Alexander Vvedensky Read online

  Zabolotsky argued that Vvedensky’s bessmyslitza has nothing to do with Futurist zaum but rather consists of “the placement of meaningful words into unusual relationships of an alogical nature.” Drawing on the paradigm of literary evolution held by the Russian Formalists, whom OBERIU members knew personally, Zabolotsky predicted that his friend’s poems will feel less alogical when readers get used to them.[9] Vvedensky disagreed. His own artistic statements are few and in the main date from one period, the years 1933 and 1934. “The Gray Notebook” expresses discontent with “our human logic and our language,” advocating active “non-understanding” as an epistemological stance superior to the one offered by ordinary language. Let us recall the poet’s already cited claim that the proposition “A man is sitting, he has a ship overhead,” presumably an example of bessmyslitza, provides a truer description of reality than conventional realism does. Together, these two thoughts render bessmyslitza no mere poetic device but a verbal tool for understanding—or rather actively non-understanding—the world.

  The shape of bessmyslitza evolved over time. In the first days of OBERIU, Vvedensky’s poetry was quite impenetrable, changing associations at such speed that readers could not discern larger patterns. Larger patterns, especially thematic ones, become visible in the more mature poetry of the 1930s. The term bessmyslitza still applies, because it remains defiantly alogical and anti-realist. Nonetheless, its alogism is mystical. It does not aim to render the world or language absurd tout court. Rather, mature bessmyslitza joins words intuitively to pose questions about the reality of human beings and objects, which are far deeper and more exact than what an ordinary language might ask. Being unanswerable, such questions evoke the state of active non-understanding (“I thought so hard that I ceased to understand”) that is even further from non-understanding by privation (“I haven’t thought about it” or “I don’t know the answer”) than it is from the false understanding of “our human logic and our language” (“I do know the answer”).

  Active non-understanding of reality is thus conceived as the purpose of art: the work that art does to help us live. Although his idea surely derives from the Russian Formalist thesis that the purpose of art is ostranenie, the defamiliarization or making-strange of reality, the poet seems possessed by a fundamentally different spirit. I would compare the conceptual framework of bessmyslitza to negative theology, with its thesis that God exceeds language, and its preference for apophatic (negational) over kataphatic (approximative) speaking. Did Vvedensky intend to echo a fourteen-hundred-year-old Christian, mainly Orthodox, tradition? Although the grandson of a priest, he exhibited no signs of religious belief; he also lived under a state that bragged of being atheist while anathemizing skepticism. However, as a poet who declared his three main themes to be “time, death, and God,” Vvedensky strikes one as a religious mystic in that very modern manner which, identifying religion with doubt, regards the absence and even nonexistence of God as facets of His infinite transcendence. The poet’s less-than-flattering depictions of deity can be interpreted as apophasis carried out to its logical conclusion.

  Admittedly, Vvedensky’s famous account of his poetic project, preserved in The Conversations, compares bessmyslitza not with the negative theology of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite but with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Less than two years after his arrest, Vvedensky confesses the disappointment of his poetic ambitions (“Poetry performs only a verbal miracle, not a real one”), and looks back:

  I raised my hand against concepts, against initial generalizations, which is something no one has ever done before. Thereby I enacted a poetic critique of reason, as it were—more fundamental than that other, abstract one. I doubted that, for instance, house, cottage, and tower connect and unite under the concept of building. Maybe the shoulder should be connected with the number four. I did it practically, in poetry, as a kind of proof. And I became convinced of the falsity of old connections, but I don’t know what the new ones should be like. I don’t even know whether there should be one system of connections or many. So my basic impression is that of the disconnectedness of the world and of the dismemberment of time. Since these contradict reason, that means that reason does not understand the world.[10]

  It seems astonishing today—although not for Russian artistic thought of the avant-garde period—that Vvedensky conceives of poetic composition as research into the relationship between language and reality, analogous to scientific experiment. How the act of combining words can test anything in the real world remains unexplained. The poet assumes a connection between relations of ideas and matters of fact that a critical philosopher would deny; nor is his association of reason with language Kantian. One may speculate that the failure of Vvedensky’s “poetic critique of reason” to produce positive knowledge led to the phase of his poetics that I compared with negative theology. However, the passage also needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since all it records is how Lipavsky interpreted some comments his friend made one evening in 1933, hopefully over vodka.

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  There are a few other things I would like to note to help people who do not read Russian read Vvedensky. One concerns the prosody of the original. Russian modernism, even the most avant-garde variety, did not adopt free verse as did Western modernism. All of Vvedensky’s poems rhyme almost everywhere. They are also often metered. The rhymes and meters are not experienced by readers of Russian in the same way as their nominal equivalents are experienced by readers of English, since prosody is a language-specific, not a language-transcendent, phenomenon. (In other words, trochaic tetrameter in Russian is not the same as trochaic tetrameter in English.) We opted not to transpose the poetic forms literally but to gesture in their direction and strive to approximate their effects. As a result, our translations take the middle way between the American preference for retaining word meanings but omitting the linguistic organization that provides the words with reason to be in the poem, and the Russian preference for retaining some of the linguistic organization at the expense of everything else.

