Selected Essays

Attack

I.

What poetry needs is Classicism, what poetry needs is Hellenism, what poetry needs is a heightened sense of imagery, the rhythm of the machine, urban collectivism, peasant folklore . . . Poor poetry! Under the muzzle of these unmitigated demands now being leveled at her, she shies. What should poetry be like? Well, maybe poetry shouldn’t be like anything, maybe poetry doesn’t owe anybody anything, and maybe these creditors of hers are all fraudulent! Nothing comes easier than talk about what art needs: first of all, it’s always arbitrary and commits nobody to anything; second, it provides an inexhaustible theme for philosophizing; third, it relieves people of a rather unpleasant obligation that not everybody is up to—gratitude for what is. It relieves them from the most commonplace gratitude for what a given time has to offer as poetry.

O monstrous ingratitude: to Kuzmin, to Mayakovsky, to Khlebnikov, Aseev, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sologub, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilev, Khodasevich¹—quite different as they are, made of different clay. They aren’t, after all, simply the Russian poets of yesterday or today; they are for all time. God wasn’t humiliating us when he gave us the likes of these. A people does not choose its poets, just as no one ever chooses his own parents. A people that does not know how to honor its poets deserves . . . Well, it deserves nothing. You might just say it is irrelevant. Yet what a difference between the pure ignorance of the people and the half-knowledge of the ignorant fop. The Hottentots, to test their old men, would make them climb a tree. Then they would shake the tree: if the old man had grown so weak he fell out of the tree, that meant he had to be killed. The snob imitates the Hottentots; his favored method recalls the ritual I have just described. To this, I think the proper response is contempt. We must distinguish between those who are interested in poetry and those who are interested in a Hottentot amusement.

Nothing favors the contagion of snobbery more than frequent change in the generations of poets, given one and the same generation of readers. The reader gets used to feeling himself an observer in the parterre. Before him file the changing schools. He frowns, grimaces, acts capriciously. Finally, he begins to feel an altogether unfounded sense of his own superiority—of the constant before the ephemeral, of the immobile before the mobile. The rapid change of poetic schools in Russia has sent one and the same reader reeling.

The reading generation of the nineties turned out to be insubstantial, utterly incompetent in poetry. For this reason, the Symbolists long awaited their readers and, by strength of circumstances, by their intellect, their education and maturity, seemed much older than the callow youth to whom they turned. The first decade of the twentieth century, judging by the decadence of public taste, was not much higher than the nineties, and along with The Scales,² that militant citadel of the new school, we had the illiterate tradition of the “Wild Rose” group [Shipovniki], the monstrous almanac literature, with its coarse and ignorant pretentiousness.

As individual and highly polished poems appeared out of the great womb of Symbolism, as the tribe disintegrated and a kingdom of the poetic person ensued, the reader who’d been educated on tribal poetry of the Symbolist sort—that womb of all new Russian poetry—grew distraught in a world of blossoming diversity where everything would no longer fit under the tribal hat, where every person stood bareheaded and apart. After this tribal period, which infused new blood and proclaimed an exceptionally capacious canon, after a dense medley that triumphed in the rich, deep bell-ringing of Viacheslav Ivanov, came the time of the person, of personality. Yet all of contemporary Russian poetry came out of the tribal Symbolist womb. The reader has a short memory, and is unwilling to acknowledge this. O acorns, acorns! who needs an oak when we have acorns.³

II.

Somebody once managed to photograph the eye of a fish. The picture showed a railroad bridge and several details of the landscape, but the optical law of fish-vision showed all this in an improbably distorted manner. If somebody managed to photograph the poetic eye of Academician Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky⁴ or of the average member of the Russian intelligentsia, how for example he sees his Pushkin, the result would be a picture no less unexpected than the world seen by the fish.

Distortion of the poetic work in the perception of the reader is an inevitable social phenomenon, difficult and useless to combat: easier to bring electrification to Russia than to teach all literate readers to read Pushkin as he is written, rather than as their emotional needs require and their intellectual capacities permit.

As distinct from musical notation, for example, poetic notation leaves a fairly big gap, the absence of a large number of signs, indications, pointers, implications, which alone make the text comprehensible and coherent. Yet all these nonexistent signs are no less precise than musical notes or dance-hieroglyphs; the poetically literate reader supplies them on his own, eliciting them from the text itself, so speak.

Poetic literacy does not in any case coincide with ordinary literacy, with reading the alphabet, or even with literary erudition. If the percentage of ordinary and literary illiteracy is very high in Russia, poetic illiteracy is absolutely abysmal, and all the worse for being confused with ordinary illiteracy, so that anyone who knows how to read is considered poetically literate. The above has a special relevance to the half-educated mass of our intelligentsia, infected by snobbism, having lost their native feeling for the language, essentially rendered languageless, amorphous in relation to language, tickling their long-dulled language-nerves with cheap and easy stimuli, dubious lyricisms and neologisms, often alien and hostile to the essence of Russian speech.

It is the demands of this milieu, declassed in the linguistic sense, that current Russian poetry is obliged to satisfy.

The word, born in the most profound layers of speech-consciousness, has to serve the deaf-mutes and tongue-tied, the cretins and degenerates of the word.

Symbolism’s great merit, the correct stance it took with regard to the Russian reading public, was in its pedagogy, in its inborn sense of authority, the patriarchal weightiness and legislative gravity with which it educated the reader.

One needs to put the reader in his place, and along with him the critic he has reared. Criticism should not consist of the arbitrary interpretation of poetry; this should give way to objective, scholarly research, to the scholarship of poetry.

Perhaps the most comforting thing in the whole situation of Russian poetry is the deep and pure ignorance, the unknowingness of the people about their own poetry.

The masses, who have preserved a healthy philological sense, those layers where the morphology of language begins to sprout, strengthen, and develop, have quite simply not yet entered into contact with individualist Russian poetry. The Russian lyric has not yet found its readers. Perhaps it will find them only after the extinction of those poetic luminaries that have already sent out their rays of light to this distant and as yet unattained destination.