Selected Essays

Storm & Stress

From this time on, readers will no longer perceive the body of Russian poetry of the first quarter of the twentieth century as “Modernism,” with all the ambiguity and semicontempt inherent in the conception, but simply as Russian poetry. What has taken place is what one might call the welding together of the backbone of two poetic systems, two poetic epochs.

The Russian reader, who has lived through not one but several poetic revolutions during this quarter of a century, has learned to seize, more or less immediately, on what is objectively valuable in the multiformity of the poetic creation surrounding him. Every new literary school—be it Romanticism, Symbolism, or Futurism—comes to us artificially inflated as it were, exaggerating its own exclusive significance, while failing to be aware of its external historical limitations. It passes inevitably through a period of “Storm and Stress.” Only subsequently, usually when the main proponents of the school have already lost their freshness and their capacity for work, does it become clear what its real place in literature is, and what objective value it created. And after the high-water mark of Storm and Stress, the literary flood tide willy-nilly subsides to its natural channel, and it is precisely these incomparably more modest boundaries and outlines that are remembered ever after. Russian poetry of the first quarter of the century twice lived through a harshly expressed period of Storm and Stress. One was Symbolism, the other Futurism. Both major currents wanted to freeze at the crest of their wave, and failed to do so; because history, preparing the crests of new waves, authoritatively ordered them, at the designated time, to recede, to return to the lap of the common maternal element of language and poetry. However, in their poetic development, Symbolism and Futurism, which complemented each other historically, were essentially of quite different types. Symbolism’s “Storm and Stress” should be seen as a stormy and fiery process of making European and world poetry accessible to Russian literature. And so this stormy phenomenon had essentially an outward cultural meaning. Early Russian Symbolism was a very powerful blast of air from the West. Russian Futurism is much closer to Romanticism. It contains all the traits of a national poetic revival, in the course of which its reworking of the national treasury of language and of a deep native poetic tradition once more brings it closer to Romanticism, unlike the alien nature of Russian Symbolism, which had been a Kulturträger, a hauler of poetic culture from one base to another. Following this essential distinction between Symbolism and Futurism, the former may be cited as an example of outward, the latter of inward striving. Symbolism hinged on a passion for great themes of a cosmic and metaphysical nature. Early Russian Symbolism is the realm of Great Themes and Big Ideas, with a capital letter, borrowed directly from Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Mallarmé, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. Futurism for the most part lived by the poetic device, and developed not the theme but the device; that is, something internal, innate in language. Among the Symbolists, the theme was brandished like a shield protecting the device. The themes of the early Briusov, Balmont, and others were extremely distinct. Among the Futurists it is difficult to separate the theme from the device, and the inexperienced eye will see in, say, the works of Khlebnikov, nothing more than pure device or naked metalogic.

It is easier to sum up the Symbolist period than the Futurist, because the latter has not come to so distinct an end and was not so abruptly broken off as Symbolism, which was extinguished by hostile influences. Almost imperceptibly Futurism has renounced the excesses of its Storm and Stress period. It has continued to elaborate, in the spirit of the common history of the language and our poetry, those of its elements that have turned out to be of objective value. To sum up Symbolism is relatively easy. Of the early stage of Symbolism, swollen and afflicted with the dropsy of great themes, almost nothing remains. Balmont’s grandiose cosmic hymns have turned out childishly weak and inept in poetic practice. The renowned urbanism of Briusov, who entered poetry as the singer of the universal city, has dimmed with time, since Briusov’s phonic and imagistic material seemed to be anything but inherent in his favorite theme. Andrei Biely’s transcendental poetry turned out not to be up to preventing its metaphysical meaning from losing the sheen of its fashionableness and becoming a bit of a ruin. The complex Byzantine-Hellenic world of Viacheslav Ivanov presents a somewhat better case. While he was essentially as much the pioneer and colonizer as the other Symbolists, he did not treat Byzantium and Hellas as foreign countries marked for conquest, but rightly saw in them the cultural sources of Russian poetry. Due, however, to the lack of a sense of measure, characteristic of all the Symbolists, he overfreighted his poetry with Byzantine-Hellenic images and myths, which significantly cheapened it. About Sologub and Annensky one ought to speak separately, since they never participated in the Storm and Stress of Symbolism. Blok’s poetic fate is most tightly bound to Russian poetry of the nineteenth century, and so one must speak separately about him, too. And here one has to mention the work of the younger Symbolists, or Acmeists, who wished not to repeat the mistakes of early Symbolism, swollen with its dropsy of great themes. Estimating their powers much more soberly, they renounced the illusions of grandeur of early Symbolism and replaced them, some with monumentality of device, others with clarity of exposition, with far from equal success.

