Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia's political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country's past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. *The Voice Over* brings together two decades of Stepanova's work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova's poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns... Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia's first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia's political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country's past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova's work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia's most acclaimed contemporary writers. Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards. Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. With translations by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva.
THE VOICE OVER
RUSSIAN LIBRARY
The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.
Editorial Board:
Vsevolod Bagno
Dmitry Bak
Rosamund Bartlett
Caryl Emerson
Peter B. Kaufman
Mark Lipovetsky
Oliver Ready
Stephanie Sandler
For a list of books in the series, see page 307
Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc.,
and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia
Columbia University Press
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
EISBN 978-0-231-55168-7
Poems “Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof,” “The light swells and
pulses at the garden gate,” “In the village, in the field, in the
forest,” “A deer, a deer stood in that place,” “The last songs are
assembling,” “Don’t wait for us, my darling,”
2021). Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books, www.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stepanova, Marii︠a︡, author. | Shevelenko, Irina, editor.
Title: The voice over : poems and essays / Maria Stepanova ; edited
by Irina Shevelenko.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2021] |
Series: Russian library
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044582 (print) | LCCN 2020044583 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231196161 (hardback ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231196178 (trade paperback ; acid-free paper) |
ISBN 9780231551687 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry. | Essays.
Classification: LCC PG3488.T4755 A2 2021 (print) |
LCC PG3488.T4755 (ebook) | DDC 891.71/5–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044582
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044583
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
CONTENTS
PART I: THE HERE-WORLD
from
A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki
The North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradle
from
Ahoy! Beyond the azure’s tempest
For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse
from
The Bride
The Pilot
from
The morning sun arises in the morning
As Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamber
It is certainly time to stop
Even bluer than the toilet tiles
(a birthday on the train)
(half an hour on foot)
from
July 3rd, 2004
1. I’ll now make a couple of
2. Doctors, lectors and actors, young widows
The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness
Sarah on the Barricades
1. The year nineteen-oh-five
2. Of all those lying in the earth, foreheads tossed back
The Desire to Be a Rib
1. Me and myself, we’re uneasy, like a lady with her pitbull
2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof
from
Zoo, Woman, Monkey
PART II: DISPLACED PERSON
from
And a vo-vo-voice arose
In the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurled
Saturday and Sunday burn like stars
In every little park, in every little square
from
from the cycle
Mom-pop didn’t know him
Mama, what janitor
A train is riding over Russia
Ordnance was weeping in the open
The A went past, Tram-Traum
Well I don’t sing
from the cycle
The light swells and pulses at the garden gate
In the village, in the field, in the forest
A deer, a deer stood in that place
The last songs are assembling
from the cycle
My dear, my little Liberty
There he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his head
Don’t wait for us, my darling
Don’t strain your sight
Four Operas
1. Carmen
2. Aida
3. Fidelio
4. Iphigenia in Aulis
In Unheard-of Simplicity
Displaced Person
PART III: SPOLIA
Spolia
War of the Beasts and the Animals
War of the Beasts and the Animals
Today Before Yesterday (excerpt)
After the Dead Water
Intending to Live
At the Door of a Notnew Age
PART IV: OVER VENERABLE GRAVES
The Maximum Cost of Living (
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (
What Alice Found There (
The Last Hero (
From That Side: Notes on Sebald
Over Venerable Graves
Notes
PREFACE
BY IRINA SHEVELENKO
Maria Stepanova (b. 1972) is one of the most original and complex poets on the literary scene in Russia today. She has published ten books of poetry, the last of which came out in Moscow at the end of 2019. Two volumes of her collected poems, which together represent the corpus of her work from 1995 to 2015, appeared in 2010 and 2017. She is the recipient of a number of Russian and international poetry awards. During the 2010s, Stepanova also earned recognition for her work in a genre that does not have a stable tradition in Russian literature—that of the essay. She is virtually the only Russian author of comparable caliber in her generation who has worked consistently to reestablish the essay as an important form of creative discourse—a work of art and an intellectual statement—that addresses topics ranging from the contemporary political climate to the work of famous and lesser-known authors of the past, from current literary politics to metapoetical reflections. Three collections of her essays came out between 2014 and 2019. In 2017, Stepanova published a novel entitled
STRUCTURE OF THE VOLUME
This volume offers a systematic introduction to Stepanova’s work for the Anglophone reader: it includes a representative selection of poems and essays from a period of twenty years, 1996–2016. A bibliographic note on Stepanova’s Russian publications from which this volume draws follows the preface.
The first three parts of this volume are organized chronologically, giving the reader an opportunity to follow the principal transformations in Stepanova’s poetic practice. Small selections from several early poetry collections that comprise part I provide insight into the author’s engagement with a series of lyric idioms. More recent collections are represented by substantially broader selections, with about half of the poems from
The introduction to the volume offers an interpretative survey of Stepanova’s work set against the background of cultural and political conditions of the post-Soviet period. Drawing on translations included in this volume, it situates them within the body of the author’s work and connects them, where appropriate, to other works by Stepanova, particularly to her novel
The author provided significant input on the composition and structure of this volume. Poetry translators chose individual poems from a list compiled by the editor or made their own selections from suggested collections and cycles. Both the editor and the author reviewed drafts of poetry translations, most of which went through several rounds of revisions. The editor read drafts of essay translations, suggested revisions, and closely collaborated with translators throughout the revision process. Near-final versions of essay translations were then reviewed by the author.
Unless stated otherwise, notes to poems and essays were added by the editor, including bibliographic citations for passages quoted in essays; these citations are not part of the original Russian text.
NOTE ON POETRY TRANSLATIONS
Translators of Stepanova’s poetry face many challenges, some of which are common for translations of Russian experimental poetry into English in general. Metric organization, rhythmic expressiveness, and rhyme remain key elements of poetic form in much of contemporary Russian poetry, particularly in Stepanova’s poetry. Some of these prosodic patterns are not necessarily associated with contemporary poetic idioms for an Anglophone reader, yet their complete obliteration in translation would change the essence of many poems. Stepanova’s complex syntax, lexical and morphological inventions, and disjointed diction complement prosodic challenges, as does the high degree of allusiveness of her works.
Among the short poems included in parts I and II, only a small number are not rhymed in the original: all the poems from
One aspect of prosody that most translators tried to retain was the rhythmic contour of poems. In some cases, the meter of the original was reproduced with a great degree of precision; in others it was relaxed or slightly modified. Rhymes were preserved with substantial accuracy in some translations, but in the majority of them rhyming is less systematic to allow for greater semantic proximity to the original and to avoid an impression of forced rhymes. Among translations of metric rhymed poems, prosodic qualities of the original are most closely conveyed in “The Pilot,” the second part of “July 3rd, 2004,” in poems from
Eugene Ostashevsky’s translations from the first cycle of
CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several translations included in this volume have been previously published. Among them are three translations by Sibelan Forrester. The poem “The morning sun arises in the morning” originally appeared in
Two other translations, the poems “Saturday and Sunday burn like stars” (trans. Dmitry Manin) and “The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness” (trans. Zachary Murphy King), earned first and second prizes respectively in the 2017 Compass Translation Award competition dedicated to the poetry of Maria Stepanova; they originally appeared in vol. 8 (2018) of
Finally, by permission of Bloodaxe Books, as specified on the copyright page, we have included eight translations by Sasha Dugdale from her forthcoming book of translations of Maria Stepanova’s poetry,
As the editor of this volume, I would like to thank, first and foremost, the extraordinary team of translators whose dedicated work made this project come true: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva. I am particularly indebted to Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky for their help at the early stages of planning for this volume and for their advice on several occasions in the course of my work. My spouse and colleague, Karen Evans-Romaine, provided invaluable editorial advice on poetry translations, as did Megan Kennedy, who also copyedited a draft of my introduction. Commentaries by three anonymous reviewers solicited by Columbia University Press were very helpful at the final stage of my work. I am grateful to these reviewers as well as to the members of the editorial board of the Russian Library series for their support of this project. The editorial staff at Columbia University Press, especially Christine Dunbar and Christian Winting, offered unfailing support throughout the process. This process would be entirely impossible without Maria Stepanova’s involvement at all stages of preparation of this volume.
TRANSLITERATION AND STYLE
This volume uses the Library of Congress (LC) system of transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet (without diacritics) in bibliographic references as well as in transliterations of titles of Russian sources. A modified LC system is used in the text for personal names and some proper nouns to ensure easier readability.
All omissions in quoted sources are designated with ellipses in square brackets to distinguish them from suspension points as a punctuation mark used by authors of quoted sources.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
Maria Stepanova’s poems included in this volume come from the following books of poetry:
The cycle
Essays included in parts II and IV of this volume come from the collection
Seven of the included essays were also reprinted in Stepanova’s most recent collection of essays,
INTRODUCTION
BY IRINA SHEVELENKO
“Occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence.”
“Stepanova’s début was distinguished by brilliant poetic technique and a purity of style,” Dmitry Kuzmin, poet and publisher, wrote fifteen years ago. “Progress along this route would virtually have assured Stepanova of success with the reading public and with the critics, but she chose another and far riskier strategy,” he remarked. It was the ever expanding vocal range that became a hallmark of Stepanova’s development: “At times she engaged in a dialogue with the Russian tradition, with the archaic language and poetry of the eighteenth century; at others she introduced casual contemporary diction, close to slang, into a classical stanza reminiscent of Catullus. At one time, in a lyric miniature, she reached the heights of estrangement, observing the sufferings of the spirit and the body from some point of passionless elevation; at another, a sonnet cycle looked like total parody.”1
Over the years since, new turns and transformations in Stepanova’s work have continued to surprise, irritate, and stir admiration in her readers, yet the stable core of this evolving system has also become more tangible. Russian Formalist literary critics once coined the term
Stepanova’s seminal long poem
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
and so she always uses rhyme in her poems
ersatz and out of date poetic forms
her material
offers no resistance
its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless
she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair
read us the poem about wandering lonely
she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator
careful unadventurous
where is her
why on earth does she speak in voices
(voices “she has adopted,” in quote marks:
obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything
for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms
pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat
although no one believes him quite)
[…]
let her come out herself and say something
(and we’ll listen to you)
she won’t come out
it won’t come right*
The motif of a lacking
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
so she is always ruled by others
because her history repeats and repeats itself
takes on ersatz and out of date forms
and there is no knowing where her quotes are from
nineteen thirty or nineteen seventy
they’re all in there pell-mell all at once
[…]
her raw material
her diamonds her dust tracks her dirt-colored trailers
ancient forests mountain ranges
snow leopards desert roses gas flow
needed for global trade arrangements
her raw material doesn’t want to do business with her
gives itself up without love will do as she wants
unclear what she needs
where’s your
why do strangers speak for you
or are you speaking
in the voices of scolds and cowards
get out of yourself
put that dictionary back on the shelf
she won’t come out
it won’t come right
Russia appears here as a double of the poet, a country-without-an-I, whose possessions, carefully accounted for, along with events and voices of her past, seem to be stored in a giant repository and available for ad hoc repurposing in ever new combinations—as spolia, as building blocks of obsolete structures. The Russia of
Like many members of her literary generation, Stepanova started publishing in the late 1980s, when she was still in high school. A few of her poems appeared in the first half of the 1990s, but it was not until the later part of that decade that she was published consistently. This dynamic testifies as much to the conditions of the time as it reflects Stepanova’s own choices. In an interview she gave in 2017 to Cynthia Haven, Stepanova spoke about the atmosphere of the early 1990s—the time following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when she studied at the Literary Institute in Moscow and contemplated “how to be a poet”:
When I was a teenager, a student, I saw how the people who belonged to the previous generation were traumatized by the crash of the Soviet system of literary education and literary work. The Soviet Writers’ Union had been able to give writers enough to live on after publishing a book or a collection of poems in some literary magazine—for the official writers, of course, not to the authors of
The early 1990s, along with political freedoms and a deep economic crisis, brought about new conditions for writing, both economic and existential. At the end of that decade, one of the most prominent prose writers of the time, Victor Pelevin, made the fate of a poet in post-Soviet Russia a theme of his novel
We can acknowledge today that there were brighter alternatives to Tatarsky’s fate. And yet Stepanova could have easily crossed paths with him: “I started in the mid-1990s as a copywriter in a French advertising agency, and then I switched to TV.” This choice, Stepanova explained, was a way for her to sever links with the vanishing Soviet-era support system for literature and with the kind of literary community that system cultivated: “I was quite young and opinionated, so my attitude was rather harsh. I didn’t want to have anything in common with them. I refused to rely on poetry to make a living, to attain a position in the world. I would find some other professional occupation and would be as free as I could be in terms of poetry. It was the easiest way for me to stay independent. I split my world into halves.”3
In one way or another, all poets of that generation had to find their “second professions”—in editing and the publishing industry, in media and journalism, and in teaching and research. Individual choices aside, the pressing issue was the viability of a new type of literary community. The experience of “unofficial” culture of the late Soviet period provided some models for that, but the situation was quite different already, and no one in Russia had a clear sense of how exactly not just poets but experimental poetry itself would exist in a market economy. That knowledge was yet to be acquired, while the larger context seemed unfavorable for young authors in the 1990s: it was a time when the country was avidly reading all the books, Russian and foreign, that had been banned or barely accessible during the Soviet period. It is therefore noteworthy how quickly this generation of poets reinvented itself as a literary community, establishing venues for readings, publication, and intellectual exchange. It was in the mid-1990s, as Stepanova herself recalled later, that the sense of belonging to a remarkable poetic community became a shared feeling: “Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preference. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices” (“In Unheard-of Simplicity”).
In 2001, Stepanova published, one after another, three books of poetry:
So when he came back here forever to stay,
An empty descendant from the freedomless sky,
Mysterious like a suitcase,
We went out by the staff door, the night chill and clear,
The boy in my arms and the girl hanging near,
And he gave me a whack on the face.
Like the flowing blush when we hear the word “love,”
All over my face his sky-blue glance roved,
While he hurt me, time and again.
And we plopped on the lawn, all the pedigree, staring
At the horizon where the sky was flaring
And no one put out the flame.
Besides the mismatch between the archaic genre frame of a ballad and the register and subject of the narration, the peculiarity of this and other ballads from
The title of the book,
Stepanova’s poems from
Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing
That is stitching together the book’s cover,
Leaping in lilacs like a swing
Into here-world—and there-.
While a few poems in this early corpus are programmatic at some level, “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki” from
Our Lyubka, led to market, gets stripped down:
There, sizing up her muscles, gropes the muse,
Assessing us, deciding which to ride.
And every single birthday is a duel.
The grotesque here becomes a voice for the sublime, and it is a variation on a pattern that has been one of the hallmarks of Stepanova’s poetic diction: a mismatch between the tone, the image, and the actual subject, allowing the reader to contemplate the peculiar effect of a simultaneity of transpositions into various keys that such poems produce.
A semantic shift in the transposition of a borrowed image in a poem may work similarly, both emphasizing and blurring the line between two distinct meanings that collide in the reader’s imagination. Such is the use of Horace’s “swan” ode (II, 20) in the poem “The morning sun arises in the morning” from
Whatcha want, my dovey little swan?
Turn back around, take off the last rag,
Feast your eyes on the golden mirror,
Moving this and that part forward.
And hey! I hear a muffled beating.
Your sides feel warm and neck’s stretched longer.
The legs don’t please you, but your white feathers
Are the envy of many girlfriends.4
The flight of Stepanova’s swan culminates in a declaration of immortality (“—Immortal, forever immortal am I, / The Styx itself will not arrest my flight!”) that paraphrases Horace’s (“Nor will I […] die or be / confined by the waters of Styx”5). The erotic emotion, with an air of naïve nonchalance, transcribes itself as a creative act, giving an inaugural tune to a book of love lyrics.
In the poetic construction of
I know (it would be better not to know)
That these universal birthing pains,
Rhythmic as a cannonade, are
The coming of a whole new strain.
That into sleepless bassinets
Yawn these gaping hatches.
That this demo-graphic tide
Boils and bubbles with every type.
Despite “private history” appearing in the title of the book, it is “history writ large,” with which Stepanova often engages, viewed through the lens of family history. The core tension of “Sarah on the Barricades” emerges precisely from the dual perspective available to the speaker: one that engages both with the grand scheme of twentieth-century Russian and European history and with a family member’s position at one of its early critical junctures. Over a decade later, her great-grandmother Sarah Ginzburg, the title character of this poem, becomes one of the protagonists in the novel
The same prominence is given to the feminine in recounting history in “The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness.” The opening sketch of a locker room in a modern gym gradually morphs into a vision of a catastrophe that would forever “classify” some as perpetrators (marching in raids on Kristallnacht) and others as victims:
This pillar of water might turn to ice,
Reason to a poison, air to gas,
Sweetie-pies will march and stride
In closed ranks through shops and shacks.
And the door that led out to the swimming cube
Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.
And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,
En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls
Who broke the lock.
The haunting horrors of the historical past that break through the contours of contemporary life is a motif that repeats in Stepanova’s work, becoming later a subject of reflection in her essays and the novel
You open your eyes: time to file in the ark:
Spring comes and swallows you up,
The Czechs are close, Kolchak advances from the east
And under Moscow undressed Germans stand like sharpened pales.
And flayed forest partisans like flanks.
And dead pilots without their holsters or their watches.
Death and birth are two motifs that run through
“Journalism happened rather late in my life,” Stepanova remarked in her conversation with Cynthia Haven. “I cannot say it doesn’t affect my poetry, because it does. Of course it does. The things I deal with as a journalist get mixed up with the problems that make me tick as a poet. That space I was hoping to make—you know, the enclosed garden—is not secluded enough. It’s not enclosed now—the doors are wide open, and the beasts of the current moment are free to enter. Because I’m changing, too. You have to open the doorways to let the world in—to make the words come in, in fact.”6 In 2007, Stepanova became editor-in-chief of the online media resource OpenSpace.ru, which endeavored to set new standards of cultural journalism in Russia. In 2012, as a consequence of the government crackdown on independent media projects, following a series of anti-government rallies in Moscow in 2011–2012, OpenSpace was discontinued by its owners, and its team soon founded another cultural journalism portal, Colta.ru, the first media resource in Russia that has no owners and operates on the model of crowdfunding, and of which Stepanova remains editor-in-chief today.
Stepanova’s engagement with journalism and changes in her poetic practice were not causally related, however: the two coincided, rather than one being predicated on the other. In the poem “And a vo-vo-voice arose” from
At thirty years old
I was not very old.
At thirty-three
’Twere a babe inside me.
At thirty-five
Time came back alive.
Now I am thirty-six
Time to eat myself up quick.
Scoop out my head
With a big pewter spoon,
So new beer can be poured in
And topped off after settling,
So that she not, like the olive tree,
Spend the winter blue and empty
Proverbially famous Soviet-period “announcements” that instructed customers to demand “topping off one’s beer glass after the foam settles” serve here to frame a statement about creative renewal. The pointedly low stylistic register masks the sublime subject matter: scooping out one’s head with a pewter spoon makes room for the world and words that are new, alien, and unfamiliar.
The poems of
In 2008, Stepanova translated into Russian e. e. cummings’s famous poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” which seemed to respond to her new sensibilities. In her volume of collected poems,
I walk in a state-owned throw
Through train cars full of people
And sing as earnestly
As a saved soul in paradise
It’s a dirty job, even dirtier
Than the bossman-conductor might deem
For a quality song in our business
Always rises up to a scream
[…]
My voice makes a hole in the comfort
Of the car like an out-of-nowhere shiv
Everyone starts feeling downcast
And takes turns beating me by the toilet
In part, the turn in poetics that
“I” turns out to be not an actor now, but a camera; suddenly several cameras appear—a lot of them—and they aren’t pointed at you. […] But if we suppose that all the cameras are working, all the voices are speaking (singing, coughing, whistling, stuttering; one of them, obviously, belongs to the author himself, but we can’t say with any certainty which)—and if this sheaf or whiskbroom of diverging intonations exists as a text, as a
The three cycles comprised by
There he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his head,
Such a mustachioed gentilhomme, now in the coffin all alone,
So here he lies, all numb and quiet, and the collar of his face
Is growing yellow from inside, but you would best avert your gaze,
For deep within, just like a clock that’s scratching its tick-tock-tick-tock,
He still produces, dull and low, his never-ceased Iloveyouso,
But all the people at his side, they wouldn’t hear him if they tried,
Just us, we look from the plafond, invisible, but not for long,
Each one of us, so well we know:
I too had squadrons to command,
Wore in my mouth Iloveyouso,
Wore round my head a paper band.
This succinct outline of a life, in which the catharsis is born from the grotesque, is but one of the reflexes of the vision from beyond. Voices in
However
Still sparrows will arrive,
And peck at our remains.
I am earth, march-’n’-marsh, muck-’n’-mold,
Collarbone, flowers in season.
For a whole ’nother reason.
The cycle
The action continues by the water,
A fatal war, trenches, swords, cuirasses,
The yids occupy the war’s left bank,
The faggots stand in formation on the right.
This battle takes place on foot, it will never end,
Will grind through and chew up five hundred generations,
Will have its way, like a nuclear winter,
Because cavalry attacks them from the heavens,
While darkness comes on from under the ground,
Piercing the heel and poking the knees apart.
[…]
With a sword in my chest I sing and do not die
In the war waged on the foothills of paradise.
The derogatory vocabulary of Stepanova’s poem, Kukulin remarks, is “a ‘smutty’ parody of the style of social media hate speech,”10 but it also exposes hate speech as a structural element of war as such. No one could have guessed that a new war was just around the corner in 2010. When it came, Stepanova called her long poem about it
“National traitors,
Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s
In both
like a mound
under a snowdrift
means nothing
writing on a tomb
sees no one
writing on a stone
nothing, we read
it not
but it is
Commenting in her interview on the two “digests” that frame
The essays included in the last part of this volume were written in the period 2010–2013, and they present Stepanova as an interpreter of the work, personalities, and life strategies of other authors. Three of them—Marina Tsvetaeva, W. G. Sebald, and Susan Sontag—are among the authors with whose work Stepanova has been deeply engaged. Her pieces on Lyubov Shaporina and Alisa Poret, on the other hand, anticipate some of the documentary novellas in her
It is striking how the authorial perspective in these essays connects authors as different as Shaporina (a member of the Soviet cultural establishment, whose voluminous diary demonstrates remarkable independence and freedom from self-censorship) and Sebald. Shaporina’s diary is “obviously, flagrantly overabundant,” Stepanova writes, “as if it lacks a filter to distinguish the important things from the unimportant, the superfluous from the essential, the verisimilar from the fantastic. Rumors, gossip, dreams, jokes, conversations in lines and worldly salons, news of banishments, executions and hungry deaths come billowing in a thick, blind wave. The index of names at the end of the second volume takes up twenty-seven pages; the book, issued by NLO Press, is a Noah’s Ark where everything that breathes and talks swims out of nonbeing: peasants, Red Army soldiers, literary functionaries.” Stepanova emphasizes this same pattern—“
In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything
Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a
This is one of the framing motifs in Stepanova’s
Our natural inclination to look at history as an exhibit of accomplishments (or a sequence of traumas) is suddenly pushed out by other kinds of histories. Cooking pots, bedsheets, irons, porcelain, faience, diapers, baby powder, hollow gold rings, underskirts, postcards from the city of Gorky, a Niva edition of Chekhov, sleds, a Napoleon cake, union fees, ring four times, theater clutch bags, two-kopeck coins, quarter-kopeck coins, a monthly pass (September), a vocabulary notebook, a butter dish, a mimosa, a ticket to the Moscow Art Theater. Over each grave, like a post, like a beam, there is an invisible (maybe glowing, maybe devoid of any color or weight) mass of
It is remarkable how Stepanova’s vision in “Over Venerable Graves” resonates with her early poem “A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,” that opens this volume. In it, “unforeseen ancestors” come to invade the poet’s space (or mind), demanding recognition and acceptance. Ancestors or not, these people seek the poet out because they want to be remembered, and a “plaintive bead” made of crystal that hangs around the speaker’s neck (evoking a “crystal voice”) explains the choice of this unruly crowd. Over the span of two decades and across dramatic transformations of poetics, one aspect of the pragmatics of Stepanova’s speech keeps coming back like a pendulum. It has to do with an archaic notion of poetry as speaking on behalf of multitudes—yet it appears ever more modern with every return.
NOTES
* This and subsequent quotations come from the present edition.
1. Dmitry Kuzmin, “The Vavilon Project and Women’s Voices Among the Young Literary Generation,” in
2. Cynthia Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry: An Interview with Maria Stepanova,”
3. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
4. Cf. in Horace: “The transformation begins: rough skin forms / on my legs, and I am turning into a white bird / above, smooth feathers growing / through my arms and fingertips.”
5.
6. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
7. The two poems I specifically mean here have not been translated (and they would present significant difficulty for translation): “Zhenskoe. Babskoe. Iz-pod-sarafannoe” and “Bylo, ne ostalosia nichego podobnogo.”
8. Ilya Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” in
9. Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 253.
10. Kukulin, “Narrative Poetry,” 251.
11. Haven, “Mad Russia Hurt Me Into Poetry.”
I
The Here-World
Poems from books and cycles
from
A Gypski, a Polsk I, a Jewski, a Russki,
All crowded round the festive table.
A plaintive bead hangs round my neck,
From the mountains, throat, some crystal.
Unforeseen ancestors descend to play,
Crash, like multi-stories, on the saucer.
They swarm about your elbows like mosquitoes,
And mere grandmas can’t push through to me.
On the balcony with hand and heel
To shove and push against these flying crowds—
Let them hide and seek with someone else,
Don’t sing to me, don’t flock into dark clouds!
Breed or blood won’t drown us, though, like kittens,
—they’ll have their fun as long as suits their fancy.
Our Lyubka, led to market, gets stripped down:
There, sizing up her muscles, gropes the muse,
Assessing us, deciding which to ride.
And every single birthday is a duel.
Translated by Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Martha Kelly, Ainsley Morse, and Michael Wachtel*
—
* This translation was undertaken collectively, and with Stepanova’s participation, as part of the AATSEEL 2019 Translation Workshop.
The North of sleep. Head’s in a pillow cradle,
And feet and toes are all pointing south.
And I fly like a cabin boy on a cable,
Spinning like a mace in battle’s wrath.
Some time you will see me too in your dreams
As a map smoothly laid out flat.
Two polar explorers there, one tent,
One hardtack biscuit and the post that’s last.
No, if in your dream (some bedroom) I’d appear
It will be as a magnitude unrecompensed:
On the cheekbone—a permafrosted tear,
Which, like a lamp, will light dispense.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
from
One flight up fir tree under windowsill,
Where a bird darts like an adder,
Beneath the heavens, as before an icon wall.
It flits and flutters in my pupils,
And I, bespectacled monkey from the fable,*
Eyes for necessary vision framed,
Do not get off scot-free.
On an empty windowsill.
Like Moses before the bush, so still.
In a light of a particular composition.
I could have become a bird, but didn’t.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
—
* An allusion to Ivan Krylov’s fable “The Monkey and the Spectacles” (1815), in which the protagonist (the monkey) acquires glasses but is unable to figure out how to properly use them for improving its vision.
Ahoy! Beyond the azure’s tempest,
Of excess stars bereft—
Glides non-dark side, the independent
Eye of heavenly nests.
Looking down, she throws light shades
Above the paper sheets.
We cultivate darkling beneath her sway
A face’s eyes.
And then we our breasts display
For others’ eyes and thrills.
Then, under a candle, as on a plate,
Are buzzing with our quills.
Then we ascend with silent steps
The steamboat, in full stride.
… and after palms have splashed with claps
Of ebb and flow of tide,
And having wolf-howled at this darling,
Roaming with dealers in kills,
And having bayed with hounds a-lapping
Her from puddles bright as rills,
I give her up, don’t give a toss,
(Sound the all-clear, Trumpet, do!)
For an hour in a moonless fosse
With you, with you.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
For you, but the voice of the straitened Muse
Isn’t right for an ear without ears,
Nor for an ear the size of heaven’s sphere,
Nor for a body that’s not in use.
So, black earth must have a dweller.
So here’s black earth, but where’s she who dwelt there?
And there’s the air—it swirls as you,
And you calm the air down too.
Recognize, if nothing else, the seeing
That is stitching together the book’s cover,
Leaping in lilacs like a swing
Into here-world—and there-.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
from
The Bride
1.
May was incredibly heated, white heat.
In every tree birds flitted and flirted.
Maidens glanced askance as they darted,
Air blew bird cherry through the streets.
It would have swept anyone right off their feet.
2.
So for the child that is born in May,
Though she hide behind a curtain of tulle,
Yearning
Greedily snatch up this toy and play
At rocking it over the abyss—so they say.
3.
That Marusya was barely in her teens.
Outsiders thought that she was a fool,
In through one ear and out of the other the cool
Moscow river’s oar wind had blown her brains:
Carried her common sense downstream.
4.
She didn’t stroll down the avenue.
Out with friends she rarely sashayed.
The small gift of young living critters,
That whiteness, and sweetness, and scarlet hue,
Bowled her over and gave her the jitters.
But it was water that made her sorely afraid.
5.
Even from a tap, and a trickle so thin.
Or from a kettle—the merest wisp of steam.
That’s why even as a teeny young thing,
Though few words were exchanged, no evening
Was complete without her swoon.
6.
She’d often tip over as if wanting to sleep.
Would show white like a saucer’s underside.
So they’d bring revivifying water to help,
And she’d bite her lips into a bee sting,
And sail off into an unearthly Spring.
7.
She even took safety-pins to school,
To keep herself from harm:
Permanent scar marks on her hands and arms.
Boats or ponds would set off alarms,
Or even benches next to pools!
