Alexander Vvedensky
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Sniffing ether: After Vvedensky introduced Kharms to sniffing ether, Kharms wrote him this poem, dated March 5, 1927:
My friend kept falling into the funny bathtub
The wall rotated around
A charming cow swam
There was a street above the house
As my friend flickering on the sand
He walked the rooms in one sock
Twirling his hand like a magician
His left hand first and then the other
Flinging his body on the bed
Meanwhile a corncrake in the marsh
Twittered its little hat and howled
My friend was in the tub no more
An hour and 1 ½: So in the original.
The soundface of the fox: Possibly a reference to Khlebnikov’s poem “Bobeobi sang the lips” (c. 1909), which expresses a portrait’s features in zaum.
Mayflies are hundred-year-old dogs compared to them: Textual emendation of “them,” nimi, for “us,” nami.
The seventh hour descends upon everything: Seven signifies the end of the world. See “five and six,” below.
I do not un: Break in manuscript.
GUEST ON A HORSE
I heard the hoofbeat of a horse: The meter of the original alludes to Poe’s “Raven.” The imagery alludes to The Bronze Horseman.
FOUR DESCRIPTIONS
There are eight speakers in this poem. The first four—Zumir, Kumir, Chumir, Tumir—presumably gods of the land of the dead, recall Khlebnikov. Of their zaum-like names, one, Kumir, is Russian for “idol.” The other three are not entirely nonsensical either.
Mir, “world,” was a key hieroglyph of the Lipavsky circle. Tumir sounds like tut mir, “here is a world,” or tot mir, “the other world, the world of the dead.” As for Zumir and Chumir, premodern names for the letters ch and z are cherv’ or “worm,” and zemlia or “earth.”
All eight speakers are designated with the help of the meaningless string umir. For the second group of four speakers, though, it begins the word umirayuschiy, “dying man.” The fact that the ordinals in their names contradict orders of appearance (3, 1, 2, 4), storytelling (3, 2, 1, 4), and death (2, 1, 3, 4), indicates the atemporal state of the dead (or forever dying) speakers. By contrast, their accounts emphasize history and even chronology.
The third dying man’s recollection of the Great War is quite confused: some of the events he describes took place the year after his death, while others never took place at all. The guests of the second dying man debate the emancipation of Russian serfs, which became law in 1861. The first dying man mentions artists regarded as “progressive” in the first decade of 1900: the painter Ilya Repin, the American dancer Isadora Duncan, and the symbolist poets Alexander Blok and Konstantin Balmont. The fourth speaker falls in the Russian Civil War.
I was sitting in my living: The Russian is a series of five terms of similar sound but increasingly unsuitable meanings. Compare with names in “The Soldier Ay Bee See.”
five and six: One of five or six characters in Vvedensky’s 1929 poem “Five or Six” explains: “That we particularly have five or six horses I say deliberately approximately, since you can never say anything exact anyway.” Druskin in The Conversations regards numerical statements about the world as inherently false. Kharms positions the natural number sequence 1–6 as characteristic of this world, fallen and rational. Vvedensky, in “The Witness and the Rat,” ejects his suicides from a sixth-floor window. The significance of six and seven as numbers of the apocalypse (e.g. the seventh hour in “The Gray Notebook”) derives from the biblical Book of Revelation.
THE WITNESS AND THE RAT
Margarita: Heroine of Goethe’s Faust.
Co-ed: In the original, kursistka, student of a women’s college in Imperial Russia.
Petr Ivanovich Ivanovich Ivanovich, Grudetsky the Steward, Stepanov-Peskov, Kostomarov, Griboedov: The first three names are impossible or silly for sundry reasons; the fourth is that of a Russian historian; the fifth, of a Russian Romantic writer who fled to Georgia.
THE SOLDIER AY BEE SEE
Ay Bee See: In the original, Az Buki Vedi, premodern names of the first three elements of the Cyrillic alphabet, which together mean, roughly, “I know letters.”
Fundamental guiding thought: Mikhail Meilakh and Vladimir Erl’ note the deconstruction of Stalinist—and perhaps Stalin’s own—turns of speech in this text.
Andrey...Lialya...Both series start with conventional names but turn into nonsense.
Walnut, brazil nut: In Russian, literally, “Greek nut” and “American nut.”
and... Break in manuscript.
I walked a long: Vvedensky’s widow, Galina Viktorova, recalled Vvedensky singing this lullaby to his son Peter, born September 1937, as he lay in his crib. The spacing of the English approximates that of the Russian.
Courageously we: Break in manuscript.
ELEGY
The critic Nikolai Khardzhiev called “Elegy” “an epitaph for the age” and recited it to Akhmatova before the war. Vvedensky’s summation is dense with literary allusions. Many lines refer to the poet’s own work. Others recall Pushkin, not only The Bronze Horseman but also a plethora of lyrics, especially “The Farm-Cart of Life,” whence the analogy between life and a farm-cart ride. Still others evoke even earlier poetry, like the deathbed ode of Gavrila Derzhavin. The epigraph paraphrases the 1927 “Elegy” of OBERIU member Igor Bakhterev.
Singer: Rough draft has “poet.”
Acknowledgments
The translators would like to thank
Edwin Frank, Jeffrey Yang, and NYRB Poets for rescuing this project;
The editors of A Public Space, Ars-Interpres, Conjunctions, Common Knowledge, Fence, The Germ, Infinite Instances: Studies and Images of Time, Little Star, Modern Poetry in Translation, New American Writing, The Russian Avant-Garde and Radical Modernism: An Introductory Reader, and Words Without Borders for publishing earlier versions of these translations;
Ugly Duckling Presse and Northwestern University Press for letting us include revised versions of “The Gray Notebook,” “Rug Hydrangea,” and “Elegy”;
The MacDowell Colony, the NYU Liberal Studies Program, and the NYU Humanities Initiative for generous support of Eugene Ostashevsky’s efforts;
Alexei Parshchikov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Brandon Downing, Genya Turovskaya, Anna Moschovakis, Mikhail Iossel, Michael Meylac, Andrey Ustinov, and others who offered suggestions and support.
OTHER NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS / POETS TITLES
MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ Selected and translated by Don Share
A.K. RAMANUJAN The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from the Classical Tamil
PIERRE REVERDY Edited by Mary Ann Caws
ALEXANDER VVEDENSKY An Invitation for Me to Think Selected and translated by Eugene Ostashevsky