Alexander Vvedensky Read online

  ALEXANDER VVEDENSKY (1904–1941) was born into the liberal intelligentsia of St. Petersburg and grew up in the midst of war and revolution, reaching artistic maturity just as Stalin consolidated control over Russia. After attending a progressive high school, Vvedensky spent a year working at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK) as a researcher in a lab devoted to Futurist abstract poetry. Along with Daniil Kharms, he then became a major figure in the short-lived underground avant-garde group OBERIU (a neologism for “the union for real art”). Unable to publish his poetry—by the 1930s there was no tolerance in the USSR for work of such shimmering invention and provocation—Vvedensky made a living as a writer of children’s literature. In 1931 he was arrested for his so-called counterrevolutionary literary activities, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of internal exile. He was detained again in 1941, and on February 2 he died of pleurisy on a prison train, leaving behind his wife and four-year-old son. Though much of Vvedensky’s work has been lost, what remains has established him as one of the most influential Russian poets of the twentieth century.

  EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY is the author of the poetry collections The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza and Iterature, both published by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, the first collection of writings by Vvedensky and friends in English translation. Ostashevsky teaches in the liberal studies program at New York University.

  MATVEI YANKELEVICH is the author of the poetry collection Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and a novella in fragments, Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books). His translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook/Ardis). He edits the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.

  Alexander

  Vvedensky

  An Invitation

  for Me to Think

  SELECTED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

  BY EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY

  ADDITIONAL TRANSLATIONS BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2013 by Eugene Ostashevsky

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Matvei Yankelevich

  All rights reserved.

  The poems “Rug Hydrangea” and “Elegy,” which originally appeared in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, edited and translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky (Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 13–16, appear here by permission of Northwestern University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vvedenskii, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 1904–1941, author.

  [Poems. English. Selections. 2013]

  An invitation for me to think / by Alexander Vvedensky ; edited and

  translated by Eugene Ostashevsky with additional translations by Matvei Yankelevich.

  pages ; cm. — (New York Review Books poets)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-630-6 (alkaline paper)

  1. Experimental poetry, Russian—20th century. I. Ostashevsky, Eugene, translator, editor. II. Yankelevich, Matvei, translator. III. Title. IV. Series: New York Review Books poets.

  PG3476.V87A2 2013

  891.71'42—dc23

  2012048920

  eISBN: 978-1-59017-645-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Introduction:

  Alexander Vvedensky, An Invitation for Us to Think

  The Mirror and the Musician

  The Joyful Man Franz

  Snow Lies

  The Meaning of the Sea

  The Demise of the Sea

  God May Be Around

  The Gray Notebook

  Stomach Rumbling During Confession of Love

  Contracting Syphilis, Amputated Leg, Extracted Tooth

  Guest on a Horse

  Four Descriptions

  The Witness and the Rat

  An Invitation for Me to Think

  Rug Hydrangea

  Twenty-four Hours

  The Soldier Ay Bee See

  Elegy

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  Alexander Vvedensky,

  An Invitation for Us to Think

  THE RUSSIAN avant-garde did not die of natural causes. After adopting the first Five-Year Plan in late 1928, the Soviet state moved to centralize the arts just as it had centralized the economy. Its first goal was to make literature “understandable” to the masses it was supposed to indoctrinate. For that effect, the state sought a return to premodernist conventions of “reflecting” “reality,” except that the writer had to work gently, lest any reality be reflected. Despite its avowed Marxism, the state identified the aesthetic proclivities of the masses with those of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. By 1930, the avant-garde experimentation that we still associate with Soviet art was suppressed even when, as in the case of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s journal LEF or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, it embraced propaganda for the Soviet way of life as its primary task. The fact that modernism of any stripe starts off by challenging the realist code opened experimental artists to charges of political subversion and to arrest as agents of the bourgeoisie.

  On April 9, 1930, a Leningrad newspaper reviewed a poetry reading (and magic show) put on in a university dormitory. The participants belonged to OBERIU, a young writers’ collective that took avant-garde experiments—by then abandoned by former Futurists—along different and more radical paths, breaking up conventional linguistic structures, whether grammatical, narrative, or semantic, and recombining the pieces in seemingly nonsensical ways. “The proletarian undergraduate body,” wrote the reviewer,

  remarked with indignation that in the period of intense efforts by the proletariat at the front lines of socialist construction, in the period of decisive class battles, members of OBERIU distance themselves from public life, from the social reality of the Soviet Union....Their departure from life, their meaningless poetry, their irrational (zaumnoe) jugglery are a protest against the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is why their poetry is counterrevolutionary. It is the poetry of people who are strangers to us, the poetry of the class enemy![1]

  In 1930, a review like this could convey only official opinion. It therefore represented a signal for institutions to provide its object with no further platform. OBERIU fell apart. It was the last, the youngest, the smallest, and the most skeptical avant-garde faction of 1920s Russia. Its leaders, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky—neither of whom had taken part in the dormitory debacle—were not yet twenty-six years old.

