Less Than One: Selected Essays

JOSEPH BRODSKY

Less Than One

SELECTED ESSAYS

FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX New York

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the John and Catherine MacAtlhur Foundation for its five years of generous support.

In memory of my mother and my father In memory of Carl Ray Proffer

Contents

Less Than One I 3

The Keening Muse I 34

Pendulum's Song I 53

A Guide to a Renamed City I 69

In the Shadow of Dante I 95

On Tyranny I 113

TheChild of Civilization I 123

Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary I 145

The Powerof the Elements I 157

The Soundof the Tide I 164

A Poet and Prose I 176

Footnote to a Poem I 195

Catastrophes in the Air I 268

On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden I 304

To Please a Shadow I 357

A Commencement Address I 384

Flight from Byzantium I 393

InaRoomandaHalf I 447

And the heart doesn't die when one thinks itshould.

Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N."

Less Than One

Less Than One

i

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off.

I remember rather little of my life and what I do remem­ber is of small consequence. Most of the thoughts I now recall as having been interesting to me owe their significance to the time when they occurred. If any do not, they have no doubt been expressed much better by someone else. A writer's biography is in his twists of language. I remember, for instance, that when I was about ten or eleven it occurred to me that Marx's dictum that "existence conditions con­sciousness" was true only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement; thereafter, consciousness is on its own and can both condition and ignore existence. At that age, this was surely a discovery—but one hardly worth recording, and surely it had been better stated by others. And does it really matter who first cracked the mental cuneiform of which "existence conditions conscious­ness" is a perfect example?

So I am writing all this not in order to set the record straight (there is no such record, and even if there is, it is an insignificant one and thus not yet distorted), but mostly for the usual reason why a writer writes—to give or to get a boost from the language, this time from a foreign one. The little I remember becomes even more diminished by being recollected in English.

For the beginning I had better trust my birth certificate, which states that I was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, Russia, much as I abhor this name for the city which long ago the ordinary people nicknamed simply "Peter"—from Petersburg. There is an old two-liner:

The sides of people

Are rubbed by Old Peter.

In the national experience, the city is definitely Leningrad; in the growing vulgarity of its content, it becomes Lenin­grad more and more. Besides, as a word, "Leningrad" to a Russian ear already sounds as neutral as the word "construc­tion" or "sausage." And yet I'd rather call it "Peter," for I remember this city at a time when it didn't look like "Lenin­grad"—right after the war. Gray, pale-green facades with bullet and shrapnel cavities; endless, empty streets, with few passersby and light traffic; almost a starved look with, as a result, more definite and, if you wish, nobler features. A lean, hard face with the abstract glitter of its river reflected in the eyes of its hollow windows. A survivor can­not be named after Lenin.

Those magnificent pockmarked facades behind which— among old pianos, worn-out rugs, dusty paintings in heavy bronze frames, leftovers of furniture (chairs least of aU) consumed by the iron stoves during the siege—a faint life was beginning to glimmer. And I remember, as I passed these facades on my way to school, being completely ab­sorbed in imagining what was going on in those rooms with the old, billowy wallpaper. I must say that from these fa­cades and porticoes—classical, modern, eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic animals or people—from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the balconies, from the torsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned more about the history of our world than I subsequently have from any book. Greece, Rome, Egypt— all of them were there, and all were chipped by artillery shells during the bombardments. And from the gray, re­flecting river flowing do^ to the Baltic, with an occasional tugboat in the midst of it struggling against the current, I have learned more about infinity and stoicism than from mathematics and Zeno.

All that had very little to do with Lenin, whom, I suppose, I began to despise even when I was in the first grade—not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which at the age of seven I lrnew very little, but because of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life. There was baby Lenin, looking like a cherub in his blond curls. Then Lenin in his twenties and thirties, bald and uptight, with that meaningless expression on his face which could be mistaken for anything, preferably a sense of purpose. This face in some way haunts every Rus­sian and suggests some sort of standard for human appear­ance because it is utterly lacking in character. (Perhaps because there is nothing specific in that face it suggests many possibilities.) Then there was an oldish Lenin, balder, with his wedge-like beard, in his three-piece dark suit, sometimes smiling, but most often addressing the "masses" from the top of an ^mored car or from the podium of some party congress, with a hand outstretched in the air.

There were also variants: Lenin in his worker's cap, with a carnation pinned to his lapel; in a vest, sitting in his study, writing or reading; on a lakeside stump, scribbling his April Theses, or some other nonsense, al fresco. Ultimately, Lenin in a paramilitary jacket on a garden bench next to Stalin, who was the only one to surpass Lenin in the ubiquitous- ness of his printed images. But Stalin was then alive, while Lenin was dead and, if only because of that, "good" be­cause he belonged to the past—i.e., was sponsored by both history and nature. Whereas Stalin was sponsored only by nature, or the other way around.

I think that coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson in switching off, my first attempt at estrangement. There were more to follow; in fact, the rest of my life can be viewed as a nonstop avoidance of its most importunate aspects. I must say, I went quite far in that direction; per­haps too far. Anything that bore a suggestion of repetitive- ness became compromised and subject to removal. That included phrases, trees, certain types of people, sometimes even physical pain; it affected many of my relationships. In a way, I am grateful to Lenin. Whatever there was in plenitude I immediately regarded as some sort of propa­ganda. This attitude, I think, made for an awful accelera­tion through the thicket of events, with an accompanying superficiality.

I don't believe for a moment that all the clues to char­acter are to be found in childhood. For about three genera­tions Russians have been living in communal apartments and cramped rooms, and our parents made love while we pretended to be asleep. Then there was a war, starvation, absent or mutilated fathers, horny mothers, official lies at school and unofficial ones at horne. Hard winters, ugly clothes, public expose of our wet sheets in summer camps, and citations of such matters in front of others. Then the red flag would flutter on the mast of the camp. So what? All this militarization of childhood, all the menacing idiocy, erotic tension (at ten we al lusted for our female teachers) had not affected our ethics much, or our aesthetics—or our ability to love and suffer. I recall these things not because I think that they are the keys to the subconscious, or cer­tainly not out of nostalgia for my childhood. I recall them because I have never done so before, because I want some of those things to stay—at least on paper. Also, because looking backward is more rewarding than its opposite. To­morrow is just less attractive than yesterday. For some reason, the past doesn't radiate such immense monotony as the future does. Because of its plenitude, the future is propaganda. So is grass.

The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. I happen to remember mine. It was in a school library when I had to fill out an application for membership. The fifth blank was of course "nationality." I was seven years old and knew very well that I was a Jew, but I told the attendant that I didn't know. With dubious glee she suggested that I go home and ask my parents. I never returned to that library, although I did become a member of many others which had the same application forms. I wasn't ashamed of being a Jew, nor was I scared of admitting it. In the class ledger our names, the names of our parents, home addresses, and nationalities were registered in full detail, and from time to time a teacher would "forget" the ledger on the desk in the classroom during breaks. Then, like vultures, we would fall upon those pages; everyone in my class knew that I was a Jew. But seven-year-old boys don't make good anti-Semites. Besides, I was fairly strong for my age, and the fists were what mattered most then. I was ashamed of the word "Jew'' itself—in Russian, "yevrei"—regardless of its connotations.

A word's fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its usage. In printed Russian "yeurei" appears nearly as seldom as, say, "mediastinum" or "gennel" in American English. In fact, it also has something like the status of a four-letter word or like a name for VD. When one is seven one's vocabulary proves sufficient to acknowl­edge this word's rarity, and it is utterly unpleasant to identify oneself with it; somehow it goes against one's sense of prosody. I remember that I always felt a lot easier with a Russian equivalent of "ldke"—"zhyd' (pronounced like Andre Gide) : it was clearly offensive and thereby meaningless, not loaded with allusions. A one-syllable word can't do much in Russian. But when suffixes are applied, or endings, or prefixes, then feathers fly. All this is not to say that I suffered as a Jew at that tender age; it's simply to say that my first lie had to do with my identity.

Not a bad start. As for anti-Semitism as such, I didn't care much about it because it came mostly from teachers: it seemed innate to their negative part in our lives; it had to be coped with like low marks. If I had been a Roman Catholic, I would have wished most of them in Hell. True, some teachers were better than others; but since aU were masters of our immediate lives, we didn't bother to distin­guish. Xor did they try to distinguish among their little slaves, and even the most ardent anti-Semitic remarks bore an air of impersonal inertia. Somehow, I never was capable of taking seriously any verbal assault on me, especially from people of such a disparate age group. I guess the dia­tribes my parents used to deliver against me tempered me very well. Besides, some teachers were Jews themselves, and I dreaded them no less than I did the pure-blooded Rus­sia.

^^ is just one e^rnple of the framing of the self that —along with the lan^^ge itself, where verbs and no^u change places as freely as one dares to have them do sa­bred in us such an overpowering sense of a.mbh-alence that in ten years we ended up with a ^fflpower in no way superior to a seaweed's. Four vears in the ^my (into which men were drafted at the age of nineteen) completed the pr^^ss of total ^mender to the state. O^^ence would become both first and s^nnd nature.

If one had brains, one would ^^^^y try to outsmart the system by devising all kinds of deto^, ^^rnging shady deals with one's superiors, piling up lies and puUing the strings of one's semi-nepotic connections. ^^ would be­come a ful-time job. Yet one was constantly aware that the web one had woven was a web of lies, and in spite of the degree of su^^s or your sense of humor, you'd de­spise yourself. That is the ultimate triumph of the system: whether you beat it or join it, you feel equally guilty. The national belief is—as the proverb has it—that there is no Evil without a grain of Good in it and presumably vice versa.

Ambivalence, I think, is the chief characteristic of my nation. There isn't a Russian executioner who isn't scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the sorriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability to become an executioner. Our immediate history has provided well for both. There is some wisdom in this. One might even think that this ambivalence is wisdom, that life itself is neither good nor bad, but arbitrary. Per­haps our literature stresses the good cause so remarkably because this cause is challenged so well. If this emphasis were simply doublethink, that would be fine; but it grates on the instincts. This kind of ambivalence, I think, is pre­cisely that "blessed news" which the East, having little else to offer, is about to impose on the rest of the world. And the world looks ripe for it.

The world's destiny aside, the only way for a boy to fight his imminent lot would be to go off the track. This was hard to do because of your parents, and because you yourself were quite frightened of the unknown. Most of all, because it made you different from the majority, and you got it with your mother's milk that the majority is right. A cer­tain lack of concern is required, and unconcerned I was. As I remember my quitting school at the age of fifteen, it wasn't so much a conscious choice as a gut reaction. I sim­ply couldn't stand certain faces in my class—of some of my classmates, but mostly of teachers. And so one winter morn­ing, for no apparent reason, I rose up in the middle of the session ami made my melodramatic exit through the school gate, knowing clearly that I'd never be back. Of the emo­tions overpowering me at that moment, I remember only a general disgust with myself for being too young and let­ting so many things boss me around. Also, there was that vague but happy sensation of escape, of a sunny street without end.

The main thing, I suppose, was the change of exterior. In a centralized state all rooms look alike: the office of my school's principal was an exact replica of the interrogation chambers I began to frequent some five years later. The same wooden panels, desks, chairs—a paradise for carpen­ters. The same portraits of our founders, Lenin, Stalin, mem­bers of the Politburo, and Maxim Gorky (the founder of Soviet literature) if it was a school, or Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of the Soviet Secret Police) if it was an inter­rogation chamber.

Often, though, Dzerzhinsky—"Iron Felix" or "Knight of the Revolution," as propaganda has it—would decorate the principal's wall as well, because the man had glided into the system of education from the heights of the KGB. And those stuccoed walls of my classrooms, with their blue hori­zontal stripe at eye level, running unfailingly across the whole country, like the line of an infinite common denom­inator: in halls, hospitals, factories, prisons, corridors of communal apartments. The only place I didn't encounter it was in wooden peasant huts.

This decor was as maddening as it was omnipresent, and how many times in my life would I catch myself peering mindlessly at this blue two-inch-wide stripe, taking it some­times for a sea horizon, sometimes for an embodiment of nothingness itself. It was too abstract to mean anything. From the floor up to the level of your eyes a wall covered with rat-gray or greenish paint, and this blue stripe topping it off; above it would be the virginaUy white stucco. No­body ever asked why it was there. Nobody could have answered. It was just there, a border line, a divider between gray and white, below and above. They were not colors themselves but hints of colors, which might be interrupted only by alternating patches of bro^: doors. Closed, half open. And through the half-open door you could see an­other room with the same distribution of gray and white marked by the blue stripe. Plus a portrait of Lenin and a world map.

It was nice to leave that Kafkaesque cosmos, although even then—or so it seems—I sort of knew that I was trad­ing six for half a dozen. I knew that any other building I was going to enter would look the same, for buildings are where we are doomed to carry on anyhow. Still, I felt that I had to go. The financial situation in our family was grim: we existed mostly on my mother's salary, because my father, after being discharged from the navy in accordance with some seraphic mling that Jews should not hold substantial military ranks, had a hard time finding a job. Of course, my parents would have managed without my contribution; they would have preferred that I finish school. I knew that, and yet I told myself that I had to help my family. It was almost a lie, but this way it looked better, and by that time I had already learned to like lies for precisely this "almost-ness" \"hich sharpens the outline of truth: after all, truth ends where lies start. That's what a boy learned in school and it proved to be more useful than algebra.

2

Whatever it was—a lie, the truth, or, most likely, their mix­ture—that caused me to make such a decision, I am im­mensely grateful to it for what appears to have been my first free act. It was an instinctive act, a walkout. Reason had very little to do with it. I know that, because I've been walk­ing out ever since, with increasing frequency. And not nec­essarily on account of boredom or of feeling a trap gaping; I've been walking out of perfect setups no less often than out of dreadful ones. However modest the place you happen to occupy, if it has the slightest mark of decency, you can be sure that someday somebody will walk in and claim it for himself or, what is worse, suggest that you share it. Then you either have to fight for that place or leave it. I happened to prefer the latter. Not at all because I couldn't fight, but rather out of sheer disgust with myself: managing to pick something that attracts others denotes a certain vulgarity in your choice. It doesn't matter at all that you came across the place first. It is even worse to get somewhere first, for those who follow will always have a stronger appetite than your partially satisfied one.

Afterward I often regretted that move, especially when I saw my former classmates getting on so well inside the sys­tem. And yet I knew something that they didn't. In fact, I was getting on too, but in the opposite direction, going somewhat further. One thing I am especially pleased with is that I managed to catch the "working class" in its truly proletarian stage, before it began to undergo a middle-class conversion in the late fifties. It was a real "proletariat" that I dealt with at the factory where, at the age of fifteen, I began to work as a milling machine operator. Marx would recognize them instantly. They—or rather "we"—all lived in communal apartments, four or more people in one room, often with three generations all together, sleeping in shifts, drinking like sharks, brawling with each other or with neigh­bors in the communal kitchen or in a morning line before the communal john, beating their women with a moribund de­termination, crying openly when Stalin dropped dead, or at the movies, and cursing with such frequency that a normal word, like "airplane," would strike a passerby as something elaborately obscene—becoming a gray, indifferent ocean of heads or a forest of raised hands at public meetings on behalf of some Egypt or other.

The factory was all brick, huge, straight out of the industrial revolution. It had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, and the population of "Peter" referred to it as "the Arsenal": the factory produced cannons. At the time I began to work there, it was also producing agricultural machinery and air compressors. Still, according to the seven veils of secrecy which blanket almost everything in Russia that has to do with heavy industry, the factory had its code name, "Post Office Box 671." I think, though, that secrecy was im­posed not so much to fool some foreign intelligence service as to maintain a kind of paramilitary discipline, which was the only device for guaranteeing any stability in produc­tion. In either case, failure was evident.

The machinery was obsolete; 90 percent of it had been taken from Germany as reparations after World War II. I remember that whole cast-iron zoo full of exotic creatures bearing the names Cincinnati, Karlton, Fritz Werner, Sie­mens & Schuckert. Planning was hideous; every once in a while a rush order to produce some item would mess up your flickering attempt to establish some kind of working rhythm, a procedure. By the end of a quarter (i.e., every third month), when the plan was going up in smoke, the admin­istration would issue the war cry mobilizing all hands on one job, and the plan would be subjected to a storm attack. Whenever something broke down, there were no spare parts, and a bunch of usually semi-drunk tinkers would be called in to exercise their sorcery. The metal would arrive full of craters. Virtually everyone would have a hangover on Mondays, not to mention the mornings after paydays.

Production would decline sharply the day after a loss by the city or national soccer team. Nobody would work, and everybody discussed the details and the players, for along with all the complexes of a superior nation, Russia has the great inferiority complex of a small country. This is mostly the consequence of the centralization of national life. Hence the positive, "life-affirming" drivel of the official newspapers and radio even when describing an earthquake; they never give you any information about victims but only sing of other cities' and republics' brotherly care in supplying the stricken area with tents and sleeping bags. Or if there is a cholera epidemic, you may happen to learn of it only while reading about the latest success of our wondrous medicine as manifested in the invention of a new vaccine.

The whole thing would have looked absurd if it were not for those very early mornings when, having washed my breakfast do^ with pale tea, I would run to catch the streetcar and, adding my berry to the dark-gray bunch of human grapes hanging on the footboard, would sail through the pinkish-blue, watercolor-like city to the wooden dog­house of my factory's entrance. It had two guards checking our badges and its facade was decorated with classical veneered pilasters. I've noticed that the entrances of pris­ons, mental hospitals, and concentration camps are done in the same style: they all bear a hint of classicistic or baroque porticoes. Quite an echo. Inside my shop, nuances of gray were interwoven under the ceiling, and the pneumatic hoses hissed quietly on the floor among the mazout puddles glittering with all the colors of the rainbow. By ten o'clock this metal jungle was in full swing, screeching and roaring, and the steel barrel of a would-be antiaircraft gun soared in the air like the disjointed neck of a giraffe.

