Selected Essays

About the Nature of the Word

But we worry about things, and forget

that only the word glows and shines,

and the Gospel of John

tells us this word is God.

We’ve surrounded it with a wall,

with the narrow borders of this world,

and like bees in a deserted hive

the dead words rot and stink.

N. Gumilev*

The only question I want to ask is whether Russian literature constitutes a unity. Is contemporary Russian literature really the same as the literature of Nekrasov, Pushkin, Derzhavin, or Simeon Polotsky?¹ If continuity has been preserved, then how far back does it go? If Russian literature has always been one and the same, then what determines its unity, what is its essential principle, its so-called criterion?

The question I have put acquires a special edge, thanks to acceleration of the historical process. No doubt it would be an exaggeration to consider each year of our present history an entire century, yet something in the nature of a geometric progression, a consistent quickening, may be noted in the stormy discharge of this accumulated historical energy. Thanks to such change in our time, the conception of the unity of time has been shaken, and it is not by accident that contemporary mathematical science has advanced the principle of relativity.

In order to rescue the principle of unity in the whirlpool of change and the ceaseless current of events, contemporary philosophy in the person of Bergson, whose profoundly Judaic mind, obsessed by the urgent practical need of sustaining monotheism, proposes to us a doctrine of the systematization of phenomena. Bergson examines phenomena not through the logic of their subordination to the law of temporal sequence, but, as it were, through the logic of their distribution through space. It is exclusively the inner bond of phenomena that interests him. This bond he liberates from time and examines separately. In this way, interconnected phenomena form a kind of fan, the folds of which may develop in time, while at the same time the fan may be collapsed in a way that allows the mind to grasp it.

Comparing phenomena united in time to such a fan merely emphasizes their inner bond, and instead of the problem of causality, bound so slavishly to thinking in time, which for long held the minds of European logicians in thrall, it advances the problem of connection, without any flavor of metaphysics and, for precisely that reason, more fruitful in producing scientific discoveries and hypotheses.

A science built on the principle of connection rather than causality exempts us from the “foolish infinity” of evolutionary theory, not to mention its vulgar appendage, the theory of progress.

The movement of an infinite chain of phenomena, without beginning and end, is really a foolish infinity that says nothing to the mind seeking unity and connection. It hypnotizes scientific thought with this easy and accessible evolutionism that gives, to be sure, an appearance of scientific generalization, but at the price of rejecting any synthesis or inner structure.

The diffuseness, the unstructured nature of nineteenth-century European scientific thought, by the time of the turn of the present century, had completely demoralized scientific thought. Intellect, which does not consist of a mere aggregate of knowledge, but rather of “grasp,” technique, method, abandoned science, since intellect can exist independently and can find its own nourishment where convenient. Searching for intellect in precisely this sense in European scientific life would be futile. The free intellect of man had removed itself from science. It turned up everywhere, but not there: in poetry, in mysticism, in politics, in theology. As for scientific evolutionism and its concern with the theory of progress (insofar as it did not wring its own neck as the new European science had), it puffed along in the same direction and flung itself on the shores of theosophy, like an exhausted swimmer who had achieved a joyless shore. Theosophy is the direct heir of that old European science which had theosophy as its inevitable destination: the same foolish infinity, the same absence of backbone in the doctrine of reincarnation (karma), the same coarse and naïve materialism in the vulgar understanding of a supersensate world, the same absence of will, the same taste for the cognition of activity, and a certain lazy omnivorousness, an enormous, ponderous chewing of the cud, intended for thousands of stomachs, an interest in everything that at the same time verges on apathy, an omniscience that resembles know-nothingness.

Applied to literature, evolutionary theory is especially dangerous, and the theory of progress is downright lethal. Listen to the evolutionist literary historians and it might seem that writers think only of how to clear the road for those who are to go ahead of them, and not at all about how to finish their own job of work; or that they all take part in some inventors’ contest for the improvement of some sort of literary machine, while it isn’t at all clear where the jury is hiding, or what purpose this machine serves.

