Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry [1 ed.] 9781789205701, 9781571811486

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SIGHT AND SOUND ENTWINED

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Studies in Slavic Literature, Culture, and Society General Editor: Thomas Epstein Volume 1 Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics: Collected Essays Neil Cornwell Volume 2 Women and Russian Culture: Projections and Self-Perceptions Edited by Rosalind Marsh

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Volume 3 Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover Volume 4 Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry Gerald Janecek Volume 5 Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia Edited by Gennady Barabtarlo

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SIGHT AND SOUND ENTWINED Studies of the New Russian Poetry

Copyright © 2000. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gerald Janecek

Berghahn Books Books Berghahn Providence NEW Y O R K • • OOxford X FOR D

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Published in 2000 by Berghahn Books

© 2000 Gerald Janecek All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janecek, Gerald. Sight and sound entwined : studies of the new Russian poetry / by Gerald Janecek. p. cm. – (Studies in Slavic literature, culture, and society : v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-148-6 (alk. paper) 1. Russian poetry–20th century–History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PG3056.J36 1999 98-47069 891.7'1409–dc21 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

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Dedicated to Konstantin Kuzminsky and Mikhail Shemiakin to mark the twentieth anniversary of the almanac

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Apollon-77

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations Preface

ix

Introduction

x

1. Anri Volohonsky’s “Aorists of the Decrepit”

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viii

1

2. Elizaveta Mnatsakanova’s “Requiem”

20

3. How Joseph Brodsky Read His Poems

44

4. Henry Khudyakov, Poet of Compressed Form

55

5. Vsevolod Nekrasov’s Minimalist Poetry

74

6. The Poetics of Punctuation in Gennady Aygi’s Free Verse

91

7. Rea Nikonova’s Pliugms

110

Afterword

125

Index

127

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ILLUSTRATIONS Tables 1.1 Numerical Relations of the Natural and Tempered Musical Scales

3

1.2 Color Wavelengths in Relation to the Natural Scale

5

3.1 Pitch Positions in Brodsky’s Recitation

48

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Figures 2.1 E. Mnatsakanova, “Requiem,” beginning of Part 7

36

2.2 E. Mnatsakanova, “Requiem,” conclusion

38

3.1 J. Brodsky’s Recitation: Musical Examples

47

4.1 H. Khudyakov, “V/Br-/Om”

58

4.2 H. Khudyakov, “Time of [a twenty-four-hour] Day”

70

4.3 H. Khudyakov, “Window sill rain tap”

70

5.1 Vs. Nekrasov, “—Early”

86

7.1 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” beginning

117

7.2 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” Variations 21 to 27

118

7.3 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” Variations 65 to 68

120

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PREFACE

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Sources for previously published chapters of this book are the following: Chapter 1: “Anri Voloxonskij: Poet Scientist,” Slavic and East European Journal [SEEJ ] 26, no. 4 (1982):434–44. Chapter 2: “Paronomastic and Musical Techniques in Mnacakanova’s ‘Rekviem,’” SEEJ 31, no. 2 (1987):202–19. Chapter 3: “Comments on Brodskij’s ‘Stixi na smert’ T. S. Eliota,’” Russian Language Journal 34, no. 118 (1980):145–53. Chapter 4: “Genrix Xudjakov, Poet of Compressed Form,” SEEJ 29, no. 2 (1985):164–75. Chapter 5: “Minimalism in Contemporary Russian Poetry: Vsevolod Nekrasov and Others,” The Slavonic and East European Review 70, no. 3 (1992):401–19; “Vsevolod Nekrasov, Master Paronymist,” SEEJ 33, no. 2 (1989):275–92; “Teoriia i praktika kontseptualizma u Vsevoloda Nekrasova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 5 (1993):196–201. Chapter 6: “The Poetics of Punctuation in Gennadij Ajgi’s Free Verse,” SEEJ 40, no. 2 (1996):297–308. I would like to thank these journals and their editors for publishing the original articles, and Thomas Epstein and Marion Berghahn for the opportunity to present them again in this collection. Names in the text have been transliterated using a typical journalistic style, but citations in Russian and Russian-language references employ the Library of Congress transliteration without diacriticals.

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INTRODUCTION The origin of this book can be traced to a meeting I had in June 1980 with the poet Konstantin Kuzminsky, who at the time was living in Austin, Texas. Up until then, my research had been devoted first to the work of the Russian Symbolist Andrei Bely and then to Russian Futurism. In connection with Futurism, I had come upon Kuzminsky’s article on the subject, and I took the opportunity, while in Houston, to visit him in Austin. We immediately found a common language, and our conversation over tea and an excellent soup prepared by his wife Emma continued until it was too late for me to drive back to Houston that night. The evening had two consequences for the future. The first was that one of the things Kuzminsky said that evening has now become a personal motto: “Dead poets can wait; you should work on living poets.” The Kuzminskys provided me with a place to rest and, should I have trouble sleeping, I might look at a special publication few were familiar with. Kuzminsky handed me the huge folio edition Apollon-77 (Paris, 1977) assembled and published by Mikhail Shemiakin, and he suggested that I pay particular attention to the poetry of Anri Volohonsky. The quantity of tea I had downed did indeed keep me awake in the hot, unairconditioned apartment, and I moved my mattress out onto the balcony and began reading Apollon. This was the second consequence, as a result of which my work took on a new direction. I discovered fascinating Russian poetry hitherto unknown to me or to more than a few others in the West. The majority of articles in this collection can be traced back directly to Apollon-77, from which initially I selected poets in emi-

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Introduction | xi

gration to explore (Volohonsky, Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, Genrikh Khudyakov) because their other work was more readily accessible, as were they themselves. Work on Vsevolod Nekrasov turned out to be possible, but was complicated by the fact that he lived in the Soviet Union and therefore contacts with him in the early 1980s were limited by that circumstance. The other studies can also be seen as outgrowths of that meeting with Kuzminsky. The present collection is thus partly an effort to mark the twentieth anniversary of Apollon-77, which, by the way, is still not well known or appreciated in the scholarly community today. For that reason, I am dedicating this publication to Kuzminsky, who had served as literary consultant and contributor to Apollon, and to Shemiakin, who published it in grand style and contributed his magnificent and disturbing art to it as well. In retrospect, it is evident to me that there is another thread linking these articles, a thread not consciously followed, but one which reflects my intuitive preference for literature, poetry in particular, that is both avant-garde and synesthetic. In twentieth-century literature these two factors are often joined, but, as I now realize, the musical side of literature attracts me first, while the visual side (literature is by definition a visual artifact) enters into consideration as a consequence of innovative ways poets devise to represent the sonic qualities of their poetry on the page. After all, it is in literature that sight and sound can be most closely entwined. Music may be sightless and the visual arts may be totally silent, but literature always has elements of both. Hence each of the articles below examines a case, often a single work, in which a poet has produced an intersection of sight and sound with especially intriguing and unusual results. All of the articles collected here, except the last one, have been previously published in some form, but each has been carefully reexamined, revised and updated as necessary, some more extensively than others. The article on Nekrasov is in fact an amalgamation of material from three separate articles. The final essay, a study of Rea Nikonova, has been written specially for this volume on the basis of a paper I gave in Edmonton at the “Eyerhymes” conference in June 1997. The articles move roughly from those most concerned with musical factors to those more concerned with visual aspects, although

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xii | Introduction

all have something of both. The Nikonova study seems to me a fitting conclusion, because she so thoroughly explores the possibilities of sight–sound–literature as to give us an exhaustive panoramic view. All the works chosen for analysis were selected for their inherent interest (avant-garde innovation), because they seemed typical of the given poet, and because of their multimedia dimensions. These studies also reflect my preference for practice over theory, in that their focus is primarily on understanding the works themselves, rather than on any theories that might be attached to them. Art lasts, theories generally don’t. One could probably also place them on a scale from maximum focus on meaning, where every item, even the smallest, is semanticized (Volohonsky), to maximum focus on innovative form, where meaning is relatively incidental (Nikonova). However, I would not take this too literally or attempt to place the other poets’ work in the spectrum between these two poles. As the author of the first scholarly studies of most of these poets, I can report that the experience has been an exciting one and one which I look forward to continuing. Among the advantages, initially, is that one need not spend much time seeking out and absorbing previous writing and thought on the subject, since there usually is little or none. And there is the excitement of participating in the creative forces of the present, in the so-called “literary process,” although this term has too deterministic a feel to it. Perhaps the main benefit is having the opportunity to work directly with the poets themselves, to be able to ask them questions, elicit background information and, finally, to take inspiration and energy from them. In return one may hope that one’s scholarly efforts have been meaningful and will expose their work to a wider audience. Being the first rather than the hundredth on the scene, though, certainly has disadvantages as well. Among the disadvantages are the inclinations of traditional scholarship to wait until the dust has settled before making choices and to think that the greats of the past are more important and worthy of attention than any poet of the present. Let History, presumably, conduct an election of the few, the best. But, of course, “the few and the best” also lived in a present that thought less of them than of the greats of their respective pasts.

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Introduction | xiii

Another drawback is the lack of a crowd of public opinion to support and shield a scholar-critic from too personal or too hasty a judgment. Choices do reflect the chooser’s taste as well as courage. Then there is a small measure of the avant-gardist’s agon of loneliness, in which one finds oneself fairly consistently the only scholar on a panel on contemporary Russian literature to report on contemporary poetry (contemporary prose is evidently easier for scholars to discuss). And of course there is the strong likelihood that few in one’s audience or on one’s editorial board will have heard of the poet in question, much less have become familiar with his or her work. The obvious exception among the poets discussed below is Brodsky, who is quite famous, and deservedly so, although he seems to have unintentionally occupied for many the position of the one contemporary Russian poet known (i.e., taken seriously) by the West, much as Solzhenitsyn at one time filled that position for prose. Dead poets can indeed be asked to have patience when the living ones are starving for attention. Nor do the living poets have to be from the current avant-garde, as has been my bias; more traditional poets also need more attention than they have been getting. If these essays result in even a slightly broader attention to contemporary Russian poetry, then a sleepless night in Austin, Texas, will have been well rewarded.

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Chapter 1

ANRI VOLOHONSKY’S “AORISTS OF THE DECREPIT” nri Volohonsky is a recent member of a line of Russian thinkers and poets going back to Lomonosov whose talents and expertise are so broad that they are able to produce significant work in such disparate areas as mathematics, natural science, philosophy and poetry. Moreover, it is typical of Volohonsky and some other poets in this tradition, such as Bely and Khlebnikov, to strive to synthesize this knowledge into a unified vision of science and art. His earliest publications, dating from 1971 during his Soviet period, are on the mathematical symmetry of natural formations: two articles on the DNA molecule and one on the atomic nucleus.1 As the basis of an atomic nucleus, Volohonsky sees the tetrahedron (a four-sided solid), the first of Plato’s fundamental forms2 and the simplest geometric shape which exists in three dimensions. On the shape of the DNA structure, he concludes: “the genetic code itself is not a chance product of evolutionary wanderings…, but an organized and unavoidable consequence of initial principles chosen by nature for the production of a code.”3

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A

1. A. G. Volokhonskii, “O formal’noi strukture geneticheskogo koda,” Sbornik Perevodov (Novosibirsk, 1971), pp. 69–85; “O simmetrii atomnykh iader” and “Geneticheskii kod i simmetriia,” Simmetriia v prirode (Leningrad, 1971), pp. 325–30, 371–75, resp. 2. Plato, “Timaeus,” The Dialogues of Plato, ed. and trans. B. Jowett (Oxford, 1953), vol. 3, pp. 741–43. 3. “Geneticheskii kod i simmetriia,” pp. 374–75.

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2 | Sight and Sound Entwined

The reference to Plato shows an orientation toward synthesizing (or perhaps resynthesizing) philosophy and natural science. It also reveals a satisfaction that Plato had intuited what the scientific method would later confirm, though in a different form. One can note in Volohonsky’s efforts a continuous attempt, not unlike Khlebnikov’s, though with greater empiricism, to find a unifying factor that would bring together apparently disparate phenomena via mathematics. His first attempt at such a synthesis, the self-published Book of Branches (1962), thus begins: “I speak of Unity./ The description of the world is a system of symbols. Verbal symbols are distorted by emotionality, but the numerical system is almost untouched.” However, he concluded that this effort to rationalize the early Cabbalistic Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzira) was unsuccessful: “I posited that this book mythologizes a kind of mathematics; in fact it is quite the opposite” (letter to the author, 17 Sept. 1981). His article on the natural musical scale, “The Twelve Steps of the Natural Scale”4 can be seen as his correction of this error. It is an attempt to reestablish the ontological rightness of the natural, as opposed to the tempered (i.e., distorted), musical scale now used nearly universally in Western music. Since Bach’s time (though the system was not universally adopted until 1850), most of the tones within the octave have been shifted slightly from their ideal natural frequency. This is a compromise in the mathematical relation of tones in which the eleven semitone intervals in an octave of the chromatic scale are equalized in order to make modulation to distant keys equally possible in the course of a composition. The natural scale used from ancient times was based instead on the pitches resulting from the fractional division of a vibrating string. The relative relationships in the two scales are given in Table 1.1. Only C and F sound at their true pitch in the tempered scale, but the adjustments in the other pitches are slight enough to be virtually inaudible. Nevertheless, they are not based on the ideal mathematical relationships arrived at in ancient times by subdividing a 4. “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei natural’nogo stroia,” Gnosis 3–4 (1978):99–124.

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Anri Volohonsky | 3

Table 1.1 Numerical Relations of the Natural and Tempered Musical Scales*

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Scale Pitch

Natural Relation

Natural Scale**

Tempered Scale

C

1

360

360

Cs

9:10

324

340

D

8:9

320

321

Ds

5:6

300

303

E

4:5

288

286

F

3:4

270

270

Fs

32:45

256

254

G

2:3

240

241

Gs

5:8

225

226

A

3:5

216

214

Bf

5:9

200

202

B

8:15

192

191

C’

1:2

180

180

*Adapted from Volohonsky, “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei natural’nogo stroia,” Gnosis 3–4 (1978):107. **Volohonsky has calculated these numbers in the form of “antilogorithms” and not vibrations per second (see ibid., p.107).

vibrating string (dividing in half yields the interval of an octave, dividing at a ratio of 2:3 yields the fifth, etc.).5 Volohonsky goes on to relate the intervals in the natural scale to the wave lengths of light (in angstroms) in the color spectrum and arrives at the conclusion that, mathematically, the color spectrum traverses nearly the same intervals and forms the same relationships in going from infrared to ultraviolet as are seen in the natural octave. 5. In a recent letter (18 February 1998) with comments on this article, Volohonsky adds the following clarification: “The word ‘Pythagorean’ can be used in two meanings. In the broad sense, it signifies the use of numbers in general. But in the narrow sense only those numbers actually used by the Pythagoreans in various areas, such as in cosmology and music.” He explains, for instance, that the Pythagorean Timaeus, in Plato’s dialog named after him, used the numbers 1, 3, 9, 27 and 2, 4, 8, but not the number 5. Hence the natural relations in Table 1.1 for the interval of the

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Since Aristotle,6 thinkers have speculated on how sense perceptions may be linked. Goethe suggests: “Colour and sound do not admit of being directly compared together in any way, but both are referable to a higher formula, both are derivable, although each for itself, from this higher law.”7 Newton first proposed dividing the spectral continuum into subdivisions “after the manner of a Musical Chord.”8 A. Wallace Rimington, in his Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Colour (London, 1911), outlined a similar relationship between the tempered scale and the color spectrum. In “approximate frequencies of aether vibration in millions of millions per second” (ill. after p. 50), Rimington aligns the same octave (C–B) with segments of the color spectrum from low red to upper violet, assigning the frequencies 395, 433, 466, 500, 533, 566, 600, 633, 666, 700, 733, 757, [790], usually by adding a factor of 33. Volohonsky solves the problem of arbitrariness by dividing the visible spectrum in half at 5560 angstroms and then using the proportions of the natural scale to derive the other positions in the “color octave.” His chart of relationships is given in Table 1.2. As with Newton and Rimington, the “color fourth (C:F) and fifth (C:G) correspond with the Timaean system (though in ideal form they would be 3:1 and 1:3, respectively); however, the interval of the major third (C:E) would not be 4:5, but 64:81 (ideal: 1:81), and the minor third (C:Ef/Ds) would not be 5:6, but 27:32 (ideal: 27:1). The number 5 came to be employed only later, probably in the sixth to eighth centuries A.D. and became canonized in music theory only in the eighteenth century by Rameau. 6. Aristotle: “… colours may, indeed, be analogous to harmonies. Thus, those compounded according to the simplest proportions, exactly as is the case in harmonies, will appear to be the most pleasant colours, e.g., purple, crimson, and a few similar species. (It is an exactly parallel reason that causes harmonies to be few in number.)” De Sensu [439b-440a]. Aristotle, De Sensu and De Memoria. Text and trans. with intro. and commentary by G. R. T. Ross (New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. 59. 7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours. Trans. and notes by C. L. Eastlake [1840] (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970), pp. 298–99. Eastlake notes the connection to Aristotle (p. 418) and refers to the passage given in the preceding note. 8. Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light. 4th ed. [1730] (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), p. 126, also 225–26, 295, 305. Newton began a study of this comparison in November 1665, and it is also discussed in Optica, Part II, Lecture 11, where nearly the same ratios as in Volohonsky’s Table 1.1 are proposed, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, ed. Alan E. Shapiro (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 545–47.

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Table 1.2 Color Wavelengths in Relation to the Natural Scale* Absolute Wavelength (angstroms)

Relative Wavelength

Relation to Basic

Natural Scale

Black (octave)

3707

480

.5

1:2

(.5)

Dark purple

3861

500

.521

8:15 (.533)

Violet

4170

540

.563

5:9

(.556)

Dark blue

4448

576

.6

3:5

(.6)

Blue

4633

600

.625

5:8

(.625)

Bright blue

4826

625

.651

2:3

(.667)

Green

5212

675

.703

32:45 (.711)

Yellow-green

5560

720

.75

3:4

(.75)

Yellow

5792

750

.781

4:5

(.8)

Orange

6255

810

.843

5:6

(.833)

Bright red

6672

864

.9

8:9

(.889)

Red

6950

900

Black (basic)

7414

960

.937 1

59:10 (.9) 1

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*Adapted from Volohonsky, “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei,” p. 122.

octave” from infrared to ultraviolet corresponds to a single musical octave. The interval of the fifth corresponds to the color yellow-green and the primary colors form a minor triad. Color-sound synesthesia is a phenomenon reported by numerous individuals who automatically have color associations with specific sound pitches. In the Russian context, the composers Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin come immediately to mind. Both composers associate particular tonalities or keys (not just pitches) with colors in a circle of fifths, but, although there are points of similarity, there are many points of dissimilarity in the colors that are associated with given keys. For instance, while for both composers D major is yellow, C major for Rimsky is white, but for Scriabin it is red. Moreover, Scriabin does not distinguish major and minor keys.9 9. See V. Del’son, Skriabin. Ocherki zhizni i tvorchestva (Moscow: Muzyka, 1971), pp. 400–401; also see Kenneth Peacock, “Synaesthetic Perception: Alexander

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Volohonsky places color–sound relationships on a mathematical foundation similar to Newton’s. But he adds a caveat:

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It is necessary to keep in mind that the structure of the visible octave is somewhat different from the structure of the sound octave. Regardless of their construction, the principles of their realization are not equivalent. In the sound area, because of the significantly broader diapason of audibility, the interval of the fifth … passing from octave to octave, plays a fundamental role. In the color area, where we are limited to only one octave (in fact somewhat less), the fundamental role belongs to the narrower intervals of the major and minor third, 4:5 and 5:6…. Therefore, we think the idea of any kind of primitive “color music” is not promising. Nevertheless, the kinship of the organizing principles in the musical scale and the color spectrum has been demonstrated quite clearly here. In both instances, we obtain a twelve-tone natural structure—”ontological”—in the modern sense of the word.10

Volohonsky, however, is unique among investigators of synesthesia in having produced a poetic work on the subject. “Aorists of the Decrepit: A Composition about Harmony”11 is a philosophical poem in free verse (not typical of Volohonsky, who usually prefers more traditional syllabotonic forms), with prose transitions and “Commentaries” drawn from the findings of his article on the natural scale. As the subtitle indicates, the poem is a search for the principle of Harmony (with a capital letter) informing the universe. It is composed of a dialogue between a “long-bearded

Scriabin’s Color Hearing,” Music Perception 2, no. 4 (1985):483–506. On the relationship between Scriabin’s color-sound associations and Rimington’s, see Rosemary DiCarlo’s dissertation, “Andrej Belyj’s “Petersburg” and the Modern Aesthetic Consciousness” (Brown University, 1980), p. 89–91. 10. Volokhonskii, “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei,” pp. 122–23. 11. “Aoristy obvetshalogo. Sochinenie o Garmonii,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Band 5 (1980):353–63; Anri Volokhonskii, Stikhotvoreniia (Ann Arbor, 1983), pp. 82–93. Subsequent references in the text and notes are to the latter edition. An English translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky, “Aorists of the Decrepit,” was published in Everything Is According to the Way: Voices of Russian Transpersonalism, ed. T. R. Soidla and S. I. Shapiro (Brisbane, 1997), but the translations here are by the present author.

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nephew” and his “clean-shaven uncle.” Putting the beard on the younger man underlines a sort of reversal of roles: the nephew asks profound and wise questions which the uncle has difficulty understanding. (Of course, in the 1960s a beard became the emblem of the young radical and not the symbol of venerable old age. Volohonsky has a beard.) The work is divided into six sections, each with a title of physico-philosophico-poetic import: 1. Double Speech, 2. Measure of the Sphere, 3. Broken Sound, 4. New Words about Harmony, 5. Flowers of This Bird, 6. Shadow.12 The dialogue opens with a barrage of questions from the nephew: O uncle! Uncle o uncle! Reveal to me Why do combinations of words never die? Give me to know What kind of life Animates the breathing of a flute? Tell me What fable Is concealed in the afternoon air?13

As the title of the section (“Double Speech”) suggests, speech is not “double” merely because of the existence of a dialogue. The author himself insists: “Pay attention, please, to the ‘role’ of repetitions—as the foundation of harmony (‘memory’): ‘dia—dia,’ ‘Diadia o diadia,’ repetition of the question, repetition 360 ⫻ 2 = 720, repetition at the octave (1:2).”14 While not everything is literally double (there are, for instance, three questions in the quote), doubleness is indeed a prominent feature on a variety of levels. In the 12. 1. Dvoinaia rech’, 2. Mera shara, 3. Razbityi zvuk, 4. Novye slova o Garmonii, 5. Tsvety etoi ptitsy, 6. Ten’. 13. O diadia!/Diadia o diadia!/Otkroi mne/Pochemu nikogda ne umiraiut sochetaniia slov?/Dai mne znat’/Kakogo roda zhizn’/Odushevliaet dykhanie fleity?/Rasskazhi/Chto za basnia/Pritailas’ v poslepoludennom vozdukhe? (p. 82) 14. Letter to this writer, 17 September 1981.

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quoted passage there is, for example, alliteration (sochetania s lov), proto-rhyme (zhizn’—rasskazhi), play on roots (odushevliaet dykhanie [animates the breathing]) followed by a later addition (vozdukhe [air]). The uncle “in the naked brilliance of spherical-looking cheeks” finds all this to be oxymoronic and synesthetic: You are asking me a great, lofty And base question A yellow question, a bad question,15

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Note once again the repetitions (velikii, vysokii, nizkii; the triple question (vopros) and its sound echoes in vysokii (lofty) and nekhoroshii (bad). The uncle twice says that he doesn’t understand and twice asks the nephew to repeat his question, followed by a third statement of noncomprehension: I ask you: Repeat Repeat your question Because I do not understand it very well.16

Note again the word and sound repetitions. So the nephew rephrases the questions in more concrete terms: Where does the flute’s whistle exist When the flutist Is dead drunk? Where does the afternoon light evaporate to At the time when thousands of angular tiny birds Begin to dash around Insanely in the blue-gray air?

