by Iliazd
Today Laurence could have tasted the delights of the reception he had been dreaming of. But there wasn’t time
The path to the hamlet was too steep and winding. The horse couldn’t go any farther. This played in Laurence’s favor. “The gendarmes won’t be able to ride through, either,” he thought, “and on foot, can they really catch a highlander?” And, abandoning the horse, he ran, despite the slippery needles and the boughs and the acclivity, through the woods with the swiftness of a deer and was soon on the breakpoint to the other slope
Night was ready to step in at any moment and, it seemed, was only waiting for a long and fanciful pink cloud in the sky to dim. It smelled of moss and mushrooms. There was no wind, and even the red squirrels didn’t shake the oak branches. Traveling along the western slope was much more difficult, he ended up sliding down every ten steps. Beyond the forest, on the grassy escarpment, keeping a foothold was inconceivable. Laurence tripped and went flying downhill. Here he is down below. The glade was spangled with fireflies, and the lights of the unpronounceable hamlet melted among the numberless stars. Above, the constellations, swelling with damp, differed in no way from the insects and conducted the same silent chorus. Neither birds (become altogether extinct), nor jingling bells, nor a stream to trouble the bottomless silence. And all of a sudden a rumbling hum that made the abyss still more apparent reached Laurence, something the young man had heard many times before, but had remained deaf to until now. The cretins were singing
How much Laurence had been dreaming during these last days about a return to the good life, lost through carelessness, but it had never occurred to him that he would have to return, no matter what, and that the good life was death. But now the meaningless, lifeless, useless sounds had touched the bandit and it became clear (why, however, so late) that only behind these nonhuman sounds was hidden a happiness he had stubbornly sought away from home. Why, horrified (who cares about the rules of singing, were they really worth happiness?), did Laurence then, on the morning after Luke’s murder, abandon the cretins’ salvific stable? To return to them. To remain near them forever
The young man became suddenly alert. Shots, it seems. Most likely, the chase. Yes, and the cretins have gone silent. It’s late to be dreaming of happiness
And Laurence ran off to Ivlita’s house. Before the guard ran him down, everything would be over. He was about to break the door wide open with a blow when it opened on its own, and a woman, in whom he immediately recognized the wenny’s eldest daughter, sprang up from the threshold and grasped the bandit’s shoulder: “Quiet,” she whispered loudly, “She’s not well, she’s been in labor two days and can’t be delivered”
Laurence pushed the beldam out of the way and burst into the house. But when he saw a bed in its depths and was engulfed in groans, he paused, not daring to move. Giving birth? Could he kill both? Let the mother perish, but his offspring?
“Get out, don’t you see?” the wenny daughter pressed him, shoving him into the next room. Feeling for his pistol, Laurence paced from one corner to another, stopping now and then to listen
The silence wasn’t broken from outside. Time was passing. “Where are my pursuers, why are they dillydallying?” Laurence asked. Are they wondering how to behave? Or are they surrounding the house so they can propose surrender?…A futile business. That would cost them dearly. Should, however, determine what the problem is. Laurence went up to the attic and pulled himself onto the roof. No one. Evidently, the guard had decided to put off an attack until morning in order to avoid pointless shootouts. Most likely
Night wheeled slowly and wearyingly. The distant howling of wolves and growling of bears, still performing their weddings somewhere, could be heard for a minute without even provoking a bark from the village dogs, and then dissipated forever. Nothing except Ivlita’s groans. Not one window, not a heavenly body shining. But in that blind and speechless night, something swelled, rotated, accumulated, the air had already become heavier, weighing down on his breast like lead. Why don’t they kill? Are they creeping up?
And when the tension approached its highest point and, grasping his pistol, Laurence was prepared to shoot and shoot wherever his gun pointed, snow suddenly came down. Large flakes rapidly piled up, not melting, and now the barbed mountains they emphasized emerged from the hideous night, the sides of the dale covered in forest and patched in places by cliffs, the miserable creek, the few sleeping chimneys scattered on the glade, and right close up, Laurence’s hand, still extended, the ill-suited pistol already dropped
“Why isn’t Ivlita groaning anymore?” Laurence recollected and decided to go down. But his body refused to obey. He got to the stairs, couldn’t bear up, and tumbled down. Was he really dying, and Ivlita would remain alive? Convulsively scratching the floor, Laurence made it, crawling, to the bedroom. The door opened part way with a lament
Next to the bed, feebly colored by a candle, the beldam was puttering about. The door made the wenny daughter turn her head. But Laurence no longer thought to interrogate her. A most lightsome smoke was emanating from the corner, and in the smoke swayed two trees—they were blossoming, but without leaves, they filled the room, leaning lovingly toward the fallen man, rendering him into rapture, and the words “the infant is dead, too” resounded far, far away from Laurence, a needless echo
NOTES
THE GOLDEN EXCREMENT OF THE AVANT-GARDE
1. See Roman Jakobson’s essay written in late Spring 1930 in the wake of Mayakovsky’s suicide. “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” trans. Edward J. Brown, in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 273–300. Zdanevich, typically, doesn’t figure at all in Jakobson’s overview of Futurism.