8.
And maidenly May was all wrapped up
In a cosmoheat, miracle-ranging,
Rising to her bare knees from her feet,
Just like tea freshly brewed in a cup.
And all this led, quite naturally, to changes.
9.
For example, a groom announced his presence
Like a firework display over the park,
In the hot heaven, with a cherished present,
Differing from all others one could mention,
Like heavenly fabric from those with earth’s mark.
10.
And so here’s the guipure and veil of the dress.
Meters of lace, wings of inspiring advice on all sides,
Bows, ribbons, the corset’s tight press
And the cathedral veil flowing astride:
She’s been cleared for take-off, we guess!
11.
And so to the wedding: honey mead from lips spills.
The day’s set, all’s strictly planned by the hour.
A week to wait, straightening up the frills,
Trying footwear on for size and thrills,
Making sweet partings in the hair.
12.
But one old woman, her neighbor, has noted
That the bride’s soul is ill at ease,
Heart in mouth and nowhere to put it.
And she grows thin, and wan, and grieves,
And sits alone every eve.
13.
So this old dame gathered up her pluck,
A fortifying spoonful of air in her chest, no more,
And snuck
Up to the nearest door
And, eavesdropping, almost sank to the floor.
14.
“Ah” and “oh” was all she heard, time after time.
As water rumbled all through the pipes.
“His anger’s truly boiled over the brim.
Water imp, water imp, water imp.
Just my luck to take after him!
15.
And what on earth does he want with me,
Who announced himself like a patrimony?
On a dread day of my forgotten childhood,
I locked myself away from him in a wardrobe …
And to this day haven’t set myself free.
16.
I should get married, be curled up like a vine.
But my harsh master is spooking
Me in every cracked cup in the kitchen:
Quietly splashing: ‘Stay in line!’
Glistening in ripples: ‘Vengeance is mine!’
17.
How I’m scared of him, that old guy!
Whenever some running water is sprinkling
Or heaven’s thunderstorm winking
At the troubled green of my eye,
That’s him hinting, ‘Yes, all this is I.’”
18.
… And so the neighbor turned silent heels,
Walked the whole corridor length, teeth a-chatter,
Trying to escape this terrible natter—
With no one to advise or to heal
In white robes behind an ambulance wheel.
19.
But no sooner had she resolved to bear witness
And report this to the appropriate quarters
Than in her cat’s dish the shallow water,
As if brought to the boil, smirked and taunted her
With the words: “Mind your own fucking business.”
20.
And so it all remained a mystery.
A car rolled up decked in bows and sprays,
With a pink doll under bouquets,
The doll that beautifies our special day,
And, looking like a divinity,
21.
Down the stairs the bride descends,
And running up the stairs the groom ascends,
And held her up like a bouquet.
And his car revved up and sped away,
Drove off and didn’t return. The end.
22.
And fast withering, bough burnt by the sun,
And whiter than brocade for the dead,
Speaking rarely and non-hearsayly,
Till her grave the neighbor merely
Sought out reports the mainstream papers would run.
23.
There is no consolation, none.
Translated by Andrew Reynolds
The Pilot
And when he came back from wherever there is,
He groaned in his sleep and rained bombs on the cities
And ghosts appeared to him.
He’d get up in the middle of the night for a smoke,
Our communal rags piled about, and awoke,
I’d start packing bags in the dim,
He wouldn’t go tilling our vegetable patch,
Our family’s living and income to match,
And he wouldn’t allow me to go.
Wouldn’t let me touch the confounded greens.
He ate and grew cross, and grew mean, and grew lean
And rolled his own cigs nice and slow.
But when he came back from wherever there is,
Where civil airliners go up on the breeze
Up over the rainbow there,
So when he came back from up there for good,
We had no clue, we felt totally screwed,
Helpless like sucklings and scared.
There up in the skies, pilots sing at the yoke,
And stewardesses fly serving drinks to the folk,
Rolling carts down the aisle cheerfully.
And he wasn’t a lodger up there, not my man,
But the Father has lent him his firm helping hand,
And no one will take that from me.
So when he came back here forever to stay,
An empty descendant from the freedomless sky,
Mysterious like a suitcase,
We went out by the staff door, the night chill and clear,
The boy in my arms and the girl hanging near,
And he gave me a whack on the face.
Like the flowing blush when we hear the word “love,”
All over my face his sky-blue glance roved,
While he hurt me, time and again.
And we plopped on the lawn, all the pedigree, staring
At the horizon where the sky was flaring
And no one put out the flame.
He drank for a week, hard and deep, with a tear.
He cussed at whoever, with a snarl, with a jeer,
He grabbed at his throat and stuttered.
And then he grew quiet and said, in the sky,
He said, and he didn’t look me in the eye—
There lived The Heavenly Daughter.
She’s a daughter, a grandma, he said, and a wife,
And what she was like with her clothes off,
And I could’ve forgiven him lies,
But he was so convincing describing the ways
Of her gaze as indifferent as heavens themselves,
Of her careless and colorless eyes.
He saw her, he said, for the very first time
When the white little town all burst into flame,
But our mission was almost complete,
And in her blue skirt and white headscarf, she swooped
Headlong in a dive, in a hell of a loop,
To open my parachute.
He added, the dawn is the best time to see her,
She’s dressed every time as a Young Pioneer,*
A raven-blue band in her locks.
—And he snored away, and the house awoke,
Deserted now on, ’cause we drank like we’re broke,
Could as well throw away all the locks.
And me, I got nothing at all, not a stitch,
But this bitch of his, this celestial bitch,
His airborne Commissar,
She’ll answer, she’ll answer for his every turn
She’ll remember his crew doomed to crash and burn
And whatever her orders were.
—
* A member of a mass youth organization in the Soviet Union.
Then everything changed. And life lived on,
It felt clear as glass and pure as dawn,
As if there were no cares.
And my man went to work at the transit lines
And became an enforcer of ticketless fines
For the fair collection of fares!
But one day he came home a stranger again,
With a strain in his voice, that familiar strain,
And staring me close in the face,
He said worldly affairs had wearied him,
And The Heavenly Daughter appeared to him
Near the boulevards, on the bus.
He lay down on the bed and he set about dying,
He kept picking from bedsheets invisible down
And passed away, while, insane,
I sobbed as I ran to buy corvalol drops,
And a bus on the boulevard came to the stop,
And She looked through the windowpane.
She was wearing her Young Pioneer uniform,
She leaned to the side of the window and squirmed,
And a blush blew about her face,
And she made a terrible din in my head,
I stepped on the footboard towards where she stood,
And the court is deciding my case.
… I ask for forgiveness, even though, all told,
It’s my fault, the death of this twelve-year-old,
This girl who has met her doom,
’Cause in that drab abyss, like a fish in a tin,
The Heavenly Daughter still lives in sin,
And no one will know with whom.
Translated by Dmitry Manin
from
The morning sun arises in the morning—
So many seductive probabilities!
Why then do you, girly, walk through the house,
Clattering your slippers, printing with your heels?
Whatcha want, my dovey little swan?
Turn back around, take off the last rag,
Feast your eyes on the golden mirror,
Moving this and that part forward.
And hey! I hear a muffled beating.
Your sides feel warm and neck’s stretched longer.
The legs don’t please you, but your white feathers
Are the envy of many girlfriends.
You only need to make a move with a wing
For an oof in the belly; the hardwood floor
Looms far below; my dear ones, farewell,
Write to me poste restante.
—Immortal, forever immortal am I,
The Styx itself will not arrest my flight!
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
As Danaë, prone in the incarce-chamber,
Hears the sounds of rain, barking, a ring and clink,
Sweetly squeezing her eyes shut (in vain: you can’t sleep
Through a visit by gold),
In the warm night, hear ye: suddenly and in the west
The gate hinges groan, snow blows into your mouth,
And weightily over the ice, as if on sand, villagers
Step with their wagons.
Silence? Silence. Nobody’s there, nobody.
The person-exemplar lies to sleep, as they lie,
Cumulonimbus migratory, feathery friable,
Banning evolution.
A female I-person would also sleep, but no.
There pining for us, who heal over in an hour
With grey hair, with scales, chicken feathers,
He is, and swallows tears.
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
It is certainly time to stop
The transversion of all these forms,
Fish turned fishwife, maiden turned maple,
Snow turned napkin, and all that jazz.
How to stop it? Well, for a start,
Set yourself the limit of self:
Squeeze the rhymes dry, cancel the metaphors,
Drop your lover, don’t sing in the bathroom.
Who is speaking to me in the night?
I am speaking, by daylight even.
Who is answering the question?
Answering; ask another!
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
Even bluer than the toilet tiles.
Even whiter than the sleeping sinks.
Longer still than toilet rolls, unwound.
Quieter than gently splashing water
Is my morning path toward the empty
Swimming pools, along the hotel’s quiet
Corridors, in clean and rapid lifts,
All around a sanitary strictness.
Does all this bring something else to mind?
What it brings is something else to mind!
All alone, as if in a balloon,
And—just half a meter off the ground.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
(a birthday on the train)
So I rode, and it’s always amazing
That the curtain keeps holding on, like
A madwoman, a suicide, with a trembling hand,
But then, whoosh, flies into the window after all.
In my compartment, they won’t look me in the eye,
As if last night, someone made a thorough search,
Lights on, all belongings rummaged through.
Or maybe a little bird has told them something,
Explaining that what awakes from sleep
In a humbled strait sleeve of my self and mumbles hi
Isn’t me, but an old man, an experienced worker,
His suitcase clinking with empty space.
How did I meet-and-greet my birthday on the train?
Like a sentry who overslept and missed his minute of glory.
For all that, what a marvelous dream it was,
Which we will see again at the final trial.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
(half an hour on foot)
Like when in a diving windshield glass
The very first of glaciers showed up,
All-the-bus, as if at the embrasures,
At the window, we breathe halfmouthed,
And they show us, show us,
To the right and to the left and again,
The tireless whiteness.
Felt ashamed, but tears spilled awake,
So on foot, catching my breath,
Straightening my spine in steps, rushing,
I open immemorial vent panes,
Sweep away the invisible dust.
You’ll get up in the dark, as if late in a country house,
Listen to the time, listen to your blood.
And a glimpse of a pro-i-e, that’s all there was,
A coloring book, so what.
Don’t fall silent, I don’t.
Translated by Irina Shevelenko
from
July 3rd, 2004
(on your birthday we visit a cemetery*)
1.
I’ll now make a couple of
Glossy prints, tear open
A pack of Italic cigarettes,
Porno comics in cellophane,
The gentle sheath of the brain,
Under which there’s a smoky gray,
Breathing, like a spring,
A spring of this and that.
The cemetery floats in water,
A pie made of bricks.
Steamers, like water striders,
Scurry hither and thither.
The underage cypress has
A forced gloomy look,
Barely casting a shadow
On the neighborhood of shades.
While back there, in Russia, on Whit Monday
And on Soul Saturday, and thereabouts,
They’ve gathered together under the drizzle
By the friendly graves,
—
* The San Michele Cemetery in Venice, where Joseph Brodsky is buried.
They light their candles, and crumble their bread,
And eggshells fall on the ground,
Which the deceased, as far as I recall,
Just couldn’t stand.
So then, the colored eggshells crumble
Off, mosaically.
The compulsory glass transparently filled,
Rainwater it’s not.
You can see those who stood there
Through those who stand there;
Little wings sewn to their feet,
And sometimes on their backs.
… And here, with the cooing of turtledoves
Behind the stone wall,
In a heavy beam of sunlight,
With an albatross meowing,
In the whole horizontal hall
From the Lutherans to the Greeks,
One is hard-pressed to find four
Living legs to walk,
And here, with nothing but dust and ivy
And the Pompeian blue,
A wreath of faience flowers is
Like a little rosy mouth,
A vial of vodka lies in shabby grass,
And a pile of copper coins
Is provided to promise someone
They’ll be back.
Here, nothing is as he would’ve liked,
The one who wanted to lie here.
Here, nothing is as I would’ve liked
Where I would want to lie,
And nevertheless an obvious sense of rightness, which wasn’t mine,
Extended both time and space like a festive table.
2.
Doctors, lectors and actors, young widows
Leave their photos-and-cards,
Leave their bottles-and-hearts,
All their hurried confessions on the window-
Sill of love’s limit, the utmost, the upmost rung,
The final address—the gravestone,* but beyond
The gravestone, there is nothing, not a bond.
There is no
America (his place of death), Europa
(The one he stole and bedded, his affair)
And native land (with hand outstretched elsewhere,
Her features covered up and bottom bare)—
The three perform a primavera ring,
Their heads together, in an ancient vein.
But every tombstone is the edge of things.
And trees—like walking canes.
Take this bouquet: transparent paper mates,
The bodies living off the ink they spend,
Amid the fictions, little clouds and shades
Over the fate you hoped to circumvent:
That of a god, one of so many gods:
Vertumnus joins Priapus, you’re the third,
In light and shade, your marbled vision blurred,
A faceless patron of the written word.
—
*
This tiny island bears all that passed.
The size of an Archangel’s palm, this oven
Bakes everything until it’s interwoven,
A pie where single lines try hard to last,
Just numbers, rarely letters, to be seen,
And rarer still with my tongue in accord
That darkens for me, humid as a board,
Which you’ve wiped clean.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina and Irina Shevelenko
The Women’s Locker Room at Planet Fitness
Nothing in common but warmth and fleece,
Lonesame keys and nine orifices,
Filled with what? moisture, pleasure, shit;
Covered by a mouth; closed by sleep.
Baking up: blood, tears, kids and wax.
Surrounding: their essence or another’s flesh.
Of my own nine, I enter, sat to remove.
I stood to be. And head to the pool.
Pink and yellow, big like babies,
Nakie-nude, towels to the neck—
Crossing the floor are flocks of girltrees.
Each to the shower, languidly leaning its trunk.
Like types of wine and species of aves
They must be classi- or curiosified:
Here’s collarbone plates; there: sails of shoulder blades.
We must catalogue each footarch height.
Soon these ones won’t be. Soon they’ll be replaced.
Here’ll be wound in velvet, there: the stage refaced.
Visitors will stare amazed, not hiding tears,
At the combos of bones, skin, and black braided hair.
Some pretty boy on hand
Or baddie good’un
Plays in the kiddy garden:
Touching your plum,
Partaking of your pear,
Gathering, in his mouth, water:
Then winter will come into it, bejeweled and cut up time,
And the brother go unknown by the animal of mind.
This pillar of water might turn to ice,
Reason to a poison, air to gas,
Sweetie-pies will march and stride
In closed ranks through shops and shacks.
And the door that led out to the swimming cube
Will open just a tad, like a zipper on a boot.
And we’ll step out of slippers, nails and crowns,
From watches, juxtaposed rags, our voices’ sounds.
And into nostrils, ears and mouths, like out a kettle spout,
En masse they’ll surge and spill, souls
Who broke the lock.
But like in forest school: the noisy surplus
Of creams, muscles, hair, armpits and lips.
Self-tanner and shame, as vixens from their bores,
Look at our bodies’ surface through the lenses of our pores.
But like in cattle cars, with cramped and vulgar mutter,
Squares of steam and lengthy howls roam-wander,
Unbreachable, the sky becomes a brother.
And someone sings in the shower room.
In summer camps, in July’s blue shorts,
First hanging back, then straightening spine and neck,
My first I, scowling like a bullet,
Makes its very first step.
And furrowing the landscape, like crushing paper in the hand,
I look at it as almost with the sky. And will then
Lie down, like ball lightning does in fields:
With a single revolution of the wheel.
Translated by Zachary Murphy King
Sarah on the Barricades
1.
The year nineteen-oh-five.
In the cradles sleep no more.
Tiny hands unshod, open eyes,
Toothless mouths yawn wide,
Packed in the train like Guidon in his barrel,*
Oh, no, like sardines packed in a tin,
Rattling off to distant steppes.
Over them in Tambov and Yeysk
In the sackcloth of drapes gone feral
They sigh, those misty Jewish mamas
(German Russian Polish or …)
And the list of children’s surnames
Like a roster of those lost in war.
Their future lady-loves, their girlies,
Come spilling from grandfathers’ loins,
And peer into the eyes of needles,
That lead far into unknown wombs.
(The funny grove around the funny shame
Is curly as a picture-frame.
Above it twirl the scents of procreation,
But no speaking of them.
—
* Prince Guidon is a character in Alexander Pushkin’s
Then there are the mists of soup and toilet.
And headlines of today’s financial news,
First bell, a second-class train,
Inkblot and tear stain.)
I know (it would be better not to know)
That these universal birthing pains,
Rhythmic as a cannonade, are
The coming of a whole new strain.
That into sleepless bassinets
Yawn these gaping hatches.
That this demo-graphic tide
Boils and bubbles with every type.
Any old Martha from off the street
Boasts the same kinds of folds,
A map under every skirt—
A yielding, nebulous, smooth
Landscape, going under ice
For years and years to come.
Atop should lie like tracing paper
The periodic layers of events,
Of spectacles and blood-lettings;
A steamboat chugs across the heart
From nineteen thirty-nine.*
While in the throat—a barricade in black-and-white.
—
* An allusion to the popular song “Parokhod” (“The Steamboat”), which was written in 1939 and performed by Leonid Utyosov and his jazz orchestra; also a reference to Marina Tsvetaeva’s return to the USSR from France on a steamboat in 1939. About the latter, see Stepanova’s essay “The Maximum Cost of Living” in this volume.
On which great-grandma Sarah
—her eye, punched black last night,
is tied around like a pirate’s—
and Sanka and Sarah Sverdlova
are standing with the workers of the world.
2.
In a white hat, with girlfriend and friend,
On an alpine path,
Where the century’s burning down like a wick,
Dwindling in the throng;
On a summer day in the Luxembourg Gardens,
Where Mary Stuart is,
Where I, too, in a hundred years, will stand
And there’s no covering your tracks;
On a winter night in Villefranche-sur-Mer
Watching the lights go.
In Petersburg in prison,
Here, look.
Sorting through the desk box
In the Moscow apartment.
On Pokrovsky Boulevard.
In the communal latrine.
In the hospital ward
In a white coat—
Receiving patients.
Now—only in my crowded skull.
With her daughter.
Her granddaughter.
Her great-granddaughter me.
This feminist firmament—its swallow, its stormcloud.
The Noah of a female ark.
And when she crowns that barricade,
I will not bare her arms-her breasts,
But neither will I cover her with a flag,
For there is no such flag.
And neither red, nor blue & white
Is any good for things like this.
Now, from on high the radio turns on
Liberty, barricade, democracy.
And for them, Sarah Ginzburg’s a demonstration
(Perhaps of the reasons for poetry?)
Though any old acacia growing wild’s
Both easier and better for things like this.
… but who can tell the difference anymore.
And if you put our Sarah in a vase
Or drape the barricade with acacia—
It’s the same number (of the estimated year)
We get when we go look up the solution.
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse
The Desire to Be a Rib
1.
Me and myself, we’re uneasy, like a lady with her pitbull.
Here I, a many-headed storm, strike this little village.
Here I’m some saber-toothed dino at a peaceful feast.
Better grab me by the and shove me in this drawer:
Like into a chest of drawers—my chest
Between this rib and that one,
Beyond borders of skin, flesh, bone—
Into this inviolable lifetime home.
I relinquish my rights
To one sleeve and the other.
I relinquish my lefts
To doubt, opinion, rage.
I relinquish speech.
I sever myself from shoulders,
Face, coat and bra
For the sake of this vocation—the rib’s.
I want to lie here in your midst,
Like messy hens up in their nests,
Like flat herrings in their tins.
To hammer out your rib cages.
I want to take part in the work
Of leukocytes or electrons,
Shock-worker in the flesh works,
I’ll pack up all the sockets,
Account for the state of the tissue,
Like Tanya from the textile plant,
The whole of her dowry in two braids.
Dole out to you sateen and calico,
For covering over the empty, the
Endless hallways of our body.
Singing along with riddle-songs.
Popping open pores with flair,
Like that champagne bottle from before.
Like dark blood flowing toward the nape.
2.
…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .
…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .
Like back in wild childhood on not peeing yourself—
To concentrate on seeping, shade-like,
Under the skin layer, under the fatty membrane,
Under this nervy, living scrap,
Under that bushel, beyond the wet layers,
Into filaments stratified and hard
Boring through a passage like some tick.
And gently lying down, like something small.
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse
Bus Stop: Israelitischer Friedhof
There is no place for the living on dead ground
Even there, where the first lady of the sod,
Soviet Maize, strode on limbs earth-bound
And waxed unceremonious towards the Gods
The young mother, the queen bee
Who has learned to gather up like children, the glean
Of harvests, meadows and sowings
Her tongue sucking sap from the weed
A cocktail of vital air and dank mold-green
Blood and water from the left flank flowing.
Even here where she leafs through the fields
Speaking with the voices of seasons
Where the antennae quiver, the swarm breathes
And unready minds are breached
By the promise of bright new reasons.
Thimble-bodied, the sparrows flit and fly
The sparrows, as shaggy as foxes.
Where a cross is formed from every outline
And, like the maypole, surges to the sky
And flies—but onto the ropes, like boxers.
So at dawn they lie still: her, him, any of us
Like the babe in its pram, the ice in the compress
Like the unborn child in the amniotic flow
Its soft down washing in the womb’s scumble
Like a headcount in a children’s home
Like a little finger loose in a thimble.
Is anyone easy in their skin? How about the one
Who will wake embraced and held tight?
Moses in his basket, the muses’ suckling son
The newlywed appearing in smoke and light?
Stepping across the reproductive earth, one as two.
In imitation of spring, whispering, renewed
And will he give thanks and praise
For this duality, so newly gained …
Is
And opened himself for the first shriek
Between red and white, between doctor and breast
The indignity of air in the barreling chest
Now speak!
Nor is there place for the living in the warm surf.
Is anyone easy in their skin? Is anyone easy enough?
And clutching at the very last the last of all
The hands I can trust, I glance out over the sill:
Between soothing and surviving, between living and dead
There is a secret place, I know
I cannot steal it, nor is it my debt
Nor will I leave it alone.
In the deadest of all dead places at the heart
Of the earth, in an empty sleeve, in the untouched dust
Of endless cenacles, each colder than the last
Brought to life by the cooing of doves.
On the buses terminating at and on their paths
In the darkening bushes, the unworkplaces
The brashly lit halls where kids learn martial arts
On orphaned balconies, two joining faces.
Buying the day’s pretzels
Crossing with the bicycles
Every warehouse loader, every wife, every girl
This place drags them all into its thrall.
I stand by it like a watchman, pacing my duty
Borne by invisible hands, in a heaven that is earthly
At the cemetery, where the eternal act of bringing forth
Is the meeting and parting with a
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
from
Zoo, Woman, Monkey
… And the vixen rises, quaking
On her woody stalks.
And the bear slides the view to closed,
Like an outstretched piney paw,
And the deer seem older than their very skin.
And the polar owls are squandering their coats.
And bicolor ducks are leading out their troops.
And bipedal girls are sticking out of stockings,
Blowing smoke with the exclamation buttons of their mouths
And lying out on benches, faces to the skies.
We’re not here for nothing,
We are here on business.
I was sitting here like a pep talk before battle.
My belly warm, rolling
Before me like a stroller,
I roamed here like a hunter on an isle,
I was honored and patted like I’d passed an exam,
For any wretched
Two-winged, quadruped
Carries weight here with a babe on hand.
The assembly line of nature has done its job quite well.
Before our eyes convincing sets of breeds and races
Are reproducing, procreating kin,
Despite confinement and the muzzles on their faces.
And so long as roundelays are lying round the pond
The squad commander Nature, breeder-pimp,
Gives increase to the livestock and feasts out on the porch.
But I have always been the enemy of mandatory “sesames!”
And showy jumps through well-placed hoops.
When Dumber Nature used to hit the gas on me
I would freeze up from my tips down to my roots.
And when my family tree made a try to swallow me,
And presented me with faces, compelling my repeat,
That I cast a few more stitches on the knitting of our genes,
Just by a pinch—but still to go on, clinging to the axis!—
I only answered with my calm indifferent
But what was the result?
And what’s here to observe?
What are we laughing at, my soul, and where’s our weeping curve?
Like a short and paunchy, greased-up godlet,
(The names are not, the thing is all the same)
I eat a pliant pastry by the zoo’s link fence,
While glances from the public shine my skin to gleam.
I’ve inclined my mind, and today came to submit
Where they are off to mock and kiss—
With my admission of guile and full confessup,
To earn myself a place, like the beaver and the zebra,
Fence off some untroubled corner for myself
Between the summer molt and winter sleep,
To lie down on the concrete floor, to learn to love the grate—
The faithful carcass of the nesting on the way.
Here I am, and here I’ll lay my hopes.
It’s here that I will re(pro)duce myself
With every crumb of food and gulp,
Entrust my body to resilience and polysemy:
That is, two-facetry or monomatrimony.
Here they’re hawking juice and balloons,
Men carry daughters on their backs,
It’s here it’s time to take the place I’m due:
To enthrone myself by “Hawk” and “Stag”:
Another witness to a yawning tomb.
Sleeping nanny and nurse by my own womb.
Cheeta the dope sits nakey in her cage:
Face a bag, nipples pencil-tipped,
Babe at feet and trough at head.
And neither her coating of red fur,
Nor her keeping up a hunky mate
Will pacify or save her.
And her stolen beigey rag may entertain
But also is no savior,
And there’s no second one around to snag.
And days go by, and breasts begin to sag,
Like sails of mangled hopes.
The baby is still playing on the floor,
Its back to you; already bloomed to girl
And eager to please in its own court.
So life’s gone by, with nowhere left to go.
But in the cage across, others have pride of place.
And one’s run up, wearing her son on top,
Testing the speeds and stamina of her tail.
While others hide their girly blushing facelets.
Others lurch for the higher ledge,
Which is so far away.
And build monkey castles in their minds,
And lead monkey troops to the fray.
Some are scary, some are scarred,
Some lie like shrooms on stumps,
Like stranded fish or slaves.
Above them sway liana fakes,
Whose shadows cloud each monkey face.
All their seeds are sown with spring
But time goes and what’s it bring?
And the children, the children fly in a tire
Above the harvest’s ample share,
They flicker by, in men’s or women’s eyes,
To the right or the left of the cage,
They grow old senselessly and stately,
In their mother’s own embrace.
And like a recent patch of cloth you fly away
Worn and weary from the weave of life,
Animal womanness with a rag erased,
Clutched behind her in a death-grip—
A threadbare, cotton, soggy
Scrap, so small, so small and tiny!
And here I’m still heading to you for my face-off,
Like to a clerk for a crucial doc,
To stand and set my mirrors to you—
Recording devices, my glasses’ lenses,
My last hour’s bodies and business,
Marked by the scars of their new breakage.
The hammers tap, and hidden bits are burning,
Sudorific doodads wind the calendar,
So we mums and girlies turn out for the big parade,
And fathers with their sons work out a dictionar,
Where it shines and snorts, strikes, igni-,
Centens of spoons play in little cups from sunup,
And just breathing out can explain to the doc,
That human reason’s naught or I don’t want.
You open your eyes: time to file in the ark:
Spring comes and swallows you up,
The Czechs are close, Kolchak advances from the east
And under Moscow undressed Germans stand like sharpened pales.
And flayed forest partisans like flanks.
And dead pilots without their holsters or their watches.
All who sent appeals to the setting sun,
All for whom a lawyer bell-like tolled his tongue—
And won them no delay. And the naked earth
Like gums expelling lodgers from a shameful dream.
And they flood the outskirts with black postal streams,
Rattling wattles, walking freetown free.
But wherever they go, the door alltoomatically secures,
And only galing woods perk up their wrens.
Or does the noise come from a lesser, tongueless creature,
That pleads for mercy, beating at the boundaries of its ken?
I’ll go and sit by the pond uncovered by ice,
Waiting for my pardon like before the Last Judgment,
And lay my monkey palms upon my tum,
Like a vault upon a vault,
So what was promised in dark and empty space
Like a victory salute, apply no less to me and my tum,
Apply like the wind, and lie down in an embrace,
As a letter slips into the mail.
In a red and white coat, in a wide red-white coat
We will while by the pond, having laid out our hopes,
In unbounded O, like a window’s wide hole,
Two together home.
Translated by Zachary Murphy King
II
Displaced Person
Poems from books
Essays
In Unheard-of Simplicity (2010)
Displaced Person (2012)
from
And a vo-vo-voice arose
To make verbs roll.
Amid commercial roses
Fine weather to ring a bell.
The drought is over,
Now it’s Easter day,
Tenderness and tenterhooks
Run along the vertebrae.
Little sleep,
But spring has sprung,
All of the bird-cherry’s teeth are white fangs,
And the sky-womb’s opened out,
Murky-tender like smoked trout.
At thirty years old
I was not very old.
At thirty-three
’Twere a babe inside me.
At thirty-five
Time came back alive.
Now I am thirty-six
Time to eat myself up quick.
Scoop out my head
With a big pewter spoon,
So new beer can be poured in
And topped off after settling,
So that she not, like the olive tree,
Spend the winter blue and empty,
So that in my pupil, like sunshine in a boot,
At least kitschy icons will stand resolute,
Many-colored,
Not like the others.
Translated by Amelia Glaser and Ainsley Morse
In the festive sky, impassivable, tinfurled,
In the burning, immemoriable, tinfouled,
See the ladder neatly leaned against the clouds,
Trodden over top to bottom by the words.
One of them is mincing steps,
And another wails and weeps,
And mine just hangs and swings there on the bar and barely grips.
Barely mumbles,
Nearly tumbles.
