Selected Essays

The Morning of Acmeism

I.

Amidst the immense emotional excitement surrounding works of art, it is desirable that talk about art be marked by the greatest restraint. For the immense majority, a work of art is enticing only insofar as it illuminates the artist’s perception of the world. For the artist, however, his perception of the world is a tool and an instrument, like a hammer in the hands of a stonemason, and the only thing that is real is the work itself.

To live is the artist’s highest self-esteem. He wants no other paradise than being, and when he’s told about reality, he only smiles bitterly, because he knows the infinitely more convincing reality of art. The spectacle of a mathematician proclaiming the square of a ten-digit number without stopping to think about it fills us with a certain astonishment. Too often, however, we overlook the fact that the poet raises a phenomenon to its tenth power, and the modest exterior of a work of art often deceives us concerning the prodigiously condensed reality that it possesses. In poetry this reality is the word as such. Just now, for example, while expressing my thought as accurately as possible, yet not at all in poetic form, I am speaking essentially with the consciousness, not with the word. Deaf-mutes understand one another very well, and railroad signals perform their quite complicated assignments without recourse to help from the word. Thus, if one is to regard the sense as the content, one must regard everything else in the word as mechanical ballast that only impedes the swift transmission of the thought. The “word as such” was slow to be born. Gradually, one after the other, all the elements of the word were drawn into the concept of form; only the conscious sense, the Logos, is regarded even to this day erroneously and arbitrarily as the content. From this needless honor, Logos only loses; Logos requires only an equal footing with the other elements of the word. Our Futurist, who could not cope with the conscious sense as creative material, frivolously threw it overboard and in essence repeated the same crude error as his predecessors.

For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as splendid a form as music for the Symbolists.

And if, among the Futurists, the word as such still crawls on all fours, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed the more dignified upright position and entered upon the Stone Age of its existence.

II.

The cutting edge of Acmeism is not the stiletto and not the pinprick of Decadence. Acmeism is for those who, seized by the spirit of building, do not meekly renounce their gravity, but joyfully accept it in order to arouse and make use of the forces architecturally dormant in it. The architect says: I build. That means, I am right. The consciousness of our own rightness is what we value most in poetry, and scornfully discarding the pick-up-sticks of the Futurists, for whom there is no higher pleasure than to hook a tough word with a crochet hook, we are introducing the Gothic into the relationships of words, just as Sebastian Bach established it in music.

What kind of idiot would agree to build if he did not believe in the reality of his material, the resistance of which he must overcome? A cobblestone in the hands of an architect is transformed into substance, and the man for whom the sound of a chisel splitting stone is not a metaphysical proof was not born to build. Vladimir Soloviev used to experience a special kind of prophetic horror before gray Finnish boulders. The mute eloquence of the granite block disturbed him like an evil enchantment. But Tiutchev’s stone that “rolled down from the mountain to the valley floor, torn loose itself, or flung by a sentient hand,” is the word. The voice of matter sounds in this unexpected fall like articulate speech. To this call one can answer only with architecture. Reverently the Acmeists pick up the mysterious Tiutchevan stone and lay it in the foundation of their building.

The stone thirsted as it were for another being. It was itself the discoverer of the dynamic potential concealed within it, as if it were asking to be let into the “groined arch” to participate in the joyous cooperative action of its fellows.

III.

The Symbolists were bad stay-at-homes. They loved voyages; yet they felt bad, ill at ease, in the cage of their own organisms and in that universal cage which Kant constructed with the help of his categories.

The first condition for building successfully is a genuine piety before the three dimensions of space—to look on the world not as a burden or as an unfortunate accident, but as a God-given palace. Really, what is one to say about an ungrateful guest who lives off his host, takes advantage of his hospitality, yet all the while despises him in his soul and thinks only of how to put something over on him. One can build only in the name of the “three dimensions,” because they are the conditions for all architecture. That is why an architect has to be a good stay-at-home, and the Symbolists were bad architects. To build means to fight against emptiness, to hypnotize space. The fine arrow of the Gothic belltower is angry, because the whole idea of it is to stab the sky, to reproach it for being empty.

IV.

We tacitly understand a man’s individuality, that which makes him a person, and that which forms part of the far more significant concept of the organism. Acmeists share a love for the organism and for organization with the Middle Ages, a period of physiological genius. In its pursuit of refinement the nineteenth century lost the secret of genuine complexity. That which in the thirteenth century seemed a logical development of the concept of the organism—the Gothic cathedral—now has the esthetic effect of something monstrous; Notre Dame is a celebration of physiology, its Dionysian orgy. We do not wish to divert ourselves with a stroll in a “forest of symbols,” because we have a more virgin, a denser forest—divine physiology, the infinite complexity of our own dark organism.

The Middle Ages, while defining man’s specific gravity in its own way, felt and acknowledged it for each individual quite independently of his merits. The title maître was used readily and without hesitation. The most humble artisan, the very least clerk, possessed the secret of down-to-earth respect, of the devout dignity so characteristic of that epoch. Yes, Europe passed through the labyrinth of a fine tracery-work culture, when abstract being, unadorned personal existence, was valued as a heroic feat. Hence the aristocratic intimacy that links all people, so alien in spirit to the “equality and fraternity” of the Great Revolution. There is no equality, no competition—there is the complicity of those united in a conspiracy against emptiness and nonbeing.

Love the existence of the thing more than the thing itself and your own being more than yourself—that is the highest commandment of Acmeism.

V.

A = A: what a splendid poetic theme. Symbolism languished and longed for the law of identity; Acmeism makes it its watchword and offers it instead of the dubious a realibus ad realiora.*

The capacity for astonishment is the poet’s greatest virtue. Still, how can one not be astonished by that most fruitful of all laws, the law of identity? Whoever has been seized with reverent astonishment before this law is undoubtedly a poet. Thus, once having acknowledged the sovereignty of the law of identity, poetry acquires in lifelong feudal possession all that exists, without condition or limitation. Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be perpetually astonished. We have fallen in love with the music of proof. For us logical connection is not some little ditty about a finch, but a symphony with organ and choir, so intricate and inspired that the conductor must exert all his powers to keep the performers under his control.

How persuasive is the music of Bach! What power of proof! One must demonstrate proof, one must go on demonstrating proof endlessly: to accept anything in art on faith alone is unworthy of an artist, easy and tiresome . . . We do not fly; we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.

VI.

The Middle Ages are dear to us because they possessed to a high degree the sense of boundary and partition. They never mixed different levels, and they treated the beyond with immense restraint. A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism and the perception of the world as a living equilibrium makes us kin to this epoch and impels us to derive strength from works that arose on Romance soil around the year 1200. And we shall demonstrate our rightness in such a way that the whole chain of causes and consequences from alpha to omega will shudder in response; we shall teach ourselves to carry “more lightly and more freely the mobile chains of being.”

Note

* Symbolism’s slogan, as provided by Viacheslav Ivanov in the collective work Borozdy i mezhi [Furrows and boundaries]. (Mandelstam’s note.) Slogan means “from the real to the more real.”