The Voice Over

IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY

Conventional wisdom has it that Russian poetry is now undergoing a remarkable, extraordinary flowering; recently someone compared it to the Silver Age, even to the Golden Age of Russian poetry. I myself have said something similarly rosy, perhaps expressing myself a bit more carefully, but rejoicing no less than the others. And there was plenty to rejoice about: the mid-1990s really did chart something like a new course.

Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preferences. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices (especially after the cramped beginning of the 1990s, when it was as if all poetry’s voice broke or the air ran out; here I’m not mentioning the few important exceptions, who seem to me more to confirm the catastrophic nature of that time’s context). Soon the hallmark of the new decade was a constant conversation about numbers (do we have six good poets or six hundred, fifteen or twenty-five?); but long before that we got used to feeling confident in the presence of a choice, an assortment of goods—we have both calico and brocade, and this, and that, for any taste, color, and character. The feeling of warmth and reliability that such a picture gives is natural and innocent, but it more often arises in connection with other matters—say, when you go to a local supermarket, that paradise of availability: there, the absence of some familiar cereal on the shelf would make the customer sense a gaping hole, a black gash in the fabric of the macrocosm. Strictly speaking, poetry’s task is precisely that—to be that kind of gash, a black hole that leads God knows where or with what purpose, strengthening discomfort, and if offering consolation, then of a very special kind. But it would be odd not to rejoice, right? And so Russian poetry not only turned out to be good and varied: it also let itself be aware of that. And right away, to its own surprise, it turned into something like a popular exhibit of achievements—a festive and colorful panorama of its own abundance.

Where then does the growing uneasiness come from, the sense that the picture of a general feast has been badly distorted, if not fictitious? The “market mechanisms” of poetry’s existence, as they’re generally described, explain and justify the existence of literary clans and unions, the warring parties, the literary struggle with all its losses. But market mechanisms don’t explain the particular inflammation that has distinguished any conversation about poetry for the last few years, flattening the mass media and blogs into a single style. It’s really not easy to explain it—with an enormous quantity of publishers, journals, venues to speak up, poetic series, there’s lots of space for everyone,¹ and the variety shouldn’t dispose anyone to bitterness: what kind of animosity could the butchers’ row feel for the greengrocers, or the “Space” pavilion for “Horse Breeding”? Yet there’s a shared feeling of some kind of unnamed, unnoticed distortion, offense, disagreement with what’s going on—and this turns out to be more or less the point of consensus that critics were for so long declaring impossible. This feeling—“things aren’t right, guys”—is uniting aesthetic platforms that wouldn’t imagine knowing of one another in the most terrible dream, and it makes allies of authors who have nothing else in common.

It’s been accumulating slowly, day by day: first this or that link runs through the blogs, and everyone follows the sound—they’ve trashed someone again: time to read, discuss, take a position, and defend it. After a year or so goes by, “they’ve trashed” won’t suffice to get anyone’s attention—everyone’s trashing everyone; the very tone of irritation has become a tool for advancement in the literary market. (Someone’s grouching—that means “he’s not afraid of anyone,” “he has the right,” “he speaks from a position of strength”—strength being the key word here.) But then any praise becomes a pressure point: the words “X is a good poet” provoke a lightning reaction: to give him the acid test, to conclude that the poet is bad, to let the world know it as soon as possible (to pull out the splinter). Strange substitutions occur here: a good or, why not, a major poet in the context of that sort of conversation is understood (and refuted) as the best, the main, the chosen one, as if the interested reader constantly measures the author’s place in an underlying yet unmentioned table of ranks, where any “I like” lifts a poet up a few invisible steps. There’s another thing, too: it seems that praise (a mention, no matter whose; publication, no matter where), like a streetlight in the dark, picks out one person’s face, and that alone shoves everyone else back into the outer darkness, beyond the bounds of the visible world. What lies behind that feeling, besides the general loss of culture, which makes one see money or a personal connection everywhere? Plenty of things. An abolition of conventions that finally allows us to see what is complicated as a failure of simplicity (and to talk about it with a soldier’s bluntness). A certainty, abashed at itself, of the existence of a single military hierarchy, a big general staff, which alone can make a recruit into a poet. A deep distrust of the very possibility of parallel systems, of planes and poetics that don’t intersect, and that aren’t evaluated on a single scale. And a sense that everyone shares of some kind of massive unfairness.

