Alongside Khlebnikov, as if for contrast, the mocking genius of fate placed Mayakovsky, with his poetry of common sense. There is common sense in any poetry. But specific common sense is nothing other than a pedagogical device. Schoolteaching that instills previously well-established truths into childish heads makes use of visual aids—that is, of a poetic tool. The pathos of common sense is part of schoolteaching. Mayakovsky’s merit is in his poetic perfection of schoolteaching, in applying the powerful methods of visual education to the enlightenment of the masses. Like a schoolteacher, Mayakovsky walks about with a globe of the world or some other emblem of the visual method. He has replaced the repulsive newspaper of recent times, in which no one could understand anything, with a simple, wholesome schoolroom. A great reformer of the newspaper, he has left a profound imprint in our poetic language, simplifying its syntax to the limit of the possible and directing the noun to the place of honor and primacy in the sentence. The force and precision of his language make Mayakovsky akin to the traditional carnival side-show barker.4 Both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky are national to such a degree that populism—that is, folklore with a crude sugar-coating—would seem to have no place beside them. It continues to exist, however, in the poetry of Esenin, and to some degree in that of Kliuev, too.5 The significance of these poets is in their rich provincialisms, which link them to one of the basic tendencies of our age.
Aseev stands completely to Mayakovsky’s side. He has created the lexicon of a well-qualified technician. He is a poet-engineer, an organizer of work. In the West such people—that is, engineers, radio-technicians, inventors of machines—tend to be poetically mute, or they read François Coppée.6 It is characteristic of Aseev that he places the machine, as an expedient contraption, at the foundation of his poetry, without really talking about the machine at all. The plugging in and plugging out of the lyrical current provides an impression of swift fusing and powerful emotional discharge. Aseev is exceptionally lyrical and sober with regard to the word. He never poeticizes, but simply plugs in the lyrical current, like a good electrician, using the materials he needs.
Now the dikes that artificially held back the development of our poetic language have already given way, and any glossy, dress-uniform innovativeness strikes one as unnecessary and even reactionary.
The truly creative epoch in poetry is not that of invention, but that of imitation. When the prayer books have been written, then it is time to begin the service. The last poetic prayer book to be issued for common use throughout all the Russias was Pasternak’s. My Sister Life [Sestra moia zhizn’]. Not since Batiushkov’s time has such a new and mature harmony resounded in Russian poetry. Pasternak is not a fabricator or a parlor magician, but the founder of a new harmonic mode, a new structure of Russian versification that corresponds to the maturity and toughness achieved by the language. By means of this new harmony one can say whatever one likes. Everybody will use it, whether he wants to or not, since it has become henceforth the common property of all Russian poets. Up to now the logical structure of a sentence has become archaic along with the poem in which it appears; that is, it was only the briefest means for expressing the poetic meaning. Owing to frequent use in poetry, customary logical progression had become effaced and imperceptible as such. Syntax, which is the circulatory system of poetry, was stricken with sclerosis. Then comes a poet who reanimates the virginal strength of the logical structure of the sentence. It was just this in Batiushkov that astonished Pushkin, and Pasternak awaits his Pushkin.
Humanism & Modern Life
There are certain periods that say they have nothing to do with man: that say he should be used, like brick, like cement; that say he should be built from, not for. Social architecture takes its measure from the scale of man. Sometimes it becomes hostile to man and nourishes its own majesty by belittling and deprecating him.
Assyrian captives swarm like chickens under the feet of the immense king; warriors, who personify the state-power hostile to man, kill bound pygmies with their long spears; and the Egyptians and the Egyptian builders dispose of the human mass as if it were inert matter, of which there is always bound to be a sufficient supply, which has to be provided in any quantity that may happen to be required.
But there is another social architecture; and of this, too, man is the scale and the measure. It does not, however, use man as material from which to build, but builds for the sake of man; it does not build its majesty on the insignificance of personality, but on a higher expediency that corresponds to the needs of the individual.
Everybody senses the monumentality of form of the oncoming social architecture. The mountain is still not visible, but already it casts its shadow over us, and we who have grown unaccustomed to monumental forms of social life, having become accustomed to the politico-legal flatness of the nineteenth century, move about in this shadow with fear and perplexity, not knowing whether it is the wing of oncoming night, or the shadow of our native city that we are about to enter.
Simple mechanical immensity and bare quantity are hostile to man, and it is not some new social pyramid we find enticing, but social Gothic: the free play of weights and forces, a human society, conceived as a dense and complex architectural forest, where everything is expedient and individual, and where every part echoes in exchange with the immense whole.