I have always envied those nineteenth-century characters who were able to look back and distinguish the landmarks of their lives, of their development. Some event would mark a point of transition, a different stage. I am talking about writers; but what I really have in mind is the capac­ity of certain types of people to rationalize their lives, to see things separately, if not clearly. And I understand that this phenomenon shouldn't be limited to the nineteenth century. Yet in my life it has been represented mostly by literature. Either because of some basic flaw of my mind or because of the fluid, amorphous nature of life itself, I have never been capable of distinguishing any landmark, let alone a buoy. If there is anything like a landmark, it is that which I won't be able to acknowledge myself—i.e., death. In a sense, there never was such a thing as childhood. These categories—childhood, adulthood, maturity—seem to me very odd, and if I use them occasionally in conversation I always regard them mutely, for myself, as borrowed.

I guess there was always some "me" inside that small and, later, somewhat bigger shell around which "everything" was happening. Inside that shell the entity which one calls

T never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outside. I am not trying to hint at pearls inside. What I am saying is that the passage of time does not much affect that entity. To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or to lecture on Callimachus in a classroom is essentially the same. This is what makes one feel a bit astonished when one grows up and finds oneself tackling the tasks that are supposed to be handled by grownups. The dissatisfaction of a child with his parents' control over him and the panic of an adult con­fronting a responsibility are of the same nature. One is neither of these figures; one is perhaps less than "one."

Certainly this is partly an outgrowth of your profession. If you are in banking or if you fly an aircraft, you know that after you gain a substantial amount of expertise you are more or less guaranteed a profit or a safe landing. Whereas in the business of writing what one accumulates is not ex­pertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. In this field, where expertise invites doom, the no­tions of adolescence and maturity get mixed up, and panic is the most frequent state of mind. So I would be lying if I resorted to chronology or to anything that suggests a linear process. A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is aca- demia is boredom, with flashes of panic.

Except that the factory was next to a hospital, and the hospital was next to the most famous prison in all of Russia, called the Crosses. · And the morgue of that hospital was where I went to work after quitting the Arsenal, for I had the idea of becoming a doctor. The Crosses opened its cell doors to me soon after I changed my mind and started to

· The Crosses has 999 cells.

write poems. When I worked at the factory, I could see the hospital over the wall. When I cut and sewed up corpses at the hospital, I would see prisoners walking in the courtyard of the Crosses; sometimes they managed to throw their letters over the wall, and I'd pick them up and mail them. Because of this tight topography and because of the shell's enclosure, all these places, jobs, convicts, workers, guards, and doctors have merged into one another, and I don't know any longer whether I recall somebody walking back and forth in the flatiron-shaped courtyard of the Crosses or whether it is me walking there. Besides, both the factory and the prison were built at approximately the same time, and on the surface they were indistinguishable; one looked like a wing of the other.

So it doesn't make sense to me to try to be consecutive here. Life never looked to me like a set of clearly marked transi­tions; rather, it snowballs, and the more it does, the more one place (or one time) looks like another. I remember, for instance, how in 1945 my mother and I were waiting for a train at some railway station near Leningrad. The war was just over, twenty million Russians were decaying in makeshift graves across the continent, and the rest, dis­persed by war, were returning to their homes or what was left of their homes. The railway station was a picture of primeval chaos. People were besieging the cattle trains like mad insects; theywere climbing on the roofs of cars, squeez­ing between them, and so on. For some reason, my eye caught sight of an old, bald, crippled man with a wooden leg, who was trying to get into car after car, but each time was pushed away by the people who were already hanging on the footboards. The train started to move and the old man hopped along. At one point he managed to grab a handle of one of the cars, and then I saw a woman in the doorway lift a kettle and pour boiling water straight on the old man's bald crown. The man fell—the Bro^ian movement of a thousand legs swallowed him and I lost sight of him.

It was cruel, yes, but this instance of cruelty, in its o^ turn, merges in my mind with a story that took place twenty years later when a bunch of former collaborators with the German occupation forces, the so-called Polizei, were caught. It was in the papers. There were six or seven old men. The name of their leader was naturally Gurewicz or Ginzburg—i.e., he was a Jew, however unthinkable it is to imagine a Jew collaborating with Nazis. They all got various sentences. The Jew, naturally, got capital punishment. I was told that on the morning of the execution he was taken from the cell, and while being led into the courtyard of the prison where the firing squad was waiting, he was asked by the officer in charge of the prison guard: "Ah, by the way, Gurewicz [or Ginzburg], what's your last wish?" "Last wish?" said the man. "I don't know ... I'd like to take a leak . . ." To which the officer replied: "Well, you'll take a leak later." Now, to me both stories are the same; yet it is even worse if the second story is pure folklore, although I don't think it is. I know hundreds of similar tales, perhaps more than hundreds. Yet they merge.

What made my factory different from my school wasn't what I'd been doing inside each, not what I'd been think­ing in the respective periods, but the way their fa'

I had an uncle who was a member of the Party and who was, as I realize now, an awfully good engineer. During the war he built bomb shelters for the Party Genossen; before and after it he built bridges. Both still stand. My father always ridiculed him while quarreling about money with my mother, who would cite her engineer-brother as an example of solid and steady living, and I disdained him more or less automatically. Still, he had a magnificent li­brary. He didn't read much, I think; but it was—and still is—a mark of chic for the Soviet middle class to subscribe to new editions of encyclopedias, classics, and so on. I envied him madly. I remember once standing behind his chair, peering at the back of his head and thinking that if I killed him all his books would become mine, since he was then unmarried and had no children. I used to take books from his shelves, and even fashioned a key to a tall book­case behind whose glass sat four huge volumes of a pre- revolutionary edition of Man and Woman.

This was a copiously illustrated encyclopedia, to which I still consider myself indebted for my basic lrnowledge of how the forbidden fruit tastes. If, in general, pornography is an inanimate object that causes an erection, it is worth noting that in the puritanical atmosphere of Stalin's Russia, one could get turned on by the one hundred percent inno­cent Socialist Realist painting called Admission to the Kom­somol, which was widely reproduced and which decorated almost every classroom. Among the characters depicted in this painting was a young blond woman sitting on a chair with her legs crossed in such a way that two or three inches of her thigh were visible. It wasn't so much that bit of her thigh as its contrast to the dark brown dress she wore that drove me crazy and pursued me in my dreams.

It was then that I learned to disbelieve all the noise about the subconscious. I think that I never dreamed in symbols —1 always saw the real thing: bosom, hips, female under­wear. As to the latter, it had an odd significance for us boys at that time. I remember how during a class, somebody would crawl under a row of desks all the way up to the teacher's desk, with a single purpose—to look under her dress to check what color underpants she was wearing that day. Upon completing his expedition, he would announce in a dramatic whisper to the rest of the class, "Lilac."

In short, we were not troubled much by our fantasies —we had too much reality to deal with. I've said some­where else that Russians—at least my generation—never resort to shrinks. In the first place, there are not so many of them. Besides, psychiatry is the state's property. One knows that to have a psychiatric record isn't such a great thing. It might backfire at any moment. But in any case, we used to handle our problems ourselves, to keep track of what went on inside our heads without help from the outside. A certain advantage of totalitarianism is that it suggests to an individual a kind of vertical hierarchy of his o^, with consciousness at the top. So we oversee what's going on inside ourselves; we almost report to our consciousness on our instincts. And then we punish ourselves. When we realize that this punishment is not commensurate with the swine we have discovered inside, we resort to alcohol and drink our wits out.

I think this system is efficient and consumes less cash. It is not that I think suppression is better than freedom; I just believe that the mechanism of suppression is as innate to the human psyche as the mechanism of release. Besides, to think that you are a swine is humbler and eventually more accurate than to perceive yourself as a fallen angel. I have every reason to think so because in the country where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the only forms of free enterprise. Plus Art.

All the same, I felt patriotic. This was the normal pa­triotism of a child, a patriotism with a strong militaristic flavor. I admired planes and warships, and nothing was more beautiful to me than the yellow and blue banner of the air force, which looked like an open parachute canopy with a propeller in the center. I loved planes and until quite recently followed developments in aviation closely. With the arrival of rockets I gave up, and my love became a nostalgia for propjets. (I know I am not the only one: my nine-year-old son once said that when he grew up he would destroy all turbojets and reintroduce biplanes.) As for the navy, I was a true child of my father and at the age of fourteen applied for admission to a submarine academy. I passed all the exams, but because of the fifth paragraph —nationality—didn't get in, and my irrational love for navy overcoats with their double rows of gold buttons, resembling a night street with receding lights, remained unrequited.

Visual aspects of life, I am afraid, always mattered to me more than its content. For instance, I fell in love with a photograph of Samuel Beckett long before I'd read a line of his. As for the military, prisons spared me the draft, so that my affair with the uniform forever remained platonic. In my view, prison is a lot better than the ^roy. In the first place, in prison nobody teaches you to hate that distant "potential" enemy. Your enemy in prison isn't an abstrac­tion; he is concrete and palpable. That is, you are always palpable to your enemy. Perhaps "enemy" is too strong a word. In prison you are dealing with an extremely domes­ticated notion of enemy, which makes the whole thing quite earthly, mortal. After all, my guards or neighbors were not any different from my teachers or those workers who humiliated me during my apprenticeship at the fac­tory.

My hatred's center of gravity, in other words, wasn't dis­persed into some foreign capitalist nowhere; it wasn't even hatred. The damned trait of understanding and thus for­giving everybody, which started while I was in school, fully blossomed in prison. I don't think I hated even my KGB interrogators: I tended to absolve even them (good-for- nothing, has a family to feed, etc.). The ones I couldn't justify at all were those who ran the country, perhaps be­cause I'd never got close to any of them. As enemies go, in a ceU you have a most immediate one: lack of space. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is a lack of alternatives, and the tele­scopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy. Even so, it is a hell of a lot better than the solemnity with which the army sics you on people on the other side of the globe, or nearer.

Service in the Soviet Army takes from three to four years, and I never met a person whose psyche wasn't mutilated by its mental straitjacket of obedience. With the exception, perhaps, of musicians who play in military bands and two distant acquaintances of mine who shot themselves in 1956, in Hungary, where both were tank commanders. It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it you still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being. If there is any reason for pride in my past, it is that I became a convict, not a soldier. Even for having missed out on the military lingo—the thing that worried me most—1 was generously reimbursed with the criminal argot.

Still, warships and planes were beautiful, and every year there were more of them. In 1945, the streets were full of "Studebekker" trucks and jeeps with a white star on their doors and hoods—the American hardware we had got on lend-lease. In 1972, we were selling this kind of thing urbi et orbi ourselves. If the standard of living during that pe­riod improved 15 to 20 percent, the improvement in weap­onry production could be expressed in tens of thousands of percent. It will continue to go up, because it is about the only real thing we have in that country, the only tangible field for advancement. Also because military blackmail, i.e., a constant increase in the production of armaments which is perfectly tolerable in the totalitarian setup, may cripple the economy of any democratic adversary that tries to maintain a balance. Military buildup isn't insanity: it's the best tool available to condition the economy of your oppo­site number, and in the Kremlin they've realized that full well. Anyone seeking world domination would do the same. The alternatives are either unworkable (economic compe­tition) or too scary (actually using military devices).

Besides, the army is a peasant's idea of order. There is nothing more reassuring for an average man than the sight of his cohorts parading in front of Politburo members standing on top of the Mausoleum. I guess it never occurred to any of them that there is an element of blasphemy in standing on top of a holy relic's tomb. The idea, I guess, is that of a continuum, and the sad thing about these figures on top of the Mausoleum is that they really join the mummy in defying time. You either see it live on TV or as a poor- quality photograph multiplied in millions of copies of the official newspapers. Like the ancient Romans who related themselves to the center of the Empire by making the main street in their settlements always run north-south, so the Russians check the stability and predictability of their ex­istence by those pictures.

When I was working at the factory, we would go for lunch breaks into the factory yard; some would sit do^ and un­wrap their sandwiches, others would smoke or play volley­ball. There was a little flower bed surrounded by the stan­dard wooden fence. This was a row of twenty-inch-high planks with two-inch spaces between them, held together by a transverse lath made of the same material, painted green. It was covered with dust and soot, just like the shrunken, withered flowers inside the square-shaped bed. Wherever you went in that empire, you would always find this fence. It comes prefabricated, but even when people make it with their o^ hands, they always follow the prescribed design. Once I went to Central Asia, to Samarkand; I was al warmed up for those turquoise cupolas and the inscrutable ornaments of madrasahs and minarets. They were there. And then I saw that fence, with its idiotic rhythm, and my heart sank, the Orient vanished. The small-scale, comb-like repetitiveness of the narrow palings immediately annihilated the space—as well as the time— between the factory yard and Kubla Khan's ancient seat.

There is nothing more remote from these planks than

nature, whose green color their paint idiotically suggests. These planks, the governmental iron of railings, the inevi­table khaki of the military uniform in every passing crowd on every street in every city, the eternal photographs of steel foundries in every morning paper and the continuous Tchaikovsky on the radio—these things would drive you crazy unless you learned to switch yourself off. There are no commercials on Soviet TV; there are pictures of Lenin, or so-called photo-etudes of "spring," "autumn," etc., in the intervals between the programs. Plus "light" bubbling music which never had a composer and is a product of the amplifier itself.

At that time I didn't know yet that all this was a result of the age of reason and progress, of the age of mass produc­tion; I ascribed it to the state and partly to the nation itself, which would go for anything that does not require imagi­nation. Still, I think I wasn't completely wrong. Should it not be easier to exercise and distribute enlightenment and culture in a centralized state? A ruler, theoretically, has better access to perfection (which he claims anyhow) than a representative. Rousseau argued this. Too bad it never worked in Russia. This country, with its magnificently in­flected language capable of expressing the subtlest nuances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity (a good result of its otherwise tragic history), had all the makings of a cultural, spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization. Instead, it became a drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.

My generation, however, was somewhat spared. We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its o^ skin and couldn't look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. You cannot cover a ruin with a page of Pravda. The empty windows gaped at us like skulls' orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy. True, we couldn't connect ourselves to the ruins, but that wasn't necessary: they emanated enough to interrupt laughter. Then we would resume laughing, quite mindlessly—and yet it would be a resumption. In those postwar years we sensed a strange intensity in the air; something immaterial, almost ghostly. And we were young, we were kids. The amount of goods was very limited, but not having kno^ otherwise, we didn't mind it. Bikes were old, of prewar make, and the o^er of a soccer ball was considered a bourgeois. The coats and underwear that we wore were cut out by our mothers from our fathers' uniforms and patched drawers: exit Sigmund Freud. So we didn't develop a taste for possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ugly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to the things themselves, though when we looked in mirrors we didn't much like what we saw there.

We never had a room of our own to lure our girls into, nor did our girls have rooms. Our love affairs were mostly walking and talking affairs; it would make an astronomical sum if we were charged for mileage. Old warehouses, em­bankments of the river in industrial quarters, stiff benches in wet public gardens, and cold entrances of public build­ings—these were the standard backdrops of our first pneu­matic blisses. We never had what are called "material stim­uli.'" Ideological ones were a laughable matter even for kindergarten kids. If somebody sold himself out, it wasn't for the sake of goods or comfort: there were none. He was selling out because of inner want and he knew that himself. There were no supplies, there was sheer demand.

If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and con­versations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to become a vicious circle, but we didn't want to break it.

In its ethics, this generation was among the most book­ish in the history of Russia, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a pref­erence for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our real Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but soon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and un­worthy of effort. So we thought, and I think we were right.

The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles. Even those of us who managed to make it through the very thick woods of "higher education," with all its unavoidable lip—and other members'—service to the system, finally fell victim to literature-imposed scruples and couldn't manage any longer. We ended up doing odd jobs, menial or edi­torial—or something mindless, like carving tombstone in­scriptions, drafting blueprints, translating technical texts, accounting, bookbinding, developing X-rays. From time to time we would pop up on the threshold of one another's apartment, with a bottle in one hand, sweets or flowers or snacks in the other, and spend the evening talking, gossip­ing, bitching about the idiocy of the officials upstairs, guessing which one of us would be the first to die. And now I must drop the pronoun "we."

Nobody knew literature and history better than these peo­ple, nobody could write in Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This wasn't, as it might seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperative than their o^ personal destinies. Poorly dressed but some­how still elegant, shuffled by the dumb hands of their im­mediate masters, running like rabbits from the ubiquitous state hounds and the even more ubiquitous foxes, broken, growing old, they still retained their love for the non­existent (or existing only in their balding heads) thing called "civilization." Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought that at least that world was like them­selves; now they know that it is like others, only better dressed. As I write this, I close my eyes and almost see them standing in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses in their hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces. "There, there . . ." They grin. "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite . . . Why does nobody add Culture?"

Memory, I think, is a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our move­ments, including migration. Apart from that there is some­thing clearly atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process never is linear. Also, the more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dying.

If this is so, it is a good thing when your memory stum­bles. More often, however, it coils, recoils, digresses to all sides, just as a tail does; so should one's narrative, even at the risk of sounding inconsequential and boring. Boredom, after all, is the most frequent feature of existence, and one wonders why it fared so poorly in the nineteenth-century prose that strived so much for realism.

But even if a writer is fully equipped to imitate on paper the subtlest fluctuations of the mind, the effort to repro­duce the tail in all its spiral splendor is still doomed, for evolution wasn't for nothing. The perspective of years straightens things to the point of complete obliteration. Nothing brings them back, not even handwritten words with their coiled letters. Such an effort is doomed all the more if this tail happens to lag behind somewhere in Russia.

But if the printed words were only a mark of forgetful- ness, that would be fine. The sad truth is that words fail reality as well. At least it's been my impression that any experience coming from the Russian realm, even when depicted with photographic precision, simply bounces off the English language, leaving no visible imprint on its sur­face. Of course the memory of one civilization cannot, per­haps should not, become a memory of another. But when language fails to reproduce the negative realities of another culture, the worst kind of tautologies result.