About the Change in the Air

To my taste, it’s too seductive and simple to explain what’s happening to us with the usual set of external conditions, as is routinely done in literary life. The parties that are clearing out a place for themselves under the literary sun are doing so industriously but somehow not seriously. They have nothing to divide: there’s no venue that could be the contested object, no prize that everyone would treat with equal respect, no united audience that everyone would like to please. The situation is thus conducive to peace and calm. But there’s no calm, while a sense of the anomaly of the present condition remains—for me myself, too, among others.

For a start, regardless of all the conversations about how interest in poetry has returned or overturned, poems themselves (as distinct from the poet) have suddenly stopped interesting people. What one might call resonance has disappeared; new names, new texts fall and vanish without a sound. You can see hardly two or three meters in any direction, your nearest neighbors are barely within reach. In confusion you start being non-judgmental in a bad sense: what previously seemed unacceptable turns out to be possible, permissible, almost even likable. It appears that, after we settled in the recent zone of risk, the territory of strong actions and big experiments, we succeeded in turning it into something like a large state corporation, where coexistence is regulated not only by a set of general rules but also by hidden indifference toward the field of our own activities. Poetry has become a profession, serving has become service (going to the office every day)—and it can’t possibly survive that.

That sense of a meaningful shared space, which was the main gift of the late nineties and early aughts, has disappeared before our very eyes. It’s possible to exist in a zone of pitch-dark uncertainty, in a physical (and also metaphysical) blast of wind, and it’s there of all places that poetic speech could become the only instrument of cognition, the cane in a blind person’s hands. But that isn’t happening at all. We’re no longer alone with ourselves, not in a blind spot, as in the early 1990s, but in a well-lit major shopping center along the lines of IKEA. You can say (buy, sell) anything you like here, which means you can get along without any of it. The very situation doesn’t presuppose the existence of words that are indispensable. Whereas poetry, one would like to believe, can be nothing else.

Everything else has changed along with the air; first and foremost—the poems themselves and what we expect from them. Conventions that worked for decades and seemed unshakeable precisely due to their obviousness have now crumbled: the presumption of trust in the author (who won’t try to make a fool of you), the need for experience as a reader (the citation-cicadas in the text want to be recognized), faith in the necessity of shared work—of the text and the one reading it. Today every author is offered an easy chance to feel like a charlatan (in the best case—like a clumsy joker): “Well, I think you’re shit”² is the main mode of talking about poetry.

What we’re encouraged to reject now is perhaps the most important thing: the idea of a genuine reader, the reader from Mandelstam’s article “On the Interlocutor,” who’s ready to take on the work of understanding and collaboration. The new logic suggests that we approach the reader like a waiter or chef, whose duty is to serve the client in a way that pleases him. Poems begin to be perceived not as a guide (to a brave world, new or old) but as a tool. For what? For immediate pleasure, which the reader has already earned—simply by agreeing to open a book of poetry. The main virtues of a poetic text turn out then to be new, alien things: being energetic, entertaining, touching, and comfortable for reception.

This is a new approach, though it ought to work; you can make a standard, mass-consumption product from poetry, as from any other material. It will be of high quality, it will cheer up hundreds of intelligent people and thousands of fools, it will pay its way physically and symbolically. It’s another matter that it takes away territory that poetry has occupied since the Modern Era: it will cease to be a place to work out new things, an arena of anthropological experimentation. Lacking a market suited poetry: cheap to produce, not very attractive to an outside observer, it regulated itself, saved and ruined itself on its own. In surrendering itself to the reader’s mercy, it will have to agree to a decorative existence at a nicely furnished resort: with no function, with no task—as background music for someone else’s emotional life.

