The River of Time: Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry 9781618116277

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The River of  Time

Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry

Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy Series Editor:  Maxim D. Shrayer (Boston College) Editorial Board Ilya Altman (Russian Holocaust Center and Russian State University for the Humanities) Karel Berkhoff (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies) Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary University of London) Brian Horowitz (Tulane University) Luba Jurgenson (Universite ParisIV—Sorbonne) Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University) Dov-Ber Kerler (Indiana University) Vladimir Khazan (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mikhail Krutikov (University of Michigan) Joanna Beata Michlic (Bristol University) Alice Nakhimovsky (Colgate University) Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University) Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University) David Shneer (University of Colorado at Boulder) Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto) Leona Toker (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Mark Tolts (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

The River of Time Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry

Ian Probstein

Boston 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Probstein, Ian, author. Title: The river of time: time-space, history, and language in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary Russian and Anglo-American poetry / Ian Probstein. Description: Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2017. Series: Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and their legacy Identifiers: LCCN 2017012872 (print) | LCCN 2017020898 (ebook) | ISBN 9781618116260 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781618116277 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Russian poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | English poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Comparative ­ literature— Russian and English. | Comparative literature—English and Russian. | Space and time in literature. | History in literature. | Modernism (Literature)—Soviet Union—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—England—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—United States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PG2981.E5 (ebook) | LCC PG2981.E5 P76 2017 (print) | DDC 891.71/409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012872 Ian Probstein Copyright ©2017 Part Five: Interview and Conversations with Mr. John Ashbery© 1990–1992, 2017; Ian Probstein© 1990–1992, 2017. © Academic Studies Press, 2017 ISBN 978-1-61811-626-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-61811-627-7 (e-book) Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. www.kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Ivan Grave. On the cover: drawing by Arkady Shteinberg, from the cycle “Pillars.” Published by Academic Studies Press in 2017 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA P: (617)782-6290 F: (857)241-3149 [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation Introduction: Forms of Time-Space (Chronotope) in Poetry Part One:

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 1.  Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry 2. “The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky

Part Two: Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound 1. Nature and “The Artifice of Eternity”: The Relation to Nature and Reality for Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam 2. “Sailing to Byzantium”—“Sailing after Knowledge”: Byzantium as a Symbol of Cultural Heritage in Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 3. Fear and Awe: Mandelstam’s “The Slate Ode” Part Three:

vi viii ix 01 02 09

47 48

78 107

T. S. Eliot: “Liberation from the Future as Well as the Past” 121 1. The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination 122 2. “Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four Quartets 154

Part Four: Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man”

187

Part Five:

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion”

217

Part Six:

Charles Bernstein: “Of Time and the Line”

229

Bibliography 245 Index 266

Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank the T. S. Eliot Society for giving me the opportunity to discuss my chapters dedicated to T. S. Eliot’s work at the annual meetings of the Society and for access to the Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, especially to the previously unpublished Clark Lectures. I am indebted to my editors at the Academic Studies Press, especially to the series editor, Dr. Maxim Shrayer, for his keen remarks and overall support, and to my editor, Annette Ezekiel Kogan. I am enormously grateful to my former professor Dr. Elizabeth Beaujour for her invaluable and thoughtful suggestions, and to my family for their patience and understanding. I also want to thank all the publishers who granted me permission to reprint previously published material, as several chapters of this work have appeared as articles. My previously published work is as follows: “Nature and ‘Paradiso Terrestre’: Nature, Reality and Language in Pound, Yeats, and Mandelstam,” The McNeese  Review 46 (2008): 54–74. “The Waste Land as Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination,” in Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning, ed. Jacob Blevins, 180–260. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2008. My translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poems “The Horseshoe Finder,” “The Age,” and “January 1, 1924” were finalists for the Gabo (Gabriel Marquez) Prize for translation and multilingual texts. They appeared in Lunch Ticket (Summer/Fall 2016), a literary and art journal published by Antioch University’s MFA program. My translation of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poems “O dostoyevskimight of a rushing cloud,” “City of the Future,” “Kruchonykh,” “A police precinct is a great thing! . . ,” and “To All,” appeared first in Four Centuries of Russian Poetry in Translation 14 (2006): 10–16.

Acknowledgments vii

“Fear and Awe: On Osip Mandelstam’s ‘The Slate Ode’” and my translation of “The Slate Ode” into English appeared in Brooklyn Rail: In Translation (March 2011). My translation of Osip Mandelstam’s “The Octaves” appeared in Brooklyn Rail: In Translation (March 2011). My translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate” (“Verses on the Unknown Soldier”) and of other poems quoted in chapter three were published in Four Centuries of Russian Poetry in Translation 4 (2013): 14–20. My translations of Osip Mandelstam’s “Hagia Sophia” and “Impressionism” were published in Osip Mandelstam: New Translations, ed. Ilya Bernstein, 6 and 19 (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2006). The author is grateful to Mr. John Ashbery for generously allowing me to publish some fragments of the interview and conversations that appear on pp. 221–223 as well as some excerpts from his poems “Soonest Mended” and Self-Portrait in the Convex Mirror. The essay on the American poet Charles Bernstein, “Of Time and the Line,” was published in the electronic journal of Stanford University, Arcade (November 13, 2015). The author expresses his gratitude to Mr. Charles Bernstein for allowing to cite his poems.

Note on Transliteration and Translation

A

ll translations from books published in Russia and in the former Soviet Union, if not otherwise mentioned, are mine. Transliterations of names of foreign authors are as they appear in the books cited in this work; otherwise, they follow the Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian.

Introduction Forms of  Time-Space (Chronotope) in Poetry In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; And darkness was upon the face of the deep And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: And God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, And the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Genesis 1:1–5 Hear the voice of the Bard! Who Present, Past, and Future sees Whose ears have heard, The Holy Word, That walk’d among the ancient trees.

T

William Blake

his book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde , modernist, and contemporary poetry. I seek to characterize the works of modern Russian, French, and AngloAmerican poets based on the attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. I also aim to identify crucial differences between poets from the same artistic movement (for example, the Italian and Russian futurists, especially the major

x Introduction

Russian futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky). In my approach, I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope and apply it to poetry. Although Bakhtin in his seminal work The Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel applies the chronotope only to prose, disregarding other genres or arts, or even culture in general,1 it is my contention that time and space play a more crucial role in poetry, even in lyric poetry, since poetry can be defined as time and space condensed in images. The idea of time and space is associated in human consciousness with the mythic separation of “the light from the darkness” and of “the waters from the waters.” We can trace the development of time-space relations from the book of Genesis, Gilgamesh, The Elder Edda, and the Homeric epics, through Dante and Milton, and finally to modern poetry. Time and language are closely connected. As George Steiner asserts in After Babel, Every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.2

Combining what one might call the synchronic and diachronic approaches in modern literary theory, Steiner summarizes: “Language itself [. . .] is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux. It alters at every moment in perceived time.”3 Steiner’s examples reveal the crucial interrelations between language, time, and history: “The grammar of 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258. 2 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 24. 3 Steiner, After Babel, 18.

Introduction  xi

the Prophets in Isaiah enacts a profound metaphysical scandal—the enforcement of the future tense, the extension of language over time. A reverse discovery animates Thucydides; his was the explicit realization that the past is a language-construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.”4 Time, one of the most important philosophical ideas of humanity, serves as a powerful poetic motive in the history of world literature and is always a potent device in the structural formation of a literary work. In his book The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern shows how the introduction of the wireless, the telephone, and other technological inventions, as well as the increase of speed and the appearance of Einstein’s special (1905) and general (1916) theories of relativity, changed the human perception of time and space.5 Another impact on human consciousness of technological inventions such as the telegraph, telephone, and airplane was that a resident of a big European city realized that there were five billion people on earth, and the sense of multitude was reflected by individual consciousness: a person felt that one was dissolved in that multitude and lost one’s “ego” and privacy. The Russian critic Leonid Dolgopolov wrote in his essay on Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, “in Gogol’s and, especially, in Dostoyevsky’s novels man began to lose himself and dissolved the uniqueness of his ‘ego’ in the life that surrounded him.”6 Raskolnikov’s life was already the “life of the street, of the city, of the whole mankind: the boundary between his room without a lounge and the street was conventional.”7 The idea of relativism was already present in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century: the separation between time and space was being smothered, dissolved in the consciousness of people who lived in big Russian cities, to say nothing of those who lived in Western 4 Ibid., 22. 5 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. 6 Leonid Dolgopolov, “Roman Andreia Belogo ‘Peterburg,’” in Peterburg, by Andrei Belyi (Moscow: Nauka Publishing House, 1981), 588. 7 Ibid.

xii Introduction

Europe. Time is the fourth dimension of space, as Stephen Kern asserts in The Culture of Time and Space.8 In The Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin proposes the term “chronotope.” As he puts it, “this term [time-space, or, chronotope] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”9 Bakhtin applied this term to literary theory as a metaphor (he himself mentions in parentheses that it is “almost, but not entirely” a metaphor for him10). The idea of the unity of time and space—time as the fourth dimension of space—was most relevant for him. Bakhtin understood the chronotope as a “category of literature with its own significance in form and content.”11 Bakhtin discusses the time-space relationship and applies the chronotope only to prose, not to other genres, or to arts or culture in general. Time in literature is condensed, and therefore becomes more artistically vivid and notable; space, in turn, is intensified as it becomes a deeper part of the movement of time, plot, and history.12 (This phenomenon was noticed by Viktor Shklovsky much earlier than by Bakhtin.)13 The features and images of time are revealed through space, and space, in turn, is comprehended and measured by time. The chronotope in literature is thus characterized by this intersection and interrelation of sequences and by the junction of these features (time and space). Bakhtin states that “genre and generic distinctions [varieties]”14 are defined by the chronotope: “the chronotope as a formal constitutive category determines to a  8 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 145, 206.  9 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” 84. 10 Ibid. 11 Mikhail Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvenaia literatura, 1975), 235. Translation is mine. 12 Bakhtin, Voprosy, 235. 13 Viktor Shklovsky, “The Connection between Devices of Syuzhet Construction and the General Stylistic Devices,” in Russian Formalism, ed. Stephen Bann and John Bowlt, trans. Jane Knox (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 58–61. 14 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” 85.

Introduction  xiii

significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.”15 Bakhtin extends the meaning of the chronotope and applies it to such categories as the chronotope of reality, the chronotope of the road, the chronotope of love, and so on. He shows the development of the forms of the chronotope only in the novel, but, as was stated by Roman Jakobson in “Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature” with Krystyna Pomorska, the notion of time is one of the most relevant and dominant features in poetry. Discussing the heritage of the Polish classical philologist Tadeusz Zielinski (1859–1944), who revealed essential instances of time-space relations in the Iliad, Jakobson comes to the conclusion that “the most effective experience of verbal time occurs in verse [. . .] which simultaneously carries within it both linguistic varieties of time: the time of the speech event and that of the narrated event” (my emphasis).16 It is my contention that the chronotope is crucial to our understanding of literary movements and of individual poets, and we can trace it from ancient to modern poetry. Tracing the chronotope and connecting it with history are the objectives of this book. In neoclassical poetry, the flux of time is a more or less successive movement with a beginning, past, present, and future (though time may be condensed or reversed). In the poetry of the younger romantics, however, especially Shelley, we have, using the metaphors of Bergson, “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future, [. . .] the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”17 In Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816), where “primaeval mountains / Teach the adverting mind,”18 the primeval past leaves its footprint on nature. Shelley can see the primeval past in the present time, which for him 15 Ibid., 85. 16 Roman Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 21–22. 17 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 52–53. 18 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 92.

xiv Introduction

is prolonged into space and the universe. The boundaries of time and space do not exist for him: they are like a multi-folded fan. He easily travels from one reality to another (here Shelley anticipates both the theory of relativity and José Ortega y Gasset’s perspectivism) and can see how “the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young Ruin.”19 As Shelley himself writes in “A Defence of Poetry,” quoting Francis Bacon, “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world.”20 For Shelley, a poet “not only beholds the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time” (my emphasis).21 In emphasizing this anticipation of the future, both Ortega y Gasset22 and Renato Poggioli23 called the romantics the predecessors of modernism. As Jakobson stated, “the romantics are often described as explorers of man’s spiritual realm and poets of emotional experience, but as a matter of fact the contemporaries of the romantics thought of the movement exclusively in terms of its formal innovations. They observed first of all the destruction of the classical unities.”24 In the poetry of the romantics, the relations between art and life were forever changed. They made time, space, and reality palpable by breaking with the classical tradition of personifying abstract ideas, human virtues, and evils, and by turning to subjective reality: the micro-world of feelings, not only of the past, but also of the present and the future. Along with this revolution against accepted ideas, the romantics broke the old forms as well, the exhausted intonational 19 Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 91. 20 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 482. 21 Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 482–83. 22 See José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 23 See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968). 24 Roman Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov,” in Major Soviet Writers, ed. Edward J. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 63.

Introduction  xv

and lexical-semantic structures that had been automatized by the epigones. They shook the old rhythms and used old forms to express new content. A similar revolution took place in avant-garde and modernist literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both Stephen Kern and Marjorie Perloff write about this new perception of time and space in twentieth century literature. It is crucial, in my view, that both the French avant–garde poets and the Russian futurists eliminated the separation between the past, the present, and the future as well as between space and time. In his otherwise brilliant book The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern is mostly concerned with ideas, and he uses literature, including poetry, mainly to illustrate his point of view. For Kern, there is little difference between the works of Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Barzun, since for him they all put forth fascinating ideas like simultaneity, as will be discussed in the following chapter. Marjorie Perloff in her illuminating book The Futurist Moment is mainly concerned with the problem of form, but the differences between the works of two innovators, Aleksei Kruchonykh (1886–1968) and Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), who both put forward the idea of zaum’ or beyonsense (trans-sense) language,25 are unclear, as is the reason why Kruchonykh, who lived on for forty-six years after the death of Khlebnikov, never created anything equally innovative. I presume it was due to the fact that Kruchonych was concerned mostly with form, limiting his search to philology and unable to go beyond it. In contrast, the greatness of Khlebnikov’s genius eventually became clear even to the average reader. I believe that the interpretation of literature should be neither reduced to the analysis of form nor to hermeneutics alone. The interpretation of what is hidden behind the word of an image-picture should go alongside analyses of the intonational systems of different 25 Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, ed. Charlotte Douglas and trans. Paul Schmidt, vol. 1, Letters and Theoretical Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 147.

xvi Introduction

poets, their stylistic devices, diction, and so on. In other words, I advocate an approach that interprets the poetic motives rather than the meaning or the form of the poems. These analyses of poets’ views of reality, history, and time-space relations should ideally include analyses of artistic personalities. The notion of “poetic motive” has been developed in Russian literary theory by Alexander Veselovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and Boris Gasparov.26 Vladimir Toporov’s and Eleazar Meletinsky’s works should be also added to this list.27 In his first known article of 1919, “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost’” (“Art and Responsibility”), Mikhail Bakhtin states, “the three spheres of human culture— science, art, and life—are unified only by the personality of the artist that joins them together in the union.”28 Bakhtin further discusses the discrepancy between the personality of the artist in art and in life and concludes that “it is solely the unity of responsibility” that guarantees the intrinsic unity of the artistic personality: “I have to be accountable with my entire life for everything that I have experienced and understood in art, so that it [everything that I realized and experienced] should not be wasted.”29 The classical scholar Sergey Averintsev (1937–2004) differentiates between the notions of “the author (‘auctor’—nomen augentis, i.e. denomination of the subject of an action)” and “auctoritas (‘authority’—

26 Alexander Veselovskii, Istoricheskaya poetika (Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola, 1989); Boris Tomashevskii, Teoriya literatury: Poetika (Moscow: Aspect Press, 1999); Boris Gasparov, Literaturnye leitmotivy (Moscow: Nauka, 1994) and Poetika "Slova o polku Igoreve" (Moscow: Agraf, 2000). In his otherwise thoughtful and insightful study of the Poetics of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign, Boris Gasparov studies each motif separately as in Vladimir Propp’s Morfologiia skazki (Leningrad: Academia, 1928). 27 Vladimir Toporov, Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz. Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo (Moscow: Progress, 1995); and Eleazar Meletinskii, Poetika mifa (Moscow: Nauka, 1976). 28 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Art and Responsibility,” in Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986), 3. Translation is mine. 29 Bakhtin, “Art and Responsibility,” 3. Translation is mine.

Introduction  xvii

denomination of a certain quality of the subject).”30 Mentioning the problem of identifying the real authors of Psalms and Proverbs, Averintsev claims that the former nevertheless bears the name of King David, while the latter that of King Solomon. In both cases, the authority of the king has been institutionalized as the author, and that authority allows him to speak in the name of God.31 Averintsev also differentiates between Homer and Hesiod: although the latter spoke about himself in great detail in Labors and Days (633–40, 654–57), whereas very little is known about Homer’s life, their primary difference does not lie in the scope of their biographies. Rather, as Averintsev illustrates, Hesiod’s own words reveal the biggest distinction between the two: “We know enough to make up lies / Which are convincing, but we also have / The skill, when we’ve a mind, to speak the truth.”32 Homer was an authority as a poet, an author; Hesiod pretended to utter the truth of the gods and of the community, not his own. Averintsev concludes that Hesiod shifted the epic from the heroic to the didactic.33 In other words, based on a new poetic motive, Hesiod put forth a new poetic style (although, of course, this is not to suggest that Hesiod was a better poet than Homer). In his work “Poetic Motive and Context”—which develops the notion of German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) that the motif is the poetic approach to life and reality in all its complexity— Russian scholar, poet, and translator Vladimir Mikushevich states, “art begins with an approach towards life, with a substance [. . .]. Yet we need a personality for the poetical comprehension of this relation. Personality and substance are the two sides of a poetic motive.”34 I understand the motive of an artistic work as the integrity of the main theme—something 30 Sergei Averintsev, “Avtorstvo i avtoritet,” in Istoricheskaia poetika (Moscow: Nasledie, 1994), 105. Translation is mine. 31 Averintsev, “Avtorstvo i avtoritet,” 109. Translation is mine. 32 Dorothea Wender, trans., Hesiod and Theognis (London: Penguin, 1973), 24. 33 Averintsev, “Avtorstvo i avtoritet,” 119. 34 Vladimir Mikushevich, “Poeticheskii motiv i kontekst,” in Voprosy teorii hudozhestvennogo perevoda (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1971), 41.

xviii Introduction

that induces the artist to act—as well as the philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic approach of the artistic personality to reality. It is crucial to trace the artistic realization of the poetic motive only in definite contexts. These two planes are united by the personality of the verbal artist who simultaneously belongs to life (reality A) and to art (reality B), which is not necessarily a “reflection” or mimetic representation, but is rather the creation of another reality with the help of artistic devices or orudiinye sredstva (weapons), as Osip Mandelstam put it.35 The execution of a poetic motive is its lexical, syntactical, and rhythmical (or metrical, if we consider the traditional system of versification) realization in the specific context of the literary work. The poetic motive is evoked or realized only in this specific context, since words can acquire meanings only in contexts, not in the dictionary. The context of a poetic work is the “speaking picture,” to quote Sir Philip Sidney,36 or the “plastic space” in which a poetic motive is realized or evoked.37 The Russian scholar Boris Eikhenbaum defines melodics as an intonational system, that is, “a combination of intonational figures or movements as they are revealed in a definite syntax.”38 If we extend this definition, we come to the conclusion that the intonational system is the unity of the poet’s personal tone, rhythm, meter (in traditional systems of versification), diction, and stylistic devices realized in a definite syntax (including the composition of the piece) in the process of realization of the poetic motif in the context of a specific literary work. In this book, I seek to characterize the works of modern poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space and history revealed in their poetics. In the following chapters I will show both similarities 35 Osip Mandel'shtam, “Razgovor o Dante,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. Pavel Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2:214. 36 Sir Philip Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” in Selections from Arcadia and Other Poetry and Prose, ed. T. W. Craik (New York: Capricorn, 1966), 27. 37 This is the expression of the prominent Russian poet, artist, and the best translator of Milton’s Paradise Lost into Russian—Arkady Shteinberg (1907–1984). 38 Boris Eikhenbaum, O poezii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1969), 338. Translation is mine.

Introduction  xix

between the poets from different artistic movements (as for instance, the attitude towards time and space of Apollinaire and Mayakovsky) and crucial differences between the French avant–garde poets (Barzun, Cendrars, and Apollinaire), Italian and Russian futurists, or with the major Russian futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. The attitude towards time, space, and history is equally important for W. B. Yeats, Osip Mandelstam, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot— revealing both similarities and differences of the poets “sailing after knowledge” in their spiritual quest—and, in spite of the postmodernist “estrangement” of reality,39 similar traces can be found in the work of contemporary American poets John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein.

39 I will continue to use the term “estrangement” or “defamiliarization,” put forward by Victor Shklovsky (1893–1984) in his seminal “Iskusstvo kak priem” (“Art as Device” or “Art as Technique”), first published in volume 2 of Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (Collections [of Essays] on the Theory of Poetic Language) (Petrograd, 1917), 3–14. He considered “the device of defamiliarization” or estrangement as one of the main devices in literature aimed at a “shift” of meaning and perception in order to deautomatize them. It is possible that Gertrude Stein— who wrote, “A Rose is a rose is a rose”—and Ezra Pound, who drew his “make it new” from Chang Ti (the Chinese emperor of 1766 BC), came independently to the same idea. It will be most illuminating to see how Gertrude Stein’s and Ezra Pound’s ideas, merged with Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization,” were employed by the Language School of contemporary American poetry, discussed in the last chapter of the book.

CH AP T ER O N E

Forms of Chronotope in Avant-Garde Poetry

Je suis ivre d’avoir bu tout l’univers. Apollinaire1

T

he futurist revolution began as a revolt against history, with fierce attacks on the past, adoration of the modern technological inventions of their time, the increasing speed of progress, and a craving for the future (a characteristic feature of the Russian futurists, especially of Mayakovsky). Some scholars like Ortega y Gasset call this tendency the “dehumanization of art,” while others like Poggioli see its democratic elements.2 Stephen Kern brings up the manifestoes of the Italian futurists “that recommended burning the Louvre and filling the canals of Venice.”3 He quotes Marinetti’s manifesto of February 1909, which “contained the essentials of an [. . .] antipasséiste project to destroy  1 I’m drunk from having swallowed the entire universe (in French). Guillaume Apollinaire, “Vendémiaire,” in The Banquet Years, trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: Vintage, 1968), 313.   2 See Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art; and Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde.  3 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 57.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 3

the museums and the academies and to free the land from ‘its smelly gangrene of old professors, archeologists, ciceroni, and antiquarians.’”4 Moreover, Marinetti not only sought to unleash energy but also praised war: “we will glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of a woman.”5 Following the mindsets of both Roger Shattuck6 and Poggioli—who presumes in The Theory of the Avant-Garde that “the futurist movement belongs to all the avant-gardes, and not only to the one named for it”7—Marjorie Perloff consistently calls the avant-garde “the avant guerre” and states, “the revolution longed for by the poets and artists of the avant guerre never came, at least not in the form anticipated.”8 The French avant-garde artists Robert Delaunay and Henri Rousseau expressed their idea of the time-space relation on canvas, with the Eiffel Tower in the background symbolizing the reign of a new era. Different as they were in their aesthetic convictions, Henri-Martin Barzun, Blaise Cendrars, and Guillaume Apollinaire introduced simultaneous poetry, which involved either the uniting of remote places and distant times or the same characters acting simultaneously in disparate places. As Roger Shattuck summarized, “the aspiration of simultanism is to grasp the moment in its total significance or, more ambitiously, to manufacture a moment which surpasses our usual perception of time and space.”9 Barzun, Cendrars, and Apollinaire even argued about who was the first to introduce the new term.10 In 1912, Barzun founded a journal in which he intended to present his theory of simultaneity and to publish works that conformed to it.   4 Filippo Marinetti, “The Foundation and the Manifesto of Futurism,” in Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain, R. W. Flint, J. C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 46.   5 Marinetti, “The Foundation and the Manifesto,” 46.   6 See Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 353.  7 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde.  8 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), xvii.  9 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 345. Translated by Shattuck. 10 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 72, 329.

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He proclaimed the age of democracy: of public crowds and public ­assemblies. He praised the age of aviation and the unification of the world by the wireless: “I radiate, invisible, from the summit of the Tower / Fluid carrying the hope of ships in distress / Enveloping the earth with my waves / Proclaiming the Word, the Time of the world.”11 The Eiffel Tower, the construction of which was finished in 1889, was considered by Barzun and others to be a modern Tower of Babel, through which the curse of Babel had been overcome. The new technological inventions, they believed, could not only help overcome time, space, and the physical separation of mankind, but would also help reunite mankind spiritually. “The Time of the world” meant the time of understanding, the time of breaking the barriers of superstition and prejudices. Barzun was convinced that song had to give up its monodic character and become polyphonic: “multiple lyricism must render the multiplicity of modern life.”12 In 1913, Blaise Cendrars published La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the TransSiberian [Express] and the Little Joan [D’Arc] of France), which was illustrated with Sonia Delaunay’s “couleurs simultanées.” For Sonia Delaunay the term of simultaneity, or “couleurs simultanées,” meant something different than for Cendrars or the other poets discussed above. As observed by Marjorie Perloff, for Delaunay the term refers to “M. E. Chevreul’s 1839 treatise De la Loi du contraste simultané de couleurs (On the law of the contrast of colors) from which Robert Delaunay derived his doctrine of ‘simultaneism’ as the dynamic counterpoint of otherwise dissonant colors when observed in complimentarity.”13 Hence another facet of simultaneity was added to that of Cendrars. Cendrars’s reader saw “simultaneous” colors, a map 11 Barzun’s poem from Voix, Rythmes et Chants Simultanés was published in his journal Poème et Drame 3 (March 1913): 54. Quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 72. Interlinear translation by Kern. 12 Henri-Martin Barzun, “L’Ère du drame: Essai de synthèse poétique moderne” (Paris: E. Figuière, 1912), 15–35, quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 72. Interlinear translation by Kern. 13 Arthur Cohen, ed. New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, trans. David Shapiro and Arthur Cohen (New York: Viking, 1978), 202. Cited by Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 8.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 5

of the trip, and a poem about it at the same time. No less significantly, Cendrars in this poem sought to unite synchronic and diachronic time (“I spent my childhood in the hanging gardens of Babylon”) with space, which could not separate him in the train racing across Russia from the other world. The poet simultaneously hears, “The big clapper of Notre Dame / The shrill ringing of the Louvre announcing Saint Bartholomew / The rusted bells of Bruges-la-morte / The electric bells of the New York Public Library / The city bells of Venice / And the bells of Moscow.”14 Therefore, several types of simultaneity can be observed in this poem: remote places and times are united in one plane by the character traveling simultaneously in space and time. The poem also involves history: the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907 as witnessed by Cendrars, and the anticipation of the Great War. It is notable that the Swiss-born Cendrars (born Frédéric-Louis Sauser, 1887–1961) and the Italian-born Apollinaire of Polish origin (born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, 1880–1918) welcomed World War I with enthusiasm, like Marinetti. Both Cendrars and Apollinaire volunteered. Both were wounded: Cendrars’s right arm was amputated; Apollinaire was gravely wounded in the head, never fully recovered, succumbed to the flu epidemic, and died. With the exception of Mayakovsky—who at the beginning of World War I was overcome by patriotism and even chauvinism but then came to his senses and criticized the war—the Russian futurists never really praised violence, although they did welcome the revolution. Khlebnikov, who was drafted into the Russian army, depicted the atrocities of both World War I and the Civil War, but was mainly concerned with finding the laws of history, thus uniting all of time and space, as will be discussed below. Apollinaire was also concerned with time and space. As he claimed in his “Les Peintres cubistes” (“The Cubist Painters,” 1913), “today scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to 14 Blaise Cendrars, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. Quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 74. Kern’s interlinear translation.

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preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term: the fourth dimension.”15 Kern notes that “Apollinaire’s poetry also included several aspects of simultaneity.”16 Zone (1912), according to Kern, “sought to knit remote places and times into a single fabric of present experience—a zone between past and future, between near and remote.”17 Equally important to his exploration of time and space is Apollinaire’s defamiliarization of myth: Christ pupil of my eye Pupil of twenty centuries he knows what he’s doing And changed into a bird this century like Jesus soars in the air Devils in abysses lift their heads to stare Look they say he takes after Simon Magus of Judea They say he can steal but can also steal away The angels vault past the all-time greatest pole vaulters Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana Gather around the first airplane Or make way for the elevation of those who took communion The priests rise eternally as they raise the host And the airplane touches down at last its wings outstretched From heaven come flying millions of swallows Ibises flamingoes storks from Africa The fabled Roc celebrated by storytellers and poets With Adam’s skull in its claws the original skull [. . .] Here comes the dove immaculate spirit Escorted by lyre-bird and vain peacock And the phoenix engendering himself from the flames 15 Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (Paris: Figuière, 1913). English translation by Lionel Abel in Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Wittenborn, 1944), 10. Cited by Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 223. 16 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 75. 17 Ibid.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 7

Veils everything for a moment with his sparkling cinders The sirens leave the perilous seas And sing beautifully when they get here all three of them And all of them eagle phoenix and pihi of China Befriend our flying machine18

In this poem, Daedalus and Icarus, alongside the Old Testament prophet Enoch—the great grandfather of Noah, are taken alive into heaven just like the prophet Elijah, who was elevated in a fiery chariot—are accompanied by Simon Magus, the first century AD gnostic philosopher and miracle worker, as well as Apollonius of Tyana (circa 15 to circa 100 AD), a charismatic teacher and miracle worker, whose life was described by Philostratus (170–247 AD). Both Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana were revered by the French symbolists. All these characters gather in the poem around the first airplane and are accompanied by birds—both real and mythological—from various parts of the world used by Apollinaire as metonymies of time, history, and humankind, like Khlebnikov’s gods in “Edinaia kniga” (“The One Book”) and in Azy iz Uzy (As I Am Easy), discussed below. In Ondes (1913), Apollinaire describes the Eiffel Tower, “whose electronic waves carried the signals that made it possible to determine the simultaneous occurrence of distant events.”19 Apollinaire’s calligrammes, with words arranged to depict the poem’s content, unite lexical and visual images, thus creating a new form. As Roger Shattuck suggests in The Banquet Years, Apollinaire’s “most expressive ‘calligrams’ can be reduced to simple messages like lyric telegrams [. . .]. Because they exist in several dimensions of time and meaning, his poems suggest an infinity of human experience and represent the freedom which Apollinaire treasured as the most precious fulfillment of our nature.”20 18 Translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone in Virginia Quarterly Review 89, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 60-64. http://www.vqronline.org/translations/apollinaires-zone. Translated from the French by David Lehman. 19 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 75. 20 Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 315.

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In Apollinaire’s poetry we encounter various metamorphoses of the lyrical hero, his “self” and “the other”: “I” is looking at “you,” which becomes or is treated as another facet of “I”: You are in Paris summoned before a judge Arrested like a common criminal You journeyed in joy and despair Before you encountered lies and old age Love made you suffer at twenty at thirty I’ve lived like a fool and wasted my time.21

Sometimes the poet’s “I” bursts out of its limits as if his body were too small for him, like the lyrical hero of Mayakovsky (to be discussed in the following pages): I’m drunk from having swallowed the entire universe On the quay from which I saw the darkness flow and the barges sleep Listen to me I am the throat of all Paris And I shall drink the universe again if I want Listen to my songs of universal drunkenness.22

Even the space of a page in Apollinaire’s work differs from that of traditional poetry. In both Zone and “Vendémiaire” by Apollinaire, the absence of punctuation marks is, evidently, a self-conscious use of device, a kind of negative-positive space aimed at intensifying ambiguity. Not only does the avant-garde thirst for the present and for simultaneity, but it also searches for new synthetic forms in order to reveal a new poetic motive in a new context. Russian futurism had similar poetic motives.

21 Apollinaire, Zone. Translated from the French by David Lehman. 22 Apollinaire, “Vendémiaire,” in The Banquet Years, 313. Shattuck’s translation.

CH A PT ER T WO

“The King of Time” and “The Slave of Time”: Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky The sense of time disappears and time looks like a field before you and behind you, and, finally, times becomes a sort of space. . . . Khlebnikov1 I flew off like a curse My other foot was already in the next street. Mayakovsky2

R

ussian futurism began with “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), a manifesto in which the authors called to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”3

 1 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Pis’mo P. Miturichu,” in Sobranie proizvedenii, ed. Iurii Tynianov and Nikolai Stepanov (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei, 1933), 5:324. Translation is mine.  2 Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. Cited by Roman Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov,” in Major Soviet Writers, 67. Translated by Edward J. Brown.   3 “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, trans. and ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 51.

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Besides the Bloomian “anxiety of influence,”4 the aesthetic motivation for the futurist revolution combined with the denial of the classics, as well as of the past and of history itself, was different for Marinetti and for the Russian futurists. As Roman Jakobson assumed, “the idea of parole in libertà (the free word) [. . .] is a reform in the field of reportage, not in poetic language” (Jakobson’s emphasis).5 The Russian futurists, as Jakobson asserted, were not so much concerned with praising new technological innovations; their motivation was not the need “to tell of new facts in the material and psychological worlds.”6 The Russian futurists put forward a completely different poetic motive. Jakobson refers to the manifesto of Aleksei Kruchonykh in the collection The Three: “Once there is new form, it follows that there is new content: form thus conditions content. Our creative shaping of speech throws everything into a new light. It is not a new subject matter that defines genuine innovation. New light shed on the old world can yield the most fanciful play.”7 Jakobson maintained that “the aim of poetry is here very clearly formulated, and it is precisely the Russian futurists who invented a poetry of the ‘self-developing, self-valuing word,’ as the established and clearly visible material of poetry.”8 However, the poetic motives of the Russian futurists, especially those of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, are drastically different from one other.9 Their attitudes toward reality, in general, and toward timespace relations, in particular, vary greatly. This chapter is a comparison of Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the two principal figures of Russian futurism. Velimir Khlebnikov was one of the creators and leaders of Russian futurism, and also its principal philosopher. He invented his own name   4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).   5 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 61.  6 Ibid.  7 Ibid.  8 Ibid.   9 The use of the term “motive,” which is not limited to motif (a recurrent theme), and which includes the personality of the artist in all its complexity, was discussed in the introduction.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 11

for futurism itself. The futurists were for him budetliane (literally, “will-be-people,” “futurians”)—and this concept is characteristic of Khlebnikov’s understanding of that movement and is typical of his creative practices. He rejected borrowings from foreign languages and invented Russian words even for new scientific and technological phenomena. The work of the Russian futurists, especially that of Khlebnikov, was deeply rooted in Slavic folklore, mythology, the so-called carnival tradition, and Old Russian art. As was stated by Russian futurist artists David (1882–1967) and Vladimir Burliuk (1886–1917) in their introduction to the catalogue of the Munich exhibition of 1910–1911, Russian leftist artists were not epigones of French art: “their hyperbolism of line and color, the archaic character of it and its primitivism in the synthesis have deep roots in Russian art: in the icons, frescoes, luboks [Russian primitive art, folk-posters], the plastics of Scythian sculpture and in their frightening idols.”10 The roots of the past, of the primal language are palpable in Khlebnikov’s most typical poems of his futurist quest. Consider his coinages such as budetliane, liudokon’ (centaur, literally “homohorse”), samobeg (an automobile, an “autorun” or “self-run,” literally), or liudostan (“peoplehood,” literally, or “humanstan”). The ideas of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903) were important for Khlebnikov as well. Fedorov spoke of a hostile “unbrotherly state of the world” with its separation of “learned” and “illiterate,” and he called for the “restoration of the family ties of Humankind.” To quote Fedorov, “one should live not for oneself (egotism) and not for the sake of others, but with others and for everybody.”11 These oppositions are very characteristic of Khlebnikov’s philosophy: he begins with the philosophic opposition of Fate and Nemesis (the latter is not a vengeance, but the law of the counter event for him), continues 10 The Burliuk essay is cited in the introduction to Velimir Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, ed. M. Poliakov, V. Grigor’ev, A. Parnis (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 17. Translation is mine. 11 Nikolai Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela (Moscow: 1906), 1:96. Translation is mine.

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with the opposition of tvoriane (creators) with dvoriane (nobility), comes to the conclusion that each word is based on its silence, and finishes with the idea of phonemic oppositions that have semantic meanings of their own (“d”-“t” in the dvoriane-tvoriane binary opposition is one of the examples). Khlebnikov’s work does not simply manifest its ties with old forms—it is archaic, rooted in primeval pagan mythology (comparable to the early Christian and medieval mythology in the first period of Mayakovsky’s poetry)—but also estranges them, to use Shklovsky’s term. Yuri Tynianov noted that in Khlebnikov’s work, “the ancient Tale of Igor’s Campaign proves more modern than Bryusov.”12 In “Svoiasi”—which derived from svoy or svoí, that is, “belonging to us” or “our own”—Khlebnikov writes of his poem “Devii Bog” (“Virgin’s God”): “I wanted to take a pure Slavic root with all its ‘lime-tree-ness [lime tree, lipa, is a Slavic symbol for Khlebnikov] and golden strings stretched from the Volga to Greece.”13 Besides Fedorov, Khlebnikov’s philosophical ideas, his historiosophy and his work were influenced by the Russian symbolist poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) and by the ideas of the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), the first to put forward the idea of space flights and a new type of rocket engine. Khlebnikov was also affected by Nikolai Lobachevsky’s (1792–1856) two-dimensional geometry. In his geometry, unlike that of Euclid, parallel lines could meet and the sum of the angles of a triangle could be greater than 180 degrees. Lobachevsky’s space was hyperbolic. Khlebnikov wrote as early as 1908, “if a living language existing in the mouths of the people can be compared to Euclid’s geometry [Khlebnikov uses the neologism dolometriya, ‘measurement of valleys’], can the people afford the luxury unattainable in other nations—of creating a language similar to the geometry of Lobachevsky, this shadow of alien worlds?”14 12 Yuri Tynianov, “On Khlebnikov,” in Major Soviet Writers, 96. 13 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Svoiasi,” in Sobranie proizvedenii (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo pisatelei, 1930), 2:7. 14 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Kurgan Sviatogora,” in Neizdannye proizvedeniia, ed. Nikolai Khardzhiev and T. Grits (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1940), 323. Translation is mine.

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Khlebnikov was also a follower of the ideas of H. G. Wells and alluded to his works several times. Like the author of The War of the Worlds, Khlebnikov exposed the conflict between the human world and that of machines and objects of machine-made civilization. In his long poem Zhuravl’ (Crane), Khlebnikov portrays the revolt of things against the human world: On the square in the damp of an entering corner Where the needle radiant with gold Covers the burial ground of tsars, There a boy whispered in horror— hey! hey! Look how the chimneys started reeling around drunk—there! ............................................................................ Slowly I get out my glasses. And it’s really as though the chimneys craned their necks.15

Here, the poet’s attitude toward reality is expressed through what Northrop Frye called an “unexpected or violent metaphor,” one fused with hyperbole and realized to the very end.16 Jakobson first noticed this use of extended metaphor and called it “metamorphosis.”17 Like Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov in the pre-revolutionary period of his work was against “inhuman reality,” where man-made objects—the things— were “the traitors of the living, civilization opposed itself to humanity”: “Life gave its power / To the union of corpse and thing.”18 Analyzing 15 Khlebnikov’s poem Zhuravl’ is cited in Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 64. Brown’s translation. 16 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 281. 17 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 66. 18 Velimir Khlebnikov, Zhuravl’, in Tvoreniia, 191. Translation is mine.

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extended similes and metaphors and connecting this poem not only to the myth of St. Petersburg but also to some kind of cosmogonic myth, the Hungarian scholar Anna Han concludes that cosmos in this poem is turned into chaos.19 However, Khlebnikov would use the same device of realized similes and metaphors in his later poems, such as in “Gorod budushchego” (“City of the Future,” 1920) discussed below, with the polar opposite goal of creating cosmos out of chaos while drawing a cubist picture. From the very beginning, Khlebnikov was fiercely opposed to the inhuman present, to the totally absurd world war. Although he was enthusiastic about the revolution of 1917, his works “Ladomir” (“Harmonious World”), “Ustrug Razina” (“Razin’s Boat”), “Noch’ pered Sovetami” (“The Night before the Soviets”), the sixteenth fragment of Zangezi, and, especially, “Nochnoi obysk” (“Night Search”) all portray the revolution and the Civil War in a more complicated fashion than the majority of Russian poems of that period. Khlebnikov showed the naked truth of war, bloodshed, and the hostility of both sides. His “Night Search” can be compared only to Alexander Blok’s long poem “Dvenadtsat’” (“The Twelve”) for its complexity and for its dramatic and polyphonic character. Although Khlebnikov supported the October revolution, he was more concerned with the future unity of all humankind: Fly, human constellation, Further on, further into space And merge the Earth’s tongues Into a single human conversation.20

Sobornost’ (collective harmony)—the idea of the Russian religious ­philosophers Nikolai Fedorov and Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900)— was the only solution for Khlebnikov. In his long poem Tiran bez T (Tyrant without ‘T’)—that is, without the letter “t,” or in other words, 19 Anna Han, “Realizovannoe sravnenie v poetike avangarda (na materiale poemy Khlebnikova ‘Zhuravl’)” Russian Literature 26,1 (1989): 69–92. 20 Khlebnikov, “Ladomir” in Tvoreniia, 283. Translation is mine.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 15

Iran—Khlebnikov writes about his voyage to Persia: “I sailed aboard the Kursk against fate. / It plundered and burned, and I am a deity of the word.”21 Combining the motives of quest and wandering with that of the Civil War, Khlebnikov opposes violence and juxtaposes it to creativity. The poet anticipates the future as the realization of his dream of the harmonious unity of mankind, which is the value of the revolution for him. Khlebnikov sees in technological inventions first and foremost their cultural value. In his essay “O radio” (“On Radio”), he speaks of “radio reading walls,” “radio auditoriums,” and “radio-education.”22 In his poems “City of the Future” (1920) and “Moskva budushchego” (“Moscow of the Future,” 1921), he describes “winged villages” and “glassy sails of substance” and foresees new architectural forms with cubes of concrete, steel, and glass. In the “City of the Future,” he creates a cubist picture (drawn in his own, Khlebnikovian way): Here the squares of halls in one ply Are hanging like a glassy page. The stone was told: “away” When thoughts came to reign. Rectangles, cubes, and glassy logs, Spheres, a flight of fields and angles, A crowd of crystal clear honey-combs Rests on transparent hills, The streets of queer logs are stretched, The foreheads of walls are made Of icy-white timber: We enter the city of Sunnyshire, The kingdom of measure and meter.23

In this poem from 1920, Khlebnikov turns chaos into cosmos using the device of metaphors and similes realized to the end—the same device as in his 1909 Crane. 21 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 350. 22 Ibid., 637–38. 23 Ibid., 118. Translation is mine.

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Unlike Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov never denied the past, and a sense of history helped him restore the development of mankind and show the path to the future. He differentiates his ideas from those of the Russian symbolists. Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) presumes that an artist reveals “super-real archetypes” (symbols) in the images of reality.24 For Khlebnikov, those archetypes are not the incarnations of another world or being; the direction of their movement is not toward the past but toward the present reality and is aimed at the future. Thus, Khlebnikov erases the boundary between art and reality, image and reality, signifier and signified. He develops the idea of a “two-faced” or even a multi-faced word, which has ceased to be a symbol. As Yuri Tynianov notes, Khlebnikov “looks upon words like a scientist, and he reappraises their dimensions.”25 In other words, Khlebnikov is to poetry what Lobachevsky is to mathematics. In “Ladomir,” Khlebnikov writes, Being sick with a wound of honor, Unlocking the dawn, Hold Aquarius by the mustache, Pat the Hounds on the shoulders! And let the space of Lobachevsky Fly from the banners of night Nevsky. [. . .] That’s a flying Razin’s riot Reached the sky of Nevsky Dragging away the scheme And the space of Lobachevsky. Let the curves of Lobachevsky Decorate the cities Like the Arc of world labor Over the worker’s neck.26 24 Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, “Simvolizm,” in Liki i lichiny Rossii. Estetika i literaturnaia teoriia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1995), 151. 25 Tynianov, “On Khlebnikov,” 98. 26 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 281–82. Translation is mine.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 17

Both Khlebnikov and Kruchonykh spoke of zaum’ and “the self-sufficient” word, but each interpreted those terms differently. Kruchonykh sought freedom in zaum’, claiming that it “induces creative imagination by giving it freedom without insulting it with anything concrete.”27 His goal was to liberate the word from its established connections, called clichés, and to move from clichéd thinking toward a new form, which was also new content, as he declared in the manifesto “Troe” (“The Three”). He elaborated the theory of sdvigologiia (shiftology), the main idea of which was that there are constant semantic shifts, changes, and fermentation in language, as in the world around it. Kruchonykh perceived phonetic shifts in verse and shifts of meaning in lexical usage. Unconscious shifts were lapses, and he caught many famous poets making them. Khlebnikov’s views of the matter were broader and deeper, although he agreed with Kruchonykh and collaborated with him. As Khlebnikov states, My first idea in dealing with language is to find—without breaking the circle of roots—the magic touchstone of all Slavic words, the magic that transforms one into another, and so freely to fuse all Slavic words together. [. . .] This self-sufficient language stands outside historical fact and everyday utility. I observed that the roots of words are only phantoms behind which stand the strings of the alphabet, and so my second approach to language was to find the unity of the world’s languages in general, built from units of the alphabet. A path to a universal beyonsense [trans-sense] language.28

Reflecting on this idea while analyzing Khlebnikov’s famous “Kuznechik” (“Grasshopper”), Marjorie Perloff draws the conclusion that “zaum’, in this context, far from being ‘nonsense,’ is more accurately super-sense”29 and compares Khlebnikov’s thoughts to Pound’s famous 27 Aleksei Kruchonykh, “Deklaratsiia Zaumnogo slova,” in Kukish poshliakam (Moscow: Gileia, 1992), 46. 28 Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 1:147. 29 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 126.

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formula: “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree [. . .]. I begin with poetry because it is the most concentrated form of verbal expression.”30 In the essay “Nasha osnova” (“Our Foundation”), Khlebnikov also states, “Zaum’ language is the fetus of a forthcoming world language. Only it can unite people. Smart languages have separated them.”31 Thus Khlebnikov develops Fedorov’s idea from The Philosophy of a Common Cause: “a union in language cannot but be the result of the realization of kinship, the necessity of mutual understanding in a common cause.”32 Hence, zaum’ for Khlebnikov is also the tool of a future union and the communion of humankind. A new poetic motive thus requires a new means of expressing it: a new language. The poet, of course, pushes language to its limits and, when “the syntax stiffens” and “the words seem to go dead under the weight of sanctified usage,”33 he tries to go beyond the limits of language and to extend them. George Steiner, in his diagnosis of this veritable disease of language and culture, asserts, “the frequency of sclerotic force of clichés, of unexamined similes, of worn tropes increases. Instead of acting as a living membrane, grammar and vocabulary become a barrier to a new feeling. A civilization is imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches, or matches only at certain ritual, arbitrary points, the changing landscape of fact.”34 Analogous ideas were put forward by the futurists in their manifestos; by Kruchonykh, who invented the theory of shifting meaning; and by Shklovsky in his 1916 essay “Iskusstvo kak priem” (“Art as Device,” published in 1917). Shklovsky considered the device of defamiliarization or estrangement as one of the main tools in literature, shifting meaning and perception in order to deautomatize them. According to Shklovsky, this device works on many levels: sound, meter, form, syntax, 30 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 36. 31 Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 5:236. Translation is mine. 32 Fedorov, Filosofiia obshchego dela, 36. Translation is mine. 33 Steiner, After Babel, 21. 34 Ibid.

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convention, and genre. The final purpose of defamiliarization is to deautomatize aesthetic perception, as reinstated in one of Shklovsky’s last books, Tetiva (A Bow String, 1970).35 Shklovsky’s ideas were further developed by Roman Jakobson; by the Prague school;36 through Bertold Brecht’s alienation; and, in recent years, even by the renowned Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.37 As Jakobson claimed, “form exists for us only as long as it is difficult to perceive, as long as we sense the resistance of the material.”38 By refreshing language and tropes, Khlebnikov refreshes our perception of the world, making it more palpable. The need to extend the limits of language inevitably leads the poet beyond established borders— to new meanings. Thus, in Plane 9 of Zangezi Khlebnikov begins with the Russian word um (mind, reason) and forms neologisms based on his “starlanguage,” filling each sound with meaning:39 Go-mind [or “High-Mind,” since Khlebnikov explains that Goum is high mind, “like those celestial trifles, stars”] Oh-Mind [abstract mind] OO-Mind [mind of mind] Pa-Mind [“Pa” of sleeves or the cuffs of a white shirt] Co-Mind me and those I don’t know [collaborative mind] Crush-Mind [the disastrous, crushing, destroying mind] Bow-Mind [following the voice of experience].40 35 Viktor Shklovsky, Tetiva (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), 346, 351–52. 36 See the concept of “deautomatization” in Jan Mukařovsky, “On Poetic Language,” in The Word and Verbal Art: Selected Essays by Jan Mukařovsky, ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 27. 37 See Carlo Ginzburg, “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” in “The New Erudition,” special issue, Representations, no. 56 (Autumn 1996): 8–28. 38 Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, ed. Bengt Jangfeldt and Stephen Rudy, trans. Stephen Rudy (New York: Marsilio, 1997), 174. 39 Unfortunately, Paul Schmidt’s decision to preserve the sound “oom” causes the devaluation, so to speak, of super-sense in his otherwise excellent translation; but then, the translator had the supertask of re-inventing a new zaum’ (trans-sense) language in English, not just to translate. 40 Khlebnikov, Zangezi, in Tvoreniia, 482. Interlinear translation is mine.

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Khlebnikov also defines “No-mind” and “Yes-Mind.” Here the device of skornenie (rooting) is a productive way of forming neologisms (as in lebedivo, which is “swan” plus “wonder”). Virtually every scholar of Russian poetry since Jakobson’s Modern Russian Poetry (1921) has analyzed Khlebnikov’s “Zakliatie smekhom” (“Incantantation by Laughter”) and “Kuznechik” (“Grasshopper”). Following Khlebnikov’s own comments of 1914, Jakobson states, “The title hero Kuznéchik [grasshopper] in turn is paronomastically associated with ushKúynik [pirate], and the dialectical designation of the grasshopper, konëk [little horse], must have supported Khlebnikov’s analogy with the Trojan horse.”41 Thus, alongside the device of “laying bare,” the term introduced by Jakobson,42 Khlebnikov is, so to speak, also concealing the word (which, incidentally, is characteristic of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, such as “Assirian wings of dragonflies”43 or “hairy water-music”44). The device of rooting, as combined with “laying bare” and “concealing” meaning, is best exemplified in the following quatrain by Khlebnikov: O dostoyevskiMight of a rushing cloud, O, pushkinLengths of a drooping noon, Night looks like Tiutchev, Filling the boundless with beyond worldiness.45

In this poem, Khlebnikov rethinks and re-establishes the links between nature and art. Nature looks in the mirror of art, reflects it, and even 41 Khlebnikov, “Futurian!” in Sobranie proizvedenii, 5:194; Roman Jakobson, “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 253. 42 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 68. 43 Osip Mandelstam, “Veter nam v uteshen’e prines,” in Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, 1:144. 44 Mandelstam, “Veter nam,” 165. 45 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 54. Translation and emphasis are mine. The original text is as follows: “O, dostoevskiimo begushchei tuchi, / O, pushkinoty mleiushchego poldnia, / Noch’ smotritsia kak Tiutchev, / Bezmernoe zamirnym polnia.”

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imitates it. Here “a poetic etymology,”46 as Jakobson calls it, is revealed in the neologisms formed from proper names. In this condensed quatrain, Khlebnikov characterizes Dostoyevsky’s works as impetuous, starting with what Bakhtin called a Menippean scandal and ending with a “finish in timelessness” and “for the last time.”47 The next line characterizes Pushkin’s harmony and euphony, and finally, Khlebnikov speaks of Tiutchev’s attraction to night and his willingness to explore the limits of being. Khlebnikov freely shifts from past to future, and from one reality to another, thus unifying time and making it whole. According to Jakobson, “Khlebnikov transforms time present into a whole temporal reality.”48 In Khlebnikov’s prose, the lyrical hero Ka “has no outposts in time. Ka moves from dream to dream, intersects time and achieves bronzes (the bronzes of time). He disposes himself in the centuries as comfortably as in a swing.”49 When the lyrical hero meets a scientist in 2222, the latter, having learned from a coin the year from which the stranger arrived, mentions: “at that time they believed in space and thought little of time.”50 Khlebnikov, however, was constantly thinking of time itself as building “the state of time.”51 His prose and poetry use both the transitory present, as in “Oktiabr’ na Neve” (“October on the Neva River”) and the timeless present. Poliakov, the author of the introduction to Khlebnikov’s Tvoreniia (creations or works), suggests, “accompanying his hero, Ka leads him from everyday autobiographical reality into the past and the future of humankind. Conclusion: ‘After bathing in the waters of death people will change.’”52 From 1905 to 1917, Khlebnikov felt the flux of time especially acutely: “terrible is the hunt when the sedge is years—and the game—

46 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 76. 47 Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1975), 188, 208. 48 Jakobson, Selected Writings (New York: Mouton, 1981), 5:319. 49 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 69. 50 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 524. Translation is mine. 51 Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of the Martians,” in King of Time, 127. 52 Ibid., 30.