  ◆◆◆

  Alexander Vvedensky was born in late 1904 in St. Petersburg to a family of liberal intelligentsia. A half-hour walk across the Neva separated their apartment from the Winter Palace, the main residence of the tsar. It may be suggested that the apocalyptic motifs of Vvedensky’s poetry are not unrelated to Russia’s passage through three wars and three revolutions before he turned sixteen, with the epicenter of events always just across the water. At the progressive high school he attended during the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, he befriended the future philosophers Leonid Lipavsky and Yakov Druskin. After graduation, the aspiring poet worked for a year at the State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK), as a researcher in a lab devoted to Futurist abstract poetry co
mposed of made-up words, or zaum. In the spring of 1925, Druskin and Vvedensky met another young poet, Daniil Kharms, also a student of the Futurists, at a poetry reading. Their shared attitudes—and metaphysics—surface in the note Vvedensky left in Kharms’s autograph book to commemorate the encounter: “avvedensky / Weird a cat initially has five, / then 4, then 3 and maybe / even 2 legs.”

  The poets called themselves the chinars, a neologism of Vvedensky’s derived from the archaic words for “rank” and “to create.” Vvedensky took to signing his poems as “chinar, auto-rity on meaninglessness (bessmỳslitza),” and Kharms as “chinar, the gazer.” They also tried to put together an umbrella group of avant-garde practitioners under such monikers as the Academy of Left Classics, where the term “left” means aesthetically radical. A new friend, the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, objected to Vvedensky’s credo that “I accept neither emotions nor meaning in art; the only thing that is positive to the end is meaninglessness.”[2] The first reviews of their poetry readings already spoke of the politically reprehensible “hooliganism” of “Dadaists in Leningrad,” who emphasize form at the expense of content to such an extent as “to frighten away” other “literary workers” from “raising their qualifications,” presumably by taking creative writing classes.[3] But such reviews in 1927 were not the end of the world. In the fall of that year the Leningrad Press Club, then home to several other avant-garde groups, offered the poets a meeting place on the condition that they stopped calling themselves “left” or “left-wing” lest they be mistaken for Trotskyites, who at the time were being purged from the government and the Party—and beaten up in the vicinity of the Press Club. The poets came up with OBERIU, a modified acronym for Association of Real Art, the term “real” advertising their belief that art should be reality rather than imitate it, as realism thinks.

  The OBERIU poets spent a couple of years as darlings of the young avant-garde cliques, putting on raucous shows in Leningrad clubs and educational institutions. The group’s evenings interspersed poetry with theater, film, magic tricks, juggling, and general clowning around; they transpired under provocatively incomprehensible slogans and culminated in debates that turned into shouting matches. By contributing to a children’s magazine co-edited by their friend Nikolai Oleinikov, and collaborating on children’s books with younger avant-garde painters, the OBERIU poets made a living that left time for “adult” literary activities. Although Vvedensky was soon being published in editions of fifty thousand, he never took his “day job” as seriously as Kharms, for all the traces it left on his experimental writing. Nonetheless, in their lifetimes it was only as children’s authors that the two of them got into print.

  In November 1931, the newspaper that had forced OBERIU to disband eighteen months earlier attacked again. The true field of class struggle today, proclaimed the paper, was children’s literature. It accused the “bohemianizing bourgeois epigones” who had banded together as OBERIU of “squeezing into children’s literature through a crack” in order to continue their sabotage. “Throw out the class enemy!” hectored the paper.[4] A month later, Kharms and Vvedensky were jailed. Vvedensky cracked under interrogation, named names, and signed a confession of guilt:

  Our literary activity consisted of two parts. First of all, there was zaum, there were pieces intended for adults, saturated with mysticism and purposefully obscure with regards to their semantic content....All these pieces are counterrevolutionary in essence as well as in their tendency toward mysticism and idealism. Secondly...in the field of children’s literature, with the connivance of the people guiding and directing that field, we smuggled in ideas that were politically inimical to the aims of Soviet education of children.[5]

  They were sentenced to three years of internal exile, the wonderfully Russian punishment of being forced to live outside the more Westernized urban centers. They returned to Leningrad in the beginning of 1933, their terms reduced by the lobbying of Kharms’s father, a former revolutionary.

  Kharms and Vvedensky were readmitted into the ranks of children’s writers, but any chance to appear as poets “for adults” had been precluded by the state’s total permeation of public life. They shut themselves off within the circle of their intimates: Lipavsky, Druskin, Oleinikov, and Zabolotsky, the only other former OBERIU member. It is this group, often sans Zabolotsky, that some Russian scholars refer to as the chinars, resurrecting the 1920s term that in fact was not used in the 1930s, when any collective name would invite arrest. Lipavsky’s dialogue The Conversations, a source corroborated by diary evidence, describes the group’s 1933–1934 meetings. Another weave of conversations took place in their writings, with members improvising upon each other’s metaphorical structures, or “hieroglyphs” in the jargon of the group.