No single poetic heritage has ever aged and deteriorated in such a short time as Symbolism. It would even be more correct to call Russian Symbolism a pseudosymbolism, to call attention to its misuse of great themes and abstract conceptions, inadequately embodied in its language. The pseudosymbolic, that is, a large part of what the Symbolists wrote, preserves for the history of literature only a relative interest. That which has some objective value lies hidden under heaps of stage props and pseudosymbolist rubbish. What was the hardest-working and noblest generation of Russian poets paid a heavy tribute to the age in which they lived and their cultural task. Let us begin with the father of Russian Symbolism, Balmont. Strikingly little of Balmont has survived; a dozen poems perhaps. That which has survived, however, is truly superb: both in its phonetic brilliance and its deep sense of roots and sounds, it bears comparison with the best examples of metalogical poetry. It isn’t Balmont’s fault that his undemanding readers turned the development of his poetry in the worst possible direction. In his best poems—“O night, stay with me” [O noch’, pobud’ so mnoi”] and “The Old House” [“Staryi dom”]—he extracted from the medium of Russian verse new and never-to-be-repeated sounds of a foreign, almost a kind of seraphic, phonetics. For us, this is explained by the special phonetic quality of Balmont, by his exotic perception of consonant sounds. It is here rather than in his vulgar musicality that the source of his poetic power is to be found. In Briusov’s best (non-urban) poems, one feature, making him the most consistent and able of Russian Symbolists, will never fade with age. This is his capacity to approach his theme, his total authority over it, his capacity to draw from it all it can and must give, to exhaust it completely, to find for it a correct and capacious stanzaic vessel. His best poems are models of absolute mastery over the theme: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Theseus and Ariadne,” “The Demon of Suicide” [“Demon samoubiistva”]. Briusov taught Russian poets to respect the theme as such. There is also something to be learned from his latest books: Distances [Dali] and Last Dreams [Poslednye mechty]. Here he provides examples of the breadth of his verse and of his astonishing capacity to deploy thought-filled words of varied imagery in a space of frugal dimension. In The Urn [Urna] Andrei Biely enriched the Russian lyric with sharp prosaisms from the German metaphysical vocabulary, displaying the ironical sound of philosophic terms. In his book Ashes [Pepel] he skillfully introduces polyphony, that is, many voices, into Nekrasov’s poetry, the themes of which are subjected to an original orchestration. Biely’s musical populism is reduced to a gesture of beggarlike plasticity that accompanies the immense musical theme. Viacheslav Ivanov is more genuinely native and in the future will be more accessible than all the other Russian Symbolists. A large part of the fascination for his majestic manner stems from our philological ignorance. In no other Symbolist poet does one hear so distinctly the hum of his lexicon, the powerful clamor of popular speech surging forward and waiting its turn like a bell: “Mute night, deaf night” [“Noch’ nemaia, noch’ glukhaia”], “The Maenad” [“Menada”], etc. His apprehension of the past as the future relates him to Khlebnikov. Viacheslav Ivanov’s archaism stems not from his choice of themes, but from his incapacity to think in relative terms, that is, to compare different periods. Viacheslav Ivanov’s Hellenic poetry was not written after or at the same time as Greek poetry, but before it, because not for one moment does he forget that he is speaking in his own barbarous native tongue.

These were the founders of Russian Symbolism. None of them worked in vain. In each of them there is something to be learnt at the present moment, or at any moment you like. Let us turn to those contemporaries of theirs on whom fell the bitter lot of avoiding the historical mistakes of their kindred but at the price of exclusion from the invigorating riot of the first Symbolist feasts. Let us turn to Sologub and Annensky.