15. Ty zadaesh’ mne velikii, vysokii/I nizkii vopros/Zheltyi vopros, nekhoroshii vopros. (p. 82) 16. Ia proshu tebia:/Povtori/Povtori svoi vopros/A to ia ego khoroshen’ko ne ponimaiu. (p. 82)

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By what means does it repeat What has never existed And yet we recognize it easily again Though we had never seen it until now? Somehow their damp emptiness does not accept speech about them …

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Explain to me: Why don’t they die?17

The flute ceases, since the player is drunk; the afternoon air becomes the afternoon light; the air itself becomes blue-gray and refuses to absorb the words about these things. So the words do not die out, but somehow continue to survive. At this point it is more obvious that the young man is on a quest for the eternal forms of Plato, or rather, he has experienced their existence in nature and wants to know why they exist—why words, sounds, sights do not disappear forever, but instead emerge and submerge. The older man, clearly overwhelmed by the inquiry, can answer only that, if the youth is asking about butterflies, then he is “perhaps right.”18 This response “horrifies” the youth, evidently in part because 17. Gde sushchestvuet fleity svist/Kogda fleitist/Mertvetski p’ian?//Kuda ispariaetsia poslepoludennyi svet/V to vremia kogda nachinaiut metat’sia/Tysiachi uglovatykh melkikh ptakh/Bezumstvuia v sizom vozdukhe?//Kakim zhe putem ono vtorit tomu/Chego nikogda ne byvalo/I my uznaem ego vnov’ legko/Khot’ ni razu dosele ne vidyvali?//Pochemu-to i rechi o nikh vlazhnaia pustota ikh ne beret … //Ob”iasni mne:/Pochemu oni ne umiraiut? (pp. 82–83) 18. Volohonsky has added the following explanation of this moment: “After all, the uncle well knows that he is being asked not about the death of sounds and birds, but about his own death. However, his nephew puts the question ‘esthetically.’ The uncle re-asks and becomes convinced that this is the case—for the very ‘repetition of the question’ is a harmonizing act—and, speaking ironically, he says ‘butterflies,’ an image of the short-lived. The nephew becomes horrified because, instead of a conversation between two civilized people, what occurs is something like a look into the abyss. The uncle remarks that ‘you want to know not about what you are asking.’ This level is present the whole time; therefore the interlocutors both fall apart and become ‘decrepit’ (vetshaiut) to the extent of their discussion on harmony. Therefore the nephew weeps when he looks at the sky.” (Letter to this writer, 2 March 1982.)

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of its seeming obtuseness and triviality. But when the youth criticizes his uncle for refusing to consider the matter seriously, it turns out that the latter does understand: “You are seeking to know/Who she is, Harmony?” The uncle’s answer is: “The foundations of Harmony are narrated in the heights … Gaze at the sky/Gaze at the sun” (p. 84). But the youth has done this and has seen only sky and sun:

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—I merely look And observe a yellowish-green shining disk At the highest point of the semicircle of the sphere, But I also still hear my speech And again I hear both sky and sun disappearing in it. (p. 84)

The odd designations “yellowish-green disk” and the “semicircle of the sphere” turn out eventually to be keys to the proposed solution. By combining the systematic exposition of the article on the natural scale with the more elliptical “Commentaries” in the poem, we can see that yellowish-green is the middle of the color spectrum and is given a relative wavelength of 720 (5560 angstroms)(see Table 1.2). “720 steps, equal to the diameter of a disk, compose the complete heavenly circle” (p. 85), half of which, i.e., 360, are for the sun: The disk on the noonday semicircle of sky Traverses steps three hundred sixty times In its whole diameter. (p. 85)

The other half is for the moon. This formulation is somewhat troubling, since it represents numerical halves at twice what they usually are for the circle and semicircle (360˚ and 180˚, respectively). However, the commentary at the end of this second section (aptly titled “2. Measure of the Sphere”) explains how these figures were arrived at: “Divide the circle in half, the half into three, each third into four, each of these fourths into five and every fifth part into six equal parts—in this way one will obtain 720 equal parts in a full circumference” (p. 85). If we compare these relationships to the subdivisions in the

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natural scale (see Table 1.1), we see that 1:2 yields the octave, 2:3 the fifth, 3:4 the fourth, 4:5 the major third and 5:6 the minor third, whence the Pythagorean “music of the sphere” in a direct mathematical sense. This is spelled out in more detail in the next section (“3. Broken Sound”) where the sounding string is divided (or broken) into numbers corresponding to the divisions made in the sphere. Volohonsky mathematically generates the set of relationships from 360 to 720 which can also be obtained by doubling the values for the natural scale given in Table 1.1. In Section 3 there emerges another facet of the issue: the mythological background. In the silence, the nephew and uncle hear “a dry tap and Mixolydian singing” (p. 86) which takes them to ancient times and the island of Samos. Harmony is not just “harmony,” but also Harmonia, the wife of Cadmus, who founded the city of Thebes. Both she and her husband were ultimately turned into serpents, whence the “Cadmean serpent” (Zmeia Kadmeiskaia) of the poem which is characterized as a “Pythagorean reptile” (p. 86). In Russian, harmony and Harmonia are the same feminine form: Garmonia. Ironically, Harmonia’s necklace, a circular object fashioned by Hephaestus, was a cause of disaster to its possessor. The Cadmean serpent has eight legs and eight arms, with forty-five fingers on each hand. Out of these is generated the octave and the segments of the circle (1/16 of the circle, i.e., 720/16 = 45) and also a handful of useless fish or serpent scales (cheshui) which are plastered onto the sky like indulgences or silver coins “each of which is exactly the diameter of a cheap little bazaar sun” (p. 88). Harmonia then reappears as a “porcelain maiden” whose honor is sung by mercenaries on the march. As can be seen even in this schematic recounting, associations mount with astronomical rapidity. One set of lines from the middle of Section 3 will return us to the context of our dialogue and restore our primary focus: We have carved out the twelve steps in the large semicircle This is the celestial law—the foundation of memory Why are you sad, my leftish younger brother?

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Has it turned out so bitter for you, this blue-gray smoke From the tar ring-like serpent octaves?19

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An intriguing Platonic connection between harmony and memory is suggested here, as in Volohonsky’s letter quoted above. This passage also makes it relatively clear that the main discourse comes from the uncle, a fact not explicit earlier. Also evident is the fact that the radical-minded nephew is not exactly happy with this explanation. His reasons are not directly revealed, though they may be inferred from the demonic rings of the serpentine structure advanced by the uncle. In the next section, “New Words about Harmony,” Harmony goes through a series of metamorphoses or embodiments: O Carthaginian maiden— Beautiful woman of Novgorod Street girl—Neapolitan songstress Carousing houri of Nablus Distant Alexandrinian Novocherkasskan Give it up for lost!— Old woman of New York! That is the old new New Orleans maid Mahalia Jackson! (p. 89)

Volohonsky later explains this sequence as follows: Europa (who was abducted by the bull) was the sister of the Phoenician Cadmus (i.e., the East, Europa is from Erebus, i.e., the West). Therefore Europa is the sister-in-law of Cadmus’s wife, Harmonia. But all of Cadmus’s activities in the West (“the search for his lost sister”) boil down to the building of a New City (Carthage = Karta ha’hadasha, i.e., New City). Hence in the hymn to Harmony, all the cities have the epithet “New,” from Carthage through Nablus (= Neapolis, not far 19. My vyrubili dvenadtsat’ stupenei na bol’shom polukruge/Eto nebesnyi zakon—osnovanie pamiati/Chto zhe grustish’, moi levyi mladshii brat?/ Neuzhchto tak gorek vyshel tebe sizyi dym/Ot smolianykh kol’tsevidnykh zmeinykh oktav? (p. 88)

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from Sihema) to New Orleans with Mahalia Jackson. This “universal New City” of Harmony has been described somewhat in my “Sim and Japhet.”20 There it is with mirrors, etc. In this sense, the monkey-Harmony becomes “a prison or gorilla.” Cadmus, it turned out, was looking for his sister, but found a wife-city-monkey-prison—his own repeating image, and not a “soul,” not actual immortality. In one way or another we create Harmony, but we ourselves die. This is the subject of “Aorists.”21

The next lines produce a similar sequence:

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Bird of Harmony Lizard of Harmony Old maid Harmony— She gallops laughing through dim chaos Riding on a folding yardstick Or on a sweet humped symmetrical animal Of a form—like a hedgehog A laughing genius of a gray witch! (p. 89)

The series goes on to include Ephesian bees, chameleons, “a thousand tiny birds,” “The bear of Harmony/The iguana of Harmony/ Simonia of Harmony,” and in Section 5 (“The Colors of This Bird”), Valkyries. As the interlocutors had earlier become “as if two skeletons” (p. 86), so does Harmony: “Twelve bones compose the skeleton/Of the white owl of Harmony” (p. 91). The whole multifaceted structure of the poem is united at the moment when the very bones of the interlocutors are seen to reflect the principles of Harmony laid out:

20. “Sim i Iafet,” Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizheniia 120 (1977): 70–94. In this article, Volohonsky develops a complicated interpretation of human beings’ relation to the world in which a mirror (referred to in the next sentence in his letter), as an image of scientific description and measurement, prevents penetration into deeper understanding, since it merely reflects the light shed on the object back on the observer and goes no further than the mirror’s surface (p. 80). 21. Letter to this writer, 3 February 1982.

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This was phosphorus coming out of them— A yellowish-green smoke was evaporating. “They could have convinced us,” rustled the smoke of the elder, “Those honest, learned people, As though every light Was such a petty sound Like an inaudible squeak,

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Therefore I think That our yellowish-green color From the smoke of our phosphorizing bones The color of the luminary At the highest position of the heavens Must—having the form of Harmony’s body— Contain those same seven hundred and twenty parts. (p. 91)

Following this passage, Volohonsky relates the color spectrum numerically to the natural scale. Yellowish-green (zheltozelenyi) is in the middle of the “color octave” and therefore at the highest point of the semicircle of the daytime heavens. Yellow-green is “almost white” (p. 92). At the end of this section, Harmony becomes a “singing peacock-salamander,” a confluence of all sounds and colors in a fantastic bird-serpent. Thus the poem parallels the content and structure of the theoretical article on the natural scale. Moreover, Sections 1, 3, 5, which contain the essence of the matter, form a triad of the three ideal tones in the octave.22 Yet in Section 6 (“The Shadow”) the question still remains: Who is Harmony?: “So isn’t it just a stupid monstrosity composed only of repetitions which just waves by like a dragonfly realm in the foundations of our memory?

22. Volokhonskii, “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei,” p. 104. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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“So who is She? A prison or a gorilla? “Or is she simply a sclerotically flabby Drunken old woman with forgetful cheeks—Harmony Who has breasts to overflowing Not to speak of buttocks in the bargain?

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Let’s say one thing—or the other... (p. 93)

Everything is doubled, and we go from the fantastic image of a phoenix to the burlesque image of a puffy old hag. Perhaps new images should be tried (a prison), or a new animal (a gorilla). Something made merely of repetitions is perhaps to be discredited as a “stupid monstrosity,” yet we come around again to a repetition in the last line,23 or to two alternatives. In this resolution (or lack of it), we cannot help but sense a dose of playfulness and irony, qualities that are typical of Volohonsky and separate him from other metaphysical-philosophical poets, though it links him to Vladimir Soloviev, Bely and Brodsky. While the article on the natural scale may be more tightly constructed and more logically complete, the poem brings in the human element and relates dry numbers (less “distorted by emotionality” though they may be) to poetic imagery and living substance. Relevant here is a statement by Volohonsky which I think represents a correction to his earlier views: I myself have lived from childhood with a clear knowledge—from sight and hearing—that the world and I and—as I have come to understand with the years—other people also are nothing else but transfigured light.24 Therefore all areas where I can make this knowledge common, all languages, are appropriate for me; the question is only of my learning to speak the given language. Poetry is the most direct language; however,

23. The repetition is more evident in the original Russian (“Skazhem tak—skazhem etak …”) than in the translation. 24. In fact, Volohonsky’s recent book Blesk (Sparkle) (Forstinning: Kastner & Callwey, 1994) is devoted to this topic in connection with interpretations of passages from the Hebrew Bible.

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here too, it took me ten years to learn to say more or less what I wanted to say. The language of contemporary science is bad to an extreme. It arose out of astrology (I am speaking of physics) with its internal determinism and lack of freedom, and was thus depicted in the mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the nineteenth it became the language of physics and was thus passed on to us, preserved in the social structures of European-type universities, science degrees, journals, articles and similar ritualistic forms. For all my aversion to it, I have, it seems, learned to babble something in it, too. Of course, inasmuch as I myself live within those structures, I must sometimes “play another’s game.” I turn out “professional trivia,” in essence simple stylizations, which are of little interest to me or to anyone else. I am trying to keep this to a minimum and gradually I am succeeding.25

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Hence, while the poem presents mathematical and philosophical analysis, it is fleshed out and given a soul by poetic language, without diminishing its cosmic viewpoint, as the beautiful sounds and images of the concluding lines illustrate even in translation: At this the mother-of-pearl whisper from the conch of the Universe fell silent Its plaintive, shimmering sighs were stilled The Aorists of the Decrepit had ended And a kingfisher dove into the emerald water.26

We are overwhelmed by the synesthetic and synthetic richness of the poetic mind at work. When the title of the work returns in its last lines, we are less puzzled by it but we are still not sure of its significance, except that it points to the past—doubly so since, as the author points out, “both words denote the same thing: an aorist is not only a past tense form,27 but also a form which itself no longer 25. Letter to this writer, 10 November 1981. 26. Na etom smolk perlamutrovyi shopot rakoviny Vselennoi/Stikhli ego zhalobnye mertsaiushchie vzdokhi/Konchilis’ Aoristy Obvetshalogo/I v izumrudnuiu vodu nyrnul zimorodok. (p. 93) 27. An aorist is a form of the verb in Greek or Slavic which denotes a single, undivided action or state related completely to the past; now archaic in Russian.

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exists in Russian.”28 And obvetshaloe can alternately mean “decayed,” thus “archaic,” or simply “old.” The sudden appearance of the kingfisher (zimorodok) has been prepared for in the sequence of aviary metamorphoses of Harmony and is related to the emerald water (izumrudnuiu vodu) by a paronomastic sound attraction and by its color position in the middle of the spectrum. The original yellow question receives a green answer with echoes throughout the poem. Not since Bely has such a grand synthesis been attempted, involving modern science, mathematics, philosophy, occult systems, and poetry. Here one thinks of Bely’s The Return. Symphony No. 3 (1905), which contains similarly cosmic dialogues between an old and a young man, and his essays in Symbolism (1910), especially “The Magic of Words,” with its synthesis of linguistics, artistic theory and occult sciences, and Glossolalia (1922), which attempts a comparable synthesis of sound, sight, etymology, and philosophy. But there is more science in the Volohonsky piece and greater complexity, despite its relative brevity. The preceding commentary has not by any means exhausted its interesting aspects, particularly in the area of poetic language. And whether one likes the Platonic/ Pythagorean orientation or not, it is certainly refreshing to come upon a modern man who believes in the unity of creation and presents it so beautifully. Moreover, this is not merely an intellectual game for Volohonsky. His argument against the tempered scale we use and in favor of the natural scale we have abandoned is profoundly ethical: The tempered scale itself is a phenomenon of a certain stage of human spiritual history—that stage characterized by gigantomania, technological refinement, subjectivism, and disregard for ontology in some areas, together with an inclination to compromises in others. Therefore modern consciousness in general can only weakly imagine the unity of ethics, esthetics and ontology. However, another spiritual orientation is possible—when a person’s demand for truth is more important than external effects. If the problem of the pure interval of the fifth is recognized as a moral issue, if the musician considers that in 28. Letter to this writer, 17 September 1981.

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playing an inexact fifth he is lying—because the world itself is structured otherwise—then for him it will be natural to reject tempering. Possibly he will have to reject many seductive claims and traditional devices once he has sharply limited the technical means available to him; however, each relation in his music will at least have a recognizable meaning, and every key or structure a profound individuality.29

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This striving for unity between the real and ideal worlds is, of course, a revival of Symbolism, Russian and other, but on firmer scientific footing. Perhaps because of his better grasp of science, and perhaps because science itself may be moving in this direction, Volohonsky seems less frantic and more cerebral than Bely in his thinking and his art, more confident of the solidity and stability of his world. For Volohonsky, eternal verities are not slipping away into the abyss, but are calmly providing a unified structure to the world and merely await the attention of perceptive, intelligent observers.

29. Volokhonskii, “Dvenadtsat’ stupenei,” pp. 123–24. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Anri Volohonsky Anri Volohonsky (b. 1936, Leningrad), by profession a limnologist, worked in that capacity in the Soviet Union and then at the Kinneret Limnological Laboratory in Israel after his emigration in 1973. In 1985 he moved to Munich, where he worked for Radio Free Europe. Among other interpretive studies, he has written a cabbalistic treatise dealing with numbers and their relation to the elements (The Book of Branches, 1962) that draws symbolic links between the Apocalypse and Herod’s Temple. His poetry is characterized by a broad erudition spanning science, philosophy, religions, and the arts and bringing these wide-ranging fields into fascinating cross-relationships. It is not unusual to find him juxtaposing a Carthaginian maiden and Mahalia Jackson or contemporary scientific theories and classical poetic images, as is the case in “Aorists of the Decrepit.” At the same time, there is an element of playfulness and good humor about his work, perhaps better appreciated in his own manner of presentation than in a reading of his texts, which are likely to seem difficult and complex. He is also the co-author with Aleksei Khvostenko of a number of guitar songs, one of which, “Paradise,” appeared in the avant-garde Soviet film ASSA (1987) as a “folk song” arranged and sung by Boris Grebenshchikov and his rock group Aquarium. Volohonsky now lives in Tubingen, is continuing his translation of Hebrew mystical literature, and has begun work on a translation of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into Russian.

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Chapter 2

ELIZAVETA MNATSAKANOVA’S “REQUIEM” lizaveta Mnatsakanova is particularly notable for her application of musical forms to poetry and for her focus on paronomasia as a dominant poetic technique. One of her most important works of this sort is “Autumn in the Lazaretto of Innocent Sisters: Requiem in Seven Parts,” dated 8 September 1971, and published in Apollon-77.1 The genesis of the work is a fascinating story in itself. It was begun while Mnatsakanova was in a hospital “not of her own will”2 and was completed at home in Moscow after her release. The section “Song of rotting sisters” (Part 3) was composed in the hospital by memory, since paper was not available, and this became the thematic kernel of the poem.3 Mnatsakanova writes of the hospital experience that inspired the poem:

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E

What Moscow hospitals are like … you will never be able to imagine, and thank God! I will say that these are places where the inhumanity of Russian life is revealed in its quintessential sadism and bestiality, where people are humiliated in all sort of ways, where the dying are shouted 1. Pages 173–80. Since lines quoted from this source are easily located, page citations will not be given. However, this version contains a few minor errors, which are corrected in the citations given here. 2. Letter to this writer, 1 March 1983. 3. Letter to this writer, 9 February 1983.

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at: “Jew-snout, wipe yourself off !” [Zhidovskaia morda, utris’! ]—this was shouted at me by a “sister of mercy”, a “med-sister” [nurse], as they are called there, and I was lying on the operating table, bleeding, and was clinically dead for three minutes! … When, coming to, I called the “med-sister” and asked for something to drink, she answered, “You can wait, Sarah, you won’t croak.” They called everyone “Sarah” who seemed to them to be of Jewish origin. I don’t know why I deserved this name; probably to their mind I looked like a Jew. And this, in the eyes of almost every average Moscovite was almost a crime.… But all this was said in the absence of the doctor. When the doctor was there, they weren’t so brave. When the doctor was there, they used “official designations: “Patient” [Bol’naia or Bol’noi ]. “Patient, get up! Make your bed!” And this was even in a regular hospital, not a prison one,… not in the least!4

That was in stark contrast to what she remembered of her parents, both of whom were doctors. Though poorly paid, her mother, for instance, when prescribing medicine for indigent patients, would often leave some money with the prescription so the patient could afford to buy the medicine. The Moscow hospital was just one of the more intense manifestations of the cruel, lonely environment in which the poet felt she continually existed. She therefore was able to identify closely with the other female patients, who are the “innocent sisters” of the title, not to be confused, obviously, with the “sisters of mercy,” the nurses. In 1965, Mnatsakanova destroyed nearly all her writings. Later she contemplated destroying her more recent work as well, but Heinrich Böll, the prominent German novelist, on a visit to Moscow in 1970, insisted that she allow him to preserve them. Therefore she made him copies of the “Requiem” and of the book-length Beim tode zu gast and Das Buch Sabeth, which he obtained from her in 1972. He took these copies through Soviet customs in his coat pocket without incident. When Mnatsakanova emigrated to Vienna in 1975, he returned her manuscripts to her. She credits his kindness to her in Moscow as the inspiration she needed to go on living. At 4. Letter to this writer, 1 March 1983.

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the time of her arrival in Vienna, Mikhail Shemiakin was assembling Apollon-77, and at his request she sent him the “Requiem” and “Anton Chekhov,” a short work she wrote on her first day in Vienna. These were her first poems to appear in print. The title of the “Requiem” provides the embryonic kernel, the musical subject, out of which the entire edifice of the poem will be built, at least from the reader’s viewpoint. (According to the author’s comment quoted above, this was not the actual genesis.) Mnatsakanova appears then to take each piece of the title and develop its potent associations in a variety of directions, much the way a composer might develop a main theme by developing each of its component short motifs. The first three of the poem’s seven parts thus focus on the three main units of the title: “Autumn/in the lazaretto/of innocent sisters.” In contrast to musical practice, where the composer develops the musical material more or less on one level by applying augmentation, diminution, inversion, repetition, key change, and interval variation, while at the same time trying to produce spontaneity and dynamism, the poet has in the word a material that can be developed by paronomasia on several levels—phonetic, morphological, and (especially) semantic. The semantic level can be further subdivided into relationships based primarily on metaphor or primarily on metonymy. Variations on the phonetic and morphological levels might correspond fairly closely to musical practice in providing brief sonic motifs that can be developed, but the semantic level opens up nearly infinite possibilities. In poetry of this type, surprising and unanticipated effects are readily produced by sudden shifts from one level to another, with consequent development of associations on the new level. Thus Part 1 begins with a semantic-contextual (metonymic) association: “In the lazaretto of Innocent Sisters it is September!”5 From there, associations are developed not with the word “autumn,” which drops from view, but with “September.” The line also contains another variation in shifting from nevinnykh (“innocent” with a broad connotation of lack of anything to be guilty about) to 5. V lazarete Sester Nepovinnykh—sentiabr’!

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nepovinnykh (not convicted or held guilty of anything). The next lines build on the association of September with “seven” (the seventh month of the Roman calendar), directly using the Latin words (emphasis added):

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September. Septimus. Seventh circle in Seventh Heaven. The sky darkens, Septimus, Septimius, you leaf through the leaves.6

Seven, when translated back into Russian suggests the Seventh Circle of Dante’s Paradiso. Seventh “heaven” produces a “sky” (both nebo in Russian), which darkens on a Brother Septimius, who is leafing through not leaves of paper (which would be listy), but leaves of trees (list’ia), as in fallen autumn leaves. Septimius, the poet reports,7 does not refer to anyone in particular (one looks in vain for him in Paradiso), but was merely a name suggested by septimus. He does nevertheless serve as a sympathetic counterpart to the “Sisters” in a monastic, latinate setting. Further, the mystical number seven figures not only in the name of the month and in Dante’s circles of heaven, purgatory and hell, but also in the seven parts into which the poem is divided, and in the seven parts (Introit, Kyrie, Sequence, Offertory, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei) into which the traditional musical portions of the Latin Requiem Mass are divided (although in concert requiems there are usually further subdivisions, especially in the long Sequence). Nearly all the associations in the opening stanza are semantic, based on the meaning of words in Russian and Latin, rather than on sounds or morphology—although the links Septimus–Septimius and “leafing through leaves” (list’ia listaesh’ ) might be considered morphological, the latter is in fact an example of paregmenon. However, 6. September. Septimus. Sed’moi/krug na Nebe Sed’mom./Nebo merknet, Septimus, Septimius,/ty/list’ia/listaesh’. 7. Letter to this writer, 2 May 1984.

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the next stanza introduces a different principle, one which is a hallmark of Mnatsakanova’s poetic technique and can be understood only from the Russian text:

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Brat Septimius edva li e dva libo dva li dva li bo dva li bo tri li bo mnogo tam by lo nevidimykh brat’ev

Brother Septimius scarcely scar cely or two ly two ly or two ly or three ly or many there we re invisible brothers

She breaks words down, here syllabically, into meaningful subunits, which then suggest new paths of development. Thus edva (scarcely) is divided into e dva as if in a rhythmic chant. This separates out dva (two), and a sequence of repetition-variations is generated which goes on to three and then many. At the same time, li (interrogative particle) becomes libo (or), which is then enjambed and eventually metathesized into by-lo (were). Along with this, the lone Brother Septimius has multiplied into a cohort of many invisible brothers. As noted above, this technique closely parallels the musical practice of focusing on a fragment of a theme to produce variations and developments by subdivision and recombination. Mnatsakanova’s “Requiem” has numerous examples of this sort. The next two stanzas contain other important sequences. First comes a passage which links the two initial stanzas: Brat Septimius ty li bo ty list’ia listaesh’?

