Adalis6 and Marina Tsvetaeva are prophetesses, and so is Sophie Parnok.7 Prophecy, as domestic needlework. While the formerly elevated tone of masculine poetry, the intolerable bombastic rhetoric, has given way to a more normal conversational pitch, feminine poetry continues to vibrate on the highest notes, offending the ear, offending the historical, the poetic sense. The tastelessness and the historical insincerity of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Russia—pseudonational and pseudo-Muscovite—are immeasurably beneath the poems of Adalis, whose voice now and again acquires a masculine force and certainty.
Inventiveness and remembrance go hand in hand in poetry. To remember means also to invent. He who remembers is also an inventor. The radical illness of Moscow’s literary taste lies in forgetting this double truth. Moscow has been specializing in inventiveness, no matter what.
Poetry breathes through both the mouth and the nose, through remembrance and inventiveness. One needs to be a fakir in order to deny oneself one of these modes of breathing. The passion for poetic breathing by way of remembrance was expressed in that heightened interest with which Moscow greeted Khodasevich’s8 arrival. He is a man who’s been writing verses for about twenty-five years now, thank God; yet he has suddenly found himself in the position of a young poet just beginning.
As from the Taganka to the Pliushchikha, literary Moscow spread out enormously from MAF to the Lyrical Circle.9 At one end, something like inventiveness; at the other, remembrance. Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh,10 Aseev on the one side; on the other, given the complete absence of domestic resources, there was a need to resort to visiting players from Petersburg in order to draw the line. And so one needn’t talk about the Lyrical Circle as though it were a Muscovite phenomenon.
What, then, goes on in the camp of pure inventiveness? Here, if one leaves out the completely unsound and unintelligible Kruchenykh—and I say this, not because he’s left-wing or extreme, but because there is after all such a thing in the world as simple nonsense . . . (And yet, Kruchenykh’s attitude to poetry is passionate and very intense, and this makes him interesting as a personality.) Here Mayakovsky goes on resolving the great, elementary problem of “poetry for all, not just for the elite.” An extensive broadening of the space contiguous to poetry naturally takes place at the expense of intensivity, pithiness, poetic culture. Splendidly informed about the richness and complexity of world poetry, Mayakovsky, in founding his “poetry for all,” had to send everything obscure to the devil; everything, that is, that assumed the least bit of poetic preparation in his audience. And yet to address in verse an audience completely unprepared poetically is as thankless a task as trying to sit on a pike. The completely unprepared audience will grasp absolutely nothing, or else poetry, emancipated from culture of any kind, will quite cease to be poetry, and then, due to some strange quality in human nature, will become accessible to an enormous audience indeed. Yet Mayakovsky writes poetry, and quite cultivated poetry: that is, his refined raeshnik, whose stanza is broken by a weighty antithesis, saturated with hyperbolic metaphors and sustained in the monotonous brief pauznik.* It is therefore quite in vain that Mayakovsky impoverished himself. He is threatened with the danger of becoming a poetess, and it has already half come to pass.
If Mayakovsky’s poems express the tendency toward universal accessibility, what speaks out in Aseev’s11 is our time’s passion for organization. The brilliant rational imagery of his language produces the impression of something freshly mobilized. There is essentially no difference between the snuffbox poetry of the eighteenth century and Aseev’s twentieth-century mechanical poetry. A sentimental rationalism on the one hand, an organizational rationalism on the other. A purely rationalistic, electro-mechanical, radioactive, and in general technological poetry is impossible, for a single reason that should be equally close to the poet and the mechanic: rationalistic mechanical poetry does not store up energy, gives it no increment, as natural irrational poetry does; but only spends, only disperses it. The discharge is equal to the windup. As much comes out as is wound up. A mainspring cannot give back more than has been put into it beforehand. This is why Aseev’s rationalistic poetry is not rational, why it is sterile and sexless. A machine lives a deep and animated life, but it gives forth no seed.
