Selected Essays

Literary Moscow

Moscow-Peking: here it is continentality that triumphs, the spirit of a Middle Empire; here the heavy tracks of the railroads have been spliced together into a tight knot; here the Eurasian continent celebrates its eternal name day.

Whoever isn’t bored by Middle Empire is a welcome guest in Moscow. There are some who prefer sea-smell and some who prefer world-smell.

Here the cabdrivers drink tea in the taverns as if they were Greek philosophers; here, on the flat roof of a modest skyscraper, they show nightly an American detective drama; here, without attracting anybody’s attention, a decorous young man on the boulevard whistles a complex aria from Tannhäuser in order to earn his bread, and in half an hour an artist of the old school, sitting on a park bench, will do your portrait for you on a silver academic medal; here the boys selling cigarettes travel in packs, like the dogs of Constantinople, and do not fear competition; people from Iaroslav are selling pastries, and people from the Caucasus have sat down in the coolness of the delicatessen. There isn’t a single man here, provided he’s not a member of the all-Russian union of writers, who would go to a literary discussion in the summertime, and Dolidze,¹ at least for the summer, moves in spirit to Azurketa, where he’s been planning to move these past twelve years.

When Mayakovsky went about scouring poets in alphabetical order at the Polytechnic Museum, there were some young people in the auditorium who actually volunteered to read their own poems when their turn came, to make Mayakovsky’s job easier. This is possible only in Moscow and nowhere else in the world; only here are there people who, like Shiites, are ready to prostrate themselves so that the chariot of that stentorian voice might pass over them.

In Moscow, Khlebnikov could hide himself from human eyes, like a beast of the forest, and, without even being noticed, he exchanged the hard beds of the Moscow flophouses for a green Novgorodian grave. And yet it was in Moscow, too, that I. A. Aksenov, when that happened, in the most modest of modest literary gatherings, placed a beautiful wreath of analytical criticism on the grave of the departed great archaic poet, illuminating Khlebnikov’s archaicism by means of Einstein’s principle of relativity and revealing the link between his creative work and the old Russian moral ideal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And this was at the very time that the enlightened Petersburg Literary Messenger could respond at best with an insipid, arrogant remark about the “great loss.” From out of town, with a different perspective, one can see more easily: all is not well with Petersburg; it has forgotten how to speak in the language of time and wild honey.

As far as Moscow is concerned, the saddest symptom is the pious needlework of Marina Tsvetaeva,² who seems to echo the dubious solemnity of the Petersburg poetess Anna Radlova.³ The worst thing about Literary Moscow is women’s poetry. The experience of the last years has shown that the only woman who has entered the circle of poetry with the rights of a new muse is the Russian study of poetry called to life by Potebnia⁴ and Andrei Biely and nourished to maturity in the formalist school of Eikhenbaum, Zhirmunsky, and Shklovsky.⁵ To the lot of women has fallen the enormous realm of parody, in the most serious and formal sense of this word. Feminine poetry is an unconscious parody of poetic inventiveness as well as of reminiscence. The majority of Muscovite poetesses are bruised by metaphor. These are poor Isises, doomed to an eternal seeking for the second part of the poetic comparison which has been lost somewhere, and which must return its primal unity to the poetic image, to Osiris.

Adalis⁶ and Marina Tsvetaeva are prophetesses, and so is Sophie Parnok.⁷ Prophecy, as domestic needlework. While the formerly elevated tone of masculine poetry, the intolerable bombastic rhetoric, has given way to a more normal conversational pitch, feminine poetry continues to vibrate on the highest notes, offending the ear, offending the historical, the poetic sense. The tastelessness and the historical insincerity of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Russia—pseudonational and pseudo-Muscovite—are immeasurably beneath the poems of Adalis, whose voice now and again acquires a masculine force and certainty.

Inventiveness and remembrance go hand in hand in poetry. To remember means also to invent. He who remembers is also an inventor. The radical illness of Moscow’s literary taste lies in forgetting this double truth. Moscow has been specializing in inventiveness, no matter what.

Poetry breathes through both the mouth and the nose, through remembrance and inventiveness. One needs to be a fakir in order to deny oneself one of these modes of breathing. The passion for poetic breathing by way of remembrance was expressed in that heightened interest with which Moscow greeted Khodasevich’s⁸ arrival. He is a man who’s been writing verses for about twenty-five years now, thank God; yet he has suddenly found himself in the position of a young poet just beginning.

