Less Than One: Selected Essays

In the end both give up; Organs perhaps less willingly than doctors, for medicine has less in the way of a hierarchy which stands to be affected by the impending changes. But even the Organs finaUy get bored with their master, whom they are going to outlive anyway, and as the bodyguards ^ra their faces sideways, in slips death with scythe, hammer, and sickle. The next morning the population is awakened not by the punctual roosters but by waves of Chopin's Marche Funebre pouring out of the loudspeakers. Then comes the military funeral, horses dragging the gun carriage, preceded by a detachment of soldiers carrying on small scarlet cushions the medals and orders that used to adorn the coat of the tyrant like the chest of a prize- winning dog. For this is what he was: a prize- and race- winning dog. And if the population mourns his demise, as often happens, its tears are the tears of bettors who lost: the nation mourns its lost time. And then appear the members of the Politburo, shouldering the banner-draped coffin: the only denominator that they have in common.

As they carry their dead denominator, cameras chirr and click, and both foreigners and the natives peer intently at the inscrutable faces, crying to pick out the successor. The deceased may have been vain enough to leave a po­litical testament, but it won't be made public anyway. The decision is to be made in secrecy, at a closed—that is, to the population—session of the Politburo. That is, clan­destinely. Secretiveness is an old party hang-up, an echo of its demographic origin, of its glorious illegal past. And the faces reveal nothing.

They do it all the more successfully because there is nothing to reveal. For it's simply going to be more of the same. The new man will differ from the old man only physi­cally. Mentally and otherwise he is bound to be the exact replica of the corpse. This is perhaps the biggest secret there is. Come to think of it, the party's replacements are the closest thing we've got to resurrection. Of course, repe­tition breeds boredom, but if you repeat things in secret there is still room for fun.

The funniest thing of al, however, is the realization that any one of these men can become a tyrant. That what causes all this uncertainty and confusion is just that the supply exceeds the demand. That we are dealing not with the tyranny of an individual but with the tyranny of a party that simply has put the production of tyrants on an in­dustrial footing. Which was very shrewd of this party in general and very apt in particular, considering the rapid surrender of individualism as such. In other words, today the "who-is-going-to-be-who" giessing game is as romantic and antiquated as that of bilboquet, and only freely elected people can indulge in playing it. The time is long since over for the aquiline profiles, goatees or shovel-like beards, walrus or toothbrush mustaches; soon it will be over even for eyebrows.

Still, there is something haunting about these bland, gray, undistinguished faces: they look like everyone else, which gives them an almost underground air; they are similar as blades of grass. The visual redundance provides the "gov­ernment of the people'' principle with an additional depth: with the rule of nobodies. To be governed by nobodies, however, is a far more ubiquitous form of tyranny, since no­bodies look like everybody. They represent the masses in more ways than one, and that's why they don't bother with elections. It's a rather thankless task for the imagination to think of the possible result of the "one man, one vote" sys­tem in, for example, the one-billion-strong China: what kind of a parliament that could produce, and how many tens of millions would constitute a minority there.

The upsurge of political parties at the turn of the century was the first cry of overpopulation, and that's why they score so well today. While the individualists were poking fun at them, they capitalized on depersonalization, and presently the individualists quit laughing. The goal, how­ever, is neither the party's own nor some particular bureau­crat's triumph. True, they turned out to be ahead of their time; but time has a lot of things ahead, and above all, a lot of people. The goal is to accommodate their numerical expansion in the non-expanding world, and the only way to achieve it is through the depersonalization and bureau­cratization of everybody alive. For life itself is a common denominator; that's enough of a premise for structuring existence in a more detailed fashion.

And a tyranny does just that: structures your life for you. It does this as meticulously as possible, certainly far better than a democracy does. Also, it does it for your own sake, for any display of individualism in a crowd may be harm­ful: first of all for the person who displays it; but one should care about those next to him as well. This is what the party- run state, with its security service, mental institutions, police, and citizens' sense of loyalty, is for. Still, all these devices are not enough: the dream is to make every man his own bureaucrat. And the day when such a dream comes true is very much in sight. For bureaucratization of individ­ual existence starts with thinking politics, and it doesn't stop with the acquisition of a pocket calculator.

So if one still feels elegiac at the tyrant's funeral, it's mostly for autobiographical reasons, and because this de­parture makes one's nostalgia for "the good old days" even more concrete. After all, the man was also a product of the old school, when people still saw the difference between what they were saying and what they were doing. If he doesn't deserve more than a line in history, well, so much the better: he just didn't spill enough of his subjects' blood for a paragraph. His mistresses were on the plump side and few. He didn't write much, nor did he paint or play a musi­cal instrument; he didn't introduce a new style in furniture either. He was a plain tyrant, and yet leaders of the greatest democracies eagerly sought to shake his hand. In short, he didn't rock the boat. And it's partly thanks to him that as we open our windows in the morning, the horizon there is still not vertical.

Because of the nature of his job, nobody knew his real thoughts. It's quite probable that he didn't know them him­self. That would do for a good epitaph, except that there is an anecdote the Finns tell about the will of their Presi- dent-for-Life Urho Kekkonnen which begins as follows: "If I die ..."

1980

The Child of Civilization

For some odd reason, the expression "death of a poet" always sounds somewhat more concrcte than "life of a poet." Perhaps this is because both "life" and "poet," as words, are almost synonymous in their positive vagueness. Whereas "death"—even as a word—is about as definite as a poct's own production, i.e., a poem, the main feature of which is its last line. Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last line of a poem nothing follows except literary criticism. So when we read a poet, we par­ticipate in his or his works' death. In the case of Mandel- starn, we participate in both.

A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker. Para­phrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying. But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one write is not so much a concern for one's perishable flesh as the urge to spare certain things of one's world—of one's personal civilization—one's own non-semantic continuum. Art is not a better, but an alterna­tive existence; it is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words. In the case of Mandelstam, the words happened to be those of the Russian language.

For a spirit, perhaps, there is no better accommodation: Russian is a very inflected language. What this means is that the noun could easily be found sitting at the very end of the sentence, and that the ending of this noun (or ad­jective, or verb) varies according to gender, number, and case. All this provides any given verbalization with the stereoscopic quality of the perception itself, and (some­times) sharpens and develops the latter. The best illustra­tion of this is Mandelstam's handling of one of the main themes of his poetry, the theme of time.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytic device to a synthetic phenomenon; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet. Yet in dealing with Mandelstam it wouldn't be much easier to apply such a device in Russian either. Poetry is the supreme result of the entire language, and to analyze it is but to diffuse the focus. It is all the more true of Mandelstam, who is an extremely lonely figure in the context of Russian poetry, and it is precisely the density of his focus that accounts for his isolation. Literary criticism is sensible only when the critic operates on the same plane of both psychological and linguistic regard. The way it looks now, Mandelstam is bound for a criticism coming strictly "from below" in either language.

The inferiority of analysis starts with the very notion of theme, be it a theme of time, love, or death. Poetry is, first of all, an art of references, allusions, linguistic and figurative parallels. There is an immense gulf between Homo sapiens and Homo scribens, because for the writer the notion of theme appears as a result of combining the above tech­niques and devices, if it appears at all. Writing is literally an existential process; it uses thinking for its own ends, it consumes notions, themes, and the like, not vice versa. What dictates a poem is the language, and this is the voice of the language, which we know under the nicknames of Muse or Inspiration. It is better, then, to speak not about the theme of time in Mandelstam's poetry, but about the presence of time itself, both as an entity and as a theme, if only because time has its seat within a poem anyway, and it is a caesura.

It is because we know this full well that Mandelstarn, unlike Goethe, never exclaims "0 moment, stay! Thou art so very fair!" but merely tries to extend his caesura. "'hat is more, he does it not so much because of this moment's particular faimess or lack of fairness; his concern (and subsequently his technique) is quite different. It was the sense of an oversaturated existence that the young Mandel- stam was trying to convey in his first two collections, and he chose the portrayal of overloaded time as his medium. Using all the phonetic and allusory power of words them­selves, Mandelstam's verse in that period expresses the slowing-down, viscous sensation of time's passage. Since he succeeds (as he always does), the effect is that the reader realizes that the words, even their letters—vowels espe­cially—are almost palpable vessels of time.

On the other hand, his is not at all that search for bygone days with its obsessive gropings to recapture and to recon­sider the past. Mandelstam seldom looks bacW'ard in a poem; he is all in the present—in this moment, which he makes continue, linger beyond its own natural limit. The past, whether personal or historical, has been taken care of by the words' own etymology. But however un-Proust:ian his treatment of time is, the density of his verse is some­what akin to the great Frenchman's prose. In a way, it is the same total warfare, the same frontal attack—but in this case, an attack on the present, and with resources of a dif­ferent nature. It is extremely important to note, for in­stance, that in almost ever case when Mandelstam happens to deal v\ith this theme of time, he resorts to a rather heavily caesuraed verse which echoes the hexameter either in its beat or in its content. It is usually an iambic pentam­eter lapsing into alexandrine verse, and there is always a paraphrase or a direct reference to either of Homer's epics. As a rule, this kind of poem is set somewhere by the sea, in late summer, which directly or indirectly evokes the an­cient Greek background. This is partly because of Russian poetry's traditional regard for the Crimea and the Black Sea as the only available approximation of the Greek world, of which these places—Taurida and Pontus Euxinus—used to be the outskirts. Take, for instance, poems like "The stream of the golden honey was pouring so slow . . . ," "In­somnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails . . . ," and "There are orioles in woods and lasting length of vowels," where there are these lines:

. . . Yet nature once a year

Is bathed in lengthiness as in Homeric meters.

Like a caesura that day ya^M . . .

The importance of this Greek echo is manifold. It might seem to be a purely technical issue, but the point is that the alexandrine verse is the nearest kin to hexameter, if only in tenns of using a caesura. Speaking of relatives, the mother of all Muses was Mnemosyne, the Muse of Memory, and a poem (be it a short one or an epic) must be mem­orized in order to survive. Hexameter was a remarkable mnemonic device, if only because of being so cumbersome and different from the colloquial speech of any audience, Homer's included. So by referring to this vehicle of memory within another one—i.e., within his alexandrine verse— Mandelstam, along with producing an almost physical sen­sation of time's tunnel, creates the effect of a play within a play, of a caesura within a caesura, of a pause within a pause. Which is, after all, a form of time, if not its mean­ing: if time does not get stopped by that, it at least gets focused.

Not that Mandelstam does this consciously, deliberately. Or that this is his main purpose while writing a poem. He does it offhandedly, in subordinate clauses, while writing (often about something else), never by writing to make this point. His is not topical poetry. Russian poetry on the whole is not very topical. Its basic technique is one of beating around the bush, approaching the theme from various angles. The clear-cut treatment of the subject mat­ter, which is so characteristic of poetry in English, usually gets exercised within this or that line, and then a poet moves on to something else; it seldom makes for an entire poem. Topics and concepts, regardless of their importance, are but material, like words, and they are always there. Lan­guage has names for all of them, and the poet is the one who masters language.

Greece was always there, so was Rome, and so were the biblical Judea and Christianity. The cornerstones of our civilization, they are treated by Mandelstam's poetry in approximately the same way time itself would treat them: as a unity—and in their unity. To pronounce Mandel­stam an adept at either ideology (and especially at the latter) is not only to miniaturize him but to distort his historical perspective, or rather his historical landscape. Thematically, Mandelstam's poetry repeats the develop­ment of our civilization: it flows north, but the parallel streams in this current mingle with each other from the very beginning. Toward the twenties, the Roman themes gradually overtake the Greek and biblical references, largely because of the poet's growing identification with the archetypal predicament of "a poet versus an empire." Still, what created this kind of attitude, apart from the purely political aspects of the situation in Russia at the time, was Mandelstam's own estimate of his work's relation to the rest of contemporary literature, as well as to the moral climate and the intellectual concerns of the rest of the na­tion. It was the moral and the mental degradation of the latter which were suggesting this imperial scope. And yet it was only a thematic overtaking, never a takeover. Even in "Tristia," the most Roman poem, where the author clearly quotes from the exiled Ovid, one can trace a certain Hesi- odic patriarchal note, implying that the whole enterprise was being viewed through a somewhat Greek prism.

TRISTIA

I've mastered the great craft of separation amidst the bare unbraided pleas of night, those Ungerings while oxen chew their ration, the watchful town's last eyelid's shutting tight. And I revere that midnight rooster's descant when shmildering the wayfarer's sack of wrong eyes stained with tears were peering at the distance and women's wailings were the Mwes' song.

Who is to tell when hearing "separation" what kind of parting this may resonate, foreshadowed by a rooster's exclamation as candles twist the temple's colonnade; why at the dawn of some new life, new era when oxen chew their ration in the stall that wakeful rooster, a new life's towncrier, flaps its tom wings atop the city wall.

And I adore the worsted yarn's behavior:

the shuttle bustles and the spindle hums;

look how young Delia, barefooted, braver

than down of swans, glides straight into your arms!

Oh, our life's lamentable coarse fabric,

how poor the language of our ;oy indeed.

What happened once, becomes a worn-out matrix.

Yet, recognition is intensely sweet!

So be it thus: a small translucent figure spreads like a squirrel pelt across a clean clay plate; a girl bends over it, her eager gaze scrutinizes what the wax may mean. To ponder Erebus, that's not for our acumen. To women, wax is as to men steel's shine. Our lot is drawn only in war; to women it's given to meet death while they divine.

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

Later, in the thirties, during what is lmown as the Voronezh period, when all those themes—including Rome and Chris­tianity—yielded to the "theme" of bare existential horror and a terrifying spiritual acceleration, the pattern of inter­play, of interdependence between those realms, becomes even more obvious and dense.

It is not that Mandelstam was a "civilized" poet; he was rather a poet for and of civilization. Once, on being asked to define Acmeism—the literary movement to which he belonged—he answered: "nostalgia for a world culture." This notion of a world culture is distinctly Russian. Because of its location (neither East nor West) and its imperfect history, Russia has always suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority, at least toward the West. Out of this inferiority grew the ideal of a certain cultural unity "out there" and a subsequent intellectual voracity toward anything coming from that direction. This is, in a way, a Russian version of Hellenicism, and Mandelstam's remark about Pushkin's "Hellenistic paleness" was not an idle one.

The mediastinum of this Russian Hellenicism was St. Petersburg. Perhaps the best emblem for Mandelstam's attitude toward this so-called world culture could be that strictly classical portico of the St. Petersburg Admiralty decorated with reliefs of trumpeting angels and topped with a golden spire bearing a silhouette of a clipper at its tip. In order to understand his poetry better, the English- speaking reader perhaps ought to realize that Mandelstam was a Jew who was living in the capital of Imperial Russia, whose dominant religion was Orthodoxy, whose political structure was inherently Byzantine, and whose alphabet had been devised by two Greek monks. Historically speak­ing, this organic blend was most strongly felt in Petersburg, which became Mandelstam's "familiar as tears" eschato- logical niche for the rest of his not-that-long life.

It was long enough, however, to immortalize this place, and if his poetry was sometimes called "Petersburgian," there is more than one reason to consider this definition both accurate and complimentary. Accurate because, apart from being the administrative capital of the empire, Petersburg was also the spiritual center of it, and in the beginning of the century the strands of that current were merging there the way they do in Mandelstam's poems. Complimentary because both the poet and the city profited in meaning by their confrontation. If the West was Athens, Petersburg in the teens of this century was Alexandria. This "window on Europe," as Petersburg was called by some gentle souls of the Enlightenment, this "most invented city," as it was defined later by Dostoevsky, lying at the latitude of Van­couver, in the mouth of a river as wide as the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey, was and is beautiful with that kind of beauty which happens to be caused by madness—or which tries to conceal this madness. Classicism never had so much room, and the Italian architects who kept being invited by successive Russian monarchs under­stood this all too well. The giant, infinite, vertical rafts of white columns from the fagades of the embankments' palaces belonging to the Czar, his family, the aristocracy, embassies, and the nouoeaux riches are carried by the reflecting river down to the Baltic. On the main avenue of the empire—Nevsky Prospect—there are churches of all creeds. The endless, wide streets are filled with cabri­olets, newly introduced automobiles, idle, well-dressed crowds, first-class boutiques, confectioneries, etc. Im­mensely wide squares with mounted statues of previous rulers and triumphal columns taller than Nelson's. Lots of publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, political parties (more than in contemporary America), theaters, restau­rants, gypsies. All this is surrounded by the brick Birnam

Wood of the factories' smoking chimneys and covered by the damp, gray, widespread blanket of the Northern Hemi­sphere's sky. One war is lost, another—a world war—is im­pending, and you are a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pentameters.

In this giant-scale embodiment of perfect order, iam­bic beat is as natural as cobblestones. Petersburg is a cradle of Russian poetry and, what is more, of its prosody. The idea of a noble structure, regardless of the quality of the content (sometimes precisely against its quality, which creates a terrific sense of disparity—indicating not so much the author's but the verse's own evaluation of the described phenomenon), is utterly local. The whole thing started a century ago, and Mandelstam's usage of strict meters in his first hook, Stone, is clearly reminiscent of Pushkin, and of his pleiad. And yet, again, it is not a result of some conscious choice, nor is it a sign of Mandelstam's style being predetermined by the preceding or contemporary processes in Russian poetry.

The presence of an echo is the primal trait of any good acoustics, and Mandelstam merely made a great cupola for his predecessors. The most distinct voices underneath it belong to Derzhavin, Baratynsky, and Batyushkov. To a great extent, however, he was acting very much on his own in spite of any existing idiom—especially the contemporary one. He simply had too much to say to worry about his stylistic uniqueness. But this overloaded quality of his otherwise regular verse was what made him unique.

Ostensibly, his poems did not look so different from the work of the Symbolists, who were dominating the literary scene: he was using fairly regular rhymes, a standard stan- zaic design, and the length of his poems was quite ordinary —from sixteen to twenty-four lines. But by using these humble means of transportation he was taking his reader much farther than any of those cozy-because-vague meta- physicists who called themselves Russian Symbolists. As a movement, Symbolism was surely the last great one (and not only in Russia); yet poetry is an extremely indivi­dualistic art, it resents isms. The poetic production of Sym­bolism was as voluminous and seraphic as the enrollment and postulates of this movement were. This soaring upward was so groundless that graduate students, military cadets, and clerks felt tempted, and by the tum of the century the genre was compromised to the point of verbal inflation, somewhat like the situation with free verse in America today. Then, surely, devaluation as reaction came, bearing the names of Futurism, Constructivism, Imagism, and so forth. Still, these were isms fighting isms, devices fighting devices. Only two poets, Mandelstarn and Tsvetaeva, came up with a qualitatively new content, and their fate reflected in its dreadful way the degree of their spiritual autonomy.

