Metamorphosis in Russian Modernism 9789633865248

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M E T A M O R P H O S E S IN RUSSIAN M O D E R N I S M

METAMORPHOSES IN RUSSIAN MODERNISM

edited by PETER I. BARTA

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Central E u r o p e a n University P r e s s

Published by Central European University Press Nadorutca 15 H-1051 Budapest Hungary 400 West 59 th Street New York, NY 10019 USA

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To my metamorphic friends: Sniffles, Beigli, Jobbles, and Greedy

TABLE OF

CONTENTS

Introduction: Russian Literature and the Metamorphic Theme Peter I. Barta Echo and Narcissus in Russian Symbolism Peter I. Barta The Transformation Myth in Russian Modernism: Ivan Konevskoi and Nikolai Zabolotsky Joan Delaney Grossman Pythagoras and the Butterfly: Nabokov's 0vidian Metamorphoses David H. J. Larmour Ovidian Intertexts in Olesha's 'The Cherry Stone': The Metamorphosis of Metamorphosis Stephen Hutchings Sansculotte Improvisers and Clouds in Trousers: Poetic Metamorphosis in Pushkin and Mayakovsky Irene Masing-Delic Savage Thinking: Metamorphosis in the Cinema of S. M. Eisenstein Anne Nesbet

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List of Contributors

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Index

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INTRODUCTION

RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND THE METAMORPHIG THEME P E T E R I.

BARTA

may be the only modern, technologically advanced civilization whose historical individuality is substantially informed by the realization of a metaphor. The attempt to westernize the country was not so much a matter of wanting Russia to be like one of the prominent European powers; rather Peter the Great ruled that the country should simply be a Western entity. The prevalence of the theme of metamorphosis in Russian literature is undoubtedly related to the post-Petrine culture's sense of identity, which is bound up in a unique fashion with the experience of sudden transformation. Peter turned northern marshlands into a Western European metropolis—St Petersburg—whose foundations were cemented on top of the bones of thousands of serfs who perished while they were building roads, houses, and squares the like of which they had never seen before. Along with the city came the establishment of a modern state modeled entirely on the Western European pattern. However, in the phenomenon we know as metamorphosis the blending of diverse and dissimilar features means that the new form retains to a significant degree the characteristics of the original entity. Thus, the empire of Peter and his successors, followed by the Soviet

RUSSIA

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PETER I. B A R T A

regime and what has come after it, has never lost many of the traits of old, pre-eighteenth-century Russia: the primacy of the state over the individual; submissiveness to the intransigence of bureaucratic leaders; and artistic excellence coupled with inefficiency in practical matters. Peter's activity and the metamorphosis of Russia— highlighted by the building of its new capital, St Petersburgproduced one of the most powerful modern myths of origin in the literary imagination. If we consider the prevalent themes of Russian literature, the most famous ones are firmly anchored in the Petrine myth and the aftermath of Peter's transformation of the Russian state: the aspiration of the Westernizers to complete Peter's work and 'catch up' with the West; the desire of the Slavophiles to transform the forever imperfect present into the ideal of a past Golden Age; Dostoevsky's vision of Russia's missionary role in converting greedy Western civilization with its vast secular appetite to true Christianity; Tolstoy's moral crusade propelled by the idealization of 'nature' (that is, patriarchal, old Russia) versus the falsity of Western-oriented urban (that is, Petersburg) culture, commerce, technology, and industry. Metamorphosis takes several recurrent forms in Western and non-Western cultures, all of which have left traces in the Petrine myth and in modern Russian literature. The type of transformation is largely determined by the person or entity that wishes it to occur. Magic, the oldest—most primitive—system, upon which more advanced and sophisticated Greco-Roman mythology draws, always involves an outside agent whose wish brings about the transformation. In classical antiquity the divine intervention responsible for transformative events is a more developed version of this phenomenon. Transformation stories recall through mythic memory a time long past when people still remembered the origin of the world. Thus, they search for supernatural forces to find explanations for

Introduction

3

the mysteries of the human environment and to enable people to control the future. Such a desire motivates the Siberian shamans—and also the hero of the Russian medieval epic tale, Volkh Vseslavich—who initiate the metamorphosis themselves: they turn into animals to gain insight unavailable to humans (Propp, 1984,122). In modern Russian culture, nevertheless, it is metamorphosis as understood in classical antiquity which has proved most influential. Peter in his myth is the source of god-like, absolute power whose caprice results in a short, sharp shock forcing the boyars to lead their wives from the terem in décolleté dresses to dance parties in rococo palaces. Classical mythic consciousness offers a connection between the metamorph's story and the fate of a people, thus blending the particular with the general. Individuals with names, such as Alcyone, Orpheus, and Echo, embody universal phenomena. Likewise Peter the Great incarnates social, political, and cultural transformation on a colossal scale in Russia (Lotman and Uspensky, 1988). Peter attempted to perform in political, social, economic, and cultural terms the metamorphosis of old, isolated Russia into a modern European state. Pushkin transformed Russian literature from a provincial into a universal institution. His interest in the myth of Petersburg—as embodied in The Bronze Horseman—demonstrates his fascination with the country's most famous protean figure besides himself: Peter. Pushkin is intrigued by the two most conspicuous features of metamorphosis: transforming something existing into something new and the related question of immortality. It hardly comes as a surprise that Pushkin shares important features with his metamorphic precursor Ovid, who was immersed in the same concerns. Both poets incorporate a wide network of source materials into their writing: in Ovid's Metamorphoses we have hundreds of stories about transformations based on Greek and

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Roman myths with origins far more remote in time than the sophisticated literary culture in which he wrote. Ovid offers to the modern age the most complete version of such ancient myths as those of Echo, Narcissus, Orpheus, and Daphne. Pushkin also adapted a large number of Western and Russian sources but, more importantly still, he assimilated Western poetic forms and themes into his own national literature. Like Ovid, his version became far more famous than the literary models he incorporated had ever been. Both poets were also victimized by the phenomenon of Empire. Pushkin was exiled to the provinces for his pro-Decembrist sympathies. Ovid was exiled to Tomi: apparently he was punished for sabotaging Augustus' moral and cultural establishment. Banished to the vicinity of the Black Sea, Ovid and Pushkin each found exile to be an experience akin to metamorphosis, a liminal condition between past and present, between the life before exile and the new intellectual experience of displacement. Ovid and Pushkin exemplify the artistic preoccupation with immortality and the recycling of earlier texts. The conclusion of Ovid's poem envisages immortality in terms more acceptable to modern humanity than the faith in physical transmutation that was part and parcel of the religious and philosophical order of the classical world. Thus, immortality is achieved through art: the writer metamorphoses into his writing. This concept is rearticulated with eloquence and the requisite stamp of originality in Pushkin's famous poem 'Exegi monumentum'. The author's shapeshifting into his successor is the condition of meaningfulness, the reinterpretation of something already stated. Clearly, transformation is not the end of the self (Skulsky, 1981, 27; Lotman and Mints, 1981). The original author's text placed in its new (con)text continues to be effective yet never ceases to have had an earlier—different—identity. That Russian critics should have championed the development

Introduction

5

of the theory of intertextuality is certainly no accident. Ever since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russian culture has echoed Western themes, reproduced Western genres and types, but always managed to retain the ability to communicate its own strong and distinct identity. Julia Kristeva, who first used the term 'intertextuality', was quick to point out that the genesis of the concept rests with Bakhtin's dialogism: all texts are constructed as a mosaic of quotations; all texts absorb and transform other texts (Kristeva, 1986, 37). Ovid's mythological figure Echo is richly symbolic in Russian literature. Her story itself is a metaphor both for metamorphosis and for the process of intertextuality. Her statements repeat the previous speaker's utterances or, at least, the latest or most resonant parts of them. Ovid's nymph also embodies the poet's anxious concern about the strength of his own voice, whether it will elicit the desired response from future generations. Artistic obsession with immortality and metamorphosis will be of central significance in the present volume. Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism offers the first scholarly account of metamorphosis as a theme, structuring principle, and source of artistic identity in Russian literature. In the six chapters, we have attempted to discuss less well remembered texts by famous Russian authors as well as features of muchdiscussed works that have hitherto remained in obscurity. The focus of attention will be on the first decades of the twentieth century, a period loosely referred to as 'Modernism'. These intellectually fertile years preceded Stalin's complete Sovietization—and near-destruction—of Russian culture. It has been our purpose to consider the blending of the theme of metamorphosis with three elements: artistic self-consciousness, the search for immortality, and the rearticulation of precursor texts. The topic of metamorphosis in Russia has certainly received some scholarly attention, but from a different perspec-

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tive. Roman Jakobson studied metamorphosis as a linguistic phenomenon, ignoring its mythological significance (Jakobson, 1921, 18). Gogol's 'metamorphoses' have been discussed as a stylistic device which makes possible, through the skillful use of metaphor and metonymy, the creation of grotesque fantasies (Dranch, 1984, 141, 147; Holthusen, 1974, 6). Zoomorphism in literature, which has also received critical scrutiny, is a related phenomenon: in Khlebnikov's poem 'Zhuravl' (The crane), for example, Petersburg transforms into an enormous bird (Holthusen, 1974, 10). In light of Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World much attention has been lavished on the subject of carnival. Like metamorphosis, carnival also results in the transformation of the individual, but here the emphasis lies on the juxtaposing of reality with its alternative world rather than shapeshifting. In particular, Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita offers a powerful example of the ingenious use of carnivalesque tropes which reverse hierarchical values. Metamorphosis will be seen in the following chapters as an important theme in its own right rather than as a literary device. In its mythological context it is a cumulative event which emphasizes how both the old and the new identities of the self are retained rather than how masks turn the 'I' into the 'non-I', as is the case with the metaphor of carnival (Flaker, 1986, 35). The sudden change of individuals into a different shape or form does not result in the loss of the original soul (Barkan, 1986, 23). For example, in Homer's Odyssey, which together with the Iliad contains the earliest Western transformation narratives, Circe causes the metamorphosis of the sailors into pigs, but they retain their human intelligence and personality. As Ovid's poem shows, the birth of the world is a huge transformation from chaos to order, but as the many stories also illustrate, chaos continues to be a vital force lurking under the surface of this order. Likewise, behind the gilded facade of Peter's 'Western'

Introduction

1

state or Catherine's Potemkin's village, the country's profoundly non-European aspects are always apparent. * *

*

Aleksandr Pushkin's poem 'Echo' offers the most significant rearticulation of this classical myth in Russian literature before the age of Symbolism. The poem deftly repositions Ovid's concern with the poetic voice and immortality: Pushkin wonders whether the poetic utterance is released, like Echo's, only to receive no response. Pushkin's conclusion about the 'Echo' poem is ambiguous. His reshaping of the weighty issues of mortality and art which are inseparable from the Ovidian Echo myth provoked the Symbolists some seventy years on at the end of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century to revisit the subject. Peter I. Barta's 'Echo and Narcissus in Russian Symbolism' (Chapter 1) studies the impact of these mythological figures within the poetic imagination at a period characterized by irrational philosophies and the rise of psychoanalysis. The metamorphosis of Echo and Narcissus inspired the poets of this dynamic age to voice their most fundamental concerns: a sense of one's inability to communicate; the painful rift between appearance and essence; and a profound uncertainty about the identity of the human subject. The chapter evaluates the poetic dialogue between the Symbolists—Bryusov, Balmont, Gippius, Ivanov, and, chiefly, Blok— and their predecessors, in particular Ovid and Pushkin. Blok's handling of the Echo character in his lyrical drama The Puppet Show reinterprets the classical figure by concentrating on her profound sense of alienation. Ivanov, in a similar vein, likens Narcissus to Dionysus, the quintessential metamorphic god, who in his dual capacity as both victimizer and victim embodies the modern problem of the division of the human subject's sense of identity.

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Another symbolist poet, Ivan Konevskoi, took an active interest in metamorphosis, attempting to connect matter and spirit and so to overcome death. Joan Delaney Grossman, in 'The Transformation Myth in Russian Modernism: Ivan Konevskoi and Nikolai Zabolotsky' (Chapter 2), links these early symbolist and late modernist poets, who are separated by forty years of sweeping social and political changes, scientific discoveries, and artistic and philosophical experimentation. Konevskoi and Zabolotsky share an Ovidian fascination with the ever-changing nature of life. Unable to come to terms with mortality, they use the formula of metamorphosis to develop their vision of panpsychism. According to this concept the universe is alive and possesses a consciousness, and the question is how humans can reach it so as to attain immortality. Unable to repeat Ovid's and Pushkin's rhetorically confident assurances about conquering death in the metamorphosis of immortal art, both poets conduct their respective poetic searches for ways of accessing nature's secrets by exploring Tiutchev's pantheism, Finnish and Russian shamanism, and the philosophical implications of early space research. Intellectual curiosity about transition from one dimension to another made metamorphosis an important structuring principle in Nabokov's art. Political, cultural, and linguistic bordercrossings and the trauma of transformation in Nabokov are the subject of David H. J. Larmour's chapter, 'Pythagoras and the Butterfly: Nabokov's Ovidian Metamorphoses' (Chapter 3). He argues that the theme of metamorphosis in Nabokov's oeuvre follows a pattern close to the one he discerns in Ovid's own poem: from a description of the pain of shapeshifting to regarding transformation as a universal force in the world. Larmour sees the icon of the butterfly as an emblem of Nabokov's biographical transformations from a Russian subject into an émigré, from a Russian into an Anglo-American writer. The chapter's

Introduction

9

focus on the development of Nabokov's sustained interest in transformation throughout his career throws light on the role of language, in whose inherent ambiguities and slippages the confusion of human identity originates. This is especially apparent when the Russian originals are reincarnated within another culture through the metamorphosis of translation. Nabokov's eventual rebirth as an American writer was brought about by the violent political transformation of his homeland. For all its brutality and the devastation of human lives and the country's cultural heritage, communism ironically derives from the Petrine transformation of Russia into a European civilization: the ideas upon which it was built, including the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', were all imported from the West. The final three chapters in this volume examine figures whose interest in metamorphosis was provoked by a desire to participate in the rebirth of Russia under the Soviets. Stephen Hutchings' 'Ovidian Intertexts in Olesha's "The Cherry Stone": The Metamorphosis of Metamorphosis' (Chapter 4) assesses how this twentieth-century text appropriates Ovid's poem. The point of departure for the comparison between the two writers is their different means of coming to terms with the degeneration of myth into metaphor. Both Ovid and Olesha used this phenomenon as a means of subtly undermining official ideology. Olesha's 'reconciliation' between artist and state is rendered deliberately unconvincing; the success and durability of their respective metamorphoses are as uncertain as their faith in literal immortality. Olesha's story about the metamorphosis of a cherry stone into a tree replaces the mythic sense of eternity characteristic of the first half of Ovid's poem with the metaphoric—and decidedly modern—transitoriness pervading the second part. Olesha's story thus reveals the ambivalence felt by 'fellow travellers' in the 1920s towards the coming of the 'eternal socialist paradise'. Olesha avoids placing his story

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about rebirth within the confines of unchanging mythic values, choosing instead to articulate a subversive new twentiethcentury form of mythic discourse centered on the pseudo-immortality of the fictional persona. Art as metamorphosis is also the subject of Irene Masing-Delic's chapter, 'Sansculotte Improvisers and Clouds in Trousers: Poetic Metamorphosis in Pushkin and Mayakovsky' (Chapter 5). Metamorphosis in Mayakovsky's oeuvre is linked to the image of the Italian Improviser in Pushkin's fragment Egyptian Nights. Whereas for Pushkin metamorphosis is contained primarily within the realm of art, in Mayakovsky art needs to transform life. Seeing himself as the new Pushkin of a new Russia, Mayakovsky opts for Gogol's rather than Pushkin's aesthetic position: the poet has no right to a private life because art serves life, not itself As with Olesha, the transformational power of art is unable to effect the kind of metamorphosis the artist has envisaged. For all his improvisational gifts, Mayakovsky's persona is unable to transform vulgarity and shallowness. Here, again, the poetic word—unlike Ovidian metamorphosis, which conquers death—is chained to the limitations of a metaphor. Mayakovsky is different from Pushkin's Improviser in that his art is not a mere job but offers the sole meaning of life. If life cannot effect a genuine transformation and prove stronger than 'Fate', the poet will kill himself. Sergei Eisenstein also sees art and metamorphosis as intricately connected and as basic to grasping the meaning of life. Anne Nesbet, in 'Savage Thinking: Metamorphosis in the Cinema of S. M. Eisenstein' (Chapter 6), studies Russia's most famous film director's cinematic experiments with, and views on, metamorphosis. His understanding of this phenomenon combines examples from classical mythology conveyed by Ovid, the shapeshifting rituals of 'primitive' cultures, and, finally, montage. The metamorphic potential of the last-mentioned lies in the

4 Introduction

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term's etymological origin (reproduction in animal husbandry). Eisenstein's thinking is guided by his study of the religion of the Bororo, who see themselves as being simultaneously people and parrots. Montage—like the copulation of animals from different species—is not juxtaposition but a superimposition of effects that combine and simultaneously transform themselves into a new entity. The chapter considers Eisenstein's metamorphic cinema from various interrelated points of view as a means of capturing the moment of historical change, with a particular focus on myths of rape, and as the confluence of life and metamorphic phenomena when one state of being is transformed into another: it considers five elements—the fetus, the bullfight, the execution, the wedding, and bisexuality. It is not the purpose of the present volume to provide a comprehensive survey of metamorphic literature in Russia but instead to direct attention to the importance of the subject through some carefully selected examples. As already noted, the shapeshifter retains features of previous identities and is sometimes capable of returning to previous forms. Russia, after 1991, contains all its previous particularities—superimposed on each other over centuries of ideological confrontations and contradictions—and this is one of the qualities which make it so distinctive. It continues to be neither Western nor Asian; an industrial country with Third-World characteristics; supremely cultured and yet profoundly uncivilized. It is, in short, a quintessential metamorph. It is futile to attempt to understand this civilization—let alone predict its future—without considering the reasons why it is not at rest with itself. It is to this that the present volume hopes to make a contribution. I would like to thank the volume's contributors for their cooperation. I am particularly grateful to Joan Delaney Grossman and David H. J. Larmour for discussing general ideas regarding metamorphosis with me. Many thanks are due to Christian J. L.

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Frankland for inspiring several thoughts about the subject and also for excellent advice regarding computer-based editing. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the British Academy which enabled me to travel to the 1996 convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston, where several contributors met to discuss the shape of the volume. Finally, I am very grateful to the team at the Central European University Press for their unusually generous assistance.

Bibliography Barkan, Leonard. 1986. The Gods Made Flesh. Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dranch, Sherry A. 1984. 'Metamorphosis as a Stylistic Device: Surrealist Schemata in Gogolian and Nabokovian Texts.' Language and Style 17, no. 2: 139-48. Flaker, Aleksander. 1986. 'Metamorfoza' (Metamorphosis). Russian Literature 20:31-40. Galinsky, Karl G. 1975. Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Holthusen, Johannes. 1974. Tiergestalten und Metamorphe. Erscheinungen in der Literatur der russischen Avantgarde (1909-1923) (Animal figures and metamorphs. Appearances in the literature of the Russian avantgarde). Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Jakobson, Roman. 1921. Noveishaia russkaia poeziya (The latest Russian poetry). Vol. 1. Prague. Kristeva, Julia. 1986. 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, 34-61. New York: Columbia University Press. Lotman, Yuri, and Zara G. Mints. 1981. 'Literatura i mifologiia' (Literature and mythology). Trudypo znakovym sistemam 13: 35-56. Lotman, Yuri, and Boris Uspensky. 1988. 'Myth-Name-Culture', in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, ed. Daniel P. Lucid, 233-53. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Massey, Irving. 1976. The Gaping Pig. Literature and Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Propp, Vladimir. 1984. Theory and History of Folklore. Trans. Ariadne Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shchelgov, Iu. K. 1962. 'Nekotorye cherty shtruktur "Metamorfoz" Ovidiya' (Some aspects of the structures of Ovid's Metamorphoses), in Teksty sovetskogo literaturovedcheskogo shtrukturalizma. Munich: Centrifuga. Skulsky, Harold. 1981. Metamorphosis. The Mind in Exile. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Tomlinson, Charles. 1983. Poetry and Metamorphosis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER

1

ECHO AND NARCISSUS IN RUSSIAN SYMBOLISM P E T E R I.

BARTA

of the century—frequently referred to as the 'Silver Age'—was a period of unprecedented dynamism in Russian culture. The country was experiencing social, economic, and spiritual turmoil; an established way of life was rapidly disappearing and the way forward seemed unclear. The rising popularity of the Decadent movement, Symbolism, and the new spirituality in the philosophical works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in addition to the rediscovery of folklore, mythology, and the new definitions of religion made a powerful impression on Russian intellectual life centred in St Petersburg and Moscow. T H E TURN

Russian Symbolist literature attempted to rise above everyday reality and to debunk the discourse of cliched convention. A profound interest in myth, classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages enabled poets to direct their gaze away from the trite themes popular among the vapid bourgeoisie they despised. Fascination with the world of the artifact and experimentation with the expressive powers of the poetic idiom, with rhyme and rhythm, distanced artists from the banality of the 'real' world.

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At the opposite end of the spectrum from positivism, which views literature essentially as mimetic representation of social phenomena, the Symbolists were fascinated by such literary works as Ovid's Metamorphoses, and its many sources in ancient myths of origin and in religious rituals (Barkan, 1986, 26). Several figures in Russia's Silver Age took a particularly strong interest in Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus. There was even a ballet entitled Narcisse, written by Nicholas Tcherepnine and Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes. The first literary account of the story of Echo and Narcissus is in the third book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (8 BCE) (Hollander, 1981, 24; Vinge, 1967, 3; Zimmerman, 1994, 2). Unlike Echo, Narcissus does not feature in extant literature preceding Ovid but his was certainly an old myth and must have been in Greek sources available to Ovid. The story of Echo in Ovid is well known. Unable to articulate words of her own, Echo falls in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus. The various narratives which draw upon the myth of Narcissus and which inform Ovid's account all tell of a young man who was loved by many but who in turn ignored and rejected everybody. The nymph Echo was his most famous victim. By repeating the final words of Narcissus' sentences addressed to her, she manages to communicate to him that she loves him, only to find out that Narcissus has no desire at all to reciprocate her feelings. But Narcissus has not long to wait for his own discomfiture, brought about by Nemesis in response to a prayer from one of his unrequited admirers. He catches sight of his reflection on the surface of a lake, falls hopelessly in love with what he sees and—unable to have his 'beloved'—he withers away. Eventually he turns into a narcissus (also known as the daffodil), a bulbous flower with a strong scent and a corona surrounded by crimson and yellow. Symbolist poets produced a group of literary texts on the metamorphosis of Echo and Narcissus. No thematic study of

Echo and Narcissus in Russian Symbolism

17

these lyrical works has yet been undertaken. The purpose of the present chapter will be to remedy this situation by systematically examining the relevant poetic material on Echo and/or Narcissus in Russian Symbolism. We shall consider Blok's play The Puppet Show (.Balaganchik), and a group of his poems thematically connected to this play; we shall also discuss poems on Echo and Narcissus by Balmont, Gippius, and Vyacheslav Ivanov. Our investigation will consider the intertextual chain which supplies an underpinning to all the texts under analysis in this study. Intertextuality—the textual link between works and their precursors—is a phenomenon which is itself analogous to the process of metamorphosis. If literary creation is a shape onto which the writer's soul is imprinted, and if this shape—by way of intertextual recycling—transforms into another text, is the author then metamorphosed into the shape of his successor? Does metamorphosis offer eternal life? The metamorphosis of Echo and Narcissus inspired Russian Symbolists to voice some of the fundamental concerns of their age: the inability to communicate one's desires; the division between the inner self and outer appearance—masked or metamorphosed; the sense of being located between different realities (Skulsky, 1981, 56-57). Uncertainty about human identity, the concept of the double, and the intoxication offered by Dionysus to dull the senses and liberate pent-up libidinal energies greatly exercised Russian writers at the turn of the century. The self-conscious artist of the fin de siècle tended to identify with figures, such as Narcissus and Echo, whose lives were defined by a yearning for the unattainable. Narcissus cannot stop adoring himself and therein lies his tragedy: he suffers terribly because at the same time he knows that he cannot have himself. The knowledge that he is in love with himself also fills him with a profound sense of emptiness (Barkan, 1986, 47). Like a true Symbolist, Narcissus in his solipsism is unable to distance him-

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self from the image to which he gave birth; Echo, in turn, in Ovid's version cannot leave Narcissus. Ovid's relatively short story about Echo and Narcissus can be read in a variety of ways. The Symbolist texts broaden further the interpretative horizons of Ovid's version of Echo's story instead of serving as references to Ovid as source (Knoespel, 1985, ix; Brenkman, 1976, 293). Rather than being a mirror of social phenomena—which was one of the main ambitions of nineteenth-century realism— the themes of Echo and Narcissus reveal literature as a selfreflecting mirror, much like the surface of the magical lake in which Narcissus stares at his own image. Texts are meaningful because they relate to, and represent, other texts in an elaborate chain. In this large intertextual system, certain features stand out as overtly linked to each other. The scene by the lake where Narcissus' drama unfolds—much like Yeats' Byzantium— reveals a world of artificial beauty isolated from humans and animals. This space is also removed from conventional temporality (Brenkman, 1976, 304-305): the demise of both Narcissus and Echo demonstrates this clearly as they metamorphose into their final condition and thus step into eternity. The Narcissus theme was popular with European Symbolists. For Mallarmé, Rilke, Valéry, and Yeats, Narcissus primarily represented poetic self-awareness: artistic creation removed from the surrounding world of triviality. The figure of Narcissus was seen in a considerably more favorable light in these Symbolists' treatment than in Ovid's version. The cruel insensitivity he showed to others—including Echo—who fell in love with him before he, in turn, fell in love with his own image, was ignored by the Russian poets: they tended to focus only on his pain and suffering. In Blok's 'In the Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard' (V chas kogda p'yaneyut nartsissy), and in Balmont's 'Narcissus and Echo' (Nartsiss i Ekho) and 'The Flowers of Narcissus' (Tsvety Nartsissa), Narcissus appears already metamorphosed into a

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flower. The flower is not liberated from Narcissus' predicament, however. Like the youth, it also keeps staring at its image on the water's surface. The short-lived, delicate flower reflects human tragedy. However, concentrating on it rather than on Narcissus (particularly his life before falling in love with his own image), reveals the interest of the Symbolists in the figure as a victim and one with whom they wish to identify. His tragic predicament lies in the love lost between the self and the other. In short, his story—complemented by that of Echo—offers a metaphor for the poet's fate. In Russian literature, Ovid and Pushkin became inseparably connected. For the Symbolists, the concerns in Pushkin's poems expressing his ars poetica invited definitions of the role of the poet. In his review entitled 'The Heroines of Ovid' Blok emphasized the relationship between Ovid and 'sacred' Pushkin, who, like the bright light of dawn, penetrates the darkness of night. Bryusov's poem 'In the Camp of the Gypsies' (V tsyganskom tabore) also pays homage to Pushkin's poetic selfdefinition as it arises in the image of the poet narrating Ovid's tale to his audience. Bryusov's poem illuminates the Symbolists' urge to enrich their writing with allusions and references. Seeping into the symbolical context, these greatly broaden the range of meaning. Because Bryusov's persona—speaking on behalf of the poet—finds his own social and physical environment vulgar, shallow, and spiritually empty, he wishes to fill his own and his readers' consciousnesses with the memory of a more meaningful past. This distant reality can be retrieved only in mythic memory: "Everything that one has acquired since childhood as a dream of dreams, / is before me in the cloak of darkness." 1 The "dream of dreams" refers to the child's spontaneous mythopoetry as he makes stories meaningful for himself, in his own terms. Bryusov's mythopoeia resembles a Chinese box: "I await the tale about Ovid in Aleko's

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crowd". The persona's mental appropriation of Pushkin builds upon Pushkin's poetic recreation of Ovid's poetic recreation of a cultural heritage which recorded the primary myths of the ancient world and which is mostly lost to us. The Symbolists' focus on Echo and Narcissus illustrates how such literary processes can create artistically effective modern literature. Pushkin's interest in Ovid, a poet who, like him, was exiled, is evident in the direct references in The Gypsies (Tsygany) and in such poems as 'Rhythm' (Rifma) and 'Echo' (Ekho). The Symbolists, for whom the concern for expressing the contents of the soul is crucial, rephrase Pushkin's fear that his voice disappears in a void like Echo's. The Symbolists' poetic reinterpretation of their precursors' themes informs a dialogue within which ideas converge—or metamorphose—into new ideas. Ovid's assertion that nothing ever dies is thus reborn—albeit without Ovid's sense of certainty—in their writings. 2 Thus, Echo and Narcissus are given a new life as figures of poetic self-definition in Blok's The Puppet Show. They are effective in such a capacity because of their attached intertextual baggage, which accommodates their previous literary occurrences throughout the ages. Blok's play mockingly alludes, in the mise-en-scène of the third couple of lovers, to a medieval reinscription—Boiardo's epic Orlando Innamorato—of Echo's story. Blok's knight and his lady appear in mock-medieval costumes. In Orlando Innamorato warm, human love is abandoned in favour of an illusion. Characters modeled on Narcissus leave their lovers and forsake their happiness in pursuit of an image: their predicament is akin to the poet's, who has to choose between representing the impact of the world on his soul and the factual reality of physical-temporal life. Orlando's attention shifts from his wife because of his infatuation with the image of a beautiful woman on the surface of the water. We learn about his fate from the narrative of a lady whose own story reflects

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Orlando's: she was abandoned by her knight who was bewitched by the image of a beautiful face on the surface of the water in a fountain (Knoespel, 1985, 111-12). In Boiardo, the frame narrative repeats the narrative proper almost identically and so alludes not only to Narcissus but also to Echo's story. Blok's medieval scene occupies the intertextual centre of gravity in The Puppet Show's own dialogue with its classical, medieval, and Romantic precursor texts. The woman of the third couple is an Echo-character; we shall see later that Blok explicitly refers to her by that name when he comments on the play. In addition, a number of other texts inform the consciousness of Blok's lyrical drama. Poems thematically related to The Puppet Show resonate with the same problems. Among them we find the noteworthy titles 'Echo' (Ekho) and 'In the Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard'. Blok's poem 'Echo' draws upon another extant myth—recorded in the Homeric 'Hymn to Pan'— which does not include Narcissus. In the Homeric version, Echo gives birth to Pan's daughter. Subsequently, Echo is torn apart and her limbs, endowed with voice, repeat the last words of the speech of others. Both the Homeric and Ovidian versions depict a victimized and betrayed female figure, represented merely by her disempowered voice rather than by her image. To emphasize the importance of Echo's voice, Symbolist poets gave new life to an old literary form: most of the literary works we shall discuss are echo verses. The echo verse is primarily conspicuous as an artifact halfway between verse and drama. It is, of course, strikingly different from literature which aimed to mirror conventional, daily life (Colby, 1920, 42). The archetype of the echo verse is contained in the interchange between Echo and Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The echo verse repeats lines or the ends of lines; the recurrence of the same sound or cluster of sounds also achieves echo effects at intervals sufficiently close to each other to be perceptible to the

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ear. Thus, rhyme, refrain, and all forms of alliteration also constitute echo effects {Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974, 212). Repetition can appear as a reply to, or a commentary on, words previously spoken. The echo verse occurs most frequently in poems about unrequited love. It enjoyed particular popularity during the Renaissance and the Baroque, mainly in pastoral poetry. It exemplifies the Symbolist ambition to highlight the fact that the poem is an artifact, invoking the world of art in which old myths can metamorphose into a new existence. Poetry seeks to gain access to a 'higher than real' reality—to move from the phenomenon to the 'noumenon'— through mythic consciousness. However they approached the subject, all poets addressed perhaps the most crucial point in the myth of Echo and Narcissus: how to live in a world of broken communication (Pyman, 1979, 233). In Ovid's story, the conflict originates in mistaken identities and mistaken intentions (Bennett, 1982,146). In The Puppet Show none of Blok's characters has a unified personality either (Westphalen, 1993, 55, 58). Like Echo and Narcissus, Blok's third pair of lovers are unsure about their own identity and the general meaning of their situation. The knight's questions seem to be addressed to a person other than his partner on stage who mechanically merely repeats the last words of each of the knight's utterances. The emotionally charged questions are sharply at odds with the grotesquely echoed responses. The identity of the Echo figure, moreover, is completely obscured by the banality of mechanically repeated sounds (Bennett, 1982,147): He - So you believe me? Oh, you are more beautiful today than ever. She - Ever. He - You know everything that ever was and ever will be. You understood the meaning of the circle drawn here. She - Circle drawn here.

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He - Oh, how enchantingly you speak. You uncover the mysteries of my soul. How much your words mean to my heart. She - Heart. He - Oh, Eternal Joy! Eternal Joy! She - Joy.

Because of the discontinuity between her speech and her mind, her words are clearly not her own (Brenkman, 1976, 300). A sound-device rather than a human subject, her self is behind a veil which makes her unknowable. Both Ovid's and Blok's Echo figures need to wait for the man to speak to them first so that they can give back the end of each statement (Knoespel, 1985, 7; Spivak, 1993, 24). Unlike Ovid's Echo, though, who retains her own desire to communicate even when locked into Narcissus' speech, Blok's Echo comes across as a highly alienated and alienating figure. The Puppet Show reinterprets its 'mother-text': removed from the fairy-tale-like world of classical mythology and placed in the grotesquely distorted medieval scenery (which, in turn, is inside a distorted commedia dell'arte, inside a Symbolist play), Echo's loneliness is greatly enhanced. Blok's disempowered female device is now unable to express herself to her male companion. The multiple meaning of the utterances results in the impossibility of attaching meaning to what is said. Nothing and nobody is what it seems. The theatre in The Puppet Show is not really a theatre; the characters and the staging are endowed with symbolical rather than dramatic significance. The person referred to as the 'author' does not understand why his actors are not performing the play he has written, but, at the same time, he himself cannot have understood somebody else's instructions either, given that an extended arm yanks him off-stage in midsentence. Columbina, Pierrot, and Harlequin emphasize different aspects of their personalities by donning various masks; furthermore, a range of minor characters reflect different sides of

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the protagonists. Communication fails to accomplish its task as a means of leading to the fulfillment of human desire. The subject of Balmont's poem 'Narcissus and Echo' is similar. The scene in the poem complements the following passage in Ovid's Metamorphoses: "As often as the unhappy boy sighed 'Alas', she took up his sigh, and repeated 'Alas!'...his last words as he gazed into the familiar waters were 'Woe is me for the boy I loved in vain' and the spot re-echoed the same words. When he said his last farewell, 'Farewell!' said Echo too" (iii, 482-517). Narcissus, reduced to a flower in Balmont's poem, has been the victim of unsuccessful communication by virtue of falling in love and not realizing from the messages received that he only sees the reflection of a body and that the body is his own (Vinge, 1967, 12). Losing his body by turning into a flower is paralleled by Echo's losing her body and retaining only her ability to repeat the last words of someone else's speech. Narcissus is fixated on a reflection of a face without a body, while Echo, with a disintegrating body and a voice unable to initiate speech, is fixated on Narcissus. Messages are understood according to the interpretative intention of the addressee. The ambiguity of the discourse illustrates the treacherous nature of communication in the story. Ovid's Narcissus ignores Echo's pleas addressed to him, which are, actually, the repetitions of his own words of farewell to the beautiful image on the surface of the lake. Balmont uses the adjective lzavetnyV to modify the noun izvuk\ The sound is indeed 'desired' by Echo, who desperately wants to hear the voice of the youth so that, by repeating it, she can attempt to send her message to him. 'ZavetnyV also means 'intimate', however. The words are private and personal from Narcissus' perspective; he intends them not for Echo, hiding behind the bushes, but for the beloved image on the water's surface. A further shade of meaning lzavetnyV conveys is that of one who preserves a sacred

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heritage: this clearly refers to the sound of the echo, which sustains the memory of the unhappy lovers forever. In Balmont's re-creation of the myth, the air is filled with laughter and crying, prophesying and tittering: the mood combines the joy of seeing-hearing the image of the beloved and the tragedy of recognizing the doomed nature of misplaced emotions. Balmont's image of intermittent laughing and crying captures the confusion in the communication of the three participants: Echo, Narcissus, and the image of the latter. Narcissus' disembodied reflection matches Echo's soon-to-be-disembodied voice. They love and cannot reach their loved one, they live but they cannot control their lives: their senses register false messages and eventually they lose their bodies. Sound is allimportant in this strange ménage à trois. No wonder that Balmont uses a wide variety of verbs to qualify verbal communication: 'revnuef (feels jealous), 'molit' (beseeches), 'grozif (threatens), 'prorochif (prophesies), 'rydaet' (sobs), 'khokhochef (guffaws). A further suggestion of the effect of miscommunication appears in Balmont's final stanza: the persona identifies with one of the lovers by using the first person plural. To whom the 'my' refers, however, remains unclear. The reader, thus, is brought into Echo and Narcissus' deadly game with words: the persona's identity is not revealed. This marks a difference from Ovid: the Symbolist poet's sense of identity with the characters creates a more tragic rendering of the myth than in Ovid's poem. In Metamorphoses, the narrator's voice is outside the world of the narrative. In Balmont, however, all distance between the poetic persona and the mythic figure is lost: because of the immediacy of the experience, akin to the action in classical tragedy, the fate of Echo and Narcissus affects the reader directly. Balmont's 'Narcissus and Echo' is about loss and failure. After the metamorphosis, all that is left of Echo is her voice, of

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Narcissus a flower, and nothing at all of the boy's reflection on the water. Unable to accomplish anything, the figures remain profoundly isolated. Balmont's Echo and Narcissus respond to invitations but their responses fail to result in any action or consequence. Their voices disappear in a void. In Blok's poem 'In the Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard', the clownfigure on the stage faces empty infinity in the image of an insatiably greedy spider ('nenasyto-zhadnyi pauky), which sucks out whatever it can without showing any concern for its victim. Ultimately, nature chooses to remain deaf. In Balmont's poem, in the last line, everything comes to an end in the heartless, inanimate kingdom of uncaring Nature. In Gippius' poem 'Song' (Pesnya)—perhaps

the most finely chiseled echo poem in Rus-

sian—the natural world surrounding the speaker is distant and dispassionate. While the poem does not explicitly mention Echo, it captures the emotional and intellectual moorings of the cycle of poems which is the subject of this chapter. In 'Song', a personified natural world surrounding the persona fosters desire— as is the case in the Echo-Narcissus story—but the commitment is uncertain and unreliable ("the pale sky promises me the coming of miracles / of miracles"). The sky above is covered in a rosy hue but the setting sun preceding the darkness of night produces this. The scene in Blok's 'Echo' is similar. A detached universe—described in cold colours—surrounds the persona: the moon is like a green sickle against the dark-blue evening sky. The persona, in a state of excitement, rushes towards a clearing. Echo, the nymph, answers his call: the autumnal scene is now described as soft and welcoming as the cold colours give way to gold, the colour of the foliage. But this comforting effect is deceptive: Echo does not notice the persona. The persona remains an uninvolved bystander, again surrounded by the coldness of nature as he is left alone hearing the laughter of Echo disappearing at nightfall.