Brother Septimius is it you or you leafing through the leaves

Then comes a new development:

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nevinnykh nevidnykh nedvizhnykh sester nevid imo nevid imykh nedvizhimo brechennykh pogibeli gnoinoi

of innocent unseen immobile sisters unsee ably unsee able immobilely destined for a destruction rotting

By beginning with another word from the title and producing a series of grammatically based deep slant rhymes based on it, the poet links the qualities of innocence, motionlessness, and invisibility of these fellow-suffering women doomed to a wretched fate. The image emerges of Brother Septimius leafing through these poor suffering women like pages in a medical record which are in turn fallen, rotting autumn leaves. This links them to the first epigraph at the head of the poem: “And I saw upon the right hand of Him who sits upon the throne a book written within and sealed with seven seals” (Rev. 5:1). Brother Septimius is He who is leafing through the book of life as, one by one, the seven seals of revelation are broken, Part by Part, in the poem. Note also one detail in the above passage, the sharing of a vowel by two words: nedvizhim-o/-brechennykh, as if a shift of levels occurred in mid-word on the basis of the common vowel “o”, as often occurs in musical modulations where a note shared by two keys serves as the pivotal point for a change from one key to the other. The next stanza develops the new word that emerged at the end of the previous series (gnoinoi ): Brat Septimius, Goriat i gnoiat i gnoiatsia pustye glaznitsy!

Brother Septimius, They burn and rot and are rotting the empty eye-sockets!

The next stanzas chant these sequences in varying configurations, adding only the linkage brat—boliat—goriat (brother—they hurt— they burn) by way of new development until the Part ends on a further

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reference to Revelation, a couplet in upper-case letters with a series of subtle, rich sonic links: SEM’IU SEMERO BYLO TAM IKH SOSTRADAIUSHCHIKH BRAT’EV

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SEVEN TIMES SEVEN WERE THERE OF THEM OF FELLOW-SUFFERING BROTHERS

If the starting point of Part 1 was autumn/September/seven, the starting point for Part 2 is the second noun of the title, lazaret, technically a military field hospital or infirmary. But the military aspect is not as relevant as the etymology of the word, which can be traced, via French, to the Venetian church of Santa Maria di Nazaret, which in the fifteenth century established a nearby hospital, di San Lazaro. The Venetians combined Nazaret with Lazaro to produce lazareto, or lazaretto, and subsequently lazaro (Fr. ladre), a “leper” and later “sordidly vicious person.”8 The connection of the name Lazarus to leprosy is supported by Christ’s parable of Lazarus, “covered with sores,” and the rich man (Luke 16:19–31). More relevant to the poem, however, is not this Lazarus, but the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany, whom Christ raised from the dead (John 11) and who had died of causes other than leprosy. Thus Part 2 begins: lazarus they tremble my dead hands tremble and don’t sleep and no sleep comes to me to me no no not to me sleep to me not to me no

8. O. Bloch and W. von Wartenburg, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950), pp. 340, 346. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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w to me forever not eternally and eternally not to me no no do not sleep in the grave of the fallen asleep in the alcove of the not-sleeping does not sleep lazarus—brother brother of all the fallen asleep

A tension is maintained between being dead and being alive (“dead hands/tremble”; “no sleep comes to me … not to me”; “not/eternally and eternally”; “in the grave of the fallen asleep/in the alcove of the notsleeping”) which we can imagine in the mind of Lazarus returning from the dead and which the poet herself experienced in the hospital. Associations are worked out on a variety of levels. The sound of the repeated “not to me” (ne mne) generates nyne (now), which in turn, based on the Russian Orthodox liturgical formula i nyne i prisno i vo veki vekov (and now and forever and unto ages of ages), generates prisno (forever), and vechno (eternally) and then later in Part 2 veki (ages) itself. The active participles later generate a whole series of others, not unlike the “word-weaving” of the hagiographer Epiphanius the Wise:9 sleeping not-sleeping not seeing not-seeing not visible not-visibly trembling calling coming not-seeing hobbling10

9. See, for instance, the conclusion to his “Life of St. Stefan of Perm” (Ad. Stender-Petersen, ed., Anthology of Old Russian Literature [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954], p. 224). 10. spiashchikh nespiashchikh ne/zriachikh nezriachikh ne/zrimykh nezrimo/ drozhashchikh/zovushchikh/griadushchikh/nezriachikh bredushchikh

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The thick, repeated sibilants of the Russian endings (-shchikh, -chikh) and other consonants obsessively embody the rustling of dry leaves and ghostly movements of Part 1. Part 3, titled “Song of rotting sisters” (Pesnia gnoinykh sester), the first Part to be composed, contrasts with the other six in being in a standard verse form of quatrains of rhymed couplets in anapestic tetrameter changing to trimeter after the first three lines. The meter is observed throughout, except for the second line, where an unstressed syllable is dropped. This Part, with an obvious implication that the uninvited female guest is Death herself (smert’ [fem.]), focuses finally on the “Innocent Sisters” of the title, who so far have been mentioned only in passing, though there is an implied link with “brothers” Septimius and Lazarus. The first stanza brings back the association of the sisters with autumn leaves:

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Gost’ei gnoinoi nezvanoi khozhu po domam List’ia gnoinye shleifom b’iut po nogam Gnoinykh list’ev korona siiaet ventsom Vysoko nad beskrovnym litsom Like a rotting uninvited guest I walk house to house Rotting leaves beat at my feet like the train of a dress A crown of rotting leaves shines like a wreath High above my bloodless face

The obsessive repetition of forms of gnoinyi (rotting) from the preceding part is prominent here. It is noteworthy that the initial cluster “gn ” has predominantly negative associations in Russian (gnida [nit], gnoi [pus], gnil’ [rot, mold], gnusnyi [foul, vile]),11 somewhat like English “sl” (slime, slut, slush, sloppy); the articulation is doubtless a significant component of these words’ sound symbolism.

11. Of the forty-two words listed by S. Ozhegov in Slovar’ russkogo iazyka (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1964), pp. 130–31, beginning with gn-, twenty-two are variations of the words mentioned. In addition, most of the others have negative connotations in some contexts, e.g., gnat’ (to drive, force), gnev (anger), gnesti (to oppress), gnut’ (to bend).

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Repetitions in this Part tend to come in pairs, echoing the twocouplet structure of each stanza. Thus the second stanza begins with a partial repetition of the first stanza: Like a rotting guest I pass over the earth Along a rotting moldy path Falling leaves, falling golden leaves! Never to return to my home!

The second couplet of this stanza becomes the first couplet of the fifth and final stanza and is followed there by a close repetition of the second couplet of the third stanza: I will finish my not long time In the Lazaret of Not-Long Cripples

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However, at this point the quatrain structure turns into something closer to a litany. There is no space between the preceding couplet just quoted and the following lines, which end Part 3: In the Lazaret of the Innocent Forever In the Lazaret of the Not-Sleeping Forever In the Lazaret of the Strolling Who-Knows-Where In the Lazaret of Gone-Astray Brides In the Lazaret of the Wandering Around In the Lazaret of the Hobbling From Behind Lazaret, Lazaret, Nazareth...12

If we consider the preceding couplet to belong to this litany as well as to its own quatrain (as the -o- belonged both to nevidimo and obrechennykh), then we have two quatrains of lines all of which rhyme in couplets that are slant rhymes of each other. At the end, the pattern develops a coda repetition of Lazaret, which is then 12. V Lazarete Nevinnykh Navek/V Lazarete Nespiashchikh Vovek/V Lazarete Guliashchikh Nivest’/V Lazarete Brodiashchikh Okrest/V Lazarete Bredushchikh Vosled/Lazaret, Lazaret,/Nazaret ...

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rhymed with Nazaret, a link which is not only sonic, but, as we have discovered above, deeply etymological. It is perhaps no accident that this most highly structured part of the work is the one composed by memory in the hospital, since the traditional versification devices of meter, rhyme and stanza are useful mnemonically. This part is also unique in the poem as the part in which, with the exception of some additions in the final litany,13 no changes or additions were made between the early version supplied to me by the poet and the version published in Apollon-77. Evidently the strict form inhibited the kind of further associative developments that occurred throughout the rest of the work. Only in the litany was there enough formal flexibility to permit change. The next part is titled “Recordare, Jesu!,” the first overt reference to the Latin Requiem, which thereby picks up the next piece of the main title. The given phrase begins the section of the Sequence which expresses the sentiment: “Remember, kind Jesus, that I am the reason for your incarnation and save me from damnation on that day of judgement.” In some of the most famous concert requiems (by Mozart, Verdi, Berlioz), this is a moment of quiet pleading after the drama of the preceding section, “Rex tremendae majestatis!” Therefore, we are entering while the Requiem liturgy is in progress and some of the most dramatic parts have already passed. The mood is expressed by the opening lines of Part 4: Sister says to Sister: “Never to forget: ‘The Examining Room’ ‘The Bandaging Room’ ‘The Snack Bar’ (the cabbage soup rancid—with fumes, fumes) ‘The Dissection Room’—somewhere here somewhere there 13. In the original version, the lines between ia skonchaiu nedlinnyi svoi vek and Lazaret, Lazaret, were: “v Lazarete Guliashchikh Kalek/V Lazarete Skorbiashchikh Navek/v Lazarete Bludiashchikh Nevest/v Lazarete Bredushchikh Vosled.”

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somewhere nearby nearby near close by

In this recitation of the horrible chambers of the hospital, even the food in the snack bar reminds one of poverty, decay and hell. There follows a glimpse of orderlies carrying what seems to be a corpse on a shrouded pallet:

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they are carrying: it is narrow it is lengthy it is something long (eternal?) wooden this thing they are carrying (a white unbending shroud—step by step, close by)

The remainder of Part 4 is developed from these motifs. From chadom (with fumes) we already have riadom (nearby), sledom ([following] close by), and shagom (step by step), to be followed eventually by other morphologically parallel forms with the same stress pattern: iadom (by poison), snegom (by snow), and vzgliadom (by glance). Later this chain of associations includes nad ogradoi (over the fence) and then nagradoi (by reward), closely linked in sound, but also by the instrumental case, now feminine. It turns out that chadom is the sonic and rhythmic key to about half of the associations in this part. Progorklye (rancid) is developed paronomastically in the following way: shagom vzgliadom progorklym pregor’kim gor’kim gnoinym (step by step by a glance rancid most bitter bitter rotting)

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the corpse in the shroud. Finally there is another example of a modulation occurring on the basis of a shared syllable: sentiabr’ sentiabr’ se stra govorit sestre:

September September S ister says to Sister:

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A long developmental sequence has ended on a string of Septembers that unexpectedly returns us to the opening line. Part 5, “Song of the merciful brother,” begins with a slightly varied reprise of the first line of Part 1, then introduces a sequence based on Khlebnikov-like internal declension14 in connection with the consonant cluster “br ” (sentiabr’ [September], oktiabria [October], brodit brat [brother wanders], bred [delirium]). This in turn produces a clustered allegro passage in which words are run together and enjambed. Here are the opening lines of this part. V Lazarete Sester Nepovinnykh—sentiabr’ … Khodit smekh Brodit smekh U vorot Oktiabria Brodit brat Brodit brod Brodit bred brat brat brod brod itbratbrod itbratok tiabriabro15

14. Khlebnikov proposed that the vowels in Russian inflection could be given certain abstract meanings that could then be applied to the same vowels when they appeared in word roots as well. See V. Khlebnikov, “Uchitel’ i uchenik,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3, pp. 171–72 (Reprint, Munich: Fink Verlag, 1972). Eng. trans. V. Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 1: Letters and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas, pp. 277–78. Also Roman Jakobson, Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (Prague: Politika, 1921), pp. 48–51. 15. In the Lazaret of Innocent Sisters it is September/Laughter walks/Laughter wanders/At the gates/Of October/A brother wanders/A ford wanders/Delirium wanders brother brother ford wan/dersbrotherwan/dersbrotheroc/toberwan

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An immediate reprise of this passage produces further variations:

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V Lazarete Sester Nepodvizhnykh—oktiabr’ … Khodit smekh Brodit smert’ Khodit sneg Po koleno V dozhde Brodit brat Shag za shagom16

Hereafter and continuing into the final two parts there are increasingly frenetic variations based on all the previous material, which soon become too complex to be quoted effectively. The poem, up to this point set in two columns on Apollon-77 ’s ample folio pages (11" ⫻ 13"), now requires the full spread of the page, and the layout draws greater attention to itself. Not only is there more frequent allegro clustering of words, but these passages become longer. Capitalization is used for emphasis (shouting), and, toward the end of Part 5, repeated words are scattered across the page. The phrase, Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis (Grant them, O Lord, eternal rest, and let perpetual light shine upon them), which begins and ends the Requiem mass, enters for the first time in Part 6, where the first two words are used as the title of the part and additional fragments of the phrase are scattered throughout. Associative chains, which have heretofore been brief, in Part 6 become quite extensive. In fact, this Part could be considered a single associative chain based on all the foregoing material. With the exception of the Latin phrase, there is practically no new material; everything is a direct development of earlier themes. The following excerpt gives an idea of the whole, which covers more than two folio pages (141 lines):

16. In the Lazaret of Immobile Sisters it is October/Laughter walks/Death wanders/Snow goes/Knee-deep/In the rain/A brother wanders/Step by step Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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leisia leites’ shagom vzgliadom nad vzgliadom shagom shagom leites’ shagom nad vzgliadom iadom iadom leites’ iadom vzgliadom vzgliady leites’ leites’ vzgliady ostylye prostylye pokoinye pristoinye pristoinye stony stony veselye leites’ stony veselye leisia krov’ stony slezy veselye leites’ shagom vzglaidom iadom veselye leites’ requiem aeternam dona eis: lux perpetua luceat eis17

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One notable associative event, fully developed toward the end of this part, is a trilingual paronomastic link between the Russian leites’ (pour), the Latin luceat eis (shine upon them), and finally the German ewiges (eternal), which parallels the semantic associations: svetom vechnym svetite sviatye sestritsy luceat svetom lux perpetua vechnym luceat eis predvechnym luceat svetom vechnym luceat leites’ eis, leites’ eis smeites’ eis sleites’ eis svetites’ eis sviatye eis sviatye ewig svetom ewiges vechnym eis leites’ eis ewiges eis leites’ lux luceat eis sviatites’ ewiges eis struites’ lux perpetua18

Mnatsakanova comments: The composition of the parts … more or less observes the composition of the Catholic Requiem; Mozart’s Requiem was my model. The Latin text is from there also. But I tried to combine the Latin text with the Russian, to make them consonant. I don’t know if I succeeded. But I tried. Lux perpetua luceat eis is the main idea of the whole thing.19 17. Pour pour step by glance over glance step by step pour/step over glance by poison poison pour by poison by glance glances pour/pour glances chilled chilled through deceased decent/decent groans groans merry pour groans merry pour blood/groans tears merry pour step by glance by poison merry pour/requiem aeternam dona eis: lux perpetua luceat eis 18. with eternal light shine holy sisters luceat with light lux perpetua/eternal luceat eis with pre-eternal luceat eternal light luceat pour eis,/pour eis laugh eis pour together eis shine eis/the holy eis ewig with light ewiges eternal eis/pour eis ewiges eis/pour lux luceat eis/bless ewiges eis/stream lux perpetua 19. Letter to this writer, 1 March 1983.

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The reader should keep in mind that the word luceat should be pronounced in the German fashion (lutseat), as the author indicates in her Russian transcription of the phrase contained in the preceding quote, though the Italian pronunciation (lucheat) is even better in the context, since it nicely echoes the “ch ” in vechnym (eternal). The connection with Mozart’s Requiem is made explicit in the poem by its third epigraph, “Listen, Salieri, to my Requiem,” from Pushkin’s “little tragedy,” “Mozart and Salieri.”20 Salieri is presumed to be responsible for Mozart’s death, though Mozart, of course, triumphs through the greatness of his art. The second epigraph, “DO NOT DO AN EVIL DEED,—/THE DEAD AVENGE THEMSELVES WITH CRUELTY,”21 are the last lines of N. Gumilev’s poem “Revenge from beyond the grave,”22 a ballad which narrates how three brigands beat up a man and leave him to die, after which each of them in turn dies a miserable death. The theme of ultimate, if only posthumous, triumph over the abuse foisted on helpless victims by cold-hearted evil-doers is underlined by these two epigraphs. Finally in Part 7, “Resurgam” (I will resurrect), the grandest structure of all emerges, with a marked visual component. The poet explains: In the end, in “Resurgam,” polyphony, the division of the text into voices, occurred spontaneously. But when I noticed this, I understood that in some places it was possible to create a basis also in a musical form, a fugue, for example. Of course, not in pure form; literature after all has its own laws. But the result was interesting, that is, a new fugue form of a purely literary type.23

Polyphony is achieved by arranging small groups of words in threes horizontally and vertically on the page. Initially there are four groups across and six down, then six groups across (Figure 2.1). The effect is arresting. 20. A. S. Pushkin, “Motsart i Sal’eri,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, 2d ed. (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1956–58), vol. 5, p. 367. 21. “Ne tvorite dela zlogo,—/Mstiat zhestoko mertvetsy.” 22. N. S. Gumilev, “Zagrobnoe mshchenie” [1918] (no. 385), Sobranie sochinenii v 4–kh tomakh (Washington: Victor Kamkin, 1964) vol. 2, pp. 195–97. 23. Letter to author, 1 March 1983.

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Figure 2.1 E. Mnatsakanova, “Requiem,” beginning of Part 7

The first question is how to proceed with reading the text. Does one read one set (ia vernus’/ia pridu/ia vzglianu [I’ll return/I’ll come/ I’ll look up]), then move to the right and read that set? Or down to the next set below the first? Or the first words in each set across the top line and then the second line across? Common practice (set = stanza) would strongly suggest that we read each set as a unit, and this generally produces understandable syntactic sequences. This is, in

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fact, what Mnatsakanova had in mind. From there we are to move to the right to read the next three-line “stanza.”24 This procedure simplifies matters a great deal but does not, I think, do justice to the possibilities present in the text—although it is perhaps the single solution a conservative reader will be most satisfied with. The point, however, is that the poem exists at a complex intersection of sight and sound in which neither separately can do justice to the work. In fact the eye (and here I emphasize the visual level) simultaneously perceives several competing vectors at once. Added to the ones already mentioned is the possibility (though not a strong one) of diagonal reading, and a tendency for the eye to notice and link repeated words and stanzas, an urge that is compelling when one confronts the whole page. Initially, then, the reaction is to let one’s eye wander along these various vector-paths more or less at random, searching for a way to proceed while being confused by the conflicting possibilities. It becomes clear that although the eye can rapidly take in the whole picture silently, a single reading voice cannot adequately handle such a text. Visually, the opening section of Part 7 is a well-defined block of four-by-six three-line stanzas creating an overall rectangle with approximately the same proportions as each component stanza. This leads to another block of stanzas with a more complex, oval or crosslike configuration. Thereupon follows a lengthy section which, by comparison, appears visually chaotic and grows increasingly so until the very end, where we meet an obvious cross-like shape (Figure 2.2), like a Baroque figure-poem, such as is found in the Russian sphere, for instance, in Simeon Polotsky.25 The poet has said26 that she intended in Part 7 to produce an orchestral score with a specific musical structure, something of a hybrid of a sonata-form movement (with principal and secondary 24. Letter to author, 2 July 1985. 25. S. Polotskii, Izbrannye sochineniia, ed. I. P. Eremin (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1953), p. 113. On figure poetry in general, see Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: A Guide to an Unknown Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). 26. Letters to this writer, April–May 1985.

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Figure 2.2 E. Mnatsakanova, “Requiem,” conclusion

theme, development section, and recapitulation) and a double fugue (which ought to have two fugue subjects first stated individually in succeeding episodes and then developed simultaneously). The visual structure parallels at least the sonata form rather well. The two opening sections could represent the principal and secondary themes,

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respectively; the chaotic section would be the development section; and the final cross a recapitulation of the opening sections and a return to order. However, one would also expect this structure to be reflected in the verbal contents of the text, and here the matter is less clear-cut. The principal theme (“I’ll return/I’ll come/I’ll look up”) is stated clearly at the very beginning, and dominates the first section. But the secondary theme (gnoinym svetom … gor’kim smekhom [with rotting light … with bitter laughter]), though it does emerge clearly in the second section, is already hinted at in the first section, and the principal theme is strongly present in the second section as well. For the musical structure to be clear, these two themes should have been kept more separated and should have been combined only in the development section. And there is nothing at the end, even in the cross figure, that noticeably recapitulates the text of either of these themes, except perhaps in the word resurgam as an image of returning. Rather, we have continual development to the very conclusion. If we examine the text for evidence of a fugue or double-fugue form, we must first of all face the question of simultaneity. The essence of musical polyphony is, of course, several melodic voices or lines proceeding simultaneously, and the fugue is one of the main genres of this sort. Literal polyphony in a verbal medium, as opposed to a metaphoric use of the term such as Bakhtin’s,27 is technically impossible with one reciter or reader, though the eye can come close to a sense of simultaneity by a rapid scanning of the page. If we take this latter approach, then we have a situation similar to that found in Vasily Kamensky’s “ferroconcrete” poems of 1914–17,28 but if we take the approach that each small three-line stanza is meant to be recited simultaneously by three separate voices, then we have true polyphony, or at any rate simultaneity. There is a precedent for this technique in the choruses of Ilia Zdanevich’s dras and 27. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Izd. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), pp. 7–9. 28. See G. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Chap. 4, for a detailed analysis of these poems by Kamensky.

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the simultaneous poems of the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists,29 although these would not have been familiar to Mnatsakanova at the time. Actually, I think the first approach is more interesting, since it allows for a degree of indeterminacy and variability in reading. However, an individual reader has little choice but to resort to scanning. The point is that the first approach involves a visual simultaneity— as in a painting, where one sees the whole instantaneously, but then may explore the details over a longer time span—rather than a musical simultaneity. On the other hand, it is not unlike some modern musical compositions, where a player is provided with a page of scattered pieces of notation and is instructed to play the pieces in any order for as long as desired. But this, too, is a kind of visual structuring where the roving eye, as much as the ear, determines ad hoc the order of musical events. It is only the second approach, the choral one, that is truly akin to the musical technique of polyphony. But with it certain relationships or vectors that are apparent to the eye would have to be sacrificed, that is, left unrealized in sound. One can perform the text in only one way at a time. This said, it becomes clear that implementing a truly fugal form here is problematical. Parts of the text would have to be allotted to specific voices, as in a Zdanevich chorus, and we ought to be able to follow each voice as a separate entity. If we take the three-line stanzas as indication that there are three voices, then, to begin with, we do not actually have polyphony, but homophony, that is, “chords” of simultaneously spoken words. In the “development section,” the voices do separate, but then we are prevented from keeping track of the individual voices by the disorder of the layout. There are, however, a few instances of what could be called a fugal stretto, where the same subject or motif is repeated by the three voices in close succession, as indicated by the diagonal layout, for instance in the middle and lower third of the last page (Figure 2.2) with resurgam and ia—shagom, etc. If we do not insist too strictly on such formal matters, the impression is indeed created of movement from ordered articulation to a jumble of voices. 29. Ibid., pp. 169–78, 21–23.

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The figure of the cross at the end—a purely visual, not musical, effect and not so neatly configured as in typical Baroque examples— might be seen as a coda, if not a recapitulation. It is a fitting conclusion, because the cross, an instrument of present suffering, is also a promise of future salvation, a symbol of victory over one’s enemies in this life. The poem suitably concludes on the word resurgam. Other works by Mnatsakanova use similar or even more elaborate associative and musical procedures. For instance, in Das Buch Sabeth (1972) there are lines of scansion without words; only the rhythm is given. In addition there is a grand passacaglia30 effect, where a column of repeating italicized words on the right is juxtaposed to much freer variations scattered to the left, reflecting the regularly repeated pedal line over which the organist provides variations in the manuals.31 In “Dialogues and views” (1972–82), many lines simply demand to be sung; for example: ooo maaat’ ooo maat’ Mat’ ——- —-— ooo—-—ooo——-ooo—-— teeesnyyy teeesny dooooski do mo viny——-——32

The repetitions typical of these works may evoke in the EnglishAmerican reader the image of Gertrude Stein, whom Mnatsakanova has not read;33 in places where the repetitions are perhaps too extensive and monotonous they may produce an irritation that Stein also 30. A passacaglia is a musical composition, typically for organ, in which a melody in the bass (pedal) is repeated over and over again, while the upper registers (manual keyboards) perform a series of variations above this melody. 31. E. Mnatsakanova, Shagi i vzdokhi (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1982), pp. 147–67. 32. O mother, the boards of the coffin are cramped. Ibid., p. 195. 33. Letter to this writer, 20 January 1983.

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produces at times. But nowhere are Mnatsakanova’s paronomastic and musical techniques better illustrated and their pitfalls so thoroughly avoided as in her “Requiem.” As V. P. Grigoriev states: In resorting to paronomasia, poets raise accidents in the historical development of the lexicon to the level of poetic semantics. Paronomasia interacts vigorously in context with metaphors, similes, and other devices of verbal art.… Possessing, in contrast to alliteration, its own level of content, paronomasia thereby mirrors the links between phenomena in individual artistic pictures of the world.34

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If in Khlebnikov’s world paronomasia leads to word creation, in Mnatsakanova’s world ugly pressures make paronomasia a device for conveying the disintegration which surrounded her. Yet, despite this ugliness, by making full use of the power of paronomasia and quasimusical form, she has created out of her own negative experiences and verbal associations a grippingly evocative musical and visual poetic edifice.

