by Iliazd
By December 21, Zdanevich was already being advertised as a “mezzo-soprano” in a piece arranged for “Dada Lir Kan” by Sergei Charchoune, a Russian Paris resident from before the war who had become a regular participant in Tzara’s and Francis Picabia’s Dada soirées. The prospect of uniting 41° with Dada excited Zdanevich’s Russian compatriots who were already active in the Dada group (Valentin Parnakh and Sergei Romov, in addition to Sergei Charchoune).48 Zdanevich participated selectively and became friendly with members of different emerging Dada factions, but he remained wary of identifying too closely with Dada, skeptical as to whether their poetic missions were really directed toward the same end.49 Unfortunately, by the time Zdanevich arrived in Paris, Dada was reaching a crisis. Picabia had already broken with Tzara, and André Breton was giving clear signals that he felt Tzara’s approach to literature and art was not quite serious enough. Zdanevich was thankful to his Dada connections for the attention he received from the French-language press. Still, he poured much of his energy into preparing a magnificent edition of the last of his dras, lidantIU as a bEEkon, engaging Paul Éluard to write a French preface.
Before he could finish, Paris Dada was over. Iliazd had used the occasion of a visit by Mayakovsky in November 1922 to announce the formation of the “Through” (Cherez) group of young émigré writers, who intended to establish close ties with both French and Soviet avant-gardes.50 Mayakovsky’s promise to organize a corresponding group in the Soviet Union led to the founding of LEF, the Left Front of the Arts, in January 1923. Zdanevich also quickly became active in the Union of Russian Artists in Paris, later filling the office of secretary and, in 1925, president.51 Since Tzara’s reputation for destructive scandal prevented him from renting halls in Paris for Dada soirees, Iliazd and Through took responsibility in July 1923 for arranging the “Evening of the Bearded Heart,” a program of music, poetry, film, and a performance of Tzara’s “Gas-operated Heart.” Breton, accompanied by Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret, rushed the stage and began beating Pierre de Massot before being removed by police from the hall. After an intermission, Éluard confronted Tzara directly as the play was beginning and the evening ended in a mêlée that sealed the final separation of Breton’s group from Tzara’s.52 Initially, Iliazd and most of his Russian associates took Tzara’s side, but it wasn’t long before the Russians were back on friendly terms with the group that became known in 1924 as the Surrealists, since, for a time at least, they shared aesthetic and ideological interests.
Once these dustups settled down, Iliazd had every reason to believe he would be able to support a Russian-language artistic grouping independent of the dominant anti-Soviet Russian émigré circles. Surrealists were eager to collaborate with Through, and the Union of Russian Artists held annual fund-raising balls that became legendary events in Parisian life, attracting high-profile collaborators like Picasso. France finally recognized the USSR and included a Soviet Pavilion in the 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts, where work by Constructivists like Alexander Rodchenko was displayed alongside a copy of Iliazd’s lidantIU as a bEEkon.53 It looked as though publishing opportunities for leftist artists living in France would soon open up in the Soviet Union. The Union of Russian Artists went so far as to pass a resolution declaring loyalty to the Soviet Union in January 1926.54 Iliazd was even able to find work as a translator in the new Soviet embassy.