History, no doubt, is bound to repeat itself: after all, like men, history doesn't have many choices. But at least one should have the comfort of being aware of what one is fall­ing a victim to when dealing with the peculiar semantics prevailing in a foreign realm such as Russia. One gets done in by one's own conceptual and analytic habits—e.g., using language to dissect experience, and so robbing one's mind of the benefits of intuition. Because, for all its beauty, a distinct concept always means a shrinkage of meaning, cutting off loose ends. While the loose ends are what mat­ter most in the phenomenal world, for they interweave.

These words themselves bear witness that I am far from accusing the English language of insufficiency; nor do I lament the donnant state of its native speakers' psyche. I merely regret the fact that such an advanced notion of Evil as happens to be in the possession of Russians has been denied entry into consciousness on the grounds of having a convoluted syntax. One wonders how many of us can recall a plain-speaking Evil that crosses the threshold, say­ing: "Hi, I'm Evil. How are you?"

If all this, nonetheless, has an elegiac air, it is owing rather to the genre of the piece than to its content, for which rage would be more appropriate. Neither, of course, yields the meaning of the past; elegy at least doesn't create a new reality. No matter how elaborate a structure anyone may devise for catching his own tail, hell end up with a net full of fish but without water. Which lulls his boat. And which is enough to cause dizziness or to make him resort to an elegiac tone Or to throw the fish back.

Once upon a time there was a little boy. He lived in the most unjust country in the world. Which was ruled by creatures who by all human accounts should be considered degenerates. Which never happened.

And there was a city. The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. With an immense gray river that hung over its distant bottom like the immense gray sky over that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beautifully elaborated fa9ades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint of a giant mollusk called civilization. Which ceased to exist.

Early in the morning when the sky was still full of stars the little boy would rise and, after having a cup of tea and an egg, accompanied by a radio announcement of a new record in smelted steel, followed by the army choir singing a hymn to the Leader, whose picture was pinned to the wall over the little boy's still warm bed, he would run along the snow-covered granite embankment to school.

The wide river lay white and frozen like a continent's tongue lapsed into silence, and the big bridge arched against the dark blue sky like an iron palate. If the little boy had two extra minutes, he would slide down on the ice and take twenty or thirty steps to the middle. All this time he would be thinking about what the fish were doing under such heavy ice. Then he would stop, t^™ 180 degrees, and run back, nonstop, right up to the entrance of the school. He would burst into the hall, throw his hat and coat off onto a hook, and fly up the staircase and into his classroom.

It is a big room with three rows of desks, a portrait of the Leader on the wall behind the teacher's chair, a map with two hemispheres, of which only one is legal. The little boy takes his seat, opens his briefcase, puts his pen and notebook on the desk, lifts his face, and prepares himself to hear drivel.

1976

The Keening Muse

When her father learned that his daughter was about to publish a selection of her poems in a St. Petersburg maga­zine, he called her in and told her that although he had nothing against her writing poetry, he'd urge her "not to befoul a good respected name" and to use a pseudonym. The daughter agreed, and this is how "Anna Akhmatova" entered Russian literature instead of Anna Gorenko.

The reason for this acquiescence was neither uncertainty about the elected occupation and her actual gifts nor an­ticipation of the benefits that a split identity can provide a writer. It was done simply for the sake of "maintaining appearances" because among families belonging to the no­bility—and the Gorenkos were one—the literary profession was generally regarded as somewhat unseemly and befitting those of more humble origins who didn't have a better way of making a name.

Still, the father's request was a bit of an overstatement After all, the Gorenkos weren't princes. But then again the family lived in Tsarskoc Selo—Tsar's Village—which was the summer residence of the imperial family, and this sort of topography could have influenced the man. For his seventeen-year-old daughter, however, the place had a dif­ferent significance. Tsarskoe was the seat of the Lyceum in whose gardens a century ago "carelessly blossomed" young Pushkin.

As for the pseudonym itsdf, its choice had to do with the maternal ancestry of Anna Gorenko, which could be traced back to the last khan of the Golden Horde: to Achmat Khan, descendant of Jenghiz Khan. "I am a Jen- ghizite," she used to remark not without a touch of pride; and for a Russian ear "Akhmatova" has a distinct Oriental, Tatar to be precise, flavor. She didn't mean to be exotic, though, if only because in Russia a name with a Tatar overtone meets not curiosity but prejudice.

All the same, the five open a's of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name's carrier firmly at the top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense; it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot about the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after her first publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and time; the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be prophetic.

Anna Akhmatova belongs to the category of poets who have neither genealogy nor discernible "development." She is the kind of poet that simply "happens"; that arrives in the world with an already established diction and his/her own unique sensibility. She carne fully equipped, and she never resembled anyone What was perhaps more signifi­cant is that none of her countless imitators was ever capable of producing a convincing Akhmatova pastiche either; they'd end up resembling one another more than her.

This suggests that Akhmatova's idiom was a product of something less graspable than an astute stylistic calcula­tion and leaves us with the necessity of upgrading the sec­ond part of Buffon's famous equation to the notion of "self."

Apart from the general sacred aspects of the said entity, its uniqueness in the case of Akhmatova was further se­cured by her actual physical beauty. She looked positively stunning. Five feet eleven, dark-haired, fair-skinned, with pale gray-green eyes like those of snow leopards, slim and incredibly lithe, she was for half a century sketched, painted, cast, carved, and photographed by a multitude of artists starting with Amedeo Modigliani. As for the poems dedicated to her, they'd make more volumes than her own collected works.

All this goes to show that the visible part of that self was quite breathtaking; as for the hidden one being a perfect match, there is testimony to it in her writing, which blends both.

This blend's chief characteristics are nobility and re­straint. Akhmatova is the poet of strict meters, exact rhymes, and short sentences. Her syntax is simple and free of sub­ordinate clauses whose gnomic convolutions are responsible for most of Russian literature; in fact, in its simplicity, her syntax resembles English. From the very threshold of her career to its very end she was always perfectly clear and coherent. Among her contemporaries, she is a Jane Austen. In any case, if her sayings were dark, it wasn't due to her grammar.

In an era marked by so much technical experimenta­tion in poetry, she was blatantly non-avant-garde. If any­thing, her means were visually similar to what prompted that wave of innovations in Russian poetry, as everywhere else, at the tum of the century: to the Symbolists' quatrains, ubiquitous as grass. Yet this visual resemblance was main­tained by Akhmatova deliberately: through it she sought not the simplification of her task but a worsening of the odds. She simply wanted to play the game straight, with­out bending or inventing the rules. In short, she wanted her verse to maintain appearances.

Nothing reveals a poet's weaknesses like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged. To make a cou­ple of lines sound unpredictable without producing a comic effect or echoing someone else is an extremely per­plexing affair. This echo aspect of strict meters is most nagging, and no amount of oversaturating the line with concrete physical detail sets one free. Akhmatova sounds so independent because from the outset she knew how to exploit the enemy.

She did it by a collage-like diversification of the content. Often within just one stanza she'd cover a variety of seem­ingly unrelated things. When a person talks in the same breath about the gravity of her emotion, gooseberry blos­soms, and puUing the left-hand glove onto her right hand— that compromises the breath—which is, in the poem, its meter—to the degree that one forgets about its pedigree. The echo, in other words, gets subordinated to the discrep­ancy of objects and in effect provides them with a common denominator; it ceases to be a form and becomes a norm of locution.

Sooner or later this always happens to the echo as well as to the diversity of things themselves—in Russian verse it was done by Akhmatova; more exactly, by that self which bore her name. One can't help thinking that while its inner part hears what, by means of rhyme, the language itself suggests about the proximity of those disparate objects, the outer one literally sees that proximity from the vantage point of her actual height. She simply couples what has been already joined: in the language and in the circum­stances of her life, if not, as they say, in heaven.

Hence the nobility of her diction, for she doesn't lay claim to her discoveries. Her rhymes are not assertive, the meter is not insistent. Sometimes shed drop a syllable or two in a stanza's last or penultimate line in order to create the effect of a choked throat, or that of unwitting awkward­ness caused by emotional tension. But that would be as far as she'd go, for she felt very much at home within the con­fines of classical verse, thereby suggesting that her raptures and revelations don't require an extraordinary formal treat­ment, that they are not any greater than those of her prede­cessors who used these meters before.

This, of course, wasn't exactly true. No one absorbs the past as thoroughly as a poet, if only out of fear of inventing the already invented. (This is why, by the way, a poet is so often regarded as being "ahead of his time," which keeps itself busy rehashing cliches.) So no matter what a poet may plan to say, at the moment of speech he always knows that he inherits the subject. The great literature of the past humbles one not only through its quality but through its topical precedence as well. The reason why a good poet speaks of his own grief with restraint is that, as regards grief, he is a Wandering Jew. In this sense, Akhmatova was very much a product of the Petersburg tradition in Russian poetry, the founders of which, in their own tum, had behind them European classicism as well as its Roman and Greek origins. In addition, they, too, were aristocrats.

If Akhmatova was reticent, it was at least partly because she was carrying the heritage of her predecessors into the art of this century. This obviously was but an homage to them, since it was precisely that heritage which made her this century's poet. She simply regarded herself, with her raptures and revelations, as a postscript to their message, to what they recorded about their lives. The lives were tragic, and so was the message. If the postscript looks dark, it's because the message was absorbed fully. If she never screams or showers her head with ashes, it's because they didn't.

Such were the cue and the key with which she started. Her first collections were tremendously successful with both the critics and the public. In general, the response to a poet's work should be considered last, for it is a poet's last consideration. However, Akhmatova's success was in this re­spect remarkable if one takes into account its timing, espe­cially in the case of her second and third volumes: 1914 (the outbreak of World War I) and 1917 (the October Revolution in Russia). On the other hand, perhaps it was precisely this deafening background thunder of world events that rendered the private tremolo of this young poet all the more discernible and vital. In that sense again, the beginning of this poetic career contained a prophecy of the course it came to run for half a century. What in­creases the sense of prophecy is that for a Russian ear at the time the thunder of world events was compounded by the incessant and quite meaningless mumbling of the Sym­bolists. Eventualy these two noises shrunk and merged into the threatening incoherent drone of the new era against which Akhmatova was destined to speak for the rest of her life.

Those early collections (Evening, Rosary, and White Flock) dealt mostly with the sentiment which is de rigueur for early collections; with that of love. The poems in those books had a diary-like intimacy and immediacy; they'd describe no more than one actual or psychological event and were short—sixteen to twenty lines at best. As such they could be committed to memory in a flash, as indeed they were—and still are—by generations and generations of Russians.

Still, it was neither their compactness nor their subject matter that made one's memory desire to appropriate them; those features were quite familiar to an experienced reader. The news came in the form of a sensibility which mani­fested itself in the author's treatment of her theme. Be­trayed, tormented by either jealousy or guilt, the wounded heroine of these poems speaks more frequently in self- reproach than in anger, forgives more eloquently than accuses, prays rather than screams. She displays all the emotional subtlety and psychological complexity of nine­teenth-century Russian prose and all the dignity that the poetry of the same century taught her. Apart from these, there is also a great deal of irony and detachment which are strictly her own and products of her metaphysics rather than shortcuts to resignation.

Needless to say, for her readership those qualities seem to come in both handy and timely. More than any other art, poetry is a fonn of sentimental education, and the lines that Akhmatova readers learned by heart were to temper their hearts against the new era's onslaught of vulgarity. The comprehension of the metaphysics of personal drama betters one's chances of weathering the drama of history. This is why, and not because of the epigrammatic beauty of her lines only, the public clung to them so unwittingly. It was an instinctive reaction; the instinct being that of self-preservation, for the stampede of history was getting more and more audible.

Akhmatova in any case heard it quite clearly. The in­tensely personal lyricism of White Flock is tinged with the note that was destined to become her imprimatur: the note of controlled terror. The mechanism designed to keep in check emotions of a romantic nature proved to be as effective when applied to mortal fears. The latter was in­creasingly intertwined with the former until they resulted in emotional tautology, and White Flock marks the be­ginning of this process. With this collection, Russian poetry hit "the real, non-calendar twentieth century" but didn't disintegrate on impact.

Akhmatova, to say the least, seemed better prepared for this encounter than most of her contemporaries. Besides, by the time of the Revolution she was twenty-eight years old: that is, neither young enough to believe in it nor too old to justify it. Furthermore, she was a woman, and it would be equally unseemly for her to extol or condemn the event. Nor did she decide to accept the change of social order as an invitation to loosen her meter and associative chains. For art doesn't imitate life if only for fear of cliches. She remained true to her diction, to its private timbre, to re­fracting rather than reflecting life through the prism of the individual heart. Except that the choice of detail whose role in a poem previously was to shift attention from an emotionally pregnant issue presently began to be less and less of a solace, overshadowing the issue itself.

She didn't reject the Revolution: a defiant pose wasn't for her either. Using latter-day locution, she internalized it. She simply took it for what it was: a terrible national upheaval which meant a tremendous increase of grief per individual. She understood this not only because her own share went too high but first and foremost through her very craft. The poet is a born democrat not thanks to the pre- cariousness of his position only but because he caters to the entire nation and employs its language. So does tragedy, and hence their affinity. Akhmatova, whose verse always gravitated to the vernacular, to the idiom of folk song, could identify with the people more thoroughly than those who were pushing at the time their literary or other programs: she simply recognized grief.

Moreover, to say that she identified with the people is to introduce a rationalization which never took place be­cause of its inevitable redundancy. She was a part of the whole, and the pseudonym just furthered her class anonym­ity. In addition, she always disdained the air of superiority present in the word "poet." "I don't understand these big words," she used to say, "poet, billiard." This wasn't hu­mility; this was the result of the sober perspective in which she kept her existence. The very persistence of love as the theme of her poetry indicates her proximity to the average person. If she differed from her public it was in that her ethics weren't subject to historical adjustment.

Other than that, she was like everybody else. Besides, the times themselves didn't allow for great variety. If her poems weren't exactly the vox populi, it's because a nation never speaks with one voice. But neither was her voice that of the creme de la creme, if only because it was totally devoid of the populist nostalgia so peculiar to the Russian intelli­gentsia. The "we" that she starts to use about this time in self-defense against the impersonality of pain inflicted by history was broadened to this pronoun's linguistic limits not by herself but by the rest of the speakers of this lan­guage. Because of the quality of the future, this "we" was there to stay and the authority of its user to grow.

In any case, there is no psychological difference between Akhmatova's "civic" poems of World War I and the revolu­tionary period, and those written a good thirty years later during World War II. Indeed, without the date under­neath them, poems like "Prayer" could be attributed to virtually any moment of Russian history in this century which justifies that particular poem's title. Apart from the sensitivity of her membrane, though, this proves that the quality of history for the last eighty years has somewhat simplified the poet's job. It did so to the degree that a poet would spurn a line containing a prophetic possibility and prefer a plain description of a fact or sensation.

Hence the nominative character of Akhmatova's lines in general and at that period in particular. She knew not only that the emotions and perceptions she dealt with were fairly common but also that time, true to its repetitive na­ture, would render them universal. She sensed that history, like its objects, has very limited options. What was more important, however, was that those "civic" poems were but fragments borne by her general lyrical current, which made their "we" practically indistinguishable from the more fre­quent, emotionally charged "I." Because of their over­lapping, both pronouns were gaining in verisimilitude.

44 I J О s E p II B R О D s K y

Since the name of the current was "love," the poems about the homeland and the epoch were shot through with almost inappropriate intimacy; similarly, those about sentiment itself were acquiring an epic timbre. The latter meant the current's widening.

Later in her life, Akhmatova always resented attempts by critics and scholars to confine her significance to her love poetry of the teens of this century. She was perfectly right, because the output of the subsequent forty years outweighs her first decade both numerically and qualitatively. Still, one can understand those scholars and critics, since after 1922 until her death in Akhmatova simply couldn't publish a book of her own, and they were forced to deal with what was available. Yet perhaps there was another reason, less obvious or less comprehended by those scholars and critics, that they were drawn to the early Akhmatova.

Throughout one's life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, etc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabu­lary absorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance grati­fies a subject, however inanimate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastical, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book's suggestion as to what God is. Love is essentially an attitude main­tained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal con­stitutes either faith or poetry.

Akhmatova's love poems, naturally, were in the first place just poems. Apart from anything else, they had a terrific novelistic quality, and a reader could have had a wonderful time explicating the various tribulations and trials of their heroine. (Some did just that, and on the basis of those poems, the heated public imagination would have their author "romantically involved" with Alexander Blok—the poet of the period—as well as with His Imperial Majesty himself, although she was a far better poet than the former and a good six inches taller than the latter.) Half self- portrait, half mask, their poetic persona would augment an achtal drama with the fatality of theater, thus probing both her own and pain's possible limits. Happier states would be subjected to the same probing. Realism, in short, was em­ployed as the means of transportation to a metaphysical destination. Still, all this would have amounted to animating the genre's tradition were it not for the sheer quantity of poems dealing with the said sentiment.

That quantity denies both biographical and Freudian ap­proaches, for it overshoots the addressees' concreteness and renders them as pretexts for the author's speech. What art and sexuality have in common is that both are sublimations of one's creative energy, and that denies them hierarchy. The nearly idiosyncratic persistence of the early Akhma­tova love poems suggests not so much the recurrence of passion as the frequency of prayer. Correspondingly, dif­ferent though their imagined or real protagonists are, these poems display a considerable stylistic similarity because love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The same goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals.

It is the finite's nostalgia for the infinite that accounts for the recurrence of the love theme in Akhmatova's verse, not the actual entanglements. Love indeed has become for her a language, a code to record time's messages or, at least, to convey their tune; she simply heard them better this way. For what interested this poet most was not her own life but precisely time and the effects of its mono­tone on the human psyche and on her own diction in par­ticular. If she later resented attempts to reduce her to her early writing, it was not because she disliked the status of the habitually love-sick girl: it was because heT diction and, with it, the code, subsequently changed a great deal in order to make the monotone of the infinite more audible.