The theory of progress in literary studies is the coarsest, most repulsive façade of academic ignorance. Literary forms change, some forms give way to others. But every change, every such innovation, is accompanied by bereavement, by a loss. There can be no “better,” no progress of any kind in literature, simply because there is no literature-machine of any kind, and there’s no finish line to which you have to rush to get ahead of anybody else. This senseless theory of betterment is not even applicable to the manner and form of individual writers—here every innovation is similarly accompanied by bereavement and loss. Where does the Tolstoy who in Anna Karenina mastered the psychological power and the highly structured quality of the Flaubertian novel show the animallike sensitivity and the physiological intuition of War and Peace? Where does the author of War and Peace show the transparency of form, the “Clarism”² of Childhood and Boyhood? Even if he had wanted to, the author of Boris Godunov could not have repeated the lyceum poems, and similarly no one now could write a Derzhavin ode. Who likes what better is another matter. Just as there are two geometries, Euclid’s and Lobachevsky’s, there may be two histories of literature, written in two different keys: one that speaks only of acquisitions, another only of losses, and both would be speaking of one and the same thing.

Returning to the question of whether Russian literature is a unity and, if it is, what the principle of that unity might be, let us cast aside the amelioration theory from the very beginning. Let us speak only of the inner connections of phenomena, and above all let us try to seek out a criterion of possible unity, the core which allows the various dispersed phenomena of literature to unfold in time.

The only criterion that can serve to indicate the unity (conditional, to be sure) of the literature of a given people is that people’s language, to which all other criteria are secondary. The language, although it changes from period to period, although it does not stand still and congeal, retains a certain common constant that to the philologist’s mind at least is blindingly clear. An inner unity remains. Any philologist grasps when a language retains and when it changes its personality. When Latin speech, which had spread to all the Romanic lands, brought forth new bloom and began sprouting the future Romance languages, a new literature began, childish and impoverished compared with Latin, but already “Romance.”

When the vibrant and graphic speech of The Tale of Igor’s Men³ resounded, thoroughly worldly, secular, and Russian in its every turn of phrase, Russian literature began. And while Velemir Khlebnikov, the contemporary Russian writer, immerses us in the very thick of Russian root words, in the etymological night dear to the mind and heart of the clever reader, that very same Russian literature is still alive, the literature of The Tale of Igor’s Men. The Russian language, like the Russian national identity itself, was formed out of endless mixtures, crossings, graftings, and foreign influences. Yet in one thing it will remain true to itself, until our own kitchen Latin resounds for us, too, and on that powerful body which is language, the pale young runner-shoots of our life come up, as in the Old French song about Saint Eulalia.⁴

The Russian language is a Hellenic language. Due to a whole complex of historical conditions, the vital forces of Hellenic culture, which had abandoned the West to Latin influences, and which found scant nourishment to prompt them to linger long in childless Byzantium, rushed to the bosom of Russian speech and communicated to it the self-confident secret of the Hellenic world view, the secret of free incarnation, and so the Russian language became indeed sounding and speaking flesh.

While Western cultures and histories tend to lock language in from the outside, hem it in with walls of church and state and become saturated with it in order that they might slowly decay and slowly come into bloom as the language in due course disintegrates, Russian culture and history are washed and girdled on all sides by the awesome and boundless element of the Russian language, which does not fit into church or state forms of any kind.

The life of language in Russian history outweighs all other factors through the ubiquity of its manifestations, its plenitude of being, a kind of high goal that all other aspects of Russian life strive to attain without succeeding. One can identify the Hellenic nature of the Russian language with its capacity for achieving concrete modalities of existence. The word in the Hellenic conception is active flesh that resolves itself in an event. Therefore, the Russian language is historical even in and of itself, the incessant incarnation and activity of intelligent and breathing flesh. There is not a single other language that stands more squarely opposed than the Russian to merely denotative or practical prescription. Russian nominalism, that is, a doctrine of the reality of the word as such, animates the spirit of our language and links it with Hellenic philological culture, not etymologically and not literarily, but through a principle of inner freedom that is equally inherent in them both.

Utilitarianism of any sort is a mortal sin against Hellenic nature, against the Russian language, quite regardless of whether it be a tendency toward a telegraphic or stenographic code, whether for reasons of economy or simplified expediency, or even whether it be utilitarianism of a higher order, offering language in sacrifice to mystical intuition, anthroposophy, or word-hungry, omnivorous thinking of any kind.