In poetry, as anywhere else, spiritual superiority is always disputed at the physical level. One cannot help thinking it was precisely the rift with the Symbolists (not entirely without anti-Semitic overtones) which contained the germs of Mandelstam's future. I am not referring so much to Georgi Ivanov's sneering at Mandelstam's poem in 1917, which was then echoed by the official ostracism of the thirties, as to Mandelstam's growing separation from any form of mass production, especially linguistic and psycho­logical. The result was an effect in which the clearer a voice gets, the more dissonant it sounds. No choir likes it, and the aesthetic isolation acquires physical dimensions. When a man creates a world of his own, he becomes a foreign body against which all laws are aimed: gravity, compression, rejection, annihilation.

Mandelstam's world was big enough to invite all of these. I don't think that, had Russia chosen a different historical path, his fate would have been that much different. His world was too autonomous to merge. Besides, Russia went the way she did, and for Mandelstam, whose poetic devel­opment was rapid by itself, that direction could bring only one thing—a terrifying acceleration. This acceleration af­fected, first of all, the character of his verse. Its sublime, meditative, caesuraed flow changed into a swift, abrupt, pattering movement. His became a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-evident with somewhat abbreviated syntax. And yet in this way it became more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its sharp, unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo.

And like that bird, he became a target for all kinds of stones generously hurled at him by his motherland. It is not that Mandelstam opposed the political changes taking place in Russia. His sense of measure and his irony were enough to acknowledge the epic quality of the whole un­dertaking. Besides, he was a paganistically buoyant person, and, on the other hand, whining intonations were com­pletely usurped by the Symbolist movement. Also, since the beginning of the century, the air was full of loose talk about a redivision of the world, so that when the Revolution came, almost everyone took what had occurred for what was desired. Mandelstam's was perhaps the only sober re­sponse to the events which shook the world and made so many thoughtful heads dizzy:

Well, let us try the cumbersome, the awkward,

The screeching turning of the wheel . . .

(from "The Twilight of Freedom")

But the stones were already flying, and so was the bird. Their mutual trajectories are fully recorded in the memoirs of the poet's widow, and they took two volumes. These books are not only a guide to his verse, though they are that too. But any poet, no matter how much he writes, expresses in his verse, physically or statistically speaking, at most one-tenth of his life's reality. The rest is normally shrouded in darkness; if any testimony by contemporaries survives, it contains gaping voids, not to mention the differing angles of vision that distort the object.

The memoirs of Osip Mandelstarn's widow take care pre­cisely of that, of those nine-tenths. They illuminate the darkness, fill in the voids, eliminate the distortion. The net result is close to a resurrection, except that everything that killed the man, outlived him, and continues to exist and gain popularity is also reincarnated, reenacted in these pages. Because of the material's lethal power, the poet's widow re-creates these elements with the care used in de­fusing a bomb. Because of this precision and because of the fact that through his verse, by the acts of his life, and by the quality of his death somebody called forth great prose, one would instantly understand—even without knowing a single line by Mandelstam—that it is indeed a great poet being recalled in these pages: because of the quantity and energy of the evil directed against him.

Still, it is important to note that Mandelstam's attitude toward a new historical situation wasn't at all that of out­right hostility. On the whole he regarded it as just a harsher form of existential reality, as a qualitatively new challenge. Ever since the Romantics we have had this notion of a poet throwing down the glove to his tyrant. Now if there ever was such a time at all, this sort of action is utter nonsense today: tyrants do not make themselves available for such a tete-a-tete any longer. The distance between us and our masters can be reduced only by the latter, which seldom happens. A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and, by implication, his psychological superiority, rather than because of his politics. A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts a doubt on a lot more than a concrete political system: it questions the entire existential order. And the number of its adversaries grows proportionally.

It would be a simplification to think that it was the poem against Stalin which brought about Mandelstam's doom. This poem, for all its destructive power, was just a by­product of Mandelstam's treatment of the theme of this not-so-new era. For that matter, there's a much more devas­tating line in the poem called "Ariosto" written earlier the same year ( 1933): "Power is repulsive as are the barber's fingers . . ." There were plenty of others, too. And yet I think that by themselves these mug-slapping comments wouldn't invite the law of annihilation. The iron broom that was walking across Russia could have missed him if he were merely a political poet or a lyrical poet spilling here and there into politics. After all, he got his warning and he could have learned from that as many others did. Yet he didn't because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to his aesthetics. It was the immense in­tensity of lyricism in Mandelstam's poetry which set him apart from lis contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch, "homeless on an all-union scale." For lyricism is the ethics of language and the superiority of this lyricism to anything that could be achieved within human interplay, of whatever denomination, is what makes for a work of art and lets it survive. That is why the iron broom, whose purpose was the spiritual castration of the entire populace, couldn't have missed him.

It was a case of pure polarization. Song is, after all, re­structured time, toward which mute space is inherently hostile. The first has been represented by Mandelstarn; the second chose the state as its weapon. There is a certain terrifying logic in the location of that concentration camp where Osip Mandelstam died in 1938: near Vladivostok, in the very bowels of the state-o^ed space. This is about as far as one can get from Petersburg inside Russia. And here is how high one can get in poetry in terms of lyricism (the poem is in memory of a woman, Olga Vaksel, who re­portedly died in Sweden, and was written while Mandelstam was living in Voronezh, where he was transferred from his previous place of exile near the Ural Mountains after having a nervous breakdo^). Just four lines:

. . . And stiff swallows of round eyebrows(a) flew (b)from the grave to me to tell me they've rested enough in their (a) cold Stockholm bed (b).

Imagine a four-foot amphibrach with alternating (a b a b) rhyme.

This strophe is an apotheosis of restructuring time. For one thing, language is itself a product of the past. The retum of these stiff swallows implies both the recurrent character of their presence and of the simile itself, either as an inti­mate thought or as a spoken phrase. Also, "flew ... to me" suggests spring, returning seasons. "To tell me they've rested enough," too, suggests past: past imperfect because not attended. And then the last line makes a full circle be­cause the adjective "Stockholm" exposes the hidden allu­sion to Hans Christian Andersen's children's story about the wounded swallow wintering in the mole's hole, then recovering and flying home. Every schoolboy in Russia knows this story. The conscious process of remembering turns out to be strongly rooted in the subconscious memory and creates a sensation of sorrow so piercing, it's as if this is not a suffering man we hear but the very voice of his wounded psyche. This kind of voice surely clashes with everything, even with its medium's—i.e., poet's—life. It is like Odysseus tying himself to a mast against the call of his soul; this—and not only the fact that Mandelstam is married—is why he is so elliptical here.

He worked in Russian poetry for thirty years, and what he did will last as long as the Russian language exists. It will certainly outlast the present and any subsequent regime in that country, because of both its lyricism and its pro­fundity. Quite frankly, I don't know anything in the poetry of the world comparable to the revelatory quality of these four lines from his "Verses on the Unknown Soldier," writ­ten just a year prior to his death:

An Arabian messmul a muddle, The light of speeds honed into a beam— And with its slanted soles, A ray balances on my retina...

There is almost no grammar here but it is not a modernistic device, it is a result of an incredible psychic acceleration, which at other times was responsible for the breakthroughs of Job and Jeremiah. This honing of speeds is as much a self-portrait as an incredible insight into astrophysics. What he heard at his back "hurrying near" wasn't any "winged chariot" but his "wolf-hound century," and he ran till there was space. When space ended, he hit time.

Which is to say, us. This pronoun stands not only for his Russian- but also for his English-speaking readers. Perhaps more than anyone in this century, he was a poet of civilization: he contributed to what had inspired him. One may even argue that he became a part of it long before he met death. Of course he was a Russian, but not any more so than Giotto was an Italian. Civilization is the sum total of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle—speaking both meta­phorically and literally—is translation. The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation.

His life, as well as his death, was a result of this civ­ilization. With a poet, one's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperament, is determined and shaped by one's aesthetics. This is what accounts for poets finding them­selves invariably at odds with the social reality, and their death rate indicates the distance which that reality puts between itself and civilization. So does the quality of translation.

A child of a civilization based on the principles of order and sacrifice, Mandelstam incarnated both; and it is only fair to expect from his translators at least a semblance of parity. The rigors involved in producing an echo, formidable though they may seem, are in themselves an homage to that nostalgia for the world culture which drove and fashioned the original. The formal aspects of Mandelstam's verse are not the product of some backward poetics but, in effect, columns of the aforesaid portico. To remove them is not only to reduce one's own "architecture" to heaps of rubble and shacks: it is to lie about what the poet has lived and died for.

Translation is a search for an equivalent, not for a substi­tute. It requires stylistic, if not psychological, congeniality. For instance, the stylistic idiom that could be used in trans­lating Mandelstam is that of the late Yeats (with whom he has much in common thematically as well). The trouble of course is that a person who can master such an idiom— if such a person exists—will no doubt prefer to write his own verse anyway and not rack his brains over translation (which doesn't pay that well besides). But apart from technical skills and even psychological congeniality, the most crucial thing that a translator of Mandelstam should possess or else develop is a like-minded sentiment for civilization.

Mandelstam is a formal poet in the highest sense of the word. For him, a poem begins with a sound, with "a so­porous molded shape of form," as he himself called it. The absence of this notion reduces even the most accurate rendition of his imagery to a stimulating read. "I alone in

Russia work from the voice, while all round the unmitigated muck scribbles," says Mandelstam of himself in his "Fourth Prose." This is said with the fury and dignity of a poet who realized that the source of his creativity conditioned its method.

It would be futile and unreasonable to expect a translator to follow suit: the voice one works from and by is bound to be unique. Yet the timbre, pitch, and pace reflected in the verse's meter are approachable. It should be remem­bered that verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They can­not be replaced even by each other, let alone by free verse. Differences in meters are differences in breath and in heart­beat. Differences in rhyming pattern are those of brain functions. The cavalier treatment of either is at best a sacri­lege, at worst a mutilation or a murder. In any case, it is a crime of the mind, for which its perpetrator—especially if he is not caught—pays with the pace of his intellectual degradation. As for the readers, they buy a lie.

Yet the rigors involved in producing a decent echo are too high. They excessively shackle individuality. Calls for the use of an "instrument of poetry in our own time" are too strident. And translators rush to find substitutes. This happens primarily because such translators are themselves usually poets, and their own individuality is dearest of all to them. Their conception of individuality simply precludes the possibility of sacrifice, which is the primary feature of mature individuality (and also the primary requirement of any—even a technical—translation). The net result is that a poem of Mandelstam's, both visually and in its texture, resembles some witless Neruda piece or one from Urdu or Swahili. If it survives, this is due to the oddity of its imagery, or of its intensity, acquiring in the eyes of the reader a certain ethnographic significance. "I don't see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet," said the late W. H. Auden. "The translations that I've seen don't convince me of it."

Small wonder. In the available versions, one encounters an absolutely impersonal product, a sort of common de­nominator of modern verbal art. If they were simply bad translations, that wouldn't be so bad. For bad translations, precisely because of their badness, stimulate the reader's imagination and provoke a desire to break through or abstract oneself from the text: they spur one's intuition. In the cases at hand this possibility is practically ruled out: these versions bear the imprint of self-assured, insufferable stylistic provincialism; and the only optimistic remark one can make regarding them is that such low-quality art is an unquestionable sign of a culture extremely distant from decadence.

Russian poetry on the whole, and Mandelstam in partic­ular, does not deserve to be treated as a poor relation. The language and its literature, especially its poetry, are the best things that that country has. Yet it is not concern for Mandelstam's or Russia's prestige that makes one shudder at what has been done to his lines in English: it is rather a sense of plundering the English-language culture, of de­grading its own criteria, of dodging the spiritual challenge. "O.K.," a young American poet or reader of poetry may conclude after perusing these volumes, "the same thing goes on over there in Russia." But what goes on over there is not at all the same thing. Apart from her metaphors, Russian poetry has set an example of moral purity and firmness, which to no small degree has been reflected in the preservation of so-called classical forms without any dam­age to content. Herein lies her distinction from her Western sisters, though in no way docs one presume to judge whom this distinction favors most. However, it is a distinction, and if only for purely ethnographic reasons, that quality ought to be preserved in translation and not forced into some common mold.

A poem is the result of a certain necessity: it is inevitable, and so is its fonn. "Necessity," as the poet's widow Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her "Mozart and Salieri" (which is a must for everyone interested in the psychology of creativity), "is not a compulsion and is not the curse of determinism, but is a link between times, if the torch in­herited from forebears has not been trampled." Necessities of course cannot be echoed; but a translator's disregard for forms which are illumined and hallowed by time is nothing but stamping out that torch. The only good thing about the theories put forth to justify this practice is that their authors get paid for stating their views in print.

As though it is aware of the fragility and treachery of man's faculties and senses, a poem aims at human memory. To that end, it employs a form which is essentially a mne­monic device allowing one's brain to retain a world—and simplifying the task of retaining it—when the rest of one's frame gives up. Memory usually is the last to go, as if it were trying to keep a record of the going itself. A poem thus may be the last thing to leave one's drooling lips. Nobody ex­pects a native English speaker to mumble at that moment verses of a Russian poet. But if he mumbles something by Auden or Yeats or Frost he will be closer to Mandelstam's originals than current translators are.

In other words, the English-speaking world has yet to hear this nervous, high-pitched, pure voice shot through with love, terror, memory, culture, faith—a voice trem­bling, perhaps, like a match burning in a high wind, yet utterly inextinguishable. The voice that stays behind when its owner is gone. He was, one is tempted to say, a modem Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamor­phoses, our myths.

1977

Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary

Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the wife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. In educated circles, especially among the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identity. This is especially so in Russia, where in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union.

"Nadya is the most fortunate widow," Anna Akhmatova used to say, having in mind the universal recognition com­ing to Osip Mandelstam at about that time. The focus of this remark was, understandably, her fellow poet, and right though she was, this was the view from the outside. By the time this recognition began to arrive, Mme Mandelstam was already in her sixties, her health extremely precarious and her means meager. Besides, for all the universality of that recognition, it did not include the fabled "one-sixth of the entire planet," i.e., Russia itself. Behind her were already two decades of widowhood, utter deprivation, the Great (obliterating any personal loss) War, and the daily fear of being grabbed by the agents of State Security as a wife of an enemy of the people. Short of death, anything that fol­lowed could mean only respite.

I met her for the first time precisely then, in the winter of 196:2, in the city of Pskov, where together with a couple of friends I went to take a look at the local churches (the finest, in my view, in the empire). Having learned about our intentions to travel to that city, Anna Akhmatova suggested we \ isit Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was teaching English at the local pedagogical institute, and gave us several books for her. That was the first time I heard her name: I didn't know that she existed.

She was living in a small communal apartment consisting of two rooms. The first room was occupied by a woman whose name, ironically enough, was Nyetsvetaeva (literally: Xon-Tsvetaeva), the second was Mme Mandelstam's. It was eight square meters large, the size of an average American bathroom. Most of the space was taken up by a cast-iron twin-sized bed; there were also two wicker chairs, a ward­robe chest with a small mirror, and an aU-purpose bedside table, on which sat plates with the leftovers of her supper and, next to the plates, an open paperback copy of The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The presence of this red-covered book in this tiny cell, and the fact that she didn't hide it under the pillow at the sound of the doorbell, meant precisely this: the beginning of respite.

The book, as it turned out, was sent to her by Akhmatova, who for nearly half the century remained the closest friend of the Mandelstams: first of both of them, later of Nadezhda alone. Twice a widow herself (her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 by the Cheka—the maiden name of the KGB; the second, the art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a concentration camp belonging to the same establishment), Akhmatova helped Nadezhda Mandelstam in every way possible, and during the war years literally saved her life by smuggling Nadezhda into Tash­kent, where some of the writers had been evacuated, and by sharing with her the daily rations. Even with her two husbands killed by the regime, with her son languishing in the camps for eighteen years, Akhmatova was somewhat better off than Nadezhda Mandelstam, if only because she was recognized, however reluctantly, as a writer, and was allowed to live in Leningrad and Moscow. For the wife of an enemy of the people big cities were simply off limits.

For decades this woman was on the run, darting through the back waters and provincial to^s of the big empire, settling down in a new place only to take off at the first sign of danger. The status of nonperson gradually became her second nature. She was a small woman, of slim build, and with the passage of years she shriveled more and more, as though trying to herself into something weightless, something easily pocketed in the moment of flight. Similarly, she had virtually no possessions: no furniture, no art objects, no library. The books, even foreign books, never stayed in her hands for long: after being read or glanced through they would be passed on to someone else—the way it ought to be with books. In the years of her utmost affluence, at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, the most expensive item in her one-room apartment on the out­skirts of Moscow was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall.

A thief would be disillusioned here; so would those with a search warrant.

In those "affiuent" years following the publication in the West of her two volumes of memoirs^ that kitchen became the place of veritable pilgrimages. Nearly every other night the best of what survived or came to life in the post-Stalin era in Russia gathered around the long wooden table, which was ten times bigger than the bedstead in Pskov. It almost seemed that she was about to make up for decades of being a pariah. I doubt, though, that she did, and somehow I re­member her better in that small room in Pskov, or sitting on the edge of a couch in Akhmatova's apartment in Lenin­grad, where she would come from time to time illegally from Pskov, or emerging from the depth of the corridor in Shklov- sky's apartment in Moscow, where she perched before she got a place of her own. Perhaps I remember that more clearly because there she was more in her element as an outcast, a fugitive, "the beggar-friend," as Osip Mandelstam calls her in one of his poems, and that is what she remained for the rest of her life.

There is something quite breathtaking in the realization that she wrote those two volumes of hers at the age of sixty- five. In the Mandelstam family it is Osip who was the writer; she wasn't. If she wrote anything before those volumes, it was letters to her friends or appeals to the Supreme Court. Nor is hers the case of someone reviewing a long and eventful life in the tranquillity of retirement. Because her

* Translated as Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (both pub­lished by Atheneum, in 1970 and 1973, and translated by Max Hay- ward).

sixty-five years were not exactly normal. It's not for nothing that in the Soviet penal system there is a paragraph specify­ing that in certain camps a year of serving counts for three. By this token, the lives of many Russians in this century came to approximate in length those of biblical patriarchs— with whom she had one more thing in common: devotion to justice.