Sologub and Annensky began their work as early as the nineties, completely unnoticed. Annensky’s influence left its mark with unusual force on the Russian poetry that came after him. Our first teacher of psychological acuity in the new Russian lyric, he transmitted the art of psychological composition to Futurism. Sologub’s influence, with almost equal force, manifested itself in a purely negative way: having brought to an extreme simplicity and perfection, by way of a lofty rationalism, the devices of the old Russian literature of the period of decline—including Nadson, Apukhtin and Golenishchev-Kutuzov¹—having cleansed these devices of their trashy emotional admixture and having painted them the color of original erotic myth, he rendered impossible all attempts to return to the past, and he had, it would seem, practically no imitators. Organically compassionate on behalf of banality, keening tenderly over some dead word, Sologub created a cult of ghastly and outlived poetic formulas, inspiriting them with a miraculous and terminal life. Sologub’s early poetry and his collection Ring of Fire [Plamennyi krug] are a cruel and cynical disposal of the poetic stereotype, not an enticing example, but rather a terrible warning to the brave idiot who might in the future try to write such verse.

Annensky, with the same resoluteness as Briusov, introduced the historically objective theme into poetry, and he introduced psychological constructivism into the lyric. Burning with a thirst to learn from the West, he had no teachers worthy of his vocation and was forced to pretend to be an imitator. Annensky’s psychologism is not a caprice and not the ephemeral flash of an exquisite sensibility; it is genuine, firm construction. A straight path connects Annensky’s “Steel Cicada” [“Stal’naia tsikada”] with Aseev’s “Steel Nightingale” [“Stal’noi solovei”]. Annensky taught us how to use psychological analysis as a working tool in the lyric. He was the real forerunner of psychological construction in Russian Futurism, so brilliantly represented by Pasternak. To this day, Annensky has not found his Russian reader and is known only by Akhmatova’s vulgarization of his methods. He is one of the most authentic originals in Russian poetry. One would like to transfer every poem in his books, Quiet Songs [Tikhie pesni] and The Cypress Chest [Kiparisovyi larets], into an anthology.

If Russian Symbolism had its Vergils and Ovids, it also had its Catulluses, not so much with regard to their relative stature as to the nature of their work. Here one must mention Kuzmin² and Khodasevich. These are typical minor poets, with all the purity and charm of sound characteristic of minor poets. For Kuzmin the major line in world literature would seem in general never to have existed. He’s all bound up in a prejudice against it and in a canonization of the minor line, no higher than the level of Goldoni’s comedy and Sumarokov’s love songs. He cultivated rather successfully in his poems a conscious carelessness and baggy awkwardness of speech, sprinkled with Gallicisms and Polonisms. Enkindled by the minor poetry of the West—Musset, let us say—he writes a New Rolla and creates for the reader the illusion of the completely artificial and premature decrepitude of Russian poetic language. Kuzmin’s poetry is the prematurely senile smile of the Russian lyric. Khodasevich cultivated Baratynsky’s theme: “My gift is meager and my voice is soft” [“Moi dar ubog i golos moi negromok”] and worked every possible variation on the theme of the prematurely born child. His minor line stems from the poems of the secondary poets of the Pushkin and post-Pushkin periods, the domestic amateur poets like Countess Rostopchina, Viazemsky, and others.³ Coming from the best period of Russian poetic dilettantism, the period of the domestic album, the friendly epistle in verse, the casual epigram, Khodasevich carried the intricacy and the tender coarseness of idiomatic popular Moscow speech as it had been used in the noble literary circles of the last century right into our own. His poetry is very national, very literary, and very elegant.