Andrei Biely,⁵ now, turns out to be a painful and negative phenomenon in the life of the Russian language. This is only because he pursues the word so single-mindedly and yet is guided in this pursuit exclusively by the fervor of his own speculative thought. He gasps, with a kind of refined garrulity. He cannot bring himself to sacrifice a single shading, a single fragment of his capricious thought, and he blows up the bridges he is too lazy to cross. As a result, we have, after momentary fireworks, instead of a fullness of life, an organic wholeness, and a moving balance, a heap of paving-stones, a dismal picture of ruin. The basic sin of writers like Andrei Biely is their lack of respect for the Hellenic nature of the word, their merciless exploitation of it for their own intuitive goals.

Russian poetry more than any other brings up as a motif again and again that ancient doubt of the word’s capacity to express feeling:

How can the heart express itself?

How can another understand you?

(Tiutchev)⁶

—Thus our language secures itself from unceremonious encroachments.

The rate at which language develops is not the same as that of life itself. Any attempt to adapt language mechanically to the requirements of life is doomed in advance to failure. Futurism, as it is called, is a conception created by illiterate critics that lacks any real content or scope; it is, however, more than a curiosity of philistine literary psychology. Futurism acquires an exact sense if one understands by it precisely this attempt at a forced, mechanical adaptation, this lack of faith in our language itself which is at one and the same time Achilles and the turtle.

Khlebnikov busies himself with words, like a mole, and he provides for the future by burrowing enough passageways in the earth to last for a whole century. The representatives of the Moscow metaphorical school who call themselves Imaginists, on the other hand, exhaust themselves adapting our language to modern life. They have remained far behind language, and it is their fate to be swept away like litter.

Chaadaev,⁷ when he wrote that Russia had no history, that is, that Russia belonged to no organized cultural system, omitted one circumstance—and that is language. Such a highly organized, such an organic language is not merely a door into history, it is history itself. For Russia, a defection from our language would be a defection from history, excommunication from the kingdom of historical necessity and sequence, from freedom and expediency. The “muteness” of two or three generations could bring Russia to its historical death. Excommunication from language has for us a force equal to that of excommunication from history. Therefore it is absolutely true that Russian history walks on tiptoes along the edge, along the bank, over the abyss, and is ready at any moment to fall into nihilism; that is, into excommunication from the word.

Of contemporary Russian writers, Rozanov⁸ has felt this danger more keenly than any other, and he spent his whole life struggling to preserve a link with the word, on behalf of a philological culture, which would base itself firmly on the Hellenic nature of Russian speech. My attitude to just about everything may be anarchic, my world view a complete muddle, catch-as-catch-can; yet there is one thing I cannot do—live wordlessly; I cannot bear excommunication from the word. That was more or less Rozanov’s spiritual makeup. This anarchic and nihilistic spirit acknowledged only one authority—the magic of language, the authority of the word. And this, mind you, not while being a poet, a collector and threader of words beyond any concern for style, but while being simply a babbler or a grumbler.

One of Rozanov’s books is called By the Church Walls. It seems to me that all his life Rozanov rummaged about in a swampy wasteland, trying to grope his way to the walls of Russian culture. Like several other Russian thinkers, like Chaadaev, Leontiev, Gershenzon, he could not live without walls, without an Acropolis. The environment yields; everything is mellow, soft, and pliable. Yet we want to live historically; we have within us an ineluctable need to find the firm hard kernel of a Kremlin, an Acropolis, no matter what this nucleus might be called, whether we name it “state” or “society.” The need for this nucleus and for whatever walls might serve as a symbol for this nucleus determined Rozanov’s whole fate, and it definitely acquits him of the accusation of anarchic tendencies or lack of principle.

“It’s hard for a man to be a whole generation. All there is left for him to do is to die. It’s time for me to decay, for you to blossom.” And Rozanov did not live; rather, he went on dying a clever, intellectual death, as generations die. Rozanov’s life was the death of philology, the dessication, the withering of letters, and that bitter struggle for the life that glimmers in colloquialisms and small talk, in quotation marks and citations, and yet all the same remains philology and only philology.