2. Il’ia Zdanevich, “O futurizme [On Futurism],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1912–1914: Tom I: Vystupleniia, stat’i, manifesty [Futurism and Everythingism 1912–1914: Volume 1: Speeches, Articles, Manifestos], ed. A. V. Krusanov (Moscow: Gileia, 2014), 69.
3. D. S. Mirsky, “Voskhichtchénié (Ravissement), par Iliazd,” La Nouvelle Revue Française no. 219 (December 1931), 962–63.
4. On May 12, 1922, a few months after arriving in Paris, Zdanevich presented a birthday lecture and rechristened himself “Iliazda” (later, Iliazd). The name was initially feminine and combined both his first and surnames. It also recalled Homer’s Iliad and the Zoroastrian god Ahura-Mazda and evoked the Russian words for “star” (zvezda) and “cunt” (pizda). It is also a simple assertion in French of his existence: Il y a Zda (his intimate friends called him “Zda”). Iliazd subjected the name to several further transformations to designate the hero of his next novel, Philosophia, first published in 2008. I refer to Iliazd (both author and historical personage) before May 1922 as Ilia Zdanevich. “Iliazda. Na den’ rozhdenie [Iliazda. For His Birthday],” Filosofiia futurista: Romany i zaumnye dramy [A Futurist’s Philosophy: Novels and Beyonsense Dramas], ed. S. Kudriavtsev (Moscow: Gileia, 2008), 683–703.
5. Dates before 1918 are given in Old Style (Julian calendar).
6. Sofiia Starkina, Velimir Khlebnikov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2007), 71–72.
7. Trans. R. W. Flint, in Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall (New York: Viking, 1973), 19–24.
8. “Poklonenie bashmaku [Shoe Worship]” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:170, 180. Note that in his exegesis of shoe worship, Zdanevich consistently reverses or parodies critical moments for Dostoevsky’s characters. He venerates not the feet, but the shoe. Rather than bowing down to kiss the ground, he urges human beings to tear themselves from the Earth. His praise for shoes is also an implicit criticism of Tolstoyan simplicity and any other “barefoot” back-to-nature movement.
9. “Pis’mo no. 12, I. M. Zdanevich—V. K. Zdanevich, Peterburg 1 marta 1913,” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1912–1914: Tom 2: Stat’i i pis’ma [Futurism and Everythingism 1912–1914: Volume 2: Articles
and Letters], ed. A. V. Krusanov (Moscow: Gileia, 2014), 77.
10. “O futurizme,” 81–83; “O Natalii Goncharovoi [On Natalia Goncharova],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:132–33; “Marinetti v Rossii [Marinetti in Russia],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:147–48; “Protiv Kul’bina [Against Kulbin],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:185–86; “Protiv Gilei [Against Hylaea],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:187–92; S. Khudakov [pseud. Il’ia Zdanevich], “Literatura. Khudozhestvennaia kritika. Disputy i doklady [Literature. Art Criticism. Disputations and Papers],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 2:44–51.
11. Here, for example, is the second of Kruchenykh’s poems “in [his] own language…whose words have no definite meaning,” where he mixes beyonsense with standard Russian (my translation):
freet fron owngt
I’m in love I won’t lie
the black tongue
that was even among savage tribes
12. See archival drafts of an everythingist manifesto included in E. N. Basner, A. V. Krusanov, G. A. Marushina, “Ot sostavitelei [From the Compilers],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:28–29.
13. “Ot sostavitelei,” 31.
14. “Protiv Kul’bina,” 185.
15. “Nataliia Goncharova i vsechestvo [Natalia Goncharova and Everythingism],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:130.
16. “O Natalii Goncharovoi,” 132–33.
17. Régis Gayraud, “Voskhishchenie. Roman [Rapture: A Novel],” Filosofiia futurista, 724–25.
18. “MV: Mnogovaia poeziia: Manifest vsechestva [MV: Manifold Poetry: A Manifesto of Everythingism],” Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:182.
19. Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:297. See the multiple drafts reprinted in the notes to the manifesto.
20. Futurizm i vsechestvo 1:299.
21. See Petr Kazarnovskii’s reading of Laurence the sawyer in “Roman kak svidetel’stvo ochevidtsa iskusstva iz tupika, ili ‘perevernutyi’ sposob kak konstruktivnyi podkhod Il’iazda [The Novel as a Testimonial of One Who Has Seen Art Out of an Impasse, or the ‘Inverted’ Device as Iliazd’s Constructive Method],” in DADA po-russki [DADA Russian-Style], ed. Korneliia Ichin (Belgrade: Filologicheskii fakul’tet Belgradskogo universiteta, 2013), 93.
22. In a fit of anti-German sentiment, St. Petersburg had been renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War. Zdanevich, like other male members of the group founded in 1915, participated intermittently, on short visits from the front.
23. A. V. Krusanov. Russkii avangard: 1907–1932 (Istoricheskii obzor) v 3-x tomakh: Tom 1: Boevoe desiatiletie [The Russian Avant-garde: 1907–1932 (An Historical Overview) in 3 volumes: Vol. 1: The Militant Decade] (S.-Peterburg: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996), 269–71.
24. Janko Lavrin, a Slovene by birth, had helped guide Khlebnikov’s research into South Slavic languages. He emigrated after the February 1917 Revolution to England and had a long career as a Slavist at Nottingham University. His early books in English, Dostoevsky and His Creation: A Psycho-Critical Study (1920) and Ibsen and His Creation: A Psycho-Critical Study (1921) grew from articles in A. R. Orage’s The New Age. His interpretations of these authors’ major heroes emerge from conversations in Zdanevich’s St. Petersburg milieu and provide, in my opinion, insight into Iliazd’s “transcendental criminal” Laurence and his “wrestle with the void.” Kazarnovskii conjectures that Iliazd transformed Lavrin’s Albanian adventure yet again into the story of Rapture’s Laurence (“Roman kak svidetel’stvo,” 91–92).
25. He had published a book, Natalia Goncharova. Mikhail Larionov, in 1913 under the pseudonym Eli Eganbury, where Eli corresponds to his first name (essentially, Elijah or Elias) and Eganbury is the way a French postal carrier might make sense of the name Zdanevich written on an envelope in Cyrillic script (in the dative case). Scholars generally agree that he was responsible in whole or in part for the essays under the names V. Parkin and S. Khudakov in Larionov’s 1913 companion volume to the Ass’s Tail and Target exhibits. Khudakov’s essay on “Literature. Artistic Criticism. Disputes and Papers” even quotes examples from imaginary collections of beyonsense and Rayonist poetry ascribed to other apparent pseudonyms for Zdanevich, preferring them to Kruchenykh’s work. These examples, technically, are Zdanevich’s first published poems, although he never acknowledged them. Zdanevich’s name had also appeared with Larionov’s on manifestos such as “Why We Paint Our Faces” (December 1913).
26. Tat’iana Nikol’skaia, “Fantasticheskii gorod”: Russkaia kul’turnaia zhizn’ v Tbilisi (1917–1921) [“Fantastic City”: Russian Cultural Life in Tbilisi (1917–1921)], (Moscow: Piataia strana, 2000), 24.
27. Nikol’skaia, 22.
28. Nikol’skaia, 23.
29. A. V. Krusanov, Russkii avangard: 1907–1932 (Istoricheskii obzor) v 3-x tomakh: Tom 2, Kniga 1: Futuristicheskaia revoliutsiia [The Russian Avant-garde: 1907–1932 (An Historical Overview) in 3 volumes: Vol. 2, Book 1: The Futurist Revolution] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 10–20.
30. Nikol’skaia, 35.
31. Nikol’skaia, 62.
32. Nikol’skaia, 76. 41° referred first of all to Tbilisi’s latitude, but accumulated many more connotations: A fever sufficient to induce babbling; one degree more alcohol than vodka; the day after Christ’s return from forty days in the desert; Zarathustra’s age when he goes down the mountain to the people. In a further mystification, soon after his first Paris lecture, “New Schools in Russian Poetry,” Zdanevich told his French interviewer, Raymond Cogniat, “the majority of the great beacon cities lie on the 41st parallel: Madrid, Naples, Constantinople, Peking, New York.” See Raymond Cogniat, “Laboratoriia poezii: Universitet 41° [A Laboratory for Poetry: 41° University],” trans. Leonid Livak, in Leonid Livak and Andrei Ustinov, Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha: Istoriia, khronika, antologiia, dokumenty (1920–1926) [The Literary Avant-garde of Russian Paris: History, Chronology, Anthology, Documents (1920–1926)] (Moscow: OGI, 2014), 815.