An intense interest in the whole range of Russian poetry, from the powerfully clumsy Derzhavin to that Aeschylus of the Russian iambic line, Tiutchev, preceded the advent of Futurism. All the old poets at that time—roughly before the beginning of the World War—suddenly seemed new. A fever of reappraisal and the hasty correction of historical injustice and short memory seized everyone. Essentially, all Russian poetry at that time struck the new inquisitiveness and the renovated hearing capacity of the reader as metalogical. A revolutionary reappraisal of the past preceded the revolution in creativity. Affirmation and legitimation of the real values of the past is just as much a revolutionary act as the creation of new values. Most unfortunately, however, memory and deed soon parted company; they did not proceed hand in hand. Futurizers and his-torizers very quickly found themselves in two hostile camps. The futurizers indiscriminately rejected the past, though their rejection was no more than dietetic. For hygienic reasons they denied themselves a reading of the old poets, or they read them surreptitiously, without letting on in public. And the historists prescribed themselves exactly the same kind of diet. I would even go so far as to say that many respectable literary men, right up to recent times when they were forced to do it, did not read their contemporaries. It would seem that the history of literature had never before known such an irreconcilable hostility and lack of understanding. The hostility between the Romantics and the Classicists, let us say, was child’s play compared to the abyss that opened up in Russia. But quite soon a criterion came to hand that facilitated a meeting of minds in this impassioned literary litigation between two generations: whoever does not understand the new has no comprehension of the old, and whoever comprehends the old is bound to understand the new as well. Only misfortune results when, instead of the real past with its deep roots, we get “former times.” “Former times” means easily assimilated poetry, a henhouse with a fence around it, a cosy little corner where the domestic fowl cluck and scratch about. This is not work done upon the word, but rather a rest from the word. The boundaries of such a world of comfortable repose from active poetry are now defined approximately by Akhmatova and Blok, and not because Akhmatova or Blok, after the necessary winnowing of their works, are bad in themselves—for Akhmatova and Blok were never meant for people with a moribund sense of language. And if the linguistic consciousness of the age approached its death in them, it was dying gloriously. It was “that which in a rational being we call the heightened diffidence of suffering,” and certainly not the inveterate stupidity bordering on malicious ignorance of their dedicated opponents and adherents. Akhmatova, using the purest literary language of her time, adapted with extraordinary steadfastness the traditional devices of the Russian folksong, and not only Russian, but the folksong in general. What we find in her poems is by no means a psychological affectation, but the typical parallelism of the folksong, with its acute asymmetry of two adjacent theses, on the pattern of: “My elderbush is in the yard; my uncle is in Kiev.” This is where her twofold stanza with the unexpected thrust at the end comes from. Her poems are close to the folksong not only in structure but in essence, asserting themselves always and invariably as laments. Keeping in mind the poet’s purely literary lexicon, filtered through her clenched teeth, these qualities make her especially interesting, allowing one to discern a peasant woman in this twentieth-century Russian literary lady.

Blok is the most complex phenomenon of literary eclecticism, a gatherer of the Russian poetry strewn and scattered by the historically shattered nineteenth century. The great work of collecting Russian poetry accomplished by Blok is still not clear to his contemporaries and is felt by them only instinctively as melodic power. Blok’s acquisitive nature, his effort to centralize poetry and language, recalls the state-building instinct of the historic figures of Muscovy. His is a firm, stern hand as far as any provincialism is concerned: everything for Moscow, which in the given case is to say, for the historically formed poetry of the traditional language used by this proponent of a centralized poetic state. Futurism is all in its provincialisms, in its tumult reminiscent of the medieval appanages, in its f olkloric and ethnographic cacophony. Try looking for that in Blok! Poetically, his work went at right angles to history and serves to prove that the government of language lives its own special life.

Fundamentally, Futurism ought not to have directed its barbs against the paper fortress of Symbolism, but rather against the living and genuinely dangerous figure of Blok. And if it failed to do this, it was only because of its characteristic inner piety and its literary propriety.

