The Objects of Russian and American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1905-1945
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Device: The Objects of Russian and American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1905-1945 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Weinstein, Michael M. 2017. Device: The Objects of Russian and American Avant-Garde Poetry, 1905-1945. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41142040 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2017 Michael M. Weinstein All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Professor Stephen Burt Michael M. Weinstein Device: The Objects of Russian and American Poetry Avant-Garde Poetry, 1905-1945 Abstract Many histories of the relationship between Russian and American lyric poetry in the twentieth century begin with four, California-based Language poets’ 1989 journey to Leningrad for a conference with their Russian contemporaries. When they arrived, these writers—Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Michael Davidson, and Ron Silliman—found the innovations of the Russian Formalists and Futurists reflected in their Russian contemporaries’ treatment of the poem itself as an object. This dissertation offers the prehistory of that cross-cultural encounter, from the pre-revolutionary moment of Futurism to the rise of Stalinism and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It recounts the history of Russian and American avant-garde poetry in the twentieth century as the story of a shared idea: namely, that the material object offered a conceptual model or ideal for the poem. The project takes the form of a series of comparative case studies, detailing the often- parallel histories of Russian and American poets’ relationships to this idea. It discusses the work of Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Mayakovsky, George Oppen, and Aleksandr Vvedensky. It argues that the notion of the poem as an object unites these poets, and their respective poetic traditions, and serves to illuminate their shared aesthetic, philosophical, and political concerns over the course of the last century. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Introduction Objects and Objections 1 Chapter I The Objects of Abstraction: Velimir Khlebnikov and Gertrude Stein 25 Chapter II Between Montage and Monument: William Carlos Williams, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Poetry’s Revolutionary Objects 97 Chapter III The Ruins of the Everyday: George Oppen and Aleksandr Vvedensky 183 Conclusion Beyond the Object 258 Appendix to Chapter II 272 Works Cited 307 iv Acknowledgments A dissertation is never quite finished, even when it enters the annals of the registrar’s office or the online database. My work on the topics discussed here is ongoing, and I owe much of the progress I have made on that work thus far to the support, insight, and care of others. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee first and foremost. Steph Burt offered to advise my dissertation all the way back in my second year and has been open to all the directions the project has taken, even while holding me to an uncompromising intellectual standard. Peter Sacks generously joined my committee midway through, bringing his incredible critical acumen to bear on these pages while offering generous encouragement, ensuring that this process was not merely awful, but cheerful. Lastly, although I came to her from a different department with little besides my enthusiasm, Stephanie Sandler took me on as her advisee and has been a tireless interlocutor for this project. Her comments have kept me honest and kept me hopeful. As both teacher and scholar, she has modeled for me an approach to cross-cultural, cross-linguistic literary scholarship that I aim to continue beyond these walls. Many other scholars and colleagues helped to shape this project in its earlier stages, including the members of the Harvard American Literature Colloquium, the Harvard Slavic Colloquium, the Yale Slavic Colloquium, and the attendees of multiple conferences, here and abroad. Particular thanks are due to the Slavicists who have invited me into the fold, including Katerina Clark, Daria Khitrova, Marijeta Bozovic, Molly Brunson, Geoff Cebula, Ania Aizman, Bela Shayevich, and the incomparable Ainsley Morse. In less formal contexts, several friends have offered advice and perspective, including Elizabeth Plantan, Elizabeth Metzger, Calista McRae, David Nee, and Elizabeth Weckhurst. Finally, throughout the past five years, Jorie Graham has exerted a singular influence over my work. She has taught me to write for my own best reader—a role which she herself has often served. Thanks to her, I will never write, or read, the same way again. Several institutions have also made this project possible, including the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Dexter Fund of the Harvard English Department, and several travel grants from Harvard that have allowed me to attend conferences in both Russia and the U.S. As institutions depend upon their administrators, so, too, has my graduate career depended on the support of Gwen Urdang-Brown, Case Kerns, Sol Kim-Bentley, and others in the English Department offices. This dissertation is dedicated to several people, two of whom will not read it. The first is Matthew, my true north—the pole towards which my compass of what matters is ever re- orienting itself. The second is Selma, who always said of the dissertation, “Write it today, and turn it in tomorrow.” She wanted to be here for this. My life—and most of what I have done with it—I owe to my parents. Thank you for keeping a huge dictionary in our kitchen, and for pointing to it whenever I asked what a word meant. Thank you for your love. And lastly, to my most brilliant, generous, relentless reader, Marta Figlerowicz. Your infernal optimism has kept this thing going. I could not have done it without you. v Introduction: Objects and Objections What is an object? The ambiguities inherent in this seemingly most concrete and empirical of entities gave rise to many of the twentieth century’s most politically and aesthetically revolutionary works of art. To writers in the first half of the last century, the object seems to have been both increasingly compelling and increasingly suspect, the more closely they scrutinized it as a category. Were objects always concrete, or could they also be abstract? Were objects generic, particular, or some combination of both? Could one categorize objects on the basis of their relative functionality or uselessness? And was there a way to talk about objects’ autonomy that did not subjugate them to the laws and limits of human perception? There were, as I hope to show, serious questions at the heart of the often playful approach that many poets of the avant-garde took to these matters. As a concept, the material object is tantalizingly referential and yet weirdly immaterial; considering that objects’ primary characteristic is (to borrow a phrase of George Oppen’s) “that they are there,” objects, as a general category of phenomena, are paradoxically hard to lay one’s hands on. These paradoxes gave rise to aesthetic developments that are strikingly analogous, and often aesthetically congruent, in two cultures which the past century has tended to brand as opposites and rivals in all things: Russia and the United States. The modernist fascination with objects is a product of a number of political, economic, social, and technological factors that are not unique to the United States and Russia but that took on a special salience—and some very particular forms— in the art and literature of those countries, as compared with those of Western Europe. This study focuses on Russian and American writers who tend to be seen as members, or descendants, of the avant-garde. Although some overlap 1 obviously exists between the categories of “modernist” and “avant-garde,” for the purposes of this project, I treat the former as primarily a historical category, whereas the latter refers to writers and artists within the modernist period (broadly construed) who shared certain aesthetic and ideological concerns and commitments, whether they produced art in Russia or in the West. In arguing that the work of the various writers discussed here was shaped by dialectical thinking, this project builds on Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), in which “the turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended the mode in which it functioned in bourgeois society, [i.e.] its own social status. The historical avant-garde…was the first movement in art history that turned against the institution ‘art’ and the mode in which [art’s] autonomy functions.”1 It also contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the Western avant-garde across media (as in the work of Andreas Huyssen, Marjorie Perloff, and Daniel Albright),2 and on the Russian avant-garde in relation to other cultural formations (as in the work of Jacob Edmond and Steven Lee).3 The historical period in question, for the sake of this study, runs from the early careers of writers in the first avant-garde generation (circa 1905) to the start of the Second World War and including, in the American context, the art works of its immediate aftermath. I hope to show how the avant-garde’s object-focused aesthetic arose out of unusual (and strikingly analogous) conditions in Russia and the U.S., and gave rise to similar stylistic innovations in poetry, even as profound cultural and linguistic differences ensured that 1 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde.” In Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.