Selected Essays

About an Interlocutor

What is there about a madman, tell me, that produces the most frightening impression of madness? The distended pupils—because they are unseeing, because they focus on nothing in particular, because they are empty. Or his mad speeches, because, even while turning to you, the madman does not take you into account, does not consider your existence, as if he did not wish to acknowledge it, because he is absolutely uninterested in you. In the madman, we fear for the most part that uncanny, absolute indifference that he turns toward us. Nothing frightens a man more than another man who has no concern for him. There is deep significance in that cultivated pretense, that politeness, we continually use in order to emphasize a certain interest in each other.

When a man has something to say, he usually goes to people, seeks out listeners. But a poet does the opposite. He runs “to shores of desert waves, to deep-sounding groves.” The abnormality is obvious . . . A suspicion of madness falls on the poet. And people are right when they call him mad, who addresses inanimate objects, nature, and not his living brothers. And they would be in the right to recoil from the poet as from a madman if his word were not really addressed to anyone. But this is not the case.

The view of the poet as “God’s creature” is very dangerous and basically incorrect. There is no reason to think that Pushkin, for instance, in his little song about the bird,¹ had the poet in mind. But even with regard to Pushkin’s bird, the case isn’t really so simple. Before it can sing forth, it “heeds the voice of God.” Obviously he who orders the bird to sing listens to it. The bird “shook its wings and sang” because it was bound by a “natural contract” with God—an honor to which even a poet of the greatest genius dares not aspire . . . To whom then does the poet speak? It’s a disturbing question, and very contemporary, because to this very day the Symbolists have avoided posing it sharply. Symbolism completely neglected the, as it were, contractual relationship, the mutuality that accompanies an act of speech. (I speak, and that means I am listened to, and not for nothing, not out of kindness, but because there is an obligation.) The Symbolist poets turned their attention exclusively to acoustics. They hurled sound into the architecture of the soul and, with that self-absorption characteristic of them, followed the sound’s meanderings through the archways of another person’s psychology. They would reckon up the sonic increment issuing from good acoustics and call this computation magic. In this regard Symbolism recalls “Prestre Martin” of the medieval French proverb, who himself serves Mass and listens to it. The Symbolist poet is not only a musician, he’s a Stradivarius at the same time, the great artisan of the violin, preoccupied with estimating the proportion of the “box” in relation to the psychology of the listener. It is precisely depending on these proportions that the stroke of the bow either acquires a regal fullness or tends to sound squalid and unconvincing. Yet, gentlemen, a piece of music nevertheless exists independently of the player or the instrument or the place! Why then should the poet be so anxiety-ridden about the future? Where finally is that supplier of living violins for the poet’s needs—those listeners whose psychic apparatus is up to Stradivarius’ “helix”? We don’t know, we never know where such listeners might turn up . . . François Villon wrote for the Parisian rabble of the mid-fifteenth century, yet we find in his poems a living charm . . .

Everybody has friends. Why doesn’t the poet turn to his friends, to those people who are naturally close to him? The shipwrecked sailor throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment, and it has his name in it and what happened to him. Many years later, walking along the dunes, I find it in the sand, I read the letter, I learn when it happened, the testament of the deceased. I had a right to do this. I did not unseal someone else’s letter. The letter sealed in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, then, that I am its secret addressee.

My gift is poor, nor loudly rings my voice

And yet I live—and on the earth, my being

Means something dear to someone:

My distant heir will find it

In my verses; who can tell? my soul

Will turn out to be bound with his in tie

And as in my generation I found a friend

So will I find a reader in posterity.

Reading Boratynsky’s² poem I have the same feeling I would have if such a bottle had come into my hands. The ocean in all its vastness has risen to help it fulfill its designation, and the finder cannot escape a certain feeling of providentiality. In the sailor’s flinging a bottle into the flow of the sea and in Boratynsky’s poem there is a certain common bond. Like the poem, the letter isn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Nevertheless, both have an addressee: the letter’s is the person who will accidentally notice the bottle in the sand; the poem’s is “a reader in posterity.” What reader, I wonder, could look on these lines of Boratynsky without a sudden start and an uncanny shiver of joy, as happens sometimes when one is called unexpectedly by name?