This manner of existence (oriented toward no one’s taste, the statistical average) moves to the forefront the kind of poetry that this averaged taste identifies as “strong,” making an impression on people external to poetry. A declarative quality is valued. Sentimentality is in favor, along with everything intensive, quick-acting, straightforward. So is narrativity (sources of interest not directly linked with the matter of poetry are brought into play). Forced, exaggerated devices admixed with extremely lightweight content. Humor, humor, blazing satire, and once again innocent humor. To fit the new role (to be liked, to be loved) a poet has to behave like a circus performer, demonstrating wonders of agility, spinning weights and catching porcelain teacups: each line with a prizewinning metaphor but even better with two. Everything that isn’t obvious, that doesn’t dazzle at first sight, that is delicate, light, unsteady, multilayered, is simply not apprehended by the new taste; the new reader has a poorly tuned sound receiver.

I wish the guilty parties in all these unpleasant things were some kind of them—those people from the outside, so easy to make claims against: they write badly, they hear badly, they misunderstand, they miss the point. The problem is that this them is us, that the new taste was formed not by popular magazines and not by visitors to literary cafés but by us ourselves, by “me myself.”

I can’t call the thing that has worried and perplexed me myself for the last few years anything but a simplification, a shallowing of verse. This tendency seems to me so contagious that it’s almost impossible to stand up to it; I see its patterns in the work of the best (and, for me, best-loved) authors, I see it in my own practice; otherwise, I wouldn’t even bother to talk about it. In order to understand what I have in mind, it’s enough to take any few stanzas at random from Elena Shvarts or, say, from Alexei Parshchikov’s “I Lived on the Battlefield of Poltava” and compare their density with the best texts of the late aughts. I invite the reader to do this independently; for me the lesson is obvious, and I just want to understand how and why it turned out this way.

On the Aughts

The first decade of the new century in Russia formed not only a new standard of everyday behavior, a generally accessible consumer ideal, but also broad possibilities for its application. These years gave us, after all, the desired consensus; it just hasn’t been set up on the territory of taste. It has to do with more basic things: the wish for affluence, the cycle of “I want,” “I can,” and “I get.” This looks the same in the cultural field as in any other shop: we expect attention to our wishes, we require quality, we consider ourselves experts. That explains why for the first time in several decades they’ve started talking about the reader—and we were quickly called on to entertain them without delay; but that’s not all. What’s important is that our own internal reader wants to have a good time, too, feeling that it has a perfect right to do so.

It was enough to start considering oneself a qualified user, proud of one’s own ability to choose goods after one’s own heart, in order to see the formation (with regard to esoteric things such as poetry that resist and evade) of what Susan Sontag calls a new sensibility. Having applied the logic of the supermarket to poetry, we obtain devices familiar from the work of a discount supermarket chain—aggressive promotion of a product, various kinds of the ever-changing most current, overproduction of goods that are more in demand, deep indifference to what is not in demand. Altogether this forms the very poetic mainstream that no one wants to admit belonging to, but that can be fairly easily described in military or sports terms—strength, success, the center, surprise, power, target/hitting accuracy.

The best match for such an understanding are the poems that were abundant precisely in the early 1990s—and which have made a victorious comeback in the last few years: orderly, cheerfully, and neatly made, with devices and tricks that flex like biceps along the line: text-broadcasters of an indefinite lyric ferment. Strictly speaking, these are verses of the late Soviet school (with its particular, dark-unfiltered, drive toward beauty—the best words in the best order), which give a good illustration of the special taste of the aughts.

But complex, non-linear poems show up here as well, as long as they conform to some set of external parameters. Complexity is entirely permitted—if it’s well-dressed, swanky, demonstrative, worn to be seen. The new sensibility looks for excess, fullness, emotions that overwhelm your soul, and it reacts to whatever strikes these sparks of emotion. We have already mentioned the demand for entertainment and a plot, with the latter opening an easy path to the reader’s sentimentality. But there are other variations, too—the game of recognition that takes old things out of the storage shed: a child’s Soviet memory, a skeleton key to experience that only pretends to be shared. Or a direct sermon, life lessons, commandments of blessedness, spelled out to a one-two-three beat. There are lots of variations and only one invariant: the new sensibility uses poems as a painkiller, expecting them to provide it with direct and tangible benefit. Poems should be more than poems—in and of themselves, they aren’t needed here.