Rozanov’s attitude to Russian literature was as “unliterary” as it could be. Literature is a social phenomenon; philology is a domestic phenomenon, of the study. Literature is a public lecture, the street; philology is a university seminar, the family. Yes, just so, a university seminar where five students who know each other and call each other by first name and patronymic listen to the professor, while the branches of familiar campus trees stretch toward the window. Philology: it is a family because every family sustains itself by intonation and by citation, by quotation marks. In a family, the most lazily spoken word has its special shading. And an infinite, unique, purely philological literary nuancing forms the background of family life. This is why I deduce Rozanov’s inclination to domesticity, which so powerfully determined the whole tenor of his literary activity, from the philological nature of his spirit, which, in incessant search of the kernel, cracked and husked his words and colloquialisms, leaving us only the husk. No wonder that Rozanov turned out to be an inutile and unproductive writer.

How awful it is that man (the eternal philologue) found a word for it—“death.” Can it be named at all? Does it really have a name? A name is already a definition, already a “we-know-something.” Rozanov defines the essence of his nominalism in such an original way; a perpetual cognitive motion, a perpetual unshelling of the kernel, ending with nothing, because there is no way to crack it. But what kind of a literary critic is this Rozanov? He’s always only plucking at everything, he’s a casual, chancy reader, a lost sheep, neither here nor there.

A critic has to know how to devour his way through volumes, picking out what he needs, making generalizations: but Rozanov plunges in over his head into the line of almost any Russian poet, as he got stuck in that line of Nekrasov’s: “If I ride at night along the dark street,” the first thing that came to mind one night in a cab. The Rozanovian commentary: one could scarcely find another verse like that in the whole of Russian poetry. Rozanov loved the church for that very same philology for which he loved the family. Here is what he says: “The church pronounced such amazing words over the deceased, as we ourselves would scarcely know how to utter over a father, a son, a wife, a dead mistress; that is, she has felt that any man dying or dead was so close, so ‘near her spirit’ as only a mother can feel her own dead child. How can we not leave her everything in return for this . . . ?”

The antiphilological spirit with which Rozanov wrestled had burst loose from the very depths of history; in its own way, it was just as much an inextinguishable flame as the philological fire.

There are on earth just such eternal oil-fed fires; a place catches fire accidentally and burns dozens of years. There is absolutely no way to snuff them out. Luther showed himself to be a bad philologue because, instead of an argument, he let fly an inkwell. The antiphilological fire ulcerates Europe’s body, growing dense with flaming volcanoes in the land of the West, making an everlasting cultural wasteland out of that soil on which it had burst forth. There is no way to put out the hungry fire. We must let it burn, while avoiding the cursed places, where no one really needs to go, toward which no one will hurry.

Europe without philology isn’t even America; it’s a civilized Sahara, cursed by God, an abomination of desolation. The European castles and Acropolises, the Gothic cities, the cathedrals like forests, and the dome-topped basilicas would stand as before, but people would look at them without understanding them, and even more likely they would grow frightened of them, not understanding what force raised them up, or what blood it is that flows in the veins of the mighty architecture surrounding them.

What an understatement! America has outdone this Europe that for the time being is still comprehensible. America, having exhausted the philological supply it had carried over from Europe, somehow panicked, then took some thought and suddenly started growing its own personal philology, dug Whitman up from someplace or other; and he, like a new Adam, began to give names to things, provided a standard for a primitive, nomenclatural poetry to match that of Homer himself. Russia is not America; we have no philological import trade; an out-of-the-way poet like Edgar Poe wouldn’t germinate here, like a tree growing from a date pit that had crossed the ocean in a steamer. Except maybe for Balmont, the most un-Russian of poets, alien translator of the Aeolian harp, of a sort never found in the West; a translator by calling, by birth, even in the most original of his works.

Balmont’s position in Russia is that of being the foreign representative of a nonexistent phonetic power, the rare instance of a typical translation without an original. Although Balmont is actually a Muscovite, between him and Russia there lies an ocean. This is a poet completely alien to Russian poetry; he will leave less of a trace in it than the Edgar Poe or the Shelley who were translated by him, although his own poems lead one to assume a very interesting original.