In fact, it was already quite distinct in Anno Domini Л/CAfXX/—her fifth and technically speaking last col­lection. In some of its poems, that monotone merges with the author's voice to the point that she has to sharpen the concreteness of detail or image in order to save them, and by the same token her own mind, from the inhuman neu­trality of the meter. Their fusion, or rather the former's subordination to the latter, came later. In the meantime, she was trying to save her own notions of existence from being overtaken by those supplied to her by prosody: for prosody knows more about time than a human being would like to reckon with.

Close exposure to this knowledge, or more accurately to this memory of time restructured, results in an inordi­nate mental acceleration that robs insights that come from the actual reality of their novelty, if not of their gTavity. No poet can ever close this gap, but a conscientious one may lower his pitch or muffle his diction so as to down­play his estrangement from real life. This is done some­times for purely aesthetic purposes: to make one's voice less theatrical, less bel canto-like. More frequently, though, the purpose of this camouflage is, again, to retain sanity, and Akhmatova, a poet of strict meters, was using it pre­cisely to that end. But the more she did so, the more in­exorably her voice was approaching the impersonal tonality of time itself, until they merged into something that makes one shudder trying to guess—as in her Northern Elegies —who is hiding behind the pronoun "1."

What happened to pronouns was happening to other parts of speech, which would peter out or loom large in the perspective of time supplied by prosody. Akhmatova was a very concrete poet, but the more concrete the image, the more extemporary it would become because of the accom­panying meter. No poem is ever written for its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obituary. What is called the music of a poem is essentially time re­structured in such a way that it brings this poem's content into a linguistically inevitable, memorable focus.

Sound, in other words, is the seat of time in the poem, a background against which its content acquires a stereo­scopic quality. The power of Akhmatova's lines comes from her ability to convey the music's impersonal epic sweep, which more than matched their actual content, especially from the twenties on. The effect of her instrumentation upon her themes was akin to that of somebody used to being put against the wall being suddenly put against the horizon.

The above should be kept very much in mind by the foreign reader of Akhmatova, since that horizon vanishes in translations, leaving on the page absorbing but one- dimensional content. On the other hand, the foreign reader may perhaps be consoled by the fact that this poet's native audience also has been forced to deal with her work in a very misrepresented fashion. What translation has in com­mon with censorship is that both operate on the basis of the "what's possible" principle, and it must be noted that linguistic barriers can be as high as those erected by the state. Akhmatova, in any case, is surrounded by both and it's only the former that shows signs of crumbling.

Anno Domini MCMXXl was her last collection: in the forty-four years that followed she had no book of her own. In the postwar period there were, technically speaking, two slim editions of her work, consisting mainly of a few re­printed early lyrics plus genuinely patriotic war poems and doggerel bits extolling the arrival of peace. These last ones were written by her in order to win the release of her son from the labor camps, in which he nonetheless spent eigh­teen years. These publications in no way can be regarded as her own, for the poems were selected by the editors of the state-run publishing house and their aim was to con­vince the public (especially those abroad) that Akhmatova was alive, well, and loyal. They totaled some fifty pieces and had nothing in common with her output during those four decades.

For a poet of Akhmatova's stature this meant being buried alive, with a couple of slabs marking the mound. Her going under was a product of several forces, mostly that of history, whose chief element is vulgarity and whose im­mediate agent is the state. Now, by MCMXXI, which means 1921, the new state could already be at odds with Akhma­tova, whose first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was exe­cuted by its security forces, allegedly on the direct order of the state's head, Vladimir Lenin. A spin-off of a didactic, eye-for-eye mentality, the new state could expect from Akhmatova nothing but retaliation, especially given her reputed tendency for an autobiographical touch.

Such was, presumably, the state's logic, furthered by the destruction in tie subsequent decade and a half of her entire circle (including her closest friends, poets Vladimir Narbut and Osip Mandelstam). It culminated in the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilyov, and her third husband, art- historian Nikolai Punin, who soon died in prison. Then came World War II.

Those fifteen years preceding the war were perhaps the darkest in the whole of Russian history; undoubtedly they were so in Akhmatova's own life. It's the material which this period supplied, or more accurately the lives it sub­tracted, that made her eventually earn the title of the Keen­ing Muse. This period simply replaced the frequency of poems about love with that of poems in memoriam. Death, which she would previously evoke as a solution for this or that emotional tension, became too real for any emotion to matter. From a figure of speech it became a figure that leaves you speechless.

If she proceeded to write, it's because prosody absorbs death, and because she felt guilty that she survived. The pieces that constitute her "Wreath for the Dead" are sim­ply attempts to let those whom she outlived absorb or at least join prosody. It's not that she tried to "immortalize" her dead: most of them were the pride of Russian literature already and thus had immortalized themselves enough. She simply tried to manage the meaninglessness of existence, which suddenly gaped before her because of the destruc­tion of the sources of its meaning, to domesticate the reprehensible infinity by inhabiting it with familiar shadows. Besides, addressing the dead was the only way of prevent­ing speech from slipping into a howl.

The elements of howl, however, are quite audible in other Akhmatova poems of the period and later. They'd appear either in the form of idiosyncratic excessive rhyming or as a non sequitur line interjected in an otherwise coherent narrative. Nevertheless, the poems dealing directly with somcone's death are free of anything of this sort, as though the author doesn't want to offend her addressees with her emotional extremes. This refusal to exploit the ultimate opportunity to impose herself upon them echoes, of course, the practice of her lyric poetry. But by continuing to ad­dress the dead as though they were alive, by not adjusting her diction to "the occasion," she also refuses the oppor­tunity to exploit the dead as those ideal, absolute interlocu­tors that every poet seeks and finds either in the dead or among angels.

As a theme, death is a good litmus test for a poet's ethics. The "in memoriam" genre is frequently used to exercise self-pity or for metaphysical trips that denote the subcon­scious superiority of survivor over victim, of majority (of the alive) over minority (of the dead). Akhmatova would have none of that. She particularizes her fallen instead of generalizing about them, since she writes for a minority with which it's easier for her to identify in any case. She simply continues to treat them as individuals whom she knew and who, she senses, wouldn't like to be used as the point of departure for no matter how spectacular a des­tination.

Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn't be pub­lished, nor could they even be written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by some seven other people, since she didn't trust her own memory. From time to time, she'd meet a person privately and would ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being excessive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper with a few lines on it. Besides, she feared not so much for her own life as for that of her son, who was in a camp and whose release she desperately tried to obtain for eighteen years. A little piece of paper with a few lines on it could cost a lot, and more to him than to her, who could lose only hope and, perhaps, mind.

The days of both, however, would have been numbered had the authorities found her Requiem, a cycle of poems describing the ordeal of a woman whose son is arrested and who waits under prison walls with a parcel for him and scurries about the thresholds of state offices to find out about his fate. Now, this time around she was autobio­graphical indeed, yet the power of Requiem lies in the fact that Akhmatova's biography was all too common. This requiem mourns the mourners: mothers losing sons, wives turning widows, sometimes both, as was the author's case. This is a tragedy where the chorus perishes before the hero.

The degree of compassion with which the various voices of Requiem are rendered can be explained only by the author's Orthodox faith; the degree of understanding and forgiveness which accounts for this work's piercing, al­most unbearable lyricism, only by the uniqueness of her heart, her self, and this self's sense of time. No creed would help to understand, much less forgive, let alone survive this double widowhood at the hands of the regime, this fate of her son, these forty years of being silenced and os­tracized. No Anna Gorenko would be able to take it. Anna Akhmatova did, and it's as though she knew what was in store when she took this pen name.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into some­thing graspable, something that otherwise couldn't be re­tained by the mind. In that sense, the whole nation took up the pen name of Akhmatova—which explains her popu­larity and which, more importantly, enabled her to speak for the nation as well as to tell it something it didn't know. She was, essentially, a poet of human ties: cherished, strained, severed. She showed these evolutions first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history, such as it was. This is about as much as one gets in the way of optics anyway.

These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repository of time within language. Hence, by the way, her ability to forgive —because forgiveness is not a virtue postulated by creed but a property of time in both its mundane and metaphysi­cal senses. This is also why her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are charged with time in both those senses. They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always s^^ves history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that.

1982

Pendulum's Song

l

Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, and died there seventy years later of throat cancer. The uneventfulness of his life would have made the strictest of New Critics happy. Cavafy was the ninth child of a well- to-do mercantile family, whose prosperity went into rapid decline with the death of his father. At the age of nine the future poet went to England, where Cavafy and Sons had its branches, and he returned to Alexandria at sixteen. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox religion. For a while he attended the Hermes Lyceum, a business school in Alexandria, and some sources tell us that while there he was more interested in classical and historical studies than in the art of commerce. But this may be merely a cliche in the biography of a poet.

In 1882, when Cavafy was nineteen, an anti-European outbreak took place in Alexandria which caused a great deal of bloodshed (at least according to that century's standards), and the British retaliated with a naval bom­bardment of the city. Since Cavafy and his mother had left for Constantinople not long before, he missed his chance to witness perhaps the only historic event to take place in Alexandria during his lifetime. He spent three subsequent years in Constantinople—important years for his development. It was in Constantinople that the histori­cal diary, which he had been keeping for several years, stopped—at the entry marked "Alexander." Here also he allegedly had his first homosexual experience. At twenty- eight Cavafy got his first job, as a temporary clerk at the Department of Irrigation in the Ministry of Public Works. This provisional position turned out to be fairly permanent: he held it for the next thirty years, occasionally making some extra money as a broker on the Alexandrian Stock Exchange.

Cavafy knew ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Arabic, French; he read Dante in Italian and he wrote his first poems in English. But if there were any literary influences —and in Cavafy's Alexandria Edmund Keeley sees some of the English Romantics—they ought to be confined to that stage of Cavafy's poetic development which the poet him­self dismissed from the "canon" of his work, as Keeley defines it. As for the later period, Cavafy's treatment of what were known during Hellenic times as mime-jambs (or simply "mime") and his use of the epitaph are so much his own that Keeley is correct in sparing us the haze of the Palatine Anthology.

The uneventfulness of Cavafy's life extends to his never having published a book of his poems. He lived in Alexan­dria, wrote poems (occasionally printing them in feuilles volantes, as pamphlets or broadsheets in a severely limited edition), talked in cafes to local or visiting literati, played cards, bet on horses, visited homosexual brothels, and some­times attended church.

I believe that there arc at least five editions of Cavafy's poetry in English. The most successful renderings are those by Rae Dalven · and Messrs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. t The hardcover version of the latter is bilingual. Since there is little or no cooperation in the world of trans­lation, translators sometimes duplicate others' efforts with­out knowing it. But a reader may benefit from such dupli­cation and, in a way, the poet may benefit too. In this case, at least, he does, although there is a great deal of similarity between the two books in the goal they set themselves of straightforward rendering. Judged by this goal, Keeley and Sherrard's versions are certainly superior. It is lucky though that less than half of Cavafy's work is rhymed, and it is mostly his early poems.

Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an excep­tion. What is exceptional is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poet, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia—rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately "poor" means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds "green" and describes bodies as being "young and beauti­ful." This technique comes out of Cavafy's realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses lan-

· The Complete Poems of Cavafy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). f C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savadis (Prince­ton University Press, 1975).

guage for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's ownwn means.

Cavafy's use of "poor" adjectives creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader's imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to their accomplishments. For these reasons a translation of Cavafy is almost the next logical step in the direction the poet was moving—a step which Cavafy himself could have wished to take.

Perhaps he didn't need to take it: his handling of meta­phor alone was sufficient for him to have stopped where he did or even earlier. Cavafy did a very simple thing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description (the "tenor," as I. A. Richards called it), and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply grammatically, allied (the "vehicle"). The implica­tion which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way a poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the very beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career he developed and elaborated upon its implicit notions without bothering to return to the first part, assumed as self-evident. The "vehicle" was Alexandria; the "tenor" was life.

2

Cavafy's Alexandria is subtitled "Study of a Myth in Prog­ress." Although the phrase "myth in progress" was coined by George Seferis, "study of a metaphor in progress" would do just as well. Myth is essentially an attribute of the pre- Hellenic period, and the word "myth" seems an unhappy choice if we take into consideration Cavafy's own view of all the haclmeyed approaches to Greek themes—myth- and hero-making, nationalistic fervor, etc.—taken by numerous men of letters, Cavafy's compatriots as well as foreigners.

Cavafy's Alexandria is not exactly Yolmapatawpha County, nor is it Tilbury Town or Spoon River. It is, first of all, a squalid and desolate place in that stage of decline when the routine character of decay weakens the very sen­timent of regret. In a way, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 did more to dim Alexandria's luster than had Ro­man domination, the emergence of Christianity, and the Arab conquest together: most of the shipping, the main source of Alexandria's commercial existence, was shunted to Port Said. Cavafy, though, could view this as a distant echo of the time, eighteen centuries earlier, when the last ships of Cleopatra escaped by the same route after losing the battle of Actium.

He called himself a historical poet, and Keeley's book, in its tum, represents some sort of archaeological undertaking. We should keep in mind, however, that the word "history" is equally applicable to the endeavors of nations and to pri­vate lives. In both cases it consists of memory, record, and interpretation. Cavafy's Alexandria is a kind of upward- reaching archaeology because Keeley is dealing with the layers of an imagined city; he proceeds with the greatest care, knowing that such layers are apt to be intermingled. Keeley distinguishes clearly at least five of them: the literal city, the metaphoric city, the sensual city, mythical Alex­andria, and the world of Hellenism. He finally draws a chart indicating into which category each poem falls. This book is as marvelous a guide to the imagined Alexandria as E. M. Forster's is to the real one. (Forster's book was dedi­cated to Cavafy, and Forster was the first to introduce Cavafy to the English reader.)

Keeley's findings are helpful, so is his method; and if one disagrees with some of his conclusions, this is because the phenomenon is, and was, still larger than his findings can suggest. Comprehension of its size, however, rests on Keeley's fine performance as a translator of Cavafy's work. If Keeley doesn't say certain things in this book, it is largely because he has done them in translation.

One of the main characteristics of historical writing— and especially of classical history—is, inevitably, stylistic ambiguity caused either by an abundance of contradic­tory evidence or by firm contradictory evaluations of that evidence. Herodotus and Thucydides themselves, not to mention Tacitus, sometimes sound like latter-day para- doxicalists. In other words, ambiguity is an inevitable by­product of the struggle for objectivity in which, since the Romantics, every more or less serious poet hr.s been in­volved. We know that as a stylist Cavafy was already moving in this direction; we know also his alfection for history.

By the tum of the century Cavafy had acquired that objective, although properly ambiguous, dispassionate tone that he was to employ for the next thirty years. His sense of history, more precisely his reading tastes, took hold of him and supplied him with a mask. Man is what he reads, and poets even more so. Cavafy in this respect is a library of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ( Psellus, above all). In particular, he is a compendium of documents and inscrip­tions pertaining to the Greco-Roman inteiplay during the last three centuries n.c. and the first four centuries a.d. It is the neutral cadences of the former and the highly formal pathos of the latter that are responsible for the emergence of Cavafy's stylistic idiom, for this cross between a record and an epitaph. This type of diction, whether it is applied to his "historical poems" or to properly lyrical matters, creates an odd effect of genuineness, saving his raptures and reveries from verbosity, staining the plainest utter­ances with reticence. Under Cavafy's pen, sentimental cliches and conventions become—very much like his "poor" adjectives—a mask.

It is always unpleasant to draw boundaries when you are dealing with a poet, but Keeley's archaeology requires it. Keeley introduces us to Cavafy at about the time that the poet found his voice and his theme. By then Cavafy was already over forty and had made up his mind about many things, especially about the literal city of Alexandria, where he had decided to stay. Keeley is very persuasive about the difficulty of this decision for Cavafy. With the exception of six or seven unrelated poems, the "literal" city does not come to the surface in Cavafy's 220-poem canon. What emerges first are the "metaphoric" and mythical cities. This only proves Keeley's point, because utopian thought, even when, as in Cavafy's case, it turns toward the past, usually implies the unbearable character of the present. The more squalid and desolate the place, the stronger one's desire becomes to enliven it. What prevents us from saying that there was something extremely Greek about Cavafy's decision to remain in Alexandria (as if he had chosen to go along with Fate, which had put him there, to go along with

Parkos) is Cavafy's own distaste for mythologizing; also, perhaps, the realization on the reader's part that every choice is essentially a flight from freedom.

Another possible explanation for Cavafy's decision to stay is that he did not like himself enough to think that he deserved better. Whatever his reason, his imagined Alex­andria exists as vividly as the literal city. Art is an alternate form of existence, though the emphasis in this statement falls on the word "existence," the creative process being neither an escape from reality nor a sublimation of it. At any rate, Cavafy's was not a case of sublimation, and his treatment of the entire sensual city in his work is proof of that.

He was a homosexual, and his frank treatment of this theme was advanced not only by the standards of his time, as Keeley suggests, but by present standards as well. Relat­ing his thought to attitudes traditionally found in the east- em Mediterranean is of little or no help; the difference between the Hellenic world and the actual society in which the poet lived was too great. If the moral climate of the actual city suggested techniques of camouflage, recollec­tions of Ptolemaic grandeur should have required some sort of boastful exaggeration. Neither strategy was accept­able to Cavafy because he was, first and foremost, a poet of contemplation and because both attitudes are more or less equally incompatible with the very sentiment of love.

Ninety percent of the best lyric poetry is written post- coitum, as was Cavafy's. Whatever the subject of his poems, they are always written in retrospect. Homosexuality as such enforces self-analysis more than heterosexuality does. I believe that the homosexual concept of sin is much more elaborate than the heterosexual concept: heterosexuals are, to say the least, provided with the possibility of instant re­demption through marriage or other fonns of socially acceptable constancy. Homosexual psychology, like the psychology of any minority, is overtly one of nuance and ambivalence: it capitalizes on one's vulnerability to the extent of producing a mental U-turn after which the offensive can be launched. In a way, homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which absorbs and consumes both the rational and the emotional faculties of a person so completely that T. S. Eliot's old friend, "felt thought," is likely to be the result. The homosexual's notion of life might, in the end, have more facets than that of his hetero­sexual counterpart. Such a notion, theoretically speaking, provides one with the ideal motive for writing poetry, though in Cavafy's case this motive is no more than a pretext.

