Rapture

by Iliazd

  This list of Ivlita’s “masks,” so to speak, suggests that Iliazd is coming to terms with Marinetti’s “scorn for women,” a fundamental Futurist tenet repeated in every one of Zdanevich’s lectures on Futurism. Kruchenykh also frequently invoked the phrase. In Kruchenykh’s “research” on beyonsense, he asserted, along with Khlebnikov, that the phonetically liquid letter л (l) could be characterized as “damp” and, when combined with the typically feminine ю (iu) in “liubov,” the Russian word for “love,” presented all kinds of pitfalls for the masculine Futurist artist. Marinetti associates the theme with his hatred for moonlight, and Zdanevich, in his “shoe worship” and “face painting,” with hatred for the earth and everything natural. Damp, fog, moonlight, and love are all themes associated in Rapture with Ivlita, but also with Laurence’s first victim, the monk Mocius, who paradoxically pursues and threatens him. Mocius’s name invokes a further, related, set of associations: Mokosh’, a Slavic fertility goddess, patron of weaving and, like the Parcae, tied to fate; Mocius, Hieromartyr of Amphipolis, who battled Dionysian cults in Macedonia before the legalization of Christianity; Moses, “drawn from the water,” in Jovanović’s reading; and, in a multilingual pun, “mockery.”73 Love threatens Laurence, the one crowned with “laurels,” whether victor or poet, with stagnation and sleep.

  As it happens, these troubling letters, l, iu, b, are the initials of Mayakovsky’s great and tragic love, Lilia IUr’evna Brik, who had already entered the developing mythology around Mayakovsky as the source of a certain “softening” noted by Kruchenykh in his 1918 article, “Mayakovsky’s Amorous Adventure.”74 She became love personified and Mayakovsky frequently inscribed her name and initials in his poetry. She was later marked as the femme fatale who dragged Mayakovsky down from the heights of revolutionary activism into the “poshlost’” of “byt,” the vulgarity of day-to-day existence with its petit bourgeois aspirations, most succinctly represented in Rapture in Laurence’s acquiescence to the novel’s betrayal scene.75 But betrayal in Rapture is as ambiguous an action as any other and flows both ways, just as water in the novel flows sometimes uphill and sometimes down—it could be the justified abandonment of the poet by a neglected muse.

  Symbolists like Alexander Blok had recorded this changeability of the muse or the Eternal Feminine from the comforting Beautiful Lady (with all attendant religious and chivalrous connotations) to the threatening, but exciting, Stranger (usually a prostitute-like figure). For Zdanevich, the chameleon’s constant change presented an imperative for Futurists, but he went on to push “changeability” (izmenchivost’) into praise for violent transformation and generalized faithlessness (betrayal, treachery, apostasy, and infidelity [izmena]). He put into Larionov’s mouth a revolutionary rejection of all notions of legitimacy and fidelity in “Face Painting (A Conversation on Gaurishankar),” a talk at the Stray Dog on April 9, 1914: “…apostates are our ideal fathers, prostitutes our ideal mothers.”76 But changeability is also susceptibility to transfiguration, metamorphosis, and alchemy. What Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass was to the drUnkeyness cycle, Ovid’s Metamorphoses is to Rapture with its transmutation of people into trees, as well as numerous borrowings from individual stories. The book ends not with Penelope and Odysseus’s rooted bed (emblem, in Zdanevich’s lecture, of a rejected heraldic motto: semper immota fides), but with, contrary to Marinetti’s dream of rootless humanity, human beings rooted by their metamorphoses. Petr Kazarnovskii has identified “inversion” or “perversion” as the constructive principle of Iliazd’s novel, harking back to Huysmans’s Against the Grain with its relentless emphasis on artifice.77 For me, however, every inversion in Rapture is liable to reversion, or perhaps revision, spiraling into previously unimagined forms. Changeability (and exchangeability) in the novel is thoroughgoing: every image is supremely ambivalent, every assertion morphs immediately into its opposite, the philosopher’s stone turns not just iron, but shit to gold—and gold to shit.