It is characteristic and important that these distinctive features are often the qualities of very good poems; and they are not at all definitive there. But they’re exactly what the ruling taste marks as “its own,” nourishing, necessary; they’re exactly what determines the reader’s choice. More than that, in some cases it’s as if certain things (intonations, meanings) are conveyed to the text from outside, aside from the author’s intention (that is, the possibility of such a reading isn’t even contained in the poems as such); they’re inscribed there by readers themselves or, more accurately, by a certain mode of reading, which pushes everything that seems superfluous, inessential off the side of the road. This might be called a regulating or redacting kind of reading, which exclusively lifts the froth off the text—the layer of meaning it needs for itself. The context in which a complicated thing is read and understood as a simple thing is an invention of the aughts, their mirthless know-how.

I am intentionally not naming names: my task is not to redraw hierarchies with one “mainstream” taking the place of another but to describe a situation that is tragically shared by everyone.

On the Victory of Strength over Subtlety

But here are some names. In a long-ago article (from 1999), Elena Fanailova cites a phrase from Grigory Dashevsky: “Plenty that’s subtle—little that’s strong.” That time’s need for strength (for a clear authorial position, for explicitness and consistency of poetics, for—in the broad sense—refusal to compromise in what is being done), noted correctly and early, became a general need as time progressed. That is, it became a mass demand. In the early aughts, authorial practices that were based on the application of strength of various kinds turned up in the field of vision and discussion. Radicalism of means and tasks, deformation of language and meaning (or, on the contrary, a pointed scorn for devices), active exploration of traumatic experience, private and all-encompassing, a new narrativity, which by force takes upon itself the duties of prose—all these, let’s face it, are potent substances, and from ten or twelve years’ distance I see how they provoked addiction and repulsion at once—including (or, first and foremost) in authors who worked most actively with these things. Toward the middle of the decade, the intensive course had been completed and texts started to stall, to shed, to seek nourishment from external sources—with greater or lesser success.

As much as the 1990s, their second half, did for poems, with something new being thrown in every minute, so the fortunate aughts turned out to be strange, frozen like a computer. The era of stability turned out to be the same thing for poems, too; but I’ll say in passing that these ten years have hardly given us three or four truly remarkable poetic debuts. And at the same time the poets of complexity fell silent, gave up, or changed their writing. I’ll mention a few names whose absence from the everyday scene seems to me perhaps more significant than the presence of others. Mikhail Gronas and Grigory Dashevsky, whose main corpus of texts took shape in the 1990s, are writing vanishingly little. Vsevolod Zelchenko, Aleksandr Anashevich, Mikhail Sukhotin have fallen silent; Kirill Medvedev has stopped publishing, if not writing. The poetics of Dmitry Vodennikov, Elena Fanailova, Sergei Kruglov have changed radically—and in all three cases with a turn toward a new intelligibility, direct speech, immediate impact. The authorial practices of Mikhail Eremin, Gennady Aigi, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Nikolai Baitov, Andrei Poliakov wound up sidelined by readers’ interest; this list (most important for the understanding of what in point of fact was going on with Russian poems in the last decade) could be continued for a whole page.

In a certain sense, what happened to Russian poetry was the same thing that happened to the whole country at that time. A complex and ramified system of institutions had arisen that regulated the consumption of texts. After that, an alternative system arose (the literary internet), which immediately engaged in self-regulation, becoming something like the unofficial reverse side of the existing (“professional”) system. All at once, it became terribly important to know and understand who was speaking in verse and about verse—that is, any statement, regardless of its own pragmatics, wound up getting drawn into a process of constructing hierarchies (this has been going on most openly of all on Live Journal, with its perpetual objection “And so who are you?”). Under these circumstances, a critical conversation about texts became impossible or optional, was crowded out from the usual venues into the blogosphere, so that the status of discourse about poetry became deliberately informal, while the discourse itself wound up oversimplified, fragmentary, coarsely emotional. All of that somehow blindly, unwittingly reproduces what was going on in those years in Russia, and the very accidental quality of this imitation makes the situation inherently absurd. On the other hand, precisely the ability to simplify the complex is now dictated by the milieu. It’s in the air and hangs on your collar; without it, the faculty of unreasoning pleasure might atrophy.