By now the passion for inventiveness in poetic Moscow is already passing. All the patents have already been taken out, and there have been no new patents for some time. The double truth of inventiveness and remembrance is as much needed as bread. That is why in Moscow there is not a single real poetic school, not a single lively poetic circle, for all the factions somehow find themselves on one side or the other of a divided truth.
Inventiveness and remembrance are the two elements by which the poetry of B. Pasternak is moved. Let us hope that his poems will be studied in the immediate future, and that they will not suffer the mass of lyrical stupidities (inflicted by our critics) that has befallen all Russian poets, beginning with Blok.
World cities like Paris, Moscow, London are amazingly tactful in their relationship to literature, permitting it to hide in any trench, to disappear without trace, to live without a permit, or under another name, or not to have an address. It is as absurd to talk of Muscovite literature as it is of a world literature. The first exists only in the imagination of the reviewer, just as the second exists only in the name of a worthy Petersburg publishing house. To the man who has not been forewarned, it might seem that there is no literature at all in Moscow. If he should accidentally meet a poet, the latter would wave his hands and look as though he were in a terrible hurry to be off somewhere, and he would disappear through the green gates of the boulevard accompanied by the blessings of the cigarette boys, who know better than anyone else how to estimate the value of a man and how to bring out in him the most remote possibilities.
Note
* The raeshnik is a verse form deriving from the country-fair side-show-barker, who used to call attention to his show by spouting rhymes. The pauznik is a meter, usually of three feet, with an unequal number of unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables; i.e., with pauses.
Literary Moscow: Birth of the Fabula
I.
Once upon a time the monks in their chill Gothic refectories ate more or less lenten fare, while listening to a reader, to the accompaniment of a prose that was quite good for its time, from the book of Chet’i-Minei.*1 It was read aloud, not only for instruction; the reading was added to the refectory as table music, and, freshening the heads of those who dined, the seasoning provided by the reader supported the harmony and orderliness at the common table.
But imagine, if you will, almost any social group, the most enlightened, the most modern, wishing to renew the custom of reading aloud at table and inviting a reader; and this reader, wishing to please everybody, brings along Andrei Biely’s St. Petersburg and he reads it to the group. Well, he begins. The results are incredible. Somebody has something stuck in his throat; somebody else is eating his fish with his knife; a third person burns himself swallowing the mustard.
It is impossible to imagine such an occasion, such an event, such a group occasion, to which Andrei Biely’s prose might conceivably serve as an accompaniment. Its rhythmic periods are reckoned on the scale of a Methusalean age; incompatible with any kind of human activity. The tales of Scheherazade, on the other hand, were measured to 366 days, one for every night of a Leap Year, and the Decameron befriended the calendar, attentive to the shifting of day and night. Why mention the Decameron! Dostoevsky makes excellent table reading; well, if not just yet, then he will in the very near future, when, instead of weeping over him and being moved by him, as chambermaids are touched by Balzac and by good cheap novels, people will apprehend him in a purely literary way, and then for the first time they will have read and understood him.
Extracting pyramids from your own depths is an indigestible, unsociable activity; it is a stomach probe. It’s not entertainment, but a surgical operation. From the time that the plague of psychological exper
imentation penetrated literary consciousness, the prose writer has become a surgeon and prose a clinical catastrophe, to our taste quite unpleasant; and a thousand times I’ll drop the belletristic psychologizing of Andreev, Gorky, Shmelev, Sergeev-Tsensky, Zamiatin,1 for the sake of the magnificent Bret Harte in the translation of an unknown student of the nineties: “Without saying a word, with a single motion of hand and foot, he flung him from the staircase and turned very calmly to the unknown lady.”
Where is that student now? I’m afraid he is unjustly ashamed of his literary past and in his leisure hours places himself at the disposal of the psychologist-authors to be vivisected, though now it’s no longer the clumsy ones from the clinic of The Miscellanies of Knowledge,2 where the least operation, the extraction of the tooth of a member of the intelligentsia, threatened blood poisoning, but rather the excellent surgeons of Andrei Biely’s polyclinic, equipped with all the resources of antiseptic Impressionism.