  And every theme passes into another. Follow an image and you find yourself wandering through often-contradictory spheres of reference. I could pick up the tree theme, or take up the history of early modern popular culture or, as Elizabeth Beaujour has suggested, the history of social banditry.78 When we consider any of these spheres, we see how much “life” this novel gobbles up and digests, how much detail it wrests from descriptive sources outside the world of strictly literary reference and divests of reality. Iliazd constantly reminds us of Rapture’s artifice. We, like Laurence, turn up all kinds of jewels, but as the wenny old man suggests, every treasure brought to light is a red herring. The real treasure is nonobjective (it has no object, whether purpose or prototype) and lies in the novel’s pointed silence, with the cretins’ abject timelessness, the inside-out of the “mind’s mind” Ivlita craves, untouched by natural or human history or by society, neither exchangeable nor communicable. The artist’s vain attempts to grasp it produce an inevitably tainted art that only whets our thirst and points to what cannot be attained. The lost Dante found a renewed faith and the return of will and desire, moved, himself, by “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Iliazd rediscovers in Rapture the engine of Freudian drives, the struggle of Eros and Thanatos, propelling the artist toward ceaseless transformation in a hopeless and often hidden quest to embody an elusive poetic ideal. In that sense, the novel is, as Gayraud claims, “a return to a species of Symbolism bearing the experience of the avant-garde.”79

  It should nevertheless be said that, while Zdanevich draws on a vast fund of Russian sources, for English readers Dostoevsky will loom large over the novel. I have already mentioned Iliazd’s idiosyncratic appropriation of the “responsibility of all for all.” He also displays a penchant for doubling characters. He gradually loads specific terms with complex semantic content as they pass from one context to another (Dostoevsky usually does this by letting the words pass through the mouths of different speakers, but Il­iazd’s is not a psychological novel and his characters do much less speaking). Finally, he includes significant references to Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Demons. Here we have a rational murder committed impulsively and the subsequent struggle of the murderer to recognize the nature of his guilt. Ivlita, like Sonia reading the account of the raising of Lazarus from her Gospel of John to Raskolnikov, attempts to instruct Laurence by interpreting the prehistoric paintings and artifacts they find in their refuge from a punitive expedition. (This cave, by the way, recalls Christ’s nativity and his tomb, not to mention Plato’s cave.) We find in Rapture the same fairy-tale and folk themes Dostoevsky uses to depict the relationship between Nikolai Stavrogin and his wife, the crippled Marya Lebyadkina: Ivan Tsarevich, the falcon, and the red dragon. And Laurence resembles Stavrogin in his moments of moral lassitude and in his susceptibility to being used in others’ schemes. Perhaps the most tightly realized relationship of any character to prototype in Rapture is the revolutionary party agent Basilisk’s to Dostoevsky’s verbally incontinent Pyotr Verkhovensky. Dostoevsky is also an inspiration for the narrating voices, the shifts into parodies of lyrical, ethnographic, picturesque, and bureaucratic prose, not to mention Brother Mocius’s carnivalesque Dionysian and Orphic funeral, suddenly erupting scandals, and moments of outright satire.

  I would speculate further that Iliazd’s Rapture, this tissue of words, looms, in turn, over Nabokov’s works as one of those “Viceroy” texts for Nabokov’s own “fantastically rare” Nymphalis danaus Nab., the species in Ada that mimics “not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy.”80 Kazarnovskii has pointed to a similarity between the novel’s unresolved ending and Nabokov’s treatment of Cincinnatus C. at the end of Invitation to a Beheading.81 Ivlita, however, triggers an immediate, perhaps too easy, question about Lolita, Nabokov’s great meditation on art and crime (his own “Crime and Pun”) and the transmutation of life into art.82 I’ve already mentioned my suspicion that the veil of punning obscenity Eric Naiman lifts from Lol
ita for us in Nabokov, Perversely could have derived from practices perfected by 41°. But I’m also struck by a late scene in Rapture in which Laurence feels an overwhelming sense of regret and deep loss as he listens to the cretins’ songs wafting up from the valley below, like Humbert Humbert on a mountainside above Telluride, Colorado, reflecting on the distant sounds of children at play. Both novels end with all main characters dead—focused on a stillbirth at Christmas.