What matter in art are not one's sexual affiliations, of course, but what is made of them. Only a superficial or partisan critic would label Cavafy's poems simply "homo­sexual," or reduce them to examples of his 'hedonistic bias." Cavafy's love poems were undertaken in the same spirit as his historical poems. Because of his retrospective nature, one even gets the feeling that the "pleasures"— one of the words Cavafy uses most frequently to refer to the sexual encounters he is recalling—were "poor" almost in the same way that the literal Alexandria, as Keeley de­scribes it, was a poor leftover of something grandiose. More often than not, the protagonist of these lyric poems is a solitary, aging person who despises his own features, which have been disfigured by that very time which has altered so many other things that were central to his existence.

The only instrument that a human being has at his dis­posal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy's poems, in dealing with that Hellenic "spe­cial love," and touching en passant upon conventional broodings and longings, are attempts^^r rather recognized failures—to resurrect once-loved shadows. Or: photo­graphs.

Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his hopelessness for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy's love poetry is not "tragic" but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the fait accompli, terror is the product of the imagination (no matter where it is directed, toward the future or toward the past). His sense of loss is much more acute than his sense of gain simply because separation is a more lasting experience than being together. It almost looks as though Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like "Before Time Altered Them" or "Hidden Things" represent a complete reversal of Susan Sontag's formula "Life is a movie; death is a photograph." To put it another way, Cavafy's hedonistic bias, if such it is, is biased itself by his historical sense, since history, among other things, implies irreversibility. Alternatively, if Cavafy's historical poems had not been hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes.

One of the best examples of the way this dual technique works is the poem about Kaisarion, Cleopatra's fifteen- year-old son, nominally the last king of the Ptolemaic line, who was executed by the Romans in "conquered Alexan­dria" by the order of the Emperor Octavian. After finding Kaisarion's name in some history book one evening, the narrator plunges into fantasies of this young boy and "fashions him freely" in his mind, "so completely" that, by the end of the poem, when Kaisarion is put to death, we perceive his execution almost as a rape. And then the words "conquered Alexandria" acquire an extra dimension: the torturing recognition of personal loss.

Not so much by combining as by equating sensuality and history, Cavafy tells his readers (and himself) the classic Greek story of Eros, ruler of the world. In Cavafy's mouth it sounds convincing, all the more so because his historical poems are preoccupied with the decline of the Hellenic world, the situation which he, as an individual, re­flects in miniature, or in mirrors. As if unable to be precise in his handling of the miniature, Cavafy builds us a large- scale model of Alexandria and the adjacent Hellenic world. It is a fresco, and if it seems fragmentary, this is partly because it reflects its creator, but largely because the Hel­lenic world at its nadir was fragmented both politically and culturally. With the death of Alexander the Great it began to crumble, and wars, skirmishes, and the like kept tearing it apart for centuries after, the way contradictions tear one's mind. The only force which held these motley, cosmopoli­tan pieces together was mama.gna lingua Grecae; Cavafy could say the same about his own life. Perhaps the most uninhibited voice we hear in Cavafy's poetry is when in a tone of heightened, intense fascination he lists the beauties of the Hellenic way of life—Hedonism, Art, Sophistic philosophy, and "especially our great Greek language."

3

It was not the Roman conquest that brought an end to the Hellenic world; it was the day Rome itself fell to Christi­anity. The interplay between the pagan and Christian worlds in Cavafy's poetry is the only one of his themes that is not sufficiently covered in Keeley's book. It is easy to understand why, however, since this theme deserves a book to itself. To reduce Cavafy to a who felt

uneasy about Christianity would be simplistic. For that matter, he felt no cozier with paganism. He was perceptive enough to know that he had been born with the mixture of both in his veins—born, too, into this mixture. If he felt the tension, it was not the fault of either one but of both: his was not a question of split loyalty. Ostensibly, at least, he was a Christian; he always wore a cross, attended church on Good Friday, and received the last rites. Profoundly, too, he was perhaps a Christian: his most vigorous ironies were directed against one of the main vices of Christianity —pious intolerance. But what matters to us as readers, of course, is not Cavafy's church affiliation but the way in which he handled the mixture of two religions—and Ca­vafy's way was neither Christian nor pagan.

At the end of the pre-Christian era (although people, whether they are warned about the coming Messiah or about the impending holocaust, do not count their time backward) Alexandria was a marketplace of creeds and ideologies, among them Judaism, local Coptic cults, Neo- platonism, and, of course, newly arrived Christianity. Po­lytheism and monotheism were familiar issues in this city, site of the first real academy in the history of our civiliza­tion—Mouseion. By juxtaposing one faith with another we certainly take them out of their context, and the context was precisely what mattered to the Alexandrians, until the day came when they were told that what mattered was choosing one of them. They didn't like doing so, and neither does Cavafy. When Cavafy uses the words "paganism" and "Christianity" we should keep in mind, as he did, that they are approximations, conventions, common denominators, and that numerators are what civilization is all about.

In his historical poems Cavafy uses what Keeley calls "common" metaphors, i.e., metaphors based on political symbolism (as in the poems "Darius" and "Waiting for the Barbarians"); and this is another reason why Cavafy almost gains in translation. Politics itself is a kind of meta-language, a mental uniform, and unlike most modern poets, Cavafy is very good at unbuttoning it. The "canon" contains seven poems about Julian the Apostate—quite a few considering the brevity (three years) of Julian's reign as emperor. There must be some reason for Cavafy's interest in Julian, and Keeley's interpretation does not seem adequate. Julian was brought up as a Christian, but when he took the throne he tried to re-establish paganism as the state religion. Although the very idea of a state religion suggests Julian's Christian streak, he went about the matter in a quite different fashion: he did not persecute the Christians, nor did he try to convert them. He merely deprived Christianity of state support and sent his sages to dispute publicly with Christian priests.

In these verbal sparring matches, the priests were often losers, partly because of dogmatic contradictions in the teachings of that time and partly because the priests were usually less prepared for a debate than their opponents, since they simply assumed their Christian dogma to be superior. At any rate, Julian was tolerant of what he called "Galileanism," whose Trinity he regarded as a backward blend of Greek polytheism and Judaic monotheism. The only thing Julian did which could be viewed as persecution was to demand the return of certain pagan temples seized by Christians during the rule of Julian's predecessors and to forbid Christian proselytizing in the schools. "Those who vilify the gods should not be allowed to teach youths and interpret the works of Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thu- cydides and Herodotus, who worshipped those gods. Let them, in their own Galilean churches, interpret Matthew and Luke."

Not yet having their own literature and, on the whole, not having much with which to counter Julian's arguments, the Christians attacked him for the very tolerance with which he treated them, calling him Herod, a carnivorous scarecrow, an arch-liar who, with devilish cunning, does not persecute openly and so deceives the simpleminded. What­ever it was that Julian was really after, Cavafy evidently was interested in the way this Roman emperor handled the problem. Cavafy, it seems, saw Julian as a man who tried to preserve the two metaphysical possibilities, not by making a choice, but by creating links between them that would make the best of both. This is surely a rational attihide for one to take on spiritual issues, but Julian was after all a politician. His attempt was a heroic one, considering both the scope of the problem and its possible outcomes. Risking the charge of idealization, one is tempted to call Julian a great soul obsessed with the recognition that neither pa­ganism nor Christianity is sufficient by itself and that, taken separately, neither can exercise man's spiritual capacity to the fullest. There are always tonnenting leftovers, always the sense of a certain partial vacuum, causing, at best, a sense of sin. The fact is that man's spiritual restlessness is not satisfied by either font, and there is no doctrine which, without incurring condemnation, one may speak of as combining both, except, perhaps, stoicism or existentialism (which might be viewed as a form of stoicism, sponsored by Christianity).

A sensual and, by implication, a spiritual extremist cannot be satisfied by this solution, but he can resign himself to it. What matters in any resignation, however, is not so much to what as from what one is resigning. It adds greater scope to Cavafy's poetry to realize that he did not choose between paganism and Christianity but was swinging between them like a pendulum. Sooner or later, though, a pendulum real­izes the limitations imposed upon it by its box. Unable to reach beyond its waUs, the pendulum nevertheless gets some glimpses of the outer realm and recognizes that it is subservient and that the directions in which it is forced to swing are preordained, that they are governed by time in— if not for—its progress.

Hence that implacable note of ennui which makes Ca­vafy's voice with its hedonistic-stoic tremolo sound so haunting. What makes it even more haunting is our realiza­tion that we are on this man's side, that we recognize his situation, even if it is only in a poem that deals with the assimilation of a pagan into a pious Christian regime. I have in mind the poem "If Actually Dead" about Apollo- nius of Tyana, the pagan prophet who lived only thirty years later than Christ, was kno^ for miracles, cured people, left no record of his death, and, unlike Christ, could write.

1975

A Guide to a Renamed City

To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

In front of the Finland Station, one of five railroad terminals through whiA a traveler may enter or leave this city, on the very bank of the Neva River, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city presently bears. In fact, every station in Leningrad has a monument to this man, either a full-scale statue in front of or a massive bust inside the building. But the monument before the Finland Station is unique. It's not the statue itself that matters here, because Comrade Lenin is depicted in the usual quasi-romantic fashion, with his hand poking into the air, supposedly ad­dressing the masses; what matters is the pedestal. For Com­rade Lenin delivers his oration standing on the top of an ^raored car. It's done in the style of early Constructivism, so popular nowadays in the West, and in general the very idea of carving an armored car out of stone smacks of a certain psychological acceleration, of the sculptor being a bit ahead of his time. As far as I know, this is the only monu­ment to a man on an armored car that exists in the world. In this respect alone, it is a symbol of a new society. The old society used to be represented by men on horseback.

And appropriately enough, a couple of miles downstream, on the opposite bank of the river, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city bore from the day of its foundation: to Peter the Great. This monument is known universally as the "Bronze Horseman," and its immobility matches only the frequency with which it has been photo­graphed. It's an impressive monument, some twenty feet tall, the best work of Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who was recommended by both Diderot and Voltaire to Catherine the Great, its sponsor. Atop the huge granite rock dragged here from the Karelian Isthmus, Peter the Great looms on high, restraining with his left hand the rearing horse that symbolizes Russia, and stretching his right hand to the north.

Since both men are responsible for the name of the place, it's quite tempting to compare not their monuments alone but their immediate surroundings, too. On his left, the man on the armored car has the quasi-classicistic building of the local Party Committee and the infamous "Crosses"—the biggest penitentiary in Russia. On his right, there is the Artillery Academy; and, if you follow the direction in which his hand points, the tallest post-revolutionary building on the left bank of the river—Leningrad's KGB headquarters. As for the "Bronze Horseman," he too has a military institu­tion on his right—the Admiralty; on his left, however, there is the Senate, now the State Historical Archive, and his hand points across the river to the university which he built and where the man on the armored car later got some of his education.

So this two-hundred-and-seventy-six-year-old city has two names, maiden and alias, and by and large its inhabitants tend to use neither. When it comes to their mail or identity papers, they certainly write "Leningrad," but in a normal conversation they would rather call it simply "Peter." This choice of name has very little to do with their politics; the point is that both "Leningrad" and "Petersburg" are a bit cumbersome phonetically, and anyway, people are inclined to nickname their habitats—it's a further degree of do­mestication. "Lenin" certainly won't do, if only because this was the last name of the man (and an alias at that); whereas "Peter" seems to be the most natural choice. For one thing, the city already has been called that for two centuries. Also, the presence of Peter I's spirit is still much more palpable here than the flavor of the new epoch. On top of that, since the real name of the Emperor in Russian is Pyotr, "Peter" suggests a certain foreignness and sounds congenial—for there is something distinctly foreign and alienating in the atmosphere of the city: its European- looking buildings, perhaps its location itself, in the delta of that northern river which flows into the hostile open sea. In otherwords, on the edge of so familiar a world.

Russia is a very continental country; its land mass con­stitutes one-sixth of the world's Ornament. The idea of building a city on the edge of the land, and furthermore proclaiming it the capital of the nation, was regarded by Peter I's contemporaries as ill conceived, to say the least. The womb-warm, and traditional to the point of idio­syncrasy, claustrophobic world of Russia proper was shivering badly under the cold, searching Baltic wind. The opposition to Peter's reforms was formidable, not least be­cause the lands of the Neva delta were really bad. They were lowlands, and swamps; and, in order to build on them, the ground would have to be strengthened. There was plenty of timber around but no volunteers to cut it, much less to drive the piles into the ground.

But Peter I had a vision of the city, and of more than the city: he saw Russia with her face turned to the world. In the context of his time, this meant to the West, and the city was destined to become—in the words of a European writer who visited Russia then—a window on Europe. Ac­tually, Peter wanted a gate, and he wanted it ajar. Unlike both his predecessors and his successors on the Russian throne, this six-and-a-half-foot-tall monarch didn't suffer from the traditional Russian malaise—an inferiority com­plex toward Europe. He didn't want to imitate Europe: he wanted Russia to be Europe, in much the same way as he was, at least partly, a European himself. Since his childhood many of his intimate friends and companions, as well as the principal enemies with whom he warred, were Europeans; he spent more than a year working, traveling, and literally living in Europe; he visited it frequently afterward. For him, the West wasn't terra incognita. A man of sober mind, though of frightful drinking habits, he regarded every country where he had set his foot—his own included—as but a continuation of space. In a way, geography was far more real for him than history, and his most beloved di­rections were north and west.

In general, he was in love with space, and with the sea in particular. He wanted Russia to have a navy, and with his own hands this "Czar-carpenter," as he was called by con­temporaries, built its first boat (currently on display at the Navy Museum), using the skills he had acquired while working in the Dutch and British shipyards. So his vision of this city was quite particular. He wanted it to be a harbor for the Russian fleet, a fortress against the Swedes, who beset these shores for centuries, the northern strong­hold of his nation. At the same time, he thought of this city becoming the spiritual center of the new Russia: the center of reason, of the sciences, of education, of knowl­edge. For him, these were the elements of vision, and conscious goals, not the by-products of the military drive of the subsequent epochs.

When a visionary happens also to be an emperor, he acts ruthlessly. The methods to which Peter I resorted, to carry out his project, could be at best defined as conscription. He taxed everything and everyone to force his subjects to fight the land. During Peter's reign, a subject of the Russian cro^ had a somewhat limited choice of being either drafted into the army or sent to build St. Petersburg, and it's hard to say which was deadlier. Tens of thousands found their anonymous end in the swamps of the Neva delta, whose islands enjoyed a reputation similar to that of today's Gulag. Except that in the eighteenth century you knew what you were building and also had a chance in the end to receive the last rites and a wooden cross on the top of your grave.

Perhaps there was no other way for Peter to ensure the execution of the project. Save for wars, Russia until his reign hardly knew centralization and never acted as an overall entity. The universal coercion exercised by the future Bronze Horseman to get his project done united the nation for the first time and gave birth to the Russian totalitarianism whose fruits taste no better than did the seeds. Mass had invited a mass solution, and neither by education nor by Russian history itself was Peter prepared for anything else. He dealt with the people in exactly the same fashion as he dealt with the land for his would-be capital. Carpenter and navigator, this ruler used only one instrument while designing his city: a ruler. The space un­rolling before him was utterly flat, horizontal, and he had every reason to treat it like a map, where a straight line suffices. If anything curves in this city, it's not because of specific planning but because he was a sloppy draftsman whose finger would slide occasionally off the edge of the ruler, and the pencil followed this slip. So did his terrified subordinates.

This city reaUy rests on the bones of its builders as much as on the wooden piles that they drove into the ground. So does, to a degree, nearly any other place in the Old World; but then history takes good care of unpleasant memories. St. Petersburg happens to be too young for soothing mythology; and every time a natural or pre­meditated disaster takes place, you can spot in a crowd a pale, somewhat starved, ageless face with its deep-set, white, fixed eyes, and hear the whisper: "I tell you, this place is cursed!" You'll shudder, but a moment later, when you try to take another look at the speaker, the face is gone. In vain, your eyes will search the slowly milling crowds, the traffic creeping along: you will see nothing except the indifferent passersby and, through the slanted veil of rain, the magnificent features of the great imperial buildings. The geometry of this city's architectural perspec­tives is perfect for losing things forever.

But on the whole the sentiment about nature return­ing someday to reclaim its usurped property, yielded Clnce under human assault, has its logic here. It derives from the long history of Hoods that have ravaged this city, from the city's palpable, physical proximity to the sea. Even though the trouble never goes beyond the Neva's jumping out of her granite straitjacket, the very sight of those massive leaden wads of clouds rushing in on the city from the Baltic makes the inhabitants weary with anxieties that are always there anyway. Sometimes, especially in the late fall, this kind of weather with its gushing winds, pouring rain, and the Neva tipping over the embankments lasts for weeks. Even though nothing changes, the mere time factor makes you think that it's getting worse. On such days, you recall that there are no dikes around the city and that you are literally surrounded by this fifth column of canals and tributaries; that you are practically living on an island, one of the 101 of them; that you saw in that movie—or was it in your dream?—that gigantic wave which et cetera, et cetera; and then you turn on the radio for the next forecast. Which usually sounds affirmative and optimistic.

But the main reason for this sentiment is the sea itself. Oddly enough, for all the naval might that Russia has amassed today, the idea of the sea is stiU somewhat alien to the general population. Both folklore and the official propaganda treat this theme in a vague, if positive, ro­mantic fashion. For the average person, the sea is associ­ated most of all with the Black Sea, vacations, the south, resorts, perhaps palm trees. The most frequent epithets encountered in songs and poems are "wide," "blue," "beau­tiful." Sometimes you might get "rugged," but it doesn't jar with the rest of the context. The notions of freedom, open space, of getting the hell out of here, are instinctively suppressed and consequently surface in the reverse forms of fear of water, fear of drowning. In these terms alone, the city in the Neva delta is a challenge to the national psyche and justly bears the name of "foreigner in his own father­land" given to it by Nikolai Gogol. If not a foreigner, then at least a sailor. In a way, Peter I achieved his goal: this city became a harbor, and not only literally; meta­physically, too. There is no other place in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of St. Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence.

