° "National in form and socialist in content," a standard Soviet press definition of a work of art.
One of the basic principles of art is the scrutiny of phenomena with the naked eye, out of context, and without intermediaries. "Novogodnee" is essentially one person's tete- a-tete with eternity or—even worse—with the idea of eternity. Tsvetaeva has used the Christian version of eternity here not only terminologically. Even if she had been an atheist, the "next world" would have had concrete ecclesiastical meaning for her: for, having a right to disbelieve in an afterlife for oneself, a person is less willing to deny such a prospect to someone he loved. Furthermore, Tsvetaeva ought to have insisted on "paradise," if only proceeding from the tendency—so typical of her—to dismiss the obvious.
A poet is someone for whom every word is not the end but the beginning of a thought; someone who, having uttered rai ("paradise") or tot svet ("next world"), must mentally take the subsequent step of finding a rhyme for it. Thus krai ("edge/realm") and otsvet ("reflection") emerge, and the existence of those whose life has ended is thus prolonged.
Looking in that direction, upward, into the grammatical time and also the grammatical place where "he" is, if only because "he" is not here, Tsvetaeva ends "Novogodnee" as all letters end: with the name and address of the addressee:
—So that nothing spill.s on it I hold it in my palms.—
Above the Rhone and above the Rarogne, Above the clear-cut and total separation To Rainer—Maria—Rilke—into his hands.
(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)
"So that nothing spills on it"—rain, perhaps? Overflowing rivers (the Rhone)? Her ownwn tears? Most likely the last, for usually Tsvetaeva omits the subject only in the case of something self-evident—and what could be more self-evident at parting than tears capable of bluring the name of the addressee meticulously inscribed at the end, as though with an indelible pencil on a moist surface. "I hold it in my palms" from a detached viewpoint is a sacrificial gesture and, naturally, is beyond tears. "Above the Rhone" that flows from Lake Geneva, above which Rilke had lived in a sanatorium—that is, almost above his former address; "and above the Rarogne," where he was buried, i.e., above his present address. It is remarkable that Tsvetaeva merges both names acoustically, conveying their sequential order in Hilke's fate. "Above the clear-cut and total separation," the sensation of which is intensified by the reference to the grave site, about which it was said earlier in the poem that it is a place where the poet isn't. And finally, the name of the addressee spelled out in full on the envelope, with the further specification "into his hands" (formerly standard postal terminology for "personal")— as previous letters, no doubt, had also been addressed. This last line would be utterly prosaic (reading it, a postman would spring to his bicycle) were it not for the very name of the poet, which is partly responsible for the previous "you yourself are I Verse!" Apart from its possible effect on the postman, the line returns both the author and the reader to what love for that poet began with. The main element of the line—and of the entire poem as well—is the effort to hold someone back—if only by voice alone calling out a name—from nonbeing; to insist, despite the obviousness of it, upon his full name, to \vit, presence, the physical sensation of which is supplemented by the specification "into his hands."
Emotionally and melodically this last stanza creates the impression of a voice that has burst through tears and, cleansed by them, takes off from them. In any case, the voice chokes when reading it aloud. This probably happens because there is nothing for anyone (either the reader or the author) to add to what has already been said; to raise the pitch a note higher is not possible. The art of poetry, apart from its numerous functions, bears witness to the vocal and ethical possibilities of man as a species—if for no other reason than that it drains them dry. For Tsvetaeva, who was always operating at the vocal limit, "Novogodnee" served as an opportunity to combine two genres requiring the highest pitch: the love lyric and the funeral lament. It is striking that in the controversy between them the last word rests with the former: "into his hands."
(Translated by Barry Rubin)
1981
Catastrophes zn the Air
IIy a des r^wdes a Ia sauvagerie primitive; il n'y en a point a Ia manie de paraitre ce qu'on nest pas.
Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie
1
Because of the volume and quality of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century, it's been widely held that the great Russian prose of that century has automatically, by pure inertia, wandered into our own. From time to time, in the course of our century, here and there one could hear voices nominating this or that writer for the status of the Great Russian Writer, purveyor of the tradition. These voices were coming from the critical establishment and from Soviet officialdom, as well as from the intelligentsia itself, with a frequency of roughly two great writers per decade.
During the postwar years alone—which have lasted, blissfully, so far—a minimum of half a dozen names have filled the air. The forties ended with Mikhail Zoshchenko and the fifties started with the rediscovery of Babel. Then came the thaw, and the cro^ was temporarily bestowed upon Vladimir Dudintsev for his Not by Bread Alone. The
* The Biddle Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on January 31, 1984, under the auspices of the Academy of American Poets.
sixties were almost equally shared by Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and by Mikhail Bulgakov's revival. The better part of the seventies obviously belong to Sol- zhenitsyn; at present what is in vogue is so-called peasant prose, and the name most frequently uttered is that of Valentin Rasputin.
Officialdom, though, it should be noted in all fairness, happens to be far less mercurial in its preferences: for nearly fifty years now it has stuck to its guns, pushing Mikhail Sholokhov. Steadiness paid off—or rather a huge shipbuilding order placed in Sweden did—and in 1965 Sholokhov got his Nobel Prize. Still, for all this expense, for all this muscle of the state on the one hand and agitated fluctuation of the intelligentsia on the other, the vacuum projected by the great Russian prose of the last century into this one doesn't seem to get filled. With every passing year, it grows in size, and now that the century is drawing to its close, there is a growing suspicion that Russia may exit the twentieth century without leaving great prose behind.
It is a tragic prospect, and a Russian native doesn't have to look feverishly around for where to put the blame: the fault is everywhere, since it belongs to the state. Its ubiquitous hand felled the best, and strangled the remaining second-rate into pure mediocrity. Of more far-reaching and disastrous consequence, however, was the state-sponsored emergence of a social order whose depiction or even criticism automatically reduces literature to the level of social anthropology. Even that presumably would be bearable had the state allowed writers to use in their palette either the individual or collective memory of the preceding, i.e., abandoned, civilization: if not as a direct reference, then at least in the guise of stylistic experimentation. With that tabooed, Russian prose quickly deteriorated into the debilitated being's flattering self-portrayal. A caveman began to depict his cave; the only indication that this still was art was that, on the wall, it looked more spacious and better lit than in reality. Also, it housed more animals, as well as tractors.