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generations.”53 In his poem “Noch’ v okope” (“Night in the Trench”), the Scythian idol is placed simultaneously in eternity and in the present, covered in blood: “A stony body looked / On human deeds.”54 Jakobson was one of the first to notice that a temporal shift in Khlebnikov’s “Mirskontsa” (“World from the End”) is “laid bare [obnazhenny], that is to say, not motivated, which has the effect of a motion picture film run backwards. [. . .] Another kind of temporal displacement favored by Khlebnikov is the anachronism.”55 In his “Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature” with Krystyna Pomorska, Jakobson emphasizes that “poetic approaches make it possible to render several simultaneous actions dispersed in space. The time in a narrative can be reversed. [. . .] In one Khlebnikov tale the two heroes pass from the ends of their lives to the beginnings but continue to speak of the past and future in the normal and uninverted order of these times.”56 Not only does Khlebnikov reverse time, but he also merges time and space, transforming time into space. As Poliakov argues in his introduction to Khlebnikov’s Tvoreniia: Khlebnikov’s time moves in circles, gyres [. . .] cyclic [. . .] historical time dominates his world. It looks as if Khlebnikov is watching the flux of time from the cosmic age. The laws of worldly time [mirovogo vryemeni] are separated from the subject. Hence time is transformed into space. [. . .] Khlebnikov, “miroosi dannik zvezdnyi” [the starry tributary of the world axis],57 was seeking his way of entering the universe. During this period of his work, the main character is “man in general” who is put into the intersection of the present, the past and the future and included in the chain of eternity (that was the origin of Khlebnikov’s archetypal motives of the “eternal revival,” of the “golden age,” and of “reviving death”).58 53 Khlebnikov, “Chertik.” Quoted in Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 73. 54 Ibid., 280. 55 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 69. 56 Jakobson, Verbal Art, 21. 57 Khlebnikov, Sobranie proizvedenii, 2:271. 58 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 14. Translation is mine.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 23

In the last stage of his creative work, Khlebnikov was preoccupied with drawing the law of time and the law of history —in fact, thus overcoming the future and making it transparent. In a letter from March 14, 1922, Khlebnikov wrote to the Russian painter Petr Miturich: My main law of time is that a negative shift in time occurs in 3n days and a positive shift in 2n days; the events, the spirit of time is reversed in 3n days and intensifies its numbers in 2n days; from December 22, 1905, the Moscow uprising, to March 13, 1917, 212 days passed. [. . .] When the future becomes transparent due to these calculations, the sense of time disappears, and it seems as if one is standing still on the deck of foreseeing the future. The sense of time disappears, and time looks like a field before you and a field behind you; time becomes a sort of space.59

In Khlebnikov’s letter to Miturich time becomes transparent; that is, it acquires clarity and lucidity. Thus, Khlebnikov’s ideas of a word, a sound, a letter, and a number are based on his ideas of time, space, history, and being. In the metaphor “the deck of foreseeing the future,” time becomes water and is also compared to a field. This image has a deep metaphysical meaning because the field is a metaphor for life for Russian poets, since Russia used to be an agricultural country, while plowing is a metaphor for creativity.60 In The Futurist Moment, Marjorie Perloff suggests that Khlebnikov’s ideas were affected by Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, in which he put forward the idea that time is “the fourth dimension of space.”61 However, we should not overlook the fact that Khlebnikov was a mathematician by education, and in addition to Lobachevsky, he mentions Poincaré and Minkowski in his 1914 letters to Matiushin.62 Likewise, in his supersaga Voina v myshelovke (The War in a Mousetrap), Khlebnikov 59 Khlebnikov, “A Letter to P. Miturich,” 324. Translation is mine. 60 For more on this, see Pound’s Canto 47, discussed later in this book. 61 Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 128. 62 Khlebnikov, “Pis’ma” in Neizdannye proizvedeniia), ed. Nikolai Khardzhiev and T. Grits (Moscow: Khudozhestvennia literatura, 1940), 375.

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writes of the one (his lyrical hero), who “The equation of Minkowsky / Drew on a gray helmet / And in the song-call of Mayakowsky / Shined in the black sky.”63 Vyacheslav V. Ivanov states that Khlebnikov also predicted poly-dimensional space, although he died before Theodore Kaluza’s (1885–1954) theory and Kaluza-Klein’s theory of everything; or, in other words, before the unified field theory of gravitation and electromagnetism that was built around the idea of a fifth dimension—beyond the usual four dimensions of space and time—had taken shape.64 With the approval of Einstein, Kaluza’s first paper was published in 1921 and was not known in Russia at the time of Khlebnikov’s death. In his work Doski sud’by (The Tables of Fate), Khlebnikov further developed his “Basic Law of Time,” provided numerous examples of his theory, and summarized as follows: “time and space together seem to comprise a single tree of mathematics, but in one case an imaginary squirrel of calculation moves from the branches to the base, in the other, from the base to the branches. [. . .] Where space is concerned, it is the exponent that is created by the propensity toward the smallest possible numbers, the greatest proximity to zero; in the case of time it is the base.”65 During the last period of his creativity, Khlebnikov wrote his sverkhpovesti (supernovels, or as Paul Schmidt aptly calls them, “supersagas”66), in which he tried “to break the logic of time and space with unseen freedom,” and created his “continent of time.”67 It is no less important that Khlebnikov tried to fulfill the dream of the German romantics of a universal genre that could simultaneously reveal life in both its earthly and cosmic dimensions, where “earthly life is only a transient ‘chain’” of being while “the Bird of Wandering” is passing it by.68 The basis of this universal genre for Khlebnikov is drama, not the 63 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 463. Translation is mine. 64 Vyacheslav Ivanov, Izbrannye trudy po semiotike i istorii kul’tury (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 2:374. Translation is mine. 65 Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time, ed. Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 179. 66 Khlebnikov, The King of Time, 191. 67 Khlebnikov, “The Trumpet of Martians,” in The King of Time, 127. 68 Mark Poliakov, “Velimir Khlebnikov: Mirovozzrenie i poetika,” in Tvoreniia, 15.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 25

novel. The poet created his supernovels based on drama, combining prose, verse, and—as in Zangezi—essays on the theory of numbers, literary theory, and “starry language” (zaum’ or transense language). Poliakov also notes that Khlebnikov’s “‘continent of time’ combines historical and mythological time, enabling the author to juxtapose different phenomena. History acquires the mythical character of a permanently repeating denominator.”69 In Deti vydry (The Children of the Otter), history and contemporaneity are included in cosmological myth. In the beginning there were three suns: one of them is white, the second red in a blue halo, the third black in a green wreath. Two suns are stricken by the spear of the Otter’s Son. The Otter (Vydra) is the Mother of the World. After the collapse of the two suns, the earth turns dark, the heavens become blue, the golden flow of lava turns into rivers, and the children of the Otter descend to earth where “the Child of the Otter is thinking of India on the bank of the Volga.”70 Time in The Children of the Otter is multilinear and ever present or, rather, contemporary and eternal. It is peculiar that the Children of the Otter also participate in a theatrical show: having descended on Earth, they are eventually taken to the theatre in a samobeg (an automobile), and an usher accompanies them to their places. There they meet Budetlianin (Futurian), both the narrator and a spectator. Likewise, the Children of the Otter both view the show and act in it. The tragedy of the Titanic, World War I, and the wars of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus coexist in one and the same dimension or plane. The neoclassical Russian poet and scientist Lomonosov meets Copernicus and Jan Hus, as well as the Russian prince Sviatoslav alongside Pugachev and Stepan Razin (the leaders of Russian peasant rebellions)—symbols of the struggle for freedom for Khlebnikov. All meet in the same dimension (“6th Sail”) and talk to each other—in verse. For Khlebnikov, time— always present and boundless—turns into space, but he creates as many spaces as realities. His supernovel is divided into parusa (sails), and each of them forms a kind of space. 69 Poliakov, “Velimir Khlebnikov,” 15–16. 70 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 433.

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In the second supernovel, Azy iz Uzy (As I Am Easy)71 (1919–1922), Khlebnikov reveals a violent and hostile contemporaneity: And on the lips of a deaf-mute There’s only one word: “Shoot!”72

The poet tries to overcome the violence by bringing in the creative work of Tagore and H. G. Wells, urging the “wanderer” to aim “at the stars of the world, / hiding in conversation the knife of a murderer.”73 The poet denies conventional ideas, drawing daring historical parallels: “You thought, recollecting diligently, / That Nero was good while acting out / Christ as the Cheka chairman.”74 This sarcastic remark is evidently aimed at Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), the creator and the first chairman of the Cheka (chrezvychainaia komissiia, “Emergency Committee”), which became notorious for mass executions during the so-called Red Terror and the Civil War. By contrast, Mayakovsky wrote in his long poem Khorosho (Good): To a youth, thinking about life, deciding — from which model to mold it, I will say without hesitation — “Mold it from comrade Dzerzhinsky’s model.”75

The only solution for Khlebnikov was to unite all human knowledge and wisdom in one book. The Gospel, the Koran, and the Indian sacred 71 This is not a literal translation by Paul Schmidt. “Az” is the Russian word for the numeral “one” and at the same time means “the beginning,” “creation,” “elementary knowledge,” “foundation”; “uzy” means the “ties” or “bounds” (also “chains”) that connect mankind. 72 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 469: “I na ustakh glukhonemogo / Vsego odno lish’ slovo: ‘K stenke!’” Translation is mine. 73 Ibid., 469. Translation is mine. 74 Ibid., 471. Translation is mine. 75 Maiakovskii, “Khorosho,” in Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1988), 416. Translation is mine.

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books burn themselves (as Khlebnikov himself is known to have burned Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Antony76 page by page while reading it) to accelerate the coming of the “Only Book,” whose pages are seas and whose bookmarks are the greatest rivers. “The reader of the book is mankind, / The sign of the creator is on its cover.”77 According to the contemporary poet and scholar Ol’ga Sedakova, “the book in Khlebnikov’s world, unlike the medieval book—is a text creating itself. It is a book without an author (Khlebnikov’s Gods is nothing more than the text),” she adds in parenthesis.78 This is Khlebnikov’s first attempt at the theme of the destruction of the gods, also addressed in “Ladomir” and in his play Bogi (Gods). The hero of the supernovel has “rivers for hair”: I have rivers for hair See where the Danube streams Upon my shoulders! Turbulent tantrums Rip the Dnieper’s blue rapids. This is the Volga, the shining big-sea-water And this is long hair That I twist in my fingers, This is the Amur, where geishas gaze Toward heaven, praying Away the storm.79

These lines are later repeated in the supernovel Zangezi. In the above fragment, a chain of metonymies creates a sublime catalogue, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, an inspiration for many futurists. As if soaring above the earth, the poet observes the junction of the rivers that at the very same moment stream over his shoulders. Viktor Grigor’ev believes 76 Velimir Khlebnikov, “Oktiabr’ na Neve,” in Sobraniie proizvedenii, 4:115–17. 77 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 466. 78 Ol’ga Sedakova, “Kontury Khlebnikova,” in Mir Velimira Khlebnikova (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 574. 79 Khlebnikov, The King Of Time, 225.

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that Khlebnikov’s poetry reveals a kinship with Walt Whitman’s.80 Such a comparison makes sense if we consider the universal cosmic vision of both poets, their transcendental philosophy, and their relation to nature, which is alive for both of them. Khlebnikov may have read Whitman in Chukovsky’s translation (the first edition was published in 1907; the second, with an introduction by the painter Ilya Repin, in 1914). However, Khlebnikov was very skeptical of Chukovsky’s essay on Whitman, “The First Futurist,” published in 1913.81 Along with Mayakovsky, David Burliuk, and Kruchonykh, he opposed Chukovsky during his public lecture “On Futurism,” in which the latter juxtaposed the Russian futurists to Whitman, characterizing the American poet as “the first Futurist” and “the poet of the forthcoming democracy.”82 Khlebnikov even wrote a polemical response, found in his drafts and papers: “Chukovsky, a pirate of the word, with Whitman’s ax jumped in the boat that endured a storm to overtake the place of the helmsman and the treasures of the race.”83 Although both Khlebnikov and Whitman were convinced that history is created in the present— here and now—Khlebnikov’s universal view is a view from “a poetic observatory,” according to Tynianov.84 Time, space, history, being, and humanity are viewed from the poetic observatory in their integrity, as a whole. Words, sounds, letters, and numbers are united and acquire equal importance as word-sense, sound-sense, letter-sense, and numbersense, even though Khlebnikov constantly shifts their meanings while trying to reach beyond sense—to expand what he calls the “Udely liudostana” (domains of humanhood). Hence the necessity of “The One Book”—not only the book itself of that name, but also the unified book as a genre: the supersaga. At this point “Mirkontsa” (the world in reverse) becomes possible; so does the meeting of Prince Sviatoslav, 80 See V. Grigor’ev, Budetlianin (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), 498. 81 Kornei Chukovskii, “The First Futurist,” Russkoe slovo, no. 127 (June 4, 1913). 82 Khlebnikov, Neizdannye proizvedeniia, 463. Commentary by Grits. Translation is mine. 83 Khlebnikov, “Polemic Notes of 1913,” in Neizdannye proizvedeniia, 343. Translation is mine. 84 Iurii Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in Literaturnaia evoliutsiia (Moscow: Agraf, 2002), 375. This fragment is missing in Brown, Major Soviet Writers. Translation is mine.

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Pugachev, Razin, Scipio, Hannibal, and Copernicus (in The Otter’s Children). In “Ladomir,” Khlebnikov also realizes his dream of united humanity with the help of metonymies: not rivers, like in As I Am Easy, but pagan gods represent various nations (the Slavic Perun, the Greek god Eros, and the Phoenician Goddess Astarte). The Roman gods Amor and Juno are united with gods of the Indian, Aztecan, and Chinese pantheons, to enjoy the art of Correggio, Murillo, and Hokusai, while the Japanese god Izanagi (who is male in one draft and female in the revised version) reads Monogatari (Japanese light novels) to Perun. The same verses appear in the play Gods, written in November 1921, but the function and the meaning of the same lines in “Ladomir” and in the play differ. “Ladomir” and Gods have different poetic motives. Hence, the same poems have different meaning in different contexts. In “Ladomir,” gods are the symbols of harmony, love, and the union of East and West, while in the play as well as in Zangezi, humans liberate themselves from the rule of gods, as in Lukian’s Zeus Tragic and Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Antony.85 “The play is a gigantic countdown game, in the process of which the gods are destroyed,” Gasparov observes. “Khlebnikov’s attitude towards gods is ambivalent. As symbols of humanity, gods are wonderful, hence the idyll of the initial poem ‘There, there, where Izanagi. . . .’ However, as real masters of the universe, gods are evil, they are a burden and as such each of them should be overthrown (virtually all the futurists have iconoclastic themes in their creativity).”86 Is it possible that both in the play and in Zangezi Khlebnikov shows theogony in reverse? Even his poem of 1915, cited below, begins with an allusion to Gavrila Derzhavin’s “Reka vremen” (“The River of Time”) and ends with the iconoclastic line, “Gods are ghosts of the darkness” (Bogi—prizraki u t’my): Nations, faces, ages pass, Pass as in a dream, 85 This was suggested by the verse historian Mikhail Gasparov. See Mikhail L. Gasparov, “Schitalka bogov: O p’ese V. Khlebnikova Bogi,” in Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: NLO, 1995), 257. 86 Gasparov, “Schitalka bogov,” 257.

30 The River of Time And ever-flowing stream. In Nature’s shifting glimmer-glass Stars are nets, with their haul, Gods are shadows on a wall.87

In Khlebnikov’s third supernovel, Zangezi, a passerby reads an extract from Zangezi’s manuscript Doski sud’by (The Tables of Fate)—which, again, comes from another of his works, this time an essay whose very title, like everything in Khlebnikov’s work, has more than one meaning. Barbara Lönnqvist argues that the title Doski sud’by on the one hand “means ‘Tables of Fate,’ recalling the tables or tablets of the law (Khlebnikov himself compared them to the laws of the Babylonian King Hammurabi).88 On the other hand, Tables of Fate also contains the meaning ‘boards.’ Khlebnikov compares himself to a ‘carpenter’ building a ‘world cabin’ out of his ‘boards.’”89 To quote Zangezi, Zangezi also calls himself a carpenter: I am the master carpenter of time. I have deciphered the timepiece of humanity, And set its hands accurately. . . 90

The poets who signed the manifesto “Truba Marsian” (“The Trumpet of Martians”)—a major portion of which was written by Khlebnikov

87 Khlebnikov, King of Time, 28. Paul Schmidt’s translation. The literal translation of this line is, “Gods are shadows of the darkness.” Schmidt also dropped “ryby— my” (we are fish). The original text of the entire quote is as follows: “Gody, liudi i narody / Ubegaiu navsegda, / Kak tekuchaia voda. / V gibkom zerkale prirody / Zvezdy—nevod, ryby—my, / Bogi—prizraki u t’my.” 88 Khlebnikov, King of Time, 174. In another place in “The Tables of Fate,” Khlebnikov speaks of the Law of Moses: “indeed, the Law of Moses and the entire Koran is very probably contained in the iron force of this equation” (ibid). Paul Schmidt’s translation. 89 Barbara Lönnqvist, Xlebnikov and Carnival (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979), 30. 90 Khlebnikov, King of Time, 225–26. Paul Schmidt’s translation.

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himself—declared, “we are uncompromising carpenters.”91 Such coincidences make it possible to say that Zangezi is another self of the poet. In Zangezi, as well as earlier in “Gospozha Lenin” (“Madame Lenin”), Khlebnikov introduces archaic forms: the personification of Memory, Reason, Fear, Grief, and Laughter, all of which remind us of medieval mysteries. The climax of Zangezi is a duel between Sorrow and Laugher: “Where Laughter finally leaves, / Everyone grieves!”92 Zangezi, the main hero of the supernovel, dies while acting as Laughter; he literally turns into laughter. However, in keeping with the carnival tradition, Menippean satire according to Bakhtin,93 Khlebnikov revives Zangezi in Plane 21, which bears the subtitle, “A Cheerful Location.” Zangezi reappears when two people are reading a newspaper and find out that “Zangezi is dead! / Not only that, but he did it himself with a razor! . . . The motive seems to have been the destruction / Of all his manuscripts by fiendish / Villains with big broad chins / And lips that went smack smack, chomp chomp.”94 Zangezi holds the “matches of fate” and unites the whole composition heretofore divided into planes (which allude to geometry and cubism). Khlebnikov is thus able to travel even more freely from one reality to another. His time is unlimited, and his universe is boundless. He does not merely travel in time, but erases its boundaries, overcoming time and space with his verse. The poet creates another reality and is dissolved in it. Tynianov declared, “Khlebnikov’s was a new vision. A new vision takes in various subjects simultaneously. Thus not only do these subjects ‘begin life in verse,’95 according to Pasternak’s remarkable formula, but they live also in the form of epic poetry.”96 For Khlebnikov, this new vision was inseparable from a new language. Mayakovsky believed that “Khlebnikov never completed any extensive and finished poetic works. The apparent finished state of 91 Ibid., 126. 92 Ibid., 233. Paul Schmidt’s translation. 93 Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo,128–29. 94 Khlebnikov, Zangezi, 235; Paul Schmidt’s translation. 95 Boris Pasternak, “Tak nachinayut zhit’ stikhom,” in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 1:202. 96 Tynianov. Quoted in Brown, Major Soviet Writers, 93.

32 The River of Time

his published pieces is most often the work of his friends’ hands.”97 Perhaps the most important reason for that was Khlebnikov’s approach to creativity as a process, a continuum, and not as an end result. Khlebnikov’s fellow futurist Mayakovsky, on the contrary, always aimed at the result, at the effect produced by his work. This is not to suggest that Mayakovsky was not concerned with time-space or history, but his approach to them somehow lacks Khlebnikov’s dialogic depth. Mayakovsky’s work can be roughly divided into three periods: the pre-revolutionary period, the early revolutionary period, and the period from approximately the mid-1920s to 1930, the year of his death by suicide. In his pre-revolutionary period, Mayakovsky fiercely attacked the past, but he was not reconciled with the present either. As Jakobson observed, the so-called byt (the routine of everyday life in Russian) is hostile to the poet,98 as in the poem “A vy noktiurn sygrat’ smogli by?” (“What about You?”): I splashed some colors from a tumbler And smashed at once the map of daily dull I showed upon a jelly-dish. The slanting cheek-bones of the ocean. I read the calls of lips though mute Upon the scales of tin-plate fish. And you, could you have played a nocturne, A nocturne on a drainpipe flute?99

The present is too tight, too rational for Mayakovsky. Conventional music is unbearable to his ear. In his first period, Mayakovsky renders

97 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “V. V. Khlebnikov,” in Major Soviet Writers, 83. 98 Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” in Major Soviet Writers, 11. 99 “A vy noktiurn sygrat’ smogli by?” in Selected Poems, by Vladimir Mayakovsky, trans. Dorian Rottenberg (Moscow: Progress, 1980), 23.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 33

this rational world irrational and makes poetry out of the prose of being: . . . six-storied fauns broke out dancing. . . brothel upon brothel. [. . .] Chimneys danced everywhere on the roofs, Each one kicking up a cancan.100

Irreality becomes real and palpable. Artifacts—dead objects— are alive; they are growing on the yeast of his hyperboles, moving and acting, akin to Khlebnikov’s Crane discussed above. Mayakovsky makes the world estranged, “defamiliarizes” it—realizing metaphors and hyperboles to their very absurd end, thus attracting attention to his verse.101 Even three-dimensional space is too small for him, as in his tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky: “I flew off like a curse / My other foot was already in the next street.”102 The street is enormously important for the futurists, especially for Mayakovsky: “Streets are our paintbrushes, / Public squares are our palettes.”103 In his essay “On Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” Korney Chukovsky states, “in every line Mayakovsky unconsciously serves this new street aesthetic.”104 (I might add “consciously,” since Mayakovsky the poet is a very self-conscious master.) Not only space and the present, but even his own bodily form, his ego, is too small for Mayakovsky: “and I feel that I am too small for myself. Someone obstinately bursts out of me.”105 As Chukovsky put it, 100 Quoted in Korney Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky” in Major Soviet Writers, 47. John Pearson’s translation. 101 The term “defamiliarization” was proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay “Iskusstvo kak priem” (Art as Device). See also Ezra Pound’s “making it new” (footnote 36 in Introduction). 102 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. Cited by Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 67. Translated by Edward J. Brown. 103 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Prikaz po armii iskusstv.” Cited by Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” 50. Translated by John Pearson. 104 Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” 50. Translated by John Pearson. 105 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, in Major Soviet Writers, 10. Translated by Edward J. Brown.

34 The River of Time Napoleon, for example, crossed only one single Arcola bridge, but Mayakovsky (so he tells it) crossed “a thousand Arcola bridges.” Napoleon visited the pyramids, but in Mayakovsky’s heart (so he says) loom a thousand pyramids. [. . .] His verses continuously tell us that he is Don Quixote, Goliath, and Napoleon—in fact, who is Napoleon alongside him? “I walk Napoleon on a chain like a pug.” His gestures are correspondingly Brobdingnagian: —Hey you, heaven, take off your hat: I’m coming. . . Sun, I challenge you to a duel.106

As Chukovsky observed, Mayakovsky “considers himself a citizen of the world.”107 His lyrical hero is present in different places at the same time, akin to the simultaneity of the French avant-garde poets discussed above: Saying this brought me to my Golgothas in the auditoriums of Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev, where there wasn’t one who didn’t yell: “Crucify him, Crucify him!”108

Mayakovsky presents himself as a prophet of the future: I, praiser of England and machines perhaps and merely the thirteenth apostle in a common gospel.109 106 Vladimir Mayakovsky, Oblako v shtanakh. Cited in Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” 45. Translated by John Pearson. 107 Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” 46. 108 Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers. Russian Poetry: The Modern Period, ed. John Glad and Daniel Weissbort, trans. Bob Perelman and Kathy Lewis (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1978), 18. 109 Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers, 24.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 35

Mayakovsky, who called himself a “brazen-lipped Zarathustra,” was certainly familiar with Thus Spoke Zarathustra—a book commonly read in Russia at the time—and with Nietzsche’s views in general. The Russian poet transformed Nietzschean images: “No gray hair in my soul, / no doddering tenderness, / I rock the world with the thunder of my voice, / strolling, looking good— / twenty-two.”110 Mayakovsky was not afraid of blasphemy; in fact, he used it to defamiliarize biblical images. Such defamiliarization is very characteristic of the first period of his work: Listen, sir god! aren’t you bored daubing your puffy eyes in cloudy jelly every day? Why don’t we rig up a merry-go-round around the tree of good and evil?111

Angels are “swindlers with wings” in Oblako v shtanakh (A Cloud in Trousers). Mayakovsky cannot reconcile with the present or with “the City Leprous.” He—“the Chrystosomest, / whose every word / gives a new birthday to the soul, gives a name to the body”—declares, Today brass knuckles will smash the world inside the skull!112

Like the romantic poets and Western futurists, Mayakovsky anticipates the future. He foresees in 1915 that “the year 1916 comes, / leading hungry masses, / wearing the thorny crown of revolution.”113 As noted

110 Ibid., 10. 111 Ibid., 28. 112 Ibid., 20. In Russian: “Segodnya // nado // kastetom // kroit’sia miru v cherepe!” 113 Ibid., 18.

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above, Khlebnikov predicted the revolution of 1917 even earlier.114 Revolutionarism is a characteristic feature of Russian futurism. World War I and the 1917 Revolution mark the border between Mayakovsky’s first and the second periods. During the war (though at first he paid tribute to Russian national chauvinism), the poet gained an apocalyptic vision. In the long poem Voyna i mir (War and Peace or War and the World—the title alludes to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but also reveals the second meaning of the Russian word mir, “world”), Mayakovsky writes, My China has drowned, my Persia sank out of sight. Look, what’s this? How’s Alaska? Nothing left? Nothing! Goodbye!115

During his second period, Mayakovsky calls himself a poet “mobilized by the revolution,”116 and one who consciously “stamped on the throat of his own song.”117 It is during this period that Mayakovsky tried to reconcile with the present, to reconcile the rational with the irrational. He deliberately used prosaic language, industrial, political, and ideological clichés (another source of defamiliarization) in order to be closer to life and to defend the existence and the necessity of art in what he viewed as “the great battle of the construction of socialism”: “Let our common monument be / socialism built in the battles.”118 In his “Razgovor s finispektorom o poezii” (“Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry”), the poet pretends to begin rather humbly: “Forgive my bothering you. . . / Thank you. . . / don’t worry. . . / I’ll stand. . . .” The poet tries to convince a Soviet bureaucrat that “the poet / spends a fortune on words,” and that 114 Velimir Khlebnikov, “The Teacher and the Student,” in Sobranie proizvedenii, 5:179. 115 Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” 46. Translated by John Pearson. 116 Vladimir Maiakovskii, Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1987), 1:425. From the “First Prelude” to the long poem Vo ves’ golos (At the top of my voice). Translation is mine. 117 Ibid., 426. Translation is mine. 118 Ibid., 429.

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Poetry is like mining radium. For every gram you work a year. For the sake of a single word you waste a thousand tons of verbal ore.119

He says that the duty of the poet is “To blare / like brass-throated horns / in the fogs of bourgeois vulgarity. . . ,” and that poetry “is a caress / and a slogan, / a bayonet / and a whip!”120 In the “Manifest letuchei federatsii futuristov” (“Manifesto of a Flying Federation of Futurists,” 1918), signed by David Burliuk, Vassilii Kamensky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky himself, the authors call for “the third bloodless but cruel revolution, revolution of spirit,” and claim, I. Separation of art from the state. Annihilation of nepotism, privileges, and control in the sphere of art. Down with diplomas, titles, official offices and ranks. II. Handing over all material facilities of art—theaters, choir premises, art galleries and the buildings of art academies and art schools into the hands of the masters of art for their equal utilization by the entire people of art. III. Universal art education, since we believe that the basis of future free art can emerge only from the depths of a democratic Russia that has not quenched its hunger for the bread of art. IV. Immediate confiscation of all hidden aesthetic stocks alongside food supplies for equal and uniform utilization by all of Russia. Hail the third Revolution, the Revolution of Spirit!121

119 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Razgovor s finispektorom o poezii,” in The Heritage of Russian Verse, ed. Dimitri Obolensky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 381. Interlinear translation by Dimitri Obolensky. 120 Mayakovsky, “Razgovor,” 384. Interlinear translation by Obolensky. 121 “Manifesto of a Flying Federation of Futurists,” in Russian Futurism, 63. Translation is mine. The original punctuation is preserved. Signed in Moscow in March 1918 by D. Burliuk, V. Kamensky, and V. Mayakovsky.

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The reality, as we know, turned out to be the complete opposite and was a rejection of all their aspirations. It is peculiar that the futurists in this manifesto use elevated biblical rhetoric, characteristic of Bolshevik writings and proletarian poets but not of Mayakovsky. There is not the slightest shade of the pleading tone of the “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry.” The manifesto sounds like a decree. Later, however, the pattern of the world became more complicated for Mayakovsky. In “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry,” he writes, The poet / is always / indebted to the universe, // paying / interest / on fines / and sorrow. // I am / indebted / to the lights of Broadway, // to you, skies of Baghdadi, // To the Red Army, / to the cherry-trees of Japan— // To all those things / about which / I have not had time to write. [. . .] The poet’s word / is your resurrection, Your immortality, / citizen bureaucrat. // Centuries hence, / take a line of verse // in its paper frame / and bring back time!122

By uniting different realities and geographical planes, the poet proclaims the integrity of being, time, and history. He, too, is convinced that ars longa, vita brevis est. His intonation, pleading and humble in the beginning of the poem, changes miraculously in the presence of eternity. In 1921, Mayakovsky writes in his “Prikaz No. 2 po armii iskusstv” (“Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts”): This is for you— the fleshy baritones 122 Mayakovsky, “Razgovor,” 383–84. Interlinear translation by Dimitri Obolensky. Since the translation is interlinear, I added a single back slash ( / ) to show the separation of lines (the so–called “Mayakovsky’s staircase”) and a double back slash ( // ) to show the beginning of a new stanza.

Beyond Barriers: Avant-Garde and Futurism 39

who, since the days of Adam, have shaken those dens called theaters with the arias of Romeos and Juliets.123

Here the personal tone of the poet becomes commanding and aggressive; it differs greatly from that of his “Conversation with a Tax Collector,” not to mention the long poems Khorosho (Good) or Vladimir Il’ich Lenin. Mayakovsky, a great master of declamation and oratorical speech, dominant in his intonational system from the very beginning, uses various devices aimed at defamiliarizing oratory. Especially important for him are hyperbolization—the grotesque realization of the metaphor to its logical or illogical end124 —and, so to speak, “metaphorical blasphemy”—defamiliarizing evangelical images. The poet also found a productive way to form neologisms, often by using verbs formed from nouns, or by forming the perfective aspect of verbs that, according to Russian grammar, have no perfective form. In his second period, Mayakovsky defamiliarized oratorical speech with the help of prosaisms— newspaper and bureaucratic vocabulary, the language of slogans and posters: Listen! The locomotives groan, and a draft blows through crannies and floor: “Give us coal from the Don! Metal workers and mechanics for the depot!”125 123 Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, ed. Patricia Blake, trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 145. Translation here by George Reavey. 124 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 66. Jakobson calls this concept “metamorphosis.” 125 Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, 147. Translated by George Reavey.

40 The River of Time

Rhyme is another dominant figure in Mayakovsky’s intonational system, always fresh and based on assonance and consonance. As Shklovsky puts it, “Mayakovsky’s rhymes are made according to the sound and not the graphic principle.”126 “Mayakovsky’s rhyme emphasizes the dominant semantic meaning of the line.”127 Still another equally important dominant figure of Mayakovsky’s intonational system is rhythm based on tonic or accentual verse, and the occasional fusion with syllabo-tonic meters where the amount of phrasal or semantic accents is approximately the same in each line. Each line is thus locked by a rhyme, and rhythm is in inseparable unity with the rhyme. The number of stresses in each line does not vary greatly, while the number of unstressed syllables does. In his influential essay “O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov” (“On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets”), Jakobson states that Mayakovsky’s poem “Domoi!” (“Homeward!” 1925) is “devoted to the contradiction between the rational and the irrational. It is a dream about the fusion of the two elements, a kind of rationalization of the irrational.”128 I want the heart to be paid Its wage of love / at the specialist’s rate. [. . .] I want The pen to be equal to the bayonet And I want Stalin To report in the name of the Politburo About the production of verse As he does about pig iron and steel. 126 Viktor Shklovsky, On Mayakovsky (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1940), 219. 127 Shklovsky, On Mayakovsky, 219. Mayakovsky’s rhythmic system was analyzed in the works of Roman Jakobson; the Russian poet Nikolai Aseev; the Russian scholars Kolmogorov, Kondratov, Tomashevsky, Zhirmunsky; and many others. 128 Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” 14.

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Thus, and so it is We’ve reached The topmost level up from the workers’ hovels In the Union Of Republics The appreciation of verse Has exceeded the prewar level.129

No hostility toward reality can be traced here. The so-called “ROSTA Windows,” political propaganda posters where Mayakovsky tried to combine the visual arts with rhymed slogans, were another attempt to conquer reality and to reconcile with the present. In his second period, Mayakovsky tried to depict the simple man. This intention is important, since his first collection was entitled “I” (“Me” in Paul Schmidt’s translation).130 Vladimir Mayakovsky is not only the hero of his first play, but, as Jakobson observes, “his name is the title of that tragedy, as of his last collection of poems. His name is also the title of his last published volume of poetry. The author dedicates his verse ‘to his beloved self.’”131 Although Mayakovsky claimed that he wanted “to depict simply man, man in general,” in the poem “Man” he “could directly feel only himself.”132 Jakobson then cites Trotsky’s article on Mayakovsky: “In order to raise man he elevates him to the level of Mayakovsky. The Greeks were anthropomorphists, naively likening the forces of nature to themselves; our poet is a Mayakomorphist, and he populates the squares, the streets, and the fields of the revolution only with himself.” Even when the hero of Mayakovsky’s poem appears as the 150-million-member collective, realized in one 129 Ibid., 14–15. Translated by Edward Brown. 130 Khlebnikov, The King of Time. Translated by Paul Schmidt. 131 Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” 10. 132 Ibid., 10.

42 The River of Time collective Ivan—a fantastic epic hero, the latter in turn assumes the familiar features of the poet’s “ego.”133

There is no distinct border between Mayakovsky’s second and the third periods. In the middle of the 1920s, as he was reconciling with the present (although in his plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse he fiercely attacks bourgeois philistine consciousness and superstitions), Mayakovsky finally faced the past. It was time for him to sum up fifteen years of his creative work. In his long poems Lenin and Good, Mayakovsky restores history in his own way, making a legend of the past. By addressing the generations to come (the future), he places himself in the legendary past of the revolutionary and poetic battles. For a nation that denied its past, it was the time to create its own history or a legend of it, and Mayakovsky was one of the first to feel this need. In his last long poem, Vo ves’ golos (At the Top of My Voice), he writes, Years of trial and days of hunger ordered us to march under the red flag. We opened each volume of Marx as we would open the shutters in our own house; but we did not have to read to make up our own minds which side to fight on. Our dialectics were not learned from Hegel.134

This poem is addressed to the generations to come and is dedicated to the future, but, as we see, a new poetic motive virtually dominates the “old” one: a substantial part of the poem is an attempt to praise the past as well as the present—his reality. Khlebnikov, by contrast, is ironic about reality: A Police Precinct is a great thing! It is a place of meeting Of myself and the state. 133 Ibid., 10. 134 Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, 221. Translated by George Reavey.

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The state reminds me That it still exists!135

He even grows bitter, as in one of his last poems “Vsem” (“To All”), dated April–May 1922: There are letters-vengeance, My cry is ripe, And the snowstorm flutters flakes, And the spirits rush soundlessly. I am pierced with the spears of spiritual hunger, Pierced with spears of starving mouths. [. . .] Ah, to find pearls of beloved faces On a street saleswoman! [. . .] Everywhere is a ragged knife And the faces of butchered poems. Everything that a three-year-old year gave us The score of sons round by a hundred, And a circle of faces familiar to all? Everywhere lie the bodies of slaughtered princes, Everywhere, everywhere’s damned Uglich!136

Here, the effect of alienation from reality is intensified by Khlebnikov’s metaphors— “pierced by the spears of spiritual hunger” and “pierced by the spears of starving mouths”—which can be read in direct and reverse order (A = B and B = A). In this poem, “a bundle of pages” does not only mean a literary work but also implies history and reality: the poet blames himself for his own prophecy. The complex metaphor “the executioner of the manuscript’s fire,” intensified by the inversion and redundancy (an executioner who burned the manuscripts), 135 Khlebnikov, Tvoreniia, 177. Written in early 1922. Translation is mine. 136 Ibid., 179. Translation is mine.

44 The River of Time

is then realized in metonymies: “ragged knife” and “the faces of butchered poems.” The motif of the destruction of culture and spiritual life is evoked in a universal metonymy: “Everywhere, everywhere’s damned Uglich!”137 Hence, not only metaphors but also metonymies become metamorphoses, to paraphrase Mandelstam’s formula. It is notable that Jakobson uses the term “metamorphosis” in the sense of “a parallelism developed in time.”138 Thus, the two futurist poets Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, often using the same devices and tropes, came to completely different poetics by 1922. Strange as it may seem, the authorities ignored Mayakovsky during this last period of his work. Soviet newspaper critics either attacked him or were silent even on his anniversaries. He felt alone and isolated. Some of his friends, like Khlebnikov, had already passed away. Others, like Jakobson and David Burliuk, were in exile. In addition, Mayakovsky had his personal tragedy. Still now, many do not believe that Mayakovsky committed suicide (1930). Several research workers from the Moscow Institute of Criminological Expertise analyzed the photo of Mayakovsky on his deathbed and revealed traces of two bullets. Two of his former neighbors witnessed that they heard two shots fired, although all his friends knew that there was only one bullet in his gun.139 The date of Mayakovsky’s death is traditionally associated with the end of the era of Russian futurism. In fact, during his second and, especially, third periods, Mayakovsky moved further and further away from futurism and was concerned more with the present than with the future. I consider the year of Khlebnikov’s death (1922) as the watershed mark of the end of Russian futurism and the end of the first Russian avant-garde, although Aleksei Kruchonykh (1886–1968) and Nikolai Aseev (1888–1963) were still 137 Uglich is the place where Tsar Boris Godunov had supposedly killed Prince Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. It is thus a symbol of usurpation, lawlessness, violence, and destruction, perhaps also alluding to the murder of the royal family by the Bolsheviks. 138 Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry,” 77. 139 Shklovsky writes about this in his book On Mayakovsky, 219.

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alive, as was Aleksandr Tufanov (1877–1942?)—who, according to the Swiss scholar Jean-Philippe Jaccard, further developed zaum’, thus paving the way for the second Russian avant-garde, OBERIU (Union of Real Art). For Jaccard, the tragic ends of Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941), Nikolai Oleinikov (1898–1937), as well as the exile of Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903–1958), marked the end of the Russian avant-garde.140 

140 Jean-Philippe Jaccard, Daniil Harms et la fin de l’avant-garde russe (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991).

CH A PT ER O N E

Nature and “The Artifice of Eternity”: The Relation to Nature and Reality for Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam

I

n their pursuit of modernism and “making it new,”1 the poets of the turn of the twentieth century were divided, so to speak, into two major opposing trends: the futurists on the one hand—who denied the past and tradition and sought “to throw the past overboard,” according to the Russian futurist manifesto of 19122—and, on the other hand, those who sought the renewal of language and poetry through foreign cultures and traditions, through the “cross fertilization between different languages,” as Clare Cavanagh characterized the work of Pound.3 In her book on Mandelstam, Cavanagh subtly observed, “the mobile polyglot unity of Eliot’s or Pound’s English, like Mandelstam’s Russian, allows for and even requires the continuous contributions of outsiders. Their world culture is no less dependent on the generosity of strangers.”4 Pound’s celebrated manner of rhyming ideas, citations, and languages is strikingly similar to Mandelstam’s praise of “the orgy   1 See note 36 in the Introduction.   2 Anna Lawton, ed., “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu,” in Russkii futurizm (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 41; Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, eds. and trans., Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912–1928 (Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1988), 51.   3 Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 22.  4 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 22.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 49

[feast] of quotations”5 and of the abundance of “lexical thrusts” he finds at work in Dante’s Divine Comedy.6 One cannot deny Cavanagh’s claim that “Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound began their careers with a quest for what Eliot calls ‘a living and central tradition,’ and their search for the center of world culture took all three ‘exiled wandering poets’ to the same source—to the Mediterranean, the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, and the Romance cultures that sprung up where Rome has sown its colonies.”7 There are still more affinities between Mandelstam and Pound concerning their relation to nature. Of the sixty-six meanings distinguished in the notion of “nature” or “natura” by Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas in Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, I have chosen two out of the three (the first and the third), as proposed by Burton Hatlen in his essay “Pound and Nature,” to draw on Mandelstam’s and Pound’s similar relations to nature: 1) Nature as a system of powers immanent in organic life forms and even in inorganic matter; 2) Nature as a play of physical and chemical processes.8 In addition, I will focus on Mandelstam’s and Pound’s views on the nature of the word (the title of a formidable Mandelstam’s essay9), art and poetry in relation to nature, since the poets’ relations to nature are revealed in their art. Both Pound and Mandelstam were opposed to symbolism,10 preferring instead to go back to Medievalism and Hellenism, thus restoring the meanings of words and bringing objects   5 Ibid. I would translate “pir tsitat” as a “feast of citations,” not “an orgy.”   6 Osip Mandelstam, The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. J. G. Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 401.  7 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 17.   8 Burton Hatlen, “Pound and Nature: Reading of Canto XXIII,” Paideuma 25, nos. 1–2 (Spring and Fall 1996): 163.   9 Osip Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, comp. and ed. A. G. Mets (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2010), 2:64–81. 10 Although they opposed similar trends, it should be noted that Pound opposed the epigones of French and English symbolism while Osip Mandelstam opposed primarily the Russian symbolist movement, meaning Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) or Valery Briusov (1873–1926).

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back to nature. My starting point will be the relation of the three poets to human nature, leading inevitably to the conflict between Pound’s “paradiso terrestre” (“earthly paradise”)11 and “the artifice of eternity,”12 the dream of the lyrical hero of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which will be further discussed in detail. Unlike the great Irish poet Yeats, Mandelstam and Pound did not see a contradiction between nature, reality, “earthly paradise,” and eternity. In the Pisan Cantos, Pound responded in French to Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels13 and to Yeats’s “artifice of eternity”: “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel.”14 Pound does not deny or defy nature and reality even in a “gorilla cage.” In his Drafts and Fragments, Pound states his approach to reality and being: “I tried to make a paradiso / terrestre [earthly paradise]. // I have tried to write Paradise.”15 On the other hand, Yeats seeks to overcome nature and reality. As Hugh Kenner asserts, “‘Sailing to Byzantium’ moreover is a transformation wrought on two Odes of Keats, about a bird not born for death and about a Grecian artifice of reality.”16 Here Kenner establishes the connection between Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” alluding to Keat’s “Immortal Bird” that “was not born for death” (in “Ode to a Nightingale”) and to his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“when old age should this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain. . .”).17 Yeats also hopes to overcome mortality—or as Paul de Man put it, aspires “not to be reborn in the manner of natural creation.”18 He feels, perhaps, a nostalgia to overcome the inaccessibility of art and that of literary art in particular: to become an aesthetic object without a mediator in an attempt to reunite time (and even maybe to reach a kind of eternity). 11 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1972), 802. 12 See Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound. 13 Artificial paradises (French). 14 Paradise is not artificial (French). Cantos 74 and 83, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 438, 528. 15 This is taken from Pound’s notes for Canto 117. 16 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 164. 17 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 209, 210. 18 Paul de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 69.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 51

Like Keats, Yeats is striving to overcome human passions: “a heart highsorrowful and cloyed, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”19 Yeats speaks of “dying generations,” thus alluding both to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (“hungry generations”) and to the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“When old age should this generation waste…”).20 Yeats goes farther than Keats by declaring that a frail human being overcome by passions is just an animal: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.”21 However, unlike his great predecessor, Yeats is so powerfully passionate in his desire to break with nature that his ties to nature and humanity are reinforced in spite of his desire to be gathered “in the artifice of eternity.” In contrast to Kenner and de Man, Northrop Frye claims that the image of the chestnut tree at the end of Yeats’s “Among School Children” “recalls the traditional image of earthly paradise, just below the circling stars, in which man was originally placed” (emphasis mine).22 In other words, Frye presumes that Yeats or his lyrical hero has found earthly paradise. Yet, Yeats’s search for reality and earthly paradise is much more sophisticated and painful. He goes from defying Plato and Plotinus; through vacillating between life and death, soul and heart; to establishing a “Translunar Paradise”: And I declare my faith: I mock Plotinus’s thought And cry in Plato’s teeth, Death and life were not Till man made up the whole. . . [. . .] And further add to that 19 Keats, Poetical Works, 210. 20 Keats, Poetical Works, 209, 210. 21 William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 193. 22 Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 257.

52 The River of Time That, being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar Paradise.23

Whitaker presumes that the poet “prepared his dream in the mirroring world of the imagination; but though he had referred to a future translunar Paradise, his peace is a present reality.”24 For Yeats, life and death exist only when man creates reality out of his “bitter soul.”25 As Whitaker points out, “as the word ‘bitter’ recognizes, these consciously defiant articles of faith are what in 1930 Yeats called ‘all that heroic casuistry, all that assertion of the eternity of what nature declares ephemeral.’”26 Yeats’s reality is the reality of his art and imagination that have accumulated world culture, history, and memories: I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things whereof Man makes a superhuman Mirror-resembling dream.27

I would agree with John Unterecker, who writes, “Yeats makes his farewell in this poem to the temptations of Heaven” (and to “the artifice of eternity,” we might add). Torn between soul and heart, between “the heaven of Christian dogma or the place where the spirit who passes 23 William Butler Yeats, “The Tower,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 198. 24 Thomas Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 201. 25 Yeats, “The Tower,” 198. 26 Whitaker, Swan and Shadow, 200. 27 Yeats, “The Tower,” 199.

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through the purgative fires of “Byzantium,” and the fire of passion, “he chooses a different fire: that of passion.”28 The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem. The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme? The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire? The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire! The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within. The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?29

The mature artist denies “Isaiah’s coal” and parts with the Catholic mystic and philosopher Von Hügel (1852–1925), choosing Homer’s “unchristened heart.”30 Unlike Yeats, Mandelstam always viewed eternity and heaven as natural and achieved through art and poetry. In his later poem of 1937, Mandelstam wrote, I will say it in draft, in a whisper— Since the time has not come yet: The game of the instinctive heaven Is attained through experience and sweat. And beneath the temporary sky Of purgatory we often forget That this happy heaven’s depot Is our expending and lifetime haven.31

Having gone through all the circles of earthly hell and purgatory, and anticipating his own arrest and perhaps even death, Mandelstam 28 John Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide to W. B. Yeats (New York: The Noonday Press, 1959), 223. 29 William Butler Yeats, “Vacillation,” in The Collected Poems, 252. 30 Ibid. 31 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:247 (March 9, 1937); translation here and further is mine, if not noted otherwise.

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nevertheless claims that heaven is a “lifetime home,”32 thus creating his own form of “paradiso terrestre.” Mandelstam does not see a contradiction between nature and eternity and never dreamed of departing from nature; he even feels inferior to it: It’s not I, not you—it’s they Who have the entire strength of gender endings.33

In his usual manner, Mandelstam simultaneously implies several meanings in the word “rodovoi”—“ancestral,” “genus,” and “generic”— thus alluding to being and procreation, as well as to creativity. He then states that “porous reeds are singing naturally in the wind, / and the snails of human lips [the metaphor speaks for itself] / will gratefully absorb their breathing heaviness.” Mandelstam urges one (addressing himself rather than his readers) “to enter their cartilage— / and you will be the heir of their kingdoms. // And for humans, for their living hearts / Wandering in their curves and twists, / You will picture both their pleasures / And the pain that tortures them in time of tides.”34 On another occasion he wrote, “On Lamarck’s flexible scale / I will take the lowest stair,”35 alluding to Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s (1744–1829) theory of organic evolution, which Mandelstam openly admired in both his poetry and his prose: “Lamarck feels the rifts between classes. He hears the pauses and syncopes of the evolutionary line.”36 Earlier, Mandelstam noted, “in Lamarck’s reversed, descending movement down the ladder of living creatures resides the greatness of Dante. The lower forms of organic existence are humanity’s Inferno.”37 “Inferno” 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 1:222. 34 Ibid. Mandelstam uses the second person singular here in place of the first person. The specific role of personal pronouns in the structure of the poetic text was profoundly analyzed by Roman Jakobson in “Poeziia grammatiki i grammatika poezii,” in Poetics. Poetyca (Warsaw: 1961), 405, 409; see also: Iurii Lotman in “Zametki po poetike Tiutcheva,” in O poetakh i poezii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1996), 553–64. 35 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:171. The original Russian: “Na podvizhnoi lestnitse Lamarka / Ia zaimu posledniuiu stupen’.” 36 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 367. 37 Ibid.

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is the key word. If memory, progress, and human-refined intellect do not matter, it is better to lose memory, and perhaps humanity, to escape the horror of contemporary life: If all living nature is but an error Of a short nightmarish day, I will take the lowest stair On Lamark’s flexible scale.38

Now the stanza acquires a different connotation due to the if-clause and the epithet “nightmarish.” The poem appears to be about Lamarck’s theory of organic evolution, but is really a sharp protest against the poet’s contemporary life: He says that nature abounds in breaks, There’s no vision—you see for the last time. He says: “The resonance will cease, You loved Mozart in vain: A spider’s deafness will seize You—this gap is beyond our strength.”39

Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her “Comments to the Poems of 1930–1937” that in “Lamarck” and in “Octaves” 8 and 9 there is “a horrible fall of human beings who forgot Mozart and denied everything (mind, vision, hearing) in that kingdom of spider-like deafness.”40 In the “nightmarish” Soviet life of that time, there was no need either for vision or hearing; therefore, there was no need for art or music. Naturally, it is Mandelstam, not Lamarck, who bitterly exclaims: “you loved Mozart in vain.” In contemporary life as Mandelstam observed it, only primitive types could survive. There was no more need for 38 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:171. 39 Ibid. 40 Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Tret’ia kniga (Moscow: Agraf, 2006), 283. Translation is mine.

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the “uninterrupted procession of generations,” as Przybylski observed while analyzing Mandelstam’s 1912 poem “Hagia Sophia.”41 Reading “Lamarck,” one might even suppose that there is no need for humanity at all. At the end of “Lamarck,” written twenty years after “Hagia Sophia,” the poet makes gloomy predictions: Nature has turned away As if she didn’t need us anymore And put our medulla, spinal cord, In a dark sheath like a sword. She was late or just forgot To put down a drawbridge for those Who have a green grave, A lithe laughter and red breath.42

I would not agree completely with the poet’s wife, however, that “The Octaves” have the same connotations as “Lamarck.” In my view, in “The Octaves” the poet summons the strength and willpower to preserve cultural memory and bridge its gaps and breaks, and to name the unnamed, thus overcoming the infernal state of oblivion: A tiny appendage of the sixth sense Or lizard’s parietal eye, Monasteries of snails and shells, And a hum of flickering cilias nearby. Inaccessible—how close, but try to unfold— One can neither see it, nor unbind, As if a note from somebody you hold And it should be immediately replied.43 41 Ryszard Przybylski, An Essay on the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: God’s Grateful Guest, trans. Madeline G. Levine (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1987), 109. 42 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:186. 43 Ibid., 1:201.

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Therefore, the poet’s duty is to reveal the joys and pains of unnamed and unconscious creatures, that is, to name the unnamed. As was correctly noted by Vladimir Toporov, “the poet [. . .] gives his reader the gift of what is preserved in his ancestral memory, which in the rarest cases binds the child to something that existed before civilization, before speech and even before birth with that foundation (‘S pervoosnovoi zhizni slito’ [merged with the foundation of life]), that is the content and the meaning of these ‘recollections’ explicated from chaos.”44 Hence the duty of the poet is to connect human, organic, and even non-organic nature to make order out of chaos and to name the unnamed. Ezra Pound is closer to Mandelstam’s perception of nature than any other poet known to me: The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry. . .45

Both Pound and Mandelstam use a scientific approach to nature and are consistently faithful to it. In the ABC of Reading and in the Cantos, Pound writes about the Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). In Drafts and Fragments from the last Cantos, he mentions the Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) who invented the Systema Naturae (The System of Nature, the title of his book from 1735): a system for classifying animals, plants, and minerals, thus making order out of chaos. Likewise, Mandelstam writes about the theory of evolution both in his poetry and in his prose. In his essay “K probleme nauchnogo stilia Darvina” (“To the Problem of the Scientific Style of Darwin,” 1932), Mandelstam links Darwin’s 44 Toporov, Mif. Ritual, 435. Translation is mine. 45 Pound, Canto 81, in The Cantos, 521.

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theory of evolution with the discoveries of Linnaeus and Lamarck. This essay can be viewed as an outline for his poems “Lamarck” (“It’s not I, not you—it’s they / Who have the entire power of the gender [ancestral] endings”) and the “monasteries of snails and shells” from “The Octaves.”46 The later poems of Mandelstam have many similarities with Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Written during his exile in Voronezh, Mandelstam’s late work reveals his anxiety and desire to overcome loneliness and separation from life in three major ways. As Gasparov observed, Mandelstam considered himself a member of the fourth estate, and, therefore, unlike Marina Tsvetaeva, he was not initially proud of being an outcast. Hence, his first way to overcome separation and exile was by seeking forgiveness and attempting repentance in the so-called “Stalin’s Ode,” “Stanzas,” and the like. The second way Mandelstam tried to overcome the loneliness of exile was by expressing his thirst for life and his acute feeling and vision of life itself. In addition to “Lamarck’s flexible scale”47 and the poems of this cycle mentioned above, there is one particular poem reminiscent of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, especially Canto 83. Pound: And brother Wasp is building a very neat house Of four rooms, one shaped like a squat indian bottle48 Mandelstam: Armed with the vision of narrow wasps Sucking the axis of the earth, the axis of the earth, I feel all that I have had to watch And recollect by heart and in vain. [. . .] Oh, if only an air’s barb and summer warmth Could have made me— 46 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:201. 47 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:171. 48 Pound, Canto 83, in The Cantos, 532.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 59 Passing sleep and death— Hear the axis of the earth, the axis of the earth.49

In addition to the literal affinities with Pound (“the barb of air” and “the barb of time”), the image of the wasp in Mandelstam’s case is also an allusion to his—and Stalin’s—first name: Iosif-Osip-Osia; the word “wasp” in Russian is “osa.” In the genitive plural it is “os,” while the word denoting the earth’s axis is a soft and palatalized “os’”—almost a homophone. As Taranovsky observed, there is a hidden allusion here to these lines of the slightly earlier “Stalin’s ‘Ode’”: “I would say who moved the axis of the earth, / honoring the tradition of hundred forty nations.”50 Thus Mandelstam implies all the meanings mentioned above and rhymes them, expressing his anxiety and thirst for life. The poet both begs and rebels: Let go, Voronezh, raven-town, Let me be, don’t let me down, You’ll drop me, crop me, won’t revive, Voronezh—whim, Voronezh—raven, knife.51

A month later, Mandelstam writes: Having deprived me of seas, flight, space, You gave me instead a foothold of a forcible land, What have you gained? A brilliant end: You couldn’t have taken moving lips away.52

Similarly, Pound in a Pisan camp vacillates between humility (“pull down thy vanity”), despair (“caged: “Nothing, nothing that you can do”), and desire for life: 49 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:239–40. Written in 1937. 50 Kiril Taranovsky, Essays on Mandelstam (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 113. 51 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:212. Written in April 1935. Translation is mine. 52 Ibid., 1:216. Written in May 1935. Translations are mine.