But there were countervailing forces. Inflation in Germany brought a new wave of young Russian writers from Berlin. Writers who joined a series of newly established competing organizations, including the Poets’ Guild (whose Acmeist founder, Nikolai Gumilev, was revered as an anti-Bolshevik martyr and was executed in 1921), were gradually given privileged access to the most important émigré salons and to major Russian-language journals and newspapers. The Union of Young Poets and Writers received a blessing from Vladislav Khodasevich, a leading conservative poet and critic, to explicitly combat Futurism’s prestige and Boris Pasternak’s influence among young Russian émigré writers.55 Writers like Parnakh, who had enthusiastically moved to the Soviet Union beginning in 1922, sent or brought back disturbing news about bureaucratic stonewalling, growing anti-Semitism, and worse. And no sooner had the Soviet government established direct contact with leftist artists in Paris than official policy turned against the avant-garde in Russia, including Mayakovsky.56 Iliazd became increasingly isolated in what he called “poetic reclusion.”57 One of his last remaining disciples, the poet Boris Poplavsky, addressed the situation in a poem dedicated to Jean Cocteau and titled with Iliazd’s favorite ready-made phrase, “A Criminal Attempt Using Unsuitable Means”:
We’re in coffins for one, fit tight
Where our breath coos without purpose
We wear straitjackets in the night
And rap back and forth our verses.58
By 1928, Poplavsky could not endure yet another unrealized edition of his poetry. The lure of publication in the major journals drew him, too, into the mainstream of the emigration. Iliazd’s French contacts among writers diminished after he broke with Breton, the “Roman pope” of Surrealism, when Breton forbade all criticism of Soviet bureaucracy.59 Iliazd, still quixotically claiming to speak “in the name of the young writers,” made a spectacular break with all the Russian factions at a meeting of the Franco-Russian Studio on April 29, 1930, where he requested the floor after a paper on emerging features of the Russian émigré novel and a response from a committed Communist who claimed there was no Russian literature outside the Soviet Union. A Riga newspaper account reported that this “exemplar of literary failure” who “writes endlessly under the strange pseudonym ‘Iliazd’ ” and whom “no one publishes” or “takes seriously” asserted that the whole world should learn from Soviet literature and that émigré writers were “pretenders at best.”60 One month after he published Rapture and two weeks after Mayakovsky’s suicide, Iliazd committed a corresponding professional suicide. Mayakovsky had set a period to the end of the Futurist era and Iliazd acted in homage to his old rival.61
2.
This professional suicide was merely a second, tardy, and very public death. Iliazd had already acknowledged a significant break in his creative life much earlier, in the elegiac tone of his intended foreword to the final dra, lidantIU as a bEEkon, published in Paris in 1923. The brash manifesto attitude is gone; Iliazd had no pronouncements or prescriptions for the future of art. The book is “a wreath on the grave of what we lived by these last ten years.” After briefly reviewing the spectacles, scandals, and shocking experiments that filled those years, along with the aspirations that occasioned them, Iliazd writes, “We know that all our youth was for nothing, and I vainly swore I would prevail because I was young…. Farewell, youth, beyonsense, the acrobat’s long way, equivocations, cold intellect, everything, everything, everything.”62 Illiazd’s foreword announces the reckoning that would come in Rapture, and announces it as a sublimation, claiming that with lidantIU as a bEEkon he has reached the point of perfection for the approach he had chosen and now “throws it away,” much like Wittgenstein kicking away his ladder. The loss marks a distinct gain—he dies that he might live, christened with a new name, Iliazd. In a sense, his dramatic farewell to “everything, everything, everything” functions as a greeting, an attempt to see the world, “everything,” as if for the first time.63
The break is real, and the farewell to beyonsense as a technique is genuine. In the midst of life’s way, after years of avant-garde experimentation, he had, like Dante, lost the direct path, albeit often intentionally. Iliazd avoids neologism in Rapture and merely describes instances of beyonsense—the unpronounceable name of the hamlet and the songs the cretins sing in the evening—without ever providing the actual words. Nevertheless, the novel is filled with “inhuman” sound, like the last stanzas of Baudelaire’s “To the Reader”: animals, plants, wind, water, avalanches, and machines. And the novel evinces a longing as deep as Novalis’s or Khlebnikov’s, if more pessimistic, for establishing line
s of communication with the inhuman, from the rocks beneath our feet to the stars over our heads. In the rest of his work, he returned to beyonsense only to collect and reprint exemplary texts in a polemic 1948 anthology, The Poetry of Unknown Words. Iliazd wanted to demonstrate to Isidore Isou and the Lettristes that he and his colleagues, including Dada poets like Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann, had thoroughly explored decades before what Isou was naively claiming to discover anew.
