The way in which separate items in a lyrical sequence follow each other may be just as natural as the order of the lines in a single poem, but the outer signs of this are less clear. It is obvious in the case of a work whose unity is not in doubt, such as a narrative or epic poem, but the inner thread running through a series of lyrics is not so easily seen. Yet M.'s words about the poet's "stereometric instinct" (in "Conversation About Dante") are just as applicable to lyric poems gathered together as a "book."
The way in which a "book" comes about probably varies from poet to poet. Some write interlinked poems in their chronological sequence; others rearrange work written at different times (though in the same general period) to make a "book"—this was Pasternak's procedure, and Annenski's (in his Trefoils). M. belonged to the first type of poet: his poems came in groups, or in a single flow, until the initial impulse was spent. In order to put a book together, all he had to do was establish the right chronological order of the items. This does not, however, apply to Tristia, which was not put together by M. himself.
It is no easy matter to reconstruct the chronology of M.'s work— not only because many of his things bear no date, but also because even if they do, the date refers to the moment when the poem was written down, not to the beginning or the end of M.'s work on it. It seems to me, indeed, that one can pinpoint the precise genesis of a poem only if it is a matter of coldly calculated versification rather than true poetry. How could M. know beforehand what exactly would come out of the movement of his lips after he had begun to listen to the voice inside him, or at what moment he would begin to write it down? Another difficulty about dating is whether one should regard the beginning or the end of the actual work of composition as the crucial moment. This is all the more important in that work could be in progress on several poems at one time.
In a number of cases M. was not himself certain in what order to put the poems of a cycle—this was so, for instance, with the poems in the "Wolf" cycle, and those in the middle of the Second Voronezh Notebook. He didn't manage to make up his mind about this while he was still able to. I have often been asked about the origin of these "Notebooks." This was the name we used to refer to all the poems composed between 1930 and 1937 which we copied down in Voronezh in ordinary school exercise books (we were never able to get decent paper, and even these exercise books were hard to come by). The first group constituted what is now called the "First Voronezh Notebook," and then all the verse composed between 1930 and 1934, which had been confiscated during the search of our apartment, was copied down into a second notebook—M. himself looked on these two notebooks as distinct, evidently thinking of them as sections of a "book."
In the fall of 1936, when some more poems had accumulated, M. asked me to get a new exercise book, although there was still room in the old ones. Though there was practically no interval of time between the "Third Notebook" and the "Second," it is clear from the contents of the "Third" that it is a new departure—not a continuation of the impulse, by then exhausted, which had given rise to the poems in the "Second Notebook." If there were precise methods for analyzing poetry, one would be able to see exactly where one impulse ends and another begins—though even without this, one can see it clearly enough.
We always associate the word "book" with printing, and think of it in terms of format and typographical convenience, but such mechanical criteria do not apply to notebooks, whose beginning and end are determined only by the unity of the poetic impulse which gives birth to a given series of poems. In other words, a notebook is the same as a "book" in the sense in which the term was understood by Charents, Pasternak and M. himself. The only difference was that M. did not have to stick to some particular length or structure— often artificial—which is required for a published book. But the word "notebook" itself, as I have said, arose in our usage quite accidentally, owing to the fact that we were forced to write in school exercise books. It has the drawback of being too concrete in itsmeaning, as well as reminding one of Schumann's "Notebooks." The only thing in its favor is that it faithfully reflects the way in which we had been thrown back into a pre-Gutenberg era.
he word "phase" refers to stages in the growth of a person's
In his younger days M. had used the word "book" in the sense of "phase." In 1919 he thought he would be the author of one book only, but then he realized that there was a division between Stone and the poems that came to be known under the general title of Tristia. This title, incidentally, was given to the collection by Kuz- min, and the book itself is a miscellany of jumbled-up manuscripts taken to Berlin by the publisher without M.'s knowledge. His Second Book was garbled by censorship and M. gave it this name because he realized his mistake in thinking that he would write only one book. He was not quite certain where the boundary lay between the pre-revolutionary Stone and this second book with his poems about the war, his presentiment of revolution and the Revolution itself. The poems grouped together under the title "New Verse" (1930-35) reflect his consciousness of being an outcast, and the Voronezh "Notebooks" his exile and approaching doom. Under each of the poems I copied out for him in Voronezh, M. put the date and the letter "V." When I asked him why, he just said: "Just because." It was as though he was somehow branding these pages, but very few of them survived: 1937 was close at hand.
41 Cycle
outlook—his changing view of the world and his own work. Tristia consists of poems which came to M. as he was waiting for the Revolution and as he experienced it in the early days. The "New Verse" is what he wrote after he overcame his silence by writing "Fourth Prose." It is possible for there to be different "books" within the same phase: I believe, for instance, that "New Verse" and the "Voronezh Notebooks," though separate "books," comprise a single phase divided in two by M.'s arrest and exile. In the first there are two and in the second three sections called "notebooks." In other words, for M. a "book" represents a biographical period, while a "notebook" is a poetic division embracing material born of a single
impulse.
A "cycle" is a smaller subdivision. In the first section ("Notebook") of the "New Verse," for instance, one can pick out the "Wolf" (or "convict") cycle and also the Armenian cycle—though the group entitled "Armenia" is actually more in the nature of a selection than a cycle. By this I mean that it resulted—as in many of M.'s earlier cycles—from a ruthless weeding-out process by which the more immature poems were discarded. The remaining ones were arranged not necessarily in the order in which they were written— thus breaking the sequence and obscuring the quality of a lyrical diary which is otherwise so typical of the Voronezh Notebooks.
These cycles are generally built around one particular "theme poem"—it is obvious, for example, that the matrix of the "convict" or "Wolf" cycle is the poem beginning "For the thundering prowess of future times. . . ." This kind of cycle—as opposed to those in which the items simply follow each other like links in a chain—resembled a cluster of shoots all sprouting from a main stem, and in these cases the poet's work was rather like a gardener's: training the viable shoots away from the stem and letting them develop independently. The common origin, however, was always visible in the repetition of certain key words or themes. In the "Wolf" cycle M. dwelt on his fear of succumbing to falsehood ("my mouth is twisted by lies"), the need to preserve his own voice ("Save my speech forever"), and there are echoes of the idea that so haunted him in Cherdyn: that he might be executed with an ax as in Peter's time.