34. V. P. Grigor’ev, “Paronimiia,” Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1962–78), vol. 9, pp. 598–99. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Elizaveta Mnatsakanova Elizaveta Arkadievna Mnatsakanova (b. 1922, Baku), both of whose parents were medical doctors, moved to Moscow in 1945 to attend Moscow University and the Moscow Conservatory. She received diplomas in piano and music theory and a graduate degree from the Conservatory, and earned her living writing books and articles on the music of Mozart, Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and others. Her first literary-artistic works, a series of handwritten, selfillustrated books of poetry, were done between 1946 and 1948. None of her poetry was published in the Soviet Union, nor did she try to have it published there. In April 1975, she emigrated to Vienna where she was first employed as a schoolteacher of Russian and piano. Because of difficulty pronouncing her surname, the children simplified it to Netzkowa, which she began using as a pen name. Since 1979 she has been teaching in the Slavic department of the University of Vienna. She is a prize-winning translator from German into Russian and from Russian into German. Her first major collection of poems, Steps and Sighs (Shagi i vzdokhi) was published by Wiener Slawistischer Almanach in 1982. In recent years she has published elegantly designed editions of her major works and translations using her own original artwork. Her first book published in Russia, VITA BREVE, appeared in the Perm series “Vodolei” in 1994.

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Chapter 3

HOW JOSEPH BRODSKY READ HIS POEMS It was strange to see you in a natural setting; no less strange though was the fact that nearly everyone understood me. The reason no doubt was the ideal acoustics connected with the architecture, or—in your intervention; in the general inclination of an ear with perfect pitch toward inarticulate sounds. Copyright © 2000. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Joseph Brodsky, “Vertumn”1

J

oseph Brodsky in most respects is notably more conservative than the other poets examined in this set of essays. He employs mainly the traditional devices of standard Russian syllabotonic versification (meter, rhyme schemes, stanzas, metaphor, etc.), if with various, sometimes subtle, departures from traditional practice.2 Yet anyone who has ever heard him 1. Stranno tebia bylo videt’ v estestvennoi obstanovke no ne menee strannym byl fakt, chto menia pochti vse ponimali. Delo, naverno, bylo v ideal’noi akustike, sviazannoi s arkhitekturoi, libo—v tvoem vmeshatel’stve; v sklonnosti voobshche absoliutnogo slukha k nechlenorazdel’nym zvukam. Iosif Brodskii, Peizazh s navodneniem (Dada Point, Calif.: Ardis, 1995), p. 69. 2. See especially the various essays in Poetika Brodskogo, ed. L. V. Loseff (Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1986), and Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff and Valentina Polukhina (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

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recite his own poems cannot help but be struck by the unusual manner of his recitation, which is incantatory and quite unlike the prevailing modes of the oratorical style derived from Mayakovsky, or the more traditional, subdued, intimate lyrical style of Akhmatova and Blok, or the theatrical style favored by Russian actors giving public poetry “concerts,” where the verse features are minimized in favor of a “natural,” prosy, emotive manner of delivery. Brodsky instead chants his lines, seeming to be possessed by a force independent of his personality, as one might imagine a Greek oracle possessed by a message from the gods. His manner is public and projective like the oratorical style, but much more musical, in fact he nearly sings.3 This aspect of his poetic persona is not obvious or even to be guessed at from the text of his poetry on the page and it is the aspect that permits me to include his work in this set of studies of sight and sound. As an example for analysis, I’ve chosen his “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” [January 1965]4 because his reading of the poem at the University of Louisville, 19 November 1975, was both typical of his recitation style and particularly successful in the correspondence between its prosodic-melodic and thematic features. 3. Lev Loseff described his initial reaction to Brodsky’s reading in the following way: “… though I myself was by that time [1962] a tried and tested reader of poetry I was absolutely knocked out by his reading. That notorious shamanistic way of reading he has didn’t shock me in the least, though as you know, I’m made very differently and am very suspicious of extremes of any sort, and that includes people who make a show of reciting their poetry. The poem I remember best from that reading is ‘Hills’.… It wasn’t really just the fascination of the way he read which is, as I now know, the very quintessence of the musical qualities to be found in his verse—if you like you could call it a prosodic feast; there was also the sheer novelty of his poetry, because it seemed to me then that I was hearing the poetry that comes to one in one’s dreams, the poetry that I had always dreamt about, and here it was as if someone had managed to catch it and write it down.” Interview in 1989 with Valentina Polukhina in Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes of his Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. 115–16. Among others who have remarked on Brodsky’s reading style and its intonational intensity in Polukhina’s collection of interviews are Anatoly Naiman (pp. 3, 4, 8), Yakov Gordin (pp. 30, 36), Elena Ushakova (p. 97), Vladimir Ufliand (p. 143), Viktor Krivulin (pp. 186–87), Elena Shvarts (p. 228), and Czesl~aw Mil~osz (p. 327). 4. Iosif Brodskii, “Stikhi na smert’ T. S. Eliota,” Ostanovka v pustyne (New York: Chekhov, 1970), pp. 139–41.

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Since the poem has been ably translated by George Kline5 and its themes and place in Brodsky’s oeuvre well discussed by Polukhina and Bethea,6 here I will discuss only those aspects of the poem that relate directly to Brodsky’s recitation of it. Following the model of W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939), the poem’s 82 lines are divided into three sections: I (lines 1–40) in five octets (rhyme: aaaBcccB), II (lines 41–54) with one octet (rhyme: aBBaaBBa), a quintet (rhyme: AAbbA) and a monostich (rhyming with the preceding line), and III (lines 55–82) in seven quatrains (rhyme: AABB). Sections I and II are in iambic pentameter and section III is in trochaic tetrameter. The structure of Brodsky’s recitation is astoundingly precise in its melodic outlines. Each of the stanzas in sections I and II have identical patterns with only minor variations. In musical notation, the typical pattern (given here in the actual pitches for Stanza 2) is seen in Figure 3.1, Example 1. An upbeat (1) on the pitch of the preceding cadence (Stanza 1, of course, excepted) leads to a downbeat an interval of a fourth or fifth above (2). This is established as the chanting pitch or tenor, which rises in the course of the stanza by three semitones (3)(4)(5) to the minor third (5) above the tenor. On some significant word in the penultimate or final line of the stanza the pitch dips momentarily to the fifth below (6) and then returns to the chanting pitch (7) until the final cadence configuration (8–10). The figure (6–7) serves as a pre-cadence signal and identifies the tonic pitch, since (6) and (10) are the same. Musically speaking, the 5. Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1973/Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 99–102. 6. Valentina Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 81–88; David M. Bethea, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Chap. 4. Also especially relevant are Brodsky’s essays “Footnote to a Poem,” “On ‘September 1, 1939’ by W. H. Auden,” and “To Please a Shadow,” in his Less Than One. Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986), pp. 195–267, 304–83. The earlier versions of the present essay contain additional comments on the poem that have been omitted here; see G. Janecek, “Comments on Brodskij’s ‘Stixi na smert’ T. S. Eliota,’” Russian Language Journal, vol. 34, no. 118 (1980):145–53; and “Brodskii chitaet ‘Stikhi na smert’ T. S. Eliota,’” Poetika Brodskogo, op. cit., pp. 172–84.

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Figure 3.1 J. Brodsky’s Recitation: Musical Examples

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-

cadence is quite harmonic in its progress from the fifth (7) through the minor third (8) and second (9) to the tonic note. The stressed presence in the cadence of the second makes the cadence less final than a progression from the fifth to the tonic, yet it provides for a certain finality while allowing for continuation. This pattern is so regularly and clearly observed that, without seeing the poem printed in stanzas, it is quite easy from the melodics of Brodsky’s recitation to hear where the stanza divisions fall and even predict their arrival ahead of time. Of course, an ear attuned to traditional Russian versification is also aided by the rhyme and meter patterns as well. Each stanza of Sections I and II rises from an initial tenor (2) through three semitones to (5) and, with the exception of a slight variation in Stanza 7, has a cadence configuration equivalent to Figure 3.1, Example 1. The stanzas in Section II do not, however, have

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the pre-cadence figure (6–7). The important pitches for the stanzas are shown in Table 3.1 (corresponding with the numerical positions in Figure 3.1, Example 1): Table 3.1 Pitch Positions in Brodsky’s Recitation

I

II

Stanza

(2)

(5)

(8)

(9)

(10)

Key

1

D

F

C

B

A*

a minor

2

E

G

Ef

D

C

c minor

3

Fs

A

F

E

D

d minor

4

G

Bf

Gf

F

Ef

ef minor

5

Gs

B

G

Fs

E

e minor

6

G

Bf

Gf

F

Ef

ef minor

7

G

Bf

Fs D

E

D

d minor

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*In this one instance, the interval between (5) and (10) is not a fifth, but a sixth, as if to introduce the process of modulating to a new key.

Pitch (2) can be seen to rise by whole tones or semitones through the first five stanzas, carrying with it the pitch positions of the rest of the stanza. This modulation creates a magnificent rising arch of tension to a highpoint of B at pitch (5) in Stanza 5. The two stanzas of Section II show a release of tension and a slight lowering of pitch position to a final cadence in the last line of the section (the monostich [line 54] which Brodsky includes in the melodic pattern of Stanza 7) and this returns us by a slight adjustment in the structure to the pitch of D on which the poem began, thus closing a neat modulatory circle. This cadence may be seen in Figure 3.1, Example 2. Indeed, Stanza 7 has several special features, among which are its rhymes exclusively on the “high” vowel “i ” (svoi, i, unyly, mogily, korabli, zemli ), its truncation (5 + 1 lines instead of 8), and its modulating progression downward. The visual separation of line 54 in this context gives it an unusually marked significance, first of all, as a highlighted sententia, and second, as the melodic cadence not just to its own stanza, but to the melodic arch of the first two sections.

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Significantly, Brodsky made only a slight pause before this line, much less than he usually does between stanzas. The fact that this arch is musically elegant illustrates Brodsky’s fine sense of pitch. Section III presents us with a different but related structure. The individual quatrains do not have final cadences, but rather they are grouped under a melodic arch which has a cadence only in the last quatrain. Within this arch, however, there are structural subdivisions. The gradual rise of pitch by semitones, as in (2–5) above, occurs over the space of two quatrains, then it dips a semitone to begin a new two-quatrain rise, followed by another dip, until finally in the last two stanzas he wavers between high C# (or Db) and D. The final cadence in Stanza 14, which concludes the entire poem, is seen in Figure 3.1, Example 3. The poem is found to be largely in the key of D minor. The concluding stanzas seem to waver between D minor and F minor, which the final cadence resolves into the relative major of F. The musical details of this structure are quite impressive, but perhaps too technical to be discussed further here. It is important to keep in mind that Brodsky does not quite sing, but rather intones his lines, so the pitches described are not as precise or constant as they would be in a true song. There are swoops and glides around the main pitches. The preceding description identifies only the most obvious melodic signposts. While it is possible that this form of chant, which consists of rising semitones, is related to the Russian Orthodox liturgical recitation of the Epistle, which traverses an octave in this way (Brodsky does the same, though in cadenced segments, going from D to D), it is more likely a structure that comes naturally in an incantation of increasing intensity. Of particular interest is the cadential configuration. Work by Buning and van Schooneveld, Bryzgunova, and Gardiner7 has pointed 7. J. E. Jurgens Buning and C. H. van Schooneveld, The Sentence Intonation of Contemporary Standard Russian as a Linguistic Structure (s’Gravenhage, The Netherlands: Mouton, 1961); E. A. Bryzgunova, Zvuk i intonatsiia russkoi rechi (Moscow: Russkii iazyk, 1972); Duncan B. Gardiner, Intonation and Music: The Semantics of Czech Prosody (Bloomington, Ind.: Physsardt, 1980).

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to the significant regularity of the intonational cadence from the fifth to the tonic at the end of Russian declarative sentences and also its likely relationship with the development of Western musical melody and harmony. An analogy has been made between sentence intonation and Gregorian chant, with the chanting pitch (tenor) of the authentic modes located a fifth above the cadential final pitch (tone).8 It is beyond the scope of this study to discuss this further, except to note that while Brodsky’s practice conforms roughly to the standard Russian cadence pattern of fifth to tonic, it does so in a peculiar manner: the interval of the fifth occurs between pitch positions (7) and (10) rather than somewhere in the final cadential configuration (8–10). Typically, the fall from the fifth to the tonic ought to occur between the final preictus and ictus, as in Figure 3.1, Example 4. Brodsky’s cadential formula seems therefore more related to the sliding cadence of chant than to speech intonations. Also, his melodic phrases correspond not to syntax, but to the verse structures of his lines and stanzas. His final cadences occur only when the end of a sentence is also the end of a stanza (in Sections I and II). Therefore many sentences which end elsewhere (either line-internally or stanza-internally) are deprived of a normal cadence. In addition, line units are usually clearly marked in his recitation by pauses, regardless of the syntactical situation. Brodsky uses enjambment fairly frequently,9 but the line break is almost always observed in his recitation by the presence of a significant pause. In fact he does not distinguish between a line ending with a period and a mid-word enjambment, so that in the poem lines 46 and 47 have equivalent breaks: 46 ne strast’, a bol’ opredeliaet pol. 47 Odna pokhozha na Adama vpol48 oborota. No pricheska—Evy …

8. Gardiner, p. 36. 9. See Barry P. Scherr, “Beginning at the End: Rhyme and Enjambment in Brodsky’s Poetry” in Loseff and Polukhina, op. cit., pp. 180–93, for a discussion of this aspect.

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46 not passion, but pain determines sex. 47 One figure looks like Adam in half48 profile. But the hairstyle is Eve’s …10

In this poem there are fourteen enjambments of varying radicalness (line 47/48 is the most radical), and Brodsky provides them all with pauses. On the other hand, there are also sporadic line-internal pauses, and these do tend to correspond to syntactic divisions. More rarely (three instances in the given recitation), he will run a line into the next one without a pause, no doubt for the sake of rhythmic variety, but in these cases it is again in violation of the syntax and there is end punctuation (lines 44/45, 62/63, 70/71). In short, Brodsky’s recitation is more closely bound to prosodic structure than to normal speech intonation. It should be noted, moreover, that while one could not guess the special features of Brodsky’s recitation from the page, nevertheless the determining factors of stanza and line division are fully visible in the layout of the text, and his recitation is made to correspond with them, rather than with the standards of syntax and normal intonation. This reflects Brodsky’s emphasis on the special nature of poetic language. By highlighting rhyme and meter, by pausing even at the end of enjambed lines, and by reciting his poems with a unique melodic chant, Brodsky is declaring the transcendence of poetry over the chaos of mortal existence (syntax, everyday speech), and in this way also distinguishing poetic creation from other forms of verbal creation (e.g., prose and drama).11 The effective confluence of recitation and text described here in one relatively early case (1975) in Brodsky’s career as a public performer of his own poetry is not unique among his public readings. Rather, the manner is typical of Brodsky. Perhaps too typical and eventually at risk of being merely an automatic reflex, regardless of the content or style of the poem read. Not all poems, probably not 10. Literal translation by the author. 11. For Brodsky’s views on declamation, see especially Iosif Brodskii, “evropeiskii vozdukh nad Rossiei,” interview with Annia Epelboin [1981], Strannik (Moscow), no. 1 (1991):37.

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even all Brodsky poems, should be recited this way. Cases in point are his recitations of Akhmatova poems at the Library of Congress, 24 February 1993, and his recitations of English translations (sometimes by him) of his own poems. Whatever the important relationship there had been between Akhmatova and Brodsky, they are very different poets; and when one has heard her own delicate, lyrical recitations recorded in the 1960s, one cannot help but feel that the Brodsky manner of recitation is inappropriate to them. The matter of recitation in English is more complex. While no Englishlanguage poet I know of recites quite this way, it certainly produces an interesting effect. What it does also, in the case of Brodsky’s own translations of his poems and of his poems written directly in English, is to cover those places where his language sense is nonnative12 (a problem miraculously absent in his prose). The manner, to be fully effective, requires the poet to be at full energy, able to enter a practically trance-like state of intensity and vision—something difficult to achieve when one is on heart medication and has to appear on schedule, time after time. There is also the probability that his being on “automatic pilot” in latterday recitations was intentional. In an interview with John Glad published in 1987, the poet remarked: “I incline toward neutrality of tone and I think that a change in meter or the quality of meters may indicate this. And if there is any evolution, then it is in an effort to neutralize any lyrical element, to bring it close to the sound produced by a pendulum, i.e., for there to be more pendulum than music.”13 Brodsky’s voice became stilled in January 1996, adding the next link in a chain begun by Auden with Yeats (1939), and then by Brodsky with T. S. Eliot (1965) in the poem discussed. His manner of recitation may not be the most important aspect of his work, but it is certainly the one that most directly and easily

12. David Bethea provides a succinct but finely nuanced evaluation of this aspect of Brodsky’s work in op. cit., pp. 233–36. 13. Joseph Brodsky with John Glad, “Nastignut’ utrachennoe vremia,” Vremia i my, no. 97 (1987):176.

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impresses itself on the listener, even on the listener who cannot follow the Russian text itself. One has the immediate sense of being in the presence of something significant. Brodsky’s poetry will continue on without him, of course, but we have certainly lost one of the most recognizable, memorable and unique voices in modern poetry.

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Joseph Brodsky One of the most esteemed Russian poets of the latter part of the twentieth century, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (1940–1996) was born in Leningrad and was early recognized by Anna Akhmatova and others as an important new voice in Russian poetry. After being accused and convicted of social parasitism by the Soviet authorities in 1964, he was exiled to hard labor in northern Russia. He emigrated to the United States in 1972 and spent his initial emigration at the University of Michigan, then taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Mount Holyoke College. The recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991–92. His first collections of poems appeared in the United States in 1965 and 1970, before his emigration. Editions of his poetry and essays and translations of his poetry by himself and others have appeared regularly since then in the United States and, more recently, in Russia. Volumes of his complete collected works began to be published in his native city in 1992, and consequent to his death a new edition is planned.

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Chapter 4

HENRY KHUDYAKOV, POET OF COMPRESSED FORM enry Khudyakov’s poetry provides an unusually clear example of the arrival of a radical new technique for laying out verse on the page and subsequently of an equally radical way of reciting it based on the new layout. In the 1950s, Khudyakov wrote in traditional forms, often rhymed quatrains; but it occurred to him that these orderly, blocky configurations did not correspond to the sharp, chaotic peaks of emotion that he was trying to convey in his poems. Therefore, in 1962 he began to work out a graphic system better suited to his expressive purposes. In an interview with Viktor Tupitsyn in 1982, Khudyakov described how this process came about:

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H

V.T. When did you first begin to use visual imagery? H.K. In fact, from the very beginning: even the poems written in columns are the direct result of a visual approach to the word. Once in 1962 when I wanted to transcribe into a notebook some rhymes and fragments of lines which were scattered over various bits of paper, it turned out that all this looked different than I expected. It turned out that I had substituted wishful thinking for reality: when written in a “line,” the purely verbal composition looked naive, and I sensed this once I had come in contact not just with the “ideal,” i.e., the abstractsemantic side of the matter, but with the material side: the paper, ink, letter symbols, etc. Soon I began to move the words around the paper

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in order to achieve the best layout. Eight months were spent on this, in the course of which I created a system for writing down my things.1

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As Khudyakov subsequently explained to me (letter of 4 March 1984), the idea of how to attack the problem probably came subconsciously from the stepladder of Mayakovsky, who otherwise did not significantly influence him. Khudyakov therefore began stepladdering his lines, then further shortened the segments, thereby increasing the angle of incline. The final logical step was to arrange the segments vertically in a column. Most of Khudyakov’s poems exist in either a traditional layout or in the new layout (the majority). At least one exists in two versions, which we may compare in order to better understand the profound and complex transformation involved in the new system. They represent a trail, as it were, left by Khudyakov to allow us to follow the evolution of his poetic form. The items in question are “At the Black Sea Itself ” (U samogo Chernogo Moria [Alushta, Autumn, 1955]) and its later variant “Into/Bro-/Mide” (V/Br-/Om [16–17 December 1962]—see Figure 4.1), both published on the same page in Apollon-77 (p. 103).2

1. “henry khudyakov,” interview with Victor Tupitsyn, A-YA (Elancourt) no. 4 (1982):21. The translation in A-YA has been adapted and corrected in several places. As it turns out, the interview had been somewhat altered by A-YA and the original version was subsequently published by Tupitsyn in his collection “Drugoe” iskusstvo. Besedy s khudozhnikami, kritikami, filosofami: 1980–1995 gg. (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1997), pp. 91–98. 2. Because of typographical errors in the texts given there, the poems are cited here from the poet’s own typescript.

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U samogo Chernogo moria Stoit trekhetazhnyi kottedzh... Dva mesiatsa mykal tam gore, Rodilos’ menia chto doprezh’!.. Mezhdu topolei, kiparisov Na fone gory golubom Stoit on, lishennyi abrisa— Ne to belyi grib, ne to gnom!.. S balkona pod samoiu kryshkoi Na more,—kogda ne u del,— Vse chashche ne iungoi uzh s vyshki, A slovno pozharnyi gliadel...

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By the Black Sea itself Stands a three-storey cottage... Two months I lived there in misery, It had been born before I got there!.. Among the poplars and cypresses, Against the blue background of a mountain It stands, deprived of a contour— Either a white mushroom or a gnome!.. From the balcony up under the very roof At the sea,—when not occupied with chores,—3 More often not like a boy in the crow’s nest, But like a fireman [I] gazed.

3. Khudyakov was there in the off-season when the resort had ceased its usual services; therefore, he had to cook and clean for himself. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Figure 4.1 H. Khudyakov, “V/Br-/Om”

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Figure 4.1 H. Khudyakov, “V/Br-/Om” (continued)

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Figure 4.1 H. Khudyakov, “V/Br-/Om” (continued)

The original is generally a traditional lyric depicting a landscape on the Black Sea coast evoked with some intensity and interesting imagery. It is quite accessible, but hardly striking in any way. The second version, however, immediately throws the reader off balance. The principles involved in the new layout are fairly simple. Each word of more than two letters is broken into two-letter pieces and

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arranged in a column. If the word has an odd number of letters, the penultimate piece has three letters. The first letter in each piece is capitalized (“a kind of atavistic semblance of separate verse lines,” as the author puts it).4 But if the final piece in a word contains an unstressed vowel, then the piece is not capitalized—unless it has a secondary stress, which is supposed to be provided for every third vowel after a stressed syllable.5 The latter rule, though it provides some visual variety, might be considered unnecessarily complicated. Since this factor is too complex for the reader to figure out easily, the rule comes across in practice not as a rule but as an element of free or arbitrary variation. In fact, Khudyakov himself is not rigid in his application of any of these principles, but frequently violates them in a variety of ways. For instance, he breaks into three-letter pieces long words which would create a very long column in two-letter pieces; the word lish’ (merely) is not divided because of its “sonic compactness” (as the poet explained to me [oral communication, 1983]); and, disliking the consonant combination pr, he divides it wherever it occurs, regardless of the rules. Also, the punctuation is noteworthy. Hyphens are naturally used to link pieces of the same word, and also as spacers or pause-markers between some words. One hyphen indicates a pause greater than the normal break between words; two hyphens are used to indicate a structural division, though, according to the author (letter 4 March 1984), they are not meant to indicate a greater pause than one hyphen. Three dots introduce emphatic insertions into the flow of thought.6 The role of insertions, that is, the interruption of one flow of thought by another emotion-packed train of thought or exclamation, is great in Khudyakov’s poetry and this,

4. G. Khudyakov/Aftograf, “KOMMENTARII k osobennostiam graficheskoi zapisi stikhotvorenii ‘stolbikom,’” in K. Kuzminsky and G. Kovalev, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, vol. 1 (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1980), p. 511; also in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow) no. 16 (1995):193. 5. Kuzminsky and Kovalev, pp. 511–12. 6. Ibid.

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along with heavy use of other unusual punctuation and elliptical expression, shows the influence of Tsvetaeva, although Khudyakov takes them to a new level of intensity. Rearranging a text in this way can initially be a mechanical procedure, however radical and unorthodox, although for Khudyakov it has not been purely mechanical, and he allows himself considerable leeway for entirely spontaneous variations in addition to those already noted. To paraphrase Zhovtis,7 any change in layout produces a change in one’s perception of the text, and here the “one” is, foremost, the author himself. A new layout changes the vectors, introduces or exposes new patterns (or a new potential for patterns), and creates different pressures. A radical change of layout is likely to produce a significant shift in other prosodic elements as well. For instance, the new look of a word may cause us to examine it more carefully and to see in it features we had not noticed before, internal or external relationships we had previously overlooked. One may experience some difficulty recognizing even very common, familiar words in the new layout. At the very least, this produces “defamiliarization” (ostranenie). Furthermore, the marked emphasis on vertical extension changes one’s perception of the length of the poem. It seems longer, and there is pressure to shorten it, to eliminate superfluous verbiage. The minimalization of the horizontal tends to destroy a sense of sequentiality and syntax in favor of small units, knots, explosions, or spasms. It is rare that a word remains whole and unhyphenated. Thus small words occupy a privileged position in their wholeness. These tend to be prepositions, pronouns and expletives, not verbs or even nouns, and certainly not those hallmarks of discursiveness, participles. This general compression into units of mostly two letters must inevitably have an effect on intonation and cause a fragmentation of expression, of verse “melody.” In fact, perhaps the first question a reader might ask upon being confronted with one of these poems is: “How 7. “In verse of any structure, joining several lines into one, or, on the other hand, breaking one into several pieces immediately affects the intonation. The intonation changes, carrying along with it the sphere of content, for intonation is an inseparable part of content.” A. L. Zhovtis, “Granitsy svobodnogo stikha,” Voprosy literatury 5 (1966):108.