60 The River of Time When the mind swings by a grass blade an ant’s forefoot shall save you the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower53

Both Pound in the “gorilla cage”54 and Mandelstam in Voronezh exile, which he perceives as “a lion’s den”— “I’ve been submerged in a lion’s den and a fortress”),55 an allusion to The Book of Daniel—are longing for life and are thinking of an earthly paradise. Pound exclaims, “will I ever see the Giudecca again?”56 Likewise, Mandelstam appeals to France: “I beg as compassion and grace, / Your earth and your honeysuckle, France.” In this poem, the Russian poet asserts that “a violet is still a violet in a prison cell.”57 The third way Mandelstam attempts to overcome his forceful separation from life is through his “nostalgia for world culture,” his search for the harmony of France, Italy, the Mediterranean, and “the blessed islands.” Here again, there is affinity between Mandelstam and Pound in the admiration of both poets for François Villon. Mandelstam writes, Spitting at the spider’s rights, An impudent scholar, a stealing angel, Played tough tricks near Gothic sites. Unrivaled Villon François. He is a heavenly robber, It is not shameful to sit near him: Before the very end of the world Skylarks will still ring and warble.58

53 Pound, Canto 83, in The Cantos, 533. 54 Ibid. 55 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:227. 56 Pound, Canto 83, in The Cantos, 533. 57 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:227. 58 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:251. Written in 1937. Translation is mine.

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Like Pound in “Montcorbier, Alias Villon,” Mandelstam in his essay on Villon emphasizes Villon’s medievalism, his ability to combine both plaintiff and defendant within his own persona, and his self-compassion, which lacks both self-pity and self-centeredness. Most importantly, Mandelstam writes of Villon’s desire for reality, his denial of abstract notions, and his ability to combine gaunt reality with a vision of the divine. Similarly, Pound states that Villon “is utterly mediæval, yet his poems mark the end of mediæval literature. [. . .] he recognizes the irrevocable, he blames no one but himself,”59 and that “his poems are gaunt as the Poema del Cid is gaunt; they treat of actualities, they are unattained with fancy; in the Cid death is death, war is war. In Villon filth is filth, crime is crime; neither crime nor filth is gilded.”60 Like Pound, Mandelstam feels sympathy for “the heavenly robber,” finally associating himself with outcasts and exiles, and alluding to Ovid, Dante, and Villon. There is the motif of wandering as exile and a spiritual kinship with Ovid; and, through Ovid, with Pushkin, who also addressed a poem to the Roman poet (“To Ovid,” 1821) from his Southern exile, as was noted by Przybylsky.61 Such poems as “On the stony spurs of Pieria” (1919) and, especially, “Thalassa and thanatos of Grecian flutes” (1937) reveal Mandelstam’s nostalgia for a natural life in an unnatural totalitarian state. There is a certain antagonism and an attempt to escape Soviet reality, not his own human nature. He strives for the “blessed islands” and a time where “no one eats hard-earned bread / Where there is only honey, wine, and milk, / Where a creaking labor does not darken the sky, / And the wheel turns lightly.”62 As was brilliantly demonstrated by Przybylsky, Mandelstam longs for the islands of the Greek Archipelago, going as far back as Hesiod’s Theogonia, in which the dance of the Muses— born in Pieria—is shown. To be exact, the Muses descended from the mountains of Helicon to the valleys (among them, the valley of Tempe 59 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1953), 170–71. 60 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 172–73. 61 Ryszard Przybylsky, “Rim Osipa Mandelstama,” in Mandel’shtam i antichnost’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 1995), 44. 62 Osip Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:105.

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in the land Phaecia—Ulysses’s last stop on his way home and the probable site of the town from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”).63 Przybylsky states that Hölderlin called these islands beloved, Byron referred to them as “Blessed Isles,” and “Leconte de Lisle did not hesitate to call the archipelago holy.”64 On the other hand, as Yefim Etkind observed, Mandelstam’s seemingly humorous poem of 1931, “Ia skazhu tebe s poslednei priamotoi” (“I will tell you with the last [ultimate] frankness”), expresses his bitterness and disillusionment in his quest for “world civilization”: I will tell you this, my lady, With final candor, All is folly—sherry-brandy, Oh, my angel. Where Beauty shone To a Hellene, Disgrace gazed at me From a black hole. Greeks stole Helen Along the sea, While I taste a salty brine On my lips. Void will soil my lips And disgrace, Poverty will cock a grim snook At my face.65

Yefim Etkind presumes that this poem of 1931 is “Mandelstam’s esthetic self-denial: Beauty, that was the purport of art and being, has not 63 Przybylsky, God’s Grateful Guest, 175–78. 64 Ibid., 187. 65 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:170–71. Written in 1934. Translation is mine.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 63

endured the test of time and life; it turned out to be a common ugliness, Achaian men turned ordinary Greeks, who, like vulgar criminals, just kidnapped Helen.”66 In my view, Etkind oversimplifies Mandelstam’s “self-denial”: it is rather a denial of the conditions in which beauty becomes ugliness. The motive of this poem is concealed bitterness, disguised as mockery at breaking with world culture when time is “out of joint.”67 Moreover, as was stated by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poem was written “during a drinking party [popoika] in the Zoological Museum,” and therefore cannot be interpreted as a serious refutation of any previous ideas or as “an esthetic self-denial.”68 In his 1937 poem, “Zabludilsia ia v nebe—chto delat’?” (“I got lost in heaven—what’s to be done?”),69 Mandelstam reveals his metaphysical, as well as his physical, fear. It was easier for those who, like Dante, were close to heaven and God; we are unable to have the same feelings towards God, heaven, and humans as Dante had. In his thirst for life threatened by real death, perhaps execution, Mandelstam denies the “sharp-tender laurel” striving for “Florentine nostalgia.”70 (He uses the same word “toska,” with which he expressed his thirst for world culture.) In the other version of the same poem—the “dvoichatka,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam called them, or the “twin poem,” to use the term of Kiril Taranovsky71—the poet begs an unnamed cup-bearer (perhaps the one who deprived him of the cup at the feast of his forefathers “to give him

66 Efim Etkind, “Osip Mandel’shtam—Trilogiia o veke,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo O. E. Mandel’shtama (Voronezh: Izadatel’stvo Voronezhskogo universiteta, 1990), 241. Translation is mine. 67 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:170. 68 Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, “Kommentarii k stikham 1930–1937 gg.,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 199. 69 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:248. 70 Ibid. 71 See Kiril Taranovsky, “Tri zametki o poezii Mandel’shtama,” International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 12 (1969): 167; Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Soglasie, 1999), 233–34; Nadezhda Mandelstam even observed some troichatki (triplets) (ibid., 234); see also: Omry Ronen, “Lexical Repetition, Subtext and Meaning in Osip Mandelstam’s Poetics,” in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. Roman Jakobson, C. H. van Schooneveld, and Dean S. Worth (Paris: Mouton, 1973), 370.

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the strength to drink to the health of the turning tower, / a wrestling crazy azure.”)72 As many scholars of Mandelstam (the most important and profound works are by Taranovsky, Omry Ronen, Mikhail Gasparov, and Irina Semenko73) have stated, Mandelstam’s poetry is extremely esoteric and is built upon hidden allusions and associations with Russian, European, and classical poetry. Here again Mandelstam’s affinity with Pound and T. S. Eliot, and their thirst for world culture, is quite evident. Yet, already in “Vek” (“The Age”), “1 ianvaria 1924” (“January 1, 1924”), and other Mandelstam poems of this period, a strong longing for contemporaneity can also be felt in the verses of this “aging son of a century.”74 Yuri Tynianov, in his essay dedicated to modern Russian poetry, “Promezhutok” (“The Gap” or “The Space Between”), writes about the “bloom” of contemporary Russian prose and the “decline” of poetry in the 1920s. Comparing the poetry of Pasternak and Mandelstam, Tynianov writes, “a word in Pasternak’s work becomes an almost palpable thing, while in Mandelstam a thing becomes an abstraction [a versified abstraction].”75 Tynianov continues that the peculiarity of Mandelstam’s poetry is that it has “not a word, but shades of words and meanings,” and that his work resembles “the work of almost a foreigner in the literary language.”76 This was probably to some extent true, as far as Mandelstam’s first book Kamen’ (Stone, 1914) was concerned (though Tynianov’s essay was written after “January 1, 1924” had been published); however, Mandelstam’s great poems of 1923—“The Slate Ode” and “The Horseshoe Finder”—and “January 1, 1924” mentioned above, which proved that the poet was also seeking reality, were overlooked by Tynianov. 72 Taranovsky, “Tri zametki,” 167. 73 See, among others, Taranovsky, Essays on Mandelstam; Mikhail Gasparov, Grazhdanskaia lirika Mandel’shtama 1937 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 1996); Irina M. Semenko, Poetika pozdnego Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Mandel’shtamovskoe obshchestvo, 1987). 74 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:152. 75 Iurii Tynianov, Poetika. Istoria literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 189. 76 Tynianov, Poetika, 190–91.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 65

Pasternak is—and was—contemporary, real; his thirst for life (Life, My Sister is the title of one of his books) at that point in his work was satisfied by contemporary reality, by the present moment. He rarely went further back (even in his long “epic” poems), than “1905” or the nineteenth century. In my view, Mandelstam in his “Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate” (“Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” discussed below, managed to express his own time, as well as the timeless, more profoundly and impressively than Pasternak. Mandelstam also claimed to be a contemporary: “It’s time you knew: I’m a contemporary too.”77 I would argue that both Mandelstam’s theoretical views and his art of that period (“The Age,” “January 1, 1924”) and his later poems, especially those of his Moscow and Voronezh period (1935–1937), prove that he, too, was seeking reality and life. In opposition to Vyacheslav Ivanov’s slogan “a realibus ad realiora”78 (from real to the most real), Mandelstam in “Utro Akmeizma” (“The Morning of Acmeism,” 1912) expressed his understanding of reality and realism by means of a mathematical equation, as noted in Ivanov’s 1909 book of essays, Po zvezdam (By the Stars): “A = A what a magnificent theme for poetry! Symbolism languished and yearned for the law of identity. Acmeism made it its slogan and proposed its adoption instead of the ambiguous a realibus ad realiora.”79 Notably, in this search for reality and “making it new,” both Pound and Mandelstam turned to the Middle Ages and to Provence. Mandelstam wrote in “The Morning of Acmeism”: The Middle Ages are very close to us because they possessed to an extraordinary degree a sense of boundary and partitions. They never confused different levels and treated the beyond with the utmost restraint. A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism as well as a feeling for the world as a living equilibrium makes us kin to this

77 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:178. 78 From real to the most real. Ivanov, Po zvezdam (St. Petersburg, 1909), 305. Quoted in Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 65. 79 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 65.

66 The River of Time epoch and encourages us to derive strength from the works which arose on Romance soil around the year 1200.80

This thought almost exactly coincides with what Pound wrote in the chapter “Il Miglior Fabbro,” dedicated to Arnaut Daniel: “the Twelfth century, or, more exactly, that century whose center is the year 1200, has left two perfect gifts: the church of San Zeno in Verona, and the canzoni of Arnaut Daniel; by which I would implicate all that is most excellent in the Italian-Romanesque architecture and in Provençal minstrelsy.”81 Pound started with The Spirit of Romance and for the rest of his life was faithful to “the spirit, which arose on Romance soil around the year 1200.”82 Beyond the features that Mandelstam, Pound, and T. S. Eliot have in common—as observed by Cavanagh in her book on Mandelstam discussed earlier—the affinity of their ideas is due to the affinity of their sources. Homer, Dante, and Villon were more contemporary and real for Mandelstam—who translated The Song of Roland into Russian and, like Pound, wrote poems and essays dedicated to Hellenism and medievalism—than were the works of the symbolists. In his essay “O prirode slova” (“Nature of Word,” 1921–22), Mandelstam opposes Hellenism to symbolism, revealing his attitude toward reality: Hellenism is the conscious surrounding of man with domestic utensils instead of impersonal objects; the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils, and the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth [. . .]. In the Hellenistic sense, symbols are domestic utensils, but then any object brought into man’s sacred circle could become a utensil and consequently, a symbol.83

80 Ibid., 66. 81 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 22. 82 Ibid. 83 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 127–28.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 67

Mandelstam argues, “there is essentially no difference between a word and an image. An image is merely a word which has been sealed up, which cannot be touched. An image is inappropriate for everyday use, just as an icon lamp would be inappropriate for lighting a cigarette.”84 Then, by applying his views on the nature of a symbol to the school of Russian symbolism, which he called “pseudo-Symbolism,” Mandelstam concludes, Jourdain discovered in his old age that he had been speaking ‘prose’ all his life. The Russian Symbolists discovered the same prose, the primordial, image-bearing nature of the word. They sealed up all words, all images, designating them exclusively for liturgical use. An extremely awkward situation resulted: no one could move, nor stand up, nor sit down. One could no longer eat at [the] table because it was no longer simply a table. One could no longer light a lamp because it might signify unhappiness later.85

Pound in his 1914 “Vorticism” attacked symbolism in a very similar fashion: “the symbolists dealt in ‘association,’ that is, in a sort of allusion, almost an allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonymy. One can be grossly ‘symbolic,’ for example, by using the term ‘cross’ to mean ‘trial.’ The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra.”86 Both Pound in his 1914 essay and Mandelstam in “The Morning of Acmeism” compare poetry to mathematics. Mandelstam puts it thus: “the sight of a mathematician who produces without effort the square of some ten-digit phenomenon to the tenth power, and the modest appearance of a work of art frequently deceives us with respect to the monstrously condensed reality which it possesses” (emphasis added).87 84 Ibid., 128–29. 85 Ibid. 86 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 84. 87 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 61.

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Gregory Freidin states, “in turn-of-the-century Europe, intensity in association with the paradigmatic (or, as in Mandelstam, the ‘condensed reality’ of a mathematical formula) denoted a phenomenon commanding the sort of reverence and respect afforded hidden springs of a tremendous power.”88 However, Mandelstam would later go further and claim that “poetry is not a part of nature” and that it creates a different reality. In his essay “Vypad” (“The Slump”), he argues that poetry “is not obliged to anyone, perhaps its creditors are all fraudulent!”89 In “Razgovor o Dante” (“Conversation about Dante”), he states that “poetry is not a part of nature, not even its best or choicest part, let alone the reflection of it—this would make a mockery of the axioms of identity; rather, poetry establishes itself with astonishing independence in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating as acting out in nature by means of its arsenal of devices, commonly known as tropes” (emphasis added).90 Similarly, Pound emphasized the importance of image, stating, “the image is the poet’s pigment. The painter should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative or non-representative. He should depend, of course, on the creative, not upon the mimetic or representational part in his work.”91 Furthermore, there is a striking affinity in both Mandelstam’s and Pound’s views on the nature of poetry. In “Conversation About Dante,” Mandelstam asserts, It is only with the severest qualifications that poetic discourse or thought may be referred to as “sounding”; for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, one of which, taken by itself, is completely mute, while the other, abstracted from its prosodic transmutation, is totally devoid of significance and interest, and is susceptible of 88 Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 12. 89 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 202. 90 Ibid., 397. 91 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 86.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 69 paraphrasing, which, to my mind, is surely a sign of non-poetry. For where there is amenability to paraphrase, there the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night.92

Pound, in turn, distinguishes “three kinds of poetry”: Melopœia, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing of trend of that meaning. Phanopœia, which is a casting of images upon their visual imagination. Logopœia, “the dance of the intellect among words.”93

In the ABC of Reading, Pound maintains, very much like Mandelstam, that “music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.”94 Hence, for Pound and Mandelstam the nature of poetry is inseparable from music, the understanding of which goes far beyond meter and rhythm for both poets. Both Pound and Mandelstam were concerned with the renewal of literature, especially of the language of poetry, but both considered futurism a narrow-minded escape from the past and from tradition. As Pound said in “Vorticism,” defying Marinetti, “we do not desire to evade comparison with the past. We prefer that the comparison be made by some intelligent person whose idea of ‘the tradition’ is not limited by the conventional taste of four or five centuries and one continent.”95 In “The Morning of Acmeism,” Mandelstam also opposes futurism, aiming primarily at Mayakovsky: “the Futurists, unable to cope with conscious sense as creative material, frivolously threw it overboard and essentially repeated the crude mistake of their predecessors. For the Acmeists, the conscious sense of the word, Logos, is just as magnificent a form as music is for 92 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 397. 93 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), 25. 94 Pound, ABC, 61. 95 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 90.

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the Symbolists. And if, for the Futurists, the word as such is still down on its knees creeping, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a dignified upright position and entered the Stone Age of its existence.”96 Pound would be the last modernist to defy Logos, since he managed to express the same idea in an aphoristic form: “Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”97 Without knowing that he was writing about the first translator of his poetry into Russian, Pound wrote in “Vorticism,” “a Russian correspondent, after having called it [Pound’s poem “Heather”] a symbolist poem, and having been convinced that it was not symbolism, said slowly: ‘I see, you wish to give people new eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing.’”98 The correspondent was Zinaida Vengerova, who happened to be the wife of Mandelstam’s professor at Petersburg University, the prominent scholar Semen Vengerov. She was the first translator of Pound and others from Des Imagistes into Russian. Vengerova published her essay in Strelets (Sagittarius) in 1915 and, nevertheless, entitled it “The English Futurists.”99 However, the particular detail she emphasized was the new vision: “making it new,” expressed through the image of new eyes that almost literally recalls that of Khlebnikov: And with horror I understood—no one could see me. I would have to sow eyes. My task was to be a sower of eyes!100  96 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 62.  97 Pound, ABC, 36.  98 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 85.  99 The essay as well as the translation of “Before Sleep” from Blast were reprinted in the addendum to the first volume of Ezra Pound, Poems and Selected Cantos in Russian Translation: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Ian Probstein (St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal’, 2003). 100 Khlebnikov, “The Solitary Player,” in The King Of Time, 55. Not a very exact translation by Paul Schmidt. The last line reads, “that the sower of eyes must move.”

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 71

Thus, both Mandelstam and Pound were opposed to symbolism, futurism, and mimesis. Mandelstam’s understanding of reality was probably closer to that of Ortega y Gasset, who believed that there are as many realities as points of view (so-called “perspectivism”). Mandelstam’s reality is always a condensed image. Sometimes his reality is close to impressionism: . . . The artist painted How deeply lilacs fainted, And ringing colors, layer over layer, He dabbed like scabs on canvas.101

Sometimes Mandelstam’s reality is closer to surrealism: So play to the rapture of aorta With a cat’s head in your mouth, There were three devils, you’re the fourth, The last, marvelous colorful sprite.102

If we do not seek literal likeness, we could probably grasp the imagepicture of this poem: “the rapture of aorta” is the fate of the artist; “the cat’s head in your mouth” is the sound image inspired by the performance of a lady-violinist (Galina Barinova, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Commentaries”103), “the devils” were, perhaps, Paganini, Wieniawski, and Fritz Kreisler. The images-pictures of these two poems are related to the paintings of Russian artists Falk and Chagall. The image of time itself is sometimes “hidden” and must be decoded: After midnight the heart feasts, Having bitten a silvery mouse.104

101 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:214. Written April–July 1935. Translation is mine. 102 Ibid. 103 See N. Mandel’shtam, “Kommentarii k stikham,” 258. 104 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:170. The translation is mine.

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According to Nadezhda Mandelstam, the “silvery mouse” is an image of time that, probably, was inspired by Maximilian Voloshin and by Greek philosophy—as she wrote in Vtoraia kniga (The Second Book) and in her “Commentary,” in which she also mentioned Indian philosophy but was not sure if Osip Mandelstam knew it.105 Still, Mandelstam was a contemporary concerned with life and the present: “Just try and rip me out of the time! — // You’ll wring your own neck, I’m telling you!”106 His thirst for reality was almost as great as his thirst for world culture. Although his approach to reality and time was often hostile, his attitude was far from straightforward. The most vivid example of Mandelstam’s complex approach to art and reality is revealed in his visionary poem “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” which evokes his vision of the past, present, and future of humankind based on history and science. Like Pound, Mandelstam persistently followed the scientific inventions of his time. He was aware that science could bring destruction and chaos, as he predicted in “Verses on The Unknown Soldier,” and as Pound did in Canto 115. The poem “Verses on The Unknown Soldier” begins with a vision of a human ocean that lacks sight and foresight— “Let this air be called a witness: / The long-ranged heart that it has, and in dug-outs, omnivorous and active / Is the ocean, windowless stuff. . .”107— and then reveals a cosmic vision: Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes The light of speeds ground down to a ray Starts a number, made lucent and clear By the bright pain of moth-eaten holes and moles. And a new battlefield beyond the field of fields Flies like a triangular flock of cranes, The news flies like a new light-dust, And it’s bright from yesterday’s fight. 105 N. Mandel’shtam, “Kommentarii k stikham,” 199. 106 Osip Mandelshtam, The Complete Poetry of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Burton Raffel and Anna Burago (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973). 107 Bernard Meares’s translation.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 73 The news flies like a new light-dust: I am not Leipzig, not Waterloo, Not the Battle of Nations—I am new, I will dazzle the world with my light. Arabian mess, mash and hash, The light of speeds ground down to a ray— And trampling my retina with its squint soles, The beam flattens the apple of my eye.108

In addition to Pound’s Canto 115, Mandelstam’s vision here recalls Yeats’s “Second Coming” and Pound’s “Hell Cantos.” The Russian poet’s vision differs from that of Yeats, however, since it is revealed in an incredible blend of scientific vision and vocabulary and, at the same time, genuine metaphors. Though Mandelstam begins with the hell of past wars, the lines quoted above alluding to World War I, his “Soldier” also differs from Pound’s “Hell Cantos” because Mandelstam expresses a cosmic vision and goes far beyond particulars. Yuri Levin maintains that Mandelstam’s entire poem is set by Blok’s line, “A horrid sight of future wars,” and evokes “a complex image of a global war.”109 Ivanov presumes that old scientific theories, such as that of ether, as well as the newest theories—in particular, the velocity of the speed of light (C = 300,000 km/sec) and Einstein’s theory of relativity and the formula E = MC2, which eventually led to the invention of the nuclear bomb110—are reflected in the poem. Levin distinguishes the main themes as Cosmos and Nature, War and Death. Mandelstam is perhaps the most intricate Russian poet of the twentieth century, known for his esoteric and complex allusions and for associations mostly hidden between the lines; Mandelstam’s reader, 108 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:242. The translation is mine. 109 Iurii Levin, “Zametki o poezii Mandel’shtama 30-h godov. II ‘Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate,’” Slavica Hierolymitana 4 (1979), 185–212. 110 Viacheslav V. Ivanov, “‘Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate’ v kontekste mirovoi poesii,” in Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 360.

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like the readers of Yeats and Pound, has to do a lot of research in order to decode them. As for Mandelstam’s allusions and associations, Nadezhda Mandelstam and the scholars mentioned above point out Ezekiel, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the poetry of Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Baratynsky’s “Cherep” (“Skull”), Lermontov’s “Demon,” Zedlitz’s “Die Nächtliche Heerschau” (“The Night Parade”) in Zhukovskii’s translation, and Flammarion. In addition, Gasparov mentions Erich Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Henri Barbusse’s Fire, as well as the Russian writer Lidin’s novel The Grave of the Unknown Soldier and Arcadii Shteinberg’s 1933 expressionist poem that bears the same title. Gasparov proves that Shteinberg’s poem alludes to Lermontov’s character Napoleon and Zedlitz’s “Die Nächtliche Heerschau,” and it distinguishes the themes of darkness and future eternal light, purgatory and resurrection.111 The poems of German poet Max Bartel “To the Unknown Soldier” and “Verdun,” which Mandelstam himself translated into Russian in the middle of 1920s, can certainly be added to that list. In addition, there is a certain affinity between the opening of Mandelstam’s “Soldier” and Apollinaire’s surrealist poem “Ocean of Earth,” dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico and translated into Russian by Benedikt Lifshits—an acquaintance of Mandelstam, a prominent translator of French poetry, and a superb poet close to the futurists. In particular, the fragment below bears a striking resemblance to the spirit of Mandelstam’s “Soldier”: Airplanes drop eggs Watch out for the anchor Watch out for the ink which they squirt 111 S. I. Lipkin, “Vtoraia doroga,” in K verkhov’iam, by Arkadii Shteinberg (Moscow: Sovpadeniie, 1997), 361. Lipkin proved that another poem of Shteinberg, “Wolf Hunting,” attracted the attention of both Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, who wrote his famous poem “For the Glory of the Future Ages” alluding to certain metaphors in the above poem. Therefore, it is most likely that Mandelstam alluded to the poem of his younger contemporary, who would later share the great poet’s fate of spending more than ten years in Stalin’s camps and then would become one of the greatest Russian translators of poetry, in particular, the best translator of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 75 It’s a good thing you came from the sky The honeysuckle of the sky climbs up The earthly octopus throb And then we are closer and closer to being our own grave-diggers Pale octopus of chalky waves O octopus with pale beaks Around the house there is this ocean which you know And which is never still.112

The vision of Mandelstam’s poem, however, goes beyond all scientific and literary allusions and shows a state of humanity in which light itself becomes darkness. Mandelstam’s “light” differs of course from that of Pound’s “Nous,” the neoplatonic light of his Cantos. At the end of the poem, written mostly in the third person, Mandelstam shifts to the first person singular to “dissolve in humanity”: Aortas are flooded with blood, And a whisper spreads through the ranks: —“I was born in the year ninety-four, —I was born in the year ninety-two. . .” And squeezing in my fist a worn date of birth, With bloodless lips I whisper amid crowd and herd: “I was born on the night of the second and third Of January in the unreliable year Of ninety-one, and the centuries Encircle me with fire.”113

The end of the poem symbolizes Mandelstam’s reunion with humankind on the eve of annihilation and his vision of the Last Judgment. Yet it seems like Mandelstam is also foreseeing his own horrible fate: when “squashing” a number in his fist, deprived of his name and personality, the poet will be dissolved in the multitudes of persecuted 112 Willis Barnstone, ed., Modern European Poetry, trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), 9–10. 113 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:245. Written March 1–15, 1937. The translation is mine.

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exiles thrown into Stalin’s camps. Mikhail Gasparov stated that, at the end of the poem, Mandelstam showed soldiers drafted into the army, not prisoners of the Soviet concentration camps in the Gulag, since they are calling out the year of their birth, not prisoners’ numbers;114 however, Mandelstam never served in the army, but he did serve his first prison term in Cherdyn’ (within the Perm’ oblast in the Urals) from 1934 to 1935, until he was pardoned and exiled to Voronezh. Nevertheless, Mandelstam’s vision is more terrifying than Dante’s Hell, since even the worst sinners in the Inferno preserve their names and personalities. However, in another poem of 1937 (written the same year as the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier”), Mandelstam says that the sky of purgatory is temporary, though we forget that in our suffering, “This happy heaven’s depot / Is our expending and lifetime home.”115 Thus, Mandelstam fearlessly faces reality and, like Pound, claims that paradise is here on earth. Different as they are, all three poets finally chose the reality of life and art when confronted with death and annihilation. All three great poets of the twentieth century were seeking the renewal of language, poetry and art by “charging the language with meaning to the utmost degree”116 and conveying their vision in images. Though they were all seeking reality, they did not do so in a literal way; for them reality was, first and foremost, spiritual. Therefore, one of the main sources of the renewal they sought was the birthplace of civilization: Hellas, the Mediterranean, and—more characteristic for Mandelstam and Pound—medievalism. Unlike Yeats, neither Mandelstam nor Pound ever attempted to escape reality and the present. Nor did they seek the so-called “artifice of eternity”. As stated above, Mandelstam and Pound did not see a contradiction between nature, reality, and eternity, and each was trying to create his “earthly paradise” in his own way. Both Mandelstam and Pound had a similar attitude toward nature 114 Gasparov, Grazhdanskaia lirika, 14–15. 115 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:247. Written on March 9, 1937. The translation is mine. 116 Pound, ABC, 36.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 77

“as a system of powers immanent in organic life forms and even in inorganic matter,” as well as toward human nature, nature as “a play of physical and chemical processes,”117 and the natural sciences and scientific language. Both sought ways to overcome symbolism and futurism, and they had the same approach to mimesis. Although they never read a line of each other’s writing, the affinities between Mandelstam and Pound were due to the affinities of their sources— Hellenism, high antiquity, medievalism, Dante, and Villon.

117 Hatlen, “Pound and Nature,” 163.

CH A PT ER T WO

“Sailing to Byzantium”—“Sailing after Knowledge”: Byzantium as a Symbol of Cultural Heritage in Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound Hagia Sophia: it was commanded by the Lord That kings and nations halt in wonder here! Mandelstam1 And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the Holy City of Byzantium “Constantinople” said Wyndham “our star,” Mr. Yeats called it Byzantium

Yeats2

Pound3

T

o paraphrase Cavanagh’s observation cited in the previous chapter, Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound dedicated their entire careers (not just the beginnings of them) to spiritual quest aimed at high antiquity, medievalism, and Mediterranean culture.4 Although Yeats was never an exile, his alienation from nature and human frailty resulted in his   1 Mandelstam, “Hagia Sophia,” in Osip Mandelstam: New Translations (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2006), 6. Written in 1912. Translation is mine.   2 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193.   3 Pound, Canto 96, in The Cantos, 661.  4 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 17.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 79

desire to be gathered “in the artifice of eternity”; it made him, so to speak, a spiritual exile from reality, being, and present time. The attraction to history and high antiquity for Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound is part of their concern for the wholeness of culture, history, and time-space—or “chronotope,” the term proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work “The Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” as discussed in the introduction.5 The idea of time and space is dominant both for Mandelstam—whose lyrical hero returns “filled with space and time”6—and for Yeats, whose artificial nightingale nevertheless, “sings of what is past, or passing, or to come.”7 The central idea of Pound’s Cantos is a spiritual quest for time, space (Byzantium being one of the most important symbols of civilization in his later poetry), and a kind of justification of history, as mentioned by many scholars—among them Bacigalupo, Dekker, Kearns, Pearlman, Wilhelm, Makin, and Witemeyer, to name a few.8 Kearns’s analysis of the manipulation of time in the Pisan Cantos can, in my view, be extended and applied to the Cantos in general, including Drafts and Fragments: “there are several ‘times’ running through the sequence, but we must remember that events that define these times do not appear chronologically. There are times of eternity, of myth, of history, of nature of ‘the process,’ of Pound’s own lifetime, reaching from memories of his childhood in Pennsylvania (C/81) to the present moment in the gorilla cage and to the time of the DTC (and of events reported in Time during that period), 14 July to 8 October, 1945).”9 Here Kearns is interpreting time precisely in the spirit of Bakhtin, who applies such categories as the   5 Bakhtin, “The Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” 235.   6 Osip Mandelstam, “The thread of gold cordial flowed from the bottle. . . ,” in Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. C. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 19.   7 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 194.   8 See bibliography for their works.   9 George Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 157. Another noticeable similarity between Pound and Mandelstam is that many of Mandelstam’s poems discussed below were written in exile from 1935 to 1937, after the poet served his first prison term; Pound, as stated above, was writing his Pisan Cantos in the detention center in Pisa (which was more like a concentration camp than prison). Furthermore, Pound wrote his Rock-Drill Cantos and Thrones in St. Elizabeth, virtually a psychiatric prison, where he spent

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chronotope of reality, the chronotope of the road, the chronotope of love, and so on. The unity of the chronotopes of history and culture, as well as the chronotope as such, is an axiom for Mandelstam and Pound. Both Kenner and Makin mention the transparency of the times and the effect of simultaneity in Pound’s Cantos. Such transparency and simultaneity can certainly be observed in Mandelstam’s “Nashedshii podkovu” (“The Horseshoe Finder,” 1923) and the Crimean-Hellenic cycle in the 1917 poem, especially, “The thread of gold cordial flowed from the bottle,”10 which unifies the Crimea of 1917, the Argonauts, and Odysseus. The same transparency and simultaneity of time can be found in “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails,” in which the boundary between a sleepless night in Koktebel, Crimea, and the siege of Troy is eliminated. (Both poems are discussed below.) All three poets were seeking “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time,”11 to quote T. S. Eliot. One such meaningful point of intersection for them all was Byzantium. Yeats wrote in his diary that if he could have lived a month in the time of high antiquity, he would have chosen to live in Byzantium at some time before Justinian built the church of Saint Sophia and closed Plato’s Academy. The protagonist of his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” has chosen exactly this time and space. Unlike Yeats, Pound meticulously draws the City’s history—focusing on the right to coin money, The Eparch’s Book of Leo the Wise (886–911), Del Mar’s writings, Social Credit theory (“and of course there is no local freedom / without local control of purchasing power,” Canto 96/655)— and carefully avoids fancy symbols and high-flown poetic language. However, by making the construction of Saint Sophia the climax of Canto 96 (reinforced in Canto 97), he creates precisely that which he has been trying to escape or at least not to say out loud: a monument “of unageing intellect.”12 As Ronald Bush observed, more than twelve years after capital punishment for high treason was replaced with a life sentence in St. Elizabeth. 10 Mandelstam, Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 18. 11 T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1980), 136. 12 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 81 An aestheticized image of Byzantium very close to the one memorialized by Yeats animates both the subject and the treatment of Thrones. For however much Pound believes himself to be creating an ideogram of wise leadership, only with difficulty can one glean from his texts the clear outlines of legal and administrative policy. These Cantos concern themselves not with the ordinary life of society but with gem-like clarity of an idealized moment when the whole of culture has become a work of art.13

Moreover, rhyming ideas and images, Pound places Saint Sophia beside the Tempio Malatestiano (or rather, vice versa), admiring both creators: Sigismondo, the protagonist of Cantos 8–11; and Justinian, the protagonist of Canto 96 and, of The Later Cantos, including Thrones. The phrase “templum aedificavit” (built the temple)14—a hymn to the creator—corresponds to his citation of Horace in his eulogy for Yeats: “A great peacock aere perennius.”15 Therefore, Byzantium can be viewed as a symbol of cultural heritage and civilization for both Yeats and Pound, while the church of Saint Sophia is a symbol and gem of Byzantium for Pound, although he was preoccupied with Dionysian—not Christian— mysteries. As Wilhelm observed, Pound “saw the great cathedral rising out of the hubbub, just as he himself envisioned the formation of the canto.”16 The church of Saint Sophia appears twice in Osip Mandelstam’s poetry: in “Ottave” (“The Octaves”) and in his early poem of 1912, as seen below: Hagia Sophia—it was commanded by the Lord That kings and nations halt in wonder here! Since your cupola, in the eyewitness’s word, Seems raised towards heaven on a chain.17 13 Ronald Bush, “Late Cantos LXXII–CXVII,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 123. 14 See Pound, Cantos 8, 90, and 107, in The Cantos, 32, 605, 758 (respectively). 15 Pound, Canto 83, in The Cantos, 534. 16 James J. Wilhelm, The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Walker, 1977), 132. 17 Mandelstam, “Hagia Sophia,” 6.

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As Hansen-Löve maintains, “in contrast to the Symbolist myth of the city and parallel to the Futurist urbanism and love of technology, the Acmeist world city has its own geography and conception of history. In the foreground is the historically established culture of the city, the archetype of the polis as the abode of culture in which urbis and orbis coincide.”18 Mandelstam never visited Constantinople, but he read Dmitry Ainalov’s book The Hellenistic Foundations of Byzantine Art (1900) and, as mentioned by Przybylski, in 1912 attended Ainalov’s lectures on the history of architecture at the Museum of Ancient History (a great deal of those lectures was dedicated to Hagia Sophia and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris).19 The eyewitness to the construction of Hagia Sophia, as Przybylski noted, was Procopius of Caesarea, the philosopher of history known for his Secret History. Procopius described the enormous cupola of the basilica as so light that it seemed to be suspended “miraculously from heaven on a golden chain and hung above the earth.”20 Cavanagh argues that Hagia Sophia, “suspended on a chain from heaven, itself becomes a lamp hanging from an infinitely vaster ceiling.”21 I would, however, agree with Przybylski that the movement in Mandelstam’s poem is the opposite: the cupola is raised towards heaven evidently by humans, not by God. Likewise, in Canto 96 Pound emphasizes the process of the construction of the temple (which was actually the third structure built in 537 AD) as being “unlikely to fall,” after two previous buildings had been destroyed by fire: “After all Justinian’s boy had built Santa Sophia.”22

18 Aage Hansen-Löve, “Mandel’shtam’s Thanatopoetics,” in Readings in Russian Modernism: To Honor Vladimir Fedorovich Markov, eds. Ronald Vroon and John Malmstad. UCLA Slavic studies new series, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 125. 19 Przybylski, God’s Grateful Guest, 108. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. 20 Ibid., 109. 21 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 74. 22 Pound, Canto 96, in The Cantos, 662.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 83

Mandelstam views the temple from a slightly different vantage point: Justinian has set a pattern for all ages When Ephesian Diana gave him leave To abduct for alien gods One hundred seven verdant marble columns.23

As observed by Przybylski, the Ephesian Diana “allowed” Justinian to abduct or to steal (in Russian, pokhitit’) 107 green marble pillars from her temple, Artemision—one of the nine wonders of the world.24 Thus, in Mandelstam’s view, Diana was blessing the new temple of Divine Wisdom and the new religion, Christianity, which was the real cause of its firmness, not just its solid foundation. Although not exactly like Pound, Mandelstam connects paganism and Christianity or rather, he emphasizes the continuity of human history and civilization. As Przybylski states, “the history of humanity is an uninterrupted procession of generations, nations and kings. The Church of Divine Wisdom is the place in which God stopped the flow of history. To use the poet’s own words, this church is ‘a cross-section of time,’ an organism, a system, thanks to which history acquires meaning.”25 Przybylski then points out that “the place designated for stopping” was unusual, since “Constantinople was originally a copy of pagan Rome. As in Rome all the streets, all traffic led to the center, where the temple of Jupiter was located. Hagia Sophia was erected on that spot. It is a sort of second Hellenic Center of Existence, if only because Constantinople was the second Rome.”26 Moreover, Mandelstam binds together East and West, united by divine wisdom—Sophia: But what was your generous builder thinking When elevated both in mind and spirit 23 Mandelstam, “Hagia Sophia,” 6. 24 Przybylski, God’s Grateful Guest, 110. 25 Ibid., 109. 26 Ibid.

84 The River of Time He set out your apses and exedrae Pointing them to West and East?27

The Russian philosopher Konstantin Leont’ev (1831–1891) wrote in his work “Vizantinizm i slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism,” 1875) that the Western Christian world acquired its culture, spirit, law, and religion from the Western Roman empire and then during the Renaissance, which Leont’ev called “the epoch of complexity blossoming as the result of late contact with Roman-Germanic and Byzantine cultures,” while the Eastern Slavic world acquired both its religion and culture directly from Byzantium.28 Although Mandelstam disliked both Leont’ev and the idea of Byzantinism, as Przybylski correctly noted—quoting Mandelstam’s “Shum vremeni” (“The Noise of Time”)—the idea expressed in “Hagia Sophia” goes far beyond Byzantinism and Pan-Slavism in a Leontievian sense.29 Mandelstam emphasizes the continuity (Sagetrieb, in Pound’s dictum) of human civilization and spirit. Hence, the beautiful edifice is a celebration of light and, as such, will outlive nations, kings, and ages:30 Beautiful is the temple bathing in the world, And its forty windows are the triumph of light, But the most beautiful of all are the four Archangels on the pendetives beneath the dome. And the wise spherical edifice Will outlive nations, kings and ages, And even seraphim’s resonant sobbing Will not distort the dark gold leaf.31

27 Mandelstam, “Hagia Sophia,” 6. 28 Konstantin Leont’ev, “Visantinism i slavianstvo,” in Vostok, Rossiia, Slavianstvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), 95. Translation is mine. 29 See Przybylski, God’s Grateful Guest, 107. 30 Thus, this poem can be also considered the response of the young Mandelstam to Derzhavin’s “River of Time” and the theme of oblivion (discussed below). 31 Mandelstam, “Hagia Sophia,” 6.

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Unlike Mandelstam, Yeats does not feel harmony between divine wisdom as represented by Saint Sophia and “the fury and the mire of human veins”: A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins.32

Pound, on the other hand, seems to combine both approaches, drawing heavily on the history of Byzantium, the battles and laws of Justinian and Leo the Wise’s edicts, but he utters in the middle of it: “‘Constantinople’ said Wyndham ‘our star,’ / Mr. Yeats called it Byzantium.”33 Thus, Byzantium is the place where the two civilizations and cultures meet, and this thought sheds light on the similarity of Mandelstam’s, Yeats’s, and Pound’s philosophical ideas and themes. All three seek to reunite time, culture, and spirit; or perhaps to find such a point of observation in the universe from which time, history, and civilization can be seen in their entirety. Therefore, the main theme of Thrones, subtly explicated by Massimo Bacigalupo, can be considered the theme of the Cantos as a whole: “kings and cultures appear united in a timeless renaissance of civilization, intimately connected with the only valid model of rebirth: the new frond, the instant ‘gone as lightning,’ yet, ‘enduring 5000 years (c. 95).’”34 In their courageous attempt to reunite time and civilization, the poets, or rather their lyrical heroes, depart from the present and sail through the ages. Sea voyage or wandering is both the medium and the metaphor for all three poets under consideration. To this end, Yeats uses his own lyrical hero; Mandelstam and Pound, meanwhile, employ the persona of either Odysseus, as in Mandelstam’s “The Horseshoe Finder,” or the 32 Yeats, “Byzantium,” in The Collected Poems, 248. Written in 1932. 33 Pound, Canto 96, in The Cantos, 661. 34 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 367.

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Seafarer, as in Pound’s translation of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon text “The Seafarer.” In Mandelstam’s poem, an “unbridled passion for space”—a desire to sail “beyond the Gates of Hercules”—erases the boundary between time and space: And the seafarer, In a frantic thirst for space Drags through soggy furrows The fragile instrument of a geometer, To weigh the rugged surface of the seas Against the attraction of the terrestrial bosom.35

Mandelstam’s seafarer may be Odysseus (since he is called “the father of seafarers, the friend of the seafarer”), but Steven Broyde and Cavanagh do not exclude Peter the Great, since he was also a shipbuilder, though not “Bethlehem’s peaceful carpenter.”36 Moreover, alluding to Mandelstam’s earlier poem of 1918 “Sumerki svobody” (“Twilight of Freedom”), Cavanagh even supposes that Mandelstam’s “father of a seafarer” might be Lenin himself, although this is more than doubtful in my view.37 As mentioned by a number of scholars, the rhythm and imagery of Mandelstam’s poem allude to Pindar. Broyde indicates the Seventh Nemean (15) and the Third Pythian Odes (89–90) of Pindar as the source of Mandelstam’s verses, as well as Hesiod’s Theogony (915–17), in which the Muses and their mother Mnemosyne are crowned with frontlets.38 To this, Irina Kovaleva adds the Fourth Isthmian and the Third Nemean Odes of Pindar.39 Cavanagh also mentions Pindar’s Sixth 35 Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder.” Translation in http://lunchticket.org/thehorseshoe-finder/ is mine. 36 Ibid. 37 See Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 168. 38 See S. J. Broyde, “Osip Mandel’štam’s ‘Našedšij podkovu’” in Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky (Paris: Mouton, 1973). 39 Irina Kovaleva and Anton Nesterov, “Pindar and Mandelstam (To the Formulation of the Problem),” in Mandel’shtam i antichnost’ (Moscow: Mandel’shtamovskoe obshchestvo, 1995), 166–68.

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and Ninth Olympian Odes, the Fifth Nemean Ode, and the Eleventh Pythian Ode.40 Broyde supposes the influence of Ovid’s Amores (2.2.1– 4),41 while Kovaleva suggests the beginning of Catullus 64.42 It is true that Mandelstam juxtaposes the successful Pindar with his own fate as a literary and cultural outcast in the Soviet state. According to Cavanagh, “The Horseshoe Finder” is “a poem about failure, both personal and artistic.”43 I would argue that the poem is not about artistic failure, since Mandelstam was well aware of his genius and was still a recognized and published author until the 1930s (the last book published during his lifetime, Poems, came out in 1928). As for his personal failure, it was a conscious choice announced in “January 1, 1924”: Can I betray to a shameful smear— The frost smells of apple again— The wonderful oath to the fourth estate And the wows as large as tears?44

Pound also viewed himself as an outcast and was in constant opposition to literary and political authorities (notably, FDR), both at the beginning of his career and at the time of his arrest. Both Pound and Mandelstam nonetheless looked far beyond the present to overcome the fears of persecution, arrest, execution, and oblivion by “combining the uncombinable” through “a synchronism of events, names, and traditions severed by centuries,” as Mandelstam wrote in his “Conversation about Dante.”45 Yet, time is not only a fearful giant but also “a sick beast” for Mandelstam. In “Vek” (“The Age”), he refers 40 See Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 172–73, 183. 41 See Broyde, “Osip Mandelstam’s,” 49–66. 42 Kovaleva and Nesterov, “Pindar and Mandelstam,” 166–68. 43 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 158. 44 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:153. The so-called “intelligentsia”—spiritually independent intellectuals, not of noble origin, who fought for freedom and educated common people—belonged to the fourth estate in nineteenth-century Russia. There was no formal pledge to the fourth estate: here Mandelstam is talking about his spiritual obligations and devotion to the ideas of humanism. 45 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 420.

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to time as to “a sick and dying beast,”46 while in “January 1, 1924,” age is portrayed as a dying tyrant who will nevertheless “sink onto the numb arm of an aging son.”47 “The era was ringing as a golden sphere,” wrote Mandelstam in “The Horseshoe Finder,” alluding to the Golden Age.48 As Nadezhda Mandelstam recollected, the poet later called the nineteenth century the Golden Age.49 Hence his need to heal sick time with the help of cultural memory and art. In “January 1, 1924,” Mandelstam juxtaposes sick time to the roaring rivers of deceptive and desolate times, alluding both to bloody reality and to Derzhavin’s “River of Time.” Hence the necessity to heal or save sick time, even at the cost of the poet’s own life; “the time is out of joint,” to quote Shakespeare (Hamlet, 1.5.190). Therefore, the theme of overcoming separation in time and isolation in civilization 46 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:146. 47 See Omry Ronen, An Approach To Mandelstam (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 983), 248–50. As convincingly shown by Ronen, the theme of the aging (sick, weak) son of a sick (decrepit) age goes back to Lermontov, Gogol, Nekrasov (“you are the sick son of a sick age”), Grigoriev, Sologub (“I am also the sick son of a sick age”), Annensky (“I am the weak son of a sick generation), and Blok; and to Chateaubriand’s “mal du René” and Musset’s “mal du siècle, echoed by Alexander Gertsen’s (1812-1870) S togo berega. 48 Cavanagh correctly noticed that “The Horseshoe Finder” “abounds in images of circles and spheres, whether partial or full” (Osip Mandelstam, 159). However, the scholar also lists in that group the lintel or threshhold (porog) that is defined in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language, 4th edition, ed. Baudouin de Courtenay (St. Petersburg-Moscow: M. O. Wolf, 1912–14)—known as Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary—as “a cross-cut height or elevation, something that blocks, an obstacle.” This is certainly a plain, vertical object, especially in a Russian house. Further, Cavanagh mentions a mysterious “green ball,” meaning the line, “a rustle runs across the trees like a green ball.” This is misread by the translator, since the Russian word “lapta,” as defined in Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary, is “a flat thing, one end of which is wider than the other, a stick or a bat with which a ball is hit” in an old Russian game similar to baseball. In other words, the trees that are obviously seen as green spheres are hit with a stick or a bat. The line should be rendered as “a rustle runs through the trees hit by a green bat” or even as “a rustle runs through the green spheres of trees hit by a bat.” Thus, Mandelstam opposes spheres to flat piercing objects, beginning the poem by contrasting a plumbline to “dump furrows of the seas” and describing pines that “once stood on the earth uncomfortable as a mule’s backbone.” Therefore, the imagery of the poem is even subtler than perceived by Cavanagh, whose book is otherwise solid and coherent. 49 N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 271.

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and culture by healing or saving time and beginning a new world was inevitably connected in Mandelstam’s poetry with the theme of art: To tear the age from bounds, To found a new world, The knotty joints of days Should be bound by flute sounds.50

Here “the flute is a metonymy of art, poetry,” as Yefim Etkind put it.51 Similarly, in “The Horseshoe Finder,” the theme of wandering and spiritual quest is connected with the art of poetry: Thrice-blesséd is he who puts a name in a song; A song embossed with a name Outlives the others— It is set apart from her girlfriends by a headband, Healing from oblivion by a befuddling odor too strong to endure— Whether caused by the imminence of a man Or the smell of a strong beast’s fur, Or just by the scent of thyme grated by the palms.52

In Mandelstam’s poem, oblivion (or amnesia) is caused by an overly strong, befuddling smell, the source of which might be the closeness of a male, or the smell of a strong wild beast’s hair, which corresponds to Yeats’s vision: The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long 50 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:145. 51 Etkind, “Osip Mandel’shtam,” 260. 52 Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder.”

90 The River of Time Whatever is begotten, born and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.53

Yeats’s “sensual music” of dying generations and Mandelstam’s amnesia have the same causes, and the vital power of procreation can lead to unbeing if not saved by creativity or by the “monuments of unageing intellect.” At the outset, the acmeists called themselves Adamists, declaring that a poet—like biblical Adam—names things, thus bringing them back to life and preserving them in eternity. To name the phenomena of the world is to reveal them. Revelation is reevaluation: re-veiling and unveiling something so palpable and fragile that when “rendered in disdainful prose,” as Pushkin said, it evaporates. Having acquired a name, the object acquires being and is saved from oblivion. Therefore, language is an instrument of the comprehension of being, and naming, as one of the functions of poetry, is connected to the comprehension of time, space, and being as a whole. Levin mentioned that all the poems of Mandelstam’s Crimean-Hellenic cycle have “a feeling of the integrity of time and space.”54 However, the search to unite time that is “out of joint” is both a dangerous quest and difficult work for the poet. “Poetry is the plough that turns up time,” Mandelstam states in “Slovo i kul’tura” (“The Word and Culture”).55 This metaphor brings to mind Pound’s Canto 47: [. . .] think of plowing. By this gate art thou measured Thy day is between a door and a door Two oxen are yoked for plowing Or six in the hill field 53 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193. 54 Iurii Levin, “Zametki o ‘krymsko-ellinskikh stikhakh’ O. Mandel’shtama,” in Mandel’shtam i antichnost’ (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo gumanitarnogo universiteta, 1995), 91. 55 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 113.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 91 White bulk under olives, a score for drawing down stone, Here the mules are gabled with slate on the hill road. Thus was it in time.56

To be “in time” is to make the present actual and to revive the past. Both Pound in Canto 47 and Mandelstam in “The Horseshoe Finder” allude to Hesiod. Furthermore, in “The Horseshoe Finder,” the seafarer is ploughing the sea; the metaphors “soggy furrows,” “the soggy black soil of Neaira each night plowed anew,” and “the air can be as dark as water, and all creatures swim in it like fish / Whose fins thrust the sphere” all show the relativity of the separation between land, sea, and air. Pound’s “whale-path” and the “tracks of ocean” (“The Seafarer”) are not only metaphors comparable to those mentioned above, but they also reveal the similar poetic vision of the two poets, although I doubt they had even heard of each other. Pound’s “The Seafarer” is not only a translation of an Old English poem but also the poet’s most significant “persona” (mask), allowing him to distance himself from his own wandering and hardships. Like the lyrical hero of “The Horseshoe Finder,” Pound’s seafarer is an outcast. Driven by the desire to discover life and to free himself of earthly bonds including property, he leaves the here and now: The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks On flood-ways to be far departing. [. . .] Burgher knows not— He the prosperous man—what some perform Where wandering them widest draweth. [. . .] And all arrogance of earthen riches, There come now no kings nor Cæsars Nor gold-giving lords like those gone. Howe’er in mirth most magnified, 56 Pound, Canto 47, in The Cantos, 237.

92 The River of Time Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest, Drear all this excellence, delights undurable! Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth. Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low. Earthly glory ageth and seareth.57

The sea is doubtless a metaphor for life, while wandering is a metaphor for the spiritual quest. Witemeyer correctly states that Pound’s interpretation of “The Seafarer” is a further continuation of his earlier voyage poems such as “Purveyors General,” “In the Heart o’ Me,” and, especially, “Guido Invites You Thus.” Pound’s “Seafarer” is also “a precursor of the major poems structured around the Odyssean quest, such as Hugh Selvyn Mauberley and The Cantos. In these other poems, the ocean voyage symbolizes ‘a sailing after knowledge,’ the hero’s quest for a civilized city or the artist’s quest for beauty.”58 Taking into consideration Robinson’s proof of the fact that Pound was a serious scholar of Anglo-Saxon culture,59 it is quite evident that the majority of the deviations from the original Anglo-Saxon text are not just misreadings, but conscious choices aimed at both preserving the poetic texture of the original (as mentioned by Makin60) and rejecting the burgher’s common sense and temptation to substitute the eternal and universal with the transient and local, as observed by Witemeyer. Drawing on Donald Davie’s idea that “Pound’s alterations ‘romanticize’ the poem by introducing a strong new motive not in the original: épater le bourgeois,” Witemeyer concludes: Moreover, Pound goes out of his way to introduce and satirize the bourgeois in a poem where they actually have no role. He has committed two other significant “mistakes” (unremarked by Davie 57 Ezra Pound, “The Seafarer,” in Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926), 62–3. 58 Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 116–17. 59 See Fred C. Robinson, “‘The Might of the North’: Pound’s Anglo-Saxon Studies and ‘The Seafarer,’” The Yale Review 71 (1981–82). 60 See Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 37.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 93 and Sisam), which serve to transform the comfortable shoredwellers in the poem into Old English Babbits. He translates “in burgum” (in the dwellings of men) as “mid burghers” and “beorn” (man, warrior) as “Burgher.” Thus the philistine middle class makes a sudden and surprising appearance in Anglo-Saxon England.61

The end of Pound’s “Seafarer” powerfully emphasizes the idea of uselessness of gathering treasures on earth as if alluding to Matthew 6:19 (“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal”), which recalls the Russian poet Derzhavin’s (1743–1816) “The River of Time,” his last unfinished ode, the title of which was “Na tlennost’” (“On Frailty”). Mandelstam alludes to Derzhavin’s poem several times, both in his prose and poetry: Human lips which have nothing more to say Keep the form of the last uttered word, And a feeling of heaviness fills the hand. . . [. . .] Some stamp lions on coins, Others a head. Various copper, bronze and golden lozenges Are buried in earth with equal honor. The age has tried to gnaw on them leaving the clench of its teeth. Time cuts me like a coin, And there is not enough of myself left for myself. . .62

The image of time that “has tried to gnaw” on ancient coins is reminiscent of Bergson’s image of time where the past “is gnawing into the future.”63 The Bergsonian coil symbolizes the real synchronic flux of time, durée: “real duration gnaws on things and leaves on them the mark of its 61 Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 120. 62 Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder.” 63 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 52–53.