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A sense of similar frustration and rejection—born out of the inability to communicate with each other—surrounds the vaguely delineated figures in Blok's The Puppet Show. Undoubtedly, in one sense, Columbina, the play's female protagonist, who in one of her metamorphoses turns into a cardboard doll, comes across as a hollow figure. She utters only five, apparently meaningless, words in the entire play: "I shall not leave you." But, having made this promise to Pierrot, she promptly leaves. Her speech, however, is meaningless only on the level of the plot. In the play's symbolic—higher—reality, the quest for the Beautiful Lady is as eternal as Pierrot's search for Columbina, Narcissus' eternal yearning for the beautiful boy—his own image—and Echo's undying love for Narcissus, which survives the loss of speech and body. The cardboard doll represents the debunking, and subsequent loss, of physical but not of spiritual life. Columbina and the Echo character of the third couple are not primarily there to mock the Eternal Feminine, as has been suggested by critics who imply that the grotesque voice of Blok's Echo was all that remained of the 'Verses on the Beautiful Lady' (Mochulsky, 1983, 123). It has even been suggested that the scene with the third couple in The Puppet Show was a 'cruel satire' on the cult of the Beautiful Lady (Fedorov, 1980, 64; Volkov, 1926, 32). Such interpretations ignore the play's Symbolist apparatus which seeks to bridge the gap between the superficial and the implied higher forms of reality. It is significant, I think, that Columbina, rather than the other two protagonists, is listed first in the dramatis personae. Readings which imply that she is an inactive, essentially redundant character (Kelly, 1990, 153), fail to take into consideration her metamorphosis, "the hinge on which the play swings" (Westphalen, 1993, 64; Zarovnaya, 1972, 142): such interpretations focus on what Gayatri Spivak calls Echo's "(non)representation", the absence of attention to her narrativization (Spivak, 1993, 17, 22).

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As women, Blok's Columbina and the Echo character— essentially the same person—are denied a life, a body, and a voice; they are not characterized by their utterances and they are not described. They lack the ability to love or ever to be loved. But, significantly, in the conclusion of the play, it is Columbina who turns into a shining, bright star whose light is there for all to see, like the sound of the echo is there for all to hear: the metamorphosed being keeps company with the living from within a transcendental realm. This space is unattainable just as the quest for the Beautiful Lady never reaches its target. The image of being between two realities, on the border of two ontologically different realms, captures the mood of Blok's 'In The Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard'. This is the time when the world is between day and night ('v zakatnom ogne'), between the last rays of the sun and the penumbra signaling the onset of darkness. The contrast between the glare of the footlights, which the clown in Blok's poem faces, and the darkness beyond, expresses the sensation of an existentially very uncertain space. Narcissus' drama is also enacted in such a space, between the physical and the metaphysical. In Balmont's poem 'Narcissus and Echo', Narcissus' words reverberate in the invisible Echo's voice: it is a physical sound but one permeated with the pain of someone imprisoned in a dimension outside time and space. The contrast is captured in the rhyming words at the line's end in the couplet: ' Vneshny/nezdeshny': "The desired voice, even as it comes from outside, / Is forever penetrated with otherworldly yearning" (A zvuk zavetny, khotya i vneshny, / Navek pronizan toskoi nezdeshnei). The poem's images move gradually from life—filled with pain—to the eternal realm of death. The images of the sad, cold, and deceived flower are replaced by the emptiness of eternity. The sounds die down and the waters reflect no one.

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Narcissus' realization that he is in love with his own reflection dawns on him gradually. The poem captures the final stage of his metamorphosis from human to flower, before being freed altogether from the bounds of physical existence. Balmont's 'Narcissus' Flowers' (Tsvety Nartsissa) dwells on Narcissus' psychological maturation when he fully understands the hopelessness of his situation. The pale flowers' outward appearance is as different from Narcissus' as one species can be from another. Nevertheless, the narcissuses do not cease to have once been the young man and this experience enhances their "forlorn uniqueness": they have retained Narcissus' mind even if they are now in the shape of flowers (Skulsky, 1981, 32). Having seen their image in the water of the lake—a phenomenologically transitory space—they became aware of the "world of beauty": "they understood the world of beauty" (ponyali, ponyali svet krasoty). The end of the poem reaches this higher reality of 'Beauty' where suffering ends. Here the painful division is finally resolved between dream and illusion, on the one hand, and the reality of the physical-temporal world on the other. Thus, Balmont's conclusion is happier than Gippius' in her 'Song', in which the persona is imprisoned in her physical body, excluded from a world of ideals whose existence she can nevertheless perceive. Torn between reality and a higher reality, between ignorance and full knowledge of the tragedy of his own situation, the Narcissus figure fails to know himself. The question—'Who is Narcissus?'—occupies the center of Vyacheslav Ivanov's 'Narcissus' (Nartsiss). The poem contains mutually contradictory images which emphasize the alienation of the self from its other. Narcissus is a beautiful child of the forest whose movements, nevertheless, remind one of a satyr; it is also uncertain whether he is mortal or divine. It is not known whether a 'frisky Naiad' or a shy and timid Dryad draws him towards the fateful

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lakeside. Is he, like Dionysus, intoxicated with wine or, like Apollo, with the dream of solitariness? Ivanov ponders whether Narcissus was attracted to the fatal location by the pipe of Pan, the Dionysian seducer we saw in Blok's 'Echo', or by the sound of Echo, the victim. As Narcissus is a double of contrasting figures, his identity is shrouded in considerable uncertainty. Because he fails to know himself, he—like all humans—has no control over his fate and has no freedom. The poet advises him not to look into the water, knowing full well how futile the advice is. Even if he is not Narcissus, he will catch sight of his image, fall in love with it, and metamorphose into a new Narcissus. Ivanov clearly implies that the figure is bound to destroy himself and cannot avoid his fate. Self-destructiveness is an essential feature of narcissistic behavior, according to Sigmund Freud, who fully developed this concept in his well-known study 'Zur Einführung des Narzissismus'' (On narcissism: an introduction). Narcissus is unable to love another and treats his own body the same way as the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated (Freud, 1957, 73). The origin of the term 'narcissism' is in Otto Rank's essay 'Der Doppelgänger' (1914). It would be hard to find more poignant archetypes for the Doppelgänger than Echo and Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. She highlights in her repetitions that Narcissus' discourse is loaded with multiple meanings. She cannot touch her beloved Narcissus just as Narcissus cannot touch his own image. When they realize that the person they are in love with will not, or cannot, reciprocate, they both perish. Their actions and feelings mirror each other. But Narcissus' image on the surface of the water also doubles Echo in that his role, like hers, is to reflect Narcissus: the three figures cannot separate from each other and therein lies the destruction of them all. They lack the sense of uniqueness, essential to qualify as an individual. Both Rank and Freud suggest that Narcissus' behav-

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iour implies the production of Doppelgänger figures and a wish for annihilation. According to Freud, Narcissus is strongly linked with both paranoid and suicidal types of behaviour (Vinge, 1967, 51; Rank, 1989, 69). Both these urges are present in the fascination with doubles, which keeps recurring in Blok's corpus. The extensive critical literature discussing the play The Puppet Show alone has devoted a great deal of attention to Pierrot and Harlequin as each other's doubles. Their relationship is rightly seen as the struggle between the divided aspects of the self, or as some would argue, Blok's own self (Gromov, 1961, 442; Rubtsov, 1968, 34; Zarovnaya, 1972, 135). The theme of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbina appears in the cycle of poems thematically related to the play The Puppet Show: the poem with the same title as the play, 'The Puppet Show' (Balaganchik), 'The Light Wandered about in the Window' (Svet shatalsya v okne), 'The Puppet Booth' (Balagan), 'In The Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard', 'He Appeared at a Smart Ball' (Yavilsya on na stroinom bale), and 'Double' (.Dvoinik). The triangle between Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbina quite possibly doubles the complex relationship between Blok, his wife, and Andrei Bely. Blok suggested himself that he considered doubling to be his fundamental method in creating the characters of The Puppet Show (Medvedev, 1928, 20). He wrote: "1. In the story there are doubles (P'ero and Arlekin. 2. In the scene with the first couple, the double is by the column. 3. In the scene with the second couple, the double is the third pursuer. 4. In the scene with the third couple, she herself is the double (Echo)." The female figure of the third pair of lovers is explicitly related to Echo here. The title of the poem 'In The Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard', in turn, directly alludes to Narcissus. Harlequin— the person in the wings—pines for the speaker in the poem, Pierrot. But Pierrot cannot reciprocate: Pierrot and Harlequin are

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two aspects of one human subject. In the poem 'Double' the cynical side of the persona's character is represented by a double—another harlequin. The two harlequins are inseparable: intertwined in an embrace, they are two aspects of the same person (Masing-Delic, 1973, 87). Their union is unhappy: the old one is abusive and oppressive, the younger one—gentle and loyal—is his victim. A similar division between Pierrot and Harlequin—two sides of the same self—is apparent in 'He Appeared at a Smart Ball'. In the poem 'In The Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard', however, Harlequin appears to be in harmony with Pierrot: they are both kind and compassionate. These fluctuations are not surprising: in the play The Puppet Show, the inconsistent behaviour of the characters reflects the contradictory desires and ambitions which Blok thinks are inherent in the human personality. The theme of the Doppelgänger and the Narcissus theme are related in mythology (Zimmerman, 1994, 2). The noun ileirion\ the water lily, from which the name of Narcissus' mother, Leiriope (or Liriope) is clearly derived, also meant 'narcissus'. Her decision to name her child Narcissus suggests that she intended to turn him into her own image—into a double, in other words (Hamilton, 1982, 111). As we have already said, the theme of the Doppelgänger intertwines with the wish to escape from a life filled with pain. Both Vyacheslav Ivanov and Blok attach significance to the Symbolism implied by Narcissus' name. Blok's poem 'In the Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard' considers the flower as an opiate. The title implies a personified image: in the hour when the daffodils—that is, the narcissus flowers—drink hard, the whole world is ensconced in twilight and people slip out of the prison house of individuation imposed on them by society. Oblivion is brought on by alcohol. The figures' sense of identity is vague and it is hardly surprising that Harlequin has

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forgotten what his role was supposed to be. It appears that Harlequin and Pierrot are themselves the flowers, doubles charmed by narcissistic fascination. The invisible figure whose crying voice is heard could very well be Echo—a further double of the Narcissus persona, Blok's central figure. As we discussed earlier, in Blok's poem 'Echo' the disappearing nymph laughs— seemingly at the forlorn figure of the persona. His loneliness is enhanced by his position as a mere observer of the seduction of the intoxicated nymph by Pan, the god of shepherds. Pan, a companion of Dionysus, has the lower body of a goat and the upper body of a human. His presence suggests sexual abandon induced by alcohol or other intoxicating substances. Echo's laughter mixes with the longing sound of Pan's reed pipe. Whereas Narcissus is not present in the poem, the concept of love brought on by 'narcotic' Pan—a Dionysian figure—clearly demarcates a typological pattern similar to that in the EchoNarcissus story. The association between the flower and the oblivion brought on by a drug is an early one. Pliny notes the etymological connection between the words ''narcissus'' and 'narke'—'narcotic' {Natural History, 21.128). Like the youth Narcissus, the flower is also associated with waterside locations (Zimmerman, 1994, 1). This is exploited for its symbolic potential both in Balmont's 'Narcissus and Echo' and in his 'Flowers of Narcissus'. In the latter, the process of infatuation leading to death at the peak of passion is illustrated in the poem's colour symbolism. The flowers are cool and detached—an allusion to the heartless and discompassionate Narcissus—and this condition is marked by their snow-white colour: 'lepestki belosnezhnye' (petals as white as snow). Once they catch sight of their image in the water, they are promptly drugged and trapped. Calmness and coolness now give way to breathless thrill. White turns into purple and gold: "Surrounded by purple lining, the heart preserves secret golden

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confessions" (Serdtse, bagryanoi chertoi okaimlennoe / Taino khranit zalatyya priznaniya). In phenomenological terms, lakes, rivers, and the like suggest a transition from the realm of the living to that of the dead. In line 8 of the Homeric 'Hymn to Demeter'—where the earliest reference to the narcissus occurs—the flower appears as a drug associated with sexual desire and death (Zimmerman, 1994, 2). Persephone is gathering narcissus flowers and, as their radiance and fragrance enchant her, she is snatched away by Hades into the Underworld. The lakeside and the flowers are a trap (Knoespel, 1985, 2, 9; Zimmerman, 1994,2). The idea of trapping people by enchanting them and, subsequently, destroying them through the tortures of unrequited love, is clearly at the centre of Ivanov's poem 'Narcissus' {Nartsiss). As Ivanov ponders the identity of the figure in the poem—an 'entrapper' who is himself entrapped—he points to a link between Narcissus and Dionysus. The relationship between the two mythological figures was established in Greek literature.4 The second generation of Russian Symbolists took a strong interest in Dionysus because of this figure's importance, as well as that of the god Apollo, in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (Barta, 1991-92). The fact that Ovid compares Narcissus—in particular his locks—to both Apollo and Dionysus (3:420-423) was surely not lost on the Symbolists, whose thinking on the subject was strongly influenced by Nietzsche. Ivanov likens the Narcissus figure in his poem to Lyaeus—an epithet derived from the Greek lueus, which means the 'loosener', the one who makes loose. This is a straightforward reference to Ovid's Metamorphoses: within a few pages of the poetic account of the fates of Echo and Narcissus, the beginning of Book 4 discusses the celebration of Bacchus (the Latin name of Dionysus).5 Here he is referred to as both 'Bromius' and 'Lyaeus' amidst allusions to the fact that he was the child of two different mothers. With his

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wine-giving capacity—which can induce the most natural form of metamorphosis—and his bisexuality, Bacchus is clearly the quintessential metamorphic god (Barkan, 1986, 38; Flaker, 1986, 31). 6 In the next couplet, Ivanov explicitly asks: "Are you not Bacchus yourself?" (ne sam li ty Bakkh?). It appears that in a painting of Narcissus described by Philostratus (the Elder) vine and ivy surrounded Narcissus {Imagines, 1.23). The connection with the Dionysus theme is apparent: the vine symbolizes the deadly illusion induced by the release of uncontrolled libidinal energies. Dionysus produces the condition in humans of "half-prophetic, halfdestructive madness" which releases primitive, animal impulses (Barkan, 1986, 38). As the drunken women look at Pentheus, they see a wild animal and kill him. Narcissus—like Dionysus—is both the creator and the victim of such a lethal illusion (Vinge, 1967, 40). Dionysus and Narcissus, then, are both victims and victimizers. As in Balmont's 'Flowers of Narcissus', in Ivanov's 'Narcissus' too, Narcissus moves from his detached, individual sense of solitariness to deadly intoxication. Nietzsche's influence is apparent here: in The Birth of Tragedy, drawing upon Schopenhauer's symbol, Nietzsche implies that Apollonian sobriety protects us from looking behind the veil of maya, which shrouds us from the spectacle of the essential truth of life (Nietzsche, 1967, 35-36). When humans behold this view, they perish, unable to endure what they see. In the various Symbolist reworkings of the Echo-Narcissus story, the echoing discourse is unable to effect any change even as it signifies powerful desire. It enhances a sense of loneliness. Ovid's two unsuccessful lovers capture the mood of such figures as Gippius' persona in 'Song' whose general gloom ('bezumnaya pechal") urges her to look for an alternative world. The famous line, "I need that which does not exist on this earth"

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(mne nuzhno to chego na sveie net), captures the Symbolist search for a spiritual rather than a material world. Companions are doubles—Doppelgänger—who cannot help one overcome the sense of lack and incompleteness because they are mere projections of the self. All that humans can do is yearn for a 'higher reality', but attempts to find happiness in this life are doomed. The sense of certainty of an eternal life in the myths underpinning Ovid's poem has disappeared and so has the classical universe cohabited by humans and their gods. Even in the work of Blok, who, unlike lesser Symbolists, is clearly aware of the intellectual limitation of the symbol as a cognitive device, Echo and Narcissus are represented in ä chain of deferrals, matching the sequence of masks donned and the roles played out: doubles of doubles, signifiers of signifiers, beyond which the object of desire remains an ever-elusive signified. But, like Ovid's nymph, such poets as Pushkin and the best of the Symbolists never merely reflect obvious details of the classical myth but instead their poetry uncovers significant, often repressed aspects of our humanity. They add to the classical myth their authoritative voice which keeps resonating in the echo chamber of intertextuality as long as books and poems are written and read, as long as there is literature.

Notes 1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine. 2 This and other poems by Pushkin, such as 'The Poet' (Poet) or 'The Poet and the Crowd' (Poet i tolpa) inspired Vyacheslav Ivanov to voice his views about artistic creation (Davidson, 1989, 240). Furthermore, both Ivanov's poem 'The Alpine Horn' (Alpiisky rog), written in 1903, and his essay of 1946 'Ein Echo', written in German, deal with the role of poetry and Symbolist art, apropos of the figure of the echo (Wachtel, 1994,156-7).

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3 In the classical sources (Conon, Pausanias, Ovid), we see fluctuation between depictions of Narcissus as naive—unaware of the 'identity' of his 'beloved'—and as conscious of being in love with his own reflection (Pellizer, 1987, 107-19; Zimmerman, 1994,6-7). 4 Sophocles, describing the grove at Colonus, says "Dionysus walks there" and that "the narcissus blooms there" (Oedipus at Colonus, 673-693). Also, in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (fifth century), the narcissus flower is associated with Dionysus (Knoespel, 1985, 3). In Metamorphoses, the story of Narcissus is in Book III amidst stories about Bacchus. In fact, it immediately precedes the story of Pentheus' disastrous attempt to prevent Dionysus from entering Thebes, a theme well known from Euripides' Bacchae. In Philostratus, the relationship between Narcissus and Dionysus is more overt: it is assumed that in the picture gallery, which Philostratus supposedly describes, Narcissus' picture hangs among other paintings with Dionysian themes (Imagines, 1, 23). Nearby hangs a picture depicting the demise of Pentheus (Vinge, 1967, 29, 339). 5 On Lyaeus see Horat., Epode 9.37; Lucan, Pharsalia 1.675. 6 I am grateful to Pamela Davidson and David H. J. Larmour for their helpful comments on this subject.

Bibliography Barkan, Leonard. 1986. The Gods Made Flesh. Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Barta, Peter I. 1991-92. 'Nietzschean Masks and the Classical Apollo in Andrei Bely's Petersburg: Studia Slavica 37: 393—403. Bennett, Virginia. 1982. 'Russian Pagliacci: Symbols of Profaned Love in the Puppet Show', in Drama and Symbolism, Vol. 4 of Themes in Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brenkman, John. 1976. 'Narcissus in the Text.' The Georgia Review 30: 293-327. Colby, Elbridge. 1920. The Echo-Device in Literature. New York: The New York Public Library. Davidson, Pamela. 1989. The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fedorov, A. V. 1980. Aleksandr Blok—dramaturg (Aleksandr Blok the playwright). Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo leningradskogo universiteta.

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Flaker, Aleksander. 1986. 'Metamorfoza' (Metamorphosis), Russian Literature 20: 31-40. Freud, Sigmund. 1957 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, 67-104. London: The Hogarth Press. Gromov, Pavel P. 1961. 'Tipologiya liricheskikh dram 1906-ogo goda' (The typology of the lyrical dramas of 1906), in Geroi i vremya (The hero and time). Leningrad: Sovetsky pisatel': 388-481. Hamilton, Victoria. 1982. Narcissus and Oedipus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hollander, John. 1981. The Figure of Echo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelly, Catriona. 1990. Petrushka. The Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knoespel, Kenneth J. 1985. Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Masing-Delic, Irene. 1973. 'The Mask Motif in Aleksandr Blok's Poetry.' Russian Literature 5: 79-101. — . 1994. 'Creating the Living Work of Art: The Symbolist Pygmalion and His Antecedents', in Creating Life. The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, 51-82. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Medvedev, P. N. 1928. Dramy i poemy Aleksandra Bloka (The Plays and Lyrical Long Poems of Aleksandr Blok). Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei. Mochulsky, Konstantin. 1983. Aleksandr Blok. Trans. Doris V. Johnson. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ovid. 1955. The Metamorphoses. Trans. Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. Pellizer, Ezio. 1987. 'Reflections, Echoes and Amorous Reciprocity on Reading the Narcissus Story', in Interpretations of Greek Mythology, ed. Joan Bremmer, 107-19. London and Sydney: Croom Helm. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 1974. Enlarged Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pyman, Avril. 1979. The Life of Aleksandr Blok. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Rank, Otto. 1989. The Double. Trans. Harry Tucker. London: Maresfield Library. Rubtsov, A. B. 1968. Dramaturgiya Aleksandra Bloka (The Drama of Aleksandr Blok). Minsk: Izdatel'stvo vysheisheya shkola. Skulsky, Harold. 1981. Metamorphosis. The Mind in Exile. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. 'Echo.' New Literary History 24: 17-43. Vinge, Louise. 1967. The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century. Gleerups: Lund. Volkov, N. 1926. Aleksandr Blok i teatr (Aleksandr Blok and the theatre). Moscow. Wachtel, Michael. 1994. 'Viacheslav Ivanov: From Aesthetic Theory to Biographical Practice', in Creating Life. The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, 151-66. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Westphalen, Timothy C. 1993. 'The Carnival-Grotesque and Blok's The Puppet Show.' Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (Spring): 49-66. Zarovnaya, V. P. 1972. 'Liricheskaya drama A. Bloka Balaganchik' (A. Blok's lyrical drama The Puppet Show), in Voprosy russkoi, sovetskoi i zarubezhnoi literatury, 125-46. Khabarovsk: Khabarovskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogocheskii institut. Zimmerman, Clayton. 1994. The Pastoral Narcissus. A Study of the First Idyll of Theocritus. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

CHAPTER

2

THE TRANSFORMATION MYTH IN RUSSIAN MODERNISM: IVAN KONEVSKOI AND NIKOLAI ZABOLOTSKY JOAN DELANEY

GROSSMAN

"How the world changes! And how I myself change!" Nikolai Zabolotsky, 'Metamorphoses' (1937) 1 "O tribe of splendid metamorphs, Strange to all, yet kin to all. " Ivan Konevskoi, 'The Call' (1899) 2

Ovid in his Metamorphoses requested the gods' help to "tell the shifting story of the world / From its beginning to the present hour", he was in effect laying out a program that would continue to draw European poets for ages to come. In no time was this truer than in that of Russian modernism. Against a background that first seethed with signs of coming change, then exploded into new and often frightening forms, Russian poetry underwent a renewal more vital and fruitful than most of the 'real-life' changes that accompanied it. Moreover, many of the poets themselves entertained visions of transformations to come. The 'splendid metamorphs' invoked by the early symbolist-decadent poet Ivan Konevskoi were emblems of a generation's yearning for 'other lives' of 'mysterious freedom' that seemed just out of reach. WHEN

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Konevskoi and the post-avant-garde poet Nikolai Zabolotsky stand at two ends of a process, occurring between the 1890s and, roughly, 1930, which altered Russian life drastically and fundamentally. Due in part to the dramatic political shifts of 1917 and after, this change was owing also to the impact of scientific developments that, beginning before 1900, gained rapid momentum during the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, at the turn of the century, a heady atmosphere of mysticism, occultism, neoKantianism, decadence, symbolism, Nietzscheanism, neo-Darwinism, and other trends encouraged the notion that a radical transformation of life, and even of human nature, was nigh. The physical sciences offered their scenarios, and so did particular contemporary philosophers, notably Vladimir Solov'ev and Nikolai Fedorov. Beginning in the 1890s, attention focussed increasingly on the search for a link between matter and spirit and, in effect, for limitless expansion of life. Irene Masing-Delic writes in Abolishing Death of these attempts to "exchange the religious dualism of flesh and spirit for a more science-oriented monism that would allow for spectacular metamorphoses from grossly material, and hence mortal, human beings to increasingly dematerialized and therefore more lasting ones" (Masing-Delic, 1992, 44). By the 1930s Communist ideology had definitely settled the question, at least for its adherents. The Communist Utopia was advertised as the perfect future condition of life, and it was to be built on material foundations and a radical change in human consciousness. However, the many for whom this solution was unsatisfying continued explorations begun earlier in the century. The two poets to be discussed here, Ivan Konevskoi (1877— 1901) and Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-58), spoke from perspectives separated by forty years and several layers of cultural and historical change. Not surprisingly, their conceptions of human beings and their potential were profoundly different. Yet they

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displayed striking affinities, sharing as they did the notion of a universe constantly in flux and perhaps on the brink of dramatic change. Two of the poems to be discussed here, Konevskoi's 'The Call' (1899) and Zabolotsky's 'Metamorphoses' (1937), project this shared vision with particular acuity. Other poems bring into play their differences. Yet, however greatly Konevskoi and Zabolotsky differed on the nature and goal of these changes, as well as on the means of achieving them, each found it appropriate to express his particular notions through the ancient formula of metamorphosis that went back to Ovid and beyond. The ever-changing nature of life lay at the heart of Ovid's conception. In his world, where shapes alter at the will of gods whose whimsies match the contradictory passions of humans, the distinction between human and non-human beings is not absolute; there, seemingly, nothing ever dies. Later poets envied Ovid that certainty. Konevskoi and Zabolotsky, while emerging from very different backgrounds and spiritual formations, had in common a tremendous thirst for life ahd a curiosity about all its facets. They were linked also by a special horror before the notion of death, final and irreversible, that implied annihilation of the individual self. For Konevskoi, whose 'decadence' consisted mainly in rejection of any and all limitations on the self, disappearance of the individual persona was unthinkable. Formed in the thinking of the 1890s, which typically included some variant of neoKantianism, he struggled bitterly against the limiting categories of time and space and dreamed of some sort of mitigation that nature might provide. Zabolotsky, with the advantage of modern biology and stimulated by the proclaimed Soviet goal of social transformation, was nonetheless oppressed by the prospect of individual annihilation. Each, approaching the problem from his peculiar vantage point, became convinced that a solution existed. The theory of

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panpsychism—a living universe permeated by consciousness— appealed to both Zabolotsky and Konevskoi. This theory, though traceable back through the Renaissance to some of the Greek philosophers, gained a relatively large and rather strangely assorted body of supporters or semi-supporters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its particular appeal in modern times lay for many in its being a likely warrant for individual immortality, the assurance of which dimmed as traditional religion lost its authority. For some, like Konevskoi, panpsychism held a special attraction: it appeared to offer the means to penetrate the world's secret structure. The poets and scientists of Konevskoi's generation regarded nature as a code to be deciphered. The methods of the two differed radically, of course, in terms of their respective conceptions of the universe. But in both cases, human intelligence and human intuition must penetrate the deep structure of nature in order to find the meaning of all life. For Ivan Konevskoi this task was the sense and goal of his existence. In a notebook entry from late 1895 he recorded a typical adolescent conversation with a friend who wondered melancholically whether life was worth living. "What about it, Ivan?", his friend asked. The answer is phrased in terms that betray the speaker's youth and cultural milieu, but also his genuine thirst for answers. He felt he had yet to savour fully the joys of living. Among them he numbered: "creative work, understanding the World's soul and the meaning of existence, penetrating the mysterious essence of phenomena so as to get at nature's secrets..." "And what if you don't succeed?" "I'll go out of my mind, or die trying...All the same, that's better than killing myself' (quoted in Stepanov, 1987, 182). Sounding like the dialogue of two characters in a Dostoevsky novel, this exchange nonetheless reveals the force that drove Ivan Konevskoi through the remaining four years of his life.

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But to accomplish all this there had to be a way in, and, if nature was that way, Konevskoi confessed in an early poem, 'Nature' (Priroda), that he was baffled: nature was not forthcoming. "Ah, every tiny leaf is sure of itself, and only I stand wavering, confused" (Konevskoi, 1904, 3). Then, in the summer of 1896, Vladimir Solov'ev's article on the poetry of Tiutchev came into his hands (Solov'ev, 1990, 283-96; Grossman, 1995). Tiutchev's poems were known and read at that time, but not widely. In an interpretation that became definitive for Symbolists and for many later readers, Solov'ev presented Tiutchev as the great seer for whom life and soul in nature were realities, not poetic figures, and who therefore deeply understood the real nature of the universe. Solov'ev had his own philosophy of the cosmic process, which he grafted onto Tiutchev's poetry. Apparently not attracted to the Solov'evian program, Konevskoi stopped instead with Tiutchev's vision of the living mystery in nature. For him the great revelation in Tiutchev's poetry was pantheism. Convinced that this was the sought-for 'way in', he now turned earnestly to exploring its possibilities. Part of the Romantic heritage still very much alive in Russia at the end of the century, pantheism served also as an alternate belief for those who had abandoned traditional religion but wanted some spiritual explanation for their existence. The Introduction to Philosophy by the Berlin neo-Kantian Friedrich Paulsen, published in Germany in 1892 and shortly thereafter in Russia, framed pantheism in modern terms. Paulsen attempted, as William James wrote in his preface to the English translation, "so to state naturalism as to make it harmoniously continuous with religious faith" (James, 1906,4). He argued that, given modern biology's findings and the theory of psychophysical parallelism traceable from Spinoza through Leibniz and Fechner, pantheism was the only solution that made sense. Nature was thus united by one life, and that life was conscious. "The evolution of the earth strives after the reali-

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zation of life, life after consciousness, consciousness after mind: the evolution of mind is the central purpose of earthly existence" (Paulsen, 1906,233). Paulsen's theories were discussed in the Petersburg philosophical circle of Yakov Erlich frequented by Konevskoi, and he found them congenial to his state of mind and spiritual needs. One's own consciousness, intimately linked to, even identified with, the consciousness running throughout nature, presumably is well positioned to understand nature from the inside. At the same time, some would-be pantheists (Valery Bryusov, for one) were troubled by the perceived threat to the individual persona. It is, after all, precisely that persona that thirsts for full understanding of the universe's inner workings. When the individual is totally dissolved in the one Whole, the difficulty is obvious. (Zabolotsky would encounter the same problem.) Paulsen's pantheism, which he also termed 'panpsychism', did not fully satisfy that objection, indeed did not address it. However, for Konevskoi and his like, the answer was of paramount importance. In an 1898 essay called 'The Cornerstones of My World View' (Kraeugol'nye kamni moego mirovozrenia), Konevskoi wrestled fiercely with notions of finitude, but concluded that humanity in its present state could not escape the time-space trap (Konevskoi, 1898). But could another race or another condition of life conceivably exist that was not subject to these limitations? He explored this question in a poem written a year later and dedicated to Valery Bryusov. 'The Call' {Prizyv) evokes the image of a nobler race living intimately with nature and regarding human beings as petty, comic figures. Encased in its hardened crust, humanity is essentially dead to nature's wholeness, its life consisting of nothing but futile gyrations. The poet then turns directly to address these beings of his fantasy: "O tribe of splendid metamorphs, / Strange to all, yet kin to all, / How often in meager moments / I've dreamed

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(bredil) of other lives..." 3 He attempts (with only partial success) to visualize those lives of "mysterious freedom" spent in "lofty places and under the earth", that is, in places inaccessible to—and unimagined by—ordinary humans. Finally, the poet concludes with a direct, wistful appeal: "Towards you, charmers of nature {prel'stiteli prirody), / My barren spirit has yearned." The central image of 'The Call' is obviously the 'metamorph', who, in contrast to a human being—rigid, lifeless, trapped in a futile existence—lives in a fluid state that presumably includes freedom to change form at will and thus to participate fully in nature's life. In another poem, written a year and a half later, Konevskoi is more specific about this breed and its relationship with nature. In 'The Elder Bogatyrs' (Starshie bogatyri), the folk hero Volkh Vseslav'evich is addressed as "Marvelous metamorph, cunning, wise serpent" (Divnyi oboroten', khitrii, mudryi zmei) (Konevskoi, 1904, 114-17). 4 Changing shape freely, at home everywhere in nature, listening to the roots growing underground, Volkh was recognized by all creatures as one of their own: "Waters, thickets, and beasts, and the tribe of birds all knew / That you were of their kind." However, he was more: as "heir to all their powers", at will he assumed any form of life and found no barrier separating various levels of being. All this was possible because Volkh "knew the word" that opened all nature's secrets. In short, this magical being possessed the deep knowledge of nature and the world that was Konevskoi's cherished goal: "You grasped life's structure, penetrated bodies to the very core." Volkh (or Vseslav, as he is also known) had another quality that matched Konevskoi's ideal: he was not limited by time and space. This legendary hero saw noon and midnight in one instant; he heard at once the "church bells of two Sophias", that is, two churches at distant points in medieval Rus'. That quality, along with others, set him apart from the ordinary magician. On the

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other hand, epic hero and legendary prince Volkh/Vseslav is easily identified as belonging to a type that Konevskoi encountered in his reading at the time 'The Call' was written, the shaman. If he had known the work of Russian ethnographers then studying shamanism in Siberia, Konevskoi might have recognized features of Volkh as well as of his idealized race, the 'metamorphs'. The power to metamorphose was certainly one of these features. In his comprehensive study of shamanism, Mircea Eliade wrote: "Each time a shaman succeeds in sharing the animal mode of being, he in a manner re-establishes the situation that existed in illo tempore, in mythical times, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred" (Eliade, 1964, 94). Another shamanic feature is the ecstatic journey, in which the shaman's soul ascends to the sky or descends to the underworld, his return being in effect a return from death. "Shamans are of the 'elect'", writes Eliade, "and as such they have access to a region of the sacred, inaccessible to other members of the community" (Eliade, 1964, 7). In the event, Konevskoi was not reading ethnographic reports. Instead, his diary records that in May 1899, preparing for a summer stay in Finland, he read the Kalevala. Although the term does not of course appear in it, the Kalevala is a veritable encyclopaedia of the northern Eurasian variety of shamanism. Basically a collection of Karelian folk songs and tales put together by a Finnish ethnographer in the first half of the nineteenth century, it features a roster of characters who easily qualify as shamans. Singers of endless magical charms, they are on intimate terms with nature and readily adopt new forms to suit convenience or necessity. The maiden Aino changes into a salmon and plunges into the sea to evade the unwanted advances of the chief hero (and shaman) Vainamoinen; the old woman Louhi descends as an eagle on Vainamoinen's boat. Vainamoinen's escape from Tuonela follows classic metamorphic form:

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a net was hung in the black river to catch him, but he "crept in the form of an iron reptile, went as a poisonous snake across the river of Death's Domain, through Death's nets" (Kalevala, 1963, 101). Like the heroes of the Kalevala, Volkh/Vseslav is easily recognizable as one of this breed or caste. Konevskoi called such individuals 'prophets'. To his mind they were not merely legends, nor poetic images evoking a past that was in close contact with nature; they were not really of the past at all, but existed outside time. In a letter from June 1901, written shortly before his accidental drowning, Konevskoi extolled the superiority of the prophetic individual's insight over the dry bones of science. The prophet, he explained, penetrates into the very heart of external objects, and this gives him knowledge of the future. Such knowledge comes through study of "the threads and cords linking matters with their consequences. With all his being the prophet travels the path between the present and the distant days that await" (Konevskoi, 1901). From his extra-temporal situation the 'prophet' has access to all of time, which is spread out before him, as is all of nature. Moving freely through time and space, he partakes of matter but is not subject to its limitations. In short, he belongs to that 'tribe of splendid metamorphs', who exemplify another, fuller life available, potentially, to all. Konevskoi himself eagerly accepted the prophetic role traditionally assigned to poets. In his conceptualization, the 'poetprophet' figure bore responsibility for seeking out answers to basic questions: about life's meaning, but also about, to use one of his favourite words, the 'mirozdanie' (world structure). If science could not—or could not yet—promise so much, mystical thought and mystical art could and did. At last, it would seem, Konevskoi was approaching a satisfactory solution for the great conundrum: how is human consciousness to share a life with conscious nature while at the