If the beyonsense dras, as Regis Gayraud claims, “erect bridges between every human being’s individual unconscious and various mythological and religious notions ‘surfacing’ from the collective unconscious,” Rapture sublimates in a consummate form what had been dredged up in those earlier exercises.64 Iliazd simultaneously renounces and preserves what he has lost. An excremental, absolutely useless and needless waste (“youth…for nothing”) turns out to be a priceless sign of lavish cosmic generosity. The work’s title encapsulates both aspects of sublimation: our mourning for something we believe we once possessed while we raise it to the dignity of an unattainable ideal. In Russian, as in English, it sits in the midst of a sizeable etymological web connecting raptors, ravishers, and rapt admirers—rapacious, ravenous behavior with rapturous ecstasy, utter deprivation with unhoped-for fulfillment. For our English ears, it draws in reivers and the bereft. I can’t help thinking of Flannery O’Connor’s title The Violent Bear It Away, which comes, of course, from a “hard saying” about the Kingdom of God and those who attain it. But I also wish to recall a verse from one of Rapture’s most important intertexts: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10 AV). I can’t quite agree with the Serbian scholar Milovoje Jovanović’s assertion that Iliazd intends his title to invoke only violent loss and death.65 Nevertheless, the novel is full of the thief’s work, leaving everything ravaged.
Rapture may seem an oblique memorial for the losses of war, revolution, and civil war, but no more strange in this role than lidantIU as a bEEkon. Ostensibly concerned with problems of artistic representation, Iliazd dedicated the final dra to the memory of his fellow everythingk Mikhail LeDantu, killed in a train accident while returning from the front in 1917. Some readers may find an engaging meditation in Virginia Woolf’s use of the word “rapture” in her death-haunted To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Bernard in The Waves, for instance, takes stock of how Percival’s death has affected each of the other characters with these words: “All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead,” where making some accommodation with human finiteness, with mortality, can be seen as the condition for really living. Lily Briscoe, in section IX of “The Window” in To the Lighthouse, also thinks about rapture in the course of a meditation on autonomy and secrecy, artistic representation, and the latter’s use for capturing the experience of love and grappling with absence. To the Lighthouse happened to appear while Iliazd was waiting for news about whether a Soviet publishing house would accept his novel. These associations are mere coincidence, something in the air across Europe, but I suspect deeper ties, perhaps emerging from shared Nietzschean themes, with Thomas Mann’s own mountain novel, in which Hans Castorp descends to die in the Great War.
What then, can be saved? Iliazd called Rapture “a commentary on the idea of poetry as an always vain endeavor.” Gayraud expands on the thought: “The attempt is vain because it is aimed at infinity, at eternity. But poetry remains a precision instrument.”66 In that sense, Iliazd’s work calls out to Baudelaire’s “artificial paradises” of hashish and opium employed to satisfy the “taste for the infinite” by means alternative to religious devotion and mysticism.67 In Rapture, Iliazd recalibrates his everythingk tools to make yet another “criminal attempt,” knowing in advance that it will be a “needless echo” like the one that ends the novel, or, as he expressed the same idea elsewhere, “the beard growing on a corpse’s face.”68 Iliazd applies his “woodsman” skills this time not to words and phonemes, but to mythological, religious, folk, and literary plots (and, let’s not forget, to the story of Russian Futurism), cutting apart scenes and characters to reassemble them into multilayered “orchestral” symbols. But where an allegory or a roman à clef always points us toward the appropriate “higher” interpretation and derives energy from readers’ desire to understand it, Iliazd’s novel inspires an aptly frustrated joy in the tensions between ultimately irreconcilable source plots. The poets in Rapture are “pretenders,” as are we when we attempt to draw one neat meaning from its weave.
Let me illustrate Iliazd’s treatment of plots and myths by choosing, for the sake of argument, two sources that are as intimately related as can be, the Gospel of John and the Revelation to John, both ascribed to the same author and foundational to a single religious system. As we move in Rapture from an obvious parody of the Gospel of John to a riff on the Revelation to John, we tend to want characters who inhabit a role in the first plot to inhabit a corresponding role in the second. We want heroes to continue to be heroes and villains to remain villains (even if they eventually repent). But more often than not, we find that Iliazd does not place his characters in the new scene as we would expect. This treatment prevents us from identifying a master plot that would allow us to interpret the novel in a single key. Moreover, as characters shift from “positive” to “negative” positions within borrowed plots and myths, all are subjected to the trials that beset finite beings: longing, temptation, self-doubt, delusion—but also external violence and the vagaries of chance. Sometimes they triumph; sometimes they fail. None of the plots and myths brought to bear on the novel’s composition expresses the whole truth, but in their aggregate, their partial truths point toward a common human condition, the desire for more than bare life, to which culture is the response, in all its bafflingly proliferating manifestations. Rapture simply takes its place on the heap (not necessarily on top). According to Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis called Joyce’s Ulysses “a time-book, a midden-heap of temps retrouvé, a lingering over what had long faded from the world.”69 Iliazd continues to follow his everythingist practice and revives fading and faded plots and myths by overcoming time to bring them together simultaneously. The consciousness of the artist draws on them all to accomplish a particular task, “to create,” in Lewis’s words, “new beauty.”