However true it might be that Peter was planning to have a new Amsterdam, the result has as little in common with that Dutch city as does its former namesake on the shores of the Hudson. But what went, in the latter, up, in the former was spread horizontally; the scope, however, was the same. For the width of the river alone demanded a different scale of architecture.

In the epochs following Peter's, they started to build, not separate buildings but whole architechual ensembles, or, more precisely, architectural landscapes. Untouched till then by European architectural styles, Russia opened the sluices and the baroque and classicism gushed into and inundated the streets and embankments of St. Petersburg. Organ-like forests of columns sprang high and lined up on the palatial fa,.ades ad infinitum in their miles-long Euclid­ian triumph. For the last half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this city became a real safari for the best Italian and French architects, sculptors, and decorators. In acquiring its imperial look, this city was scrupulous to the very last detail: the granite revetment of the rivers and canals, the elaborate character of every curl on their cast-iron grilles, speak for themselves. So does the decor of the inner chambers in the palaces and country residences of the Czar's family and the nobility, the decor whose variety and exquisiteness verge on obscenity. And yet whatever the architects took for the standard in their work—Versailles, Fontainebleau, and so on—the outcome' was always unmistakably Russian, because it was more the overabundance of space that dictated to the builder where to put what on another wing, and in what style it ought to be done, than the capricious will of his often ignorant hut immensely rich client. When you look at the Neva's pano­rama opening from the Trubetzkoy bastion of the Peter and Paul fortress, or at the Grand Cascade by the Gulf of Fin­land, you get the odd sensation that it's not Russia trying to catch up with European civilization but a blown-up projection of the latter through a laterna ^gica onto an enormous screen of space and waters that takes place.

In the final analysis, the rapid growth of the city and of its splendor should be attributed first of aU to the ubiquitous presence of water. The twelve-mile-long Neva branching right in the center of the town, with its twenty-five large and small coiling canals, provides this city with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable. Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Fin­land, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images. No wonder that sometimes this city gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with its own appearance. It is true that in such places you pay more attention to facrades than to faces; but the stone is incapable of self-procreation. The inexhaustible, maddening multipli­cation of all these pilasters, colonnades, porticoes hints at the nature of this urban narcissism, hints at the possibility that at least in the inanimate world water may be regarded as a condensed form of time.

But perhaps more than by its canals and rivers, this ex­tremely "premeditated city," as Dostoevsky termed it, has been reflected in the literature of Russia. For water can talk about surfaces only, and exposed ones at that. The depic­tion of both the actual and mental interior of the city, of its impact on the people and their inner world, became the main subject of Russian literature almost from the very day of this city's founding. Technically speaking, Russian literature was born here, on the shores of the Neva. If, as the saying goes, all Russian writers "came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" it's worth remembering then that this over­coat was ripped off that poor civil servant's shoulders no­where else but in St. Petersburg, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The tone, however, was set by Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman," whose hero, a clerk in some department, upon losing his beloved to a flood, ac­cuses the mounted statue of the Emperor of negligence (no dikes) and goes insane when he sees the enraged Peter on his horse jumping off the pedestal and rushing in pursuit to trample him, an offender, into the ground. (This could be, of course, a simple tale about a little man's rebellion against arbitrary power, or one about persecution mania, subconscious versus superego, and so forth, were it not for the magnificence of the verses themselves—the best ever written in praise of this city, with the exception of those by Osip Mandelstam, who was literally stamped into the ground of the empire a century after Pushkin was killed in a duel.)

At any rate, by the beginning of the nineteenth cen^ry, St. Petersburg was already the capital of Russian letters, a fact that had very little to do with the actual presence of the court here. After all, the court sat in Moscow for cen­turies and yet almost nothing came out of there. The reason for this sudden outburst of creative power was again mostly geographical. In the context of the Russian life in those days, the emergence of St. Petersburg was similar to the discovery of the New World: it gave pensive men of the time a chance to look upon themselves and the nation as though from outside. In other words, this city provided them with the possibility of objectifying the country. The notion of criticism being most valid when conducted from without enjoys a great deal of popularity even today. Tien, enhanced by the alternative—at least visually—utopian character of the city, it instilled those who were the first to take quill in their hands with a sense of the almost unques­tionable authority of their pronouncements. If it's true that every writer has to estrange himself from his experience to be able to comment upon it, then the city, by rendering this alienating service, saved them a trip.

Coming from the nobility, gentry, or clergy, all these writers belonged, to use an economic stratification, to the middle class: the class which is almost solely responsible for the existence of literature everywhere. With two or three exceptions, all of them lived by the pen, i.e., meagerly enough to understand without exegesis or bewilderment the plight of those worse off as well as the splendor of those at the top. The second attracted their attention far less if only because the chances of moving up were far smaller. Conse­quently, we have a pretty thorough, almost stereoscopic picture of the inner, real St. Petersburg, for it is the poor who constitute the main body of reality; the little man is always universal. Furthennore, the more perfect his imme­diate surroundings are, the more jarring and incongruous he looks. No wonder that all of them—the retired officers, impoverished widows, robbed civil servants, hungry journal­ists, humiliated clerks, tubercular students, and so forth— seen against the impeccable utopian background of classi­cists porticoes, haunted the imagination of writers and flooded the very first chapters of Russian prose.

Such was the frequency with which these characters ap­peared on paper and such was the number of people who put them there, such was their mastery of their material and such was the material itself—words—that in no time some­thing strange began to happen to the city. The process of recognizing these incurably semantic reflections, loaded with moral judgment, became a process of identification with them. As often happens to a man in front of a mirror, the city began to fall into dependence on the three-dimen­sional image supplied by literature. Not that the adjustments it was making were not enough (they weren't!); but with the insecurity innate to any narcissist, the city started to peer more and more intently at that looking glass which the Russian writers were carrying—to paraphrase Stendhal— through the streets, courtyards, and shabby apartments of its population. Occasionally, the reflected would even try to correct or simply smash the reflection, which was al the easier to accomplish since nearly al the authors were residing in the city. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, these two things merged: Russian literature caught up with reality to the extent that today when you think of St. Petersburg you can't distinguish the fictional from the real. Which is rather odd for a place only two hundred and seventy-six years old. The guide will show you today the building of the Third Section of the police, where Dostoev- sky was tried, as well as the house where his character Ras- kolnikov killed that old money-lending woman with an ax.

The role of nineteenth-century literature in shaping the image of the city was all the more crucial because this was the century when St. Petersburg's palaces and embassies grew into the bureaucratic, political, business, military, and in the end industrial center of Russia. Architecture began to lose its perfect—to the degree of being absurd— abstract character and worsened with every new building. This was dictated as much by the swing toward function- alism (which is but a noble name for profit making) as by general aesthetic degradation. Save for Catherine the Great, Peter's successors had little in the way of vision, nor did they share his. Each of them tried to promulgate his version of Europe, and did so quite thoroughly; but in the nineteenth century Europe wasn't worth imitating. From reign to reign the decline was more and more evident; the only thing that saved the face of new ventures was the ne­cessity to adjust them to those of their great predecessors. Today, of course, even the barrack-like style of the Nicholas I epoch may w^m a brooding aesthete's heart, for it con­veys well the spirit of the time. But on the whole, this Russian execution of the Prussian military ideal of so­ciety, together with the cumbersome apartment buildings squeezed between the classical ensembles, produces rather a disheartening effect. Then came the Victorian wedding cakes and hearses; and, by the last quarter of the century, this city that started as a leap from history into the future began to look in some parts like a regular Northern Euro­pean bourgeois.

Which was the name of the game. If the literary critic Belinsky was exclaiming in the thirties of the past century: "Petersburg is more original than all American cities, be­cause it is a new city in an old country; consequently it is a new hope, the marvelous future of this country!" then a quarter of a cenhiry later Dostoevsky could reply sar­donically: "Here is the architecture of a huge modern hotel —its efficiency incarnate already, its Americanism, hun­dreds of rooms; it's clear right away that we too have rail­roads, we too suddenly became a business-like people."

"Americanism" as an epithet applied to the capitalist era in St. Petersburg's history is perhaps a bit farfetched; but the visual similarity to Europe was indeed quite startling. And it was not the facades of the banks and joint-stock companies only that matched in their elephantine solidity their counterparts in Berlin and London; the inner decor of a place like the Elyseev Brothers food store (which is still intact and functioning well, if only because there is not much to expand with today) could easily bear comparison with Fauchon in Paris. The truth is that every "ism" oper­ates on a mass scale that mocks national identity; capitalism wasn't an exception. The city was booming; manpower was arriving from all ends of the empire; the male population outnumbered the female two to one, prostitution was thriv­ing, orphanages overflowed; the water in the harbor boiled because of the ships exporting Russian grain, just as it boils today as the ships bring grain to Russia from abroad. It was an international city, with large French, German, Dutch, and English colonies, not to speak of diplomats and mer­chants. Pushkin's prophecy, put into his Bronze Horse­man's mouth: "All flags will come to us as guests!" received its literal incarnation. If in the eighteenth century the imitation of the West didn't run deeper than the makeup and the fashions of the aristocracy ("These Russian monkeys!" cried a French nobleman after attending a ball in the Winter Palace, "how quickly they've adapted!

They're outdoing our courtl"), then the St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century with its nouveau riche bourgeoisie, high society, demimonde, etc., became Western enough to afford even a degree of contempt toward Europe.

However, this contempt, displayed mostly in literature, had very little to do with the traditional Russian xeno­phobia, often manifested in the form of an argument as to the superiority of Orthodoxy to Catholicism. It was rather a reaction of the city to itself, a reaction of professed ideals to mercantile reality; of aesthete to bourgeois. As for this business of Orthodoxy versus Western Christianity, it never got very far, since the cathedrals and churches were de­signed by the same architects who built the palaces. So unless you step into their vaults, there is no way of deter­mining what denomination these houses of prayer are, unless you pay attention to the form of the cross on the cupola; and there are practically no onion domes in this city. Still, in that contempt, there was something of a reli­gious nature.

Every criticism of the human condition suggests the critic's awareness of a higher plane of regard, of a better order. Such was the history of Russian aesthetics that the ar­chitectural ensembles of St. Petersburg, churches included, were—and still are—perceived as the closest possible incar­nation of such an order. In any case, a man who has lived long enough in this city is bound to associate virtue with proportion. This is an old Greek idea; but set under the northern sky, it acquires the peculiar authority of an em­battled spirit and, to say the least, makes an artist very conscious of form. This kind of influence is especiaUy clear in the case of Russian or, to name it by its birthplace, Peters- burgian poetry. For two and a half centuries this school, from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to Pushkin and his pleia< (Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Delvig), to the Acmeists—Akh matova and Mandelstam in this century—has existed unde: the very sign under which it was conceived: the sign o classicism.

Yet less than fifty years separate Pushkin's paean to tht city in "The Bronze Horseman" and Dostoevsky's utteranci in Notes from Underground: "It's an unhappy lot to habi tate Petersburg, the most abstract and the most pre meditated place in the world." The brevity of such a spai can be explained only by the fact that the pace of this city': development wasn't actually a pace: it was acceleratioi from the start. The place whose population in 1700 wa: zero had reached one and a half million by 1900. Wha would take a century elsewhere was here squeezed int< decades. Time acquired a mythic quality because the mytl was that of creation. Industry was booming and smoke stacks rose around the city like a brick echo of its colon nades. The Imperial Russian Ballet under the directior of Petipa starred Anna Pavlova and in barely two decade: developed its concept of ballet as a symphonic structure— a concept which was destined to conquer the world. Abou three thousand ships Hying foreign and Russian Hags bustlec annually into St. Petersburg harbor, and more than a dozei political parties would convene in on the floor of th< would-be Russian parliament called the Duma, which ir Russian means "thought" (its achievements, in retrospect make its sound in English—"Dooma"—seem particularly ominous). The prefix "St." was disappearing—gradual!) but justly—from the name of the city; and, with the out­break of World War I, due to anti-German sentiment, the name itself was Russified, and "Petersburg" became "Petro- grad." The once perfectly graspable idea of the city shone less and less through the thickening web of economics and civic demagoguery. In other words, the city of the Bronze Horseman galloped into its future as a regular metropolis in giant strides, treading on the heels of its little men and pushing them forward. And one day a train arrived at the Finland Station, and a little man emerged from the carriage and climbed onto the top of an ^rnored car.

This arrival was a disaster for the nation but a salvation for the city. For its development carne to a full stop, as did the economic life of the whole country. This city froze as if in total mute bewilderment before the impending era, un­willing to attend it. If anything, Comrade Lenin deserves his monuments here for sparing St. Petersburg both ignoble membership in the global village and the shame of be­coming the seat of his government: in 1918 he moved the capital of Russia back to Moscow.

The significance of this move alone could equate Lenin with Peter. However, Lenin himself would hardly approve of naming the city after him if only because the total amount of time he spent there was about two years. Had it been up to him, he would have preferred Moscow or any other place in Russia proper. Besides, he didn't care much for the sea: he was a man of the terra firma, and a city dweller at that. And if he felt uncomfortable in Petrograd, it was partly because of the sea, although it wasn't the flood which he was mindful of, but the British Navy.

There were perhaps only two things he had in common with Peter 1: knowledge of Europe and ruthlessness. But while Peter, with his variety of interests, boisterous energy, and the amateurishness of his grand designs, was either an up- or outdated version of a Renaissance man,

Lenin was very much a product of his time: a narrow- minded revolutionary with a typical petit bourgeois, mon- omaniacal desire for power, which is in itself an extremely bourgeois concept.

So Lenin went to Petersburg because that's where he thought it was: power. For that he would go to any other place if he thought that place had it (and, in fact, he did: while living in Switzerland he tried the same thing in Zurich). In short, he was one of the first men for whom geography is a political science. But the point is that Petersburg never, even during its most reactionary period under Nicholas I, was a center of power. Every monarchy rests on the traditional feudal principle of willing submis­sion or resignation to the rule of one, backed by the church. After all, either of these—submission or resignation—is an act of will, as much as casting a ballot is. Whereas Lenin's main idea was the manipulation of will itself, the control over minds; and that was news to Petersburg. For Peters­burg was merely the seat of imperial rule, and not the mental or political locus of the nation—since the national will can't be localized by definition. An organic entity, society generates the forms of its organization the way trees generate their distance from one another, and a passerby calls that a "forest." The concept of power, alias state control over the social fabric, is a contradiction in terms and reveals a woodcutter. The city's very blend of architectural grandeur with a web-like bureaucratic tradi­tion mocked the idea of power. The truth about palaces, especially about winter ones, is that not all of their rooms are occupied. Had Lenin stayed longer in this city, his idea of statehood might have grown a bit more humble. But from the age of thirty, he lived for nearly sixteen years abroad, mostly in Germany and Switzerland, nourishing his political theories. He returned to Petersburg only once, in 1905, for three months, in an attempt to organize workers against the czarist government, but was soon forced abroad, back to his cafe politicking, chess playing, and Marx read­ing. It couldn't help him to get less idiosyncratic: failure seldom broadens perspectives.

In 1917, in Switzerland, upon learning from a passerby about the Czar's abdication, with a group of his followers Lenin boarded a sealed train provided by the German General Staff, which relied on them to do a fifth-column job behind the Russian lines, and went to Petersburg. The man who stepped down from the train in 1917 at the Fin­land Station was forty-seven years old, and this was pre­sumably his last gamble: he had to win or face the charge of treason. Except for 12 million in German marks, his only luggage was the dream of world socialist revolu­tion which, once started in Russia, would produce a chain reaction, and another dream of becoming head of the Russian state in order to execute this first dream. On the sixteen-year-long, bumpy journey to the Finland Station, the two dreams merged into a somewhat nightmarish con­cept of power; but climbing onto that armored car, he didn't know that only one of those things was destined to come true.

So it wasn't so much his coming to Petersburg to grab power as it was the idea of power which grabbed him long ago that was carrying Lenin now to Petersburg. What's rendered in the history books as the Great October Socialist Revolution was, in fact, a plain coup d'etat, and a bloodless one at that. Following the signal—a blank-fire shot of the cruiser Aurora's bow gun—a platoon of the newly formed

Red Guards walked into the Winter Palace and arrested < bunch of ministers of the Provisional Government idlinj there, vainly trying to take care of Russia after the Czar': abdication. The Red Guards didn't meet any resistance they raped half of the female unit guarding the palace am looted its chambers. At that, two Red Guardsmen were sho and one drowned in the wine cellars. The only shooting tha ever took place in the Palace Square, with bodies falling and the searchlight crossing the sky, was Sergei Eisenstein's

It's perhaps in reference to the modesty of that Octobei 25 night enterprise that the city has been termed in officia propaganda "the cradle of the Revolution." And a cradli it remained, an empty cradle, and quite enjoyed this status To a degree, the city escaped the revolutionary carnage "God forbid us to see," said Pushkin, "the Russian debacle meaningless and merciless," and Petersburg didn't see it The civil war raged all around and across the country, an< a horrible crack went through the nation, splitting it int< two mutually hostile camps; but here, on the shores of th( Neva, for the first time in two centuries, quiet reigned am the grass started to shoot up through the cobblestones o emptied squares and the slates of sidewalks. Hunger tool its toll, and so did the Cheka (the maiden name of thi KGB); but other than that, the city was left to itself anc to its reflections.

As the country, with its capital returned to Moscow, re treated to its womblike, claustrophobic, and xenophobi« condition, Petersburg, having nowhere to withdraw to came to a standstill—as though photographed in its nine teenth-century posture. The decades that followed the civi war didn't change it much: there were new buildings bui mostly in the industrial outskirts. Besides, the general hous ing policy was that of so-called condensation, i.e., putting the deprived in with the well-off. So if a family had a three- room apartment all to itself, it had to squeeze into one room in order to let other families move into the other rooms. The city's interiors thus became more Dostoevskian than ever, while the fac;ades peeled off and absorbed dust, this- suntan of epochs.

Quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of seasons. Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern light, pale and dif­fused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the direct­ness and length of the streets, a walker's thoughts travel farther than his destination, and a man with normal eye­sight can make out at a distance of a mile the number of the approaching bus or the age of the tail following him. In his youth, at least, a man born in this city spends as much time on foot as any good Bedouin. And it's not because of the shortage or the price of cars (there is an excellent system of public transportation), or because of the half-mile-long queues at the food stores. It's because to walk under this sky, along the brown granite embankments of this immense gray river, is itself an extension of life and a school of farsightedness. There is something in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly flowing, departing water that instills in one's soles an almost sen­sual desire for walking. The seaweed-smelling head wind from the sea has cured here many hearts oversaturated with lies, despair, and powerlessness. If that is what conspires to enslave, the slave may be excused.

This is the city where it's somehow easier to endure loneliness than anywhere else: because the city itself is lonely. A strange consolation comes from the notion that these stones have nothing to do with the present and still less with the future. The farther the facades go into the twentieth century, the more fastidious they look, ignoring these new times and their concerns. The only thing that makes them come to terms with the present is the climate, and they feel most at home in the foul weather of late fall or of premature spring and its showers mixed with snow and its impetuous disoriented squalls. Or—in the dead of winter, when the palaces and mansions loom over the frozen river in their heavy snow trimmings and shawls like old imperial dignitaries, sunk up to their eyebrows in massive fur coats. When the crimson ball of the setting January sun paints their tall Venetian windows with liquid gold, a freezing man crossing the bridge on foot suddenly sees what Peter had in mind when he erected these walls: a giant mirror for a lonely planet. And, exhaling steam, he feels almost pity for those naked columns with their Doric hairdos, captured as though driven into this merciless cold, into this knee-high snow.

The lower the thermometer falls, the more abstract the city looks. Minus 25 Centigrade is cold enough, but the temperature keeps falling as though, having done away with people, river, and buildings, it aims for ideas,

Even in the late thirties, when local industries finally began to catch up with the pre-revolutionary level of pro­duction, the population hadn't sufficiently increased; it was fluctuating somewhere near the two million mark. In fact, the percentage of long-standing families (those who had lived in Petersburg for two generations or more) was constantly dropping because of the civil war, emigration in the twenties, purges in the thirties. Then came World War II and the nine-hundred-day-long siege, which took nearly one million lives as much through bombardments as through starvation. The siege is the most tragic page in the city's history, and I think it was then that the name "Lenin­grad" was finally adopted by the inhabitants who survived, almost as a tribute to the dead; it's hard to argue with tombstone carvings. The city suddenly looked much older; it was as though History had finally acknowledged its exis­tence and decided to catch up with this place in her usual morbid way: by piling up bodies. Today, thirty-three years later, however repainted and stuccoed, the ceilings and fa<;ades of this unconquered city still seem to preserve the stain-like imprints of its inhabitants' last gasps and last gazes. Or perhaps it's just bad paint and bad stucco.

Today, the population of this city is around five million; and at eight o'clock in the morning, the overcrowded trams, buses, and trolleys rumble across the numerous bridges carying the barnacles of humanity to their factories and offices. The housing policy has changed from "condensa­tion" to building new structures on the outskirts whose style resembles everything else in the world and is known popularly as 'barrackko." It's a big credit to the present city fathers that they preserved the main body of the city vir­tually untouched. There are no skyscrapers, no braiding speedways here. Russia has an architectural reason to be grateful for the existence of the Iron Curtain, for it helped her to retain a visual identity. These days when you receive a postcard it takes a while to figure out whether it's been mailed from Caracas, Venezuela, or Warsaw, Poland.

It's not that the city fathers wouldn't like to immortalize themselves in glass and concrete; but somehow they don't dare. For all their worth, they, too, fall under the spell of the city, and the furthest they go is to erect here and there a modem hotel where everything is done by foreign (Fin­nish) builders—with the exception, of course, of telephone and electric wiring: the latter is subject to Russian know- how only. As a rule, these hotels are designated to service only foreign tourists, often the Finns themselves, owing to the proximity of their country to Leningrad.

The population amuses itself in nearly one hundred movie houses and a dozen drama, opera, and ballet theaters; there are also two huge soccer stadiums and the city supports two professional soccer teams and one ice-hockey team. In general, sports are endorsed substantially by officialdom, and it's widely known here that the most enthusiastic ice- hockey fan lives in the Kremlin. But the main pastime in Leningrad, as everywhere in Russia, is "the bottle." In terms of alcohol consumption, this city is the window on Russia indeed, and a wide-open one at that. At nine o'clock in the morning, a drunk is more frequently seen than a taxi. In the wine section of the grocery stores, you always find a couple of men with that idle but searching expression on their faces: they are looking for "a third" with whom to share both the price and the content of a bottle. The price shared at the cashier's, the content—in the nearest doorway. In the semidarkiess of diose entrances, reigns, at its highest, the art of dividing a pint of vodka into three equal parts without any remainder. Strange, unex­pected, but sometimes lifelong friendships originate here, as well as the most grisly crimes. And while propaganda condemns alcoholism orally and in print, the state continues to sell vodka and increases the prices because "the bottle" is the source of the state's biggest revenue: its cost is five kopecks and it's sold to the population for five rubles. Which means a profit of 9,900 percent.

But drinking habits are no rarity among those who live by the sea. The most characteristic features of Lenin- graders are: bad teeth (because of lack of vitamins dur­ing the siege), clarity in pronunciation of sibilants, self- mockery, and a degree of haughtiness toward the rest of the country. Mentally, this city is still the capital; and it is in the same relation to Moscow as Florence is to Rome or Boston is to Washington. Like some of Dostoevsky's char­acters, Leningrad derives pride and almost a sensual plea­sure from being "unrecognized," rejected; and yet it's perfectly aware that, for everyone whose mother tongue is Russian, the city is more real than anywhere else in the world where this language is heard.

For there is the second Petersburg, the one made of verses and of Russian prose. That prose is read and reread and the verses are learned by heart, if only because in Soviet schools children are made to memorize them if they want to graduate. And it's this memorization which secures the city's status and place in the future—as long as this language exists—and transforms the Soviet school­children into the Russian people.

The school year usually is over by the end of May, when the White Nights arrive in this city, to stay throughout the whole month of June. A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours—a phe­nomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city, when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it's too light and because any dream will be inferior to this reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

1979

In the Shadow of Dante

Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed against its precursors and predecessors. The ghosts of the great are especially visible in poetry, since their words are less mutable than the concepts they repre­sent.

A significant part, therefore, of every poet's endeavor in­volves polemics with these shadows whose hot or cold breath he senses on his neck, or is led to sense by the in­dustry of literary criticism. "Classics" exert such tremendous pressure that at times verbal paralysis is the result. And since the mind is more able to produce a negative view of the future than to handle such a prospect, the tendency is to perceive the situation as terminal. In such cases natural ignorance or even bogus innocence seems blessed, because it permits one to dismiss all such specters as nonexistent, and to "sing" (in vers libre, preferably) merely out of a sense of one's own physical stage presence.

To consider any such situation terminal, however, usually reveals not so much lack of courage as poverty of imagina­tion. If a poet lives long enough, he learns how to handle such dry spells (regardless of their origins), using them for his own ends. The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human fore­sight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.

Eugenio Montale is now eighty-one years old and has left behind many futures—his own as well as others'. Only two things in his biography could be considered spectacular: one is that he served as an infantry officer in the Italian Army during World War I. The second is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Between these events one might have found him studying to become an opera singer (he had a promising bel canto), opposing the Fascist regime—which he did from the start, and which eventually cost him his post as curator in the Vieusseux Library in Florence—writing articles, editing little magazines, cover­ing musical and other cultural events for about three de­cades for the "third page" of ll Corriere della Sera, and, for sixty years, writing poetry. Thank God that his life has been so uneventful.

Ever since the Romantics, we have been accustomed to the biographies of poets whose startling careers were some­times as short as their contributions. In this context, Mon­tale is a kind of anachronism, and the extent of his contri­bution to poetry has been anachronistically great. A con­temporary of Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Mandelstam, he be­longs more than chronologically to that generation. Each of these writers wrought a qualitative change in his respec­tive literature, as did Montale, whose task was much the hardest.

While it is usually chance that brings the English- speaking poet to read a Frenchman ( Laforgue, say), an Italian does so out of a geographical imperative. The Alps, which used to be civilization's one-way route north, are now a two-way highway for all sorts of literary isms! Ghost- wise, that crowds (clouds) one's operation enormously. For any Italian poet to take a new step, he must lift up the load amassed by the traffic of the past and the present; and it is the load of the present that was, perhaps, a lighter thing for Montale to handle.

With the exception of this French proximity, the situa­tion in Italian poetry during the first two decades of this century was not much different from that of other European literature. By that I mean that there was an aesthetic inflation caused by the absolute domination of the poetics of Romanticism (whether in its naturalistic or sym­bolist version). The two principal figures on the Italian poetic scene at that time—the "prepotenti" Gabriele D'An- nunzio and Marinetti—did little more than manifest that inflation, each in his own way. While D'Annunzio carried inflated harmony to its extreme (and supreme) conclusion, Marinetti and the other Futurists were striving for the opposite, to dismember that harmony. In both cases it was a war of means against means; i.e., a conditioned reac­tion which marked a captive aesthetics, a sensibility. It now seems clear that it took three poets from the next genera­tion, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba, and Eugenio Montale, to make the Italian language yield a modem lyric.

In spiritual odysseys there are no Ithacas, and even speech is but a means of transportation. A metaphys­ical realist with an evident taste for extremely condensed imagery, Montale managed to create his o^ poetic idiom through the juxtaposition of what he called the "aulic"— the courtly—and the "prosaic"; an idiom which as well could be defined as "amaro stile nuovo" (in contrast to Dante's formula, which reigned in Italian poetry for more than six centuries). The most remarkable aspect of Mon- tale's achievement is that he managed to pull forward des­pite the grip of the dolce stile nuovo. In fact, far from trying to loosen this grip, Mantale constantly refers to or paraphrases the great Florentine both in imagery and vo­cabulary. His allusiveness is partially responsible for the charges of obscurity that critics occasionally level against him. But references and paraphrases are the natural ele­ments of any civilized discourse (free^^r "freed"—of them, discourse is but gesturing), especially within the Italian cultural tradition. Michelangelo and Raphael, to cite only two instances, were both avid interpreters of La Divina Commedia. One of the purposes of a work of art is to create dependents; the paradox is that the more indebted the artist, the richer he is.

The maturity that Montale displayed in his very first book —Ossi di Seppia, published in 1925—makes it more diffi­cult to account for his development. Already here he has subverted the ubiquitous music of the Italian hendecasyl- labics, assuming a deliberately monotonous intonation that is occasionally made shrill by the addition of feet or is muted by their omission—one of the many techniques he employs in order to avoid prosodic inertia. If one recalls Montale's immediate predecessors (and the flashiest figure among them is certainly D'Annunzio), it becomes clear that stylistically Montale is indebted to nobody—or to everybody he bounces up against in his verse, for polemic is one form of inheritance.

This continuity through rejection is evident in Montale's use of rhyme. Apart from its function as a kind of linguistic echo, a sort of homage to the language, a rhyme lends a sense of inevitability to the poet's statement. Advantageous as it is, the repetitive nature of a rhyme scheme (or for that matter, of any scheme) creates the danger of overstate­ment, not to mention the distancing of the past from the reader. To prevent this, Montale often shifts from rhymed to unrhymed verse within the same poem. His objection to stylistic excess is clearly an ethical as well as an aesthetic one—proving that a poem is a form of the closest possible interplay between ethics and aesthetics.

This interplay, lamentably, is precisely what tends to vanish in translation. Still, despite the loss of his "vertebrate compactness" (in the words of his most perceptive critic, Glauco Cambon), Montale survives translation well. By lapsing inevitably into a different tonality, translation— because of its explanatory nature—somehow catches up with the original by clarifying those things which could be regarded by the author as self-evident and thus elude the native reader. Though much of the subtle, discreet music is lost, the American reader has an advantage in under­standing the meaning, and would be less likely to repeat in English an Italian's charges of obscurity. Speaking of the present collection, one only regrets that the footnotes do not include indications of the rhyme scheme and metric patterns of the poems. After all, a footnote is where civili­zation survives.

Perhaps the term "development" is not applicable to a poet of Montale's sensitivity, if only because it implies a linear process; poetic thinking always has a synthesizing quality and employs—as Montale himself expresses it in one of his poems—a kind of "bat-radar" technique, i.e., when thought operates in a 360-degree range. Also, at any given time a poet is in possession of an entire language; his preference for an archaic word, for instance, is dictated by his subject matter or his nerves rather than by a precon­ceived stylistic program. The same is true of syntax, stan- zaic design, and the like. For sixty years Montale has managed to sustain his poetry on a stylistic plateau, the altitude of which one senses even in translation.

New Poerm; is, I believe, Montale's sixth book to appear in English. But unlike previous editions, which aspired to give a comprehensive idea of the poet's entire career, this vol- ^e contains only poems written during the last decade, coinciding thus with Montale's most recent ( 1971) collec­tion—Safura. And though it would be senseless to view them as the ultimate word of the poet, still—because of their author's age and their unifying theme, the death of his wife—each conveys to some extent an air of finality. For death as a theme always produces a self-portrait.

In poetry, as in any other form of discourse, the addressee matters no less than the speaker. The protagonist of the New Poerm; is preoccupied with the attempt to estimate the distance between himself and his "interlocutor" and then to figure out the response "she" would have made had she been present. The silence into which his speech neces­sarily has been directed harbors, by implication, more in the way of answers than human imagination can afford—a fact which endows Montale's "her" with undoubted su­periority. In this respect Montale resembles neither T. S. Eliot nor Thomas Hardy, with whom he has been frequently compared, but rather the Robert Frost of the "New Hamp­shire period," with his idea that woman was created out of man's rib (a nickname for heart), neither to be loved nor to be loving, nor to be judged, but to be "a judge of thee."

Unlike Frost, however, Montale is dealing with a form of superiority diat is a fait accompli—superiority in absentia— and this stirs in him not so much a sense of guilt as a feeling of disjunction: his persona in these poems has been exiled into "outer time."

This is, therefore, love poetry in which death plays ap­proximately the same role it does in La Divina Commedia or in Petrarch's sonnets to Madonna Laura: the role of a guide. But here quite a different person is moving along familiar lines; his speech has nothing to do with sacred anticipation. What Montale displays in New Poems is that tenaciousness of imagination, that urge to outflank death, which might enable a person, upon arriving in the domain of shadows and finding "Kilroy was here," to recognize his own handwriting.

Yet there is no morbid fascination with death, no falsetto in these poems; what the poet is talking about here is the absence which lets itself be felt in exactly the same nuances of language and feeling as those which "she" once used to manifest "her" presence—the language of intimacy. Hence the extremely private tone of the poems: in their metrics and in their choice of detail. This voice, of a man speaking —often muttering—to himself, is generally the most con­spicuous characteristic of Montale's poetry. But this time the personal note is enforced by the fact that the poet's per­sona is talking about things only the real he and the real she had knowledge of—shoehorns, suitcases, the names of hotels where they used to stay, mutual acquaintances, books they had both read. Out of this sort of realia, and out of the inertia of intimate speech, emerges a private mythology which gradually acquires all the traits appropriate to any mythology, including surrealistic visions, metamorphoses, and the like. In this mythology, instead of some female- breasted sphinx, there is the image of "her," minus her glasses: this is the surrealism of subtraction, and this sub­traction, affecting either subject matter or tonality, is what gives unity to this collection.

Death is always a song of "innocence," never of experience. And from the beginning of his career Montale shows his preference for song over confession. Although less explicit than the latter, a song is less repeatable; as is loss. Over the course of a lifetime, psychological acquisitions become more real than real estate. There is nothing more moving than an alienated man resorting to elegy:

With my arm in yours I have descended at least

a million stairs, and now that you aren't here, a void opens at each step.

Even so our longjourney has been brief. Mine continues still, though I've no more use for connections, bookings, traps, and the disenchantment of him who believes that the real is what one sees.

I have descended millions of stairs with my arm in yours,

not, of course, that with four eyes one might

see better. I descended them because I knew that even though so bedimmed yours were the only true eyes.

Other considerations aside, this reference to a continuing solitary descent of stairs echoes something in La Divina Commedia. "Xenia I" and "Xenia II," as well as "Diary of 71" and "Diary of 72," the poems that make up the present volume, are full of references to Dante. Sometimes a refer­ence consists of a single word, sometimes an entire poem is an echo—like No. 13 of "Xenia I," which echoes the con­clusion of the twenty-first Song in the Purgatorio, the most stunning scene in the whole Cantica. But what marks Mon­tale's poetic and human wisdom is his rather bleak, almost exhausted, falling intonation. After all, he is speaking to a woman with whom he has spent many years: he lmows her well enough to realize that she would not appreciate a tragic tremolo. He knows, certainly, that he is speaking into silence; the pauses that punctuate his lines suggest the closeness of that void, which is made somewhat familiar— if not actually inhabited—because of his belief that "she" might be somewhere out there. And it is the sense of her presence that keeps him from resorting to expressionistic devices, elaborate imagery, high-pitched catch-phrases, and so forth. She who died would resent verbal flamboyance as well. Montale is old enough to know that the classically "great" line, however immaculate its conception, flatters the audience and by and large is self-serving, whereas he is perfectly aware toward whom and where his speech is directed.