  Vvedensky’s poems feel fast, smart, and effortless. He did not revise much, and Anna Gerasimova, an editor of his work, compares its flow to that of automatic writing. With a taste for thematic rhymes like mòre-gòre (sea-catastrophe), doch-noch (daughter-night), vodà-zvezdà-gnezdà (water-star-nest), he let the linguistic coincidences of Russian determine his meaning with great equanimity, which coheres with the group’s belief that the organization of my language is the organization of my world.

  While the work of Kharms and Vvedensky does form a vital chapter in the history of the twentieth-century global avant-garde, they also need to be understood in their local context, not only as skeptical heirs of Russian Futurism, but also as the inhabitants of their own city: Leningrad or St. Petersburg. I am especially fascinated by how their writing incorporates and reinterprets the so-called Petersburg myth of Russian literature. Western readers may recognize the facets of the myth associated with Gogol’s Petersburg Tales and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but its central text is Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, a narrative poem whose protagonist, driven mad by the flood of 1824, curses the equine monument of Peter the Great, the eponymous “Bronze Horseman” that consequently comes to life and pursues him. Pushkin gave the city its own brand of phantasmagoria, where the sense that life is an empty dream arises from the coercion the state exercises over nature and the individual, rather than from consumer capitalism (as in Walter Benjamin’s picture of nineteenth-century Paris). Alogical, noncausal gestures in the context of the Petersburg myth express lack of control over one’s fate and may be apocalyptic in inflection.

  Such habitual Vvedensky themes as sleeping and dreaming (the Russian word for both is son, so the translator always has to choose), the alienation of divinity, the unreliability of causality, the end of the world are all shared with The Bronze Horseman. The same holds true of the motifs of statue, horse, water, rock, drowning, and others. Even the theme of mir
ror symmetry, at least in its variant of time reversal, is prefigured in Pushkin’s description of the river flowing backward to drown the city. I would go so far as to say that Vvedensky’s attitude toward diction and rhyme (in his advice to “respect the poverty of language” and in his preference for the poorer rhyme over the richer) also embodies the poetic tradition of St. Petersburg, singled out by Joseph Brodsky for the intentional “pallidness” of its style.[11]

  If ideologically innocent literary games do exist, Vvedensky’s recourse to the Petersburg myth is not one of them. Bolshevik propaganda of the 1920s conscripted the imagery of the myth to reorient its apocalyptic elements from the future onto the recent past: the collapse of the old regime and the coming of the Revolution. The authorities marked the onset of a new order of centuries by renaming the city of Peter after Lenin (1924) and by raising a monument to the latter on top of an armored car to supersede the Bronze Horseman (1926). Artworks celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, such as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film The End of St. Petersburg, similarly drew on the Petersburg myth to recast its apocalyptic theme as a redemptive one. Here Vvedensky and his friends struck a discordant note. The name Kharms invented for the city, “Leterburg,” in English “Lethesburg,” after the Greek river of oblivion (with a fainter pun on “letters” and “literature”), imagined St. Petersburg, split apart by the Never river, as the metropolis of the dead. Kharms’s wordplay found echoes in Vvedensky’s hieroglyph of the underwater city, as well as the novels of OBERIU member Konstantin Vaginov, whose characters spend their days rummaging in imperial detritus, unable to go backward or forward.

  The increasingly hard-line Stalinist environment of the 1930s intensified the apocalyptic sensations of the underground circle around Vvedensky, whose members were cut off from the possibility of publication or recognition as “adult” writers, riven by personal disagreements, and finally, hit by the waves of arrests. Their writing now conveyed the sense of living in the last days: during the phantasmagoric reign of the Antichrist, taking place between the first heaves of the apocalypse and its promised end, when “A dead gentleman runs in / and silently removes time.” The arrival of World War II in the Soviet Union confirmed their premonitions.

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  What is Vvedensky’s place in the Russian early-twentieth-century canon as it is understood today? Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov: Older than OBERIU poets by more than a decade, they met the Revolution as public figures and had books published in the Soviet period. Unpublished until more than over fifty years after his death, Vvedensky could not influence subsequent poets until the closing years of the century. Baby boomers, who grew up on more straightforward modernism, still can’t figure him out. I once asked a friend of my parents, an erudite and sensitive St. Petersburg literary critic, what he thought of Vvedensky’s poetry. “Vvedensky?” he exclaimed. “But he’s a schizophrenic!” I also asked Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky started reciting Vvedensky’s “Elegy,” then cut to Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End.” “Well, it’s obvious who is better,” he explained. I used to tell this story as an example of how the deep meaning of some words, like “obvious,” is the exact opposite of their surface meaning.

