Salon

The news that veteran actor Valery Tokarev died Sunday set me on a trail of thought about his profession. Tokarev did not act in theater or film; instead, he belonged to a special caste of performers called chtetsy (from the verb chitat, or "to read") who give solo performances, reciting poetry or prose by heart. Nowadays, those who devote their careers exclusively to this kind of art are rare. But in decades past, some of Russia's best-known movie stars also excelled as reciters of poetry.

It is often said that poetry has special significance for Russians. And since it is essentially spoken literature -- unlike prose, it can never be weaned from how it sounds -- the tradition of learning poems by heart and reading them aloud has always been strong in Russia. It takes at least three distinct forms. One is the self-representation of poets reading their own verse. The old, scratchy recordings of Osip Mandelstam or Vladimir Mayakovsky are often startling and unusual, as well as extremely interesting for the way they reveal the poets' perception of their own art; and we can only grieve that Alexander Pushkin, whose reading inspired contemporaries, died before the advent of the phonograph. The second form consists of readings by professional reciters. In Soviet times, they had immense influence on the imaginations of listeners in concert halls or over the radio. The poets noticed: Mandelstam, for one, stated in his politically questionable but powerful "Ode to Stalin" that "there is a glorious word for the reciter's strong lips," probably even having a specific performer in mind.

Thirdly, and most interestingly, the phenomenon has a popular dimension, too. Since memorizing poetry is part of the school curriculum, most Russians can quote some Pushkin and other classics, sometimes at considerable length. U.S. scientist and philosopher Douglas Hofstadter once wrote how fascinated he was that his chance Russian acquaintance knew big chunks of "Eugene Onegin" by heart.

Some time ago, I found myself spending part of the winter holidays with a group of high school kids and their teachers at a dacha outside Moscow. In the evening, they gathered in the attic and went through a ritual where every participant, holding a candle, recited a poem by heart. The candle made several circles to the accompaniment of Marina Tsvetayeva, Mikhail Lermontov, Josef Brodsky, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak. The teachers (none of whom taught the humanities) were even more impressive than the kids. It was a great pleasure to see that the tradition lives on.