A powerful visionary, he dreams his own hanging on the eve of probable execution. But, strangely enough, with incomprehensible acrimony and rhythmic animation, he depicts in his ballad how the wind rocks the bodies of the unfortunate, to and fro, capriciously . . . Even death he endows with dynamic qualities and even here he contrives to manifest his love for rhythm and movement . . . I think it was not demonism that captivated Villon, but the dynamism of crime. For all I know there is an inverse relationship between the moral and the dynamic development of the soul. In any case, both the Testaments of Villon, the big and the little (that feast of magnificent rhythms the like of which French poetry had not previously known) are incurably amoral. Twice the pathetic vagabond writes his will, disposing of his imaginary property to the right and to the left, as a poet, ironically asserting his mastery over all the things that he wished to possess: if Villon’s spiritual experiences, for all their originality, were not distinguished by any special depth, his human relationships, the tangled web of his acquaintances, links, calculations, formed a pattern of genial complexity. This man contrived to place himself in a vital, urgent relationship to an immense number of people of the most varied callings, from all levels of the social hierarchy, from thief to bishop, from bar girl to prince. With what pleasure he tells their little secrets! How precise and keen he is! Villon’s Testaments are captivating if for no other reason than that such a mass of accurate information is communicated in them. It strikes the reader that he can use them, and he feels himself the poet’s contemporary. The present moment can bear the weight of centuries, preserve its wholeness, and retain it “now.” One only needs to know how to dig it out of the soil of time without damaging its roots—otherwise it will wither. Villon knew how to do this. The bell of the Sorbonne that interrupted his work on the Petit Testament sounds to this day.
Like the princes of the troubadours, Villon “sang in his own Latin.” Once, as a scholar, he heard about Alcibiades—and, as a result, the unknown lady Archipiade joins the graceful procession of ladies of former times.
The Middle Ages hung on tight to its children and did not voluntarily relinquish them to the Renaissance. Authentic medieval blood flowed in the veins of Villon. To this he owed his integrity, his temperament, his spiritual originality. The physiology of the Gothic—there was such a thing, after all, and the Middle Ages were precisely a physiologically gifted epoch—substituted for a world view for Villon and rewarded him, and then some, for the absence of a traditional link with the past. Moreover it secured him a worthy place in the future, because nineteenth-century French poetry drew its strength from the very same national treasure house of Gothic. It will be said: what does the splendid rhythm of the Testaments, now tricky, like bilboquets, now slow, like a church cantilena, have in common with the craftsmanship of the Gothic builders? Yet isn’t Gothic the triumph of dynamics? One more question: what is more mobile, more fluent, the Gothic cathedral or the oceanic surge? How if not by a sense of architectonics is that magical balance of stanzas to be explained in which Villon dedicates his soul to the Trinity by way of the Virgin in “Chambre de la divinité”—nine heavenly legions. This is no anemic flight on the little wax wings of immortality, but an architecturally based ascension, corresponding to the tiers of the Gothic cathedral. He who first proclaimed in architecture the mobile equilibrium of masses and built the crossed vault genially expressed the psychological essence of feudalism. The medieval man considered himself part of the world-building, as necessary and as constrained as any stone in the Gothic structure, bearing with dignity the pressure of his neighbors and entering as an inevitable stake into the general play of forces. To serve meant not only to be active for the common good. Unconsciously, the medieval man considered the bare fact of his existence as a service, as a kind of heroic deed. Villon, the last-born, epigone of the feudal world-sense, turned out to be unreceptive to its ethical side, to the sense of mutual commitment and guarantee! The steadfast, the moral in Gothic was quite foreign to him. On the other hand, to make up for that, by no means indifferent to its dynamics, he lifted it to the level of amoralism. Villon twice received pardons—lettres de rémission—from kings: Charles VII and Louis XI. He was firmly convinced that he would receive just such a letter from God, forgiving him all his sins. Perhaps in the spirit of his dry and rational mysticism he projected the ladder of feudal jurisdictions into infinity, and in his soul there dimly wandered a wild, but profoundly feudal insight, that there is a God beyond a God . . .
“I know well that I am not the son of an angel crowned by the diadem of a star or of another planet,” said of himself that poor Parisian scholar, capable of much for the sake of a good supper.
Such negations are worth as much as positive certitude.
Note
Note: This translation was originally published in New Literary History 1 (1974–1975) 633–639.
Uncollected Essays and Fragments
Pushkin & Scriabin (Fragments)
Pushkin and Scriabin1 are two transmutations of a single sun, two transmutations of a single heart. Twice the death of an artist gathered the Russian people and kindled the sun over them. They served as an example of a collective Russian demise, they died a full death, as people are said to live a full life; their personality, while dying, extended itself to a symbol of the whole people, and the sun-heart of the dying remained forever at the zenith of suffering and glory.
I wish to speak of Scriabin’s death as of the highest act of his creativity. It seems to me the artist’s death ought not to be excluded from the chain of his creative achievements, but rather examined as the last conclusive link. From this wholly Christian point of view, Scriabin’s death is amazing. It not only is remarkable as the fabulous posthumous growth of the artist in the eyes of the masses, but also serves as it were as the source of this creativity, as its teleological cause. If one were to tear the veil of death from this creative life, it would flow freely from its cause—that is, death—which disposes itself around it as if around its own proper sun, and absorbs its light.