Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

  Professionally, Tozzi was a loose cannon. He criticized the mainstream Futurists and crepuscolari, openly attacking the powerful editors Papini and Prezzolini. He founded his own (short-lived) magazine La Torre in defiance of them, and finally panned a late work by Gabrielle d’Annunzio—one of his early influences—risking publication of his own novel out of the same house. The success he did realize was due in large part to Borgese and Pirandello, who were faithful admirers, and without whose support and editorship, Tozzi would not have published during his lifetime or after.

  Why has Tozzi’s work, even in Italy, only recently started receiving the popular and critical attention commensurate with his extraordinary innovation? In 1923, Italian literary critic Domenico Giuliotti assessed Tozzi’s work in the following way: “Tozzi is not a fun writer—not ‘entertaining,’ as we used to say. That is why he has not had many readers. He is among those writers who dig into the sadness of life, who digs very deeply, one of those writers who is ignored by his contemporaries and left to be discovered much later.” Indeed, it would seem that we have needed almost a century of successors—those who assimilated and embellished the vision of Modernism—as well as the context of his more widely read contemporaries, in order to understand the mechanics and scope of Tozzi’s oeuvre.

  Where Pirandello was interested in self-conscious form, and Italo Svevo in dramatizing psychology, Tozzi reflected on the layer of significance beneath the surface of daily life, to identify and speculate upon what he termed the “mysterious acts of man.” In his aesthetic manifesto “Reading My Way,” Tozzi explains that a mysterious act might be a man pausing along his journey to pick up a pebble. The writer’s task is to present a perspective on such a moment—a perspective, not merely observation, phrased in such a way that it leads us toward an understanding of the simple gesture. Why does the “idiot” fixate on playing cards? Why is a love-hungry man whelmed by a glass of water? Why does a man selling his house give away his dignity? These short stories lay bare the explicable—yet still somehow inexcusable—emotional justification behind our weakest moments and crudest whims: betrayal, violence, intoxication, intolerance, rape, suicide, judgment and murder. Alberto Moravia, a fellow speculator of Freud, said that Tozzi might very well have been “the first Italian writer, who, without meaning to, was an existentialist.”

  Echoing the then current interest in form, Tozzi would say that mere content has no life or even purpose outside of the form in which it is expressed. Here the influence of Edgar Allan Poe can be seen. Poe’s writing certainly gave him permission to explore the darker side of man’s character. But perhaps more significantly, Tozzi practiced the rigorous stylistic architecture articulated in Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” even paraphrasing the following in his own essay: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.”

  Tozzi’s short stories challenge traditional reversals, in which illumination or resolution comes through the reversal itself, performing instead a heightened mock reversal that leads dramatically back to the status quo. In “The Idiot” we have a man whose mental disability keeps him from even fantasizing an escape—the recognition, sadly, belongs to the reader only. In “L’Amore,” in which our hero is offered the chance to confront the object of his desire and realizes that he is capable only of pining, nothing more—his pining, mirror of the mighty ocean, is reduced suddenly to an impotent glass of water. In “House for Sale,” a man’s desperate supplication before three heartless men only leads to further abuse; his inability to act against what he recognizes clearly as his own weakness is the tragedy.

  As Henry James wrote: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Tozzi’s characters operate within the parameters of delusion and that is, perhaps, the key to his place in the twentieth-century canon. By continually encouraging the reader to hope for defiance of tragic destiny—traditional narrative form, Tozzi indoctrinated his readers into the next level of a Modernist sensibility—the inexplicable human character; the mysterious nature of the mundane; the intrigue of plotlessness. It is the unfulfilled promise that Tozzi’s characters, thus his stories, are going to defy classical boundaries that gives them their edge. Through a liberal use of Modernist tropes, lyricism, dialect and the fantastic, Tozzi repeatedly deludes the reader into imagining a narrative world free of formal strictures—liberated into a new literature, where destiny is indeterminate, and a happy ending, or at least a merited one, would be possible.