Friends will crowd around excited, asking questions,
At the same time breathless, speechless and tempestuous,
Quacky and screechy:
What’s up? Whaddija see?
Back at them, as from a tongueless bell, comes almost losing
Any semblance: from the fifth bar up—oh boy, what mmoooosic!
Translated by Dmitry Manin
Saturday and Sunday burn like stars.
Elder trees foam and fizz.
By the railroad crossing’s striped bars
A communal wall hovers.
Past it are slabs, like canvases, dank in the dark,
And the moon cherry,
And tiny tightly-packed crosses, a darned
Sock or a cross-stitch embroidery.
Yellow dogs pass here at an easy trot,
And grandmas come to comb the sand,
Giant women grind their temples into the rock
Wailing and thrashing to no end.
But these are times, indistinguishable like stumps,
Like my pair of knees:
At the sun one stares, in the shade the other one slumps,
Both are dust and ashes.
But these are nights when the nettle-folk stands guard
Among the pickets here,
And the gentle May enters its peaceful orchard
Raining a tear.
And between hand and hand, between day and night
There is inhumane, brightly burning, eternal
Quiet.
Translated by Dmitry Manin
In every little park, in every little square,
Lovely people go about their lovely tasks,
Girls stroll with strollers to give babies some air,
Buying little presents and kaolin facial masks.
Kaolin is only clay,
Somewhere for your corpse to lay,
Mortal cells, your bread and doom,
A collective cozy tomb.
By the pond, with their laptops, the skypers
Are cutting a pretty figure.
On the high Moscow rooftops, the snipers
Let their fingers dance on the trigger.
The augoors of inaugooration
Walkie-talk their way to elation;
On the streets, the city’s protesters
Are brought down by their own posters.
Waaa! Goo! Shush, baby, please.
Moscow’s still there, no need to howl.
Igor’s Yaroslavna is crying like an owl.*
I’ll go get some cottage cheese.
The selection of cheeses today is wide,
As if the city had eaten its fill and died.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
—
* An allusion to an episode from a twelfth-century Russian epic,
from
YOUNG MAIDS SING
TRANSLATED BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Translator’s Note
Language is history. Maria Stepanova is a poet for whom that is the case. Her cycle
The language of history is not a universal language at all. How do you translate it? How do you translate what the reader of the original—different child taken for the same ride—is supposed to pick up from inflections, innuendos, and incomplete gestures? How do you translate the meaning that inheres in the half-said, when the intended reading depends on shared historical experience that the reader of the translation will most certainly lack? I was grasping for straws, and my main straw in the particular instance of drowning that translating Stepanova’s poems was for me, became the classical Chinese literary ballad such as Du Fu’s “Song of the War Carts,” and in general I was remembering English-language translations of T’ang dynasty poetry: poetry whose formal concentration, citationality both erudite and pop, and constant sense of unsaid political and war trauma make it so kin to Russian poetry of the twentieth century.
This is why I called my selections from the cycle
Unfortunately, the tortured Latinate syntax of Russian poetry, and of Stepanova’s poetry in particular, is really nothing like the straightforward syntax of classical Chinese verse. Although what I really wanted was to get rid of all the subordination of clauses, I failed at the task, but I do hope to liberate all clauses next time.
Mom-pop didn’t know him
Young wife didn’t know him
Colonel came back from
Below black blue ice
Victory vodka
The upright counts time
He went in winter
Left circles behind
Lights on in housing
A blank tenant book
In the deaf open
The dead falling in
All fire and smoke where
I passed and came out
Lentils on boil there
Blind root in the pot
No ship comes to dock
Whistle runs aground
Still the signaler
The kernel won’t sprout
Hole in my belly
Ice water within
Many tank turrets
Tear nets in the spring
I pumped up the spare
Burned papers, crushed coals
My housing permit
Here, let me go home
Safe conducts speechless
Lie sunk deep in ice
I will not know how
His wife doesn’t know him
Mama, what janitor
Lives in the basement
Can’t recollect
His scattering name
Now seldom that damned man
Comes out on burning ice
Shuffles the iron spade
Scrapes with the bright broom
When at dawn I get dressed
Come out for work
When at dusk get undressed
Stick pumps in the dresser
In that basement womb
Daylight or nightlight
He lies around like a bedspread
The abyss sets its sights on me
Child, how could we know
Our lost Alexei
Lies in the basement with no heating
Half-forgotten by people
And that you didn’t know him
For your groom and husband
It’s that life is a great hall
Where many souls take a stroll
And that they’re yellower than an orange
His non-Russian features
It too stands to reason
We too are not what once we were
We have grown old like tramcars
Ashen is your permanent
While he like a lava lamp
Glows alone in the basement
A train is riding over Russia
Along some great river
The passengers took off their shoes
The conductors don’t look sober
Slippery with grease and dreamy
Chicken thighs go sailing by
The faces of huddled humanity
Like trees in unsteady water
I walk in a state-owned throw
Through train cars full of people
And sing as earnestly
As a saved soul in paradise
It’s a dirty job, even dirtier
Than the bossman-conductor might deem
For a quality song in our business
Always rises up to a scream
Ladies gasp when with my naked larynx
Over the knee-jerk cursing of men
I sing of how poppies turn even more red
When the blood of our commander drips down on their head
My voice makes a hole in the comfort
Of the car like an out-of-nowhere shiv
Everyone starts feeling downcast
And takes turns beating me by the toilet
An honest song has such outrage in it
The heart cannot stomach the shame
The passengers keep their defenses up
Like a tear in the middle of a face
Ordnance was weeping in the open
For the hero’s open wound
There he lay, his breast thrown open halfway
In anticipation of the end
Battle-prattle rattled in the eardrums
Tattled, sent regrets for plodding hammers
Female installation the Katyusha
Fed with kasha the whole panorama
And, while she was pounding close-in targets
As she polished off the riverbanks
For the one she was in love with
For the one she could not save
Raining dust and down off his service coat
Tensing infantile wings to fly
The heir of the gray eagle of the steppes
Kept watch over his parent from the sky
The A went past, Tram-Traum
It’s given lifts to you and me
Some mademoiselle will now
Open a fashion boutique
Lay out the blacks and whites
Wipe the empty mirrors
Look up at the unplugged
Displays from the corner
Which don’t reflect the Friday hour
Not the shopping people
Not a few summer dresses
But something else entirely
In everyday hustle and bustle
The gait of grandpa’s spring
You by the bakery
With a net bag of national air
The past is waterborne
A tear washes away
Its look of reproach
And falls to disappear in the display
We open up like faucets
This way and that, this way and that
Boutique security
Never give us a second look
Well I don’t sing
And I don’t hazard games of chance
I resolve issues of high priority
On the guesstimate that I won’t die today
The postal carriage is coming down the rails
The iron horse is steaming at the bit
You let it go after an hour or so
That you are not entirely ready for it
Into whichever of our young republics
I’ll carry off my empty head
That heart’s a bagel, it costs only a ruble
Get it before it’s cold
KIREEVSKY
TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE
The light swells and pulses at the garden gate
Rolls itself up, rolls itself out
Smetana,* the very best—
Sweet lady, unlatching a casement—
O black-throated Smetana, flame up
O white-winged Smetana, flare high
I’m no Lenten gruel, no scourge of sultanas
No faceless soup of curds for convicts
Don’t you dare compare my cream of ermine!
Are you pleased with a simple-minded cheese?
As the land rises and falls in hills and valleys
I’m shaped in living lipids and calories
Congealed unconcealed made gloriously manifest
Turned from one side to another and back again
Who will take up a silver spoon to muddy
My lilac-hued body?
And you, my light, barely at the threshold
Little fool, my light, never where I need you
You effulgent, I gently melting
I gently melting, I slightly smelling
And down there, where life rustles in the undergrowth
A tiny frog sits and croaks
Swells and croaks. Croaks and swells
And lifts its front legs to protect itself.
—
*
In the village, in the field, in the forest
A coach rattled past, a carriage
A smart little trap with a hood like a wing
From the big city they came, from Kazan,
At the turning of the year, with caskets and coffers
To carry out an inspection, a census:
Oh the forest is full of souls, and the water’s flow,
Many souls in the hamlet, and in the oak tree, too
And day wanders the wood, walking into the wind
All its own self long, on the spoor of the hind.
And the circles of dancers—still traces in the ground
The lips of hired weepers—not yet shrivelled
And all of it, even the young Cleïs,
Recorded in the book of conscience
And behind the gilded crest stamped on the boards
They barely dare to scratch or burp.
A deer, a deer stood in that place
Under the nut tree
And tears ran down its coat
Blood smoked on the snow.
A deer, a deer stood in that place
Under the nut tree
And rocked, rocked gently
The empty cradle.
A deer, a deer stood in that place
Asking the endless question
And from beyond the seven seas
Carried the wails of a child.
I wandered the yards, I glanced in the windows
I searched for a child I could raise myself
Choose myself a little babby
Maybe a girl or a little laddy
I’d feed my child the purest sugar
Teach it to lace and embroider
Take it for strolls under my pinny
Sing sweet songs to my own little sonny.
But they cast me out, they came at me
With torches and pitchforks they drove me
Your own foolish mothers and fathers!
And you will wander snot-nosed for years
Angering strangers, lost and derided
Without the muzzle-scent of tears
Never knowing your own true tribe.
The last songs are assembling,
Soldiers of a ghostly front:
Escaping from surrounded places
A refrain or two make a break for it
Appearing at the rendez-vous
Looking about them, like the hunted.
How stiffly unbending they are
Running water won’t soften them now!
How unused they are to company
The words don’t form as they ought.
But their elderly, skillful hands
Pass the cartridges round,
And until first light their seeing fingers
Reassemble Kalashnikovs,
They draw, with sharp intake of breath
From wounds, the deeply lodged letters—
And toward morning, avoiding checkpoints,
They enter the sleepless city.
In times of war, they fall silent.
When the muses roar, they fall silent.
UNDERGROUND PATHEPHONE
My dear, my little Liberty,
I wanted you—but why?
A tiny boat runs on the sea,
Alone in it I lie.
A teaspoon sits beside a plate,
But nothing’s left to stir.
I’ve done some being around the place,
I will not anymore.
My soul, unmarred, unmarried,
You are all mist and dew,
Homely and unhurried,
Beautiless and subdued—
Where the azure used to sparkle in
Vermillionish banks,
There muscular and masculine
Clouds close their solid ranks.
Translated by Dmitry Manin
There he lies in his new bed, a band of paper round his head,*
Such a mustachioed gentilhomme, now in the coffin all alone,
So here he lies, all numb and quiet, and the collar of his face
Is growing yellow from inside, but you would best avert your gaze,
For deep within, just like a clock that’s scratching its tick-tock-tick-tock,
He still produces, dull and low, his never-ceased Iloveyouso,
But all the people at his side, they wouldn’t hear him if they tried,
Just us, we look from the plafond, invisible, but not for long,
Each one of us, so well we know:
I too had squadrons to command,
Wore in my mouth Iloveyouso,
Wore round my head a paper band.
Translated by Alexandra Berlina
—
* In Russian Orthodox funeral rites, paper or cloth bands inscribed with a prayer and sacred images are placed on the forehead of the deceased.
Don’t wait for us, my darling
Me and my friend been took.
Reporting back from the front, sir:
There’s war wherever you look.
We’re based down in a basement
In the deepest depths of the clay
They’re throwing flames above us
But we’ve gone away
Some arrived only lately
Some at the beginning of time
All of them flat as playing cards
Fallen in the grime.
And the earth that flows between us
Is thick as wine.
We were men but now
We’re amino acids in soup
The smell of tears and sperm
And bonemeal and gloop
And me I’m singed at the edges
A piece of felted wool
The one who stood at the window with you
Is made of deep hole.
When they lay that table
With plates on damask cloth
When they light the Christmas tree
And sing Ave to the host
When a camel hoof
Breaks the icy crust—
A king’s ransom: gold
Frankincense and myrrh
Won’t light us through the cold
Won’t ward off the hunger
So it was all a lie, my girl.
No need to caress the brambles
Or finger through the copse
I’m the empty corner of old cloth
The earth has lain on top.
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
Don’t strain your sight,
What’s mortal is not inside.
However you knock,
They won’t come to unlock.
However
Still sparrows will arrive,
And peck at our remains.
I am earth, march-’n’-marsh, muck-’n’-mold,
Collarbone, flowers in season.
For a whole ’nother reason.
Translated by Irina Shevelenko
FOUR OPERAS
TRANSLATED BY SIBELAN FORRESTER
1. Carmen
They still allow us to smoke in the office,
They get it: this kind of work, you have to smoke,
They run after one as he’s walking: hey, commander,
The second from the table raises his eyes to the door,
The second one from the trial raises his eyes to a hook,
There the lamp’s swaying back and forth, Svetlana, what’ll I say
When the earth quakes, and the ground opens its mouth,
And the arrested earn their execution?
The third one stands up, decorated, and he has everything,
But they’ve called him, and he goes.
“Look for me at dawn,” he said to his comrades,
As if he and they are he and someone else
Who’s alone, like Job, and waits for him like for a storm.
What’s that blue sign on his arm, sister?
That’s a powerful sign on his arm, girlfriend.
There it sort of says: beloved,
My darling, take care of yourself, don’t be on the take in front of everyone,
Give your parents a call, take time off on Wednesday,
If you don’t take it—try to behave yourself,
And if there’s anything call, if there’s anything call for me.
2. Aida
Beautiful, quiet, or rather: she hardly knows Russian,
I like her surroundings, the gingerbread, sugar and all the halvah,
All and all manner of halvah that’s exuding praise,
When she’s in the corner and weighing out the goods.
Her fingers take tangerines by the sides, the freight
Of greenish, stepped-on, sweetly moaning pears—by the neck,
She loads the dark flesh of eggplant into the white
Flesh of rustling plastic; and the price list is born.
While the persimmon is like a mother to her, and she doesn’t look at it
And feels shame for her public profession.
I ask her a question, and she doesn’t give an answer.
I drop by like a thief, and she won’t restrain the thief.
Her weak, her cheap labor force
Is all gathered in her arms and won’t tolerate conversation.
Her father and everyone’s will descend upon us like an avalanche,
The moment she doesn’t turn out to be a virgin.
Her father and everyone’s, the elder guide,
Head doctor of an empty mountain hospital,
Where someone’s ribs, like the mother’s womb, are stretched
And fear pulls apart eyelashes that were squeezed flat.
Her father and everyone’s, he’s coming after his dotter,
Along the dark route he stretches by day and by night,
Like a stripe of fug on a train car’s walls.
When his armies make their way into the city,
And stick like a bone in the throat by Red Square,
And go along ambulance roads, easing their hunger,
Taking the fox-fur coats off the homespun poor,
We’ll wait for them beneath the mound,
Where Yulia the manager swore at her today.
3. Fidelio
The session begins, everything rustles,
They lead witnesses out and lead new ones in,
The sentence is delivered in haste,
The accused turns into the convicted.
The sentence is brought into action,
Usually with the doctor and the prison director.
They don’t allow relatives in here.
They don’t allow journalists in here either.
They let the convicted in here, one by one,
Arrange their shoulders, ankles and wrists,
Let them smoke one final cigarette,
Give them a shot, give them alternating current,
The convicted man turns into a bear.
The relatives don’t usually come to pick them up,
Although I do know of one exceptional case:
They keep it at the dacha, under guard, to live out its years.
The unclaimed ones are distributed to zoos,
To circus troupes, to private animal collections:
They aren’t aggressive, they can be trained well,
They walk on their hind legs, sometimes they say “Mama.”
(The woman disguised in the pelt of a guard
is politely ushered into a “Black Mariah.”)
4. Iphigenia in Aulis
The action continues by the water,
A fatal war, trenches, swords, cuirasses,
The yids occupy the war’s left bank,
The faggots stand in formation on the right.
This battle takes place on foot, it will never end,
Will grind through and chew up five hundred generations,
Will have its way, like a nuclear winter,
Because cavalry attacks them from the heavens,
While darkness comes on from under the ground,
Piercing the heel and poking the knees apart.
Each one of us stands on that bank or this.
Each one of us didn’t lay down arms at once.
Each one of us, long as we’re still alive,
Looks toward where the flag-bearers are consulting,
The riders whistle and shout back and forth,
Where willy-nilly you turn into a poet.
Let me join the yids or the faggots,
I’ve been dreaming of this since third grade:
To become a stag or a ram for you,
A fatted heifer or a pudgy aunt,
A maiden, revealed in the bushes!
With a sword in my chest I sing and do not die
In the war waged on the foothills of paradise.
IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY
Conventional wisdom has it that Russian poetry is now undergoing a remarkable, extraordinary flowering; recently someone compared it to the Silver Age, even to the Golden Age of Russian poetry. I myself have said something similarly rosy, perhaps expressing myself a bit more carefully, but rejoicing no less than the others. And there was plenty to rejoice about: the mid-1990s really did chart something like a new course.
Everything changed then, just as if you had discovered a new room no one had noticed in an old communal apartment, and it could be settled in and filled up to suit one’s own preferences. It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck—that possibility of the simultaneous existence of not three, not five, but fifteen or twenty major authorial practices (especially after the cramped beginning of the 1990s, when it was as if all poetry’s voice broke or the air ran out; here I’m not mentioning the few important exceptions, who seem to me more to confirm the catastrophic nature of that time’s context). Soon the hallmark of the new decade was a constant conversation about numbers (do we have six good poets or six hundred, fifteen or twenty-five?); but long before that we got used to feeling confident in the presence of a choice, an assortment of goods—we have both calico and brocade, and this, and that, for any taste, color, and character. The feeling of warmth and reliability that such a picture gives is natural and innocent, but it more often arises in connection with other matters—say, when you go to a local supermarket, that paradise of
Where then does the growing uneasiness come from, the sense that the picture of a general feast has been badly distorted, if not fictitious? The “market mechanisms” of poetry’s existence, as they’re generally described, explain and justify the existence of literary clans and unions, the warring parties, the literary struggle with all its losses. But market mechanisms don’t explain the particular inflammation that has distinguished any conversation about poetry for the last few years, flattening the mass media and blogs into a single style. It’s really not easy to explain it—with an enormous quantity of publishers, journals, venues to speak up, poetic series,
It’s been accumulating slowly, day by day: first this or that link runs through the blogs, and everyone follows the sound—they’ve trashed someone again: time to read, discuss, take a position, and defend it. After a year or so goes by, “they’ve trashed” won’t suffice to get anyone’s attention—everyone’s trashing everyone; the very tone of irritation has become a tool for advancement in the literary market. (Someone’s grouching—that means “he’s not afraid of anyone,” “he has the right,” “he speaks from a position of strength”—
About the Change in the Air
To my taste, it’s too seductive and simple to explain what’s happening to us with the usual set of external conditions, as is routinely done in literary life. The parties that are clearing out a place for themselves under the literary sun are doing so industriously but somehow not seriously. They have nothing to divide: there’s no venue that could be the contested object, no prize that everyone would treat with equal respect, no united audience that everyone would like to please. The situation is thus conducive to peace and calm. But there’s no calm, while a sense of the anomaly of the present condition remains—for me myself, too, among others.
For a start, regardless of all the conversations about how interest in poetry has returned or overturned, poems themselves (as distinct from the poet) have suddenly stopped interesting people. What one might call
That sense of a meaningful shared space, which was the main gift of the late nineties and early aughts, has disappeared before our very eyes. It’s possible to exist in a zone of pitch-dark uncertainty, in a physical (and also metaphysical) blast of wind, and it’s there of all places that poetic speech could become the only instrument of cognition, the cane in a blind person’s hands. But that isn’t happening at all. We’re no longer alone with ourselves, not in a blind spot, as in the early 1990s, but in a well-lit major shopping center along the lines of IKEA. You can say (buy, sell) anything you like here, which means you can get along without any of it. The very situation doesn’t presuppose the existence of words that are
Everything else has changed along with the air; first and foremost—the poems themselves and what we expect from them. Conventions that worked for decades and seemed unshakeable precisely due to their obviousness have now crumbled: the presumption of trust in the author (who won’t try to make a fool of you), the need for experience as a reader (the citation-cicadas in the text want to be recognized), faith in the necessity of shared work—of the text and the one reading it. Today every author is offered an easy chance to feel like a charlatan (in the best case—like a clumsy joker): “Well,
What we’re encouraged to reject now is perhaps the most important thing: the idea of a
This is a new approach, though it ought to work; you can make a standard, mass-consumption product from poetry, as from any other material. It will be of high quality, it will cheer up hundreds of intelligent people and thousands of fools, it will pay its way physically and symbolically. It’s another matter that it takes away territory that poetry has occupied since the Modern Era: it will cease to be a place to work out new things, an arena of anthropological experimentation. Lacking a market suited poetry: cheap to produce, not very attractive to an outside observer, it regulated itself, saved and ruined itself on its own. In surrendering itself to the reader’s mercy, it will have to agree to a decorative existence at a nicely furnished resort: with no function, with no task—as background music for someone else’s emotional life.
This manner of existence (oriented toward
I wish the guilty parties in all these unpleasant things were some kind of
I can’t call the thing that has worried and perplexed
On the Aughts
The first decade of the new century in Russia formed not only a new standard of everyday behavior, a generally accessible consumer ideal, but also broad possibilities for its application. These years gave us, after all, the desired consensus; it just hasn’t been set up on the territory of taste. It has to do with more basic things: the wish for affluence, the cycle of “I want,” “I can,” and “I get.” This looks the same in the cultural field as in any other shop: we expect attention to our wishes, we require quality, we consider ourselves experts. That explains why for the first time in several decades they’ve started talking about the reader—and we were quickly called on to entertain them without delay; but that’s not all. What’s important is that our own internal reader wants to have a good time, too, feeling that it has a perfect right to do so.
It was enough to start considering oneself a qualified user, proud of one’s own ability to choose goods after one’s own heart, in order to see the formation (with regard to esoteric things such as poetry that resist and evade) of what Susan Sontag calls a new sensibility. Having applied the logic of the supermarket to poetry, we obtain devices familiar from the work of a discount supermarket chain—aggressive promotion of a product, various kinds of the ever-changing
The best match for such an understanding are the poems that were abundant precisely in the early 1990s—and which have made a victorious comeback in the last few years: orderly, cheerfully, and neatly made, with devices and tricks that flex like biceps along the line: text-broadcasters of an indefinite lyric ferment. Strictly speaking, these are verses of the late Soviet school (with its particular, dark-unfiltered, drive toward
But
It is characteristic and important that these distinctive features are often the qualities of very good poems; and they are not at all definitive there. But they’re exactly what the ruling taste marks as “its own,” nourishing, necessary; they’re exactly what determines the reader’s choice. More than that, in some cases it’s as if certain things (intonations, meanings) are conveyed to the text from outside, aside from the author’s intention (that is, the possibility of such a reading isn’t even contained in the poems as such); they’re inscribed there by readers themselves or, more accurately, by a certain mode of reading, which pushes everything that seems superfluous, inessential off the side of the road. This might be called a regulating or redacting kind of reading, which exclusively lifts the
I am intentionally not naming names: my task is not to redraw hierarchies with one “mainstream” taking the place of another but to describe a situation that is tragically shared by everyone.
On the Victory of Strength over Subtlety
But here are some names. In a long-ago article (from 1999), Elena Fanailova cites a phrase from Grigory Dashevsky: “Plenty that’s subtle—little that’s strong.” That time’s need for strength (for a clear authorial position, for explicitness and consistency of poetics, for—in the broad sense—refusal to compromise in what is being done), noted correctly and early, became a general need as time progressed. That is, it became a mass demand. In the early aughts, authorial practices that were based on the application of
As much as the 1990s, their second half, did for poems, with something
In a certain sense, what happened to Russian poetry was the same thing that happened to the whole country at that time. A complex and ramified system of institutions had arisen that regulated the consumption of texts. After that, an alternative system arose (the literary internet), which immediately engaged in self-regulation, becoming something like the unofficial reverse side of the existing (“professional”) system. All at once, it became terribly important to know and understand
But this system of coordinates simply gives no chance to the
How It Happened
It’s possible that we’ve taken the position of the
It’s possible that the face of the
It’s possible that we’ve lost something very important along with
It’s striking that everyone agrees that
And What Is to Be Done Here
First and foremost—to be cognizant of the absurdity and relativity of manmade hierarchies. No one is canceling anyone, no one’s intriguing against anyone, no one’s needed by anyone. The chill of having no place (against the background of hysterical
What does poetry reject when it turns away from aspirations to success—away from the contemporary reader? From a social function? From the need to meet (invariably overly low) expectations? From the possibility of becoming a remedy? Losses are inevitable here. Willy-nilly you’ll start looking toward the allied industries—into the territory of contemporary art, which has spent a century on separating the “creators of the beautiful” once and for all from the producers of what is comfortless, inapplicable in everyday life, socially unacceptable, and continues to go through the desert toward an unknown goal.
I’ll be honest: I don’t know what to do now. But this situation (of unproductive not-knowing, constant shame, dismal anxiety, blind running through the corridors of the brain) seems to me the only way of finding the emergency exit.
October 2010
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
DISPLACED PERSON
Imagine that (for any reason you like) using first-person pronouns in poetry was suddenly forbidden—and it was one of the tasks of the person writing (and, consequently, of the person reading) to reject the focal points designated in the old days as “I” and “we.” What gets lost in this case? And is anything lost at all? Why indeed does a lyric poem need an “I” when things are set up so that if you blot out every “I” and “we” in a poem, we’ll be visible all the same. The substance of poetry takes care of itself, reproducing
Let’s leave aside the hypothetical reader who selects texts for himself guided by the logic of “Hey, this is about me”—as if, in order to read a poem about love or a fiddlehead fern, one must without fail get hold of one’s own photograph with them in the background, stick one’s own head out the window—“I was there, too!” But if you consider poems an enterprise for obtaining a certain extreme experience (or a special one, at least, not afforded easily or to everyone), with the task of nudging the reader, taking him out of himself (to somewhere
Lyric poetry is hardly possible without trust in the one “who speaks.” In essence, a poet is a simple device, something like a flashlight pointed at certain objects, making them visible for the first time—but the place where we need a flashlight is dark and alien, and she’s our only guide. Hence, the importance of the voice itself, its unity and indivisibility—what may be described very crudely as intonation or manner. That’s why readers are so troubled by the difference between “early” and “late” Pasternak and Zabolotsky, and that’s what nourishes the very need to compare “before” and “after,” “was” and “became,” unavoidable when you speak of a life that endures.
It’s another matter that occupying oneself with poetry presumes a chain of greater and lesser deaths, each putting in doubt the possibility of continued existence. Poems move forward in gigantic leaps, rip themselves loose from familiar and fertile soil, rejecting (shaking off) the very soil they were only just clinging to. Poetry seems to preserve itself by way of disruptions, renouncing what only a moment ago comprised an inalienable part of it, and sometimes its very essence.
Perhaps now this disruption will impact the figure of the author and the idea of authorship.
As I sense it, speaking-in-verse in Russia has now hit some kind of wall, and I physically feel the scale of the effort needed to hack one’s way through it. What’s going on? Did the first decade of the 2000s bring to life a parade of abilities, an exhibition of achievements, which we now want to consider closed? The very abundance and variety of what’s been going on vaguely recalls, with distorted proportions and details, what has been happening in society—living pictures of Putin-era stability! But a conversation about changing the frame, rebooting, rethinking the foundations on which the poetic now exists, has been going on for a long time and in various forms, even sometimes inside one’s own mouth. As it happens, it’s a matter of refusal—this time, of everything that could be perceived as excess or “riches,” everything that has a relationship to vigor, success, and even simple quality: everything with a possibility of hierarchy, a shadow of selectivity. In the profound article “How to Read Contemporary Poetry,” Grigory Dashevsky, among other things, divides contemporary poems into those that speak to an inner circle, that call out for recognition (of citations, cultural codes, underground passages of secret affinity)—and then those that anyone can read in the blinding light of impersonality.1 Conceiving of one’s speech as common—or directed at some collectivity, groping toward it in the dark—means ridding it of everything excessive, everything
But there’s a sense that more serious measures might be necessary. A poetics may break with the individual in a variety of ways. The most straightforward and drastic move is the definitive
It would seem to work just that way—that is, it can work that way, too—and poetry can be looked at not only as a project (“a colonial one,” someone in the audience will say) to expand the territory of the poetic, where ever more new, uninhabited zones are occupied and cultivated, yesterday’s virgin soil is plowed (and pondered). And not only as a progressive utopia of cultivating new devices in pursuit of galloping modernity. But also as a kind of potlatch, an orgy of self-denial, the ultimate letting go of property (
It seems that at present the sense of lyric poetry, its new
What thus comes into question is the lyric poet as an agent. How was this set up for the last two or three hundred years, in the traditional arrangement of lyric poetry’s workings? Like in old movies. The hero drives a car, gets on a horse, a motorcycle, a flying carpet, remaining immobile himself—while behind him the landscape goes by with terrible speed, creating the illusion of movement: he’s not the one rushing; rather, it’s his surroundings, the mountains, valleys, clouds. The lyric poet is the static and stable center of his universe—he’s the point where speech emerges, a ray directed at objects passing by. In a certain sense, it’s precisely that immobility that ensures the poetic text’s authenticity and the readers’ trust: it’s a kind of trademark; we have already once and for all dubbed certain images and situations “Blok” or “Aronzon.”
