A POET AND A PROPHET

Continuing our Russian Nietzsche-admiration series from the last entry, we are looking at another example of his identification as a prophet and a poet. In order to understand what we are talking about, one must be familiar with Pushkin’s powerful poem The Prophet, where the poet, akin to the great Prophets of the Bible, is called up for the prophetic duty by an angel of God. The fact that Nietzsche is a consummate philosophical poet must be apparent to everyone who is reading his works. The fact that he is a mighty prophet, as well as a poet, is revealed by Nietzsche himself, in the person of Zarathustra. The Russian critical tradition has always identified Nietzsche with Zarathustra, the poet and the prophet. Not surprisingly, Nikolai Gumilev puts Nietzsche in one rank with Confucius, Muhammad, and Socrates, who are, to him, all poets and prophets.
The great Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky gives himself the highest praise in the following lines of his long poem A Cloud in Pants:

“Listen!

“He is prophesying, ranting and raving,

“Today’s shouting-lipped Zarathustra!”

He is comparing himself to Nietzsche here, through Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and not to the Persian prophet Zoroaster. All Russian literary critics writing about Mayakovsky emphasize Mayakovsky’s feeling of a very special affinity with Nietzsche, whom he considers as his precursor, a fellow revolutionary of the spirit.
I must again emphasize that Gumilev and Mayakovsky (to name the giants only) are not some isolated cases of Russian Nietzsche-philia. They are just two big examples of an incurable Nietzsche-philia as a congenital obsessive “disease” infecting the Russian Intelligentsia since well over a century ago.