  Three Poems

  Zinaida Gippius

  —Translated from Russian by Anneta Greenlee

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  ZINAIDA GIPPIUS IS RUSSIA’S foremost female symbolist writer. She was born in 1869 in the province of Tula, and died in 1945, as an exile in Paris. By the turn of the century, Gippius had become the leading Russian woman writer, and her poetic innovations opened the way for later poets such as Anna Akhmatova. Her writing was unavailable in Russia until recently; since the fall of the Communist regime, her work is being rediscovered.

  As the Russian poet Valery Bryusov said of Gippius’s work: “Each poem brings in something new, something that has never before existed in Russian poetry.” Gippius’s poetry has a disquieting quality, reflecting an anxious inner struggle to reconcile the opposing forces of love and hate, faith and disbelief, hope and despair. Gippius herself wrote in her poem “Song” in 1893: “I want that which does not exist.”

  The three poems, appearing here for the first time in English, are from Zinaida Gippius: Stikhi, Vospominania, Dokumentalnaya proza (Nashe Naslediye, Moscow, 1991).

  MIRRORS

  Have you ever seen them?

  In the garden, or in the park—I don’t know.

  Mirrors shone everywhere.

  Down below, in the clearing, on the edge,

  up above, in the birch, in the fir-tree.

  Where soft squirrels leaped,

  where rich branches bent,

  mirrors shone everywhere.

  In the upper mirror—the grass swayed,

  in the lower one a cloud passed …

  But each of them was too sly,

  not happy with just the earth or just the sky,—

  They each repeated the other,

  they each reflected the other …

  In both, the pink of dawn

  blended with the grassy green;

  The earthly and the heavenly were equal

  in this brief mirroring moment.

  SPIDERS

  I am in a narrow cell in this world,

  the cell has a low ceiling.

  In the four corners I see

  four spiders who never tire.

  They are dexterous, fat and dirty.

  They weave and weave, and never stop.

  It is frightening, their ceaseless

  and never changing work.

  They have woven four spider webs

  into one enormous web.

  I look and see their moving backs

  in the dusty, foul-smelling dusk.

  The spider web covers my eyes.

  The web is gray, soft and sticky.

  And the four spiders are glad

  with the gladness of feral beasts.

  COMPLEXITIES

  Why should we return to simplicity?

  Well, I know the reason why.

  But not everyone is able.

  People like me just can’t.

  I’m walking through thorn bushes,

  they grab at me, I cannot get through.

  But even though I fall,

  and never reach a higher simplicity,

  I simply cannot return.

  From The Unknown Fourth Notebook

  THE DIARY OF VASLAV NIJI
NSKY: Unexpurgated Edition

  Vaslav Nijinsky

  —Edited by Joan Acocella, with a translator’s note by Kyril FitzLyon

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THE DIARY OF VASLAV NIJINSKY was written in early 1919, shortly before the great dancer was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nijinsky wrote this diary in four school notebooks, the first three giving an account, in journal form—and in Russian—of his thoughts at the time, the fourth containing sixteen letters that he wrote in French, Russian and Polish to various people while he was at work on the rest of the diary. When Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, finally decided to publish the diary in 1936, she deleted most of the fourth notebook. Of the sixteen letters, she kept only six, inserting them into the main body of the diary. Since its publication, Romola’s version has been the only English edition of the diary, and until recently it was the basis of all other translations. Thus the fourth notebook has remained largely unknown.

  The following five letters from the fourth notebook, selected from the upcoming unexpurgated Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), are being printed here in their entirety for the first time. Three of them—those to the President of the Council of Allied Forces, to Eleanora Nijinsky (Nijinsky’s mother) and to Serge Diaghilev—were included in Romola’s edition, but in heavily bowdlerized form. Romola knew, when she published the diary, that her husband would appear insane to the book’s readers, but she didn’t want him to appear too insane, or insane in the wrong way. To her, he was not so much a madman as a prophet, a humanitarian, who, as she wrote in her preface to the diary, “could not escape … the fate of all great humanitarians—to be sacrificed,” and it was to this pattern that she cut Nijinsky’s manuscript. She deleted parts that might seem improper, including copious material on sex. She also deleted parts that could seem bizarre or tedious, including all the poems in the diary. A case in point is the letter to Diaghilev. She retained Nijinsky’s recriminations against his former lover and employer, but as for the 171-line poem that came in the middle of this outburst—a poem of love, wrath, obsession and complicated word-weaving (together with a little obscenity)—the entire thing was dropped. Romola was not going to allow Nijinsky to be represented bylines such as “I am the Prick, I am the Prick/ I am God in my Prick.” In fairness, it should be said most wives of the period would have made the same decision.