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in the world do you read this?” Before considering this question, let us examine the second version and its relation to the first version in more detail. In order to do this, I have produced a third version here which might be helpful. In the third version the content of the second is retained, but the layout has been returned to a standard stanza pattern with divisions based on rhymes. Note that the poem now has four stanzas instead of the original three. V brom tavrskogo l’ iz Chernovzmorii... ot syrosti l’?..solnts li?!. kottedzh... gde...likhom v razmyk by!.. k zamore na mysl’,.. tem, na svet chto doprezh’

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zamory!.. Promezh kiparisov na fone gory...kolunom, torchkom!.. iz kaprizov abrisa: li to volnolom, li to gnom,.. to mukhomor v biriuzovyi, li to belogrib v izumrud,— uglom ikh zh v podvetrnost’ brizovyi V slukh to vdrug volchkom, to vraskrut balkonom pod shifernoi fishkoi,.. s nego zh, s plech lish’ kambuznyi krest, ziud kursom ne iungoi uzh s vyshki... vernei vse!.. pozharnym okrest... Into the bromide of Tauris from the Black Sea coast... from dampness is it?..from suns?!. a cottage... where...to relieve the misery!.. to [my] affliction!..8 the thought came into the world before

8. The background to these difficult lines is that the poet had been suffering from severe nasal congestion in Leningrad for two years, and as a result had been unable to study. He was given a therapeutic trip to the Black Sea in the hope that the southern climate would cure his medical problem.

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the affliction!..9 Through the cypresses on the background of a mountain,.. axe-like, sticking up!.. from caprices of outline: either a breakwater or a gnome,.. or a death-cup toward turquoise, or a boletus toward emerald,— at their corner into leeward sea breeze To the hearing suddenly like a spinning top unwinding

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like a balcony under a slate tile [roof ],.. from it, from the shoulders the cross of kitchen duty,10 in a southern course not like a ship’s boy from the crow’s-nest... more truly!.. like a fireman [looking] around...

Perhaps the first thing to point out is that the two poems are indeed versions of the same poem—a fact probably not immediately obvious until one constructs the third version. Many of the key words of the first remain in the second (e.g., kottedzh, doprezh’, kiparisov, na fone gory). This is particularly true for the rhyme words, though the fact that they are rhymes is not nearly so evident in the second version (or even in the third one): the visual cues for locating them have been obliterated. Other words reappear in variant forms; for example, U Chernogo moria (By the Black Sea) becomes iz Chernovzmorii (from the Black seaside), mykal tam gore (lived there in misery) becomes likhom v razmyk by (to relieve the misery). And we have a considerable amount of new, but related material. In short, the poem has been extensively reworked. It is worth examining the direction of this reworking. Firstly, all the principles of layout described above are illustrated in the new version, including a long word broken into three-letter pieces (Cher-Nov-Zmo-rii ), an undivided Lish’, and two words that do not follow the rules, (Pro-Me-Zh, and—capriciously—Ka-P-Rizov).11 Note that three-letter words such as gde (where), tem (that), 9. The feeling that the affliction was part of his life even before he was born is expressed here even more elliptically than in the first version. 10. That is, once his kitchen chores were done, he could relax. 11. In both cases, the issue seems to be the forbidden combination pr. In the first instance, the word has an even number of letters (zh in Cyrillic is one letter)

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and chto (that) do not fit the rule and must be divided either G-De or Te-M. Secondly, verbs are completely absent. The verbs in the first version were not very active or strong (stoit [stands] twice, mykal [lived in misery], rodilos’ [had been born], gliadel [gazed]), so they are easily dispensed with. The avoidance of verbs is characteristic of Khudyakov and has led commentators to call his poems rebuses.12 In place of verbs we find much more vivid and active prepositional phrases and adverbs. Thus, for Dva mesiatsa mykal tam gore we have Gde likhom v razmyk by k zamore, certainly a gain in intensity. Also, soundplay and wordplay are increased in intensity. A glance at the new version of the second stanza makes this clear. We have not just two pairs of rhymes, but much more elaborately developed relationships (kolunom, torchkom, volnolom, gnom, uglom—echoing the initial V brom; kiparisov—kaprizov abrisa; mukhomor v—biriuzovyi). Much of the new material would appear to be a natural consequence of the stolbik (column) layout, as Andrei Bely demonstrated with his first collection Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri, 1904); that is, there is a tendency in poetry to build relationships between line units: the more lines, the more relationships possible, desired and even expected. But these are aspects that are inherent in what Bely had already done, and they could also result from a layout such as that of our third version. They do not justify or even readily emerge from Khudyakov’s second version, which takes Bely a step or two farther, although Bely himself did occasionally split words into syllables or, a few times, into even smaller units. The same is true of Mayakovsky.13 In the case of Khudyakov, the artificial division of words into segments of one to three (mostly two) letters delays word recognition and forces us to reconstruct the words from initially unfamiliar fragments. Consequently, we are likely to pay more attention than and should have been divided into two-letter segments, but the first is given three letters to avoid isolating pr; in the second, P and R are separated instead. 12. L. Alekseeva and M. Volgin, “vecher piati stikhotvorenii,” Gnosis 5–6 (1979):194, 196. Khudyakov’s verblessness had been previously noted by V. Andreeva, “In a Small Poetry Circle,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 16 (1978):204. 13. See the chapters on Bely and Mayakovsky in my The Look of Russian Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

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usual to the components of words, rather than swallowing words as whole units. We may note, possibly for the first time, that gde divided as G-De contains de, which might be semanticized into deskat’ (they say/it is said); that chto divided Cht-O contains an exclamation (O!); that cypresses contain rice (Ki-Pa-Ris-ov); that dampness is related to growth (Sy-Ros-Ti [ros = he grew]); or that turquoise “summons” one (Bi-Riu-Zov-yi [zov = summons]). Moreover, the possibilities of parallelism among pieces are increased and highlighted, as in this example from another poem:

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PRi EloS’ ,...

PRe LosT’ !-14

Here two words, meaning respectively “it palled” and “moldiness” and already paronomastically related, are given a similar visual configuration that further emphasizes their closeness. In the poem we have been focusing on, Om becomes a visual leitmotif independent of its role as a prominent rhyme and can create visual links with Oland On-, with its mirror image Mo-, and thence by further extension with To. When the units are as small as these, such palindromic relations are easy to use and can provide a creative variety and richness of patterning. Here we should note that, because the subdivisions are based not on morphology15 but on a system of counting letter symbols, the units frequently contain combinations quite bizarre and in violation of our sense of the language (e.g., Tte-, Rchk-, Lchk-, Mb-, Rn-). Sometimes these unexpected configurations cause initial misreadings which reveal hidden meanings. An excellent example is found in another poem:

14. From the unpublished collection Koshki-”Mishki”, p. 93. 15. It should perhaps be added here that Russian standards for hyphenation of words divided over a margin in prose are freer than they are in English, where morphology plays a role. In Russian, a word may be divided at nearly any point, regardless of morphology.

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!..“DoMo Ddy Kha ”!!.16

These lines take some deciphering (dom otdykha = vacation lodge), but clearly they end in a laugh (ha!). Other configurations have a purely visual impact. One particular example, for instance, creates its effect by dramatically departing from the usual layout rules: Oi Ty Go I Es I

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Ploshchad’ Krasnaia !Ploshchad’ Krasnaia ,Do My Kr Epkie ,..17

Here Khudyakov mimics the rectangular expanse of Red Square by leaving these two words undivided, in stark contrast to the surrounding narrow columns.18 16. Koshki-”Mishki”, p. 39. 17. Ibid., p. 24. “Oh, how fine you are, Red Square! Red Square,—Strong Buildings,..” 18. An effect the poet did not, as it turns out, consciously intend. Rather, he explains, for some reason the words “themselves did not ‘want’ to be broken down into segments” (letter to this writer, 12 February 1998).

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In general, the vertical spread of the narrow column creates a strong pressure toward contraction, toward a “squaring off,” so that the vertical dimension is less disproportionate to the horizontal than could easily be the case when a single line in the traditional layout might take up a full column in the new layout. In the third version of the poem that is our primary subject, we see that virtually all syntactically motivated “filler” words have been removed, leaving behind only essential words and phrases, which are quite fragmentary or syntactically elliptical, although highly charged with content and emotion. At the same time, the imagery, while retaining the original framework, becomes more specific: a “death-cup” instead of just a “mushroom,” “Slate tile” instead of a “roof ” (which thereby clarifies the parallel between the white-stemmed, reddish-capped mushroom and the cottage walls and roof ), nautical conditions spelled out more specifically, and colors added. The imagery becomes more hermetical—mainly because of the weakened syntactic links. The last stanza is particularly challenging in this regard. The image, as the poet explained it to me, is that of looking from the balcony southward toward the sea, not triumphantly (like a boy at watch in the crow’snest of a ship), but calmly (like a fireman expecting no emergencies because he is surrounded by water). The elliptical syntax is perhaps more palpable in the layout of the third version than in Khudyakov’s second, where we are too busy reconstructing the words to worry about the lack of complete sentences. Khudyakov’s style everywhere tends toward succinctness, compactness, and intensity—rather like Marinetti’s description of “wordsin-freedom”: CONDENSED METAPHORS. TELEGRAPHIC IMAGES. MAXIMUM VIBRATIONS. NODES OF THOUGHT. CLOSED OR OPEN FANS OF MOVEMENT. COMPRESSED ANALOGIES.19

19. U. Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 100. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Or, “Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.”20 This is perhaps more directly a legacy of Russian CuboFuturism and Literary Constructivism (e.g., A. N. Chicherin),21 but is in fact characteristic of excited speech which occurs, as Khudyakov’s poems do, at moments of maximum agitation and dissatisfaction. How then does one recite this challenging poetry? Here it would be most appropriate to play a tape recording of the author reading his poems; however, a brief verbal description will have to suffice. Khudyakov’s reading resembles rhythmic stuttering produced by a spastic glottis instead of the tongue in the oral cavity, where stuttering usually occurs. With special breathing exercises for the lungs and diaphragm which he had begun in the 1960s, he developed the capacity to produce this rhythmic glottal stopping in the same way as wind instrument players produce triple-tonguing or fluttertonguing. The effect, while not precisely duplicating the segmentation in the layout, nevertheless creates an equivalent sense of nervous tension caused by a highly emotional state. His recitation certainly makes a strong and unique impression and an audience is likely to be surprised, even shocked by it on first exposure. Khudyakov developed this recitation style in emigration. When I played a tape of his readings for various friends of his in Moscow during the summer of 1983, they uniformly remarked that he did not read in this way when he lived in Moscow, but they added that his reading style even then was unique. Khudyakov neither converted all his earlier poetry into the new columnar form nor stopped writing in the traditional form. However, he did take the next logical steps beyond the new form. In 1965 he began to write what he called katsaveiki (short, furtrimmed jackets), where the text was reduced to only a few words,

20. Ibid., p. 98. 21. See my The Look of Russian Literature, pp. 191–202, and “A. N. Cˇicˇerin, Constructivist Poet,” Russian Literature (Amsterdam) no. 25 (1989):469–523, for a discussion of similar principles in the work of Chicherin.

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Figure 4.2 H. Khudyakov, “Time of [a twenty-four-hour] Day”

Figure 4.3 H. Khudyakov, “Window sill rain tap”

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and by 1968 they appeared in the new, carefully worked out visual configuration in the New York journal S.M.S, no. 3 (1968) (Figure 4.2). The given poem, titled “Time of [a twenty-four-hour] Day,” consists of only two almost oxymoronically linked words (brekhali = yapped, vorob’i = sparrows), which have an equal number of letters and therefore are laid out perfectly symmetrically. Off to the right is the abbreviated word for “poem,” as if to assure the reader of the nature of the work presented. Finally, there is the prominent handwritten signature (Aftograf [Autograph] is the poet’s pseudonym) and date meant to suggest that the work is a picture signed by the artist (letter to author, 7 December 1983). The neat layout contrasts strikingly with the raucous and perhaps puzzling, yet maximally succinct text of the poem, a line of iambic trimeter with a poetic inversion of subject and verb. In such katsaveiki, as the poet pointed out to me (same letter), the main thing is the visual distribution of words over the space of the page, which plays the role of a surface, as in a painting. This feature is further developed in the haiku which Khudyakov began to write at the same time (the first ten in 1968, the remaining ten in 1971–73). In these, the first three letters are separated into a box at the left and given suitable visual details. In Figure 4.3 the first letter is the frame, and we are to read “Opodokonnik...” (Window sill rain tap/At christmas?!. On a sub-zero night?!./Against the “window sill”,—pi-ll-ow). Implied in the poem is the metaphor raindrops = tears. This approximates the Japanese calligraphic realizations of the form in which pictographic elements are important. There are twenty of these “minimalist”22 poems. In the 1960s and 1970s Khudyakov engaged in a certain amount of work in the visual arts that paralleled his poetic creativity. An orientation toward the visual can be seen in the poetry itself, with its

22. In the interview with Viktor Tupitsyn, Khudyakov is quoted as referring to the collections of “katsaveiki” and “haiku” as “minimalist albums” (op. cit. 1983, p. 21), however, in the actual transcript of the interview (Tupitsyn 1997, p. 91), this designation of them was actually supplied by Tupitsyn and Khudyakov simply agreed to it.

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rebus-like focus on formal visual elements and nouns. As his poetic urge declined in the early 1970s, his interest in the visual arts grew. Soon after arriving in New York City in 1974, Khudyakov abandoned poetry altogether in favor of brightly colored painting, collage, and clothing design, though these often contain verbal elements, such as his favorite, the ubiquitous logo “I [love] N.Y.” where the word “love” is replaced by a heart symbol.

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Henry Khudyakov

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Henry (Genrikh) Fyodorovich Khudyakov (b. 5 December 1930, Chelyabinsk) completed high school in Moscow in 1948 and Leningrad University (Philology) in 1959. He worked as an art historian (1960–62) and as a technical translator from English and Czech (1963–74). He emigrated to New York City in 1974 and now lives in New Jersey. Most of his poetry dates from before emigration; he now concentrates his energies almost entirely on acrylic painting, clothing design, and other decorative items, believing that it is more appropriate to work in the visual arts in America than to continue to write Russian poetry. Nevertheless, he had six poems in Apollon-77 and has published poetry in anthologies and journals from time to time, most recently in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 16 (Moscow 1995):193–98. When the journal Gnosis asked a number of writers three questions, most wrote at least several lines in response, some several pages. Khudyakov, however, replied: I. Your literary teachers? II. Your aesthetic concepts? III. Your attitude towards your own work?

Kh: I am self-taught. Kh: Don’t wish for yourself what you wish for others. Kh: You [the works] and I and we together. (Gnosis 5–6 [1979]:193)

Khudyakov’s favorite Russian poets were Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, which explains the title of his major (and still unpublished) collection of verse, Koshki-”Mishki” ili zhe Tretii k lishnim (Cats and “Mishas,” or Three to the superfluous), based on a pun (myshki = mice, Mishka is a Russian teddy bear) and on the common expression tretii lishnii (Three’s a crowd). It is an address from one superfluous poet to two others (Pasternak and Tsvetaeva).

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Chapter 5

VSEVOLOD NEKRASOV’S MINIMALIST POETRY hile minimalism has become an accepted and commonly used label in the visual arts and in music to identify works which employ a radically limited range of materials and effects, its application to the sphere of poetry has not been common. We have already noted a tendency toward minimalism in the later works of Khudyakov, but the real master of the style in Russian poetry is Vsevolod Nekrasov. In the Russian context, there is a fairly rich pre-history of minimalist poetry. In addition to ancient oriental short forms such as the haiku and tanka which resurfaced in Russian translation during the post-Stalin period, there are the traditional proverb which has a very rich history in Russia, and the epitaph and epigram. One distinction to note here is that these traditional forms tend to be syntactically and conceptually complete (the haiku sometimes excepted). Even the one-line poem has a certain history from classical times through Karamzin and Bryusov to the Russian Futurists.1 In the latter group,

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W

1. For the first survey of the one-line poem in Russian, see Vladimir Markov, “Odnostroki,” Vozdushnye puti 3 (1963):242–58; reprinted in V. Markov, O svobode v poezii. Stat’i, esse, raznoe (St. Petersburg: Izd. Chernysheva, 1994), pp. 341–56. Also Dmitrii Kuz’min, “‘Otdel’no vziatyi stikh prekrasen!’” Arion (Moscow), no. 2 (1996):68–83.

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moreover, we find one-word and one-letter poems (Gnedov,2 Kamensky, Kruchenykh) and the most famous of them all, Gnedov’s “Poem of the End,”3 which, contrary to popular opinion, does not consist of a blank page, but of a page with the given title and, at the bottom, because it is the last page, the printer’s mark and date (which Markov considers to have spoiled the effect).4 As early as 1913, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov had declared that “From then on a poem could consist of a single word, and merely by skillful variation of that word, all the fullness and expressiveness of the artistic image could be achieved.”5 We can also point to the Constructivist Aleksei Nikolaevich Chicherin, whose principle of a maximum of meaning in a minimum of material led him to extremes of verbal compression.6 In contrast to traditional small forms which have a clearly defined, even rigid structure, the form of minimalist poetry is not predetermined. Therefore a working definition might be that minimalist poetry reduces the verbal means to notably less than expected. This may be in terms of the amount or variety of verbiage, and ultimately this must be decided for a given context that sets up an expectation. After all, a blank page is not necessarily minimalism, since most books have some blank pages at the front or back, and no one pays any attention to them; but the Gnedov poem created a scandal because he had set up an expectation (a title indicating a large verse work) and then failed to fulfill it (no text, end of book; or, in performance, no words, only a brief, silent gesture). Tangential here would be the concept of the literary vacuum (see Chapter 7). Hence, the context is crucial, as is implicit in one of Kenneth Baker’s definitions of minimalism: “the tendency to present as art 2. See Nils Ake Nilsson, “Vasilisk Gnedov’s One-Letter Poems,” in Gorski Vijenats: A Garland of Essays Offered to Professor Elizabeth Mary Hill (Leeds: Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association, no. 2, 1970), pp. 220–23. 3. Vasilisk Gnedov, Smert’ iskusstvu! (St. Petersburg, 1913). 4. Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 80. 5. Quoted from: Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 55. 6. G. Janecek, “A. N. Cˇ icˇerin, Constructivist Poet,” Russian Literature 25 (1989):469–523.

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things that are—or were when first exhibited—indistinguishable (or all but) from raw materials or found objects, that is, minimally differentiated from mere non-art stuff.”7 It is therefore true that one needs something in the framework of a given phenomenon that tells one “This is art.” The old argument in aesthetics that “it is not the picture that makes art, but the frame and the frame’s implicit message ‘This is art’” comes into higher relief in recent theory and practice. As Susan Stewart continues, “The frame focuses our attention not upon content alone, but upon the organization of content and the relationship between content and its surroundings. The idea of content itself is brought about by organizing interpretive activities. To determine what is or is not content and what is or is not context depends upon schemes guided by a purpose at hand.”8 A pile of bricks at a construction site or lumber yard is building material, but, carefully arranged on the floor of a New York art gallery or museum, the same bricks become a minimalist art work by Carl Andre. The boundary between art and non-art (or “art” and “life”) is a key one in the conceptualism and minimalism with which Vsevolod Nekrasov is associated. In an article addressing issues related to a discussion of Moscow Conceptualism,9 Nekrasov lays out principles in the use of poetic language that relate as well to minimalism as they do to conceptualism: 1. “Everyday speech turns out to be far subtler and more developed than any cultured, specially poetic language,” because it is “functional, in use, alive and continually being perfected.”

7. Kenneth Baker, Minimalism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 9. 8. Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 21. 9. Vsevolod Nekrasov, “Kak eto bylo (i est’) s kontseptualizmom,” Literaturnaia gazeta (Moscow), no. 31 (1 September 1990):8. This article was abbreviated and its titled changed by the newspaper editors. The full authorial version has now been published in A. Zhuravleva and Vs. Nekrasov, Paket (Moscow: Meridian, 1996), pp. 307–20. See also Dzheral’d Ianechek [Gerald Janecek], “Teoriia i praktika kontseptalizma u Vsevoloda Nekrasova,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow), no. 5 (1993):196–201.

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2. Conceptualism “proclaims a finally achieved confluence of art and life.” But this confluence takes place “only in the language of art.” 3. “Art will be that text, that segment of speech, which the author, who lives (as we all do) continually in speech, feels obliged to make as good as possible.” 4. “In order to do this, the text or segment of art must be clearly separated out by a frame. Otherwise the obligation would be: to make all speech, all life as good as possible.” This would be fine, but is unrealistic, utopian. 5. The avant-garde may attempt to dispute and broaden this frame, but it nevertheless remains “unavoidable” [neotmeniaema] in principle. 6. “It is precisely this conditional ‘frame’ which provides the possibility for relating more unconditionally, more broadly and more directly to what is inside the ‘frame,’—to the art.” 7. Conceptualism “considers the sole serious, professional criterion to be ‘good/bad,’ and any further concretization or preciseness in these ideas is already a narrowing or a truncation and clearly favors someone at the expense of someone else.” 8. Conceptualism is not new, but is the discovery of one of the foundations of art: there was always communication between the artist and the public, but previously the artist masked this situation. 9. Conceptualism “should more precisely be called contextualism. The very first parameters of this artifice are appropriateness and precision.” 10. Since conceptualism uses natural everyday language and materials, it needs to organize the language specially, so that it makes an impression. More recently (1995), Nekrasov has summarized his view this way: “poetry is that truth which is always concrete—an occasion and not a rule, a breathing and not an adherence to a system and not mechanical technique as such. Not a genre, but the thing that the

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genre and all its techniques are for. And technique always allows for repetition, but the live occasion does not.”10 Along these lines then, a poem is “living, intonated speech” well organized in some suitable frame (context or speech situation) so as to give the impression that it is a work of art. Nekrasov extends the idea that art requires a frame by concluding that ultimately the frame is located within ourselves as perceivers,11 a theme developed more fully in the Russian sphere by Boris Uspensky.12 In more traditional art, the frame is so conventionalized that we assume it automatically and do not pay attention to it as a perception-forming phenomenon per se (museum, art gallery, picture frame, concert hall, book cover, layout in lines on a page). In conceptualism and minimalism, it often and purposely is the focus of attention and becomes a subject of controversy because the material “content” of the work is so commonplace that our first reaction is to deny it the status of art, as have, in the case of Nekrasov, more than a few narrow-minded critics.13 This is especially likely to happen with minimalist works where the verbal material is scanty and quite ordinary, in contrast to many conceptualist pieces, which can be elaborate and where the role of the artist as a thinker and assembler (if not maker) is more obvious. What then does the “frame” consist of in the poetry of Nekrasov, since its forms are not predetermined and can be quite various? The only more or less constant element of form is the quarter sheet of paper that Nekrasov uses for most of his poems, particularly the 10. Paket, p. 567. 11. A remark made in an unpublished lecture on Moscow Conceptualism, 1984. 12. B. A. Uspenskii, Poetika kompozitsii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970), p. 181– 214; A Poetics of Composition, trans. V. Zavarin and S. Wittig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 137–67. 13. Most notably and unfortunately by Mikhail Epshtein in “Kontsepty... Metaboly...O novykh techeniiakh v poezii,” Oktiabr’ 4 (1988):203, where he says that such poetry could have been written by Akaky Akakievich from Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” This can be compared to a similar reaction by A. Stepanov, an otherwise unknown Soviet critic, in reference to the Nekrasov poem “vesna vesna vesna vesna” whose author was, however, not named. The poem was called “a poor imitation of visual poetry—an avant-garde invention of fifty years ago,” A. Stepanov, “Puteshestvie ot ‘A’ do ‘Ia,’ ili Ot ‘neoffitsial’nogo’ isskustva k propovedi antisovetchiny,” Moskovskaia pravda, 20 April 1986, p. 1.

