MEL GORDON

VALENTIN PARNAKH, APOSTLE OF ECCENTRIC DANCE

"Dear God, do not make me like Parnok." (, "The Egyptian Stamp")

The raucous sound and presentation of American jazz-and the novelty dances associated with it-enthused and confounded theatrical during the frenzied and wildly-innovative season of 1922-23. Between September 1922 and April 1923, writers and reviewers for the major entertainment weeklies, Zrelishcha [Spectaclesi and Teatralnaia Moskva (Theatrical Moscow], attempted to define jazz music and register its visual and scenic incarnations (the jazz-band, Shimmy, and Charleston) within an authentic social and national context, befitting the needs of the first workers' state. Avant-garde directors, choreographers, and-two sea- sons later-composers in Moscow also struggled to capture the genuine, syncopated rhythms, discordant arrangements, and disembodied gesticu- lations of this haunting form from the dance palaces of the Capitalist West. At the center of the debate to understand American jazz and ap- propriate its astonishing movement possibilities was Valentin Yakovlevich Parnakh (1891-1951), a tragicomic artist manque with distinct Chap- linesque features. Born to a family of Jewish merchants in , a Black Sea port 400 miles east of Odessa, Valentin Parnakh was the younger brother of the minor neo-Symbolist poetess, Sofiia Parnakh (1885-1933), a lesbian partner of and intimate friend of Osip Mandelstam. In the early 1910s, Parnakh toured the major West European cultural cen- ters of Germany, Spain, , and France, obsessively pursuing the latest experimental trends in the visual arts and poetry. When Parnakh arrived in in 1913, he gravitated to the Russian art colony centered in the Latin Quarter. But more than his esthetic interests and literary preten- sions, it was Parnakh's strange physical presence-a freakishly large head on a slight, fragile body-and his hyperkinetic behavior that impressed it- self in the expatriate memories. In a 1979 interview with S. Frederick Starr, Nina Berberova, the Russian writer and cultural historian, still re- membered the diminutive Parnakh "like a jockey, like a leaf."' She could have been just as well been describing Chaplin's Little Tramp or the thou- sands of ridiculous-looking Jewish luftmenshn, on which the character was based. In 1914, Parnakh returned to St. Petersburg, where his neurotic char- acter and desperate Bohemian existence became the inspiration for Mandlestam's 1928 "Bloom in Nightown" like story,'The Egyptian Stamp." Following in his sister's path--who had since converted to Orthodoxy and changed her name twice, finally to the Russified Sofiia Parnok-Parnakh's earliest successes were in poetry and French-to-Russian translations. In 1916, a poem of Parnakh appeared in the third issue of Vsevolod Meierkhold's prestigious journal, Liubov k trem apeisinam [The Love of Three Oranges]. Once again in Paris after the Russian Revolution, Par- nakh completed two volumes of Futurist and -inspired poetry that were published by Russian-language presses: Samum (Paris: Kvo Nah, 1919) and Karabkaetsia akrobat [Clambering Acrobat] (Paris: Franko- russkaia pechat, 1922). The first included three drawings by Natalia Gon- charova, the second had a line-drawing of the author by Picasso together with several of Parnakh's own schematic notations (Figs. 177, 178) In July 1921, Parnakh's life and career changed utterly. At the Tro- cadero nightclub, he witnessed a performance of Louis A. Mitchell's "Jazz Kings," the resident black-American jazz band of Paris. Images of African jungles, Manhattan skyscrapers, and the Wild West all arose in the ador- ing eyes of the French spectators.2 Like those around him, Parnakh was mesmerized by the playful antics of the black musicians and conductor. While prewar ragtime and other American syncopated styles of "hot mu- sic" were rhythmic invitations to stage and floor dancers, with jazz, the orchestra itself created the kinesthetic spectacle; each performer mani- fested a spirited and boisterous personality with a distinct movement vo- cabulary of waves, kicks, flutters, nods, head shakes, bows, foot taps, winks, shoulder turns, and shuffles. For Parnakh, the seemingly impro- vised gestures of the jazz Kings represented something more than amus- ing physical banter, they would be the basis of a new art form, the Eccen- tric Dance. Nineteen twenty-one was the summer of jazz in Paris and Berlin. Some half dozen American jazz bands-like Mitchell's Jazz Kings, who were assembled from the remnants of Negro entertainment units in the American Expeditionary Force-had already traipsed across Europe since

1. S. F. Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of/azz in the (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1983), p. 43. 2. A. Batashev, Sovetskii dzhaz; istoricheskü ocherk (Moscow: Muzyka, 1972), p. 14.