Lewis’s invocation of the “midden-heap” has a further aptness for our purposes. Iliazd was also a student of ethnography and archaeology, recognized as an expert when it came to comparative studies of Byzantine, Armenian, Georgian, and Spanish and French Romanesque church architecture. He was quite sensitive to shared features of widely dispersed cultures. Yet, despite his experiments with evoking a collective unconscious, it seems to me that he was far more fascinated by the diversity of cultures than by their convergence. In contrast to Khlebnikov, who saw beyonsense as the royal road to a common, nearly telepathic language, Iliazd reveled in the effect of what we would now call “dissemination.” A project like James Frazer’s Golden Bough could serve as a treasure house for material without convincing Iliazd that it all boiled down to one fundamental myth. Likewise, Iliazd’s treatment of a collective unconscious is illuminated less by Carl Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious filled with archetypes than by Jacques Lacan’s later interpretation of Freud, where “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Iliazd’s affinities are, after all, with the Russian roots of structuralism in Viktor Shklovsky’s OPOIAZ (later known as the Russian Formalists) and Jakobson’s Moscow Linguistics Circle.
Iliazd’s novel is utterly lacking in a religious key, and there is little actual mysticism as opposed to mystification, despite his Soviet evaluators’ misgivings.70 As I pointed out previously, Iliazd makes it difficult to form judgments about his characters precisely because plots do not consistently map onto one another. The difficulty only increases when Iliazd also shares out characteristics derived from recognizable fi
ctional characters and mythological figures. Consider, for example, some of the ways an important source character like Jarry’s Père Ubu enters the novel. Laurence displays Père Ubu’s penchant for cruelty when he derives pleasure by scattering coins and causing a brawl at his reception banquet. But the former forester wields Ubu’s pataphysical mechanism for assuring good weather, drawn from Jarry’s science of imaginary solutions, or “the science of that which is induced upon metaphysics.”71 At the same time, the former forester experiences a suspicion, directed primarily toward his daughter/dead wife, that someone might take over his home, an idea borrowed this time from one of Ubu’s victims in Ubu Cuckolded, the “professor of polyhedrons,” Achras. “Paternity,” however, is never well established, and when the former forester expresses this same suspicion in his wary welcome of Laurence, the source is clearly Manilov’s mannered reception of Chichikov in Gogol’s Dead Souls. The effect on our ability to judge recalls the Dostoevskian responsibility “of all for all,” voided of its particular Christian content—all the major characters fall short of that striving for eternity that is the glory of poetry. Ultimately, the roman à clef falls apart: While we may agree with Gayraud that Laurence can most closely be identified with Mayakovsky, the wenny old man with Khlebnikov, Jonah (who attempts to rape Ivlita after an avalanche destroys the hamlet) with Burliuk, and the former forester with Zdanevich himself, the bandit’s yellow blouse doesn’t always fit, nor should it.72 Each in some way falls victim to the distorting vices Hölderlin singles out in his 1795 preface to Hyperion: acquisitiveness and tyranny, the excessive desire to possess and the excessive desire to dominate. Each character is a manifestation of the poet, flawed by definition. Ivlita, likewise, need not be confined to just one of her hypothetical source figures. Some of these sources can be read in her name: Eve, Lilith, St. Julitta, Juliet, Miss Julie. Some are revealed by her involvement in plots or by her attributes: Diana, Daphne, Isis, Sophia, Mary, the Woman Clothed with the Sun, the Whore of Babylon, Solveig, Sonia Marmeladova, Marya Lebyadkina, Christ, Baba Yaga—or Sleeping Beauty, for that matter.