Love the existence of the thing more than the thing itself and your own being more than yourself—that is the highest commandment of Acmeism.
V.
A = A: what a splendid poetic theme. Symbolism languished and longed for the law of identity; Acmeism makes it its watchword and offers it instead of the dubious a realibus ad realiora.*
The capacity for astonishment is the poet’s greatest virtue. Still, how can one not be astonished by that most fruitful of all laws, the law of identity? Whoever has been seized with reverent astonishment before this law is undoubtedly a poet. Thus, once having acknowledged the sovereignty of the law of identity, poetry acquires in lifelong feudal possession all that exists, without condition or limitation. Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be perpetually astonished. We have fallen in love with the music of proof. For us logical connection is not some little ditty about a finch, but a symphony with organ and choir, so intricate and inspired that the conductor must exert all his powers to keep the performers under his control.
How persuasive is the music of Bach! What power of proof! One must demonstrate proof, one must go on demonstrating proof endlessly: to accept anything in art on faith alone is unworthy of an artist, easy and tiresome . . . We do not fly; we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.
VI.
The Middle Ages are dear to us because they possessed to a high degree the sense of boundary and partition. They never mixed different levels, and they treated the beyond with immense restraint. A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism and the perception of the world as a living equilibrium makes us kin to this epoch and impels us to derive strength from works that arose on Romance soil around the year 1200. And we shall demonstrate our rightness in such a way that the whole chain of causes and consequences from alpha to omega will shudder in response; we shall teach ourselves to carry “more lightly and more freely the mobile chains of being.”
Note
* Symbolism’s slogan, as provided by Viacheslav Ivanov in the collective work Borozdy i mezhi [Furrows and boundaries]. (Mandelstam’s note.) Slogan means “from the real to the more real.”
Literary Moscow
Moscow-Peking: here it is continentality that triumphs, the spirit of a Middle Empire; here the heavy tracks of the railroads have been spliced together into a tight knot; here the Eurasian continent celebrates its eternal name day.
Whoever isn’t bored by Middle Empire is a welcome guest in Moscow. There are some who prefer sea-smell and some who prefer world-smell.
Here the cabdrivers drink tea in the taverns as if they were Greek philosophers; here, on the flat roof of a modest skyscraper, they show nightly an American detective drama; here, without attracting anybody’s attention, a decorous young man on the boulevard whistles a complex aria from Tannhäuser in order to earn his bread, and in half an hour an artist of the old school, sitting on a park bench, will do your portrait for you on a silver academic medal; here the boys selling cigarettes travel in packs, like the dogs of Constantinople, and do not fear competition; people from Iaroslav are selling pastries, and people from the Caucasus have sat down in the coolness of the delicatessen. There isn’t a single man here, provided he’s not a member of the all-Russian union of writers, who would go to a literary discussion in the summertime, and Dolidze,1 at least for the summer, moves in spirit to Azurketa, where he’s been planning to move these past twelve years.
When Mayakovsky went about scouring poets in alphabetical order at the Polytechnic Museum, there were some young people in the auditorium who actually volunteered to read their own poems when their turn came, to make Mayakovsky’s job easier. This is possible only in Moscow and nowhere else in the world; only here are there people who, like Shiites, are ready to prostrate themselves so that the chariot of that stentorian voice might pass over them.
In Moscow, Khlebnikov could hide himself from human eyes, like a beast of the forest, and, without even being noticed, he exchanged the hard beds of the Moscow flophouses for a green Novgorodian grave. And yet it was in Moscow, too, that I. A. Aksenov, when that happened, in the most modest of modest literary gatherings, placed a beautiful wreath of analytical criticism on the grave of the departed great archaic poet, illuminating Khlebnikov’s archaicism by means of Einstein’s principle of relativity and revealing the link between his creative work and the old Russian moral ideal of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And this was at the very time that the enlightened Petersburg Literary Messenger could respond at best with an insipid, arrogant remark about the “great loss.” From out of town, with a different perspective, one can see more easily: all is not well with Petersburg; it has forgotten how to speak in the language of time and wild honey.
As far as Moscow is concerned, the saddest symptom is the pious needlework of Marina Tsvetaeva,2 who seems to echo the dubious solemnity of the Petersburg poetess Anna Radlova.3 The worst thing about Literary Moscow is women’s poetry. The experience of the last years has shown that the only woman who has entered the circle of poetry with the rights of a new muse is the Russian study of poetry called to life by Potebnia4 and Andrei Biely and nourished to maturity in the formalist school of Eikhenbaum, Zhirmunsky, and Shklovsky.5 To the lot of women has fallen the enormous realm of parody, in the most serious and formal sense of this word. Feminine poetry is an unconscious parody of poetic inventiveness as well as of reminiscence. The majority of Muscovite poetesses are bruised by metaphor. These are poor Isises, doomed to an eternal seeking for the second part of the poetic comparison which has been lost somewhere, and which must return its primal unity to the poetic image, to Osiris.
Adalis6 and Marina Tsvetaeva are prophetesses, and so is Sophie Parnok.7 Prophecy, as domestic needlework. While the formerly elevated tone of masculine poetry, the intolerable bombastic rhetoric, has given way to a more normal conversational pitch, feminine poetry continues to vibrate on the highest notes, offending the ear, offending the historical, the poetic sense. The tastelessness and the historical insincerity of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Russia—pseudonational and pseudo-Muscovite—are immeasurably beneath the poems of Adalis, whose voice now and again acquires a masculine force and certainty.
Inventiveness and remembrance go hand in hand in poetry. To remember means also to invent. He who remembers is also an inventor. The radical illness of Moscow’s literary taste lies in forgetting this double truth. Moscow has been specializing in inventiveness, no matter what.
Poetry breathes through both the mouth and the nose, through remembrance and inventiveness. One needs to be a fakir in order to deny oneself one of these modes of breathing. The passion for poetic breathing by way of remembrance was expressed in that heightened interest with which Moscow greeted Khodasevich’s8 arrival. He is a man who’s been writing verses for about twenty-five years now, thank God; yet he has suddenly found himself in the position of a young poet just beginning.