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minimalist ones. Literariness is absent in the modest, ordinary words of a typical Nekrasov poem, such as: Chto delat’

What to do

Chto govorit’

What to say

Kak skazat’14

How to say [it]

The poem consists of three language “ready-mades,” common, almost empty, cliché phrases typically used in situations when a person cannot think of what to say or does not want to express an opinion. The phrases convey incompetence or passivity. They are so common that the lack of question marks in the text is hardly noticed. The art here, of course, is in the choice of identically constructed phrases and in several pairs of repetitions in the three lines. The positioning of the phrases in the center of a quarter-page with extra space between each creates a visual effect that is lost here by being surrounded by another text and in fact has not been retained in Nekrasov’s own editions, where for economic reasons as many poems are placed on a page as space will allow. Framed as originally intended, and not used in the course of a conversation or letter, these externally insignificant words acquire an artistic value that is considerable. One must first make an effort to build a context in which the phrases would be appropriate. This context is another kind of frame, one constructed not directly by the poet, but rather by the reader, who creates it on the basis of hints the poet has placed in the poem. (Hence Nekrasov’s suggestion that readers carry the frame within themselves.) In the present instance, it seems that there are practically no hints about time, place or the identity of the speaker or speakers. This is one of the interesting features of such clichés: they are maximally impersonal, therefore universally usable. 14. Apollon-77, p. 66; Vsevolod Nekrasov, Spravka (Moscow: Postskriptum, 1991), p. 8, hereafter cited in the text. Unfortunately, the literal English translation of these phrases cannot avoid a certain awkwardness, since the impersonal infinitive structure quite common in Russian is not as common or natural in English. Moreover, the aspectual difference between govorit’ (something like “what to talk about or discuss at length”) and skazat’ (“what to say specifically or how to convey what I mean”) is difficult to reproduce succinctly in translation.

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We all use such expressions often and in many contexts. A zero context approaches an infinite context. So then what is the meaning here? Probably that humans relate to many situations and perhaps to the world in general with a sense of helplessness, passivity, or at the very least, detachment. The three phrases are evidently one side of a conversation (e.g., an overheard telephone conversation) in which an unheard interlocutor is complaining and the heard speaker is essentially inarticulate, offering, as it were, no help or even words of consolation. One is free to elaborate a whole scenario on the basis of this much, if one wants. The lack of punctuation, by the way, is provocatively avant-garde, since it quietly violates normal practice and therefore calls further attention to the “artfulness” of text, while it serves to underline the speaker’s lack of emotional involvement in the conversation. The extra visual space surrounding the words introduces a temporal dimension (pauses) that conveys surrounding silence. The poem serves as an excellent example of the principles outlined above: the language has nothing poetic about it, it is the most ordinary set of clichés imaginable, yet the phrases are tightly structured in simple parallels, and they are carefully framed by layout and posited context. In short, we have a well-made poem consisting merely of five very basic words. However, for a minimalist poem, this example would have to be considered one of the more verbose. The zero point for poetic minimalism would be a totally blank page framed in such a way as to make its intentions clear, i.e., it would have to appear in a place where one expects to find a text. Richard Kostelanetz has “written” two books consisting of nothing but blank pages, but they have covers with titles: Tabula Rasa: A Constructivist Novel and Inexistences: Constructivist Fictions (both New York, 1978). The closest thing to a blank page in Nekrasov is one in which only a typed period appears in the lower right corner of the sheet.15 An immediate question is: “Is this a poem?” More basically: “Is it even a text?” If you found such a piece of paper on the floor or the

15. Spravka, p. 64. In this edition, the period does not appear in the lowest possible position, as it should, but two-thirds down the right edge, thus changing the picture significantly. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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street, you would not consider it so; you might not even notice the dot, and you would probably throw the scrap away. But contextualized in a series of other, more obviously literary texts presented on quarter-sheets, or pages in a book, the work is sufficiently framed to be taken as a poem or a prose text (given the position of the period). It consists of a very simple, common, necessary punctuation mark. From the original typescript we can conclude that it is a punctuation mark and not a blot, defect in the paper, or fly speck, because it is clearly typed. (The physical “thingness” of most of these poems makes them fall also within the bounds of concrete poetry, and often causes problems for correct publication of them.) The period is positioned with considerable care so that nothing can follow it either to the right or below. As a punctuation mark, it serves to end a declarative sentence, but there is no sentence before it, no specific content to the declaration. The content is either absent or infinite, like the white background in Malevich’s Suprematist paintings. The phrase postavit’ tochku (place a period) comes to mind to express metaphorically bringing a decisive end to some activity or train of thought. We have no choice then but to turn the page, that is, to go on to something new. But the nature of what has been accomplished or ended is unspecified and the reader must posit something with no help from the author. Nekrasov has recently published a similar poem in which there is a comma instead of a period in the lower right corner,16 thus suggesting a different set of associations. The content finally turns out to be the nature and meaning of the punctuation mark and of punctuation marks in general, a surprisingly rich topic which we will explore also in the work of Aygi in the next chapter. The reader is drawn to participate in a new way, bringing to mind Baker’s comment: “viewing the object under a changed assumption alters your relationship to it, occasioning more activity on your part, or a greater awareness of observation as conduct that in some degree constructs the thing seen.”17 Because of an intense focus on the means of 16. Paket, p. 519. 17. Baker, p. 45.

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expression, I would argue that such works should be classified as poems, rather than as another category of literature (or art, as might be the case for works by Karl Kempton or Anna Alchuk in which geometric patterns are made on a typewriter with dots and other punctuation marks). A next step is to add a word. The positioning of the elements obviously contributes significantly to the meaning here as well. In the center of a page we have:18 .

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odnako

We have the end of some unspecified declaration and a continuation. “Odnako” (however) suggests a coming objection, or at least a supplementary thought, either by the first speaker or by an interlocutor. A third possibility is an expression of surprise (“You don’t say!”). The word is not capitalized as it should be to begin a new sentence, hinting that the period might be functionally only a comma. If in the case of the lone period we have finality, here it is replaced by alternativity, dialogue and potential conflict. . (here [it is]!), with the word posiAnother one-word poem, “vot” tioned in the center of the page, has a dot in the center of the “o” as well, indicating precisely where “here” is. In this case, the dot has to be put in by hand in ink (which sometimes fails to happen, as in Spravka, p. 64) and becomes an entity visually penetrating the word to locate its demonstrative meaning, but the dot then loses its function as punctuation. On the back cover of Spravka, an artist has given the word a three-dimensional look and changed the dot into a nail driven into the center of the “o,” a loss in subtlety, but perhaps a gain in drama. 18. Spravka, p. 59. Since Nekrasov frequently uses footnotes as part of his poetic structures, I will place mine away from the poems to avoid confusion. By the way, a humorous instance of publication travails involving the significant “minutiae” of Nekrasov poems occurred in my first article on him, “Vsevolod Nekrasov, Master Paronymist,” Slavic and East European J. 33, no. 2 (1989):275–92. I quoted this poem and was pleased to see in the proofs that the period and word had been positioned correctly, but when the article finally appeared, the period had disappeared, evidently removed by a zealous editor as a “stray” mark I had missed.

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Nekrasov has a series of different poems using the word nichego (nothing, it’s nothing). One, perhaps banal, instance has the word on the outside of a folded half-sheet, the inside of which is blank. This toys with the paradox that you cannot express the concept “nothing” without producing something. The word typed on a page is something, the page itself is something, the process of verbalization and symbolization is something, like Magritte’s 1929 painting, “La trahison des images,” of a pipe with an inscription that declares that it is not a pipe, and yet in some sense it is. The other meaning of nichego (OK, not bad, i.e., there is nothing wrong) emerges more clearly in another poem where the word is repeated once immediately below itself and overlapping slightly (Spravka, p. 61), suggesting the rapid repetition of the word in a social setting where someone has stepped on your toe and apologized and you say, “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.” At the same time, twice “nothing” is even more nothing than one “nothing.” Let us consider one other one-word poem. In this case, we have the word budet centered on the bottom of an otherwise blank page but with a line drawn just above the word (Spravka, p. 60), and here, as in the preceding poems, the graphic elements and layout play an important signifying role. The word “budet” (it will be), by being placed at the bottom center below a line first suggests an arithmetic sum (“dva plius dva budet chetyre” [two plus two is four]), but the quantities added up and, therefore the resulting total, are unspecified. Then one notices the ambiguities of the situation. A sum should be in the past (or at least in the present), that is, an accumulation of existing values with a given result, but instead, following the conventional language of Russian arithmetic, is in the future. One could easily read a political meaning into this in the Soviet context, or a philosophical meaning, particularly since the phrase “budet vam” is used as a form of consolation: “it will be OK (eventually).” And again, one has no choice but to turn the page and go on. A next small step in complexity is represented by the poem (Spravka, p. 64):

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o solntse

which translates as “o sun.” However, the “o” can easily be seen in this configuration also as the sun itself rising or setting above the horizon of the word for itself. Thus the boundary between minimalism and concrete poetry, in which words are used as visual objects, is a subtle and flexible one, certainly in connection with Nekrasov. As we move into poems with more than one word, greater possibilities obviously appear, including some of the more traditional features of poetry, such as soundplay and rhythm that require at least a few words to establish. Particularly characteristic of Nekrasov is his use of paronomasia as a prime structural feature of his poems.19 One example of this feature, with minimalist and visual properties as well, is (Spravka, p. 63):

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pravda trava

The juxtaposition of these two seemingly unrelated words (truth/ grass) takes on a proverbial quality because the ear immediately perceives a paronomastic relationship between them. But because Nekrasov has chosen to shift the second word to the left, the visual correspondence between them is somewhat obscured. At the same time, this visual shift is coordinated with the fact that the paronomastic relationship, while rich, is not simple either. The vowels are the same, but the first word is stressed on the first syllable, the second on the second syllable; and the consonants surrounding the first a in both words are the same, but the other consonants are different. However, of the remaining consonants, t differs from each of the two in the first word by a single distinctive feature (t–p: place of closure [dental vs. bilabial]; t–d: voicing [voiceless vs. voiced]). In the context of a preponderance of similarities, these differences suffice to 19. For a study of this aspect of Nekrasov’s work, see my article “Vsevolod Nekrasov, Master Paronymist,” op. cit.

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avoid tautology and maintain interest. The words remain in provocative tension, forcing readers to ponder more seriously the relationship proposed. Ideally, rhymed words should produce a similar tension, but rhyme is such a trite device that it is doubtful that many modern readers perceive it in this way, or, for that matter, that many poets any longer intend to use it in this way. It has been necessary to free paronomasia from clichéd use in rhyme in order to reactivate its aesthetic function. Sometimes quite sizable works, whether of visual art, music or poetry, can nevertheless remain minimalist by tightly restricting the variety of their resources. Repetitiousness over great lengths is a hallmark of musical minimalism and the technique can be applied to poetry. Figure 5.1 (Spravka, p. 61) demonstrates how repetition can be used effectively, together with the edge of the page. In the series of “—Rano” (—[too] early/not yet), the dash, as is standard practice in Russian, introduces a piece of dialogue and creates the impression of repeated response to the implied question “Now can we?” Finally when the speaker agrees that “It’s time” (Pora), the page edge cuts off the lower part of the word, suggesting that it is now too late and the person has postponed action too long. The absence of a dash before Pora seems to indicate that it is a continuation of the previous Rano, and that the person has finally changed his/her mind. Nekrasov’s most famous poem, “Freedom is freedom” (Spravka, pp. 5, 68), also uses only two repeated words: Svoboda est’ Svoboda est’ Svoboda est’ Svoboda est’ Svoboda est’ Svoboda est’ svoboda 1964

It develops an equation and by its layout it both affirms that freedom exists (Freedom is) and by its monotonous repetitiveness suggests an attempt to convince oneself of the truth of the statement Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Figure 5.1 Vs. Nekrasov, “—Early”

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despite evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, it uncompromisingly insists, obviously in the face of attempts to misuse the word and turn it into an empty concept, that it means something definite and essential, and that substitutes or illusions will not suffice. Again, the political implications when it was written and when it was published abroad in 197520 were considerable. Implicit in the original poem is a further possibility that was exploited in a later eleven-line extension of the poem in 1977 (Spravka, p. 68), namely, a pun on est’ (is/to eat), but with that the poem outgrows its minimalist bounds in my opinion. Other patter poems illustrate the emergence of a new idea at the end of a blur of repetitiveness. Sometimes the effect is humorous, as in the “Poem About Threads” (Spravka, p. 5):

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STIKH PRO NITI Nit’ i nit’ I nit’ i nit’ I niti niti niti niti Niti niti niti niti niti niti Ne tianite Ne tianite

In this poem, which is most effective in oral recitation, the sequence “thread and thread,” when repeated rapidly, turns into a sonic blur “And threads threads...” until the phrase “don’t pull” (phonetically: nitiniti) is arrived at. The picture seems to be an encounter with a bunch of threads (loose ends) which one seems to be overwhelmed by (or gleefully gathering up) until the final multivalent phrase orders the process stopped. It is unclear whether it is the threads who should not pull the speaker (somewhere) or it is someone (plural/formal) who should not pull the threads (thus unraveling a garment?).

20. In a German anthology that used it as the title poem: Freiheit ist Freiheit: Inoffizielle sowjetische Lyrik, ed. Liesl Ujvary (Zurich: Der Arche, 1975), p. 86. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Other patter poems involve a more intricately evolving sequence and have a more serious message (Spravka, p. 55): Eto ia Eto ia Eto ia

It is I It is I It is I

A gde moia Gde moia Gde moia Gde Moia Moia Moia Moia Moia Iama

But where is my Where is my Where is my Where is My My My My My Hole

In this instance an initial affirmation of presence gradually turns into a question of figurative or literal death. Iama (hole [in the ground]) could be a place of hibernation, concealment or burial, in any case being “underground” or below the surface. And the shocking last word emerges as a paronomastic inversion from the two words that focus on selfhood, ia and moia (pronounced: maiá). As in the other arts, the boundaries between poetic Minimalism and non-Minimalism (Concrete Poetry, Conceptualism and free verse in general) are not particularly clear-cut. In Nekrasov one encounters subtle transfer points in these and other directions. Is the last poem already too long or complex to belong to minimalism? Is the poem about the sun rather a concrete poem? Is the first poem quoted, which used three linguistic “ready-mades” more conceptual than minimal? Are some of these poems not even poems, but something else? Examining these distinctions in the work of Nekrasov is intriguing and valuable, but establishing firm guidelines is not particularly essential. What is significant in his work is the richness and originality of his approach to language. He is able to evoke fresh meaning and awareness from material as modest as a period or dash,

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the shape of a letter, the position of a single word on the page, a sequence of repeated words, a slight shift of sounds. Each poem makes creative use of the unique features of a given set of words, generating from it a correspondingly unique poetic form. Each poetic form emerges naturally from its own material. In each of the general areas illustrated above there are other poems that are somewhat similar, but take their natural growth in other directions. And in Nekrasov’s longer works, minimalism can be seen as an important foundation for much more extensive explorations of the linguistic, sonic and visual properties of common language.

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Vsevolod Nekrasov Vsevolod Nikolaevich Nekrasov (b. 1934, Moscow) studied philology at the now defunct Potemkin Institute in Moscow, where he currently lives. In the 1950s and 1960s he was associated with the Lianozovo School, an informal group of artists and poets centered around Evgeny Leonidovich Kropivnitsky (1893–1976) and his sonin-law Oskar Rabin, which gathered in the suburbs of Moscow. The poets around Kropivnitsky, who included, in addition to Nekrasov, Yan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, and Genrikh Sapgir, focused on spoken everyday Russian as the material for verse. This led to a quiet revolution in poetic diction with far-ranging consequences for contemporary Russian poetry. Nekrasov has authored over seven hundred poems. In the 1970s his poetry appeared in various Western anthologies and periodicals, including Apollon-77, but he was little published in the Soviet Union. His one major publication in the pre-Gorbachev period, Between Summer and Winter: Poems, Counting Rhymes, Riddles and TongueTwisters (Moscow, 1976), which he collected and edited, and which included his own poems and those of other Lianozovo poets, appeared without any indication of his editorship. Since the late 1980s, however, he has regularly given poetry readings and published his poetry and essays on literature and art in Russia and abroad, including two books of poems: Stikhi iz zhurnala (Poems from a Journal, Moscow, 1989), a collection of poems published previously only in samizdat, and Spravka (Reference, Moscow, 1991), a collection of poems previously published in various Western sources. He also published a large collection of essays, commentaries, and poems, Paket (Moscow, 1996), which also includes essays by his wife Anna Zhuravleva, a professor of Russian literature at Moscow University.

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Chapter 6

THE POETICS OF PUNCTUATION IN GENNADY AYGI’S FREE VERSE hile there is a strong element of native Chuvash and Russian Symbolist mysticism in Aygi’s poetry, there is at the same time a significant element of Futurist typographical experimentation. Peter France has noted that Aygi “leaves out many of the transitions of prose, replaces normal punctuation by a system of his own, coins new words, and pays great attention to sound as such, and to the spatial organization of words.”1 All these aspects have both musical and visual features, but it is Aygi’s special use of punctuation that will be the focus of our attention here. However mutable and controversial the norms for punctuation may have been through history, its main functions in the literary sphere center on: (1) semantic/syntactic distinctions, (2) intonational/expressive indications, and (3) spatial/visual properties. In the last category, to the usual set of punctuation marks, poetry adds typographical provisions for line and stanza divisions, extra capitalizations (usually of line-initial words), and sometimes other layout features. In some free verse, layout features may indeed be the only factor distinguishing it from prose.

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W

1. Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 211. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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The unorthodox use of punctuation to increase the expressive complexity of literary texts still awaits its historian, so for the present purpose we will only briefly note a few Russian developments that impinge on Aygi’s poetry. Andrei Bely began introducing unusual layouts and punctuation in his prose and verse very early in the century, and by 1913 Christian Morgenstern, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Kruchenykh, David Burliuk, Gnedov and others had dispensed with punctuation entirely in some of their poems.2 Among the Futurists, however, other more radical experiments tended to overshadow this feature of their poetic practice. For Aygi in the post-Stalin period, as for Vsevolod Nekrasov, avoidance of punctuation was still a radical gambit and was taken as a sign of a forbidden orientation toward the avant-garde. In the late 1950s, Aygi eliminated all standard punctuation, introducing punctuation marks only when absolutely necessary. In fact though, a poem with literally no punctuation is a rarity in his work.3 Rather, Aygi tends to use line breaks and spacing to indicate segmentation and pauses, thus making commas and periods redundant. Elsewhere, while the rules might require punctuation, the syntax is clear enough without it. This elimination of superfluous punctuation can be taken as a measure of the austerity of means characteristic of Aygi in general. 2. Apollinaire took the step of eliminating all punctuation from the 1913 edition of Alcools (Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I [New York: Vintage Books, 1968], p. 281). Many of Kruchenykh’s poems, particularly those in zaum’, were unpunctuated (see A. Kruchenykh, Izbrannoe, ed. V. Markov [Munich: Fink Verlag, 1973]). Most of Gnedov’s contributions to the Ego-Futurist and Centrifuga miscellanies Nebokopy (1913) and Rukonog (1914) had no punctuation and in some cases had no spaces between words (V. Gnedov, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. N. Khardzhiev and M. Marzaduri [Trento: Università di Trento, 1992], pp. 51–67). David Burliuk began to eliminate punctuation earlier than any of the preceding with poems in the first Sadok sudei (1910), and thereafter sporadically published poems with reduced or absent punctuation along with others that were regularly punctuated. His contributions to the Futurist miscellanies of 1913–14 were especially notable for lack of punctuation. 3. For examples, see G. Aygi, Otmechennaia zima: Sobranie stikhotvorenii v dvukh chastiakh, ed. V. K. Losskaia (Paris: Sintaksis, 1982), pp. 366, 391, 395. Hereafter quotations from this edition are cited as Aygi 1982.

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An early example of his practice is the poem “Otmechennaia zima” (1959), the title poem of his major 1982 collection and one of his first poems to be written directly in Russian, rather than translated from a Chuvash original.4 OTMECHENNAIA ZIMA

WINTER NOTED

belym i svetlym vtorym strana otdykhala

by white and bright second the country rested

prichinoi byla temnote za stolom

the reason was to darkness at table and for its own sake creating silence it made a gift not knowing where and to whom

i radi sebia tishinu sozdavaia darila ne vedaia gde i komu

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i bog priblizhalsia k svoemu bytiiu and god was approaching his creation i uzhe razreshal nam kasat’sia and permitting us to touch upon zagadok svoikh his riddles i izredka shutia vozvrashchal nam zhizn’ chut’-chut’ kholodnuiu

and joking now and then he would return to us a life somewhat cold

i poniatnuiu zanovo

and understandable anew

1959

There is no punctuation here but a hyphen in “chut’-chut’” (somewhat). The segmentation of text that is usually accomplished by commas and periods is accomplished instead by line and stanza divisions, thus eliminating the two most frequent and automatic punctuation marks in Russian.5 Were one to introduce standard punctuation here, 4. Aygi 1982, p. 18; cited from the corrected later edition, Aygi, Teper’ vsegda snega. Stikhi raznykh let. 1955/1989 (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1992), p. 13 (hereafter Aygi 1992). See also Aygi, “Obydennost’ chuda,” Druzhba narodov 12 (1993):196. 5. Statistics on this are worth noting. In a sample of Soviet newspapers of 1953, “for 5500 words of text there were 729 punctuation marks (i.e., an average of

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commas would generally be placed at line ends and periods at stanza breaks, with the exception of the seventh line, which would not have a comma after “kasat’sia,” and of the penultimate line, which would not have a period. In these cases, the space divisions might be interpreted as providing emphatic or rhythmic pauses. We might also note the complete absence of another redundant feature of common poetic practice, namely capitalization, whether sentence- or line-initial, another legacy of Futurism. Elsewhere Aygi usually employs punctuation and capitalization to a greater extent, though still sparingly. From the very beginning we can therefore assume his careful attention to and concern with matters of punctuation and layout.6 Nothing is superfluous, nothing accidental, nothing automatic or unpremeditated. Aygi rarely revises earlier works and his decisions are generally permanent. Hence we can proceed in confidence that, once errata have been accounted for, we are dealing with a vital, essential feature of his poetics. Moreover, since all routine, “unnecessary” punctuation has been eliminated, the punctuation that is provided by the poet is thereby placed in the foreground. If for Bely the dash (and his unique double dash) had a specific significance,7 and for Tsvetaeva it was a frequently used means one mark for every 7.5 words); of these there were 245 periods, 436 commas, one colon, 28 dashes, 7 sets of quotation marks, 3 parentheses, 3 question marks, 4 exclamation points and no ellipses.” In a sample of six of Turgenev’s “Stikhotvoreniia v proze,” for “860 words there were 217 punctuation marks (i.e., an average of one for four words). Of these there were 47 periods, 67 commas, 18 semicolons, 6 colons, 45 dashes, 5 sets of quotation marks, 13 question marks, 7 exclamation points, 10 ellipses, and no parentheses” (A. B. Shapiro, Sovremennyi russkii iazyk. Punktuatsiia [Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1966], pp. 63–64). Shapiro notes the greater frequency of punctuation in the literary text and the greater incidence of “emotional” punctuation [?!...] (p. 64). 6. Aygi’s errata lists for his books, in addition to the usual typographical errors, include corrections in the details of punctuation and layout, e.g., “ognia! ” should be “ognia!—” (1982, p. 141) and “siianiem—vozdukhom” (p. 218) should be “siianiem-vozdukhom”. Aygi made his corrections available to this scholar, and they have been incorporated into the citations throughout. 7. See Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Chap. 2.

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of introducing extra pauses, for Aygi the colon and the hyphen have been given a special, idiosyncratic role. The colon is among the least frequently encountered punctuation marks in standard usage, and there is some question whether the hyphen is even a punctuation mark at all in the normal sense, since its most common use is to divide words ad hoc at the justified margins of printed texts. Shapiro (see note 5) does not even report the hyphen’s frequency, though it could not have been absent from his newspaper samples (where they would presumably be plentiful, given the typical newspaper layout in narrow columns), and it is certifiably present in his Turgenev samples. Nunberg regards it as an affix to a word-part (like an apostrophe), rather than to a word, which thereby sets it apart from other forms of punctuation.8 Let us now examine the original way in which Aygi uses these and a few other punctuation marks. The colon can be most succinctly defined as indicating that what follows it is in some sense an “expansion” of some element in the clause that precedes the colon.9 Webster’s mentions such functions as “explanation, example, definition, restatement, recapitulation, quotation, appositive or list.”10 It can also sometimes be used “between clauses of a compound sentence esp. when no conjunction is used and when the clauses balance each other antithetically.”11 These uses correspond to Russian usage.12 For several years beginning in 1964, the colon is particularly prominent in Aygi’s poetry, and especially in poem titles, a feature which then continues for more than two decades. An especially rich example is the following poem.13

8. Geoffrey Nunberg, The Linguistics of Punctuation (Menlo Park, Calif.: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1990), p. 68. 9. Nunberg, pp. 26–32. 10. Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1966), p. 447a. 11. Ibid. 12. Shapiro, pp. 60, 121, 132–37. 13. Aygi 1992, pp. 54–55.