What interests me now lies somewhere in the vacant zone between the author-as-necessity (a guide, an intermediary, a Dersu Uzala,4 or Leatherstocking, a living person in the
Let’s suppose a problem has these conditions: we’re being asked not just to dump the ballast, get rid of the excess—but to reject everything we possess, consciously or unconsciously, and “possession of speech” is the natural pretension of a person who lives with the help of words. If the problem is formulated as a victory over subjectivity, rejecting oneself and one’s own, then, I repeat, the most obvious, straightforward solution comes down to purification, smoothing the text with sandpaper—completely renouncing expressive means, what comprises its outer integument. In point of fact, this is something like a cosmetic redecorating that doesn’t touch on the structure of a residence and a way of life; there’s no demand here for radical changes of layout or rewiring the entire building. But from the outside it looks like a powerful gesture—if only because it too exists in a whirlpool of coercion, except that this time it turned to face the author, who’ll have to work in the new system of prohibitions and never step on a crack.
But it can turn out that this is not the only solution—and that the equation should be solved for
What does it mean, this will-to-death-of-the-author revealed one way or another in texts of the recent period? “I” leaching out from poetry collections and anthologies, anonymous and pseudonymous projects, experiments at speaking in voices, experiments at adding in someone else’s word (on which people lie down prone, as if on newly discovered land), speech that hovers, like a dirigible, over the border between the individual and the impersonal—these are all details of the big picture. But almost the whole stretch of the canvas shows the author unclenching his hands and
But the text and the author are fighting on the same side—they aren’t master and hired man (nor horse and mounted ranger) but rather a gun crew where each soldier has their own function (and a common goal). To make sure the artillery doesn’t shoot at its own side, one has to confirm the sense and place of each one—and presume that the rationale for their standing together is con-frontation with the external thing, foe or friend, that stands before both of them.
If the center of the poetic world, its navel-omphalos, turns out to be not the selfhood of the poet (eternally stuck with the arrows of ecstasies, like Saint Sebastian, or sending rays of valency in every direction), but something from-outside, exterior—an immovable question that stands before a singular poetic practice, calling for an answer and a solution—then it turns out that we can see the relations “author-language,” “author-text,” and even “author-author” in a different way. This question, as a rule, has nothing to do with a
The very thought of being one’s own master (“I” as a candle manufactory) seems somewhat faded and a bit silly, but you can’t get away from it. Among the various rights of ownership connected with the practice of poetry (in which the right of precedence, where themes or devices are concerned, continues to mean something, as before), only “I” can’t possibly be patented, or copied, and it remains the sole inalienable possession, the sole token of established destiny. But the present situation seems to provide a possibility for revamping the usual correlations.
In a 2001 article about the poetry of the 1990s, Ilya Kukulin introduced the critical concept of
These bodies represent a certain kind of intermediary, linking authorial consciousness with the world; at the same time they are characters that play out their own dramas, encapsulating the world’s general characteristics. The author’s consciousness, or more precisely the author’s longing that pervades the whole being of the person writing (in the words of Mandelstam’s “Conversation About Dante”), flies behind these ghostly bodies—it’s as if they bring about the creative work ahead of the author’s mind. These bodies are alienated from the author’s consciousness and can be examined somewhat from a distance, like strangers […]. At the same time they are inseparably linked, linked by blood, with the author’s consciousness. […] Their procreation was, obviously, characteristic of the poetry of preceding epochs, but in the 1990s interacting with them and dramatizing this interaction became an important, vivid and frequently deliberate creative method.7
If we move on according to the logic suggested, and if we remove from the equation, as only one of many options, the corporeal character of these constructions and intermediaries that are alienated from the author and indissolubly connected with her, we can speak about something larger—and extremely important. The end of the 1990s gave poetry a new
(What sets these phantom voices, practices-for-an-hour, apart from the centuries-old experience of literary mystification with its masks and mustachios? Perhaps the fact that they don’t even try to pretend that they’re not one-offs. The lightweight working constructions don’t conceal their utilitarian and situational nature, the fact that they’re set up, like a tent or a tripod, for a short time, to complete a singular task. One could say that their existence is something like a demonstration of capabilities that greatly exceed the skills and pretensions of their physical author; they’re a kind of fragment pointing to the existence of a whole.)
But what remains of the author in this situation? I agree with those who see an ethical difference between “I write the way I want” and “I write the way I can” (and who for understandable reasons choose the second), so I suspect that “I can’t do otherwise” refers not so much and not only to the text itself, its acoustic and semantic topcoat, but also to what about and what for it exists. No matter the kinds of problems the poet is solving on the surface of her own writing, where there is room for the illusion of successes and mistakes, from where the sequence of texts looks like a product of her will (a collection of conscious decisions) rather than destiny (a sequence determined by laws very like the laws of grammar), in the main she is all the same doomed to herself. As if surrounding a shell crater, all her energies are drawn to the borders of an enormous problem, which she attempts to deal with (to which everything she does, strictly speaking, is an answer)—they’re gathered together, like cloth wrapped around a fist. Facing this problem, one’s own voice has no more rights, and no fewer, then the voices of the neighbors, the subs, the witnesses, who are alive or seem to be alive. The poet endlessly fumbles and pulls at the contours of this problem; moves from place to place chasing after a solution; speaks about it at length and quietly, loudly and succinctly—and no kind of individual “I saw the way out” will be sufficient as an answer. In a certain sense, poets of this type are
If we remind ourselves of the condition where the lyric poet was the immovable object in a film shot (and at the same time the reason for it, and the only optical instrument that allowed one to see what was around), the new situation promises a new filming technique. “I” turns out to be not an actor now, but a camera; suddenly several cameras appear—a lot of them—and they aren’t pointed at you. Then the author’s volition comes down to arranging the work of the team that is providing live coverage of the experiment; here the task is nearly technical: switching cameras, alternating viewpoints. But if we suppose that all the cameras are working, all the voices are speaking (singing, coughing, whistling, stuttering; one of them, obviously, belongs to the author himself, but we can’t say with any certainty which)—and if this sheaf or whiskbroom of diverging intonations exists as a text, as a
In Elena Shvarts’s
But the soul would run off as a spark
From one—into another—to the live one,
To me, flying up in a moment,
Leaving behind all the crowds
Of melting, dressed, undressed,
Enraged, and merry, and sorrowful—
Just like a city after the eruption
Of an indifferently wild volcano.
What can be offered and understood as a metaphor all too often turns out to be a simple statement of fact. From “I” to “I,” as if from thought to thought, there are many thousands of miles, and along the road as mileposts stand the used-up, lifeless shells of living meaning, which doesn’t know anything except how to knock the bottom loose and get out.
My poems, I suppose, are indeed written by various authors; and from various points of view and with various voices, they attempt to bear witness to or to overturn one hypothesis that someone put in my mind as a lifelong sting. Like a prisoner in shackles, the poet is bound with the shared chain to precisely this hypothesis, rather than voice-manner-gait—and in order to estrange oneself from it, see it from a distance and from above, one needs these series of fissions and substitutions, of exits from the self and from the world, familiar-unfamiliar voices that speak with you from the sidelines, with the indifferent engagement of a stranger. Thus, a fictive poetics forms around the hole in reality. Its task is to overturn the paving stones of personal pain that have rooted into the earth and to make the water of life flow beneath them. If that works out.
2012
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
III
Spolia
Poems
Essays (2014–2016)
Today Before Yesterday (excerpt)
After the Dead Water
Intending to Live
At the Door of a Notnew Age
SPOLIA
TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE
totted up
what was said
amounted to
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
and so she always uses rhyme in her poems
ersatz and out of date poetic forms
her material
offers no resistance
its kiss is loveless, it lies motionless
she’s the sort you’d lift onto a chair
read us the poem about wandering lonely
she’s the sort who once made a good soviet translator
careful unadventurous
where is her
why on earth does she speak in voices
(voices “she has adopted,” in quote marks:
obvs anyone-without-an-I cannot adopt anything
for anyone-without-an-I will wander, begging alms
pretending to be a corner, a jar of mayonnaise, a cat
although no one believes him quite)
I’m a bagel I’m a bagel says the speaker-without-an-I.
some people are stuffed with soft cheese but oh no not me
some people are engorged with character and culture
potato scones, hot stones,
I’ve got the biggest hole empty yawning
I’m the earth I send my cosmonauts floating
the mouths of my eaters, the teeth of my tenants,
converging from the east and the south,
they take a last chew swallow
when a quick nought has licked up the last crumb
fire’s sharp tongue will scour the granaries—
I won’t even remain as air, shifting
refracting sound
fading with the light on the river’s ripple
sucking the milk and vodka from still-moist lips
anyone-without-an-I
is permitted a non-i-ppearance
wants libert-i
——
Tramcar, tramcar, squat and wide!
Pushkin pops his clogs inside!
Dingle-dangle Pushkin-Schmushkin
Dying cloudberries in the bushkin
Demigod theomorph
Dig the burning peaty turf
Innokenty Annensky
Stuck between
Is feeling miserably empty
At the station in Tsarskoselsky
All the hungry passengers
Waiting in the railway shack
Say Look! A Bone is stuck in your Throat!
But the bone is red-lipped gabriak.
No I won’t be your good boy,
The teenage poet blurts—
Voloshin can have his way with them
Stick his fingers up their skirts,
Crimean wine, bearded philanderer …
Now Blok appears—is gone again
Under the sun of Alexander
Polyakov picks up the reins.
Ancient Scythian stone women
Glow as they crumble
Instagram posts for Soviet airmen,
Seizing wheat ears as they scramble
Now fire the search engine!
Fix eyepiece on the earth’s sphere!
Glazova and Barskova
Are coming over loud and clear.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
All the poets were full of woe
And nobody knew what to do.
Dying, like clearing out a room
Without making a fuss
Resurrection, if and when
——
visible delicate
invisible inviolate
nearest dearest
souring, steeping
delayed
root of the
wormwood
clamped
in the teeth
wordeed
wordtree
word wood
beasting
the unbested
suspended, resisted
put by in secrets
halfcracked halfvolk
——
let her come out herself and say something
(and we’ll listen to you)
she won’t come out
it won’t come right
speaks from the heart
(tchaikovsky! let me die but first)
but she says it like she doesn’t mean it
it even seems like her words
might have come from someone else
always over-stylizing
like she’s dressing a corpse
where’s her inimitable intonation
the breath catching in her throat
that individual stamp
recognizable from a single note
(the work of an engineer and not of a poet)
(not lyrics, mechanics—
signs not of a lady but of a mechanic)
and these
as if the cold sweat of inspiration
on her forehead never made her hair stand on
enough, I said, I’m prigov
you prigs can fuck off
——
when blossoms tum-ti-tum
for the last time the blossom
in the dooryard bloomed
the lilac in the dooryard bloomed
and stars that shoot along the sky
not yet will measureless fields be green
and dancing by the light of the moon
the light of the moon
and after april when may follows
banquet halls up yards and bunting-dressed
and breasts stuck white with wreath and spray
marked off the girls unreally from the rest
who lined the sidings grimly gay
(she loves embedding quotes because
she can’t be without love)
washed by the rivers blest by the suns of home
my land, I love your vast expanses!
your steppe & coachmen, costumed dances!
your peddlers of mystic trances!
and murdered tsar nicholas
oh, and kitezh’s watery kingdom
and how above our golden freedom
rises gloom dusk cumulus
how early that star drooped in the chilled western air
I’ll remember may the first and the scent of your hair
when for the last time
when we saw
last one to the gate is a rotten egg
and they run and run
——
and so I decided
I was told
curly feathers of metro marble
milk white enamel girls
in gilded kazakh skull caps
and children with gently determined faces
you, blue-eyed aeronauts and machine gunners
saboteurs, cavalrymen and tank drivers
fringe-finned guardsmen, officers
platforms of shaggy crouching partisans
and especially the border guard’s alsatian
plum blossom in a golden bowl
early morning crimea
ballerina winding herself widdershins
apollo in singlet and hockey shorts
alabaster profile on wedgwood medallion
clearly sketched in a golden oval
aeroplane wreathing omens in the clouds
hercules, given to omphale
you must have forgotten
in the passageway leading to the circle line
——
Do you remember, Maria
our twilit corridor
nineteen-forties Russia
a settlement, post war
dances to the radiogram
twostep at arm’s length
freight trains loaded
with gold and frankincense
those hard done hard won
those barely alive
down on your bare knees
a head against your thigh
tea twinkles in the strainer
steams in the room
bulbous iron knobs
where a cheap dress is thrown
remember how she stood
weeping on the porch
when they hunted him down
caught him in the church
smiling, he was led
looked back as if to say
then a round in the head
and a truck sped away
at the crack of fire
you turned and left
and cranked up your life
and lived it cleft.
——
my brother said you’re a fascist
you sing up, and I’ll sing loud
we’ll be back when the trees are in leaf
but I’ll stand my ground
when the leaves are in fist
and the deer dances past the oak
the antifascist flips to fascist
and the wood goes for broke
words are attached to things
with old twine
and people lay down with their tubers
in the ground for all time
but them, they cross yards
with lists and chalk
and lick the paint off window sills
with tongues that fork
fascist fattish fetish
flatfish, flippery, facetious
but the air knows we’re not of them,
none of you or us
untie the words
let them drop in a corner
and the wood will call back its men
——
across the vast rippling sound
under the evening star
from the furthest shore
floated a wooden box
you couldn’t hear any captain aboard
you couldn’t see any sailors
all you could see a faint flickering light
(it floats closer to our home)
all you could hear a faint scratching
as if something was awake in the case but crumbling
shifting handful by handful
all you could hear the dripping and crackling of wax
and water psalm by psalm
read then washed away
then read and washed away
forgive me forgive me my friend
let me perish
it isn’t about that
don’t run along the shore after me
along a path that doesn’t exist
legs collapsing under you
don’t look for my wooden box
bobbing in the shallows
caught in the reeds
and most of all: don’t take off the lid
turn your back on the old world
don’t take off my lid
don’t go back to mother
don’t wander the villages speaking
from lips chalky white petrified
——
depart from me for I am a sinful man
said the eagle to the headwind
depart from me for I am an infirm man
said the red clay to the hands
depart from me
I am not man at all
I am a recording device
——
and snow fell, and it was kind of:
the azure light disappeared like a cataract
——
under the spindle of a low sky
a dust trail on the near shore
two cars, a jawa motorbike
a woman in a scarf, her face hidden
the young are beautiful, the old are more so
a shop without a signboard
loaves of bread on the shelf
in rows like soldiers on parade
still warm to the touch
each loaf reluctantly cooling
by the factory gates
a briar rose in raspberry cuffs
points in its madness
to where the sickening smell comes from
where did you get to, mr speaker
from the regional office
how long, my dear
have we been traveling
over this bridge in our little car
will we ever leave this place
——
the high towers are lit up red
and on them tall flags are talking
in the skies the stars assemble in rows
and jet planes, rising
tanks on parade with heavy paunches
armoured chariots
dolphin-heroes
swallow-martyrs
lions picked for their stature, their roar
people people and people
above them floats apple blossom
scented buds of white acacia
crinkle-edged paper poppies
heads
on poles
——
apparition of these faces in the metro
lamps on a wet black wire
——
Instead of scribbles in soft pencil lead:
Spinnrade the brook the mill weir,
You find the homunculus stone dead
His fetal hands pressed to his ears,
And guards to the left and the right of the door
And
You’ll stand in the entrance hall to read your verse
The stitches drawn so tight you’ll forget all the words.
—
Plush Soviet rose
Drilling the briar shoot
But the shoot sows
Itself silently, hides deep among the roots
You beat to death those without babble
And honour those without grace
But if you look with a gaze that is level
The spines have grown on your face.
—
See how Pushkin’s cobbler
Measures the foot with a sole
The litigant follows his example
And the author is tied to a pole.
But it’s Pushkin’s miller!
The auditorium is slowly filling
A re-educated pine tall as a pillar
Stretches confesses it was once a willow
——
…. …… .
<insert hole in bagel here>
——
and so I decided
it was told to me that I should think back
so I thought back
and remembered
and it upset me
so I went and died
I died
and nothing came of it
apart from books
which came at some point
after fifty years
and former men
lost the form they once had
——
tell her to come out and say something
(
and the dog-heart growls and shrinks
and the son is born on the barracks floor
two friends lived like
and if one of them said yes
the underground water rose in the darkness
I’ll sing of that soon
no says the other
no and that is an end
there are no children in the army
which is made up of many men
but the friends could say nothing
when I sprang forth
between tree bole and gun bore
my cradle was caught
——
before the great war the apples were so fine
you might have heard that once at market—but who’s left alive
——
click
trigger (shutter) cocked
chink viewfinder sight
the photographer takes the picture
(things are taken from their places)
trans-ferr-al
and trans-ition trans-lates the space anew
(where corpses lie alongside the quick)
trans-humans transhumance
ex-isled con-sumers
jesters creatives
students
peasants
(great-grandfather grigory with his two hands
factory machine will chew off the right hand, but later,
great-grandfather whose face I never saw)
gawpers and gazers, proceeding arm-in-arm
and jews unassigned scattered
(we-jews)
o what bewildering confusion
from wild profusion
click
springtime, green garden, maytime
brooch at her throat, hair gathered in a bun
my grandmother (only a little older than me)
feeding a squirrel in a park on the outskirts of moscow
lonely soldier drinking mineral with syrup
school uniform, fitting room, apron-winged, unhemmed
festive streets, the houses and pavements illuminated in tiny lights
five-year-old mother flicks her silken ribbon
looks
click
click
wide-hipped rowing boats drawn up on the shore
their hulls bright in the sun
gondola swings flying over the abyss
a gypsy camp by the roadside, surly children in headscarves
home for former revolutionaries, two old ladies on a bench
(one is mine)
crimea, nineteen thirty eight, cascades of bathing beauties
(which one’s you)
croquet on the dacha lawn, moscow region
twenty years later in forty three
siberia, in evacuation
a headless cockerel and it swooped dead through the yard
head lying in the grass
and all the radio stations of the soviet union are speaking
accountant overwhelmed by numbers
nurse (made it to berlin)
seventeen-year-old nanny
shoeshiner from the next stairwell
geologist recently released from his second sentence
gynecologist
lecturer at the institute of architecture
vasya (who?) from solyanka street
woman from local health inspectorate
twenty-year-old lyodik killed in action
his father, a volunteer, bombed troop train
his mother who lived right up until death
a little girl who will remember all this
relatives from saratov and leningrad
inhabitants of khabarovsk and gorky
and those I have forgotten
and pushkin pushkin of course
everyone round a laden table
ninth of may victory celebration
windows thrown back radio on
victoria herself sitting at the table
singing the blue scarf song singing schubert
as if there were no death
——
so what bounds Russia, said the crippled man
you know very well what bounds it, said the crippled man
and every span of her earth
and every step in her dust
is a step towards border control
across no man’s land
and the sky drawn up close
all the better to gape
oh this place, place, where boundaries are everywhere
everywhere junctions connections between this world and that
every passing on walkways and subways
and the border-guard peering into the still-open mouth
holes and dugouts and pores
through the skin of the country, these doors
through which passers-by
may not descend unauthorized
not a tear duct, nor a shallow well
but a mine in every hole
a deep long shaft
to where the canary
——
I teach straying from I, yet who can stray from me!
this
throbs in your ears till you say “here
I do not say these things for a ruble or to fill up the time while I wait for a boat
(it is you talking, not I—I is your native tongue
tied in your mouth, in mine it began to wag)
while we sleep,
——
suburbangascompressionworks where the unstable sublimated mass
rises paraglides over paradise or over gas
the compressed is overgrown, but peonies grow abundant as the plucked
——
it is time to explain myself—let us stand up
earth cannot stand
she has no close or distant plans
no sense of her own rightness
she doesn’t pity herself doesn’t answer in answer to
doesn’t lie down doesn’t run
makes no particular mistakes
leaves no person without
earth opens her mouth but not to speak
nor does she stop herself being mired in herself
——
the intricate carved doors of the butterfly
don’t flap forwards backwards so you
can pull your heart from its cavity
and peer on tiptoes over the garden wall
the suite of rooms won’t sway or come apart,
nor will the mezzanine bend and snap
at last vision runs from the garden
says to reason: enough of your crap
and now in the whitest nights—
when light hardly catches its own—
our trial opens in court and takes flight
and marrow courses and teems in the bone
the prosecutor mops his damp brow
pours a thick glass with a hand that shakes
so water scatters in beads on the cloth
a tiny map of the italian lakes
bone marrow, like porridge left overnight,
suddenly singing in full throat
a song of an old life, our old life,
but no more now than a flat joke
as if we weren’t sawdust-stuffed, soap slivers,
splinters of worlds thrown into a pail
and the thick-lipped beer bottles
trumpeted our way
——
transparent pine legs flicker past
like a shadowy borodino battle
moscow like a played draught
slips out of reach its draw is lateral
there: inseparable, clustered like grapes,
foaming goblets of lilac in the dark
caught in the thin smoke from war medals
mid-bloom, outwinging firework
not holy mother of god! not a dungeon!
but darkling glass in the entrance halls
v-sign smeared on the walls.
but I awoke and went awol!
I saw the skull beneath the skin
its sockets its machined teeth its seam
not a bonnet but a bauble
the night sickblossom of a bluebottle crown
trotting like guinea hens, zulfiya
zemfira, maria and russ
run like ink across the meadow
into the open maw of a severed head
roost on the perch in the mouth’s red hollow
but I awoke before we were swallowed
——
the watery world is boiling and burning
its motors begin dully moving and turning
and dust in damp little scrupuli
coats the horse’s muzzle and eye
who rides so late through standing water
it is the father, he holds his daughter
the cart rattles and clatters and shakes
but the child never wakes
hush now child don’t be frightened
the sedge has withered from the lake
the heron calls, the stork has quietened
we’ll get there in the time it takes
languor on the bosom, warm in the womb
trembling like water in a manger
tell the child that dawn has come
now the child’s beyond danger
but deep in the rock where the sediment’s hard
the underground water is born in the dark
and rises up the dungeon stairs
slowly up the legs of chairs
——
summarised
what was said
amounted to
she simply isn’t able to speak for herself
so she is always ruled by others
because her history repeats and repeats itself
takes on ersatz and out of date date forms
and there is no knowing where her quotes are from
nineteen thirty or nineteen seventy
they’re all in there pell-mell all at once
not to remind us, you understand, just to plug the holes
(appalling really)
her raw material
her diamonds her dust tracks her dirt-coloured trailers
ancient forests mountain ranges
snow leopards desert roses gas flow
needed for global trade arrangements
her raw material doesn’t want to do business with her
gives itself up without love will do as she wants
unclear what she needs
where’s your
why do strangers speak for you
or are you speaking
in the voices of scolds and cowards
get out of yourself
put that dictionary back on the shelf
she won’t come out
it won’t come right
look how ferry fleet she is
see her wings in aeroplansion
woolscouring steelbeating pasteurizing
thousand-eyed thousand-bricked civic expansion
weavers singing at their non-functioning looms
voluntary wine-drinking zones
supre (forgive my french) matists striding forth
junckerlords kalashnikovs
bolshoiballet dancing out from behind the fire curtain
the fenced-in ghost of a murdered orchard
paradise sleeping in hell’s embrace
——
let her stay like that, in bloom
I’ll take my stand here
with the brief falling petals
with the night sentry
prostitutes pale shadows
under the shadows of trees on the arterial road
blinded by headlamps
approach the cars
careful like deer to the feeder
wagon-restaurant plastic flowers
menu in gilded letters on leatherette
waitress with bitemarks on her neck
anyone who speaks as I can’t yet speak
dust storm at the railway halt
where on another day we could have lit up a cigarette
the expanse of fields, rain-moist and restless
a retired officer in a military coat
a truck driver in his lit cabin, now we can see
whether it’s high-walled like a palace’s eaves
and whether light will dispel darkness between two tiny towns.
place your hand on my
June 2014
Translator’s Note to
By Sasha Dugdale
Maria Stepanova wrote her epic poem
Maria and I worked on this translation together during her residency at The Queen’s College in Oxford in 2017, and I used her extensive notes and comments to guide me through. Often, where I felt an image wouldn’t work in translation, I could return to Maria’s notes on her intended effect and choose a slightly different image, or extend the image in some way. Maria also gave me the freedom to use images with a currency in the UK, and as both Russia and Britain suffer from martial and imperial mythmaking, this gave me great satisfaction. Lines from Kipling found their way into the poem, for example, and a pre-battle quote from Shakespeare’s
In the end this text is a triangulation rather than a translation. It is the result of a dance between the original poem, Maria, and me, and it has at its heart the Russian poet Grigory Dashevsky’s concept of the existence of “a poem’s pre-textual body” from which we can both draw.
WAR OF THE BEASTS AND THE ANIMALS
TRANSLATED BY SASHA DUGDALE
——
I smiled
he said, marusya,
marusya, hold on tight and down
we went
—
no vember
the cruellest month, the hoarsest mouth
driving from the dead clay
peasants forged to the field,
cows, curs, leaving
the postbag snagged in the stream
the tin spoon
the quick streams slipping the quicksilver
slip sliding away to the estuary
this little piggy went to market
and this little piggy froze to death
and the landowner put a gun to his head
and a black car came for the officer
the greek in odessa, the jew in warsaw
the callow young cavalryman
the soviet schoolboy
gastello the pilot
and all those who died in this land
out of the murky pool, the surface still warmed by the sun
in a night in may, steps rus al ka and quickly begins her work
throws her wet clothes from her tramples with her wet feet
her black body shines her white smock cast
mother, mother is that you? alyosha I don’t rightly know
o swallow, swallow, is it her? she flew away, my friend
——
such high-minded intercourse
topples and must fall at last
a plague a’ both your
(ivy-clad turret, waterside folly)
masha learns on breakfast tv
’er petticoat was yaller an’ ’er little cap was green
till apples grow on an orange tree
breaches of password security
if I were drowned in the deepest sea
thus sung the maid down in the valley
russian actor mikhail porechenkov
fingers his warm little rifle
like the latest novelty musical box
like he’s desperate
to grow his own golden fleece
and the narrow water’s already round his knees
svyatoslav in kiev did hear the ringing of that knell
and tom thumb
bid them listen
who were of the lands of surozh and korsun:
black night brings long strings
foot-foot-foot-foot slogging
all the millers-of-god
hi ho hi ho and off they go
to civil war
——
lay to the left
a general touched his side
over the marxist’s chest
the liberal’s curls spread wide
o your goldenes haar
and a pair of blue eyes
few words spoken
feel free to surmise
thou art the armorer of the heart
sing me a ditty, something from rossini
rosina, perhaps, like on radio rossiya
——
as in a chariot race
the chosen one, glistening like quartz
in his roaring metal carapace
whips this way along the course
but the chariot is cleverer
throwing up stones
crashes the barrier
and crushes
the marrow from bones,
so, setting out rooks and queen
in their checkered chambers
culture leads fear
down the gauntlet of human nature,
stinking of laurel wreaths
steeped in a boiling pan,
to where there’s a lively trade
in the living unit of man
sing to me of how, on an ancient alley on your family’s estate,
the weathered bones lay bleached and scattered
under a birch tree; quietly they chattered:
there was no point to us, we didn’t lend each other our hands
like babes we lay in the nursery in our swaddling bands
——
I can just imagine coming under him
says one, and I can hear everything
and the other is speaking, speaking
fruits of the curbside reads the jar label
from whatever takes root in the stony rubbish
embers, sawdust, scorched wood
suspended in sweet amber sugar
cockerel-shaped lollies for the day of the dead.
when I’m off to market, or when I’m coming home
I always remember what she said back then
——
one leg crossed the other: who goes on top
one leg vows to the other: I’ll top you
——
when we seize all the banks!
share out the fruits of labor!
and the engines in all the tanks
flooded with rainwater
then we’ll help the poor earth
shake the wig from her head
erect a polytunnel instead
with a multiplication of those poles:
and the south will come knocking at our ears
pears will droop in the heat
gleaming bulbous pears
swollen globular fruit
and the pizza delivery’s well-oiled
and the truth wears at our heart:
for the rapid soil
shall bring forth its own bard.