  Finally, I’d like to qualify one of my earlier claims. Iliazd does not entirely reject the beyonsense tricks of the drUnkeyness dras. Jovanović has noticed a Khlebnikovian phonetic battle in Rapture between l and r or life and death, respectively.83 English happily allows a neat consonant exchange of this “minimal pair,” a possible Freudian slip of the tongue, to transform “ravish” into “lavish,” which generates its own yo-yo movement between themes of unstinting generosity and prodigious waste—all the shades of prodigality.84 In this novel, that minimal shift, keyed as it is to the unconscious, can often be far more consequential than characters’ psychological motivations. The scatological and sexual themes that emerged in the dras also remain, most prominently in Mocius’s association with masturbation (“erotic solipsism”) and in the cretins’ shit-choked stable (they produce two equally useless things: excrement and sublime song)—certainly enough to foreclose any possibility of publishing the novel with a reputable house in Russian Paris.

  3.

  This, then, is the peculiar book Iliazd hoped to publish in 1927. He sent the manuscript to his brother Kirill, who had gone back to the Soviet Union around the same time Iliazd came to Paris. Kirill had connections to Red Virgin Soil, the chief publishing venue for “fellow travelers,” writers who were not members of the Communist Party, but were not averse to supporting the Soviet government. In December, based on the first three chapters, Kirill expected he could get the novel published first serially, and then as a separate edition. But conditions were rapidly changing in the Soviet Union. By February, Kirill informed Iliazd that “40 publishers are being shut down right now…and it will be harder to get into print, although your novel is very good and I think it will move forward.”85 Red Virgin Soil became a particular target of a militant “proletarian” writers’ faction on the ascent, and its editor was arrested as a “Trotskyist.” The new editors rejected Rapture in May 1928 and Kirill offered the manuscript to the Federation publishing house, where the editorial board declined it nearly unanimously. According to Gayraud, the board criticized, aside from a perceived “‘mystical state of the spirit,’ an aesthetico-contemplative indifference to the characters, failure to indicate place and time, and a language that was ‘very strange, even clumsy at times, as though illiterate.’ ”86

  Iliazd attempted to craft a satisfactory, even tendentiously tailored reply to Bolshevik objections, interpreting “rapture” as “a feeling that anticipates and accompanies revolution,” placing himself at Petrograd’s Finland Station in March 1917 for Lenin’s fateful return to Russia from Swiss exile, where Zdanevich witnessed the “unforgettable,” “enraptured gazes of the sailors.” He objected that the editors would not call Gorky a religious writer because some of his characters pray. He disputed the charge of indifference by drawing attention to the author’s evident attitude toward despotic power and punitive raids, among other things. He defended the novel’s supposed lack of a specified time and place by claiming to be “an internationalist, not a student of Leskov.” Consequently, if the writing gave the impression of being “‘a translation from a foreign language,’ so much the better. But as to ‘illiteracy,’ this, at any rate, is an exaggeration.”87 Iliazd’s letter did not change the editors’ minds.