Yet it wasn't this devotion to justice alone that made her sit down at the age of sixty-five and use her time of respite for writing these books. What brought them into existence was a recapitulation, on the scale of one, of the same process that once before had taken place in the history of Russian literature. I have in mind the emergence of great Russian prose in the second half of the nineteenth century. That prose, which appears as though out of nowhere, as an effect without traceable cause, was in fact simply a spin-off of the nineteenth century's Russian poetry. It set the tone for all subsequent writing in Russian, and the best work of Russian fiction can be regarded as a distant echo and meticulous elaboration of the psychological and lexical subtlety dis­played by the Russian poetry of the first quarter of that cen^ry. "Most of Dostoevsky's characters," Anna Akhma­tova used to say, "are aged Pushkin heroes, Onegins and so forth."

Poetry always precedes prose, and so it did in the life of Nadezhda Mandelstam, and in more ways than one. As a writer, as well as a person, she is a creation of two poets with whom her life was linked inexorably: Osip Mandel­stam and Anna Akhmatova. And not only because the first was her husband and the second her lifelong friend. After aU, forty years of widowhood could dim the happiest mem­ories (and in the case of this marriage they were few and far between, if only because this marriage coincided with the economic devastation of the country, caused by revolu­tion, civil war, and the first five-year plans). Similarly, there were years when she wouldn't see Akhmatova at all, and a letter would be the last thing to confide to. Paper, in gen­eral, was dangerous. What strengthened the bond of that marriage as well as of that friendship was a technicality: the necessity to commit to memory what could not be com­mitted to paper, i.e., the poems of both authors.

In doing so in that "pre-Gutenberg epoch," in Akhma­tova's words, Nadezhda Mandelstam certainly wasn't alone. However, repeating day and night the words of her dead husband was undoubtedly connected not only with com­prehending them more and more but also with resurrecting his very voice, the intonations peculiar only to him, with a however fleeting sensation of his presence, with the realiza­tion that he kept his part of that "for better or for worse" deal, especially its second half. The same went for the poems of the physically often absent Akhmatova, for, once set in motion, this mechanism of memorization won't come to a halt. The same went for other authors, for certain ideas, for ethical principles—for everything that couldn't survive otherwise.

And gradually those things grew on her. If there is any substitute for love, it's memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy. Gradually the lines of those poets became her mentality, became her identity. They supplied her not only with the plane of regard or angle of vision; more im­portantly, they became her linguistic norm. So when she set out to write her books, she was bound to gauge—by that time already unwittingly, instinctively—her sentences against theirs. The clarity and remorselessness of her pages, while reflecting the character of her mind, are also inevitable stylistic consequences of the poetry that had shaped that mind. In both their content and style, her books are but a postscript to the supreme version of language which poetry essentially is and which became her flesh through learning her husband's lines by heart.

To borrow W. H. Auden's phrase, great poetry "hurt" her into prose. It really did, because those two poets' heritage could be developed or elaborated upon only by prose. In poetry they could be followed only by epigones. Which has happened. In other words, Nadezhda Mandelstam's prose was the only available medium for the language itself to avoid stagnation. Similarly, it was the only medium avail­able for the psyche formed by those poets' use of language. Her books, thus, were not so much memoirs and guides to the lives of two great poets, however superbly they per­formed these functions; these books elucidated the con­sciousness of the nation. Of the part of it, at least, that could get a copy.

Small wonder, then, that this elucidation results in an indicbnent of the system. These two volumes by Mme Mandelstam indeed amount to a Day of Judgment on earth for her age and for its literature—a judgment administered all the more rightfully since it was this age that had under­taken the construction of earthly paradise. A lesser wonder, too, that these memoirs, the second volume especially, were not liked on either side of the Kremlin Wall. The authorities, I must say, were more honest in their reaction than the intelligentsia: they simply made possession of these books an offense punishable by law. As for the intelligentsia, espe- dally in Moscow, itwent into actual turmoil over Nadezhda Mandelstam's charges against many of its illustrious and not so illustrious members of virtual complicity with the regime, and the human Hood in her kitchen significantly ebbed.

There were open and semi-open letters, indignant resolu­tions not to shake hands, friendships and marriages collaps­ing over whether she was right or wrong to consider this or that person an informer. A prominent dissident declared, shaking his beard: "She shat on our entire generation"; others would rush to their dachas and lock themselves up there, to tap out antimemoirs. This was already the begin­ning of the seventies, and some six years later these same people would become equally split over Solzhenitsyn's attitude toward the Jews.

There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone's moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a First Party Secretary, or of a Fiihrer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eagerly question a prophet. This is so, pres^ably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are a zero. After aU, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks the fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks, the questioning of a writer's assertions and charges, come not from the desire for truth but from the inteUectual smugness of slavery. All the worse, then, for the literati when the authority is not only moral but also cultural—as it was in Nadezhda Mandelstam's case.

I'd like to venture here one step further. By itself real­ity isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality to meaning. And there is a hierarchy among per­ceptions (and, correspondingly, among meanings), with the ones acquired through the most refined and sensitive prisms sitting at the top. Refinement and sensitivity are imparted to such a prism by the only source of their supply: by culture, by civilization, whose main tool is language. The evaluation of reality made through such a prism—the acquisition of which is one goal of the species—is therefore the most accurate, perhaps even the most just. (Cries of "Unfair!" and "Elitist!" that may follow the aforesaid from, of all places, the local campuses must be left unheeded, for culture is "elitist" by definition, and the application of democratic principles in the sphere of knowledge leads to equating wisdom with idiocy.)

It's the possession of this prism supplied to her by the best Russian poetry of the twentieth century, and not the uniqueness of the size of her grief, that makes Nadezhda Mandelstam's statement about her piece of reality un­challengeable. It's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the revolution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsve- taeva. They would have become what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this cen­tury had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history.

Would Nadezhda Mandelstam have become what she be­came had it not been for the Revolution and all the rest that followed? Probably not, for she met her future husband in 1919. But the question itself is immaterial; it leads us into the murky domains of the law of probability and of his­torical determinism. After all, she became what she be­came not because of what took place in Russia in this century but rather in spite of it. A casuist's finger will surely point out that from the point of view of historical deter­minism "in spite of' is synonymous with "because." So much then for historical determinism, if it gets so mindful about the semantics of some human "in spite of."

For a good reason, though. For a frail woman of sixty-five turns out to be capable of slowing down, if not averting in the long run, the cultural disintegration of a whole nation. Her memoirs are something more than a testimony to her times; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture. In that light history winces, and an individual realizes his choice: between seeking that light's source and committing an anthropological crime against himself.

She didn't mean to be so grand, nor did she simply try to get even with the system. For her it was a private matter, a matter of her temperament, of her identity and what had shaped that identity. As it was, her identity had been shaped by culture, by its best products: her husband's poems. It's them, not his memory, that she was trying to keep alive. It's to them, and not to him, in the course of forty-two years that she became a widow. Of course she loved him, but love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more space in the mind than it does in the bed. Outside of that setting it falls Hat into one-dimensional fiction. She was a widow to culture, and I think she loved her husband more at the end than on the day they got married. That is probably why readers of her books find them so haunting. Because of that, and because the status of the modem world vis-a-vis civilization also can be defined as widowhood.

If she lacked anything, it was humility. In that respect she was quite unlike her two poets. But then they had their art, and the quality of their achievements provided them with enough contentment to be, or to pretend to be, hum­ble. She was terribly opinionated, categorical, cranky, dis­agreeable, idiosyncratic; many of her ideas were half-baked or developed on the basis of hearsay. In short, there was a great deal of one-upwomanship in her, which is not sur­prising given the size of the figures she was reckoning with in reality and later in imagination. In the end, her intoler­ance drove a lot of people away, but that was quite all right with her, because she was getting tired of adulation, of being liked by Robert McNamara and Willy Fisher (the real name of Colonel Rudolf Abel). All she wanted was to die in her bed, and, in a way, she looked forward to dying, because "up there I'll again be with Osip." "No," replied Akhmatova, upon hearing this. "You've got it all wrong. Up there it's now me who is going to be with Osip."

Her wish came true, and she died in her bed. Not a small thing for a Russian of her generation. There undoubtedly will surface those who will cry that she misunderstood her epoch, that she lagged behind the train of history running into the future. Well, like nearly every other Russian of her generation, she learned only too well that that train running into the future stops at the concentration camp or at the gas camber. She was lucky that she missed it, and we are lucky that she told us about its route. I saw her last on May 30, 1972, in that kitchen of hers, in Moscow. It was late afternoon, and she sat, smoking, in the corner, in the deep shadow cast by the tall cupboard onto the wall. The shadow was so deep that the only things one could make out were the faint flicker of her cigarette and the two piercing eyes. The rest—her smallish shrunken body under the shawl, her hands, the oval of her ashen face, her gray, ashlike hair—all were consumed by the dark. She looked like a remnant of a huge fire, like a small ember that burns if you touch it.

1981

The Power of the Elements

Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. This is one, if not the main, reason why today, one hundred years after Dostoevsky's death, his novels preserve their relevance. Given the modern world's economic vector, i.e., that of general impoverishment and leveling of living standards, this writer can be regarded as a prophetic phe­nomenon. For the best way to avoid mistakes in dealing with the future is to perceive it through the prism of poverty or guilt. As it was, Dostoevsky used both lenses.

In her diary, a fervent admirer of the writer, Elizaveta Stackenschneider, a St. Petersburg socialite whose house in the seventies and eighties of the last century was a veritable salon for literati, suffragettes, politicians, artists, etc., writes about Dostoevsky in 1880, i.e., a year before his death:

.. . but he is a petit bourgeois, yes, a petit bourgeois. Not of the gentry, nor of the clergy, not a merchant, nor an odd ball, like an artist or s^olar, but precisely a petit bourgeois. And yet this petit bourgeois is the most profound thinker and a writer of genius . . . Now he frequents the houses of the aristocracy and even those of the high nobility, and of course he bears himself with dignity, and yet the petit bour­geois in him triples through. It can be spotted in certain traits, surfacing in private conversation, but most of all, in his works ... in his depiction of big capital he will always regard 6,00 rubles as a vast amount of money.

Now this, of course, is not entirely accurate: a great deal more than six thousand rubles Hies into Nastasya Filip- povna's fireplace in The Idiot. On the other hand, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in world literature—the scene no reader's conscience survives intact—Captain Snegiryov from The Brothers Karamazov stamps no more than two hundred rubles into a snowdrift. The point, how­ever, is that those six thousand rubles (at present the equivalent of $20,000) could buy a year of decent living at the time.

What Mme Stackenschneider, a product of her epoch's social stratification, calls petit bourgeois is known today as middle class, as defined in terms of annual income and not social affiliation. In other words, the said amount means neither great riches nor screaming poverty, but a tolerable human condition: a condition that makes one human. Six thousand rubles is the monetary expression of a moderate, normal existence, and if it takes a petit bourgeois to com­prehend this fact, hail to the petit bourgeois.

For a normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspires to. A writer who regards six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money operates, there­fore, on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of people; i.e., he deals with life on its own general terms, since, like every natural process, human life gravi­tates toward moderation. Conversely, a writer who belongs to the upper echelon of society or to its lower depths will invariably produce a somewhat distorted picture of exis­tence, for, in either case, he would regard it at too sharp an angle. Criticism of society (which is a nickname for life) from either above or below may produce a great read; but it's only an inside job that can supply you with moral imperatives.

Furthermore, a middle-class writer's own position is pre­carious enough to make him view what goes on below with considerable keenness. Alternatively, the situation above, due to its physical proximity, lacks in celestial appeal. Nu­merically, to say the least, a middle-class writer deals with a greater variety of plights, increasing, by the same token, the size of his audience. In any case, this is one way to account for the wide readership enjoyed by Dostoevsky, as well as by Melville, Balzac, Hardy, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner. It looks as if the equivalent of six thousand rubles ensures great literature.

The point is, however, that it is far harder to come into this money than to come into millions or to stay penniless, for there are simply more contenders for the norm than for extremes. Acquisition of the said amount, as well as of a half or a tenth of it, involves far greater convolutions of the human psyche than any get-rich scheme or any form of asceticism. In fact, the smaUer the amount involved, the more one spends emotionally to acquire it. It's obvious then why Dostoevsky, for whose operation the intricacies of the human psyche were lock and stock, viewed six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money. To him, it meant a vast amount of human investment, a vast amount of nuance, a vast amount of literature. In short, it was not so much real as metaphysical money.

Almost without exception, aU his novels are about peo­ple in narrow circumstances. This kind of material itself guarantees absorbing reading. However, what t^ed Dostoevsky into a great writer was neither the inevitable intricacy of his subject matter nor even the unique pro­fundity of his mind and his capacity for compassion; it was the tool or, rather, the texture of the material he was using, i.e., the Russian language.

As intricacies go, this language, where nouns frequently find themselves sitting smugly at the very end of the sen­tence, whose main power lies not in the statement but in its subordinate clause, is extremely accommodating. This is not your analytical language of "either/or"—this is the lan­guage of "although." Like a banknote into change, every stated idea instantly mushrooms in this language into its opposite, and there is nothing its syntax loves to couch more than doubt and self-deprecation. Its polysyllabic na­ture (the average length of a Russian word is three to four syllables) reveals the elemental, primeval force of the phe­nomena covered by a word a lot better than any rationaliza­tion possibly could, and a writer sometimes, instead of developing his thought, stumbles and simply revels in the word's euphonic contents, thereby sidetracking his issue in an unforeseen direction. And in Dostoevsky's writing we witness an extraordinary friction, nearly sadistic in its intensity, between the metaphysics of the subject matter and that of the language.

He made the most of Russian's irregular grammar. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles- lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. True, he never wrote at leisure. Much like his characters, he worked to make ends meet: there were always either creditors or a deadline. Still, for a man beset with deadlines, he was extraordinarily digressive, and those digressions, I venture to say, were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from con­sciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one's consciousness.

No, he was not a victim of the language; but his treat­ment of the human psyche was by far too inquisitive for the Russian Orthodox he claimed to be, and it is syntax rather than the creed that is responsible for the quality of that treatment. Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. This discovery very often creates an unbearable schism within an individual and is, in part, responsible for the demonic reputation literature enjoys in certain witless quarters. Basically, it's just as well, for the seraphim's loss nearly always is the mortal's gain. Besides, either extreme, in itself, is quite boring, and in a work of a good writer we always hear a dialogue of the spheres with the gutter. If it doesn't destroy the man or his manuscript (as in the case of Gogol's Part II of Dead Souls), this schism is precisely what creates a writer, whose job there­fore becomes making his pen catch up with his soul.

This is what Dostoevsky was all about, except that his pen was pushing his soul beyond the confines of his creed, Russian Orthodoxy. For to be a writer means invariably to be a Protestant or, to say the least, to employ the Protes­tant conception of man. WhWhile either in Russian Orthodoxy or in Roman Catholicism man is judged by the Almighty or

His Church, in Protestantism it is the man who subjects himself to a personal equivalent of the Last Judgment. In doing so, he is far more merciless toward himself than the Deity, or even than the Church, if only because he knows himself better (so he thinks) than does either, and is un­willing or, to be precise, unable to forgive. Since no writer writes for his parish alone, a literary character and his deeds should be given a fair trial. The more thorough the investi­gation, the greater the verisimilitude, and verisimilitude is what a writer is, in the first place, after. In literature, Grace doesn't count for much; that's why Dostoevsky's holy man stinks.

Of course, he was a great defender of the "good cause," the cause of Christianity. But come to think of it, there hardly ever was a better devil's advocate. From classicism, he took the principle that before you come forth with your argument, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments of the opposite side. And it is not that in the process of listing them one is being swayed by the opposite side; it is simply that the listing itself is a mightily absorbing process. One may not in the end drift away from one's original stance, but after having ex­hausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor. This, in its own way, also fosters the case of verisimilitude.

But it is not for the sake of verisimilitude only that this writer's heroes bare their souls with an almost Calvinistic tenacity before the reader. There is something else that forces Dostoevsky to tum their lives inside out and undo every fold and wrinkle of their mental dirty linen; and it is not the quest for truth either. For the results of his in­quisition show more than truth; they reveal the very fabric of life, and that this fabric is shabby. The force that drives him to do it is the omnivorousness of his language which eventually comes to a point where it cannot be satisfied with God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity, salvation, air, earth, water, fire, money; and then it takes on itself.

1980

The Sound of the Tide'

Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment when centers cease to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is not legions but languages. Such was the case with Rome, and before that, with Hellenic Greece. The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provinces, from the outskirts. Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends—they are precisely where it unravels. That affects a language no less than an eye.

Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia, in the parts where "the sun, tired of empire, declines." As it does, however, it heats up a far greater crucible of races and cultures than any melting pot north of the equator. The realm this poet comes from is a real genetic Babel; English, however, is its tongue. If at times Walcott writes in Creole patois, it's not to flex his stylistic muscle or to enlarge his audience but as a homage to what he spoke as a child—before he spiraled the tower.

Poets' real biographies are like those of birds, almost identical— their real data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography is in his vowels and sibilants, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors. Attesting to the miracle of exis-

· This piece originally appeared as the introduction to Poem.s of the Caribbean by Derek Walcott (Limited Editions Club, 1983).

tence, the body of one's work is always in a sense a gospel whose lines convert their writer more radically than his public. With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written. If Walcott's origins are to be learned, the pages of this selection are the best guide. Here's what one of his characters tells about himself, and what may well pass for the author's self- portrait:

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

This jaunty four-liner informs us about its writer as surely as does a song—saving you a look out the window—that there is a bird. The dialectal "love" tells us that he means it when he calls himself "a red nigger." "A sound colonial education" may very weU stand for the University of the West Indies, from which Walcott graduated in 1953, al­though there is a lot more to this line, which well deal with later. To say the least, we hear in it both scorn for the very locution typical of the master race and the pride of the native in receiving that education. "Dutch" is here because by blood Walcott is indeed part Dutch and part English. Given the nature of the realm, though, one thinks not so much about blood as about languages. Instead of— or along with—"Dutch" there could have been French, Hindu, Creole patois, Swahili, Japanese, Spanish of some Latin American denomination, and so forth—anything that one heard in the cradle or in the streets. The main thing is, there was English.

The way this third line arrives at "English in me" is remarkable in its subtlety. After "I have Dutch," Walcott throws in "nigger," sending the whole line into a jazzy downward spin, so that when it swings up to "and English in me" we get a sense of terrific pride, indeed of grandeur, enhanced by this syncopatic jolt between "English" and "in me." And it's from this height of "having English," to which his voice climbs with the reluctance of humility and yet with certitude of rhythm, that the poet unleashes his oratorial power in "either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation." The dignity and astonishing vocal power of this statement are in direct proportion to both the realm in whose name he speaks and the oceanic infinity that surrounds it. When you hear such a voice, you know; the world unravels. This is what the author means when he says that he "love the sea."