In such an absence, art grows humble. For all our cere­bral progress, we are stiU greatly subject to relapse into the Romantic (and, hence, Realistic as weU) notion that "art imitates life." If art does anything of this kind, it undertakes to reflect those few elements of existence which transcend "life," extend it beyond its terminal point—an undertaking which is frequently mistaken for art's or the artist's own groping for immortality. In other words, art "imitates" death rather than life; i.e., it imitates that realm of which life supplies no notion: realizing its own brevity, art tries to domesticate the longest possible version of time. After all, what distinguishes art from life is the ability of the former to produce a higher degree of lyricism than is pos­sible within any human interplay. Hence poetry's affinity with—if not the very invention of—the notion of afterlife.

New Poems provides an idiom which is qualitatively new. It is largely Montale's own idiom, but some of it derives from the act of translation, whose limited means only increase the original austerity. The cumulative effect of this book is startling, not so much because the psyche portrayed in New Poems has no previous record in world literature, as be­cause it makes clear that such a mentality could not be expressed in English as its original language. The question "why" may only obscure the reason, since even in Mon­tale's native Italian such a mentality is strange enough to earn him the reputation of an excepticnal poet.

Poetry after all in itself is a translation; or, to put it another way, poetry is one of the aspects of the psyche rendered in language. It is not so much that poetry is a form of art as that art is a form to which poetry often resorts. Essentially, poetry is the articulation of perception, the translation of that perception into the heritage of lan­guage—language is, after all, the best available tool. But for all the value of this tool in ramifying and deepen­ing perceptions—revealing sometimes more than was orig­inally intended, which, in the happiest cases, merges with the perceptions—every more or less experienced poet knows how much is left out or has suffered because of it.

This suggests that poetry is somehow also alien or resis­tant to language, be it Italian, English, or Swahili, and that the human psyche because of its synthesizing nature is infinitely superior to any language we are bound to use (having somewhat better chances with inflected ones). To say the least, if the psyche had its own tongue, the dis­tance between it and the language of poetry would be approximately the same as the distance between the latter and conversational Italian. Montale's idiom shortens both trips.

New Poems ought to be read and reread a number of times, if not for the sake of analysis, the function of which is to return a poem to its stereoscopic origins—the way it existed in the poet's mind—then for the fugitive beauty of this subtle, muttering, and yet firm stoic voice, which tells us that the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but with a man talking, pausing, and then talking again. When you have had such a long life, anticlimax ceases to be just another device.

The book is certainly a monologue; it couldn't be other­wise when the interlocutor is absent, as is nearly always the case in poetry. Partly, however, the idea of monologue as a principal device springs from the "poetry of absence," an­other name for the greatest literary movement since Sym­bolism—a movement which came into existence in Europe, and especially in Italy, in the twenties and thirties— "Hermeticism." The following poem, which opens the pres­ent collection, is testimony to the main postulates of the movement and is itself its triumph. ( Tu in Italian is the familiar form of "you.")

106 I J os ep h Brodsky

The Use of "Tu"

Misled by me

the critics assert that my "tu" is an institution, that were it not for this fault of mine, they'd have known that the many in me are one, even though multiplied by the mirrors. The trouble is that once caught in the net the bird doesn't know if he is himself or one of his too many duplicates.

Montale joined the Hermetic movement in the late thirties while living in Florence, where he moved in 1927 from his native Genoa. The principal figure in Hermeticism at that time was Giuseppe Ungaretti, who took the aesthetics of Mallarme's "Un Coup de Des" perhaps too much to heart. However, in order to comprehend the nature of Hermeti­cism fully it is worthwhile to take into account not only those who ran this movement, but also who ran the whole Italian show—and that was 11 Duce. To a large degree, Hermeticism was a reaction of the Italian intelligentsia to the political situation in Italy in the third and fourth decades of this century and could be viewed as an act of cultural self-defense—linguistic self-defense, in the case of poetry—against Fascism. At least, to overlook this aspect of Hermeticism would be as much a simplification as fre­quently overstressing this aspect is.

Although the Italian regime was far less carnivorous toward art than were its Russian and German counterparts, the sense of its incompatibility with the traditions of Italian culture was much more apparent and intolerable than in those countries. It is almost a rule that in order to survive under totalitarian pressure art should develop density in direct proportion to the magnitude of that pressure. The whole history of Italian culture supplied part of the re­quired substance; the rest of the job fell to the Hermeticists, little though their name implied it. What could be more odious for those who stressed literary asceticism, compact­ness of language, emphasis on the word and its alliterative powers, sound versus—or, rather, over—meaning, and the like, than the propaganda verbosities and state-sponsored versions of Futurism?

Montale has the reputation of being the most difficult poet of this school and he is certainly more difficult—in the sense of being more complex—than Ungaretti or Salvatore Quasimodo. But for all the overtones, reticence, merging of associations, or hints of associations in his work, its hid­den references, substitutions of general statements for mi­croscopic detail, elliptical speech, etc., it was he who wrote "La primavera Hitleriana" ("The Hitler Spring"), which begins:

The dense white cloud of the mayflies crazily whirls around the pallid street lamps and over the parapets

spread on the ground a blanket on which the foot grates as on sprinkled sugar . . .

This image of the foot grating on the dead mayflies as on sprinkled sugar conveys such a toneless, deadpan unease and horror that when some fourteen lines below he says:

. . . and the water continues to eat at the shoreline, and no one is any more blameless

(Translated by Maurice English)

it sounds like lyricism. Little in these lines recalls Hermet- icism, that ascetic variant of Symbolism. Reality was calling for a more substantial response, and World War II brought with it a "de-Hermetization." Still, the "Hermeticist" label became glued to Montale's back, and he has, ever since, been considered an ""obscure" poet. But whenever one hears of obscurity, it is time to stop and ponder one's notion of clarity, for it usually rests on what is already known or pre­ferred, or, in the worst cases, remembered. In this sense, the more obscure, the better. In this sense, too, the obscure poetry of Montale still carries on a defense of culture, this time against a much more ubiquitous enemy:

The man of today has inherited a nervous system which cannot withstand the present conditions of life. While waiting for the man of tomorrow to be born, the man of today reacts to the altered conditions not by standing up to them or by endeavoring to resist their blows, but by turning into a mass.

This passage is taken from Poet in Our Time, a collection of Montale's prose pieces which he himself calls a "collage of notes." The pieces are excerpted from essays, reviews, inter­views, etc., published at different times and in different places. The importance of this book goes far beyond the sidelights it casts on the poet's own progress, if it does that at all. Montale seems to be the last person to disclose his inner processes of thought, let alone the "secrets of his craft." A private man, he prefers to make the public life the subject of his scrutiny, rather than the reverse. Poet in Our Time is a book concerned precisely with the results of such scrutiny, and its emphasis falls on "Our Time" rather than on "Poet."

Both the lack of chronology and the harsh lucidity of lan­guage in these pieces supply this book with an air of diag­nosis or of verdict. The patient or the accused is the civiliza­tion which "believes it is walking while in fact it is being carried along by a conveyor belt," but since the poet realizes that he is himself the flesh of this civilization's flesh, neither cure nor rehabilitation is implied. Poet in Our Time is, in fact, the disheartened, slightly fastidious testament of a man who doesn't seem to have inheritors other than the "hypothetical stereophonic man of the future incapable even of thinking about his o^ destiny." This particular vision surely sounds backward in our track-taped present, and it betrays the fact that a European is speaking. It is hard, however, to decide which one of Montale's visions is more frightening—this one or the following, from his "Piccolo Testamento," a poem which easily matches Yeats's "Second Coming":

... only this iris can I

leave you as testimony

of a faith that was much disputed

of a hope that burned more slowly

than a hard log in the fireplace.

Conserve its powder in your compact

when every lamplight spent

the sardana becomes infernal

and a shadowy Lucifer descends on a prow

of the Thames or Hudson or Seine

thrashing bituminous wings half-

shorn from the effort to tell you: It's time

(Translated by Cid Corman)

Still, a good thing about testaments is that they imply a future. Unlike philosophers or social thinkers, a poet pon­ders the future out of professional concern for his audience or awareness of art's mortality. The second reason plays a bigger part in Poet in Our Time because "the content of art is diminishing, just as the difference between individ­uals is diminishing." The pages in this collection that do not sound either sarcastic or elegiac are those that deal with the art of letters:

There remains the hope that the art of the word, an incurably semantic art, wilwil sooner or later make its repercussions felt even in those arts which claim to have freed themselves from every obligation toward the identification and representation of truth.

This is about as affirmative as Montale can be with respect to the art of letters, which he does not spare, however, the following comment:

To belong to a generation which can no longer be­lieve in anything may be a cause of pride for anyone convinced of the ultimate nobility of this emptiness or of some mysterious need for it, but it does not excuse anyone who wants to transform this emptiness into a paradoxical affirmation of life simply in order to give himseU a style . . .

It is a tempting and dangerous thing to quote Montale because it easily turns into a full-time occupation. Italians have their way with the future, from Leonardo to Marinetti. Still, this temptation is due not so much to the aphoristic quality of Montale's statements or even to their prophetic quality as to the tone of his voice, which alone makes one trust his utterances because it is so free of anxiety. There is a certain air of recurrence to it, kindred to water coming ashore or the invariable refraction of light in a lens. When one lives as long as he has, "the provisional encounters be­tween the real and the ideal" become frequent enough for the poet both to develop a certain familiarity with the ideal and to be able to foretell the possible changes of its fea­tures. For the artist, these changes are perhaps the only sensible measurements of time.

There is something remarkable about the almost simul­taneous appearance of these two books; they seem to merge. In the end, Poet in Our Time makes the most ap­propriate illustration of the "outer time" inhabited by the persona of the New Poems. Again, this is a reversal of La Divina Commedia, where this world was understood as "that realm." "Her" absence for Montale's persona is as palpable as "her" presence was for Dante's. The repetitive nature of existence in this afterlife now is, in its turn, kin­dred to Dante's circling among those "who died as men before their bodies died." Poet in Our Time supplies us with a sketch—and sketches are always somewhat more con­vincing than oils—of that rather overpopulated spiral land­scape of such dying yet living beings.

This book doesn't sound very "Italian," although the old civilization contributes a great deal to the accomplishment of this old man of letters. The words "European" and "in­ternational" when applied to Montale also look like tired euphemisms for "universal." Montale is one writer whose mastery of language stems from his spiritual autonomy; thus, both New Poems and Poet in Our Time are what books

112 I J 0 s E p II B II 0 D sky

used to be before they became mere books: chronicles of souls. Not that the latter need any. The last of the New Poems goes as follows:

To Conclude I charge my descendants (if I have any) on the literary plane, which is rather improbable, to make a big bonfire of all that concerns my life, my actions, my non-actions. I'm no I.eopardi, I leave little behind me to be burnt, and it's already too much to live by percentages. I lived at the rate of five per cent; don't increase the dose. And yet it never rains but it pours.

1977

On Tyranny

Illness and death are, perhaps, the only things that a tyrant has in common with his subjects. In this sense alone a na­tion profits from being run by an old man. It's not that one's awareness of one's o^ mortality necessarily enlightens or makes one mellow, but the time spent by a tyrant ponder­ing, say, his metabolism is time stolen from the affairs of state. Both domestic and international tranquillities are in direct proportion to the number of maladies besetting your First Secretary of the Party, or your President-for-Life. Even if he is perceptive enough to learn that additional art of callousness inherent in every illness, he is usually quite hesitant to apply this acquired knowledge to his palace intrigues or foreign policies, if only because he instinctively gropes for the restoration of his previous healthy condition or simply believes in full recovery.

In the case of a tyrant, time to think of the soul is always used for scheming to preserve the status quo. This is so be­cause a man in his position doesn't distinguish between the present, history, and eternity, fused into one by the state propaganda for both his and the population's convenience. He clings to power as any elderly person does to his pen­sion or savings. What sometimes appears as a purge in the top ranks is perceived by the nation as an attempt to sustain the stability for which this nation opted in the first place by allowing the tyranny to be established.

The stability of the pyramid seldom depends on its pin­nacle, and yet it is precisely the pinnacle that attracts our attention. After a while a spectator's eye gets bored with its intolerable geometrical perfection and all but demands changes. \Vhen changes come, however, they are always for the worse. To say the least, an old man fighting to avoid disgrace and discomfort, which are particularly unpleasant at his age, is quite predictable. Bloody and nasty as he may appear to be in that fight, it affects neither the pyramid's inner structure nor its external shadow. And the objects of his struggle, the rivals, fully deserve his vicious treatment, if only because of the tautology of their ambition in view of the difference in age. For politics is but geometrical purity embracing the law of the jungle.

Up there, on the head of the pin, there is room only for one, and he had better be old, since old men never pretend they are angels. The aging tyrant's sole purpose is to retain his position, and his demagoguery and hypocrisy do not tax the minds of his subjects with the necessity of belief or tex­tual proliferation. Whereas the young upstart with his true or false zeal and dedication always ends up raising the level of public cynicism. Looking back on human history we can safely say that cynicism is the best yardstick of social progress.

For new tyrants always introduce a new blend of hypoc­risy and cruelty. Some are more keen on cruelty, others on hypocrisy. Think of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Qad- dafi, Khomeini, Amin, and so on. They always beat tlieir predecessors in more ways than one, and give a new twist to the arm of the citizen as well as to the mind of the spec­tator. For an anthropologist (an extremely aloof one at that) this kind of development is of great interest, for it widens one's notion of the species. It must be noted, how­ever, that the responsibility for the aforesaid processes lies as much with technological progress and the general growth of population as with the particular wickedness of a given dictator.

Today, every new sociopolitical setup, be it a democracy or an authoritarian regime, is a further departure from the spirit of individualism toward the stampede of the masses. The idea of one's existential uniqueness gets replaced by that of one's anonymity. An individual perishes not so much by the sword as by the penis, and, however small a country is, it requires, or becomes subjected to, central planning. This sort of thing easily breeds various forms of autocracy, where tyrants themselves can be regarded as obsolete versions of computers.

But if they were only the obsolete versions of computers, it wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that a tyrant is capable of purchasing new, state-of-the-art computers and aspires to man them. Examples of obsolete forms of hard­ware running advanced forms are the Fiihrer resorting to the loudspeaker, or Stalin using the telephone monitoring system to eliminate his opponents in the Politburo.

People become tyrants not because they have a vocation for it, nor do they by pure ^ance either. H a man has such a vocation, he usually takes a shortcut and becomes a family tyrant, whereas real tyrants are known to be shy and not terribly interesting family men. The vehicle of a tyranny is a political party (or military ranks, which have a structure similar to that of the party), for in order to get to the top of something you need to have something that has a vertical topography.

Now, unlike a mountain or, better still, a skyscraper, a party is essentially a fictitious reality invented by the men­tally or otherwise unemployed. They come to the world and find its physical reality, skyscrapers and mountains, fully occupied. Their choice,. therefore, is between wait­ing for an opening in the old system and creating a new, alternative one of their own. The latter strikes them as the more expedient way to proceed, if only because they can start right away. Building a party is an occupation in itself, and an absorbing one at that. It surely doesn't pay off im­mediately; but then again the labor isn't that hard and there is a great deal of mental comfort in the incoherence of the aspiration.

In order to conceal its purely demographic origins, a party usually develops its own ideology and mythology. In general, a new reality is always created in the image of an old one, aping the existing structures. Such a technique, while obscuring the lack of imagination, adds a certain air of authenticity to the entire enterprise. That's why, by the way, so many of these people adore realistic art. On the whole, the absence of imagination is more authentic than its presence. The droning dullness of a party program and the drab, unspectacular appearance of its leaders appeal to the masses as their own reflection. In the era of over­population, evil (as well as good) becomes as mediocre as its subjects. To become a tyrant, one had better be dull.

And dull they are, and so are their lives. Their only re­wards are obtained while climbing: seeing rivals outdone, pushed away, demoted. At the ^ro of the century, in the heyday of political parties, there were the additional pleasures of, say, putting out a haywire pamphlet, or escap­ing police surveillance; of delivering a fervent oration at a clandestine congress or resting at the party's expense in the Swiss Alps or on the French Hiviera. Now all that is gone: burning issues, false beards, Marxist studies. What's left is the waiting game of promotion, endless red tape, paper work, and a search for reliable pals. There isn't even the thrill of watching your tongue, for it's surely devoid of any­thing worth the attention of your fully bugged walls.

What gets one to the top is the slow passage of time, whose only comfort is the sense of authenticity it gives to the undertaking: what's time-consuming is real. Even within the ranks of the opposition, party advancement is slow; as for the party in power, it has nowhere to hurry, and after half a century of domination is itself capable of distributing time. Of course, as regards ideals in the Vic­torian sense of the word, the one-party system isn't very different from a modem version of political pluralism. Still, to join the only existing party takes more than an average amount of dishonesty.

Nevertheless, for all your cunning, and no matter how crystal-clear your record is, you are not likely to make it to the Politburo before sixty. At this age life is absolutely irreversible, and if one grabs the reins of power, he un­clenches his fists only for the last candle. A sixty-year-old man is not likely to try anything economically or politically risky. He knows that he has a decade or so to go, and his joys are mostly of a gastronomical and a technological na­ture: an exquisite diet, foreign cigarettes, and foreign cars. He is a status quo man, which is profitable in foreign affairs, considering his steadily growing stockpile of missiles, and intolerable inside the country, where to do nothing means to worsen the existing condition. And although his rivals may capitalize on the latter, he would rather eliminate them than introduce any changes, for one always feels a bit nos­talgic toward the order that brought one to success.

The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most. When it's more than that, it in­variably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging wars or internal terror, or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, re­sorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalize himself by doing something horrendous. The younger cadres, who are not so young anyway, press from below, pushing him into the blue yonder of pure Chronos. Because after reaching the top of the pinnacle that is the only way to continue. However, more often than not, nature has to act alone and encounter a formidable opposition from both the Organs of State Security and the tyrant's personal medical team. Foreign doctors are fiown in from abroad to fish your man out from the depths of senility to which he has sunk. Sometimes they succeed in their humanitarian mission (for their govern­ments are themselves deeply interested in the preservation of the status quo), enough to enable the great man to reiter­ate the death threat to their respective countries.