As from the Taganka to the Pliushchikha, literary Moscow spread out enormously from MAF to the Lyrical Circle.⁹ At one end, something like inventiveness; at the other, remembrance. Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh,¹⁰ Aseev on the one side; on the other, given the complete absence of domestic resources, there was a need to resort to visiting players from Petersburg in order to draw the line. And so one needn’t talk about the Lyrical Circle as though it were a Muscovite phenomenon.

What, then, goes on in the camp of pure inventiveness? Here, if one leaves out the completely unsound and unintelligible Kruchenykh—and I say this, not because he’s left-wing or extreme, but because there is after all such a thing in the world as simple nonsense . . . (And yet, Kruchenykh’s attitude to poetry is passionate and very intense, and this makes him interesting as a personality.) Here Mayakovsky goes on resolving the great, elementary problem of “poetry for all, not just for the elite.” An extensive broadening of the space contiguous to poetry naturally takes place at the expense of intensivity, pithiness, poetic culture. Splendidly informed about the richness and complexity of world poetry, Mayakovsky, in founding his “poetry for all,” had to send everything obscure to the devil; everything, that is, that assumed the least bit of poetic preparation in his audience. And yet to address in verse an audience completely unprepared poetically is as thankless a task as trying to sit on a pike. The completely unprepared audience will grasp absolutely nothing, or else poetry, emancipated from culture of any kind, will quite cease to be poetry, and then, due to some strange quality in human nature, will become accessible to an enormous audience indeed. Yet Mayakovsky writes poetry, and quite cultivated poetry: that is, his refined raeshnik, whose stanza is broken by a weighty antithesis, saturated with hyperbolic metaphors and sustained in the monotonous brief pauznik.* It is therefore quite in vain that Mayakovsky impoverished himself. He is threatened with the danger of becoming a poetess, and it has already half come to pass.

If Mayakovsky’s poems express the tendency toward universal accessibility, what speaks out in Aseev’s¹¹ is our time’s passion for organization. The brilliant rational imagery of his language produces the impression of something freshly mobilized. There is essentially no difference between the snuffbox poetry of the eighteenth century and Aseev’s twentieth-century mechanical poetry. A sentimental rationalism on the one hand, an organizational rationalism on the other. A purely rationalistic, electro-mechanical, radioactive, and in general technological poetry is impossible, for a single reason that should be equally close to the poet and the mechanic: rationalistic mechanical poetry does not store up energy, gives it no increment, as natural irrational poetry does; but only spends, only disperses it. The discharge is equal to the windup. As much comes out as is wound up. A mainspring cannot give back more than has been put into it beforehand. This is why Aseev’s rationalistic poetry is not rational, why it is sterile and sexless. A machine lives a deep and animated life, but it gives forth no seed.

By now the passion for inventiveness in poetic Moscow is already passing. All the patents have already been taken out, and there have been no new patents for some time. The double truth of inventiveness and remembrance is as much needed as bread. That is why in Moscow there is not a single real poetic school, not a single lively poetic circle, for all the factions somehow find themselves on one side or the other of a divided truth.

Inventiveness and remembrance are the two elements by which the poetry of B. Pasternak is moved. Let us hope that his poems will be studied in the immediate future, and that they will not suffer the mass of lyrical stupidities (inflicted by our critics) that has befallen all Russian poets, beginning with Blok.

World cities like Paris, Moscow, London are amazingly tactful in their relationship to literature, permitting it to hide in any trench, to disappear without trace, to live without a permit, or under another name, or not to have an address. It is as absurd to talk of Muscovite literature as it is of a world literature. The first exists only in the imagination of the reviewer, just as the second exists only in the name of a worthy Petersburg publishing house. To the man who has not been forewarned, it might seem that there is no literature at all in Moscow. If he should accidentally meet a poet, the latter would wave his hands and look as though he were in a terrible hurry to be off somewhere, and he would disappear through the green gates of the boulevard accompanied by the blessings of the cigarette boys, who know better than anyone else how to estimate the value of a man and how to bring out in him the most remote possibilities.

Note

* The raeshnik is a verse form deriving from the country-fair side-show-barker, who used to call attention to his show by spouting rhymes. The pauznik is a meter, usually of three feet, with an unequal number of unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables; i.e., with pauses.