94 The River of Time

tooth.”64 In Mandelstam’s poem, however, time “cuts me”: the lyrical hero, if not the poet himself, is nearly factually cut by time. Hence, time for Mandelstam, who is alluding to Dezhavin’s “The River of Time” and to the theme of oblivion, is also a fearful thing. Derzhavin’s poem is about the flux of time, which carries away all human deeds and “drowns in the chasm of oblivion / nations, kingdoms and kings.”65 In his pessimistic view of time as the destroyer of all things, Derzhavin admits that the creations of poetic art will be the last things to be destroyed, but they will not last, either: “Even if something is left / through the sounds of lyre and trumpet” (metonymies of lyrical and heroic poetry for Derzhavin), “it would be swallowed by eternity’s muzzle / and won’t escape the common fate.”66 As Mandelstam wrote, “here, in the rusty language of doddering age, with all its power and perspicacity, the latent thought of the future is expressed—its loftiest lesson abstracted, its keystone sounded. This lesson is relativism, relativity: ‘But if something should happen to remain. . . .’”67 Thus, the only way to escape oblivion is wandering in order to gain knowledge and reveal it in poetry, as Mandelstam in “The Age” (1923) welds together (literally, “glues together”) “the vertebrae of two centuries.”68 The poet who manages to weld together centuries and preserve “the tale of the tribe” is undefeatable. Similarly, the seafarer—who brings back knowledge, space, and time—“liberates himself of future as well as of the past,” to paraphrase Eliot.69 In his work “Chinese Improvisations of Pound,” the Russian Sinologist Maliavin states that Pound established a certain propinquity between the “The Seafarer” and the “Exile’s Letter” by Li Po, a Chinese poet of the eighth century (both translated by Pound). 64 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Random House, 1944), 7, 52. 65 Derzhavin, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1957), 360. Literal translation is mine. Below see also the translation of the same poem by Alexander Levitsky and Martha T. Kitchen. 66 Derzhavin, Stikhotvoreniia, 360. 67 Mandelstam, “The Nineteenth Century,” in Complete Critical Prose, 138. 68 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:145. 69 “Little Gidding” (III/142) actually reads: “The is the use of memory: / For Liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.” Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 142. (Emphasis added and will be discussed below.)

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As Pound himself wrote, “apart from ‘The Seafarer’ I know no other European poems of the period that you can hang up with the ‘Exile’s Letter’ of Li Po, displaying the West on a par with the Orient.”70 This affinity is revealed, as Maliavin put it, “in the epic perception of life as a brisk, but heroic instant and as eternal wandering in a comfortless world. The courageous sorrow of their lyrical heroes is engendered by their knowledge of the frailty of human life, yet the hope for human infinity is hidden within it. Any word about the elapsed instant of life is senseless, the word of a man who found himself in that instant is boundless.”71 In this subtle comparison, however, the thirst for wandering and knowledge—which is the motif, if not the theme and the motive, of Pound’s “Seafarer”—is absent. As Cavanagh observed, the themes of wandering and spiritual quest are central in The Cantos and in Mandelstam’s Crimean cycle, including “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly-swelling sails.”72 Pound’s Odysseus, like Mandelstam’s, is sailing after knowledge, although in Pound’s case, it is “Knowledge the shade of a shade, / Yet must you sail after knowledge / Knowing less than dragged beasts.”73 Dekker entitled his book on Pound Sailing After Knowledge, emphasizing this idea of knowledge revived.74 Probably not coincidentally, the same theme is expressed in Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” of 1833 (published in 1842): For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life Were all too little, and of one to me Little remains: but every hour is saved From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things; and vile it were 70 Pound, ABC, 51. 71 Vladimir Maliavin, “Kitaiskie improvizatsii Paunda,” in Vostok-Zapad (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), 260. Translation is mine. 72 See Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 23–25. 73 Pound, Canto 47, in The Cantos, 236. 74 See bibliography.

96 The River of Time For some three suns to store and hoard myself, And this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.75

Tennyson’s Ulysses seeks knowledge, unlike Dante’s Odysseus in Canto 26 of Hell, who is restless and dissatisfied with a life that lacks adventure. Pound’s main theme, on the other hand, is “sailing after knowledge,” a spiritual quest that is closer to Tennyson. Thus, Pound’s “Seafarer” becomes the Ulysses of the Cantos, which begins with Odysseus departing from both Circe and Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey. At the end of Canto 1, Pound returns to Divus’s Homeri Odyssea76 and to “the Cretan” in his pursuit of knowledge, civilization, and cultural heritage:77 Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe. Venerandam, In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden Girdle and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.78 75 This poem appeared in Alfred Tennyson, Poems, 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1842), vii, 233. Quoted in Victorian Prose and Poetry, ed. Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 416–18. 76 Andreas Divus was a Renaissance scholar who translated Homer’s Odyssey into Latin, as was printed in the book that Ezra Pound found in Paris; Pound writes about this translation and analyzes it in his essay “Early Translators of Homer,” in Literary Essays, 259–67. It was printed in Venice, in the office of Christiani Wecheli in 1537: “Homeri Odyssea ad Verbum Translata, Andrea Divo Justinopolitano interprete, Eusdem Hymni Deorum XXXII.” Di Capodistria is surnamed “Justinopolitanus” in Latin and implies an origin at Koper (now in Slovenia), which was named at different times Aegida, Justinopolis, and Capodistria. 77 Georgius Dartona, the translator of the Homeric Hymns into Latin printed in the same edition found by Pound, was from Crete, Greece. 78 Pound, Canto 1, in The Cantos, 5.

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As Pound follows not only Homer but also his translators, Pound’s Ulysses makes an enormous circle from Circe to the underworld and back, and Pound’s reader travels through time, space, history, and civilization. “The language of Canto I,” as Christine Froula notes, “is not simply a translator’s modern English version of the ancient Greek, but folds together, ‘ply over ply,’ Homer’s Greek, the Latin of the [sixteenth century] translator Andreas Divus, whose text mediates between Pound and the Greek. Past and present, foreign and native coexist in a linguistic fabric that is heavy with history.”79 Moreover, Pound finishes his Canto 1 with a hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Not only does Pound’s Ulysses “give new life to the tremulous dead” and “will have them rise again, ‘free now, ascending [. . .] lights among them, enkindled’ (C. 90),”80 since the descent in the underworld is the main theme of the Cantos stated from the very first Canto, but his “sailing after knowledge” also unifies time and history. Sailing far beyond the Gates of Hercules, the protagonists of Pound and Mandelstam, unlike the lyrical hero of Yeats, are bound to return “filled with time and space,” to quote Mandelstam,81 thus unifying time and civilization. Hence, the resolution of Canto 30 is dedicated to the invention of italic script by Francesco da Bologna as related by Hieronymous Soncinus, and to the death of Pope Alexandro Borgia in 1503, which marked the end of the epoch and the decline of the Renaissance, as noted by Kenner and Makin.82 The journey for Pound and Mandelstam, again, is a spiritual quest to shelve (shore) the fragments of civilization and culture, as Pound wrote in Canto 8, alluding to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Similarly, in his famous poem of 1919, “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails,” Mandelstam penned the lines 79 Christine Froula, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1983), 129. 80 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 359. 81 Osip Mandelstam, “The thread of gold cordial flowed from the bottle. . . ,” in Selected Poems, 19. 82 See Kenner, The Pound Era; Hugh Kenner, “Drafts and Fragments and the Structure of The Cantos,” in Agenda 8, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1970), 8; and Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 168.

98 The River of Time Leaving his boat, and its sea-wearied sails, Odysseus returned filled with time and space.83

Time and space are metonymies of knowledge and experience for Mandelstam, emphasizing the idea of returning and bringing back the knowledge acquired by hard work (“natrudivshii” means the one that has worked hard, not just worn-out, as the translator puts it). In the poem “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails,” a chain of nominal sentences performing (or acting out)—in the Mandelstamian dictum—a stream of consciousness, is at the same time a chain of metonymies of space, history, and culture.84 Cavanagh correctly notes that “Mandelstam’s brief lyric, like Pound’s first Canto, evokes both the presence of the past and its pastness, as the events described in Homer’s writings converge with and diverge from the experience of the modernist poet-synthesizer who works to recuperate an ancient history for the modern age.”85 Separated—though not completely—from the word “Homer,” “insomnia” can be read as an expression of the poet’s “nostalgia [or craving] for a world culture” (according to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam’s famous definition of acmeism).86 “Homer,” placed between “insomnia” and “tautly swelling sails,” combines this craving with time-space and history. “The catalogue of ships” that sailed to 83 Osip Mandelstam, “The thread of gold cordial. . . ,” 19. 84 Translation of this poem is from the following source: Osip Mandelstam, 50 Poems, trans. Bernard Meares (New York: Persea Books, 1977), 37. 85 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 25. 86 Actually, this is not a direct citation from Osip Mandelstam: according to Nadezhda Mandelstam, he coined this formula in 1930s either in the Press House (Dom Pechati) in Leningrad or at the Writers Union in Voronezh. In response to the question “What is acmeism?”, O. Mandelstam said, “Craving for a world culture” (Toska po mirovoi kul’ture). She also adds that ‘toska’ is rhymed with ‘Toskana’ (Tuscany), thus making it clear that Mandelstam’s craving is akin to the anxiety of a prisoner deprived of freedom, besides world culture, and exiled in Voronezh. See Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Vospominaniia (Moscow: Soglasie, 1999), 296. Hence Mandelstam’s poems of that period: “I am eager to wander where / There’s more sky, but a serene nostalgia / Doesn’t let me go from young Voronezh hills / To those of Tuscany, which illumine mankind” (Mandel’shtam, Sochinenniia, 1:232; translation is mine).

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Troy—“sei vyvodok, sei poezd zhuravlinyi” (this outstretched brood, a train of cranes)—is a link that connects epochs. In the lines “I more, i Gomer—vse dvizhetsia lubov’iu” (Both Homer and the sea: all things are moved by love87), metonymy, not metaphor, is the device that links disparate ideas (to follow Lomonosov’s theory): Homer stands for The Iliad and The Odyssey; the sea for wandering. Both Pound in Canto 1 and Mandelstam in the above poem sing a hymn to love that gives meaning to wandering. However, the sea in Mandelstam’s poem is not just “a metaphor of love, ” as Nil’sson put it, but first and foremost a metonymy of a quest for time—if not for eternity— and for history.88 In addition, as was observed by Cavanagh, “the sea itself, móre in Russian, is anagrammatically concealed within Homer, Gomér, while Homer, conversely, lies partially in the Russian ‘sea,’ as Mandelstam reminds us by rocking the two words back and forth in the poem’s closing lines: ‘I mó-re, i Go-mér’; ‘I vot Go-mér molchit / I mó-re chérnoe…’ Centuries, traditions, and linguistic boundaries wash away in the verbal play that gives any Russian speaker permanent access to a Homeric past through their own sea, their móre.”89 The last two verses of the poem, “And the dark sea thunders, eloquent, / And rumbling heavily it breaks beneath my bed,”90 finally wash away the boundary between a sleepless night in Koktebel, where Mandelstam composed this poem, and the siege of Troy. This merging represents a shift in time-space—symbolizing the integrity of time, space, and history, and making the closeness of historic epochs vivid and palpable. As stated above, we encounter a similar sense of time-space and history to that of Mandelstam and Pound in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), in which the lyrical hero of the poem is leaving the here and now—the country that is not for old men, where

87 Mandelstam, 50 Poems, 37. 88 See N. A. Nil’sson, “Bessonnitsa,” in Mandel’shtam i antichnost’, (Moscow: Mandel’shtamovskoe obshchestvo,, 1995), 65–76. 89 Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 25. 90 Mandelstam, 50 Poems, 37. I would have translated as “The Black Sea” and “head.”

100 The River of Time Whatever is begotten, born and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.91

As Denis Donoghue put it, “‘Sailing to Byzantium’ begins with the old man leaving the world and human life, looking back at the sensuality of the shade; partly in wonder, partly in pathos, partly in self-pity. In the second stanza, the Self is separated from the Soul, as Dublin— we shall say—is separated from the ‘holy city of Byzantium.’”92 As noted by several Yeats scholars,93 this quest symbolizes Yeats’s desire to overcome human frailty and to sail “out of nature into perfection.”94 As discussed earlier, Mandelstam and Pound, unlike Yeats, do not see a contradiction between nature and eternity. For Mandelstam, eternity and heaven are natural and are achieved through art and poetry (my emphasis), from his early poems—“My breath, my warmth has been already / Laid upon the panes of eternity” (1908)—to his last, written in exile in Voronezh after his first term in Stalin’s prison, and in anticipation of further persecution. Art gives Mandelstam the strength to leave space (and time, that is, the here and now): So I leave space for a desolate garden Of values and break at my will A seeming permanence and self-consciousness of causes, And there, alone and tranquil, Infinity, I read your textbook, Which can offer solutions and heal, 91 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193. 92 Denis Donoghue, “The Human Image in Yeats,” in William Butler Yeats: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Patrick J. Keane (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 115. 93 See Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Patrick J. Keane, ed., “Embodied Song,” in William Butler Yeats; M. L. Rosenthal, “A Critical Introduction” to The Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 1960), 35–40. Reprinted as “Poems of Here and There” in William Butler Yeats, 39–44; Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide, 170–74. 94 Keane, “Embodied Song,” 29.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 101 A leafless, primeval, wild heal-book, A task-book of infinite roots.95

In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats, unlike Pound or Mandelstam, departs not only from human bondage and “dying generations,”96 but also from the present time. Although there is a certain antagonism toward the present in Mandelstam’s poetry, he also demanded that he be seen as a contemporary. In “The Age,” “January 1, 1924,” and other poems of this period, a strong yearning for contemporaneity resounds in the verses of “the aging son of a century.”97 Pound, as mentioned earlier, makes palpable the transparency of the times, and along with other themes and motives, The Cantos are unified by simultaneity. Avoiding symbolist imagery, Pound draws on the laws and regulations, showing how the City functions. Yeats’s “holy city of Byzantium”98 is even more vague than the city depicted on the Keatsian urn. Frye presumes that in “Sailing to Byzantium” [. . .] the city is seen from afar, and the tower has expanded into an entire chain of being, ranging from the divine (“drowsy Emperor”) through the spiritual (traditionally the angels and the stars, here the sages in the fire) and the human (“lords and ladies of Byzantium”) down through the rest of creation with bird and the tree transformed into gold. “Sailing to Byzantium” is very like a conventional Christian poem about the New Jerusalem awaiting the soul after death, except for the paradox in “the artifice in eternity.” The builder of Byzantium is not of God conceived as independent of man, and when a man is thought as the only visible creator, nature is no longer a creation, but a ruin, and man builds his palaces out of and in defiance of nature.99

95 Osip Mandel’shtam, “Ottave, 11” in Polnoye sobraniye, 1:188. Translation is mine. 96 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193. 97 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:152. 98 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193. 99 Frye, The Stubborn Structure, 276.

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In the fourth stanza, the coda of “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats’s lyrical hero dreams of the unity of culture and cultural heritage as a means of intellectual freedom: Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.100

Interpreting the last stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium,” Kenneth Burke asserts that “‘nature’ becomes tyrannously burdensome, once the poet, having made himself at home in ‘grace,’ finds that it has been withdrawn.”101 Donoghue reads this passage differently and argues that “Yeats never made himself at home in Soul and dragged the Self with him even into Byzantium. The last lines seem to be a turning-back to the world of time, joining up again, incipiently, with the sensual music of the first stanza.”102 Yeats was apparently still struggling between “the sensual music” and “the monuments of unageing intellect”: “the Here and the There” (to quote Rosenthal103) between eternity and “what is past, or passing, or to come.”104 The desire to overcome the here and now, to unite time and culture is evident: this is the poet’s means of conquering time, of struggling with an unconscious present. Byzantium is a symbol of spirit and culture, both for the poet and for his lyrical hero. As Northrop Frye writes, “in Yeats the theme of a journey backward in time is reinforced by the ‘ancestral stair’ in which the poet travels in the track 100 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193. 101 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Braziller, 1955), 317. 102 Donoghue, “The Human Image in Yeats,” 115. 103 Rosenthal, “A Critical Introduction,” 39. 104 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 193.

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of his great predecessors, and by the personal and cultural memories in ‘The Tower.’”105 Yeats seeks the unity of culture and history in his search for harmony, the loss of which was sharply felt by many poets of the twentieth century: Pound and Mandelstam, but also T. S. Eliot, the German poet Gotfried Benn, and many others. Yeats’s idea of time is that of an “unfashionable gyre” turning and turning its rounds where “all things run.”106 Hence, he seeks “not to be reborn in the manner of natural creation.”107 He is perhaps nostalgic in his desire to overcome the inaccessibility of art, and of literary art in particular: he wants to become an aesthetic object without a mediator, in an attempt to reunite time (even to reach a kind of eternity). While impressive as poetry, this piece is an expression of the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to flee from not only present time but also human nature. As Sturge Moore writes in his letter to Yeats on April 16, 1930, the golden bird of “Sailing to Byzantium” was an essentially natural thing, unable to escape the round of reincarnations: “your ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ magnificent as the first three stanzas are, lets me down in the fourth, as such a goldsmith’s bird is as much nature as a man’s body, especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies.”108 “Byzantium” is a further development of the theme of a quest for the “monuments of unageing intellect,” an attempt to unify and purify time, not only human nature. Here, at the end “of the Christian millennium,” as Yeats recorded in his diary in April 1930, are “flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour, offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to paradise.”109 Where Yeats sees “drunken soldiery,”110 violence, and chaos, Pound portrays efforts to fight against “Avars, Bulgars, Gepidae, / quatenus Hunnos [as far as 105 Frye, The Stubborn Structure, 262. 106 William Butler Yeats, “The Gyres,” in The Collected Poems, 293. Written in 1938. 107 De Man, “Intentional Structure,” 69. 108 Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide, 218–19. Quoted by Unterecker, who in turn, refers to Ursula Bridges. 109 Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide, 217. 110 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 248.

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the Hunnos],”111 Turks, Arabs, and other hostile tribes; to build and rule the City; and to regulate currency and manufacture by establishing laws and rules known as the The Eparch’s Book of Leo the Wise. Yeats in “Byzantium,” on the other hand, meticulously elaborates on the image of a supernatural bird, which has no ties to nature and cannot be defined in natural terms: Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood. 112

This bird is a deliberate contrast to the “common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire or blood.” As Unterecker argues, “Sailing to Byzantium” represents the voyage and is written from the point of view of the uninitiated outsider who leaves the material world for the immaterial. “Byzantium,” on the other hand, is written from the point of view of the initiate who watches the uninitiated, unpurged spirits arriving from beyond “the gong-tormented sea” which separates Byzantium’s reality from the flesh and blood reality of the twentieth-century world.113

In my view, the contradiction between “Byzantium’s reality” and “the flesh and blood reality of the twentieth-century world” in “Byzantium” is even subtler and therefore more dramatic. “The Emperor’s drunken soldiery,” the “night-walkers’ song” and “all complexities of mire or blood” are still present in “Byzantium.” Time and 111 Pound, Canto 96, in The Cantos, 657. 112 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” (17–24), 248. 113 Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide, 217.

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space alone cannot cure an insatiate heart; it takes effort to be purified and reborn, to acquire integrity. The “paltry thing” and “Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy cloth,” the “unpurged image” with “all mere complexities / The fire and the mire of human veins,” and the purified “fresh image”114 are all, in essence, reincarnations of the same lyrical hero, if not of the poet himself. In other words, the lyrical hero of “Byzantium” is not an “outsider”: he is both the object and the subject of purification. Commenting on the lines, “Dying into a dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve,” Richard Ellmann calls the fires of “Byzantium” “artistic” and maintains that “in art the fires are all-powerful, but in life they have no effect at all.”115 The architectonics of the poems in a subtle, rhythmical-semantic pattern reenact all the stages of purification: “All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins” through the third and the fourth stanzas move to the climax of the poem and reach purification in the fifth stanza. The “great cathedral gong” is echoed in the final line of the poem; the “gong-tormented sea” is an aural-visual image depicting the density and intensity of time-space itself. The twelve strokes of the gong denote external time, while the instant of purification is revealed in the visual image of a Dionysian “dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.”116 Frank Kermode asserts that Yeats perceived Byzantine art “as the perfect being of art,”117 and in the final scene of the poem “Byzantium,” in which the dancer finally overcomes mortality, “all is image and there are no contrasts and no costs, inevitable concomitants of the apparition of absolute being in the sphere of becoming.”118 Unlike Yeats, Pound tried to escape “the gong-tormented sea” by plunging into the sea of history, economics, and monetary theory, as 114 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 248. 115 Richard Ellmann, “Yeats Without Analogue,” in Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, ed. John Hollander (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 408. 116 Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 248. 117 Frank Kermode, “Dancer and the Tree,” in William Butler Yeats, 70. 118 Kermode, “Dancer and the Tree,” 71.

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he interpreted it. On the other hand, neither Pound nor Mandelstam attempted to flee from “all complexities of mire or blood.” While Yeats’s protagonist is determined to depart from nature and reach the so-called artifice of eternity, the lyrical heroes of Pound and Mandelstam strive to bring back knowledge and wisdom. Different as they are in their real lives, and in their approaches toward nature, life, heaven, eternity, Yeats, Pound and Mandelstam “meet” on their way to Mediterranean. In his book Enei—Chelovek sud’by (Aeneas, the Man of Destiny), Vladimir Toporov states that the formula “the point of intersection of two themes, [. . . Virgil and the Mediterranean,] is space, time, the sphere of spirit.”119 Although the Russian scholar was writing about epic poetry, Byzantium and the Mediterranean can, in my view, be considered “the point of intersection” of Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam in their spiritual quest. The bonds between space and time are unbreakable for them. “Sailing to Byzantium”—to Greece and to the Mediterranean shores, following Homer, Dante, Nietzsche, Hölderlin and many others—is the poets’ spiritual quest for “world culture” and “monuments of unageing intellect.”

119 Vladimir Toporov, Enei—chelovek sud’by (Moscow: Radiks, 1993), cii.

CH A PT ER T H RE E

Fear and Awe: Mandelstam’s “The Slate Ode”

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nlike Mandelstam’s “The Horseshoe Finder”—in which, as discussed, all the similes and metaphors are revealed, and the successive flow of poetical thought reenacted in free verse—“Grifel’naia oda” (“The Slate Ode,” 1923) is one of the poet’s most esoteric works. Mandelstam is known for his exceptional manner of hiding allusions and destroying bridges-associations. If the theme of “The Horseshoe Finder” is “sailing after knowledge,” that of the “Slate Ode” is a metaphysical quest: Here terror writes, here a shift writes With a leaden milky stick, Here a draft grows ripe Of the disciples of flowing water. [. . .] There a plumb-line preaches, Time gnaws, water teaches, And a transparent wood of air Has had a surfeit of them all. Like a dead hornet from a hive, A pied day is swept off with disgrace. A hawkish night carries a burning chalk

108 The River of Time And feeds the slate to erase The day’s impressions away From the iconoclastic board, And shake off transparent visions Like nestlings from the hand! [. . .] I break the night, a burning chalk, To make a steadfast instant note, I trade the noise for the arrows’ song, I trade harmony for a bustard’s wrath. Who am I? I am not a straight stonemason, Neither a shipbuilder, nor a roofer, I am a double-dealer, with a double soul, A friend of night, and a daymonger. Blessed is he who called flint A disciple of the flowing water, Blessed is he who tied the strap Of the mountains’ feet on firm soil. So, now I study a record Of the summer scratches on the slate board, The language of flint and air, With a layer of darkness, a layer of light; And I yearn to put my fingers In the flinty way from the old song, As in a sore—to weld and join Flint with water, a horseshoe with a ring.1

In his profound book An Approach to Mandelstam, Omry Ronen constructs diachronic and synchronic analyses of “The Slate Ode” and “January 1,  1 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:149–50. Translation is mine. Published in InTranslation (March 2011): http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/ russian/the-slateode.

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1924.”2 While restoring the connections between these Mandelstam poems written in 1923, Ronen even created a kind of a history of Russian verse from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to the twentieth century on the one hand; on the other, he bridged together Mandelstam’s prose, essays, and poetry. His writing is striking but sometimes superfluous, as he discusses allusions and associations not directly related to the poem under consideration, such as his mentioning the use of blazhen and blagosloven (blessed) in Russian poetry: after Derzhavin and especially after Pushkin, there was hardly a Russian poet who did not use these words.3 This stanza will be discussed below. A close reading of a poem, linking each line with its sources, is not new but it is probably one of the most productive methods of restoring the entire picture. This method allowed Ronen to bridge the gaps: to restore the allusions and associations hidden between the lines and even between the words. Ronen correctly links “The Slate Ode” and its very title with Derzhavin’s last unfinished poem, “The River of Time,” written on a slate tablet with a leaden chalk or “milky stick,” to quote Mandelstam.4 The poetic motive of Derzhavin’s poem is the flux of time, which carries away all human deeds and “drowns [them] in the chasm of oblivion / nations, kingdoms and kings”: Relentless River, coursing ages, Usurps all works of mortal hands; It thinks all worlds, in darkness rages: Should any trace endure an hour Through Lyre’s chord or Trumpet’s call, Obscured it drowns, by Time devoured, Purged of its from—the Fate of all. . .5

  2   3   4   5

See Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 37–223. Ibid., 200–1. Ibid., 59. Gavrila Derzhavin, Poetic Works: A Bilingual Album, trans. Alexander Levitsky and Martha T. Kitchen (Providence: Brown Slavic Publications, 2001), 12:188.

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This motif—the flux of time erasing all traces of human activity and leading to oblivion—is half hidden in allusions and associations, since “The Slate Ode” begins on a very high note: “A star and a star is a mighty joint, // A flinty way from an old song.”6 This beginning immediately reminds us of a Lermontov’s poem “Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu”: “the old song” is a kind of a defamiliarization. Here is not only the motif of “poetic oblivion,” as observed by Ronen,7 but also the idea and yearning for the connection of two worlds. This motif continues into the next two lines: The tongue of flint and air, Flint with water, a horseshoe signet ring.8

Ronen quotes the idea from Mandelstam’s “Conversation about Dante” where the Russian poet refers to Novalis: “the Hermit in Heinrich von Ofterdingen calls the miner’s craft ‘astrology turned inside out.’ However, for Mandelstam, mineralogy and ‘astrology’ are one.”9 According to Mandelstam, “mineral rock is an impressionistic diary of weather accumulated by millions of natural disasters; however, it is not only of the past, but also of the future: it has periodicity. It is Aladdin’s lamp penetrating the geological twilight dusk of future ages.”10 Analyzing these lines and their allusion to Lermontov’s “Skvoz’ tuman kremnistyi put’ blyestit” (A flinty way glistens through the fog),11 Mikushevich mentions that “flint can hardly glisten through fog; it glistens due to the anagrammatically concealed meaning of the words: ‘kremen’ (flint)—‘nye merk’—(does not fade).”12 Mikushevich  6 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:149, The original Russian is as follows: “Zvezda s zvedoi—moguchii styk, / Kremnistyi put’ iz staroi pesni.”  7 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 61.  8 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:149. Translation is mine. Published in InTranslation (March 2011): http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/ russian/the-slate-ode.  9 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 65–66. 10 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 439. 11 This poem will hereafter be referred to as “Flinty Way.” 12 Vladimir Mikushevich, “Dvoynaya dusha poeta v ‘Grifel’noy ode’ Mandel’shtama,” in “Mandelstam,” No. 3/1 of Sokhrani moyu rech’ (Moscow: RGGU Zapiski Mandel’shtamovskogo obshchestva , 2000), 58.

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also points out that the word kremen rhymes with vremya (time), while the “flinty way” is an analogue of “the river of time.” He suggests that the Russian word for time, vremya, is etymologically derived from the Sanskrit word vartaman, which means “way,” “furrow,” “revolve.” Hence, Mikushevich concludes, “‘A stream babbles back to its source’— this is the river of time going back to its source.”13 A stream babbles back to its source, Like a foamy warbler, a chain, a speech.14

Mandelstam’s desire to unify time, and thus to overcome oblivion, is revealed in these lines. In addition to the allusions to Derzhavin (the first two are to titles of his poems) and to Pushkin, as analyzed by Ronen,15 there is also the matter of the second meaning of the word penochka: it is not only the name of a bird but also “foam”; both penochka and tsepochka (chain) are diminutive forms, and the fountain/ spring (the “foamy warbler”) is a metaphor for poetry. The fountain of human thought and being (a striking resemblance to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”) moves backwards: this is not a mechanical metamorphosis. Indeed, in an earlier poem Mandelstam wrote, Aphrodite, remain foam, A word come back to music.16

The lines “Here terror writes, here a shift writes / With a leaden milky stick”17 have a circular movement characteristic of Mandelstam, who was more than skeptical of the so-called linear causal chain of things. These lines connect the first and second stanzas and introduce the theme of inspiration and creativity. Ronen was right to present both 13 Mikushevich, “Dvoinaia dusha poeta,” 58. 14 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:149. Translation is mine. 15 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 105. 16 Osip Mandelstam, “Silentium,” in Sochineniia, 1:145–146 [71]. Written in 1910. 17 Osip Mandelstam, “The Slate Ode,” trans. Ian Probstein. Brooklyn Rail: In Translation (March 2011): http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/russian/the-slate-ode.

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a synchronic and diachronic interpretation of these lines, where fear itself has not a physical, but a primarily metaphysical, meaning: the mysterious fear of the secrets of being and the “geological” shifts of time, as well as the fear and uncertainty of creativity known to every true master. As Mandelstam himself put it, “the horror of the present tense is given here, a kind of terror praesentis. Here the unalloyed present is taken as a sign introduced to ward off evil [“negation” or churanie, in Mandelstamian dictum]. The present tense, completely isolated from both the future and the past, is conjugated like pure fear, like danger.”18 Again, the “leaden milky stick” connects in a circular movement Derzhavin’s poem to the first stanza, with Mandelstam’s perception of being as becoming, as a school of knowledge and creativity: “Here a draft grows ripe / Of the disciples of flowing water.” The metaphorical use of the verb “to ripen” is crucial for Mandelstam, who connects creativity, understood as a process—which is why he wrote in “Conversation about Dante” that “the drafts cannot be annihilated”19—with natural phenomena.20 Mandelstam spent much of his time in Crimea before the revolution of 1917 and also later, from 1919–1920. The motifs of “steep goatish towns,” of “sheepish villages and churches,” and of “the mighty layering of flint” (the epithet “mighty,” as Ronen noticed, is used twice in the “Slate Ode” and in “January 1, 1924”21), as well as the images in “The Horseshoe Finder” and other poems (“Theodosia,” for instance), were inspired by Mandelstam’s Crimean visits. As Mandelstam put it, “Black Sea pebbles tossed up on shore by the rising tide helped me immensely when the conception of this conversation was taking shape. [. . .] It was thus that I came to understand that mineral rock is something like a diary of the weather, like a meteorological blood clot.”22

18 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 403. 19 Mandelstam, Polnoye sobraniye, 2:429. 20 See Mandelstam, “The Horseshoe Finder.” 21 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 116. 22 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 438.

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While “the mighty layering of flint” is a development of a motif from the first stanza, “plumbline the preacher” (or plumb-ruler), connects two worlds, the physical and the metaphysical, and alludes to Mandelstam’s own “The Horseshoe Finder” (“A plumbline of a mariner”) and to his essay “Petr Chaadaev” (1928), as pointed out by Ronen.23 The juxtaposition of “multicolored day” and “hawkish night,” which “carries a burning chalk / And feeds the slate to erase / The day’s impressions away / From the iconoclastic board,” is, again, the opposition of physical everyday life to metaphysical being. Night as beneficial to poetic and prophetic inspiration is a common motif in Russian lyrical poetry. The night is bringing “burning chalk”: this metaphor connects the theme of Derzhavin’s poem with the whole tradition of Russian lyrical poetry. Ronen quotes a dozen poems to which this image alludes.24 Mandelstam, perhaps, did not think consciously about all of them, but they were in his poetic “blood.” There is one, however, yet to be mentioned: Lermontov’s “A Word Born of Fire and Light.” The aim of the poet according to Mandelstam—and here he speaks mainly of the aim of the poet and poetry—is “to erase / The day’s impressions away / from the iconoclastic board / And shake off transparent visions / Like nestlings from the hand!”25 “Transparent” (prozrachnyi) stands perhaps in opposition to the prizrachnyi (seeming) experiences and impressions of the day. Taranovsky, in his analysis of the poems “Kogda Psikheia-zhizn’” (When Psyche-life) and “Petropolis,” emphasizes the opposition of “transparent spring” and “transparent death.”26 This interpretation of poetry as vision and foresight (connecting poetic and prophetic inspiration) is very close to the ideas expressed by Shelley, who argued in his “Defence of Poetry” that “poets [. . .] were called in the earlier epochs of the world

23 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 120–21. 24 Ibid. 25 Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia, 1:150. Translation is mine. 26 Taranovsky, Essays on Mandelstam, 157.

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legislators or prophets.”27 For Mandelstam, a poet is a disciple of a prophet, if not a prophet himself. The entire second part of the “Slate Ode” is a development of this theme of prophetic inspiration; therefore, the stanza beginning with the lines, “It is only by the voice that we’ll know / What scribbled and struggled there / And lead a stiff lead pencil where / The voice will point out”28—omitted in the final as well as in Khardzhiev version— plays an important role in the interpretation of the poem. I agree with Ronen, who gives both versions of the poem (with and without this stanza) in his book.29 The fifth stanza begins with the motif of day and alludes to some of Mandelstam’s earlier poems (starting with “The Horseshoe Finder”), reaching far beyond the limits of a linear interpretation of time. In the context of “The Horseshoe Finder” (written not long before “The Slate Ode”), one encounters the children’s “tender game” (babki, a national Russian game similar to baseball), where “children are playing with the vertebrae of extinct animals.”30 Here again, Mandelstam reveals the footprints of the past in the present and expresses a kind of cosmic vision, one he praised highly in Tiutchev. As noted above, between the sixth and the seventh stanzas in the draft of the “Ode” were these lines: It is only by the voice that we’ll know What scribbled and struggled there And led a stiff lead pencil where The voice will point out. I break the night, a burning chalk To make a steadfast instant note, 27 Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 482. In addition, Shelley states that the poet “not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germ of the flower and the fruit of the latest time.” 28 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, in Addendae, 1:386. 29 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 365–69. 30 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:147.

Chronotopes of Reality and History in the Poetry of Mandelstam, Yeats, and Pound 115 I trade the noise for the arrows’ song, I trade harmony for a strembling wrath.31

These verses, excluded from the final version, confirm what was correctly observed by Mikhail Gasparov: “the key images that connected the ‘Ode’ with Derzhavin’s octave, the foundational background of Mandelstam’s poem, are wiped out from the latter step by step.”32 Moreover, the romantic idea that poetic gift is akin to prophetic vision, as in Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” was perhaps unacceptable to the mature Mandelstam. Since all his poems of that period changed in intensification of the activity of the lyrical “I,” as also noted by Gasparov,33 the “The Slate Ode” symbolizes a shift from the half-tones and hidden allusions of the books Stone and Tristia to a more active social position. It is not a “passive” contemplation, but like Derzhavin, Mandelstam “breaks the night” with the “burning chalk” and therefore “trades the noise” (The Noise of Time, the title of his book in prose) for “the arrow’s song,” and “harmony” for “trembling wrath” (or “strembling,” since Mandelstam coins a neologism, very much like Khlebnikov, changing “trembling” to its opposite.34 To learn from memory means to learn “to listen and to hear the voices”: this line returns to the theme of the poet and poetry.35 In fact, the whole poem evokes this theme through the motifs of time-space; of a sense of history; and of the abilities to listen, to hear the voices, and to learn. Hence the constant shifts from “we” to “I” in the second part of the ode, beginning with the sixth stanza, in which the lyrical hero of

31 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:150. Translation is mine. Ibid. 32 Mikhail Gasparov, “‘Solominka’ Mandel’shtama. Poetika chernovika,” in Izbrannye stat’i, 188. Gasparov has an analogous idea in his essay “Za to chto ia ruki tvoi. . .” (ibid., 220). See also Irina Semenko, Poetika pozdnego Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Mandelstam Society, 1997), 9–35. 33 Gasparov, Grazhdanskaia lirika, 14–15, 109. 34 Originally, the word “strembling” [strepet] was an error of a typist for “trepet” [trembling], which Mandelstam liked. See notes to the poem in Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:498. 35 Ibid.

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the poem (who in this case is very close to the poet himself) is already present: Who am I? I am not a straight stonemason, Neither a shipbuilder, nor a roofer, I am a double-dealer, with a double soul, A friend of night, and a daymonger.36

Ronen connects these lines with Pushkin’s poem “My Pedigree” and with the dialogue of the clowns from Hamlet (5.1): “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?” (Ronen omits the witty-paradoxical answer, “the gallowsmaker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.”) In my opinion, the ties to Mandelstam’s own work that are revealed by Ronen—the poem “Akter i rabochii” (“Actor and Worker,” 1920) and his essay “Krovavaia misteriia 9 ianvaria” (“The Bloody Mystery-Play of January Ninth,” 1922)—as well as the development of the “Orphic” theme (connected with Vyacheslav Ivanov’s essay “Orpheus”), are much more important than allusions to Hamlet or even to Pushkin’s poem “My Pedigree”).37 Yet, only at the end of his long explication does Ronen briefly mention such typically Russian (or rather “Soviet”) as well as Mandelstamian, phrases as “ia nochi drug, ia dnia zastrel’shchik,” which can be translated as, “I am a friend of the night, I am a shooter of the day” (the day’s assailant and even killer, but also the “initiator” or “beginner” of the day).38 Both meanings would be immediately caught by a native speaker living in the country of “newspeak,” bored by endless editorials and broadcasting programs. Mandelstam plays with both meanings by defamiliarizing the words’ monosemantic simplicity and hiding in irony his negative attitude towards reality. The lines “Blessed is he who called flint / A disciple of the flowing water, / Blessed is he who tied the strap / Of the mountains’ feet 36 Ibid. 37 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 193–200. 38 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:498.

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on firm soil”39 begin the coda of the entire poem and return to the themes of memory, mineralogy, and astrology, as well as to chapter six of the “Conversation about Dante”: “O Poetry, envy crystallography, bite your nails in anger and impotence! For it is recognized that the mathematical formulas necessary for describing crystal formation are not derivable from three-dimensional space. You are denied even that element of respect which any piece of mineral crystal enjoys.”40 Blessed is he who called flint A disciple of the flowing water, Blessed is he who tied the strap Of the mountains’ feet on firm soil.41

When discussing Mandelstam’s use of blazhen and blagosloven (blessed), as mentioned above, Ronen displays brilliant knowledge of Russian literature and cites Russian poetry and prose from the Beatitudes (“Beatus ille qui”) to Derzhavin, Pushkin, Chaadaev, Tiutchev, and Khodasevich.42 However, he missed perhaps the most important allusion, that to Derzhavin’s rendering of Psalm 1, entitled “True Happiness”: Most blessed is he who sitteth not In council with the men of slaughter, Nor standeth in the sinners’ plot, Nor goeth down to their dark quarters. [. . .] As by the current of clear stream A tree is planted in the valley, Set ‘round with colored blooms agleam, In season yielding fruitful tally.43 39 Ibid. 40 Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 422. 41 Ibid. The Russian original is: “Blazhen, kto nazyval kremen’ / Uchenikom vody protochnoi. / Blazhen, kto zaviazal remen’ / Podoshve gor na tverdoi pochve.” 42 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 200–13. 43 Derzhavin, Poetic Works, 25. Translated by Alexander Levitsky and Martha T. Kitchen.

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Since we encounter here another “clear stream,” it would be appropriate to link Mandelstam’s poem to the Old Testament and to Derzhavin’s “True Happiness.” The lines “A stream babbles back to its source, / Like a foamy warbler, a chain, a speech”44 then become transparent: the poet, as a disciple, returns to Derzhavin, his source, while speech returns to “the Word which was in the beginning” (John 1:1, New English Bible). Of the many allusions cited by Ronen, the most important is to Tiutchev: “Blessed is he who came to this world in its most fateful moments.”45 While explicating the last two lines of the above stanza, Ronen rightfully links them to the New Testament, referring to Mark 1:7, Luke 3:16, John 1:27, as well as to Matthew 3:11, which “agrees well both with the theme of discipleship (because the office of touching, carrying, or untying the sandals was performed by the disciples for their instructors).”46 However, we should not overlook an allusion to Proverbs, as well: “Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?” (Proverbs 30:4, New English Bible). The Russian edition of the Old Testament uses the same word zaviazal (tied, bound) that Mandelstam employs in “The Slate Ode”: “Kto zaviazal vodu v odezhdu?” (Who hath bound the waters in a garment?) This allusion perhaps makes the poet the disciple of the Creator Himself. In the last stanza, the poet speaks of himself as a disciple of memory, studying “a record / Of the summer scratches on the slate board, / The language of flint and air, / With a layer of darkness, a layer of light” (an allusion to mineralogy) in order “to put his fingers / In the flinty way from the old song, / As in a sore—to weld and join / Flint with water, a horseshoe with a ring.”47 The circle is complete: the last 44 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:149. 45 Ronen, An Approach to Mandelstam, 201. “Blazhen, kto posetil sei mir / V iego minuty rokovye.” 46 Ibid., 208. 47 Mandelstam, Sochineniia, 1:150.

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stanza is like a spherical mirror reflecting the first one or, perhaps, it is another turn of the gyre. The word “ulcer,” as mentioned by Ronen, reveals the motif of painful inspiration, which, again, is one of the recurrent motifs in Russian poetry and which alludes to the prophecies of Isaiah.48 The poetic motive of “The Slate Ode” connects with the motives of “The River of Time,” and of Lermontov’s “Flinty Way” and “A Word Born of Fire and Light,” with its theme of the poet’s duty and destiny to bridge gaps and to overcome the metaphysical fear of loneliness and separation of mankind in history. It is neither physical fear nor synchronic local time (even if it is a century)—these themes dominate “January 1, 1924,” which, though powerful, is more “earthly” than the cosmic vision of “The Slate Ode.” “The Slate Ode” reveals time-space, history, and being in their integrity. Here, Mandelstam goes far beyond “the Gates of Hercules”: these are not only the gates of space, but also of time and being.

48 Ibid., 221.

CH A PT ER O N E

The Waste Land as a Human Drama Revealed by Eliot’s Dialogic Imagination

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n Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics,1 Mikhail Bakhtin put forth his concept of the polyphonic novel (combined with the concepts of “carnival” and Menippean satire). The most crucial aspect of the polyphonic novel was “dialogism,” which revealed the many-voiced and multi-faceted nature of Dostoyevsky’s works: “different voices singing the same theme differently, [. . .] punctum contra punctum.” Bakhtin differentiates between dialogism and monologism (“pretending to possess the final truth”) and claims, “the truth is not born nor is it put in the mind of a person—it is born between people.”2 Bakhtin gives the two main principles of “Socratic dialogue” as the syncretic (the fusion of different points of view of the same problem) and the anacretic (ways to provoke a person to express his opinion to the end), and states that “the main heroes of ‘Socratic dialogue’ are ideologists, [. . .] those who seek and test the truth and involve others in the process of doing it.”3   1 Citations of Eliot’s poetry in this and subsequent sections will primarily be done parenthetically. Quotes are taken from the following source, unless otherwise noted: T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1980). Parenthetical citations denote first the title of the work, then the chapter and page number.  2 Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 51, 126. Bakhtin’s emphasis; the translation is mine.   3 Ibid., 126; the translation is mine.

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Dialogue as the main principle and method is combined with the dialogues of characters, which enable the author to create a “dialogic,” free character. According to Bakhtin, “the freedom of a character is the author’s intention. The word of a hero is created by the author, but it is created in such a way that it can [. . .] develop its inner logics and independence as [. . .] the word of a character.”4 Bakhtin felt that other genres were more studied, fixed, and established, while the novel had an innovative force and was in the process of formation “in the full light of a historic day,” as he wrote in the introduction to Epic and Novel.5 Paradoxically, however, he wrote about medieval authors such as Rabelais, and did not go any farther than nineteenth-century Russian prose, focusing primarily on Dostoyevsky. Although he never seriously examined poetry in his work, Bakhtin’s major discoveries—the chronotope, dialogism, polyphony, and parody (“one of the most ancient and widespread forms of rendering others’ direct speech”6)—can be found not only in epic poetry but also in lyric poetry, and most certainly in modernist and avant-garde poetry, as was discussed in the introduction. Among the first to point out polyphony and dialogism in The Waste Land was Max Nanny, who rightfully connected the poem with Bakhtin’s ideas, though mainly with the problem of Menippean satire and carnival.7 Calvin Bedient also pointed out dialogism, correctly stating that The Waste Land was not, like Satyricon, a “straight Menippea,” but that it “substitutes for the impudent marginality of laughter a poetics of banishment, in which numerous voices, styles, and generic registers conspicuously fill a void left by a missing All [. . .]. The Waste Land is never really, and is finally far from being, carnivalesque; instead, it arranges the appearance of a riot of tones and images and languages with the cold cunning of a Hieronymo and with no less an

  4 Ibid., 76, 127.  5 Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 392.   6 Ibid., 362.   7 See Max Nanny, “The Waste Land: A Menippean Satire?” English Studies 66, no. 6 (1985): 526–27, 534–35.

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intention than to silence the pretensions of language and literature once and for all.”8 In a way, Nanny and Bedient used Bakhtin’s method against Bakhtin, so to speak—as did Jo-Anne Cappeluti, who revealed Bakhtin’s contradictions, since Bakhtin never considered poetry, let alone lyric poetry, in his work.9 Moreover, I would argue that Bakhtin is essentially “monologic” himself in his discourse: on the one hand, he claims that “ideologists,” as he calls them, of the Socratic school are seeking the truth, as opposed to those who already know it, but on the other hand, his rhetoric is full of teaching and preaching. All this is in addition to the fact that Plato’s Laws and Republic are also essentially monologic. Donald Wessling discussed Bakhtin’s contradiction in the broader context of lyric poetry, and Omry Ronen and the Russian scholar Yuri Lotman both applied Bakhtin’s principles “against Bakhtin” to lyric poetry in the 1970s.10 I intend to do the same here and apply Bakhtin’s ideas against Bakhtin to lyric poetry and The Waste Land in particular. In Pound’s “Persona” and “Mask,” even the frame and boundaries of the once firmly lyrical first-person “I” are shattered and shifted. In no way can we take at face value the first-person “I” of “La Fraisne,” or “Cino,” or “De Aegypto.” The same phenomenon can be observed in Eliot’s poetry. Stephen Spender correctly states that “there are many voices which say ‘I’ in The Waste Land. But those which speak out their living characters are of the surface, objects of the prophetic or witnessing voices. Even when they speak in the first person, dramatically, they are third-person voices of people looked at from the outside.”11 As observed by Frye, in T. S. Eliot’s “later poetry the ‘I,’ the speaker  8 Calvin Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 8. Bedient’s emphasis.   9 Jo-Anne Cappeluti, “Reaching Out of—or Into—Speech,” Yeats Eliot Review 15, no. 2 (Spring 1998), 2–11. 10 See Donald Wessling, Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003); Ronen, “Lexical Repetition,” 367–89; Iurii Lotman, O poetakh i poezii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1996), 177; Iurii Tynianov, Poetika, 51. 11 Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 97.

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of the poem, is a persona of the poet himself; in the earlier work the narrators are created characters, speaking with the poet’s voice but not for him.”12 As far as Four Quartets are concerned, Frye’s idea is true to some extent, but it does not necessarily apply in the case of the “I” (or “We”) of The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, “Journey of the Magi,” or “Marina” from Ariel Poems. T. S. Eliot, like Pound, was seeking ways of “making it new.” Beginning with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” he shifted the convention of lyric poetry, filling it with “others’ utterances and others’ individual words.”13 In “A Question of Speech,” Anne Ridler merely mentions the problem of direct quotations, bluntly stating that “Eliot’s and Pound’s method of direct quotation is apt to be a disastrous one in other hands,” without drawing any further conclusions: any method is disastrous in the hands of a mediocre poet.14 In my view, Ridler overlooked I. A. Richards’s worthwhile idea that “quotation performs the work of concentration in The Waste Land, a poem which he says would otherwise have needed to be of epic length.” Doubting the truth of that statement, Ridler concludes, “it seems a purely personal technique, liable to degenerate in other hands into mere patchwork.”15 However, using citations, allusions, and the speech of the other, was a general tendency of modernist and postmodernist literature, found in the work of Borges or of Mandelstam, who “celebrates the orgy of quotations” (although “feast” is more exact) in his “Conversation about Dante,” as observed by Claire Cavanagh. As previously discussed, Cavanagh compared Mandelstam’s “craving for world culture” to Pound’s concept of “crossfertilization between different languages” and Eliot’s idea that poetry grows from “the struggle between native and foreign elements.”16 12 Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963, 48. 13 Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92. 14 Anne Ridler, “A Question of Speech,” in T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands, ed. Balachandra Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947), 108. 15 Ridler, “A Question of Speech,” 108–9. 16 See Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 22.

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The tradition of the quotation or of allusion as a dialogue in time and space with one’s predecessors goes back in Russian poetry to Pushkin, whose Eugene Onegin is truly a “feast of quotations”—brilliantly estranged or defamiliarized, in Shklovsky’s dictum, and performed by the greatest Russian poet. In modern European poetry, the use of allusions and quotations can be found even in Rilke’s works, with his constant allusions to the Bible or to high antiquity, and in Apollinaire’s poems, such as in his poem “The Synagogue,” which has a quotation in Hebrew at the end. However, Pound and Eliot, as well as Mandelstam and Borges, made this device dominant and used it masterfully in their work. In “Prufrock,” epigraphs and citations—allusions to Hamlet or Saint John—break the monologue, or “the Swan’s Song,” as Eliot himself called it. Prufrock’s confession is estranged through parody, irony, even sarcasm: the remarks of the visitors of some high-society salon. “They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’” “They will say” in art means, of course, that “they” are included in the dialogue. So are the words of a female character, the “one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window, should say: ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.’”17 From those lines, we learn as much about Prufrock as about the unnamed “her.” Not only do we see her, but we also actually hear her intonations. As Bakhtin mentioned, “the expression of an utterance can never be fully understood or explained if its thematic content is all that is taken into account. The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances, and not just his attitude towards the object of his utterance” (Bakhtin’s emphasis).18 In a note to that statement, Bakhtin added, “intonation is especially sensitive and always points beyond the context.”19 In poetry, intonation is even more palpable and, I would say, more important than in other genres, with the exception of drama, perhaps. The intonation of the lady in Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” is much more distinct than that of her counterpart in “Prufrock.” In 17 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 6. 18 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 92. 19 Ibid.

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“Portrait of a Lady,” the dialogue moves through seasons and space. Moreover, it is not just a dialogue, but a many-voiced lyrical drama and a musical piece, which includes the voices of Marlowe’s characters; Henry James’s irony; Laforgue’s ironic, even sarcastic, undertones juxtaposed with Chopin’s Preludes, as played by “the latest Pole” (I. Paderevsky or Joseff Hoffman, I presume); “the windings of violins / And the ariettes / of cracked cornets”; and, finally, Arnold’s “buried life”20 that is expressed through Eliot’s heroine. The fusion of buried life with April sunsets would be further developed by Eliot in “April is the cruellest month” of The Waste Land. Thus, even in his early work, T. S. Eliot had not only learned the art of using personae from Ezra Pound, but he also elaborated his own forms of dialogism and polyphony in lyric poetry. It would be most illuminating to see how Eliot developed his method of “dialogic imagination” in the first draft of the poem, heavily edited by Ezra Pound. Although it is certainly thrilling for the connoisseur to reveal all the hidden allusions and associations in this work, we must not forget that we are dealing with poetry, which is a “speaking picture” in Sir Philip Sidney’s dictum,21 that is, time-space condensed in images and revealed in music.22 It is music and dialogism, not only themes, as Frye presumes, that unify Eliot’s longer poems.23 Stephen Spender brought to light the sonata form in “Ash Wednesday” as early as 1935 and likened Four Quartets to the late quartets of Beethoven.24 Therefore, Frye was right to compare The Waste Land to a musical composition.25 However, I would disagree with Frye that “Eliot in all his longer poems is [. . .] essentially a poet of fragments. The impulse by which he is able to see and organize his material as poetry is not very sustained.”26 Like Ezra Pound, Eliot was a modernist, and as a modernist, he was concerned with “making it new,” that is, not developing the plot but shifting from scene to 20 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 8. 21 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27. 22 Ibid. 23 See Frye, T. S. Eliot, 107. 24 See Spender, T. S. Eliot, 161. 25 See Frye, T. S. Eliot, 108. 26 Ibid., 107.