For the almost forty years that Walcott has been at it, at this loving the sea, critics on both its sides have dubbed him "a West Indian poet" or "a black poet from the Caribbean." These definitions are as myopic and misleading as it would be to call the Saviour a Galilean. This comparison is appro­priate if only because every reductive tendency stems from the same terror of the infinite; and when it comes to an appetite for the infinite, poetry often bests creeds. The mental as well as spiritual cowardice, obvious in these attempts to render this man a regional writer, can be fur­ther explained by the unwillingness of the critical profes­sion to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man. It can also be attributed to completely busted helixes or bacon-lined retinae. Still, its most benevolent explanation is, of course, a poor knowledge of geography.

For the West Indies is a huge archipelago, about five times as big as the Greek one. If poetry is to be defined by the subject matter alone, Mr. Walcott would have ended up with material five times superior to that of the bard who wrote in the Ionian dialect and who, too, loved the sea. Indeed, if there is a poet Walcott seems to have a lot in common with, it's nobody English but rather the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or else the author of On the Nature of Things. For Walcott's descriptive powers are truly epic; what saves his lines from the corresponding tedium, though, is the shortage of the realm's actual history and the quality of his ear for the English language, whose sensibility in itself is a history.

Quite apart from the matter of his o^ unique gifts, Walcott's lines are so resonant and stereoscopic precisely because this "history" is eventful enough: because language itself is an epic device. Everything this poet touches mush­rooms with reverberations and perspectives, like magnetic waves whose acoustics are psychological, whose implications are echo-like. Of course, in that realm of his, in the West Indies, there is plenty to touch—the natural kingdom alone provides a great deal of fresh material. But here's an exam­ple of how this poet deals with the most de rigueur of all poetic subjects—with the moon—which he makes speak for itself:

Slowly my bodygrows a angle sound, slowly I become a beU,

an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire.

(from "Metamorphoses, 1/Moon")

And here's how he himself speaks about this most un- palpable poetic subject—or rather, here's what makes him speak about it:

a moon ballooned upfrom the Wireless Station. О mirror, where a generation yearned for whiteness, for candour, unreturned.

(from Another Life)

The psychological alliteration that almost forces the reader to see both of the Moon's o's suggests not only the recur­rent nature of this sight but also the repetitive character of looking at it. A human phenomenon, the latter is of a greater significance to this poet, and his description of those who do the looking and of their reasons for it aston­ishes the reader with its truly astronomical equation of black ovals to the white one. One senses here that the Moon's two o's have mutated via the two Ts in "ballooned" into the two r's of "O mirror," which, true to their consonant virtue, stand for "resisting reflection"; that the blame is being put neither on nature nor on people but on language and time. It's the redundance of these two, and not the author's choice, that is responsible for this equation of black and white—which takes better care of the racial polariza­tion this poet was born to than all his critics with their professed impartiality are capable of.

To put it simply, instead of reductive racial self- assertion, which no doubt would have endeared him to both his foes and his champions, Walcott identifies himself vith that "disembodied vowel" of the language which both parts of his equation share. The wisdom of this choice is, again, not so much his o^ as the wisdom of his language— better still, the wisdom of its letter: of black on white. He is simply a pen that is aware of its movement, and it is this self-awareness that forces his lines into their graphic eloquence:

Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor, their immortal coupling still halves our world. He is your sacrificial beast, bellowing, goaded, a black bull snarled in ribbons of its blood. And yet, whatever fury girded on that saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword was not his racial, panther-black revenge pulsing her chamber with raw musk, its sweat, but horror of the moon's change, of the corruption of an absolute, like a white fruit

pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet.

(from "Goats and Monkeys")

This is what "sound colonial education" amounts to; this is what having "English in me" is all about. With equal right, Walcott could have claimed having in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire. These are not influences—they are the cells of his bloodstream, no less so than Shakespeare or Edward Thomas are, for poetry is the essence of world cul­ture. And if world culture feels more palpable among urine- stunted trees through which "a mud path wriggles like a snake in flight," hail to the mud path.

And so Walcott's lyric hero does. Sole guardian of the civilization grown hollow in the center, he stands on this mud path watching how "the fish plops, making rings/ that marry the wide harbour" with "clouds curled like burnt-out papers at their edges" above it, with "telephone wires singing from pole to pole I parodying perspective." In his keensightedness this poet resembles Joseph Banks, except that by setting his eyes on a plant "chained in its own dew" or on an object, he accomplishes something no naturalist is capable of—he animates them. To be sure, the realm needs it, not any less so than does the poet in order to survive there. In any case, the realm pays back, and hence lines like:

Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen

and scribbles leisurely, the egret

on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph . . .

This is more than naming things in the garden—this is also a bit later. Walcott's poetry is Adamic in the sense that both he and his world have departed from Paradise—he, by tasting the fruit of knowledge; his world, by political history.

"Ah brave third world!" he exclaims elsewhere, and a lot more goes into this exclamation than simple anguish or exasperation. This is a comment of language upon a greater than purely local failure of nerves and imagination; a semantic reply to the meaningless and abundant reality, epic in its shabbiness. Abandoned, overgrown airstrips, dilapidated mansions of retired civil servants, shacks cov­ered with corrugated iron, single-stack coastal vessels cough­ing like "relics out of Conrad," four-wheeled corpses escaped from their junkyard ccmcterics and rattling their hones past condominium pyramids, helpless or corrupt politicos and young ignoramuses trigger-happy to replace them and babbling revolutionary garbage, "sharks with well-pressed fins I ripping we small fry off with razor grins"; a realm where "you bust your brain before you find a book," where if you turn on the radio, you may hear the captain of a white cruise boat insisting that a hurricane-stricken island reopen its duty-free shop no matter what, where "the poor still poor, whatever arse they catch," where one sums up the deal the realm got by saying "we was in chains, but chains made us unite, I now who have, good for them, and who blight, blight," and where "beyond them the firelit man­grove swamps, I ibises practicing for postage stamps."

Whether accepted or rejected, the colonial heritage re­mains a mesmerizing presence in the West Indies. Walcott seeks to break its spell neither by plunging "into incoher­ence of nostalgia" for a nonexistent past nor by eking him­self a niche in the culture of departed masters (into which he wouldn't fit in the first place because of the scope of his talent). He acts out of the belief that language is greater than its masters or its servants, that poetry, being its su­preme version, is therefore an instrument of self-betterment for both; i.e., that it is a way to gain an identity superior to the confines of class, race, or ego. This is just plain common sense; this is also the most sound program of social change there is. But then poetry is the most democratic art —it always starts from scratch. In a sense, a poet is indeed like a bird that chirps no matter what twig it alights on, hoping there is an audience, even if it's only the leaves.

About these "leaves"—lives—mute or sibilant, faded or immobile, about their impotence and surrender, Walcott knows enough to make you look sideways from the page containing:

Sad is the felon's love for the scratched wall, beautiful the exhaustion of old towels, and the patience of dented saucepans seems mortally comic . . .

And you resume the reading only to find:

. . . I know how profound is the folding of a napkin

by a woman whose hair will go white . . .

For all its disheartening precision, this knowledge is free of modernistic despair (which often only disguises one's shaky sense of superiority) and is conveyed in tones as level as its source. What saves Walcott's lines from hysteri­cal pitch is his belief that:

. . . time that makes us objects, multiplies our natural loneliness . . .

which results in the following "heresy":

. . . Gods loneliness moves in His smallest creatures.

No 'leaf," neither up here nor in the tropics, would like to hear this sort of thing, and that's why they seldom clap to this bird's song. Even a greater stillness is bound to follow after:

All of the epics are blown away with leaves, blown with careful calculations 011 brown paper, these were the only epics: the leaves . . .

The absence of response has done in many a poet, and in so many ways, the net result of which is that infamous equilibrium—or tautology—between cause and effect: si­lence. What prevents Walcott from striking a more than appropriate, in his case, tragic pose is not his ambition but his humility, which binds him and these "leaves" into one tight book: ". . . yet who am I ... under the heels of the thousand I racing towards the exclamation of their single name, I Sauteurs! . . ."

Walcott is neither a traditionalist nor a modernist. None of the available -isms and the subsequent -ists will do for him. He belongs to no "school": there are not so many of them in the Caribbean, save those of fish. One would feel tempted to call him a metaphysical realist, but then realism is metaphysical by definition, as well as the other way around. Besides, that would smack of prose. He can be naturalistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, imagistic, hermetic, confessional—you name it. He simply has absorbed, the way whales do plankton or a paintbrush the palette, all the stylistic idioms the North could offer; now he is on his own, and in a big way.

His metric and genre versatility is enviable. In general, however, he gravitates to a lyrical monologue and to a narrative. That, and the tendency to write in cycles, as well as his verse plays, again suggest an epic streak in this poet, and perhaps it's time to take him up on that. For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or "a world"; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language as well as in the ocean which is always present in his poems: as their background or foreground, as their subject, or as their meter.

To put it differently, these poems represent a fusion of two versions of infinity: language and ocean. The common parent of these two elements is, it must be remembered, time. If the theory of evolution, especially that part of it that suggests we all carne from the sea, holds any water, then both thematically and stylistically Derek Walcott's poetry is the case of the highest and most logical evolve- ment of the species. He was surely lucky to be born at this outskirt, at this crossroads of English and the Atlantic where both arrive in waves only to recoil. The same pattern of motion—ashore, and back to the horizon—is sustained in Walcott's lines, thoughts, life.

Open this book and see " ... the grey, iron harbour I open on a sea-gull's rusty hinge," hear how ". .. the sky's window rattles I at gears raked into reverse," be warned that "At the end of the sentence, rain will begin. I At the rain's edge, a sail . . ." This is the West Indies, this is that realm which once, in its innocence of history, mistook the lantern of a caravel for a light at the end of a tunnel and paid for that dearly—it was a light at the tunnel's entrance. This sort of thing happens often, to archipelagoes as well as to indi­viduals; in this sense, every man is an island. If, neverthe­less, we must register this experience as West Indian and call this realm the West Indies, let's do so, but let's also clarify that we have in mind the place discovered by Co­lumbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott. We may add, too, that giving a place a status of lyrical reality is a more imaginative as well as a more gen­erous act than discovering or exploiting something that was created already.

1983

A Poet and Prose

1

The tradition of dividing literature into poetry and prose dates from the beginnings of prose, since it was only in prose that such a distinction could be made. Ever since, poetry and prose have customarily been regarded as sep­arate areas—or, better yet, spheres—of literature wholly independent of each other. To say the least, "prose poems," "rhythmical prose," and the like indicate a derivative men­tality, a polarized rather than integral perception of litera­ture as a phenomenon. Curiously enough, such a view of things has by no means been imposed upon us by criticism from without. This view is, above all, the fmit of the guild approach to literature taken by literati themselves.

The concept of equality is extrinsic to the nature of art, and the thinking of any man of letters is hierarchical. With­in this hierarchy poetry occupies a higher position than prose, and the poet, in principle, is higher than the prose writer. This is tme not so much because poetry is in fact older than prose, but because a poet in narrow circum­stances can sit down and produce a piece; whereas in simi­lar straits a prose writer would hardly give thought to a poem. Even if the prose writer has what it takes to write a decent verse text, he knows full well that poetry pays a lot worse, and more slowly than prose.

With few exceptions, all the more or less eminent writers of recent times have paid their dues to verse. Some, like Nabokov, for example, have tried to the very end to con­vince themselves and those around them that even if they were not primarily poets, they were poets all the same. Most of them, however, after once yielding to the temptation of poetry, never addressed themselves to it again except as readers; still, they remained deeply grateful for the lessons in laconism and harmony it taught them. In twentieth- century literature the only case of an outstanding prose writer becoming a great poet is that of Thomas Hardy. In general, however, it can be said that the prose writer with­out active experience in poetry is prone to prolixity and grandiloquence.

What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The de­pendence of a word's specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind. And what does the poet le^ from prose? Not much: attention to detail, the use of common parlance and bureaucratese, and, in rare instances, compositional know-how (the best teacher of which is music). All three of these, however, can be gleaned from the experience of poetry itself (especially from Renaissance poetry), and theoretically—but only theoretically—a poet can get along without prose.

And only theoretically can he get along without writing prose. Need or a reviewer's ignorance, not to mention ordi­nary correspondence, will sooner or later force him to write in run-on lines, "like everyone else." But apart from these, a poet has other reasons, which we will attempt to exam­ine here. In the first place, one fine day a poet may simply get an urge to write something in prose. (The in­feriority complex that the prose writer suffers vis-a-vis the poet doesn't automatically imply the poet's superiority complex vis-a-vis the prose writer. The poet often deems the latter's work much more serious than his o^, which he may not even always regard as work.) Moreover, there are subjects that can be treated only in prose. A narrative involving more than three characters resists almost every poetic form except the epos. Reflections on historical themes, as well as childhood remembrances (in which the poet indulges to the same degree as ordinary mortals do), in turn look more natural in prose. The History of the Pu- gachev Rebellion, The Captain's Daug/iter"—what could be more gratifying subjects for romantic poems! And espe­cially in the era of Romanticism . . . However, what hap­pens in the end is that the novel in verse is replaced more and more often by "verses from a novel."t No one knows how much poetry loses when a poet turns to prose; it is quite certain, though, that prose profits from it greatly.

The prose works of Marina Tsvetaeva explain this better than anything else. To paraphrase Clausewitz, prose for Tsvetaeva was nothing but the continuation of poetry by other means (which, in fact, is what prose historically is). Everywhere—in her diary entries, essays on literature, fic­tionalized reminiscences—that is just what we encounter: the resetting of the methodology of poetic thinking into a prose text, the growth of poetry into prose. Tsvetaeva's

· Prose works by Pushkin.

f Allusions to Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and to the poems concluding Pasternak's novel, Doctor Z/iivago.

sentence is constructed not so much in accordance with the principle of subject followed by predicate as through the use of specifically poetic technology: sound association, root rhyme, semantic enjambment, etc. That is, the reader is constantly dealing not with a linear (analytic) develop­ment but with a crystalline (synthesizing) growth of thought. Perhaps no better laboratory can be found for analyzing the psychology of poetic creation, inasmuch as all stages of the process are sho^ at extremely close range, verging on the starlrness of caricature.

"Reading," says Tsvetaeva, "is complicity in the creative process." This most certainly is the statement of a poet; Leo Tolstoy would not have said such a thing. In this state­ment a sensitive or at least a reasonably alert ear can dis­tinguish a note of despair, greatly muffled by authorial (and feminine at that) pride, corning specifically from a poet sorely fatigued by the ever-widening rift—growing with each additional line—between author and audience. And in the poet's turning to prose, that a priori "normal" form of communication with a reader, there is always a touch of slackening tempo, shifting gear, trying to make oneself clear, to explain things. For without complicity in the crea­tive process there is no comprehension: what is compre­hension if not complicity? As Whitman said: "Great poetry is possible only if there are great readers." In turning to prose, and dismantling almost every other word of it into component parts, Tsvetaeva shows her reader what a word, a thought, a phrase consists of; she tries, often against her o^ will, to draw the reader closer to her: to make him equally great.

There is still another explanation of the methodology of Tsvetaeva's prose. Since the day that the narrative genre first came into being, every form of it—short story, tale, novel—has dreaded one thing: the charge of being un­convincing. Hence either a striving for realism, or struc­tural mannerisms. In the final analysis, every writer strives for the same thing: to regain or hold back time past or cur­rent. Toward this end a poet has at his disposal caesura, un­accented feet, dactylic endings; a prose writer has nothing of the kind. Turning to prose, Tsvetaeva quite unconsciously transfers to it the dynamics of poetic language—essentially the dynamics of song—which is in itself a form of restruc­tured time. (If only because a verse line is short; each word in it, frequently each syllable, is subjected to a double or triple semantic burden. A multiplicity of meanings pre­supposes a corresponding number of attempts to compre­hend, that is, several takes; and what is a take if not a unit of time?) Tsvetaeva, however, is not particularly con­cerned about how convincing the language of her prose is: whatever the topic of her narrative, its technology remains the same. Furthermore, her narrative in a strict sense is plotless and is held together mainly by the energy of mono­logue. But all the same, unlike professional prose writers and other poets who have resorted to prose, she does not submit to the genre's aesthetic inertia: she imposes her own technology on it, she imposes herself. This is not a result of an obsession with her own self, the belief generally held; instead it comes from an obsession with intonation, which is far more important to her than either poem or story.

Verisimilitude in a narrative may be a result of complying with the genre's requirements; the same effect may also be ascribed to the timbre of the voice that does the narrating. In the latter case both the plausibility of the story line and the story line itself recede into the background of the listener's consciousness (i.e., into parentheses), as the author's dues paid to the proprieties of the genre. What stand outside the parentheses are the timbre of the voice and its intonation. To create this effect on the stage requires supplementary gestures; on paper—that is, in prose—it is achieved by the device of dramatic arrhythmia, which is most often brought about by interspersing nominative sen­tences among a mass of complex ones. In this alone one can see elements of borrowing from poetry. Yet Tsvetaeva, who doesn't have to borrow anything from anyone, starts with the utmost structural compactness of langiage and ends with it as well. The degree of linguistic expressiveness of her prose, given the minimal use of typographical means, is remarkable. Let us recall the author's stage direction describing Casanova in her play Casanova's End: "Not starlike—tsarlike" (Ne barstvenen—tsarstvenen). Let us now try to imagine what space this would have taken in Chekhov. At the same time, this is not a result of intentional economy—of paper, words, or effort—but a by-product of the poet's instinctive laconism.

Extending poetry into prose, Tsvetaeva does not obliter­ate the boundary existing between them in the popular consciousness; instead, she shifts it into hitherto syntac­tically inaccessible linguistic spheres—upward. And prose, where the danger of a stylistic dead end is much greater than in poetry, only benefits from this shift: there, in the rarefied air of her syntax, Tsvetaeva imparts to it an accel­eration that leads to a change in the very notion of inertia. "Telegraphic style," "stream of consciousness," "the art of subtext," and so forth, bear no relation to the above. The works of her contemporaries, not to mention authors of subsequent decades whose production begs for such defini- lions, can be read seriously mainly for nostalgic reasons, or else for literary history (which is about the same) considerations. The literature created by Tsvetaeva is a literature of "supertext"; if her consciousness "streams," it follows a channel of ethics. The only way in which her style approaches the telegraphic is through her principal punctu­ation mark, the dash, identifying proximity of phenomena as well as leaps across the self-evident. That dash does serve one more purpose, though: it crosses out a great deal in Russian literature of the twentieth century.