Futurism confronted Blok with Khlebnikov. What could they say to each other? Their battle continues, even in our own time when neither the one nor the other is any longer among the living. Like Blok, Khlebnikov thought of language as if it were a state, only not spatial, not territorial, but temporal. Blok is contemporary to the marrow of his bones; his time will go to rack-ruin and be forgotten; yet he will remain in the consciousness of generations to come as a contemporary of his own time. Khlebnikov does not know what a contemporary is. He is a citizen of all history, of the whole system of language and poetry. He is like some sort of idiotic Einstein who doesn’t know how to tell which is closer, a railroad bridge or the Igor Tale. Khlebnikov’s poetry is idiotic in the authentic, innocent, Greek sense of the word. His contemporaries could not and cannot forgive him the absence in his work of any reference to the madness of his own time. How terrifying it must have seemed when this man, oblivious of his interlocutor, without distinguishing his own time from all the ages, yet appeared in a persona that seemed unusually sociable, and gifted to a high degree with the purely Pushkinian gift of poetic small talk. Khlebnikov jokes, and nobody laughs. Khlebnikov makes light, elegant allusions, and nobody understands them. A very large part of what Khlebnikov has written is not more than light poetic small talk as he understood it, corresponding to the digressions from Evgeny One gin, or to Pushkin’s “Order yourself some macaroni with Parmesan in Tver, and make an omelette” [“Zakazhi sebe v Tveri/S parmezanom makaroni,/ I iaichnitsu svari”]. He wrote comic dramas—The World from its End-side [Mir s kontsa]—and tragic buffonades—Miss Death [Baryshnia smert’]. He provided models of a marvelous prose, virginal and, like the story of a child, incomprehensible, because of the onrush of images and ideas pushing and crowding one another right out of consciousness. Each line he wrote is the beginning of a new long poem. Every tenth line is an aphorism, seeking a stone or bronze plaque on which to come to rest. It wasn’t even poems or epics that Khlebnikov wrote, but a huge all-Russian prayer-and-icon book, from which for centuries upon centuries everyone who has the requisite energy will be able to draw.

Alongside Khlebnikov, as if for contrast, the mocking genius of fate placed Mayakovsky, with his poetry of common sense. There is common sense in any poetry. But specific common sense is nothing other than a pedagogical device. Schoolteaching that instills previously well-established truths into childish heads makes use of visual aids—that is, of a poetic tool. The pathos of common sense is part of schoolteaching. Mayakovsky’s merit is in his poetic perfection of schoolteaching, in applying the powerful methods of visual education to the enlightenment of the masses. Like a schoolteacher, Mayakovsky walks about with a globe of the world or some other emblem of the visual method. He has replaced the repulsive newspaper of recent times, in which no one could understand anything, with a simple, wholesome schoolroom. A great reformer of the newspaper, he has left a profound imprint in our poetic language, simplifying its syntax to the limit of the possible and directing the noun to the place of honor and primacy in the sentence. The force and precision of his language make Mayakovsky akin to the traditional carnival side-show barker.⁴ Both Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky are national to such a degree that populism—that is, folklore with a crude sugar-coating—would seem to have no place beside them. It continues to exist, however, in the poetry of Esenin, and to some degree in that of Kliuev, too.⁵ The significance of these poets is in their rich provincialisms, which link them to one of the basic tendencies of our age.

Aseev stands completely to Mayakovsky’s side. He has created the lexicon of a well-qualified technician. He is a poet-engineer, an organizer of work. In the West such people—that is, engineers, radio-technicians, inventors of machines—tend to be poetically mute, or they read François Coppée.⁶ It is characteristic of Aseev that he places the machine, as an expedient contraption, at the foundation of his poetry, without really talking about the machine at all. The plugging in and plugging out of the lyrical current provides an impression of swift fusing and powerful emotional discharge. Aseev is exceptionally lyrical and sober with regard to the word. He never poeticizes, but simply plugs in the lyrical current, like a good electrician, using the materials he needs.

Now the dikes that artificially held back the development of our poetic language have already given way, and any glossy, dress-uniform innovativeness strikes one as unnecessary and even reactionary.

The truly creative epoch in poetry is not that of invention, but that of imitation. When the prayer books have been written, then it is time to begin the service. The last poetic prayer book to be issued for common use throughout all the Russias was Pasternak’s. My Sister Life [Sestra moia zhizn’]. Not since Batiushkov’s time has such a new and mature harmony resounded in Russian poetry. Pasternak is not a fabricator or a parlor magician, but the founder of a new harmonic mode, a new structure of Russian versification that corresponds to the maturity and toughness achieved by the language. By means of this new harmony one can say whatever one likes. Everybody will use it, whether he wants to or not, since it has become henceforth the common property of all Russian poets. Up to now the logical structure of a sentence has become archaic along with the poem in which it appears; that is, it was only the briefest means for expressing the poetic meaning. Owing to frequent use in poetry, customary logical progression had become effaced and imperceptible as such. Syntax, which is the circulatory system of poetry, was stricken with sclerosis. Then comes a poet who reanimates the virginal strength of the logical structure of the sentence. It was just this in Batiushkov that astonished Pushkin, and Pasternak awaits his Pushkin.