such an apocalyptic moment to combine collective mourning “In the summer a nation in mourning / was bound in iron chains” with a message of life’s survival from the natural world. Note, in particular, Tarkovsky’s clever combining of the glimmer of light from the disappearing sun with a very concrete image of a Russian scythe:

Somehow all converges to indicate life, no matter what continues.