But this system of coordinates simply gives no chance to the subtle. It is precisely the subtle that we lack—tormentingly, desperately.

How It Happened

It’s possible that we’ve taken the position of the other (the other self, the reader’s self, the stranger’s self) too much to heart. We got the urge to read our own poems with the eyes of the person next to us on the train; we wanted to like them, whereas they’d have to frighten or strike us, and we would have to be unacquainted with them.

It’s possible that the face of the other came too close and too fast. With the spread of social networks, the opacity and separateness of the author, the poem, and the reader is no longer the natural state of things but rather a question of personal choice (while intentional opacity becomes something like an exotic ascetic exercise). A lot changes when it’s not a book of poetry but a freshly written individual poem that becomes the unit of a text’s public presence—a poem that moreover is written partly in public, before the eyes of strangers. Now you can think of poetry as token money of communication, one of the currencies in circulation. The possibility of a quick reaction to a text makes it even more like a commodity, courteously delivered to you at home (commentaries on the poem are given by readers, like change for a bill, bringing in the additional backlighting of success or failure). Poems have become a message, poorly (crookedly) adapted to the addressee; they show up next to a note on a blog or a photograph on a Facebook timeline. Then again, it’s easy to say that there’s nothing to regret: in the end, a picture too is no longer a window in a blank wall, as it used to be in the olden days.

It’s possible that we’ve lost something very important along with opacity—the author’s right to being alone, to not writing, to long transitions between one text and the next one. And, not least, to not knowing everything they’re saying about you. “I don’t read reviews,” “I don’t do vanity searches,” “I’m not interested in readers’ reactions”—a tactic that now seems archaic (if not hypocritical)—is almost the only way to take a stand against the logic of supply and demand. It will win anyway: it’s already hard not to know one’s own reader by sight; the speed of communication keeps increasing, the temporal gap between the text and publication is minimal, while between the text and someone else’s evaluation there’s no gap at all. I’m sure, though I can’t verify it, that all these things influence the poetic work itself: the tempo of writing changes and the amount that’s written, the addressee spreads out or else gathers into a point. We live in public, demonstrating our jumps and somersaults to the audience on a broad background of statewide vigor and plenitude. It’s not at all surprising that we perceive any kind of judgment of taste as an attempt to establish a hierarchy on a model of top-down governance.

It’s striking that everyone agrees that things aren’t right—but no one has any idea how to make it right. Everyone’s positive program comes down to reciting several names from a list; that’s precisely why everyone feels so awkward about praising someone else’s poems—understanding that the peace and accord last only while we conceal this indecent thing—private opinion, personal taste. The builders of the tower of Babel no longer even try to talk to one another; there’s neither a common language, nor borders, nor rules, nor even faith in the possibility of understanding. In place of that is a sense of sinister stability, a feeling that we’re taking part in the work of someone else’s mechanism, one that we ourselves did not set into motion. This feeling, I think, is shared by all the participants in the literary process, and by everyone around it.

And What Is to Be Done Here

First and foremost—to be cognizant of the absurdity and relativity of manmade hierarchies. No one is canceling anyone, no one’s intriguing against anyone, no one’s needed by anyone. The chill of having no place (against the background of hysterical overheating in which theater and performance art now exist) is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external meaning. In this situation, opacity seems like the only choice: a murky, closed, unpopular, unentertaining, unsuccessful existence in the catacombs, one that remains aloof. One that, among other things, ignores its own “I want” and “I can” that enwrap every action in the logic of the market, that are ready to write themselves into any context and to turn any loss into a well-calculated win.

What does poetry reject when it turns away from aspirations to success—away from the contemporary reader? From a social function? From the need to meet (invariably overly low) expectations? From the possibility of becoming a remedy? Losses are inevitable here. Willy-nilly you’ll start looking toward the allied industries—into the territory of contemporary art, which has spent a century on separating the “creators of the beautiful” once and for all from the producers of what is comfortless, inapplicable in everyday life, socially unacceptable, and continues to go through the desert toward an unknown goal.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know what to do now. But this situation (of unproductive not-knowing, constant shame, dismal anxiety, blind running through the corridors of the brain) seems to me the only way of finding the emergency exit.

October 2010

Translated by Sibelan Forrester