  That same year, Iliazd asked Parnakh to translate the novel into French. Parnakh was making a living writing for French-language art and music journals after returning to Paris from his sojourn in the Soviet Union. He apparently agreed, but there is no surviving evidence that he ever managed to translate any of Rapture.88 Iliazd published the novel at his own expense in 1930, under the old 41° imprint, emblazoned with a curious illustration that may be a variant of Jarry’s gidouille, the spiral that graces Ubu’s belly. It looks at once like a mountain, a labyrinth, a variety of fossil ammonite, and a coiled pile of shit. He sent copies to his old associates in the Soviet Union and heard that many of them liked it. But there were no reviews in the Soviet press. Olga Leshkova, his former companion in Bloodless Murder, noted that the novel was better received in Leningrad, where she shared it with Evgeny Zamyatin and Korney Chukovsky, than in official Moscow.89 Most of the 750 copies remained unsold after Russian bookstores in Paris refused to carry the book because of the obscenities it contained. Mirsky published his French review, where he commented on Iliazd’s unfortunate isolation in the Russian émigré community and urged quick translation of the novel, believing that it might even have something to teach French writers. Only Iliazd’s former disciple, Poplavsky, published a full-fledged notice in the Russian émigré press about this “most original work” that “taken altogether frames…something approaching the ‘age-old questions’ the revolution and its tumult have no power whatsoever to change.”90 Charchoune mentioned Il­iazd’s Rapture in his 1932 article on “Magical Realism” among young writers of the emigration. He noted that this noteworthy example of the new prose had already been forgotten because Iliazd was one of only two writers who were “neither ours nor yours.”91 Faced with a situation in which it had become nearly impossible not to choose sides, the other, Parnakh, had gone back to the USSR for good the previous year.

  And then, after one more unsuccessful proposal in 1970 to translate the novel into French, it disappeared to be unearthed here in the United States, like one of the ammonites Iliazd collected. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour introduced a facsimile reprint of the 1930 printing for Berkeley Slavic Specialties in 1983, a few years before Régis Gayraud’s 1987 French translation. Beaujour’s reprint brought the novel to the attention of a new wave of Russian émigrés from the Soviet Union, while Gayraud’s translation was the long-awaited first step toward making it accessible beyond its Russian audience. For a long time, Mayakovsky, who had been “canonized” by Stalin, remained the only visible, widely available poet of the avant-garde for Soviet readers, although a group of dedicated academics and writers tended other legacies, especially Khlebnikov’s. Gorbachev’s glasnost made it easier to publish their works, sometimes in large editions that were sold as soon as they appeared on the shelves, but Zdanevich’s novel remained out of print. The fall of the Soviet government in 1991 finally removed barriers to content. Unfortunately, it also wiped away the well-funded Soviet publishing system. When Sergei Kudriavtsev’s Gileia publishing house brought out a new Russian edition of Rapture in 1994 with a Russian introduction by Gayraud, it was again in a small edition funded in association with a Düsseldorf specialty house. The edition largely escaped the notice of Russian readers. Perhaps the novel’s most visible boost came in October 1999, when the late Russian/Israeli critic Aleksandr Gol’dshtein included Rapture on his list of the “best of the best” twentieth-century Russian novels for the influential newspaper Nezavisimaia gazeta. Gol’dshtein praised the “incomparable” novel’s “magical prose, like a wizard’s spell,…rendered deep and flowing in a language that flushes our vision clean.”92 In 2008, Kudriavtsev’s Gileia published the novel again in Filosofiia Futurista (A Futurist’s Philosophy), a better-funded, larger collection of Iliazd’s writings with commentary. This edition attracted more attention from Russian readers, especially among younger poets like Petr Kazarnovskii, who reviewed it for Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, one of the leading journals of literary scholarship and criticism in Russia today. It also incorporated a few emendations Iliazd made after Rapture’s 1930 publication. I have followed this edition in my translation, with minor exceptions.

  I hope that the novel has not, as Gol’dshtein conjectures, “forever passed fame by.” And I think Iliazd would appreciate encountering a small circle
of new readers through this translation, an American English louse on the corpse’s beard of his art. I have already mentioned more than once a phrase he liked to repeat: “A poet’s best fate is to be forgotten.” The line comes from an obscure seventeenth-century French poet, Adrien de Monluc, some of whose works Iliazd published in luxurious editions during his later career as a printer specializing in the livre d’artiste. For Iliazd, the phrase was another twist on John the Theologian’s and Dostoevsky’s “corn of wheat.”93 It meant to die and be resurrected, to be lost in the earth and dug up again by chance at some unforeseeable time and place after undergoing subterranean processes of fossilization and metamorphosis—to be recognized with passionate interest, lovingly polished, and presented once again to an audience the poet never imagined or intended.