——
were it not seemly, citizens
to begin in ancient diction
to stay silent
——
oh in paris I could have lived and died
if there had been nowhere else besides
moscow of your land
china of your water
and tanganyika of the small trees
where the saplings and new roots are hidden
when it comes to it
somebody’s been put here to keep guard over it all
here, at the crossroads
of two legs, vast, fumble-footed
the un-russian god rose
the puddles reflected
the shadows under a birch like a cut out
my darling priapus, surely it’s time to sprout?
or is the geist not doing so well?
nothing here corresponds to the spotted skin
and the pink dusk
comes from the time of a nation’s devastation
no one calls for coolness,
all want con flag ration
and here the iambs trip-trap: tetrameters chirrup
but trip up on naked vowels
and fall so far from europe
bleeding pelts, they howl
——
children in the yard played at being olympian gods
and then at gestapo interrogation—tbh it’s much the same
I had a dream
night in its nuptial attire
the cornfield the melon’s swelling belly
under the stars the machine gunner sings
to the machine gun,
swaddled
cradled at his breast
sleep my sunflower
sleep my poppy
soon the warm sun will come back from the south
and there’ll be new life in the
pedestrian subway
playing on the half-dismembered harmony
and soldiers soldiers
gather the light ash in pots
——
how little earth was saved on the bosom of the earth
lift the corner of the blanket, replace the hot water bottle
measure perspiration, water allow reach for it
deep in-draught:
ditch after
dug-out
dogged indrafted
——
say the word that don’t belong
put it on and march along
forget the old and step anew
and the word will march with you
that word, it curls up and dies
at your lips as it emerges
like the spread-eagled toad it lies
in the heat on the verges
it clots sticky in the mouth
froths issues
here let me wipe out
it’s in the tissue
ugh with it e u
and gagging om
they don’t half-mean anything
when they die they’re gone
blue wings thrown wide
under the weight of the sky
the eagle floats over the forest
undulating in the air like a plaice
divested of alphabet
——
on the twenty-second of june
at four o’clock on the dot
I won’t be listening to anything
I’ll have my eyes shut
I’ll bury the foreign broadcast
It’s the news but I won’t lift a hand
If anyone comes I’m out of the loop
I’m a sparrow I’m no man’s land
——
the home fires are burning low
be still my heart beat slow
don’t spend the kerosene douse the fire
it won’t end as I desire
strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows
a hundred young warriors scrambling to form the watch
the warrior’s raven-black horse returns without its rider
the dark cloud was without silver lining
the song snatched
from the river the bayonets glittered
glimpses of white sleeve
volunteer walking at volunteer
cigarette in the death-grip of teeth
human waves
drum bangs
machine gun strafes
camera pans
birds singing in the sycamore tree
major petrov fucks major deyev
in the coarse pockets of ploughed soil
——
that night
over the field of battle
the nachtigall tells the nachtigall
nightingasps in disbelief
and in neighboring places
bird tells bird passing
from beak to beak like a dead frog
the exact science:
earth’s caesura
between the stains of the sighted
between one mottled zone of streetlights
warmed by proximate life
and its answering beam
the sightlessness of moss on boughs
anxious flight
armored vehicles
lenses
aimed at movement
——
no difference between first and second
patriotic or patriotic
great or pacific
atlantic
world
all the same they fall
to the only the civil
where sunrise quivers in the cinders
draws out the spear-tips
mate eh mate
giss a light
says the dead to the dead
says the killed to the killer
——
the flower dies under a skin of glass
mouth blackens stumps trickly crust
earth takes the dead she keeps them
and brings them up when she must
the sensible animals hold court
the witness box is a transparent lung
dark and trickled the way is damp
the bitch suckles her young
the judge lifts its eyes from the bench
to daylight’s low-hung bulb
holds up wanted posters
and asks the jury if I am absolved
barely pausing their talk
yesterday’s brothers emerge from the copse
in charred pelts, mud-crusted
get up on the cart, whip on the horse
to where the meadow holds an awning,
pins a path of stinging plants and thorns
the way back is belted down
even hope is stillborn
how to justify this? on the greedy tongue
milk writes in curds,
and paper is marked by tree rings
traces of axe a fool’s words
——
the acacia has long blossomed
the army is long gone
melodeclamation
has spread its wings and flown
ride a cock horse
to wherever the cross
and rip out the stuffing
and give it a toss
and freedom needs stripping
stay standing, lads, as long as you can
bust the joint, smash the game
one of our gang will crouch in a hole
wherever we are, and swig champagne
gypsies—dead
hussars—defunct
dusk now falls
color shrunk
pitter patter
across the heart
sputter spatter
on the tablecloth
voices raised in lament
which once were full of joy
——
who is that riding on to red square
towards st basil’s cathedral
countries rejoice cities jubilant
across my territory
begins two minutes history
vixens bark at the crimson shields
mosquitoes’ drone
drowns out the pealing of bells
russian hares
in all the polling stations
the country has spoken
and then the midges
tearing themselves from flesh
rotate tactically overhead
who wouldn’t want to be drinking the quiet don from grandfather’s
wooden cup, going back in time, rub your eyes
put kebabs on the fire
reclaim those words sprinkle them on
soup
sprinkle earth
——
Vlas the volunteer, a fortnight dead
forgot the ruble rate, and what the sparrows said
and where he was from.
A current of explosive air
held his bones in embrace. As he flew
the years passed from him, chubby-cheeked
babbling.
Russky or Ukrainian,
o you, whoever you are, in this neglected crossing place,
consider Vlas. Vlas was nicer than you.
——
——
the human body
is not soap wearing thin to a hole
in the scented water bowl
nor is it ever wholly
of the past, always of the here and now
glows through the deadwood
not easy to dispatch
it creeps up like a snowdrop
through the carbon patch
and what was pining, barely alive
shut away within its bony cage
now floods into the dark recesses
to happen again
new life emerges when hope is no more
and you stand there, empty-handed and unsure
——
they traveled a long time
longlongtime
dumbstruck stillstanding trees
not-earth and earth pressed close
builder’s yards morgues fly-tips
skyfail palewhite
bluehills skywarmed
up and down the road and the road
swallet
grim
droop
spinybroom
steep
stonecrop
cumb
the unbending river vodopr’
can’t swallow enough water—
its shame next to the
perfectly round hills
they call the hills “mounts”
and we walked on the mount
we strolled in ornamental gardens
reflected in the long shanks of birch
we gazed in the heavenly blue
we noticed that populousness is bluer:
roofs fences
cars
heavy colors like a waterproof tarp
no one from our family
has been in these lands
since nineteen sixteen
glare of white handkerchiefs
spread wide
on the uncharted waters
non op posing
non meta morph osing
non harvest table
non stop able
——
life, you are a gash in need of stitching
death, you are a crust that yearns for filling
——
those who carry in their mouths, at first with care, heads with seeing eyes
those who touched newspaper print in their heads, as mother said never to do, never, wash your hands
those who rip apart in flight, carrying from nest to nest, smearing on the glass
attempt to mount the blunt-snouted body on a set of wheels,
set it trundling, throat outstretched and spouting fire
yes, them and these, too
but actually more these
for them conscripts spread their green arms wide
like a tablecloth plentifully spread
lie heaped at their feet like birch logs
to please the valkyries
at the harpies’ hearts desire
to the bayan’s thrum
the accordion’s reveille
and o, those children’s voices, singing where once there was a dome
in the soiled field
surrounded by corn and scarecrows
——
not on the earth but above or below
war’s deep grunt
producing slimy rivers of sweat
its hand feels for the gut
and we stagger
carry ourselves through the darkness
and mother demeter mithering in the muck
and anguish of the fields
hears from below: mother fuck
yet the sky might be brightening, or so it feels
and mother hecate comes out for a smoke
from the back street
from the foul black streets from the pecking fowl
the puddles of spilt milk
the earth lying like a kitbag
behind enemy lines give it tongue
mother mary hurries
but hasn’t yet come
——
in a great and strong wind
a still small voice
she who cradles leviathan in her hands like the infant
and she who rises above the rye
all are present for this, as it happens
they watch, they steadily
unspeaking
as the ice in the ice house and the tear in the bottle come of age
as the soil tastes the first weight of the rain
as the ice-stoves send out blocks of
smoking death
in the big brother house a fight opens like a flower
women in flip-flops
fixated
shut the fuck up why don’t
spring in the recruiting office
knee jerk, stethoscope down the spine
picking out the shaggy the short-legged the sinewy
under matron’s watchful eye
how the thick plaits of herring stream away
the lines of tanks on bridges flash in the sun
a waiter’s flourish reveals a pitiful morsel
shivering, drizzled in salt, underdone
and over there is everything that I kiss from afar
that I love to smithereens
all of it still shouting alleluia
but no respite from the shameful dream
serpents and all deeps
tin soldiers at the city walls
all the ranks of angels
nanny lena digging vegetables
snow like wool and hoarfrost like ashes
throat like spindrift, legs like a foal
heart thrust through the noose
like a button through a button hole
a memory
won’t save us
lies in the ashes
biting its own tail
——
like the tailor who sews
not the straitjacket
(which from childhood has begged to sit up
woken from the canvas)
but the pattern
cuts on the bias
like a court proceeding
down the long hospital corridor
with a heavy trolley
handing out the tightly wrapped packages
the little living weights of verdicts
like when in a moment’s confusion you spit out a barbed word
and it lodges in a treebody
or the body of a comrade
or a friendlip
and the line
goes taut
like a mound
under a snowdrift
means nothing
writing on a tomb
sees no one
writing on a stone
nothing, we read
it not
but it is
2015
Today Before Yesterday
(excerpt)
We often want to return to any day before yesterday, to turn it over like a reversible coat and put it on again. In foul times, this is like scratching away at a scab, or a kind of nervous tic: the search for analogies appropriate to one’s situation spins out of control. You can compare any situation to what is going on today and draw immediate and terrifying conclusions. This is especially visible in the overlay of different blueprints—in the conversations about a Third World War, which is to begin in yet another August ’14. This somehow reminds me of the fretting over the arrival of the new millennium, the fear and trembling before the round date—as if fate shared mankind’s predilection for exact dates and historical reenactment.
The feverish turn to the past, the obsession with what has already been, can signify a turn away from the future, а lack of belief in it. Benjamin’s angel of history is moved by the winds that carry him forward, into the unknown; his sorrowful face is turned back, toward the ruins and wreckage that emerge along the way and separate him from what has been lost (paradise,
A couple of weeks ago, I read an observation that struck me as accurate and thus worrisome. It was about how the events of the last few months (fill in what fits, cross out what doesn’t) robbed us of the present. Let me expand on how I understood this: the situation has changed so much that X or Z are no longer at fault for comparing contemporary Russia to Munich back in the day, or Petersburg the day before yesterday, because the very country is writing itself like a literary text, like a stuffy historical novel whose setting is explored in the artless manner of a school play. Тhe present day has been canceled in one fell swoop; it’s like during the filming of a recent movie when the actors, the crew, and their families had to spend weeks and even years in interiors from the Soviet fifties, wearing clothes from that era, and paying a fine whenever they broke character.1 Today we, the entire country, are breaking from the present; the present, which people share with one another and the world, has been abolished—it is now one of many alternate realities, a kind of hypothesis one needs to prove. And that is what we are forced to do, now and then sinking knee-deep into either the 1930s or the 1970s, and it is exactly the fractionary, mismatched nature of the everyday that seems essential to this predicament.
This palpable unease forces the inhabitants of our not-present to crowd together in a kind of situational foam, a flighty we, which gathers for this or that reason and then dissipates within hours or days. What Alexander Blok called “the events”—roughly speaking, the language that history uses to speak to people—is addressed precisely to multitudes, sets
I like to think back on the late eighties, when perestroika brought an immense amount of unread works into circulation, and for several years
It feels like our working vocabulary does not have the words or constructions that would allow us to speak of what is happening today without using a complex past tense and a portable quote book. The public space—from official statements to social media—is full of exclusively borrowed speech, with gaps and scuff marks, its expiration date long-discolored on the packaging. Whenever the need for speech arises, whenever a mouth opens to agree or dissent, to appraise or name, a quotation lies at the ready (often intonational, more often yet forgetful of where it comes from), and the event is no longer novel or singular. What is said aloud comes not from me and not even from “us”; when the president of the country recites “Hey, men! Is Moscow not behind us?”3 he is not pointing the audience to the text, to this or that set of meanings—he is merely leaning on a powerful layer of common knowledge, like an athlete leaning against a column. When a pop star says that St. Petersburg should be renamed Petrograd, he is following an invisible blueprint, serving a god unbeknown to him. When a warlord posing as a White Guard incarnate4 reenacts Stalin’s orders in eastern Ukraine, he is merely taking what is already at hand. In this realm of borrowed speech, the only things that can be known—that can exist—are those that we have never not known.
The inhabitants of this realm are, naturally, forced to speak in quotations (worn smooth into proverbs, ready at the tip of the tongue); everything written in Russian should be seen as a giant phrase book that can illustrate any statement with a randomly chosen quotation, whatever its original meaning. The working of this mechanism of appropriation is visible on Facebook where on any given day someone is busy explaining which side Pushkin, Nabokov, or Brodsky would have taken in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict or in some smaller dispute—and it turns out you can use the very same lines to beat both sides over the head.
In these exchanges (not of thoughts but of diffuse wisps of intents and judgments), everything is deliberately approximate, language is used not to diagnose but to mask the diagnosis. A system of labels has been developed for just this purpose, as limber as it is flimsy: it is enough to note the most crucial thing about a person or a thing—is he one of us or one of them (that is, good or bad)—and not a word more. National traitors,
The ability of certain words to emerge out of thin air and fill up with fresh blood would be terrifying all on its own, but what stands behind them is a new kind of doctrine, unnamed and unrecognized, which tells us about the a priori approximate nature of any utterance. Anyone can become a top student at the school of inaccuracy, where all words mean the same thing, which is always very far from their original dictionary definition. For example, a fascist or a liberal, in this language, is anyone who the speaker disagrees with. Hate speech is still new to us, so in order to curse someone, we look for words from
When any conversation about the here and now is made impossible, the conversation about the past becomes but a euphemism, a means of clarifying our relationship to the ousted present, a way to
Now—completely and unquestionably—a “solid order” has been installed in Russia, which consists of the hands and feet of its inhabitants being bound together tightly—separately for each person and collectively for everyone. Any active movement (in any given sphere) can only bring suffering to your neighbor, who is as tied up as you are. Such are the conditions of public, state, and private life. You should, while not forgetting your own illness, always remember that you are in a position no better and no worse than that of any other conscious person who lives in Russia. Because of that you can only feel okay in those moments when you forget your surroundings. […] All is as foul, filthy, and airless as ever in Russia: history, art, events, or any of the things that create a fundament for life, have barely ever existed here. It’s not surprising that there isn’t any life either.
August 2014
Translated by Maria Vassileva
After the Dead Water
1.
Some months ago, I was asked to write an article about the centennial of the First World War,1 and while working on it, I realized that the text was turning toward the present, toward its complex, warped distinctness, and there was no way to prevent that turn. As hard as you try to avoid historical analogies, they have become impossible to escape, and each new comparison seems to nudge the country ever closer to an actual catastrophe, sewn from that same twentieth-century pattern. The rhetoric of the last few months, all the speech bubbles that swell around our dismal situation, is marked by a strange pragmatics: their task is not to explain what is happening using a recent example, but to fortify it, to scale it up. Comparing Putin to Stalin or Hitler, calling Kyiv’s Maidan fascist or
Everyday existence, no matter how mundane, is always guilty before something or someone—by the mere fact of its coexistence with someone else’s misfortune. You can never know the full measure of the things that cast a shadow on your own prosperity, how your luck breathes the same air as so much suffering. Sometimes—when what’s happening is so conspicuous that it can no longer be ignored—the mundane existence becomes not just blind but criminal. And so it does not know how to respond: abolish itself, change, squint harder?
Nowadays, it’s hard not to think about how our daily life (over the past few years, Moscow has adopted the generic look of a peaceful European capital with bike lanes, small cafés, and a complete lack of preparedness for any kind of danger) has a flip side, and how the curious apathy, which now accompanies any statement that can fit into our shrunken public sphere, is backed by the fact that for half a year, not very far from the bike lanes and cafés, there’s been a war going on, and it looks like everything we had to read about as children. And that there are people, some of them sitting at the next table, to whom this double edifice seems natural and understandable.
I recently read an article by a psychotherapist whose clientele is made up of people my age, Muscovites in their thirties and forties, all burdened by a Soviet childhood and softened by years of relative prosperity. Somewhere in the text a dream is retold; here is what I remember from it. A new law has been passed, the dreamer says, and now those who lose their documents are sentenced to death by firing squad, and I’ve lost my passport, so they’ve come for me. Everyone is really upset at home, but there’s nothing to be done, I collect my things, mom tells me, “Well, no, of course they won’t shoot you, they’ll just exile you.” And indeed they don’t shoot me, and I’m sitting in the cold train car, and the train is going somewhere. And I’m thinking, I always knew this would happen. That my home, my childhood, my daily life with its small troubles—that none of it would last, that it would all end this way, that there’s nothing else besides this train car. That I was born to be here.
At this point the psychotherapist explains that this is a typical dream, that nearly everyone living in Russia today has had a version of this dream. And all of these dreams are about a profound disbelief in the soft surface of this world—that shaking it will bring you back to its icy foundation, the cold-hearted “us-them,” and to the simple realization that anything could happen.
2.
The events of the last two years, which still seem unbelievable, comic, macabre, illustrate this point. It seems that there is no law too absurd to pass—and our bewilderment and public outrage merely spur on our lawmakers. There is also no situation you could consider unthinkable. The war with Ukraine, Khodorkovsky’s release,3 banning Parmesan4—none of this seems surprising anymore: in the dark, all swans are black. The borders of what is possible have stretched to the horizon, logical arguments do not work, everyday pragmatism does not save us: it’s like falling into a zone of turbulence that shifts all proportions, moves all the accents—and removes the very possibility of a corridor, a clear perspective, a view of the future. Which might be the hidden meaning of what is happening, its actual purpose.
In a recent interview, Boris Groys talks about the fear of the future as one of the hallmarks of the present, and of the idea of saving oneself from the future as an urgent problem. “There is the sense that the future, whatever shape it takes, will bring about some kind of unpleasantness and a worsening of what is. There is a tendency to hold one’s ground and preserve what is. In other words, what’s current today is how to save oneself from the future and maintain the status quo.”
Nowhere is this fear stronger than in Russia. We habitually express horror at the fact that (according to sociologists) 84 or 86 percent of the population supports Putin. But, in reality, the consolidation is almost 100 percent, and it all boils down to the fear of tomorrow, which brings us all together: Putin, cabbies in Moscow, teachers in the provinces, social media users, and those active in the protest movement. The mere thought of the fact that the unsightly and uncomfortable today is not the final point, that tomorrow will be worse, is the source of a heavy, secret, communal anxiety. Tomorrow promises myriad unknown dangers—war, crisis, revolution, mass repression—and our neurotic logic fails to accept that those things are not likely to happen all at once.
Putin’s rule over the last years (with his conservation projects à la “linger a while—thou art so fair!”) was the first symptom of this turn in our worldview. The commonplace thing to say about Putin is that his main political goal is to preserve this very same status quo, to strengthen his position at the gambling table. This is, broadly speaking, what the conflict between Putin and the protesters on Bolotnaya5 was about: he reminded us of the social contract of the aughts (offering the private joys of travels, consumption, and the unsubtle ploy of oil bonuses in exchange for our non-participation in political life), the opposition demanded a future, a return to the historical process, a life that was dynamic instead of static. But when things were set into motion, the ensuing dynamic turned out to be worse than any stasis—and as early as the winter of 2013 we were talking and thinking about how nice it would be to go back at least a couple of steps. Back to the previous summer, to the protest spring of 2012, to the peaceful autumn of 2011—before the Bolotnaya Square case,6 before the cannibalistic laws were passed, before people were banned from their jobs, etc. Back to the warm stasis when life was, it turns out, much more bearable.
On the other hand, there are people who seem to derive pleasure from the way our wheels have spun out of control, from the sense of finding oneself in the midst of history. Interviews with warlords of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” bubble with the excitement of people who have finally found themselves in the right place, feeling useful and important, taking their position, attacking, rising up off their knees—in a new kind of sense, for which a mere year ago they would have had to reach back to the ’20s, to Babel’s
It’s interesting, however, that this project of redoing the present is entirely blind to the future, that its entire pathos is retrospective. There’s a reason why one of the main figures of the summer of 2014 was Girkin-Strelkov,7 an intellectual turned reenactor, who easily moves from historical fantasy to actual death. In this zone of turbulence, everyone is restoring something of their own, gluing it together from whatever’s at hand: for some it’s Makhno’s huliaipole,8 camouflage costumes, pictures with severed heads (“We used to join the Cossacks / And now we join the bandits”9); for some it’s the Soviet Union with the gilded Friendship of Nations Fountain and an exhibit of its accomplishments; for some it’s tsarist Russia with its 1913 borders—and all of this is reconstruction, а replica, a costumed game of survival. The versions of the future that are being offered here are all a kind of revanchist ready-made object; none of them contain new elements. Meanwhile, the great distances that separate all these versions give us a sense of the size of the crater into which our present is ready to crash.
The weird optical phenomenon of our strange time resembles a sudden onset of nearsightedness: 2034 is not merely indiscernible, it’s of no interest to anyone—especially compared to 1914. In our everyday life there is no room for futurology, either optimistic (which would be hard to come by) or pessimistic (which scares us with its realistic forecast); nothing induces more anguish and anxiety than the fantasy of what will be. The future is something like yet another version of the iPhone, which is being met with obvious reluctance and distrust: “It was much better when Jobs was still in charge.” And that might be the main issue—the thing that prevents any perspective from becoming a way forward and won’t let analogies get back on their own feet. The twentieth century—by which we measure ourselves, to which we set our watches—was built in the name of tomorrow, using modernist utopia as its template, and in spite of the dark forebodings and bloody sunsets, the expectation of the new, unseen, and of the complete redoing of everything, was the motor that kept the century moving forward. The new—a multifaceted, multiocular utopia, progressive, technocratic, this and that, “we will build a new world,”10 “our country will be great,” “don’t turn the pages—resurrect,”11 was a kind of slope along which time hurtled along, changing and spurring itself to go faster. The absence of a yearning for the future or a will toward it is almost more frightening to me than the collages of antique mustaches and slogans with which the present is preoccupied.
3.
They say that if you file down the very tip of a crow’s bill, the bird will start crashing into things: the fine-tuned sense of direction, the organ of long-range connection to the future, will cease to work, all distances will collapse into one, all sense of proportion will be lost, there will be no exit. I believe that this is how we orient ourselves in time: if we file down our sense of tomorrow, we will always crash into the corners and cornices of the past—which is all there is to it, anyway. It’s interesting to think about the distortions that happen in a mind that makes no provisions for the future (which has been disinfected, anesthetized—carefully masked under the guise of the present or excluded and ignored like a faux pas). In a world that contains just the present and past, any personal choice loses its substance: events happen as though of their own accord, following the will of things, without any desire on the part of participants (who are barely even participating—just using the circumstances that befell them). Everything that happens has a whole nomenclature of prototypes, which makes it easy to relieve oneself of responsibility, to spread it across a dozen convenient generalizations. Some of them you hear very often: “we have to compromise in difficult times,” “artists have always collaborated with those in power,” “there has always been censorship”; “always” is a key word here, it allows us to not be the exception. The future as a paradigm shift, an opportunity to act not-as-always evokes great distress. But there’s no place to hide anymore; history has caught up with us, and it won’t be easy to work ourselves free from it. We could, of course, wind back what can be rewound, “erase accidental features,”12 the feverish florescence of movies and books, exhibitions and shows, falafel and meatball shacks—and prepare for a long siege. This is already happening a little bit: state television is mimicking the Soviet ’70s and ’80s, the press is eager to catch up with it; things that until recently seemed like a collection of artefacts, souvenirs of lost times, have suddenly acquired an unexpected terrifying cohesion. As if everything that spent decades locked up in attics, crypts, and other far corners of the mind has suddenly joined a parade of dead things. It’s like the old fairy tale: they put together the rotting pieces of the dead man, splashed some black water on him, and he shuddered—and now his unseeing eyes are about to open.
But this very water is unalive. It pulls together the mishmash of the late Putin years into a kind of system; it holds together layers of language that have burnt down to ashes, lets them rise to the surface once more. Before it disappears, the dead should become solid: whole and visible—and one can’t turn away from it or hide from it. Vladimir Propp writes about this: “The hero is first splashed with dead water, and then with living water. The dead water finishes him off, turns him into someone definitively dead. It is a kind of funeral rite, corresponding to the covering with earth. Only now is he an actual dead person, and not a creature caught between the two worlds, which can come back as a vampire. Only now, after the sprinkling with dead water, can the living water act.”
The dead water has been poured; now we live to see the water of life.
November 2014
Translated by Maria Vassileva
Intending to Live
1.
In the spring of 1909, Blok wrote to his mother from Venice.
Lyuba’s in a Parisian tailcoat, and I wear my Viennese white suit and a Canotier hat. I look at the people and houses, I play with the crabs and collect seashells. It’s all very quiet, lazy and restful. We want to go swimming in the sea. Finally, there are no Russian newspapers around, and I don’t hear or read the indecent names of the Union of the Russian People and Milyukov; instead, in all the shop windows I see the names of Dante, Petrarch, Ruskin and Bellini. Every Russian artist has the right to spend at least a few years with his ears closed off to everything Russian, and instead see his other homeland—Europe, and especially Italy.
A great temptation of our present time, one which is almost impossible to resist, is to perform the following simple operation: take Milyukov and replace him with Milonov (or Navalny, a name closer to the political sensibilities of the author), and replace the Union of the Russian People with the
The peculiarity of the Russian mindset might, in fact, consist of a too condensed reading of this Pushkin text—a reading that makes impossible the very hope of any continuity, even in its simplest possible form. While the intention to live is still rising to its full height, still taking a deep breath, in your head, like a taunt, “but suddenly we die” hurries on, and in this line we hear a gloating that the author did not intend—it has nothing in common with the awareness of death that is required of the living. In this reading, which has already called off its own future, there is no rest or freedom, because there is no
There is an English novel in which someone calls up old people on the phone and tells them, “Don’t forget that you will die.” Among the many terrified, enraged recipients who report this call to the police, there is one old lady who responds, “My dear, there’s nothing I remember quite as well!” It is unlikely that memento mori might be optional anywhere on Earth—but on the territory of today’s Russia, people are all too prepared for death (and much less prepared to live for a while without feeling that one’s journey to the other world has already begun). Marina Tsvetaeva wrote about this and called it
According to Rilke, Russia borders directly on God—a geopolitical situation that must trouble those who live in its outermost territories. The practical conclusion from this adjacency is that the usual pathway between cause and effect, crime and punishment, past and future, today and tomorrow, becomes opaque, impenetrable. Here is God, and here is the threshold; beyond it there is a terrifying unknown, the frightening
There is the sense that Russia today is more eager to believe in the prospect of the terrible (familiar to us since childhood thanks to examples that were so generously provided—from the pioneer heroes8 to one’s own grandfathers and great-grandfathers) than in its own aptitude for change. This casts a very specific light on the present, endows it with a disquieting unity, which does not at all match its reality—an eclectic, hogwash, patchwork flow of life. This strange lighting, the unmistakable sense that each movement follows someone’s external design, is something I know very well from my experience with crafted reality: that is how a work of art is usually structured, carrying the mark of its author’s will. The rather dismal compulsion of everything that happens around us is very similar to a literary text. In a certain sense, this is exactly how things stand right now; more and more it seems that the country is not at all planning to close the book and get off at the next stop.
2.
The wild, tattered process of archaization that everyone is talking about, which we observe and describe right as the ground is crumbling underneath our feet, has a peculiar backstory in Russia. Some years ago, I was asked a question that is worth revisiting today. It came from an English scholar of Russian literature who couldn’t understand why all Russian prose could fit under the umbrella of the fantastic (sci-fi, fantasy, fairy tales). Take Pelevin, Sorokin, Petrushevskaya, he said—any work of realism will inevitably include some kind of apparition, a miraculous rescue, an
Even if it’s not quite everywhere, a significant portion of the texts that a broad audience (here we move away from literature per se, and toward ethnography and anthropology, where the laws of large numbers are at play) would consider as written to the point, as having to do with reality, are really about the lives of vampires, foxes, and saints. Moreover, some of them seem to have an extended shelf life—like the old Pelevin story, in which a German pilot from WWII is resurrected in the forest outside of Moscow, so that a girl can marry a foreigner. Somehow, even thirty years later, this text still provides a glimpse of reality as we know it today: it remains an accurate “physiological sketch” of Russian life, drawn from nature.
This departure from reality is the most homespun kind of realism—the realism of the front page, a sideshow of authorial bravery. This is also how it is received by its local audience (and as a rule it does not really appeal to outside readers—unlike the lush wonders of Latin American magical realism). That is, the Russian unbelievable, which is the same as the Russian believable, is a product not meant for export, one you couldn’t easily dress up in a frock appropriate for the outside world. All of this has little to do with the books themselves—but it says a lot about what the Cyrillic alphabet and those who use it have to contend with.
There is the sense that the reality here follows the provisions of an unwritten convention, often invisible and incomprehensible to the outside observer, but clear to those who live within this conceptual realm. Until quite recently, it looked like the country was taking part in the political, economic, and cultural affairs of the present, and was trying, if not to catch up and overtake, then at least to join in and match its advances, excitedly rolling out bike lanes, joining the WTO and whatnot, signing agreements and participating in summits. At the same time—more precisely,
According to this logic, any movement in history—in its syntactical design—is perceived as coming from the outside, as an imitation, almost like a child’s play whose purpose is to merely pass the time. What’s actually important is another, internal order. There is the common belief that any, even the wildest possible, plot twist in one’s life is both possible and inevitable. As well as the common fear that one will get too comfortable on the warm side of this world, and then crash into the freezing unknown.
But even more important is the near-absolute immersion in the past. It won’t let us think about the future without imagining it as Stalingrad or Potsdam, Tsushima or Hiroshima; nor will it let us feel the present as our own, without any precedent, analogy, or model. This obsession with the past is unlike any other illness I know of, and it needs to be analyzed and treated. The inability to allow even a sliver of air to come between oneself and the past, the absence of any distance, or even the desire to create distance, between oneself and everything that has already happened—lead to strange transmutations. When the past and the present coexist with such intensity, the future is rendered useless—and it comes to resemble a descent into Hades.
All the flashpoints of Russian history, no matter how far back you look, from 1991 to 1917, from Stalin to Peter the Great, from the Decembrists to the Vlasovites—no longer appeared, at the turn of the millennium, like points along a common line or paragraphs of a shared narrative, but like episodes in an unceasing war, clusters of conflicting versions. There is no period in the last three centuries that we could consider free of such conflict—and that wouldn’t belong to the territory of
This special way of handling the past has its own vocabulary, which can hardly be translated into the language of comparable cases. These relations with the past neither conform to the model of suppression or forgetting nor to that of admitting and working with guilt. The way it works in Russia can only be described as an enchantment, a deep and personal involvement with the past of every one of us, people of
3.