  In the five letters reproduced below, one can track the developing logic of the fourth notebook, its progression from prose to a kind of vatic poetry. In the first two letters Nijinsky writes plainly enough, and with practical goals in mind. He makes requests, gives instructions. But gradually prose becomes verse, and as in the letter to Diaghilev, Nijinsky yields increasingly to the seductions of wordplay, taking the syllables of his words apart, fashioning new words, and again and again juxtaposing words on the basis of sound, or “clanging.”

  None of the letters is dated, but the main text of the diary strongly suggests that they were all written in one day. Indeed, they may well have been written in one sitting, in a single burst of energy. This would explain their increasingly manic character: the forced jocularity, the insistent rhythm, the rush and excitement. By the final letters, what we have, much of the time, is simply a sequence of sounds. Even in these letters, however, Nijinsky is not out of control. Many apparent nonsense lines seem to contain elaborate puns. However difficult they are to read, these letters are very careful sound constructions, something like scat singing.

  The wordplay poses serious translation problems. The last two letters reproduced here, one to Jean Cocteau and one to Jesus, are not translatable. They are given in the original French, much of it spelled phonetically.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The English version of Nijinsky’s Diary published by his wife, Romola, in 1936, and subsequently translated into many other languages, enjoyed a considerable success. It showed the famous dancer to have been a subtle and original thinker, capable of stimulating observations on life, God and man, which, for those who knew him, were quite unexpected. Some forty years later, however, this version of the diary was found to have been the product of very heavy revision. In 1979, shortly after Romola Nijinsky’s death, the diary notebooks were put up for sale, and I was hastily commissioned to translate them for the use of the auction house in describing the notebooks to prospective buyers. From my draft translation, the first attempt at a faithful reproduction of the original, one could see at last the extent of Romola’s editing, including the deletion of about two-fifths of Nijinsky’s text. Because of copyright restrictions, my translation could not be published, though over the years it was apparently made available to scholars, including Peter Ostwald, who quoted from it in his 1991 Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness. Only since the recent release of the copyright have full translations of Nijinsky’s diary begun appearing, including, now, my own.

  I have tried, in my version, to preserve Nijinsky’s highly individual use of words, phrases and syntax. If the translation occasionally appears awkward as a result, it does no more than reflect the awkwardness of the original Russian. One source of difficulty is Nijinsky’s bilingualism, the fact that he was a Pole educated in Russia. Though he thought he was more at home in Russian than in Polish, the diary contains numerous “polonisms.” Occasionally, his turns of phrase and use of words, while perfectly correct in Polish, make little sense in Russian, even if the meaning can be guessed at. At other points, he has difficulties with his Russian vocabulary, confusing one word with another and making the meaning difficult or impossible to discover unless the reader happens to know what word he has in mind.

  If Nijinsky’s vocabulary is sometimes faulty, more often it is simply idiosyncratic. A good example is the meaning he attaches to “feeling” (chuvstvo), a central concept in the diary. To him “feeling” means intuitive perception, the ability to understand something—a person, a situation—by merging with it emotionally. Such understanding, which in his mind can be akin to a spiritual experience, is seldom achieved deliberately, and never by means of what he calls “thinking” or “intellect.” Nijinsky regards thinking, with some contempt, as the antithesis of feeling: a purely cerebral and almost artificial activity, which never penetrates beneath the surface of things. People who merely think are incapable of knowing the truth or conducting intimate relationships. “Thinking” and “intellect” must not, however, be confused with “reason,” which Nijinsky sees as a faculty emanating from God and not subservient to logic.