2

"Marina often begins a poem on high C," Anna Akhmatova said. The same thing can be said, to a certain degree, about Tsvetaeva's intonation in prose as well. Such was the char­acter of her voice that her speech almost always begins at the other end of the octave, in the highest register, at its uppermost limit, after which only descent or, at best, a plateau is conceivable. However, the timbre of her voice was so tragic that it ensured a sensation of rising no matter how long the sound lasted. This tragic quality was not exactly a product of her life experience; it existed prior to it. Her experience only coincided with it, responded to it, like an echo. This timbre is already clearly distinguishable in her Juvenilia (a collection of lyrics written between 1913 and 1915):

Lines of my poetry, so early written

That I knew not I was a poet yet . . .

This, already, is not so much an accounting as a discount­ing of oneself. Her life experience could do nothing but follow the voice, permanently lagging behind it, for the voice was overtaking events—after all, it had the speed of sound. On the whole, experience always lags behind antici­pation.

Yet the issue here is not only that of experience lagging behind anticipation; it is a question of the differences be­tween art and reality. One of them is that in art, owing to the properties of the material itself, it is possible to attain a degree of lyricism that has no physical equivalent in the real world. Nor, in the same way, does there exist in the real world an equivalent of the tragic in art, which (the tragic) is the reverse of lyricism—or the stage that follows it. No matter how dramatic a person's direct experience is, it is always exceeded by the experience of an instrument. Yet a poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former graduaUy taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.

Perhaps this may partly explain why a poet turns to prose, especially to autobiographical prose. In Tsvetaeva's case, it is certainly not an attempt to reset history—too late for that; it is, rather, a withdrawal from reality into prehistory, into childhood. However, this is not the "when-nothing-is- known-yet" childhood of a certified memoirist. It is the "when-everything-is-already-lmo^" but "nothing-has-be- gun-yet" childhood of the mature poet caught up in the middle of her life by a brutal era. Autobiographical prose— prose in general—in this case is just a breather. Like any respite, it is lyrical and temporary. (This sensation—of respite and its accompanying qualities—is quite evident in most of her essays on literature, along with the strong autobiographical element. Because of it, her essays prove to be "literature within literature" to a much greater extent than all modem "textual criticism of text.") In essence, all of Tsvetaeva's prose, except for her diary entries, is retro­spective, for only after taking a glance backward is it pos­sible to pause for breath.

The role of detail in this kind of prose thus becomes similar to the role of the very flow of the prose itself, slack­ened in comparison with poetic speech. This role is purely therapeutic; it is the role of a straw at which we all lrnow who clutches. The more detailed the description, the more obvious the need for the straw. In general: the more a work of this kind is constructed in the "Turgenev mode," the more avant-garde are the author's own "modifiers" of time, place, and manner. Even the punctuation takes on an added burden. Thus, a period that completes a narrative denotes its physical end, a boundary, a precipice plummet­ing into reality, into nonliterature. The unavoidability and proximity of this precipice, which are controlled by the narrative itself, make the author's striving for perfection within the allotted bounds ten times as great and, in part, even simplifies his task, forcing him to discard everything superfluous.

The discarding of the superfluous is in itself the first cry of poetry—the beginning of the predominance of sound over reality, of essence over existence: the source of tragic consciousness. Along this path Tsvetaeva went farther than anyone in Russian and, it would seem, world literature. In Russian literature, at least, she has occupied a place ex­tremely apart from all—including the most remarkable— of her contemporaries, fenced off from them by a wall built of discarded excess. The only one who proves to be near her—and precisely as a prose writer—is Osip Mandelstam. The parallel relationship between Tsvetaeva and Mandel­stam as prose writers is indeed remarkable. Mandelstam's The Noise of Time and The Egyptian Stamp can be put on a par with Tsvetaeva's Autobiographical Prose; his essays in On Poetry and "A Conversation about Dante" with her literary essays; and Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia and "Fourth Prose" with Tsvetaeva's Pages from a Diary. The stylistic similarity—plotlessness, retrospectivity, linguistic and metaphorical density—is clearly even greater than the similarity of genre and theme, although Mandelstam is somewhat more traditional.

It would be a mistake, however, to try to explain this closeness of style and genre by the similarity of the two authors' biographies or by the general climate of the era. Biographies are never known in advance, just as "climate" and "era" are strictly transitory notions. The basic element of similarity between the prose works of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam is their purely linguistic oversaturation per­ceived as emotional oversaturation and quite often reflect­ing it. In the "thiclrness" of writing, density of images, sentence dynamics, they are so close that it is possible to suspect if not blood ties then cliquishness, adherence to the same ism. But while Mandelstam was in fact an Ac- meist, Tsvetaeva never belonged to any group, and even the bravest of her critics never ventured so far as to attach a label to her. The key to the similarity between Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam in prose lies in the same place as the rea­son for their difference as poets: in their relation to lan­guage, or more precisely, in the degree of their dependence on the same.

Poetry is not "the best words in the best order"; for lan­guage it is the highest form of existence. In purely technical terms, of course, poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and ex­ternally inevitable sequence. Ideally, however, it is lan­guage negating its own mass and the laws of gravity; it is language's striving upward—or sideways—to that begin­ning where the Word was. In any case, it is movement of language into pre- (supra-) genre realms, that is, into the spheres from which it sprang. The seemingly most artificial forms for organizing poetic language—terza rima, sestinas, decimas, and so forth—are in fact nothing more than a natural, reiterative, fully detailed elaboration of the echo that followed the original Word. Consequently, Mandel­stam, outwardly a more formal poet than Tsvetaeva, needed prose that spared him from echo, from the power of re­peated sound, not a whit less than she did, with her ex- trastanzaic—on the whole, extraverse—thinking, and with her principal strength lying in the subordinate clause, in word-root dialectics.

Any uttered word requires some sort of continuation. It can be continued in various ways: logically, phonetically, grammatically, in rhyme. This is the way a language de­velops, and if not logic, then phonetics indicates that lan­guage needs development. For what has been uttered is never the end but the edge of speech, which—owing to the existence of time—is always followed by something. And what follows is always more interesting than what has already been said—and no longer on account of time but, rather, in spite of it. Such is tie logic of speech, and such is the basis of Tsvetacva's poetics. She never has enough space: either in a poem or in prose. Even her most scholarly- sounding essays are always like elbows protruding from a small room. A poem is constructed on the principle of the complex sentence; prose consists of grammatical enjamb- ments: that is how she escapes tautology. (For invention in prose plays the same role with respect to reality as rhyme in a poem. ) The most awful thing about service to the Muses is precisely that it does not tolerate repetition— either of metaphor, subject, or device. In everyday life, to tell the same joke two or three times is not a crime. One cannot, however, allow oneself to do that on paper; lan­guage forces you to take the next step—at least stylistically. Not for the sake of your inner well-being, of course (though subsequently it does prove to be for its sake as well), but for the sake of language's own stereoscopic (-phonic) well- being. A cliche is a safety valve by means of which art pro­tects itself from the danger of degeneration.

The more often a poet takes this next step, the more iso­lated a position he finds himself in. The process of elimina­tion, in the final analysis, usually turns against a person who overuses the method. And if we were not speaking of Tsve- taeva, it might be possible to see in a poet's turning to prose a kind of literary nostalgie de la boue, a desire to merge with the (writing) mass, to become, at last, "like everyone else." We are considering, however, a poet who knew from the very beginning what she was headed for, or—where language led. We are dealing with the author of the lines: "A poet starts his speaking from afar. I The speak­ing takes the speaker far . . ."· We are dealing with the author of "The Pied Piper." Prose for Tsvetaeva is by no means a refuge; it is not a form of emancipation^^ither psychological or stylistic. For her, prose is a witting ex­pansion of her sphere of isolation, that is, of the possibilities of language.

3

This is, in fact, the sole direction in which a self-respecting writer can move. (In essence, all existing art is already a cliche: precisely because it already exists.) And insofar as literature is the linguistic equivalent of thinking, Tsvetaeva, taken extraordinarily far by speech, proves to be the most interesting thinker of her time. Any generalized descrip­tion of any person's views, especially if they have been expressed in artistic form, inevitably tends toward carica­ture; any attempt to approach analytically a phenomenon whose nature is synthetic is doomed by definition. Nonethe­less, without running any particular risk one can define Tsvetaeva's system of views as a philosophy of discomfort, as a plea for the cause not so much of borderline situations as of existence on the edge. This position can be called neither stoic—since it was dictated above all by reasons of an aesthetico-linguistic nature—nor existentialist—since it is precisely the denial of reality that makes up its substance. On a philosophical level there is no evidence of her having either forerunners or successors. As for contemporaries, if it were not for the absence of documentary evidence, it would

· Opening lines of "The Poet" ( 1923).

be natural to assume a thorough knowledge of Lev Shestov's works. There is no such evidence, alas; or the sum of it is quite insignificant. The only Russian thinker (or rather, ponderer) whose influence on her work—though only in its early stage—Marina Tsvetaeva openly acknowledged is Vasily Rozanov. But if indeed diere was such influence, it should be recognized as strictly stylistic, however, since there is nothing more polar to Rozanov's lack of discrimina­tion than the brutal, at times almost Calvinistic, spirit of personal responsibility that pervades the work of the ma­ture Tsvetaeva.

Many things determine consciousness besides being^ (the prospect of nonbeing, in particular). One of them is lan­guage. The self-pitilessness that makes one think of Calvin (and whose obverse is Tsvetaeva's often unwarranted gen­erosity in evaluating the work of her fellow writers) is not only the product of upbringing, but is—and this first of all—the reflection or continuation of the professional rela­tionship between the poet and her language. With regard to upbringing, however, it is important to remember that Tsvetaeva's was trilingual, with Russian and German pre­dominant. Certainly, it was not a matter of choice: her native tongue was Russian. But a child who reads Heine in the original becomes instructed, willingly or not, in de­ductive "seriousness and honor/ in the West, from an alien family."t Bearing an outwardly strong resemblance to the striving for truth, the striving for precision is by nature linguistic; that is, it is rooted in language, has its source in the word. The process of elimination mentioned above,

· Karl Marx: "Being [existence] determines consciousness." t From Mandelstam's poem "To the Cennan Tongue" ( 1932).

the need to discard the superfluous—which has reached, or rather been brought to, the level of instinct—is one of the means through which this striving is pursued. In the case of a poet, this striving often takes on an idiosyncratic quality, inasmuch as to the poet phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical.

This identity imparts to consciousness so much accelera­tion that it carries its possessor beyond the parentheses of any polis a lot sooner and farther than suggested by this or that energetic Plato. But that is not all. Any emotion that accompanies this imaginary or—more frequently—real re­location is edited by that identity; and the form—as well as the very fact—of the expression of that emotion proves to be aesthetically dependent on the said identity. In a more general sense, ethics slip into a dependence on aesthetics. A remarkable feature of Tsvetaeva's work is precisely the absolute independence of her moral valuations that exists along with such a phenomenally heightened linguistic sen­sitivity. One of the best examples of the struggle between ethical principle and linguistic determinism is her 1932 essay "The Poet and Time": it is a duel in which no one is killed and both parties are victorious. This essay, one of the most crucial for an understanding of Tsvetaeva's work, affords one of the most trenchant examples of a semantic frontal attack on the positions occupied in our conscious­ness by abstract categories (in this instance, on the idea of time). An indirect gain achieved by such maneuvers is that the literary language receives training in breathing the rarefied atmosphere of abstract concepts, while the latter acquire the flesh of phonetics and morality.

Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would ex­hibit a curve—nay, a straight line—rising at almost a right angle because of her constant endeavor to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher. (Or, more precisely, an octave and faith higher.) She always carries everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In either her verse or her prose nothing remains hanging in the air or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is that unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (in this instance, the sense of ambivalence, of the contradictoriness of the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means; whereupon it was transformed into the material of art. That a poet resorts to prose, which creates the illusion of a more con­sistent development of thought than poetry does, is in itself a kind of indirect proof that the paramount spiritual ex­perience is not so paramount; that experiences of a higher nature are possible, and that a reader can be taken by the hand by prose and delivered to where he would otherwise have to be shoved by a poem.

This last consideration—the notion of concern for the reader—should be taken into account if merely because it is our only chance to squeeze Tsvetaeva into the tradition of Russian literature, with its main tendency toward con­soling, toward justifying (on the highest level, if possible) reality and the existing order of things in general. Or else, it turns out that the "gray wolf" who keeps looking to the "thick woods of Eternity" no matter how much time you feed it, the mouthpiece or the ear of the voice of 'heavenly truth versus earthly truth," i.e., Tsvetaeva, who cares for nothing in between, really stands all alone in Russian lit­erature, very, very much off by herself. An unwillingness to accept reality, motivated not only by ethics but by aes­thetics as well, is something unusual in Russian literature.

This, of course, can be attributed to the quality of reality itself, within the Russian homeland and without; but the problem undoubtedly lies elsewhere. Most likely, the prob­lem is that the new semantics required new phonetics, and Tsvetaeva provided it. In her, Russian letters found a di­mension that hitherto had not been intrinsic to it: she demonstrated language's own self-interest in tragic subject matter. In this dimension justification or acceptance of reality is out of the question if only because the existing order of things is tragic in purely phonetic terms. According to Tsvetaeva, the very sound of speech is prone to the tragi­cal and, in a way, even profits from it: as in a lament. No wonder, then, that for a literature so steeped in didactical positivism that the expression "to begin with well-wishing but end with 'Ashes to ashes' " is considered a formula for deviation from the norm, Tsvetaeva's work proved to be something novel, with all the ensuing personal conse­quences. Tsvetaeva's biography differs favorably only from the biographies of those of her contemporaries who per­ished earlier.

But what was a novelty for letters was not one for the national psyche. Of the entire pleiad of great twentieth- century Russian poets, with the exception of Nikolai Klu- yev, Tsvetaeva stands closest to folklore, and the style of the lament provides one of the keys to understanding her work. Leaving aside the decorative, not to say drawing- room, aspect of folklore, which was so successfully elab­orated by, again, Kluyev, Tsvetaeva was compelled by force of circumstance to resort to that device which is the essen­tial element of folklore: unaddressed speech. In both her verse and her prose we constantly hear a monologue—not the monologue of a heroine, but a monologue as a conse­quence of having no one to talk to.

The characteristic feature of this kind of speech is that the speaker is also the listener. Folklore—a shepherd's song —is speech intended for the self, for itself: the ear heeds the mouth. Thus, through self-audition language achieves self-cognition. But no matter how or through what one accounts for the genealogy of Tsvetaeva's poetics, the de­gree of responsibility placed on the reader's consciousness by its fruits exceeded—and exceeds to this day—the degree of the Russian reader's preparedness to accept this respon­sibility (with the demand for which the difference between folklore and authored literature presumably starts). Even protected by the annor of dogma or by the no less sturdy armor of absolute cynicism, he proves defenseless against the intensity of art lighting up his conscience. The inevita­bility of the presumably ruinous effect that this entails is understood more or less equally by both the shepherds and the flock itself, and to this day Tsvetaeva's collected works do not exist either outside or inside the country in the lan­guage of whose people she wrote. Theoretically, the dig­nity of a nation degraded politically cannot be seriously wounded by obliterating its cultural heritage. Russia, how­ever, in contrast to nations blessed with a legislative tradi­tion, elective institutions, and so forth, is in a position to understand herself only through literature, and to retard the literary process by disposing of or treating as nonexis­tent the works of even a minor author is tantamount to a genetic crime against the future of the nation.

Whatever the reasons that moved Tsvetaeva to t^™ to prose and regardless of how much Russian poetry conse­quently lost, one can only be grateful to Providence that such a turn took place. Moreover, poetry has in fact hardly lost; if it did lose something with respect to form, it re­mained true to itself in terms of energy and essence, i.e., it presened its substance. Every author expands upon—even by means of repudiating—the postulates, the idioms, the aesthetics of his predecessors. Turning to prose, Tsvetaeva was expanding upon herself—she was a reaction to her own self. Her isolation was not premeditated but enforced, imposed from without: by the logic of language, by his­torical circumstances, by the quality of her contemporaries. By no means is she an esoteric poet—no more passionate voice ever sounded in Russian poetry of the twentieth cen­tury. Besides, esoteric poets don't write prose. The fact that she ended up, nevertheless, out of the mainstream of Russian literature was only for the better. Thus, a star, in a poem by her beloved Rilke translated by her no less beloved Pas­ternak, like the light in the window "of the last house at the parish's edge," only expands the parishioners' concep­tion of the size of the parish.

(Translated by Barry Rubin)

1979

Footnote to a Poem

On February 7, 1927, in Bellevue, outside Paris, Marina Tsvetaeva finished "Novogodnee" ("New Year's Greet­ings"), in many respects a landmark not only in her own work but in Russian poetry as a whole. In terms of genre, the poem can be regarded as an elegy—that is, the most fully developed genre in poetry; and this classification would be proper were it not for certain attendant circum­stances, one being that this is an elegy on the death of a poet.

Every "on the death of" poem, as a rule, serves not only as a means for an author to express his sentiments occa­sioned by a loss but also as a pretext for more or less general speculations on the phenomenon of death per se. In mourn­ing his loss (be it the beloved, a national hero, a close friend, or a guiding light), an author by the same token frequently mourns—directly, obliquely, often unwittingly —himself, for the tragic timbre is always autobiographical. In other words, any "on the death of' poem contains an element of self-portrait. This element is aU the more inevitable if the object of moaning happens to be a fellow writer with whom the author was linked by bonds—real or imaginary—too strong for the author to avoid the

196 I J О s E p H B R О D SICY

temptation of identifying with the poem's subject. In his struggle to resist such temptation the author is hampered by his sense of professional guild-like association, by the theme of death's own somewhat exalted status, and, finally, by the strictly personal, private experience of loss: some­thing has been taken away from him; therefore, he must bear some relation to it. It may be that the only shortcoming of these wholly natural and otherwise respectable senti­ments is that we learn more about the author and his attitude toward his own possible demise than about what actually happened to the other person. On the other hand, a poem is not a news report, and often a poem's tragic music alone informs us of what is happening more precisely than a detailed description can. Nevertheless, it is difficult, sometimes simply awkward, to combat the feeling that the writer is situated in regard to his subject as a spectator is to the stage, and that his own reaction (tears, not applause) is of greater consequence to him than the horror of what is taking place; that at best he simply occupies a seat in the front row of the orchestra.