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same time preserving its individual identity? It was not a solution that could have made much sense to Nikolai Zabolotsky, wrestling with a similar problem several decades later. For both Zabolotsky and Konevskoi, all nature—animals, plants, stones, atoms, humans—shared one life, and each poet resisted with all his mind and strength the notion of any fixed limits on that life. Yet in Zabolotsky's view, human beings stood in an entirely different relation to nature than that envisioned by the dualistic pantheist-mystics of the 1890s, of whom Konevskoi was one. Yet, divergent as their philosophical bearings were, their paths crossed in a common veneration of the poet Fedor Tiutchev. The aura of German Romanticism that permeated Tiutchev's poetry and world-view had a notable influence on both. Yet, while they shared Tiutchev's view of nature as a living organism potentially intimately linked to humankind, their perceptions of the poet himself differed. At the start of his brief career Konevskoi prized Tiutchev chiefly as the exemplar of the poet-mystic that he set out to be in his own life. For both Konevskoi and his mentor, nature was a mystery accessible to the human spirit only in special states and circumstances. Both held positions squarely based on an idealist conception of the universe. However, while Tiutchev saw man's desired end in his attaining harmony with nature, Konevskoi's goal was total comprehension. For Zabolotsky, Tiutchev's work was one of the chief touchstones, not only of his mature poetic art, but also of his worldview. Nonetheless, in his mature poetry Zabolotsky engaged— and in some cases polemicized—with ideas expressed in the major philosophical poems of Tiutchev. For example, Sarah Pratt has argued that Zabolotsky's poem 'I Do Not Seek Harmony in Nature' (la ne ishchu garmonii v prirode) can be read as a direct answer to Tiutchev's 'There Is Melodiousness in the Waves of the Sea' (Pevuchest' est' v morskikh volnakh) (Pratt, 1983, 224). Pratt argues that Zabolotsky "provides both antithe-

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sis and completion" of Tiutchev's idea. In Zabolotsky's view, nature stood to be perfected by the imposition of order by human reason. In this particular poem, she notes, "rational man, the 'son', is superior to mother nature, thus establishing the point of view opposite Tiutc[h]ev's; but the antithesis is softened by the poetic act of completion, for nature is declared capable of learning" (Pratt, 1983,224). Underlying these disagreements was a profound philosophical difference: Tiutchev and Konevskoi were dualists, Zabolotsky was not. Zabolotsky's friend Nikolai Chukovsky recalled: "In our discussions and disputes he invariably declared himself a 'materialist' and a 'monist'...and he spoke of dualism with disdain. He classed as 'dualism' any opposition of spiritual to material, any failure to understand their identity, their complete oneness" (Chukovsky, 1965, 265). This led directly to the assertion that all classes of being—animal, mineral, vegetable—were not only interdependent but also interchangeable. This notion occurred in some of Zabolotsky's early poems and was further developed in poems of the 1930s and 1940s. 'Metamorphoses' is the most explicit of these: "How the world changes! And how I myself change! / 1 am called by only one name,— / But in fact, that thing that is called me— / Is not I alone." The speaker goes on to reflect how his body derives from many dead bodies, how "he" lies in the earth, and how "he" is found everywhere in the world, "rocked on the sea...flying on the wind..." Indeed, how everything changes! "A thought was once a simple flower; / A poem marched solemnly as a slow ox; / And what was once I perhaps / Again grows and multiplies the world of plants" (Zabolotsky, 1983, 191). Life continually renews itself. This for him was the fact that prompted mankind's stubborn search for "what must be called / Immortality. O, our superstitions!" A boy from the provinces, coming of age in Leningrad in the first years of the Communist regime, Zabolotsky enthusiastically

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took up the new ideology, which prescribed the restructuring not only of the individual and society, but also of humanity's environment as well. Nature, including human nature, was the raw material for the new Utopia. One component of this restructuring, continuing a quest that had begun well before the 1917 Revolution, was the search for a means of extending life indefinitely. Irene Masing-Delic, whose book Abolishing Death examines literary expressions of this search, considers Zabolotsky an important contributor to what she calls the 'salvation myth'. As she writes, the quest for physical immortality came for him to include far more than technology. His long poem 'The Triumph of Agriculture' (Torzhestvo zemledeliia) "celebrates not just the achievements of the soil sciences, agricultural reform, and machine technology in serving the rural population, but the triumph of resurrecting the dead, buried in a soil that for too long has held them captive" (Masing-Delic, 1992, 23). The ideas of the pre-revolutionary philosopher Nikolai Fedorov unquestionably played a role in Zabolotsky's thinking. An even more immediate influence may have been the eccentric philosopher and pioneer rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Sometime in the early 1930s Zabolotsky came upon his work and ideas, which blended nicely with hi» own developing notions. The titles of some of Tsiolkovsky's writings published in the 1920s suggest the nature of their appeal; for instance: The Monism of the Universe (Monizm vselennoi, 1925) and The Earth's Future and Mankind (Budushchee zemli i chelovechestvo, 1928). In her useful discussion of the relationship of Zabolotsky and Tsiolkovsky, Darra Goldstein writes: "[Tsiolkovsky's] perception of the universe may be termed anthropocosmism or even panpsychism (in their furthest extremes), but whatever the label, the idea of a living, breathing, feeling universe stirred Zabolotsky, appearing in his poetry of the 1930s" (Goldstein, 1993, 137).

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However, Tsiolkovsky's belief in the immortality of the atoms that for a time make up the individual (though pre-existing and post-existing in other forms) troubled Zabolotsky. This was all very well for the atoms, which fared very well, but what of the individual? When his atoms were dispersed throughout the universe, where did his individual identity go? In various poems he worked at this problem, trying to convince himself that this dispersal did not mean the death of the individual. The poem 'Yesterday, Thinking of Death' (Vchera, o smerti razmyshliaia, 1936) tells how he is suddenly saddened by the thought that death will separate him from nature, from the woods, streams, and stones that he loves so much. Then a revelation comes. As he roams freely in those woods, those fields, "the thoughts of the dead in transparent columns / Stood round me, reaching to the skies". Moreover, as a further reassurance, he finds he can identify some of these presences: he hears about him the voices of Pushkin and Khlebnikov. Most striking, perhaps, is one stone that stands motionless, and "on it appeared the face of Skovoroda". From this discovery the poet comes to the joyful conclusion that he himself will leave just such a memorial: "And I myself am not nature's child, / But her thought! Her surging mind!" 5 This poem, written the year before 'Metamorphoses', was part of Zabolotsky's campaign to convince himself that change of form did not mean personal death. Nonetheless, he often returned to this problem, and Nikolai Chukovsky, recalling their frequent conversations on the subject, did not believe that he ever succeeded in resolving it for himself. "He insisted that all humanity's spiritual and physical qualities are immortal because in nature nothing disappears, but only changes form." Unconvinced, Chukovsky argued with him, if somewhat timidly. "I agreed that, if the living becomes the dead, this is only transformation, not disappearance. However, to the living being it is a

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matter of indifference whether he disappears or is merely 'transformed'." In what was seemingly an echo of Ovid's story of Apollo and Daphne, Chukovsky maintained that, i f out of the shinbone of a dying girl a tree were to grow, the result would be another being entirely, while the girl's 'I' would disappear irretrievably. He capped his argument by saying: "Even though nature is immortal and nothing in her disappears, you and I are mortal and will die for certain and forever" (Chukovsky, 1965, 265). Chukovsky also quoted from another poem, written in 1947, after Zabolotsky's return from prison camp, to emphasize how the latter clung to his cherished beliefs. In {Zaveshchanie)

'Testament'

(Zabolotsky, 1983, 223) Zabolotsky reflected on

the continuity of being and of his own existence, which began when the world began and will go on, he hoped, forever: "When in declining years my life runs dry / And, putting out the candle, I depart / For that unbounded world of misty transformations, / When millions o f new generations / Fill this world with the sparkle of wonders / And complete the building of nature..." However, he quickly asserts: "I will not die, my friend." And recalling, but in a happier tone, the fate of Ovid's Narcissus: "In the breath of flowers / I will manifest myself in the world." Then, with a hint of the grotesque, he describes how "[a]n ancient oak, mournful and stern / Will wrap its roots about my living soul". His chief concern here is with transmitting his essential self to those who come after him. The best of him—his thoughts, his mind—will reach distant descendants through the medium of trees and all of nature. Chukovsky maintained that, for Zabolotsky, the notion of metamorphosis was a psychological necessity. "I understood that this whole theory that he had created, of immortality brought about through metamorphosis, was during his entire life a shield, a defence. The thought of death's inevitability—for

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him and for those close to him—was too terrible. He required a defence against that thought, he was unwilling to submit and he grew angry when anyone found a gap in this theory" (Chukovsky, 1965, 268). Fear of death, anguish in the face of its inevitability, was not a theme to which Ivan Konevskoi turned directly in his writings. No doubt his youth and his zest for life had something to do with this. Yet that very zest may have been the reverse side of the coin. His passionate determination to get to the bottom of nature's secrets may have covered (and there is some poignant evidence that it did cover) the same anxiety that burdened Zabolotsky. The secret of immortality was surely one of the secrets he dreamed of penetrating, though he called it by other names. In 'The Call' his 'splendid metamorphs' were addressed also as 'charmers of nature', that is, beings having power over nature, a power that surely preserved them from dying. Their kin, the 'marvellous metamorph' Volkh/Vseslav, was able by shamanic power to overstep natural laws of time, space, and form, and implicitly of mortality. Another lyric, 'The Magic Word' (Slovo zakliatiia), written in Finland at the onset of Konevskoi's Kalevala phase, dramatizes the threats that surround and confront the wayfarer in life (Konevskoi, 1904, 90-91). The first stanza finds the hero amid looming crags, rushing waters, and gloomy fortress-like shapes. But his spirit is strong, for "against evil, / 1 know the word". The second and third stanzas follow a similar pattern. "Wherever we look—only the bare steppe / And flocks of dark birds of prey." The point begins to emerge: nature herself is the threat, and the threat is, ultimately, death. That threat is personified in a shadowy way when he and his companion are pursued by "the witch, evil fate". But, throwing himself on the earth, the speaker turns the threat back on her, whispering: "Your lineage I know / And I curse it!" There is an ambiguity here: 'witch', 'fate', and 'earth'

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are all feminine nouns in Russian: ived'ma\ 'sud'ba', 'zemlia' (here, 'zem'). The object of the wayfarer's whisper, then, could be any of these. Or are they all one threat? Do the first two emanate from the third, their ultimate source, the earth? The wayfarers' final trial in the forest comes when they are besieged by spirits—not the thoughts of ancestors, bearing forward the heritage of their race, as in Zabolotsky's 'Yesterday, Thinking of Death', but sinister, destructive forces. These he drives away with 'the word'. Having shown conclusively that a power exists that can quell and defeat such attacks, he turns to address that power. The last stanza is a paean to 'the prophetic word' (slovo veshchee), able to question the universe and, as it were, force from it the answers. The Kalevala is made up in large part of 'words', that is, charms that its characters know or sometimes obtain at great risk. Once the name of an object is known, the knower can command it. Vainamoinen makes his perilous journey to Tuonela in quest of such a 'word'. Another shamanic figure, the mother of another hero, is helped by appropriate 'words' to sew her son's body back together and return him to life after he has been cut to pieces in the same dark river. From all of these folkloric narratives Konevskoi draws one important lesson, with which he concludes his poem: knowledge (of the right word) is life-giving power. "From the past darkness / The word has saved us" (Iz t'my bylogo / Spaslo nas slovo). Though shrouded in misty Kalevalan imagery, the dangers menacing Konevskoi's hero reveal much of the notional universe in which he himself functioned. On the one hand, nature appears as the source of knowledge, power, and life. But on the other, it holds a threat to the free individual, who must match strength and wits with it, before gaining access to its secret life—and thereby saving himself from death. A poem written in January 1899, shortly before his immersion in the Kalevala,

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shows how acutely at that stage Konevskoi felt the ambiguity of his relations with nature: "In my blood is a great battle. / O, who will tell me what is in my blood?" (Konevskoi, 1904, 59-60). Far from sharing Zabolotsky's ready acceptance of the interdependence of man and nature, he seems in some sense to hold himself aloof. He chafes at the demands made upon him by "blind shades", coming from lower on the scale of being. "Why do I share the dreams of plants, / Why are birds, beasts, and cattle my friends?" My life energies, he tells them, have their source elsewhere: "Not merely bone and flesh from bone and flesh, / I am an independent and free spirit." These "blind shades" anticipate the besieging spirits in 'The Magic Word'. But whereas the "shades" threatened to entrap him in their "ruinous circle", the spirits, along with the "witch, evil fate", can be put to flight by the means he knows of. Obviously, in the intervening months, he had learned the "magic word". In the Kalevala Konevskoi seems to have found a model of interaction with nature different from the one that had guided him earlier. If previously he had resisted the continuity that ranged human beings with the animal and plant world, he now sees its positive side. What once appeared demeaning to the human mind and spirit now opens the way to deeper understanding. Recognizing and accepting his own participation in all levels and aspects of nature, he now approaches more closely to the secret of their hidden structure, their origin. By the time he wrote 'The Elder Bogatyrs', Konevskoi could claim that Volkh contained in his person "the entirety of the blessings, riches, greatness" of nature, whose members recognized him as their own. Nature thus had no secrets from Volkh or from the other beings that shared his transformational powers. For Konevskoi this was the meaning and marvel of all his 'splendid metamorphs'. The continuity that characterized the natural spectrum, making of mankind and nature an integral whole, raised no questions

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at all for Zabolotsky. He was, after all, a monist. That nature needed the ordering and developing powers of human reason was a foregone conclusion, but both were in the process of evolving into higher forms, and mankind, with its powers of consciousness, was in the forefront. Related, perhaps, to this sense of continuity was Zabolotsky's fascination with not only the fact, but also the process, of metamorphosis. Darra Goldstein describes it as "Zabolotsky's favorite terrain: that blurred state of being between imminent death and incipient life, the fleeting moment of transformation from one form into the next, the very instant of metamorphosis" (Goldstein, 1993, 115). 6 Each instant in this endless chain of events, in which new life emerges constantly from old, is a moment of learning about the universe. For, as the old form becomes the new, it discovers more about its own and the universe's potential. This process of discovering the universe by sharing in its life unfolded very differently in the respective schemes of Konevskoi and Zabolotsky. Yet each, relying on the cultural resources of his own epoch, determined to follow it through to its conclusion. Seemingly the most important outcome for Zabolotsky was the guarantee of immortality. For Konevskoi it was to reach his goal of total understanding or to 'die trying'. For each, 'metamorphosis' as he conceived it was the 'way in' to the secrets of nature.

Notes 1 N. Zabolotsky (1983), 1:194. Translations from Russian are mine unless otherwise noted. 2 Ivan Konevskoi (1904), 85. 3 The Russian word 'oborotert',

usually translated 'werewolf, obviously has

a much wider meaning in this context; hence: 'metamorph'.

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4 Volkh Vseslav'evich, also known as 'Vol'ga', is identified in Konevskoi's poem with the mysterious Vseslav in the Tale of Igor's Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve). The fullest information on this figure is found in Jakobson and Szeftel (1949); see also Grossman (1992). 5 Zabolotsky (1983), 1:181. On the poet's fondness for Skovoroda, see Goldstein (1993), 201-202. 6 Interestingly, Zabolotsky, too, was interested in shamanic rites and beliefs, which he encountered in childhood while living near the Mari (Cheremis) in the Viatka area (Goldstein, 1993, 280, n. 39).

Bibliography Chukovsky, Nikolai. 1965. ' 0 Nikolae Zabolotskom' (On Nikolai Zabolotsky), in Nikolai Zabolotsky (1965), 263-68. Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Trans. Willard Trask. New York: Pantheon Books. Goldstein, Darra. 1993. Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grossman, Joan Delaney. 1992. 'Ivan Konevskoi: Bogatyr of Russian Symbolism', in The Silver Age in Russian Literature, ed. John Elsworth, 1 10. New York: St Martin's Press. . 1995. 'Konevskoi's Tiutchevan Pilgrimage', in O Rus! Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean, ed. Simon Karlinsky, James L. Rice, and Barry P. Scherr, 398-405. Oakland, California: Berkeley Slavic Studies. Jakobson, Roman, and Mark Szeftel. 1949. 'The Vseslav Epos', in Russian Epic Studies, ed. Roman Jakobson and Ernest J. Simmons. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1949. James, William. 1906. 'Preface', in Friedrich Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, iii-vii. Trans. Frank Thilly. New York: Henry Holt. Kalevala. 1963. Trans. Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Konevskoi, Ivan. 1898. 'Kraeugol'nye kamni moego mirovozzreniia' (The foundations of my world-view). Unpublished manuscript. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). Fond 259, op. 3, ed. khr. 9. . 1901. Unpublished letter to S. P. Semenov (21 June). RGALI. Fond 259. op. 3, ed. khr. 21.

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. 1904. Stikhi i proza (Poems and prose). Moscow: Scorpio. Reprinted, Fink Verlag, 1978. Masing-Delic, Irene. 1992. Abolishing Death. A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Ovid. 1958. Metamorphoses. Trans. Horace Gregory. New York: The Viking Press. Paulsen, Friedrich. 1906. Introduction to Philosophy. Trans. Frank Thilly (from 3rd German ed.). 2nd ed. New York: Henry Holt. Pratt, Sarah. 1983. '"Antithesis and Completion". Zabolockii Responds to Tjutcev.' Slavic and East European Journal (Summer): 211-27. Solov'ev, Vladimir. 1990. 'Poeziia F. I. Tiutcheva' (The poetry of Tiutchev), in Stikhotvoreniia, estetika, literaturnaia kritika, ed. N. V. Kotrelev, 2 8 3 96. Moscow: Kniga. Stepanov, N. L. 1987. 'Iz statei "Ivan Konevskoi. Poet mysli'" (From the article 'Ivan Koneskoi. A poet of ideas'), in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Vol. 92, part 4, Aleksandr Blok. Novye materialy i isledovaniia, ed. A. E. Parnis, 178-202. Moscow: Nauka. Zabolotsky, Nikolai. 1965. Stikhotvoreniia, ed. G. P. Struve and B. A. Filippov. Washington, D.C.-New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates. . 1983. Sobranie sochinenii. 3 vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura.

CHAPTER

3

PYTHAGORAS AND THE BUTTERFLY: NABOKOV'S 0VIDIAN METAMORPHOSES DAVID H. J.

LARMOUR

"What bliss it is, in this worldfull of song, to brush against the chalk of walls, what bliss to be a Russian poet lost among cicadas trilling with a Latin lisp. " 'Provence' (1923), (Nabokov, 1970, 13-16)

Nabokov has frequently been associated with metamorphosis and its literary manifestations. In her book on allusions in Pale Fire, for instance, Priscilla Meyer lists metamorphosis as one of the four "constants" that "structure Nabokov's art" (Meyer, 1988, 6-7). My purpose here is to examine briefly several aspects of metamorphosis in Nabokov's writings: exile, translation, boundaries, and language. In the process, I will also trace the trajectory of metamorphosis in Nabokov's oeuvre from its early manifestations in such pieces as 'The Return of Chorb' and Glory, in which the trauma of the effort to achieve transformation is emphasized, through the linguistic and textual metamorphosis of Lolita and Pale Fire, to the radical fluidity of the later novels, such as Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins!, in which metamorphosis is associated with tranVLADIMIR

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scendence of the world of the here and now. There is, in this development, a trace of the trajectory of Ovid's Metamorphoses: the poem begins amid metamorphic chaos, with violent and painful transformations in a disorderly cosmos, through a long sequence of interwoven stories exploring the various forms of metamorphosis and its linguistic parallels, to the concluding appearance of Pythagoras, whose doctrine of metempsychosis expresses the universality of change and the supremacy of the imagination over the boundaries of time and space. Nabokovian metamorphosis, it transpires, has much in common with the Ovidian brand. The icon of the butterfly is suggestive of the author's transformation from a Russian into an American writer, of his émigré status, and of his sustained interest in the processes of becoming and transformation. At the same time, the development of the hungry caterpillar into the butterfly serves as a metaphor for the relationship between Nabokov and all those other texts which he incorporates, through pastiche, allusion, and parody, into his own complex creations. In the Nabokovian cosmotext,1 emergence into the butterfly from the previous stages of existence becomes a metaphor for general ideas of transformation, rebirth, immortality, and contact with the world hereafter, 2 and, more specifically, for the emergence of the writer into a creative artist and the adaptation of the émigré to his new life and language. Thus in 'Ultima Thule' and 'Solus Rex', Adam Falter, whose surname means 'butterfly' in German, discovers 'the essence of things' and has been compared to Nabokov's archetypal poet, mentioned in Speak, Memory, who "feels everything that happens in one point of time" (Nabokov, 1967, 218; Sisson, 1994, 169). In Pnin we see the eleven-year-old "poor cocooned pupa, Timosha (Tim)...under a mass of additional blankets" studying the squirrel carved in his bedroom (Nabokov, 1957, 375). The squirrel is closely connected with Russia (Barabtarlo, 1989, 2 1 -

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23) and later references to it evoke, according to Nassar, Pnin cocooned in his past or trying to emerge from the chrysalis and adapt to his new life (Nassar, 1993, 259). Another character in the same novel, Aleksandr Petrovich Kukolnikov, whose name contains the Russian word kukolka (chrysalis), has successfully emerged from his cocoon and metamorphosed into an American, under the suitable sobriquet A1 Cook (Nabokov, 1957, 450, 454). In the first character, we see the painful and difficult nature of the metamorphic process, while in Cook, we have a reminder that the metamorph retains aspects of its original form: "A1 Cook seems to have emerged from his cocoon and completed his metamorphosis, his own assimilation. However, his devotion to Russian people, language and culture suggests that his new name is, like Pnin's car and suit, 'make believe', a 'disguise' [kukol'nyi in Russian]" (Nassar, 1993, 262-63). Metamorphosis involves the mixing of apparently incompatible forms, but not a complete blending: when Daphne becomes a laurel or Narcissus a flower, the new form is a hybrid which embodies salient aspects of the metamorph's character (Solodow, 1988, 174-86). 3 In Nabokov's texts, metamorphosis is a liminal state, a disguise, a confusion of identities, of cultures, of languages, and ultimately the confusion arising from the inherent ambiguity of language. Nabokov's interest in transformation narratives can be seen from the choice of topics in his Lectures on Literature-. 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (Nabokov, 1988, 179204) and 'Metamorphosis' by Kafka (Nabokov, 1988, 250-83). He focuses on the "epoch-making scene" of Jekyll's transformation into Hyde (Nabokov, 1988, 197), noting that Stevenson "musters all possible devices" to deflect the reader from asking "whether this transformation is possible or not", and adduces for comparison the famous scene of spontaneous combustion in Bleak House (Nabokov, 1988, 188). He also connects textual

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metamorphosis with the transformation of the author, linking Stevenson's last, heart-attack-induced words "Has my face changed?" with "the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book" (Nabokov, 1988, 204). The metamorph characters Nabokov discusses seem to share some features with his own heroes, such as Hermann in Despair or Krug in Bend Sinister: he associates Kafka's story with Stevenson's and also with Gogol's 'The Overcoat' (Nabokov, 1988, 251-52), noting that both Gogol's and Kafka's tales have "a central figure endowed with a certain amount of human pathos among grotesque, heartless characters, figures of fun or figures of horror, asses parading as zebras, or hybrids between rabbits and rats" (Nabokov, 1988, 253-54). 4 He adds that "the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans—and dies in despair" (Nabokov, 1988, 254-55). He also connects metamorphosed figures with the artist, and perhaps his most telling observation about the transformation of Kafka's Gregor Samsa is the following: "the isolation, and the strangeness, of so-called reality—this is, after all, something which constantly characterizes the artist, the genius, the discoverer. The Samsa family around the fantastic insect is nothing else than the mediocrity surrounding genius" (Nabokov, 1988, 260). 5 The protagonist of Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus C., has naturally been associated with Kafka's Gregor, although only indirectly, if at all, by Nabokov himself. 6 Cincinnatus early on describes his soul as having "grown lazy and accustomed to its snug swaddling clothes" (Nabokov, 1959, 36). Just before the execution, Rodion brings a moth for the spider in Cincinnatus' cell to eat, but the "splendid insect" disappears from his sight "as if the very air had swallowed it" (204). Cincinnatus, though, sees where it lands, and notes its "visionary wings...monolithic straightness... perfect symmetry of all the diverging lines" (206).

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The moth heralds his transformation from chrysalitic prison to freedom, from isolation and alienation to union with "his own kind", and from this world to the hereafter. At the end, the last person to rush past is "a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms" (223). Given Nabokov's critical interest in narratives with transformation themes, it is not surprising that his autobiographical writings should turn out to be shot through with the phenomenon of metamorphosis. In Strong Opinions he reports his childhood habit of doing "magic tricks", "turning water into wine, that kind of thing" (Nabokov, 1973, 11) and his habit of doing translations of foreign works into Russian. In Pale Fire, Kinbote pictures Shade as a conjurer who "put a pack of index cards into his hat—and shook out a poem" (Nabokov, 1962, 28). In the Introduction to Glory, Nabokov twice refers to himself as a magician: "The hero of Glory, however, is not necessarily interested in politics—that is the first of two mastertricks on the part of the wizard who made Martin" (Nabokov, 1971, xii); and "My second wand-stroke is this: among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent" (xiii). The artist as magician is an idea running throughout his works, reflected in the title of Michael Wood's recent study The Magician's Doubts. For Nabokov, the artificer—as for Ovid, the artifex (craftsman, master, contriver)—the power of the creative artist lies to a significant extent in his ability to effect and embody change and to cross boundaries. These metamorphic authors bring together disparate elements through linguistic and stylistic devices, and, at the same time, meld texts into new forms through intertextual references and allusions. The effect is to create a linguistic and textual embodiment of metamorphosis at work in the cosmos: a sense of the radical instability of the relationships, and of the permeability of the boundaries, upon which we assume the universe rests. It is in this sense that Nabokov's

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conception of metamorphosis can be seen as deriving from Ovid's archetypal poem of cosmic change and linguistic fluidity, Metamorphoses.

M E T A M O R P H O S I S A N D EXILE Of all those ancient authors who travelled or dwelt far away from their native lands, Ovid is the one most closely identified with the experience of exile. Banished by the emperor Augustus for reasons not fully known, but perhaps not that far removed from the 'gnostical turpitude' of Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, he penned the first collection of 'exile poetry', the Tristia, gazing westward on the shores of the Black Sea in the direction of Rome. That Ovid should also be the archpoet of metamorphosis is surely no coincidence, for exile and metamorphosis are connected on several levels. In Metamorphoses, Ovid assembles and manipulates a vast array of traditional tales to depict a universe in which transformation is a sudden and devastating event, brought about, more often than not, by capricious divinities. Transformations occur within a system of justice and punishment which is vague at best. Most exiles no doubt feel that they are victimized by forces, fortunes, and individuals in much the same way as many of the characters in Ovid's stories appear to be. Both Nabokov and Ovid exhibit considerable hostility to authority which attempts to limit the free exercise of thought: in Ovid's Metamorphoses, there is a strain of antiAugustan discourse and it has often been suggested that the poem as a whole is a conscious undermining of the emperor's moral and political ideology (Curran, 1972; Galinsky, 1975, 210-65). Nabokov's Bend Sinister, the most overtly political of his novels, rages against the 'communazi' tyranny of Ekwilism, which is allusively associated with the Roman Empire (Lar-

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mour, 1990b).7 Also, the victim of metamorphosis exists in a liminal state: between a human and some other (animal, vegetable, or mineral) form, often without the power of speech or with a sharply reduced capacity to express itself. This is very much akin to the situation of the exile, who exists in the liminal space between the old culture and the new, in a confused temporal blending of past and present, and in the two halves of a split identity. For the exile, the task is to learn to function within a new language and all the structures which it brings with it. That Nabokov knew at least some of Ovid's work is very likely: a line from his Amores is mentioned in Lolita (Larmour, 1990a, 145-46) and three lines from the Tristia, quoted by Pushkin in one of his letters, are referred to by Edmund Wilson in a letter to Nabokov (Karlinsky, 1979, 317 [no. 247]). Wilson thought Pushkin had written them himself; Nabokov probably knew better. 8 He may have encountered Ovid through his reading of Pushkin or Mandelstam: Brian Boyd, in his biography of Nabokov, notes that "just as Pushkin was aware of having a predecessor in Ovid [see his 'To Ovid' of 1821], exiled to these same parts, so Nabokov on reaching the Crimea had at once plunged himself into Pushkin's orientalia" (Boyd, 1990, 213; see Nabokov, 1967, 244); Mandelstam's collection Tristia, redolent with allusions to both Pushkin and Ovid, was doubtless of similar interest.9 Nabokov's own 'Soft Sound' in the collection Poems and Problems (Nabokov, 1970, 58-61) has an Ovidian flavor, and 'The Paris Poem' mentions "Ovidius / crammed with carmina" (Nabokov, 1970, 116-17, lines 43-44). As for Metamorphoses, a good case has been made for his being familiar with the Io and Argus myth, which is recounted in Metamorphoses 1.583-779, and possibly the poem as a whole (Sweeney, 1986). Metamorphoses could well have been the source of many of his Classical allusions—to such figures as Orpheus 10 and Narcissus 11 —as it frequently contains the most

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complete ancient version of these myths. It could also have provided some inspiration for the figure of the 'nymphet' through its descriptions of nymphs such as Daphne and Echo. The words "a couple of inseparable birches grew there (or a couple of couples, if you counted their reflections)" in Despair (Nabokov, 1937, 46) could be an allusion to Ovid's tale of Baucis and Philemon, the two old dears changed into a pair of intertwining trees, as a reward for their pietas, while all their impious neighbours were drowned by a flood {Metamorphoses, 8.611724). The inventor of the automannequins in King, Queen, Knave may owe something to Ovid's Pygmalion (10.243-97), while the landlord Enricht, who thinks he can metamorphose himself into "all kinds of creatures—a horse, a hog, or a six-year-old girl in a sailor cap" (Nabokov, 1968, 99), is one of the author's many Proteus figures: 12 the 'stage manager' of Albinus' sufferings in Laughter in the Dark is imagined by Axel Rex as "an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting magic Proteus of a phantom...the ghost of a juggler on a shimmering curtain" (Nabokov, 1938, 183) and Quilty is characterized as "a veritable Proteus of the highway" in Lolita (Nabokov, 1955, 229). The incest motif, which is so prevalent in Nabokov, forms the basis of the most dramatic and elaborate episodes in Ovid's poem: the richly scandalous tales of Scylla (Metamorphoses 8.150-51), Byblis (9.450-65), and Myrrha (10.298-502). What matters more than putative specificities, however, is the recognition that Nabokov is an 'Ovidian' writer; that through his oeuvre, as he said about the Index to Speak, Memory, "sometimes a gentle wind ex / Ponto blows" (Nabokov, 1967, 16). Ovid, as a Roman poet, was dependent upon his Hellenic predecessors, the epic hexameter form and tradition, and the corpus of Greek mythology. To create poetry in Latin was always already an act of transformation, intertextual referencing, and bilingual skill. To be a Roman poet was to be in exile—

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mentally, if not always physically—in Greece, or, to put it another way, from Greece, whose literary tradition was overwhelmingly greater than the Roman in almost all genres. Ovid's physical exile to Tomi served to intensify in him, probably to a degree unique among ancient writers, the 'exilic' sensibility common to all Latin poets of the late Republic and early Empire. Exiled from his native land, Nabokov actually metamorphoses himself into an American writer, transforms his own Russian works into his new language, and develops a remarkable multilingual facility. In some of his early works, the trauma of exile is clearly associated with the phenomenon of metamorphosis. For example, in 'The Return of Chorb' (Nabokov, 1976b), the young Russian émigré Chorb returns to the German hometown of his wife, who was killed in a freak accident. He books into a cheap hotel and hires a prostitute to stay in the room with him; his purpose is to recreate his wife's image. When he wakes up suddenly, however, he thinks the prostitute is his wife and screams. At that point, the Kellers, parents of the dead girl, knock at the door; they enter as the prostitute leaves and the narrative breaks off. There is a general presence of metamorphosis: the confusion of several moments in time and space, the changing of the seasons reflected in the trees, and memories of distant places (the Black Forest, Switzerland, Nice); the transformation of the Kellers' daughter into something very different from her unappealing parents. There is an allusion to Orpheus: from his hotel window, Chorb sees a statue outside the opera house. The story of Orpheus' attempt to bring back Eurydice from Hades, and his loss of her forever by turning round to look at her, has obvious analogies with Chorb's quest (Larmour, 1993; Connolly, 1992, 228, n. 5). Orpheus, moreover, is the archetype of the poet and the poet-in-exile and thus has reference to the author Nabokov as well. One of the main sources for the myth is Book 10 of

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Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Orpheus functions as both a teller of myths and a character in them. Chorb's unhappy experience represents the failure of the exile to metamorphose successfully: he is unable to adapt to the loss of his wife and, by extension, to the loss of his homeland. 13 His alienation from his surroundings (physical, emotional, and temporal) prevents him from effecting the necessary transformations. Ovid's Orpheus, similarly alienated after the loss of his wife from his surroundings (symbolized by his retreat to the mountains and his disavowal of heterosexual love, Metamorphoses 11.1-66), ends up getting torn to pieces. Perhaps a similarly violent fate is implied for Chorb, given the somewhat pugnacious character of Herr Keller, who "resembles Oom Paul Kruger", an aggressive Boer leader. The failure to metamorphose successfully, then, results in another kind of transformation, the destruction of the self. The allusion to Parsifal, which comes earlier in the narrative, seems to offer a different paradigm: in Wagner's music-drama, Parsifal is transformed into a hero, heals the mortally wounded Amfortas, and comes to an awareness, through the grail, of something akin to Nabokov's 'cosmic synchronization': Sisson comments that this concept "corresponds to the illumination.. .of Christian mysticism, or...since Nabokov excludes a Christian orientation... to the secular and spontaneous ecstasy of universal oneness" (Sisson, 1994, 155). At this stage, however, these ideas remain cocooned in an allusion; it will take the rest of the oeuvre for them to be fully developed. 14 In the novel Glory, Nabokov presents another young émigré, Martin Edelweiss, who goes to Cambridge University, where he becomes friends with a student called Darwin and unsuccessfully courts a young Russian woman, Sonia. He travels to Germany and then disappears over the eastern border, for some glorious but unspecified purpose, never to be seen again. Here too metamorphosis is at work: the transformation of Martin from a

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boy into a young man ("Martin grew sturdier, his shoulders broadened", Nabokov, 1971, 45) and into an English/Russian hybrid ("all this English-ness, really of a rather haphazard nature, was filtered through his motherland's quiddity and suffused with peculiar Russian tints", Nabokov, 1971, 55). The women Martin desires change from Alia to Marie to Bess to Rose to Sonia, but these are all merely particular shapes of the objectified female. Martin's homeland has also been transformed: the "splendid amphora" that was Russia replaced by a "clay kitchen pot" (Nabokov, 1971, 64). At the end of the novel, just before Martin goes on his quest, Darwin sees that he is transformed ("everything about Martin had been extraordinary—the roughish tan, the breathless voice, the bizarre dark utterances, and the new haughty look in his eyes", Nabokov, 1971, 201); again, we are dealing with the failure to achieve a successful metamorphosis, one which would enable Martin to adapt to his new surroundings. Instead, he tries to return to an earlier stage of development by re-entering his homeland. This is not possible, as surely as it is not possible for the butterfly to become a caterpillar again. Glory also illustrates the Nabokovian metamorphosis of previous texts into a more developed form. There are allusions to Arthurian, Classical, and Russian myths, and to poems by Horace, Lermontov, and Pushkin. Martin is, on one level, a transformation of the mythical hero, an Odysseus seeking to return home. The journey is an attempt to find a resolution, and that can only be achieved by metamorphosis. In his depiction of Martin, Nabokov suggests that a simple nostos or return for the exile, one without the necessary transformations along the way, means death. Metamorphosis, then, is for Nabokov becoming emblematic of life and the process of renewal.