We have no Acropolis. Our culture has been wandering until now and has not found its walls. But to make up for it, every word of Dal’s dictionary is a kernel of Acropolis, a small castle, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for incessant struggle with the formless element, with the nonbeing that threatens our history on all sides.

Just as Rozanov is the representative in our literature of a domestic Hellenism that plays the holy fool and the beggar, so Annensky⁹ is the representative of heroic Hellenism, philology militant. The poems and tragedies of Annensky can be compared to the wooden fortifications, the stockades, which were set up deep in the steppe by the appanage princes for defense against the Pechenegs as the time of the Khazar night came on.

Against my dark fate I no longer feel injury;

Stripped and unpowered was Ovid once, too.

Annensky’s incapacity to submit himself to any kind of influence, to be a go-between, a translator, is immediately striking. With a most original swoop he seizes the foreign in his claws, and still in the air, at a great height, he haughtily lets his prey drop, allowing it to fall by its own weight. And so the eagle of his poetry, that had entaloned Euripides, Mallarmé, and Leconte de Lisle, never brought us anything in its clutch but some tufts of dry grass—

Hark, a madman is knocking at your door

God knows where and with whom he spent the past night,

His gaze wanders and his speech is wild,

And his hand is full of pebbles.

Before you know it, he empties the other hand.

He showers you with dry leaves.

Gumilev called Annensky a great European poet. It seems to me that when the Europeans come to know him, having humbly instructed their future generations in the study of the Russian language as former generations had been instructed in the ancient languages and classical poetry, they will take fright at the audacity of this regal predator, who has seized from them their dove Eurydice and carried her off to the Russian snows; who has torn the classical shawl from the shoulders of Phaedra, and has placed with tenderness, as becomes a Russian poet, an animal hide on the still-shivering Ovid. How amazing Annensky’s fate is! He fingered universal riches, yet saved for himself only a miserable pittance; or rather, he lifted a handful of dust and flung it back into the blazing treasure house of the West. Everyone slept while Annensky kept vigil. The realist moral chroniclers [bytoviki] were snoring. The journal The Scales did not yet exist. The young student Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was studying with Mommsen and writing a Latin monograph on Roman taxes. And at this time the headmaster of the Tsarskoe Selo lyceum was wrestling long nights with Euripides, assimilating the snake poison of crafty Hellenic speech, preparing an infusion of such strong, bitter-as-wormwood poems as no one had written before or would write after him. For Annensky, too, poetry was a domestic affair, and Euripides a domestic writer, just one continuous citation and set of quotation marks. Annensky perceived all of world poetry as a shaft of light thrown off by Hellas. He had a sense of what distance means, felt its pathos and cold; and he never tried to bring together externally the Russian and the Hellenic world. The lesson Annensky’s creative work taught Russian poetry was not Hellenization but an inner Hellenism adequate to the spirit of the Russian language, a domestic Hellenism so to speak. Hellenism is a baking dish, a pair of tongs, an earthenware jug with milk; it is domestic utensils, crockery, the body’s whole ambiance; Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth felt as something sacred; it is any personal possession that joins part of the external world to a man, any clothes placed on someone’s shoulders by a random person, accompanied by that very same sacred shudder with which

As the swift river froze

And winter storms raged,

With a downy hide they covered

The holy old man,

Hellenism means consciously surrounding man with utensils [utvar’] instead of indifferent objects; the metamorphosis of these objects into the utensil, the humanization of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove near which a man sits, prizing its warmth as something related to his own inner warmth. Finally, Hellenism is the boat of the dead in which Egyptian corpses set sail, in which everything is stored that is needed for continuation of a man’s earthly wanderings, including even an aromatic jar, a hand mirror, and a comb. Hellenism is a system, in the Bergsonian sense of the word, which man unfolds around himself, like a fan of phenomena liberated from temporal dependence, commonly subordinated to an inner bond through the human “I.”

In Hellenic terms, the symbol is a utensil, and therefore any object drawn into the sacred circle of man can become a utensil; and therefore, a symbol, too. And so we may ask whether Russian poetry needs a deliberately contrived Symbolism. Is this not a sin against the Hellenic nature of our language that creates images as utensils for the use of man?