Such are the costs of the genre, and from Lermontov to Pasternak Russian poetry bears witness to their inevita­bility. The only exception, perhaps, is Prince Vyazemsky and his "In Memoriam," written in 1837. Very likely, the inevitability of these costs, of this, in the end, self-mourning, at times bordering on self-admiration, can and even must be explained by the fact that the addressees were always, specifically, fellow writers; that the tragedy was occurring within native Russian literature, and self-pity was the re­verse side of presumptuousness and an outgrowth of the sense of loneliness that increases with the passing of any poet and is, in any case, intrinsic to a writer. If, however, the subject was the demise of a preeminent figure belonging to another culture (the death of Byron or Goethe, for example), its very "foreignness" seemed to give added stimulus to the most general, abstract kind of discussion, viz.: of the role of the "bard" in the life of society, of art in general, of, as Akhmatova put it, "ages and peoples." Emo­tional distance in these cases engendered a didactic diffuse- ness, and some Byron or Goethe was not easily distinguish­able from a Napoleon or from Italian Carbonari. The element of self-portrait in these instances naturally dis­appeared; for, paradoxical as it may seem, death, in spite of all its properties as a common denominator, did not lessen the distance between the author and the mourned ''bard," but, on the contrary, increased it, as though an elegist's ignorance regarding the circumstances of the life of a particular "Byron" extended as well to the essence of that "Byron's" death. In other words, death, in its turn, was perceived as something foreign, alien—which may be per­fectly justified as circumstantial evidence of its—death's— inscrutability. Especially since the inscrutability of a phe­nomenon or, at least, the feeling of mistrust toward the results of cognition is what constitutes the ethos of the age of Romanticism, in which the tradition of poems "on the death of a poet" originates, and by whose poetics it is still colored.

Tsvetaeva's "Novogodnee" has much less in common with this tradition and these poetics than does the vir­tual hero of the poem, Rainer Maria Hilke. As possibly the only thread connecting Tsvetaeva with Romanticism in this poem one ought to consider the fact that for Tsvetaeva "German is more native than Russian," i.e., that German was, on a par with Russian, the language of her childhood, which coincided with the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, with all the consequences that nineteenth-century German literature entailed for a child. This thread is, to be sure, more than just a connec­tive—which is something we shall dwell on again later. For a start, let us note that it was precisely her knowledge of German that Tsvetaeva had to thank for her relation to Rilke, whose death, thus, delivered an indirect blow— across the whole of her life—to her childhood.

For no other reason than that a child's attachment to a language (which is not native but more native) culminates in adulthood as reverence for poetry (i.e., the form of that language's highest degree of maturity), an element of self-portraiture in "Novogodnee" seems inevitable. "Novo­godnee," however, is more than a self-portrait, just as Rilke to Tsvetaeva is more than a poet. (Just as a poet's death is something more than a human loss. Above all, it is a drama of language as such: that of inadequacy of linguistic ex­perience vis-a-vis existential experience.) Even irrespective of Tsvetaeva's personal feelings toward Rilke—extremely powerful ones that underwent an evolution from platonic love and stylistic dependence to an awareness of a certain equality—even irrespective of these feelings, the death of the great German poet created a situation in which Tsvetaeva could not confine herself to an attempt at a self- portrait. In order to understand—or even not understand— what had happened, she had to extend the limits of the genre and step up from the orchestra, as it were, onto the stage.

"Novogodnee" is above all a confession. In this regard one feels inclined to mention that Tsvetaeva is an extremely candid poet, quite possibly the most candid in the history of Russian poetry. She makes no secret of anything, least of all of her aesthetic and philosophical credos, which are scattered about her verse and prose with the frequency of a first person singular pronoun. The reader, therefore, turns out to be more or less prepared for Tsvetaeva's man­ner of speech in "Novogodnee"—the so-called lyrical mono­logue. What he is not at all prepared for, however, no matter how many times he may reread "Novogodnee," is the intensity of the monologue, the purely linguistic energy of this confession. And the point is not at all that "Novo­godnee" is a poem, that is, a form of narration that requires, by definition, maximum condensation of speech, sharpening of the maximum focus. The point is that Tsvetaeva con­fesses not to a priest but to a poet. And on her scale of ranks a poet is higher than a priest to roughly the same degree as man, in standard theology, is higher than the angels, since the latter were not created in the image and likeness of the Almighty.

Paradoxical and blasphemous as it may seem, in the dead Rilke Tsvetaeva found what every poet seeks: the supreme listener. The widespread belief that a poet always writes for someone is only half justified and is fraught with numer­ous confusions. The best answer to the question "Whom do you write for?" was given by Igor Stravinsky: "For my­self and for a hypothetical alter ego." Consciously or un­consciously, every poet in the course of his career engages in a search for an ideal reader, for that alter ego, since a poet seeks not recognition but understanding. Baratynsky long ago consoled Pushkin in a letter, saying that one shouldn't be particularly surprised "if the Hussars don't read us anymore." Tsvetaeva goes even further, and in her poem "Homesickness" she declares:

Nor shall I crave my native speech, its milky call that comes in handy. It makes no difference in which longiie passers-by won't comprehend me.

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

This type of attitude toward things inevitably leads to a narrowing of the circle, which by no means always sig­nifies an improvement in the quality of readers. A writer, however, is a democrat by definition, and the poet always hopes for some parallelism between the processes taking place in his own work and those in the consciousness of the reader. But the further a poet goes in his development, the greater—unintentionally—his demands are on an audience, and the narrower that audience is. The situation oftentimes ends with the reader becoming the author's projection, which scarcely coincides with any living creature at all. In those instances, the poet directly addresses either the an­gels, as Rilke does in the Duino Elegies, or another poet— especially one who is dead, as Tsvetaeva addresses Rilke. In both instances what takes place is a monologue, and in both instances it assumes an absolute quality, for the author addresses his words to nonexistence, to Chronos.

For Tsvetaeva, whose verse is distinctive for its almost pathological need to say, to think, to carry all things to their logical end, this was by no means a new destination. What turned out to be new—with the death of Rilke— was the fact that it turned out to be inhabited and for the poet in Tsvetaeva this could not but be of interest. To be fure, "Novogodnee" is the result of a particular emotional outburst; but Tsvetaeva is a maximalist, and the vector of her emotional movements is known in advance. Neverthe­less, it is impossible to call Tsvetaeva a poet of extremes, if only because an extreme—whether deductive, emotional, or linguistic—is merely the point where, for her, a poem starts. "Going through life is not the same as walking across a field" · or "Odysseus returned full of space and time"t could never have been used as last lines in a poem of Tsvetaeva's; a poem of hers would have begun with these lines. Tsvetaeva is a poet of extremes only in the sense that for her an ''extreme" is not so much the end of the kno^ world as the beginning of the unknowable one. The tech­nique of allusion, circumlocution, half-statement, or omis­sion is characteristic of this poet to only a minute degree. Even less attributable to her is the use of the highest achievements of the rhythmic school, psychologically com­forting to the reader with their lulling metrical pattern. Oversaturated with stresses, the h^mony of Tsvetaeva's verse line is unpredictable; she leans more toward trochees and dactyls than toward the certitude of the iamb. The beginnings of her lines tend to be trochaic rather than stressed, the endings mournful, dactylic. It's hard to find another poet who has made such skillful and abundant use of caesura and truncated feet. In terms of form, Tsvetaeva is significantly more interesting than any of her contempo­raries, including the Futurists, and her rhymes are more inventive than Pasternak's. Most importantly, however, her te^nical achievements have not been dictated by formal explorations but are by-products—that is, natural effects— of speech, for which the most significant thing is its subject.

· The last line of "Hamlet," by Boris Pasternak. t The last line of 'The Stream of Golden Honey Was Pouring . . ." by Osip Mandelstam.

Art, generally speaking, always comes into being as a result of an action directed outward, sideways, toward the attainment (comprehension) of an object having no im­mediate relationship to art. It is a means of conveyance, a landscape flashing in a window—rather than the con­veyance's destination. "If you only knew," said Akhmatova, "what rubbish verse grows from . . ." The farther away the purpose of movement, the more probable the art; and, theoretically, death (anyone's, and a great poet's in par­ticular, for what can be more removed from everyday reality than a great poet or great poetry?) turns into a sort of guarantee of art.

The theme of "Tsvetaeva and Rilke" has been, is, and will continue to be the subject of many investigations. What interests us is the role—or idea—of Rilke as the addressee in "Novogodnee'' his role as the object of psychic move­ment and the extent of his responsibility for the by-product of that movement: a poem. Knowing Tsvetaeva's maxi- malism, one cannot but take note of how natural her choice of this subject is. Apart from the concrete, deceased Rilke, there appears in the poem an image (or idea) of an "ab­solute Rilke," who has ceased being a body in space and has become a soul—in eternity. This removal is an absolute, maximum removal. The feelings the poem's heroine has— i.e., love—toward their absolute object, a soul, are also absolute What in addition proves to be absolute are the means of expressing this love: maximum selflessness and maximum candor. All this could not but create a maximum tension of poetic diction.

There is, however, a paradox in the fact that poetic lan­guage possesses—as does any language in general—its own particular dynamics, which impart to psychic movement an acceleration that takes the poet much farther than he imagined when he began the poem. Yet this is, in fact, the principal mechanism (temptation, if you will) of creative work; once having come in contact with it (or having succumbed to it), a person once and for all rejects other modes of thought, expression^^onveyance. Language pro­pels the poet into spheres he would not otherwise be able to approach, irrespective of the degree of psychic or mental concentration of which he might be capable beyond the writing of verse. And this propulsion takes place with unusual swiftness: with the speed of sound—greater than what is afforded by imagination or experience. As a rule, a poet is considerably older when he finishes a poem than he was at its outset. The maximum range of Tsvetaeva's diction in "Novogodnee" takes her much farther than the mere experience of loss could; possibly even farther than the soul of Rilke himself is capable of getting to in its posthumous wanderings. Not only because any thought of someone else's soul, as distinct from the soul itself, is less burdened than that soul by its deeds, but also because a poet, generally speaking, is more generous than an apostle. A poetic "paradise" is not limited to "eternal bliss," and it is not threatened with the overcrowding of a dogmatic para­dise. In contrast to the standard Christian paradise that is presented as a kind of last instance, the soul's dead end, poetic paradise is, rather, a peak, and a bard's soul is not so much perfected as left in a continual state of motion. The poetic idea of eternal life on the whole gravitates more toward a cosmogony than toward theology, and what is often put forward as a measure of the soul is not the degree of its perfection essential for achieving likeness and merger with the Creator but rather the physical (meta­physical) duration and distance of its wanderings in time. In principle, the poetic conception of existence eschews any form of finiteness or stasis, including theological apotheosis. In any case, Dante's paradise is much more interesting than the ecclesiastical version of it.

Even if the loss of Rilke served Tsvetaeva only as "An Invitation to a Journey," it would be justified by the other­worldly topography of "Novogodnee." But this is not in fact the case, and Tsvetaeva does not replace Rilke the man with the "idea of Rilke" or with the idea of his soul. She would have been incapable of making such a replacement if only because that soul had already been embodied in Rilke's work. (On the whole, the not overly justifiable po­larization of soul and body, a practice that is very commonly abused when a person dies, appears all the less convincing when we are dealing with a poet.) In other words, the poet invites the reader to follow his soul during the poet's life­time, and Tsvetaeva, with regard to Rilke, was first of all a reader. The dead Rilke, consequently, is not particularly different for her from the living one, and she follows him in roughly the same way that Dante followed Virgil, with great justification in the fact that Rilke himself undertook similar journeys in his own work ("Requiem for a Lady Friend"). In brief, the next world has been sufficiently domesticated by the poetic imagination to warrant the assumption that self-pity or curiosity about the other­worldly might have served Tsvetaeva as motivation for "No!Jogodnee." The tragedy of "No!Jogodnee" lies in the separation, in the almost physical rupture of her psycho­logical bond with Rilke, and she sets out on this "journey," not frightened by a Dantean leopard blocking her path, but by an awareness of abandonment, of being no longer able to follow him the way she did during his lifetime— following every line of his. And also—in addition to that abandonment—from a feeling of guilt: I'm alive, whereas he—the better one—is dead. But the love of one poet for another (even of the opposite sex) is not Juliet's love for Romeo: the tragedy lies not in that existence without him is unthinkable but precisely in that such an existence is thinkable. And as a consequence of this conceivability, the author's attitude toward herself, still living, is more merci­less, more uncompromising. Therefore, when beginning to speak, and—if it ever comes to this—when beginning to speak of oneself, one does so as if confessing, for it is he— not a priest or God but another poet—who hears you. Hence the intensity of Tsvetaeva's diction in "Novogodnee," since she is addressing someone who, in contrast to God, has absolute pitch.

"Novogodnee" begins in typical Tsvetaeva fashion, at the far right—i.e., highest—end of the octave, on high C:

S Novym godom—svetom—kraem—krovom!

Happy New Year—World/Light—Edge/ Realm-—Haven!

—with an exclamation directed upward, outward. Through­out the entire poem this tonality, just like the very tenor of this speech, is unvarying: the only possible modification is not a lowering of the register (even in parentheses) but a raising of it. Imbued with this tonality, the device of the nominative sentence in this line creates an ecstatic effect, an effect of emotional soaring. This sensation is intensified by the outwardly synonymic enumeration, like ascending stairs (stages) with each step higher than the previous one. This enumeration, however, is synonymic only with respect to the number of syllables each word has, and Tsvetaeva's sign of equality (or inequality )—the dash—separates them more than a comma would: it thrusts each successive word upward beyond the one preceding it.

What is more, only the word god ("year") in S Novym godom ("Happy New Year") is used in its literal meaning; all the other words in this line are loaded—overloaded— with associations and figurative meanings. Svet ("world," "light") is used in a threefold meaning: first as "world," as in "New World," by analogy with "New Year"—i.e., geo­graphically new. But this geography is the abstract one; Tsvetaeva more likely has in mind here something "at the back of beyond," rather than on the other side of the ocean: a certain outer limit. This understanding of a "new world" as another limit leads to the idea of the "next world," which in fact is the real issue. However, the "next world" is, first of all, light; for, owing to the drift of the line and the euphonic superiority (more piercing sound) of svetom over godom, it is located somewhere literally overhead, above, in the heavens, which are the source of light. The preceding and succeeding dashes, which nearly free the word from seman­tic obligations, equip svet with the entire arsenal of its posi­tive allusions, At any rate, in the concept of "next world" emphasis falls tautologically on the aspect of the light rather than, as usual, of darkness.

Next, from the abstractly geographic svet the line acous­tically and topographically flies upward toward the short, sob-like krai ("edge," "realm"): edge of the world, edge in general, heavenward, to paradise. S novym . . . kraem means, apart from everything else, "Happy new realm, happy new boundary, happy crossing of it." The line ends with the coda s novym krovom ("Happy new haven"), which is both phonetic and semantic, for the phonic sub­stance of krovom is almost identical to that of godom. But these two syllables have already been raised a whole octave ^^ight syllables—above their original sound by svetom and kraem, and there is no way they can return either to the tonality of the beginning of the line or to its literalness. It's as though krovom, from higher up, were looking back upon itself in godom, unable to recognize either vowels or consonants. The consonants kr in krovom belong not so much to the word krov itself as to the word krai, and partly because of that the semantics of krov seems too rarefied: the word has been placed too high up. Its meaning as a refuge at the edge of the world and as a home to come back to, a haven, intertwines with the krov that means heaven : the universal heaven of the planet as well as the individual one, the last refuge of the soul.

Essentially, Tsvetaeva uses the trochaic pentameter here like a keyboard, a similarity made greater by the use of dashes instead of commas; the transition from one disylla- ble to another is achieved by a pianistic rather than a stan­dard grammatical logic, and each successive exclamation, as when keys are pressed, starts up when the sound of the previous one dies out. However unconscious this device may be, it is eminently appropriate to the essence of the image developed in this line—of heaven with its levels accessible first to the eye, and after the eye, only to the spirit.

A strictly emotional impression that the reader gets from this line is the sensation of a pure voice soaring upward and, as it were, renouncing (relinquishing) itself. Yet it should be remembered that the first—if not the only— reader whom the author has in mind here is the very person to whom the poem is addressed: Rilke. Hence, the desire for self-renunciation, the urge to disavow everything worldly —that is, the psychology of confession. Naturally, all this— both the choice of words and the choice of tone—takes place so unwittingly that the concept of "choice" is inap­plicable here. For art, especially poetry, differs from any other form of psychological activity precisely because in it everything—form, content, and the very spirit of the work —is picked out by ear.

The above by no means signifies intellectual irresponsi­bility. Exactly the opposite is the case: rational enterprise— choice, selection—is entrusted to hearing, or (putting it more clumsily but more accurately) is focused into hear­ing. In a certain sense, at issue is a miniaturization, a com­puterization of selective, that is, analytical, processes, a transformation or reduction of them to one organ—that of hearing.

But not only analytical functions are relegated by the poet to hearing; the same thing happens with the purely spiritual aspect of creativity. Picked out "by ear" is the very spirit of the work, whose vehicle or transmitter in a poem is its meter, for it is precisely meter that predetermines the tonality of the work. Anyone with some experience in composing verse knows that verse meter is the equiva­lent of a certain psychological state, at times not of just one state but of several. The poet "picks" his way toward the spirit of a work by means of the meter. Lurking within the use of standard meters is, of course, the danger of mechanical speech, and every poet overcomes that danger in his own way, and the more difficult the process of over­coming, the more detailed—both for himself and for the reader—becomes the picture of a given psychological state. Often the upshot is that the poet begins to perceive meters as animate—inspired in the archaic sense—entities, as cer­tain sacred vessels. This is basically just. Form is even less separable from content in poetry than body is from soul, and what makes the body dear is precisely that it is mortal (in poetry the equivalent of death is mechanicalness of sound or the possibility of slipping into cliche). At any rate, every verse-maker has his o^ favorite, dominant meters, which could be regarded as his autographs, for they corre­spond to the most frequently repeated psychological state of the author. Trochees with feminine or—more often— dactylic endings may properly be considered Tsvetaeva's "signature." In the frequency of their use Tsvetaeva prob­ably surpasses even Nekrasov. It's quite possible, however, that both poets resorted to trochaic meters in response to the glut of iambic trimeter and tetrameter common to the works of authors belonging both to the "Harmonic School" and to the Russian Symbolists. Tsvetaeva may have had an added psychological reason: in the Russian trochee one can always hear folklore. This was kno^ by Nekrasov as well; yet his trochees echo with the narrative tone of the bylina (epic song), whereas Tsvetaeva's reverberate with lamenta­tions and incantation.

Her involvement with the tradition of the lamentation (or rather the fact that her ear was attuned to it) can be explained by, among other things, the additional possibili­ties of assonance contained in trisyllabic clausulae, on which the verse line of the lamentation, as a rule, rests. Most likely, it is a question of the poet endeavoring to transmit the psychology of modern man by means of traditional folk poetics. When it works—and for Tsvetaeva it almost always worked—it gives one an impression of linguistic justification for any fracture or dislocation of the modern sensibility; and not only of a linguistic justification but, regardless of the subject, of a priori lacrimation. At any rate, it is hard to imagine anything more suitable than the trochee in the case of "Novogodnee."