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M E T A M O R P H O S I S AND T R A N S L A T I O N

Geographical displacement brings with it an awareness of the effects of displacement in language. The exile is both translated and translator, constantly caught up in the process of metamorphosis. Translation as a form of metamorphosis offers a further link between the Nabokovian and Ovidian worlds of artifice. As a Roman poet working with raw material from the Greek tradition, Ovid was a translator, both literally and figuratively. He wrote a Medea—-now lost, but probably a Latinized version of Euripides' tragedy—and can be seen throughout his corpus translating, in the broadest sense, Greek originals into Roman versions, endowing them in the process with his uniquely personal concerns (Larmour, 1990c). In the concluding book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the end of the chain of metamorphosis is reached in the figure of Pythagoras and the doctrine of metempsychosis (15.60-478). When a soul enters a new body, according to Pythagorean doctrine, it is reincarnated and thus becomes subject to the universal processes of flux and change. Pythagoras represents the force of continuous and universal change and the limitless power of the imagination to transform by bringing disparate elements together in new and unexpected ways. Meyer comments that Nabokov "saw himself as a living synthesis of a process of literary exchange through translation and metamorphosis that began as far back as Norse mythology and took the same direction as the Viking sailors" (Meyer, 1988, 4). 15 Many of his novels consequently deal with the phenomenon of translation. Nabokov translated—or closely supervised the translations of—his own works, thereby presiding over the metamorphic process. 16 Through such translation, the Russian originals are reborn in a new incarnation, for translation is a form of metempsychosis (Tomlinson, 1983, 48-97, esp. 48-52; 72). When the Russian original meets the translator, a new text

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is created—a metamorph—which retains aspects of the original form, but has also acquired new ones. One text is reincarnated in another. When an item in the Russian text is 'translated' it crosses cultural, literary, and linguistic boundaries, losing in the process some of the qualities it had in the original language, but gaining other qualities in its new one. Metamorphosis also describes the translation of actual events into fiction. As is the case with all entities which have undergone the process of transformation, something remains of the original in the new version. This trace, however, is not necessarily visible or easily detectable; it is hidden and only partially uncoverable, like signs of previous stages of development in the fully-grown butterfly. For Nabokov, reality becomes art when it emerges from "the chrysalis of the artist's personal experience" (Meyer, 1988, 7). Metamorphosis takes the personal and individual and fixes it in the landscape as a monument or point of reference for everyone else. Metamorphosis thus signifies the essence of artistic creation, as it does for Ovid in his poem (Solodow, 1988, 203-31). By the end, we are aware that it is not just a string of metamorphoses held together by a flimsy unifying theme; rather, that metamorphosis defines art itself. The creative artist is the god-like mundi fabricator (worldmaker, Metamorphoses 1.59) or opifex rerum (crafter of things, 1.79), who combines and alters, to illuminate the "invisible links between things" mentioned in Look at the Harlequins! (Nabokov, 1974, 40). On the level of intertextuality, this involves juxtaposing multifarious texts through the devices of parody and allusion. The work of art, then, for both Nabokov and Ovid, is in a continuous state of metamorphosis and thus invites rereading, a process by which the reader is also transformed and brought closer to fuller understanding, rather as the soul is refined through successive reincarnation, according to Pythagorean beliefs.

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In this metamorphic process, the author and narrator are as difficult to pin down as Proteus; they become part of the text. Ovid puts himself in his Metamorphoses at the beginning (1.14) and at the end (15.871-79), but also makes appearances at various points when he addresses characters directly (for example, Narcissus at 3.432-33); Nabokov speaks in his authorial voice in the Introductions to many of his novels and stories, and narrators often offer opinions close to his own: for example, scorn for Freud's "hilarious elucidations" of dreams in Transparent Things (Nabokov, 1972, 56). The author becomes a participant in the processes of textual metamorphosis which he unleashes.

METAMORPHOSIS AND BOUNDARIES

Metamorphosis offers a means of defining and questioning boundaries, of viewing and undermining structuring polarities. Ernst Cassirer comments on its importance in myth-making: "There is no specific difference between the various realms of life. Nothing has a definite, invariable, static shape. By a sudden metamorphosis everything may be turned into everything. If there is any characteristic and outstanding feature of the mythical world, any law by which it is governed—it is this law of metamorphosis" (Cassirer, 1944, 43). Both Ovid and Apuleius composed their narratives of transformation in periods of significant social, political, and religious change, and, although something of a generalization, it is noteworthy that metamorphosis tends to appear in literary discourse in periods of upheaval and uncertainty. It is no surprise, then, that it should be so prevalent in twentieth-century texts, given the physical and psychic displacement which marks the era; or that an exiled Russian writer like Nabokov should so consistently utilize its

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possibilities. His metamorphic associates in Russian literature include Gogol (especially 'The Nose' and 'The Overcoat'), Bely (whose Petersburg he admired), and Bulgakov, whose Master and Margarita is a transformational masterpiece. More broadly, Nabokov is 'in sync' with Borges, Joyce, and Kafka. 17 The possibilities of metamorphosis are explored most fully in Lolita and Pale Fire, novels in which boundaries are blurred and there is considerable anxiety about classification. In Lolita, to quote Alfred Appel, "everything...is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, including the novel itself' (Appel, 1970, 340). Sweeney suggests that "the relationship between Lolita's and Humbert's metamorphoses provides the dramatic action of the novel, and is echoed by other transformations in its imagery, leitmotif, and overall structure" (Sweeney, 1986, 79). She connects metamorphosis with Lolita's metamorphoses in Humbert's eyes (little girl to nymphet, nymphet to her 'true identity') with Humbert's apotheosis as an artist, and with the transformation of this story into the novel itself (Sweeney, 1986, 88). Humbert Humbert is the prince of metamorphosis: he crosses several cultural and linguistic barriers; he has his double, Quilty, and even his name echoes himself back to himself; he manipulates his roles and disguises just as effectively as Lovelace in Clarissa (see Gwilliam, 1986, 102-11); he also mediates, Orpheus-like, between this world and the world of the dead. Here, as elsewhere in Nabokov and other metamorphic writers, desire—the longing to fill the gap and complete the lack—is what drives the process of transformation. If metamorphosis is motivated by desire and the confusion of 'the human' and 'the animal' in sexual activity—as it certainly is in Ovid's tales— then the numerous violations of this boundary are of pivotal importance. 18 They already figure in the early Laughter in the Dark, in which Margot is successively likened to a lizard (Nabokov, 1938, 79), a seal (112), and a snake (162). Consider

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Humbert Humbert: he is a spider who gets caught in his own web (Nabokov, 1955, 51). In the Enchanted Hunters episode, he is transformed from enchanted hunter into hunted enchanter, in a re-enactment of the myth of Actaeon who was turned into a stag by Diana and shredded by his own hounds (Metamorphoses 3.155-252; Larmour, 1990a, 149). Humbert clears away the foliage to get a better view, to violate and to possess Lolita, but by the very act of clearing away he reveals and exposes himself to Diana/Dolly's revenge. Metamorphosis then leads to revelation: at the moment of transformation there is a moment of recognition of the self and of the consequences of desire. In Pale Fire, demarcations between author, editor, character, and reader are confused, along with distinctions between self and other, subject and object. The myth of Narcissus, glancingly alluded to in the entry on Gordon Krummholz (see n. 11 above), is present on various levels: in the Doppelgänger motif (Kinbote and Shade, Kinbote and Charles, Kinbote and Gradus); in the self-reflexive "Commentary" which Kinbote creates to interpret Shade's poem; and in the textual narcissism of Nabokov's novel. Pale Fire is the mirror image, or the looking-glass version, of the rage for classification symbolized by—or expressed in—Nabokov's lepidopteral pursuits. Metamorphic texts are profoundly anxious about classification and the dangers of misperception, at the same time as they problematize the distinctions between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, waking and dreaming. The profusion of narrative voices contributes to the metamorphic instability, much as it does in Book 10 of Ovid's poem, in which Orpheus is the first of a whole chain of narrators. The reader is invited to play detective in an attempt to fix the flickering boundaries (see Hirsch, 1988). Ultimately, metamorphic texts like Nabokov's or Ovid's are much concerned with the metamorphosis of language. This is perhaps most apparent in the story of Echo and Narcissus, where

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the ambiguity of language, and the slippage in communication, is dramatized. It also demonstrates the failure of language in extremis: at the moment of metamorphosis (change, recognition, transgression), language cannot tell any more. This happens with the transformation of Actaeon into a stag {'verba animo desunt', Metamorphoses 3.231) and in many other tales such as those of Callisto (2.482-83) and Philomela (6.557-60). In Nabokov's oeuvre too, transformation brings about the loss of speech: the last words of 'The Return of Chorb' are "They don't speak", delivered not by the narrator but by the hotel porter, in a whisper. Many other short stories, and even some of the novels (for example, Bend Sinister), do not so much conclude as end, when the stream of language simply stops. Metamorphosis reflects the unstable nature of language and of understanding between the author or the text and the reader. The beautiful but dangerous Ovidian landscape (typified by the pristine woodland pool which destroys Narcissus), in which metamorphosis can occur without warning, is also a mapping of language. In Laughter in the Dark, the perilous world of Albinus is informed by, and thus functions as an allegory of, the perils of communication through language. Bruce Clarke considers metamorphosis in literature as an allegory of writing and its effects: "the metamorphic exile of the body is an allegory of writing...the comic or tragic ab-use and dis-figuration of the human body as represented in a metamorphosis conveys the poetic or duplicitous rhetoricity of language and the inescapable chain of translation" (Clarke, 1995, 21). One is reminded of Kinbote's misreading—or disfiguring—of John Shade's poem for the creation of an illusory life-text in Pale Fire. Like an Ovidian victim of metamorphosis, the body of Shade's poem is disfigured by the "Commentary" and "Index" appended to it, but the whole novel is perhaps Nabokov's best demonstration of the disfiguring effects of language in general. Such metamorphic

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texts also have the effect of situating their readers as exiles, caught between the desire for closure and the inability to achieve it. Thus we may read the saga of Martin Edelweiss in Glory—his longing for home, his fanciful creation of Zembla and his 'exploit'—as an allegory of the exile of the reader in the metamorphic Nabokovian text.

BEYOND METAMORPHOSIS? Most metamorphic texts tend towards a resolution or revelation of some kind, if not specifically religious like Apuleius' Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass), then at least to a transcendence of chaos and polarity through a vision of order and harmony. They seek, in other words, to metamorphose into a realm 'beyond metamorphosis'. In this sense, Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem: at the end of the journey there is a kind of resolution in the figure of Pythagoras. In his delineation of Nabokov's 'cosmic synchronization', Sisson notes that one of the devices used "for stimulating a sense of cosmic synchronization flows directly from [the] juxtaposition of contrasting images: transformation or metamorphosis" (Sisson, 1994, 167). Metamorphic figures—like Lucius, Narcissus, Hyde, or Kinbote—strive towards oneness: Massey describes them as "refugees from comparison, from the binary...condemned to die running, always in the shadow of the monster...", who "hammer at the back door of Paradise" as they "seek to rejoin the peace and unity of the non-oppositional world... to force a gate in hell to heaven" (Massey, 1976, 186). Metamorphic texts—like Ovid's or Nabokov's—through their continuous transformations seek a unifying completeness. Metamorphosis is concerned not only with the defining, but also the permeating and collapsing, of boundaries—between human and animal, male and female,

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and so on; at root, however, it is concerned with one boundary in particular, the opposition towards which all others tend, namely, the boundary between life and death. Nabokov's metamorphic oeuvre shares this end with Ovid's metamorphic epic, through its focus on the transition between this world and the 'other world' or 'Otherworld' (Johnson, 1985, 155-219). Pythagoras has no single equivalent in Nabokov's world of metamorphosis, but is diffused among the numerous characters who have access to the 'essence of being' and the 'web of sense'. Pythagoras himself does make an appearance in Bend Sinister: the narrator tells us Krug "had never indulged in the search for the True Substance, the One, the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos" and goes on to say that philosophers who think they have built something original find Heraclitus, Parmenides and "Pythagoras (already inside)...drawing the shadows of the window frames on the bright polished floor where the flies played..." (Nabokov, 1947, 152). D. Barton Johnson has argued (Johnson, 1985, 189-205) that Krug does in fact become engaged in a search for the Absolute which leads to the Author-deity who created him: "the seemingly omnipotent deity, however, is in the same position in his 'real' world as his characters are in their created world...he...like his characters, strives towards the Absolute, infinite consciousness" (Nabokov, 1947, 203). In this scheme, Pythagoras is just one manifestation of the connection between numbers and the divine, implicit in both Krug's name ('circle' in Russian) and his association with Archimedes. The notion of an 'infinite regression of worlds' and ever-expanding consciousness has clear connections with Ovidian metamorphosis: the intrusion at the end of what Nabokov termed "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me" (Nabokov, 1947, xviii) has analogies with the appearance of Pythagoras at the end of Ovid's poem. He is the figure in whom boundaries are resolved, who repre-

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sents the possibility of infinite consciousness. He is not so different from the poet himself either: one is a poetizing philosopher, the other a philosophizing poet. The choice of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Pythagoras in Bend Sinister is not coincidental: while Heraclitus framed the universe in terms of opposition, and Parmenides saw everything as a manifestation of an eternal One, Pythagoras combined the notion of an ultimate One with a system of contrasting principles (Larmour, 1988); he was the one who was always 'already inside' the system that the philosopher had built. Metamorphosis is where art and life, and art and death, meet. Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins! are Nabokov's version of Ovid's Pythagorean resolution and transcendence. 19 His penultimate novel points back to the rest of his oeuvre in all sorts of ways: significant connections have been detected with such early works as 'The Return of Chorb' (see Karlinsky, 1973) and Mary (see Clancy, 1984, 157-58), and Hugh Person has been associated with earlier heroes such as Luzhin and Krug (Clancy, 1984, 156). Transparent Things closes the circle, whose symbolic connections are very important for Nabokov (Clancy, 1984, 157; Johnson, 1985, 197-98, 203-205). Hugh Person, who operates in three languages (Nabokov, 1972, 3), is surrounded by metamorphosis: the "act of attention" details the various stages from tree to pencil (6-8); Madame Chamar clothes herself "with the suddenness of a magic metamorphosis" (40) and "as if she too, like her daughter, had been passing through several stages of change" (41). 20 The coinage 'tralatition' is apparently the equivalent of metaphor (Johnson, 1995b, 732), the feature of language with which metamorphosis is consistently identified. While it is probably too far-fetched to see in the fire and wind and the "book about triumphant vegetables whirling faster and faster" of the final scene (Nabokov, 1972, 104) echoes of Pythagorean doctrines of purification of the soul

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and vegetarianism, the end of the novel does depict that crossing from one world into another which is represented by Pythagoras in Ovid's poem. Hugh refuses to squash the butterfly in "a mood of unusual kindliness", reminiscent of Pythagorean awareness of metempsychosis (90). His "umbral companion" is Adam von Librikov (75, 98), a metamorphosed form of Vladimir Nabokov, and thus, like Pythagoras, both Hugh and the author are already dead. One cycle is complete. Appel comments: "His art records a constant process of becoming—the evolution of the artist's self through artistic creation—and the cycle of insect metamorphosis is Nabokov's controlling metaphor for the process... Significantly, a butterfly or a moth will often appear at the end of a Nabokov novel, when the artistic 'cycle' of that book is complete" (Appel, 1970, xxii). For both Ovid and Nabokov, the long chain of metamorphosis comes to an end in the author himself. At the end of the Latin poem stands Ovid himself, confident in the eternal fame his art will bring. At the end of Nabokov's oeuvre stands Look at the Harlequins! in which the real-life author is blended with fiction, the ultimate meeting of art and life in metamorphosis. It is not only reality which emerges from the chrysalis of the author's experience as art, but the author himself. The creator recreates himself, leaving behind the author of the first world, like a discarded chrysalis, and moving on to another incarnation, in a process which Ovid would have recognised as fundamentally akin to Pythagorean metempsychosis.

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Notes 1 I am using the term in allusion to Nabokov's notion of 'cosmic synchronization', mentioned in Speak, Memory (Nabokov, 1967, 218) and summarized by Sisson (1994, 155) as the apprehending of "the entire universe by an awareness expanding rapidly outward from the artist's consciousness and the part of the world immediately present in order to involve into a grand unity as much distant activity as is coherently possible". 2 See 'Christmas', 'The Return of Chorb', and 'The Aurelian'. The final words of Bend Sinister are "a good night for mothing" and Nabokov indicates in his Introduction (1947, xix) that the moth represents the soul of Krug's dead wife Olga. See also Speak, Memory (Nabokov, 1967, 11939); Karges (1985); Connolly (1992), 15; and Foster (1995), 448-50. 3 For example, the glowing beauty of the nymph Daphne remains in the sheen (nitor) of the laurel leaves, while the colouring of the narcissus and its association with sleep and drugging (nark-) are reminders of Narcissus' pale skin and fair hair and of his inability to turn away from the pool. In Lolita, when Humbert meets his nymphet, now Dolly Schiller, he still sees traces of her past beauty: "Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked— had always looked—like Botticelli's russet Venus—the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty" (Nabokov 1955, 272). 4 For a discussion of Nabokov's idea of the 'productivity' of Gogol's style and a comparison of the stylistic effects of 'Gogolian metamorphosis' with some passages in Ada, see Dranch (1984). In Nikolai Gogol (Nabokov, 1944, 43), Nabokov comments that "a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch". 5 Foster examines moth and butterfly references in the short stories 'Christmas' (Nabokov, 1976b) and 'The Aurelian' (Nabokov, 1976c) as among the "steps leading to Nabokov's decision to teach Metamorphoses in the 1950s" (Foster, 1995,448). 6 Boegeman (1982). In his Introduction to the novel (1959, 6), Nabokov denies any debt to Kafka, but see Foster (1995), 445, for the suggestion that The Red Topper, a broadly similar novel mentioned in Look at the Harlequins! (1974, 120), undermines this (see "to don the red tophat", Invitation to a Beheading, 1959, 21). Spooner (1993) discusses the mutation of Gregor, with incidental references to Nabokov's lecture on Kafka and Invitation to a Beheading.

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7 ' O n Rulers' (Nabokov, 1970, 128-33) contains the following lines: "Since when the concept / of authority has been equated / with the seminal notion of patria? / All sorts of Romans and butchers /.../ Johns, Lewises, Lenins" (16-19, 24). 8 Wilson writes: "Looking into his letters of this period, I find quite a sprinkling of Latin, including, in a letter to Gnedich of April 22, 1822, a Latin elegiac couplet, followed by a Latin hexameter, which he must have written himself and which would indicate a certain proficiency." In Letter no. 246, Nabokov writes: "I have been studying the question of Pushkin's knowledge of foreign languages for about ten years now.. .1 shall.. .explain to you again and again that Pushkin knew English, Latin etc." 9 See especially no. 104, called 'Tristia', with numerous echoes of Ovid, Tristia 1.3 in its first stanza; see also Brown (1973), Chapter 13, 'Transparent Sadness: The Classical in Tristia', 253-75. In The Gift, Nabokov speaks of "the powder snow upon the wooden paving blocks of Mandelstam's neoclassicism" (1963, 50), and in Strong Opinions (1973, 58) mentions reading Mandelstam's poems. 10 In 'The Return of Chorb' (Larmour, 1993) and Bend Sinister (Larmour, 1990b, 164); also in 'A Visit to the Museum' (Barta, 1995). 11 In Pale Fire, Shade mentions "Echo's fey child" (Nabokov, 1962, 68 [line 968]), Kinbote calls Gordon Krummholz "Narcissus" (202 [line 408]); see Meyer (1988), 187: "Gordon Krummholz is surrounded by classical imagery appropriate to Ovid's Metamorphoses." In Despair (Nabokov, 1937, 23), we find "thus a breeze dims the bliss of Narcissus" and Grayson notes (1977, 69) that the later 1966 translation adds another mention of Narcissus: "with a condescending grin he offered his hand, hardly bothering to sit up (I grasped it only because it provided me with the curious sensation of Narcissus fooling Nemesis by helping his image out of the brook)." The inclusion of Nemesis, in particular, looks like a definite Ovidian echo. See Davydov (1995), 94-95, for discussion. 12 The Pygmalion archetype appears at several points: Dreyer tells the inventor of the female automannequin "You might have thrown in a little more bosom" (261) and is described (224) as "a bachelor with a beautiful marble wife". 13 Chorb's failure represents for Connolly "the emotional dislocation that develops out of a failure to give the external world its due" (1992, 16). On the obsession with the lost other in Nabokov's early fiction, see Connolly (1992), 10-44.

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14 The interest in Wagnerian metamorphosis was perhaps stimulated by Nabokov's time in Germany (see Boyd, 1990, 197). Parsifal is connected with Lohengrin, to which Nabokov alludes in Laughter in the Dart, "that Wagner thing" (1938, 33); "a funny story about an inebriated Lohengrin who happened to miss the swan and waited hopefully for the next one" (1938, 147). Albinus is white, like a swan, and yearns for "the coolness of water" (1938, 217). Margot's "laughter in the dark" at Albinus recalls Kundry's laughter at the sufferings of Jesus, the cause of her unhappiness in Parsifal. 15 See Meyer on metamorphosis in Pale Fire (1988, 7, 49, 59-60, 107, 15253, 181-83); Raguet-Bouvart (1995) on Laughter in the Dark. 16 In addition to Grayson's comprehensive treatment, see Beaujour (1995), who links Nabokov's "evident prowess as a translator" and his "predilection for metamorphosis" (715). Boyd entitles his eighteenth chapter 'Translation and Transformation' (1990, 408-31). 17 Twentieth-century Latin American literature offers some particularly striking instances of metamorphosis: apart from Borges, see Elena Garro's 'The Day We Were Dogs', Julio Cortazar's 'Axolotl' (the story of a man who turned into stone), and Osvaldo Dragun's play Historia del hombre que se convirtió en perro. I am grateful to Laura J. Beard for this information. 18 Sweeney says that, like Metamorphoses, Lolita "describes a magical realm where conflict, exile, and unsatisfied desire are resolved by stylised metamorphosis" (80) and speculates on Metamorphoses as a source for the Io and Argus myth (Metamorphoses 1.583-779) to which Nabokov often alludes (80-87). She begins, in fact, from the statement that "human characters in Lolita continually metamorphose into animals" (79). 19 On Transparent Things, see Johnson (1995b); Rowe (1979); Clancy (1984), 155-60; Maddox (1983), 130-44. On Look at the Harlequins!, see Johnson (1995a); Patteson (1976). 20 See Transparent Things: "The scorn was unmerited since lots of things exist, from live cells to dead stars, that undergo now and then accidental mishaps at the not always able or careful hands of anonymous shapers" (Nabokov, 1972, 20).

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Bibliography Alexandrov, Vladimir E., ed. 1995. The Garland Companion to Nabokov. New York and London: Garland. Appel, Alfred, ed. 1970. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita. New York: McGraw-Hill. Barabtarlo, Gennadi. 1989. Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Barta, Peter I. 1995. 'Obscure Peregrinations: A Surreal Journey in Nabokov's "A Visit to the Museum".' Studia Slavica 40: 227-34. Beaujour, Elizabeth K. 1995. 'Translation and Self-Translation', in Alexandrov (1995), 714-24. Boegeman, Margaret B. 1982. 'Invitation to a Beheading and the Many Shades of Kafka', in Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life's Work, ed. J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, 105-21. Austin: University of Texas Press. Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brown, Clarence. 1973. Mandelstam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1944. An Essay on Man. New York: Doubleday. Clancy, Laurie. 1984. The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St Martin's Press. Clarke, Bruce. 1995. Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis. Albany: SUNY Press. Connolly, Julian W. 1992. Nabokov's Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, Leo C. 1972. 'Transformation and Anti-Augustanism in Ovid's Metamorphoses.' Arethusa 5: 71-91. Davydov, Sergey. 1995.'Despair', in Alexandrov (1995), 88-101. Dranch, Sherry A. 1984. 'Metamorphosis as a Stylistic Device: Surrealist Schemata in Gogolian and Nabokovian Texts.' Language and Style 17, no. 2: 139-48. Foster, John Burt. 1995. 'Nabokov and Kafka', in Alexandrov (1995), 4 4 4 51. Galinsky, G. Karl. 1975. Ovid's Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Grayson, Jane. 1977. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gwilliam, Tassie. 1986. '"Like Tiresias": Metamorphosis and Gender in Clarissa: Novel 19, no. 2: 101-17. Hirsch, Gordon. 1988. 'Frankenstein, Detective Fiction, and Jekyll and Hyde', in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch, 223—46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, D. Barton. 1985. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor: Ardis. . 1995a. 'Look at the Harlequins':, in Alexandrov (1995), 33(M0. . 1995b. 'Transparent Things', in Alexandrov (1995), 725-33. Karges, Joann. 1985. Nabokov's Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Karlinsky, Simon. 1973. 'Russian Transparencies.' Saturday Review of the Arts (Jan. 1973): 44-45. . ed. 1979. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. New York: Harper and Row. Larmour, David H. J. 1988. 'Heraclitus, Parmenides and Pythagoras.' The Nabokovian 20 (Spring 1988): 18-19. . 1990a. 'Nabokov Philomelus: The Classical Allusions in Lolita.' Classical and Modern Literature 10, no. 2: 143-51. . 1990b. 'The Classical Allusions in Bend Sinister: Russian Literature Triquarterly 24: 163-72. . 1990c. 'Tragic contaminatio in Ovid's Metamorphoses: Procne and Medea, Philomela and Iphigeneia (6.246-674); Scylla and Phaedra (8.19151).' Illinois Classical Studies 15, no. 1: 131—41. . 1993. 'Orpheus and Nabokov's "Vozvrashchenie Chorba".' Studia Slavica 38: 374-77. Little, D. A. 1972. 'The Non-Augustanism of Ovid's Metamorphoses: Mnemosyne 25: 3 8 9 ^ 0 1 . Maddox, Lucy. 1983. Nabokov's Novels in English. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press. Mandelstam, Osip. 1972. Tristia. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Massey, Irving. 1976. The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meyer, Priscilla. 1988. Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

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Nabokov, Vladimir. 1936. Otchayanie. Berlin: Petropolis. . 1937. Despair. English Translation. London: John Long. Revised — English Translation, 1966, repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1938. Laughter in the Dark. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1944. Nikolai Gogol. New York: New Directions. Repr. with corrections, 1961. . 1947. Bend Sinister. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1990. . 1955. Lolita. Repr., ed. Alfred Appel, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. . 1957. Pnin. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. . 1959. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dimitri Nabokov, in collaboration with the author. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1962. Pale Fire. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1963. The Gift. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. . 1967. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1968. King, Queen, Knave. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1970. Poems and Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill. . 1971. Glory. Trans. Dimitri Nabokov, in collaboration with the author. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. — . 1972. Transparent Things. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1989. . 1973. Strong Opinions. Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1990. . 1974. Look at the Harlequins! Repr. New York: Vintage International, 1990. . 1976a. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York: McGrawHill. . 1976b. 'The Return of Chorb', in Details of a Sunset (1976a), 57-70. . 1976c. 'Christmas', in Details of a Sunset (1976a), 151-61. . 1984a. Nabokov's Dozen. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday. . 1984b. 'The Aurelian', in Nabokov's Dozen (1984a), 95-111. . 1988. Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Nassar, Joseph. 1993. 'Transformations in Exile: The Multilingual Exploits of Nabokov's Pnin and Kinbote.' Visible Language 27: 253-72.

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Ovid. 1977. Metamorphoses, ed. W. S. Anderson. Leipzig: Teubner. Patteson, Richard F. 1976. 'Nabokov's Look at the Harlequins! Endless Recreation of the Self.' Russian Literature Triquarterly 14: 84-98. Raguet-Bouvart, Christine. 1995. 'Les Métamorphoses du Corps: De Camera Obscura à Laughter in the Dark de Vladimir Nabokov', in Le Corps Dans Tous Ses États, ed. Marie-Claire Rouyer, 227-35. Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux 3 : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Rowe, W. W. 1979. 'Nabokov's Ghosts: Some Notes on Transparent Things', in Nabokov and Others: Patterns in Russian Literature, ed. W. W. Rowe, 175-82. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Sisson, Jonathan B. 1994. 'Nabokov's Cosmic Synchronization and "Something Else".' Nabokov Studies 1: 155-77. Solodow, Joseph B. 1988. The World of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Spooner, David. 1993. 'Of Cells and Mutation.' Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society 5: 109-16. Sweeney, S. E. 1986. 'Io's Metamorphosis: A Classical Subtext for Lolita.' Classical and Modern Literature 6, no. 2: 79-88. Tomlinson, Charles. 1983. Poetry and Metamorphosis. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Michael D. 1994. The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER

4

0VIDIAN INTERTEXTS IN OLESHA'S 'THE CHERRY STONE': THE METAMORPHOSIS OF METAMORPHOSIS STEPHEN

HUTGHINGS

I N A P A S S A G E from the autobiographical Not a Day without a Line (Ni dnia bez strochki), Iurii Olesha refers to his work on a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, suggesting that the task coincided with his initiation into literary creativity. He juxtaposes Ovid's marvellous transformations with what he saw as the no lesser miracle of Mayakovsky's striking, poetic metaphors comparing "the human heart with a church" and enabling one to "leap out of one's own frame by leaning on one's ribs" (Olesha, 1974, 138). Small wonder that a fascination with metamorphosis was to form the mainspring of Olesha's own art in succeeding years. The focus of my attention is his tale 'The Cherry Stone' (Vishnevaia kostochka). However, this essay is intended less as an exercise in source identification than as a study of what literary theorists might call the Ovidian intertext in 'The Cherry Stone'; that is, an examination of how the entire structure of Olesha's text appropriates and, in Jonathan Culler's understanding of intertextuality, "sublimates and transforms" that of Ovid

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(Culler, 1981, 108). It is thus an account of the metamorphosis of metamorphosis. I shall trace across the millennia the threads of an implicit dialogue concerning the ties linking metamorphosis and metaphor, myth and art, the differing role within each of amorous desire, and the sameness/difference problematic which desire is called upon to negotiate. I draw upon philosophically informed theories of myth in order to ground the dominance of metaphor over myth with which Ovid and Olesha must each come to terms in their self-conscious embrace of a dualism of self and other, body and mind, image and word. I invoke this dualism to account for the obsession with immortality that Olesha shares with Ovid, and for their common awareness of art's potential as political expedient in times of repression. Finally, I exploit the conclusions reached in my analysis to suggest answers to three problems surrounding Olesha's story: (i) the less-than-convincing reconciliation between artist and state proposed in the closing lines; (ii) the contradiction between Olesha's selfdeflating 'laying bare' of his devices, and his claims to be able to make the world anew; and (iii) the difficulties involved in placing this quirky writer, with his blend of sharp, modernistic technique and retrograde, romantic sensibilities, in the twentieth-century European mainstream. 'The Cherry Stone' tells of unrequited love. The narrator, Fedia, begins with a scene at the dacha of Natasha, whom he observes canoodling with a rival named Boris. When Natasha distributes cherries to eat, the brooding Fedia retains a pip in his mouth as he walks home across a wasteland, sucking the cherry flesh and allowing his two 'sisters', Imagination and Attention, to guide him through an invisible land of fantasy. Next, the scene shifts to a tram-stop. To compensate for his disappointment at Natasha's failure to arrive at a rendezvous, he subjects his surroundings to several marvellous transforma-

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tions. When his fantasies are challenged by Abel, a worker, he decides to plant his cherry stone on the empty lot, imagining how it will grow into a beautiful tree—the fruit of his love. Finally, we observe Fedia re-traversing the wasteland, where Abel is explaining to some visitors that an enormous building is to be constructed there. Fedia ends by endorsing this socialistic vision, claiming that his tree will grow on the spot where Abel stands. The story is usually interpreted as Olesha's attempt to carve out an allegorical niche in the harsh, new Soviet reality. The cherry tree represents the product of Olesha's own creative imagination, while the final scene asserts the somewhat contradictory possibility of a reconciliation between old and new, aesthetics and politics, romance and science.1 Critics point to a second contradiction between, on the one hand, Olesha's emphasis on art's irrational powers to liberate us from reality, and, on the other hand, the way in which, precisely by celebrating its effects—it is he who refers us metatextually to Attention and Imagination—he demystifies it, depriving it of its intuitive grounding. 2 Another way of looking at this contradiction is to view it as the function of a failure to integrate what literary theorists define as the three fundamental textual levels— discursive, syntactic, and semantic. 3 There is a disjunction between Olesha's plot syntax, with its awkward flourishes and barely motivated twists (Fedia as ridiculed lover, Fedia as figure of authority, Fedia at odds with reality, Fedia reconciled), and the 'message' filtering through from the discursive level: that, within the creative refuge of fantasy, art is uniquely capable of transforming the everyday world. At the same time, the syntactic and discursive levels are out of step with the story's referent, the vivid world of objects opened up by Olesha's metaphoric vision. The syntax clouds this vision because of the rambling manner in which it unfolds the story's theme. The text's discur-

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sive thrust produces a similar effect, since its assumption that only the transforming artist can reach beyond prosaic surfaces into the realm of essences sits uneasily with the realization that Olesha's anonymous readers also gain unfettered access to this realm. The emphasis placed on vision as the sense best able to render the world in its essential vividness contradicts Fedia's own description of his transformations as a journey across an /«visible country.4 The idea of the solitary artist's need to transform reality in order to see it hardly accords with that of a reader afforded the same opportunity merely by submitting to another's images. Finally, we should note that the most important metamorphosis—that of stone into tree—does not occur in the story, for the realization of Fedia's brave prediction lies beyond Olesha's time frame; we never actually see the tree. It is in this failure that we sense the unraveling of the knot binding syntax (the linear path by which stone is metamorphosed into tree), semantics (the world liberated from its prosaic shell and rendered visible), and discourse (the act of transformation as the artist's prerogative). Let us turn to Ovid. In a transformation narrative bearing superficial resemblance to Olesha's tale, the poet relates how the nymph Daphne is changed into a laurel tree destined to stand thereafter as a living embodiment of the god Apollo's love for her (Ovid, 1955, 44). The purpose of myths such as this is to account for the origins and present form of natural phenomena. Here, syntax and semantics are one and the same. Thus, Ovid's story of Apollo's tragic love for Hyacinth ends with an explanation of the origin of the hyacinth flower, the mournful history of whose shape provides the 'content' of the tale in the same way that its linear form produces the 'meaning' of all future hyacinths (Ovid, 1955, 230). Since, as Yuri Lotman and Zara Mints indicate, foundation myths presuppose a perpetual re-enactment of the narrative at their base, it is not ephemeral phenomena that

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they reveal, but eternal truths (Lotman and Mints, 1981, 3 9 ^ 1 ) . The original nymph Echo died from unrequited love, and all subsequent echoes bearing her name contain these sad events as their essence. In this sense we can see the coincidence of plot and semantics typical of mythic metamorphoses where the transformation is the meaning. Personal names imply unique individuals, and the fact that myths are peopled by named individuals coinciding with universal phenomena is a mark of the unity of the particular and the general that defines mythic consciousness (Lotman and Uspensky, 1988, 235). The generic concept of echo reflects a post-mythic lapse from the uniquely personalized Echo who is identical with all subsequent echoes. In myth, as Lotman establishes, everything is already named and already familiar, since it is generated from collective creativity in which known values are circulated, rather than from the transfer of new information in discourse from an 'I' to a 'You' (Lotman, 1990, 20-35). Thus in myth the discursive level is circumvented altogether. What are the implications of the differences we have outlined? Metamorphosis is undoubtedly at the heart of 'The Cherry Stone'. Aside from the key transformation to which we remain blind, Fedia works other changes which we do 'see': he turns into a policeman; anthills become vast sand dunes; clock hands become the legs of a gigantic fly; Natasha's face suddenly appears as a gleaming saucer. Another paradox of Olesha's tale, however, is that the failure of the central metamorphosis is due partly to the fact that its narrative progress is continually hampered by other, minor transformations, and by the commentary surrounding them. Fedia's distraction by the anthills on his way to see Natasha provides a literal example of Shklovsky's images of literary art as a "crooked road" or "impeded speech" whose very twists and distortions enable the reader to linger over and truly 'see' the object (Shklovsky, 1965, 25).