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scene, very much like Pound in Cantos, or like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Kuleshov in their films. In essence, Eliot’s entire body of work is a dialogue with humanity. I intend to show how Eliot used dialogism to develop plot, reveal themes and ideas through implied narrators, create shifts in time and space that combine the epic past with the lyric present, compose the music of the piece, defamiliarize reality and myth by making myth real and reality unreal, and, ultimately, reveal the human drama—like Dante in his Divine Comedy. I will limit my comments on allusions, sources, references, or mythology to the minimum necessary to sufficiently explore dialogism in the poem and to identify the voices of this human drama; as Cleanth Brooks once stated, “to venture to write anything further on The Waste Land, particularly after the work of F. R. Leavis and F. O. Matthiessen, may call for some explanation and even apology.”27 I most certainly must add the work of Stephen Spender, Grover Smith, Helen Gardner, Northrop Frye, and Brooks himself to that list. Their writing shaped my understanding of T. S. Eliot’s works and my own development in the intellectual and spiritual “waste land” of the Soviet Union—where the only essay available in translation was Morton’s “Eliot in My Life” in The Matter of Britain28— while official Soviet criticism blew out of proportion Eliot’s motifs of disillusionment and destruction after World War I and his closeness to leftist radicals in the beginning of his career. Eliot was practically considered a representative of the so-called “lost generation,” while his announcement of being royalist in politics, classicist in literature, and Anglo-Catholic in religion was labeled in Soviet criticism as “reactionary.”29 The Waste Land has always attracted poets and scholars, whatever their approach: New Criticism, post-structuralism, or deconstruction 27 Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: Analysis,” in A Study of His Writings, 7. 28 A. L. Morton, The Matter of Britain: Essays in Living Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966). 29 See Iasen Zasurskii, “Predislovie,” in Besplodnaia Zemlia, by T. S. Eliot (Moscow: Progress, 1971), 9, 11; Greta E. Ionkis, Angliiskaia poeziia XX veka (Moscow: Higher School, 1980), 69–70.

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(Ruth Nevo).30 Marjorie Perloff explored the case of modernism and the new poetics,31 as did Jewel Spears Brooker,32 who with Joseph Bentley examined the limits of interpretation and the epistemological approach.33 Russell Elliott Murphy revealed the ideas in the poem,34 and Armin Frank extracted images while practically ignoring the voices.35 All their work proves that The Waste Land not only lives on, reverberating with sound and meaning, but also still disturbs readers, that is, stirs up all kinds of reactions—all except indifference. Virtually everyone who has written about The Waste Land has interpreted its use of myth and symbolism. However, very few—with the exception of George Williamson and Spender, and later Max Nanny, Calvin Bedient, and Jo-Anne Cappeluti36—have analyzed the 30 See Ruth Nevo, “The Waste Land: The Ur-Text of Deconstruction,” New Literary History 13, no. 3 (1982). 31 See Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 7–43. In the chapter “Avant-Garde Eliot,” Perloff gives Eliot some credit as far as his early poetry (1911–22) is concerned, focusing primarily on language and his innovative use of syntax, especially praising “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” However, Perloff also sympathetically quotes Cynthia Ozick’s denouncement of the entire work of Eliot, calling him “a dead duck,” “a poet nearly forgotten,” “depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman” in Ozick’s 1989 essay “Eliot at 101” (The New Yorker, November 20, 1989): 121. Further, Ozick writes, “we do know for certain that we no longer live in the shadow of T. S. Eliot. . . . High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is equated with obscurantism. [. . .] The newest generation in the line of descent from Williams [. . .] follows Williams in repudiating Eliot” (ibid., 54; Ozick’s emphasis). Perloff finds these words “harsh but not entirely inaccurate” (Perloff, 21st-Century, 11). 32 Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 33 Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990). 34 See Russell Elliott Murphy, “‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’: The Waste Land as Transcendental Meaning,” in T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting: Centenary Essays. Edited by Shyamal Bagchee (London: Macmillan, 1990), 51–67. 35 See Armin Paul Frank, “The Waste Land: A Drama of Images,” in T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting, 28–50. 36 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 132–49. First published as a chapter in his The Destructive Element (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Jonathan Cape, 1936); and in George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot (New York: Noonday Press/FSG, 1966).

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dramatic character of the poem. Williamson suggested that The Waste Land “becomes a kind of dramatic lyric, in which the lyric themes are projected by characters associated with the central experience, and the individual fortune becomes a general fortune.”37 I would suggest that the poem is essentially dramatic, and it is this dialogic imagination embracing centuries and civilizations that makes the poem a human drama. The Waste Land, as is well known, initially began with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was eventually omitted (although later The Heart of Darkness reappeared in “The Hollow Men” in a different form). The epigraph from Conrad emphasized “fear in a handful of dust,” not the theme of “buried life.” Jewel Spears Brooker maintains that The Waste Land, “in one of its many aspects, represents exactly what the discarded epigraph from The Heart of Darkness suggests—a deathbed vision of the mind of Europe; in a literal sense, the poem is a repository of fragments from that mind, and by using Frazer’s The Golden Bough as part of the scaffolding of the poem, Eliot manages to extend that mind backwards in time as far as human consciousness can go.”38 The opening intense, lavish dialogue in medias res simultaneously defamiliarizes Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend and “makes it new,” placing its characters in the hic et nunc. Eliot’s reminiscences of his own life in Boston are richly interpolated with songs from George M. Cohan’s Fifty Miles From Boston and other popular musicals of the early 1900s. As a result, Eliot merges the past and the present, making the past real. Since the title of the first movement in the first draft is the same (“The Burial of the Dead”)—alluding, as Grover Smith observed, to the “majestic Anglican service” of the same name39—and because the first draft begins with the first person plural “we,” very much like “Prufrock,” I would agree with Frye that this is not the voice of 37 Williamson, A Reader’s Guide, 124. 38 Jewel Spears Brooker, “Transcendance and Return: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism,” South Atlantic Review 59, no. 2 (May 1994): 67. 39 Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), 72.

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Tiresias, as Smith presumes, since Tiresias always has his (or her, if we consider Tiresias’s dual nature) own, distinct first-person voice.40 There was another first-person voice in the draft of The Waste Land—that of Gerontion, the lyrical hero of Eliot’s 1919 poem of the same title, which became a separate, distinct voice. Jewel Spears Brooker argues that Gerontion, a neologism derived from the ancient Greek for “old age,” symbolizes Western civilization. According to Brooker, “Eliot suggests that the brain of this decrepit intellectual contains the entire history of Europe from the Trojan War to the Treaty of Versailles. Gerontion’s mind is quite simply, the mind of Europe on the very edge of doom.”41 Brooker further connects Gerontion with the characters of The Waste Land, developing the same idea: “like Gerontion and like Tiresias, another ancient and decayed well of European consciousness who appears in The Waste Land, the Sybil is a metaphor for the mind of Europe.”42 During this period, Eliot’s ideas on history and civilization were close to those of Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West, the first volume of which was published in 1918 and revised in 1922. These ideas were shared by other modernists—most notably, by Joyce and by Pound, as observed by Brooker.43 Pound finally convinced Eliot that the opening of the first draft was excessive and unfocused, but Eliot’s dialogic method was, nevertheless, firmly in place. Likewise, the cuts in other parts, especially in “The Fire Sermon,” as shown by Richard Ellmann and later by Joseph Militello, prove the tendency to exclude overt or redundant fragments, sometimes sacrificing skillful lines not only in order to achieve coherence or emphasize the tragedy, but also to avoid excessive didactic comments and thus to create a truly modernist dialogic poem.44 The Waste Land as we know it now—the final version of 1922—is a testament to Eliot’s 40 See Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 72; and Frye, T. S. Eliot, 105–7. 41 Brooker, “Transcendance and Return,” 66. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 59. 44 Richard Ellmann, “The First Waste Land,” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 55–66; Joseph Militello, “T. S. Eliot’s ‘Fire Sermon’ as a Modernist Work in Progress,” Yeats Eliot Review 16, no. 1 (Summer 1999): 32–39.

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genius and to Pound’s extraordinary ability to see the text of the other (another facet of dialogism) and liberate the essence of meaning from the husk of words. The poem opens with Trimalchio boasting that he has seen the Sibyl at Cumae who asked the gods to grant her eternal life but who forgot to ask for eternal youth. Trimalchio quotes her, telling the boys that her only wish is to die. As Murphy keenly observed, the Sibyl’s words “are in a first-person report from a third person; and that third person, Trimalchio, is himself being quoted by Encopius, himself the fictional narrator of the Satyricon. [. . .] Furthermore, while Trimalchio’s report is in Latin, the words he is reporting were said in Greek. The entire first-century assemblage introduces a poem written two thousand years later for an audience that speaks English, a language itself partly derived from Latin and ancient Greek.”45 Thus, direct speech is at least four times transformed here: the Sibyl to the boys, Trimalchio—through Encopius—to the guests, Petronius to Eliot; and the epigraph immediately introduces the theme of an unnatural, buried life combined, or rather juxtaposed, with the revival of nature. Hence we have a dialogue between two writers, evoked in several languages, and both Petronius’s Trimalchio and the Sibyl at Cumae are estranged, parodied, and included in a new work of art—in the dialogue, or rather the drama, of The Waste Land. In his study of Seferis’s translation of The Waste Land into Greek, Nicholas Bachtin (1896–1950)—professor of Greek and linguistics at Birmingham University, England, and the brother of Mikhail—was among the first (in 1938) to point out the dialogic nature of The Waste Land as opposed to the “essentially monological” Journey of the Magi or Gerontion. He also emphasized the dialogic nature of the quotations: They are not really “quotations”—that is, extraneous elements incorporated into a unified poetic utterance; they coexist on equal terms with the other elements of the poem. They too are voices among other conflicting voices: a snatch of an Australian street-ballad 45 Murphy, “It is impossible,” 56.

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or a line from Marvell, no less than talk in the public-house, the words of the hysterical woman, or the poet’s own voice [. . .] which vanishes again as the others do, passing abruptly or imperceptibly into another voice.46

“Citation is a cicada,” Mandelstam said in “Conversation about Dante,” emphasizing the truly dialogic nature of an appropriate quotation. The citation from Petronius not only transforms Eliot’s text, but Eliot’s text also transforms the Petronius citation, creating a new meaning. This new meaning is further modified and transformed by an allusion to the Prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote And droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich liquor Of which vertu engendered is the flour. . .47

Although Eliot’s allusion to the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales was mentioned by a number of scholars—Dansby Evans and Wolfgang Rudat, to name a few48—most of them limited their comparisons to the two prologues, to the motifs, or to separate characters. Frank Perez found striking similarities between Prufrock and Chaucer’s clerk of Oxford. Perez also reconstructed what he called “a backward evolution of literary allusions: Prufrock to Hamlet to Polonius to Chaucer’s clerk.”49 In a note, Perez connects this backward evolution with “Eliot’s concept of the ‘historical sense,’” while I would also emphasize the 46 Nicholas Bachtin, “English Poetry in Greek: Notes on a Comparative Study of Poetic Idioms,” Poetics Today 6, no. 3 (1985): 336. I am grateful to Dr. Vadim Lyapunov, professor emeritus of Indiana University at Bloomington, who advised me to read this article. 47 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Prologue,” in The Canterbury Tales, lines 1–4. 48 See Dansby Evans, “Chaucer and Eliot: The Poetics of Pilgrimage,” Medieval Perspectives 9 (1994): 41–47; and Wolfgang Rudat, “T. S. Eliot’s Allusive Technique: Chaucer, Virgil, Pope,” Renascence 35, no. 3 (1983): 167–82. 49 Frank Perez, “Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford: A Prototype for Prufrock?” Yeats Eliot Review 17, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 4.

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dialogism of allusions that work exactly as the Petronius-Eliot allusion discussed above.50 Evans, a medievalist and scholar of Chaucer, was probably the only person to emphasize the similarity of Eliot’s and Chaucer’s motifs, in particular those of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and salvation.51 Furthermore, Evans correctly asserts that, modeled on Chaucer, “Eliot partially renders his pilgrims through reference to their perspective vocations and social status.”52 Not only did Eliot parody the motifs of reviving earth, roots, and flowers in opposition to draught and fog, but he also parodied the characters of The Canterbury Tales: the Knight, who fought in the Crusades from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, Alexandria, to Prussia and Russia, is certainly the model for Stetson (and earlier for Gerontion); his son, the Squire, is an ideal lover as opposed to all the failures in The Waste Land; the Nonne, who “was cleped madame Eglentyne,”53 a Prioress without a vocation but with dogs and jewelry, is replaced by Madame Sosostris. The Merchant and the Skipper reappear in The Waste Land, as well: Mr. Eugenides and Phlebas the Phoenician, respectively. Moreover, I believe that there are allusions in The Waste Land to certain Chaucer personages. For instance, the fallen kings from the Monk’s tale, especially Croesus who was hanged and washed by Jupiter in snow and rain, is perhaps here The Hanged Man in Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards” (I.46). The cock “heet Chauntecleer”54 from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” who crowed in church on Sundays, is the model for the roosters in the haunted chapel scene from “What the Thunder Said,” discussed below. In addition, the Wheel might be another allusion to the cock from “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” who “By nature [. . .] knew eech ascensioun / Of th’equinoxial in thilke town.”55 Thus, in addition to Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and Sir Fraser’s The Golden Bough—mentioned by Eliot himself and later by virtually everyone who wrote about The 50 51 52 53 54 55

Perez, “Chaucer’s Clerk,” 5. Evans, “Chaucer and Eliot,” 42. Ibid., 42–43. Chaucer, “General Prologue,” in The Canterbury Tales, fragment 1, line 121. Chaucer, “The Second Nun’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales, fragment 7, line 83. Ibid., fragment 7, lines 89–90.

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Waste Land—Eliot is also strongly alluding to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, using the motive of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and salvation in a continuing dialogue with one of the greatest English poets, who was among the first to introduce dialogism in poetry. As stated in the introduction, time-space or chronotope, as Bakhtin put it, is perhaps even more important in poetry—in lyric poetry especially—than in prose, since poetry is much more condensed and can be defined as time-space compressed in images. Bakhtin’s “chronotope of the quest,” in my view, plays a crucial role both in The Waste Land and in Four Quartets, as will be demonstrated further. The opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead” appear to be a monologue, but then we encounter “us” in the eighth and “we” in the ninth lines, and the first person plural is replaced by the first person singular—in German. By inserting the words of Countess Marie Larisch, whom the poet met in person, Eliot shifts in space and time, combining the present and the past, as Valerie Eliot asserts in her editorial notes to a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts of The Waste Land.56 Polyglossy (speaking in tongues), or, in Bakhtin’s dictum, “heteroglossia,”57 is more evidence of Pound’s method creatively adopted by Eliot. The dialogue of characters is also the dialogue of languages and vice versa. The words of the countess (and her cousin) then dissolve in the mighty and frightful bass profundo of Ezekiel and Ecclesiastes. As observed by Williamson, “the speaker also is the ‘son of man,’ his inheritor; and this inheritance is the lot of the Fisher King, whose experience he repeats.”58 After the crescendo “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” the only logical continuation is to switch to a completely different tonality, which Eliot does by introducing new voices and new characters—those of Tristan and Isolde. Medieval romance and the music of Wagner are also included

56 Valerie Eliot, “Editorial Notes” to The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, by T. S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 126. 57 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 263. 58 Williamson, A Reader’s Guide, 124.

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in the “speaking picture”59 of the poem. Thus, the theme of tragic love is juxtaposed against the theme of a loveless buried life. The theme of “a hyacinth girl,” perhaps an allusion to Tennyson’s Mariana, links medieval romance and Wagner’s opera with modern times, reinforces “the chronotope of love,” according to Bakhtin, and introduces a new character.60 The hyacinth girl also reminds us of “the slain Hyacinth,”61 thus bringing back the theme of a dying and reviving God, but she also “carries as much of the weight of ‘memory and desire’ as does the lilac in The Waste Land.”62 I would argue that the theme of the hyacinth girl is not an implication of “a male-male love ending in tragic loss,” as Patrick Query maintains.63 On the contrary, as Lyndall Gordon suggests, the hyacinth girl alongside the girl in his early poem of 1912 “La Figlia che piange” (A weeping daugher), “hidden under the heron wing” and later imagery of the garden and the lotus-lady in “Burnt Norton,” were all inspired by Emily Hale (1891–1969), who loved Eliot all her life.64 Hence the connection in the manuscript to “the hyacinth garden,” which was removed from the final version since Eliot was especially meticulous in avoiding any overt biographical connections and allusions.65 The intermediate resolution leads us to “the heart of light, the silence”: silence is not the absence of speech but a musical pattern allowing the poet to switch between planes, for “words, after 59 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27. 60 For a detailed stipulation of time-space, see this book’s introduction. 61 Williamson, A Reader’s Guide, 134. 62 Patrick Query, “‘They Called Me the Hyacinth Girl’: T. S. Eliot and the Revision of Masculinity,” Yeats Eliot Review 18, no. 3 (February 2002): 17. See also Louis Menard, “‘The Women Come and Go’: The Love Song of T. S. Eliot.” The New Yorker (September 30, 2002): 128–129. Actually, as Louis Menard stated, Eliot’s homosexuality has not been proven by either Carole Seymour-Jones in Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (London: Constable, 2001) or by John Peter in his 1952 article “A New Interpretation of The Waste Land” published in Essays in Criticism 2, no. 3: 242–66, in which he interpreted The Waste Land as “an elegy for the dead man beloved” and for which Eliot, through his solicitors, threatened to sue for libel: “Peter, much abashed, sent Eliot an apology, and the article was purged from printing in that issue of Essays in Criticism” (Menard, “The Women,” 128–29). 63 Query, “They Called Me,” 17. 64 Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: Norton, 1999), 81, 403. 65 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 13.

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speech, reach / Into the silence” (“Burnt Norton,” V). By shifting in space and time, Eliot leads his reader to 1920s London and introduces a complex new character, Madame Sosostris: a hidden citation or an allusion, as Smith noted, to Huxley’s Crome Yellow (uniting in an androgynous manner Mr. Scogan, the sorceress of Ecbatana, the king of Egypt Sesostris, and Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias).66 Lawrence Rainey—in his recent studies Revisiting The Waste Land and The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, based, in part, on the analysis of the three typewriters used in The Waste Land drafts—came to the conclusion that Eliot “had probably drafted the scene with Madame Sosostris by early February 1921 and had certainly completed the typescript of parts I and II somewhere in mid-May, while Huxley, who was living in Italy, did not even begin to write his novel until the beginning of June.”67 Nevertheless, Rainey tells the entire story of Mr. Scogan disguised as a gypsy fortune-teller named Sesostris, which has, since Smith’s 1954 essay68 misled generations of scholars to think that it was Eliot who “borrowed” Madame Sosostris from Huxley, not vice versa.69 Although Rainey maintains that Eliot’s letter of 1952 to Smith was a kind of mystification, Rainey does not put forward his own hypothesis as to why Madame Sosostris is introduced as the androgynous counterpart of Tiresias. True, the statue of Sesostris III is in the British Museum, and the Pharaoh was mentioned by Herodotus (2.102.2), Diodorus Siculus (1.53–59) and Strabo (15.687), yet the reason for the striking resemblance between the two fortunetellers is unclear. One might even assume that Huxley, as he had before, borrowed the character from Eliot.70 Huxley even 66 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 76. 67 Lawrence Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 80. 68 Grover Smith, “The Fortuneteller in Eliot’s ‘Waste Land,’” American Literature 25 (1954): 490–92. 69 Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, 80. 70 Bernard Bergonzi, “Aldous Huxley: ‘A Novelist of Talent and an Essayist of Genius,’” in Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), viii. According to Bernard Bergonzi, who compiled and edited the 1969 Harper’s Great Short Works of A. Huxley, the two were in touch long before that. Bergonzi claims the Huxley “borrowed” from “The Preludes,” when Denis thinks

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intensified the elements of carnival and Menippean satire. In addition, as was stated above, this character might be an allusion to the Nonne, who “was cleped madame Eglentyne” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Madame Sosostris, in turn, introduces a gallery of characters in the form of Tarot cards used simultaneously as icons, archetypes, and the characters of an unfolding drama that could be read as an introduction to a medieval mystery but for its ironic, even satiric undertones. The elements of Menippean satire and carnival are at work—important facets of dialogism. Although drama and myth are parodied and downplayed, the effect is, nevertheless, achieved: the themes of wandering, fate, and death—the chronotopi of the road and of the quest—unite myth and reality, antiquity and modernity. The mention of Mrs. Equitone and the remark, “one must be so careful these days” (II.59), bring us back to reality—but to the reality of the “Unreal City” (II.60), which in this case is not limited only to the financial district of London, as Rainey presumes, thus making the present unreal and the myth real. In the next seventeen lines, Eliot blurs the boundary between the past and the present. He portrays the burial of the past (or the memory, as Leavis and Matthiessen suggest) and an unreal present. Brooks believes that Dog with a capital “D” symbolizes “humanitarianism and the related philosophies which in their concern for man extirpate the supernatural—dig up the corpse of the buried god and thus prevent the rebirth of life.”71 Smith connects the dog to the Dog Star, to Stephen Dedalus’s joke about the fox and his grandmother in Ulysses, and, finally, to Frazer’s Folk-Lore in the Old Testament.72 Perhaps it would be simpler, lest one drown in sometimes contradictory details, to see the image of the dog as a symbol of cynicism and disbelief, and the meaning of the entire “Unreal City” passage as “the lack of purpose and of the lines “My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched / Over a bubbling cauldron” (compare to, “His soul was stretched tight across the skies / That fade behind a city block”), and that Denis Stone in general resembles Prufrock. Later, Bergonzi writes, “soon after Crome Yellow appeared, Eliot put himself in Huxley’s debt: “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” of The Waste Land is an adaptation of “Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana.” 71 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 14. 72 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 79.

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direction, the inability to believe really in anything and the resulting ‘heap of broken images’ that formed the excruciating contents of the post-War state of mind.”73 In a short passage, Eliot unites the battle at Mylae with World War I (also observed by Brooks) with the implication, “I had not thought death had undone so many” (echoing Pound’s “Hell Cantos”), and he thus makes Stetson a universal character.74 Smith presumes that Stetson is “a modern representative ‘of him who from cowardice made the great refusal’ (Inferno, III) and is a counterpart to the quester. The corpse he has planted in his garden is the dead god, of whom he has knowledge, but whose life he rejects, choosing to remain a ‘trimmer.’”75 The last three lines (74–76): “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men / Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”—fuse an estranged quotation from Webster, transforming “the wolf . . . that’s a foe to man” into a “friend to men,” and a quotation from Baudelaire (“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”), thus making Stetson “every man including the reader and Mr. Eliot himself.”76 Moreover, as was mentioned by Andrew Ross, Stetson is an anagram of “tsetse,” Eliot’s Harvard nickname, adding not only a satirical but a self-critical dimension to the poem.77 The second person “you” involves the reader directly in the dialogue, though, as Smith mentions: “Eliot’s quotation from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal was an insulting one.”78 Here again, citations “speak” to each other in a dialogic manner. Eliot introduces parody as a constructive device of plot and genre formation.79 In The Waste Land, Eliot parodies the use of citations, epigraphs, classical meters, popular songs, and myth, and 73 F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 21. 74 Rajan, A Study of His Writings, 13. 75 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 78. 76 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 14. It could be translated from French as, “you hypocrite reader—my double, my brother.” 77 Andrew Ross, “The Waste Land and the Fantasy of Interpretation,” Representations 8 (1984): 142. 78 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 79. 79 This understanding of parody was proposed by Yuri Tynianov in “Dostoevsky and Gogol,” in Poetika, 201. The differentiation between plot and story (narration) was first proposed by Shklovsky in “The Connection between Devices,” 51, 70–1.

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finally shifts the convention of the genre—the lyric poem—to create a new genre: the dialogic or dramatic long poem. “A Game of Chess” adds a new facet to dialogism with Eliot’s use of Ut Pictura Poesis: the change of Philomel is a speaking picture, and the nightingale physically cries. Before the woman actually speaks, we hear many voices: of myth and of the past as well as of implied literary characters, from Cleopatra to Imogine, to Bianca raped by the duke in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, and back to Shakespeare’s Ferdinand and Miranda—which is all “Shakespeherian Rag,” as the male character states. Belladonna, as Nanny mentions, means both “a fair lady” and a deadly poison. Eliot, according to Nanny, is simultaneously hiding and revealing his personal drama and uneasy love-hate relationship with Vivien behind the Tarot cards, masks, and the dramatis personae. Therefore, Nanny concludes, the client of Madame Sosostris might very well be Eliot himself, a querrent and alter ego of the quester.80 This statement is supported by Richard Ellmann’s analysis of the first Waste Land, suggesting that not only Beladonna (and, therefore, her interlocutor) represent Eliot’s first wife Vivien and the poet, but also that the Fisher King might bear a resemblance to T. S. Eliot.81 Thus, a “wicked pack of cards” alongside “impersonal poetry”82 helps Eliot not only to elevate himself beyond his personal discontent but also to reveal the archetypal tragedy of the time, which is out of joint, to use Shakespeare’s phrasing. Therefore, “impersonal poetry” does not suggest a lack of personality, which was clarified in Eliot’s 1940 essay on Yeats,83 but is instead about finding an “objective correlative,” as Eliot himself explained: “a set of objects, a 80 See Max Nanny, “‘Cards Are Queer’: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste Land,” English Studies 62, no. 4 (1981): 340–1. 81 Ellmann, “The First Waste Land,” 55–66, esp. 61–63. 82 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 40. 83 T. S. Eliot, “Yeats,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 251. Eliot admitted, “I expressed myself badly.” Having further refined what he meant by impersonal poetry, Eliot states, “there are two forms of impersonality: that which is natural to a mere skilful craftsman and that which is more and more achieved by the maturing artist. [. . .] The second impersonality is that of the poet, who, out of intense and personal

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situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”84 The “objective correlative” can be compared to Pound’s “persona,” thus avoiding the association of “I” with the poet and using masks to render images, ideas, and emotions in a truly dialogic manner. In addition, there are masculine voices: King Lear and Ariel’s song from Act 1 of The Tempest—“Those are pearls that were his eyes”—as observed by Smith.85 The woman whose desperate cry is like that of Philomel symbolizes the passion and despair of one lost in unrequited love. Whether her interlocutor actually speaks or not, we can still hear him. Perhaps he is not literally blind or deaf, but he is spiritually dead, and they both aimlessly wait in fear and hope for the final “knock upon the door.” We as readers doubt that something can come out of nothing, since the marriage is loveless and sterile and the land is still bare. As the scene moves on, the upper class characters are replaced by the lower middle class Bill, Lou, May, Albert, and Lil. These are simple folk who do not even think of Shakespeare or of higher matters, nor can they express themselves in the sophisticated manner of the man and woman of the previous scene. Here again, Menippean satire is at work. Although there is a stark contrast between the exquisite chamber of Belladonna and the London pub, the motif of sterility and a wasted life prevails. The land is barren; the City is unreal. Notably, the actual speakers in the second part are for the most part women. The proprietor’s words, or perhaps a parodic “eternal” call—“Hurry up Please It’s Time”—reminds us of the final “knock upon the door.” Hence, Ophelia’s farewell is interwoven into the parting of the pub visitors. Like Phlebas the Phoenician, Ophelia also died by water. Thus, Ophelia introduces the Thames-daughters and their counterparts, the Rheintöchter of “The Fire Sermon.” The main motifs of this chapter are water and fire: both death by water and fire and perhaps death of water and fire, as in the second movement of “Little Gidding.” Such an interpretation can be justified by Helen Gardner’s subtle experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make it a general symbol.” 84 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 48. 85 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 81.

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observation that Eliot’s poetry “is extraordinarily self-consistent, and there is almost nothing he has published that does not form part of his poetic personality. One of the results of this integrity is that his later work interprets his earlier, as much as his earlier work does his later, so that criticism of ‘The Waste Land’ today is modified by ‘Ash Wednesday,’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ is easier to understand after reading the ‘Quartets.’” Gardner proposed interpreting The Waste Land not simply as “the disillusion of a generation,” but “as an Inferno which looked towards a Purgatorio.”86 The scenery of this Inferno is a vast and devastated riverbank that suddenly flows into the waters of Leman, which, in turn, merges with the river Chebar in Babylon. Hence the voice of Ezekiel joins the song of the daughters of the Thames. Eliot removes the separation between past and present chronotopes, uniting history and myth in the present, the here and now. “The rattle of the bones” intensifies the comparison of the scenery with the desert, alluding to the “son of man” of the first movement and anticipating the wanderings in the desert of the fifth movement (and perhaps the scenery and the chirping of the bones in “Ash Wednesday,” II). The “nymphs” of Spencer’s “Prothalamion” appear as the girlfriends of “the loitering heirs of city directors.” The nymphs reappear later as the voices of the deceived lovers and speak for themselves. Likewise, the allusions to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and to Day’s “The Parliament of Bees”—noticed by a number of scholars87—have been defamiliarized, placed in a contemporary London setting and thus modernized. This allows the poet to shift in time and space and to juxtapose the voices of Ezekiel, Marvell, and Day with that of the quester, who has the lead voice—the solo, so to speak. The poet, in Bakhtin’s parlance, “makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to the unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were, ‘without quotation marks’), that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own intention.”88 86 Helen Gardner, “Four Quartets: A Commentary,” in A Study of His Writings, 59–60. 87 E.g., see Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 20; and in Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 84. 88 Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 285

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As observed by Brooks, we find that in Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, used by Eliot, “the title ‘Fisher King’ originates from the use of fish as fertility or life symbol,” associated with many of the later Grail romances.89 Eliot, however, “reverses the legend,” as Brooks put it—or, as I would say, he defamiliarizes the myth. As Brooks showed, the Fisher King also refers to Prince Ferdinand of The Tempest and of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.90 The king, though, is impotent and unable to set his “lands in order.” Hence the triumph of Apeneck Sweeney, an anti-quester, brought by lust to the anti-Diana, Mrs. Porter. Mrs. Porter—a character in an Australian ballad sung by Australian soldiers in Gallipoli in 1915, as noted by I. A. Bowra91—is another mundane voice juxtaposed with the pure voices of children from Verlaine’s “Parsifal.” Purity and chastity, however, are unattainable in the “Unreal City” and, therefore, the voice of Philomela again sings of violence and rape. Her desperate voice is immediately followed by the “demotic French” of another character, Mr. Eugenides, a parody of a Phoenician sailor and the one-eyed merchant of Madame Sosostris’s “wicked pack of cards,” who introduces another trap for the quester— homosexuality—which will by no means undo the curse and make the barren land fertile. The reader is then led to the apartment of a typist, a contemporary Philomela and another victim of unrequited love. The entire scene is described by Tiresias—both a seer and an androgen (I am not sure that “the young man carbuncular” is a quester, as Smith presumes; he is rather another counterpart to the quester).92 Although there is a sharp contrast between the description of the typist’s apartment and the exquisite chamber of the opening of “A Game of Chess,” the scenes are essentially the same: a loveless lovemaking. Hence, both scenes are accompanied by the desperate voice of Philomela. It is acknowledged that Eliot subtly used myth to reveal the timeless in contemporary life and 89 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 19. 90 Ibid., 20. 91 I. A. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (London: Macmillan, 1949), 282. Quoted by Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 86. 92 See Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 88.

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to juxtapose the profane with the sacred. Eliot himself in his “Notes on The Waste Land” emphasized the impact on his poem of Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance and of Sir Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Eliot orchestrates the myth, so to speak, or even transposes and transforms it, bringing Tiresias to the apartment of a London typist to witness and comment on the contemporary loveless lovemaking that is difficult to distinguish from rape. On the contrary, in Pound’s Canto 1, for instance, the protagonist, Odysseus, descends to the underworld to hear Tiresias, which is still very much in the spirit and letter of Homer. The reader has to follow the narrator and the protagonist. Eliot, on the other hand, defamiliarizes the myth and brings Tiresias to the reader, thus making the Greek seer both the narrator and the actor. We actually see and hear Tiresias as if he were on stage, but The Waste Land is neither a play nor a medieval mystery: it is a human drama. Nevertheless, I would argue that all “three voices” from Eliot’s later essay—lyric, epic/narrative and dramatic—are present in The Waste Land.93 Eliot combines historical and mythological time, juxtaposing different phenomena. History acquires the mythical character of a permanently repeated common denominator, and vice versa: myth becomes real. Myth, therefore, is an instrument with which to navigate reality. At this point, I must clarify my use of the term “myth.” Myth, in my view, is not limited either to la legomena epi tois dromenois (things that are spoken in ritual acts), as was understood in Greece; or to the retelling of mythological plots and images; or even to symbol and archetype. Nor should “myth” be limited only to anthropological studies of dying and reviving gods or to “anthropological studies of vegetation myths,” as stated by Spender.94 Myth is rather a way of poetic thinking that enables the poet to practice an approach toward being as becoming in the spirit of Cassirer and Eliade as well as Heidegger. Mythological thinking allows the poet to reveal the image of time and space, in which the entire picture of the world from the beginnings to the contemporaneity is evoked. Eliot’s mythological imagination is a 93 T. S. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), 89. 94 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 99–100.

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bridge joining the contemporary and the ancient, the individual and the universal, the sacred and the profane, or to quote Eliot, it helps the poet to reveal “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time.” It is also the driving force of his spiritual quest aimed at the restoration of the wholeness of human consciousness and faith. Like Joyce and Pound, Eliot defamiliarizes myth, “making it new.” While reviewing Ulysses in The Dial (November 1923), Eliot himself acknowledged his indebtedness to Joyce: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing the method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigation. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. [. . .] Instead of a narrative method, we may use now the mythical method.95

Mythological consciousness, along with dialogism, allows Eliot to shift freely in time and space, combining Tiresias’s words, “I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the dead,” with allusions to Tennyson’s and Swinburne’s “Tiresias”—most probably to the latter, as noted by Smith—and to Goldsmith’s “When lovely woman stoops to folly.”96 The reader is led between two planes, like Tiresias between his two lives, while the line “this music crept by me upon the waters” alludes both to Prince Ferdinand in The Tempest and to the brother of the Fisher King, who observed, “a rat crept softly through the vegetation.” Thus, the poet again unites the sacred and the profane: “a public bar in Lower Thames Street” and the “inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold” of the church of Magnus Martyr at the foot of London Bridge. As was observed by 95 T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 177–78. 96 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 88.

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Smith, Saint Magnus “was especially the fishermen’s church, erected, in fact, on Fish Hill, opposite the site of the Fishmonger’s Hall. ‘Fish,’ ‘Martyr,’ and vestmental ‘white and gold’ form a complex link with the Saviour and the Ritual of Easter.”97 This movement also links the Buddhist “Fire Sermon” with Saint Augustine, uniting Eastern and Western ideas in a dialogic manner. The image of the river brings the theme of human, local time and history,as in the first movement of “Dry Salvages,” where the voices of the river and the sea are reenacted in a kind of a dialogue, revealing images of local time and eternity, if we apply Helen Gardner’s approach quoted above, that emphasizes the consistency and integrity of Eliot’s poetry, so “that his later work interprets his earlier, as much as his earlier work does his later.”98 The river returns to the themes of filth and lust (reinforced by mentioning the Dog of Isle). The passionate, promiscuous but sterile relations between Queen Elizabeth and Earl Leicester resemble those of both the couples from “A Game of Chess,” as well as the typist and the clerk from “The Fire Sermon.” In addition, the song of the daughters of the Rhine is juxtaposed with the song of the deceived daughters of the Thames, the nymphs from the opening of the chapter. The latter evoke the real human drama and defamiliarize the song of the former. As a result, we simultaneously hear two triads, so to speak, as in an ancient tragedy. The words of Saint Augustine at the closing emphasize the necessity of the purification of desires and love, as if anticipating “the crowned knot of fire” from the end of “Little Gidding.” Here again, a quotation from the Confessions is included in the poem in a dialogic manner, and Saint Augustine himself becomes a character in the poem, thus uniting time and history. The theme of fire, though, is quenched by water, which symbolizes oblivion and death. The sea swell disregards the petty human considerations of “profit and loss.” As Smith put it, “the Death of Phlebas writes the epitaph to the experience by which the quester has failed in the garden.”99 Driven by lust and greed, the Phoenician, 97 Ibid., 89. 98 Gardner, “Four Quartets,” 59–60. 99 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 91.

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“who was once handsome and tall,” is finally sucked into the whirlpool. At this point, the narrator shifts from the third person to the second, addressing the reader “on the level of familiar experience,” as Spender puts it, reminding “Gentile or Jew”—everyman, in fact—of the tragic outcome of neglecting the higher principles of life.100 After death by fire and death by water, the quester returns to the desert and to the red rock, where there is still no water. The round is almost completed, and the wanderer returns to the wilderness but the spiritual thirst has not been quenched; the land is still bare, and even the thunder is sterile. After all, it took Moses forty years to bring his people from captivity to the Holy Land, and he spent most of his life in the desert without seeing the Promised Land. Following the same route, like Pound in his Cantos, Eliot spent his lifetime searching for a way out of the dead end of spiritual death-in-life, “lost in living” (Choruses from “The Rock”) of sterile human activities filled with “profit and loss.” It would take the poet twenty more years of intensive spiritual quest, and in the middle of another world war his lyrical hero would still be wandering in the wilderness: There are flood and drouth Over the eyes in the mouth, Dead water and dead sand Contending for the upper hand. (“Little Gidding,” II/140)

The son of man returns to the beginning of his wandering, under the red rock, to see “fear in the handful of dust.” As noted by almost every scholar writing on The Waste Land, the movement begins with the agony of birth and rebirth of the Crucifixion narrated, or rather performed, like the chorus in an ancient or medieval tragedy or in Bach’s Passions—most probably by the disciples of Jesus Christ, hence the first person plural “we”:

100 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 169.

148 The River of Time He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.101

Quoting the same lines, Spender correctly presumes that the entire movement “consists of a number of visions in the desert of the world without God, dominated by the absence of Christ, the God, who has not risen and whom the disciples cannot see.”102 However, Spender is concerned mainly with the theme, the visual images, and the “the voice that says ‘I’ or the I of the lyrist,” as he writes, ­quoting Nietzsche;103 he disregards the other voices. In my view, even the change of rhythm in the following passages suggests different thirsty voices. While Brooks connects the passage beginning with “who is the third who walks always beside you?” with the Journey to Emmaus,104 Smith also suggests an allusion to a Buddhist legend in H. C. Warren’s Buddhism in Translation. According to this legend, traveling along the road, an old sage met a woman and asked alms of her who only laughed at him. Since she displayed her teeth while laughing, the old man realized that “he was enabled to achieve sainthood through realizing the essential impurity of her body, whose naked bones he just saw,” so when he later met the woman’s husband looking for her, the saint answered him, Was it a woman or a man, That I passed this way? I cannot tell. But this I know, a set of bones Is traveling upon this road.105

If there is an allusion to this Buddhist legend, it is another case of polyphony and dialogism involving allusions. Based on Eliot’s notes,

101 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 46. 102 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 116. 103 Ibid. 104 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 26. 105 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 94.

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both Matthiessen and Smith connect “the Murmur of maternal lamentation” with the “decay of Eastern Europe.”106 Unknowingly, Matthiessen was even more right than he thought when he presumed that “the ‘shouting and the crying’ re-echo not only from the mob that thronged Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion, but also, as is made clearer in ensuing lines, from the ‘hordes swarming over endless plains’ in revolt in contemporary Russia.”107 By alluding to such a well-known historic event as the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, Eliot unknowingly echoes the poems of three prominent Russian symbolist poets: Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), who wrote “Tread on their Eden, Atilla!”; Valery Briusov (1873–1926), who took the above line from the former as the epigraph to his poem “Griadushchie gunny” (“The Coming Huns,” 1905); and Alexander Blok (1880–1921), the author of “Skify” (“Scythians”) and “Dvenadtsat’” (“The Twelve,” 1918). In “The Coming Huns,” Briusov anticipates and greets the coming of barbarians, although they will destroy both civilization and him: Where are you Huns who are coming, Who cloud the wide world with your spears? I hear your pig iron tramping On the still-undiscovered Pamirs. Like a drunken horde from dark field-camps Fall on us in a clamorous flood. . . To revive our too-soon-grown-old bodies With a fresh surge of burning blood. [. . .] Perhaps all that is our own will perish And leave no trace that men’s eyes can see. . . Still I welcome with a hymn of greeting All of you who will destroy me.108 106 Ibid., 26. 107 Matthiessen, Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 38. 108 From Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, eds., Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology with Verse Translations (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966), 47.

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This poem was finalized at the time of the first Russian revolution of 1905. The fall of civilization, not only the decline of the West, was anticipated by the Russian poets much earlier than by Spengler. Unintentional as it is, Eliot’s coincidence with his Russian contemporaries was nevertheless in the context of the epoch; although Eliot, unlike his Russian counterparts, never hailed the destruction of civilization by trying to save the fragments of it, as in the final verses of The Waste Land. By portraying “falling towers” and making cities that once symbolized the spiritual and cultural treasures of the world as unreal as London, Eliot shows the decay and fall of the archetypal city—the City of God perhaps—and of civilization as a whole. Hence, Eleanor Cook, referencing Hugh Kenner, maintains that this archetypal city is Rome, and states that all the “great cities in Part V [. . .] were also capitals of great though very different empires: ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, / Vienna, London.’ [. . .] Eliot preserves the chronological order of the flourishing of each empire.”109 Cook suggests that Dante’s map of the inhabited world is a key map to Eliot’s poem, and that the maps of Europe and the Mediterranean should be added to the map of London.110 We, therefore, come to the inevitable conclusion that in The Waste Land the image of space evokes time and history. Scholars of The Waste Land correctly connect the scene in the perilous chapel with Weston’s book, the legend of the Grail, the rite of initiation, and the descent to the underworld; Smith, however, also emphasized that “the imagery of the lines (II.379–84) was partly inspired, according to Eliot, by a painting from the school of Hieronymus Bosch,”111 which again, as in “The Game of Chess,” involves Ut Pictura Poesis and visual dialogism and makes the description of decay “a speaking picture.”112 The “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells” include, incude in my opinion—in addition The quote comes from “The Coming Huns,” lines 1–8, 21–24. Dated Fall 1904 and 30 July–10 August, 1905. 109 Eleanor Cook, “T. S. Eliot and the Carthagenian Peace,” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 83. 110 Cook, “T. S. Eliot,” 81–82. 111 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 95. 112 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27.

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to Ecclestiastes 22:6 and Jeremiah 2:13, mentioned by Smith113— Jeremiah 2:7, 20:2, 32:3, but most importantly, Jeremiah 38:6, which narrates how Jeremiah was cast into the dungeon: “where there was no water, but mire. So Jeremiah sank in the mire” (Jeremiah 38:6, New English Bible). In his notes, Smith also adds, “in Wilde’s Salome the prophet speaks from the cistern.”114 Evidently, the voices of prophets to whom Eliot alludes in parts one through five—especially Ezekiel, whom Eliot almost quotes in “The Burial of the Dead”—intensify the unveiling of the human drama. Other voices and sounds include the singing of the grass, the swinging of the door, the gust of the wind, the clicking of the dry bones, and the crowing of the cock (enigmatically in Portuguese, as observed by Smith).115 Smith and Brooks both state that “the cock in the folk-lore of many people is regarded as the bird whose voice chases away the powers of evil,”116 and although Smith suggests that the cock’s crowing alludes to Hamlet,117 Brooks supposes that “the cock has connection with The Tempest symbols,” and he quotes the lines from the first song that Ariel sings to Ferdinand.118 As I suggested above, the connection is between the rooster in The Canterbury Tales and the one in The Waste Land; the crowing is another voice in the so-called “speaking picture,”119 thus combining myth, literature, and contemporaneity. Finally, the voice of the thunder, which, again, connects the Buddhist wisdom of the Upanishads with Western tradition, as in “The Fire Sermon,” is actually a dialogue of civilizations: a spiritual quest of humanity as a whole, not only one part of it. As elsewhere in The Waste Land, there are many allusions here. The three calls, “Da, Daydhavan, Danyata,” which mean “give, sympathize, control,” respectively,120 113 Smith, notes to Chapter 7, in Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 314. 114 Ibid. 115 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 95. 116 Ibid.; Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 28. 117 Smith, notes to Chapter 7, 314 118 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 28. 119 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27. 120 Brihadaranayaka upanishad, V/2, as observed by Smith in note 81 to chapter 7 of Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 314.

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receive three negative answers and include new allusions, associations, and quotations in the polyphonic poem. The dialogue of the final citations, is brilliantly analyzed by Smith and by Brooks.121 Those final citations follow the return of the quester, the heir of the devastated kingdom and the waste land to the shore. However, I am reluctant to associate him or the lyrical hero only with Tiresias, as Smith does. Here we observe again a subtle use of parody as a constructive device of plot and genre formation, defamiliarization of myth and weaving together of the Old Testament (Isaiah 38:1), Eastern and Western spiritual aspirations and beliefs that symbolize destruction and call for renewal, hope and despair (the swallow from the myth of Philomel is joined by Pervigilium Veneris, simultaneously alluding to Tennyson’s The Princess, as was noticed by Smith).122 The “feast of citations,” to quote Mandelstam again,123 and the magnificent dialogue involving Isaiah, Dante, Marlowe, Nerval and their characters (including the prince of Aquitaine beholding a broken tower; two broken kings, Hezekiah and the Fisher King; two prisoners, Ugolino and the one from the allusion to the folk song “Take the key and lock him down”) all dissolve in the final wisdom of the Upanishads: this world is beyond our understanding. Brooks stated, “the basic method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity.”124 He observed the double play of irony and parallelisms (what I call defamiliarization and parody). I would add that the basic principle of the poem is dialogism, and I would not narrow the interpretation of the poem as was done by Morton and even by Edmund Wilson, to despair and destruction. As Eliot noted himself, “when I wrote a poem called ‘The Waste Land’ some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned,

121 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 97–98; Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 30–32. 122 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 314. 123 See Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam, 22; see also my footnote 5 in chapter one of part two. 124 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 32.

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but that did not form part of my intention.”125 Likewise, I would be reluctant to accept the interpretation of Smith, who wrote that “the very fact of recognition, the deliberate acknowledgement of humility, points toward ultimate triumph, if not for society, nevertheless for himself. He can expect, if not the joy of Ferdinand, then at any rate the liberation of Prospero.”126 I would instead agree with Brooks that the poem is ambiguous (another characteristic feature of modernism), and if it were clearer, it “would be thinner, and less honest.”127 The Waste Land is Eliot’s Inferno pointing to his Purgatorio, as Gardner said. Eliot uses dialogism to develop the plot; to use implied narrators to reveal themes and ideas; to shift in time and space, creating the chronotopi of love, the road, the quest, and combining the epic past with the lyric present; to create the music of the piece; to defamiliarize reality and myth, making myth real and reality unreal; and, as a result, to reveal the human drama, as did Dante in Divine Comedy.

125 T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), 324. 126 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 98. 127 Brooks, “The Waste Land,” 34.

CH A PT ER T WO

“Liberation from the Future as well as the Past”: Time-Space and History in Four Quartets History may be servitude, History may be freedom. [. . .] A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. (“Little Gidding”)

F

our Quartets is a poem of spiritual quest. As Lyndall Gordon put it, “Eliot sets the question: how do we live life in time so as to conquer time? Each of the Quartets explores a ‘point of intersection of time and timeless’ which Eliot draws initially from his own life.”1 However, Eliot does not limit his view of time, space, reality, and history either to immediate experience or to abstract ideas, thus overcoming in Four Quartets the deficiency that he himself characterized as “dissociation of sensibility.”2

 1 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 341. Trying to reveal what Eliot chose to conceal between the lines, Gordon in her literary biography of Eliot focuses on his relationship with Emily Hale, who loved him all her life and whom he finally decided not to marry in his “commitment to the solitary burden of the soul” searching for higher love purified from desire (ibid., 342).   2 Eliot, “Metaphysical poets,” in Selected Prose, 64.

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Eliot spent his lifetime in search of a way out of the spiritual dead end caused by the destruction of two world wars. Alongside faith, Eliot’s sense of history is one of his main tools for creating a sense of being. As Eliot himself wrote, “this historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional, and it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”3 Taking these words from his early 1919 essay out of the context of Eliot’s further development, John Zilcosky in “Modern Monuments: T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problems of History” finds many contradictions even in Eliot’s metaphors, ironically deconstructs them as well as Eliot’s ideas behind them, and juxtaposes them with those of Nietzsche denying history.4 Summarizing Nietzsche’s ideas, Zilcosky claims that “in Nietzsche’s system humans can learn from animals” and “active forgetting” is “a necessary prerequisite for both happiness and the production of anything great, of anything ‘truly human.’”5 First, it is necessary to differentiate cultural history from recorded history per se. As for cultural history, the views of Marinetti, Mayakovsky, and the futurists (with the exception of Apollinaire and Khlebnikov), as opposed to those of Yeats, Pound, and Mandelstam, were discussed above. As for history as such, we live in a post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima, post-Vietnam era: it is true that memory of past atrocities makes us—humans—tremendously unhappy, but forgetting about them guarantees their repetition in the very near future. Eliot’s later work, first and foremost—his Four Quartets—can help us move through guilt, shame, and purgatory in hope of spiritual redemption, since, as Eliot wrote, “This is the use of memory: / For liberation—not less of love but expanding / Of love   3 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, 38.   4 John Zilcosky, “Modern Monuments: T. S. Eliot, Nietzsche, and the Problems of History,”Journal of Modern Literature 29 (Fall 2005): 21–33. In particular, Zilcosky wittingly observes that mixing “monument” with sulphurous acid would destroy the former, which makes Eliot’s argument as well as his metaphors “chemically ‘unstable’” (ibid., 30).   5 Zilcosky, “Modern Monuments,” 24.

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beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past” (“Little Gidding,” III/142).6 By learning from animals and forgetting we turn into animals, but “a people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments” (“Little Gidding,” V/144). It should be noted that Eliot’s views on history, as well as on intellectual and spiritual development of individuals and societies, cannot be explained by either binary oppositions or even dialectical method. David Moody asserts that Eliot’s “metaphysical view of history, which is essentially a theological one, was already formulated, though without explicit theology, in Eliot’s thesis on Bradley: ‘Ideas of the past are true, not by correspondence with the real past, but by their coherence with each other and ultimately with the present moment.’ Fully expanded, that finds the absolute of history in the timeless moment of death in Love.”7 Eliot’s dissertation, published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of Bradley, was not limited to an analysis of the philosopher’s most important work, Appearance and Reality, but viewed the English philosopher’s ideas in the broader context of his work, thus dealing with metaphysics and moral philosophy. According to Bradley, history is always invented after the fact, “a mental construct and, even in the best of circumstances, never disinterested.”8 As was observed by Brooker, Bradley suggested that “knowing occurs in three stages or levels of immediate, relational, and transcendent experience”; the latter could only be obtained by the most advanced individuals and societies.9 Brooker states that “Eliot put at the center of his dissertation the concept of ‘immediate experience’, which is at the heart of Bradley’s

  6 All citations here and below are from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1980). First is the title of the quartet followed by the chapter and page number.  7 David Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256.  8 F. H. Bradley, “The Presuppositions of Critical History,” in Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), 1:38–40.   9 Brooker, “Transcendance and Return,” 63–64.

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epistemology.”10 Taking into consideration Eliot’s analysis of Bradley’s views as outlined in his dissertation, Brooker concludes, “from first to last, Eliot was aware of the dangers of analytical thinking and of the distortion produced by dualistic or binary logic. By its very nature, analysis takes a person from the unity of immediate experience into the fragmentation of dualism, and, furthermore, analytical thinking tends to block return and transcendence by locking the thinker into the dualistic mode.”11 History in Four Quartets is revealed through images of time and space. The image of time in Eliot’s work—and especially in Four Quartets—is, so to speak, a dramatis persona: one of the main characters of the poem. Time as a fundamental philosophic category has remained “profoundly enigmatic,” as philosophers themselves admit.12 Although Bakhtin in his seminal Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel applies the chronotope only to prose and not to other genres, arts, or culture in general, as previously discussed,13 the chronotope plays a crucial role in Four Quartets. The images of time are revealed through space; space, in turn, is comprehended and measured by time. This interrelation between time and space is already reflected in the titles themselves, which allude to places meaningful for Eliot: “Burnt Norton” is a country house in Gloucestershire that Eliot visited with Emily Hale in the summer of 1934. The word “burnt” has a literal meaning since the owner of the estate, Sir William Keyt, was “a dissipated baronet who eventually became insane and burnt the house and himself in it,” as noted by Lyndall Gordon.14 This story, according to David Moody, would be recalled in “Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave” (“Little Gidding,” II).15 “East Coker” is the name of the village in Somersetshire owned by T. S. Eliot’s ancestors, and from which Andrew Eliott emigrated to America. 10 Ibid., 63. 11 Ibid., 69. 12 Raymond Flood and Michael Lockwood, eds., The Nature of Time (Oxford: Wiley, 1968), 2. 13 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 85. 14 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 266. 15 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 185.

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“The Dry Salvages,” as Eliot’s note to the poem states, is “a small group of rocks with a beacon, off N. E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts,” where the poet spent several summer vacations.16 “Little Gidding,” also visited by Eliot on several occasions—the first being in 1936—is a place connected with the Anglican religious community established by Nicholas Ferrar in 1625 and three times visited by King Charles I.17 The chapel was destroyed by Cromwell’s soldiers in 1646 after the community gave refuge to Charles I, as noted by Lyndall Gordon.18 Hence the idea of time-space (the chronotope) is already embedded in the title of each quartet. When Eliot composed “Burnt Norton” in 1935, he did not know that other Quartets would follow. It is well known that “Burnt Norton” was created from fragments omitted from Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and was viewed by Eliot as a sort of a resolution of previous works—including “Choruses” from The Rock (1934)—rather than a new beginning.19 Perhaps only in the process of writing and rewriting “East Coker,” as Eliot himself admitted, did he have the idea of a definite pattern: the five-part structure with two movements of each Quartet metrically arranged (parts II and IV) and the others written either in verse libre or in tonic accentuated verse.20 This structure was a counterpoint arrangement of musical and philosophic themes interwoven in a sophisticated fabric. As Helen Gardner mentions, “the publication of the Quartets in one volume has made their interpretation easier in one way but more difficult in another.”21 I will not focus on the structure of the Quartets, brilliantly analyzed by Gardner and Moody, but will rather concentrate on timespace and history as revealed in this long poem. The chronotope in Four Quartets is evoked by the images of the rose, the garden, “a faded song,” “a lavender spray,” the river and the ocean, 16 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 130. 17 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 255. 18 See Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 372. 19 See Eliot’s interview with Donald Hall, The Paris Review 21 (Spring–Summer 1959): http://www.the parisreview.org/interviews/4738/the-art-of-poetry-no-1-t-s-eliot. 20 John Lehman, “T. S. Eliot Talks about Himself and the Drive to Create,” New York Times Book Review (November 29, 1953): 5. 21 Gardner “Four Quartets,” 57.