  For example, Vvedensky’s poems “The Demise of the Sea” and “The Witness and the Rat” express the motif of suicide by combining the group’s hieroglyphs “window” and “falling.” His intentions become clear, however, only in the light of “Window,” an earlier piece by Druskin. Vvedensky’s two poems, in turn, enrich the meaning of Kharms’s later and more famous fictions such as “The Tumbling Old Women” and “The Falling,” which operate with the same hieroglyphs. In all of these works, the window represents the membrane between “this world” and the “neighboring” or “other world,” a hieroglyph invented by Lipavsky that stands for life led according to other laws. Polysemic to the point of contradiction, Lipavsky’s “neighboring world” applies to anything from the existential realities of plants or insects, to other minds, parallel universes, or—most often in Vvedensky—the world of the dead. The latter appears in “The Demise of the Sea” as the underwater metropolis that the suicidal Dignitary wishes to enter by falling into the window that is the sea.

  Politically, these writers’ symbolic, multi-perspectival, and relativistic way of thinking opposed the one-truth models of reasoning advocated by the state, which claimed for itself a logical and scientific inevitability. Philosophically, they located the roots of the distortion of reality in human cognition and language. Commenting on a collage of memoirs about Pushkin, Vvedensky said:

  Interesting how witness reports contradict each other even where there can be no place for subjectivity. These aren’t accidental errors. Openness to doubt, non-coincidence with our logical framework, are present in life itself. And I don’t understand how there could have appeared such fantastical worlds with precise laws, worlds that do not resemble real life at all. For example, a committee meeting. Or, say, the novel. The novel describes life, time appears to flow there, but it has nothing in common with real time: There is no alternation of day and night, people remember their whole lives with ease whereas in fact it’s doubtful one can remember even yesterday. Anyway, any description is just plain wrong. “A man is sitting, he has a ship overhead,” at least has to be more right than “A man is sitting and reading a book.”[6]

  Many of Vvedensky’s critical attitudes surface in this passage: perspectives or neighboring worlds that make up the manifold of the real are not mutually translatable; all logical, causal, narrative, and linguistic models of reality are false; the alogical language of bessmyslitza (meaninglessness) provides a more truthful picture of reality than does rational language.

  In 1936, Vvedensky moved to Kharkov, Ukraine, with the woman who became his third wife. It was there, in the relative safety of willed obscurity, that he wrote such poetic and dramatic masterpieces as “Frother,” “A Certain Quantity of Conversations,” and “Where. When.”[7] Drawing on the hieroglyph of “neighboring worlds” to explore relationships among language, the ineffable, and the expectation of death, his late writing mourns the passing of poetry. The passing of poets did not have long to wait. In September 1937, Vvedensky’s wife gave birth to a son. Several weeks later, Oleinikov was shot on the fashionable charge of being a Trotskyite terrorist sponsored by Japanese intelligence. In early 1938, Zabolotsky, who had tried to ingratiate himself with the regime, was seized as an ope
rative of an imaginary terror cell.

  As the Germans advanced on Kharkov in September 1941, Vvedensky and his family tried to board a train of evacuee writers but failed. He was arrested a few days later for plotting to stay behind and put on a prison train headed east. A recently discovered death certificate says he died of pleurisy as the train was approaching Kazan, in Tatarstan, on December 19. Kharms had been detained in Leningrad a month earlier. He asked for a hat or a rag to conceal his thoughts, and died in a prison asylum on February 2, 1942, probably of starvation and exposure.

  The greater part of Vvedensky’s writings has vanished. Druskin preserved the rest when he heroically rescued Kharms’s papers during the siege of Leningrad. Violation of realist norms and the author’s arrest record kept the work from print in the Soviet period. The first edition of Vvedensky’s surviving work was smuggled out for Russian-language publication in the United States in the early 1980s. An updated version of it came out in Russia in the 1990s. Reprints and other editions have been impeded by copyright disputes until recently.

  The translations offered in Invitation for Me to Think make up the first English-language collection of Vvedensky’s poetry. Together with the multi-genre pieces in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, and with the 1938 play, “Christmas at the Ivanovs’,” in George Gibian’s The Man with the Black Coat, they cover the greater part of his extant oeuvre.[8]

  ◆◆◆

  Kharms and Vvedensky have been hailed as precursors of the literature of the absurd. They’ve also been compared to Dada and the surrealists. They have ideas in common with the pataphysical tradition. At once misleading and illuminating, these comparisons foreground some properties of their writing at the expense of others. Similar distortion occurs in translation. For example, Vvedensky’s term for his poetics, bessmyslitza, forces the English translator to choose between “meaninglessness,” with its suggestion of analytical philosophy, and “absurdity,” associated with existentialism. Although both philosophical frames offer valuable insights into his poems, neither is verbally implicated in the Russian original, nor was the author clearly exposed to them. The third possible translation of bessmyslitza, “nonsense,” evoking Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, offers insights and obfuscations of its own.