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Metaphors, the Formalists argue, render things vivid in the here and now. They must be sudden and surprising, since repetition leads to deathly automatization, a failure that the Formalist-influenced Olesha is keen to avoid: "suddenly [vdrug] her face appeared to me as a shining saucer"; "I remembered: anthills are discovered by glances all of a sudden [vnezapno]"; "[My] shadow climbs up the brick wall and suddenly [vdrug] loses its head" (Olesha, 1974, 214, 215, 219). Meanwhile, Fedia's status as sole inhabitant of a world invisible to others reinforces Olesha's conviction that good metaphor must be unique and individualized. If metaphor situates itself within the particular and momentary, then myth inhabits the eternal and unchanging. Ovid's metamorphoses are invariably held over until the culmination of the plot. The transformations of unique human beings into familiar phenomena constitute the ends of the respective stories, just as the purpose of those stories is to reveal the beginnings of the phenomena. Narrative closure connotes eternity and reinvokes myth, since it establishes a boundary separating the temporality of the events from the rest of time, and since myth identifies eternal essences rather than ephemeral appearances (Lotman, 1966, 72-74). Positioned on eternity's border, Daphne's transformation is 'once and forever'. If, however, the clock that Fedia momentarily transmutes into fly legs had remained as such, the sense of an image conjured up in an eccentric flash of genius would be lost. Fedia acknowledges both the absurdity of attributing mythic permanence to his creative whim, and the necessity of such flash-in-the-pan ephemerality to his infantile vision: "The hands have come together and...I think: 'It's a fly rubbing its legs together. The troubled fly of time.' How stupid! And what fly of time am I talking about?" (Olesha, 1974, 216). Significantly, Olesha ends his own narrative with a sentence whose divergent verbal tenses juxtapose his confidence in the

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fleeting metamorphoses of creative vision with his doubts about the permanent transfigurations of mythic truth: "I do have [imagination]—I said. I see Abel. I see clearly. Here there will be a garden. And on the very spot where you stand a cherry tree will grow" (Olesha, 1974, 220) [my emphases]. Vision is reasserted for good, while mythic transformation is deferred indefinitely. Fedia's denigration of his own clock-as-fly image also reminds us of the reversibility of metaphor. In asserting likeness, metaphoric discourse denies absolute identity, demanding that the thing compared be returned to its initial state once its appearance has been rendered vivid. Of course, Ovidian metamorphosis also includes examples of failed or reversed transformations. Thus, Icarus' metamorphosis into a soaring bird is tragically reversed because it is not a true transformation; he fails because he mistakes his fleeting likeness to a bird—his metaphoric status—for a true change of essence. The Icarus story confirms that man lacks the capacity to become, of his own accord, other than himself. Since the reversed transformation with which this purpose is accomplished coincides with the plot line, the story provides a mythic trajectory of sorts. With its outer, 'eternalizing' frame furnished by Icarus' death, the narrative converts human likeness to a bird into the myth of one man's failed attempt to become a bird, invoking the interpretation 'we are like, but are not identical to birds'. By contrast, Olesha's metaphoric assertion of likeness contains the entire sequence ('isn't—becomes—is—isn't') within the single moment of its articulation. Metaphors de-temporalize, abstract from the flow of time, placing phenomena in a vacuum in which everything has already occurred. The clock was a clock, became a fly and then a clock again-—all in the split second of Fedia's cursory glance. Fedia's disingenuous self-chastisement dramatizes his control over the clock's 'fate' (it is he who transforms it into a fly, he who converts it back into a clock), yet also the fact

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that he is capturing not the permanent essence of a clock, but its transient form. For something to be abstracted from time and made available to the immediacy of vision, it must be 'captured'. 5 Hence the lexicon of entrapment and appropriation characterizing Fedia's metaphoric language: "I hear the sound of a kiss. I don't look round, but they are caught [poimany]...No one responds to me. I turned my back on them. My greedy [zhadnyj] gaze does not follow them..."; "I create a world which submits to no rules other than the ghostly laws of my own senses" (Olesha, 1974, 215, 219). 6 The desire to possess is modeled on masculine desire, just as, in Peter Brook's view, vision is tainted with the violatory male sex drive (Brooks, 1993, 89). Indeed, Fedia's metaphoric transformations are deployed as a strategy to win Natasha's compliance. Thus, his self-transformation into a baton-wielding policeman is accompanied by this appeal: "A whistle hangs from between my lips...Children, envy me!... Congratulate me Natasha. I have turned into a policeman" (Olesha, 1974, 217). And the story's core transformation is presented in the form of an imaginary letter designed to persuade Natasha to abandon Boris in favor of the now phallicized Fedia: "Look: a hard, masculine tree has grown from the seed of a romantic... a strong Japanese tree is now standing...Bring me the son which you made with Boris Mikhailovich and I will see whether it is as healthy, pure and valid as this tree" (Olesha, 1974,218). Ovid's transformations are likewise often the result of sexual pursuits and unrequited desires. But such changes are generally a way of reminding the pursuer of the permanent unavailability of the pursued, of maintaining an essence intact, albeit in combination with new outward form. Those transformations in which it is the seducer who is changed have all the qualities of reversibility and deceit associated with appropriative desire in

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Olesha's metaphors. Here the purpose is not to embody an essence for all time, but to assimilate one essence to another. The transformation is merely an acknowledgement of the need for an initial strategy of seduction, a mediation between seducer and seduced designed to facilitate the capture. In the story of Pomona and Vertumnus, the latter falls in love with a beautiful nymph, Pomona, to whom Vertumnus attempts to gain access by adopting various guises. His transformations are, like Olesha's, deployed as a tool for seduction and are reversible. At the appropriate point Vertumnus removes an old woman's clothing, reappearing to Pomona as a handsome young man (Ovid, 1955, 331). His metamorphosis is a deception. His essence remains unchanged throughout, as it must if he is to retain control over his strategy. Claiming identity only to divest it is a metaphoric fiction rather than a metamorphosis. Indeed, when Vertumnus' trickery fails, he resorts to telling the story of a transformation, a cautionary tale of vengeance wreaked on a frigid woman, intended to warn of what happens to those who persistently refuse men's advances (Ovid, 1955, 331). The later portions of Metamorphoses are replete with similarly embedded transformations. In Book 8, Theseus is entertained with tales whose less-than-rapturous reception establishes the time of narration as the moment of transition between a period of unquestioning acceptance of mythic truths and the postmythic world of doubt, contingency—and art: "The whole company was stirred by the miracle related, but Ixion's son...challenged his host: 'Your story is pure invention...You put too much faith in the power of the gods'...[B]efore anyone else could speak Lelex...broke in...'Here is a story which will convince y o u ' " (Ovid, 1955, 195). The speaker resorts to a transformation story to dissuade his opponent of the fictionality of metamorphosis—to seduce him back into unquestioning belief in mythic truth. Likewise, Ovid must self-consciously seduce his

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readers into belief by presenting his myths as artful narrative, reflecting the alienated condition of modern fiction. 7 In the case of Vertumnus, the seduction of the listener coincides with that of the object to be possessed: if Pomona believes the story she will be his. 8 If Natasha believes Fedia's cherry tree story, she will presumably abandon Boris for Fedia. The embedded transformation tale—like the transformation as deceit—mediates between seeker and object. 9 The mediatory function of embedded transformations returns us to the differences between (mythic) transformation and (artistic) metaphor. With such transformations, it is not only the relationship between seducer and seduced which is mediated, but also the desire defining that relationship. In Ovid's version of the Pygmalion legend, Pygmalion's statue of a girl comes to life as his wife, Galatea, a transformation preceded by the story of the first prostitutes, who were punished by being turned to stone. Pygmalion's urge to sculpt is prompted both by his lack of a wife and revulsion at the prostitutes (Ovid, 1955, 231). Unlike the prostitutes, every sordid detail of whose original, shameful essences are immortalized in flint, Pygmalion's hardened, ivory sculpture is a substitute for, or likeness of, the perfect wife to whom he aspires. He falls in love not with the sculpture, but with an idealized image (Ovid, 1955, 231). The artistic transformation of woman into statue—juxtaposed with the divine transformation of woman into stone—is metaphor rather than metamorphosis. It is a means of gaining control, but at the cost of failing to retrieve a pure essence. Pygmalion desires no particular woman, but rather an incorporeal woman based on a generalized image of female loveliness derived from the desires of a universal (male) Other. 10 His statue is the fulfillment of this mediated desire. When Venus grants Pygmalion's impossible wish, his greatest pleasure comes from touching generic female flesh in which "the veins throbbed" (Ovid,

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1955, 232), not from recovering the unique form of a particular lover. Venus' transformation is thus a three-way mediation. The statue functions as a wife-substitute, as the means by which Pygmalion acquires his wife in the flesh, and as the filter for a generic image of female beauty. Olesha's tree is similarly multidimensional. On one level it substitutes for Natasha and for the inaccessible reality that Olesha attempts to capture. When Fedia savours Natasha's cherry, he achieves a surrogate consumption of Natasha herself, describing the tree that will grow from the seed as "my child from you Natasha" (Olesha, 1974, 218). Retrospectively, however, the tree is the literal fulfilment of Fedia's desire, as he suggests when he juxtaposes the unrequited love that caused him to bury the pip with the fact that the tree is now bright with flower (Olesha, 1974, 218). His characterization of the pip as seed (in Russian, semia means both seed and sperm) and as a nucleus (iadro) that will emit a blinding charge {oslepitel'nyi zariad) deepens the links with sexual fulfilment (Olesha, 1974, 218). 11 The parallel with Pygmalion's statue is strengthened by Fedia's admission that the tree is a "paper tree" [emphasis mine] (Olesha, 1974, 218), his beautiful artwork—the one object of obsession that he can press and possess. Like Pygmalion's statue, Fedia's substitution of artistic story for sexual object is "a fiction suggestive of that word's derivation from fingere, meaning both to feign and to make. [It] is the supreme fiction that becomes reality as the embodiment of the artist's desire" (Brooks, 1993, 24). Fedia's tree functions not only to fulfil his desire but also as a means of displaying the desire underlying it, thus mediating that object in a second way. The tree is as much a transformation of Fedia—a phallic metonymy of the man—as it is the surrogate object of the man's desire. The phallic associations are reinforced when Fedia compares his virile tree with the "concrete

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giant" that will "rise up" in Abel's empty lot (Olesha, 1974, 220). This brings us to a third mediation. If Boris is Fedia's initial rival for Natasha's attentions, then that same fate befalls Abel in Fedia's jealous struggle for rights over the future of the vacant lot and, by extension, over Natasha's womb. Critical consensus on the importance of the Cain and Abel subtext in Olesha's story confirms Fedia's attachment to a three-way, mediated desire based on the urge to possess what the other has. 12 Like Pygmalion, Fedia desires not a pure object, but a lofty ideal filtered through the desires of others. Significantly, neither Natasha nor Galatea are accorded physical attributes (verbal flesh). The artists are too busy detailing their creative mediations to bother rendering tangible the originary objects of desire. In order to be assimilated, then, an object must be made similar. Artistic metamorphosis of one entity into another requires a common, mediatory quality or principle of likeness to explain how the impossible change might be made possible. There is a basic affinity between our three forms of mediation: (i) mediation as metaphoric substitution; (ii) mediation through an anonymous, generic image; (iii) mediation as a fictional deceit perpetrated to seduce an object of desire. Ovid and Olesha are far from identical in the degree to which each bows to this axiom. In Ovid, the smooth mediation of entity 1 and entity 2 via principle 3 is often complicated by an uneasy synthesis in which the new being is both 1 and 2. Callisto's transformation into a bear reveals a dilemma in which the creature remains suspended between womanhood and beasthood (Ovid, 1955, 63). And the erstwhile sisters of Phaetho express pain which is that of the girls they were, while weeping tears that are the amber droplets of their new, arboreal essences (Ovid, 1955, 59). Since Echo's sadness at her unrequited love is the essence underlying all echoes, she must retain her original embodiment within that of the invisible, parasitic presence that

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is now her identity. Nor is it merely that one, unchanging essence acquires new outer form. The fascination of myth is that of one thing transformed into something completely other, a change so radical that, as Myrrha remarks when contemplating a suitable punishment for her crimes against nature, it invokes a mysterious netherworld: "[I]n case I should contaminate the living by my presence if I live, or the dead if I die, banish me from the realms of both...by changing me into some other form" (Ovid, 1955, 238). 13 The coexistence of twin essences can be identified in the hybrid creatures which abound in Metamorphoses: centaurs, minotaurs, and the Hermaphrodite whose dual form comes about after a nymph pleads to be allowed to retain an essence permanently entwined with that of a boy she loves, in lieu of being able to possess him (Ovid, 1955, 104). The origin of Hermaphrodite, this "single form possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed to be at once both and neither" (Ovid, 1955, 104), is a desiring, female nymph, yet the new, synthetic creature preserves the essence of the desired male, thwarting the process of appropriation. Critics note Olesha's own fascination with gender confusion (see Harkins, 1966). For Olesha, however, it is the mediatory 'neither nor' of androgyny that is to the fore rather than the 'both and' of hermaphroditism. Pendulous breasts notwithstanding, Andrei Babichev in Olesha's novel Envy remains a femalelike male in whom the feminine emasculates the masculine, not a man-as-woman in whom male and female essences remain undiluted. For Olesha, androgyny is merely another link in the chain that binds metamorphosis to deceit, seduction, appropriation, and mediation. The marvel of Ovid's metamorphoses is, by contrast, the marvel of otherness itself. Desire as wonderment at sheer difference is at the root of Platonic eros—something that Russian thinkers such as Pavel

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Florensky have been keen to point out (Florensky, 1990, 143— 44). Ovid lived and worked in the latter part of the Classical era. Indeed, his wavering commitment to Platonic wonderment and hostility to desire as assimilation spawn a group of transformations that, together, accomplish an anxious testing of the boundaries between self-sameness and difference. 14 In the tale of Myrrha, a woman has the misfortune to love her own father— a desire the effect of whose inversions is to subvert the systems of familial identities and distinctions on which societies are founded. Thus incest features as the polar opposite to those metamorphoses of self into other enacted to preserve difference. With Myrrha, the transformation of self into other (sister into mother, daughter into wife) is perpetrated in order to achieve union with self-same (father-as-husband). Myrrha's predicament provides an insight into the paradox of desire, which requires another to be desired but whose ultimate goal is the removal of otherness. Normally, it is difference between lovers which guarantees the achievement of sameness (possession). Here, it is sameness which ensures the maintenance of difference. The story of Narcissus develops Myrrha's dilemma to its conclusion, for Narcissus desires the reflection of his physical self as though it were another person. The shifting personal pronouns that he employs indicate his back and forth movement between the two impossible moments constituting narcissistic desire: "Oh, boy beyond compare, why do you elude me?... Alas! I am myself the boy that I see. I know it: my own reflection does not deceive me...My very plenty makes me poor... Cruel creature, stay, do not desert one who loves you" (Ovid, 1955, 86). By dramatizing his misperception as a dialogue, Narcissus enacts a transformation of self into other which, by incorporating complicity and delusion, yet also a measure o f self-conscious distance, aligns itself with fiction. Illicit love in Ovid is founded on the very transformation through (mis)per-

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ception of self into another which marks the beginnings of artistic vision. Olesha picks up the threads of the classical world's residual ties to mythic thinking, for 'The Cherry Stone' incorporates a transformation of self into other fraught with Ovidian uncertainty. Fedia oscillates obsessively between his identity as an ineffectual youth exposed to ridicule in the monumental world of Soviet reality, and that of the self-assured romantic, creating brave, artistic monuments of his own. His equivocation is symbolized in the opening scene when, crossing the wasteland for the first time, Fedia traverses the divide in his identity, generating a ghostly shadow of himself: "I walk a dual path. One of my paths is available for observation by all: a person coming the other way sees a man walking along a barren space that is turning green. But what is happening to this calmly advancing man? He sees his shadow in front of himself...the shadow climbs a brick wall and suddenly loses its head...this is seen by me alone" (Olesha, 1974, 215). The duality attains its apotheosis at the end, when Fedia insists that his tree will grow after all. Indeed, the story's ironic effect derives from the suspension of his dubious claim midway between a Fedia imprisoned in the banal world of the everyday, and a Fedia in control of his own fantasy world—between a realm in which the pip is a pip, and one where it becomes the tree of love. Olesha thus achieves a twotiered transformation: pip into tree, Fedia as feeble nonentity into Fedia as virile artist. However, like those of Myrrha and Narcissus, it is perpetually on the point of collapse. The final irony is that there is no transformation. For what is so miraculous about a pip that grows into a tree, or the transformation of a man with artistic vision into.. .the writer of an artistic text? Fedia's unerring status as an artist is never in doubt. Midway through his story, Olesha inserts two sections of scripted dialogue between Fedia and Abel (Olesha, 1970, 217-19). Sur-

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rounded by first-person narration, these sections encapsulate the paradigm of reversed transformations structuring the story: that of autobiographical self into fictional other (Fedia becomes a character in his own play), of everyday nonentity into literary giant, and of man's love into magnificent tree. But the dramatic interlude serves as the metatextual embodiment of Olesha's fiction at a higher level. If fiction transforms self into other, then Fedia himself is a transformation of Iurii Olesha who, like Fedia, is a romantically inclined artist writing about a cherry tree. 15 At this level the failure derives from Olesha's awareness that Fedia is only a literary 'I'; that, even if the fictional tree comes about, the real one will not—except as a metaphor for fiction itself. The importance of the autobiographical moment in twentieth-century literature is in line with an all-pervasive reaction against scientific rationalism which has contributed to an emerging process of re-mythification in modern culture in general. 16 There is much in common between the pseudo-autobiographical ego perched on the threshold dividing truth (selfhood, the particular individual) from fictionality (the universal otherness of the literary 'I'), and Narcissus, alternately entranced by, and alienated from, his own reflection. However, it is not only twentieth-century art which reaches for the mythic unity of general (word) and particular (image). This unity is, in fact, the unity-in-difference of the Platonic eidos as interpreted by Aleksei Losev and Mircea Eliade (Losev, 1990, 116-20; Eliade, 1995, 15-16). Contradicting the commonly assumed equation between mythic unity and universal sameness, Losev posits myth as the supreme incarnation of oneness in difference (selfhood in otherness) in which neither term is erased (Losev, 1990, 58, 194-97). Myth is, in Losev's interpretation, therefore akin to Ovidian metamorphosis, in which two states of being remain permanently united and irresolvably

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opposed; and to the Christian emphasis on the two natures of Jesus as being united 'unmergedly and inseparably'. 17 Olesha's cherry tree, by contrast, reveals itself as a corruption of mythic metamorphosis—an elaborate metaphoric fiction whose purpose is to possess phenomena, not to restore to them their rightful essences. When Fedia sucks the cherry dry, the pip's appearance presages the transformation of dead stone back into the living being from which it originated: "It revolved in my mouth and was sucked clean [obsosana dochista]. I took it out; it had a wooden look to it" (Olesha, 1974, 215). The remainder of the story effects a restoration of flesh to stone. However, Fedia restores not a fruit-bearing tree, but a 'tree' whose verbal status is reinforced by the future tense by which it is expressed. Fedia replaces the flesh he has consumed (a metaphor for his 'consumption' of Natasha) with the metaphorical flesh of the literary word. In place of the Christian incarnation of Word in flesh, we have an idea (romantic love) instantiated in singular form (the metaphoric cherry tree)—a Word made of words. 18 To put into words the unity of concept and image is, as Olesha intuits, to signal that the unity is no more. 19 We witness a mutual canceling of Olesha's two post-mythic gestures. The price of the emergence of the re-mythologized, literary 'I' is the collapse of the mythic embodiment of divine Word into the literary instantiation of Word as metaphoric word. Although the Formalistic hierarchy which places concrete image over automatized language and informs Fedia's delineation of the verbal term 'anthill' from the freshness of his living image (zhivoi obraz) of an anthill appears to stave off this harsh truth (Olesha, 1974, 219), the hierarchy ultimately collapses. For Fedia reveals how, by turning anthills into sand dunes, his appropriative vision merely serves as a function of self-delusion: "[M]y vision willingly submitted to the deceit: I...was ready to think that...this was the anthills themselves collapsing, like sand dunes" (Olesha,

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1974, 219). In transforming the anthills into what they are not, Fedia expresses the idea of an image as precisely that: an idea, a vapid abstraction. Notwithstanding the Edenic aspirations inherent in Formalism's espousal of zaum (transrational language), the movement's dualistic separation of disembodied word from fleshly image bespeaks a rampant subjectivism in which all meaning evaporates into verbal constructs (just as Echo's body degenerates into invisible sound). Foregrounding the cherry tree's verbal, imaginary status, Olesha metatextually reinforces this postmythic truth by announcing that his letter confirming that "one day in the invisible country the cherry tree will blossom" is itself a fiction: "This letter is imaginary. I did not write it...[s]urely it is not impossible to make the invisible country visible?" (Olesha, 1974, 220). The wistful tone of the question underscores the fallacy of a divine Word made flesh (and of a Formalist 'world made fresh'). Why, then, do the closing lines propel Fedia back into delusion, as he asserts that he can, after all, integrate his artistic metamorphosis with Abel's socialistic transformation? We must return to Ovid. Ovid's text reveals a progression from the effortless magic of the early transformations, through the illicit self-other changes in which art makes its hesitant appearance, to the self-conscious metamorphoses in which fictional deceit is to the fore. Close to the end, Ovid inserts a monologue in which Pythagoras expounds his cosmic philosophy, and in which the concept of likeness between man and nature finally and irrevocably displaces that of physical transmutation (Ovid, 195 5 , 340). 20 Ovid's embracing of the modern dualistic vision is placed beyond doubt when he wills his own transformation into a heavenly body—a figure for the immortality that will arise not from any changes to his flesh, which must perish, but from the power of his art: "I shall soar, undying, far above the stars...people will read my

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verse...I shall live to eternity, immortalized by fame" (Ovid, 1955, 357). This dualism is the logical outcome of the victory of metaphoric mediation over metamorphic embodiment, as is the intrusion of self-conscious, autobiographical discourse into third-person narrative (for the first time since his opening lines, Ovid addresses us directly). Accordingly, Ovid and Olesha each assert their belief in art as a substitute for immortality, in a figurative transformation of man into god.21 Readers of Not a Day without a Line will testify to the Soviet writer's obsessive conviction that, because he is an artist, he will "die and then live again" (Olesha, 1974, 343). Olesha also entwines his obsession with an awareness of art's ideological dimension and of the capital that accrues from incorporating politics into artistic vision. Ovid precedes his final lines with an account of how, following Caesar's metamorphosis into a star, the emperor Augustus will, in good time, "make his way to heaven" (Ovid, 1955, 357), while Olesha's tale ends with Fedia reassuring his political masters about the successful outcome of their transformation ("I see Abel. There will be a garden here"). 22 The final, ironic parallel to be noted is that each writer was pilloried by the very people to whom these gestures of expediency were directed. Ovid had already been exiled by Augustus to Pontus before the completion of Metamorphoses, while Olesha's Envy was to raise a storm of controversy propelling the writer into 'internal' exile. Both writers stand on the threshold of new eras. Ovid dares to contemplate an abandonment of the reverence and antique atmosphere surrounding Virgil's versions of the old legends. While a product of the first period and so aware of the antagonism between appearance and sense, Ovid straddles the divide which separates the pagan world of belief in the mutual transmutability of human and divine, of metamorphosis as the embodiment of oneness in otherness, and of desire as wonderment

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at difference, on the one hand, from the dualistic era of metamorphosis as mediation between body and soul, and of desire as the self s urge to incorporate the other through assimilation, on the other. Olesha's work heralds a new skepticism in which art, having run its course, can no longer substitute mythic embodiment with metaphoric mediation, and in which this loss must be exposed, while being adhered to. He strives to compensate for this loss by ushering in a revitalized, pseudo-mythic era dominated by the artistic persona, a unique self transformed into an immortal literary other who, nonetheless, retains an aspect of selfhood (Fedia is both literary character and self-conscious, autobiographical author). These purveyors of fictional deceit both conclude that, since meaning is divorced from the form incarnating it, artistic form can serve political ends. Ovid believes he knows that Augustus' soul will not literally soar skywards, just as he knows that his own immortality is a figure for that of his art. 23 Equally, Olesha knows that his cherry tree is made of paper and ink. When he endorses Abel's transformational project alongside that of his tree, he implicitly confirms that no transformation will take place. Like Vertumnus, Olesha dons his (political) disguise in order to secure the true object of his desire: eternal (literary) glory. Dissimulation works in tandem with assimilation. There is no contradiction between metatextual self-referentiality and textual claims to authentic vision, for Olesha's endorsement of Soviet mythology is as tongue-in-cheek as his predecessor's assertion of Augustan immortality. The 'reconciliation' was never intended to persuade. Olesha's ephemeral tale assumes more than a metaphoric relationship to the epic poem which it recapitulates. Rather than merely complete the degeneration of myth into metaphor already under way in Ovid, Olesha's text transforms the threshold marking the end of artistic myth and the beginning of art proper

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into one marking art's saturation point and the beginning of a new pseudo-mythic era. A key point of divergence is that Ovid's self-conscious, aestheticized self is conceived as real and separate from his creative output, while the status of Olesha's alter ego guarantees a new blurring of the boundaries distinguishing narrative persona from autobiographical person. Like the flower of Narcissus' unrequited love, Olesha's newly mythic art bears only the faintest imprint of the newly artistic myths that it transforms: it represents the metamorphosis of metamorphosis.

Notes 1 For this view, see Beaujour (1970), 15. 2 For an (1984), 3 See the and the

example of this approach to the story see, in particular, Ingdahl 22. classic structuralist models of narrative, such as those of Todorov early Barthes.

4 Janet Tucker draws attention to this paradox (see Tucker, 1996, 116-17). 5 Ingdahl refers to Olesha's desire to "seize life in its unbroken wholeness" (Ingdahl, 1984, 14). 6 Nils Ake Nilsson interprets Olesha's controlling metaphors as a form of reverse binocular vision (see Nilsson, 1965). 7 Chambers writes that "narrative seduction is a consequence of the alienation undergone by literary discourse in the text" (Chambers, 1984, 212). 8 Eric Downing has examined the connections Ovid establishes between imitation (fiction) and sexual manipulation (Downing, 1993, 19, 33-34). 9 For the importance of embedded narratives in Ovid, see Keith (1992). 10 Downing writes that Ovid transforms "natural, individualized regularities into ideally proportioned and regulated, de-individualized perfection" (Downing, 1993, 62). 11 The sexual subtexts in Olesha's work are treated in Harkins (1966). In his discussion of Olesha's story, Michael Naydan writes of Fedia having "acquired Nastasia's symbolic love in the form of the fruit's seed" (Naydan, 1989, 376).

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12 See Russell (1982). The Cain/Abel theme is also treated in Naydan (1989), and Beaujour (1970). 13 Kathleen Ann Perry writes of Ovidian metamorphosis that "the two contradictory states of the body remain permanently united and irresolvably opposed and one identity is melded with another" (Perry, 1990, 14-15). 14 Perry comments that Ovid's accounts of gender transformation are "riddled with problems of distinction" (Perry, 1990, 39-41). 15 For the autobiographical component in Olesha's poetics, see especially Numano (1981), and Beaujour (1977). 16 Epstein refers to the twentieth-century, autobiographical version of myth as "essayism": "Essayism is an integrative process taking place within culture as a movement towards the synthesis of life, thought and image, in which these components—originally coexistent in myth but long since divorced from one another in the differential developments of culture— come together again" (Epstein, 1995, 247). 17 Norman Brown compares Ovidian metamorphosis with Christian transubstantiation and states that "metamorphosis...is...an incarnation" (Brown, 1991, 8, 13). 18 Irving Massey acknowledges the distinction between metamorphosis and metaphor as one between, on one hand, two "concrete givens", and on the other hand, the verbal mediation of something "no longer present" (Massey, 1976, 189). 19 Olga Freidenberg writes: "The old image is mythological and concrete... without differentiated qualities...But this image begins to take on a second meaning as well... An allegory of the image bears a conceptual character: concreteness takes on abstract traits" (Freidenberg, 1978, 188-89). 20 Of the Pythagoras section in Metamorphoses, K. Sara Myers states succinctly: "miratio gives way to ratio" (Myers, 1994, 149). 21 Perry is among those Ovid scholars who have noted "a...touch of skepticism in his claims to immortality" (Perry, 1990, 69). 22 Keith points out that Augustan poets were quite aware of "governmental pressures to produce material favorable to the new regime" and claims that "it is naive to assume that Ovid did not recognize the political stakes" (Keith, 1992, 135). 23 Downing writes: "[M]ost critics now recognize how Ovid...affects a decidedly parodic distance from...his pronouncements" (Downing, 1993, 40).

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Bibliography Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. 1970. The Invisible Land: A Study in the Artistic Imagination of Iurii Olesha. New York and London: Columbia University Press. . 1977. 'Proust-Envy: Fiction and Autobiography in the Works of Iurii Olesha.' Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 1: 123-34. Brooks, Peter. 1993. Bodywork: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Brown, Norman. 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley, Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press. Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Downing, Eric. 1993. Artificial I's: The Self as Artwork in Ovid, Kierkegaard, and Thomas Mann. Tubingen: M. Niemeyer. Eliade, Mircea. 1995. Aspekty mifa (The aspects of myth). Trans. V. Bol'shakov. Moscow: Nauka. Epstein, Mikhail. 1995. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Trans. Anesa Miller-Pagacar. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Florensky, Pavel. 1990. Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (The pillar and the confirmation of truth), ed. N. F. Utkina. 2 vols. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Freidenberg, Olga. 1978. Mifi literatura antichnosti (The myth and literature of antiquity). Moscow: Nauka. Harkins, W.E. 1966. 'The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy.' Slavic Review 24, no. 3:443-57. Jngdahl, Kazimiera. 1984. The Artist and the Creative Act: A Study of Jurij Olesha's Novel 'Zavist'. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International. Keith, A. M. 1992. The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Losev, Aleksei. 1990. Filosofiia imeni (The philosophy of the name). Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarsvennyi universitet. Lotman, Yuri. 1966. 'O modeliruisushchem znachenii poniatii "nachala" i "kontsa" v khudozhestvennykh tekstakh' (On the modeling function of the concepts of 'beginning' and 'end' in artistic texts), in Tezisy dokladov

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vo vtoroi leinei shkole po vtorichnym modeliruiushchim

sistemam,

69-74.

Tartu: Tartusskii gosudarstvennyi universitet. . 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lotman, Yuri, and Zara G. Mints. 1981. 'Literatura i mifologiia' (Literature and mythology). Trudy po znakovym sistemam 13: 35-56. Lotman, Yuri, and Boris Uspensky. 1988. 'Myth-Name-Culture', in Soviet Semiotics:

An Anthology,

ed. Daniel P. Lucid, 233-53. Baltimore and

London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Massey, Irving. 1976. The Gaping Pig. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Myers, K. Sara. 1994. Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'.

Causes:

Cosmogony

and Aetiology

in the

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Naydan, Michael. 1989. 'Intimations of Biblical Myth and the Creative Process in Jurij Olesa's "Vishnevaia kostochka".' Slavic and East

European

Journal 33, no. 3: 373-86. Nilsson, Nils Ake. 1965. 'Through the Wrong End of the Binoculars.' Scando-Slavica

11: 40-68.

Numano, Mitsuyosi. 1981. 'Sud'ba iskusstva Iuriia Oleshi. Ego zhizn' v metaforax' (The fate of Iurii Olesha's art: his life in metaphors). Novyi zhurnal 145: 59-76. Olesha, Iurii. 1974. Izbrannoe (Selected works). Moscow: Iskusstvo. Ovid. 1955. Metamorphoses.

Trans. Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth: Pen-

guin. Perry, Kathleen Ann. 1990. Another Reality: Metamorphosis nation in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch

and the Imagi-

and Ronsard. N e w York-Bern-

Frankfurt am Main-Paris: Peter Lang. Russell, Robert. 1982. 'Olesha's "The Cherry Stone".' Essays in Poetics

1:

82-95. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1965. 'Art as Technique', in Russian Formalist

Criticism,

ed. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis, 3-24. Lincoln NB.: University of Nebraska Press. Tucker, Janet. 1996. Revolution OH.: Slavica.

Betrayed:

Jurij Olesa's

'Envy'. Columbus,

CHAPTER

5

SANSCULOTTE IMPROVISERS AND CLOUDS IN TROUSERS: POETIC METAMORPHOSIS IN PUSHKIN AND MAYAKOVSKY IRENE

MASING-DELIC

is perhaps the main concern of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, whether it actually takes place or not: the metamorphosis of Gogolian 'dead souls' into living ones; the metamorphosis of various 'superfluous men' into wellintegrated and 'useful' ones; the metamorphosis of 'demons' into followers of Christ (in Fedor Dostoevsky's novel The Devils)-, and many others. Aleksandr Pushkin took an interest in transformation too, but in his case the concept of 'changing form' was related to the metapoetic sphere and viewed as the change the poet undergoes when Apollo and the Muses use him as their 'vessel'. Of specific interest to him was the case of the artist to whom inspiration and transformation came easily once a specific set of circumstances was given, such as a stage, an audience, and a command to perform on a specific theme, as in the case of the improviser. Certainly he explored improvisation in his Egyptian Nights (Egipetskie nochi, 1835), where the artist is shown as a man whose artistic metamorphoses, however freMETAMORPHOSIS

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quent, never affect his character and personality. Pushkin was intrigued by the paradox of the artist who had been 'chosen by the gods' of inspiration for frequent 'visitations', but who, nevertheless, never acquired any 'divine' aspects himself. The Improviser, for example, combines lofty inspirations with total venality, complete dedication to his art with subservience to fashionable society. This was an attitude to art that Vladimir Mayakovsky (1894-1930), the young futurist poet and postrevolutionary propagandist of the 'Great Cause' of the October Revolution, could not accept. The aim of the present chapter is to examine the recurring motifs of the poet-improviser and poetry as metamorphosis in Vladimir Mayakovsky's oeuvre and life as they are linked to the image of the Italian Improviser in Aleksandr Pushkin's Egyptian Nights. To my knowledge, Mayakovsky's intertextual involvement with this fictitious figure has not previously been explored beyond some superficial observations. Here we shall argue that Mayakovsky's persona identified with this Pushkinian artist from the class of the 'have-nots' who made instantaneous performance and theatrical effectiveness the hallmark of his art. We shall also maintain that he, at the same time, rejected the Improviser, since this poet-performer lacks all ambition to change society, reserving metamorphosis for the realm of art, whereas Mayakovsky "needed art to transform life" (Shklovsky, 1972, 194). Furthermore, Mayakovsky's reception of Egyptian Nights reveals, with particular poignancy, a personal rivalry with the highest-ranking "general of classical literature",1 Pushkin, although it is masked by the notion of historical progress inevitably increasing the quality of literature as time "goes forward" (Valentin Kataev). Furthermore, the 'Queen Cleopatra and Her Lovers' theme of Egyptian Nights is seen as an inspiration for Mayakovsky's own "dazzling Hebrew Queen of Zion" theme (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 207). The intertextual links indicated ul-

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timately reflect two rival aesthetics: the Pushkinian demarcation of borderlines between art and (private) life and the Gogolian fusion of the two, with art serving the amelioration of social reality. In other words, Mayakovsky, in the tradition that Russian Radicals have, since Vissarion Belinsky, perceived as Gogolian, wants to show that art must serve life rather than itself; the "poet in the revolution" (Brown) believes that "boots" are more important than Raphael Madonnas,2 because the needs of life must take precedence over the laws of art. As a consequence, he also believes that the artist has no right to a private life since he must incarnate his message always, to all, and everywhere. Like Christ, the Word made Flesh, the poet must never join the "paltry children of earth", but act as their teacher, leader, and saviour.3 For the Christ of the Revolution, the poet Mayakovsky, this means furthermore that he must learn how to transform love for an individual woman (capitalist eros) into total solidarity with the collective (communist agape). Naturally, I do not see Pushkin as the only source of the motifs to be discussed. Any valid artistic text is poly genetic; likewise, it is open to "several interpretations simultaneously" (Smirnov, 1978, 186). At the same time, I believe that Mayakovsky, while rejecting the Pushkinian concept of the poet as an 'echo' (as expressed in his well-known poem 'The Echo' (Ekho, 1831), accepted that 'echoing' is the only valid path to creating art. Mayakovsky pursued other goals than the creation of 'mere' art, however. Hence the issue of art that uses metamorphosis only to enhance itself and to momentarily capture the imagination of an enthralled audience, but that never attempts to transform life and humanity, is treated as part of a polemic with Pushkin. Mayakovsky continues the attack on Pushkin that the Radicals of the 1860s began. Indeed, Mayakovsky (like the theme about which the poet writes) is usually linked to fictitious heroes of the radical 1860s,

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such as Bazarov and Rakhmetov, as well as to Dostoevsky's rebels protesting the limitations to human omnipotence. 4 The poet is certainly a Rakhmetov who fails to shun love, thus becoming a Bazarov who, in vain, struggles against his passion for a femme fatale from an alien class. Like Turgenev's nihilist,5 Mayakovsky ultimately cannot bear his ideological defeat and irrational attraction to a woman who does not share his values (including aesthetic ones), wherefore, like Bazarov, he ends up playing games with death. Yet it is intertextual involvement with Pushkin that brings out some of the most fundamental issues in Mayakovsky's stance towards art and life, as it did for the generation to which he spiritually belonged, the antiPushkinian and yet Pushkin-fixated Radicals of the 1860s, whose violently anti-aesthetic position was revived in Mayakovsky's and Osip Brik's LEF and REF. Vladimir Mayakovsky's early poem 'The Dandy's Blouse' (Kofta fata, 1914) clearly alludes to the epigraph of the first chapter in Pushkin's incomplete tale Egyptian Nights.6 It records a conversation in French based on the following pun: — Quel est cet homme? — Ha, c'est un bien grand talent, il fait de sa voix tout ce qu'il veut. — Il devrait bien, Madame, s'en faire une culotte. (Pushkin, 1954,111,417)

The advice to make a pair of trousers (culotte) out of a voice capable of any transformation was taken up by the poor, radical, and rebellious, in other words, 'sans-culotte' ("s'en...culotté") poet of Mayakovsky's early verse. In 'The Dandy's Blouse' (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 59), he pledges to have a pair of black trousers made out of the velvet of his voice; in addition, he will have a yellow blouse sewn out of equally sublime material, "three yards of sunset". 7 Being a poor Lumpenproletariat poet in a world ruled by the vulgar bourgeois rich, he could not af-