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the ground swell and the bell, and many more—revealing time’s protean nature until it reaches “the point of intersection” with the timeless and, finally, unites with the rose in the final “knot of fire.” The chronotopes of the road and of the quest, to use Bakhtin’s formula, are dominant in Four Quartets, and time clearly plays the most crucial part: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. (“Burnt Norton,” I/117)

The opening lines of this passage remind me of the Bergsonian coil “gnawing at the future.”22 “A world of speculation” is the only place where “what might have been” is possible. In “Little Gidding” Eliot writes: . . . Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment. (“Little Gidding,” I/139)

Smith argues that “‘what might have been’ points to an eternally present end,” and suggests that it “recalls the imagery of the center.” He concludes that “the end is not merely the present moment in which all times fall together but that eternal point, ‘the pure actuality,’ as Aristotle calls it, of God.” Hence, Smith presumes that “time is unredeemable because it is redeemed already.”23 Stephen Spender, on the other hand, comes to a different conclusion: If everything is predetermined, then is not the future, just as much as the past, part of the fixed pattern? The word ‘perhaps’ has great 22 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 52–53. 23 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 259.

160 The River of Time weight because it casts doubt on the idea that we live in a past-presentfuture coexistent time, completely predetermined, and suggests that the opposite of the statement ‘all time is unredeemable’ may be true. The sense of the statement is that since time is redeemable, then predetermined time cannot be true, the truth lies in timelessness experienced within but outside time.24

Like Spender, I doubt that all time is “unredeemable because it is redeemed already.”25 Smith seems to miss the if-clause (“If all time is eternally present”), which implies suggestion, not affirmation. In Moody’s view, “we miss Eliot’s meaning if we think only of the divine aspect, which is theology or mysticism.”26 Moreover, time cannot be redeemed without ceaseless efforts: “We shall not cease from exploration” (“Little Gidding,” V). The necessary condition to redeem time is “to be still and still moving”—to unite faith, contemplation, knowledge, and action. As Eliot stated himself, “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”27 But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint— No occupation either, but something given And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. (“The Dry Salvages,” V/136)

The rhythm here emphasizes the enormous thought shaped both musically and aphoristically. “The intersection of the timeless with time” and “a lifetime’s death in love” are opposed to a “buried life.” 24 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 165. 25 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 259 26 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 195. 27 Eliot, Selected Prose, 39.

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Here is the purest “still point,” the intersection of human time with eternity. The way to get to it is through “ardour and selflessness and self-surrender,” through “humility which is endless” (“East Coker,” II/126). As Spender put it, “this is the intersection of a moment in time with eternity: the incarnation of Christ, accepted dogmatically as a historic event, though outside the logic of history.’”28 Spender, like Gardner and Williamson, connects “Burnt Norton” with the seventh “Chorus” from The Rock (1934): Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time, A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time, A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.29

“These lines,” states Spender, “are an example of the coincidence of religious dogma (by which is meant insistence on the literal truth of the miraculous or incredible) with poetic truth. They are true both as poetic imagination and as dogmatically held belief. They are also persuasive. The audience is invited to assent to what is being asserted.”30 This motif of “a moment in time and of time” is further developed in Four Quartets: For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning,

28 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 162. 29 Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 107. 30 Ibid. Spender’s emphasis.

162 The River of Time Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. [. . .] The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered and reconciled. . . (“The Dry Salvages,” V/136)

“Music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts” is perhaps an allusion to Keats’s “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” from “Ode on A Grecian Urn.” Both the romantic poet and T. S. Eliot strive in a modernist manner “to play on / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / [. . .] to the spirit ditties of no tone.” However, Eliot does not long to overcome mortality, nor would he come to the conclusion of Keats: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’— that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”31 Eliot, on the other hand, connects “the moment in and out of time” with Incarnation. To quote Matthiessen, “the doctrine of Incarnation is the pivotal point on which Eliot’s thought has swung well away from the nineteenth century’s romantic heresies of Deification. The distinction between thinking of God become Man through Saviour, or of Man becoming God through his own divine potentialities, can be at the root of political as well as of religious belief. Eliot has long affirmed that Deification, the reckless doctrine of every great man as a Messiah, has led ineluctably to Dictatorship. What he has urged in his ‘Idea of a Christian Society,’ is a re-established social order in which both governors and governed find their completion in their

31 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in Poetical Works, 209–10.

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common humility before God.”32 This is a crucial connection of time and history. Eliot’s and Matthiessen’s ideas were most profoundly, although regrettably, proven by history: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were proclaimed “messiahs,” and as a result, dictatorships were established in these countries. We should not overlook the fact that the most of the Quartets, beginning with “East Coker,” were written during World War II; as Moody pointed out, Eliot’s canceled remark from his “Three Voices of Poetry” read, “the last three of my Quartets are primarily patriotic poems.”33 Moreover, Eliot, as he himself admitted, “was deeply shaken by the events of September 1938”—that is, by Germany’s occupation of Austria and the subsequent Munich Agreement, when Britain and France ceded Czechoslovakian Sudetes or Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, ostensibly to preserve peace.34 Hence, the only way to escape this vicious circle is to learn the lessons of history: A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. (“Little Gidding” V/144)

The integrity of time is expressed in Eliot’s famous poetic formulas: “In my beginning is my end” (alluding to the motto of Mary Stuart) and “In my end is my beginning” (“East Coker”). This is Eliot’s enormous circle. He compresses time, or rather time-space—the chronotope, in Bakhtin’s dictum. The philosophical and musical integrity of Four Quartets is, so to speak, a contrapuntal integrity of tensions and contradictions where each new movement denies the previous one whereas each fifth movement, a coda, is a solution and resolution of the entire quartet, while the first movement of the next quartet reveals 32 Matthiessen, Achievement of T. S. Eliot, 187–88. 33 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 203. 34 “The Idea of the Christian Society,” concluding remarks to the lecture at Cambridge. Quoted by Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 203.

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new contradictions—punctus contra punctum (point counter point). “Little Gidding” reveals its own contradictions and at the same time is a coda, the denouement of the entire cycle; its fifth part unites in a circular movement the themes of the rose and the yew tree: the end and the beginning. Citing Eliot’s Clark Lectures of 1926—in which Eliot asserts that the proper basis for metaphysical poetry was given in Richard of Saint Victor’s four stages of religious contemplation (natural imagination, cogitation, meditation, and contemplative vision)35— David Moody suggests that Four Quartets can be called “quartets” because “they use the four instruments of the mind, imagination, reason, meditation (which involves the will and affections), and contemplation (in which the seer is at one with what he perceives). Their formal structure corresponds to these mental functions” (emphasis added).36 It is an illuminating observation but we must not overlook the musical element, since poetry is a fusion of sound and meaning, word and music. As pointed out by Helen Gardner, there are several varieties of rhythmic patterns in Four Quartets; the four-beat accentuated line is similar to the meter of Langland’s Piers Ploughman with a strong caesura in the middle: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future” (“Burnt Norton,” I/117).37 Unlike Langland, though, Eliot breaks the flow by mixing four-beat lines with six-beat lines, a kind of hexameter: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshness” (“Burnt Norton,” I/119); “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark” (“East Coker,” III/126); “I do not know much about gods; but I think the river / Is a strong brown god— sullen, untamed and intractable” (“The Dry Salvages,” III/130). He also adds the blank iambic pentameter of “Little Gidding” (II/140): “In the uncertain hour before the morning / Near the ending of 35 These lectures are now published as the following: Anthony Cuda and Ron Schuchard, eds., The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 610–761. 36 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 329. 37 Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot, 31–40.

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interminable night.” This, in turn, is combined with a three-beat verse: “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of things shall be well” (III/142–43), with the sestinas of the second movement of “The Dry Salvages,” or with a combination of rhymed iambic tetrameter and trimeter, as in “Little Gidding” II: “Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burn roses leave . . . // This is the death of air” (II/139). This structure—the combination of metrically shaped and rhymed sections (the beginning of each second and each fourth movement) with sections written in pentameter (“Little Gidding” II, a kind of terza rima in which the rhyme is substituted with the sequence of masculine and feminine endings)—enables the poet to switch from what he calls poetry to verse and back: from oratorical poetry to the incantation of the second and fourth movements. As Eliot said in “The Music of Poetry,” There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. It is in the concert room rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quickened.38

According to Spender (who revealed the sonata form in “Ash Wednesday” as early as 1935), “Four Quartets” consists of four long poems written in a form analogous to the late quartets of Beethoven. Eliot was not trying to imitate Beethoven or to produce in his verse an effect which Beethoven produces in music. But the so-called “posthumous” quartets provided him with an example of form [. . .] at once fragmentary and having a unity of feeling and vision. For the late 38 Eliot, Selected Prose, 114.

166 The River of Time quartets are fragments held together by a mood of suffering which becomes transcended in joy beyond suffering. Out of intense suffering gaiety emerges.39

In Eliot’s well-known 1931 letter to Stephen Spender—written as he was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor and often quoted by way of introducing Four Quartets—more interesting than his wish to get something of the piece’s “more than human gaiety” into his verse is the comment, “I find it quite inexhaustible to study.”40 Such musical transitions enable the poet to switch from one reality to another, to move simultaneously in time and space—bringing the wisdom of Krishna to contemporary travellers “on the deck of the drumming liner”—and to return to the Bhagavad-Gita: I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant— Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing: That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened. And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back. You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here. (“The Dry Salvages,” III/134)

These shifts allow Eliot to reveal the complexity of being and the relativism of our knowledge. The wisdom of Krishna in the image of “a Royal Rose or a lavender spray” is projected as if with a magic lantern onto the screen of the present and the future. The possibility of obtaining knowledge and wisdom is the possibility of wistful regret 39 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 161. 40 Cited in Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 390.

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for “he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18, New English Bible). However, those who will be ready to share our knowledge and sorrow will open that book and reach that page after we are gone. The image of man is constantly changing in the ever-changing world: You are not those who saw the harbor Receding, or those who will disembark. Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind. (“The Dry Salvages,” III/134)

Alluding to the episode in the Bhagavad-Gita in which the god Vishnu incarnated as Krishna, the charioteer of prince Arjuna, teaches the latter, as Smith observed,41 Eliot states that a person has to think about fulfilling one’s duty each moment as if it were the last moment of one’s life (felt acutely by the poet under the Nazis’ bombardment of London). Knowing that this episode happened on the verge of a battle in which half of Arjuna’s kin fought on the enemy’s side and Arjuna was reluctant, if not horrified, to kill them, thus turning to fratricide, it might be hard to accept this teaching to fulfill one’s dharma, disregarding the Christian standard “Thou shall not kill”—one of the Ten Commandments—as Gordon observed.42 Gordon connects this episode with Eliot’s private life, when, during the bombardment of London (at that time Eliot was an air-raid warden and spent two nights a week fire-watching),43 Eliot refused to think about the fate of his former wife Vivienne, who had been locked up in a mental institution.44 However, in my view, Eliot attempts to overcome personal tragic experience for the sake of others: 41 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 281. 42 See Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 366. 43 Ibid., 354. 44 Ibid., 366.

168 The River of Time At the moment which is not of action or inaction You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being The mind of a man may be intent At the time of death”—that is the one action (And the time of death is every moment) Which shall fructify in the lives of others: And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward. (“The Dry Salvages,” III/134)

Eliot does not simply “abolish” time for the sake of space: “time is withdrawn” metaphysically rather than physically (parenthetically, as Husserl would put it); thinking of death does not necessarily imply a physical fear of it. This courageous act of self-denial can help obtain a vision, not only the vision of life and death, but also the ability for The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror. (“The Dry Salvages,” II/133)

“Primitive terror” alludes to Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the epigraph of which Eliot chose for “The Hollow Men” and intended to use for The Waste Land as well, as discussed above. It also involves Frazer’s The Golden Bough. As Brooker mentioned, Eliot is assuming here that the primitive mind survives behind and beneath the modern and that health for a poet involves a return, a conscious encounter with the living past. The “really new” is the fruit of this encounter. The profound continuity between the primitive and the modern minds makes it imperative for artists to cultivate the “historical sense,” to become conscious of the simultaneity of past and present and of the layers of mind supporting the modern soul. The survival of the primitive in the modern is, in some way,

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physical; the earlier spiritual and cultural experience survives in the bones of succeeding generations.45

However, Eliot argues that “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (emphasis added).46 Eliot thus extends the limits of time and space, the “chronotope,” as Bakhtin put it, of history and reality in order to move farther, not to go backwards in time, history, or evolution: Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. (“The Dry Salvages,” III/135)

Perhaps this idea of moving forward is somehow connected with that of Hesse’s Der Steppenwulf: we do not have the chance to go back either to being a child or to nature. “Only through time time is conquered.” As Moody pointed out, this “conclusion goes well beyond [allusions to] Mallarmé and Bradley” and to German philosophers—“simply by submitting to the realities of life in time.”47 Since “the way up and the way down is one and the same way”— as the second epigraph to “Burnt Norton,” a quote from Heraclitus, reads in English—Eliot leads the reader down into the rose garden of memory: Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage we did not take 45 Brooker, “Transcendance and Return,” 65. 46 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, 38. 47 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 390. In a profound explication, Moody discusses allusions to Mallarmé’s “M’introduire dans ton histoire” and “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” (ibid., 188), which cannot be discussed here due to lack of space.

170 The River of Time Towards the door we never opened Into the rose garden. (“Burnt Norton,” I/117)

This move from experience to innocence alludes to Blake’s “Songs of Experience,” to the lost Eden, and to “what might have been”: the lost world of innocence, as mentioned by Frye.48 Moreover, time is reversed here and again implies the possibility of taking another path, as in “The Garden” of Borges. Further, the image of the rose itself is a collective and complex image uniting several of Eliot’s roses: “the multifoliate Rose” of “The Hollow Men” is turned into “the Single Rose” and into “the Garden / Where all loves end” of “Ash Wednesday” and then, in turn, it becomes the garden of “Burnt Norton,” which, according to Spender, “is reminiscent of the hyacinth garden in ‘The Waste Land,’” and for Gardner, “this garden imagery of Burnt Norton is used at the climax of The Family Reunion.”49 In addition, we most certainly must add the “Royal Rose” of the third movement of “The Dry Salvages” as an image of the future, which is compared to “a faded song” and “a lavender spray.” Smith presumes that “the rose garden is a symbol of the moment drawing all times together and of the moment eternally here out of time, that is, the moment immediate to God.”50 Yet the way to this integrity is through many an obstacle, precipice, contradiction, and disillusionment. To appeal to the reader “on the level of familiar experience,” quoting Spender again, 51 Eliot reveals the rhythms of human time and of eternity, starting with the familiar and personal experiences in “The Dry Salvages,” in the images of the river and the sea, connecting them with reminiscences from his childhood and youth. Hence the recollection of the great river whose “rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom” (“The Dry Salvages,” I/130) of the boy growing up in St. Louis. As Lyndall Gordon observed, “in the third 48 See Frye, T. S. Eliot, 79. 49 Gardner, “Four Quartets,” 62–63. 50 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 259. 51 Spender, T. S. Eliot, 169.

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Quartet, Eliot took up the challenge of autobiography: to make sense of one’s life. This was his climatic effort to fuse past and future in a single pattern.”52 The poet reenacts an image of nature where “the salt is on the briar rose, / the fog is in the fir trees.” He can see and hear “many gods and many voices.” The movement itself has many voices: the “speaking picture”53 of the sea evokes the roaring of the waves, and the echo of the bell over the ocean (“. . . the granite / Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses” and “it tosses up our losses. . .”). The sophisticated rhyme pattern of the sestinas in the second movement is also a kind of an echo: each seventh line in the growing cadence of despair echoes the previous one and, like a wave breaking on the back of the previous wave, adds a new meaning to this endless “voiceless wailing,” until the rolling and roaring come to a “hardly, barely prayable / Prayer of the one Annunciation.” Perhaps the model for this movement is not Arnaut Daniel’s or Dante’s famous sestinas, as Moody suggests, but Bertrand de Born’s “Planh for the Young English King,” translated by Pound in 1909 and known to T. S. Eliot since his early days in London.54 The despair of de Born’s sestina is overcome by the “Prayer of the one Annunciation,” which is connected to the prayer of the quartet’s fourth movement “on behalf of / Women who have seen their sons or husbands / Setting forth, and not returning” (alluding to Phlebas the Phoenician from The Waste Land, as well): Figlia del tuo figlio,55 Queen of Heaven.

This poetic image of nature brings the poet to the conclusion that the Time of Being—the time of the tide where “The tolling bell / Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried / Ground swell”—is “older than the time of chronometers” (our local earthly time), “older / Than 52 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 358. 53 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27. 54 See, Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 226–27. 55 Italian for “the daughter of your son” (Dante, Purgatorio, 31.1).

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time counted by anxious worried women.” In our own private time, the past can be “all deception, the future futureless,” but the Time of Being, in the image of “the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,” can be compared only to the Word and is never-ending: “Time the destroyer is time the preserver.” The fifth movement of “The Dry Salvages” begins with average people who turn to astrologists and fortune tellers—which alludes to Madam Sosostris from The Waste Land for guidance and consolation— and who are unable to go beyond “immediate experience,” which is juxtaposed with Bradley’s three stages of knowing of “immediate, relational, and transcendent experience,” discussed above. Eliot then concludes that “prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action” is the way to conquer “daemonic, chtonic Powers”: Here the past and future Are conquered and reconciled. (“The Dry Salvages,” V/136)

The first epigraph from Heraclitus to Four Quartets reads in English: “Although the Law of Reason (Logos) is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding of logos (wisdom) of their own.”56 This separation of Logos and local wisdom results in tragic contradictions and in the spiritual separation of mankind. For Eliot, to overcome separation in space and time, spiritual separation, “the dark cold and the empty desolation” one must move, overcome the here and now: Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall 56 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 117.

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Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. (“Burnt Norton,” II/119–20)

The poet has enough courage and power of thought to see that neither Urania nor even Clio can alone protect “mankind from heaven and damnation / Which flesh cannot endure.” The anaphoric “the moment. . .” (repeated three times, as in a prayer)—when combined with an enjambement and a semicolon (“be remembered; involved with past and future”)—breaks the natural sequence and word order, separates the modal verb “can” from the notional “be remembered,” and thus emphasizes the importance of the connection between “immediate experience,”57 memory, and time. The next line, “Only through time time is conquered,” is as short, aphoristic, and expressive as the stroke of a dagger: this condensed poetic thought is the coda of the movement and the quartet. The necessity to conquer time, which is also “a place of disaffection / Time before and time after / in a dim light. . . / Ridiculous the waste sad time / Stretching before and after” is the necessity to bring meaning and form to being itself: Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into silence. Only by the form, the pattern Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. (“Burnt Norton,” V/121)

Although the jar is Chinese, it nevertheless reminds us of Keats’s “Grecian Urn.” The Keatsian “Sylvan historian” is the “foster-child 57 See Brooker, “Transcendance and Return,” 69; see also the discussion in the beginning of this chapter.

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of silence and slow time,” perhaps because the work of the historian is to seek “the point of intersection of the timeless with time.”58 Interestingly, in Pound’s Canto 13, Kung (Confucius) states, . . . And even I can remember A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, I mean for the things they did not know, But that time seems to be passing.59

Thus for Pound, as for Eliot, silence (leaving “blanks in their writings”) is connected with history and knowledge with humility. The ability to hear the music of the spheres—to see movement in stillness and stillness in movement—is what differentiates the most advanced from the average individuals, to paraphrase Brooker’s summary of Eliot’s analysis of Bradley’s three stages of experience and knowledge.60 Eliot, alluding to the mystical experience of Saint John of the Cross, writes, “The detail of the pattern is movement, / As in the figure of the ten stairs.” Pattern (paradeigma) is higher than movement. Stillness is not passive: it is rather a duration, a further development of the Bergsonian durée that Eliot found “simply not final.” As Moody suggests, “the dance at the still point must include all that we have been and might be, earthly flesh with aspiring spirit.”61 As noted by Elizabeth Drew, Heraclitus had no concept of a “still point.”62 Heraclitean “flux” or “war” and “strife,” as he called it, refer to the transmutation of the elements; in the cycle of earth, water, air, and fire, the primary substance for Heraclitus is fire. Hence, fire “motivates the cycle,” as Smith put it, and “the 58 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 194. Moody interprets this allusion to Keats differently, emphasizing “the mysterious paradoxes of death-in-life and life-in-death” and the fact that both the Chinese jar and Keats’s Grecian Urn are “unliving.” Moody comes to the conclusion that both the jar and the urn are “funeral” and the entire lyric is “an epitaph.” 59 Pound, Canto 13, in The Cantos, 60. 60 Brooker, “Transcendance and Return,” 63–64. 61 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 190. 62 See Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Scribner, 1949), 48.

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way up is from earth to fire, the way down from fire to earth. . . in an extended sense, the cycle itself is fire. This is what Heraclitus sometimes means by his logos—an equivalence, practically speaking, with the flux itself.”63 Logos—Word—is the beginning and the end of everything; hence the circular motion of events takes place in time and is preserved in eternity. As Smith put it, “we each think that time passes, but in the logos it is eternal. We each think that the past endures in our memory, but in the logos it endures in immediate actuality.”64 Therefore, earthly time and space are a necessary form of being—only a relative one: Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being. (“Burnt Norton,” V/122)

As Moody observes, the last lines suggest “absolute in its negative aspect” since it is “not just the annihilation of the world, but of all that he is.”65 I assume that this absolute moment can only be perceived “by a grace of sense” (“Burnt Norton,” II), if at all. Therefore, for Eliot, the only way to make love real is to purify it from desire: Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. 63 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 256. Smith’s emphasis. 64 Ibid. 65 Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot, 191.

176 The River of Time We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. (“Little Gidding,” IV/144)

These lines, probably among the most expressive in Eliot’s work, are full of passion, courage, and humility at the same time. The oneword nominal sentence “Love,” compressing and sharpening the line, is echoed by “wove” and “remove.” “Name” is in turn echoed by “flame,” anticipating the last line and connecting it with the previous stanza. After the first compressed line, the image itself moves through the stanza, extending, or rather enflaming the space of the poem, “the speaking picture,” to quote Sir Philip Sidney again.66 The iambic tetrameter is so condensed and expressive (with the trimetric “Behind the hands that wove” inside) that a rendering in prose (for the sake of interpretation) is impossible without losing subtle shades of the poetic sound-meaning, or sound-sense, as I call it. As Gordon observed, Eliot replaced the lines “Who heaped the brittle rose-leaves? Love” of the previous draft, with “a higher love born of torture as he puts on ‘the intolerable shirt of flame.’”67 Beginning with the scene of the dove—the dive-bomber—the fourth movement of “Little Gidding” alludes to Nessus’s “shirt of flame,” which he gave to the jealous wife of Heracles, Dianyra, who in her desire to make him belong only to her (that was the purpose of the shirt as Nessus, mortally wounded by Heracles, explained to her) gave Heracles the “shirt of flame.” Heracles, aflame and unable to remove the shirt, made a high-piled fire and burned himself on it. Purified love is not “indifference // Which resembles the others as death resembles life. . .”—it is the way to higher Love with a capital “L.” This theme of Love connects “the Garden / Where all love ends” (“Ash Wednesday”) to the revelations of Julian of Norwich, as noted by Helen Gardner.68 66 Sidney, “The Defense of Poesie,” 27. 67 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 385. 68 Gardner, “Four Quartets,” 76. In particular, Gardner cites Dame Julian: “‘Sin is behovable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ [. . .] After fifteen years of trying to ponder the meaning of what she had

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In the third and the fifth movements of “Little Gidding,” Eliot alludes three times to the revelations of Dame Julian. In the closing verses of the third movement, he connects her visions with the theme of “temporal reversion.” However, in “East Coker” (III, IV), “The Dry Salvages” (V), and especially in the second movement of “Little Gidding,” there is a certain antagonism between the self and reality, the self and the other, and even between the self and the “alter ego”: Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise. . . [. . .] Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rendering pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done and been; the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. (“Little Gidding,” II/141–42)

“The other” met in “the disfigured street” of London during an airraid (the atmosphere of this meeting alludes to that of Dante’s Divina Commedia and Yeats’s “Byzantium,” where the poet sees “more image than a shade” during the purgation between the twelve strokes of the heard and seen, Dame Julian was at last answered: ‘Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know or learn therein other thing without end.’” As Gardner concludes, “this Love is the theme of the lyric movement. The fires which have flamed and glowed throughout the poem here break out and declare their nature. Man cannot help loving; his choice is between the fire of self-love and the fire of the love of God.”

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“great cathedral gong”) is a compound image, resembling simultaneously Brunetto Latini, Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and probably Yeats, but can be also considered the “alter ego” of the lyrical hero (if not of the author) of Four Quartets. His bitter words allude to the temptation of the Word in the desert (“Burnt Norton,” V) and at the same time to the fifth movement of “East Coker”: and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. . . (II/128)

This motif of the impossibility of writing echoes and adds a new shade to the lines of the first movement of “Little Gidding”: Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfillment. (I/139)

And yet the purpose was clearly modified: Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight. . . (“Little Gidding,” II /141)

The Poet with a capital “P” is a medium of time, history, memory, and culture: he “purifies the dialect of the tribe,” develops and preserves the language, which, in turn, is capable of preserving the “timeless moments.” Like Mandelstam, Eliot is against “causal linearity,” reality marked by busy activities of “hollow men” who “go into the dark” (“East Coker,” III/126). He does not believe in progress, mass culture,

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civilization, or humanism, which is a kind of pragmatism for him. Nor does he believe “in the knowledge derived from experience”: The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived Of that, which, deceiving, could no longer harm. (“East Coker,” II/125–26)

Eliot alludes to Dante’s “selva oscura” but extends his metaphysical fear “all the way” (“East Coker,” II/125). In the third movement of “East Coker,” the quester or the lyrical hero submerges into the darkness, linking the anonymous fourteenth century English mystic—the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, as observed by Helen Gardner69—with Ascent of Mount Carmel of Saint John of the Cross. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, as rendered by Gardner, “taught that the soul in this life must be always between two clouds, a cloud of forgetting beneath, which hides all creatures and works, and a cloud of unknowing above, upon which it must ‘smite with a sharp dart of longing love. . . . By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.’”70 The religious “wisdom of humility” is opposed to a “buried life” of false knowledge and is connected to the idea of denial: not only denial of “the knowledge derived from experience” (though it threatens with “a way which is the way of ignorance”), and denial of possession, but also self-denial: And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not. (“East Coker,” III/127) 69 Gardner, “Four Quartets,” 65. 70 Ibid., 65–66.

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These lines, according to Gardner, “are an almost literal rendering of the maxims under the figure which stands as frontispiece” to Saint John of the Cross’s Ascent of Mount Carmel “and which appear in a slightly different form at the close of chapter 13 of the first book of that treatise.”71 This denial is connected to Eliot’s idea of impersonality. As Eliot writes in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”72 However, that does not mean lack of personality, as Eliot himself clarified in his essay on Yeats (1940), as discussed in the previous chapter.73 According to Frye, Eliot believed in what Remy de Gourmont supposed to be the duty of the poet who has to transmute his own personality drop by drop into the creative personality. Emerson said, “an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.”74 Eliot, as Frye mentioned, puts it the other way round: “The ego or ordinary personality is an abstraction, and a parasitic by-product of the genuine personality; it is anti-cultural and anti-traditional. But as the ego is not genuine self, it is really sub-human.”75 This “subhuman man” is a lengthened shadow of an institution; it is a hollow personality, a “hollow man.” Considering the English Revolution and the execution of Charles I alongside Archbishop Laud and Strafford, Eliot writes, We cannot revive old factions We cannot restore old policies Or follow an antique drum. [. . .] Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated What they had to leave us—a symbol: 71 Ibid., 66. 72 Eliot, Selected Prose, 40. 73 See also Eliot, “Yeats,” 251. 74 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Selected Writings (New York: Random House, 1950), 154. 75 Frye, T. S. Eliot, 13.

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A symbol perfected in death. (“Little Gidding,” III/143)

Denial inevitably brings a feeling of uncertainty to creativity itself: as a true master, Eliot understood that “in the fight to recover what has been lost // And found and lost again and again” there is “neither gain nor loss. // For us, there is only the trying.” Hence, for Eliot the “here and now” means “in my beginning.” This idea is not linear for him, either: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. . . (“Little Gidding,” V/144)

Thus, Eliot’s form of chronotope enables him not only to reveal the integrity of time-space (and to develop further the ideas of Bergson), but also to show the changing image of reality itself, the illusion of stillness in movement and movement in stillness (remember the famous epigraphs to Four Quartets from Herakleitos). In truth, Eliot’s universe has no limits. Death is only temporal: We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil. (“The Dry Salvages,” V/137)

“Temporal reversion” is a kind of “optimistic euphemism,” while “nourish” in the subordinate clause reveals the motif of humility: “humility is endless.” The epithet “significant” emphasizes and strengthens this idea. Unlike Yeats, Eliot does not dream of never taking the “form from any natural thing” (“Sailing to Byzantium”): We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them.

182 The River of Time The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree Are of equal duration. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light falls On a winter’s afternoon in a secluded chapel History is now and England. With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling. (“Little Gidding,” V/144–45)

Balachandra Rajan observed that these lines reveal “an understanding which points out to the eternal truth of history.”76 Lyndall Gordon connects Eliot’s treatment of history as “a pattern of timeless moments” revealed “in a secluded chapel” with Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which, as she observes, “Eliot owned and marked as a student. Hegel saw history,” continues Gordon, “as a manifestation of Spirit which is eternally present: ‘Sprit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now.’ For Eliot it is the spirit in the face of defeat that is ‘now and England.’”77 Eliot’s understanding of history, however, goes beyond the linear dialectics or the dualistic mode, as discussed above. Consequently, “all time” can be redeemed perhaps in “the point of intersection with the timeless.” “All time” is then not, as Smith presumes, “unredeemable because it is redeemed already” (emphasis added).78 Moreover, time cannot be redeemed without ceaseless efforts: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And to know the place for the first time. (“Little Gidding,” V/145)

The necessary condition to redeem time is “to be still and still moving”: to unite faith, contemplation, knowledge, and action. This could be the 76 Balachandra Rajan, “The Unity of the Quartets,” in A Study of His Writings, 80. 77 Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 384. 78 Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 259.

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final chord, the denouement of the whole piece, yet in the final movement Eliot, in a courageous act of self-denial, turns his “gyre”: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (“Little Gidding,” V/145)

Frye calls Four Quartets “the poem of expanded consciousness, where the poet balances the catharsis of his view of experience with the ecstasis of his view of the spiritual, invisible, or imaginative world. Here, as in the corresponding forms of drama, we have not a direct mimesis of life but a spectacular mimesis of it, able to look down on experience because of the simultaneous presence of another kind of vision.”79 Furthemore, Four Quartets is a polyphonic long poem, a “Tetralogy,” as Rajan called it.80 There are many voices in this poem: the children hidden in the foliage, the bird in “Burnt Norton” echoed by the petrel and the seagull in “The Dry Salvages,” the river and the sea reenacting a kind of a dialogue that reveals the images of local time and eternity, and the words of Krishna juxtaposed with those of Dame Julian and Saint John of the Cross. We must not forget the “antique drum,” the movement and silence of words and music, “the voiceless wailing” and the prayer accompanied by “the sea bell’s perpetual angelus.” Eliot’s chorus also includes the “shrieking voices” assailing the words of the poet, “the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera,” “the Word in the desert” “attacked by voices of temptation,” the incantation of the second or the prayer of the fourth movement of “The Dry Salvages,” and, of course, the dialogue of the implied narrator with the ghost in the streets of London in the second movement of “Little Gidding.” 79 Frye, Anatomy, 301. 80 Rajan, A Study of His Writings, 79.

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In addition, there are the “voices” of the many citations and allusions, such as Heraclitus, Aristotle, Dante, Saint John of the Cross, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton in “Little Gidding,” or the myth of Heracles and Dianyra interpolated with the defamiliarized myth of the Holy Spirit evoked by the dove, the dive-bomber (“Little Gidding” IV/143). All these voices are brought together, that is, orchestrated (and conducted) by the voice of the poet or his implied narrator. To repeat Bakhtin’s formula cited in the chapter on The Waste Land: “The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances, and not just his attitude towards the object of his utterance” (emphasis original).81 Another characteristic feature of the “dialogic imagination” runs through Four Quartets as well. According to Bakhtin, the “dialogic imagination” seeks the truth, while “monologism” pretends to know it.82 The whole composition of Four Quartets—its architectonics—is built, as I tried to show, according to the principle of investigation, that is, of seeking the truth: each movement reveals its tensions and contradictions of being and the last movement of each quartet is usually a denouement, while the first movement of the next quartet denies or develops the previous one and reveals new contradictions. Hence, Four Quartets is quite close to polyphonic music and has a polyphonic, dialogic nature. Having considered the poetic motives of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Khlebnikov’s supersagas and Pound’s Cantos, we must now redraw the boundaries between lyric and epic. As Bakhtin put it, “the world of the epic is the national heroic past, the world of ‘the beginnings’ and ‘peaks’ of national history, the world of forefathers and ancestors.” According to Bakhtin, the poet and his listener are on “the same hierarchical level, while the world of heroes is on another inaccessible level. . . separated from them by an epic distance.” Bakhtin insists that the past must be absolutely isolated from the present and that “the epic past is the absolute past” (emphasis added).83 81 Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 92. 82 Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 126. 83 Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 456–57, 459.

T. S. Eliot: “Liberation from the Future as Well as the Past” 185

In modernist poetry, however (and in prose—for instance, in Joyce’s Ulysses), the boundary between present and past is erased, as in Khlebnikov’s supersagas, in which the tragedy of the Titanic, World War I, and the wars of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus coexist in one and the same dimension or plane. Likewise, in Pound’s Cantos based on cinematographic principles, fragmentation, and simultaneity, the epic distance between Pound’s Odysseus, Confucius, ancient Anglo-Saxon kings, and modernity is blurred. In the same manner, Eliot unites the mythological past of Heracles and Dianyra, the historical past of King Charles I and World War II, during which three of the Quartets were written. In Four Quartets the poet (or “lyrical hero”) is dissolved in time and space (and the very notions of time and space are changed), while in the poems of Yeats and Brodsky time is personified. Time and history, as well as space, are lyrical characters, facets of the poet’s “ego,” which is a characteristic feature, in my opinion, of pure lyric poetry. Four Quartets is based on Eliot’s idea of impersonal poetry, as was discussed above. Unlike pure lyric poetry, Eliot’s system is not closed: there are no time limits at all, and the movement is aimed at another beginning, reaching the universe and the cosmos. Four Quartets should therefore be considered a lyricalepical poem.

Part Four

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” And what is space anyway if not the body’s absence at every given point? That’s why Urania’s older than sister Clio! . . . life’s just another word for nonbeing and for breaking rules. Brodsky

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I

n his programmatic poem “To Urania” (III, 248)1—also the title of the book in both Russian and English—Brodsky defies Clio, the muse of History, and praises Urania. In antiquity, Urania was considered the muse of astronomy and was viewed as such by the poet Baratynsky: “To the worshippers of cold Urania, / He sings, alas, the grace of passions.”2 Barry Scherr observed, in addition, that “Urania was first associated with Aphrodite and later, by Spencer and Milton, with the Muse of Christian poetry.”3 Tiutchev viewed Urania similarly in his poem of 1820: “she is the superior among the daughters of Mnemosine, the supreme goddess and the goddess of Beauty in a crown of stars, the keeper of sciences, knowledge, harmony, and poetry.” Tiutchev declares, Only Urania, like the sun amidst the stars, Keeps Harmony and governs their ways. . .4 (“Urania”)

Although Baratynsky was one of Brodsky’s most beloved poets, Brodsky’s Urania is closer to Tiutchev’s. Urania, whose symbol is a globe and who herself symbolizes space for Brodsky, is older and more important for him than Clio, the muse of history (for the Russian original, see the foonote5):   1 All quotations of Brodsky’s poems in Russian are from, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo v 7 tomakh, vols. 1–4, ed. Ia. Gordin and comp. G. Komarov (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Fond, 1993–99). Translations and original poetry written in English are from Collected Poems in English, ed. Ann Kjellberg (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Subsequent citations will be parenthetical.  2 Evgenii Baratynskii, “Poslednii poet,” in Stikhotvoreniia. Poemy (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), 275. “Поклонникам Урании холодной / Поёт, увы! Он благодать страстей.” Translations, if not mentioned otherwise, are mine.   3 Barry Scherr, “To Urania,” in “Joseph Brodsky,” special issue, Russian Literature 37, nos. 2–3 (1995): 110.  4 Fedor Tiutchev, Lirika. Stikhotvoreniia, ed. Pigarev (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 2:24. “Урания одна, как солнце меж звездами,/ Хранит Гармонию и правит их путями. . . .” They, evidently, are sciences and branches of knowledge mentioned in the previous line.  5 Brodsky, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 3:248. “У всего есть предел: в том числе, у печали. / Взгляд застревает в окне, точно лист - в ограде. / Можно налить

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” 189 Everything has its limit, including sorrow. A windowpane stalls a stare. Nor does a grill abandon A leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgle down a swallow. Loneliness cubes a man at random. A camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril; a perspective cuts emptiness deep and even. And what is space anyway if not the body’s absence at every given point? That’s why Urania’s older than sister Clio! In daylight or with the soot-rich lantern, you see the globe’s pate free of any bio, you see she hides nothing unlike the latter. There they are, blueberry-laden forests, rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon or the towns in whose soggy phone books you are starring no longer; farther eastward surge on brown mountain ranges; wild mares carousing in tall sedge; the cheekbones get yellower as they turn numerous. And still farther east, steam dreadnoughts or cruisers, and the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.6

As Scherr pointed out, the original Russian poem is written in dolnik based on a trisyllabic with either one or two unstressed syllables

воды. Позвенеть ключами. / Одиночество есть человек в квадрате. / Так дромадер нюхает, морщась, рельсы. / Пустота раздвигается, как портьера. / Да и что вообще есть пространство, если / не отсутствие в каждой точке тела? / Оттого-то Урания старше Клио. / Днем, и при свете слепых коптилок, / видишь: она ничего не скрыла / и, глядя на глобус, глядишь в затылок. / Вон они, те леса, где полно черники, / реки, где ловят рукой белугу, / либо - город, в чьей телефонной книге / ты уже не числишься. Дальше, к югу, / то-есть к юго-востоку, коричневеют горы, / бродят в осоке лошади-пржевали; / лица желтеют. А дальше - плывут линкоры, / и простор голубеет, как белье с кружевами.”  6 Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, 281. Written 1981. Translated by the author.

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between stresses.7 I will not go into detail on the intonational or rhythmical-semantic system of the poem, masterfully analyzed by Scherr. Like Galatskaia in her analysis of “Nochnoi polet” (“Night Flight”),8 Scherr emphasizes that Brodsky’s rhymes in general, and in “To Urania” in particular, help intensify semantic meaning and “may create natural semantic groupings.”9 Thus the “kontrol’nye zvonochki rifm” (controlling rings of rhymes), as Akhmatova put it, immediately draw our attention to the pairs “pechali-kliuchami” and “ograde-kvadrate,” which intensify the theme of loneliness and sorrow that “cube the man at random.” In his own translation into English, Brodsky intensified the degree of loneliness since in Russian the line reads: “Loneliness is a person squared.” This line echoes the beginning of part three of the “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” in which “odinochestvo” is translated as solitude: “Being itself the essence of all things, solitude teaches essentials.” Again, this free translation changes the meaning, since the original Russian text reads: “Loneliness teaches the essence of things since their essence is also / loneliness.” Brodsky decided to use approximate rhymes here, applying oppositions of either sonorous (pechaLi—kliuchaMi) or voiced-voiceless consonants (ograDe—kvadraTe), as noted by Mikhail Gasparov;10 Scherr calls them “shadow rhymes.”11 The rhyme “pechaLi—kliuchaMi” emphasizes the theme of loneliness and homelessness. “Pozvenet’ kliuchami” (one may rattle the keys) is probably an allusion to these lines by Mandelstam: When you think what ties you to this world, You don’t believe yourself: it’s such a trifle! A midnight key to someone’s apartment   7 Barry Scherr, “To Urania,” in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. L. Loseff and V. Polukhina (London: The Macmillan Press, 1990), 92–106.  8 See Natal’ia Galatskaia, “O rifmakh odnogo stikhotvoreniia: Iosif Brodskii, ‘Nochnoi polet,’” Scando-Slavica 36 (1990): 69–85.   9 Scherr, “To Urania,” 96. 10 Mikhail L. Gasparov, “Rifma Brodskogo,” in Izbrannye stat’i, 84. 11 However, I would disagree with Scherr’s treatment of alliteration and oglasovki (kvadraty—kliuchami, tela—esli) as “shadow rhymes.” They could never be perceived as such by native speakers of Russian, never mind Russian poets.

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” 191 And a silver dime in the pocket, And a celluloid of a movie about thieves.12

As Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote in her comments on this poem, “‘Patriarch’ develops the theme of the unsettled state, alienation and isolation, and at the same time of noise and the ‘fracturedness’ of Moscow.”13 Like Mandelstam’s 1931 poem, Brodsky’s “To Urania” deals with loneliness and alienation from life. In Brodsky’s poem, the theme of loneliness leads to emptiness, the void. Brodsky’s ontological treatment of loneliness as the void and the void as death, of and the opposition ‘unbeing-being,’ is reminiscent of Tiutchev’s poem “Everything is traceless and it is so easy not to be.”14 As we can see, Tiutchev goes further than Brodsky, claiming that there is no limit to anything; Brodsky says, “everything has its limit, including sorrow.” Moreover, Tiutchev anxiously anticipates death: “Let me taste death [literally, “annihilation”], / Blend me with the sleeping world).”15 In his own anticipation of death, Brodsky is strikingly similar to Tiutchev, although for Tiutchev there is an evident contrast between the fullness of life, the poet’s thirst for it, and his anticipation of annihilation, being dissolved in the world or being “added” to it rather than “subtracted” from it—and in this respect, Mandelstam also similar to Tiutchev. Brodsky’s main motif, on the contrary, is subtraction from life. Brodsky states that “Urania hides nothing” and opens space only to reveal human frailty and the void. Hence, Brodsky defines space in negative terms or, as Yuri and Mikhail Lotman put it, he reveals “the reality of absence.”16 “And what is space anyway if not the / body’s absence 12 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:165. “Когда подумаешь, чем связан с миром, / То сам себе не веришь: ерунда! / Полночный ключик от чужой квартиры, / Да гривенник серебряный в кармане, / Да целлулоид фильмы воровской.” Interlinear translation is mine. 13 N. Mandel’shtam, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo, 215. 14 Tiutchev, Lirika, 1:224. 15 Tiutchev, Lirika, 1:75. “Дай вкусить уничтоженья, / С миром дремлющим смешай!” 16 Iurii M. Lotman (together with M. Iu. Lotman), “Mezhdu veshch’iu i pustotoi (iz nabliudenii nad poetikoi sbornika Iosifa Brodskogo Uraniia),” in O poetakh i poezii (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1996), 740.

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at every given / point?” Brodsky here seems almost to echo Eliot’s line: “And where you are is where you are not” (“East Coker,” III).17 However, Eliot and Brodsky’s implied meanings are completely opposite in verses that sound alike. Eliot renders almost the exact maxims written under the frontispiece to The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross (quoted above), as Helen Gardner pointed out:18 In order to arrive at that which thou possessest not, Thou must go by a way that thou possessest not. In order to arrive at that which thou art not, Thou must go through that which thou art not. (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Vol. 1, 63)

Brodsky, on the other hand, interprets absence only as death. As noted by Yuri and Mikhail Lotman, “death is also the equivalent of a void, of a space which people left, and death itself is the semantic centre of the entire cycle.”19 Brodsky himself clarified the meaning of these lines as well as of his understanding of history a decade later in his 1991 lecture “Profile of Clio”: “the certitude of your existence’s discontinuity, the certitude of the void, makes the uncertainties of history a palpable proposition.”20 Brodsky argues that “the historian’s predicament is to be transfixed between two voids: of the past that he ponders and of the future for whose sake he ostensibly does this.”21 Thus, to Marc Bloch’s question from his Apologie pour l’histoire—is the past useless for our explanation of the present since it cannot fully explain it?—Brodsky answers yes.22 Nor does Brodsky accept the complex approach of T. S. Eliot, who wrote in his Four Quartets, 17 Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays, 127. 18 Gardner, “Four Quartets,” 66. 19 Lotman, “Mezhdu,” 744. 20 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 117. Originally delivered as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leiden in 1991. 21 Brodsky, On Grief, 116. 22 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour L’Histoire, 2nd edition (Paris: Cahier des Annales, 3. Librairie Armand Colin, 1952).

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” 193

“History may be servitude, / History may be freedom,” and, “A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.”23 Brodsky’s position is that history is unpredictable and that “the main trait of history, and of the future, is our absence, and one cannot be certain of something one was never a part of.”24 Growing up in the Soviet Union, the poet directly witnessed history being manipulated and rewritten as many times as the “rulers” or the General Secretaries of the Communist Party changed. History for Brodsky is an artifact and as such cannot be trusted. The opposition “Klio—skryla” intensifies the difference between Clio and Urania. Here the poem moves both horizontally (You see that she [Urania] hid nothing, with the emphasis on the negative particle “ne”) and vertically, since, as mentioned, Clio is rhymed with “skryla” (hid). In his lecture “Profile of Clio,” Brodsky quotes W. H. Auden’s “Homage to Clio,” at one point calling Clio “the Muse of Time.” The Russian poet, however, does not include Auden’s intricate interpretation of Clio as the muse of silence, almost ignoring what Auden calls Clio’s “merciful silence,” and emphasizing murder. Moreover, by cutting the Auden quotation, Brodsky falls into the trap of a blunder of which Auden was well aware: Clio, Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder, whose kindness never Is taken in, forgive our noises And teach us recollection. . .25 (June 1955)

Misreading Auden, Brodsky seems to accuse Clio of human misdeeds, crimes, and murders, and he reduces history to a linearly-oriented 23 Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, 144. 24 Brodsky, On Grief, 137. 25 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 611. The lines cut by Brodsky are emphasized.

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destructive force, whose “only law is chance.”26 He praises Urania, whose symbol is the globe and who in turn is a symbol of space and travel for Brodsky. Although space is defined as the “body’s absence at every given point,” time dissolves in space; only space helps the poet see “the towns in whose soggy books / you are starring no longer. . . .” The word “starring” in the English version27 is probably important here: to be starring, for the poet, means perhaps “to be.” Looking at the globe, the poet or his implied second-person lyrical hero28 is looking back: you see the globe’s pate free of any bio.29 This point of view is similar to that of the false prophets of Dante’s Inferno: their heads, like that of Brodsky’s lyrical hero, are forever turned backward. Brodsky himself made this comparison in his essay “The Condition We Call Exile,” rendering his mixed feelings about exile, which he characterized as “a metaphysical condition”: Like the false prophets of Dante’s Inferno, his head is forever turned backward and his tears, or saliva, are running down between his shoulder blades. Whether or not he is of elegiac disposition by nature is beside the point: doomed to a limited audience abroad, he cannot help pining for the multitudes, real or imagined, left behind. Just as the former fill him with venom, the latter fuel his fantasy. Even having gained the freedom to travel, even having actually done some traveling, he will stick in his writing to the familiar material of the past, producing, as it were, sequels to his previous works. Approached on this subject, an exiled writer will

26 Brodsky, On Grief, 134. 27 The poet translated this poem into English himself. In the Russian version, “starring” is actually “you are not mentioned.” 28 Here, Brodsky uses the second person singular in place of the first person (ne znachish’sia: “you are not mentioned” or “you are starring no longer”; vidish’, gliadish’: “you see,” “you look”). See footnote 19 to Mandelstam. 29 This is Brodsky’s addition in the English text. The Russian original reads, “she hid nothing” (Brodsky, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 3:48). “Она ничего не скрыла.” The English version emphasizes that Urania is impersonal, impartial.

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” 195 most likely evoke Ovid’s Rome, Dante’s Florence, and—after a small pause—Joyce’s Dublin.30

We can certainly add Brodsky’s Leningrad to this list. Polukhina was probably the first to notice that the past was more important for Brodsky than the present, which is illusory and cast backward to the past.31 At the end of “To Urania,” we see an extremely palpable landscape of “blueberry-laden forests, / rivers where the folk with bare hands catch sturgeon // or the towns in whose soggy phone books / you are starring no longer. . . .” The vividness of this picture allows the reader to see the convexity and roundness of the earth-globe, at whose pate one is looking. Nonetheless, the shift is not only in space but also in time. The lyrical hero is looking back at his city and at the earth like the hawk from “The Hawk’s Cry in Autumn.” Soaring, he sees the Pamir mountains and the entire continent of Asia, where “the faces grow yellower,” and the Pacific Ocean. Farther on, “the expanse grows blue like lace underwear.” Farther still, probably, is “the end of the perspective.” This poem curiously echoes Brodsky’s earlier poem, “The End of a Beautiful Era” (II/311–12), in which the poet anticipates “an ax and a green laurel” (synonymous to “starring”) and says that “time’s invented by death”:

Thus the brain earned a slug, as a spot where an error occurred earns a good pointing finger. Or should I hit waterways, sort of like Christ? Anyway, in these laudable quarters, eyes dumbfounded by ice and by booze will reproach you alike for whatever you choose: traceless rails, traceless waters.32 30 Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile,” in On Grief, 27. 31 Valentina Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 260–61. 32 Brodsky, Collected Poems, 38–40. Translated by David Rigsbee.

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In “To Urania,” the later poem, the choice between “traceless rails” and “traceless waters” has been made: “a camel sniffs at the rail with a resentful nostril” (“To Urania”). Brodsky’s attitude towards time-space, however, has not changed from that of “The End of a Beautiful Era.” The “end of the perspective” is both here and there. Such a rejection or negation of reality in the atmosphere of totalitarian Soviet society was positive in itself (the negation of negation is a positive statement). After the poet “changed continents,” however, he “hit waterways” and acquired the “five-sixths of remaining landmass,” and reality itself changed, Brodsky’s continued, overarching negation only reveals his own—rather than the epoch’s—agonism and uneasy relations with time-space and being. When contemplating time and human frailty, the poet inevitably ends up at the theme of death, which is the semantic center of the entire book, “To Urania.” The title of another poem from the book, “The Fly,” (III/281–89) bears a striking resemblance to Blake’s poem from “The Songs of Experience” of the same title: Blake:

Brodsky (iii):

Little Fly

Yet, these days, as my yellowed finger

Thy summers play,

nail mindlessly attempts to fiddle

My thoughtless hand

with your soft belly, you won’t buzz with fear

Has brushed away.

or hatred, dear.

Blake:

Brodsky: ...................................

Am I not

And here’s just two of us, contagion’s carriers.

A fly like thee?

Microbes and sentences respect no barriers,

Or art not thou

afflicting all that can inhale or hear.

A man like me?

Just us two here . . . (viii)

Brodsky emphasizes his muse’s and his lyrical hero’s similarity with a dying fly, and thus his appeal to the fly in part twelve is tragic: Don’t die! Resist! Crawl! though you don’t feel youthful.

Joseph Brodsky: “The River of Time” or “What Gets Left of a Man” 197 Existence is a bore when useful, for oneself specially—when it spells a bonus. A lot more honest is to bound calendar’s dates with a presence devoid of any sense or reasons, making a casual observer gather: life’s just another word for nonbeing and for breaking rules. Were you younger, my eyes’d scan the sphere where all that is abundant. You are, though, old and near.

Blake’s life was no less about “breaking rules” than that of our contemporary, Brodsky. However, the idea of death brings the two poets to completely different resolutions. Hence, the endings of the two “Flies” touch in a point of anguish, so to speak, passing each other by and moving farther in extremely opposite directions: Blake: If thought is life And strength & breath; And the want Of thought is death;

Brodsky (xxi): . . . next spring perhaps I’ll spot you flitting through skies into this region, rushing back home. I, sloshing

Then am I A happy fly, If I live, Or if I die. 33

through mud, might sigh, “A star is shooting,” and vaguely wave to it, assuming some zodiac mishap—whereas there, quitting spheres, that will be your winged soul, a-flurry to join some dormant larva buried

33 William Blake, Songs of Experience: The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostricker (New York: Penguin, 1977), 124.

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here in manure, to show its nation a transformation.34

If thought is the essence of life, Blake is ready to accept both life and death. For Brodsky, the idea that reincarnation can make the lyrical hero of the poem happy and accept a new life and a new death is still problematic. According to Brodsky, the place of reincarnation is manure, not “An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.”35 The strong difference in the two poets’ attitudes towards time, space, and being (the poetic motive) is revealed in their artistic weapons and in their intonational systems. Brodsky’s poetry constantly reveals an affinity with Mandelstam, of course, but their differences are also very palpable as evident in Mandelstam’s “January 1, 1924” and Brodsky’s “Fin de Siècle” (IV/73–77): “He who kissed time’s tormented temple. . .” (“January 1, 1924”) and “The century will soon be over, but sooner it will be me. . .” (“Fin de Siècle”). In Mandelstam’s poem, the movement is directed from the subject toward the object in the lines: “With a son’s tenderness will recollect / How time lay down to sleep / Behind the window in a snowy mount of wheat.” Brodsky, on the other hand, speaks of the influence of nonexistence on being and brings in the motif of his own worn-out heart in a rather reserved and distanced manner, and the movement in his poem goes from the outer world toward the subject—inward. In both these poems, the authors speak of epochs passing into non-existence, of “the river of time” which will erase all traces of the past including the lives of the poets themselves. Both Mandelstam and Brodsky are always aware of the threat Derzhavin warned of: “Should any trace endure an hour / Through Lyre’s chord or Trumpet’s call [metonymies of lyric and epic poetry for Derzhavin], Obscured it drowns, by Time devoured / Purged of its from— he Fate of all. . . .”36 Brodsky, however, in a long, skeptical list of erased traces of life, includes fear, fox-trot, and 34 Brodsky, Collected Poems, 320–29. Translated with the author by Jane Ann Miller. 35 Yeats, “Byzantium,” 248. 36 Gavrila Derzhavin, Poetic Works, 188. Translation by Alexander Levitsky and Martha T. Kitchen.