Balmont³ declares:

I do not know a wisdom fit for others,

What I carve in verse is only transience.

In everything transient I see whole worlds,

Changing with the play of rainbows.

Do not curse me, wise men, what am I to you?

Why I’m only a cloud full of fire,

Why I’m only a cloud—see, I float

And I call to dreamers—it’s not you I call.

The unpleasant obsequious tone of these lines presents a curious contrast to the deep and modest dignity of Boratynsky’s verses. Balmont justifies himself, apologizing as it were. Unforgivable! Intolerable for a poet! The only thing that cannot be forgiven! For poetry is the consciousness of one’s own rightness. In the given instance, Balmont lacks such a consciousness. He has clearly lost his foothold. The first line kills the whole poem. Right off the poet emphatically declares that we are of no interest to him: “I do not know a wisdom fit for others . . .”

To his surprise, we pay him back in the same coin: if we are not interesting to you, you do not interest us. Who cares about your cloud; a lot of clouds float by . . . Real clouds have this advantage: they don’t jeer at people. Rejection of an “interlocutor” passes like a red thread through all of Balmont’s poetry and greatly diminishes its value. In his poems, Balmont is always slighting somebody, looking down his nose at him, contemptuously. This “somebody” is the secret interlocutor. Neither understood nor acknowledged by Balmont, he in turn takes a cruel revenge on the poet. When we speak, we search our interlocutor’s face for a sanction, for a confirmation of our rightness. A poet does it even more so. In Balmont the precious consciousness of poetic rightness is often missing, because he does not have a constant interlocutor. From this lack spring two unpleasant extremes in Balmont’s poetry: his obsequiousness and his insolence. Balmont’s insolence is unreal, inauthentic. His need for self-assertion is quite pathological. He cannot say “I” sotto voce. He screams “I.” “I am”—an abrupt pause,—“I who play thunder.” In Balmont’s poetry, the “I” has definitely and unfairly tipped the scales against the “non-I” as if it were so much fluff. Balmont’s shrill individualism is unpleasant. This is not the quiet solipsism of Sologub, offensive to nobody, but individualism at the expense of someone else’s “I.” Note how Balmont loves to catch you by surprise with his direct and harsh “thou”: in these passages he is like a bad hypnotist. Balmont’s “thou” never finds an addressee, whizzing past like an arrow that has burst loose from a too tight bow-string.

And as in my generation I found a friend

So will I find a reader in posterity.

Boratynsky’s penetrating gaze goes beyond his generation—though he has friends in his generation—in order to pause at some unknown yet definite “reader.” And anyone who happens to come across Boratynsky’s poems feels himself to be such a “reader,” chosen, called to by name . . . Why not a living, concrete interlocutor, why not a “representative of the epoch,” why not a “friend in my generation”? I answer: addressing a concrete interlocutor takes the wings off the verse, deprives it of air, of flight. The air of a poem is the unexpected. Addressing someone known, we can say only what is known. It’s a solid, authoritative psychological law. One cannot emphasize too strongly its significance for poetry.

Fear of a concrete interlocutor, a listener from the same “epoch,” that very “friend in my generation,” has persistently pursued poets at all times. The more genius a poet had, the more acutely the form in which he suffered this fear. Hence the cursed hostility of artist and society. What is true with regard to the litterateur, the man of letters, is absolutely inapplicable to the poet. The difference between literature and poetry is the following: the litterateur always addresses a concrete listener, a living representative of the epoch. Even if he prophesies, he has in view the contemporary of a future time. What the litterateur has to say, he pours out to his contemporaries on the basis of the physical law of unequal levels. Consequently, the litterateur is obliged to be “above,” “better” than society. Instruction is the central nerve of literature. For that reason, the litterateur has to have a pedestal. Poetry is another matter. The poet is bound only to his providential interlocutor. He’s not obliged to be above his epoch or better than his society. That same François Villon stands much lower than the average moral and intellectual level of the culture of the fifteenth century.