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ford to replace the trousers made out of his voice with corduroy pants or the shirt made out of sunset with a silk blouse. 8 In this respect, his situation is similar to that of the gifted Improviser in Egyptian Nights to whom the conversation in the epigraph refers. This destitute Italian artist (who is never named) appears in the aristocratic Charsky's elegant lodgings wearing very worn summer trousers, although it is late autumn (Pushkin, 1954, III, 419). Clearly it is not easy to make money out of a marvellous voice and poetic gift in a world where clothes 'make' people: that is, spiritual insignificance can be masked beneath an impressive exterior. Naturally, a personality that depends on textiles, tailoring, and fashion for effect is skin-deep. Gogol laughed at such shallow metamorphoses in 'The Nose' (Nos), where the Nose becomes inaccessible to its owner by wearing the uniform of a high-ranking officer; he ridiculed them "through tears" in 'The Overcoat' (,Shinel'), where the hero, in society's and his own opinion, acquires significance by becoming the owner of a fine new coat. Of course, not all elegant men lack substance. The dandy Charsky in Egyptian Nights is not 'made' by his clothes. Like the Improviser, he is a hypostasis of Pushkin himself, the proper worldly facade the poet needs to hide the illicit Improviser inside him. The Improviser has come to Charsky—a poetic confrère but social superior in impeccable clothes—to solicit his help in making the idle rich pay for demonstrations of his improvising skill. The aristocrat is both repelled by the Improviser's undisguised display of greed, and amazed by the sincerity of the performance he instantaneously presents. This sincerity is especially incongruous when the Improviser exalts the absolute creative freedom of the artist, stating that he cannot be dictated to. It is odd that the Improviser, whose art depends on obeying commands and who is so eager to sell himself, should make such proud declarations of independence. The theme of artistic

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freedom is, however, very eloquently executed in the impromptu verse he recites for Charsky, his sole listener. Subservient in life and obeying the commands of his audience, his improvisations are nevertheless free creations. In his subsequent public performance, where he again develops a given theme suggested by a member of his trite public—that of 'Cleopatra and her lovers'—the Improviser raises the risqué topic to the level of genuine, and hence free, art. 9 The social outcast and ridiculed genius of Mayakovsky's early poetry, in marked contrast to the Italian Improviser in Egyptian Nights, refuses to obey orders and does nothing to ingratiate himself with his audience, a despicable bourgeois crowd. Naturally, he accepts the money they pay to hear him but, unlike Pushkin's humble Improviser, so eager to comply with the whims of his aristocratic audience, the young poet of 'The Dandy's Blouse' and other poems of this period relishes his demonstration of total contempt for bourgeois society in general and his public in particular. If the bourgeois believe that (proper) clothes make (acceptable) men, the bohemian artist will wear clothes that make him a succès de scandale, stunning the audience into a kind of surrender. As the poet puts it in his autobiography: "I never had any suits. I did have two blouses— terribly shabby ones. There's an old custom—to adorn oneself with a tie. Had no money for that. Took a piece of yellow ribbon from my sister. Tied it around my neck. Great success. So, the most remarkable and most beautiful thing in man is his tie. It follows that if you make a bigger tie, you have more success. But since ties have limits put on their size, I took refuge in a ruse: made a tie-shirt and shirt-tie for myself' (Mayakovsky, 1955,1,21). The same mockery of superficial values is featured in 'The Dandy's Blouse', where the poet's disdain assumes global proportions. It is poured over the entire "slick" surface of the

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"Nevsky Prospect of the world" and over an earth that has settled for the mundane (byt), becoming a "lazy slut" in the process. In 'A Cloud in Trousers' (Oblako v shtanakh', 1916), the modern-day improviser is bent on teasing his public with "the red cloth of his bloodied heart", thus making it into a "stupid bull". He is out to stun the "herd" (in the Nietzschean sense) with his protean potency, certain that none of them can surpass him in his ability to undergo endless metamorphoses: If you wish— I'll be obsessed with the meat [miaso] of women — and changing ethereal hues, like the sky— when you so desire I'll be impeccably tender, not a man, but—a cloud in trousers! (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 175)

The offer to be anything his audience wishes him to be sounds affable enough, but the improviser of a new rebellious age complies only long enough to lull his audience into a false sense of security whereupon he freely distributes his well-known "slaps [in the face of] public taste". He does not even mind spitting at this bourgeois public drowning in "flab" and thick layers of cosmetics, as the poem 'Take What You Get' {Nate, 1913) demonstrates: And if today, coarse barbarian that I am, I get sick and tired of demonstrating my clownish tricks to you—then I'll burst out guffawing and I'll joyfully spit, yes, spit, straight into your faces, I—spendthrift and wastrel of priceless words. (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 56) 10

He is entitled to act thus since he is rich, whereas his audience is poor, at least if wealth is not defined in terms of wardrobe, but rather as owning "priceless words". The poet is also

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rich because he has the gift of metamorphosis, whereas the bourgeois 'spittoons' are frozen in rigor mortis, as is typical of 'dead souls'. The proletarian sansculotte of the twentieth century is a magician of constant change, however, and it keeps him alive, even if it is at the cost of a 'bloodied' heart. Choosing not to become a bourgeois, although he could easily excel in that role (as well as in any other), is the ultimate rebuff to this class. This poet is not a humble entertainer gratefully selling himself for crumbs while anxiously maintaining a shabby propriety. He is in fact never ashamed of his "shiny trouser-bottom". Thus in 'Letter from the Writer Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to the Writer Aleksei Maksimovich Gorky' (Pis'mo ot pisatelia Vladimira Vladimirovicha Maiakovskogo pisateliu Alekseiu Maksimovichu Gor'komu, 1926), the poet recalls how he parted from the writer (who was leaving problematic Russia for happy Italy), "with the backside of his shabby trousers shining in farewell" (Mayakovsky, 1958, VII, 206). In this poem Gorky is presented as a sell-out revolutionary (he was still living in Italy in 1926), while Mayakovsky is the true sansculotte rebel. In short, he is invariably the mocking Overman flaunting his material poverty and spiritual wealth; this "most golden-mouthed" new "Zarathustra of the shouting lips" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 183— 84) towers above his surroundings, reaching up to the very clouds out of which he fashions himself. Condescendingly, he may don a pair of trousers made of 'real' textiles, so as not to frighten the half-dead bourgeois with his superhuman creative potency and sexual virility. This trousered Cloud, like the Pushkinian Echo, is able to respond to any impulse, but unlike his classic predecessor's responsive voice, the Cloud, forever reshaping itself, refuses to be merely reactive. He does not echo sounds heard, but makes music never heard before. In 'Could You Do It?' (A vy mogli by, 1913), he plays a new kind of urban pan-pipe, for example, as this query reveals: "And you— / could

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you / play a nocturne / on a flute made of drainage pipes?" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 40). 11 The answer to this question is obviously 'no' since the audience addressed is the bourgeoisie. Not only is this class unable to create anything new, but in the solid Euclidean world in which the bourgeois live, any novel phenomenon is deemed to be peculiar. This may well be the bourgeois feature the avant-garde artist despises most: the constant ridicule of matters beyond the limited mental competence of this class. In 'They Don't Understand a Thing' (Nichego ne ponimaiut, 1913) "somebody's head", looking like an "old radish", keeps giggling (khikhikala) "for a lo-o-oo-ng time" at an unusual remark made by the poet (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 57). No wonder that the relationship between the modernist poet and his audience becomes that of a mocking contest rather than compliance, a contest where outdoing the other in ridicule is of the utmost importance. The old 'radishes' may giggle as long as they like, but, as already demonstrated, the poet is quite an expert at 'guffawing' himself (see the poem 'Take What You Get' cited above). It is when laughing at those who think him a clown that he feels his superior willpower most distinctly, as the verb 'zakhoYhochuevoking the verb 'zakhochu', intimates; incidentally, this phonetic-verbal metamorphosis offers no worse a pun than the aristocratic kalambur found in the epigraph to Pushkin's Egyptian Nights. Laughing louder than the giggling freaks around him, Mayakovsky's poet escapes being "pecked to death". It is to counter the "pecking laughter" of his petty surroundings, be it these "old radishes" or "boulevard prostitutes" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 34) that the poet must shoulder the role of a Khlebnikovian smekhach or strongman of laughter. In a world where even (bourgeois) hotel candelabras "roar and neigh with laughter" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 176) at the poet's misfortune in love, his only defense must be to 'outlaugh them', a lesson also taught by the Nietzschean Overman Zarathustra.

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A lack of (decent) trousers and subsequent social stigma are not the only similarities between Mayakovsky's avant-garde bohemian poet and the Pushkinian Improviser. Scorning the Improviser's servility, he yet identifies with other features. One of these is his outlandishness. The Improviser of Pushkin's tale is an Italian and his appearance and manners are markedly southern: "flashing eyes", black disheveled hair and olive (smuglyi'j skin (Pushkin, 1954, III, 419) are matched by an expansive demeanour. The Russian aristocrat Charsky sees the Italian as a person decidedly not comme il faut. Mayakovsky too was an Italian of sorts, having been born and brought up in 'Russia's Italy', Georgia. He recited poetry in Georgian during his performances in Tiflis where the home audience usually loved him. This 'Georgian' had distinctly southern looks: dark hair (worn long during the Futurist stage of the poet's career) and black flashing eyes, both often mentioned by memoirists. Equally southern was Mayakovsky's passionate poetic temperament; he likened himself to the Italian volcano Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 179). The Improviser is gauche in his everyday behaviour, but his artistic bearing is effective, as even Charsky admits. Dressed "in black from bottom to top" (Pushkin, 1954, III, 425), his unbuttoned black lace shirt leaving his very white throat defenselessly bare, the Improviser is theatrical in a positive sense. Mayakovsky's rebellious poet often wore "a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down over his brows, a black shirt, tie, and trousers" (Brown, 1973, 41). In this all-black attire he looked "like a member of the Sicilian Mafia tossed up by fate into St Petersburg" (Livshits, 1978, 77). This costume, so like the Italian Improviser's, was varied by the yellow blouse that we know from 'The Dandy's Blouse' and 'A Cloud in Trousers'. In any of these attires, judging by photographs, Mayakovsky looked very much like a (handsome) "highway robber", "political conspirator", and "charlatan"—-just as the Italian Im-

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proviser looked to Charsky (Pushkin, 1954, III, 419). The Improviser's garb could thus have been a model for Mayakovsky who did not dress up only for performances, however, but also for everyday life. An interesting detail of Mayakovsky's dress, noted by Livshits, is the combination of a top hat and a bare throat (Livshits, 1978, 99). Did Mayakovsky note the detail of the bared throat in the Improviser's stage costume and decide to reveal, like him, the 'site' of his remarkable voice, demonstrating, as it were, both his most powerful weapon and most vulnerable spot? If so, he may have done this in order to challenge his public to a choice: either to be conquered by the velvety magic of his voice, or to 'cut his throat'. The motif of public decapitation is found in 'A Cloud in Trousers' where the poet envisages himself clowning on the scaffold seconds before his execution. Ultimately, of course, it was he himself who "stepped on the throat of his own song" (Mayakovsky, 1958, X, 281). There is one more similarity of appearance between Pushkin's fictitious Improviser (clearly endowed with Pushkin's own exotic black curls and olive skin) and the real-life improviser Mayakovsky: both are tall and hence 'visible' men. This 'nonItalian' feature—Italians are not tall, at least not in literature— marks their shared southernness as not so much an ethnic as an aesthetic feature, a sign of their artistic otherness. Mayakovsky's impressive height was of course not something he had added to his costume in the same way that the small-sized Pushkin added height to his artistic double, the Improviser; it was, however, a natural feature to which he often drew attention (see Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 177, for example). Both artists thus 'rise above' their surroundings, 'sticking out' in a way that exposes them to hostile scrutiny in a mediocre world that recognizes only the average. Mayakovsky and Pushkin, with whom the sansculotte poet is conversing via the Improviser, are both (spiritually) born under different skies, the latter under an "African sky" which

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made the North "disagree with him" {Eugene Onegin), and Mayakovsky under his Georgian "Baghdad skies" that alienated him from the "monstrous snowfields of Russia" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 119-20). In addition to impecuniousness, otherness, and effective theatricality, the two poets, as behoves improvisers, demonstrate a speedy response to stimulus. Swiftness is of course essential to the improviser's art and Mayakovsky had the gift of immediate reaction. However, versatile as he was, he did not "make verses" ('How to Make Verses', Mayakovsky, 1959, XII, 81-117) instantaneously, obeying his audience's commands. In fact, Mayakovsky vehemently rejected such passive and 'easy' responses. Verses had to be 'made' by the poet, manufactured for distribution to the masses, who also had to be taught what to demand; they were not to be 'given birth to' by the poet with the help of divine inspiration and customer demand. What he did, however, was to take questions and comments from the audience after reciting his poems. These very frequently conveyed the notion that 'Pushkin was better than Mayakovsky'. It was his swift and crushing repartee in response to a hostile audience that made his contemporaries perceive him as an improviser par excellence. S o f i a Shamardina, one of the poet's early loves, recalls how he always handled questions from the audience with superb skill, clearly enjoying himself when he got the better of "philistines, trying to get at him by their 'cunning' written questions" (Katanian, 1993, 47). Audience hostility did not disappear after the Revolution. As Lavut, Mayakovsky's 'impresario' in the late 1920s, recalls, there were regularly "barbed questions and rude remarks" (Lavut, 1963, 24) and almost invariably unflattering comparisons with Pushkin. Not even the corpulence of the hated bourgeois audiences disappeared after October, as the poet kept seeing "solid flab" on proletarian bellies (Lavut,

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1963, 86). Audience hostility reached a peak in the late 1920s. A reciter of Mayakovsky's poetry, for example, recalls that, in 1929, some of the notes from the public were so "foulsmelling" that he "felt pity for the big man" (Mayakovskaya and Koloskov, 1968, 217). During the poet's last public appearance in 1930, they were so "foul" that he even, for a moment, lost the power of "the instantaneous verbal thrust" that had previously made him "an absolute master of repartee" (Brown, 1973, 13). The fact that a proletarian audience was as hostile as a bourgeois one made the improviser of Soviet times gradually lose the magic of his aggressive improvisation, as evidenced by his last hard-won conquest over his audience, achieved at the cost of a "mortal wound" (Brown, 1973, 1226). Specifically the Pushkin comparisons became insulting as time went by. Usually able to answer them jocularly ("some poets become poetic so soon that they imagine themselves not just Pushkins, but even...Mayakovskys", Lavut, 1963, 85), he could become touchy about the inevitable ranking during the last period of his life. It may be true—as Pasternak claimed in Safe Conduct—that Mayakovsky, like all 'romantic' poets, needed the 'philistines' in order to create out of contempt for them, but, unlike his predecessors, this 'futurist romantic' also needed to know that he would infallibly conquer. He and the proletariat had to win "always and everywhere", since the Communist promise par excellence—that the underdog would triumph over the "wicked and unjust"—had to come true. Finally, both Pushkin's Improviser and Mayakovsky's lyrical 'I' glorify creative freedom in similar terms. The author of the post-revolutionary poem '150,000,000', celebrating Soviet Russia's newly won freedom, states: "Who will ask the moon? / Who will demand an answer from the sun / asking why you make nights and days!?" (Mayakovsky, 1956, II, 115). Stating the right of sun and moon to create nights and days according to

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their own volition, Mayakovsky's poet evokes biblical subtexts but also the Improviser's first poem: Why does the wind whirl in the ravine Carrying a leaf and raising dust, When a ship in immobile waters Impatiently waits for its breath? Why does young Desdemona Love her moor As the moon loves the darkness of the night? Because the wind And the heart o f a maiden know no laws. Thus is the poet... (Pushkin, 1954, III, 4 2 3 )

Pertsov therefore seems to make a good point when he emphasizes the affinity between Pushkin in the Improviser's garb and Mayakovsky's poet. Both, he states, deny the "vulgar crowd" the right "to dictate to [their] inspiration" (Pertsov, 1950, 212). Nevertheless, the revolutionary avant-gardist does not share, but rather challenges Pushkin in his two hypostases of Charsky and Improviser. He takes great pains to demonstrate that he is free not only of the Improviser's obvious "lackeyism", but also of Charsky's inner censorship cultivated out of deference to conventionality. The 'general', Pushkin, may well have disagreed with the values of his society, but he accepted its rules, both when being perfectly comme il faut, like Charsky, and when being artistically unconventional, like the Improviser. In the latter case, he made sure his impecunious Improviser paid with social servility for the stage liberties he took as an artist. Mayakovsky polemicized with both hypostases of his classic predecessor, using the tactics of outdoing his opponent at his own game. Just as the Futurist poet flaunts his art more daringly than the Improviser, extending intrepid artistry to life, so he is

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more comme il faut than even the most dandyish aristocrat when he so chooses. Charsky is so eager to please the salon that he, at least on the surface, puts his entire imagination into the creation of his perfect aristocratic 'form': his modish dandyism and refined drawing-room that displays no trace of bohemianism. Mayakovsky's poet can be a dandy too, but he cultivates dandyism to emphasize total freedom from convention. As he "walks aimlessly" along the "Nevsky Prospect of the world", reciting poetry with a "French accent", dressed in his velvety black "voice-trousers" and golden-yellow "sunset blouse", he makes artistic dandyism not the mask, but the label of a poet. Nor did this change when he dressed according to all the rules of traditional dandyism, in tails, coat, and top hat, looking like the perfect "London dandy", Eugene Onegin (Mikhailov, 1993, 94). Thus Mayakovsky's poet could easily combine the roles of bohemian and dandy, of sansculotte and aristocrat, being concurrently and in one person what Pushkin's poet could be only when divided into conflicting doubles who were united only by their ultimately shared subservience to the beau monde}2 Demonstrating two contradictory aspects in one protean personality was as easy for Mayakovsky's poet as buttoning and unbuttoning his black coat under which he wore his yellow blouse. He apparently liked to perform this "flashing exercise". Elsa Triolet (then still Kagan), describing his first visit to her parental home, recalls: "Mayakovsky came in a top hat and black coat, a wide yellow blouse underneath; his appearance caused such a shock in the maid opening the door that she fled from him into the inner rooms, looking for help" (Katanian, 1993, 47). Thus this Improviser's versatility was greater than that of the "Sun of Russian Poetry", since conventionality to him, as opposed to Charsky, was but a costume to be put on or taken off; it was like the trousers donned out of condescension for the philistines in 'A Cloud in Trousers'. Impeccable clothes are part of Charsky's

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image; Mayakovsky's poet despises a "set form". Or is there a hidden similarity between Charsky and Mayakovsky's poet after all, since both the 'closet-poet' Charsky and the extrovert publicity-hunter Mayakovsky use clothes as shields behind which to hide an excessive sensitivity to public opinion? Each is, in his own way, emotionally tied to his audience whether he fearfully hides from it while secretly scorning it, or openly scorns it, while hiding his fear behind epatage. Only the "lackeyish" Improviser is completely oblivious to his public when the "god [of inspiration] approaches" (Pushkin, 1954, III, 428) and, for that matter, quite indifferent to it even while wheedling money out of it. 13 Mayakovsky's poet is not in this position, since he must either "conquer or die" each time he performs, being not the romantic "vessel of inspiration", but the aggressive champion of a cause. Ostensibly, Mayakovsky's poet is free from the fetters of property and status since the entire cosmos is his. He may therefore even use the sun for a dandyish monocle (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 187). Or is it the radiance of Pushkin's "solar fame" that he reduces to this attribute of an aristocratic fop's attire? Certainly, he seems to outdo another Pushkin character— that of Don Juan—in another context involving the transgression of natural law. Challenging the sun in the sky to pay him a visit in his 1920 poem 'An Unusual Incident that Occurred at Mayakovsky's Country Cottage in the Summer' (Neobyknovennoe prikliuchenie, proizoshedshee s Maiakovskim...) (Mayakovsky, 1956, II, 35-38), his defiance of cosmic forces does not meet with the same tragic result as Don Juan's challenge to the Commendatore in Pushkin's Stone Guest}4 The 'Sun Guest' does not drag the modern-day Don Juan of Nevsky Prospect to fiery Hell for his defiance of the world order, but engages in a warm chat between equals. They even have a common task, namely, to 'shine': one in the sky, the other in Russian poetry. Having be-

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come equal, if not superior, 15 to the celestial body of the sun, Mayakovsky had no problems outshining the "sun of Russian poetry", Pushkin, as 'Commemorative Poem' (Iubileinoe, 1924) indicates. In 'Commemorative Poem' (Mayakovsky, 1957, VI, 47-56) Mayakovsky once more assumes the role of the fearless Don Juan challenging the world order, while relegating the role of 'stone guest' to his dead rival's statue, the famous Pushkin monument in central Moscow. Again, there is no nemesis for the Don Juan of the twentieth century, although he pulls the "topranking general Pushkin" from his pedestal, extending his living hand to the bronze one. The Commendatore of poetry, Pushkin, does not crush his successor with the dead weight of his metallic mass, does not drag him down to Hell, but passively assumes the role of silent listener. In this poem, often seen as Mayakovsky's capitulation to the classical heritage, acceptance of Pushkin does not mean cessation of rivalry since his classic predecessor clearly plays second fiddle to Mayakovsky. For example, he admits that Pushkin's muse "tugged at his tongue" with some dexterity, but he also makes a point of confusing Onegin with Olga (both names begin with 'O', after all) before paraphrasing his favourite passage from Onegin's letter to Tatiana—the one where Onegin states his obsessive need to see Tatiana each day in order to go on living. Onegin's opinion of Tatiana's husband is, however, given in crude 'proletarian' style ("Your husband is, so to speak, an idiot and an old gelding"). Finally, Pushkin is invited to become Mayakovsky's subeditor in charge of agitprop. Mayakovsky is even amiable enough to offer to "spit out some sweet iambs every now and then" (see note 14) just to please Pushkin, which adds to his condescension towards his illustrious predecessor, as does the French phrase 'entre nous' obviously thrown in to humour an 'old-timer'. It is true that the modern poet is taking Pushkin into his confidence,

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treating him as the comrade he cannot find in his own time and age, but the crude language, the refined French, as well as the studied misquotations and the job offer of subeditor, all pursue one goal: to demonstrate that literature has progressed far beyond Pushkin's time and found tasks much worthier to pursue than were available then. Revolutionary battles are eo ipso more 'significant' than the Battle of Poltava sung by Pushkin. Contemporary love is simply "more grandiose" than "some Onegin's", Mayakovsky assures Pushkin's silent statue. Mayakovsky insists on his real superiority to Pushkin and Onegin, although the only observation on modern love that the modern poet-lover has to offer as evidence of its superiority is that it is "far worse" not to be able to mourn at all than to bemoan a lost love; this is hardly a statement that makes modern love seem more "grandiose" than Onegin's, and perhaps Mayakovsky was aware of this, so yielding victory to Pushkin in the "unimportant" sphere of love. Insisting on his superior status as a poet, Mayakovsky ostensibly does not take personal credit, but rather refers to inevitable progress as the source of his claim. His condescension towards Pushkin is thus based on a cornerstone assumption of Soviet aesthetics: historical progress. Just as Pushkin had been the face of his century—the best poet of his aristocratic age—so Mayakovsky was obliged to be the incarnation of a world and time in which a new and better nobility, namely, the proletariat, had triumphed. As Mayakovsky put it in another poem dealing with the issue of the classical heritage, he was a 'Soviet poet' and "nobles oblizh" (Mayakovsky, 1958, VIII, 112). Just as Pushkin had spoken for the aristocratic cultural elite in his time, so Mayakovsky was obliged to represent the 'new class' that would soon abolish all classes, leaving but one: the creative builders of a new life (the Khlebnikovian tvoriane). Or, as Lev Kassil', the Mayakovsky devotee, put it: "Belinsky quoted Gogol's well-

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known statement that Pushkin was 'Russian man' in all his future grandeur. A poet-tribune and orator in his verse, the proponent of great love and devoted friend and fervent comrade of his reader, Mayakovsky too was above all Russian and Soviet man in all his future Communist glory" (Kassil', 1960, 89). To Kassil' it was clear that Mayakovsky was "an entirely novel phenomenon in literature" that could only have been "born and raised by the Great Socialist Revolution" (Kassil', 1960, 90). This did not mean that Pushkin was less talented than Mayakovsky, but it did mean that Russia in his time had not yet reached "the vanguard of world culture, being still a backward country". Russian poetry of those times could therefore not acquire "international fame" (Kassil', 1960, 90). Mayakovsky's "mighty voice" had thundered forth, however, when the Soviet Union had become "the forerunner of new ideas that have stunned all humanity"; it was the "good fortune" of the Soviet Union that in these decisive years it had a poet whose "gift and poetic range were commensurate with the sweep of the Revolution" (Kassil', 1960, 91). To Kassil' there could be no doubt that Mayakovsky was following paths that "not one [other] poet" had yet trodden (Kassil', 1960, 91). This was apparently also Mayakovsky's view, since he, for example, pitied Pushkin because the latter had no recourse to powerful technology, such as the microphone. Had modern technology been at Pushkin's disposal, he could have reached "the Brazilian / and the Eskimo, / the Spaniard / and the Votiak", that is, the world, in contrast to the nations of the Russian Empire listed in Pushkin's famous 'Monument' (Kassil', 1960, 121). Thus Mayakovsky, by virtue of having been born at the right time and understanding its revolutionary essence, could outdo Pushkin in that which, ever since Dostoevsky's 'Pushkin speech', had been considered the main feature of his genius: his universality. The Soviet poet, who had embraced the new world and glorified the power of

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technology, could develop his predecessor's Russian quality of universality and raise it to the level of Communist internationalism; thus he would create a superior art that would make Soviet Russia the spiritual leader of global harmony. The idea of Communist internationalism obliged the Soviet Mayakovsky to become more universal than even the most universal Russian poet hitherto, or at least it gave him the rationale for aspiring to such a position. Even though in 'Commemorative Poem' those days are over when Pushkin had to be "thrown overboard the steamship of modernity" (as the 1912 Futurist manifesto had demanded), he had still been superseded by history and surpassed by Mayakovsky. If Nikolai Nekrasov's well-known civic statement that "it was not necessary to be a poet, but it was an obligation to be a citizen" was true, then Mayakovsky was the "greatest", since he was the citizen of a state superior to Pushkin's Russia. No one could doubt his civic commitment after the October Revolution. This commitment, as well as the effort to make his entire nation equally committed, were Mayakovsky's all-dominant post-revolutionary themes. His sense of guilt when he was sidetracked from duty, as presented in 'About This' {Pro eto, 1923), was overwhelming. Nor was civic commitment ever absent in his pre-revolutionary poetry. Even in the 'epatage' poem 'The Dandy's Blouse', the poet's avowed goal is to create verse that is "as sharp and useful as toothbrushes". And, as already indicated, Pushkin was too much of an aristocrat and too little of a citizen in Mayakovsky's neo-radical and neo-nihilist estimation. The view that it was Mayakovsky's civic and artistic duty to become the (superior) Pushkin of his age was apparently shared by prominent Soviet intellectuals, such as the well-known editor of Pravda, Mikhail Kol'tsov. According to the memoirs of Kol'tsov's wife, Kol'tsov had a dream in which he organized an international competition for portraitists whose task it would be

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to paint Mayakovsky as he was writing his long poem 'Vladimir Il'ich Lenin' (1924). Kol'tsov stipulated only one feature for this portrait: Mayakovsky "would somehow have to resemble Pushkin, writing poetry in a vast leafy forest" (Mayakovskaya and Koloskov, 1968, 258). No longer cast as the "opponent of the classical heritage", Mayakovsky was being made into its "superior inheritor" in the sense in which Kassil' defined the concept of aesthetic progress. 16 The fact that the envisaged portrait was to show Mayakovsky writing his Lenin poem presumably also demonstrated the superiority of Soviet times over Pushkin's, since Lenin was worthier than any ruler of whom Pushkin could have written, including Peter the Great. Yet Lenin was also often perceived as a Petrine figure. The progression from Peter to Lenin would thus have paralleled that of Pushkin to Mayakovsky in the portrait imagined by Kol'tsov. Poetic metamorphosis paralleled historical progress. In other words, Mayakovsky was the Overman to Pushkin's still all-too-human poet, be he cast as Charsky or as the Improviser. His deep interest in Pushkin's Egyptian Nights was founded on the perception that he had transcended both servility and dandyism, thus achieving artistic superiority over the versatile Pushkin in the world of the International which had superseded the merely Universal. He was convinced that he had exchanged the role of compliant entertainer as well as modish victim of upper-class proprieties for that of the poor, but victorious destroyer of bourgeois deadwood (at first) and the Party's vigilant fighter against remnants of the past (later). In spite of his dislike of Gorky, he was perhaps following the example of his early Russian Overman, namely, Danko of the torn-out "heart-torch" (in the early Gorky story 'Old Woman Izergil') who had so demonstratively transcended Pushkin's Prophet (in 'The Prophet' [Prorok], 1826). Replacing the Prophet's purely verbal fire and his divine inspiration from above with self-initiated action (ripping his

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flaming heart out of his chest with his own hands, thus dispensing with the six-winged seraphim of Pushkin's poem), Danko had shown the path to future 'progressive' poets who would not content themselves with anything less than all. Mayakovsky's myth of himself undoubtedly cast his prerevolutionary poetic persona in the role of the rebel who refused to be the servant of the ruling class, and his post-revolutionary persona as the builder of a new world where the artist served no one but Life and Humanity in its future perfection. Like the young Gorky, he undoubtedly saw "socialism built in battles" (Mayakovsky, 1958, X, 284) as preferable to what was then commonly termed the "passive romanticism" of individual inspiration serving private and intimate ends. The modernized 1860s aesthetics that LEF propagandized proposed that art become a commodity of everyday life. The artist of the new world was not a "lonely Tsar" as Pushkin saw the poet, but one of the '150,000,000' who were building a new world. Valuing his art highly, the poet nevertheless, even in the early stages of his career, thought that "the slightest particle of life is more valuable than all [he] had ever written, or would write" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 184). This Chernyshevskian aesthetics of art as the handmaiden of life would remain Mayakovsky's declared artistic credo. It was the foundation for his claim to superiority over the anti-utilitarian Pushkin who could not make himself value "cooking pots" higher than poetry (in the poem 'The Poet and the Crowd' [Poet i chern'], 1828). 1 7 The view of art as labour in the service of 'building a new life' made it imperative that inspiration not be perceived as a force beyond human control. Mayakovsky was the Sun of Soviet Poetry and, as such, superior to the Sun of Russian Poetry, because he knew what Pushkin had not known: that the secret of 'radiance' lies in discipline and regularity, in "shining always and everywhere" and not only when "Apollo was calling the

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poet to the holy sacrifice" (Poka ne trebuet poeta, 1827). In his post-revolutionary lecture tours, Mayakovsky kept emphasizing that making verse was the "same kind of work" as any other, that it did not demand any other type of inspiration than other forms of work, and that all work was equally dependent on inspiration. The poet makes the same point in his well-known 'Conversation with the Tax Inspector' (Razgovor s fininspektorom, 1926), where poetic creativity is equated with hard work as opposed to divine illumination. Mayakovsky's 'labor aesthetics' thus clearly excludes the Improviser's mystical inspiration from above. Charsky asks the Italian at one point: "So you do not know either labour or a cooling of the inspiration, or even that inquietude that precedes it?" The Improviser answers: "No one but an improviser can understand the rapid change of impressions, this intimate link between personal inspiration and an alien, imposed will—I would attempt to describe it in vain" (Pushkin, 1954, III, 424). Mayakovsky would not want to hear him describe it, even if he could. He does not believe in "inexplicable talent" (Pushkin, 1954, III, 424), only in "planned poetry production"; he does not trust spontaneous response to an imposed will, only a conscious response to "social commands" (when guided by the Party). This is why neither the young Futurist Mayakovsky, struggling with the bourgeois enemy, nor the mature Soviet citizen educating the masses can accept the practitioners of easy improvisations, as opposed to those engaged in honest work. The poet firmly states in 'A Cloud in Trousers' that he does not want to "part his lips with ease / and immediately start singing like an inspired simpleton— / here you are, please". These lines may be aimed at the Ego-Futurist Igor' Severianin and other "facile" poets, but they could equally well be targeted at Pushkin's Improviser, as well as his Mozart (from Mozart and Salieri) and all other artists, fictitious or real, who create with (apparent) ease. The

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"worker poet" (Mayakovsky, 1956, II, 18) cannot accept art that is not based on planned effort. Like Pushkin's Salieri, Mayakovsky wants a fair distribution of the good 'inspiration' in the name of a regulated production of artifacts. Art cannot be allowed to be the product of chance, whim, or grace—however excellent the end product—but must be the result of effort. The new world was created in the name of justice: divine inspiration, often singling out some undeserving individual while rarely visiting the honest worker of the arts, had no place in it. The inspired poet is therefore dismissed as "God's Little Birdie" in the 1929 poem of that name (Ptichka bozh'ia, Mayakovsky, 1958, X, 111-13). The title alludes to Christ's parable about the "birds and lilies of the field" who, unlike humanity, have faith in Divine Providence and therefore are unconcerned about providing for themselves; it also alludes to Pushkin's The Gypsies in which the carefree life of the nomads is likened to that of "God's little birdies" who "know neither care, nor labour" (Pushkin, 1954, II, 139). The lines stating that "When the golden sun arises / The little bird listens to God's voice, / Wakes up with a start and begins to sing" (Pushkin, 1954, II, 139) evoke the Improviser type of poet who relies on "beautiful inspiration" to "sing" unburdened by any social commands, educational tasks, or even the need to take proper care of himself. The problem with being a "human-sized bird" (Mayakovsky, 1958, X, 113)— that is, an inspired poet—is that "chirping" fulfils absolutely no useful function, at least not in Mayakovsky's aesthetics. Did Mayakovsky not want poetry to be magic then? Did he really see verses as mere "toothbrushes"? It seems that he wanted poetry to be more than either magical song or useful instruction; he wanted it to have the same transformational power as Christ claimed for the Word that he himself was. Ultimately, Mayakovsky's rivalry was not with divinely inspired poets, not even Pushkin, but with the Saviour of humanity. He shares with

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Christ the aspiration to transform human nature and the world. And, as usual, he wants to outdo his rival. Christ may have pitied the "poor in spirit" and blessed those without wealth, but Mayakovsky totally obliterated the difference between himself and the victims of life, seeking his "sisters in the rot of morgues" and his brothers "among the leprous outcasts" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 159) of the modern metropolis. It is for them that he delivers his 'sermon on the mount', inviting "all those who tore the silence apart / who howled / because the nooses of noons were too tight" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 154) to come to him. He will take all their sufferings upon himself and, having passed his stations of the cross, throw the burden at the "dark god of thundering threats" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 171). He is prepared also for the ultimate sacrifice, although in his case it is not crucifixion, but self-inflicted death; if the need arises, he will "lie down.. .on the soft bed of real dung and.. .kiss the knees of the tracks" while "the wheel of the locomotive / embraces [his] throat" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 154). The poet sacrifices his art and his life (the "throat" where both dwell), for the sake of saving humanity. Mayakovsky does not want to be a "Greek with a pampered body" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 170), apparently referring to one of Cleopatra's three lovers in Egyptian Nights, but the "ecce homo" o f ' M a n ' (iChelovek, 1916-1917). He wants to be a Promethean saviour who, like Ivan Karamazov, rejects the heavens out of solidarity with earth and mortal humanity. 18 Perhaps he does not even want to damn the bourgeois. His violent mockery of their way of life may ultimately be "for their own good", serving the purpose of their transformation and regeneration. Teasing the bourgeois with the "bloodied cloth" of his heart, for example, he could be acting thus in order to "pull out their souls" and "trample them underfoot until they are big" and "bloodied enough to be used as flags" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 185), that is, to ennoble them by inspiring them with revolu-

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tionary passion. Like Christ, who drove the money-lenders out of the Temple, the 'Thirteenth Apostle' (as 'Cloud' originally was to be entitled) lashes the sinful (with his tongue), punishing them, but also hoping for their contrition and rebirth. Mayakovsky was probably not the callous cynic and coarse violator of decorum that his "bourgeois-philistine" audience saw—and some recent critics have continued to see—in him. An archetypal inverted romantic and Utopian—like the Pushkin heckler Bazarov and his prototype Pisarev—his scorn and irony serve educational functions, as well as self-protective ones. Abuse of the crowd helps shield "sacred values" against profanation, as well as hide an absolute commitment to them. The poet's well-disguised, but intense (socialist) idealism is his Achilles heel. When capable of laughing at a base world, he is an Overman in charge, able to strike any pose he likes, like a "cloud in trousers", but there are times when, overwhelmed by the pain of rejected prophecy, he is subjected to metamorphoses beyond his control. On such occasions he may become a dog, for example, as happens in 'So This Is How I Became a Dog' (Vot tak ia sdelalsia sobakoi, 1915, in Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 8889). This metamorphosis (of the Kafkaesque type, since Ovid's are too pretty, as the poet intimates—see Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 184) hits him when he is "unbearably" angry. His feelings being so intense, the poet loses control of his human form, as it were, and is transformed into a canine shape. Fangs grow out of his mouth, and a bushy tail sticks out from under his overcoat. Since this is a completely 'real' metamorphosis, the crowd in the street cannot but notice it and, following its innate hatred for everything it does not understand, it calls for the police. This is when the poet retaliates: "I crouched down on all fours / And began to bark: / whoffl whoffl whoff!" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 89).19 In this poem, metamorphosis is not devoid of humour. This quality is absent in 'To Everything' (Ko vsemu, 1916, in May-

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akovsky, 1955,1, 103-106), since metamorphosis here is linked to love rejected on account of impecuniousness—a Gogolian theme that is never funny in Mayakovsky's poetic world. Metamorphosed once more into a dog, he is now a "rabid" one, planning to sink his fangs into "large legs that reek of sweat and the marketplace" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 105). The legs are also linked to the still raging First World War, since the canine poet will hide under "the bunks of barracks" waiting out opportunities to deliver vicious bites. The implication of the metamorphosis seems clear, namely, that men waging wars and engaging in commerce—including the purchase of love—are more bestial than rabid dogs, even though men have no fangs or tails. Naturally this protean poet is not limited to one type of metamorphosis, raging anger not being the only overpowering emotion he experiences. There is also the feeling of having toiled in vain for the ungrateful, leading to his transformation into a bull. Although the poet is a gigantic white bull with powerful lungs that roar out a mighty "mooooh!" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 105), he is not Jupiter in disguise (as Ovid would have made him). Instead, he is yoked and his neck is "all wound [about]" (sheiia-iazva), a state of affairs that poses a threat to his throat and its wondrous velvet voice. Fleeing from descending swarms of flies—read: philistines—the bull turns himself into an elk. Bloodshot eyes and antlers caught by wires indicate that the poet's situation is not improved by this transformation. From metamorphosis to metamorphosis the poet remains "all pain and being knocked about"; he is hopelessly trapped, in spite of the fact that his "great soul" is an "orchard" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 106) to be inherited by future generations. Protean flexibility offers no freedom from the self, as it does in the case of Pushkin's Improviser. The Italian seems free in his art even when he follows commands and tries to please; Mayakovsky's poet is trapped although he scornfully rebels against all

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attempts to shackle him. This is so because Mayakovsky, unlike the type of poet who is split into an ordinary man and an artist, is undivided, always being, like Christ, the tool of his lofty mission, in his case the "social command". Rejecting irrational inspiration and the demands of a "corrupt" public, Mayakovsky strives to be the servant of the people. In the choice between "Athens or Jerusalem", Mayakovsky chooses Jerusalem in the sense that he serves the transformation of life rather than autonomous art, but he replaces Christ's parables with agitprop. What Mayakovsky forgets is that even Christ obeyed a higher command and followed God's will when creating his myth. Believing in a New Jerusalem of sorts separates Mayakovsky from the "Athenian" Pushkin, who presents both Charsky and the Improviser as at the same time "lackeys" of everyday life and free poets of inspiration. Paradoxically, when obeying the "approaching god" of inspiration (Pushkin, 1954, III, 428), publicly or in secret, both hypostases are free. Thus, Mayakovsky's painful metamorphoses differ from the Improviser's which are really a "show o f images" in rapid change and not changes of identity. The Italian may conjure up the images of Desdemona or Cleopatra, speak for the wind or the eagle, but he does not merge with that which he conjures up, however close the identification. Pushkin's Italian is an 'echo', close to, but invariably distanced from, his theme, in spite (or because) of the fact that, in the act of creation, he becomes completely oblivious of himself as an individual. Presumably something similar happens to the closet-poet Charsky, even if in a less spontaneous fashion than the Improviser's (however talented, he lacks the gift o f immediate creation). Mayakovsky's poet totally identifies with his subject, dissolving the barriers between himself and his creation: "dissolving" himself in his subject matter, he does not lose his self-conscious awareness of his ego, however (contrary to the Christian idea that by losing yourself you gain yourself).

