As from the Taganka to the Pliushchikha, literary Moscow spread out enormously from MAF to the Lyrical Circle.9 At one end, something like inventiveness; at the other, remembrance. Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh,10 Aseev on the one side; on the other, given the complete absence of domestic resources, there was a need to resort to visiting players from Petersburg in order to draw the line. And so one needn’t talk about the Lyrical Circle as though it were a Muscovite phenomenon.
What, then, goes on in the camp of pure inventiveness? Here, if one leaves out the completely unsound and unintelligible Kruchenykh—and I say this, not because he’s left-wing or extreme, but because there is after all such a thing in the world as simple nonsense . . . (And yet, Kruchenykh’s attitude to poetry is passionate and very intense, and this makes him interesting as a personality.) Here Mayakovsky goes on resolving the great, elementary problem of “poetry for all, not just for the elite.” An extensive broadening of the space contiguous to poetry naturally takes place at the expense of intensivity, pithiness, poetic culture. Splendidly informed about the richness and complexity of world poetry, Mayakovsky, in founding his “poetry for all,” had to send everything obscure to the devil; everything, that is, that assumed the least bit of poetic preparation in his audience. And yet to address in verse an audience completely unprepared poetically is as thankless a task as trying to sit on a pike. The completely unprepared audience will grasp absolutely nothing, or else poetry, emancipated from culture of any kind, will quite cease to be poetry, and then, due to some strange quality in human nature, will become accessible to an enormous audience indeed. Yet Mayakovsky writes poetry, and quite cultivated poetry: that is, his refined raeshnik, whose stanza is broken by a weighty antithesis, saturated with hyperbolic metaphors and sustained in the monotonous brief pauznik.* It is therefore quite in vain that Mayakovsky impoverished himself. He is threatened with the danger of becoming a poetess, and it has already half come to pass.
If Mayakovsky’s poems express the tendency toward universal accessibility, what speaks out in Aseev’s11 is our time’s passion for organization. The brilliant rational imagery of his language produces the impression of something freshly mobilized. There is essentially no difference between the snuffbox poetry of the eighteenth century and Aseev’s twentieth-century mechanical poetry. A sentimental rationalism on the one hand, an organizational rationalism on the other. A purely rationalistic, electro-mechanical, radioactive, and in general technological poetry is impossible, for a single reason that should be equally close to the poet and the mechanic: rationalistic mechanical poetry does not store up energy, gives it no increment, as natural irrational poetry does; but only spends, only disperses it. The discharge is equal to the windup. As much comes out as is wound up. A mainspring cannot give back more than has been put into it beforehand. This is why Aseev’s rationalistic poetry is not rational, why it is sterile and sexless. A machine lives a deep and animated life, but it gives forth no seed.
By now the passion for inventiveness in poetic Moscow is already passing. All the patents have already been taken out, and there have been no new patents for some time. The double truth of inventiveness and remembrance is as much needed as bread. That is why in Moscow there is not a single real poetic school, not a single lively poetic circle, for all the factions somehow find themselves on one side or the other of a divided truth.
Inventiveness and remembrance are the two elements by which the poetry of B. Pasternak is moved. Let us hope that his poems will be studied in the immediate future, and that they will not suffer the mass of lyrical stupidities (inflicted by our critics) that has befallen all Russian poets, beginning with Blok.
World cities like Paris, Moscow, London are amazingly tactful in their relationship to literature, permitting it to hide in any trench, to disappear without trace, to live without a permit, or under another name, or not to have an address. It is as absurd to talk of Muscovite literature as it is of a world literature. The first exists only in the imagination of the reviewer, just as the second exists only in the name of a worthy Petersburg publishing house. To the man who has not been forewarned, it might seem that there is no literature at all in Moscow. If he should accidentally meet a poet, the latter would wave his hands and look as though he were in a terrible hurry to be off somewhere, and he would disappear through the green gates of the boulevard accompanied by the blessings of the cigarette boys, who know better than anyone else how to estimate the value of a man and how to bring out in him the most remote possibilities.
Note
* The raeshnik is a verse form deriving from the country-fair side-show-barker, who used to call attention to his show by spouting rhymes. The pauznik is a meter, usually of three feet, with an unequal number of unstressed syllables between the stressed syllables; i.e., with pauses.
Literary Moscow: Birth of the Fabula
I.
Once upon a time the monks in their chill Gothic refectories ate more or less lenten fare, while listening to a reader, to the accompaniment of a prose that was quite good for its time, from the book of Chet’i-Minei.*1 It was read aloud, not only for instruction; the reading was added to the refectory as table music, and, freshening the heads of those who dined, the seasoning provided by the reader supported the harmony and orderliness at the common table.
But imagine, if you will, almost any social group, the most enlightened, the most modern, wishing to renew the custom of reading aloud at table and inviting a reader; and this reader, wishing to please everybody, brings along Andrei Biely’s St. Petersburg and he reads it to the group. Well, he begins. The results are incredible. Somebody has something stuck in his throat; somebody else is eating his fish with his knife; a third person burns himself swallowing the mustard.
It is impossible to imagine such an occasion, such an event, such a group occasion, to which Andrei Biely’s prose might conceivably serve as an accompaniment. Its rhythmic periods are reckoned on the scale of a Methusalean age; incompatible with any kind of human activity. The tales of Scheherazade, on the other hand, were measured to 366 days, one for every night of a Leap Year, and the Decameron befriended the calendar, attentive to the shifting of day and night. Why mention the Decameron! Dostoevsky makes excellent table reading; well, if not just yet, then he will in the very near future, when, instead of weeping over him and being moved by him, as chambermaids are touched by Balzac and by good cheap novels, people will apprehend him in a purely literary way, and then for the first time they will have read and understood him.
Extracting pyramids from your own depths is an indigestible, unsociable activity; it is a stomach probe. It’s not entertainment, but a surgical operation. From the time that the plague of psychological experimentation penetrated literary consciousness, the prose writer has become a surgeon and prose a clinical catastrophe, to our taste quite unpleasant; and a thousand times I’ll drop the belletristic psychologizing of Andreev, Gorky, Shmelev, Sergeev-Tsensky, Zamiatin,1 for the sake of the magnificent Bret Harte in the translation of an unknown student of the nineties: “Without saying a word, with a single motion of hand and foot, he flung him from the staircase and turned very calmly to the unknown lady.”