The poetry of Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, who, along with other members of the USSR Writers’ Union, was “deployed” to Latvia in 1940, reflects a deliberate cultural mission. Their task was to kickstart the creation of Soviet Latvian literature—literature designed to smooth over the questions of “reunification” and to pacify a population whose memories were tense and restless. This was literature as social engineering, an attempt to reshape collective consciousness through verse.
And Comrade Nette was the predecessor of Adam Johann von Kruzenshtern—a Russian admiral and explorer of Swedish and Baltic German descent—whose Russian name (Ivan Fyodorovich) and steamer-like appearance is familiar to any late- and early post-Soviet kid thanks to mailman Pechkin.
However, it all began like this:
Vladimir Mayakovsky
“To comrade Nette — steamer and man”
Not in vain I start.
No ghost-talc rubbish, reader.
Through the harbour’s molten sunshine,
past the jetty
steams
the very self
of Comrade THEODORE
NETTE.
Yes, it’s he;
all in a hurry to arrive,
through those lifebuoy-saucer spectacles
he looks.
“Hullo, Netted
How I’m glad that you’re alive
with the smoking life of funnels,
ropes
and hooks.
Pull up here!
I hope it's not too shallow.
Tired,
I fancy,
boiling all the distance from Batum.
Once you were a man. . . .
Remember,
dear old fellow,
the tea that on a train we would consume?
One eye cocked
towards your red-sealed cargo,
nights on end,
while others snored away
about old Romka Yakobson
you’d argue,
memorising poems
in your funny way.
Off you’d drop at dawn.
Is that revolver there?
Better mind their business,
if they’re wise!
Could I think
that only in a year
I should meet you
in this cargo-steamer guise?
There’s the moon come up.
A stirring sight, I’ll say!
Slashing space in two,
astern she’s looming;
as if, it seems,
from that last battle in the passageway
your deathless hero-track
were trailing,
blood-illumined.
Your print-and-paper communism’s not believed so readily.
“Balloney, boy!
It’s true in books alone.”
But things like these
will show you communism bodily
transforming “fancies”
all at once
to flesh and bone.
We live under a pledge
that grips in iron unity, —
no crucifix will nail,
no guns on earth will crush us, —
that’s for humanity
to live in one community,
not in a world all parcelled into Latvias
and Russias.
Blood
runs in our veins,
not lukewarm water.
Marching
through revolver bark and blast,
when we die,
it’s to become immortal,
cast in steamers,
verse
and other things that last.
I could forge ahead
through years and years,
but when life is done,
there’s nothing better
I should wish
than meet the end
when my time nears
in the way
that death was met
by Comrade Nette
Translated by Dorian Rottenberg
To know more about Dolmatovsky’s role and construction of Soviet Latvian identity check the paper by Žans Badins