Our strange relationship to the past and its objects could be explained by the fact that no one has ever come into their inheritance here. And that is not surprising: in a way we are all successors of people who, in the twenties and thirties, moved into the apartments of
It’s important, too, how readily the past accepts all advances toward it and how generously it repays them. The feeling that the entire twentieth century has become contemporaneous to us, which I remember from the early nineties, hasn’t gone away or settled down. Neither has the ability to discuss this or that Osip Mandelstam idea as urgent, fresh out of the oven, and directly related to our everyday. It hasn’t always been this way: a century ago, from a similar remove, Blok writes about Apollon Grigoryev, and he looks at him as if through binoculars, across hundreds of years, with a cold retrospective gaze. It’s hard not to think that the amplified life of the poetic field, which has been the good fortune of the last few decades, is also indebted to this immersion into the past, to this peculiar magnetic—
Here we could introduce a fashionable term and talk about colonization—thinking about how the present and future become a dominion of the past, adopt its language, are arranged in its image. Because the odd barter between the past and present in Russia does not just affect the sphere of culture: everyone, it seems, has been a victim or beneficiary of this dynamic. The past supplies the optical devices that allow us to feel
I recently read an interview with a volunteer fighter who joined the rebels in Donbass. There are many such stories; this one is a little different. The subject in question was a Frenchman of Russian descent, a second-generation immigrant. But when they asked him, “Why did you come here?” he said he was planning on finishing what his grandfathers had started.
This inability to distinguish oneself from one’s grandfathers, the past from the future, is of course also a kind of unspoken convention, a common agreement with a higher power that is hardly innocent—and sometimes it looks like a game of children playing soldiers. The sudden ability to walk through the mirror and see, instead of the quiet, boring, commonplace life, a red and black reality of some kind of
It seems that the difference with the secret war in Afghanistan or the covert war in Chechnya, the truth about which was squeezed into the periphery of public consciousness for years, is that the number of victims of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not limited to the list of those dead or wounded. All you need to do to meet the victims of the information war is go to any social media website. It’s as if this war had no mere witnesses (“a war is waged somewhere, but we still see it”) or even a home front (“we are in a peaceful city, while people get killed over there”): everyone participates in it to some extent. There is no difference between the sides of the conflict: the totality of the experience engulfs actors, survivors, the people who are living through the unimaginable. And the fact that the conversation takes place hundreds of kilometers away from the events themselves does not change anything. This is a conversation of the wounded—and its intonation is a result of a trauma that is shared, collective, the same for everyone.
I want to say, very carefully, one more thing: it’s possible that the nature of that trauma is different for those who were in the battle zone and were forced not just to suffer the effects of what happened but to endure the hardships of war: to worry about themselves and their close ones, about food, heat, shelter, survival. Working to preserve your life can, in a strange way, help preserve your mind.Whereas the illusion of being there, cobbled together from a fickle understanding of the past and an incomplete knowledge of what is currently happening, can be fatal to those who experience the present entirely online.
Because “we”—the broad we, which includes not just me and my friends, not just the imaginary community of readers of this text, but everyone whose background includes the Soviet system of historical education with its microtraumas intentionally inflicted on everyone (en masse, like some kind of inoculation), its saintly child martyrs and suicidal heroes, its incantation that “the most important thing is that there be no war,” which makes war our only horizon of expectation—recognizes a certain vocabulary as native: well, here we go.
4.
Recently social media has become another way to pump what little air there is out of the room. Perhaps, in part, because in the absence of a free press (the few publications that have survived make the empty landscape look that much bleaker), there is a need to
Each new calamity is not experienced on its own but acquires the traits of the final blow, the last drop. Alright, that’s it; after this one event (fill in what fits—after this or that law, after the first, third, twelfth of March, after yet another column), the life that has been spent in anticipation of the terrible will fall into its deep well. These “that’s it” moments can take place three times a week: our sense of the real caliber of events has long gotten confused, real and fake news are given the same consideration, there’s no one to look into the sources or figure them out—if you say something is fake, they’ll tell you, “That’s where we’re headed anyway.”
And so any conversation about things that are part of our everyday human affairs—situations and problems that concern the fabric of contemporary life—inevitably falls into the same pattern: “How can we talk about this trifle when we have a war going on, and Putin.” And so, again and again, a comic aberration forces us to call the raising of any issue
And so anything that proves that life is still in residence, anything that, as best it can, serves to affirm and expand it—pictures of kittens and cakes, showing off a new pair of shoes, any kind of mindless domesticity, any experience of the situation as compatible with life—turns out to be subtly or sharply compromising. It becomes a betrayal: not of a common cause but of a common feeling.
That feeling is:
And I just don’t agree with this.
You hear this here and there, oftentimes even in your own head. Friends decide not to come to Russia for an exhibition or conference so that they don’t take part in what happens here—as if the exhibition and conference were not organized by the same people who are preventing what is happening from taking over entirely, from dragging its oilcloth over the entire country. And other friends accuse those who have stayed (another old-new word from the current glossary) of doing work that allows the Putin majority to pretend like life is still going on as usual.
It seems to me that this is another way to simplify the situation, to make it two-dimensional—here is the evil empire, there is the rest of the world. This scheme does not account for another “we,” maybe the most important one: the 14 or 16 percent of the country whose existence even official sociologists cannot deny.13 No matter how many million people and names fall under this category, they cannot be discounted, nor added to the monolithic majority, if that even exists. Here is a useful exercise: always remind yourself of the fractional, granular, unfinished character of any monolith—and that by discounting those who live here, you remove from the battle map the flags of cities that have not yielded. Are we (here we can focus on ourselves and remind ourselves who we are and what exactly we’re worth) so easily ignored? The attitude toward
This is a mechanism from the field of psychoanalysis, here affecting too vast a territory. Given: a force majeure, which hangs over one’s head like a heavy stone, only leaving enough room for the bare necessities—for fast action, for brief affect, for clambering between today and today. The elimination of “tomorrow” (of the corridor and steady ground under one’s feet), the rejection of future prospects are, strange as it may seem, not the worst results of this setup. The worst is something else: life with a discredited, half-cancelled tomorrow can make any today seem doubtful. The present becomes guilty, desecrated. It gets displaced onto the territory of the past and starts looking for mirrors and analogies, so that it is less solitary while under attack (since the attack is inevitable, it can at least lean on previous experience, know that someone else went through this, that it’s not alone). It tries to turn its horror into fuel, to use it for movement. But there is no future and there is nowhere to go—the vagrant affect moves from person to person, around the circle, like a hot potato that no one is able to or wants to hold on to.
But what if this situation, hard as it is, depends on me, and I am expected to do something different? The willingness to admit that everything is hopeless comes way too easily these days—like a scream that switches on the second the elevator lights go off. What if another kind of modality is needed—and the point is not in knowing how to die (“oh how gloriously we will die,”14 the past suggests) but in intending to
I miss this modality in today’s air, and I wish it could be procured, distilled, dispensed in pharmacies. What is important now is to find a logic that would be compatible with life; that would work to affirm the everyday but wouldn’t turn into an improvised op-ed along the lines of “vote for N”; that would work to change who’s in power and wouldn’t want monastic self-immolation from us.
This brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s famous F-scale. This 1950 test of one’s ability to resist (or give in to) the temptations of totalitarian thought seems quite old-fashioned today. The test consists of statements like “the majority is always right” or “society should be cleansed of any kind of ill health” and asks you to agree or disagree. Now these statements would be seen as belonging to a very specific system of ideas—roughly speaking, fascist ones—before the sensors of agreement or disagreement go off. But there is another set of questions there that causes one to wonder upon first reading: Why is this here? I mean an assortment like “grit one’s teeth and keep going,” “turn away from an unbearable situation and keep living,” “find in oneself the strength to be joyful no matter what.” These might seem like the ordinary mantras of everyday courage that are offered to us for this or that reason. What’s wrong with them?
The point, it seems, is the very ability to turn away from suffering, no matter if it’s one’s own or someone else’s. The key is the voluntary refusal to
Because it’s time now to make the present suitable for living. What I mean is not the practice of small deeds (whoever said that would be enough?) and certainly not the justification of compromise and collaboration of any kind, but something more like reminding ourselves that the New Testament tells us to “rejoice always.” To me it seems of utmost importance to follow this order now; more important than ever, as important as ever.
5.
Because circumstances will never be good enough to start over, on a blank sheet, turning a new leaf on the calendar. The warped, stale, bruised life that we experience is the very same present where we need to make ourselves at home, without waiting for a “game over” and the option to reset all defaults, or Russia without Putin, or a clean Monday. It’s most likely that things will go on as they have been, and there won’t be miracles to make our task easier.
I want to stake out a claim on at least this segment of the
Blok wrote about this in 1909: “Italian antiques clearly show that art is still quite young, that almost nothing has been done yet, and of the truly perfect—nothing at all: so every kind of art (including great literature) is still ahead of us.” As is everything else.
March 2015
Translated by Maria Vassileva
At the Door of a Notnew Age
In the Soviet cultural nomenclature, Evgeny Shvarts was labeled a writer of fairy tales, and that is how he, a friend and contemporary of prisoners and exiles, managed to survive—and not have his death assigned to him by someone else. Shvarts wrote plays about dragons and bears, and naked kings; they were popular and could make for
The recent conservative turn has many different features, but if we had to choose a single face to represent it, it would be that of a sorcerer: preternaturally young, with dimples and golden curls, the face from a poster, the effigy of someone else’s fantasy about the future—as it once was, back when Shvarts was writing his tale, and Auden was looking from across the ocean at Europe, which had become one of
For a long time, it felt like we would not see that face again. The postwar world—and here there wasn’t much of a difference between the West and the Soviet Union, between Europe and America—set itself the task of working out its errors and putting in place a system that would safeguard it from the repetition of what had taken place. Generations of intellectuals, academic departments, and school classrooms, a powerful and intelligent machine of culture, all worked for decades on an effective strategy to “remember, know, beware.”
A year or two ago, I tried to figure out what was behind the processes taking place in Russia over the last few years—the changing societal sensibilities, which made all of that possible: the silent Putin majority, the war in Ukraine, the political trials that happen against the background of general festivity. I tried to single out the most important characteristics, imagining the Russian experience to be an extreme example that could not be repeated under other circumstances—and thus instructive. The set of traits seemed eclectic but also strangely consistent: those were the generic features of a society shaped by a
This makes it even stranger and more distressing to see similar patterns reproduced in the rhetoric and practice of countries that used to seem like, if not an example to be emulated, then at least one of many faces of the general norm: an existence held together by the invisible web of an ethical contract. What seemed like a rare disease turned out to be a kind of swine flu, with all cases exhibiting the same set of symptoms. One is the special kind of hybridity, the possibility to hold contradictory positions at once, to be inconsistent, to change one’s decisions and strategy, to twist facts in the name of common affect. And the dummy effect: the attempt to rely on precedents and traditions that never existed, that were just invented ad hoc, making phantoms an object of active nostalgia. And the appropriation of this and that, borrowed without any awareness of context or meaning, which turns cultural legacies into a master key for political doors and tasks. When you follow this logic, truth and lies, good and evil, black and white become nonexistent. They endlessly merge and spill over into one another for the sake of some kind of artistic effect. What’s important is that all of these truths and untruths use the language of yesterday.
And there, it seems, lies the difference between this turn and nationalist movements from a century or more ago. The key word in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is not
We cannot locate this past in time and space, nor can we describe it—in part because it’s not history but a fantasy, whose main features are prosperity and permanence. Stasis is understood as an ideal state of government, and so it was the unspoken goal of Putin’s political project, which was oriented toward a vision of the great past and awkwardly tried to reproduce it. Until recently, it was difficult to imagine that this fascination with reenactment would have global potential. But the hope to restore a version of reality from, let’s say, 1913, is not as relevant in and of itself as the urge to insure oneself against any kind of change. There have never been so many anti-utopias and disaster movies as we have seen over the last twenty years. Their lessons have been soundly grasped: the future is always worse than the present, which means that it cannot be allowed to happen. We must resist it at all cost; or at least we must try to make it look just like the day before yesterday.
What’s interesting is that for this new sensibility, which lurks behind the right turn, greatness, prosperity, or safety cannot be a product of the future: you cannot inherit them or work toward them. They can only be imitated, simulated, a picture-perfect likeness of the real thing stripped of its most recent layers: the features of globalism and multiculturalism, anything that points toward a shared human experience, or the ability to collectively work to build a better life. The world hasn’t been as afraid and bewildered by the idea of change in a long time. The present should stop and linger not because it is all that fair, but because we do not trust what will follow; the past seems like the only solid ground, a territory of exact (or so it appears to us) knowledge and reliable models.
The resulting picture does not look at all like what happened in 1917 or 1933: it is not an attempt to redraw the world in a new image but to lock it up from the inside. The things happening today in America, Europe, not to mention Russia, have more to do with metaphysics than politics. What I’m watching with fascination, and what is changing the map of the world now, is the desperate attempt at a battle with time, with the inevitability of aging and decay. One of my favorite writers would say that this is an illness typical of secular societies, which take death way too seriously.
In a world that has fallen out of love with its own future, the very idea of progress, of a gradual movement toward betterment, seems useless. So is the idea of the new—not the newest model of a gadget but the unknown-new, the scary-new, which turns life into a zone of responsibility and courage. Rimbaud’s demand “to be absolutely modern” has been abolished by the new sensibility—or, even worse, has become a parody of itself—because it veers into the domain of fashion trends and Instagram hashtags.
And where are the Ciorans, the Mayakovskys, the D’Annunzios of today? Experience shows us that historical processes are accompanied and secured by cultural processes: the currency of ideas is easy to convert; texts turn into events. I cannot help thinking that even this is no longer true today: history and culture are refusing to cooperate, their trajectories move in opposite directions. The right turn does not require the help of culture to accomplish its tasks. And for culture it’s boring to inhabit the logic of passéism: it is so used to thinking of itself in a progressive paradigm, oriented toward a bettering of the world—as an open collective project, a factory building the new.
Here, however, I would offer a caveat. It seems to me that the mass game of “the past” has been partially shaped by the high culture of recent decades—that very cult of historical memory, whose task was not to let the past repeat itself. Nazism and communism thoroughly compromised the very idea of an optimistic project, utopias gave way to anti-utopias—the futurology of the postwar period began with
The framework of obligations that the Enlightenment put in place is becoming defunct before our eyes. The importance and value of knowledge and self-improvement, the need to apply the inventory acquired from them to the world and to one’s neighbor, no longer seem obvious and recede into the zone of lost time (along with the very concept of a good education, classics departments, and long hours of studying literature). The windmills of the Enlightenment are still turning, but in this changed air their blades spin in vain. There is still art of the new time, which perceives and examines itself in relationship to the Other. But the vectors are changing; if the new sensibility had poets like Pound, their slogan would be “make it old.”
In a culture that shuns the unfamiliar, the vacancy of the Other will be redundant, if not dangerous. The new central object to be described and understood will be the Own and the Our, a plaster cast gallery of copies and reflections, an infantry regiment of models and precedents that give an unexpected meaning to the postmodernist tool kit. The Other will become the Foreign, despised and cast out of sight in outer darkness.
In Shvarts’s tale, which was written on the eve of that which could not be undone, one detail stands out to us today: in order to regain the lost-and-stolen time, the hands of the clock must be wound back seventy-seven times against the current of history. It means that the sorcerers rushed time, chased it forward (making themselves younger and more vigorous, and pushing those around them into a fake old age). From our current vantage point of a premature, shameful old age, which has taken over America after Russia, and is whiling away time remembering better days, it often seems like we are advancing into the future way too fast. The main lesson of the notnew age may be that, in any case, there is nowhere to return to. If we turn the clock back seventy-seven years, the clock of humanity will show 1939 again. We would be wise to avoid this.
November 2016
Translated by Maria Vassileva
IV
Over Venerable Graves
Essays (2010–2013)
The Maximum Cost of Living (
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (
What Alice Found There (
The Last Hero (
From That Side: Notes on Sebald
Over Venerable Graves
The Maximum Cost of Living
On May 16, 1941 (that is, as we know from
By that time (and earlier than that, by the time of her return to Russia from emigration), she had already written her
Thus, it’s tempting to consider this fragment from Tsvetaeva’s letter as something like an unintended last will and testament: a final line, drawn in the last minute under the labor of a life that was laborious in itself. It’s hardly worth letting it impress us overmuch: Tsvetaeva’s natural manner of speech and thought is an ascending dotted line of lightning formulas. They’re created “à propos,” as momentary answers to an internal or external demand, and therefore they often turn out to be mutually contradictory, refuting and rejecting one another. It’s better to consider them from a certain distance, in motion, noting the points of convergence and divergence and taking notice of the shared and unchanging center of gravity, toward which all the various utterances are oriented. Besides that, Tsvetaeva’s manner of writing involves constant stops and reboots. Drawing countless final lines under the most various circumstances of her own life and other people’s was a natural fuel for her: a means of picking up speed and transitioning into new texts and circumstances.
Let’s say, in 1939, when on the eve of leaving for the USSR Tsvetaeva copied a poem by her old literary enemy Georgy Adamovich into her notebook, adding below, “someone else’s poem, but which in places could be mine,” that gesture of poetic solidarity doesn’t annul her phrase from a letter three years before (“it turned out that it’s not bread he needs, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts: not me—but Adamovich and Co.”). What is alien remains alien, what’s her own remains her own; each assertion turns out to be totalizing: breaking out from a given sequence, asserting the priority of a dozen heterogeneous
Yet, all the same, one wants to hold her formulations closer to one’s eyes and look at them against the light—in the end, what is the common sense she speaks of, if not what Tsvetaeva pushed away her whole life: the voice of the
From the point of death (as if in a dream—from the point of waking), a human life casts back toward its beginning and acquires a final meaningfulness and clarity of structure, only now manifested. In Tsvetaeva’s case, the structure—the stubborn and destructive intention of fate—is so visible that it’s possible for that to obscure everything else. What we recognize first (“what is borne in the air,” as her mother says of Napoleon, in her prose)—is the dyad of poetry and suicide. It would seem to be an ordinary matter—dramatic biographies always cast a clear shadow, which makes them suitable for mass utilization (Pushkin—the duel; Mandelstam—death in the camps; Brodsky—exile, the Nobel Prize). But in Tsvetaeva’s posthumous fate, her suicide by far supersedes the poems, and sometimes it crowds them out. Mikhail Gasparov once wrote about that: “Today’s readers receive the myth about Tsvetaeva first of all, then afterward her poems as an optional appendix.” That seems to be true; and this particularity of Tsvetaeva’s case (which irritates many people) requires interpretation.
In essence, we have two texts in our hands, which complement and comment on each other—more than that, they don’t exist in isolation: “creative work” (her books of lyric poems, verses, long poems, plays, prose)—and “life,” where what Tsvetaeva herself wrote (the enormous archive of letters, rough drafts, diary entries) comprises barely a third. Other voices (witnesses and contemporaries) have an honorary and ungrateful mission—they step forward willy-nilly like the reasonable interlocutors of the Biblical Job: sympathizing or judging, but inevitably representing the side of
Her biography seems to be widely known; therefore, I’ll permit myself to speak about it
As an epigraph to the first part of
Tsvetaeva’s biography, like those of the majority of people born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unfolded precisely in the logic of what
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8 (September 26, Old Style—
Her mother, Maria Aleksandrovna Meyn, died when the Tsvetaeva sisters, Marina and younger Asya, were thirteen and eleven years old. Her death knocked the framework of the family arrangement crooked at once. In place of unwilling hours at the piano came
This impulse (the choice and confirmation of
For a long time consistent assertion of her own otherness also seemed necessary because at first Tsvetaeva saw the external frame of her own fate as insufficiently dramatic, overly fortunate, “too rosy and youthful”—just like her own young rosiness, just like the glasses she quickly and permanently abandoned—despite her extreme nearsightedness. What would some years later, during her Berlin meeting with Andrei Belyi, become a catchword of their shared
Tsvetaeva acts—differently, moving away step by step from any societalness or groupness. In 1912: “So far only Gorodetsky and Gumilev, both members of some kind of guild,2 have attacked me. If I were in the guild, they wouldn’t attack me, but I’m not going to be in the guild.” In 1918: “I am really, absolutely, to the marrow of my bones—outside of any estate, profession, rank. A tsar has tsars behind him, a beggar has beggars, I have—emptiness.” In 1920: “My longing for Blok is like the longing for someone I didn’t finish loving in a dream.—And what could be simpler?—Go up to him: I’m so-and-so … If you promise me all of Blok’s love in exchange for it—I won’t go up to him.—That’s how I am.” In 1926: “I haven’t belonged to any literary tendency and do not belong.” In 1932: “No one resembles me and I don’t resemble anyone, therefore it’s pointless to recommend this or that to me.” And—in 1935, a time of penultimate evaluations: “I myself chose the world of non-people, what can I complain about?”
Her literary debut already demonstrates the directness and harshness of this—forever unbending—contour. Tsvetaeva’s first, half-childish book
The new step that followed logically after that one was disregard for literature, departing into private life (more exactly—not leaving her private life). That was one more gesture of magnificent scorn. “How can I really be a poet? I simply live, rejoice, love my cat, cry, dress up—and write poetry. Now Mandelstam, for instance, now Churilin, for instance, they are poets. This kind of attitude caught on: therefore I got away with everything—and no one had any consideration for me. […] Therefore I am and will be without a name.” In 1923, writing this letter to Pasternak, Tsvetaeva retrospectively gave this recollection a tint of bitterness already habitual to her—but ten years before such a position (“a haughty head”) seemed natural. Life had joyfully tossed her such an opportunity.
In that same year, 1923, Tsvetaeva wrote in her diary:
Personal life, that is, my life in life (i.e. in days and places), has not worked out. That must be understood and accepted. I think—30 years of experience (because it didn’t work out
In the drafts of
The early meeting and the early marriage, which predetermined the whole subsequent course of Tsvetaeva’s life and, possibly, its conclusion, were a gift of gifts—but, as usual, with a double bottom. Sergei Efron, whom the eighteen-year-old Tsvetaeva met in Voloshin’s Koktebel and at once chose as her husband “in eternity—not on paper” was a person of exceptional internal beauty and nobility; he bore those traits, like stigmata, through his whole life full of circumstances that went poorly with beauty and nobility.
The way Tsvetaeva told their shared story to herself and others picked out as its main trait the inevitability, their doomedness to one other. The fates of two children, who met on the beach in Koktebel, folded into one like halves of a puzzle: loneliness, early orphanhood, their birthday, which they celebrated on the same day.3 In the series of Tsvetaeva’s love affairs (as time passed, more and more one-sided, and, as they say, virtual), it’s hard not to notice the underpinning of active pity, maternal concern (from the older to the younger)—what she herself called an inclination: “desired—pitied—piteous!” She departed from this logic, it seems, only once—in her epistolary dialogue with Boris Pasternak, where from the very start there was a sense of equality: possessing the power of an equal essence. But the appeal of female seniority, which made her choose people and relationships that could be stylized in that key, calling her peer Rodzevich a boy, and the younger ones (Bachrach—Gronsky—Shteiger) little sons (or “my wee one”) was insurmountable for her; she herself understood this, as always, more clearly and caustically than anyone—and she summed it up in 1936, in the epigraph to her poetic cycle
A little child went down the street,
Blue with cold and shaking all over.
An old woman was walking along that way,
Took pity on the little orphan.4
The high-schooler Sergei Efron was the first, if not the decisive one, in that series, and in Tsvetaeva’s eyes, his life (youth, tuberculosis, the recent double suicide of his mother and his younger brother) made him a
But in 1912 the two-fold theme of predestination and doom connected in Tsvetaeva’s heritage with Efron’s name was showing only its front, rainbow, side. Their triumphal young affinity opens a new register of meaning for Tsvetaeva (“I also used to think it was silly to be happy, even indecent! It’s silly and indecent to think that way—that’s my today,” she writes to Voloshin.) The time of
The change toward happiness meant a great deal for Tsvetaeva; among other things, it meant her juvenile, preverbal “I have the right” acquired the right to speech and began to be called “such craving to live!” Life and texts are flooded with
In her prose memoir “A Living Word About a Living Man,” dedicated to the memory of Max Voloshin, Tsvetaeva recalls their daydreams of shared literary mystifications—unrealized, as she says, only due to her Germanic honesty, “the ruinous pridefulness of signing everything that I write.”
“Marina! You harm yourself with abundance. You have the raw materials for ten poets, and all of them—marvelous! But wouldn’t you like (cajolingly) to publish all your poems about Russia, for instance, as some
“Max!—and what will be left for me?”
“For you? Everything, Marina. All that you are yet to be!”
A conversation worth remembering: Tsvetaeva’s creative work would exist under the sign of this temptation (or this choice)—to be ten poets at once (but keeping for herself the
In particular, her logic at that time (“craving all roads,” the desire to experience everything and for everyone) had an everyday flip side, which was only indirectly related to literature, but which determined a great deal in the life of Tsvetaeva’s family. “My one conviction is that I have a right to absolutely everything,
The conditions of Tsvetaeva’s life in Moscow in the four years after the Revolution (she left Russia on May 11, 1922) may be considered simply typical, if only because all of Moscow and all of Russia wound up the same. Her reaction to them was also typical in its way: remaining in her emptied Moscow home—without money (her mother’s estate, on whose interest the Tsvetaeva sisters had been living, was confiscated in 1918), with no help from outside (the paid help left along with the money), with two small daughters, Tsvetaeva tried to continue living
The quantity written in those years is impressive. What’s more, she had never written so much: eighty-seven poetic texts in the year 1917, a hundred and fifty-two in 1918, a hundred in 1919, a hundred and eleven in 1920, a hundred and eight in 1921, eighty-nine in 1922. We’re looking at a lyrical machine, producing—in the Stakhanovite mode, as it would be called later—unthinkable quantities of high-quality product, working independent of external circumstances or even in inverse dependence—producing more as things got harder for the person operating it. That same machine is revved up in her notebooks at this time—to process the living raw material of her heart’s and soul’s life. And inasmuch as the highest virtue of authorship is exactitude, this inevitably leads here to ethical maximalism of the soul, which doesn’t want to take into account what the body is doing at the moment, reduces the body to the function of experimental object—and lucky if not taking it to the anatomical theater. An extreme, uncompromising scrupulosity of analysis and a harshness of conclusions obtained remain in the notebooks, while the heart and the body keep on doing what they want, obeying their own caprices—and, therefore, providing new material for the notebooks.
Three constants are present in Tsvetaeva’s new life: the independent, autonomous work of the poetic machine; an endless series of half-accidental affairs, accounted for in the department of caprices or extravagances, but in actual fact essential for keeping the machine in working order; and the hateful necessity of existing “in days,” which Tsvetaeva was less and less capable of managing. In hindsight, she herself recollected the junkyard of amorous relationships that she worked through in those four years, the mash of human lives she tried to make use of in propelling her own historical drama, as a bad dream. Many things may be explained here only if we keep in mind Tsvetaeva’s persistent need to look upon her everydays as a text of which she wasn’t the (sole) author—evidently, unconsciously also keeping in mind that the laws of plot construction ensure any darkness comes to an end, that in sum everything should
As we know, that didn’t happen either then or later; one lesson Tsvetaeva learned herself and was ready to share with others was that “in life […]
The results of this catastrophe (not understood at first to its full, utmost degree), which always remained
What came after that? A sharp turn of her life, internal and external. Tsvetaeva turns toward Efron with all the powers of her soul—as if from a burning house or a sinking ship. She has no doubts about his moral goodness: in their relationship she had assigned him the
In 1921, Tsvetaeva finds out that Efron is alive and that their meeting is possible, and this acts on her like the repeal of a prison sentence. Leaving Russia, she locks it closed, leaves it behind her back, along with her own memory of the past—in the name of a new,
Yet the poems in the book
Let’s imagine a classical shouter: an unpleasant person who loudly complains about the crush in an overcrowded bus, in a line—about its length, and in the sun—about its heat. His demands provoke no sympathy, they seem tactless or unfounded. How is he different from the majority who keep quiet? In his knowledge, true or false, of how “a thing
All this is too easy to understand in the framework of a funny story: “Ooh, see, we’re so sensitive!” At the turn of the last century, demanding special conditions and brand new ethical scales was typical for people in the arts: as Akhmatova put it, “Sins don’t stick to poets at all.” In that sense, the case of Tsvetaeva, of a person who is unable and unwilling to handle the weight of days that had fallen onto her, becomes general, indicative: she’s a soldier in an army that remains unknown; behind her stand hundreds and thousands of people who could not adapt to the new reality and had no voice to make their own “no” audible. As a rule, we have to deal with history written by the ones who
Therefore, her fate is so electrified by posthumous readerly interest, while conversation about her almost inevitably runs in the mode of a comrades’ court. Any biographical twists of Pasternak, Kuzmin, or Daniil Kharms still keep the reader at a distance, remaining in full measure the author’s private business. When we speak about Tsvetaeva, we’re speaking about ourselves—and not only because her life bears the mark of that horror about whose existence we know thanks to our own worst misgivings. Her story is an important chapter in the invisible book of collective experience; and, unlike in many, here we receive the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Everything in this
To stand facing the wall of one’s own death cell is a pretty excruciating business. It’s more natural to prefer poetry that helps us turn away, better yet forget about the cell’s existence. There are authors who suggest that we look out the window (“Which century is it outside, my dears?”5) or take a close look at moving pictures. Tsvetaeva is in a different group, among those who represent
For her, emigration meant the necessity for the first time in her life to become a professional writer—that is, to earn her bread with literary labor. If she had existed earlier outside of ranks and contexts, publishing or not publishing according to her own wishes, now she had to
One of the points of divergence with her era was Tsvetaeva’s principled utilitarian and even condescending attitude to language: as an obedient instrument—or a part of her own body not requiring ceremonious handling. (This is fairly rare in the poetry of that time with its cult of quality—and in today’s as well, which in many ways exists within coordinates that Brodsky suggested, where language represents a self-regulating machine, recruiting authors of its own will to perform a certain type of work.) For Tsvetaeva, language is used or overcome as a material—the external membrane of the essence that alone is important. Disregarding
It was her relationship with Pasternak that, for Tsvetaeva, happened to be her primary bet on life of that time. Their internal mutual commitment “to live up to each other” was a streambed along which Tvetaeva’s thought flowed for years, flooding the underwater rocks of the inevitable affairs and infatuations, which in their shallowness and finiteness only confirmed the correctness of the main choice. But how finite that choice, too, turned out to be! Their correspondence, which began in 1922—starting at once on the highest note—was meant from the beginning to be something much more than a literary friendship: a meeting of equals (Siegfried and Brunhilde, Achilles and Penthesilea), doomed by the power of things to each other and to a shared stand against the world, back-to-back,
Pasternak’s appearance and presence in Tsvetaeva’s “days” (“in full purity of heart, the first poet in my whole life”), the feeling they both admitted of “relatedness along the whole front”—of a gift, of a human dimension and of that same other species—in and of itself summoned to life amorous connotations, a dream of complete coincidence and union. They both lived in rays of that union, now hurrying, now deferring a future meeting, until the early 1930s, when Pasternak’s new marriage made the daydream of their devotion to each other meaningless for Tsvetaeva. (“Well then I’ll refuse to look for my organic rhyme in this world, here. While there—
By the mid-1930s, Tsvetaeva’s lyric poetry had already become completely superfluous to the milieu of readers, too. If in 1921–1925 she had managed to put out ten poetic books, the next collection of verse was published with difficulty only in 1928, and it was the last book published in her lifetime. As time passed, publishing only got more complicated; a great, if not the greater, part of what Tsvetaeva wrote in emigration remained unread. After the publication of her article “The Poet on the Critic(ism),” which sharply departed from the accepted literary etiquette of the time, literary society’s sympathies turned out not to be on Tsvetaeva’s side. Over time there were fewer and fewer publications willing to collaborate with her, while the frameworks of that collaboration were ever more narrow. They asked not for new poems, but for some “understandable to the reader,” that is, hopelessly out-of-date for the author. They did print her prose (written “for earnings:
For Sergei Efron the choice was already made by the mid-1930s. The theme of a possible return to Russia stands above Tsvetaeva’s correspondence of the final years like a cloud (“I live under the stormcloud—of departure”). Everything, it would seem, was pushing her out, nudging her: the growing
Yet, nevertheless, Tsvetaeva once again takes a stand in opposition—this time not only to the logic of life, but to her own family, too: to her husband, her daughter, her son Georgy (nicknamed Mur), who is growing by the hour. “Horror at a self-satisfied Soviet
At first she decides not to travel into that
This already final turn toward
They approach, get frightened, disappear. […]
Sudden and total disappearance. He—gone without a trace. I—remain alone.