Tsvetaeva's poetry differs from the production of her contemporaries by virtue of a certain a priori tragic note, by a hidden—in a verse—wail. Given that, it should be kept in mind that this note started to sound in the voice of Tsve- taeva not as a result of firsthand tragic experience but as a by-product of her working with language, in particular as a result of her experiments with folklore.

Tsvetaeva in general was extremely prone to stylization: of Russian antiquities (Tsar-Maiden, Swans' Encampment, etc.), of the French Renaissance and Romanticism ( "Phoe­nix" [Casanova's End], "The Snowstorm"), of German folklore ("The Pied Piper"), and so on. However, regard­less of the tradition with which she dealt, regardless of the concrete content, and—what is more important—regardless of the purely intrinsic, emotional reasons that made her re­sort to this or that cultural mask, every theme was rendered, purely euphonically, in a tragic key. It was, in all likeli­hood, not only a matter of intuitive (at first) and physical (later on) perception of her own epoch, but of the general tone—background—of Russian poetic diction at the begin­ning of the century. Every creative process is a reaction to predecessors, and the purely linguistic harmonic stasis of Symbolism needed resolution. Every language, and especially poetic language, always has a vocal future. What

Tsvetaeva produced turned out to be the sought-after vocal way out of the condition of poetic diction, but the pitch of her timbre was so high that a split with both the broad readership and the bulk of the literary profession was in­evitable. The new sound carried not merely a new content but a new spirit. Tsvetaeva's voice had the sound of some­thing unfamiliar and frightening to the Russian ear: the unacceptability of the world.

It was not the reaction of a revolutionary or a progressive demanding changes for the better, nor was it the conserva­tism or snobbery of an aristocrat who remembers better days. On the level of content, it was a question of the tragedy of existence in general, par excellence, outside a temporal context. On the plane of sound, it was a matter of the voice striving in the only direction possible for it: upward. A striving similar to that of the soul toward its source. In the poet's own words, "gravitation from/the earth, above the earth, away from/both the worm and the grain." To this should be added: from one's own self, from one's own throat. The purity (as well as the frequency, for that matter) of this voice's vibration was akin to an echo-signal which is sent into mathematical infinity and finds no reverberation, or, if it does, immediately rejects it. But while acknowledging that this rejection of the world by the voice is indeed a leitmotif of Tsvetaeva's work, it must be noted that her diction was completely devoid of any "etherealness." On the contrary: Tsvetaeva was a poet very much of this world, concrete, surpassing the Acmeists in precision of detail, and in aphoristicness and sarcasm surpassing everybody. More like that of a bird than an angel, her voice always knew above what it was elevated, knew what was there, down below (or, more precisely, what—there below—was lacking). Perhaps that is why it kept rising higher and higher, to expand the field of vision, in reality, though, expanding only the diameter of the world within which the sought-after was missing. That's why her trochee in the first line of "Novogodnee" takes Bight, muffing the short sob with an exclamation point.

There are 193 more lines like this in "Novogodnee." It would take just as much space to analyze any one of them as it did to analyze the first. In principle, this is the way it ought to be, for poetry is the art of condensation, of nar­rowing things down. The most interesting thing for the scholar—as well as for the reader—is to go "back along the beam," that is, to trace the course of this condensation, to determine at what point in the dispersion common to us all the poet first gets a glimpse of a linguistic denomi­nator. However, no matter how much the scholar is re­warded in the course of such a process, the very process itself is similar to an unraveling of fabric, and we shall try to avoid that possibility. We shall dwell only on several of Tsvetaeva's statements made in the course of the poem that cast light on her attitude toward things in general and on the psychology and methodology of the creative process in particular. Statements of this kind in "Novogodnee" are numerous, yet there are even more of the very means of expression—metrical artifices, rhymes, enjambments, sound patterning, and so on—which tell us more about a poet than does his most sincere and broad-beaming declaration.

We needn't look very far for examples if we consider the enjambment extending through the second, third, and fourth lines of "Novogodnee":

Pervoe pis'mo tebe na novom —Nedorozumenie, chto zlachnom— (Zlachnom—zhvachnom) meste zychnom,

meste zvuchnom Kak Eolova pistaya bashnya.

The first letter to you in your new —Mistaken as lush, green— (Ltsh [suggetfs] ruminant) clamorous,

sonorous place Like Aeolus's empty tower.

This excerpt is a remarkable illustration of the manifold thinking characteristic of Tsvetaeva's oeuvre and her en­deavor to consider all. Tsvetaeva is an extremely realistic poet, a poet of the infinite subordinate clause, a poet who does not allow either herself or the reader to take anything on faith.

Her main purpose in these lines is the grounding of the first line's ecstatic charge: "Happy New Year—World —Realm—Haven!" To achieve this she resorts to prosaism, calling the "next world" a "new place." However, she goes beyond normal prosaicizing. The adjective repeated in the phrase "new place" is sufficiently redundant in itself, and that alone would be enough to create an effect of lowering: the redundancy of "new" all by itself compromises "place." But the a priori positiveness residing, independent of the author's will, in the expression "new place"—especially as applied to the "next world"—provokes an upsurge of sar­casm in her, and "new place" is equated by the poet with an object of tourist pilgrimage (which is justified by the ubiquity of death as a phenomenon) by means of the epithet zlachny ("lush, green"). This is all the more re­markable because zlachny undoubtedly came from the Or­thodox prayer for the souls of the dead (" . . . in green pastures, in blissful realms . . ."). Tsvetaeva, however, puts the prayer book aside, if only because Rilke wasn't Ortho­dox, and the epithet returns to its own base modern context. The virtual similarity of the "next world" with a resort is intensified by the internal rhyme of the following adjective, zhcachny ("ruminant"), which is followed by zychny ("clamorous") and zvuchny ("sonorous"). The piling up of adjectives is always suspect even in ordinary speech. In a poem it arouses even more suspicion—and not without reason. For the use of zyclmy here marks the beginning of a transition from sarcasm to an overall elegiac tone.

Zyclmy ("clamorous"), of course, still continues the theme of the crowd, of the marketplace, which was intro­duced by zlachny—zhvachny; but this is already a different function of the mouth, a function of the voice in space rein­forced by the last epithet, zvuchny. And space itself is ex­panded by the vision of a solitary tower (Aeolus's) in it. "Empty"—that is, inhabited by the wind, that is, possess­ing a voice. The "new place/pasture" gradually begins to acquire the features of the "next world."

Theoretically, the lowering effect could have been achieved simply by the enjambment itself ( novom/ . . . meste). Tsvetaeva used this device—the run-on line—so often that enjambment, in turn, can be considered her signature, her fingerprint. But perhaps, precisely because of the frequency of its use, this device did not satisfy her enough, and she felt the need to "animate" it with paren­theses—that minimalized form of lyrical digression. (In general, Tsvetaeva, like no one else, indulged in the use of typographic means of expressing subordinate aspects of speech.)

However, the main reason that prompted her to extend the enjambment over three lines was not so much the danger of cliche hidden (for all the irony of the tone) in the phrase "new place" as the author's dissatisfaction with the commonplaceness of the rhyme krovom—novom. She couldn't wait to get even, and a line and a half later she really does get even. But until that happens, the author subjects every word of hers, every thought of hers, to the sharpest rebuke; that is, she comments upon herself. More precisely, though: the ear comments upon the content.

None of Tsvetaeva's contemporaries is so constantly mindful of what has been stated, so prone to keep tabs on himself as she is. Thanks to that feature (of character? eye? ear?), her poems acquire the verisimilitude of prose. They contain—especially those of the mature Tsvetaeva—no poetic a priority, nothing which hasn't been questioned. Tsvetaeva's verse is dialectical, but it is the dialectics of dialogue: between meaning and meaning, between meaning and sound. It is as though Tsvetaeva were constantly strug­gling against the a priori authority of poetic speech, con­stantly trying to "take the buskins off' her verse. The main device, to which she resorts especially often in "Novogod­nee," is refinement. In the line that follows "Like Aeolus's empty tower,'' as if she were crossing out what she has already stated, she falls back to the beginning and starts the poem anew:

The first letter to you from yesterday's, In which, without you, I'll moan myself empty— Homeland · . .

The poem gathers momentum again, but now along the tracks that were laid by the stylistic features of the pre­ceding lines and by the preceding rhyme. "In which, with­out you, I'll moan myself empty" wedges itself into the en­jambment, thereby not so much emphasizing the author's personal emotion as separating "yesterday's" from "home­land" (here meaning the earth, the planet, the world). This pause between "yesterday's" and ''homeland" is seen— heard—no longer by the author but by the poem's ad­dressee, Rilke. At this point Tsvetaeva is looking at the world, herself included, through his eyes now, not through her own; that is, from a distance. This may be the only fonn of narcissism characteristic of her; and one of her motives for writing "Novogodnee" may well have been this tempta­tion: to take a look at herself from a distance. In any case, precisely because she is attempting here to give a picture of the world through the eyes of someone who has left it, Tsvetaeva separates "yesterday's" from "homeland," at the same time paving the way for one of the most transfixing— the first of many—passages in the poem, where she does get even—with herself—for the uneventful rhyme in the first two lines. The subordinate awkwardness of the wedged-in "In which, without you, I'll moan myself empty" is fol­lowed by

Homeland—now already from one of

The stars...

This is astounding. For it's one thing to take a look at oneself from a distance; ultimately, she was engaged in this in one way or another all her life. To look at yourself through the eyes of Rilke is something else. But in this too, we must suppose, she engaged rather frequently, if we take into account her attitude toward Rilke. To look at her­self through the eyes of the deceased Rilke's soul wander­ing in space, and moreover to see not herself but the world abandoned by him—is something that requires a spiritual optic capability which we don't know that anyone has. A reader is not prepared for such a tum of events. To be more precise, the deliberate awkwardness of "in which, without you, 111 moan myself empty" may prepare him for a lot of things, but not for the accelerating dactylism of "Home­land" or much less for the remarkable broken compound rhyme of odnoi iz ("one of'). And least of all, of course, does he expect that odnoi iz will be followed by that ex­plosively abrupt Zvyozd ("the stars"). He is still lulled by the homey-sounding "yesterday's" (vcherashnei), he is still lingering over the slightly mannered iznoyus' ("I'll moan myself empty"), when he is overwhehned by the full dy­namics and total irrevocability of "'Homeland—now already from one of/The stars." After two ruptured enjambments he is least prepared for a third—a traditional one.

It is not altogether improbable that this run-on verse is a bow, a private signal given by Tsvetaeva to Rilke in reply to his elegy to her, written and sent to Tsvetaeva in the summer of the same year, 1926, whose third line also begins with an enjambment containing a star:

О die Verluste ins All, Marina, die stilrzenden Sterne!

Wir vermehren es nicht, wohin wir uns werfen, zu welchem

218 I J О s E P H B R О D SEI

Sterne hinzu! Im Ganzen ist immer sclwn alles gezahlt ·

It is unlikely that in human consciousness two more divergent concepts exist than "homeland" (read "earth") and "star." Equating them with each other is in itself an act of violence upon consciousness. But the slightly dis­dainful "one of ...," in diminishing both "star" and "home­land," seems to compromise their mutual significance and debases the violated consciousness. In this regard, it is worthwhile to note Tsvetaeva's tactfulness in playing down, here and later on in the poem, her lot as an expatriate and in limiting the meaning of "homeland" and "star" to the context that emerged as a result of Rilke's death, and not as a result of her own peregrinations. Nevertheless, it is hard to rid oneself completely of the impression that the view described here contains an oblique autobiographical element. For the quality of sight—vision—that the author ascribes to her addressee was engendered not only by her psychological attachment to the latter. The center of grav­ity in any attachment is, as a rule, not its object but the one who has become attached; even if it is a matter of one poet's attachment to another, the main question is: What are my poems—to him?

As for the degree of despair over the loss ot a loved one, which is expressed in our readiness to swap places with him, the a priori impossibility of the realization of such a wish is in itself comforting enough, for it serves as a certain

· Oh, the losses into the All, Marina, the falling/starsl We can't make it larger, wherever we fling, to whatever/star we gol Numbered for all time are the parts of the Whole. (Translated by J. D. Leishman) emotional limit that spares the imagination further re­sponsibility. Whereas the quality of vision responsible for perceiving "homeland" as "one of the stars" testifies not only to the ability of "Novogodnee's" author to switch the places of subtrahends but also to the ability of her imagina­tion to abandon her hero and to look at even him from afar. For it is not so much Rilke who "sees" his homeland of yesterday as one of the stars, as it is the author of the poem who "sees" Rilke "seeing" all of this. And the question naturally arises: What is the author's own location and how does she happen to be there?

As for the first part of the question, one can be content with a reference to the thirty-eighth line of Gavrila Ro- manovich Derzhavin's ode "On the Death of Prince Me- shchersky" ( 1779).' As for the second part, the best answer is provided by Tsvetaeva herself, and a little later well turn to the quotes. For the moment, though, let us presuppose that the knack of estranging—from reality, from a text, from the self, from thoughts about the self —which may be the first prerequisite for creativity and is peculiar, to a certain degree, to every man of letters, developed in Tsvetaeva's case to the level of instinct. What began as a literary device became a form (nay, nonn) of existence. And not only because she was physically estranged from so many things (including motherland, readership, recognition). And not because in her lifetime so many things occurred to which the only response could be distancing, things that demanded distancing. The above- mentioned transformation took place because Tsvetaeva

· This line, referring to Prince Meshchersky, who has suddenly wed, reads: "^faere is he?—He's there.—Where there?—We don't know." the poet was identical to Tsvetaeva the person; between word and deed, between art and existence, there was neither a comma nor even a dash: Tsvetaeva used an equals sign. Hence, it follows that the device is transferred to life, that what develops, instead of craftsmanship, is the soul; that in the end they are the same thing. Up to a certain point, verse plays the role of the soul's tutor; afterward— and fairly soon—it's the other way around. The writing of "Novogodnee" took place at a time when the soul no longer had anything to learn from literature, even from Rilke. That's exactly why it became possible for the author of "Novogodnee" to get a view of the world through the eyes of a poet who had abandoned this world, but also to take a look at that poet from afar, from the outside —from where that poet's soul had not yet been. In other words, the quality of vision is determined by the meta­physical possibilities of the individual, which, in turn, are a guarantee of infinity—if not a mathematical, then a vocal one.

That is how this poem begins—with a fusion of extreme degrees of despair and estrangement. Psychologically that was more than justified, for the latter is often a direct conse­quence and expression of the former; especially in the case of someone's death, which precludes the possibility of ade­quate reaction. (Isn't art, generally speaking, a substitute for this unavailable emotion? And poetic art especially? And if so, isn't the "on the death of a poet" genre of poetry a sort of logical apotheosis and the purpose of poetry: a sacrifice of effect on the altar of cause?) Their interdepen­dence is so obvious that it is difficult at times to avoid iden­tifying despair with estrangement. In any case, let us try not to forget the pedigree of the latter when we talk about "Novogodnee"; estrangement is at the same time both the method and the subject of this poem.

Lest she should slip into pathos (something the develop­ment of the "homeland—one of the stars" metaphor might have led to), and also because of her own proclivity for the concrete, for realism, Tsvetaeva devotes the next sixteen lines to a very detailed description of the circumstances in which she learned of Rilke's death. The ecstatic character of the preceding eight lines is offset in this description (in the form of a dialogue with a visitor, Marc Slonim, who suggests she "do a piece" about Rilke) by the literalism of direct speech. The naturalness, the unpredictability of the rhymes that rig out this dialogue, the abruptness of the retorts—impart to this passage the character of a diary entry, almost prosaic verisimilitude. At the same time, the dynamics of the retorts themselves, reinforced partly by their monosyllables as well as by the dialecticism of their content, create an impression of shorthand, of a desire to be done with all these details as soon as possible and to get do^ to what is most crucial. Striving to achieve a realistic effect, Tsvetaeva employs all sorts of means, the main one being her mixing of lexical planes, which permits her (sometimes in one line) to convey the entire psycho­logical gamut produced by some situation or other. Thus, through the give-and-take with the visitor soliciting the piece from her, she learns about the place where Rilke has died—the sanatorium at Valmont, near Lausanne, where­upon follows the nominative sentence that appears even without the question "Where?" that normally prompts such information:

"In a sanatorium."

And immediately afterward, the author, who has already t^^ed downwn the request to "do" a piece, that is, who does not wish to bare her emotions in public and therefore con­ceals them from her interlocutor, adds in parentheses: "A rented paradise."

This is an important shift from the albeit feverish but nonetheless civil tone of the dialogue: a shift toward vul­garity, almost a marketplace womanish yammer ( cf. the standard saying: "A lawyer's a hired conscience"). This specific shift—let us call it a do^ward estrangement—is triggered not so much by the desire to conceal one's feel­ings as by the wish to humiliate oneself—and by this de­basement defend oneself from those feelings. As if to say, "It's not me, it's somebody else who's suffering. I couldn't have taken it . . ."· Nevertheless, even in this self-flagella­tion, in this self-denial, in this vulgarity, the poetic tension doesn't slacken, and this is attested by the word "para­dise." For the point of the poem is the description of the "next world," the comprehension of which is derived from "this" one. The coarseness of the sensations, however, is evi­dence not so much of their strength as of their approxi- mateness, and by exclaiming "A rented paradise," the author alludes to her still imperfect conception of the "next world," to the level of comprehension on which she still exists; that is, to the need for further developing the subject, something which, in the first place, is necessitated by the very rapidity of the verse, which is increased by the tele­graphic piling up of monosyllables and sentence fragments.

· Akhmatova, "Requiem."

S nastupayushchim! (Rozhdalsya zavtra!)— Rasskazat', chto sdelala uznav pro ... ? Tss ... Ogovorilas'. Po privychke. Zhizn' i smert' davno beru v kavchki, Kak zavedomo pustye splyoty.

Happy forthcoming year! (Born tomorrow!)— Shall I tell you what I did when I learned of... ? Sh! ... A slip of the tongue. Out of habit. I have long put life and death in quotes Like known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications.

Throughout the entire poem Tsvetaeva never once uses the phrase "your death." She avoids it even when the line allows it; even though several days after writing "Novo­godnee" she wrote a short essay with just that title: "Your Death." It is not so much a question of superstitious re­luctance to acknowledge death's proprietary right to Rilke —or his to death. The author simply refuses to hammer with her own hands this last psychological nail into the poet's coffin. First of all because such a phrase is the first step toward oblivion, toward domestication—i.e., toward incomprehension—of the catastrophe. And, in addition, because it is impossible to speak of a person's physical death without speaking—because of not knowing—about his physical life. In that case, Rilke's death would have taken on an abstract character against which Tsvetaeva would have rebelled purely as a realist. As a result, death be­comes the object of guesswork to the same degree that Rilke's life was its object. That is, the expression "your death" proves to be just as inapplicable and meaningless as "your life." But Tsvetaeva goes a bit further, and here we have the beginning of what we can call an "upward estrangement" and Tsvetaeva's confession.