The instinct for social architecture—that is, the structuring of life in majestic monumental forms that would seem to far exceed the direct needs of man—is deeply inherent in human societies, and no mere whim dictates it.
Reject social structure, and even the simplest dwelling, the one most indubitably necessary for all, man’s home, will collapse.
In countries threatened by earthquake, people build close to the ground, and this tendency to flatness, this rejection of architecture, beginning with the French Revolution, runs through the whole legal life of the nineteenth century, all of which passed in the tense expectation of a subterranean shock, a social blow.
But the earthquake did not spare the flat dwellings either. The chaotic world smashed its way into both the English “home” and German Gemüt; chaos sings in our Russian stoves, chaos knocks in our chimney dampers and grates.
How to preserve the human dwelling from these awesome quakes? Where to bolster its walls against the subterranean shocks of history? And who will dare to say that the human dwelling, the free house of man, ought not to stand on the earth as its best ornament and the most solid thing that exists?
The legal thought of the last generations turned out to be powerless to protect the very thing for the sake of which it had come into being, over which it had struggled and on which fruitlessly reflected.
No statutes on the rights of man, no principles of property and inalienability insure the human dwelling any longer; they do not save homes from catastrophe; they provide neither certitude nor security.
The Englishman more than others concerns himself (hypocritically) with legal guarantees of the person, but he has forgotten that the concept “home” came into being many centuries ago in his own country as a revolutionary concept, as a natural justification for the first social revolution in Europe, deeper and more akin to our own time, as a type, than the French Revolution.
The monumentality of the oncoming social architecture is implicit in its vocation to organize world economy according to the principle of a worldwide domesticity to serve the needs of man, extending the circle of his domestic freedom to boundaries that are worldwide, blowing the flame of his individual hearth to the dimensions of a universal flame.
The days to come seem cold and frightening to those who do not understand this, but the inner warmth of the days to come, the warmth of expediency, economy, and teleology, is as clear to the contemporary humanist as the heat of the kindled stove of our own day.
If an authentically humanistic justification is not at the base of the coming social architecture, then it will crush man as Assyria and Babylonia did.
The fact that the values of humani
sm have become rare now, as though removed from circulation and hidden, isn’t at all a bad sign. Humanistic values have merely gone underground and hoarded themselves away, like gold currency, but, like the gold supply, they secure the whole ideational commerce of contemporary Europe and from their underground administer it all the more authoritatively.
Switching to gold currency is a matter for the future, and in the realm of culture it will mean the exchange of current ideas—paper issue—for the gold coinage of the European humanistic heritage; and it is not under the spade of the archeologist that the excellent florins of humanism will ring; but they will see their day, and as sound current coin they will start circulating from hand to hand, when the time comes.
Fourth Prose
I.
Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan1 approached this matter with the spare, sage prudence of a wizard or that of an Odessite Newton. All of Benjamin Fedorovich’s conspiratorial activity rested on infinitesimals. Benjamin Fedorovich saw the law of salvation as a matter of maintaining a tortoiselike pace. He allowed himself to be shaken out of his professorial cubicle, answered the telephone at all hours, neither renounced nor refused anything or anyone, but for the most part what he tried to do was hold back the dangerous course of the disease.
The availability of a professor, what’s more a mathematician, in this improbable affair of saving five lives by way of those cognizable, yet utterly imponderable integral progressions that are called “pulling strings,” evoked expressions of satisfaction everywhere.
Isaiah Benediktovich2 behaved himself from the very first as if the disease might be contagious, something catching, like scarlet fever, so that he, too, Isaiah Benediktovich, might, for all he knew, be shot. Isaiah Benediktovich went bustling about without rhyme or reason. He seemed to be racing from doctor to doctor, imploring them to disinfect him immediately.
If Isaiah Benediktovich had had his way, he would have taken a taxi and driven all over Moscow at random, without any plan, imagining that that was how one performed the ritual.
Isaiah Benediktovich would keep asserting and constantly recalling that he had left a wife behind him in Petersburg. He even managed to acquire a secretary of sorts, a small, stern, very sensible companion, a woman who was a relative of his and who had already begun to baby him. To put it briefly, by appealing to different people at different times, Isaiah Benediktovich seemed, as it were, to be inoculating himself against the firing squad.
All Isaiah Benediktovich’s relatives had died in their Jewish beds of carved walnut. As a Turk will travel to the black stone of Kaaba,3 so these Petersburg bourgeois descended from rabbis of patrician blood, brought into touch with Anatole France by way of the translator Isaiah, made pilgrimages to the very most Turgenevian and Lermontovian spas, preparing themselves by taking the cure for their transition to the hereafter.
In Petersburg Isaiah Benediktovich had been living the life of a good Frenchman, eating his potage, choosing acquaintances as innocuous as the croutons in his bouillon, and making visits, according to his profession, to two stock jobbers in junk translation.
Isaiah Benediktovich was good only at the very beginning of the “string pulling,” during the mobilization and, as it were, the alarm. After that he faded, drooped, stuck out his tongue, and those very relatives of his pooled their money and sent him back to Petersburg.
I have always wondered where the bourgeois gets his fastidiousness and his so-called probity. Probity is the quality that relates the bourgeois to the animal. Many Party members relax in the company of a bourgeois for the same reason that grown-ups need the society of rosy-cheeked children.
The bourgeois is of course more innocent than the proletarian, closer to the uterine world, to the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherubim. In Russia there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and the scarcity has a bad effect on the digestion of authentic revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie in its innocent aspect must be preserved, entertained with amateur sports, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.
II.
A boy in goatskin booties, in a tight-fitting velveteen Russian coat, with his locks combed carefully back, stands there surrounded by mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, and beside him stands a cook’s brat or a coachman’s waif—some kid from the servants’ quarters. And this whole howling pack of sniveling, pulling, hissing archangels is urging Little Lord Fauntleroy on:
“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it!”
Now Vasenka lets him have it, and the old maids, the vile toads, nudge each other and hold back the mangy little coachman’s kid.
“Go on, Vasenka, you let him have it, and we’ll grab him by the curly-locks and we’ll waltz ‘im around . . .”
What’s this? A genre painting in the manner of Venetsianov? A scene by some serf-artist?
No, this is a training exercise for a Komsomol baby under the guidance of his agit-mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, so Vasenka can stomp him. Vasenka can let him have it, while we hold the scum down, while we waltz around . . .
“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it . . .”
III.
A crippled girl approached us from a street as long as a streetcarless night. She puts her crutch to one side and sits down as quickly as she can, so she can look like everybody else. Who is this husbandless girl? She is the light cavalry . . .4
We shoot cigarettes at one another and adjust our Chinese dialect, encoding into brute-cowardly formulae the great, powerful, forbidden concept of class. Brute terror pounds on the typewriters, brute terror proofreads a Chinese dialect on sheets of toilet paper, scribbles denunciations, hits those that are down, demands the death penalty for prisoners. Like little kids drowning a kitten in the Moscow River while a crowd watches, our grown-up kids playfully put on the pressure; at noon recess they give it the big squeeze: “Hey, come on and push it under. So you can’t see it any more.” That’s the sacred rule of lynch law.
—A shopkeeper on the Ordynka short-weighted a working-woman: kill him!
—A cashier shortchanged somebody a nickel—kill her!
—A manager signed some nonsense by mistake—kill him!
—A peasant stashed away some rye in his barn—kill him!
A girl approaches us, limping on her crutch. One of her legs is foreshortened, and her crude prosthetic shoe reminds one of a wooden hoof.
And who are we? We are school children who don’t study. We are a Komsomol volunteer. We are rowdies by permission of all the saints.
Filipp Filippych had a toothache. Filipp Filippych had not and would not come to class. Our notion of study has as much to do with science as a hoof with a foot, but this doesn’t bother us.
I have come to you, my artiodactylous friends, to stomp with my peg leg in the yellow socialist arcade-complex created by the unbridled fantasy of that reckless entrepreneur Giber out of elements of a chic hotel on Tver Boulevard, out of the night telegraph and telephone exchange, out of a dream of universal incarnate bliss disguised as a permanent foyer with a buffet, out of a permanently open office with saluting clerks, out of a postal-telegraph, throat-tickling dryness of the air.
Here we have a permanent bookkeepers’ night under the yellow flame of second-class railroad lamps. Here, as in Pushkin’s tale, a Jew and a frog get married, that is, we have a wedding ceremony permanently going on between a goat-hoofed fop spawning theatrical fish eggs and his unclean mate from the same bathhouse, the Moscow editor-coffinmaker, who turns out brocade coffins on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He rustles his paper shroud. He opens the veins of the months of the Christian calendar that still preserve their pastoral-Greek names: January, February, March . . . He is the terrifying and illiterate horse doctor of proceedings, deaths, and happenings, and he is pleased as can be when, like a fountain, the black horse blood of our epoch spurts forth.
IV.
Osip Mandelstam Page 20