Essentially there is no difference between word and image. The word is already a sealed image; one may not touch it. It is not suitable for daily use; no one will light a cigarette from the icon-lamp. Such sealed images are also very much needed. Man loves interdiction, and even the savage puts a magical ban, a “taboo,” on certain objects. And yet, the sealed image, removed from use, is hostile to man; in its own way, it is a scarecrow, a bugbear.

All that passes is merely a likeness. Let’s take an example: a rose or the sun, a dove or a girl. For the Symbolist not one of these figures is interesting in itself; but rather the rose is an image of the sun, the sun is an image of the rose, the dove is an image of the girl, and the girl is an image of the dove. The figures are gutted like a stuffed owl and packed with a strange content. Instead of a symbolic forest, a taxidermist’s shop.

That is where professional Symbolism is headed. The power of perception has been demoralized. Nothing is real or authentic. The terrible contredanses of “correspondences,” all nodding to each other. Eternal winking. Not a single clear word; only hints and implications. The rose nods at the girl, the girl at the rose. Nobody wants to be himself. The epoch of Russian poetry dominated by the Symbolists surrounding the journal The Scales was quite remarkable indeed. Over two decades, it developed an enormous structure that stood on clay feet and might best be defined as the epoch of pseudo-symbolism. Let this definition not be understood as a reference to Classicism, denigrating the beautiful poetry and fruitful style of Racine. Pseudoclassicism is a nickname applied by academic ignorance that has since been fastened to a great style. Russian pseudo-symbolism is really pseudosymbolism. Jourdain discovered in the maturity of his years that all his life he had been speaking prose. The Russian Symbolists discovered that very same prose—the primal figurative nature of the word. They put a seal on all words, all images, designating them exclusively for liturgical use. This has very uncomfortable results—you can’t get by or get up or sit down. Impossible to light a fire, because it might signify something that would make you unhappy.

Man was no longer master in his own house; it would turn out he was living in a church or in a sacred druidic grove. Man’s domestic eye had no place to relax, nothing on which to rest. All utensils were in revolt. The broom asked holiday, the cooking pot no longer wanted to cook, but demanded for itself an absolute significance (as if cooking were not an absolute significance). They had driven the master from his home and he no longer dared to enter there. How is it to be then with the attachment of the word to its denotative significance? Isn’t this a kind of bondage that resembles serfdom? But the word is not a thing. Its significance is not the equivalent of a translation of itself. In actual fact, there never was a time when anybody baptized a thing, called it by a thought-up name. It is most convenient and in the scientific sense most accurate to regard the word as an image; that is, a verbal representation. In this way the question of form and content is removed; assuming the phonetics are the form, everything else is the content. The problem of what is of primary significance, the word or its sonic properties, is also removed. Verbal representation is an intricate complex of phenomena, a connection, a “system.” The signifying aspect of the word can be regarded as a candle burning from inside a paper lantern; the sonic representation, the so-called phonemes, can be placed inside the signifying aspect, like the very same candle in the same lantern.

The old psychology only knew how to objectivize representations and, while overcoming naïve solipsism, regarded representations as something external. In this case, the decisive instant was the instant of what was immediately given. The immediately given of the products of our consciousness approximates them to objects of the external world and permits us to regard representations as something objective. The extremely rapid humanization of science, including in this sense epistemology, too, directs us onto another path. Representations can be regarded not only as the objective-given of consciousness, but also as man’s organs, quite like the liver or the heart.

Applied to the word, such a conception of verbal representations opens broad new perspectives and allows one to speculate on the creation of an organic poetics; not of a legislative, but of a biological character, destroying a canon in the name of a closer inner approximation to the organism, possessing all the features of biological science.