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Rather he becomes "ever more himself' the more changes he undergoes. His infinite metamorphoses increase the realm of identification, extending the frontiers of his poetic kingdom, making ever more areas of life mirror himself. Mayakovsky's poet believes that his "Truth" and valid art are one and the same, wherefore he pronounces judgements, carries the woes of the victimized, and wages war with their oppressors, as well as with all poets who think that art is comfort and escape, a "chirping" about roses and love. In this process of creation as total identification, his whole being is at stake at all times. Every victory or defeat with regard to audience acceptance belongs to his cause and marks a test of Mayakovsky the artist and the man. Art inevitably became constant performance anxiety on a grand scale, dissolving all spontaneity. Another factor preventing the poet from becoming a superior Soviet Christ uttering the life-giving agitprop word is 'General God' himself (wearing galifes no doubt—see note 11). He sees to it that Mayakovsky does not outdo His own Son. This "Hoffman of the heavens" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 200) and "Almighty Inquisitor" creates a "dazzling Hebrew Queen of Zion" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 207) and makes the poet submit to a "magic which equals that of crucifixion" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 208). This magic is very much the same as that described in the Improviser's second poem about Cleopatra and her lovers. In fact, Mayakovsky's Queen of Zion is closely related to Pushkin's Queen of Egypt, just as the young man, ready to sacrifice his life for one night with the Queen in the Improviser's poem, has much in common with Mayakovsky's persona in 'The Backbone Flute' (Fleita-pozvonochnik, 1915).20 Opting here for erotic passion rather than the kind which saves others for a better life, the poet is appropriately crucified on paper by the "nails of words" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 208). This crucifixion has been dictated by the Queen of Zion who challenges the poet's

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superiority. In fact, the poet becomes whatever her actions decree, echoing her decisions. In relation to her he accepts whatever "lot" (zhrebii) the urn of fate may hold for him. It is when he plays on his own backbone, creating music out of the very texture of his self, that he comes close to being the pliable Improviser, obedient to an alien will. Thus, if his Queen hides in the mists of London, he will turn his lips into "fiery streetlamps" ready to kiss her; should she decide to visit the desert, it is his burning cheek she will find there and not the hot sand of the Sahara. Should she go to Spain and, a second Carmen, look amorously at a handsome toreador, he will be the dying bull whose jealousy will poison her joy. In Paris he will be the Seine calling out to her, revealing his "rotting teeth" (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 204) and in Russia he will be the "naked little moon, forever waiting", a Pierrot figure jealously watching his Columbine. This is a state of being the poet cannot accept, since, among other things, it means a betrayal of the still "ragged" Lumpenproletariat. In 'About This', therefore, he seeks to flee the bourgeois comfort of his salon hostess-queen, Lili, becoming once more the young poet who heeds no one's bidding, not even his beloved's. This 'best' aspect of himself is represented by the stern "youth on the bridge" who passes judgement on the poet who has betrayed his salvatory mission and his unbending pride. Buying his Queen's sexual favours with magical words, the poet has not just squandered his life, but his immortality as well. He must therefore resurrect the youth he once was, the one who believed that the Word overcomes all: seduction, lust, woman's resistance, Fate, and Necessity. Casting Lili in the role of Cleopatra and wielder of lots (zhrebii), and himself in the role of the innocent youth of Pushkin's Egyptian Nights ready for "death and immortality in like measure" ('At the Top of My Voice', Mayakovsky, 1958, X, 282), it is not reciprocal love that he yearns for, so much as a sign that the Poet's Word is stronger

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than Fate and Death. He burns with impatience to see what effect his Word will have on the implacable Queen of his life. If she becomes what he wants her to be, he will escape obsessed Onegin's (and Bazarov's) lot.21 To be reduced to the state of "slave of love" at omnipotent Cleopatra's court, or of unsuccessful suitor to the faithful Tatiana who prefers a "high-ranking general" to him and his all-powerful Word is an intolerable situation. If his voice cannot affect either the beloved or the masses to act as the poet dictates, there is nothing to do but to put the "boot", so glorified by the Radicals, on the throbbing throat of his song. This is the crucial point where the Improviser and Mayakovsky part company forever: one trustingly bares his neck to his public, philistine though it may be, and willingly heeds Apollo's command or the voice of a "fatal woman"; the other is engaged in mortal combat with his public and his imperious Queen, but depends on them more the more he despises, or resists, them, since he must outshout any command—divine, human, or philistine. Lavut tells how a train he and Mayakovsky wanted to take had already moved away from the platform, and how the poet began shouting 'stop' with an almost supernatural might. The train did stop. It was when Mayakovsky realized that he could not stop trains any more that he decided to make its wheels "kiss" his throat. Appropriately, it was in a kind of 'Egyptian Night' situation that Mayakovsky took his own life. Putting an ultimatum to Polonskaia, his last lover, and finding her "disobedient" to his will, he anticipated the decision of the most implacable of all Queens. He could make the sun stop, halt trains, reduce Pushkin to subeditor, but he could not expect Queen Death to postpone the execution forever. Suicide was the only way in which Mayakovsky could once more demonstrate that he was the disobedient Improviser of a new age, who would rather self-destruct than echo a voice from those uncontrollable spheres that radical ideologies liked to term 'mystical'. Acting

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thus, he of course also revealed that his life creation revolved around the same components as previous romantic myths of the poet—beauty, fate, and the "throbbing throat of the nightingale"—however much he reversed the scale of values attached to them.

Notes 1 I am referring to the (in)famous lines: "And why / has Pushkin not yet been attacked? / Together with all the other generals of classical literature?" See 'Too Early to Rejoice' {Radovat'sia rano, 1918, in Mayakovsky, 1956, II, 16-17). This and all subsequent translations of Russian passages, poetry or prose, are mine. 2 This classical choice of the Radicals is evoked in 'Too Early to Rejoice' where Raphael is to be shot, among many others. 3 See Pushkin's 'Until the Poet Is Called' (Poka ne trebuet poeta). Unlike Mayakovsky, Pushkin believed poets were even more "paltry" than ordinary men, except for the moments when inspiration transformed them. 4 Pasternak's Zhivago feels that Mayakovsky's poetry could have been written by someone like Raskolnikov (Pasternak, 1958, 180). 5 Mayakovsky's nihilist credo is: "I label everything done / so far 'nihil'" (Mayakovsky, 1955,1, 181). 6 This link was noted by Pertsov, who also pointed out that Mayakovsky had a lasting interest in Egyptian Nights. He wrote a sharp epigram on Valery Bryusov's 1916 attempt to complete the Cleopatra poem (Pertsov, 1950,211-12). 7 For the poet's 'sunset blouse' as stage prop, "marriage costume" (in the poet's wedding with the City), and parodic device, see Svetlana Boym (1991). 8 The Erfurt Program's section on the Lumpenproletariat was one of the first revolutionary texts that the schoolboy Mayakovsky read (Mikhailov, 1993, 29). The German word 'Lumpen' means 'rags'. 9 The theme has most likely been suggested by an idle rake in the audience who hopes to hear something piquant; a plain young woman is wrongly suspected by some ladies, and the chivalrous Charsky therefore takes re-

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sponsibility for the suggestion, while giving the theme a twist that saves it from vulgarity. 10 For the 'verba plevandi' in Mayakovsky's poetry, see Zholkovsky (1986), 271-72. 11 For a biblical subtext to this poem, see Vaiskopf (1997), 75. Vaiskopf also points out that, in spite of the Cloud's "self-apotheosis" in 'A Cloud in Trousers', he is threatened by General Galife (Gallifet). This French general was the subduer of Parisian communards and name-giver to a style of trouser. 12 For Pushkin's "aristocraticism" in Egyptian Nights, see Herman (1996), 661-80. 13 All three poets establish bonds of sympathy only with individual members of the crowd, usually young women. Charsky springs to the rescue of the plain young woman (see note 9); the Improviser is grateful for the assistance he receives from a beautiful young woman who alone is willing to draw a theme-request from the urn for him (zhrebii); Mayakovsky's persona appreciates a young girl who does not "adore his meat", but "looks upon him as a brother" ('The Dandy's Blouse'). 14 This poem was written at Pushkino, which seems to confirm the associative link to "the Sun of Russian Poetry". So does the fact that it is written in iambs, Pushkin's favourite meter, as Mayakovsky knew well, stating in 'Commemorative Poem' that he would "spit out sweet iambs" every now and then, just to please his predecessor. 15 According to G. Artobolevskii, a professional reader of Mayakovsky's poetry, the poet would at times read the ending of this poem in a way that elevated the phrase "vot lozung moi" and reduced the subsequent "i solntsa", making the sun no more than the "nth follower of an all-embracing life-affirming ' I ' " (Mayakovskaya and Koloskov, 1968, 219). 16 There were other pretenders to Pushkin's throne. For Gorky as the "Pushkin of the Proletariat", see Masing-Delic (1997). 17 Mayakovsky's 1922 rejection of the once admired Picasso—he was too playful and not committed enough to politically useful causes—offers a parallel (see Thun, 1993, 232). 18 For 'Prometheus and Christ' in Mayakovsky's poetry, see L. L. Stahlberger (1964). 19 For a discussion of both the immediate and distant contexts of this poem, see Smirnov (1978).

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20 The 'Prologue' to 'The Backbone Flute' evokes the orgiastic setting of Egyptian Nights. True, the poet merely recalls "the endless rows" of his previous lovers, filling the "night with weddings of yore". Nevertheless, the "merriment poured from body to body", paired with the poet's readiness to "put the full stop of a bullet at the end" of the text of life (Mayakovsky, 1955, I, 199), evoke the atmosphere of Egyptian Nights where love is bought at the cost of death. 21 Mayakovsky often slightly changed the words of some of his favourite poems. In the case of Onegin's letter to Tatiana he would regularly substitute the word 'lifespan' (vek) for 'lot' (zhrebii), presumably in order to convey both his attraction to fatalism and challenge to it.

Bibliography Boym, Svetlana. 1991. Death in Quotation Marks. Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brown, Edward, J. 1973. Mayakovsky, A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Herman, David. 1996. 'A Requiem for Aristocratic Art: Pushkin's Egyptian Nights: The Russian Review 55, no. 4: 661-80. Kassil', Lev. 1960. Mayakovsky—sam, Ocherk zhizni i raboty poeta (Mayakovsky as he was, a sketch of the poet's life and work). Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Katanian, V. V., ed. 1993. Imia etoi teme: liubov'. Sovremennitsy o Maiakovskom (The name of this theme is: love. Women contemporaries on Mayakovsky). Moscow: Druzhba narodov. Lavut, P. I. 1963. Mayakovsky edet po Soiuzu (Mayakovsky travels around the Soviet Union). Moscow: 'Sovetskaia Rossiia'. Livshits, Benedikt. 1978. Polutoraglazyi strelets (The one-and-a-half-eyed archer). New York: Izd. im. Chekhova. Mayakovskaya, L. V., and A. I. Koloskov, eds. 1968. Mayakovsky v vospominaniiakh rodnykh i druzei (Mayakovsky as remembered by family and friends). Moscow: 'Moskovskii rabochii'. Mayakovsky, V. 1955-61. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Collected works). 13 vols. Moscow: Khudlit. Masing-Delic, Irene. 1997. 'Full of Mirth on the Edge of the Abyss: Pushkin in Gorky's Life Creation.' Die Welt der Sloven 42, no. 1: 111-36.

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Mikhailov, AI. 1993. Tochka puli v kontse. Zhizn' Maiakovskogo (The full stop of the bullet at the end. The life of Mayakovsky). Moscow: 'Planeta'. Pasternak, Boris. 1958. Doctor Zhivago. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Pertsov, V. 1950. Mayakovsky, zhizn' i tvorchestvo (Mayakovsky, life and art). Moscow-Leningrad: Ak. nauk SSSR. Pushkin, A. S. 1954. Sochineniia (Works). 3 vols. Moscow: Khudlit. Shklovsky, V. 1972. Mayakovsky and his Circle. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. Smirnov, I. 1978. 'Mesto "mifopoeticheskogo" podkhoda k literaturnomu proizvedeniiu sredi drugikh tolkovanii teksta' (The place of the 'mythopoeic' approach among other interpretations of the text), in Miffol 'klor - literatura (Myth-folklore-literature), ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. Leningrad. Stahlberger, L. L. 1964. The Symbolic System of Majakovskij. The Hague: Mouton. Thun, N. 1993. Majakowski: Maler und Dichter. Studien zur Werkbiographie 1912-1922 (Mayakovsky: painter and poet. Studies for a creative biography). Tübingen-Basel: francke-verlag. Vaiskopf, M. 1997. Vo ves' golos: Religiia Maiakovskogo (At the top of my voice: the religion of Mayakovsky). Moscow-Jerusalem: Salamandra. Zholkovsky, A. 1986. 'O genii i zlodeistve, o babe i vserossiiskom masshtabe' (On genius and evil-doing, the peasant woman and the all-Russian perspective), in Progulki po Maiakovskomu. Mir avtora i struktura teksta (Walks through Mayakovsky texts. The world of the author and the structure of the text), ed. A. Zholkovsky and Yu. Shcheglov. Tenafly, N. J.: Hermitage.

CHAPTER

6

SAVAGE THINKING: METAMORPHOSIS IN THE CINEMA OF S. M. EISENSTEIN ANNE

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CINEMA, of all the arts, enjoys what may be the most intimate

relationship with problems of metamorphosis: at the origins of the 'moving picture' lies the human desire to dissect the mysteries of change over time. It was at the Ail-Union Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinematography in January 1935 that Sergei Eisenstein amazed the gathered luminati of Soviet filmmaking by explaining to them that the most modern discoveries of cinema had their roots deep in 'primitive' ways of thinking about the world: All these mythological figures that we consider, at most, as allegorical material, at some level are figurative résumés of a way of perceiving the world...The Bororo, for instance, claim that they, although people, are at the same time a particular species of red parrot, common to Brazil. What's more, they do not mean by this that they will turn into these birds after death, or that in the past their ancestors were parrots. Categorically not. They directly claim that they actually are these very birds. And this is not about a similarity of name or some kind of relatedness, but rather the complete, synchronous identity of the two beings.

(Za bol'shoe, 1935,33,4g) 1

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The Soviet actor was to be understood as the descendant of the Bororo parrot-men, and the power of cinematic metaphor derived from the same force underlying another of Eisenstein's examples: the Polynesian tradition of throwing open all doors when a woman was trying to give birth. His audience was not amused. Aleksandr Dovzhenko (the Ukrainian director whose intensely poetic visual style had a history of perplexing Soviet audiences) accused Eisenstein of paying too much attention to "Polynesian dames" when all around him "living" women were giving birth "in new ways" (Za bol'shoe, 1935, 72). Sergei Vasiliev—who as half of the directorial team responsible for the epic Chapaev (1934) was one of the chief heroes of the conference—advised Eisenstein, rather cheekily (since he himself had been a student in Eisenstein's film seminars), to "throw off your Chinese bathrobe and busy yourself with delving into our contemporary Soviet reality" {Za bol'shoe, 1935, 113). Not having produced a film since Old and New (1929), Eisenstein was very vulnerable to accusations of having become stuck in the past, and his claims that contemporary artists should study the laws of "sensual thought" as expressed in the codes governing the lives of the Bororo, the Polynesians, and so on, struck his audience as highly suspect: were modern Soviet artists really supposed to learn their trade from 'primitive' man? One of the ironies of this occasion was that Eisenstein, who was certainly not incapable of enjoying a scandal, was in this instance perfectly serious. He had brought the Bororo into a Moscow gathering of cinematographers to illustrate something that for him was a profoundly serious idea: the power of mythology as an aspect of what Eisenstein called "sensual thought". The cinema, in this regard, was not only the marvellous child of the modern age, but also the most recent descendant of some of the most ancient habits and interests of the human mind, and Eisenstein found it a perfect arena for his own metamorphic

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experiments, in which the thought patterns of primitive man, the tales of Ovid, and the thrills of animal husbandry could all combine and collide. At the heart of intellectual thought, a scandalous, blasphemous, or perhaps pornographic image: this was a basic rule of Eisenstein's essays, films, and lectures. The device is most plainly bared, perhaps, in Alexander Nevsky, when, as he plans strategy for the battle with the Teutonic invaders, Nevsky overhears the famous anecdote about the Vixen and the Hare: A hare leaps into a ravine with a vixen on his tail. He makes for the forest, the vixen after him. So the hare hops between a pair of birch trees. The vixen springs after him—and sticks. Pinned between the two birches, she wriggles and she struggles, but there's no getting free. Calamity! Meanwhile the hare stands alongside her and says in a serious voice: "If you're agreeable", he says, "I'll now put paid to your virginity, all of it..." The soldiers around the campfire laugh. Ignat goes on: "Oh, how can you, good neighbour, it isn't done. How can you serve me such a shameful trick. Have pity!" she says. "This is no time for pity", the hare tells her. And he pounces. Alexander turns around and asks: "Between two birch trees?" Ignat replies: "He pinned her." Alexander's voice asks: "And pounced?" Ignat replies laughing: "He pounced." (Eisenstein, 1974, 121)2

Nevsky instantly develops from this story of one animal's clever capture and rape of another the fail-safe scenario for victory. The difference between Ignat, earthy man of the people, who tells the joke, and Alexander Nevsky, who overhears it, is that while the Tittle man' (and his immediate audience) sees in the joke only a joke, it is the military leader and strategist who is wise enough to recognize that obscenity and conceptual thought are by no means mutually exclusive—and may, in fact, be

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'comrades-in-arms'. It is entirely appropriate that Eisenstein should have found this anecdote in a collection of pornographic folklore given him by Viktor Shklovsky. We know about Shklovsky's own affection for this genre from, among other things, his famous 'Art as Device', the last third of which explores the dirty joke as a model for the aesthetic function of 'defamiliarization': the 'making strange' that makes art. Art conveyed ideas by means of unexpected images and juxtapositions; the shocks that were to precipitate the spectator in an unexpected mental direction were applications not just of force, but of force eroticized. We find ourselves, however, at a peculiar impasse: at first glance Eisenstein would seem here to be borrowing from Shklovsky only then to take precisely the approach towards art that Shklovsky polemically attacks in 'Art as Device': namely, understanding 'art' as "thinking in images" (myshlenie obrazami). That, after all, framed ironically in quotation marks, is the tired old cliché with which Shklovsky starts his article: '"Art is thinking in images.' One hears this phrase even from gymnasium students, and it is also the standard point of departure for learned philologists..."(Shklovsky, 1929, 7). Shklovsky wants us to replace this old chestnut with art as detour and defamiliarization, so that seeing may be rescued from recognition and life may be rescued from the deadening effects of automatization. Eisenstein's work, which absolutely insists on the power of 'thinking in images', is thus both a homage to, and travesty of, Shklovsky's revolutionary poetics (as it is also both homage and travesty with respect to Hegel, whose Phenomenology of Spirit had attacked "mere picture-thinking" in the nineteenth century). This contradiction is to be experienced dialectically: the homage lies precisely in the travesty. Throughout his career, Eisenstein would return again and again to 'art is thinking in images' and

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make his audiences see (rather than merely 'recognize') the potential for strangeness inherent in that kind of thinking. He defamiliarizes, in other words, this old aesthetic cliché, and brings it—and its components, 'thinking' and 'the image'—back to life. (In so doing, Eisenstein follows the pattern set up by Shklovsky: defamiliarization does not eliminate 'recognition', it just delays it, so that the object at hand, whether furniture, one's wife, or the fear of war, may be seen as well as known.) Eisenstein's work of renovation here amounts to a renewed layingbare of the explosive and erotic potential of both terms: 'thinking' and the 'image'. In Eisenstein's practice, images do not just nod to each other ad nauseam, nor are they merely 'simpler and clearer' signs for the abstract ideas they represent (Shklovsky's great objection to art as thinking-in-images): they are as complex, as 'real', as any of the meanings they might convey. The relationship between image and idea in Eisenstein is like that perceived by the Bororo between man and red parrot: neither identity in thrall to the other. Instead, the identities are enmeshed in the ongoing ebb and flow of metamorphosis. Eisenstein has become so thoroughly identified with 'montage' in standard histories of film that it is unsettling to discover that his first attempt at filmmaking was found wanting in precisely that area. The director Lev Kuleshov, whose famous experiments in the early 1920s had demonstrated to a new generation of Soviet filmmakers the enormous powers of the film editor in the creation of film meaning, claimed that Strike showed that Eisenstein was someone who knew how to work with single frames but did not yet have proper control over editing techniques: "He (S. M. E.) is a director of the framed shot—tasteful and expressive—but less of montage and human movement: Eisensteinian shots are always more powerful than everything else; they are the things that, for the most part, comprise the

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success of his work...The montage of Strike is significantly weaker [than the film's framed shots]. In it there is excess and an unsystematic enthusiasm for speedy changes" (Kuleshov, 1987, 112). 'Montage' in this formulation sounds like the mere sticking together of shots, but of course the very 'speed' that Kuleshov found so excessive in Eisenstein's editing was intended to transform the effect of montage from a serial effect ('A then B ' ) to an effect based on near superimposition ('A and B'). Eisenstein's own understanding of 'montage' went beyond the 'speedy changes' that Kuleshov found excessive in Strike. The interaction of frames, images, and ideas was to lead to a physical as well as intellectual clash, or even, as Eisenstein would call it in a 1929 essay, "copulation" (Eisenstein, 1988, 139). Eisenstein was perhaps gently reminding his audience that 'montage' was not a bloodless technical trick: in the original French, after all, the word 'montage' had historical roots that put it in close connection with animal husbandry (one of the old meanings of 'monter' refers to the kind of arranged copulation that would, one hoped, improve the herd). By using 'metamorphosis' as a lens through which to examine Eisenstein's work, we can salvage some of these less well remembered aspects of montage: the attention to the process (the moment) of change as a cumulative event rather than as a series of images or identities lined up in a row; the emphasis on sex as a part of transformation (so many Classical instances of metamorphosis involve either 'girls running from Zeus' or 'Zeus chasing after girls'); and the vital ties between modern cinema and 'primitive thinking' that make it possible to convey ideas sensually. The tale of the Vixen and the Hare embedded in Alexander Nevsky demonstrates the power of such thinking: if Nevsky, following in the footsteps of the Bororo, can accept seeing his own predicament in that of a rabbit, then the enemy, no matter how carnivorous, is doomed. The fundamental meta-

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morphosis is one of genre: as the boundaries between concrete image and abstract idea are made flexible, thought finds itself flowing from embodiment to embodiment, from body to body.

M E T A M O R P H O S I S AND S A T I R E : F R O M ' T R I C K ' TO ' A T T R A C T I O N '

Eisenstein's films had been haunted from the very beginning of his career by the theme of shapeshifting, but over the course of time his interest in metamorphosis itself underwent a series of transformations. The first bit of film produced by Eisenstein was an insert into a play, Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man (1923), a wild and woolly remake (with Eisenstein's playwright friend Sergei Tret'iakov) of Ostrovsky's nineteenth-century classic. The play was punctuated with circus acts and other shocks—most famously, perhaps, the firecrackers that were supposed to go off beneath the seats of the audience. The short film sequence, inserted into the action at the end of the play as another 'trick' or 'attraction' among many, is itself a kind of collage of film attractions, a witty take-off on the trick-films of Méliès, with a central emphasis on the theme of metamorphosis.3 The film ('Glumov's Diary') is supposed to represent the contents of the hero's diary, stolen by the villainous Golutvin. Poor Glumov, eternal groveler, is subjected by his patrons (the warmongering Joffre, the fascist Gorodulin, the anti-Soviet émigré Mamaev) to one embarrassing metamorphosis after another: he becomes, in turn, a cannon, a swastika, and an ass, in each case the appropriate embodiment of the political ideology being lampooned. The political satire is underscored by bawdiness that probably owes something to the music-hall inspirations of Eisenstein and Tret'iakov. 4 Glumov's wedding is the planned occasion that the 'diary' interrupts and makes impossible: at

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every juncture his manhood is whittled away (the cannon is classically phallic in shape, so that Glumov is not only being forced to embody political symbols, but also rude jokes). Another trick sequence shows the ability of a woman, by her mere presence, to reduce a man literally to infancy again, and the 'wedding' that the film ends with is highly parodic, involving a woman cross-dressed in a man's suit, an assemblage of clowns, and rude hand gestures, a close-up of which, with the audience as target now, closes the short film. For the young Eisenstein, metamorphosis is part of the bag of cinematic tricks to which characters and audience alike can be subjected, one 'attraction' among others: An attraction (in our diagnosis of theater) is any aggressive moment in theater, that is, any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion. (Eisenstein, 1988,1,35)

Metamorphosis thus works on two levels. On the first, the character becomes the embodiment of something demeaning to itself, its own satire; on the second, as an attraction, it effects a secondary metamorphosis: the transformation of the spectator, who is altered by emotional and even physiological 'shocks' from which he cannot retreat. Eisenstein's next film project, the full-length Strike, took an approach to film metamorphosis similar to that of 'Glumov's Diary': metamorphosis is used there as a way to underscore satirical comparisons or to reveal the secret identity of characters (as when each Tsarist agent is identified by a transformation into the embodiment of his nickname; thus the 'Fox' is turned into

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what he already truly is, a fox). Film resorts to all the techniques of the political caricature (and Eisenstein was a big fan from childhood of the satirical drawings of artists such as Honoré Daumier), and, like caricature, this is an attraction with bite.5

M E T A M O R P H O S I S AND HISTORY: VIOLENCE AND MYTH IN THE CONSTRUCTION O F THE NEW The comparisons made in 'Glumov's Diary' and Strike are based on characters being compelled to transform themselves into the satirical stereotype or figure of speech that best describes them (in the case of the famous sequence that ends Strike, quick cuts between the rout of the strikers and a slaughterhouse are used to illustrate the phrase "they treated them like animals".) In the other great films of the 1920s, Battleship 'Potemkin', October, and The General Line, Eisenstein explores, often with recourse to a particular subgroup of images with roots in the mythological tradition of metamorphosis, the relationship between sex, violence, and history. Beneath the surface of the everyday world lurked the world of myth, and to unleash the potential resonance of correspondences between these worlds was to move beyond the transformative potential of embodied figures of speech. Eisenstein was very fond of mythological references, and enjoyed unleashing them in scandalous contexts. One category of mythological figures that particularly sparked Eisenstein's imagination was images of rape. In Battleship 'Potemkin', for instance, the mother of the famous infant in the baby carriage is struck down by historical forces she cannot comprehend and clutches as she falls at a belt buckle with a swan on it, reminding us that out of terrible violence, just as from the rape of Leda, beauty and history (Helen and the Trojan war in the case of

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Leda; the Russian Revolution in the case of 'Potemkin') can be born. 'Leda' is not the only mythological reference in Battleship 'Potemkin'; in the terrifying climactic sequence played out on the steps of Odessa, the single most frightening set of shots may be the swirling, thrashing head of woman's hair that signals the massacre's beginning, directly following the title "And suddenly..." Not for nothing does Eisenstein in an early shooting script describe what happens to the Schoolmistress (the one who eventually loses her eye), watching the massacre, as "she becomes a statue" (Kleiman, 1988, 99). At the heart of Battleship 'Potemkin' lies an essential mythological figure: the head of Medusa. In the frightening, swirling head of snake-like hair, whirling about as the inauguration of disaster on the Odessa steps, we can recognize Medusa, the Gorgon whose glance transformed into stone any spectator foolhardy enough to look at her directly. Then not only the emphasis in this film on dead/living statues but some otherwise strange shots of a young man forgetting to watch the massacre in his mirror (a perilous error in a Medusan situation) make a lot more sense. Medusa, one of the scariest 'victims' of all time, whose head, when wielded by a masterful man, turns anyone who looks at it to stone, is the apotheosis of effective art (art that cannot fail to transform its audience). Medusa has the most perfect, selfrealizing point of view. She, as films like Battleship 'Potemkin' would do, truly projects her own audience: this is a step or two beyond the 'attraction' as wielded by Eisenstein at the beginning of his film career. The two references—to Leda and Medusa—are not unrelated. Each works here as part of a metahistorical, metacinematic meditation (through images: 'picture-thinking') on the dialectical relationship between 'moment' and 'momentum' in history. The quandary is the following: how does the ordinary time of

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human existence, in which accidents happen and chaos seems to reign, get transfigured into the mystery of historical time, in which patterns can be discerned and from which the laws of myth and Marxism can be derived? In Strike it is a very small thing, literally and figuratively—a toddling child lost among the horses of the strikebreaking guards—that triggers the carnage of the film's conclusion. In Battleship 'Potemkin' another infant is sent bumping down the steps as if to mark for us the cruel incommensurability of the iron march of history (all those steps, all those iron boots descending in heartless order...) and the tender, helpless little human being weeping in his buggy because he cannot understand why he is racing along that way nor see where he is headed... The figure of Medusa bears a particular relation to history, her terrifying, snaky locks being part of the traditional iconography of revolution since the late eighteenth century (as Neil Hertz [1985] has traced brilliantly in his article 'Medusa's Head'). Freud, in a little article written in 1922 but not published until much later, attributed the tradition of the horrible Medusa to a complicated series of castration anxieties and compensatory petrifications, but even before Freud, the Medusa was something like the patron saint of Terror, and in particular, naturally enough, the guillotine (Freud, 1963, 212-13). This imagery was the stuff of childhood fantasy for Eisenstein, as he recalled in his memoirs: The French Revolution captured my imagination even at this early age. At first because o f its romanticism, colorfulness, and singularity. I devoured book after book. I was fascinated by images o f the guillotine, amazed by photographs o f the Colonne Vendôme, enthralled by the caricatures o f André Gil and Honoré Daumier, and disturbed by the figures o f Marat and Robespierre. My ears filled with the crackle o f the rifle fire at the Versailles executions, and the ringing o f the Paris alarm bell,

le tocsin.6

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Eisenstein's first proto-cinematic encounters were also marked by imagery of the French Revolution, which he encountered very early in the wax renditions of the Musée Grevin in Paris: "In the Chamber of Horrors there's the little unfortunate (Louis Dix-septième) with a drunken cobbler, there's Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie, Louis Seize himself in his cell, with the patriots coming for him. And an earlier scene when the 'Austrian bitch' ('L'autrichienne'' for 'L'autre chienne', one of the first puns I enjoyed) falls in a faint, seeing through her window a procession carrying the head of the Princesse de Lamballe on a pike" (Eisenstein, 1985, 15). So many firsts for the young Eisenstein associated in one way or another with the guillotine! First puns, first introduction to the cinema's great storehouse of visual and perceptual tricks ("the clicking of the slanting blade of the guillotine as it was raised, the visual impression of what was probably the first 'double exposure' that I saw on the screen as well in those immemorial times", Eisenstein, 1985, 15), and always, made up somehow out of these numerous and vivid 'moments', so particular and local and exciting, always and above all, the sense of "something greater: my first idea of historical events..." (Eisenstein, 1985, 15). The wax museum and the cinema convey not only in their revolutionary images but in their very form the tension between things frozen or determined and things changing—in the instant it takes for the guillotine's blade to fall—that is the central mystery of revolutionary history. Both wax museum and cinema have the uncanny ability to preserve the ephemera of the moment; their technique is perfectly Medusan, too, for they also petrify. The artistic ramifications of Medusa (from the blood of whom sprang forth Pegasus, after all) feature prominently in a poem, 'The Face of Medusa', written by the Symbolist Valéry

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Bryusov in 1905 as a response to the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century (and the one commemorated, of course, in Eisenstein's Battleship 'Potemkin '):7 The Face of Medusa 1 2 3 4

The face of Medusa, threatening face, Rose above the distance of dark days, The gaze bloody, the gaze—burning, The hair an interlacing of snakes.

5 6 7 8

This is chaos. Into black chaos The path draws us, as to ruin. Whether we argue or obey, We cannot leave the track! [...]

21 22 23 24

The cherished world, the beautiful world, Will perish in the fateful abyss. To be the melody of the commanding storm— That's your longed-for destiny.