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a lampshade in the same line (and then a couch and a lady’s bodice). The power of fear is diminished by the presence of more banal objects. Mandelstam, on the other hand, would not use the word “fear” in such a context—he who “opened the exhausted eye-lids of the century” (a definite allusion to Gogol’s “Vii” and to Fear with a capital “F,” as observed by Ronen).37 The lyrical hero of Mandelstam’s poem “will always hear the noise of roaring rivers / Of deceptive and deadly times.”38 This is a different kind of fear: that of waiting for the time when “they will soon cut off a simple song / Of clay wrongs and seal the mouth with tin” (an old Tartar torture). There is no way to escape this execution; the only thing left for the poet is “to gather night herbs [of poetry] for a foreign tribe / When one’s blood is thickened with limestone.” It is unbearably tempting to run away, but, “as if a paved road sprinkled with salt, / My consciousness shines ahead.” Both Mandelstam and Brodsky are antagonistic toward the present, toward reality. Brodsky beholds “new times, sad times” (“lamentable, sorry times” in his English version). The verbs acquire past tenses as if life itself were already in the past. Mandelstam, beyond the flat surface of the present, sees and hears “mighty sonatas” and identifies himself as the vertebra uniting the past, the present, and the future. Mandelstam’s metaphors are the metamorphoses that bring worlds closer to each other. On the contrary, in Brodsky’s “Fin de Siècle” in Russian, life is mere surface and somehow lacks volume.39 There is nothing beyond the “things in the window shows,” and even nature is like “a carbon paper.” Brodsky’s attitude toward the century can be characterized neither as a “son’s” feelings nor as “tenderness,” but there is no passionate hate for it either. The tragic antagonism of Brodsky’s poetry of the late 1980s–1990s, in my opinion, is that the author considers the earth flat (as in the “Lullaby of Cape Cod”), 37 See Ronen, An Approach To Mandelstam, 240–41. 38 Here, Mandelstam uses the word glukhikh, which has three meanings: “forsaken,” “dull,” and “deaf.” 39 A discussion of the difference between the Russian and the English texts will follow.

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the universe finite, and human beings as toys in the hands of chaotic and demonic forces, unable to liberate themselves. The only way for him to escape this false sequence of a “catalogued” being is “to board a cruise-liner and sail / sail not in order to discover / an island or a plant. . . / but mainly to open the mouth.”40 The meaning of the English version differs significantly from the Russian, especially at the end: “And upon hearing that, one wants to quit one’s travail, / shoveling, digging, and board a steamship and sail / and sail, in order to hail // in the end not an island nor an organism Linnaeus never found, / nor the charms of new latitudes, but the other way round: / something of no account.” The English seems to lack the self-centeredness of the Russian text and is much deeper philosophically, implying the hail of the void and thus bringing it closer to the “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” “To Urania,” and to “Profile of Clio.” Peter Vail says of Brodsky’s poetry, “wandering in relation to space performs the same function as the text in relation to a white sheet of paper and speech to time: it fills the vacuum.”41 Brodsky’s basic device with which he renders his protest against reality is the catalogue. Since his youth, Brodsky used this device, borrowed from the English metaphysical poets and masterfully applied in his poetry.42 Lists, litanies, and catalogues (which in “Fin de Siècle” create an effect of “boredom”) have long been some of the most powerful devices in poetry. They are used for various ends, however: they may be positive, so to speak, and include the world of being within the universe of the poet, as in the poetry of Whitman or Borges; or they may be negative, aiming at the separation of the individual from time-space and from being. Brodsky’s catalogues in “Fin de Siècle” are definitely negative. Renaissance and especially baroque poetry (including metaphysical poetry) provide powerful examples of such negative catalogues. “Este 40 The poem is translated by the author. 41 Petr Vail’, “Prostranstvo kak metafora vremeni: Stikhi Iosifa Brodskogo v zhanre puteshestviia,” in Russian Literature, 411–12. 42 See, for instance, “The Great Elegy for John Donne,” I/231–35.

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que ves, engaño colorido. . .”—the famous sonnet by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651?–1695)43—explores the theme of mutability and the vain attempt to hold everything that is dear to one’s heart in a vanishing dream: This coloured counterfeit that thou beholdest, vainglorious with excellencies of art, is, in fallacious syllogisms of colour, nought but a cunning dupery of sense; [. . .] is a foolish sorry labour lost, is conquest doomed to perish and, well taken, is corpse and dust, shadow and nothingness.44

The sonnet of the Mexican poetess begins with colorful metaphorical epithets (“engaño colorido” [painted enchantment] and “falsos silogismos de colóres” [false syllogisms of colors]), directed at the outer world. The poetess then needs a far stronger device at the end, and parallel constructions intensify the incantation of despair: “. . . es cadaver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada” (is a corpse, is dust, is shadow, is nothing).45 These anaphoristic repetitions are similar to prayer. The most powerful “negative” catalogue is, however, in my opinion, the sixty-sixth sonnet of Shakespeare: Tir’d with all these for restful death I cry: As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplace’d, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d, 43 She was also known as Juana Ramírez de Asbaje. 44 Octavio Paz, comp., Anthology of Mexican Poetry, trans. Samuel Beckett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 85. 45 Ibid.

202 The River of Time And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tir’d with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Here again, the catalogue intensifies the climax of the poem. A more passionate condemnation of reality is difficult to find in poetry. In Brodsky’s “Fin de Siècle,” as well as in many other of his poems written at the end of the 1980s, there are certain traces of the neo-baroque: abundant use of catalogues, exuberant far-reaching metaphors, as well as weariness of the world. These aspects are close to what Northrop Frye called “the conceit or intellectualized image of ‘metaphysical’ poetry, typically Baroque in its ability to express an exuberant sense of design combined with a witty and paradoxical sense of the stress and tension underlying the design.”46 Some scholars of Brodsky’s late poetry, considering its form, argue that Brodsky is a neoclassical poet. In my opinion, however, classicism is first and foremost characterized by an established hierarchy of values and ideas built according to the views and criteria of the author, as, for instance, in Virgil’s Eneid. Though Brodsky has quite a few stylizations in the manner of the ancient Roman poets, he has no such hierarchy: one can only get a vague idea of one from his denial of reality, history, and time-space.47 Brodsky appears to be an anti-epic, anti-Homeric poet. Time and space do not console him. All his wanderings have a negative end result. His “Odysseus to Telemachus” (III/27) can be considered an estrangement of myth. It is written in the form of a letter and

46 Frye, Anatomy, 281. 47 We could say that Akhmatova and early Mandelstam were neoclassical poets, although Mandelstam’s last period is a phenomenon of cosmic, not neo-classicist, vision and scale.

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begins with a direct address, already a shift from convention and an introduction of another convention: The Trojan War is over now; I don’t recall who won it.48

This paradox is introduced with the help of enjambment, fusing two contradictory ideas in one line. Those who have read Homer may suppose that Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, achieved her aim and Odysseus lost his memory, since Brodsky’s Odysseus cannot even recall who won the war. Nevertheless, the paradox still remains, since the purpose of the nymph’s charms was to make him forget his family and the island of Ithaka, but Brodsky’s Odysseus is addressing his letter to his son on Ithaka. Odysseus’s argument that the Greeks won the war “for only they would leave / so many dead so far from their homeland,” is again paradoxical (and again is introduced with the help of enjambment, which makes blank iambic pentameter palpable and flexible). There is a negative attitude toward all heroic deeds, toward war itself. This motif is repeated later: While we were killing time there, old Poseidon, it almost seems, stretched and extended space.

Here again is the introduction of a common Brodsky motif: space is more important than time, “Urania is older than sister Clio.” Space itself, however, is destructive and negative. The lines “to a wanderer the faces of all islands / resemble one another” will be echoed and summed up ten years later in “To Urania” by the line, “And what is space anyway if not the / body’s absence at every given / point?” This poetic statement is motivated by the deliberate and masterful prosaization of the description: “[. . .] some filthy island / [. . .] great grunting pigs. / A garden choked with weeds [. . .].”

48 Brodsky, Collected Poems, 64. Translated by George L. Kline.

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The conceits “eyes, sore from sea horizons, / run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears” bring in the theme of nostalgia and weariness of life. This negative attitude towards history, war, and all trials and tribulations is certainly anti-epic and anti-Homeric. In Homer’s epic as well as in that of Virgil, time-space has a definite progressive movement and meaning, perhaps not so linear and straightforward, but definitely directed toward the fulfillment of the hero’s goal. In “Odysseus to Telemachus,” however, the hero himself is anti-Homeric: I can’t remember how the war came out; even how old you are—I can’t remember.

Unlike Tennyson’s Ulysses or Pound’s Odysseus discussed previously, Brodsky’s Odysseus has either lost his aim or never had it from the start. He is, moreover, like the poet himself, an exile—a toy in the hands of fate, a prisoner. Yet, in the final lines of his “letter,” Brodsky’s Odysseus recollects how he “reined in the plowing bullocks” and even justifies Palamede since “away from me / you are quite safe from all Oedipean passions, / and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.” Such a Freudian implication would probably have been impossible for the hero of Homer. The 1993 “Ithaca” (IV/138) is the last poem in which Brodsky hides behind the mask of Ulysses. Parallels with “Odysseus to Telemachus,” as noted by Lyudmila Zubova, are evident.49 However, the first-person point of view of the first poem is changed into the distanced third person of the second. The loving letter to a child (“Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong”) has become an indifferent, if not hostile, statement of fact (“Your bloke has grown and is looking at you as if you were scum”). The lyrical hero has finally alienated himself from his “island” (“it is either the wrong isle, or having absorbed the blue, / your eye has become vile”), from the vernacular (“it’s a lost labor to decipher the dialect in which everybody is shouting”), and from his past and from his son. Twenty years after “Odysseus to Telemachus,” Brodsky writes that there will be no return home. 49 Lyudmila Zubova, “Odysseus to Telemachus,” in Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem, ed. Lev Losev and Valentina Polukhina (London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 38.

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“Ithaca” bears a striking resemblance to Tomas Venclova’s “Book [or Canto] Eleven,” which Brodsky translated into Russian. In Venclova’s poem, the lyrical hero is alienated not only from space and time but also from his former self, as noted by Kullé.50 For Mandelstam, unlike Brodsky and Venclova—both exiles—the goal is to return home enriched with knowledge: “ Leaving his boat, and its seawearied sails, / Odysseus returned filled with time and space.”51 C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaca” (also translated by Brodsky into Russian) goes even further. For Cavafy, the journey is life; he emphasizes the voyage, not the return: “As you set out for Ithaka / hope the voyage is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery.”52 For Borges, like for Mandelstam, wandering (“Ars Poetica”) means discovery and acquiring knowledge while the return is inevitable: “They said that Ulysses, salted with marvels, / Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca, / Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca / Of green eternity, not of marvels.”53 For Brodsky, however, there is no return. Little by little, the many descriptions of places and continents begin to resemble each other. The differences between Rome (“To Susan Martin,” IV/55) and “Cafe Trieste: San Francisco” (IV/324) have evaporated. Similar motifs are revealed in each of these poems in almost the same words: “nothing has changed here.” Nothing has changed here. Neither the furniture nor the weather. Things, in one’s absence, gain permanence, stain by stain.54

This theme of no return is, evidently, a late facet of Brodsky’s work. His earlier work, “Mexican Divertimento” (1975), has volume, and the distinct image of reality, time, and space “left its footprints” on each poem: 50 Viktor Kullé, “Tam, gde oni konchili, ty nachinaesh (O perevodah Brodskogo),” in Russian Literature, 283. 51 Mandelstam, “The thread of gold cordial. . . ,” 19. 52 C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, ed. George Savidis, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 67. 53 Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems 1923–1967, ed. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni (London: Penguin, 1972), 143. W. S. Merwin’s translation. 54 Brodsky, “Cafe Trieste: San Francisco,” in Collected Poems, 257. Written in English.

206 The River of Time Good old Mexico City. Marvelous place to kill an evening. The heart is empty; but Time still flows like tequila. Facades, car flashes, faces cut in half with mustaches. The Ave. of Reforma forces eyes to prefer the statues. Under each one, in the gutter with hands stretched to the traffic, sits a Mexican mother with her baby. A tragic sight. Let the winning party carve them both for a Statue of Mexico, huge and portly. To cast some shade in the future.55

Time, which “flows like tequila,” is a dynamic and palpable image. “Faces / cut in half with mustaches” and a Mexican mother with her baby are vivid and alive. The poet convinces us that “a tragic sight” is a tragic sight. The motifs of skepticism and irony are very strong in this cycle; the only thing absent is the indifference and world-weariness that appear in Brodsky’s later work. In earlier poems like the 1977 “Letters from the Ming Dynasty” (III/154–55), a Chinese stylization or “persona,” to use Pound’s term, or “The Fifth Anniversary” (III/147–49), time is still private, local. In the “Letters,” sadness and bitterness are defamiliarized by abstract melancholic contemplation, but nevertheless, the poet is concerned only with his own time, space, and fate. Perhaps all these 55 Brodsky, “Mexican Romancero, I,” in Collected Poems, p. 91. Translated with the author by Alan Meyers.

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earlier poems, including “The Fifth Anniversary,” “The Letters from the Ming Dynasty” and many others, are the expression of the poet’s nostalgia for “the blueberry-laden forests.” His nostalgia, perhaps unintentionally and unconsciously, takes revenge on hostile space, being, and places: they are all flat and they all resemble each other. This motif was expressed intentionally and masterfully by Brodsky in his famous cycle,“A Part of Speech” (1972): From nowhere with love the enth of Marchember sir sweetie respected darling but in the end it’s irrelevant who for memory won’t restore features not yours and no one’s devoted friend greets you from this fifth last part of the earth resting on whalelike backs of cowherding boys. . .56

In these bitter and powerful lines alluding to Gogol’s Notes of a Madman, the boundaries between reality, space and time disappear. All that is left is “this fifth last part of earth / resting on whalelike backs of cowherding boys.” Space has very vague and blurred features, as well. Like “To Urania,” this poem echoes an earlier one, “The End of a Beautiful Era” (discussed above). Vail asserts that Brodsky “domesticates space,” since “coming back is the goal of wandering. Wandering domesticates space, and the more domesticated spaces there are, the more returns there will be. There are more chances to come back to the place where a familiar motive reminds one of a settled life, of the idea of home. Music arranges the order of time, and the melody clings to ‘a pillar, a fountain, a pyramid,’—landmarks that the poet put on his way across world and life.”57 As proof, Vail quotes Brodsky’s “Piazza Mattei”: I drank of this fountain in Rome’s ravine, 56 Brodsky, “A Part of Speech,” in Collected Poems, 103. Translated by Daniel Weissbort. 57 Vail’ “Prostranstvo,” 414–15. Translation is mine.

208 The River of Time Now, without wetting my caftan I walk by.58 (III/207)

In my view, however, Vail’s citation from Brodsky’s “Piazza Mattei” does not prove his thesis of Brodsky’s domesticating space. In this exquisitely ironic poem, the poet is a nomad, an exile: “As if they were cattle / A nomad guards his losses.”59 The plot of the poem is as old as poetry itself; however, it is not as sophisticated as its intricate poetic and linguistic web. Admitting that a young girl, Michelina, prefers an old rich count to him, and calling himself “a slave” and “a nomad,” the poet humbles and even humiliates himself only to take final revenge on them in his poetry and—eventually— in eternity. Here Brodsky introduces his true muse, Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry, and establishes his kinship with Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Tasso, Buonarotti, Borromini, and—by poetic allusion— with Mandelstam. The line “Gloomy Europe, I am in Rome, / where the sun shines!”60 is a reverse allusion, so to speak, to Mandelstam’s two poems dedicated to Ariosto: “It’s cold in Europe, it’s dark in Italy.”61 An artisan and a master craftsman, Brodsky understands that following in the footsteps of great poets from Catullus to Pushkin is a dangerous endeavor. Therefore, to sound more convincing and to reveal lofty thoughts, he uses low language, criminal jargon—“kanaiu” (walk away)—and obscenities: “stavil rakom” (he did her doggy style), “blyadi” (whores), “konchali,” (cum). Brodsky eagerly admits that he is “a nomad” (IV), “a tired slave, who finally took a gulp of freedom, which is sweeter than love, affection, faith, [. . .] since it existed before our era” (XVI). In the denouement of the poem Brodsky links freedom with time, openly manifesting that time is more intelligent than space, 58 Here and below, interlinear translation is mine. 59 Brodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 3:208. “Потери, точно скот домашний, ⁄ блюдет кочевник.” 60 Ibid., 3:209. “Европа мрачная, я в Риме, / где светит солнце!” 61 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:180, 182.

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and freedom is the mother of literature (poetry) because, through time, it reaches eternity: XVII It is characterized also by staunchness. Until Time gets as stupid as Space (which is doubtful), a seed of freedom in an evil thistle, in any landscape will give an offspring in a suffocating epoch. And even, XVIII should all the stars fall down from heaven, should the place vanish, freedom, whose daughter is literature, will not be abandoned. It—until the throat is moist—  will not be deprived a shelter. Creak, a pen. Darken, paper. Fly, a minute. (III/211–12)

Both meanings of the Russian word pobeg (“offspring” and “escape”) are implied here by Brodsky, and he is again alluding to Mandelstam’s lines: “I sing when my throat is damp, my soul is dry, / and my eye is moderately moist, and my consciousness is not cunning. . .” (1937).62 Vail states that in “Piazza Mattei” Brodsky “is a nomad, a p ­ rofessional 63 exile [. . .] thirsting to settle down.”

62 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:224. “Пою, когда гортань сыра, душа суха, / И в меру влажен взор, и не хитрит сознанье. . . .” Translation is mine. 63 Vail’ “Prostranstvo,” 414.

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I would clarify that Brodsky’s desire is not to settle down in space or even in time. The goal of wandering for him is not the love of travel or the return. Nor does he travel to acquire knowledge, like Mandelstam, Cavafy, or Borges. As Brodsky declares in “Fin de Siècle”: “to sail not in order to discover / an island or a plant [. . .] / but mainly to open the mouth.”64 Brodsky travels in order to be able to write. In his “Profile of Clio,” Brodsky gives his reasons for being a nomad, the best of which is “the escape from a rationalist theory of society based on the rationalist interpretation of history.”65 There will, however, be no return to Mandelstam’s “city familiar as tears,”66 as Brodsky makes clear in his poetry and in prose. Hence, “the faces of all islands resemble one another” and “eyes, sore from sea horizons, / run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears” (“Odysseus to Telemachus”).67 Having acquired the “five-sixths of remaining landmass,” the lyrical hero finds himself in the middle of nowhere, beholding “traceless rails, traceless waters” (“The End of a Beautiful Era”).68

Brodsky, again, values time much more than space: “Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing. / Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream / of a thing. And life itself is a variety of time” (“Lullaby of Cape Cod,” VIII). Time, according to Brodsky, has an organic nature and is a form of being. Moreover, the poet is trying to look into Nothingness, continuing in the tradition of Derzhavin, Tiutchev, and existential philosophy: And longer a hundredfold than all of this are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought of death. And ten times that, longer than all, 64 Brodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 4:77. 65 Brodsky, On Grief, 135. 66 Mandel’shtam, Polnoe sobranie, 1:152. Translation is mine. 67 Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, 64. Translated by George L. Kline. 68 Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, 39. Translated by David Rigsbee.

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In addition to his leanings toward Kierkegaard and Shestov mentioned by Polukhina,70 Brodsky has a certain affinity with Heidegger, who expressed the dual nature of metaphysics, stating that metaphysics asks questions beyond the limits of essence, looking into being and into nothing else.71 Neither paradise nor hell exists for Brodsky: “paradise is the place of weakness [. . .] the place with no prospect at all.”72 In other words, it is the true “end of the perspective.”73 Brodsky expressed this view of paradise in almost the same words in his essay “Catastrophes in the Air”:74 Now the idea of paradise is the logical end of human thought in the sense that it, that thought, goes no further; for beyond paradise there is nothing else, nothing else happens. It can be safely said, therefore, that paradise is a dead-end; it’s the last vision of space, the end of things, the summit of the mountain, the peak from which there is nowhere to step—except into pure Chronos; hence the introduction of the concept of eternal life. The same actually applies to hell; structurally at least, these two things have a lot in common.75

The only hope for Brodsky to escape oblivion is to become “a part of speech,” thus conquering both space and time. In his essay, “The Child of Civilization” (and in his introduction to Mandelstam’s 50 69 Brodsky, Collected Poems, 129. Translated by Anthony Hecht. 70 Polukhina, Joseph Brodsky, 263–81. 71 See Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 72 Brodsky, “Lullaby to Cape Cod,” in Collected Poems in English, 126. Translated by Anthony Hecht. 73 Brodsky, “The End of a Beautiful Era,” in Collected Poems in English, 39. Translated by David Rigsbee. 74 See in Less than One, 286. 75 Ibid.

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Poems, which is, in fact, an earlier version of the essay included in Less Than One76), Brodsky writes, A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker. Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying. But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one write is not so much a concern for one’s perishable flesh but the urge to spare certain things of one’s world—of one’s own personal civilization—from one’s own nongrammatical continuum. Art is not a better, but an alternative existence; it is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words.77

Brodsky is alluding here to Socrates in Plato’s “Phaedo,” who states that “those who tackle philosophy aright are simply and solely practicing dying, practicing death, all the time, but nobody sees it.”78 The philosopher argues that since the body distracts the soul with desires and “our soul is mixed up with so great an evil,” it is impossible to attain pure knowledge and truth; therefore, “if we are ever to know anything purely we must get rid of it, and examine the real things by the soul alone.”79 According to Socrates, the spirit—or rather the soul—is not seeking flesh, but, on the contrary, is seeking to depart from the body. Brodsky’s idea “that writing poetry, too, is an exercise in dying” applies more to Yeats, who wrote, “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing” (“Sailing to Byzantium”). On the contrary, Mandelstam, whether following Ulysses or going down “Lamarck’s flexible scale,” returns from any quest enriched by knowledge, experience, and civilization and brings them back into human life, thus unifying time and 76 See “The Child of Civilization” in Less Than One, 123; and Osip Mandelstam, introduction to 50 Poems, 7–8. 77 Brodsky, Less Than One, 123. 78 Plato, Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. Rouse (New York: Mentor, 1956), 466–67. 79 Plato, Great Dialogues, 469.

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space rather than departing from nature.80 From Mandelstam’s early poems—“My breath, my warmth has been already lain / On the window-glasses of eternity”81—to the last, written in exile in Voronezh after his first time in Stalin’s prison and in anticipation of further persecution, eternity as well as heaven are natural and are achieved through art and poetry. Creativity gives Mandelstam the strength to leave space for “the desolate garden of numbers, / to break a seeming permanence / and accordance of causes” and to see “How big Universe is sleeping / In the cradle of little Eternity” (“The Ottave”).82 Mandelstam did not desire “evergreen laurels”: “Don’t you put, don’t, I beg / Tendersharp laurel on my brow, / you’d better break my heart / Into the splinters of blue ringing bells.”83 His dream was to dissolve in humanity and eternity. “Pure” poets, like Blok, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov, or T. S. Eliot, are concerned with the purification of time and language: “to purify the dialect of the tribe / And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding” (II). Mandelstam wanted to purify time by making it whole and by unifying the present, past, and future. Brodsky, on the other hand, separated eternity and time and considered eternity to be only a part of time. As Sergei Kuznetsov observed in his unpublished manuscript on Brodsky, contrary to the Christian tradition, Brodsky interpreted eternity as present time absorbed by the past and the future, not as an extended and continuing present that absorbs both past and future—an idea that goes back to Saint Augustine.84 For T. S. Eliot, eternity is “the point 80 Mandel’shtam, “Lamark,” in Polnoe sobranie, 1:171. Translation is mine. 81 Mandelstam, “I am given a body. . .” in Polnoe sobranie, 1:46. Translation is mine. 82 Mandelstam, “The Ottave, 10,” 184–88. Translation is mine. 83 Mandelstam, “I am lost in the sky—what should I do?”, 234. “Не кладите же мне, не кладите / Остроласковый лавр на виски, / лучше сердце моё разорвите / Вы на синего звона куски.” Translation is mine. 84 Sergei Kuznetsov, Iosif Brodskii: Popytka analiza (Unpublished). The author generously allowed Viktor Kullé to familiarize me with this manuscript while I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation.

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of intersection of the timeless / with time.” For Brodsky, however, the present is associated with life while absolute time is purified of present, past and future. Thus, absolute time for Brodsky is death, not eternity. In Brodsky’s play Marbles, an aristocrat named Tullius and a plebeian of foreign origin—a barbarian named Publius—are sentenced to life in prison and share the same cell. Their cell is located in a gigantic steel tower approximately one mile high, a combination of the Tower of Pisa and the Empire State Building, probably an allusion to Orwell’s 1984. They are watched by the Praetor who can grant them whatever they wish if approved: books; swords for fencing; busts of famous Roman poets, historians, emperors; sleeping pills; and what not. Emperor Tiberius is an archetypal dictator, ostensibly of a post-Christian empire. The play is set in the second century after our era—in other words, “Post Aetatem Nostram,” the title of Brodsky’s 1970 poem that opens with the line, “Empire is fools’ country.”85 The Tower, as the aristocrat Tullius says, “[is] nothing but a form of struggle against space. [. . .] It virtually pushes you out, physically. Into time. Into pure time, not mucked up by miles and kilometers; into Chronos. For the absence of space is the presence of time.”86 For Tullius, the future is death, “where space comes to an end, and you become time yourself. Cremation would be even better, but that, of course, is up to the Praetor.”87 Tullius declares, “Rome’s task is to merge with time.”88 For him, “Nature itself is a live broadcast,”89 very much in the spirit of “Fin de Siècle,” where nature is like “a carbon paper.” Tullius is a Roman stoic who denies Christianity: “for a barbarian it’s always simpler to become a Christian than Roman. [. . .] Out of self-pity, Publius, out of selfpity. Since you want to escape from here. Or—to commit suicide, 85 Brodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 2:397. “Империя—страна для дураков.” 86 Joseph Brodsky, Marbles: A Play in Three Acts, trans. Alan Meyers and the author (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 48. 87 Brodsky, Marbles, 49. 88 Ibid., 14. 89 Ibid., 41.

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right? That is you crave life, preferably eternal. Eternal—but life it must be, right? [. . .] The more eternal, the more life, eh?”90 Tullius, however, commits suicide in the end. There is no escape from the Tower. As Tullius tells Publius sarcastically, escaping to Rome from the Tower is “like escaping from history into anthropology. Better still, from time into history. . . . Degradation, to put it mildly. From time, more exactly, into space. One’d be bored to death.”91 Tullius, however, manages to escape but comes back, probably “bored to death.” Thus, freedom for Tullius is “a variation on the theme of death,” and “it’s only the possibility of a catastrophe that distinguishes reality from fiction.”92 Tullius believes, very much like the author himself, “. . . if you are not a poet, your life’s a cliché.”93 Hence for Tullius, real history is “what’s said by the poets.”94 Marble is no escape from oblivion for Brodsky, since it is also destined to decay, as Brodsky states in his play and Akhmatova in her poem: “The gold is rusting, and the steel decays / marble is crumbling. Everything’s ready for death. / The most lasting on the earth is sorrow / and the most durable is the regnant word.”95 In “Aere Perennius”96—Brodsky’s 1995 poem in which he rewrites (or rather, overwrites as if it were a palimpsest) his own poem of 1962, “Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig inoi” (I erected a different monument for myself)97—he follows Horace, Derzhavin, Pushkin, and Akhmatova in search of durability and immortality. For Brodsky, very much like for his character Tullius, “a classic [. . .] becomes a classic because of Time. Not the time that passes after his death but the time while he is 90 Ibid., 53. 91 Ibid., 44. 92 Ibid., 80, 79. 93 Ibid., 40. 94 Ibid. 95 Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia (Moscow: Pravda, 1990), 1:303. Interlinear translation is mine. 96 Brodskii, Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo, 4:202. 97 Iosif Brodskii, Forma vremeni, in Stikhotvoreniia, esse, p’esy v 2 tomakh, ed. Vladimir Ufliand (Minsk: Eridan, 1992), 1:18.

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alive. . . . Because a poet always deals with time, one way or another. Whether he is young or decrepit. Even while scribbling about space. Because what is a song anyway but restructured time?”98 The present according to Brodsky, therefore, is absorbed by the past, and the future is death. Eternity for Brodsky is immortality.

98 Brodsky, Marbles, 71.

Part Five

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion”

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J

ohn Ashbery (born 1927)—the former Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets—does not have the airs of a “living legend” either in his lifestyle or in his art. On the contrary, he is in a state of constant search and doubt, to the extent that one of his main principles is uncertainty. In a way, Ashbery’s uncertainty is similar to Tiutchev’s “an uttered thought is but a lie” or, as Nabokov translated, “a thought once uttered is untrue.”1 Ashbery assumes that true understanding and spiritual intercourse in the age of high tech and the tide of information are doubtful if not impossible, and a thought or an image can no longer be fully expressed. This, however, is masterfully expressed in the long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: “The words are only speculation / (From the Latin speculum, mirror): / They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.”2 “John Ashbery affirms in his work yes, affirms, ‘an affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything,’” writes Harriet Zinns, who observes traces of Zen in Ashbery’s work.3 He does not try to name things. “You cannot ‘name’ what you are doing, he says. The ‘real thing’ is ‘colorless and shapeless,’ Ashbery says over and over again.”4 Each new book by Ashbery inspires a flood of criticism.5 Even such influential connoisseurs as Harold Bloom and Marjorie Perloff, who rarely agree with one another in their approach to poetry, have long been admirers of his work. Ashbery’s “lexical range is enormous,” Helen Vendler writes in her review of The Flow Chart, a book-length poem.6 Ashbery is capable of organically merging the language of Shakespeare, the English metaphysical poets, Andrew Marvell, William Cowper, William Blake, T. S. Eliot with contemporary slang, technical terminology, obscenities, and the language of advertising and media. “Eliot, Pound and Moore all incorporated ‘low’  1 The first translation is mine; the other is from: Vladimir Nabokov, Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry (Florida: Harcourt Press, 2008), 237.   2 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is cited from: John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1985), 189.   3 Harriet Zinns, “John Ashbery: The Way Time Feels as it Passes,” The Hollins Critic 29, no. 3 (June 1992): 4.   4 Zinns, “John Ashbery,” 4.   5 At present, Ashbery has almost thirty books, including Breezeway, published by Ecco in 2015, and Commotion of The Birds (Manchester, Great Britain: Carcanet, 2016).   6 Helen Vendler, “A Steely Glitter Chasing Shadows,” The New Yorker (August 3, 1992): 73–76.

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” 219

language that fin-de-siècle lyric had tried to do without, but Ashbery has taken the modernist experiment to its end point: to boiliterate, advertising, doggerel, obscenity, technology, media talk—the subliterary of all kinds.”7 In the 1990s Ashbery published several books of poems, noticeable for their intricate use of language and boundless vocabulary that embraces modern coinages, colloquialisms, and slang, as well as complex interpolation of a lyrical confession with irony, even sarcasm, and parody. Can You Hear, Bird (1995) astonishes with its dialogism and with the poet’s ability to dissolve in characters. The book is written in alphabetic order. The poems are all gathered in groups, the title of each beginning with every letter of the English alphabet—from A to Z. As a result, we are presented with an alphabet of contemporary life, viewed by a waiter in a Warsaw café; a politician from Washington, DC; an old friend; or an accidental encounter. Their dialogues and monologues are interpolated with the ironic and sometimes sarcastic observations of the poet; his childhood memories are estranged by a parody of a newspaper article or a scholarly literary essay. All spheres of life— from the university campus to the White House and from a romance to a scholarly or a political article—are parodied. The main theme for Ashbery, however, “is time—and flux, and he chronicles its constant ebb and flow in impressionistic detail, meditating upon the moment-to-moment shifts in emotional weather that it engenders, the ‘comings and goings,’ the human ‘mutterings, splatterings’ that pass in its wake,” as Kakutani wrote in her review of Selected Poems in 1985.8 This statement still holds, in my view. “Time is ‘an emulsion’” for Ashbery, notes Kakutani. The quotation is from the poem “Soonest Mended,” in which Ashbery writes, “for time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.”9 Social uncertainty and doubt in human understanding are interrelated. Hence the desire not to grow old, but instead to preserve   7 Vendler, “A Steely Glitter,” 74.  8 Michiko Kakutani, “With Poetic License,” The New York Times (December 7, 1985): 18, sec. C.   9 Ashbery, “Soonest Mended,” Selected Poems, 87.

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childhood, to be unlike the others. At first, it seems paradoxical that the motives of uncertainty, of unsettled being, even of being an outcast, are so strong in Ashbery, an established and quite successful member of society: Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again.10

Besides the philosophical explanation, there is a social one: intellectuals who are not engaged in business or production are outcasts in a pragmatic industrial society. There is also a psychological explanation: Ashbery is a very reserved person. He admits it himself. “People of the 1960s were open, people of the 1970s were looking inward exploring their inner selves.”11 The people of the 1960s were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: the Beat Generation. Ashbery was born in 1927, but he does not think that he shares the ideas of this generation. Neither does he consider himself a postmodernist: “I have been writing poems for more than 50 years [now more than 70, since he said this in the 1990s]. I began in the time of modernism. I have always tried to write non-traditionally, but I do not understand the difference between modernism and postmodernism. . . .”12 I told Mr. Ashbery in August 1991 on one of my visits to his Manhattan apartment, “the French scholar Lyotard presumes that modernists tried to overcome despair, the chill of loneliness and disbelief, and T. S. Eliot’s example who acquired faith is proof of it, while postmodernists, on the contrary, do not attempt to affirm anything, stating that a person is lonely and understanding is impossible. In my view, there is an affinity between those ideas and your thoughts, John.” 10 Ibid. 11 From conversations of John Ashbery and the author of this book. When I was translating his poems, we met several times in Mr. Ashbery’s apartment on 22nd Street in Manhattan. Here and below are excerpts from the John Ashbery’s conversations with the author translated into Russian and published in Inostrannaia Literatura 10 (2006): http://magazines.russ.ru/inostran/2006/10/pro6.html. 12 From conversations of John Ashbery with Ian Probstein.

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” 221 J. A.: “Well, people are not so lonely nowadays. There is, for instance, the internet allowing people to communicate 24 hours a day without leaving their homes. The internet drastically changes our mode of communication.” I. P.: “Do you often go online?” J. A.: “I have this capacity, but I don’t; otherwise I couldn’t write. I don’t feel very isolated really. I communicate with a lot of people who have the same interests that I do. As for loneliness, philosophically speaking, a person is always lonely. In certain ways we are all alone.” I. P.: “The current obsession with hi-tech is akin to the beginning of the twentieth century when it seemed that the space-time limits, not just the boundaries between countries, would be erased. However, there were two world wars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam war. . . . Even now there are no optimistic changes to be hoped for.” J. A.: “Yes, but even the worst tragedies did not stop people from thinking and writing. Even the Holocaust, even Auschwitz did not silence them.” I. P.: “You mean writing as a means of overcoming despair, tragedy, horror. And what do you think is the role of poetry in the contemporary world?” J. A.: “I do not think contemporary society appreciates poetry very much. I do not think it needs poetry. It needs something that makes a stir in the world, writing best-selling novels, journalism. I did manage to do this when I was writing about art, to do other kinds of writing also. I think I could write bestsellers, but it is not interesting for me. Poetry is what interests me most and it is much more difficult.” I. P.: “You often write about childhood in your poetry. There is a recurrent motif—a desire not to grow old, to preserve childhood: ‘. . . thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.’”13 J. A.: “I do have that line about probably wishing not to grow up, but I did not mean that for all time. I don’t think I would like 13 Ashbery, “Soonest Mended,” Selected Poems, 88.

222 The River of Time to return to my childhood. For me childhood is first reading, comics and the first books, first writing and also first love, the experience that has never been duplicated again.” I. P.: “I tried to find the sources and the motives of poems such as ‘The Ecclesiast,’ ‘As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat’ and the long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. How conscious was, so to speak, the neo-platonic idea of the impossibility of revealing reality in art? J. A.: “It is very difficult for me to recollect what I was thinking when I was writing my poems. [It should be mentioned that this was said about the poem that brought him some of his most prestigious awards and fame.] I almost never re-read my poems, even the most favorite. I read them only to avoid repeating myself. I would rather not go too deep into my own poetry.” I. P.: “In your Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror you have the line: “New York . . . / is a logarithm / Of other cities.”14 What is the influence of city images, city culture and the rhythm of such a gigantic city on your work?” J. A.: “I can’t say that New York inspires me, but it does not suppress me either. It is an easy place for me to work in. I am very comfortable here. Sometimes I listen to the radio, and some phrases penetrate my poetry. I don’t go out very much in New York. I go out much more when I am in the country where I have a small house a hundred miles north from New York City. There I write much less because there are a lot of much more interesting things to do.” I. P.: “With which contemporary poets do you feel affinity?” J. A.: “Well, James Schuyler, James Tate, I like Robert Creeley— he is very unique, does not sound like anyone else.” I. P.: “And going back to the roots, so to speak, whom can you name?” J. A.: “Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens. The first modern poet who impressed me was W. H. Auden, a very important poet for

14 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery, Selected Poems, 195.

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” 223 me, but I do not like what he wrote after he came to America, and I stopped reading him.” I. P.: “They say that rhyme is now used for advertising in subway ads. Do you think that rhyme is obsolete in poetry as it is considered in Western and American poetry?” J. A.: “No, a lot of people, New Formalists, for instance, would not agree with that. They try to use rhyme, old tropes and old forms—a sonnet, a triolet. Some of them do have poetry, for instance, Anthony Acton, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, but many don’t. It is hard for me to say what poetry should be like. It is easier to say what I don’t like in poetry. I do not like poster-like political poetry, a slogan, like Yevtushenko.” I. P.: “In your Selected Poems you included only a few poems from your book The Tennis Court Oath, which brought you recognition.” J. A.: “Those poems I considered experiments. I did not expect them to be published. My first book attracted so little attention that I was not thinking of publishing another book. In the 1950s there were fewer publishers of poetry. I was feeling somehow blocked in my writing living in France where I was cut off from my language, and a lot of poems that I wrote were experiments. When I was given an opportunity to publish another book, I put a lot of those poems that I wouldn’t have published.”15 I. P.: “So, you don’t feel them to be important?” J. A.: “Some of them I do, but mostly I don’t. Many people don’t like this book either, except for the so-called Language poets who think that it is my only good book,” says John cracking a smile.

For many years John Ashbery was a leading art critic. From 1960 to 1965 he was the art critic of the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune in Paris, and of Art International in Lugano, Switzerland. Then from 1963 to 66 he was editor of Art and Literature in Paris, and was executive editor of Art News from 1965 to 1972. 15 The book that, in Mr. Ashbery’s view, attracted little attention was Some Trees, which in 1956 won the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize selected by W. H. Auden.

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Later, in 1978, Ashbery became the art critic at New York Magazine and later still at Newsweek. However, there are not that many direct depictions of visual art in his poetry, with the exception of the long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Association of Critics Award. Some call it didactic, but I would call it programmatic. The poem is dedicated to the first self-portrait in a convex mirror viewed by the High Renaissance artist Francesco Parmigianino. As in his art criticism, Ashbery writes about his own understanding of art and his own work. He himself once mentioned that when artists write about others, they write about their own work. Hence the mirror in the poem depicts not only an artist looking into a convex mirror but a poet looking at his own art. Ashbery states that in the “accumulating mirror” of art we see “this otherness, this / ‘Not being-us.’” As noted by Roland Benedikter and Judith Hilber, “four years before the publication of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s seminal treatise The Postmodern Condition (1979) [. . .] John Ashbery anticipated most of the decisive traits of this worldview and attitude in an epochal poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ [. . .]. As the writer of the poem he is an artist; whereas in discussing Parmigianino’s painting in the poem he becomes an art critic.”16 Art and material dictate their laws, and the incarnation differs from the initial conception as much as the reflection of an artist in a convex mirror differs from his actual self. According to Murray Krieger, ekphrasis (representation of art in literature) involves the use of “a plastic object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s turning world to ‘still’ it.”17 16 Ronald Benedikter and Judith Hilber, “The Post-Modern Mind: A Reconsideration of John Ashbery’s ‘Self–Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975) from the Viewpoint of an Interdisciplinary History of Ideas,” Open Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 1 ( 2012): 65. 17 Murray Krieger, The Poet as Critic, ed. Frederick P. W. McDowell (Evanston, 1967), 3–26. Quoted in Richard Stamelman, “Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 15, no. 3, Image/Imago/Imagination (Spring 1984): 614.

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However, as Richard Stamelman pointed out, referring to Harold Rosenberg’s work “Portraits: A Meditation on Likeness,” Ashbery shifts the very notion of ekphrasis: it is no longer “meditation on likeness,” but “in Ashbery’s hands it becomes meditation on difference”18—no longer static or still but moving and dynamic: I feel the carousel starting slowly And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books, Photographs of friends, the window and the trees Merging in one neutral band that surrounds Me on all sides, everywhere I look. And I cannot explain the action of leveling, Why it should all boil down to one Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.19

The movement of the poem, like the movement of time itself, takes the poet beyond the frame of the mirror, even the convex one, and allows him to reach the height of universal archetypal themes. Ashbery speaks of time and being, of life and death, and about reality, which is deformed in a convex mirror of art, thus creating another reality that nevertheless reflects reality in this paradoxical way: . . . Sydney Freedberg in his Parmigianino says of it: “Realism of this portrait No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria. . . However its distortion does not create A feeling of disharmony. . . The forms retain A strong measure of ideal beauty,” because Fed by our dreams, so inconsequential until one day We notice a hole they left. . . 18 Stamelman, “Critical Reflections,” 608; and Harold Rosenberg, “The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience,” Art News (September 1952), as quoted in Art of Our Century: The Chronicle of Western Art: 1900 to the Present, 1988, ed. Jean-Louis Ferrier, trans. Walter D. Glanze (New York: Prentice Hall, 1989), 491. 19 Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in Selected Poems, 191.

226 The River of Time [. . .] They were to nourish A dream which includes them all, as they are Finally reversed in the accumulating mirror.20

Hence, not only does Ashbery defy the mannerist aesthetics of Parmigianino, as noted by Stamelman,21 but he also rejects the romantic belief of Keats: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”). Nor is he lured by the desire of Yeats to overcome his human frailty: “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing, / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enameling. . .” (“Sailing to Byzantium”). Art for Ashbery is a corridor in time, a bridge connecting time, revealing the uniqueness of the moment, yet destroyed by time itself. It is impossible to live in the ideal, purified air of art—either in a poem or in a picture. Yet, the magnetic attraction of art does not leave one free. Ashbery talks about it as if dealing with an inevitable harsh truth, avoiding romantic exaggerations: “The soul is a captive, treated humanely, kept / In suspension, unable to advance much farther / Than your look as it intercepts the picture.”22 Connecting centuries, the poet speaks of the eternal in art and in life; he gives the stern truth without pathos, without raising his voice. Although the human being, not just the artist, is lonely, the whole breaks into fragments: understanding is impossible, one cannot escape to the past, nor can one escape to one’s childhood or back to nature. The only way out is to move farther—even limited by the stern frames of necessity. “There is a brave despair” in Ashbery’s poetry, as Helen Vendler once put it.23 However, despite its illusionary and frail nature, only art is capable of uniting the broken splinters of time, making it whole— healing time: 20 Ashbery, “Self-Portrait,” 193. 21 Stamelman, “Critical Reflections,” 619. 22 Ashbery, Selected Poems, 188. 23 Vendler, “A Steely Glitter,” 73.

John Ashbery: “Time Is an Emulsion” 227 Its existence Was real, though troubled, and the ache Of this waking dream can never drown out The diagram still sketched on the wind, Chosen, meant for me and materialized In the disguising radiance of my room.24

Although art is “sketched on the wind,” it is impossible to erase, despite or probably due to its ephemeral nature. Only art can overcome decay and oblivion. With added doubt, reservations and contemplation, the proud motive of Horace’s “Exegi monumentum” (I erected [eternal] monument) sounds estranged and even humble in the modern poet’s wording. It is only the self-portrait of Parmigianino, an artist from the High Renaissance, that allows Ashbery—despite all his reservations and doubts—to come to an affirmation: the space of art is a form of time. It is true and real, a true reality in the image of time.

24 Ashbery, “Self-Portrait,” 203–4.

Part Six

Charles Bernstein: “Of Time and the Line”1

  1 The essay “Of Time and the Line” in a somewhat shorter form and a complete interview, including the above citation, were published in Arcade, an electronic journal of Stanford University (November 13, 2015): http://arcade.stanford.edu/ content/ charles-bernstein-time-and-line.

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C

harles Bernstein (born 1950) is one of the founders of the school of innovative Language poetry. From 1978 to 1981 he was co-editor, with Bruce Andrews, of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, host of the radio show Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, executive editor of the Electronic Poetry Center and is now coeditor of PennSound, where poetry is restored to its role of being read out loud and is thus returned to one of its most important sources—sound as such. Bernstein admits that he was enormously impressed and influenced by Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchonykh and other Russian futurists and avant-garde artists, especially Malevich, Rodchenko, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Popova, and Natalia Goncharova. Although distinguished by many titles and awards—for example, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others—he is far from self-righteous or self-centered. He seeks true values and truth in the “mobbed light”2 of so-called political reality and everyday life. Language poetry searches for truth, in Khlebnikov’s sense, by examining the roots of words, restoring meaning by shifting or even distorting it. Khlebnikov’s zaum’ (beyond understanding) is by no means senselessness, but rather the search for sense beyond common sense or official doctrine. This is very much in the manner of George Orwell, who revealed the false nature of “newspeak,” and showed that language itself exposes the lies of “fraternity, equality, freedom” (the vocabulary of any dictatorship, whether Hitler’s, Stalin’s or Mao’s) or, for that matter, the half-truths of contemporary American life. On the habitual level of everyday business life, Bernstein’s witticism mocks, as he puts it in “Beyond the Valley of the Sophist,” “the vanity of conceits.” “He understated the price of the property to be sure he got less than it was worth. This was the only way he knew for the exchange to have value” (“Sign Under Test”).3 In other words, the devaluation of real values is the only means of value exchange. The poet exposes “free gifts” (here, language itself exposes the lies, if we care to examine it) as traps.   2 Charles Bernstein, “Sign Under Test,” in Girly Man (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 157.   3 Bernstein, “Sign Under Test,” 160.

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Hence the Russian saying, “free cheese is found only in a mousetrap.” Parodying various aspects of political, social, economic, and business life, Bernstein does not spare intellectuals either, revealing various types of “discourse” as absurd—be it scientific, academic (or rather, pseudo-scholarly), literary, or historical. Robert Creeley wrote, “Bernstein’s is the most provocatively intelligent reaction to the general drift of mainstream poetry, and he is an indefatigable writer of essays and poems wherein the determinations of genre are largely superseded. In short, he has not only given brilliant instance of the confusions of contemporary social and political premises but has done so in remarkable constructs of their characteristic modes of statement, which are not simply parodic but rather reclamations, recyclings, of otherwise degraded material.”4 Charles Bernstein’s main weapon is language—sharp as a sword and piercing as a spear. Yet, he seems to both rely on his weapon and distrust it, trying to reach beyond it: “if language could talk we would refuse to understand it” (“Sign Under Test”).5 To paraphrase his own introduction to the book With Strings, entitled “In Place of a Preface a Preface,”6 the poet seems out of touch with reality, not out of touch but out of reach, not out of reach but out of pitch, not out of pitch of reality but in touch with irreality, not in touch but reaching, not reaching but teaching, not teaching but preaching, not preaching irreality but piercing reality, not piercing reality but bridging reality and irreality, reality and appearance, sense and perception, impossible possibilities and inexplicable causes, inexplicable causes and unavoidable effects, unavoidable effects and unnecessary necessity, unnecessary necessity and inevitable chances, heaven and hell. How does a translator approach this intricate texture? Should he relay or replay it, replay   4 Cited in Linda Reinfeld, “Help Is On The Way: Robert Creeley Reviews Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue,” The American Book Review 14, no. 6 (February/March 1993): 18.   5 Bernstein, “Sign Under Test,” 161.   6 Charles Bernstein, With Strings: Poems (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), xi–xii.

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or reply, replay or replace, replace or lace, lace or unbind, unbind or bind bound to interpret, or misinterpret the essence bound to interpret the husk of which art is made, as Bernstein himself once claimed? In recent years, Bernstein himself has been more and more involved in translating poetry, from Catullus to Mandelstam, Khlebnikov, Apollinaire, Paul Celan, and more. He once wrote, “the translation of poetry is never more than an extension of the practice of poetry” (“How Empty Is My Bread Pudding”).7 As he told me in a private interview recently, I disagree with Robert Frost’s often quoted remark that poetry ‘is lost . . . in translation.’ For me, poetry is always a kind of translation, transformation, transposition, and metamorphosis. There is nothing ‘outside’ translation: no original poem or idea, nor one perfect translation. It’s a matter of choosing among versions. Translation is a form of reading or interpreting or thinking with the poem. In that sense, there can be no experiencing the poem, even in your own language, without translating. Without translation the poem remains just a text, a document, a series of inert words. Poetry is what is found in translation.8

This attitude towards translation also characterizes Bernstein as a language poet. Perhaps Bernstein is a language poet in the Poundian sense: “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”9 (I first met Charles Bernstein at a conference on Pound). In other words, Bernstein’s poetry is meaningful sound or reverberating sound-meaning. In Russian, I coined the compound word zvukosmysl (literally, “sound-meaning” or “sound-sense”) to   7 Charles Bernstein, “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” in Recalculating (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 84.   8 From the essay “Of Time and the Line” in a somewhat shorter form and a complete interview, including the above citation, were published in Arcade, an electronic journal of Stanford University (November 13, 2015): http://arcade.stanford.edu/ content/ charles-bernstein-time-and-line.  9 Pound, ABC, 36.

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apply to both Khlebnikov and Mandelstam. I would even suggest that in at least one respect, Khlebnikov’s zaum’ is akin to Eliot’s “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti” at the end of The Waste Land: not only the world itself but poetry as such is beyond understanding and resists interpretation. As Mandelstam wrote, very much like Eliot in “The Three Voices,” the voice of music in poetry is incomprehensible without meaning, but if poetry is reduced only to meaning, “the sheets on the bed have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night.”10 In 1986, Bernstein wrote, “there are no thoughts except through language [. . .]. The look of the natural [is] constructed, programmatic— artful [. . .] there is no normal look or sound to a poem. Every element is intended, chosen. That is what makes a thing a poem. . . Fundamentally, construction is at the heart of writing.”11 However, Bernstein also transforms language into perceptible possibilities, or rather impossibilities, of perception: a marriage of sound and sense. He explores the limits of impossibility to find out what is possible. He not only pushes language to its limit, extending its boundaries, but he also pushes reality itself to its limit, his keen eye perceiving the irreality and absurdity of many things in our life, and he pushes reality to its utmost—to absurdity. Doing so, Bernstein distorts or deforms reality with the help of surreal fantasy, as in “Beyond the Valley of the Sophist”: The prolonged hippopotami of the matter swivel for their breakfasts, fall in the middle landing soft with the horse shrill of honeysuckle, to the decimated acid of the sweet tub. They are hobbled, dejected & lie frozen with salted humbling. To the ocean of shorn horizon, averting America’s 10 Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, 397. 11 Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986), 49.

234 The River of Time sentient emptiness, here where the body’s sightless ascent revolts in paltry recompense.12

In his programmatic essay “Introjective Verse,” which is in essence an ironic parody of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” of 1950, Bernstein states that “ebullient denial of reality takes such a verse out of believing [reality]” and that Oscar Wilde was superfluous in claiming that “life imitates art, not the other way round.”13 Opposing closed, hermetic, and reflexive poetry, Olson suggested open, “projective verse” based both on Pound’s ideas14 and on “Objective Verse,” the subject of Louis Zukofski’s 1931 essay “Sincerity and Objectivism.”15 Olson understands poetry as some kind of surge of energy on the one hand; on the other hand, he insists on the inseparability of form and content. Moreover, he claims that form is no more than an extension of content, which contradicts not only the ideas of Gertrude Stein, but also those of Pound and Williams. Bernstein seems to turn all these notions upside down and inside out—from centrifugal to centripetal and from projective to introjective, and he refuses to interpret the meaning outside the specific poetic context, even rejecting the meaning, a very important point for Olson. To paraphrase Marjorie Perloff’s comparison of Stein and Eliot (including Pound and Williams here, as well), one could say that Olson “believes that words have a naming function, that they mean individually, whereas Stein believes [and one might add here Bernstein] that meaning is only conveyed by use, and hence by the

12 Charles Bernstein, “Beyond the Valley of the Sophist,” in Rough Trades (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991), 70. 13 Charles Bernstein, “Introjective Verse,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 111. 14 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 3. “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. Regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.” 15 Louis Zukofski, “Sincerity and Objectivism,” Poetry 37, no. 5 (February 1931): 268–84. This, in turn, is based on the poetics of William Carlos Williams.

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larger context of the sentence” (Perloff’s emphasis).16 Bernstein goes even further, claiming that poetry “makes no promises, no realities outside the poem: no stances only dances. It is the matter of content, this discontent.”17 With postmodern reflection, as if formally refusing to affirm, he compares introjective verse with the uselessness of a baby, by itself and thus by others, crying in its misconception of its relation to culture, that semiotic fluidlessness to which it owes its gigantic existence. If it squall, it shall find much to squall about, and shall squirm too, culture has such flummoxing ways of terrorizing all that is outside. But if it stays inside itself, if it is contained in its infancy as if it is a participant in the life immediately surrounding, it will be able to babble and in its babbling hear what is shared. It is in this sense that the introjective ache, which is the artist’s artlessness in the intimate streets of enfoldment, leads to scales more intimate than the child’s. It’s all so easy. Culture works from irreverence, even in its constructions.18

Like Gertrude Stein, Charles Bernstein uses repetition with seemingly ready-made blocks and each time creates new meanings out of new constructions, like children building with Legos. While in the poem “Mr. Matisse in San Diego” discussed below, Bernstein shifts the meaning as if to conceal the device, in such poems as “Likeness” he lays the device bare. “Likeness” begins in a seemingly simple way: the heart is like the heart the head is like the head the motion is like the motion the lips are like the lips the ocean is like the ocean. . .19 16 Marjorie Perloff, “Gertrude Stein’s Differential Syntax,” in 21st-Century Modernism, 56. 17 Bernstein, “Introjective Verse,” 112. 18 Ibid. 19 Bernstein, “Likeness,” in Girly Man, 140.