The organic school of the Russian lyric has taken upon itself the tasks of constructing such a poetics. I refer to the school that rose from the creative initiative of Gumilev and Gorodetsky in the beginning of 1912, to which Akhmatova, Narbut, Zenkevich, and the author of these lines were officially attached.¹⁰ The very modest literature of Acmeism and the scarcity of theoretical work by its leaders render its study difficult. Acmeism arose out of repulsion: “Away with Symbolism, long live the living rose!”—that was its original slogan. It was Gorodetsky who in his time tried to graft onto Acmeism the literary world view called “Adamism,” a sort of doctrine of a new earth and a new Adam. The attempt did not succeed. Acmeism did not adopt a world view; it brought in a series of new taste sensations, much more valuable than ideas; mostly, the taste for an integral literary representation, the image, in a new organic conception. Literary schools do not live by ideas, but by tastes; to bring along a whole heap of new ideas but not to bring new tastes means not to make a new school but merely to form a poetics. On the other hand, a school can be created by tastes alone, without any ideas. Not the ideas but the tastes of Acmeism were what turned out to be the death of Symbolism. The ideas seemed to have been partly taken over from the Symbolists, and Viacheslav Ivanov himself helped a good deal in constructing Acmeist theory. Yet behold the miracle: new blood flowed in the veins of Russian poetry. It is said that faith moves mountains, but with regard to poetry I would say: it is taste that moves mountains. Because a new taste developed in turn-of-the-century Russia, we saw such giants as Rabelais, Shakespeare, Racine pick up stakes and move our way to be our guests. Acmeism’s upward thrust, its active love for literature with all its difficulties, is unusually great; and the lever of this active love is precisely a new taste, a masculine will to poetry and to a poetics, in the center of which stands man, not flattened to a pancake by pseudosymbolism, surrounded by symbols, that is by utensils, possessing literary representations, too, as a creature possesses its own organs.

More than once in Russian society we have had moments of inspired reading in the heart of Western literature. Thus, Pushkin, and with him his whole generation, read Chénier. Thus, the following generation, the generation of Odoevsky, read Schelling, Hoffmann,¹¹ and Novalis. Thus, the men of the sixties read their Buckle,¹² and, although neither party in this case possessed any dazzling genius, a more ideal reader could not be found. The Acmeist wind turned over the pages of Classics and Romantics, and these came open to the very place the age most needed. Racine opened to Phaedra, Hoffmann to The Serapion Brothers. We found Chènier’s iambs and Homer’s Iliad.

Acmeism was not merely a literary, but also a social phenomenon in Russian history. It brought a reinvigorated moral force back into Russian poetry. “I want to sail my free boat everywhere; and God and the Devil I’ll glorify alike,” said Briusov. This wretched affirmation of the void [nichevochestvo] will never repeat itself in Russian poetry. So far, the social pathos of Russian poetry has risen only to the conceptual level of “citizen”; but there is a higher principle than “citizen”—the concept “man” [muzh].

In distinction to the old civic poetry, the new Russian poetry has to educate not only the citizen but also the “man.” The ideal of complete manliness is prepared by style and by the practical demands of our time. Everything has become heavier and bigger; so man, too, must stand more firmly, because man should be the firmest thing on the earth and should regard his relation to the earth as that of diamond to glass. The hieratic, that is to say, the sacred character of poetry, is dependent on the conviction that man is the firmest thing in the world.

The age quiets down, culture goes to sleep, a people is reborn, having given its best forces to a new social class; and this whole current bears the frail boat of the human word into that open sea of the immediate future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where dreary commentary replaces the fresh wind of the hostility-and-sympathy of one’s contemporaries. How then can one rig this boat for its distant trek, without having supplied it with everything necessary for so alien and so precious a reader. Once more I compare the poem to an Egyptian boat of the dead. In this boat, everything is equipped for life; nothing is forgotten.

Yet I see many objections beginning to arise and something of a reaction to Acmeism as it was originally formulated; a crisis similar to that of pseudosymbolism. For composing a poetics, pure biology won’t do. However good and fruitful the biological analogy might be, with its systematic application a biological canon comes into being, no less oppressive and intolerable than the pseudosymbolical. From the physiological conception of art, “the superstitious abyss of the Gothic spirit” stares out. Salieri¹³ is worthy of respect and burning love. It is not his fault that he heard the music of algebra as loudly as that of living harmony.

In the place of the Romantic, the idealist, the aristocratic dreamer of the pure symbol, of an abstract esthetic of the word, in place of Symbolism, Futurism, and Imaginism, we now have the living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not the idealist-dreamer Mozart, but the stern and strict master craftsman Salieri, who now holds out his hand to that master of things and material values, the builder and producer of the material world.

Note

Note: This translation was originally published in Avion 2, no. 4 (1976).

* Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, translated by Burton Raffei and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1972 State University of New York.