View source for Prussian Nights

{{Short description|1947 long poem by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn}}
{{italic title}}
[[File:Solzh Prussian Nights.jpg|right]]

'''''Prussian Nights''''' ({{langx|ru|links=no|Прусские ночи}}) is a long poem by [[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]], who served as a [[Captain (land and air)|captain]] in the Soviet [[Red Army]] during the [[Second World War]]. ''Prussian Nights'' describes the Red Army's march across [[East Prussia]], and focuses on the traumatic [[Red Army atrocities|acts of rape and murder]] that Solzhenitsyn witnessed as a participant in that march.

Originally it was Chapter 8 of his huge autobiographic poem ''Dorozhen'ka'' (''The Road''), that he wrote in 1947 as a ''[[sharashka]]'' (scientific research camp) inmate. The original poem did not survive, but in 1950–1951, working in a hard labour camp near [[Ekibastuz]], Solzhenitsyn restored Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 (''The Feast of the Victors'') as separate poems.<ref name=Solzbio>[http://nivat.free.fr/livres/solj/03.htm Milestones] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030307055630/http://nivat.free.fr/livres/solj/03.htm |date=2003-03-07 }} by Georges Nivat {{in lang|ru}}</ref> The poem is in [[trochaic tetrameter]], "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, [[Aleksandr Tvardovsky]]'s ''[[Vasili Tyorkin]]''."<ref name ="NYT">Carl R. Proffer, [https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-prussian.html Russia in Prussia], ''The New York Times'', August 7, 1977</ref>

The poem is based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences&nbsp;– he was a captain of an artillery battery which formed a part of the [[Second Belorussian Front]], which [[East Prussian Offensive|invaded East Prussia]] from south-east in January 1945.<ref name="S1977"/> The Soviet offensive followed the path of the disastrous offensive by the [[Russian Second Army]] under [[Alexander Samsonov]] during [[World War I]]; the comparison with the Soviet victorious offensive is one of the underlying themes of the poem.<ref name="S1977"/>

Solzhenitsyn was arrested soon afterwards, in early February, three weeks after the offensive had started.<ref name="S1977"/> His arrest was partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians.<ref name="AMZ">Prussian Nights: A Poem. Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Robert Conquest. Review of by Alfred M. de Zayas, The Review of Politics, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Jan., 1978), pp. 154–156. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1407101 JSTOR]</ref> In the poem he recalls the pillages, rapes and murders committed by the Soviet troops taking their revenge on German civilians, the events which later resulted in the [[Evacuation of German civilians during the end of World War II|first part of the German exodus from Eastern Europe]],<ref name="AMZ"/> 
{{Verse translation|lang=ru|italicsoff=y
|<!-- original text -->
Дом не жжен, но трепан, граблен.
Чей-то стон стеной ослаблен :
Мать – не на смерть. На матрасе,
Рота, взвод ли побывал –
Дочь-девчонка наповал.
Сведено к словам простым :
НЕ ЗАБУДЕМ ! НЕ ПРОСТИМ !
КРОВЬ ЗА КРОВЬ и зуб за зуб !
|<!-- translation -->
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It's all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget!  Do not forgive!
Blood for blood!  A tooth for a tooth!
|attr1=[[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]: from ''Prussian Nights''&nbsp;(1974)<ref>{{cite book |title=Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |language=Russian |publisher=Ymca-Press |location=Paris |year=1974 |url=http://imwerden.de/pdf/solzhenicyn_prusskie_nochi_1974.pdf |script-title=ru:Прусские ночи — А. Солженицын |via=direct download 210 KB (64 pages) |author=Электронная библиотека}}</ref>
|attr2=Translated by [[Robert Conquest]]&nbsp;(1977)<ref name="AMZ"/> }}
Solzhenitsyn composed the poem—about twelve hundred lines and over fifty pages long—while he was serving a sentence of hard labor in [[Gulag]] camps.<ref name="S1977">Robert Conquest, ''Preface to English Edition'', in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ''Prussian Nights: A Narrative Poem'', Collins and Harvill Press, 1977, {{ISBN|0-00-262648-9}}, pp.6-7</ref><ref name="Blake">PATRICIA BLAKE, [https://web.archive.org/web/20121023001253/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919126-1,00.html A Flight into Poetry], TIME, Monday, Jul. 25, 1977</ref> He wrote a few lines of the poem each day on a bar of soap and memorized them while using it in his daily shower.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Nepo |first1=Mark |title=Finding Inner Courage |date=2020 |publisher=Red Wheel |isbn=9781633412217 |page=109 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ujrdDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA109 |access-date=25 October 2021}}</ref> He also wrote about how composing this poem helped him to survive his imprisonment: "I needed a clear head, because for two years I had been writing a poem—a most rewarding poem that helped me not to notice what was being done to my body. Sometimes, while standing in a column of dejected prisoners, amidst the shouts of guards with machine guns, I felt such a rush of rhymes and images that I seemed to be wafted overhead . . . At such moments I was both free and happy . . . Some prisoners tried to escape by smashing a car through the barbed wire. For me there was no barbed wire. The head count of prisoners remained unchanged, but I was actually away on a distant flight."<ref name="Blake"/>