  I am correcting this essay in the days after the trial of Pussy Riot, a punk feminist collective charged with blasphemy for staging an anti-Putin protest inside the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. From the defendant’s bench—cage, actually—the young women, whose eloquence, intelligence, and erudition fully match their great civic courage, did more than denounce the collusion of a state headed by one former KGB agent with a church headed by another. They also argued that the creation of a society based on civil rights requires the help of the humanities and the arts, even arts of the most contemporary, experimental, and provocative kind. Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, a twenty-two-year-old philosophy student at Moscow State University, evoked Vvedensky in her closing statement:

  Katya, Masha, and I are now in prison...but I do not consider us defeated. Just as the [late Soviet] dissidents were not defeated: As they disappeared in insane asylums and prisons, they passed judgment upon the state.... Similarly, the OBERIU poets remained artists to the end, they remained outside explanation or understanding. As Vvedensky wrote: “We’re tickled by what is unknown, the inexplicable is our friend.”...Pussy Riot are the disciples and heirs of Vvedensky. His principle of “poor rhyme” is our own. He said, “Sometimes I think up two rhymes, a good and a poor one, and I pick the poor one, because it is the one that is right.”...The highbrow and refined pursuits of the OBERIU poets, their search for thought on the edge of meaning, were realized at the cost of their lives, carried away by the meaningless and entirely inexplicable Great Terror. At the cost of their lives, the OBERIU poets inadvertently proved that their basic sensation of meaninglessness and alogism was correct: They had felt the nerve of their epoch. Thus art rose to the level of history. Participation in the making of history always exacts an unbearable toll on an individual, but it is this participation that harbors the kernel of human existence: to be paupers but to enrich many, to have nothing but to own everything. The dissidents and the poets of OBERIU are thought to be dead, but they are alive. They are punished, but they do not die.

  Eugene Ostashevsky

  [1] Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Polnoe sobranie proizvedenii v dvukh tomakh, 2 vols., eds. Mikhail Meilakh and Vladimir Erl’ (Moscow: Gileia, 1993), 2:152–54.

  [2] Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Vsio, ed. Anna Gerasimova (Moscow: OGI, 2010), 703.

  [3] Vvedenskii, Polnoe, 2:144–45.

  [4] Vvedenskii, Vsio, 718–19.

  [5] “...Sborishche druzei, ostavlennykh sud’boiu.” A. Vvedenskii, L. Lipavskii, Ia. Druskin, D. Kharms, N. Oleinikov: “Chinari” v tekstakh, dokumentakh i issledovaniiakh: v dvukh tomakh, 2 vols., ed. V. N. Sazhin et al. (Moscow: privately printed, 1998), 2:535–36. The vocabulary of the confession comes from the interrogator. While members of OBERIU denied any affinity between their work and Futurist sound poetry, the state applied the term zaum to any deviation from the realist code.

  [6] Leonid Lipavskii, Issledovanie uzhasa, ed. Valerii Sazhin (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2005), 407.

  [7] Translated in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, ed. and tr. Eugene Ostashevsky, also tr. Matvei Yankelevich et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 5–59.

  [8] Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, The Man with the Black Coat: Russia’s Literature of the Absurd, ed. and trans. George Gibian (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 201–29. For Kharms, see Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, ed. and trans. Matvei Yankelevich (New York: Overlook Press, 2009).

  [9] Vvedenskii, Polnoe, 2:174–76.

  [10] Lipavskii, 323.

  [11] Solomov Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 266.

  An Invitation

  for Me to Think

  The Mirror and the Musician

  for Nikolai Zabolotsky

  A room with a mirror. Before the mirror stands the musician Prokofiev. In the mirror stands Ivan Ivanovich.

  PROKOFIEV, MUSICIAN

  Ivan Ivanovich, you’re sad

  you’re glum and sullen and unhappy

  you’re looking down like a cloud

  Ivan Ivanovich, mon amour

  IVAN IVANOVICH, beginning to feel comfortable:

  Amour as in river

  or as in god with quiver?

  if river

  then I’m watery

  if god

  then my mind is sanitary

  PROKOFIEV, MUSICIAN

  you are a god of course. Look

  the firm flowers yellow

  inside their pebble is insane

  they are curious circles

  the signs of numerous he answered

  IVAN IVANOVICH

  and have you rendered them a visit?<
br />
  PROKOFIEV, MUSICIAN

  how else? I visited not once

  let’s say in my imagination...

  IVAN IVANOVICH

  and so?

  PROKOFIEV, MUSICIAN

  oh it’s the same thing there

  as with us

  assume a star looks out

  from its nest

  and starts to fly as if it were a fly

  I perk up my ear instantaneously

  in silence I become a beast

  I sharpen my sense of smell

  here I have become immobile

  and sat on a stool

  and stood like a stile

  to catch the breath of the star

  the misery monotonous of sky

  then I sat down on a chair

  then I admired the heavens’ picture

  IVAN IVANOVICH

  what was the look of it?

  PROKOFIEV, MUSICIAN

  ’twas sad and dark

  incomprehensible for me and clever

  look, in a grave passage

  deaf howls the sea

  the boat hops like a flea

  its appendages are sore

  O boat you are ill

  from your feet to your throat

  a man cools down in the boat

  looks for thoughts in his head

  to comprehend and explain

  learn the thread of movement

  what’s your name creature?