And it’s always one and the same story.
They abandon me. Without a word, without a “good-bye.” They used to come visit—they don’t come any more. They used to write—they don’t write any more.
And here am I in a great silence, which I never break, mortally wounded (or—cut to the quick—which is the same thing)—without ever understanding anything—neither for what, nor why.9
The great silence of abandonment, the bewilderment of culpability are the same here as in a short note from 1920: “Why does nobody love me? Isn’t the fault—in me?” The long-lasting farewell, beginning in her youth, to
The only home that remained to Tsvetaeva, who did not accept what the present offered her as such and regarded any future with justified suspicion, became the unchangeable and never-betraying time of eternal stasis, which she fell into as if going back home. In her last years, she began to use the longing for the past that accompanied her all her life as a refuge. The past became not only a synonym for
The mention of Proust here is no accident: his manner of
By the time of her departure from France this payment was complete. “How many lines gone by! I don’t write anything down. That—is finished.”
Instead of describing everything that happened to Marina Tsvetaeva next—her meeting with her family, life locked up in an NKVD dacha, her daughter’s arrest, her husband’s arrest, dragging through lines outside prisons and writers’ organizations, the first days of the war, the catastrophe of evacuation from Moscow, her extreme solitude and her solitary suicide, I shall copy here—letter by letter—at least part of the open letter she wrote for an émigré children’s magazine in winter 1937–38, which remained unpublished at the time. It’s that very same farewell voice of
Dear children,
I’ve never thought of you separately: I’ve always thought that you are people or non-people (like us).
But they say that you’re a special breed that’s still susceptible to influence.
Therefore:
—Never pour out water for nothing, because at that moment a person is dying in the desert for want of this drop.
“But he won’t get this water if I don’t pour it out!”
“He won’t get it, but there will be one senseless crime fewer in the world.”
—For the same reason, never throw bread away, and if you see some on the street, underfoot, pick it up and put it on top of the nearest fence, for there’s not only a desert where people die without water, but also slums where they die without bread. Besides that, maybe someone hungry will notice that bread, and will feel less bad taking it that way, rather than from the ground.
Never be afraid of a funny thing, and if you see a person in a silly situation: 1) try to get him out of it, and if that’s not possible—jump in to join him as if into water, with two people a silly situation is divided in half: half of it for each—or else, at
Never say that
Don’t say “not fashionable,” always say:
Don’t be too angry at your parents—remember that they used to be
Don’t condemn your parents to death before (you are) forty. And then—you won’t dare lift a hand!
2010
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead
1.
In one of her diaries—and she kept them, day after day, year after year, from 1898 to 19671 (not counting the years of her
The role she was fated to play, the work of a
This self-immolation, which she was ashamed of and secretly proud of, imbues the master plan, the main labor of her life. All the rest (including her contributions to the arts, spelled out on the book’s cover2) would be laid aside for the sake of the need to
Shaporina was one of those who went abroad in the first years after the revolution—and who voluntarily returned to the USSR. Many émigrés thought about it (in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the years when the Soviet seedling was flowering ostentatiously), and many decided to do it—some (like Aleksey Tolstoy, whose family was friendly with hers) out of love for life on a grand scale, and some because “strength is over there,” as Tsvetaeva said to Mayakovsky the only time they met in Paris. The peculiarity of Shaporina’s story is that she both left and came back without seeming to notice that she was making a historical or political choice; she left because of a break-up with her husband, in rage and sorrow, packing and collecting the children in haste, and she went back to her husband, too, at the first call. The consequences of that nonchoice were admittedly the same as for everyone: catastrophic.
1933: “Now most people have realized that there’s nowhere to go; no matter what there are prisons everywhere and hunger everywhere. The intelligentsia still unconsciously wants to jump out somewhere, they run off to the polar circle, to the Pamirs, into the stratosphere, while the peasants just sit there on their benches, perishing.” 1935: “They’re exiling people to Turgai, Vilyuysk, Atbasar, Kokchetav, to places where you have to ride 150 miles on camels, to places you only can get to by dogsled.” 1938: “Vasya [Shaporina’s son] is often put out that I don’t go to the movies, to the theater. Impressions slide over him, over today’s young people, without reaching consciousness. They’ve been accustomed since childhood to the horror of the contemporary situation. The words ‘arrested,’ ‘shot’ don’t produce the least impression.” 1939: “And here we are, poor people of the 20th century, forced constantly to run into the 16th or beginning of the 17th. And not to scream from horror, but to pretend that you don’t see, you don’t hear.”
2.
Who is Shaporina addressing, who is supposed to read this series of “
Many Leningrad blockade memoirs stress the necessity of preserving this experience of departure from the norm for history. They do this in order to endow one’s suffering with value, to make it
It was as if the world Shaporina had viewed from the start as phantasmagorical (“the land of the Morlocks,” she writes, recalling H. G. Wells’s novel) had once again confirmed its evil qualities, justifying her worst expectations. But at this very moment something unforeseen happens to the author and the text of the diaries: the emphases shift, the passive voice of proud suffering changes to the active, the inertia of expectation turns into a plot of overcoming. The diary’s tempo changes, there are unexpected pauses (“the lamps turned on, it was getting dark, the fog was blue”). Just as before, the author is like a handheld camera recording everything that moves: the large and small objects that enter the shot. But it’s as if she allows herself to hover, to freeze, to pause, to fall into something like a hungry faint: stupefied contemplation of beauty. In the space of the diaries, which she had been keeping all her life at the tempo of the daily news (facts, rumors, somebody’s remarks, evaluations)—these pauses (“I got off the tram at the Academy of Sciences, and my spirit froze from the beauty of the Admiralty embankment”), filled with long, free descriptions (“while a weather balloon slowly sailed upward amid the quiet trees”)—are something resembling a protective cover. Here, for almost the very first time, the author and the reader manage to
This experience in extremis became an unexpected reward for Shaporina. In a minute of happiness she’ll say “this is to pay me back for the blockade”; years later she’ll call the blockade the gist of her life.
From the next room, empty like the whole apartment, came the sound of a radio. […] A soprano voice, a tenor came pouring out. In the dark of night the cannons boomed heavily and terribly. A dying voice, monotonous, repeated, “Everything goes away … everything collapses … everything falls … everything goes away … I’m dying.” […] I would get up in the dark, heat up some tea, give her something hot to drink, inject camphor. And went back to bed indifferently, because I had no strength. But now it seems to me that I could have helped her spirit more, I should have read the Gospel aloud to her. Although she could very well have taken that for the last rites.
3.
One of the first things that strike you in the two-volume body of this book is the scale: over a thousand pages, hundreds (if not thousands) of surnames, the many-legged and many-headed human mass, sinking before one’s eyes under the ice of an anthropological catastrophe. From days of old, diaries have been made up of domestic matters—one’s era, friends, one’s little universe, sometimes ripped along the seam upon contact with faceless and indiscriminate common fate. Here there’s something else. Already by the early 1930s the main content of these notes turns out to be the background: big and little history change places, and big history more or less lives at the cost of little history—uses it for nourishment, occupies its space, drinks its air.
Diary writing acts on its own will: it soaks up everything, gets heavy, before your eyes the flesh of pages and other people’s stories accrues. Was that what Shaporina wanted? Who knows? She, and she was not the only one (the same dream is present in Olga Freidenberg’s postwar notes), considered it essential and unavoidable to have a
A ramified and extensive system of acquaintances (and Shaporina was on good terms with all of St. Petersburg/Leningrad and half of Moscow) and the rituals conjoined with it, which already seemed very odd in the growing shadows of twilight—these are one of the constants of her life. Maintaining connections (visits, flowers, correspondence, carefully thought-up little gifts) required tremendous time and energy. Shaporina is an entirely social animal who knows and loves her place on the class ladder, thinking of herself (unlike Mandelstam, whose seditious verses she quotes sympathetically and inexactly) as
It’s not for nothing that “With a Jewish accent” appears here. Simple-hearted and ineradicable anti-Semitism is just as much a part of her spiritual profile as passionate patriotism—and the desire to die in Rome (“there alone”), as love and hate of the Russian element (“it’s the people that is vile, not the government”), as sensitivity to hurt feelings and not bearing grudges. And as aristocratic arrogance (everything that irritated her in her unloved son was explained by Shaporin’s petit-bourgeois blood) and an inborn democratism (“What does aristocratism have to do with this? It’s just that I, apparently, just like you, am not the daughter of a bitch! I just despise them”). And—as the ability to change and readjust her attitude toward an event, a person, a country.
Russia and Europe constantly outweigh each other on her internal scales. “There’s no place here for people with a free spirit, and we should make every effort to expatriate in the future.” The dream of emigration, the shaky hope in the Varangian (“let a German Schutzmann stand on every corner”), the constant glance over her shoulder at Europe as the image of a better, undistorted way of being—these are among the diary’s main themes. But then, during the “Thaw” when she’s already a very old woman (“My God, can it be that I’ll really never go abroad?”), Shaporina makes it to Geneva for two months, to visit the family of her adored brother, and immediately starts an argument about the fates of Russia: “For forty-two years already we’ve been fighting off everyone who hoped to take Russia with their bare hands, and we’ve grown stronger than ever.” “What’s the point of this great power talk?” they answer her. Then and there Shaporina also discovers with deep sadness that her history, her extreme (as people would say now) experience have no value and present no interest for her nearest and dearest. “At first I didn’t understand the reasons for their indifference, it seemed to me, toward Russia, toward everything I had lived through over this time. Sasha wouldn’t let them ask me questions about the blockade, the war.” She herself seems to feel a certain inappropriateness of her story at the table of the living: “I wouldn’t myself start talking about something that’s painful to touch on.”
4.
The defensive mechanisms established by life itself (by the habit of safety, the need for spiritual balance) prompt us to shy away from a certain kind of information: the kind that causes pain without being able to soothe it. This knowledge, with which there’s nothing to be done, is what Shalamov writes about in his
If you like, it’s as if they are incompatible with life; they’re not a text but something else: a rupture, a rift, a yawning abyss, a black hole. Or even a pit: a sated maw with threads, scraps of cloth, and fibers of flesh dangling from it. This pit lies before the reader in place of the text (of the text that could have arisen here if history and culture had been uninterrupted), like the wreaths of artificial flowers that mark the place where someone died in an accident along our roads.
No one, I think, is ready for such a death, and is it even possible to prepare for it? It-can-happen-to-anyone is a watermark that comes through on each page of Shaporina’s text. The chronicle of a certain type of people being gradually crowded out of life is horrifying in itself. But it is precisely this type (even if without any right to it) that seems to us
A hundred years ago she was thirty-two, she was sitting on the sun-drenched Piazzale Garibaldi, a Russian woman in Rome, happy and of no interest to anyone. We, too, for now, still possess that possibility, and a certain amount of time to take advantage of it.
2011
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
What Alice Found There
1.
There’s a famous children’s fairy tale in which time is divided into a life before and a life after. Before, children (the king’s children, of course) went to school with stars on their breast and swords at their side,
Those born around the turn of the century, like Vladimir Nabokov in 1899, Daniil Kharms in 1905, or Alisa Poret in 1902, do not resemble a family at all. But so many people who, being too young, did not get to swear allegiance to the fourth estate1 and feel indebted to it, told their story in this very manner, marking a “before” and an “after.” As if the inoculation of guilt, so typical of the Russian intellectual, had not been done in time, and meanwhile all the memories of the
2.
“The time has come to write about my childhood. I am very glad to do this—I don’t have a single bad memory and nothing but the greatest gratitude toward my parents for the excellent, intelligent and placid upbringing that my brother and I had.” The excellent, intelligent, and placid—like all of her work—handwritten notebooks of Alisa Poret have been lovingly and carefully published by the small Moscow press Barbaris; the first volume was just released, and we await the second.3 Poret thought of her life as that of an artist (and her childhood memories are full of colored pencils and thoughts about beauty and ugliness), but half a century later, the emphasis ends up falling elsewhere: and the way the narrator treats the past contributes to that.
Here we should explain how these notebooks are organized because they have very little in common with regular memoirs. The cover of the first volume promises “notes, drawings, memories,” and that’s exactly what’s on the inside—every page is a single unit of a larger strange unity: note-drawing-memory. They are little stories, written down by Alisa Poret either off the cuff in the course of recollection, or following some kind of system we can no longer retrace, though some of its features are obvious: chronology is not a priority, but some of the plots form cycles: “Fears,” “Presents,” and of course “Childhood,” which is the one Poret repeatedly falls back on and reexamines. All of them, or almost all, are illustrated, furnished, like a window or a Christmas tree lantern, with a small colorful image; they are all written down with a special, festive hand: various inks whose color changes with the intonation of the story. When the narrator wants to raise or lower her voice, to amaze or amuse, lowercase letters get up on their tiptoes and become capitals; important words and key phrases are written in large red letters.
Poret’s notebooks are very much like an Andersen
Busya and I were so poor, it’s hard to think now how we managed to survive.
And so my day came—April 15. A day on which I used to rise like a lark, and was always in a cheerful mood, and Easter was just around the corner, and there were hyacinths on the table, and sunshine, and presents, and friends, and a new dress, and my family, and my beautiful house, and the long table—and Leningrad.
And here I woke up and, without opening my eyes (because I was in a stranger’s home, surrounded by disgraceful furniture, the little vases, the ugly velvet curtains), imagined the entire pitiful scene: my poor, my always poor Busya is busting his head trying to figure out what to get me. And I knew how he would sit at the edge of the horrible couch and say, “Forgive me, but you understand,” and how I would respond “Of course, we survived the war, you are alive and you love me, I don’t need anything else …” and how we would almost cry while embracing.
But it was all different. I opened my eyes and saw Boris squatting by the side of my bed. He was holding an English book,
Almost all fragments in Poret’s noteboks are set up in a similar way; here we see all the characteristic traits—a defiant indifference to big history (and its circumstances, which are left unexplained, but are dropped into the story in passing, as if the author will not deign to pay attention to the war, to being poor and displaced), and the sharp, falcon-like or magpie-like, attention to details, which are invariably more important than circumstances—the disgraceful curtain is a gentle shield from the cold and gloom of the times that have come.4 But the main thing—the ever surprising thing—is the rising intonation of the storytelling, a keyboard heady with the mix of distrust and delight, on which the story runs ever higher, reaching the high C, the joyous resolution. Each story refuses to be a simple “tale of the past,” becoming instead a circus act; each plot does a backflip, whips around, takes a bow and waits for our applause and appreciation. It’s possible that these anecdotes were worn smooth like pebbles from years of being recounted orally (what Akhmatova called her
3.
When Poret’s “Memories of Daniil Kharms” began to circulate (in the pre-Gutenbergian sense—they were only printed in 1980) in the late sixties or early seventies, they were not received well. The echo of this discontent still lingers (“free and apparently unreliable” is what Wikipedia has to say about Poret’s memoirs), which shouldn’t surprise us. Poret recounts the life of another person the same way she does her own: subjecting it to a strict editorial process. The editor’s logic is roughly as follows: events lose their scale and sometimes their meaning, details are comically enhanced, the main point is forced out of the frame, and thus the outside view of the events becomes sharper and more grotesque, clearly stylized following either the English (eccentric-Chestertonian) novel, or the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton. Maybe this was Poret’s intent: she tries to reinforce her perspective by means of montage. The finished reel has everything, facial expressions and gestures, stunts and phrases—and any one of the latter could become a caption or a title card that fills the entire screen—and behind the text, just as behind the frame, there is the invisible weight of what is
What was implied (and not said out loud until the very last moment), especially in the circles of Kharms and Poret, was essentially the same thing: that people who fit a certain profile were gradually displaced from the ranks of the living, that the air was being pumped out by the hour from the chamber of time where they had found themselves. “I am not yet in despair,” Kharms wrote in 1937. “I still seem to be hoping for something, and I think my situation is better than it actually is. Iron hands drag me toward the pit.” All of this happened gradually and very slowly; at first the “circle,” which then consisted of nearly all of the Petersburg-Leningrad intelligentsia, retained some measure of illusion and the mental space to entertain it. In the mid-twenties, you could still be part of the left (“We are the only real left-wing poets in Petrograd, however we cannot publish our work here”6); later on, you could draw nearer to the world of official literature but jump out of the way the moment it tried to take a good look at you; you could also make money, even good money, with handicrafts of sorts: children’s verse, theatre set designs, all kinds of non-shameful and pleasant trifles. Over time, there were fewer and fewer such opportunities. Those who came too close to the flywheel of the ideological machine—published, served, were in power, socialized freely and boldly, were seen or heard a lot—were the first to disappear, to sink into the vortex of the Leningrad “writers’ case,” like Oleinikov and Nikolai Zabolotsky, like Blok’s “Russian dandy” Valentin Stenich. Others followed: minor painters and actors, gamblers and chatterboxes, regulars at the restaurant of Grand Hotel Europe, thirty-year-old children, all of them born “before.” Weirdoes and eccentrics (freaks and outcasts), the category that included Kharms and Vvedensky, held out longer than others—they were the last to be taken.
Alisa Poret’s life took place along the edges of this abyss and was by no means an exception to the laws of common misfortune. Her father died in 1924; her first husband, an art historian, died in 1927, and her second—the painter Pyotr Snopkov, who happily won her away from Kharms—died in a camp in 1942; the war, the Leningrad blockade, the destitution, the evacuation, the displacement and deprivation—this is the backdrop to her memories, as it was
The easy breathing, the ability to waltz until the very end—this is one of the hallmarks of Poret’s inner life, one of the pillars of her self-esteem. For this ease she was willing to sacrifice a lot; the cost includes certain refusals, including the refusal to explain herself. “I solemnly promised all of my husbands that I would be true to them as long as they liberated me from the obligations of motherhood, and if it so happened that I fell in love with someone else, I would tell them honestly and there would be no deception or secret affairs.” This is how major decisions, plot twists, and cataclysms are described in Alisa’s story—with the logic of a comic opera, like the fireworks of chance or hidden rhyme: “so it happened,” “it was foretold,” “couldn’t have been any other way,” without explanations or superfluous psychology.
The feeling of transparency, solidity, and an almost infantile invulnerability, which these writings leave in the reader, hardly corresponds to our knowledge of the world for which they serve as a cover. It could be that such was their hidden task: hush, no complaining! To live in spite of, to live regardless, to live as if nothing had happened. This is
It may be that this is a genuine solution or at least a direction one can take: if you cannot live your life without the color scheme of daily horror, you can still tell it the way it was conceived. This strange kind of everyday heroism (entirely divorced from pathos, devoid of any pathetic element) leaves very little room to maneuver. The answer to “how are you?” can only be “fine, thank you”; it seems unthinkable to just squander your pain in public—and almost the entirety of your life is left beyond the borders of
In a movie that’s currently playing in theaters, the hero survives a shipwreck and finds himself on a boat with a giant tiger—and together they drift for a long time until they reach a safe shore. There, of course, it turns out that he imagined the tiger in order to forget the unthinkable and unbearable events that actually occurred. The story of Alisa Poret, who spent years not wanting to notice the tiger in her own boat and wrote a picture book about it, is one of the few happy endings of the previous century. And one of its models.
4.
This entry in Alisa Poret’s notebook is called “FREEDOM.”
2013
Translated by Maria Vassileva
The Last Hero
1.
Susan Sontag’s detractors, of whom she had many, often accused her of exploiting her looks—and it’s true that she gave us plenty to look at. In the posthumous corpus of what
Sontag herself would eagerly read photographs as a form of divination, as if they were the entrails of sacrificed animals. Here is the beginning of an essay in
For Sontag it was impossible or undesirable to describe herself publicly, to talk about herself in the first person. Throughout her life she had turned away from herself with shame and grief, like an artist repeatedly disappointed by the poor material at hand. And she could always find other things (people, topics) that were more important—which underwent an immediate appraisal, and transformed into ideological models for reflection and imitation. Her passion for admiration (“Ah, Susan. Toujours fidèle,” Barthes once said to her3) prevented her, as it seemed at the time, from writing her own magnum opus: her energy was expended on others. But playing this role—the interpreter working at the very front edge of the new, ready to bring words and meanings into a language everyone could understand—is how Sontag found herself in demand in the sixties, to the point where she became a grand idol of success, a Pythia, a queen of clubs—a Mrs. America of new writing. The many photographs that accompany this ascent give it a kind of cinematic quality: these are close-up shots, stills from an unfinished (but ongoing) biopic. The reader-voyeur encounters a rewarding subject in them: these pictures promise a continuation—and they will keep their promise at any cost. David Rieff, Sontag’s only son, never forgave her longtime partner Annie Leibowitz for taking a series of photographs that were final in every sense of the word: Sontag is shown in the weeks of her final battle with cancer, in a bed in the oncology center, amid tubes and monitors, heavy, her legs twisted in effort, her nightgown torn. It’s hard to imagine what the heroine, a theorist of photography and collector of film stills, would have to say about them. Photography (and the constant presence of a lens) seemed to play the role of a supporting narrative in her life, clarifying and commenting on the main events—and as such could have been considered helpful.
The Sontag effect was of course also determined by where it took place: a vacancy for the position of public intellectual, a master of intelligence creating texts about texts, can emerge and be filled where there are not just books but also readers, and universities producing these readers, and newspapers-journals-publishers that allow texts to flourish and multiply. In order for a conversation about the quality of literary criticism to be worthwhile, there has to be sufficient quantity—of printed space, hands eager to fill it, and other hands ready to turn those pages. In 1967, when Sontag’s first book of essays was published in New York (she started out with prose, whose lukewarm reception determined her authorial strategy for years to come), she had people to read and discuss. Still, Sontag’s fame went way beyond what could be expected—especially given that, with few exceptions, the things that interested her, which she was always ready to explain to the city and to the world, lacked mass appeal and were patently closed off to a broader readership. Once again, we hear the voice of the annoyed observer: it turns out that clever Sontag was not possible without beautiful Sontag, that the media persona was the opening act for the author of complex texts about unpopular things.
2.
But Sontag was exactly this—an author interested in the complex and the boring (“We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art”4), and had been since birth, with no intention of changing course. In her diaries from her youth, she complains about wasting a Sunday night with her stepfather: a driving lesson, an evening at the movies (which she “pretended to enjoy”). Her morning routine is full of more serious things (“seriousness” is another one of her important words):
The nostalgia for heroes, for the familiar dead, the dream of a textual immortality, of glory—it touches us because it makes us think of a time that has been recently and hopelessly lost, an old world bound by the borders of a great era. The scale that seems native to Sontag, the yardstick by which she measures herself, are those of the nineteenth century, with its great ideas and even greater expectations. The novelty and advantage of her position is that she is an anachronism; the way she carries herself (and her self) belongs to a different time. Sontag imposes on herself the obligation of nothing other than greatness (one of her later articles, on W. G. Sebald, begins by asking whether literary greatness is still possible in the present day7—and in a way her fifty years of authorial practice amount to variously orchestrated attempts to answer this question for herself). The tasks she sets for herself often seem neither literary nor feasible. “To be noble-minded. To be profound. Never to be ‘nice.’” “Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer” (written when she was past forty). “Well, what’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?” “I smile too much,” “I lack dignity,” “I don’t try hard enough.”8
And also:
Proust didn’t know he was writing the greatest novel ever written. (Neither did his contemporaries, even the most admiring, like Rivière.) And it wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. But he did want to write something great.
I want to write something great.9
3.
The daily journals from her youth and adulthood are where Susan Sontag’s life project comes to its long-awaited, startling conclusion. We are now presented with texts that are still fresh, that haven’t yet reached a broader readership: the first volume of the diaries,
Since the age of twelve, Sontag considered it her duty to keep a journal. The first published entry is from November 1947, when she was almost fourteen, and it is a kind of declaration of independence: the author denies the existence of a personal god (lowercase), sweeps aside the idea of an afterlife, and affirms that the most desirable thing in the world is to stay true to oneself—what she calls Honesty (capitalized). At age seventy, she still subscribed to the same credo, with minor changes and additions; it is no less astounding that her authorial voice managed to preserve that faithfulness to the self, not once breaking or changing. Its intonation of deep conviction, its natural authority (if not authoritarianism) remain unchanged no matter what happens to Sontag; the special character of her writing turns out to be not something acquired through experience but a gift bestowed to her upon birth, a feature of her timbre or diction. The things she says always have a special weight to them; they are pronounced with emphasis—which is why her way of thinking and speaking can easily be described as having
Volume one, volume two. Her childhood, her years in school, her first lesbian experience, which is a revelation for Sontag (“Everything begins from now—
The demands that Sontag placed on herself all those years, her worship of her idols and her pursuit of new heights to conquer, the high-brow dramaticism of her existence, seemed to imply some kind of hidden wound, a sting of the flesh or the mind—that which, in fact, distinguishes heroes from gods. But to many onlookers, Sontag was also a goddess, impetuous, merciless, almost impossible to comprehend.
That’s how they saw her (noting her height and figure, the flowing scarves, the tall boots), and that’s how they wrote about her: “Susan is … beyond being a lesbian. I know I’m probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn’t really fit into that category. […] I look upon her as, I don’t know, as Venus with Hera, some great goddess that is on Mount Olympus and beyond sexuality, beyond category.”15 Once you take this approach, the height, the seriousness, the assertive tone, the legendary humorlessness no longer count as merits or flaws—they are a mere footnote to the main text. Sontag comes from a place where they never heard the news about the death of irony, because irony never made an appearance there in the first place. Hence her fierce sensitivity to the appeals of the fascist aesthetic, hence the draw of camp, hence the attraction and resentment toward the avant-garde.
She also liked to think of herself as a diva (and in her late novel
4.
Throughout her life, the rejection of I-statements was both a choice and a torment. In all her literary and personal fearlessness, with all the sharp determination of her judgments, it seems that this was the only thing Sontag refused herself. In order to tell her own story, she chose others—the fates of those she admired, in whom she saw a different, better self. To a certain extent this was a sign of respect and trust in the reader: he was offered the chance to reconstruct the author, to round her out, to put her together like a puzzle from what she said in passing in articles, interviews, novels (the best of which, as if embarrassed to be works of fiction, were built on real stories).
The journals crumple this logic like a napkin. The most common and most interesting thing that happens there has nothing to do with the plot, or, more precisely, is the plot itself. These entries can be used as a great example, an experimental (and incessantly active) model, of the workings of the human mind. This is what the intellect looks like, almost autonomous in its freedom, always taking over new surfaces, clearing and honing formulas, endlessly redefining its own position. Thoughts gather and thicken like clouds, and coalesce into unexpected twin kernels; ideas fill up forms that lie fallow; consciousness does drills and tutors itself.