I have long put life and death in quotes

Like known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications.

The literal meaning of these lines—and Tsvetaeva should always be taken first of all not figuratively but literally— just as the Acmeists should be, for instance—is as follows: to the author "life" and "death" seem like an unsuccessful attempt by the language to adjust to the phenomenon, and, what is more, an attempt that debases the phenomenon with the sense which usually is invested in these words: "known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications." That is, the life of So-and-so is not yet Being, with all the consequences that this entails for the death of So-and-so, too. Splyoty is either an archaic form for "gossip," or a vernacularism for "plexus" (of circumstances, relationships, etc.); in either case "known-to-be-empty/ a priorily hollow" is an extremely fitting epithet. The key word here is davno ("long"), for it indicates the repetitive, mass character of the splyoty ("gossip," "fabrications") that compromises "life" and "death" and makes them inapplicable to Rilke.

Apart from everything else, the lyrical heroine of "Novo­godnee" is Tsvetaeva herself, the poet; and as poet she gives prejudiced treatment to these two words, which have been emasculated not only by the meaning imparted to them for so long and by so many, but also by her own extremely fre­quent use of them. And this is precisely what compels her to stop short in the middle and put her finger to her lips:

Sh! . . . A slip of the tongue. Out of habit.

This is one of the many rebellions of the poet against herself that are typical of Tsvetaeva's lyric poems. These rebellions are prompted by the same striving to achieve realistic effects that is responsible for her combining of lexical planes. The purpose of all these devices—or: move­ments of the soul—is to rid her speech of poetic a priority, to demonstrate the presence of common sense. In other words, to make the reader maximally dependent on what has been said. Tsvetaeva doesn't play egalitarian games with the reader: she places herself on his level—lexically, logically, and only far enough to make it possible for him to follow her.

Life and death I utter with a hidden Smirk . . .

she adds farther on, as if carefully enunciating for the reader the meaning of the previous lines. For the same reasons, and also because at the beginning of the poem a visitor suggests that she "do a piece," Tsvetaeva resorts to the intonation^^r mask^^f a journalist conducting an inter­view:

Now—how was the trip? How was the heart tearing and not torn Apart? As on Orlov trotters, · Not lagging, you said, behind eagles, Was it breathtaking—от more? Sweeter?

The euphemistic quality of this ''how was the trip?" (to the "new place," i.e., to heaven, paradise, and so forth),

· Bred by Count Orlov, whose name is derived from the Russian word for eagle.

as well as the subsequent periphrasis from Rilke himself, are attempts to contain the emotions about to get out of control several lines earlier as she replies to "Shall I tell you what I did when I learned of . . ,":

I did nothing, but something Was done that does without Shadow and echo!

Now—how was the trip?

Tsvetaeva resorts here to a graphic intemiption empha­sizing both a breaking off of the previous intonation and a physical breaking away of the content—upward (in the reader's consciousness) because it is downward (on paper). At this point the poem begins to move only in that direction, and if it stands still at times for lyrical digression or for lowering of tone, it occurs in spheres so high that topographical differentiation seems meaningless. In part, this is what Tsvetaeva herself has in mind when, instead of answering her own question ". . . more?/ Sweeter?" she remarks:

No heights are there, or descents For one who has flown on real Russian Eagles.

In other words, for a person who has had the experience of living in Russia, who has experienced the metaphysical Russian roller coaster, any landscape, including an other­worldly one, seems ordinary. And further, with the bitter­ness and pride of the patriot, Tsvetaeva adds:

. . . We have a blood tie with the next world: Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the

next world /n this one.

This is not flag-waving patriotism or even a liberal vari­ety that, as a rule, is tinged with sardonic tones; it is a meta­physical patriotism. "Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the next world/In this one." These words are prompted by a clear awareness of the tragic nature of hu­man existence as a whole—and by an understanding of Russia as the most perfect approximation of it.

This line totally dispels the idiotic contentions that Tsve­taeva never accepted the Revolution. Of course she didn't: for to "accept" human slaughter, regardless of the ideals in whose name it is carried out, means to become an accom­plice and a betrayer of the dead. To "accept" such a thing is tantamount to the assertion that the dead are worse than those who have remained alive. Such an "acceptance" is a position of superiority held by the majority (of the liv­ing) with regard to the minority (of the dead)—i.e., the most repulsive form of spiritual debauchery. For any human being who has been brought up on Christian ethical standards, such an "acceptance" is unthinkable, and accu­sations of political blindness or of failure to understand historical processes, manifested in the refusal to accept these things, tum into praise of the individual for his moral clearsightedness.

"Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the next world/ In this one" is not so far, after all, from "All of you, my native land,/ the King of Heaven traversed/in the guise of a slave, giving his blessing," or from "Russia one must sim­ply believe in."^ This line of Tsvetaeva's is evidence that she did something more substantial than not accepting the Revolution: she grasped it fully. As an absolute baring—to the bone—of the core of existence. And this is probably what prompts the use of the verb "has been," which alludes not so much to Rilke's visits to Russia (in 1899 and 1900) as to Tsvetaeva herself, who found herself outside Russia. It is also probable that the exclamation "Smooth switch!" that follows "In this one," that is, the ease of the relocation from this world to the next, is in part an echo of trigger- happy revolutionary justice. And all the more natural is what immediately comes after "switch":

Life and death I utter with a hidden Smirk—[you]'ll touch it with your own/ Life and death I utter with a footnote, An asterisk ...

The accumulating didactic mass of "you'll touch it with your own" finds vent in high lyricism, for the identity of the author's views on "life and death" with those of her addressee is presented here in the form of a certain over­lapping of two hidden smiles—this existential kiss, the tenderness of which is euphonically conveyed by the whisper-like kosnyosh'sya ("[you]11 touch"). The omitted personal pronoun ty ("you") in "[youjl touch it with your own" increases the sensation of intimacy that penetrates the next line as well: "Life and death I utter with a footnote,t/ An asterisk"—since "footnote" sounds less dramatic than

· Lines by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73). t Zhizn' i smert' proiznoshu so snoskoi.

"quotes" or even "smirk." While still conveying^^r de­veloping—the author's feeling that "life and death" are compromised, "footnote" (snoskoi), owing to the diminu­tive, almost hypocoristic quality of its sound, shifts the speech to a purely personal plane and seems to equate the addressee with itself by becoming "an asterisk." For Rilke is already a star or among the stars, and then what follows in parentheses are two and a half lines of pure poetry:

(the night which I plead for: Instead of a cerebral hemisphere— A stellar one!)

These parentheses are all the more remarkable because they are, in some sense, a graphic equivalent of the image they enclose. As for the image itself, its additional charm lies in the identification of consciousness with a page con­sisting solely of footnotes to Rilke—that is, stars. In tum, the archaic word chayu ("I plead for") bears within it all possible tenderness and the impossibility of realizing such a desire, so that an immediate change of register is required. Therefore, after the parentheses close we hear speech that is distinguished from the preceding segment by its out­wardly businesslike tone. This tone, however, is only a mask; the emotional content is the same as before:

The following, my friend, Shouldn't be forgotten: that if Rustian Letters are running on now instead of German— It's not because nowadays, they claim, Anything will do, that a dead ^n (beggar) will wolf anything—

Won't bat an eye! · . .

Camouflaged by the intentional bureaucratic tone of "the following," that content makes itself felt in the very mean­ing of the passage: its subject is no more and no less than the author's request to Rilke that he forgive her for writing the poem in Russian instead of German. By no means is this request an expression of coyness; Tsvetaeva had been in correspondence with Rilke since 1926 (started, by the way, on Boris Pasternak's initiative), and that correspon­dence had been conducted in German. The emotional basis of the request lies in the author's awareness that by using Russian—not Hilke's native language—she is distancing herself from the addressee, more than she already was distanced by the fact of his death; and more than she would have been had she taken the trouble of writing in German. Moreover, this request serves the function of creating distance from the "pure poetry" of the preceding lines for which Tsvetaeva virtually reproaches herself. In any case, she realizes that achievements of a purely poetic nature (like the contents of the previous parentheses), in their turn, remove her from Rilke; that she can get carried away—she, that is, and not her addressee. In the vulgar bravura of "if Russian/Letters are running on now instead of German . . ." one can detect a note of slight contempt for herself and her work. And then she starts to justify herself in the same jaunty, marketplace tone: "It's not be­cause nowadays, they claim, I Anything will do, that a dead man (beggar) will wolf anything— I Won't bat an eye!" This tone, however, is only a supplementary form of self- flagellation. The raffishness of this "... a dead man (beggar) will wolf anything— I Won't bat an eyel"—worsened by a mixture of proverb and folkloric synonym for a deceased person, "blinker" (zlunurik)—is present here not as a means of characterizing the addressee but as a touch added to the author's psychological self-portrait: as an illustration of the possible extent of her debasement. Precisely from here, from the very bottom, Tsvetaeva begins her self-defense, yielding a result that is all the more believable the worse the point of departure:

—but because the next world, Ours—Ы thirteen, in Novodevichy [monastery] I understood—is not tongueless but all-tongues.

This, again, is staggering, because the preceding lines have not prepared us for anything of the sort. Even a fairly experienced reader of Tsvetaeva, someone accustomed to her stylistic contrasts, often enough finds himself unpre­pared for these take-offs from the gutters into the empyrean. For in Tsvetaeva's poems the reader encounters not the strategy of the verse-maker but the strategy of ethics—to use her own formulation, art in the light of conscience. On our part let us add: the complete overlapping of art and ethics. It is precisely the logic of conscience (or rather con­scientiousness), the logic of guilt for being among the liv­ing while her addressee is dead, the awareness that the deceased's oblivion is inevitable and that her own lines are paving the way toward that oblivion—it is precisely all this that prompted her request that she be forgiven for an additional flight from the reality of his—the addressee's— death: for a poem in Russian, or for a poem at all. The argument Tsvetaeva makes to vindicate herself—"because the next world ... is not tongueless but all-tongues"—is remarkable above aU because it oversteps the psychological threshold at which nearly everyone stops: the interpreta­tion of death as an extralingual experience that rids one of any linguistic pangs. "Not tongueless but all-tongues" goes much further, taking conscience back to its source, where it is relieved of the burden of earthly guilt. These words have a feeling, it seems, of arms stretched wide and the festiveness of a revelation available perhaps only to a child —"at thirteen, in Novodevichy."

Even that argiment, however, proves to be insufficient. For those very pangs, the very thoughts about language, recollections of childhood, paraphrases of Rilke himself, ultimately poetry as such with its rhymes and images— everything that reconciles one to reality—to the author like a flight, like a distraction from reality:

Am I getting distracted?

Tsvetaeva inquires, looking back at the preceding stanza, but basically at the entire poem as a whole, at her not so much lyrical as guilt-prompted digressions.

On the whole one may observe that Tsvetaeva's strength lies precisely in her psychological realism, in the voice of conscience, pacified by nothing or no one, that resounds in her verse either as a theme or, at least, as a postscript. One of the possible definitions of her creative production is the Russian subordinate clause put at the service of Calvinism. Another variation is: Calvinism in the embrace of this sub­ordinate clause. In any case, no one has demonstrated the congeniality of the said Weltanschauung and this grammar in a more obvious way than Tsvetaeva has. Naturally, the severity of the interrelation between an individual and him­self possesses a certain aesthetics; but it seems there is no more absorbing, more capacious, and more natural form for self-analysis than the one that is built into the multi­stage syntax of the Russian complex sentence. Enveloped in this form, Calvinism "takes" the individual much farther than he would happen to get had he used Calvinism's native German. So far that what is left of the German is the "best memories," that German becomes the tongue of tenderness:

Am I getting distracted? But no such thing Could happen-—to be distracted from you. Each thought, every, Du Lieber, Syllable leads to you—no matter what The subject . . .

This Du Lieber is at once tribute to a feeling of guilt ("Russian I Letters are running on now instead of Ger­man") and deliverance from the guilt. Behind it, moreover, there stands a strictly private, intimate, almost physical endeavor to draw nearer to Rilke, to touch him in a way that is natural to him—with the sound of his native tongue. But if this were her only concern, Tsvetaeva, being an extremely versatile poet technically, would not have switched into German; she would have found on her palette other means for expressing those feelings already men­tioned. The point is probably that Tsvetaeva has already said Du Lieber in Russian at the beginning of the poem: "A man walked in—whoever you like—(beloved—/ You)," The repetition of words in verse is in general not recom­mended; if one repeats words with an a priori positive coloring, the risk of tautology is greater than usual. If only for this reason, it was imperative that Tsvetaeva switch into another language, and German played the role here of that other language. She uses Du Lieber here not so much semanticaUy as phonetically. Above all, because "Novogodnee" is not a macaronic poem, and therefore the semantic burden that falls to Du Lieber is either too huge or totally insignificant. The first possibility is quite unlikely, for Tsvetaeva utters Du Lieber almost sotto voce and with the spontaneity of a person for whom "German is more native than Russian." Du Lieber is simply that famous "blessed, meaningless word"" pronounced "as our own," and its generalizing blessed and meaningless role is only confirmed by the no less nonspecific atmosphere of its accompanying rhyme: "o chom by ni byf ("no matter what"). Thus, we are left with the second possibility, that is, with pure phonetics. Du Lieber, injected into the mass of the Russian text, is first of all a sound—not Russian, but not necessarily German either: like any sound. The sensa­tion to which the use of a foreign word gives rise is one that is first of all directly phonetic and therefore more personal, as it were, more private: the eye or ear reacts before reason. In other words, Tsvetaeva uses Du Lieber here in a supra- lingual rather than in its strictly German meaning.

A shift into another language to illustrate a psychological state is a fairly extreme means and in itself is indica­tive of that state. But poetry, in essence, is itself a cer­tain other language—or a translation from such. The use of the German Du Lieber is Tsvetaeva's attempt to ap­proximate the original, which she defines, following what rhymes with Du Lieber, in what may be the most significant parentheses in the history of Russian poetry:

· From Mandelstam's poem 'In Petersburg we shall meet again."

Each thmtght, every, Du Lieber, Syllable leads to you—no matter what The rubject (though German is more native

than Russian For me, the most native is Angelic!) . . .

This is one of the most significant admissions made by the author in "Novogodnee"; and, from the standpoint of intonation, the comma comes not after "me" but after "Russian." It is remarkable that the euphemistic quality of "Angelic" is almost completely removed by the whole con­text of the poem—by the "next world," where Rilke hap­pens to be, by his immediate surroundings in "that" world. It is also remarkable that "Angelic" testifies not to despair but to the height—almost literal, physical, perhaps—of the spiritual flight precipitated not so much by the presup­posed location of the "next world" as by the overall poetic orientation of the author. For "Angelic" is more native to Tsvetaeva in general in the same way that German is more native than Russian in general: biographically. It is a question of a height that is "more native," i.e., not attain­able by either Russian or German: a height that is supra- lingual, in ordinary parlance—spiritual. Angels, ultimately, communicate in sounds. However, the polemical tone clearly distinguishable in "for me the most native is Angelic" points to the completely nonclerical character of that "Angelic" and to its very indirect relation to bliss; in effect, this is just another variation of Tsvetaeva's celebrated formula: "the voice of heavenly truth—versus earthly truth." The hierarchism of world view reflected in both formulations is an unlimited hierarchism—not limited, at least, by ecclesiastical topography. The "Angelic" she uses here is therefore merely an auxiliary term to designate the height of the meaning to which, as she puts it, she shrieks herself.

This height can be expressed only in physical units of space, and the entire remainder of the poem consists of a description of constantly increasing degrees of removal, one of which is in the voice of the author herself. Once again assuming the mask of an interviewer, Tsvetaeva in­quires (starting with herself and, as is her habit, imme­diately discarding herself):

—Haven't you... about me at all?—

The surroundings, Rainer, how you're feeling?

Most urgently, most assuredly—

First impression of the universe

(I.e., by the jxiet in it),

And the last—of the planet

That's been given to you only once—as a whole!

This is already a sufficiently angelic perspective, but Tsvetaeva's understanding of the situation differs from a seraphic interpretation thanks to the absence of the con­cern on her part for the fate of the soul alone—or, for that matter, for the fate of the body alone (which makes it dif­ferent from the purely human viewpoint): "'To isolate them is to insult them both," she states; no angel would say such a thing.

In "Novogodnee" Tsvetaeva illustrates the immortality of a soul which has materialized through bodily activity— c^reative work—by her use of spatial categories, i.e., bodily ones, and this is what allows her not only to rhyme "poet" with "planet" but to equate them as well: the literal uni­verse with the traditional "universe" of individual con­sciousness. It is a matter, therefore, of the parting of things that are equal in scope, and what the "interviewer" de­scribes is not the "first impression of the universe . . . by the poet," nor even their separation or meeting, but

—a

Confrontation: a meeting and firrf Parting . . .

The reliability of Tsvetaeva's metaphysics comes pre­cisely from the accuracy of her translation of Angelic into police-station parlance, for a "confrontation" is always both a meeting and a parting: both first and last. And what follow this grandiose equation are lines of incredible tenderness and lyricism whose piercing effect is due di­rectly to the ratio between the above-mentioned cosmic spectacle and the insignificance (set off, moreover, in parentheses) of a detail that at once evokes associations both with creative activity and with childhood, and equates their irretrievability.

At your own hand How did you look (at the trace—on it—of ink) From your so many (Iww many?) miles Endless because beginningless Height above the crystal level Of the Mediterranean—and other saucers.

As a variation on the theme of "Thus souls look down from on high . . ."· these lines astonish one not only with the author's perspicacity, which allows her with an equal

· From Tyutchev.

degree of clarity to distinguish both an. ink stain on a hand belonging to an "abandoned body" and the crystallinity of "the Mediterranean—and other saucers" (which confirm these saucers' many-mile remove from this particular soul). The most thrilling thing in these lines, concomitant with their perspicacity, is the conception of endlessness as be- ginninglessness. This entire "landscape of disavowal" is presented in one breath, as though in a glide, by means of a simple compound sentence providing lexical (psycho­logical ) identity between the naively direct "ink stain" and the abstractness of "endless because beginningless," and through the irony of the "crystal saucers." This is a view from paradise, where (whence) it makes no difference, whence any view is a view do^ward: