The use of sacrilegious motifs in poetry was not, of course, invented by Blok, but rather followed the general Symbolist wish to discard clichéd concepts of universal beauty, propriety, or objective art in favor of the subjective, elitist view of representation with limited disclosure. The previously held convention of the beautiful female representing beauty itself, for instance, was later replaced by the evocation of the masculine—in the poetry of Sologub and Kuzmin—or by the androgynous, in the works of far too many artists to list here. This trend can even be seen from the public reactions to the single-line poem by one of the founders of Symbolism in Russia, Valery Iakovlevich Briusov (1873-1924):
O, close your barren pale legs! (O zakroi svoi blednye nogi. [1894])
The poem’s ambiguity is derived from Briusov’s use of the Russian verb “zakroi” (in its imperative mood meaning either cover something naked, or close something which is open), and its possibly implicit androgyny: to whose legs (male of female) was the poet referring? A. Izmajlov, for example felt it necessary to ask Briusov if he might have meant the legs of Christ taken down from the cross, since the poem would then indeed carry a profound significance for Izmajlov. Briusov answered in the negative, claiming that the line was simply an attempt to write a poem modeled on the minimalist poetry of Roman poets, who considered a single line to be potentially a complete poem. If, on the other hand, the legs belonged to a female then the poem could read in a rather scandalous way (as it was read at the time), or even sacrilegious, if the female in question were imagined to be Sophia herself. Whatever Briusov might have meant, the principal point about the newly rising sensibility engulfing Russia at the time was that the ultimate key to the decoding of any poem could only be found within the persona of the poet himself, or as Blok would state in The Stranger: “There lies within my soul a treasure chest/its Key—a trust that’s solely mine!” (cf. final stanza). Ambiguity—one of the mainsprings of artistic function—was thus elevated by the Symbolist school to the status of an aesthetic priority, indeed, its teleology. Briusov’s prose is represented below by a far less ambiguous, clearly dystopian short story, The Republic of the Southern Cross, which reflects the period’s general sense of doom. Yet the cause of the mental disease which overtakes the circumpolar society of the future—Mania contradicens—is in the typical Symbolist manner hidden and never explained.
The Symbolists’ purposeful lack of disclosure led at times to unforeseen results. For instance, in 1899 Briusov—watching as the furniture in his room was dusted—composed what seemed to him an innocuous poem, Demons the Dust-born (Demony pyli); the poet attached little significance to the work, except for the pride he took in its metrical complexity. He was even a bit annoyed when, during a visit to Peterburg several months later, his audience requested that he declaim this poem; he simply felt there were more important works he wished to share with the listeners. Yet as Thomas Venclova has recently demonstrated, it was this poem that Briusov’s Symbolist peer, Fyodor Kuzmich Sologub (1863-1927), productively utilized in the formation of his own celebrated novel, Petty Demon (Melkii bes). The novel, unlike the poem that inspired it, was a grand undertaking, deftly portraying the moral decay, silliness, and sheer banality of Russia’s degenerate provincial society at the turn of the century. Sologub’s works are represented here by more modestly sized selections: the poem Asteroid, expressing the poet’s metaphysical loneliness, and a short story A Little Man, a masterpiece in its own right, blending fantasy and social satire. The work takes the celebrated (and by that time hackneyed) subject of Russian realism—the theme of the so-called “little man”—and literally makes it shrink into thin air. The ending might well represent the author’s tongue-in-cheek hope that the subject had finally exhausted itself. But the greed of the corporate world surrounding the poor protagonist of A Little Man, as well as the plight of the authentic fairy-tale personages in other Sologub writings, show that the author had great misgivings about the survival of the fantastic in the unfolding twentieth century.
Indeed, it could be safely argued that the most prevalent form of envisioning the Russian future in Sologub’s time was one heralding doom. The most influential apocalyptic vision of such a future was again to be found in the writings of Vladimir Soloviev. His principal work in this regard is the aforementioned Three Conversations, a text rarely cited by cultural historians. Its apocalyptic themes and prophecies of the Antichrist are productively explored in Andrei Bely’s superb novel, Petersburg. Bely does not make clear the actual future he foresees as the outcome of the cataclysm about to engulf the St. Petersburg of 1905, but a Horseman of the Apocalypse does make an appearance. Within Bely’s fictional world physical actions have metaphysical consequences and vice versa, as is patently evident in the selections we offer from the novel. Taken from the Prologue and Chapter I, they introduce the three major protagonists—Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, his son Nikolai, and Petersburg itself—as well as the novel’s chief plot device, a terrorist bomb with which Nikolai hopes to assassinate his father. He fails, but the bomb’s abortive explosion—a metaphor for the 1905 revolution—does have the tangible consequence of forever separating him from his family and propelling him on a quest for life’s ultimate wisdom. The quest’s Egyptian setting speaks to the influence of Solovyov’s visions, especially since St. Petersburg’s Sophia (Sophia Petrovna Likhutina), is in fact the true opposite of Solovyov’s Holy Wisdom. At the same time our selections typify Bely’s dialogue with Gogol’s St. Petersburg tales and Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, texts embedded at the novel’s core, but in Pushkin’s poem Petersburg as an artifice survives the catastrophic flood, whereas Bely’s vison for the city’s future is far more enigmatic. Our selections form a prose companion to Blok’s The Stranger, and showcase techniques which succeed in integrating Bely’s poetry-in-prose into a victory of fantasy-making narrative. The brief example of Bely’s actual poetry, The Demon, which we newly translate, simultaneously echoes the cited poems by Lermontov, Sologub and Briusov.
Modernism was not, of course, characterized by Symbolism alone but equally by those movements and schools which grew out of it or in reaction to it, such as Russian Acmeism, Imaginism, Futurism, etc. Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Velemir Khlebnikov, to name but a few, are commonly understood in Russia to be the period’s best poets. Much of the subject matter of their poetry is either pure fantasy or borders on the fantastic. The doomsday mentality of the early Russian Symbolists and other writers, reaffirmed by the traumatic experience of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and the attendant revolution of the same year, came to a climax in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Early on the regime was welcomed by some of the Symbolists and most certainly sung by Mayakovsky, as it seemed to promise a truly glorious and remarkable emancipation of mankind in blazingly radiant futuristic scapes. The pathos of these days was further affirmed by the ascendant art forms of the poster, to which Mayakovsky contributed in no small measure, and the cinema, with Eisenstein’s films such as Ten Days that Shook the World being the most widely known. It is, however, ironic that Eisenstein’s cinematic accomplishment is generally viewed as a documentary of revolution, and that indeed millions participated in the Bolshevik undertaking. In fact the storming of the Winter Palace involved fewer than one thousand individuals, thus making the film effectively a fantasy, and assigning to “airy nothing” a St. Petersburg address. Nonetheless once the overthrow was accomplished, the terror inflicted by the Bolshevik government on the people was massive and did involve millions. The terror also affected the lives of Russia’s finest poets, writers and artists. Blok, after initially welcoming the Bolsheviks in an enigma-ridden poem, The Twelve (1918; cf. below)—in which he paradoxically saw the revolution led by Jesus Christ himself—died agonized by its consequences in 1921. The same year witnessed the suicide by drowning of Sologub’s closest life-companion, his wife Anastasia, who simply could not bear the Bolshevik regime, thus leaving her husband utterly
bereft till 1927, when he died just as utterly alone. Esenin committed suicide in 1924, and Mayakovsky in 1930; Bely died nearly insane in 1934; Mandelstam perished in a concentration camp in 1936-7; Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. Such were the non-enigmatic endings of some of Russia’s most talented explorers of unknown and alternate worlds.
Alexander Alexandrovich Blok
(1880–1921)
_______________________________________
The Stranger
When dusk has come, above the restaurants
The burning air is wild and deaf,
The drunken cries consent to rest upon
Its vernal and decaying breath.
Afar, above the dust of alleyways—
The yawn of summer bungalows,
A gilt roll glints atop a bakery,
And there resound an infant’s moans.
And every dusk, beyond the barriers,
A rakish angle to their hats,
Between the ditches with their lady-friends
Are strolling seasoned, witty lads.
Above the lake—the oarlocks’ stridency;
And there resounds a woman’s shriek,
As in the sky, inured to everything,
Inanely grins a silvery disk.
And every dusk, my sole associate
Is mirrored in my tumbler’s sheen;
Through fumes—astringent and mysterious—
Like me, both tamed and deafened seems.
Around me, at the counters neighboring,
Are drowsy waiters standing by,
And drunks, their eyes blood-shot and rabbity:
In vino veritas they cry.
Each night—the hour never deviates,
(Or do I see this in my dreams?)
A slender form in silken mantelet
Beyond the misty pane appears.
And slowly, through the crude inebriates,
Alone, and every night the same,
Effusing vapors, mists and fragrances
She sits down by the window frame.
And wafted by the myths of ancientry
Her silken dress about her clings,
Her mourning hat with plumes of ebony,
Her narrow hand bares many rings.
And seized by fettering proximity,
I gaze beyond her dark-hued veils
And see a distant shore bewitching me,
To where bewitching distance pales.
In trust I hold deep-hidden mysteries,
Another’s Sun in trust is mine,
And now are all my soul’s interstices
Suffused by this astringent wine.
And ebon ostrich plumes sway languidly,
Cascading down within my brain,
And eyes, of deepest blue and fathomless,
Bloom in the distant shore’s domain.
There lies within my soul a treasure chest,
Its Key—a trust that’s solely mine!
You’re right, you reeling-drunk monstrosity!
I know; the Truth is in the wine.
Translated by A.L. and M.K.
The Twelve
(An excerpt, 1918)
(1.)
Evening—pitch black.
Snow—pure white.
Blow winds, blow back!
“Standing up straight—man, it’s a fight.”
Blow winds, blow low—
Sweeping God’s world—whole, in their tow!
< … >
(2.)
The wind runs riot, fans the snow.
There twelve men sally in a row.
Their guns’ black slings, dark stocks and sights,
Around—dim lights, more lights and lights …
Cheap butts in teeth, and crumpled caps,
A diamond ace would suit those backs!
“Red freedom, yah, freedom,
Yah, yah—with no Cross!”
Ra-tat-tah! [—It’s a toss:
Who gets killed, who gets lost]
< … >
(11.)
…And they tramp—no holy name to utter,
All twelve goons go on.
Up for any slaughter,
All their pity gone …
< … >
12.
…On they go triumphant, marching …
“Who’s there?—Out! Don’t try no stunt!”
Just the wind—red banner’s arching
As its plaything out in front …
“Out in front—the snowdrift quivers:
Who’s that in the mound?—Stand clear!” …
Just a vagrant hound that shivers,
Hungry, limping in the rear …
“Beat it now you filthy bastard,
Else I’ll scratch you with my gun:
With my bayonet I’ll chop up
All you old-world, dog-gone scum!”
…Bares its teeth—a wolflike hunger—
Tail tucked in—yet so aware—
Follows frozen—that poor mongrel …
“Hey you—answer—who goes there?”
“Who’s there waving that red banner?
—Pitch black—you can’t see at all!
—Who’s that there—he’s done a runner,
Sliding down along the wall?”
“Wait and see, I’m gonna get you,
Better keep yourself alive!
Hey you, comrade, you’ll regret it,
Come out now, or else you die!”
Ra-tat-tat—shots echo after
From the houses lifeless now …
Just the blizzard spills its laughter
Through the endless drifts of snow …
Ra-tat-tat!
Ra-tat-tat …
…On they go triumphant, marching,
Rearwards lurks the hungry dog,
Forefront—bloodstained banner’s arching,
And unseen within the storm,
‘Mid the bullets safe from harm,
Gait above the tempest lifted,
As the pearls of snow roll drifted,
In a thorny, white-rose crown—
Forefront—Jesus Christ leads on.
(1917-18) Translated by A.L. and M. K.
Valery Iakovlevich Briusov
(1873–1924)
__________________________________
Demons the Dust-born
The dust has its demons,
Like demons of snow, of light’s prism.
A dusting of demons!
Their attire, at all times deep crimson—
In fire ablaze—
They’ve sealed now in haze:
In grey they’re cloaked, derisively hidden.
Demons, the dust-lit!
On the cupboards, in ambush, like omens
They’ve closed their eyelids.
But the moment the doors fly open,
They stir, amazed,
Wild is their gaze;
They swirl up and tumble—demons, the dust-lit.
Where they have been the victors,
There is peace, sleep—there are dreamings,
Spacious tombs hold such visions.
There they slumber and, motionless seeming,
Hide in a nook,
Disdaining to look
Through darkness; but in their dreams knowing they’re victors.
O legion of demons!
You command this brightly-hued planet!
You dust-to-dust legion!
With each age, your realm grows the wider!
Your day shall come
When all is numb
Beneath the still fluttering of your grey pinions.
Translated by A.L. and M.K.
The Republic of the Southern Cross
Recent times have seen the appearance of a whole series of descriptions of the terrible disaster which befell the Republic of the Southern Cross. They differ markedly and they recount a number of events which are patently imaginary and improbable. Apparently the authors of these descriptions have
relied too faithfully on the accounts given by the survivors from Star City, who, as is well known, have all been affected by a psychic ailment. This is why we have found it both essential and timely to compile here a summary of reliable information concerning the tragedy in the South which we have so far been able to collect.
The Republic of the Southern Cross was founded forty years ago within the Antarctic Circle as a group of steel factories belonging to a certain Trust. In the note sent to all the countries of the world the new state claimed all the continent and islands within the Antarctic Circle, as well as any part of those lands extending beyond that limit. It declared itself ready to purchase lands belonging to other states with its claims. The Republic’s pretensions found no resistance from Earth’s fifteen great powers. Disputed questions concerning some isles lying outside the Antarctic Circle but adjacent to the southern regions were settled by special treaties. After certain formalities, the Republic of the Southern Cross was accepted by the family of great powers and its representatives accredited to those states.
The Republic’s major city, which was named Star City, was established at the South Pole itself. At the imaginary point on the Earth’s axis where all the meridians meet stood the city hall, and its steeple rising above the city’s roofs was pointed at the heaven’s nadir. From the city hall the city’s streets radiated along the meridians, while they were crossed by other streets which formed concentric circles. All the buildings were of the same height and architecture. They had no windows because all buildings were lighted by electricity. Electricity also served to light the streets. Because of the harsh climate an opaque dome rose over the city which was supplied with a powerful ventilation system which constantly provided fresh air. These regions of the earth know only one day each year which persists six months, and one night also of six months duration, but the streets of Star City were always flooded with a bright and steady light. Similarly, at all seasons the temperature out of doors was held by artificial means at one and the same level.
According to the latest census Star City’s population was 2,500,000 people. The remainder of the Republic’s population, 50,000,000 inhabitants, was concentrated around the ports and factories. These locations also held millions of inhabitants and they too were of the same design as Star City. Thanks to the wise use of electrical power, the ports were ice-free the entire year. Elevated electric railroads over which passed tens of thousands of passengers and millions of tons of goods every day connected the inhabited regions of the Republic. However, the inland region of the country remained uninhabited. The traveler from his railroad car could see only monotonous waste lands uniformly white in winter and grown over with sparse grass during the three summer months. Wildlife had long ago been exterminated and nothing remained to support human life. By contrast, all the more remarkable was the vigorous life of the port cities and the manufacturing centers. One can grasp this fact by knowing that in recent years approximately seven-tenths of all the metals extracted on the Earth were processed in the Republic’s state factories.
Worlds Apart Page 42