  Another Nijinskian concept is that of “dryness.” He speaks of people being dried out, but he does not explain what this means. Presumably it means that they have been deprived of the ability to “feel.” Yet another peculiarity is his use of the word “habit.” To have a habit means to be a slave to an artificially acquired (and invariably bad) mode of behavior. To have no habits is to be free of all prejudice.

  Very seldom does Nijinsky refer to something as being “good” or “bad,” but almost always as being “a good thing” or “a bad thing.” (The expression “a terrible thing” is a great favorite of his.) This turn of phrase has been preserved in the translation in spite of stylistic disadvantages.

  I have also chosen not to interfere with Nijinsky’s violations of logic, including his reversals of causal relationships. Though they may be due in part to his linguistic difficulties, these curiosities are more probably a reflection of his disturbed state of mind.

  I have dealt similarly with layout. To Nijinsky his narrative was a flow of consciousness, governed not by logic (“thinking”), but by the association of ideas. One result of this is the scarcity of paragraphing. To introduce additional paragraphing in the translation would certainly help the reader, but it would also impose an order and shape which are lacking in the original, and would therefore misrepresent both his state of mind and his vision of reality as a single, unbroken whole. Likewise, I have followed Nijinsky in his shuttling choices regarding capitalization, a matter of great importance to him.

  Nijinsk
y’s concern with the use of capital and lowercase letters forms part of his interest in the physical aspect of writing, to which he seems to attribute more than a merely artificial or cosmetic significance. The very tools of writing—ink, pens, pencils—are to him a source of curiosity and wonder. He pays close attention to spelling and accuses himself unjustly of being a bad speller. He worries about his handwriting—which is actually quite neat and regular—and makes sporadic attempts to change it. He feels the sheer effort of writing to be such that writers (including himself, presumably) may be called “martyrs,” “similar to the crucified Christ.” Self-identification with Christ and with God is never far from his thoughts. In one way or another, it is a constant theme of the diary.

  One feature of Nijinsky’s writing that could not be reproduced in the translation is the very strong rhythms which mark his poems, and to which he adheres irrespective of any meaning the poetry might or might not possess. These insistent rhythms may be a verbal expression of his experience as a dancer.

  —Kyril FitzLyon

  TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF THE ALLIED FORCES

  Romola Nijinsky, in her edition of the diary, identifies the addressee of this letter as the president of the Council of the Allied Forces. It was because of the revolution and civil war in Russia that Nijinsky had not communicated with his mother in a year and a half.

  —J.A.

  Dear sir, I am a Polish subject. I want nothing from you. I want to ask you to forward this letter. I love my mother, and I want her to know that I am alive. I know that you have a great deal of business to do, but I know that you are a man. You will understand me if you have seen my dances. I know that dancers do not understand business. I understand very well. I am very rich, because I understand business. I ask you to be so kind as to send this letter to my mother under your protection. I know very well that this depends on you. I know very well that you have to show this letter to other authorities. I ask you once again to give me the happiness of sending this letter to my mother. My mother is a sick woman. She has lost one son. She suffers because she cannot see me. She is not a Bolshevik. She is almost 70 years old. She loves me very much. She knows that I am very famous. She knows that I am loved everywhere. She knows that I have very grand connections. She thinks that I am dead because I have not written to her in 1 ½ years. She thinks that I am dancing in England. She is afraid that people will harm me, thinking that I am a Bolshevik. My mother knows very well that I am not a Bolshevik. She knows my love for people. She knows that I do not like violence. She knows that I do not like this fighting with schoolboys. She raised me, and therefore she knows me. I am a man, not a savage animal. I do not like savagery. I do not like Bolsheviks. They can kill me, but I am not afraid. They wanted to kill my mother because she is a bourgeois. I am not a bourgeois. I am a man. I love everyone. I do not want people to die. I love my wife. She is a Hungarian. I traveled with her during the war. I was in France. The French authorities allowed us through. I went through several times. I love France. I wish France very well. I love England. I love Poland. I love Russia. I love Italy. I love the whole world. I am a man, not a savage animal.