II.
Merimée’s Carmen ends with a philological discussion about where in the family of languages the gypsy dialect belongs. The highest tension of mood and plot is unexpectedly resolved by a philological tract; yet it sounds approximately like the epode of a tragic chorus: “And everywhere there are ill-fated passions, and against the fates is no defense.” This happened before Pushkin.
Why should we then be especially surprised if Pilniak3 or the Serapions4 introduce notebooks into their narration, building estimates, Soviet circulars, newspaper advertisements, excerpts from chronicles, and God knows what else. Prose belongs to nobody. It is essentially anonymous. It is the organized motion of a verbal mass cemented together by whatever comes to hand. The basic element of prose is accumulation. It is all fabrication, morphology.
Our current prose writers are often called eclectics; that is, collectors. I think this is not meant as an insult; it’s a good thing. Every real prose writer is precisely an eclectic, a collector. Personality to the side, make way for anonymous prose. This is why the names of the great prose writers, those contractors of grandiose literary plans, anonymous in essence, collective in execution, like Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel or War and Peace, are transformed into legend and myth.
In Russia, this passion for anonymous, collective prose coincided with the Revolution. Poetry itself demanded prose. It had lost all sense of scale—because there was no prose. It achieved an unhealthy flowering and could not satisfy the demands of the reader to be given access to the pure and direct activity of verbal masses, bypassing the author’s personality, bypassing everything that is incidental, personal, and causes suffering (the lyric).
Just why is it that the Revolution turned out to be propitious for the renaissance of Russian prose? Precisely for the reason that it advanced the type of anonymous prose writer, the eclectic, the collector, who does not create verbal pyramids from the depths of his own spirit, the modest Pharaonic overseer who supervises the slow but true construction of real pyramids.
III.
Russian prose will begin its advance when the first prosewriter appears who is independent of Andrei Biely. Andrei Biely is the peak of Russian psychological prose. He soared to the top with astonishing energy; yet with his high-flown and varied devices he merely completed the spadework of his predecessors, the so-called belletrists.
Can it be that his pupils, the Serapion Brothers and Pilniak, are returning to the bosom of belles-lettres, closing in this way a cycle of rotations, and that all that remains for us now is to wait for the reappearance of the Miscellanies of Knowledge, where psychology and byt*2 will re-engender the old novel, the novel of the convict with the wheelbarrow?
As soon as the fabula disappeared, byt appeared in exchange. Earlier, Jourdain had not surmised that he was speaking prose; earlier, people did not know there was byt.
Byt is dead fabula; it is a decomposing plot, a convict’s wheelbarrow which psychology drags after itself, because after all it needs to lean on something, on a dead fabula if there isn’t a living one. Byt is a foreignism, the always falsely exotic; to the eyes of those who live in the same house it does not exist: the native knows how to notice only what is needed, what is to the point, but to the tourist, the foreigner (the belletrist) it’s another matter. He stares at everything and keeps talking about everything, inopportunely.
Our present Russian prose writers, like the Serapions and Pilniak, are just as much psychologists as their predecessors were before the Revolution, before Andrei Biely. They have no fabula. They do not lend themselves to being read aloud at table. Only their psychology is chained to another convict’s wheelbarrow—not to byt, but to folklore. I’d like to speak in more detail about just what difference this makes, because the watershed between byt and folklore is a serious matter. They are not at all one and the same thing. Folklore is a better brand. Higher quality.
Byt is a kind of night-blindness to things. Folklore is a conscious strengthening, an accumulation of linguistic and ethnographic material. Byt is the deadening of plot; folklore is the birth of plot. Listen intently to folklore and you will hear how thematic life stirs there, how the fabula breathes, and, in any folkloric entry, the fabula is present in embryo; here interest begins, here everything is fraught with the fabula, flirts, intrigues, and threatens with it. The brood hen sits on a heap of straw and clucks and cackles; the folkloric prose writer clucks and cackles about something, too, and whoever has a taste for it listens to him. In actual fact, he’s doing something worth doing—he’s hatching the fabula.