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When one gets to such analogies as “the fate is like the fate” or “the man is like the man,” however, the reader realizes that the resemblance is superficial and in reality there can be no similarity, let alone sameness or identity: neither beauty nor word can be the same, and each fate is unique. One then looks closer into the comparisons involving prepositions (“the before is like the before / the after is like the after”), and even they are not similar although their grammatical meaning could be close: “before” and “after,” for instance, depend on the context. Convention is shifted while the traditional meaning is estranged or defamiliarized, to use Shklovsky’s word. Shklovsky’s term is more than appropriate here since the Language School— and Bernstein in particular, as mentioned above—drew on Opoiaz, Russian formalism, the Russian avant-garde, and Khlebnikov. Bernstein, therefore, does not deny meaning but presumes that a word can acquire a different meaning depending on the context. Thus, the surrealist picture in “Beyond the Valley of the Sophist” is preceded by a sharp political thrust: . . . For with Rehnquist & Meese, the only ones with rights are the unborn and the police. & reigning over all, the Great Communicator—master of deceit. No release.20

“The Great Communicator” is of course President Reagan. William Hubbs Rehnquist was the sixteenth Chief Justice, and Edwin Meese was attorney general under Reagan. The surrealist image of “the prolonged hippopotami of the matter”21 is followed by a bitterly grim vision: “You’ll never get to Heaven without a box.”22 Thus, the surrealist picture acquires a frame of sorts. One might wonder whether these lines are a slap in the face of the political establishment, if not of the silent majority’s public opinion, as was the work of the Russian futurists almost a century ago. The piece ends with an ostensibly 20 Bernstein, “Beyond the Valley,” 69. 21 Ibid., 70. 22 Ibid.

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reserved and distanced, but truly hilarious, portrait of a person who entirely lacks imagination: The story is told that a man came to a house noted for its views & was told, look to the West, at the mountain ranges that loom over the land & was told, look to the South, at the turquoise-blue lake shimmering in the blue-bright sun & was taken, then, to an Eastern balcony, overhanging a garden unrivaled in its varieties of plants & flowers & he looked to the North, at the thick-grown forest & listened to the birds that filled the branches of the cascading trees & he was ushered to the Western windows & he said, “But I’ve already seen that.” 23

In “Introjective Verse,” discussed earlier, Bernstein proclaims, “ONE PERCEPTION MUST NEVER LEAD DIRECTLY TO ANOTHER PERCEPTION. It means something very different than what it says, is never a matter of, at no points, (even—I shouldn’t say—of our injuring reality as our weekly bliss) get off it, invoke arrestation, keep out of it, slow down, the perceptions, ours, the evasions, the long-term evasions, none of it, stop it as much as you can, citizen” (Bernstein’s emphasis).24 This might be also considered “a slap in the face” to public opinion. The entire poem “Mr. Matisse in San Diego,” from With Strings, is a surrealist vision-image based on that very principle of dissociation of perception, so to speak. It begins by ridiculing street names taken from Greek Classical antiquity: Take Aeschylus Boulevard ’till you hit Xanthippe Lane & hang a sharp right into Parmenides 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Bernstein, “Introjective Verse,” 111.

238 The River of Time Past Sappho. You’ll see a light at the Orestia overpass; continue to Heraclitus, then bear left at the fork that takes you to Hermes Circle. We’re at 333 Pythagoras.25

The poem then disrupts the associations and perceptions and shifts to inner perception (one might dare to use the conventional word “feelings,” risking the poet’s indignation) with the description of a city landscape filled with junk: By dint of which I have feelings, throttle estuarial fireflies. The floor conjoins the nap, able to point past mucked-up bike parts.26

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once wrote, “if you only knew from what junk poems are born / without feeling any shame. . . .”27 As if illustrating her thought, Bernstein continues with an ostensibly disjunctive, disjointed perception: Art is clatter unveiling its soulfulness. (A runon sentence mentality & a beerparlor lexicon.)28

The reader following the birth of a poem out of junk is nevertheless shocked again by the new, final “disjunctive” turn of the poem:

25 Bernstein, “Mr. Matisse in San Diego” in With Strings, 79. 26 Ibid. 27 Anna Akhmatova, “Tvorchestvo,” in Sekrety remesla: Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Lenigrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’: 1977), 202. 28 Bernstein, “Mr. Matisse in San Diego,” 79.

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For which is buoyant want detains the need flaked out among a trolley’s pumping. Blends inexplicable as it clamps, care to masquerade, bullies to glub. As partly send-up, partly hosing warm.29

Where is Matisse, one wonders? Had he ever been to San Diego? The answer is negative, of course; however, the entire poem evokes this surrealist image rooted in a reality in which art, not just the artist, is out of place. Yet, this is art—born “out of junk.” Those who cherish illusions, it is said, may end up with delusion. After World War I, such delusion resulted in anguish and anxiety for many avant-garde artists and poets. Bernstein, however, is a postmodernist and has an antidote for delusion: his courageous and piercing irony. His verse is in fact full of irony, and some even call him a satirist. True, his poems are hilarious, and one laughs heartily while listening to his subtle play with sound and meaning. However, readers afterward—at least some of them—become strangely sad in contemplation of what just made them laugh, for often they were laughing at themselves and their own lives. Bernstein “laughs through tears unseen to the world,” as the great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol said in Dead Souls.30 Perhaps that Gogolesque quality of Bernstein’s poetry is what was keenly noticed by Marjorie Perloff: “Charles Bernstein is one of the finest poets writing today, and certainly one of the greatest satirists. His poetry presents a profound and highly individual critique of contemporary half-truths, speech forms, and modes of expression, and does it so graphically and with such great good humor that the reader is left breathless—laughing and crying at the same time as the shocks of recognition register.”31 29 Ibid. 30 Nikolai Gogol’, Mertvye dushi, in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1967), 5:157.  31 Bernstein, With Strings: Poems, back cover.

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In his “War Stories,” Bernstein combines satire with allusions and “an orgy of citations” and thus “makes them strange,” defamiliarizing reality itself: War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged. War is a slow boat to heaven and an express train to hell. War is either a failure to communicate or the most direct expression possible. War is the first resort of scoundrels. [. . .] “War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.”32

This last citation, from Filippo Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto,” placed in the context of the poem, estranges Marinetti’s idea to the point of absurdity. Likewise, an estranged allusion to Ezra Pound’s “Literature is news that stays news” from ABC of Reading (already quoted above), defamiliarizes the reality of war as well: “War is news that stays news.”33 With a slightly different purpose of intensifying the absurdity of war, Bernstein cites E. E. Cummings’s great anti-war poem “Plato told you”: “War is ‘a nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el.’”34 Cummings writes about a pragmatic American businessman who will do business as usual even with enemies, in spite of common sense, and disregarding any authority from Plato to Jesus Christ, and from Lao Tsze to General Sherman. The Sixth Avenue El was dismantled in 1939 and sold as scrap metal to the Japanese, who supposedly melted it into ammunition during World War II (and perhaps used it at Pearl Harbor). Hence the conclusion of Bernstein’s poem:

32 Bernstein, “War Stories,” in Girly Man, 149. 33 See “Literature is news that STAYS news” in Pound, ABC, 29. 34 Cummnigs, “Plato told” (1944) in Poems 1923–1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 396.

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War is now. War is us.35

In addition to criticism, irony and satire, another distinctive feature perceived in Bernstein’s poetry is the sense of time and space that is palpable in many poems, but perhaps most strikingly in the poem “Of Time and the Line,” in which the poet merges time, space (in almost a Bakhtinian sense), and poetry (line). Bernstein’s play with the polysemy of the word “line” reveals his attitude toward the past, both recent—“My father pushed a / line of ladies dresses—not down the street / in a pushcart but upstairs in a fact’ry / office”—and historic, going as far back as Adam naming things: “Adam didn’t so much name as delineate.”36 The present stretched to the future in the form of a poetic line uniting time with space. Space is also revealed in a variety of “lines”: “Chairman Mao put forward / Maosist lines,”37 “long lines in Russia,” soup lines in the United States.38 Unlike Kafka, Bergson, or Proust—who were uncomfortable in space and found shelter in time, as Stephen Kern once stated39—Bernstein seems to be comfortably uncomfortable, or uncomfortably comfortable, both in space and time, since his antagonism never acquires the form of agonism. Hence his advice in “Self-Help,” which is in essence above and beyond its irony (“Miss the train?—Great chance to explore the station!”),40 self-irony (“Bald?—Finally, you can touch the sky with the top of your head”),41 mockery (“FBI checking your library check-outs.—I also recommend books on Amazon”),42 and satirical undertones (“President’s lies kill GIs.—He’s so decisive about his core values”).43 It is a very existential poem. So is “Sign under Test,” in which the major themes— poetry (“poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind”), 35 Bernstein, “War Stories,” 154. 36 Charles Bernstein, “Of Time and the Line,” in Rough Trades, 42. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 43. 39 See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 50–51. 40 Bernstein, “Self Help,” in Girly Man, 172. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 173. 43 Ibid., 174.

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language (“if language could talk we would refuse to understand it”),44 ironical and satirical juxtaposition of unreal reality with virtual irreality (“it’s not the absence in the presence but the presence in the absence”)— are again reunited in order to question the essence of being: “If progress is a process, what is the purpose of purpose or the allure of allure?”45 Mesmerized by these blank spots (what he does not know or understand), Bernstein writes, “they have become the sign posts of my consciousness.”46 The poet is not satisfied with what he does, nor is he self-righteous or conceited: “till you get to the backside of where you began. Neither round robin nor oblong sparrow.”47 Yet, for Bernstein there always seems to be a positive outcome from negative knowledge: “what you don’t know is a far cry from what you do.”48 Trying “to re-imagine the possibilities of sentience through the material sentience of language,” Bernstein is nevertheless rediscovering existentialism in order to preserve human dignity and integrity: “the Greeks had an idea of nostos, which is not quite what we call nostalgia. Nostos suggests the political and ethical responsibility of the human being, in orienting herself or himself. You can’t go home again but you can stay tuned to your senses of responsibility.”49 Therefore, I would assert that Bernstein is uniting time, space, and line to make, in the Poundian sense, “language charged with meaning to the utmost degree.”50 My claim is supported not only by his latest book, Recalculating (2013), but by poems dating back at least to 2001, such as Some of These Dayze, dedicated to 9/11. In this book, the profound and shocking merging of time and space reveals a tragic reality that seems unreal. Bernstein quotes his fellow poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge: “Oh, you can imagine it all right from the movies. You can’t just 44 Bernstein, “Sign Under Test,” 161. 45 Ibid., 163. 46 Ibid., 157. 47 Ibid., 158. 48 Ibid., 159. 49 Ibid., 162. 50 Pound, ABC, 36.

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conceive it.”51 Bernstein chronicles the tragedy as an eyewitness: “It’s 8:23 in New York.” Later he shows the degree of the devastation: I took a walk on Liberty Street today. Only it was not the same place as I had known before. They thought they were going to heaven. Large crowds surge inside the police barricades, stretching to get a glimpse of the colossal wreck. All that remains of the towers is two lattice facades standing upright amidst the rubble. These vast and hollow trunks of steel are mocked by the impervious stare of the neighboring buildings that loom, intact, over the vacant center.52

The refrain “They thought they were going to heaven” also connects present time with the historic past of the Holocaust: “Because the park is closed, it’s impossible to get to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. They thought they were going to heaven.”53

As Bernstein himself put it in A Poetics, “seeing these differences is the source of our social power to intervene, to agitate, to provoke, to rethink, to take sides—using all of the formal and cultural rhetoric at our command.”54 To deconstruct destruction is to achieve catharsis. Hence the answer to Adorno’s famous question of how one can write poetry after the Holocaust. Recalculating (2013) addresses this problem on the personal, physical, and metaphysical level: Postmodernism: modernism with a deep sense of guilt. Language is an albatross, a sullen cross, a site of loss. 51 Bernstein, “Today is the next day of your life,” in Girly Man, 20. 52 Bernstein, “Report From Liberty Street” in Girly Man, 26. 53 Ibid.,27. 54 Charles Bernstein, “In the Middle of Modernism,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 97.

244 The River of Time I think of Emma55 climbing the icy rocks of our i­magined world and taking a fatal misstep, one that in the past she could have easily managed, then tumbling, tumbling; in my mind she is yet still in free fall, but I know all too well she hit the ground hard. The hardest thing is not to look back, the endless if onlys, the uninvited what could have beens. I live not with foreknowledge but consequences; wishing I had foreknowledge, suffering the consequences of not.56

Poetry and language might not be able to save us from Hell and damnation, but they cannot help us get to Heaven either. They can, however, help us overcome the tremendous void caused by great tragedy.

55 Emma Bee Bernstein (1985–2008), a gifted daughter of Charles Bernstein and an innovative artist Susan Bee. Emma was an artist, photographer, filmmaker, writer. She mysteriously committed suicide at 23 in Venice, Italy, where she was on a fellowship from Peggy Guggenheim Museum. 56 Bernstein, Recalculating, 172.

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258 Bibliography Murphy, Russell Elliott. “‘It is impossible to say just what I mean’: The Waste Land as Transcendental Meaning.” In T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting: Centenary Essays, edited by Shyamal Bagchee, 51–67. London: Macmillan, 1990. Nanny, Max. “‘Cards Are Queer’: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste Land.” English Studies 62, no. 4 (1981): 335–47. ___. “The Waste Land: A Menippean Satire?”  English Studies 66, no. 6 (1985): 526–35. Nevo, Ruth. “The Waste Land: The Ur-Text of Deconstruction.” New Literary History 13, no. 3 (1982): 453–61. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Nil’sson, N. A. “Bessonnitsa.” In Mandel’shtam i antichnost’, 65–76. Moscow: Mandel’shtamovskoe obshchestvo, 1995. North, Michael. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Obolensky, Dimitri, ed. The Heritage of Russian Verse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987. Reprinted New York: World’s Classics Paperbacks, 1989. ___. The Spirit of Romance. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1953. Pasternak, Boris. Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1989. Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. ___. 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Parnis, Aleksandr, ed. Mir Velimira Khlebnikova. Moscow: Iazyki Russkoi Kul’tury, 2000. Plato. Great Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W. H. Rouse. New York: Mentor, 1956. ___. The Laws. In Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, edited and translated by Allan Gilbert, 59–60. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968.

Bibliography 259 Poliakov, Mark. “Velimir Khlebnikov: Mirovozzrenie i poetika.” In Tvoreniia, edited by M. Poliakov, V. Grigor’ev, A. Parnis, 5–35. Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1986. Polukhina, Valentina. Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960. ___. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. ___. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972. ___. A Draft of XVI Cantos. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925. ___. A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris: Hours Press, 1930; London: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933. ___. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970. ___. Literary Essays. Edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1954. Reprinted 1985. ___. Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. ___. Personnae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1950. Published in England as Personnae: Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber, 1952. New edition published as Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber, 1968. ___. The Pisan Cantos. Edited by Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions, 2003. ___. Poems and Selected Cantos in Russian Translation: A Bilingual Edition. Vol. 1. Edited by Ian Probstein. St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal’, 2003. ___. Selected Poems. Edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928. Reprinted New York: Laughlin, 1957. Peter, John. “A New Interpretation of The Waste Land.” Essays in Criticism 2, no. 3 (1952): 242–66. Probstein, Ian. “Fear and Awe: On Osip Mandelstam’s ‘The Slate Ode.’” Translation of “The Slate Ode” into English. Brooklyn Rail: In Translation. March 2011. http://intranslation. brooklynrail.org/russian/ the-slate-ode. ___. “Hagia Sophia” and “Impressionism.” In Osip Mandelstam: New Translations, edited by Ilya Bernstein, 6, 19. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006.

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Index A

“a realibus ad realiora” (from the real to the most or super–real) 65 Abel, Lionel, 6n15 Acmeism, 65, 67, 69–70, 90, 98 Acton, Anthony, 223 Adorno, Theodor, 243 Agassiz, Louis, 57 Ainalov, Dmitry, 82 Akhmatova, Anna, 33, 190, 202n47, 215, 238 “Tvorchestvo,” 238 Alienation, 19, 43 Allusion, 29, 59–60, 64, 73–75, 107–111, 115–118, 125–128, 133–138, 142, 145, 148, 152, 162, 169, 174n58, 184, 190, 199, 208, 214, 240 Andrews, Bruce, 230 Annensky, Innokentii, 88n47 Anthropomorphist, anthropomorphism, 41 Antipasséiste project, 2 Anxiety of influence, 10 Apollinaire, Guillaume, xv, xix, 2–3, 5–8, 74, 126, 137, 155, 232 Mamelles de Tirésias, Les, 137 “Ocean of Earth,” 74 “Synagogue, The,” 126 “Vendémiaire,” 8 Zone, 6–8 Apollonius of Tyana, 6–7 Ariosto, Ludovico, 208 Aristotle, 159, 184 Arnaut Daniel, 66, 171, 178 Art and Literature, 223 “Art as Device,” xixn39, 18

Art International, 223 Art News, 224 “Artifice of eternity” 48, 50–52, 76, 79, 106 artistic personality (see also poetic personality) xvi–xviii Aseev, Nikolai, 40n127, 44 Ashbery, John, xix, 218–227 Can You Hear, Bird, 219 Flow Chart, The, 218 Interview and Conversations with Ian Probstein, 221–223 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 218, 222, 224–227 Some Trees, 223n15 “Soonest Mended,” 219–221 Tennis Court Oath, The, 223 auctor, author xvi–xvii Auden, W. H., 193, 222, 223n15 “Homage to Clio,” 193 automatization, automatize xv Avant-garde, ix, xiv–xv, xix, 2–3, 8, 34, 45, 123, 230, 236, 239 Averintsev, Sergei, xvi–xvii

B

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 147 Bachtin, Nicholas, 132–133 Bakhtin, Mikhail, x, xii–xiii, xvi, 21, 31, 79, 122–126, 135–136, 142, 157, 159, 163, 169, 184, 241 Bacigalupo, Massimo, 79, 85, 97n80 Bacon, Francis, xiv Bagchee, Shyamal, 129n34 Bann, Stephen, xiin13 Baratynsky, Evgenii, 74, 188

Index 267 “Last Poet” (Poslednii poet), 188n2 “Skull” (Cherep), 74 Barbusse, Henri, 74 Fire, 74 Barinova, Galina, 71 Barnstone, Willis, 75n112 Bartel, Max, 74 “To the Unknown Soldier,” 74 “Verdun,” 74 Barzun, Henri-Martin, xv, xix, 3–4 Baudelaire, Charles, 50, 139, 169 Fleurs du mal, Les, 139 Paradis artificiels, Les 50 Beckett, Samuel, 201n44–45 Bedient, Calvin, 123–124, 129 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 127, 165–166 Bely, Andrei, xi Peterburg, xi Benedikter, Roland, 224 Benn, Gotfried, 103 Bentley, Joseph, 129 Bergonzi, Bernard, 137n70, 138n70 Bergson, Henri, xiii, 93–94, 159, 174, 181, 241 Bernstein, Charles, xix, 230–244 “Beyond the Valley of the Sophist,” 230, 233–234, 236 “How Empty Is My Bread Pudding,” 232 “Introjective Verse,” 234–237 “Likeness,” 235 “Mr. Matisse in San Diego,” 235–239 “Of Time and the Line,” 241 Recalculating, 232n7, 242–244 “Report from Liberty Street,” 243 “Self-Help,” 241 “Sign Under Test,” 230–231, 241–242 Some of These Dayze, 242 With Strings, 231, 237 “War Stories,” 240–241 Bernstein, Emma Bee, 244 Bessenbrugge, Mei-Mei, 242–243 beyonsense (see also trans-sense, zaum’) xv, 17 Bhagavad-Gita, 166–167 Bishop, Elizabeth, 222

Blake, William, ix, 170, 196–198, 218 “Fly, The,” 196–197 “Songs of Experience,” 170, 196 Blake, Patricia, 39n123 Bloch, Marc, 192 Blok, Alexander, 14, 73, 88n47, 149, 213 “Scythians” (Skify), 149 “Twelve, The” (Dvenadtsat’), 14, 149 Bloom, Harold, 10, 50n18, 96n75, 131n44, 150n109, 218 Boas, George, 49 Borges, Jorge Luis, 125, 170, 200, 205, 210 “Ars Poetica,” 205 “Garden, The,” 170 Boris Godunov, 44n137 Borromini, Francesco, 208 Bosch, Hieronymus, 150 Bowlt, John, xiin13 Bowra, I. A., 143 Bradley, F. H., 156–157, 169, 172, 174 Brecht, Bertold, 19 Bridges, Ursula, 103n108 Brodsky, Joseph, 185, 187–216 “Café Trieste: San Francisco,” 205 “Catastrophes in the Air,” 211 “Child of Civilization, The,” 212 “Condition We Call Exile, The,” 194–195 “End of a Beautiful Era, The” (Konets prekrasnoi epokhi), 195–196, 207, 210–211 “Fifth Anniversary, The” (Piataia godovshchina), 206–207 “Fin de Siècle,” 198–200, 202, 210, 214 “Fly, The” (Mukha), 196–198 “Great Elegy for John Donne, The,” 200 “Hawk’s Cry in Autumn, The” (Osennii krik iastreba), 195 “Ithaca,” 204–205 “Letters from the Ming Dynasty,” 206–207 “Lullaby of Cape Cod” (Kolybel’naia Treskovogo mysa), 190, 199–200, 210–211

268 Index Marbles (Mramor), 214–216 “Mexican Divertimento,” 206 “Night Flight” (Nochnoi polet), 190 “Odysseus to Telemachus,” 202–204 “Part of Speech, A,” 207 “Piazza Mattei,” 207–209 “Post Aetatem Nostram,” 214 “Profile of Clio,” 192–193, 200, 210 “To Susan Martin,” 205 “To Urania,” 188, 190–191, 195–196, 200, 203, 207 Brooker, Jewel Spears, 129–131, 156–157, 168–169, 173n57, 174 Brooks, Cleanth, 128, 138–139, 142n87, 143, 148, 151–153 Brown, Clarence, 79n6, 80n10 Brown, Edward J., xivn24, 9n2, 13n15, 28n84, 31n96, 33n102, 41n129 Broyde, Steven, 86 Brunetto Latini, 178 Bryusov, Valery, 12 Buddhism, Buddhist, 146, 148, 151 Buonarotti, Michelangelo, 208 Burago, Anna, 72n106 Burbank, John, 19n36 Burke, Kenneth, 102 Burliuk, David, 11, 28, 37, 44 Burliuk, Vladimir, 11 Bush, Ronald, 80–81 Byron, George Gordon, 62

C

Caesura, 164 Calligrammes, calligrams, 7 Cappeluti, Jo-Anne, 124, 129 Carnival, 11, 31, 122–123, 138 Cassirer, Ernst, 144 catalogue (in poetry) 27, 200–202 Catullus, 87, 208, 232 Cavafy, C. P., 205, 210 “Ithaca,” 205 Cavanagh, Clare, 48–49, 66, 78, 82, 86–87, 88n48, 95, 98–99, 125 Celan, Paul, 232 Cendrars, Blaise, xv, xix, 3–5 Chaadaev, Petr, 113, 117 Chateaubriand, François-René, 88n47 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 133–135, 138

Canterberry Tales, 133–135, 138 Chagall, Mark, 71 Charles I, 158, 180, 185 Cheka (emergency committee) 26 Chevreul, M. E., 4 Chipp, Hershel, 6n15 Chirico, Giorgio de, 74 Chronotope, chronotopic, ix–xiii, 2, 47, 79–80, 123, 135–136, 138, 142, 153, 157–159, 163, 169, 181 Chukovsky, Korney, 28, 33–34, 36n115 Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, 230 Cohan, George M., 130 Fifty Miles From Boston, 130 Cohen, Arthur, 4n13 Conrad, Joseph, 130, 168 Heart of Darkness, 130, 168 Constructive device (of plot formation) 139, 152 Cook, Eleanor, 150 Copernicus, 25, 29 Correggio, 29 Couleurs simultanées, 4 Cowper, William, 218 Creeley, Robert, 222, 231 Cromwell, Thomas, 158 cubism, cubists, 5–6, 14–15, 31 Cuda, Anthony, 164n35 Cummings, E. E., 240 “Plato Told You,” 240

D

Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary, 88n48 Dante, x, 49, 54, 61, 63, 66, 68, 76–77, 96, 106, 128, 150, 152–153, 171, 177–179, 184, 194–195 Divine Comedy (Divina Comedia), 49, 128, 153, 177 Hell (Inferno), 76, 194 Purgatorio, 171 Dartona, Georgius, 96n77 Davie, Donald, 92 Day, John, 142 “Parliament of Bees, The,” 142 Deautomatization, 19n36 De Born, Bertrand, 171 Deconstruct 155, 243

Index 269 Deconstruction 128, 243 Defamiliarization (see also estrangement) xix, 6, 39, 126, 128, 143, 146, 206, 240 De Gourmont, Remy, 180 Dehumanization, 2 Deification, 162 Dekker, George, 79, 95 Delaunay, Robert, 3–4 Delaunay, Sonia, 4 Del Mar, Alexander, 80 De Man, Paul, 50–51, 103n107 Derzhavin, Gavrila, 29, 74, 84n30, 88, 93–94, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117–118, 198, 210, 215 “River of Time, The” (Reka vremen), 29, 84n30, 88, 93–94, 109, 198 “True Happiness”, 117–118 Des Imagistes, 70 Dharma, 167 Diachronic, x, 5, 108, 112 Dial, The, 145 Dialogism, 122–124, 127–128, 132–134, 138, 14 140, 145, 148, 152–153, 184, 219 dialogic imagination, 122, 127, 130, 184 Dickens, Charles, 130 Our Mutual Friend, 130 Didactic, xvii, 131, 224 Di Giovanni, Thomas Norman, 205n53 Dilthey, Wilhelm, xvii Dissociation, of sensibility 154 of perception, 237 Divus, Andeas, 96, 96n76, 97 Dolnik, 189 Dolgopolov, Leonid, xi Dominant, xiii, 39–40, 79, 126, 159 Donoghue, Denis, 100, 102 Dostoevsky, Fedor, xi, 9, 21, 122–123 Douglas, Charlotte, xvn25, 24n65 Drew, Elizabeth, 174 Durée (Bergsonian), 93, 174 Dzerzhinsky, Felix Edmundovich, 26

E

Eagle, Herbert, 9n3, 48n2 Eikhenbaum, Boris, xviii Einstein, Albert, xi–xii, 24, 73, 145 Eisenstein, Sergei, 128 Ekphrasis, 224–225 Elder Edda, The, x Electronic Poetry Center, 230 Eliade, Mircea, 144 Eliot, T. S., xix, 48–49, 64, 66, 69, 78, 80, 94, 97, 103, 122–185, 192–193, 213–214, 218, 220, 233–234 Ash Wednesday, 125, 127, 142, 165, 170, 176 Family Reunion, The, 170 “Fire Sermon, The,” 131, 141, 146, 151 Four Quartets, 125, 154–185, 192 “Burnt Norton,” 136–137, 157–161, 164, 169–173, 175, 178, 183 “Dry salvages, The,” 80n11, 146, 158, 160, 162, 164–172, 177, 181, 183 “East Coker,” 157–158, 161, 163–164, 177–179, 192 “Little Gidding,” 94n69, 141, 146– 147, 154, 156–165, 175–184, 193, 213 “Game of Chess, A,” 140, 143, 146, 150 Gerontion, 131–132, 134 Hollow Men, The, 125, 130, 168, 170 “Journey of the Magi,” 125, 132 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The,” 125–126, 129n31, 130, 133, 138n70 “Marina,” 125 Murder in the Cathedral, 158 “Portrait of a Lady,” 125–127 Rock, The, 147, 158, 161 “Three Voices of Poetry, The,” 144, 163, 233 Waste Land, The, 97, 122–153, 168, 170–172, 184, 233 Eliot, Vivienne, 136n62, 167 Ellmann, Richard, 105, 131, 140 Emerson, Caryl, xn1, 125n13

270 Index Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 180 Epic, x, xvii, 31, 65, 95, 106, 123, 125, 128, 144, 153, 184–185, 198, 202, 204 Epistemology, epistemological approach 129, 157 Eschenbach, Volfram von, 143 Parzival, 143 Estrangement xix, 18, 202, see also defamiliarization Etkind, Efim, 62–63, 89 Evans, Dansby, 133–134 Euclid, 5, 12

F

Falk, Robert 71 Fedorov, Nikolai, 11–12, 14, 18 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 220 Finneran, Richard J., 51, 52n23, Flammarion, Nicolas Camille, 74 Flaubert, Gustav, 27, 29 Temptation of St. Antony, 27, 29 Flint, R. W., 3n4 Flood, Raymond, 157n12 Frank, Armin, 129 Frazer, James 130, 138, 144, 168 Golden Bough, The, 130, 144, 168 Freidin, Gregory, 68 Frost, Robert, 232 Froula, Christine, 97 Frye, Northrop, 13, 51, 101–103, 124–125, 127–128, 130, 131n40, 170, 180, 183, 202 Futurism, futurists, x, xv, xix, 2, 5, 8–11, 18, 23, 27–38, 44, 48, 69–71, 74, 77, 82, 155, 230, 236, 240

G

Galatskaia, Natal’ia, 190 Gardner, Helen, 128, 141–142, 146, 153, 158, 161, 164, 170, 176, 177n68, 179–180, 192 Garrod, H. W., 50n17 Gasparov, Boris, xvi Gasparov, Mikhail L., 29, 58, 64, 74, 76, 115, 190 Gertsen, Alexander, 88n47

Gilgamesh, x Ginsberg, Allen, 220 Ginzburg, Carlo, 19 Glad, John, 34n108 Glanze, Walter D., 225n18 Gogol, Nikolai, xi, 88n47, 199, 207, 239 Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi), 239 Notes of a Madman (Zapiski sumasshedshego), 207 “Vii,” 199 Goldsmith, Oliver, 145 Goncharova, Natalia, 230 Gordin, Iakov, 188n1 Gordon, Lyndall, 136, 154, 157–158, 167, 170–171, 176, 182 Gospel, 26 Grigor’ev, Appolon, 88n47 Grigor’ev, Viktor, 27 Grits, T., 12n14, 23n62, 28n82

H

Hale, Emily, 136, 154n1, 157 Hall, Donald, 158n19 Han, Anna, 14 Hansen-Löve, Aage, 82 Harris, Jane Gary, 49n6 Hatlen, Burton, 49, 77n117 Hayward, Max, 39n123 Hecht, Anthony, 211n69 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42, 182 Heidegger, Martin, 144, 211 Hellenism 49, 66, 77 Heraclitus, x, 169, 172, 174–175, 184, 238 Hermeneutics, xv Hesiod, xvii, 61, 86, 91 Theogonia, 61, 86 Hesse, Herman, 169 Steppenwulf, Der, 169 Heteroglossia, 135 Hilber, Judith, 224 Hitler, Adolf, 163, 230 Hokusai, 29 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 62, 106 Holquist, Michael, xn1, 125n13 Homer, x, xvii, 53, 66, 80, 95–99, 103, 106, 144, 169, 202–204

Index 271 Iliad, xiii, 99 Odyssey, 96, 99 Hollander, John, 105n115 Horace, 81, 208, 215, 227 “Exegi monumentum,” 227 Hus, Jan, 25 Husserl, Edmund, 168 Huxley, Aldous, 137, 138n70 Crome Yellow, 137, 138n70

I

Impersonal poetry, 140, 185 intonational system xv, xviii, 39–40, 198 Introjective verse 234–235, 237 Ionkis, Greta E., 128n29 Ivan the Terrible, 44n137 Ivanov, Vyacheslav I., 12, 16, 49n10, 65, 116, 149 Ivanov, Vyacheslav V., 24, 73

J

Jaccard, Jean-Philippe, 45 Jakobson, Roman, xiii–xiv, 9n2, 10, 13, 19–22, 32, 33n102, 39n124, 40–41, 44, 54n34 Jangfeldt, Bengt, 19n38 Joyce, James, 131, 145, 185, 195 Ulysses, 138, 145, 185 Juana Inés de la Cruz, 201 Justinian, 80–83, 85

K

Kafka, Franz, 241 Kakutani, Michiko, 219 Kaluza, Theodore, 24 Kamensky, Vassilii, 37 Kandinsky, Wassily, 230 Keane, Patric, J., 100n93–94 Kearns, George, 79 Keats, John, 50–51, 62, 101, 162, 173, 174n58, 226 “Immortal Bird,” 50 “Ode to a Nightingale,” 50–51 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 50–51, 62, 162, 226 Keeley, Edmund, 205n52 Kenner, Hugh, 50–51, 80, 97, 150

Kermode, Frank, 105, 140n82 Kern, Stephen, xi–xii, xv, 2, 4n11, 5n14, 6, 7n19, 241 Khardzhiev, Nikolai, 12n14, 23n62, 114 Kharms, Daniil, 45 Khlebnikov, Velimir, x, xv, xix, 5, 7, 9–33, 36, 42–44, 70, 115, 155, 184–185, 213, 230, 231, 233, 236 As I am Easy (Azy iz Uzy), 7, 26, 29 Children of the Otter, The (Deti vydry), 25 “City of the Future” (“Gorod budushchego”), 14–15 Crane (Zhuravl’), 13, 14n19 “Harmonious World” (Ladomir), 14, 16, 27, 29 Gods (Bogi), 27, 29n85 “Grasshopper” (Kuznechik), 17, 20 “Incantantation by Laughter” (Zakliatie smekhom), 20 “Madam Lenin” (Gospozha Lenin), 31 “Moscow of the Future” (Moskva budushchego), 15 “Night before the Soviets, The” (Noch’ pered sovetami), 14 “Night in the Trench” (Noch’ v okope), 22 “Night Search” (Nochnoi obysk), 14 “October on the Neva River” (Oktiabr’ na Neve), 21 “Razin’s Boat” (Ustrug Razina), 14 “Solitary Player, The,” 70 Tables of Fate, The (Doski sud’by), 24 “To All” (Vsem), 43 Tyrant without ‘T’ (Tiran bez T), 14 War in a Mousetrap, The (Voina v myshelovke), 23–24 Zangezi, 14, 19, 25, 27, 29–31 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 117 Kierkegaard, Søren, 211 Kitchen, Martha T., 94n65, 109n5, 117n43, 198n36 Kjellberg, Ann, 188n1 Kline, George L., 203n48, 210n67 Knox, Jane, xiin13 Kolmogorov, A. N., 40n127

272 Index Kondratov, A. M., 40n127 Koran, 26, 30n88 Kostrowicki, Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary, see Apollinaire Kovaleva, Irina, 86–87 Kreisler, Fritz, 71 Krieger, Murray, 224 Kruchonykh, Aleksei, xv, 10, 17–18, 28, 45, 230 Kuleshov, Lev 128 Kullé, Viktor, 205, 214n84 Kuznetsov, Sergei, 213–214

L

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (poets), 230 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 54–56, 58, 213 Langland, William 164 Piers Ploughman, 164 Larisch, Marie, 135 Lawton, Anna, 9n3, 48n2 Laying bare, 20, 22 Leavis, F. R., 128 Lehman, David, 7n18, 8n21 Lehman, John, 158n20 Lenin, Vladimir, 39, 42, 86, 163 Leo the Wise, 80, 85, 104 Eparch’s Book, The, 80, 104 Leont’ev, Konstantin, 84 Lermontov, Mikhail, 74, 88n47, 110, 113, 119 “Demon,” 74 “Flinty Way” (Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu), 110, 119 “Word Born of Fire and Light, A,” 113, 119 Levin, Yuri, 73, 90 Levine, Madeline G., 56n41, 82n19 Levitsky, Alexander, 94n65, 109n5, 117n43, 198n36 Lewis, Kathy, 34n108 Lidin, Vladimir, 74 Grave of the Unknown Soldier, The, 74 Lifshits, Benedikt, 74 Link, Constance, 49n6 Linnaeus, Carolus, 57–58, 200

Lipkin, S. I., 74n111 Li Po, 94–95 “Exile’s Letter,” 94 Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 12, 16, 23 Logopœia, 69 Logos, 69–70, 172, 175 Lockwood, Michael, 157n12 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 25, 74, 99, 109 Lönnqvist, Barbara, 30 Loseff, Lev, 190n7 Lost generation, 128 Lotman, Yuri M., 54n34, 124, 191–192 Lotman, Mikhail Iu., 191–192 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 49 Lukian, 29 Zeus Tragik, 29 Lyapunov, Vadim, 133n46 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 220, 224 Lyrical hero 8, 21, 24, 34, 50–51, 79, 85, 91, 94–95, 97, 99, 102, 105–106, 131, 147, 152, 178–179, 185, 194–199, 204–205, 210

M

Make (making) it new, xixn39, 65, 70, 125, 127, 130, 145 Makin, Peter, 79–80, 92n60, 97 Malevich, Kazimir, 230 Mallarmé, Stephan, 169 Malmstad, John, 82n18 Maliavin, Vladimir, 94–95 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 55, 63n71, 71–72, 74, 88, 98, 191 Second Book, The (Vtoraia kniga), 72 Mandelstam, Osip, xviii–xix, 20, 44, 48–50, 53–70, 73–91, 93–95, 97–101, 103, 106–119, 125, 133, 152, 155, 178, 190, 198–199, 202n47, 205, 208–210, 212–213, 232–233 “Actor and Worker” (Akter i rabochii), 116 “Age, The” (Vek), 64–65, 87, 94, 101 “Bloody Mystery of January Ninth, The” (Krovavaia misteriia 9 ianvaria), 116

Index 273 “Conversation about Dante” (Razgovor o Dante), 68, 87, 110, 112, 117, 125, 133, 233n10 “For the Glory of the Future Ages,” 74n111 “Hagia Sophia,” 56, 78, 81–84 “Horseshoe Finder, The” (Nashedshii podkovu), 64, 80, 85–89, 91, 93, 107, 112–114 “Impressionism,” 71 “Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sails,” 80, 95, 97–98 “January 1, 1924” (1 ianvaria 1924), 64–65, 87–88, 101, 108, 112, 119, 198 “Lamark,” 54–58, 213 “Morning of Acmeism” (Utro akmeizma), 65, 67, 69 “Nature of Word” (O prirode slova), 66–67 “Noise of Time, The” (Shum vremeni), 84, 115 “Octaves, The,” 55–56, 58, 81, 100–101 “Petr Chaadaev”, 113 “Petropolis”, 113 “Slate Ode, The” (Grifel’naia oda), 64, 107–119 “Stalin’s Ode,” 58 “Stanzas,” 58 Stone (Kamen’), 64, 115 “The thread of gold cordial. . . ,” 79n6, 80, 97n81, 98, 205n51 Tristia, 115 “Twilight of Freedom” (Sumerki svobody), 86 “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate), 65, 73–76 “When Psyche-life” (Kogda Psikheiazhizn’), 113 “Word and Culture, The” (Slovo i kul’tura), 90 “Za Paganini dlinnopalym,” 71 Manifesto of a Flying Federation of Futurists, 37

Mao Zedong, 163, 230, 241 Marinetti, Filippo, 2–3, 5, 10, 69, 155, 240 Markov, Vladimir, 149n108 Marlowe, Christopher, 127, 152 Marvell, Andrew, 133, 142, 218 “To His Coy Mistress,” 142 Mask (see also Personae), 91, 124, 140–141, 204 Matyushin, Mikhail, 23 Matthiessen, F. O., 128, 138–139, 149, 162–163 Mayakovsky Vladimir, x, xix, 2, 5, 8–13, 16, 26, 28, 31–42, 44, 69, 74n111, 155, 230 “At the Top of my Voice” (Vo ves’ golos), 36n116, 42 Bathhouse (Bania), 42 Bedbug (Klop), 42 Cloud in Trousers (Oblako v shtanakh), 34–35 “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry” (Razgovor s Fininspektorom o poezii), 36–39 “Homeward!” (Domoi!), 40 “I” (Ia), 41 Good (Khorosho), 26, 39, 42 Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, 39, 42 Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, 9, 33 At the Top of My Lungs (Vo ves’ golos), 36n116, 42 War and Peace (Voina i mir), 36 “What about you?” (A vy noktiurn sygrat’ smogli by?), 32 McDowell, Frederick, P. W., 224n17 McGee, Vern W., 125n13 Meares, Bernard, 72n107, 98n84 Medievalism, 49, 61, 66, 76–78 Meese, Edwin, 236 Meletinskii, Eleazar, xvi Melodics, xviii, Melopœia, 69 Menard, Louis, 136n62 Mendelson, Edward, 193n25

274 Index Menippean satire, 21, 31, 122–123, 138, 141 Merrill, James, 223 Merwin, W. S., 79n6, 80n10, 205n53 Metaphysical, 23, 63, 112–113, 156, 168, 194, 243 Fear, 119, 179 Poetry, 154n2, 164, 200–202, 218 Quest, 107 Scandal, xi Metaphysics, 156, 211 Mets, A. G., 49n9 Meyers, Alan, 206n55, 214n86 Middleton, Thomas 140 Women Beware Women, 140 Mikushevich, Vladimir, xvii, 110–111 Militello, Joseph, 131 Miller, Jane Ann, 198n34 Milton, John, x, 74n111, 184, 188 Paradise Lost, 74n111 Mimesis, 71, 77, 183 Mimetic, xviii, 68 Minkowski, Hermann, 23 Miturich, Petr, 9n1, 23 modernism, xiv, 48, 129, 153, 220, 243 Monogatari, 29 Moody, David, 156–158, 160, 163–164, 169, 171, 174–175 Moore, Marianne, 218 Morton, A. L., 128, 152 Motif, xvii–xviii, 10n9, 44, 61, 95, 110–115, 119, 128, 133–134, 141, 161, 178, 181, 191, 198, 203–207, 221 Motive, xi, xvi–xviii, 8, 10n9, 15, 18, 22, 29, 42, 63, 92, 95, 101, 109, 119, 135, 184, 198, 220, 222, 227 Mukařovsky, Jan, 19n36 Murillo, Esteban, 29 Murphy, Russell Elliott, 129, 132 Musset, Alfred de, 88n47 Myth, 6, 14, 25, 79, 82, 128–129, 138–145, 151–153, 184, 202 Mythological, 7 consciousness 144–145

past, 185 time, 25, 144 Mythology, 11–12, 128

N

Nanny, Max, 123–124, 129, 140 Nature, xiii–xiv, 20–28, 30, 48–61, 66–69, 73, 76–79, 100–106, 169, 171, 199, 212–214, 226–227 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 88n47 Nerler, Pavel, xviiin35 Nerval, Gérard de, 152 Nesterov, Anton, 86–87, 87n42 Nevo, Ruth, 128–129 New Criticism 128 Newsweek, 224 New York Herald Tribune, 223 New York Magazine, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35, 106, 148, 155 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 35 Nil’sson, N. A., 99 nostalgia (craving) for world culture, 60, 63, 98, 125, Novalis, 110

O

OBERIU (Union of Real Art) 45 Objective correlative, 140–141 Objectivism 234 Obolensky, Dimitri, 37n119, 38n122 Oleinikov, Nikolai, 45 Olson, Charles, 234 “Projective Verse,” 234 OPOIAZ, 236 Ortega y Gasset, José, xiv, 2, 71 Orwell, George, 214, 230 1984, 214 Ostricker, Alicia, 197n33 Ovid, 61, 87, 195, 208 Amores, 87 Ozick, Cynthia, 129n31

P

Paganini, Niccolò, 71 Paradeigma, 174 Parmigianino, Francesco, 224–227

Index 275 Parnis, A., 11n10 Parody, 123, 126, 134, 139, 143, 152, 219, 234 parole in libertà 10 Pasternak, Boris, 31, 64–65 Life, My Sister, 65 Pearlman, Daniel, 79 Pearson, John, 33n100, 33n103–104, 34n106, 36n115 Perelman, Bob, 34n108 Perez, Frank, 133–134 Perloff, Marjorie, xv, 3–4, 17, 23, 129, 218, 234–235, 239 persona (see also mask) 85, 91, 124–125, 141, 157, 206 personal tone, xviii, 39 Perspectivism, xiv, 71 Peter, John, 136n62 Peter the Great, 86 Petronius, 132–134 Phanopœia, 69 Philostratus, 7 Pindar, 86–87 Eleventh Pythian Ode, 87 Fifth Nemean Ode, 87 Fourth Isthmian Ode, 86 Ninth Olympian Ode, 87 Seventh Nemean Ode, 86 Sixth Olympian Ode, 86 Third Nemean Ode, 86 Third Pythian Ode, 86 Plane (see also sail), 19, 31, 38, 136, 145, 185 Plastic space, xviii Plato, 51, 80, 124, 212, 240 Laws, 124 “Phaedo,” 212 Republic, 124 Plotinus, 51 Poetic etymology 21 language, 10, 19n36, 80, motive xi, xvi–xviii, 8, 10 18, 29, 42, 109, 119, 184, 198 personality (see also artistic personality), xvi–xviii, 10, 142 Poggioli, Renato, xiv, 2–3

Poincaré, Henri, 23 Poliakov, Mark, 11n10, 21–22, 24n68, 25 Polukhina, Valentina, 190n7, 195, 204n49, 211 Poly-dimensional space 24, Polyglossy, 135 Polyphony, 123, 127, 148 Pomorska, Krystyna, xiii, 20n41, 22 Popova, Liubov’, 230 Postmodernist, postmodern xix, 125, 220, 224, 235, 239, 243 Post-structuralism, 128, Pound, Ezra, xix, 17, 18n30, 48–50, 57–61, 64–87, 90–106, 124–128, 131–132, 135, 139, 141, 144–145, 147, 155, 171, 174, 184–185, 204–206, 218, 232, 234, 240, 242 ABC of Reading, 18n30, 57, 69–70, 76n116, 95n70, 232n9, 240, 242n50 “Before Sleep”, 70n99 Canto 47, 90–91 Canto 96, 80 Canto 115, 73 Cantos, The, 92 “Cino,” 124 “De Aegypto,” 124 Drafts and Fragments, 50, 57, 79 “Heather”, 70 “Hell Cantos,” 73, 139 Hugh Selvyn Mauberley, 92 “La Fraisne,” 124 Pisan Cantos, 50, 58, 79 Rock-Drill Cantos, 79n9 “Seafarer, The,” 86, 91–96 Thrones, 79n9, 81, 85 “Vorticism,” 67, 69–70 Paz, Octavio, 201n44 PennSound, 230 Powers, Sharon B., xiii18 Prague school, 19 Procopius of Caesarea, 82 Projective verse, 234 Propp, Vladimir, xvin26 Przybylski, Ryszard, 56, 61–62, 82–84 Pugachev, Emel’ian, 20, 25

276 Index Pushkin, Alexander, 9, 21, 61, 90, 109, 111, 116–117, 126, 208, 215 Eugene Onegin, 126 “My Pedigree” (Moia rodoslovnaia), 116

Q

Query, Patric, 136

R

Rabelais, François, 123 Raffel, Burton, 72n106 Rainey, Lawrence, 137–138 Rajan, Balachandra, 125n14, 139n74, 182–183 Razin, Stepan, 16, 25, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 236 Rehnquist, William Hubbs, 236 Realization (literary, poetic), xi, xviii 15, 18, 39 Reavey, George, 39n123, 42n134 Reiman, Donald H., xiiin18 Reinfeld, Linda, 231n4 Remarque, Erich Maria, 74 All Quiet on the Western Front, 74 Richards, I. A., 125 Ridler, Anne, 125 Rigsbee, David, 195n32, 210n68, 211n73 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 126 Robinson, Fred C., 92 Rodchenko, Alexander, 230 Ronen, Omri, 63n71, 64, 88n47, 108–119, 124, 199 Roosevelt, Frederic D. (FDR), 87 Rosenberg, Harold, 225 Rosenthal, M. L., 100n93, 102 Ross, Andrew, 139 ROSTA Windows, 41 Rottenberg, Dorian, 32n99 Rousseau, Henri, 3 Rudat, Wolfgang, 133 Rudy, Stephen, 19n38, 20n41

S

Sagetrieb (Pound), 84 Saint Augustin, 146, 214 Confessions, 146

Sauser, Frédéric-Louis, see Cendrars Scherr, Barry, 188–190 Schmidt, Paul, xvn25, 19n39, 24, 26n71, 30n87–88, 31n92, 41, 70n100 Schuchard, Ron, 164n35 Schuyler, James, 222 Sedakova, Ol’ga, 27 Self-valuing word (self-sufficient, the word as such), 10, 17, 70 Semenko, Irina, 64, 115n32 Seymour-Jones, Carole, 136n62 Shakespear, William, 74, 88, 103, 140–141, 184, 201, 218 Hamlet, 74, 88, 116, 184 King Lear, 141 Sonnet 66, 201–202 Tempest, 140–141 Shapiro, David, 4n13 Shattuck, Roger, 2n1, 3, 7, 8n22, 75n112 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, xiii–xiv, 111, 113, 114n27, 115 “Defence of Poetry, A,” xivn20, 113, 114n27, 115 “Mont Blanc,” xiii, xivn19, 111 Sherrard, Philip, 205n52 Shestov, Lev, 211 Shiftology (sdvigologiia), 17 Shklovsky, Viktor, xii, xixn39, 12, 18, 19, 33n101, 40, 44n139, 126, 139n79, 236 Bow String, A (Tetiva), 19 Shteinberg, Arkadii, xviiin37, 74 “Grave of the Unknown Soldier, The,” 74 “Wolf Hunting,” 74n111 Sidney, Philip, xviii, 127, 136n59, 150n112, 151n119, 171n53, 176 Simon Magus, 6–7 Simultanism, simultaneity xv, 3–8, 34, 80, 101, 168–169, 185 Smith, Grover, 128, 130–131, 137–141, 142n87, 143–153, 158n17, 159–160, 167, 170, 174–175, 182 Sobornost’ (collective harmony) 14 Socrates, 212 Sologub, Fedor, 88n47 Solovyov, Vladimir, 14

Index 277 Song of Roland, The, 66 Sparks, Merrill, 149n108 “speaking picture” xviii, 127, 136, 140, 150–151, 171, 176 Spender, Stephen, 124, 127–129, 144, 147–148, 159–161, 165–166, 170 Spengler, Oswald, 131, 150 Decline of the West, 131 Stalin, Iosif, 40, 58–59, 76, 100, 163, 213, 230 Stamelman, Richard, 224n17, 225–226 Stein, Gertrude, xixn39, 234–235 Steiner, George, x, 18 Steiner, Peter, 19n36 Stepanov, Nikolai, 9n1 Stevens, Wallace, 222 Sturge Moore, Thomas, 103 Strelets (Sagittarius), 70 Supernovel (see also supersaga) 23–28, 30–31, 184–185 Super-real archetypes 16 Surrealism, surrealist 71, 74, 233, 236–237, 239 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 145 “Tiresias,” 145 Symbolism, symbolists, 7, 12, 16, 49, 65–67, 82, 69–71, 77, 82, 101, 129, 138, 143, 149 Synchronic, x, 5, 93, 108, 112, 119

T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 26 Taranovsky, Kiril, 59, 63–64, 113 Tasso, Torquato, 208 Tate, James, 222 Tatlin, Vladimir, 230 Temporal, 21–22, 155, 177, 181 Determinant, x Tennyson, Alfred, 95–96, 136, 145, 152, 204 Mariana, 136 Princess, The, 152 “Ulysses,” 95–96 Theory of everything 24 Theory of relativity xi–xii, xiv, 73

Tiutchev, Fedor, 20–21, 54n34, 114, 117–118, 188, 191, 210, 218 Tolstoy, Lev, 9, 36 War and Peace, 36 Tomashevsky, Boris, xvi, 40n127 Toporov, Vladimir, xvi, 57, 106 Trumpet of Martians, The (Truba Marsian), 24n67, 30 Transcendental, transcendentalist 28, 156, 172 Trans-sense (see also beyonsense, zaum) xv, 17, 19n39 Trilling, Lionel, 96n75 Trotsky, Leo, 41 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 12 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 58, 213 Tufanov, Aleksandr, 45 Twin poem (dvoichatka) 63 Tynianov, Yuri, 9n1, 12, 16, 28, 31, 64, 124n10, 139n79

U

Ufliand, Vladimir, 215n97 Unterecker, John, 52–53, 100n93, 103n108, 104 Upanishads, 151–152 Ut pictura poesis, 140, 150, see also ekphrasis

V

Vail’, Petr, 200, 207, 209 Van Schooneveld, C. H., 63n71 Venclova, Thomas, 205 “Book Eleven,” 205 Vendler, Helen, 218–219, 226 Vengerov, Semen, 70 Vengerova, Zinaida, 70 Verlaine, Paul, 143 “Parsifal,” 143 Vertov, Dziga, 128 Veselovskii, Aleksandr, xvi Villon, François, 60–61, 66, 77 Virgil, 106, 133n48, 202, 204, 208 Eneid, 202 Voloshin, Maximilian, 72 Von Hügel, 53

278 Index Vroon, Ronald, 82n18 Vvedensky, Alexander, 45

W

Wagner, Richard, 135–136 Warren, H. C., 148 Weissbort, Daniel, 34n108, 207n56 Wells, H. G., 13, 26 War of the Worlds, The, 13 Wender, Dorothea, xviin32 Wessling, Donald, 124 Weston, Jessie L., 134, 143–144, 150 Whitman, Walt, 27–28, 200 Whitaker, Thomas, 52 Wieniawski, Henryk, 71 Wilbur, Richard, 223 Wilde, Oscar, 151, 234 Salome, 151 Wilhelm, James J., 79, 81 Williams, William Carlos, 129n31, 234 Williamson, George, 129–130, 135–136, 161 Wilson, Edmund, 152 Witemeyer, Hugh, 79, 92–93 Worth, Dean S., 63n71

Y

Yeats, W. B. xix, 50–53, 73–74, 76–81, 85, 89–90, 97, 99–105, 140, 155, 177–178, 180–181, 212, 226 “Sailing to Byzantium,” 50–53, 78–90, 99–105, 177, 181, 198n35, 212, 226 “Second Coming,” 73 “Tower,The,” 52n23, 103 “Vacillation,” 53n29 Yevtushenko, Evgenii, 223

Z

Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 45 Zasurskii, Iasen, 128n29 Zaum’ (see also beyonsense, trans-sense), xv, 17, 18, 25, 230, 233 Zedlitz, Joseph Christian von, 74 “Night Parade, The” (Die Nächtliche Heerschau), 74 Zhirmunsky, Viktor, 40n127 Zhukovskii, Vasilii, 74 Zielinski, Tadeusz, xiii Zilcosky, John, 155 Zinns, Harriet, 218 Zubova, Lyudmila, 204 Zukofski, Louis, 234