But in both volumes, love and loving take up a great deal of space—and oh how loudly, how hastily and plaintively they speak. The constant discontent with oneself, and the yearning for something other, and the faint dotted line of guilt, shame and failure. Here Sontag’s journals join the long ranks of journals kept by women, and her voice is supplanted by the impersonal voice of pain, which cannot be confused with anything else—everyone knows it, and not just by hearsay. This register struck and confused the first reviewers of
And this
2012
Translated by Maria Vassileva
From That Side
W. G. Sebald’s book of essays
Sebald occupies a peculiar position in Russia: here he’s an
Winfried Georg Sebald, born in Germany in 1944; he wrote his name, the German version of the Soviet Iosifs, Vladlens, and Oktyabrinas,3 with dots, as the initials W. G. At home they called him Max. The name he published under, like the language he wrote in, was part of a complex (and, for him, indubitably tormenting) system of promissory notes. The story of his life can be told in a few paragraphs—let’s see whether one paragraph is enough: the contour of an exile’s life (Mann, Canetti, Benjamin), but chosen by himself; years of work teaching, several published books written in German, gradually and then swiftly growing fame, with which he tried not to get too comfortable—giving precise, dry, very well-weighed interviews with (almost otherworldly) civility, not really taking part and not refusing. Then his sudden death in an automobile accident in early winter: December 14, 2001.
W. G. Sebald’s first and last book in Russian so far is none other than
1.
Sebald called his books
Prose that “has the tendency to dissolve upon reading”4 (again, Sebald on Walser) keeps the reader in uncertainty: in the final analysis we never know whether it is Dichtung or Wahrheit that is narrated and illustrated by the next unexpressive photograph (of a barn, a shop sign, or a pocket watch). The only thing we can trust here is the voice that speaks with us; it turns out something like a banister you can lean on. What happens resembles the old-fashioned stories of Masonic rituals: eyes blindfolded, corridors and crossings done blind; unexpected flashes of light, blindness, and clarity.
In these sunspots only the pictures are clearly visible, the invariable component of Sebald’s text, something along the lines of a signature or a seal, by which one should know the hand of the master. They are of various kinds, but most often these are photographs, old ones, from the archives. Some of them are blown up powerfully and crudely, so the grain pops outward, and almost all of them are somehow inexpressive and present for the most part the complete perplexity of all participants in the shot: people with their features blurred remain somewhere at the edge of the image, the huge background crowds them out still more, and all the faces seem more typical then individual, while at the same time the mustaches, collars and buttons speak more loudly than such things are supposed to. There are also new, “contemporary” photographs that have had time to age but are just as unprepared to cooperate—amateur shots of facades and interiors, architectural objects, and restaurant signs, all black and white and looking as if someone took the picture hurriedly with a cell phone. What else? A recipe for homemade schnapps that Sebald’s grandfather wrote down on a calendar page. Photocopies of visiting cards, tourism ads, train and garden-park tickets, postcards with views, and geographical maps. There are even more landscapes, mountains, forest roads, and hills, taken by an unsteady hand, with multiple blurs. There is a certain quantity of pictures and engravings, placed in the text in the same vein, as cursory quotations, black-and-white, flat tongue-twisters.
They lack two qualities. As a rule, they don’t
Strange as it may seem, in their meek reservedness the pictures (photographs, and in particular old ones) often provoke something like irritation in Sebald’s critics; for some reason the logic and meaning of their silent participation in the text stir up the reader. Sebald’s books are so popular that many people will want to elucidate completely what it is they are dealing with—a documentary or mockumentary—and the photographs could testify to either version. The numerous questions the author of
But even the author interrupts himself with images, and more or less for the same purpose. The way Sebald treats pictures (it’s hard to find the right word here: he doesn’t
There’s an episode in
It’s clear that photographs here don’t exhibit even the slightest will for possession—they’re necessary the way a bench is, to sit down and catch one’s breath, or a watch, to look at in confusion. In a way this is like a type of diary writing that’s familiar to me: if your own existence doesn’t infuse you with particular confidence, if it seems blurred and unsteady, then you accompany your daily life text with markers of everydayness, lists of what you have seen and read, recitations of domestic tasks and kilometers covered. Sontag’s diaries are constructed this way, for example; and in the same way, it seems to me, the complex curve of Sebald’s narrative goes from souvenir to souvenir, from bookmark to bookmark, from one firm and warm point of
The picture here serves as a
That, by the way, is how this prose itself is arranged—from a certain angle it can also be described as a display window for all kinds of artifacts, readymades, installed there according to the laws of inner necessity and not always open to public observation. Among the various kinds of bookmarks, dates (which look just as if someone had gone back and underlined them with a fingernail), strange coincidences, and rhyming circumstances, every Sebald text contains a certain quantity of
“I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions,”7 he says. The chain of “password—response” that thunders down the centuries like artillery fire (“Again a skald will make a foreign song / And, as his own, he will pronounce it”8) is something like help the living provide to the dead in a pledge of mutual rescue. You might say that to repeat what Hebel or Stendhal said is much more important for Sebald than speaking up (sticking out) himself. And indeed: in order to revive the Lethean shades, one must smear their lips with hot blood. Extending someone else’s life with highly potent means of speech—
2.
But where is the author himself, and where does he speak from? He can only tell other people’s stories: his own story refuses to take on external logic, presenting instead bubbly chains of coincidences and rhymes and an incomplete chronicle of convulsive traveling. He is intentionally absent in his own text (in that same article on Walser where everything or almost everything is about himself, he talks in passing about how the main thing gets intentionally crossed out in the process of writing). At times he is suddenly reflected in mirrors: never completely enough, always with the constrained sharpness of a fragment. “In Milan, where I had some strange adventures fifteen years ago,” he says during the story of someone else’s Italian travels, but the tail of his own story, after it poked out, will never be completely developed, “as we sometimes feel in dreams” where “the dead, the living and the still unborn come together on the same plane.”9
He, the author, also exhibits awareness of the feelings and desires of the dead that is difficult to explain, as it can arise only from practice (Kafka, according to Sebald, “knew of the insatiable greed felt by the dead for those who are still alive”10). He gets preferential treatment in handling time, where he can swim as if in water, hauling out whole buckets full without fear of coming up short. Let’s add: complete absence of the will to choose and make a selection, a thirst to remember everything, and complete indifference to the consequences of what has been said—as if they can never affect us.
It’s as if Sebald is in possession of boundless leisure, a tsar’s store of time and soul laid by, which permit speech and memory to move from place to place, without hurrying and without getting distracted, to pass through walls and waste time on utter nonsense. His alter ego gets undressed, gets dressed, lies down with his hands behind his head, for endless hours, follows the changes of the light, forgets himself in writing or contemplation, lets the darkness flow over him—in such a way that the big event of the page (and of two days) turns out to be taking a bath. It’s an unimaginable tempo for contemporary prose; it would seem provocative if there weren’t so much meekness in it—and if what is happening wouldn’t make us hazily suspect that it can’t be otherwise: that sliding over the surface of forsaken (or revisited) things is all the narrator knows how to do. Moving them from their place would truly be an effort than he couldn’t bear.
Sliding, crowded out of everywhere by a gust of inner wind, not entering into the relationships of everyday life, speaking of everyone he meets with the tenderness of someone beyond Lethe—Sebald’s hero constantly moves along complicated trajectories that dreadfully resemble the posthumous wanderings of a soul who has nothing left but futile, fleshless understanding, of the kind Mikhail Kuzmin described in his diary shortly before his death: “sees everything as if through thick glass. Sees, let’s say, that a friend is on the brink of danger, but can’t hold him back, nor help, nor console, nor caress.” Sebald’s changes of place, it seems, imitate these wanderings (or, more accurately, attempt to rehearse them). In his case a consistent anticlericalism (practically normative for intellectuals of his generation) was reinforced, if not defined, by his own hands-on knowledge of what posthumous existence looks like and where it takes place.
For him the dead are poor relations of the living: crowded to the side of the road, deprived of rights, doomed to senseless wandering over a set of invisible routes. This movement, which never has either goal or consequences but invariably flowers in a series of reflections and discoveries, is, perhaps, Sebald’s only plot. All his books, no matter what they’re about, are written from the side and on the side of the dead. This kind of approach to reality has many consequences: one is that the earthly thirst to know (what comes after what, and then what, and most importantly: how it ended) loses its power at once when we approach Sebald’s prose. The fragile gratings of the basic construction barely withstand the invisible volume of what’s put inside—all the correspondences and signifieds that stand invisibly behind every turn of a sentence. Here the temporal, geographical, and other kinds of rhymes are something like direction signs. Or rather, like folds in a curtain: open it and you’ll see beneath them “the metaphysical underside of reality, its dark inner lining.”11 “And in the other world—everything rhymes,” Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak, when there was nothing more to hope for.
Sebald’s fondness for doublings and treblings, it seems, only gets stronger from understanding that in point of fact these rhymes, besides their statistical negligibility, are also fruitless: they don’t mean or lead to anything. Nothing happens in Sebald’s world, no revelation can become a turning point, the worst things all happened before the beginning, you can’t expect salvation. The ones who lived
Sebald finds a new manner of handling the horrible, in whose presence, as if by the light of a black lamp, his native world dear to him whiles away time. Written “as if through a veil of ash,”12 it (that-which-happened, you-know-very-well-what) is almost never named directly, doesn’t show itself, remains in the margins. And that is precisely the main
This is knowledge that is best kept close: it’s worth reading Sebald’s text as a manual, it pertains directly to the everyday practice of every one of us. The reality of
The world is set up as a destroyer, crowding out, uprooting, grinding into powder (
3.
“It must be terribly impertinent, talking to the reader about the present in that tone of absolute courtesy we, for some reason, have yielded to the memoirists,”15 Mandelstam writes in
The syntax of the twentieth century—its phrases that flash and phrases that pick locks, destined to grasp the moment, to reflect its tremor and fragmentation, to express the essence, to imitate time—would be entirely out of place for the task Sebald assigns himself. His sentences lack even a hint of nervous trembling; they lie down at your feet like steps, comfortably sloping periods that unfailingly lead the reader toward the designated point of observation. His syntax is usually traced to the German eighteenth or nineteenth century, and it would be easy to agree, if not for one circumstance. The era Sebald looks back at is only the territory of a literary utopia, a small, sharply delineated mini-paradise, visible through binoculars held backward. His language is not the language of a historical segment, but rather the speech of
One of his books describes something the author calls
There’s something deeply comic—and very Sebaldian—in the fact that I’m holding forth here about a syntax I only know from the English translations, merely able to guess at their correspondence to the original. Having lived in England, written in German, taught in English, been translated into dozens of world languages, he and his manner of existence are something like a promise given in passing. His prose, this measureless sponge that takes in all that is vanished and castaway, is written as if over and above language, in an angelic tongue of general equality and unity. It’s no surprise that “everything written in these […] books has—as their author might himself have said—a tendency to vanish into thin air. The very passage which a moment before seemed so significant can suddenly appear quite unremarkable.”20 And one more citation to follow it: “Opposed to any hierarchy or subordination, they suggest to the reader in the most unobtrusive way that in the world created and administered by this narrator, everything has an equal right to coexist alongside everything else.”21
4.
That’s why
Some motifs, phrases and words in Sebald’s prose are ineradicable, they float up here and there like life buoys, at every free exhalation. They include trains, and relocations, and women reading in trains; one of them has a book titled
During the journey she was reading Kafka’s travel diaries, and sometimes spent a long time looking out at the snowflakes driven past the window of the old-fashioned dining car, which with its ruffled curtains and little table lamp spreading reddish light reminded her of the windows of a small Bohemian brothel. All that she remembered from her reading was the passage where Kafka describes one of his fellow travelers cleaning his teeth with the corner of a visiting card, and she remembered that not because the description was particularly remarkable, but because no sooner had she turned a few pages than a strikingly stout man sitting at the table next to hers also, and not a little to her alarm, began probing between his own teeth with a visiting card, apparently without any inhibitions at all.22
That is how description works in Sebald. All that, along with the little mica window where, hugely diminished, Kafka can be made out in a train car as it moves into the distance, is visible just as if through binoculars held backward: with comical precision, in the cosmic ice of
It’s no sin to state an obvious thing about Sebald one more time: what he’s busy doing is called rescue of the drowning, of all things and all people excluded, crowded out and subject to crowding, of those losing their meaning, of all those displaced and forgotten persons of world history, of everything that disappears, from people and peoples to obsolete crafts and gas lamps. And it has significant consequences. In the realm of literature, Sebald steps up against the tyranny of the engaging—on behalf of everything
Sebald simply removes the “boring/not-boring” gauge from the dashboard and honestly recollects everyone he is capable of reaching—in the mode of a
Sebald’s prose is occupied with the same thing, but in a world utterly deprived of any hope of resurrection. The chosen method of standing up against non-being lends his books a particular status, like nothing else—it locates them in a no-man’s-land, between great literature (one can hardly describe it differently) and, if one can express it this way,
2013
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
Over Venerable Graves
Here’s what happened: I was looking at pictures someone sent me from Germany, and one of them was particularly striking. Winter, a dark forest or maybe a park, and a narrow path winding its way right to a church, and a giant Christmas tree all decked out in glorious lights, and the sky above looks not like Germany but more like Gzhel porcelain or Vyatka toys, dark blue with enormous cold stars. On my tiny screen, the tree was lit like a bonfire, and it looked like a perfect postcard if you wanted to, say, wish someone a happy new year; all it needed was a couple of words appropriate to the occasion.
I sent the card (“good tidings in the new year”) to several people, some of them even responded, and a month later I opened the picture file again. But then—well, yes, the dark forest or park with its snowy hills, the shrubs, the church, the spruce—of course this was a cemetery. I have no idea how I failed to notice it the first time around.
But it’s quite easy not to see the cemetery, it is always in your head anyway; any thought brought to its endpoint will brush up against it: unmarked graves, half-covered in snow, and at the end of the road a spruce (“All the apples, all the golden ornaments”1), and not much further—the church, we-all-fall-down. As the Orthodox hymn for the repose of the deceased says, “The whole world is a common, sacred grave, for in every place is the dust of our brethren and fathers.”
For some reason it matters to us how much space will be set aside for each and every person. The old jokes about six feet of English soil (“and since he’s taller, we’ll add one more”) can be easily put into the language of the Vagankovo cemetery. As if the size of our last earthly allotment meant something—and the more space surrounds you, the greater, freer, sweeter the rest. The obscure meaning of posthumous landownership (“Though senseless flesh will hardly care / Precisely where it goes to rot”2) alludes to a merger with the landscape—or an acquisition that doesn’t require expert witnesses. Meanwhile, the earthly lot of the dead is shrinking before our eyes, which is hardly just the result of overpopulation and lack of space.
W. G. Sebald’s essay “Campo Santo” was published posthumously in a book in which three or four essays sketch the deliberately incomplete outline of a journey through Corsica. These essays leave a strange impression, as if the author were approaching the light at the end of that tunnel we’ve heard so much about from popular literature. The narrator and the narration thin out over the course of their movement, they are dissolved in quick flames; the very language and its objects—Napoleon’s uniform, the school fence, the village burial rituals—are in equal measure blinding and transparent. The author
There, Sebald laments the fact that there are no ghosts to be found in Corsica anymore. The way he describes them (short, with blurry features, always at a slant from reality, petulant like children, and vengeful like jackdaws), there isn’t much to lament. But the fact that the local dead were no longer left offerings of food and drink (on doorways and windowsills), that they stopped frightening their fellow villagers on late night roads, that they stopped visiting relatives and strangers, saddens him more than you would expect. His strange compassion for these unpleasant creatures, his visible displeasure that they have to lie in the narrow communal cemetery instead of on their own land, or the fact that the living and dead no longer exist on equal terms, seems suspiciously personal—as though the author had a vested interest here, as though this were his very own sorrow. And that is in fact true: this essay was written from—and on—the side of the dead. The uneasy urgency that Sebald’s own end, a senseless death in a car crash, gives this text forces us to read it all in italics, like an urgent missive from the end of the world, from the borderlands between here and there. The trouble is that, if we are to believe its message, there is no difference between
The dead mean less and less to us, Sebald says. We clear them from the road with the utmost speed and great zeal. They take up less and less of our time, they take up less space: cremations, urns, little cells in a concrete wall. “And who has remembered them, who remembers them at all?”3 He describes cemeteries as if they were prisons or reservations (designed to isolate, edge out, weigh down with granite and marble, to deprive the dead of their own, to surround them with strangers). He mourns the things that knew how to live on for decades (we remember what those were like: a father’s coat, worn for years by his son, a grandmother’s thimble, a grandfather’s geometry box,
Indeed, the past is so broad that, it seems, we want to hem it in a little, to reduce
When the past is not preserved but discarded (the way you might clip hair or fingernails), the dead have fallen out of favor. They find themselves in the position of an aggrieved minority. They lose the right to our attention (and the ability to dodge said attention); they no longer have a say—they are remembered as others see fit. In a way, they are beyond the purview of the law: their possessions belong to others, anyone can insult them, we don’t know anything about them, but we act like they
Because the first thing a cemetery conveys, any cemetery, large or small, covered in marble sculptures or in weeds and nettle—is the actual bulk of everything that came before me (“I had not thought death had undone so many”). Our natural inclination to look at history as an exhibit of accomplishments (or a sequence of traumas) is suddenly pushed out by other kinds of histories. Cooking pots, bedsheets, irons, porcelain, faience, diapers, baby powder, hollow gold rings, underskirts, postcards from the city of Gorky, a Niva edition of Chekhov, sleds, a Napoleon cake, union fees, ring four times,6 theater clutch bags, two kopeck coins, quarter kopeck coins, a monthly pass (September), a vocabulary notebook, a butter dish, a mimosa, a ticket to the Moscow Art Theater. Over each grave, like a post, like a beam, there is an invisible (maybe glowing, maybe devoid of any color or weight) mass of
What is memory to do in a world of overproduction—when there is so much surrounding us, so many old pots, featherbeds, glasses cases? So many dead languages and so many unmarked and abandoned graves? At the old Jewish cemetery in Prague it went like this; there was very little space, and many dead people, and time passed year after year. The dead were buried in layers, one floor atop another, and when they came up against an old headstone, they would pull it out and put it right next to the new one, like a row of steeple-roofed houses. This seems like the fate of any attempt to bury one’s dead: you try to dispatch a dead idea underground, and an older one works itself loose underneath it, and not even one, but three, like the heads of the hydra. That’s what history looks like from a fixed vantage point: layers and layers of accidental proximities and irresponsible analogies; from this perspective it really seems that it’s time to
But everything about the reality of graveyards resists the vertical. The trade of the dead is, in the most literal sense, horizontal; their bodies and their deeds prove the futility of any kind of selectiveness. Rows, and rows, and rows, names and dates, if you can even find a name. A giant daycare, a nursery with millions of beds—that’s what it looks like, if you imagine for a minute that the sleepers might wake. A dormitory under the open sky, with little beds (and bunnies on each cubby). And look how many of us there are.
If one believes that our true home is not here but in the
“Sacred
To the Memory of Robert
The eldest son of Mr. Robert Brown,
of the City of London, Merchant.
Who unhappily lost his Life at Tivoli by his
Foot slipping, in coming out of Neptune’s Grotto,
on the 6th July 1823.
Aged 21 years.
Reader Beware
By this Fatal Accident
a Virtuous and Amiable Youth has been
suddenly snatched away in the bloom of Health
and pride of Life!
His disconsolate Parents are bereaved
of a most excellent Son,
His Brothers, and Sisters have to lament
an attached, and affectionate Brother,
and all his Family and Friends
have sustained an irreparable Loss.”
“Under this stone
rests the body of the former psalmist
of the Imperial Russian Mission,
Aleksandr Rozhdestvenskii”
“Artillery Captain
Sergei Aleksandrovich
Zakhar’in. 1881–1944”
“Her soul was pleasing to God.
To the unforgettable dear daughter
Anna Khristoforovna Flerova.
Born in Rome August 13 1877
Died April 12 1892.
Rest until the joyous morning, dear child.”
“Here lies buried the red army soldier
Danilov Vasilii Danilovich.
A faithful son of the Soviet people,
a fighter for the partisan cause in Italy.
Born in 1919 in Kaluga,
died tragically January 6 1945.
VASSILY DANIELOVICH, 1919 ✝ 6 J 1945”
Richard Mason
Though on the sign it is written:
“Don’t pluck these blossoms”—
it is useless against the wind,
which cannot read
2013
Translated by Maria Vassileva
NOTES
IN UNHEARD-OF SIMPLICITY
The title of this essay alludes, with a polemical twist, to a phrase from Boris Pasternak’s 1931 poem from the cycle
1. From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Valerik” (1840).
2. From Daniil Kharms’s sketch “Four Illustrations” (1933) included in his cycle
DISPLACED PERSON
1. Grigorii Dashevskii, “Kak chitat’ sovremennuiu poeziiu,” in his
2. This formula belongs to Marina Tsvetaeva; it first appeared in her notebook in 1921 and was later used many times in her works and letters.
3. An opening line from the Kontakion of St. Seraphim of Sarov.
4. A Nanai hunter who, in 1906 and 1907, served as a guide for Vladimir Arsenyev’s expeditions in the Russian Far East and later became a character in two of his books that describe these expeditions, one entitled
5. From Osip Manselstam’s poem “No, never have I been anyone’s contemporary” (“Net, nikogda, nichei ia ne byl sovremennik,” 1924).
6. From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s narrative poem
7. Il’ia Kukulin, “Proryv k nevozmozhnoi sviazi,”
8. Clones of prominent Russian writers are among the characters in Vladimir Sorokin’s novel
TODAY BEFORE YESTERDAY
1. A reference to the film project
2. An image from the opening of chapter XIV of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Terrible Vengeance” (1831).
3. A line from Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), a retrospective vision of the 1812 Napoleon invasion of Russia.
4. The White Guard fought the Bolshevik Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). The actual reference here is to Igor Strelkov (real name Girkin), a warlord of Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and a vocal public figure during the active phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
5.
6. Derogatory nicknames of various origin used in reference to Ukrainians (
7. An allusion to the title of a book by Arkadii Belinkov,
8. A term from Boethius’s
AFTER THE DEAD WATER
1. A reference to “Today Before Yesterday”: the first sections of the essay, not included in the translation published in this volume, deal with Russian poetic responses to World War I.
2. On the use of the word “Banderite” see note 5 to “Today Before Yesterday.” Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) is the central square in Kyiv that became a site of a three-month anti-government rally in November 2013–February 2014.
3. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once an owner of a major Russian oil company, spent ten years in prison, nominally for economic crimes but allegedly for his disloyalty to Putin and his cronies. He was unexpectedly pardoned and released in December 2013.
4. Parmesan was among many products whose import to Russia was banned in 2014 as part of the so-called “counter-sanctions”—the Russian government’s response to sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States, European Union, and some other countries following the Russian annexation of Crimea and aggression in eastern Ukraine.
5. The name of a square in central Moscow, which was the site of several major opposition rallies in 2011–2012.
6. A politically motivated criminal case (alleged mass riots) brought against a number of the participants in a rally on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on May 6, 2012.
7. See note 4 to “Today Before Yesterday.”
8. Nestor Makhno was the leader of an anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War; Huliaipole (literally “walk-about field”), the small town where he was born, became the center of an anarchist republic at that time.
9. From Eduard Bagritsky’s narrative poem
10. An allusion to a phrase from the Russian translation of “The Internationale.”
11. From Vladimir Mayakovsky’s narrative poem
12. From Alexander Blok’s narrative poem
INTENDING TO LIVE
1. Pavel Milyukov was a liberal politician and one of the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic party in pre-revolutionary Russia. Vitaly Milonov is a contemporary politician best known for his legislative initiatives against the LGBT community. Alexei Navalny is a prominent leader of political protests in the 2010s. The Union of the Russian People was a right-wing nationalist organization active in 1905–1917, which was notorious for its antisemitism.
2. An allusion to Pushkin’s 1834 poem “It’s time, my friend, it’s time!” (“Pora, moi drug, pora!”).
3. Pushkin’s duel, in which he was mortally wounded, took place in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, near the Black River (Chernaya Rechka). One of his last requests before he died, two days after the duel, was for cloudberries.
4. The opening line of a poem by Stanislav Krasovitsky (“Ne sadis’ udobnee”).
5. From Tsvetaeva’s “The New Year’s” (“Novogodnee,” 1927), a poem written shortly after Rilke’s death and addressed to him.
6. An inexact quotation from the story “How Treachery Came to Russia” in Rilke’s
7. An allusion to the biblical epigraph of Leo Tolstoy’s
8. Pioneers were members of the mass youth organization in the USSR. Reading stories about pioneer heroes from the Second World War period was part of the patriotic education of Soviet children.
9. On Bolotnaya Square, see note 5 to “After the Dead Water.” A pro-government rally on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow on February 4, 2012 was organized as a countermeasure to a wave of anti-government political protests.
10. From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), where the phrase is used to juxtapose the generation that, in 1812, fought Napoleon’s army in Russia (
11. A 1967 Soviet film set during the Russian Civil War.
12. An acronym for “party committee,” which was commonly used in the USSR in reference to committees of the Communist Party that existed in every establishment where people worked or studied.
13. The percent of the people who, according to 2014 polls, did not support the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.
14. A legendary phrase ascribed to one of the participants in the Decembrist uprising in 1825.
THE MAXIMUM COST OF LIVING
1. Until February 14, 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, which lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar at the time of Tsvetaeva’s birth. She kept using the Julian calendar in her notebooks and some correspondence until she left Russia in spring 1922. Dates according to the Julian calendar are traditionally marked as “Old Style” in Russian historical references.
2. Guild of Poets—a literary group founded by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky in 1911.
3. Their birthdays were actually three days apart: September 26 and 29 (Old Style); Efron, born in 1893, was one year younger than Tsvetaeva.
4. An inexact quotation from Karl Peterson’s “The Little Orphan” (“Sirotka,” 1843), a poem for children much anthologized in the nineteenth century.
5. From Boris Pasternak’s poem “About This Verse” (1917).
6. An allusion to Pushkin’s “Inspiration is not for sale, / But you can sell a manuscript” from his “Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet” (1824). Translation from Andrew Kahn,
7. A phrase from the Russian avant-garde manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912).
8. “
9. “On approche, on prend peur, on disparaît. […]
Disparition subite et totale. Lui—disparu. Moi—seule.
Et c’est invariabl<ement> la même histoire.
On me laisse. Sans un mot, sans un adieu. On est venu—on ne vient plus. On a écrit—on n’écrit plus.
Et me voilà dans le grand silence, que je ne romps jamais, blessée à mort (ou à vif, ce qui est la même chose) sans avoir jamais rien compris—ni comment ni pourquoi.”
10. “Seulement le petit Marcel m’aurait fait moins souffrir par des manques de sensibilité extérieure—étant d’une autre génération, où
CONVERSATIONS IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD
1. L. V. Shaporina,
2. Shaporina was an artist, translator, and the founder, in 1918, of the first Puppet Theater in Soviet Russia.
3. An allusion to Fedor Tiutchev’s poem on the death of Pushkin, “29 January 1837,” where Pushkin is called Russia’s “first love.”
WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE
1. An allusion to Osip Mandelstam’s poem “1 January 1924,” where “the fourth estate” refers to the proletariat whose interests the Bolshevik revolution claimed to protect.
2. An autobiographical character in Konstantin Vaginov’s novel
3. Alisa Poret,
4. An allusion to “the cold and gloom of the times to come” from Alexander Blok’s poem “A Voice from the Chorus” (1914).
5. Anna Akhmatova meant her oral memoirs—stories she repeated over the years, without making any changes, to various interlocutors.
6. Translation from
THE LAST HERO
1. Susan Sontag,
2. Susan Sontag,
3. Sontag,
4. Sontag,
5. Susan Sontag,
6. Sontag,
7. Susan Sontag, “A Mind in Mourning,”
8. Sontag,
9. Sontag,
10. Susan Sontag,
11. Sontag,
12. Sontag,
13. Sigrid Nunez,
14. Sontag,
15. Larry Kramer in an interview to Larry Mass, as quoted in Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock,
16. Nunez,
17. Sontag,
18. Sontag,
19. A modified quotation from her essay on Elias Canetti, “Mind as Passion,” in Susan Sontag,
20. Solomon Volkov,
FROM THAT SIDE
1. See note 7 to the essay “The Last Hero.”
2. In 2006, a Russian translation of
3. “Iosif” was Stalin’s first name, and it was given to Soviet children in his honor. The name “Vladlen” derives from “Vladimir Lenin,” and Oktyabrina honors October, the month when the Bolshevik revolution happened.
4. W. G. Sebald,
5. W. G. Sebald,
6. A phrase from Maxim Gorky’s novel
7. Sebald,
8. Final lines from Osip Mandelstam’s poem “I have not heard the tales of Ossian” (“Ia ne slykhal rasskazov Ossiana,” 1914).
9. W. G. Sebald,
10. Sebald,
11. Sebald,
12. W. G. Sebald,
13.
14. Sebald,
15. Osip Mandelstam,
16. W. G. Sebald,
17. Sebald,
18. Sebald,
19. Sebald uses this term in two of his conversations (with Eleanor Wachtel and with Joseph Cuomo):
20. Sebald,
21. Sebald,
22. Sebald,
23. Sebald,
OVER VENERABLE GRAVES
The title of this essay comes from Pushkin’s poem “When lost in thought I wander beyond the town” (“Kogda za gorodom, zadumchiv, ia brozhu,” 1836). The translation is from Andrew Kahn’s
1. From Boris Pasternak’s poem “Star of the Nativity” (1947).
2. From Pushkin’s poem “When down the bustling streets I pass” (“Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh,” 1829). Alexander Pushkin,
3. W. G. Sebald,
4. Anatoly Fomenko is notorious for his pseudohistorical theory of “New Chronology.”
5. Sebald,
6. In communal apartments, there would be signs telling visitors how many times to ring the doorbell for each resident so that the right person would answer the door.
Russian Library