«Boris Savinkov Is My Brother»: The Poetics of Courtroom Procedure
and Marina Tsveataeva’s Author’s Projections

The paper deals with the aesthetic aspect of how the émigré literature
reflected the «Savinkov story». Fragments of the court transcript of 1924
and a very literary speech, full of the recognizable decadent and modernist formulae,
were published by all the leading Soviet and émigré press and provoked
a wild reaction of all the agents of the political field. The trial's theatrically constructed
«turn» – the unyielding Savinkov unexpectedly acknowledging the Soviet
authority – and the following uproar in the media, produced a wave of journalistic
texts and drew into discussion of the Savinkov and «savinkovschina»
phenomenon a number of influential writers and journalists, sometimes with
opposite oilitical and wasthetic views. Marina Tsvetaeva’s statement surprisingly
includes Savinkov in the pantheon of «brothers» where she used to put her
literary associates. Possible origins of Tsvetaeva’s ideas about her personal kinship
may include the émigré press, but also personal impressions of their common
acquaintances. For example, Maximilian Voloshin had many contacts with
Savinkov. Voloshin, as well as Tsvetaeva later on, imagined Savinkov as his
personal «mirror», an embodiment in a radically different person of the principles
of his own nature (this projection is centered around the idea of veing outside
all parties, both political and aesthetical). Voloshin sees Savinkov as a politician of a Caesarian or a napoleonic type, with a «bomb» inside. In his poem
«Ropshin» (1915) he designs his hero’s image according to the aesthetics of the
synthetic modernism, combinig contradictory character traits (exterior coldness
and interior passion), arts (sculpture and pencil study), historical and cultural
layers (the «iron» 19th century and Renaissance – the 16th century, «the times of
the last Valois»).
Conjunction of the caesarism-bonapartism with aristocratic qualities, already
reflected by Voloshin in 1915, becomes a mainstream line in the reflection
around Savinkov in 1924. The widest span of the émigré press – from the Berlin
SR paper «Dni» to the Belgrade right-wing «Novoye vremya» – shows along
the expected mutual reproaches for symbolically «nurturing» Savinkov as a politician
a unique consensus in the aesthetic field. And when the numerous journalist
describe Savinkov’s qualities that allegedly predestined his treachery,
those qualities echo the personality type created by the particular literarty
movement: from nietzscheanism, immoralism and individualism to artistry,
«immeasurability» and panaestheticism. Anti-Savinkov campaign thus becomes
anti-modernist. This disposition was probably why Tsvetaeva’s intuition
prompted her not only to refrain from finding herself among self-punishing
modernists but to put Savinkov, already dead by that time, in the core of the
national identity.