For my part, knowing that permanent ideas are formed in youth and are rarely revised in later life, I can only watch with hope and bated breath as more and more people read poetry—and the "Fourth Prose." Between people like myself and those who stand on the other side, there is a clear division: we are thesis and antithesis. I do not expect to see a synthesis, but I would love to know whom the future belongs to.
5 3 Itah
о the question: "What is Acmeism?" M. once replied: "Nos
talgia for world culture." This was said in the thirties, either in the Press House in Leningrad or at the lecture he gave to the Voronezh branch of the Union of Writers—on the same occasion when he also declared that he would disown neither the living • The chapter on Dialectical Materialism in Stalin's Short Course.
nor the dead. Shortly after this he wrote: "And bright nostalgia does not let me leave the still young Voronezh hills for those of all mankind so bright in Tuscany."
Perhaps these lines give a better idea than anything else of his attitude toward Italy and the Mediterranean. I happen to have seen a note by Gleb Struve in which he wonders whether M. ever visited Italy and lists all the "Italian themes," as he calls them, in M.'s verse. M. in fact went to Italy twice, in the days when he was a student at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. But these lone trips, short and superficial (they only lasted a few weeks), left him with a feeling of frustration. ("It's as though I'd never been there," he said once.) But this is not important. The main thing is what Italy, the land "for all mankind," or, rather, the Mediterranean as a whole, meant to M. In a youthful article about Chaadayev he wrote: "One cannot launch a new history—the idea is altogether unthinkable—there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but 'progress' —the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events." These words refer to Chaadayev, but the idea behind them was certainly close to M.'s own way of thinking as well. The Mediterranean was for him a holy land where history had begun, and which by a process of continuity had given Christian culture to the world. I do not quite understand a gibe of M.'s in "Journey to Armenia" which so much upset all the Marxists such as Chechanovski: "A plant is an event, an occurrence, an arrow, not a boring 'development' with a beard." For him, the concept of "development" was evidently firmly associated with the positivists— Comte, Stuart Mill and others, read and revered by people of his mother's generation, who had prepared the way for Marxism. At any event, M. distinguished between two types of phenomena—one, as it were, positive and the other negative. Positive phenomena included such things as thunderstorms, events, precipitation of crystals —these were words that M. applied to history, art and even the formation of human character. "Negative" were all varieties of mechanical movement: the motion of a clock's hands, "development," progress. To these one could add the progression of images on a cinema screen which in "Conversation About Dante" he compared to the "metamorphosis of a tapeworm." This was a dig at the specious glitter of the then fashionable Eisenstein with his mechanical splendors. Motion of this kind was tantamount, in M.'s view, to immobility, to Buddhism as understood by Vladimir Soloviev, to the "movement of Barbarian carts." This is why he described the Moscow of his day as "Buddhist" in the line: "I have returned, or rather been returned against my will to Buddhist Moscow." During the conversations that we were always having about the new life and the coming millennium of uninterrupted progress, M. always got furious and began to argue. In all such talk he suspected the old "Slav dream of halting history." I do not know to what extent M. retained any faith in the purposefulness of the historical process—it has not been easy in the first half of the twentieth century—but he certainly did not see its purpose in the attainment of universal happiness. His attitude here was the same as toward personal happiness ("Why do you think you should be happy?"). The concept of happiness for all seemed to him the most bourgeois thing in the whole intellectual baggage inherited from the nineteenth century.
Another thing that constantly provoked argument was the question of continuity, which he sought everywhere—in history, culture and art. Here, too, he found the analogy with a clock's hands usefuclass="underline" a clock is wound up and movement begins from nothing, but an "event" is inconceivable without continuity.
M. was distinguished by a rather comic and childish literal- mindedness: once he had found this analogy between a clock hand and "drab infinity," he took a dislike to clocks and watches, always refusing to have one. "What do I need a watch for?" he used to say. "I can always tell the time without one." As is generally the case with townspeople (and he was one to the marrow of his bones), his sense of time was indeed quite remarkable and he was never wrong by more than a few minutes. The only sort of clock he would tolerate in the apartment, when I insisted very much, was a Swiss clock— the pendulum, the weight at the end of a chain and the picture on its face made the idea of a mechanical timepiece more bearable. He also thought it was something that went with a kitchen—his favorite room in any apartment, though we never had a proper one of our own. He was also fond of hourglasses and wanted to buy one for our bathroom—but we had a bathroom for such a short time before his arrest that we never got around to doing this. In a poem he wrote for children he refers to the hands of a clock, but they are compared to a pair of mustaches running around a plate—there are faces as flat as plates.
M. had no dislike at all for machines—he was interested in them, liked the way they worked, and was always glad to talk with engineers—though he was unhappy that none of them read him. In those years young technologists were attracted to LEF—in so far as they had any interest in literature at all. Some of them read Pasternak, who came to them via LEF. Today the situation is different and, moreover, the technologists are no longer felt to be the spokesmen of their age, or the ones most in touch with modern life. The more intelligent among them are even a little embarrassed at having become technocrats. The myth about the greatness of industry and its decisive role in history, about "historical necessity" and the idea of a superstructure totally dependent on the "basis," have now almost faded away. The era of social determinism seems, indeed, to be coming to an end, but it has left behind another myth about the supposed incompatibility between "civilization" and "culture." How can anyone say that the sickness of our culture is due only to the fact that we now have more sophisticated tools than a hundred years ago?