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K ZARE: V PERERYVAKH SNA v aleiushchem li oblake: tak kazhetsia: v ostatke: pered serdtsem: sna v pyli kak budto izvestkovoi: s mira kotoryi slabo snilsia mne — ia v dele nezhnom videl liubiashchikh: vozmozhno obrazy zdorov’ia menialis’ iarkie svoi: o ne shary: ne eto: oblikov dushoi oboznachenie a slovno nad tsvetami pukh: igra prostaia v iav’! zapriatany tam slabo-iarkie!

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kak budto stog sduvaemyi: ne rania stebli: vetrom! i vidimoe vse soboiu pokryvaiushchee: mertveiushchee sorom dorogim: prozrachnee chem limfy sled na rukopisi davnei: ty — solnechnoe zrenie —shevelish’sia v sosedstve sora — obraza vesel’ia vozmozhno blizko: slovno cherez nitku: kak budto duet: kak po koridoru: i svet: nigde ne oblekavshii obrazy: ne soderzhimyi imi nikogda: bez primesi ognia: iz prorubi bessoln’ia!.. zanosit kak v listvu 1965 Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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TOWARD DAWN: IN THE BREAKS IN SLEEP is it in a crimsoning cloud: so it seems: in a remnant: before the heart: of sleep in dust like linechalk: from a world which weakly came to me in dreams — i in a tender situation saw lovers: possibly images of health were changing bright their own: o not spheres: not that: of appearances by soul the designation but like fluff over flowers: a simple game into waking! concealed there weak-bright!

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as if a haystack being blown down: not hurting the stems by the wind! and all visible covering with itself: dying with precious weeds: more transparent than traces of lymph on a long-ago manuscript: you — sunsight — are rustling in the neighborhood of the weeds — an image of merriment: possibly nearby: as across a thread: as if it blows: as along a corridor: and the light: nowhere garbing images: and never being contained by them: without admixture of fire: from a breach of unsalinity!.. accumulates as into foliage

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In the title we have what could perhaps be considered a standard use of a colon in which the second part adds greater specificity to the first part by indicating that it is precisely the breaks in sleep toward dawn that the poet has in mind. In the body of the poem, there are twenty-three more colons (and only ten other punctuation marks: four dashes, four exclamation points, a hyphen, and an ellipsis). In the first stanza alone, we have five phrases in a row separated by colons, a dramatic violation of the rules, which do not permit colons within a colon expansion.14 Moreover, the title can also be included syntactically in this initial sentence-stanza. However, it is not immediately clear why there is a problem with colons nesting within colons—i.e., matryoshka-like elaborations within elaborations—except that after a certain point one can lose a sense of the hierarchy of recursions.15 Nunberg specifically characterizes colon-expansions as “non-recursive,”16 perhaps, one might surmise, because they do not provide for an exit-return to the previous text phrase. There is no “close colon.” Semantically, they provide a forward impulse, usually from the general to the more specific, without a provision for a return to the general. They are open-ended (or dead-ended), as opposed to other insertions, set off by commas, dashes, parentheses or quotation marks, which return us to the previous level by a marked exit. According to the rules, a colon-expansion can end only with a stop. What then do we have here? In the first line we have a prepositional phrase, complicated by an interrogative particle (li ), which ends with a colon leading to what is usually treated as a parenthetical expression: “tak kazhetsia” (so it seems), which also ends with a colon. This suggests that Aygi is simply substituting colons for commas, as would seem to be the case further on as well. But the effect of this unorthodox device is quite different. Instead of a sense of linear syntactic organization, one gets a feeling of 14. Nunberg, p. 31; Shapiro, p. 61. 15. On recursive structures, see Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), Chap. 5. In the context of modern computer programs, the idea of files within layers of folders has, of course, become commonplace and easily conceptualized. 16. Nunberg, p. 31.

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being poised between levels of consciousness, beginning at surface observation with a reddening cloud (of dawn? of sleep?) (li = if that is what it is) seen “it seems” in a “remnant of sleep” which remains “before/to the heart” (“serdtsem”). The boundary between these levels is unclear (is the cloud in the sky or in the mind of the dreamer?) and the heart seems to be both the sleeper and the observer. At the same time, there is a feeling of penetrating to ever deeper levels of sleep or consciousness. In at least two instances (“kazhetsia” and “serdtsem”), instead of punctuation indicating the expected return to the interrupted previous phrase, the colon indicates a further elaboration which may seem difficult to justify as such, either syntactically or logically. Lines 3 and 4, however, are less problematic, since they parallel the syntax of the first two lines and clarify their meaning: the cloud appears to be made of limestone dust from a vague dream-world. The dream (or memory) is of lovers, hence related to matters of the “heart” indicated above. Thereafter follow short stanzas containing additional similar colon usages and syntactic puzzles, inverted word order, or awkward connections (some native Russians complain that Aygi does not write in good, clear Russian), e.g., “oblikov / dushoi oboznachenie” (of appearances / by soul the designation). In several further cases, as in the first line, a parenthetical insertion is set off by colons (“: ne eto:” [not that], “: ne rania stebli:” [not hurting the stems], “: slovno cherez nitku:” [as across a thread]). Throughout, these colons suggest a more intense relationship than simple insertion: if not always an obvious causality, then something close to it, and a constant shift of levels. Thus the colon serves to heighten metaphoric complexity to an unprecedented degree. As is often the case with Aygi, there is much more to ponder in this poem, but we will go on. The colon appears very frequently in the titles of Aygi poems, even when it no longer appears with such frequency in the bodies of the poems themselves. It almost becomes his signature. Often the first word in such titles is zaria (dawn), son (dream/sleep), or mesto (place), followed by more specific or concrete information, such as posle zaniatii (after classes), polet strekozy (flight of a dragonfly), or pivnoi bar (beerhouse). The first serves as a general contextual frame for the second. On the other hand, the most frequent first word, one

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which is idiosyncratic and paradoxical, is “I:” (And:) (e.g., “I: prazdnestvo v razgare” [And: a holiday celebration in full swing], “I: roza ditia” [And: rose-child], “I: slabyi sneg” [And: light snow]). Aside from the unusualness of a title beginning “and,” which suggests that it is a continuation of something (when the poem is in fact independent and not part of a series), the colon serves to create an emphatic pause, as if to say: “and ... now I’m going tell you something really important,” an effective, economical use of punctuation. In contrast with, say, an ellipsis that might be used to indicate a pause, the colon is pregnant with causality and semantic significance. In a few cases, Aygi even uses two colons in a title: “Utro: metro: uteshenie” (Morning: subway: consolation),17 “Krik: rozy: risunki” (Shout: roses: sketches), “Kholm: sosny: polden’ ” (Hill: pines: noon), “Les: vstrecha: iunosha” (Forest: meeting: a youth),18 thus creating a concatenated effect from the very beginning of the poem. While Aygi has certainly made himself master of the colon, he shares this distinction with Bely. However, when it comes to the hyphen, he stands alone in creating hyphen strings of unique complexity. One can, of course, find hyphenated compounds of a more usual sort: e.g., “liudi-ubiitsy ” (killer-people),19 where the terms qualify each other in some way; and others that approach oxymoron, e.g., “voskhititel’no-nepravil’no” (rapturously-incorrectly);20 and even poems in which the hyphen is a main factor:21 SOSNY-S-BEREZOI

PINES-WITH-BIRCH

skvoz’ Boga Sosen ten’-izluchen’e:

through God’s Pines shadow-radiation:

bereza-ditia

a birch-child

1976

17. Aygi, Zdes’: Izbrannye stikhotvoreniia, 1954–1988 (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1991), p. 101. 18. Aygi 1982, pp. 210, 294, 295. 19. Aygi 1992, p. 138. 20. Ibid., p. 151. 21. Ibid., p. 150.

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In this example, because the hyphen suggests equivalency, its use in the title with a prepositional phrase is unorthodox, of course, but the effect is to create an even closer relationship between the pines and the birch than would otherwise be the case. The oxymoronic “shadow-radiation” leads to the image of a birch-child nestled in the lap of “God’s Pines,” a beautiful, animistic image typical of Aygi. Such hyphen effects appear episodically in Aygi’s poems beginning about 1965. But they soon acquire a unique form. In addition to the usual compounds of two nouns or an adjective and noun, whole phrases and even syntactically strange constructions are linked by hyphens, e.g., from the poem “Utro: metro: uteshenie” (1968): “v Nem-Bolee-Obshirnom” (in Him-More-Broad), “v […] SumrakeChto-Ia” (in...the Gloom-That [is]-I), “krest-I krov’-U ” (cross-I bloodU), “Bog-Krikom-Rassekaet” (God-by-Shout-Cuts-Apart).22 Items like the last one remind Americans of Native American given names and suggest an origin in Aygi’s native Chuvash language, at least in their form, if not as an attempt to translate directly from Chuvash.23 Sometimes they take on even more extravagantly agglutinated forms: (ognem-za-krov’iu-znakom) [1965]24 (by-fire-for-blood-by-sign) Slovom-Gnil’iu-Bla-Voskhodom!..— [1976]25 by a Word-Rot-Ble-Sunrise!..— ty—Kost’-I-Rannennaia=o-V-mire-mesto-est’-tvoe: [1969]26 you are Bone-And-Wounded=oh-In-the-world-is-your-place: i-Motsarta-i-Dushi! svoe-ne-Cheloveka-Motsarta... [1970]27 and-of-Mozart-and-Soul! one’s-not-of-the-Person-Mozart... 22. Aygi 1982, pp. 161–62. 23. In Aygi’s opinion, however, there is no particular link to Chuvash here (conversation with this writer, June 1994). 24. Ibid., p. 409. 25. Ibid., p. 164. 26. Ibid., p. 175. 27. Ibid., p. 179.

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Even early examples, such as “vozdukh-shelk” (air-silk) [1962],28 or simpler later examples, such as “Koridor-Narod ” (Corridor-People) [1969] and “Zerkalo-Smert’ ” (Mirror-Death) [1973],29 suggest that we are dealing with compressed similes, or, to be more precise, compressed equivalences; and on occasion the hyphen is replaced by and equal sign, e.g., “Okno=son” (Window=sleep/dream)30 and “snitsia Vecheru=vsem iunosham” (is dreamt by Evening=by all youths).31 That is, in the case of “air-silk,” air and silk are not just similar, say, in their softness or smoothness (“the air is like silk”), but so closely linked as to be equal (“the air is silk”). Some of the more elaborate hyphen strings do not as easily lend themselves to this kind of interpretation, but the hyphen insists that we try to interpret them in this way. We have so far examined two punctuation marks in isolation from the poems in which they occur. However, Aygi has in fact progressed from an initial nearly total avoidance of punctuation to a profusion of unusual punctuation in which it is rare that one punctuation mark predominates. While he generally continues to avoid the most frequent of traditional marks, the comma and period, his carefully thought out punctuation often includes dashes, exclamation points, rows of dots, parentheses, quotation marks, razriadka (added space between letters that is the Russian equivalent of italics), special capitalization, spacing between lines and other forms of layout, and occasionally even colors and shapes, to create a symphony of punctuational effects unique in Russian poetry. As an example that includes many (but not all) of these, the following poem may serve: MESTA V LESU: VARIATSIIA P.S. (V Kazanskuiu psikhiatricheskuiu lechebnitsu spetsial’nogo tipa. Vmesto pis’ma). o les!—sobor—vse vvys’ i vshir’ siiaiushchii: 28. Aygi 1992, p. 26. 29. Aygi 1982, pp. 175, 219. 30. Aygi 1991, p. 54. 31. Aygi 1992, p. 99.

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iz golosov: iz m e s t v l e s u ! — i zolotom Ubezhishcha-Sokrovishcha: siianiem Ottsovstva svetitsia: ta beskonechnost’ Bogo-Prazdnestva!..— : t a m — slukh moi...— i—dvoinik ego: v siianii tam chutok moi izbrannik: boiaryshnik—pri penii molchashchii: kak metronom bozhestvennyi netronutyi lesnogo tselomudrennogo Detstva!—

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on—P r e b y v a n ‘ ia neushcherbnyi obraz: tam—tol’ko e s t ‘ (ne sushchestvuet—b y l o ) !..— : i slukh—ne odinok!..— s dushoiu-slukhom tvoim so-prebyvatel’ i z o l i r o v a n n y i : mereshchitsia mne v boli-ozarenii: (kak v zolote samom osnovy Torzhestva!): t a m — vstrecha...— slovno mera neizbyvnosti chto v nashem p r e b y v a n i i vozmozhna!..— :

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(o les! dostupnost’ zolota-Ottsovstva: kak mysli iasnost’!..)— gde-to zvon ego i svezh i legok!..— : (schast’e-tishina) 197432

PLACES IN THE FOREST: VARIATION P.S. (To the Kazan Special Psychiatric Infirmary. Instead of a letter). o forest!—cathedral—all shining to the heights and breadths: from voices: Copyright © 2000. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

from p l a c e s i n t h e f o r e s t !— and with the gold of a Refuge-Treasure: with the radiance of Fatherhood it shines: that infinity of God-Celebration!..— : t h e r e is my hearing...— and—its double: in the radiance there my chosen one is sensitive: the hawthorn—silent at the singing: like a metronome divinely untouched of chaste forest Childhood!—

32. Aygi 1982, pp. 238–39. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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it is of A b i d i n g the undetrimental image: there is only i s (w a s — does not exist)!..— : and hearing is not lonely!..— with spirit-hearing yours a co-abider i s o l a t e d: (as in gold itself the foundation of Triumph!): t h e r e is a meeting...— like a measure of ineluctability that in our a b i d i n g is possible!..— :

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(o forest! attainability of the gold of Fatherhood: as a clarity of thought!..)— somewhere its ringing is both fresh and light!..— : (happiness-quiet)

In the title again we have a standard use of a colon in which a theme is stated first and then, after the colon, what would seem to be the form of the work. The mention of “variation” suggests a set of musical variations, although usually, in the formal designation, the word would be plural. The dedicational epigraph indicates that the poem is addressed to a friend who is evidently in psychiatric incarceration, an eventuality not uncommon in the Second Culture of the 1970s. The first line sets the theme in a lyrical exclamation to the forest as a shining cathedral, a traditional image.

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We note that each stanza, many consisting of one line, ends either in a colon or in a dash preceded by other punctuation. The dash has multiple and varied uses in standard Russian punctuation, ranging from acting as a copula to indicating direct address; it can serve to separate, to join, to insert. Like the parenthesis, it opens and closes an insertion, but like the comma and colon (and unlike the parenthesis) it does not require a close and can lead to something new. Therefore its varied functions have to be analyzed in each specific instance. Significantly, the dash can be combined more readily with other punctuation than is the case with other marks. Here it appears to be duplicating the function of the colon, and is used in instances when a colon would not ordinarily be permitted, such as after an exclamation point or an ellipsis (although at least one instance of the latter can be found in Bely’s Masks).33 We note also that the colon is used four times in a highly unusual way not discussed above, i.e., on a line by itself. Clearly this serves mainly to visually mark a section division, where other writers might use asterisks, dots, or dashes. Here the colon is a fine choice, since it both emphasizes continuity (other punctuation would suggest stopping and separation) and reminds one of the two dots plus double bar in musical notation that indicates that the preceding section should be repeated (as is common in sets of variations by many composers). We may see these as indicating the divisions between perhaps several variations, although the “subtitle” of the poem indicates only the principle of variation, not that there is a series of variations. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that each isolated colon is preceded by a line which ends in an exclamation point, two dots and a dash marking the conclusion of an intonational (melodic) phrase, but also providing for continuation. Thus we seem to have a theme and four variations (or three variations and a one-line coda). In the theme section, we are treated to one of Aygi’s ecstatic evocations of nature in its visual and sonic splendor. As is typical, this turns into a prayer to God. We also have several typical hyphen compounds hieratically capitalized, as is Fatherhood, indicating an 33. A. Belyi, Maski (Moscow: GIKhL, 1932), p. 345.

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immediate, if abstracted, divine presence. In the first “variation,” the dashes in the first two lines waver between being copular and parenthetical in an unusual figure of speech in which hearing is paralleled by a “double” (God’s, the forest’s, hearing’s—ego (its/his) is possibly any of these, although, since it is not capitalized and the presumed antecedent Bog [God] is not stated, “hearing’s” is most likely). The idea that hearing has a double is complicated by a chosen hawthorn which remains silent during singing. The present active participle molchashchii (silent), a favorite of Aygi’s, involves the paradoxical action of not speaking, i.e., a positive act of silence with full attention, rather than merely an absence of speech or sound. This act of silence is then compared to a divine metronome of “chaste forest Childhood,” “untouched,” i.e., perhaps neither set in motion to beat time and nor soiled by impure contacts. Then, once again the pronoun on (he/it) leaves open the antecedent (whether metronome, hawthorn, hearing, or God, all of which are masculine in Russian grammatical gender), although the concept that it/he is the “undetrimental image of Abiding” suggests that these are all symbols of the Divine, where there is only “is” and no “was.” The second “variation” develops the relationship of hearing to presence. Hearing is linked by a hyphen to identity with the soul and with the paradoxical concept of isolated co-abiding. A painfully bright vision of Unity with divine plenitude suggests that an encounter on that level is imminent or at least possible. While the second variation has the same number of stanzas as the theme section (six) and the same number of lines as the longer first variation (ten), the third variation shrinks to six lines in three stanzas. It recapitulates parenthetically the motifs of forest, gold and Fatherhood as images of clarity of thought. Here the ego of “zvon ego” (its ringing) would seem to relate syntactically only to les (forest), but it inevitably carries with it the rich, multivalent associations previously developed. The poem ends by shrinking to a brief final hyphenated compound which draws an eloquently ecstatic equation between happiness and silence, now not the act of not speaking, but the stillness and soundlessness of the external world. The parentheses suggest the complete interiority of this prayerful spiritual state. Significantly,

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Nunberg notes that “elements within parentheticals cannot serve as antecedents for external anaphors or analogous elements” and that “the content of a parenthetical must be entirely irrelevant to the syntactic or semantic well-formedness of the surrounding text.”34 In the case of this final line of the poem, the “text” surrounding it is the white space of the page and total silence, and the parentheses enclose a moment of pure interiority. It is poems such as these that have established Aygi’s reputation for having a mystical relationship with nature of the sort to be found elsewhere in Russian poetry perhaps only in Fet, Khlebnikov and Pasternak, his mentor. A younger Moscow poet, Evgeny Daenin has put it this way: “We other poets write poems to speak with each other; only Aygi speaks directly with God.”35 In this exalted poetic world, Aygi has turned the mundane resources of punctuation into a complex intersection of the musical and the visual and made it an important tool at the core of his art and worldview. In this poetry of silence, punctuation provides a way to create meaning without sound.

34. Nunberg, pp. 104, 106. 35. In a private conversation in 1989 with the present writer. Sight and Sound Entwined : Studies of the New Russian Poetry, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2000. ProQuest

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Gennady Aygi Gennady Nikolaevich Aygi was born in 1934 in the Chuvash village of Shaimurzino. Chuvash, a Turkic language, is his native language, and his first poems were written in Chuvash. In 1953–59 he studied in Moscow at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, where he developed a taste for French literature and taught himself French while perfecting his Russian. In the late 1950s, he became close to the poet Boris Pasternak, who encouraged Aygi to write poetry directly in Russian. As a result of the Dr. Zhivago affair, his relationship with the senior poet resulted in Aygi’s being expelled from the Institute in 1959. Thereafter Aygi remained in Moscow, working at the Mayakovsky Museum and familiarizing himself with Russian avant-garde art and poetry of the pre-Revolutionary period. In the 1960s, his poetry began to be published in the West in Russian and in translation. A collection of his poetry from 1954– 1971 appeared in Munich (Otto Sagner, 1975) and a nearly complete collection in Paris (Sintaksis, 1982). Russian editions of his poetry have appeared regularly since 1991, and editions of his poetry in English translation by Peter France have appeared in 1989, 1991, 1995, and, most recently, Selected Poems 1954–94, in 1997. He is particularly well known in France, where a biography of him by his French translator, Léon Robel, has appeared (Seghers, 1993). He is recognized by many as one of the most important and original poets writing in Russian today. A leading practitioner of free verse, he may be seen as providing a contemporary synthesis of the two major wings of Russian Modernism, Symbolism and Futurism.

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Chapter 7

REA NIKONOVA’S PLIUGMS he sleepy southern resort town of Yeisk on the Azov Sea gave birth to one of the most inventive and wide-ranging avant-gardists of modern Russia. It would easily take a whole volume to discuss in any detail the complete work of Rea Nikonova up to this point, phenomenal as it is in variety and quantity. One recently published example will perhaps give some idea of its scope. The twenty-eight printed pages of Nemotologiia1 [a neologism which might be translated as Mutology or Silentology] are essentially a catalog, based on “material from 1959–1995,” of over seven hundred ideas and titles for works using silence as an artistic medium. A portion of the items, predictably, are left blank. They are organized into twenty-three major categories and 125 subcategories. For example, in the category of “Geology (Mutocovertency),” subcategory “Geological Silence”2 we have: “1. precious, 2. semi-precious, 3. stone, plaster, etc., 4. phonetic holes and abysses, 5. useful ore for a poem is absent, 6. quiet3 as a platform, 7. ”. In the subcategory “The Mineral of Silence and the Mining of It” we

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T

1. Ry Nikonova Tarshis, “Nemotologiia,” in Move/Mova. Mezhdunarodnyi proekt, ed. Iurko Malinochka (Dnepropetrovsk, 1996), n.p. A “grammatical résumé” was also published in the Kaliningrad almanac Oikumena (1995):217–18. 2. The Russian word here, molchanie, is difficult to translate unambiguously into English, since it means “not speaking,” “remaining silent,” and relates directly to humans, not to the absence of sound or noise from other sources. 3. tishina, the physical absence of sound or noise.

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have: “1. facets of silence, 2. settings for silence (grates, chains, bracelets), 3. polishing silence with the instrument of close attention and official zeal, 4. ”. Certainly there is a strong element of conceptualism here and the interest is in trying to picture a work in the designated genre, rather than in its actual realization. This work is a major example of only one of Nikonova’s categories in her so-called “System of Interrelated Styles With Illustrations and Commentaries for Them,” namely Vacuum Poetry. Her work on the System began officially in 1981, when she began to organize and compile an encyclopedia of genres and styles (though, of course, the creation of various works that went into the System began much earlier). There is in this encyclopedia, for instance, a volume called Literature and Vacuum (1982–83, 462 pp.) which is Book 2, pt. 1 of the System (in ten books). A two-volume version, subdivided into sixteen books, was produced under the title Tonezharl’ in 1983. It should be added that nearly all of Nikonova’s works to date have been produced by her in handmade editions of only a few copies each. Clearly, Nikonova’s creative energy and imagination are virtually limitless. As a way of giving a more concrete impression of the range of her work, I would like to focus on a relatively small set of pieces that she has named “pliugmy.” The coinage is basically meaningless, but is a compound of the root pliu (pliunut’ = to spit) and the Greek suffix -gm (or gma), as in paradigm and syntagma. This invented word designates, as far as I am aware, an unprecedented genre of writing in which one to three “themes” are stated and then made to undergo a series of developments or variations. The musical variations of Beethoven, Brahms, and other composers are an obvious point of comparison, but Nikonova’s variations are much more all-encompassing. As with other poetry, these are works based on structured repetition, but the principles of repetition are at least as much akin to those found in music as to those typical in poetry (meter and rhyme play virtually no role in them). She has to date composed ten pliugms, with their dates, number of variations, and themes in Russian and English translation as follows:

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1. Roman iz dvukh fraz (Novel/romance in two phrases), 1983 (63 variations) (Transponans 19 [1983]:61–82) (prose in the styles of the System for vocal performance) 1. Vnimatel’nyi nemets prosit russkogo medvedia ne nastupat’ na ego miagkuiu golovu 2. Zachem ty govorish’ pustoe o pustom? 1. The attentive German asks the Russian bear not to step on his soft head 2. Why are you talking about nothing? 2. Prole tari-bari, 1985 (71 variations) (Transponans 34 [1986]:n.p.; Chernovik 7 [1992]:56–68) 1. PROLETARII VSEKH STRAN SOEDINIAITES’! 2. KAK BY CHEGO NE VYSHLO 1. PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! 2. OR SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN

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3. Feminofobs, 1985 (69 variations) 1. Kuritsa—ne ptitsa 2. Tsvetaeva—ne Mandel’shtam 1. A chicken is not a bird 2. Tsvetaeva is not Mandelstam 4. Trubbon, 1985 (42 variations + epilogue) 1. No vy, druz’ia, kak ni sadites’, vse v muzykanty ne godites’ (Krylov) 2. Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu zvuchit gordo (variiatsiia na temu nazvaniia sbornika futuristov) 3. Esli tebia udarili po pravoi shcheke, podstav’ levuiu nogu (parafraz na bibleiskuiu temu) 1. But you, my friends, no matter how you sit, will never make good musicians (Krylov) 2. A slap in the face of public taste sounds proud (variation on the name of a futurist miscellany) 3. If they strike you on the right cheek, stick out your left leg (paraphrase of a biblical theme)

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5. Smekhachguk, 1985 (58 variations) 1. Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi K nemu ne zarastet narodnaia tropa (Pushkin) 2. O zasmeites’, smekhachi (Khlebnikov) 1. I have raised a monument to myself not made by human hands (Pushkin) The people’s path to it will never grow over 2. O start laughing, laughers (Khlebnikov) 6. SHEBYSHCHYL, 1985 (71 variations) 1. Ia pomniu chudnoe mgnoven’e Peredo mnoi iavilas’ ty (Pushkin) 2. I zhizn’ khorosha I zhit’ khorosho (Maiakovskii) 3. Dyr Bul Shchyl (Kruchenykh)

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1. I remember the marvelous moment When you appeared before me (Pushkin) 2. And life is good And living is good (Mayakovsky) 3. Dyr Bul Shchyl (Kruchenykh) 7. pa de katet, 1985 (63 variations) (Transponans 30 [November– December 1985]:n.p.; Chernovik 1 [1989]:134–42) 1. UBEI MENIA, NO NE TRON’ MOIKH CHERTEZHEI (Arkhimed) 2. KVADRAT GIPOTENUZA RAVEN SUMME KVADRATOV KATETOV (Pifagor) 1. KILL ME, BUT DON’T TOUCH MY DRAWINGS (Archimedes) 2. THE SQUARE OF THE HYPOTENUSE IS EQUAL TO THE SUM OF THE SQUARES OF THE LEGS (Pythagoras) 8. SINKHRO/FAZO/TIAP/LIAP, 1986 (49 variations) (Transponans 35 (January–February [1987]:n.p.) [a monothematic pliugm on material in the title, i.e., the themes are not stated as usual in the beginning.—G.J.]