The Serapions and Pilniak (their older brother, and he needn’t be set apart from them) cannot please the serious reader; they are suspect because of their use of the anecdote; that is to say, they threaten with the fabula. Of the real fabula—that is, of deep narrative breathing—there is not a trace; but the anecdote tickles with its whiskers through every crack, quite as in Khlebnikov.
Winging with the goldletter of most delicate veins
The grasshopper stowed into the belly of the basket
A multitude of varied grasses and faiths.
“A multitude of varied grasses and faiths,” is what Pilniak, Nikitin, Fedin, Kozyrev and others, and Lidin (another Serapion not initiated into the brotherhood for some reason) and Zamiatin and Prishvin have.5 The beloved anecdote, the first free and joyful fluttering of the fabula, emancipation of the spirit from the melancholy monk’s cowl of psychology.
IV.
Meanwhile, let us dig in. Folklore is coming at us like a voracious caterpillar. In teeming locust swarms, jottings, notes, remarks, sayings, quotation marks, small talk, observations come crawling. A great gypsy-moth invasion, threat to cropped field. Thus, in literature, the turn of the fabula and folklore is legitimized, and folklore gives birth to fabula, as the voracious caterpillar gives birth to the delicate moth. If we did not notice this change earlier, it was because folklore was not trying to consolidate itself and tended to disappear without a trace. But as a period of accumulation, a period of voracious invasion, the folklore period preceded the flowering of any kind of fabula. And since it did not aspire to literature, not having been labeled as such, it remained within the contents of private letters, within the tradition of home-grown storytellers, in only partly published journals and memoirs, in petitions and chancery messages, in juridical protocols and in placards.
There may be some people (who knows?) who actually like those discourses of Pilniak, which are like the ones Leskov6 placed on the lips of his first railroad conversationalists, who were whiling away the boredom of the not-too-rapid transport. In all of Pilniak, however, I much prefer the epic conversation in the bathhouse, of the deacon with a certain Draube, on the theme of what sense the universe makes: there, you won’t find a single strophe beginning with “something,” nor a single lyrical simile, intolerable in prose, but the elementary play of the fabula being born, as, you will recall, in Gogol, approaching Pliushkin’s, you can’t at first distinguish “whether it’s a man or a woman; no, it’s a woman; no, a man.”<
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At the same time as the folklore line in prose, the purely byt line goes on to this day. One should overlook all the differences that characterize the Serapions, Pilniak, Zamiatin, Prishvin, Kozyrev, and Nikitin, because of the common badge of folklore by which they are united, their pledge of vitality. As the legitimate children of folklore they all slip into using anecdote. The only one who absolutely does not slip into anecdote is Vsevolod Ivanov,7 and what I said above about byt relates to him.
If you listen attentively to prose at a time when folklore flourishes, you will hear something that resembles the rich ringing of grasshoppers coupling in the air. This is the universal sound of contemporary Russian prose, and I don’t wish to take this ringing sound apart, since it was not invented by the clockmaker, since it is composed of an incalculable multitude of winging grasses and faiths. In the period inevitably ensuing, in the period of the flourishing fabula, with these multitudes thick upon each other, the voices of the grasshoppers will be transformed into the sonorous singing of the skylark—of the fabula, and then the skylark’s high notes will ring out, of which the poet said:
Fluent, frisky, sonorous, clear—
He has shaken me to the depth of my soul.
Notes
Note: See footnote, p. 85.
*1 Book of saints’ lives and similar edifying reading, divided according to the calendar. (Title Slavonicized from the Greek.)
*2 A word that has no precise equivalent in English. “Way of life,” “mores,” but assuming that these form a discernible pattern. A literary genre that emphasizes the way of life of a society or a segment of society as expressed in daily life, the ordinary, the quotidian, the daily round.
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