At the same time as the folklore line in prose, the purely byt line goes on to this day. One should overlook all the differences that characterize the Serapions, Pilniak, Zamiatin, Prishvin, Kozyrev, and Nikitin, because of the common badge of folklore by which they are united, their pledge of vitality. As the legitimate children of folklore they all slip into using anecdote. The only one who absolutely does not slip into anecdote is Vsevolod Ivanov,7 and what I said above about byt relates to him.
If you listen attentively to prose at a time when folklore flourishes, you will hear something that resembles the rich ringing of grasshoppers coupling in the air. This is the universal sound of contemporary Russian prose, and I don’t wish to take this ringing sound apart, since it was not invented by the clockmaker, since it is composed of an incalculable multitude of winging grasses and faiths. In the period inevitably ensuing, in the period of the flourishing fabula, with these multitudes thick upon each other, the voices of the grasshoppers will be transformed into the sonorous singing of the skylark—of the fabula, and then the skylark’s high notes will ring out, of which the poet said:
Fluent, frisky, sonorous, clear—
He has shaken me to the depth of my soul.
Notes
Note: See footnote, p. 85.
*1 Book of saints’ lives and similar edifying reading, divided according to the calendar. (Title Slavonicized from the Greek.)
*2 A word that has no precise equivalent in English. “Way of life,” “mores,” but assuming that these form a discernible pattern. A literary genre that emphasizes the way of life of a society or a segment of society as expressed in daily life, the ordinary, the quotidian, the daily round.
Storm & Stress
From this time on, readers will no longer perceive the body of Russian poetry of the first quarter of the twentieth century as “Modernism,” with all the ambiguity and semicontempt inherent in the conception, but simply as Russian poetry. What has taken place is what one might call the welding together of the backbone of two poetic systems, two poetic epochs.
The Russian reader, who has lived through not one but several poetic revolutions during this quarter of a century, has learned to seize, more or less immediately, on what is objectively valuable in the multiformity of the poetic creation surrounding him. Every new literary school—be it Romanticism, Symbolism, or Futurism—comes to us artificially inflated as it were, exaggerating its own exclusive significance, while failing to be aware of its external historical limitations. It passes inevitably through a period of “Storm and Stress.” Only subsequently, usually when the main proponents of the school have already lost their freshness and their capacity for work, does it become clear what its real place in literature is, and what objective value it created. And after the high-water mark of Storm and Stress, the literary flood tide willy-nilly subsides to its natural channel, and it is precisely these incomparably more modest boundaries and outlines that are remembered ever after. Russian poetry of the first quarter of the century twice lived through a harshly expressed period of Storm and Stress. One was Symbolism, the other Futurism. Both major currents wanted to freeze at the crest of their wave, and failed to do so; because history, preparing the crests of new waves, authoritatively ordered them, at the designated time, to recede, to return to the lap of the common maternal element of language and poetry. However, in their poetic development, Symbolism and Futurism, which complemented each other historically, were essentially of quite different types. Symbolism’s “Storm and Stress” should be seen as a stormy and fiery process of making European and world poetry accessible to Russian literature. And so this stormy phenomenon had essentially an outward cultural meaning. Early Russian Symbolism was a very powerful blast of air from the West. Russian Futurism is much closer to Romanticism. It contains all the traits of a national poetic revival, in the course of which its reworking of the national treasury of language and of a deep native poetic tradition once more brings it closer to Romanticism, unlike the alien nature of Russian Symbolism, which had been a Kulturträger, a hauler of poetic culture from one base to another. Following this essential distinction between Symbolism and Futurism, the former may be cited as an example of outward, the latter of inward striving. Symbolism hinged on a passion for great themes of a cosmic and metaphysical nature. Early Russian Symbolism is the realm of Great Themes and Big Ideas, with a capital letter, borrowed directly from Baudelaire, Edgar Poe, Mallarmé, Swinburne, Shelley, and others. Futurism for the most part lived by the poetic device, and developed not the theme but the device; that is, something internal, innate in language. Among the Symbolists, the theme was brandished like a shield protecting the device. The themes of the early Briusov, Balmont, and others were extremely distinct. Among the Futurists it is difficult to separate the theme from the device, and the inexperienced eye will see in, say, the works of Khlebnikov, nothing more than pure device or naked metalogic.
It is easier to sum up the Symbolist period than the Futurist, because the latter has not come to so distinct an end and was not so abruptly broken off as Symbolism, which was extinguished by hostile influences. Almost imperceptibly Futurism has renounced the excesses of its Storm and Stress period. It has continued to elaborate, in the spirit of the common history of the language and our poetry, those of its elements that have turned out to be of objective value. To sum up Symbolism is relatively easy. Of the early stage of Symbolism, swollen and afflicted with the dropsy of great themes, almost nothing remains. Balmont’s grandiose cosmic hymns have turned out childishly weak and inept in poetic practice. The renowned urbanism of Briusov, who entered poetry as the singer of the universal city, has dimmed with time, since Briusov’s phonic and imagistic material seemed to be anything but inherent in his favorite theme. Andrei Biely’s transcendental poetry turned out not to be up to preventing its metaphysical meaning from losing the sheen of its fashionableness and becoming a bit of a ruin. The complex Byzantine-Hellenic world of Viacheslav Ivanov presents a somewhat better case. While he was essentially as much the pioneer and colonizer as the other Symbolists, he did not treat Byzantium and Hellas as foreign countries marked for conquest, but rightly saw in them the cultural sources of Russian poetry. Due, however, to the lack of a sense of measure, characteristic of all the Symbolists, he overfreighted his poetry with Byzantine-Hellenic images and myths, which significantly cheapened it. About Sologub and Annensky one ought to speak separately, since they never participated in the Storm and Stress of Symbolism. Blok’s poetic fate is most tightly bound to Russian poetry of the nineteenth century, and so one must speak separately about him, too. And here one has to mention the work of the younger Symbolists, or Acmeists, who wished not to repeat the mistakes of early Symbolism, swollen with its dropsy of great themes. Estimating their powers much more soberly, they renounced the illusions of grandeur of early Symbolism and replaced them, some with monumentality of device, others with clarity of exposition, with far from equal success.