Pushkin’s quarrel with the rabble can be regarded as a manifestation of that same antagonism between the poet and his concrete listener to which I am trying to call attention. With amazing dispassion, Pushkin allows the rabble to vindicate itself. It turns out that the rabble is not so very terribly savage and unenlightened. In what way was this rabble, so delicate as Pushkin describes it and so infused with the best intentions, guilty before the poet? As the rabble justifies itself, it gives vent to a certain incautious expression; and this is what causes the poet’s cup of tolerance to overflow and inflames his hatred: “And we will listen to you”—that’s the tactless expression. The obtuse vulgarity of these seemingly innocent words is apparent. It’s not for nothing the indignant poet interrupts the rabble at just this point . . . The sight of a hand held out to receive charity is disgusting, and an ear primed to listen may dispose whom you will to inspiration—the orator, the tribune, the litterateur—but not the poet . . . The people of whom this rabble is concretely composed, the “philistines of poetry,” would permit him “to give them bold lessons,” and would in general be ready to hear out almost anything, so long as the poet’s message had the precise address: “such-and-such rabble.” In this way children and simple people feel themselves flattered when they read their own name on the envelope of a letter. There have been whole epochs when the charm and essence of poetry was brought as a sacrifice to this far from harmless demand. Such were the pseudo-civic poetry and the tedious lyric of the eighties. The civic orientation or the tendentiousness is fine in and of itself:

You need not be a poet,

But a citizen you’re obliged to be—⁴

is an excellent verse, flying on powerful wings to its providential interlocutor. But put in his place the Russian philistine of this-or-that decade, thoroughly familiar, known ahead of time, and immediately it will turn into something trite.

Yes, when I speak to somebody, I do not know with whom I speak, and I do not wish, I cannot wish to know him. There is no lyric without dialogue. Yet the only thing that pushes us into the arms of the interlocutor is the desire to be surprised by our own words, to be captivated by their novelty and unexpectedness. The logic is ineluctable. If I know to whom I speak, I know ahead of time how he will regard what I say, whatever I might say, and consequently I shall manage not to be astonished by his astonishment, to be overjoyed by his joy, or to love through his love. The distance of separation wipes away the features of a beloved person. Only then does the desire arise in me to say to him that important thing I could not have said to him when I had his image before me in the fullness of its reality. I permit myself to formulate this observation thus: the sense of communication is inversely proportional to our real knowledge of the interlocutor and directly proportional to the felt need to interest him in ourselves. It isn’t about acoustics one should concern oneself: that will come of itself. More likely, about distance. It’s boring to be whispering to a neighbor. It’s infinitely tedious to pressure-drill one’s own soul (Nadson).⁵ But to exchange signals with Mars—without fantasizing, of course—that is a task worthy of a lyric poet. Here we’ve come right up against Fedor Sologub. In many ways Sologub is a most interesting antipode to Balmont. Several qualities that Balmont lacks are found in abundance in Sologub: to wit, love and respect for the interlocutor and a consciousness of his own poetic rightness. These two excellent qualities of Sologub’s poetry are closely connected with “the distance of enormous space,” which he places between himself and his ideal friend-interlocutor.

My secret friend, my distant friend,

Look.

I am the cold and sad

Light of dawn . . .

And cold and sad

In the morning,

My secret friend, my distant friend,

I will die.

Maybe, for these lines to reach their address, it will take the same hundreds of years that it does for the light of a planet to reach another planet. As a result, Sologub’s lines continue to live after they have been written, as events, not merely as tokens of emotional experience.

And so, if individual poems (in the form of missive or dedication) can actually address concrete persons, poetry as a whole is always directed at a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet may not doubt without doubting himself. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it. Only reality can call to life another reality. A poet is not a homunculus and there is no reason why one should ascribe to him the characteristics of spontaneous generation.

The matter may be put very simply: if we had no acquaintances, we would not write them letters and would not take pleasure at the psychological freshness and novelty that is characteristic of this occupation.