Émile Verhaeren and the question of Bolshevik poetry

Émile Verhaeren, though largely forgotten today, was famous during his life-time and in the decades immediately after his death, his celebrity stretching from London to Moscow. This article argues that the reasons for this celebrity were nevertheless profoundly different in East and West: in England, France and Belgium, Verhaeren owed his fame largely ‐ though not exclusively ‐ to his reputation as a Belgian patriot against the background of WWI, and as the spokesman for Flemish cultural identity. In Russia, by contrast, after both the 1905 Revolution and the 1917 Revolution, Verhaeren was read as a prophet of proletarian-led social change. This reading was determined both by its political context and its theoretical context: that is, the debates on socialist realism in the young USSR. How could socialist realism ‐ a theory developed around the novel ‐ provide a relevant analytical framework when it came to poetry? Verhaeren???s verse seemed to offer an answer to this question. Furthermore, not despite, but thanks to, this strong contextual determination, Soviet critics picked up on something in Verhaeren’s poetry that most Western readers missed.