He wrote down the poem between the 1950s and 1970s. He made a recording of it in 1969;<ref name="Blake"/> it was not published in Russian until 1974 when it was published in Paris, France.<ref name="AMZ"/> A German translation was done by Nikolaus Ehlert in 1976,<ref name="AMZ"/> and it was officially first translated into English by [[Robert Conquest]] in 1977.

Critical reaction was mixed. The ''[[New York Times]]'' reviewed it thus: "a clumsy and disjointed 1,400-line narrative which can be called poetry only because it is written in meter and rhyme. Sent to any publishing house of émigré Russian journal bearing any name but Solzhenitsyn's, it would be rejected unhesitatingly."<ref name ="NYT"/> A reviewer in ''[[New York Review of Books]]'' called ''Prussian Nights'', "for all its shortcomings, a powerful and moving work."<ref>Helen Muchnic. ["http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/oct/13/on-the-western-front/ "On the Western Front]. ''The New York Review of Books'', October 13, 1977.</ref> The literary critic, author and poet [[Clive James]] took a more positive view:<ref>{{cite book|orig-date=Chapter first published in the ''[[New Statesman]]'', 1977  |last1=James |first1=Clive |author1-link=Clive James |title=From the land of shadows |date=1983 |publisher=Pan |location=London |isbn=978-0330269940 |chapter-url=https://archive.clivejames.com/books/solzhenitsyn.htm |access-date=11 April 2022 |chapter=The Road to Berlin}}</ref>
{{bq|text=Even in his prose, Solzhenitsyn combines any amount of modern idiom with the whole heritage of literary Russian. Packed into tetrameters, such a vocabulary can yield a daunting variety of effects. [...] The pictorial quality of the whole poem is an eye-opener. There is always a tendency, on the part of his detractors, to make of Solzhenitsyn something less than he is, but here is further evidence that he is something more than even his admirers thought. At the very least, this poem should help to give us an adequate idea of the creative power which the young Solzhenitsyn brought to the task of re-establishing objective truth in a country whose government had devoted so much murderous energy to proving that there can be no such thing.
|author=[[Clive James]]
|title="The Road to Berlin" 
|source=''New Statesman'' (1977)}}

==See also==
*[[Evacuation of East Prussia]]
*[[Lev Kopelev]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

==Further reading==
* Complete text of the "Prussian Nights" poem in [[Russian language|Russian]], published by Ymca-Press, Paris, 1974: [http://imwerden.de/pdf/solzhenicyn_prusskie_nochi_1974.pdf  Прусские ночи — А. Солженицын.] PDF file, direct download 210 KB (64 pages). Printed in Belgium.
* Carl R. Proffer, [https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/solz-prussian.html Russia in Prussia], ''The New York Times'', August 7, 1977
* Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I(sayevich) 1918–: Critical Essay by William J. Parente from Literature Criticism Series
{{Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn}}

[[Category:1974 poems]]
[[Category:Poetry by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]]
[[Category:World War II poems]]
[[Category:East Prussia in World War II]]
[[Category:Poems about rape]]