33. Nikol’skaia, 59. “Straining” connotes exertions during defecation and labor pains.
34. Nikol’skaia, 29.
35. In Russian, pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami.
36. Kruchenykh issued several books on the topic over a decade or so, the last of which was 500 New Witticisms and Puns in Pushkin (1924). Note that in this context, Zdanevich’s lecture, “Tyutchev, Singer of Shit” does not imply any denigrating criticism of Fyodor Tyutchev’s poetry. Zdanevich, in fact, considered Tyutchev one of the poets in the Russian tradition most sensitive to problems of poetic expression using a language gauged for pragmatic use.
37. Nikol’skaia, 92.
38. Sergei Spassky encapsulated Zdanevich’s stance this way: “Long live beyonsense, but organized, not accidental, like what Kruchenykh proposes” (quoted in Nikol’skaia, 34). Vladimir Nabokov provides another familiar example of similar practices, most overtly in Ada, and, if we are convinced by Eric Naiman’s Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), more discreetly in Lolita.
39. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 336. Markov later exempts Zdanevich from his qualification about the “aesthetic” value of the works produced in Tiflis. “Zdanevich is to be praised for the purity and excellence of his zaum, which was never used before or after him in a major work of such proportions and on so large a scale…. He was a ‘classicist’ of zaum, which he constructed and balanced in an elaborate manner. It is genuinely persuasive. Zdanevich displays in it unbelievable verbal imagination, and he never repeats himself. In a sense, it is a creation of genius” (357–58).
40. Petr Kazarnovskii, “Zdanevich, Il’ia.” Entsiklopediia russkogo avangarda: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, arkhitektura: Tom I: Biografii A-K [Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-garde: Visual Art, Architecture: Vol. 1: Biographies A-K], ed. V. I. Rakitin and A. D. Sarab’ianov (Moscow: Global Expert and Service Team, 2013–2014), 354.
41. “Novye shkoly v russkoi poezii [New Schools in Russian Poetry],” trans. L. Livak, in Literaturnyi
avangard russkogo Parizha, 799; Cogniat, 815.
42. André Germain, “Il’ia Zdanevich i russkii siurdadaizm [Ilia Zdanevich and Russian Sur-Dadaism],” trans. L. Livak, in Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha, 825. Germain’s November 28, 1922 talk on Iliazd happens to mention another Futurist loss: Khlebnikov’s death by starvation earlier that year. Suspicion of artistic revolutionaries from the East was real. Tristan Tzara had been arrested in Zurich as a suspected Russian agent in September 1919, and after the 1920 season of Dada soirées, the French press was full of invective. Marius Hentea writes that reviewers saw “‘literary Bolshevism’ bent on ‘destroying…everything that the French intellectual patrimony represents.’ Dada’s ideas ‘are not French…[Dada] is an Asiatic, not a European, theory.’ ‘Extremists, revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, Dadaists—same flour, same origin, same poison.’ ” Marius Hentea, Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 149–50.
43. “Novye shkoly,” 805.
44. “Novye shkoly,” 797.
45. “Novye shkoly,” 806.
46. “Novye shkoly,” 807, 809.
47. “Novye shkoly,” 810.
48. Leonid Livak, “‘Geroicheskie vremena molodoi zarubezhnoi poezii’: Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha (1920–1926) [‘The Heroic Age of Young Émigré Poetry’: The Literary Avant-garde of Russian Paris],” in Literaturnyi avangard russkogo Parizha, 50–51. Charchoune was a writer and painter who had left Russia in 1912 to study in Paris and then spent the war years in Barcelona, where he met Arthur Cravan and other poets associated with Francis Picabia. He returned to Paris after the war and made the personal acquaintance of Picabia and Tzara. Parnakh, who later introduced jazz to the Soviet Union (and who figures as the “hero” of Osip Mandelshtam’s “The Egyptian Stamp”), had been in Paris since 1915. He presumably entered the Dada ranks in December 1920, after attending an opening by Picabia where Jean Cocteau was presenting a jazz band. Romov, who had probably gone to Paris in 1905 or 1906, was a printer with l’Imprimerie Union, a firm employed by the Parisian avant-garde, including Apollinaire. Livak covers their Dada activities and their first attempts to organize young Russian émigré poets on pages 17–42.