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9. TO BE OR NOT..., 1988–91 (56 variations) (dvuiazychnyi PLIUGM na temu Shekspira) (a bilingual PLIUGM on a theme by Shakespeare)

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10. HOW DO YOU KHUI, 1989–91 (36 variations) 1. HOW DO YOU DO? (prezident SSHA [USA]) 2. A POSHEL TY NA KHUI! (soviet people) (GO FUCK YOURSELF!)

As one can note, the type with two themes is most frequent. Most were done in 1985, and in general these are the most successful. One theme seems to provide too little material for variation and three themes perhaps too much. The later bilingual ones (Nos. 9 and 10) are less successful, though they open up interesting possibilities for an audience (limited no doubt) that is itself bilingual. A glance at the titles reveals that they are mostly zaum (transrational language) requiring decoding, which typically occurs somewhere in the work itself. The themes are nearly all quotations, hence the possibilities for development are dependent on the source material, its associative resonance, and its other inherent properties. Prole tari-bari, for instance, obviously lends itself to anti-Soviet social satire, while Feminofobs, with its suggestion of feminophobia and the proverbial completion of its first theme (...and a woman is not a human being [zhenshchina ne chelovek]), addresses feminist concerns. In Trubbon (no. 4), we have the most complex pliugm, with the interplay of a famous couplet from a Krylov fable, a second theme that conflates the title of a famous Russian Cubo-Futurist manifesto with a much-quoted line from Gorky’s play The Lower Depths (which actually goes “Chelo-vek! Eto—velikolepno! Eto zvuchit...gordo! ” [Human being/person! That’s great! That sounds...proud]),4 and a burlesque of one of Christ’s most “Christian” of sayings. In the three themes of this pliugm, we have at least four sources and a very broad range of possible associations. Naturally, the themes of pa de katet, on the contrary, would suggest a narrower focus on geometric and visual development. 4. M. Gorky, Na dne [1902], Act IV. In Satin’s speech there is an obvious element of irony, which is sometimes absent in Soviet-period official citations.

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Each work proceeds by first stating the themes and then moving through a series of variations on the themes ranging in number from thirty-six to seventy-three. Each variation is based on a combination of the original themes which are changed in some abstract, often mechanical way, much the way musical themes are varied. This technique demonstrates the great scope of effects that are possible, though not generally used in mainline poetry. A probably incomplete list of the variation devices grouped by the art form where they are mainly employed would be: (1) Literary (Poetic): semantic, syntactic, sound, addition, subtraction, negation, correction, repetition, insertion, intonation, capitalization, punctuation, layout/spacing, shuffling; (2) Musical: polyphony, retrograde, inversion, fragmentation, prolongation, tempo/amalgamation, volume (loud/soft); (3) Visual: shapes, lines, color, superimposition; (4) Theatrical: motion, gestures, sound effects, props. Nikonova has her own colorful names for each device, such as chekharda (leap-frog) for having words (or syllables) shuffled into new positions, but many would have to be explained at length, so the above list of designations is streamlined. Some of the devices are used sparingly and sporadically (e.g., retrograde and inversion), others frequently. One should also add that the manipulations are distinctly “low-tech” and limited to what one can produce by hand or on a typewriter. This low-tech approach was certainly dictated by the limited technical resources available to the author at the time. One can only imagine what will happen when she can take advantage of the various high-tech imaging and manipulation resources available in computer technology. That began to happen in the summer of 1997, when her performances were digitally recorded for the Internet. Since literature combines both visual and sonic components, it is the focal art in the present context, although Nikonova employs effects and combinations of effects borrowed more directly from the other arts than is usually the case in poetry. Space does not permit reproducing a pliugm in its entirety, but selections from one will, I think, suffice to give a satisfactory impression of the genre. I’ve chosen Prole tari-bari as an example in which associations with the themes would be easily accessible to a general audience without much explanation and where the humorous aspects

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would also be fairly obvious. By the way, the title is variously punctuated by the author, sometimes with a hyphen or a space after the second syllable, sometimes not.5 Figure 7.1 shows the first page, with title and subtitle, the exposition of the themes, and the first two variations in the development. The first variation is of visual/graphic interest, with each of three words (the first two words of theme 1 and the middle word of theme 2) emerging from a wavy line and ending in large bold letters, suggesting an intonational spiral of increasing volume. The rising intonation and intensity is especially clear in the last word, which is given a question mark (What?). Among the devices used here would obviously be subtraction, intonation, capitalization, volume and lines, perhaps also gesture. Implicit is the sense that this variation is a visual indication of how the words should be spoken or even sung. By contrast, the second variation is a semantic one: “Proletarians of Asia, Africa, Honduras, Sweden, Malta, Holland, Arabia, Java, Israel, Paris and Smolensk—unite, before something happens.” The random list of continents, countries and cities, while seeming to be simply making the phrase “of the world” (in Russian more literally “of all countries”) more specific, appears absurd in its selectivity and juxtapositions (just picture, among other pairings, the “proletarians” of Arabia and Israel uniting). The addition of a semantic variation on the second theme increases the element of urgency, thus of humor. Figure 7.2 shows variations 21 to 27. Variation 21 is again a semantic one: “Uncles, workers from Africa and Antarctica, come up to one another! (Something already has come of it!).” Variation 22 is a kind of negative recipe: “Some proletarians, a little bit of geography, a drop of integration. Minimum result.” Variation 23 makes the word vsekh [of all] into a prop in the shape of a fan (for the flames of revolution?). Variation 24 employs processes of fragmentation and a bit of distortion (the end of “proletarians” is slightly prolonged (ariii ), a ne (not) is inserted between two pieces of vsekh (of all [countries]), and 5. I am familiar with three manifestations of the work: a separate typescript version, a similar version published in the handmade journal Transponans 31 (1986), and a tape-recorded collection by the author titled Pliugmatika (1990). The illustrations are drawn from the first.

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Figure 7.1 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” beginning

ТАРИ – БАРИ

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ПРОЛЕ

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Figure 7.2 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” Variations 21 to 27

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an exclamation point between the letters of by; the B is capitalized and ne is run together with vy). The result is that syllables of the original text reveal other meanings unrelated to their etymology or morphology, e.g., Prolet = a flight past something, ariii = arias (with an extra singsong extension), ran = of wounds, nevy = either “not you” or “of the river Neva.” Variation 25 separates the consonants of the themes into one line and the vowels into another. When read aloud, this would, of course, sound incomprehensible, but the visual version is relatively easy to interpret. However, the device is not mechanically employed, and contains a few departures from the pattern; namely, while all the vowels of the two themes are given in the second line, their groupings are not positioned under the relevant consonant clusters, and the consonants for the second part of theme 1 are omitted entirely. Moreover, a gratuitous soft sign is added at the end of the consonant string. Variation 26, labeled a “duet,” uses a layout for polyphonic recitation that dates back to the plays of Ilia Zdanevich (1916–23)6 in which capital letters indicate the complete simultaneity of the two voices, while the syllables aligned vertically indicate simultaneous recitation of differing material. In this case, Nikonova compresses the text, so that the end of the word “proletarians” is read over the word “of all”, and the last syllables of “unite” are read simultaneously, as are two words from the second theme. Nevertheless, as is often the case, Nikonova introduces a pattern breaker in the scheme by having the last syllable recited on top of part of itself. Variation 27, a semantic, perhaps even narrative development, contains a stage direction (“in a whisper”): “The countries will unite — and look out!” The whisper suggests a stealthy situation, reinforced by a thieves’ argot word atas! (“chickie!”—warning that someone’s coming). Figure 7.3, with variations 65 to 68, provides several examples of paronomastic development in which sequences are built on sound similarity in an almost musical progression. In Variation 65, by gradual 6. See G. Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments 1900–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 169–79.

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Figure 7.3 Rea Nikonova, “Prole tari-bari,” Variations 65 to 68

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changes, the word proletarii evolves into the word soediniaites’ (unite), and the words kak by (so that) evolve into chego ne (might not). In Variation 67, three- or four-step progressions lead from the nearly complete themes (the word chego is omitted) to new words that are mostly neologisms and to a statement that is quite incomprehensible and sounds silly. This is perhaps a lesson in debasement which suggests that any sublime pronouncement is only a few short steps from the ridiculous. Variation 68 takes the first three words from theme 1 as a paradigm and provides a sequence of substitutions for the plural subject (cockroaches, criminals, felons, intellectuals, knights, dogs, maidens, presidents) and for countries (corners, dens/gangs, codices, types, orders, breeds, measurements), hence: “cockroaches of all corners,” “criminals of all gangs,” etc. The last line breaks the pattern by dispensing with “of all” [vsekh] to read: “presidents for any term-length.” However, this is prepared for by a paronomastic series of monosyllabic words inserted parenthetically between the second and third words of the original paradigm. These all begin with s in Russian: these (sikh), such, sax, sik [a type of fish], soc, sir, sex, and finally term (srok). The effect of these inserted words is to provide a whispered repartee to the main statement, e.g., “knights of all soc[-ialist] orders,” thus burlesquing and undermining the statement. Variation 66 stands apart from this series of variations in that it is a “conceptual” variation. The box purports to organize the elements of the themes into three categories: “things,” “actions,” and “result.” In the first column, predictably, we have “proletarians” and “countries”; however, we also have chto (the pronoun “something”), the relative/adverbial/interrogative kak (as/how), and subjunctive particle by, hardly “things” in the normal sense. In the second column, we have the verbs “unite” and “might happen.” But in the last column, the “results” are punctuation marks, the particle ne [not/lest] and a dash that is new to the situation. The reader is free to draw any conclusions from this s/he chooses. The work ends with a variation (no. 71) in which the beginnings of four theme words disintegrate into wavy lines or dots, thus forming a mirror image of the first variation, suggesting that the work emerged from silence or pure sound and now returns to it.

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In the course of the work, other variations have involved isolating elements of the themes, shuffling them, adding to them or contracting them, crossing parts out, etc., thus using all the devices listed above except inversion (writing words upside down). No particular organization of the variations is evident, and if one were to try to group them by device, no pattern would seem to be present. Types of devices are repeated at random, it seems, so one has a sense of multiple threads of connection to previous variations, but no overall internal structure. In short, one does not know what to expect from the next variation, except that it will be somehow related to the themes. The general effect here, and perhaps throughout the pliugms, is of parody, in which initially serious themes are distorted in various ways, often with humorous, absurd juxtapositions resulting from abstract manipulations of the material. As a catalog of devices, these works are, of course, full of stimulating ideas and possibilities. They are a modern Gesamtkunstwerk of a concentrated sort that employs the devices of literature, music, the visual arts and performance all together. The form Nikonova has created here is unique. If one surveys the avant-garde, including Sound and Concrete poetry, one can perhaps find each of the individual devices represented somewhere, but their combination in this variation form is, as far as I am aware, entirely original. The closest literary reference points, perhaps, are Emmett Williams’s sweethearts (1967), in which an extensive series of variations is based entirely on the letters of the title word, but the range of devices and possibilities for variation are thereby rather restricted, or Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style (1947), in which a prose vignette is given a range of stylistic and genre variations. Somewhat similar applications of musical form to verbal material can be found in Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922–32), which uses completely abstract verbal material, and in the Russian sphere, Andrei Monastyrsky’s Priiatnoe chtenie (Pleasant Reading, 1974) based on an alphabetic pattern, and, of course, Mnatsakanova’s Requiem discussed above. These works have been audio recorded by their respective authors. Indeed, as several of Nikonova’s variations and variation techniques suggest, there is the additional possibility of an audio or

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performance variant of each of Nikonova’s pliugms as well. She has, in fact, made audiotapes of most of the pliugms (1985 and 1990), and it is fascinating to compare the audio version of each work with its written version, a difficult task in print. Obviously certain kinds of variations are more effective or possible in one medium than in the other. For instance, in the 1990 recording of Prole tari-bari, Nikonova adds sound effects such as regularly striking a chord on her piano at mentions of proletarians and dropping a spoon onto a china plate at the word vyshlo (happen). In the 1985 recording of Feminofobs, Segay and others take part, allowing for true polyphony. Thus neither the visual nor the audio version of the pliugms can be said to convey the full range of effects. Characteristic of Nikonova, moreover, is profusion rather than perfection. In her work, path-breaking genre inventions are often left without a culminating masterpiece. She is a master, rather, somewhat like Khlebnikov, at demonstrating the unused potential of expressive forms. The guiding principle is: try out a new form and see what develops from it. For her the process is more important than the product and the exercise of inventing new forms is more interesting than the refinement of new forms to produce a perfect work in that form. In that respect, she is a truly conceptual artist. The idea is more important than its material realization. Therefore if one is looking for examples of the myriad new and different ways in which sight and sound can be entwined in the word, there is no better place to look than in the works of Rea Nikonova.

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Rea Nikonova Rea Nikonova (b. Anna Aleksandrovna Tarshis, Yeisk, 1942) began writing in 1959, painting in 1962, and is a professional music teacher, thus combining these three fundamental arts from the beginning of her career. In 1964 she began a series of “absurdist and quantum” plays and soon incorporated innumerable experimental forms and genres, which were created essentially in isolation from contact with Western trends. In Sverdlovsk she and several other local associates founded the Uktus School (1964–74), the second wave of Conceptualism in Russia, the first being A. N. Chicherin’s Constructivism of the 1920s, and the third being Moscow Conceptualism of the 1970s to 1980s. In 1974, she and her husband Sergei Sigov (Serge Segay) took up residence in Yeisk. The movement ended there when the local KGB confiscated all the issues of the journal Nomer, which had been the focal point of the group’s activities. Nikonova and Segay began the second major phase of their activities with the journal Transponans and a movement they called Transfurism. Thirty-six issues of this multimedia journal were published by hand in five copies from 1979 to 1987. Nikonova and Segay have contributed to avant-garde publications throughout the world, but Nikonova’s first solo book printed in Russia, Epigraph to EMPTINESS. Vacuum Poetry, appeared only in 1997. In 1998 Nikonova and Segay emigrated to Germany.

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AFTERWORD

If there is one main conclusion one can draw from these individual studies, it is that there is still much going on in Russian poetry that is innovative, forward-looking, and interesting. Despite a certain postmodern malaise generally evident in the arts—a sense that there is nothing new and that nothing new is even possible any more—a careful look just below the surface reveals quite a lot of fresh activity. Creative possibilities have not at all been exhausted. Perhaps one cannot now expect the radical shifts from established traditions that gave rise to the avant-gardes of the first decades of the century to which the Russians contributed so mightily. The avant-garde itself has become a traditional stance. Rather one must look for successful refinements and syntheses of innovations from earlier years and from other countries. Each of the poets studied has something new to offer and a new way of perceiving language and its interaction with sound and sight. Volohonsky proposes an empirical, even ethical, approach to relating sounds and colors for artistic purposes, and the principles he suggests for establishing this relationship are worth further thought and exploration. Mnatsakanova has constructed a poetic edifice with musical properties of special significance and effectiveness that demonstrate untapped potential in that direction. In very different ways, Brodsky and Khudyakov demonstrate the interaction of voice and text: Brodsky by overlaying the sentences of his verse with a unique and independent recitational structure, and Khudyakov by allowing a radically new and disruptive layout structure to influence his own

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perception and reading of his poems. Nekrasov and Aygi pay exceptionally close attention to the minutiae of the poetic text (punctuation, spacing, individual sound relationships) and construct from them extremely refined poems that are wonderfully free from preconceived notions about what qualifies as poetry. And Nikonova in the end proves that the forms of poetic expression are far from exhausted; rather, they are virtually limitless. It is hoped that these studies will encourage others to explore literary art with the full use of their eyes and ears.

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INDEX

Akhmatova, A., 45, 52, 54 Alchuk, A., 82 Alekseeva, L., 65 Andre, C., 76 Andreeva, V., 65 Apollinaire, G., 92 Apollon-77, v, x–xi, 20, 22, 30, 33, 56, 73, 79, 90 Archimedes, 113 Aristotle, 4 De Sensu, 4 Auden, W. H., 46, 52 “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 46 Aygi, G., vii, ix, 81, 91–109, 126 “Places in the Forest: Variation,” 102–8 “Pines-with-Birch,” 100–1 “Toward Dawn: In the Breaks in Sleep,” 95–99 “Winter Noted,” 93–94

“Magic of Words, The,” 17 Masks, 106 Return, The, 17 Symbolism, 17 Berghahn, Marion, ix Berlioz, H., 30 Bethea, D., 46, 52 Bloch, O., 26 Blok, A., 45 Böll, H., 21 Book of Creation (Sefer Yetzira), 2 Brahms, J., 43, 111 Brodsky, J., vii–ix, xiii, 15, 44–54, 125 “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot,” ix, 45–51 “Vertumn,” 44 Bryusov, V., 74 Bryzgunova, E., 49 Buning, J., 49 Burliuk, D., 92

Bach, J. S., 2 Baker, K., 75–76, 81 Bakhtin, M., 39 Beethoven, L. van, 111 Bely, A., x, 1, 6, 15, 17–18, 65, 92, 94, 100, 106 Glossolalia, 17 Gold in Azure, 65

Cadmus, 11–12 Centrifuga, 92 Chicherin, A. N., 69, 75, 124 Christ, Jesus, 26, 114 Conceptualism, ix, 76, 78, 88, 124 Concrete Poetry, 88, 122 Constructivism, 69, 75, 124

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128 | Index Dadaism, 40 Daenin, E., 108 Dante, 23 Paradiso, 23 Delson, V., 5 DiCarlo, R., 6 Eagle, H., 75 Eliot, T. S., 52 Epelboin, A., 51 Epiphanius the Wise, 27 “Life of St. Stefan of Perm,” 27 Epshtein, M., 78 Epstein, T., ix Europa, 12

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Fet, A., 108 France, P., 91, 109 Futurism, x, 40, 68–69, 74, 92, 94, 109, 114 Gardiner, D., 49 Glad, J., 52 Gnedov, V., 75, 92 “Poem of the End” 75 Goethe, J. W. von, 4 Theory of Colours, 4 Gogol, N., 78 Gordin, Ya., 45 Gorky, M., 114 The Lower Depths, 114 Grebenshchikov, B., 19 Grigoriev, V. P., 42 Gumilev, N., 35 “Revenge from beyond the grave,” 35 Harmonia, 11–12 Hephaestus, 11 Higgins, D., 37 Hofstadter, D., 98 Jackson, Mahalia, 12–13, 19 Jakobson, R., 32 Janecek, G., 39, 46, 65, 75–76, 82, 94, 119 John (Evangelist), 26

Joyce, James, 19 Finnegans Wake, 19 Kamensky, V., 39, 75 Karamzin, N., 74 Kempton, K., 82 Khlebnikov, V., 1–2, 32, 42, 75, 108, 113, 123 Kholin, I., 90 Khudyakov, H., vii–xi, 55–74, 125–26 “At the Black Sea Itself,” 56–57 “Into/Bro-/Mide,” 57–66 “Time of [a twenty-four-hour] Day,” viii, 70–71 “Window sill rain tap,” viii, 70–71 Khvostenko, A., 19 Kline, G., 46 Kovalev, G., 61 Kostelanetz, R., 80 Tabula Rasa, 80 Inexistences, 80 Krivulin, V., 45 Kropivnitsky, E., 90 Kruchenykh, A., 75, 92, 113 Krylov, I., 112, 114 Kuzmin, D., 74 Kuzminsky, E., x Kuzminsky, K., v, x–xi, 61 Lawton, A., 75 Lazarus, 26, 28 Lomonosov, M., 1 Luke (Evangelist), 26 Magritte, R., 83 Mahler, G., 43 Malevich, K., 81 Mandelstam, O., 112 Marinetti, F. T., 68–69, 92 Markov, V., 74–75 Martha and Mary of Bethany, 26 Mayakovsky, V., 45, 56, 65, 113 Mil~osz, C., 45 Minimalism, 80, 88

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Index | 129

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Mnatsakanova, E., vii–x, 20–43, 122, 125 “Anton Chekhov,” 22 Beim tode zu gast, 21 Das Buch Sabeth, 21, 41 “Dialogues and views,” 41 “Requiem,” vii–ix, 20–42, 122 Shagi i vzdokhi, 41, 43 VITA BREVE, 43 Modernism, 109 Monastyrsky, A., 122 Priiatnoe chtenie, 122 Morgenstern, C., 92 Mozart, W. A., 30, 34–35, 43 Requiem, 34–35 Naiman, A., 45 Nekrasov, Vs., vii–ix, xi, 74–90, 92, 126 “—Early,” viii, 85–86 “Freedom is,” 85, 87 “here,” 82 “. /however,” 82 “It is I,” 88 “o/sun,” 84 “Poem About Threads,” 87 “truth/grass,” 82–83 “What to do,” 79–80 Newton, I., 4, 6 Opticks, 4 Nikonova (Tarshis), Rea, vii, xi–xii, 110–24, 126 Feminofobs, 112, 114, 123 “How Do You Khui,” 114 Literature and Vacuum, 111 Nemotologiia, 110–11 pa de katet, 113–14 Pliugmatika, 116 Prole tari-bari, viii, 112, 114–23 Roman iz dvukh fraz, 112 Sinkhro/fazo/tiap/liap, 113 Shebyshchyl, 113 Smekhachguk, 113 “To Be or Not...,” 114 Tonezharl ’, 111 Trubbon, 112, 114

Nilsson, N. A., 75 Nunberg, G., 95, 98 Ozhegov, S., 28 Pasternak, B., 73, 108–9 Peacock, K., 5–6 Plato, 1–4, 9, 12 “Timaeus,” 1, 3–4 Polotsky, S., 37 Polukhina, V., 45–46 Prokofiev, S., 43 Pushkin, A. S., 35, 113 “Mozart and Salieri,” 35 Pythagoras, 3, 11, 17, 113 Queneau, R., 122 Exercises de style, 122 Rabin, O., 90 Revelation, 25–26 Rimington, A., 4, 6 Colour-Music, 4 Rimsky-Korsakov, N., 5 Robel, L., 109 Sapgir, G., 90 Satunovsky, Ya., 90 Scherr, B., 50 Schooneveld, C. van, 49 Schwitters, K., 122 Ursonate, 122 Scriabin, A., 5–6 Shakespeare, W., 114 Shapiro, A., 94–95, 98 Shattuck, R., 92 Shemiakin (Chemiakine), M., v, x– xi, 22 Shostakovich, D., 43 Shvarts, E., 45 Sigov (Segay), S., 124 Simonia, 13 Soloviev, V., 15 Solzhenitsyn, A., xiii Sound Poetry, 122 Stein, Gertrude, 41 Stepanov, A., 78

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130 | Index Stewart, S., 76 Suprematism, 81 Symbolism, 18, 91, 109 Transfurism, 124 Tsvetaeva, M., 62, 73, 112 Tupitsyn, V., 55–56, 71 Turgenev, I., 94–95 Ufliand, V., 45 Ushakova, E., 45 Uspensky, B., 78

Wartenburg, W. von, 26 Williams, E., 122 sweethearts, 122 Yeats, W. B., 46, 52 Zdanevich, I., 39–40, 119 Zhovtis, A., 62 Zhuravleva, A., 76, 90

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Verdi, G., 30 Volgin, M., 65 Volohonsky, A., vii, ix, 1–19, 125 “Aorists of the Decrepit,” vii, x, xii, 6–17, 19

Blesk, 15 Book of Branches, 2, 19 “Paradise,” 19 “Sim and Japhet,” 13 “Twelve Steps of the Natural Scale, The,” 2–3, 5–6, 14

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