25 26 27 28

With thunder the voice of the muse is near, Ancient chaos is her friend. Hail, hail, face of the Medusa, There, above the distance of dark days. 8

In the image of the Medusa coalesce the terrible 'chaos' of revolution and the iron determination of the 'rails' from which we cannot descend. The poet, like Medusa, must make the chaotic moment permanent—the poet, like the victim of Medusa, must submit himself to all the terror of history-in-themaking. The identities of 'audience' and 'creator' are profoundly ambiguous, like the relationship between the particularities of the moment and the larger paths of history, which arise out of this chaos of particularity through mechanisms at

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once mysterious and infinitely fascinating. The Medusa's ability to mediate the gulf between chaos and necessity, her dreadful ability to spatialize time by freezing the moment in its tracks, and in so doing to change and set the course of history on its inexorable rails (or down its inexorable flight of steps), make her a perfect figure for this film that would turn its audience into a projection of itself Leda and Medusa link the revolutionary moment in history to the eruption of all the sex, violence, and interpretative power of myth—-myth played out in the tragic mode. The charm of the mythological image is the way it commemorates the ongoing collision of past and present. In the film perhaps most explicitly concerned with negotiating that narrow footbridge between 'old' and 'new'—the film that began its career (its career in utero, that is) in 1926 as 'The General Line', only to appear at the end of the 1920s as 'Old and New'—the persistence of the past marks both the form of the film and its history. Eisenstein 'screens the figures' of political speeches by Lenin and Stalin; then he superimposes these figures upon each other, and in so doing creates something that is more than the sum of its parts. Extending the rules of metamorphic thinking to politics, he unleashed the dangerous energy of contradictions (between Lenin and Stalin, or even between Stalin and Stalin) that officially should not exist. Here the process of superimposition had the potential effect of underscoring the double scandal of metamorphosis: comparisons that on the one hand highlighted similarities (between the aims of communism and capitalism) that should not be there and those that, on the other hand, revealed dissonances between the shifting versions of the Party's 'general line' as it evolved over time. Both of the film's titles refer to central tropes of Stalin's speeches. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 Stalin had thundered that there were two 'General Lines':

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one assumes that our country must remain still for a long while an agrarian

land, that w e should export our agricultural products and

import machinery...This Line demands in fact that w e simply roll up our industry. This Line leads to the conclusion that our country will never, or almost never, be able to industrialize independently...that our country should become a mere appendage to the general system o f capitalism.. .This is not our line! There's another General Line, which assumes that w e should put all our forces to work in order to turn our country, while it is still surrounded by [hostile] capitalist forces, into a country that is economically independent,

based on its own internal market...This Line deci-

sively rejects the policy o f turning our country into an appendage o f the world system o f capital. THIS is our line o f construction, held by our Party now, and one the Party will continue to hold in the future. 9

Stalin's recipe for this General Line included the voluntary agrarian cooperation Eisenstein and Alexandrov were called on to illustrate in their film The General Line. But the fact that Stalin's General Line was basically the shift from hopes of worldwide revolution to the practicalities of building socialism independently of world capital leads to a series of ironic collisions within the film. It was an end to the sort of 'marriage of convenience' between Western technology and Soviet raw materials that Lenin had proposed back in the hungry year 1920, when he had pointed out that the combination of Western tractors and Soviet land could lead to such abundance that world famine would be averted (Lenin, 1929,112-13). At the Fifteenth Party Congress, at the end of 1927, the same Congress where Trotsky's discrediting was officially completed, Stalin shifted his tropes. This is where analysts such as Yon Barna or Jay Leyda go astray when they claim that the reason for Old and New's name-change is that "[e]ven as altered [after October and after personal consultation with Stalin], the authorities were cool to The General Line, and to prevent its identification with any Party policy, scaled down its release title

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to the less specific Old and New" (Leyda, 1973, 269). The phrase 'old and new' may sound like a rather apolitical substitute for the very political 'general line', but in fact it is another trope taken from Stalin's speeches. At the Fifteenth Congress, Stalin said (rather poetically, if in a sinister way): We will never be able, so long as there are classes, to say "Well, thank God, now everything's great." That will never be the case here, comrades. Here there is always something in life that's in the process of dying out. But that which is dying out, doesn't want to just get on with it and die, but rather fights for its existence, insists on its own outlived business. Here something new is always being born into life. But that which is being born is not simply born, but wails and cries, insisting on its right to exist. (Voices: 'True!' Applause.) The battle between old and new, between that which is dying out and that which is being born—this is the basis of our development. 10

One could say, by way of a summary, that 'The General Line' tackles the problem of Russian self-sufficiency, while 'Old and New' picks up on the copula, the tricky and interesting moment for both Stalin and Eisenstein being not the 'new' per se, nor the 'old', but rather the 'AND', where 'old' and 'new' collide and interact: the point where metamorphosis is ongoing. Having saved the cooperative's money from the greedy purposes of its peasant members, Marfa, our heroine, lets her head droop over the strongbox and she dreams. Marfa dreams of a Utopian future without kulaks or exploitation, a dream that the film in its final version insists need not be a mere dream as it takes her through a series of images of ecstatic, sensual abundance to a 'real' model cooperative farm. It is ironic, however, considering the terms of Stalin's 'general line', that Eisenstein had to film these scenes of a Utopian collective at a special farm imported lock, stock, and barrel from Europe. Even the pigs are in point of fact little coddled and cosseted English swine

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(Alexandrov, 1983, 97-98). In this world of imported Utopias, imported pigs, and imported tractors, the hysterically overplayed copulation between the genuinely Soviet bull Fomka and his bovine bride functions as a kind of figurative and allegorized antidote, a veiled replay of Zeus's rape of...Europa: 'Take that, Europe!' (A scribbled note in the archives confirms our suspicions: there 'the Rape of Europa' appears as part of a list of what Eisenstein refers to as "'Mythologization' in Gen. Lin."). 11 As Fomka thunders down the slope to mount his bride, this scene becomes not only a disguised performance of Stalin's 'General Line'—the Soviet triumph over Europe—thought out for us in images, but also the perfect embodiment of Eisenstein's own 'general line', being the most literal possible instance of montage, in both its agricultural and cinematic variations. But since one of the ways Eisenstein reanimates 'picturethinking' is by working with images that are invariably at least as complicated as the 'message' they are to convey (in other words—images resistant to any single reduction), Fomka's reenactment of the Rape of Europa is not the only story being told here. Fomka's own origins are interesting, for instance. In an early scenario for The General Line, Fomka is described as the product of Sovkhoz genetic experiments, experiments that begin with the arrival by aeroplane of a mysterious little box in which is contained...a fly from Texas. On this Texan fly (more properly, on its numerous descendants), are performed all sorts of metamorphic miracles: The scientists, though receiving little by way o f salary, did great work. They created descendants of the Texas fly with four wings instead o f two, and instead o f four feet, some had six or even twelve. They caused the fly to grow fur. They perfected this fur with regard to softness and length...And then the lessons learned on the flies were tried out on animals. These Soviet scientists caused sheep that from time immemorial had only produced two lambs to give birth at once to

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eight. Two udders couldn't satisfy eight lambs, and so these Soviet 'magicians' created ewes with four udders...A rejuvenated chicken already in its fifth year laid eggs like a two-year-old. The 'magicians' [and here it's obvious Eisenstein and Alexandrav were uncomfortable with this inadequately scientific term, 'fokusniki'—it's

crossed out.

A N ] sat in laboratories, looked through their microscopes at the flies and every day brought miracles. Chickens, cows, rams, seals, horses, pigs, rabbits, cats—all were perfected the way an automobile is perfected. 1 2

Note that Fomka is produced as if he were an automobile, or for that matter a tractor, and—as notoriously in the case of tractors—the question of ultimate origin, despite earnest interventions by Soviet 'magicians', is an awkward one. Like the assembly line and the tractor, the miraculous modern Sovkhoz and its wonders of genetic engineering are haunted by the specter of foreign (and in particular American) paternity. When the peasants in search of little Fomka come to the Sovkhoz to pick him up, they find themselves, in the 1926 scenario, in a fairyland where "the very rams are Americans, merinos and Lincolns". 13 Very interesting in this regard are Eisenstein's 1929 thoughts on how The General Line might be turned into a sound picture: "In general. The conflict of the agrarian theme (negative), localized in sugary Slavic melody, and the industrial theme (positive), in the style of contemporary Western music... The lapidary nature of the leitmotifs. Their development: for example the theme of the bull, developed out of the theme of Industry, and so on..." 1 4 Fomka, the industrialized, Westernized animal is needed to "bring up the blood-lines" of the Russian countryside: here is an illustration not so much of Stalin's 'General Line' from the Fourteenth Party Congress, as of Lenin's suggestion to the capitalist West in 1920 that "we have the ability, by uniting your technology with our raw materials, to resolve the crisis [of world hunger]". This is the proposed marriage with the West

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that Stalin would so vehemently call off in 1925. Lenin's sub rosa presence in the 'Fomka' story is underscored by the 1926 scenario's remark that the peasants name the best of the young calves fathered by the industrializing bull...'Stalin' (and Fomka, appropriately, dies shortly thereafter). The multiple identities brought into play here do not fit easily together: Fomka represents not only Lenin and/or Stalin, but also the industrial influence of the West; the flower-bedecked cow he happily tackles is not just 'Europa', but also the as yet inadequately fertilized agrarian backwardness of Russia (in which case, we have another interpretation: what Stalin is doing to the countryside is more or less what Zeus did to Europa). These metamorphoses are potentially scandalous because as 'old' and 'new' collide, the identities thrown together make for some very strange bedfellows.

METAMORPHOSIS AND THE WOMB: FLUID CHANGES It was, Eisenstein tells us in notes written in 1943, a sunny day in Switzerland thirteen years earlier when he made the acquaintance of what would be one of the reigning icons of his intellectual life: There came a day when I both rose to the highest limits to which a person can hope to rise and descended to the lowest depths out of which a person emerges. It was on the same sunny day in Zurich. In the morning I flew with the now deceased Mittelholzer on the snowy whiteness of the Alps. In the afternoon we piled into the no less crystalline whiteness of one of the best women's clinics of Switzerland... Here for the first time, on a napkin, I saw a little living being, dying in my hands in about ten minutes after its premature appearance in the world. This stage of life interested me very much. 15

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The fetus was to leave a very definite mark on Eisenstein's interests. He had himself photographed with it, in several different poses, and the expression on his face in those photographs is one of softened curiosity: Eisenstein's most maternal moment. He could not, alas, take it with him, but in honor of that first fascinating specimen of prenatal life, he later acquired a kind of 'souvenir' in Moscow that could remind him of that first fetus: "Visitors to my Moscow apartment are usually frightened by one trifle that peeks out from the piles of tumbled books. This trifle swims in a solution of formaldehyde. It has a pale gray transparent color and in general is a...fetus, one that has just taken on the features of a human being." 16 From his earlier emphasis on the abrupt, violent change that shifts the course of history, Eisenstein was shifting to an interest in the early protoplasmic forms of life, to the shapes and forms of things before identity is determined. His interest in the form of life in the womb coincided with a renewed obsession with drawing, the flowing linear contours of which owed a lot to the art of Mexico, where he spent more than a year in 1930-31. In November 1932, after returning to the Soviet Union, Eisenstein mused on the form his recent drawings had taken: "[T]he figures 'hover' in space; that is, the atavism in them belongs to the period before being set upon solid ground, to the amoebicplasmatic stage of movement in liquid. This is the graphic equivalent of the sensation of 'flight' among ecstatics: an identical uterine sensation of gyroscopicness and the identical phylogenetic pre-stage—the floating of the amoebic-protoplasmatic state in a liquid environment" (Eisenstein, 1986, 70). These figures "'hover[ed]' [not only] in space", but also in time: they represented the contour in a state of liquid flux. These figures are lines flowing from one shape to the next. (Eisenstein compared them to Saul Steinberg's experiments with linear pictures made from coat hangers.)

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Another influence on these drawings was the work of Walt Disney, whom Eisenstein met in 1930 in Hollywood and admired greatly for his ability to imbue drawings with all the force of metamorphosis, a 'principle of transformation' that Disney, according to Eisenstein, had inherited from age-old literary traditions: "[P]oetry's principle of transformation works comically in Disney, given as a literal metamorphosis...Metamorphosis is not a slip of the tongue, for in leafing through Ovid several of his pages seem to be copied from Disney's cartoons" (Eisenstein, 1986, 40). Years after his scandalous comparison of Soviet filmmaking to the ancient ways of sensual thought, Eisenstein invoked the parrot-men of South America once more as he pondered the meaning of Disney for himself: "Mickey plastically truly embodies the 'ideals of the Bororo'—he is both human, and a mouse!" (Eisenstein, 1986, 96). Thus Mickey Mouse epitomizes the laws of sensual thought, that way of perceiving the world in which metamorphosis is made tangible. The fetal obsession, the re-emergence of the miracle of the animated contour, the Lamarckian flexibility of 'plasmatic' figures to shape and reshape themselves, all these things were not solely on the side of life. The fetus described so tenderly by Eisenstein was one on the brink not only of new form, but also of death: the souvenir in the jar in his room later on was a preservation in death of the moment when human life is all potential. The pictures Eisenstein was producing with such renewed vigor might be composed of flowing lines, a reminder of the infinite plasmatic possibilities of the building blocks of life, but the images they depicted were often violent: series devoted to Christ on the cross, to piercings of all kinds, to various martyrs, and to the bullfight. In Mexico, Eisenstein was exploring the meaning of death, and the nature of things changing and eternal. The scenario for the film {Que Viva Mexico!) that Eisenstein hoped to make in Mexico begins and ends on these themes: the

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Prologue was to be set among the "heathen temples, holy cities and majestic pyramids" of the Yucatan ("In the realms of death, where the past still prevails over the present, there the startingpoint of our film is laid...", Eisenstein, 1951, 27), while the Epilogue, which was to depict modern Mexico, came back again to the overarching theme of Eisenstein's Mexico: The same faces — but different people. A different country, A new, civilized nation. But, what is that? After the bustle of factory machines. After the parading of modern troops. After the President's speeches and the generals' commands — Death comes along dancing! Not just one, but many deaths; many skulls, skeletons... What is that? That is the Carnival pageant. The most original, traditional pageant, 'Calavera', death day. This is a remarkable Mexican day, when Mexicans recall the past and show their contempt of death. The film began with the realm of death. With victory of life over death, over the influences of the past, the film ends. (Eisenstein, 1951, 77)

In Ovid's Metamorphoses one of the most striking stories is that of the artist Orpheus, who descends into the underworld to seek his dead love Eurydice. When Eisenstein traveled to Mexico, he too was, in one sense, journeying to the land of death, and, like Orpheus, he sought there inspiration for his art: a journey from life into death and back again as a way of exploring the mysterious boundaries between those realms. Mexico was a place where, on the one hand, metamorphosis

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was still a living force, where the flow of identity between people and things was still in flux (thus martyrs could be planted like seeds—in the visual imagination of Diego Rivera; in the 'Maguey' episode of Que Viva Mexico!—presumably to be transformed into the corn that brought life to the Mexican people), but where, on the other hand, the metamorphic flux was matched by a feeling of timelessness (thus every age, every stage of human life, coexisted in Mexico, like the stripes on a serape, the blanket that Eisenstein said "could be the symbol of Mexico" (because of its violent contrasts) (Eisenstein, 1934, 180). Thus we cannot say that when Eisenstein shifted his interest from metamorphosis as cinema attraction or satirical 'trick', or in the violent clashing moments in which the direction of history would shift (often in the context of myths of rape) to the flowing protoplasmic potential of the fetus in the womb, his attention to things plasmatic came as part of a turn away from death and violence. The fetus brought out of the mysterious depths of the womb, like Eurydice out of Hades, died before Eisenstein's toocurious eyes, and somehow that death was an intrinsic part of the mystery (as in the preserved fetus Eisenstein kept in his apartment). The moment of metamorphosis from life to death— and from death to life—was the fascinating aspect not only of the fetus, but also of another of Eisenstein's passions, the bullfight. In the bullfight Eisenstein found an enticing combination of eroticism and violence: We can see why the bullfight is still alive today in Spain. For the image of the matador, who in the simultaneous attempt of the bull and the man to rush at each other, pierces with his sword like a flash of lightning into the blackness splashed with foam, the blackness of the fiery element of the horned monster that, according to tradition, once kidnapped Europa—and damn it, I understand Europa's yielding to this black devil who tramples everything with his

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hoofs—this is simultaneously the image of both great Spaniards, El Greco and Pablo Picasso. They also both seem to be, not for life, but for death (the sword— for the bull or the horn—for the matador!), grappling with nature itself; also in the same way the horn or sword penetrate each other; they penetrated each other in a similar great moment of the mutual merging of life and death, bull and man, instinct and craft: animal nature and the art of man! (Eisenstein, 1987, 362)

Rape, death, and communication are all confounded here: the bullfight as means of sensual thought, as the locus of all the pain, change, and potential packed into the mythological tradition of metamorphosis. The matador and the bull meet, pierce each other, transform themselves into a complex package where actor and object, life and death, can no longer be extricated neatly one from the other. The bullfight, "still alive today in Spain", is a preservation in life of the moment of death, just as the fetus separated from the womb represents the preservation in death of the moment when life begins.

METAMORPHOSIS AND THE MASQUERADE: PUNCTUATED FLOW The role of metamorphosis in sensual thought is the bringing together of unlikely things, two separate, perhaps incompatible, identities (as in all those mythological metamorphoses triggered by the lusts of the gods). A deceptively benign figure for this sensual/violent blending is the wedding. This was a ceremony that interested Eisenstein from his earliest years, as he later recalled in his memoirs:

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Another friend, who was French, and whose name and surname I have forgotten, was the son of the owner of the pen factory. [...] There was a trio of plays we performed on Sundays, with him, Alyosha Bertels, and myself. The happy ending of one of these plays. Alyosha en travesti. The French boy was dressed as an English 'bobby'. And I, for some reason, was dressed as a fantastic.. .rabbi (!) who married them. (Eisenstein, 1995, 117)

Late in Eisenstein's career come a series of dramatic wedding scenes: not just the grand feast in honor of Anastasia and the young Tsar in Ivan the Terrible. Part One, but the 'Dance of the OprichnikV and the murder in the cathedral that are that first wedding's darker reflection. In the last months of Eisenstein's life, he found himself preoccupied, among other things, by the role in culture of what he thought an essential trait of human character, what he called "Bi-Sex[uality]". As usual, he managed to cull examples (in this case of symbols, figures, and situations in which 'masculine' and 'feminine' inextricably coexisted) from all sorts of unlikely sources. Also as usual, his own previous work provided him with many illustrative moments. The 'Dance of the OprichnikV in Ivan the Terrible. Part Two features participants in various degrees of drag: Vladimir, for example, the 'fool', puts on the Tsar's raiment in an exchange whose origins Eisenstein traces in some unpublished notes to the old marriage custom of bride and groom exchanging clothes: "The exchange of clothes (and of 'places') between king and slave is not only a phenomenon related to the exchange of male for female clothing—it is a direct derivative of that exchange. Men and women exchange clothing when they enter into marriage." 17 Thus we learn to recognize this dark celebration as a kind of wedding. Vladimir is not the only one in borrowed clothing: Fyodor Basmanov, still the Tsar's faithful servant, dances at the

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'wedding' in the robes of a pale princess—Eisenstein refers to this moment as "Fyodor en travesti"}& This is a very complicated wedding! Not only does it replay the anthropological tradition (as Eisenstein would claim in his notes) of transvestite weddings, but its images are in part borrowed, as is the case throughout Ivan, from Walt Disney's Snow White (in this instance from the scene in which Snow White and the dwarfs sing and dance together in the dwarfs' cottage) (Nesbet, 1997). The 'wedding' of Ivan and Vladimir turns out, like that of Fomka and his sweet little cow, to be a complex and multilayered masquerade. Vladimir may dote on Ivan, but this travesty of a marriage will find its consummation only in death, as Vladimir is pierced by the knife intended for the Tsar, for in Ivan identity is painful and metamorphosis involves suffering. The actors who worked with Eisenstein on this film complained that, because he required them to turn themselves into the exact shapes he held in his own mind, Eisenstein's approach to directing caused them not just mental, but physical agony. 19 In Eisenstein's experiments with different aspects of change, metamorphosis had never been divorced from pain. In the 1920s and early 1930s, however, the pain of metamorphosis lies in its use as satire (in Strike and Every Wise Man); or in the suffering that changes in the course of history bring to those who, like the myriad love objects of Zeus for whom rape by a god brings pain and eventual glory, have the fortune or misfortune to stand at the pivotal point; or in the death that always lurks behind the plasmatic life of the womb or the flowing contours of the bullfight. By the time Eisenstein is making Ivan, however, even Zeus has learned to suffer. What is more, it has become more and more difficult to figure out what the 'thought' is, exactly, that the image so painfully conveys. In Ivan ambiguity reigns: the images are powerful, and certainly 'meaningful', but it becomes less and

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less possible to pin them down to one meaning in particular. (Stalin, by awarding Eisenstein a Stalin Prize for Part One and banning Part Two, could be said to be making a very profound critical point about Eisenstein's filmmaking: it was astonishingly capable of being both hagiography and blasphemy at one and the same time.) Metamorphosis is not, it turns out, painless, even if one stretches one's contours like a Mickey Mouse of flesh and blood. Likewise sensual thought, though it was, as Eisenstein believed, one of the most important ways to make seemingly abstract concepts real for a present-day audience, was not without risk, not without pain. Art was to be an experience of painful metamorphosis for the audience: a change that changed them, too. For Eisenstein, after all, pain and sensuality were inextricably bound up with each other, and metamorphosis without pain would be a transformation not worth having. When Eisenstein looked back, in the later years of his life, to the games and entertainments of his childhood, it was not the 'wedding' of the pen-maker's son and little Alyosha en travesti that struck him as having been the most satisfying kind of play. Another genre particularly captured his attention: I also remember the way the game was played, vaguely. There was an 'execution' in it. This entailed lifting the 'condemned' into the tree in the sitting position, but it is not worth dwelling on the details of all this. I think the whole idea came from 'justifying' one's 'ascent' into a tree—it was the first attempt at an external 'projection' of the situation. I can only recall that one governess, after watching our game for some time, shook her head reprovingly, saying: 'That really is a very savage game, children.' (Eisenstein, 1995, 552-53)

These two basic 'games' of Eisenstein's childhood—the wedding and the execution—are by no means entirely unrelated: in

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Eisenstein's aesthetic universe, unions, sexual or otherwise, tend to be explosive, and executions charged with erotic energy. 'Weddings' and 'executions' are both essential components of the great game of 'myshlenie obrazami' (thinking in pictures) played by Eisenstein all his life long, from his early days with Alyosha and sinister goings-on in trees, right through Ivan the Terrible and his notes from the 1940s. In cinema's metamorphic potential (stemming not only from its rich repertoire of technical tricks, but also from its omnivorous approach to the myths and paradigms of all human culture) Eisenstein discovered a perfect modern home for the exhilarating and savage game of thinking, in which 'abstract' and 'concrete', like bull and matador, circle each other warily, waiting for that ecstatic, painful moment of consummate penetration when even the most intellectual idea and its figure would finally achieve the "complete synchronous identity" of the Bororo parrot-men.

Notes 1 All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2 Note that this anecdote seems to have been a late substitution: a less suitable (and less ribald) story about fish holds its place in the 1938 scenario that Leyda publishes, and the story of the vixen and the hare, transcribed from the film, appears in a footnote. 3 Not only was this play the inspiration for Eisenstein's most famous early theoretical article, 'The Montage of Attractions' (originally in the journal LEF, no. 3 [June/July 1923]: 70-71, 74-5), but that phrase appeared on the play's publicity poster (also featured as backdrop in the film sequence as the various characters, and finally Eisenstein himself, take their bows). 4 "The school for the montageur is cinema and, principally, music hall and circus because (from the point of view of form) putting on a good show means constructing a strong music-hall/circus programme that derives from the situations found in the play that is taken as a basis" (Eisenstein, 1988,1,35).

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5 The apotheosis of such satire is achieved in the sequences in October when marauding Bolsheviks storm through the private chambers of the Tsar's family. The soldiers and the camera pay irreverent attention to such objects as the Imperial chamber pot; the scene thus effects the Tsar's satirical metamorphosis from state figurehead into a man with a body. 6 From 'Souvenirs d'enfance\ in S. M. Eisenstein (1985), 12-13. 7 My thanks to Harsha Ram, who brought this poem to my attention. 8 Valéry Iakovlevich Bryusov, from the section 'Sovremennost" of the collection Stefanos (dedicated to Viacheslav Ivanov), in Izbrannoe (Moscow: 'Pravda', 1982). This poem is dated September 1905. 9 XIV s 'ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (B), 18-31 December 1925 (Moscow; Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1926), 27-28. 10 XV s'ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (B.), December 1927 (Moscow; Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1928), 71. 11 In the archives there is a scribbled note, dated 25 June 1935, containing a list of mythological and symbolic references in The General Line: "'Mythologization' in Gen. Lin. (The Rape of Europa. David and Goliath. Moses...The Holy Grail) as a transitional stage—depictive—for my principle—prelogic as a structural form" (S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 2, e/x 234, 50). 12 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 1, e/x 135, 1. 33 (dated 22 June 1926). 13 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 1, e/x 135,1. 37. 14 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 1, e/x 146,1. 11. 15 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 2, e/x 251,11. 26-27. 16 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 2, e/x 251,1. 26. 17 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 2, e/x 268, p. 3 (dated 13 September 1947). 18 S. M. Eisenstein, Fond 1923, op. 2, e/x 268, p. 30 (dated 27 November 1947). 19 Later in his life, Nikolai Cherkasov (the actor who played Ivan) would reflect more than once on the strain of literally embodying Eisenstein's graphic visions, as the endless drawings Eisenstein used as a sort of 'first draft' of Ivan the Terrible were brought to life ('animated') by the actors. The director's achievements, complains Cherkasov, came at the price of "not infrequently constraining me within the cruel frames of his graphic and pictorial intent"; "during the numerous rehearsals and shoots devoted to the mental anguish of Ivan, I thus was not once able to free myself from the sensation of physical constraint, which hampered to the highest

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degree my efforts as an actor" (Nikolai Cherkasov, ed. N. N. Cherkasova and S. Dreiden, 101, 158. Moscow: Vserossiiskoe teatral'noe obshchestvo, 1976).

Bibliography Aleksandrov, G. V. 1983. Epokha i kino (The age and the cinema). Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury. Eisenstein, S. M. 1934. The Film Sense. London: Faber and Faber. . 1951. Que Viva Mexico! London: Vision. . 1974. Three Films. Ed. Jay Leyda. Trans. Diana Matias. New York: Harper and Row. . 1985. Immoral Memories. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. . 1986. Eisenstein on Disney. Ed. Jay Leyda. Trans. Alan Upchurch. Calcutta: Seagull Books. . 1987. Nonindifferent Nature. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1988. 'Beyond the Shot', in Selected Works. Vol. I: Writings, 19221934. Ed. and trans. Richard Taylor. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. . 1995. Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein. Ed. Richard Taylor. Trans. William Powell. London: British Film Institute. Freud, Sigmund. 1963. 'Medusa's Head', in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. New York: Collier. Hertz, Neil. 1985. 'Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure', in The End of the Line. Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Columbia University Press. Kleiman, N. I. 1988. 'Vzrevevshii lev. K proiskhozhdeniiu, smyslu i funktsii montazhnoi metafory' (Aspects of the production, meaning, and function of the metaphor of montage). Kinovedcheskie zapiski 1. Moscow: VNII kinoiskusstva Goskino SSSR. Kuleshov, Lev. 1987. 'Volia. Uporstvo. Glaz', in Collected Works. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Lenin, V. I. 1929. 'Doklad o kontsessiiakh na fraktsii RKP(b) VIII s'ezda sovetov. 21 December [1920], (Lecture about concessions made at the

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group meeting of the RKP(b) conference of soviets), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 42, 91-117, 112-13. Leyda, Jay. 1973. Kino: A History of Russian and Soviet Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nesbet, Anne. 1997. 'Inanimations: "Snow White and Ivan the Terrible".' Film Quarterly 50, no. 4: 20-31. Shklovsky, Viktor. 1929. 'Iskusstvo kak priem', in O teorii prozy (On the theory of prose). Moscow: Federatsiia. Za bol'shoe kinoiskusstvo (For grand cinematic art). 1935. Vsesoiuznoe tvorcheskoe soveshchanie rabotnikov sovetskoi kinematografii, 8-13 January. Moscow: Kinofotoizdat.

LIST OF

CONTRIBUTORS

is Senior Lecturer and Head of Russian Studies at the University of Surrey. JOAN DELANEY GROSSMAN is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. STEPHEN HUTCHINGS is Senior Lecturer in Russian Studies at the University of Surrey. DAVID H. J. LARMOUR is Professor and Head of Classics at Texas Tech University. IRENE MASING-DELIC is Professor and Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Ohio State University. ANNE NESBET is Assistant Professor of Russian Literature and Film Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

PETER I. BARTA

INDEX

Acteon, 76, 77 Alcyone, 3 Apollo, 30, 34, 35, 54, 92, 113, 134 Apuleius 74; Metamorphoses 78; The Golden Ass 78 Archimedes, 79 Augustus (Emperor), 4, 66,107, 108 Bacchus. 34, 35, 37n.4 Bakst, Leon, 16 Ballets Russes 16 Balmont, Konstantin, 7, 17, 25, 26 ; "Narcissus and Echo", 18, 24, 25, 28, 33; "The Flowers ofNarcissus", 18, 29, 33,35 Beautiful Lady, 27 Belinsky, Vissarion, 115, 130 Bely, Andrei, Petersburg 75 Blok, Aleksandr, 7, 23, 28, 31, 32, 36 ; "Double", 31, 32; "Echo", 21,26, 30, 33; "He Appeared at a Smart Ball", 31, 32; "In the Hour When the Narcissus Flowers Drink Hard", 18, 21, 26, 28, 31, 32; "The Heroines of Ovid", 19; "The Light Wandered about in the Window", 31; The Puppet Show, 7, 17,20,21, 22, 23, 27, 31, 32; "The Puppet Show", 31; "The Puppet Booth", 31

Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato 20 Borges, Jorge Luis, 75 Botticelli, Sandro, 82 Brik, Osip, 116 Briusov, Valerii, 7, 46, 144n6, 161, 177n8; "In the Camp of Gypsies", 19 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 6; The Master and Margarita, 6, 75 Caesar, Julius (Emperor), 107 Callisto, 77, 100 Catherine II (Empress), 7 Cleopatra (Queen), 118, 137, 140, 141, 142, 144n6 Commedia dell'arte, 23 Conon, 37n3 Daphne, 4, 54, 63, 68, 82, 92, 94 Darwin, Charles Robert, 42 Decembrists, 4 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House 63 Disney, Walt, 169; Snow White, 169, 174 Dionysus, 7, 17, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37n4 Don Juan, 128 Doppelgänger, 31, 32, 36, 76 Dostoevsky, Fedor M, 2,41,113, 116, 131, 137; The Devils, 113 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, 150

184

Index

Echo, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15-39, 68, 76, 83nl 1, 93, 100, 106 Echo verse, 21-22 Eisenstein, Sergei M, 10, 11, 149-179; Aleksandr Nevsky, 151, 154; Ivan the Terrible, Part I and Ivan the Terrible, Part II, 173-177; October, 157, 163, 177; Old and New, 150, 162, 163, 164; Que Viva Mexico!, 169, 171; Strike, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 174 El Greco, Domenikos Theotoköpoulos, 172 Erlich, Yakov, 46 Euripides, 72; Bacchus, 37n4 Europa 165, 167, 171 Eurydice, 170, 171 Fedorov, Nikolai, 42, 52 i'n-de-siecle, 17 Freud, Sigmund, 31, 159; "On Narcissism: an Introduction", 30 Galatea, 100 Gippius, Zinaida, 7, 17; "Song", 26, 29, 35 Gogol, Nikolai, 6, 10, 82n4,113,115, 130, 139; "The Overcoat", 64, 75, 117; "The Nose", 75, 117 Gor'ky, Maksim, 120, 133, 134, 145nl6; "Old Woman Izergil", 133 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 152 Heraclitus, 79, 80 Hermaphroditus, 101 Homer, 6 ; "Hymn to Demeter", 34; "Hymn to Pan", 21; The Iliad, 6; The Odyssey, 6 Hyacinthus, 92 Icarus, 95 Intertextuality, 5, 17, 20, 36, 114 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 7, 17, 30, 32, 36n2; "Ein Echo", 36n2; "Narcissus", 29, 34-35; "The Alpine Horn", 36n2

Ixion, 97 James, William, 45 Joyce, James, 75 Jupiter, 139 Kafka, Franz, 63, 64, 75,138 Kalevala, 48, 49, 55, 56, 57 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 43 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 6, 53, 121; "The Crane", 6 Kol'tsov, Mikhail, 132 Konevskoi, Ivan, 8, 41-60; "The Call", 41,43,46-48; "The Magic Word", 55 Kuleshov, Lev, 153 Leda, 157-158, 162 Leibniz, Gottfried Willhelm, 45 Lenin, Vladimir Il'ich, 133, 162, 163, 166, 167 Louis XVI (King), 160 Lucius, 78 Lyaeus, 34, 37n5 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 10, 89, 113-147; "A Cloud in Trousers", 119, 122, 123, 127, 135, 145nll; "A Letter from the Writer Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to the Writer Aleksei Maksimovich Gor'ky", 120; "About This", 132, 142; "An Unusual Incident That Occurred at Mayakovsky's Country Cottage in the Summer", 128; "Backbone Flute", 141,146n20; "Commemorative Poem", 129, 145nl4; "Conversation with the Tax Inspector", 135; "Could You Do It", 120; "God's Little Birdie", 136; "How to Make Verses", 124; Man, 137; "So This Is How I Became a Dog", 138; "Take What You Get", 119, 121; "The Dandy's Blouse", 116, 118, 122,132, 145nl3; "They Don't Understand A Thing", 121; "To Everything" 138; "150000000", 125,134 Mallarme, Stephane, 18

Index Mandelstam, Osip, 67, 83n9 Medusa, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162 Metamorphosis, 1-6, 9-11, 17, 29,48, 58, 61-64, 6 6 - 7 0 , , 72, 73, 75, 77, 79,. 80, 89, 92, 93, 94, 107, 109, 110nl8, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121, 138-39, 140, 141, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 162, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177n5 Mickey Mouse, 169 Modernism, 5, 8, 41 Montage, 10, 11, 153, 165, 176n3 Muses, 113 Myrrha, 101, 102 Mythopoeia, 19 Nabokov, Vladimir, 8, 9, 61-88; Bend Sinister, 64, 66, 77, 79, 80, 82n2; Despair, 64, 68; Glory, 61, 65, 70, 71, 78; Invitation to a Beheading, 64-65, 66, 82n6; Laughter in the Dark, 68, 75, 77, 84nl4, 84nl5; Lectures on Literature, 63; Lolita, 61, 67, 68, 75, 82; Look at the Harlequins!, 61, 73, 80, 81, 82n6; Mary, 80; Pale Fire, 61, 65, 75, 76, 77; Pnin, 62; Poems and Problems, 67; "Provence", 61; Solus Rex, 62; Speak, Memory, 62, 68, 82n2; Strong Opinions, 65; "The Return of Chorb", 61, 69-70, 77, 80; Transparent Things, 61, 74, 80; "Ultima Thüle", 62 Narcissus, 4, 7, 15-39, 54, 63, 67, 74, 76, 77, 78, 82n3, 8 3 n l l , 102, 104, 109 Nemesis, 16, 83nl 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15,42, 119, 121; The Birth of Tragedy, 34, 35 Nonnus, Dionysica, 37n4 Olesha, Iurii, 9, 89-112; Envy, 101, 107; Not a Day without a Line, 89, 107; "The Cherry Stone", 9, 8 9 112

185

Orpheus, 3,4, 67, 69, 70, 75, 76,170 Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man, 155 Ovid, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 28, 29, 20, 21, 23, 25, 36, 37n3, 43, 54, 61, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 95, 96, 100, 106, 107, 109, 138, 139, 151, 169; Amores, 67; Medea, 72; Metamorphoses, 3, 16, 21, 24, 25, 30, 34, 37n3,41,62, 66, 67,70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 89, 97, 101, 107, 110nl9, 170; Tristia, 66, 67 Panpsychism, 8,44, 46, 52 Pantheism, 45, 46 Parmenides, 79, 80 Pasternak, Boris, Doctor Zhivago, 144n4; Safe Conduct, 125 Paulsen, Friedrich, 45, 46 Pausanius, 37n3 Pentheus, 35, 37n4 Peter the Great (Tsar), 1, 2, 3, 6, 133 Philomela, 77 Philostratus, 37n4 Picasso, Pablo, 145nl7, 172 Plato, 101, 102,104 Pomona, 97 Proteus, 68, 74 Pushkin, Aleksandr S, 3 , 4 , 7, 8, 10, 19, 20, 36, 53, 67, 83n8, 113, 120, 124, 125, 126,128, 129,130, 131,134, 136, 138, 140, 144n3; "Echo", 7, 20, 115; Egyptian Nights, 10, 113-123, 133, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144n6, 145nl2, 146n20; Eugene Onegin, 124, 127, 129; "Exegi Monumentum", 4; "Rhythm", 20; The Stone Guest, 128; The Bronze Horseman, 3; The Gypsies, 20, 136 ; "The Poet", 36n2; "The Poet and the Crowd", 36n2, 134; "The Prophet", 133 Pygmalion, 68, 83nl2, 98, 99,100 Pythagoras, 8, 62, 72, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 106

186 Rafaello, Santi (Raphael), 115,144n Rank, Otto, "Der Doppelganger", 30 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 15, 35 Shamans, 3, 8, 48, 59 Shapeshifting, 8, 10, 11,155 Shklovsky, Viktor, 152 Silver Age, 15, 16 Skovoroda, Grigorii, 53, 59n5 Solov'ev, Vadimir, 4 2 , 4 5 Sophocles, 37n4 Spinoza, Benedict, 45 Stalin, Iosif, 5, 162, 163, 164,166, 167, 175 Symbolism, 7, 8, 15-39 Tale of Igor's Campaign, 59n4 Tcherepnine, Nicholas, Narcisse, 16 Theseus, 97 Tiutchev, Fedor, 45, 50, 51; "There Is Melodiousness in the Waves of the Sea", 50 Tolstoy, Lev N., 2 Trotsky, Leon, 163

Index Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 52, 53; The Earth's Future and Mankind, 52; The Monism of the Universe, 52 Turgenev, Ivan S., 116 Tyutchev, Fedor, 8 Valery, Paul, 18 Vasiliev, Sergei, 150 Venus, 99 Virgil, 107 Vertumnus, 97 Volkh Vseslavevich, 3,47, 55, 57, 59n4 Wagner, Richard, 84nl4; Lohengrin, 84n 14; Parsifal, 70, 80nl4 Yeats, Samuel Butler, 18 Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 8, 41-60; "Metamorphoses", 41,43, 51; "Testament", 54; "Yesterday, Thinking of Death", 54 Zeus, 154, 165, 167, 174 Zoomorphism, 6