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Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Redko, Philip Leon. 2019. Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth- Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts). Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41121299 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 Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts) A dissertation presented by Philip Leon Redko to The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Slavic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts December 2018 ã 2018 - Philip Leon Redko. All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Stephanie Sandler Philip Leon Redko Boundary Issues in Three Twentieth-Century Russian Poets (Mandelstam, Aronzon, Shvarts) Abstract This dissertation examines works by three twentieth-century Russian poets in which the construction, dismantling, crossing, and blurring of boundaries plays an important role. Boundaries are understood in a variety of ways––as personal, political, and formal constructs–– and all three poets engage with boundaries in situations where their poetry indirectly comments on itself as poetry. Their engagement with boundaries calls attention to issues of poetic creation and reception, and dramatizes processes and relations that would otherwise remain wholly implicit, such as the writing process, the circulation of texts, ideas, and images, and the formation and deformation of traditions. Close readings of individual poems focus on poetic and cultural exchange, encounters with various forms of alterity, negotiations between abstract and material aspects of poetic language, and the relationship between poetic tradition and historical reality. Chapter One traces Osip Mandelstam’s conceptions of the poetic image across three groups of poems written in late 1933 and early 1934; Mandelstam valorizes images that are dynamic, fleeting, and oblique, and shows how these kinds of images resist deformation when a poet’s work becomes part of the cultural landscape. Chapter Two looks at framing devices and interartistic discourse in the poetry of Leonid Aronzon, and shows how Aronzon draws on both classic and marginalized strands of the Russian poetic tradition to create a homespun personal canon meant for a small audience of friends. Chapter Three compares two works by Elena Shvarts, in which the protagonists engage in forms of creativity outside of or adjacent to artistic iii production; these extraliterary creative practices are marked by intensive engagement with notions of selfhood, authority, and responsibility, and touch on the question of the poet’s exceptionalism, as well as the relationship between creative genius and power. All three poets wrote from the margins of the Soviet literary establishment; by playing with boundaries, their work questions and resists dominant cultural paradigms, and explores strategies for wresting something from power, evading it, or even assuming its mantle. iv Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments vi Introduction Virtual Borders as Sites of Mediation, Exchange, and Potential in Russian Poetry 1 Chapter One Elusive Nearness: Love, Death, and the Human Image in Mandelstam’s Poems of 1933-34 46 Chapter Two You Come to Bed Through Landscapes: Aporia, Framing, and the Sister Arts in Aronzon 132 Chapter Three The Monster in the Tower: Creativity Between Life and Art in Two Works by Elena Shvarts 206 Conclusion 276 Appendix: Aronzon’s visual poems and typescripts 281 Bibliography 290 v Acknowledgments I am grateful, first and foremost, to the members of my committee – Stephanie Sandler, Daria Khitrova, and Aleksandra Kremer. Their guidance and encouragement were indispensable, and their insights helped shape every facet of this work. I am especially grateful to Professor Sandler, who has been a mentor to me throughout graduate school, beginning with a seminar on Russian poetry after Brodsky whose influence is readily apparent even in these pages. I am also thankful to other members of the Slavic Department, past and present, who were generous with their time and ideas; in particular, this dissertation would never have been written without the help of John Malmstad and Joanna Niżyńska. Professor Malmstad’s seminars on Russian poetry and poetic traditions––some of which I took as an undergraduate––made me the close reader I am today, and Professor Niżyńska helped me find my voice as a scholar by pushing me to think way outside my comfort zone. Lenia Constantinou made the administrative side of dissertation writing totally painless – thank you. Ainsley Morse and Philipp Penka helped talk me through many of the ideas in this dissertation, and continue to be inspired and inspiring interlocutors. Finally, I want to thank Maria Vassileva for her help at every stage, and look forward to returning the favor. vi INTRODUCTION Virtual Borders as Sites of Mediation, Exchange, and Potential in Russian Poetry The eye drops, weighted, through the lines the burin made, the lines that move apart like ripples above sand, dispersing storms, God’s spreading fingerprint, and painfully, finally, that ignite in watery, prismatic white-and-blue. – Elizabeth Bishop In her poem “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” Elizabeth Bishop takes a familiar household object, an illustrated family bible, and uses it as a portal for imaginary travel.1 By contemplating the bible’s engravings, the poem’s speaker accesses a seemingly random sequence of travel memories. This imaginary journey takes place at the intersection of memory, fantasy, history, and belief, and ends with Bishop calling the seeming stability and orderliness of these mental categories into question. The lines quoted above describe the moment of access: the “weighted” eye drops through the etched surface of the print into an intermediary space where the materiality of the contemplated object coexists with the visionary journeys it will inspire – albeit in embryonic form. The direction these journeys will take is foreshadowed with metaphor: the etched lines are compared to a desert landscape, then to turbulent weather, and finally to “God’s spreading fingerprint.” But the decisive moment comes right after, when the lines “ignite.” Here, Bishop emphasizes the affinity between imaginative access and pain, as the speaker’s discomfort and anticipation are uncannily echoed by the repetition of adverbial endings: “painfully, finally.” 1 Elizabeth Bishop, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 57. The engraving in the poem, or rather, the transitional space the engraving opens into, functions as a virtual border. This border is a little like a line dividing distinct states from one another (and is in fact made up of lines), but it is also a lot like a zone. Unlike the borderline, which restricts and delineates, creating opposable binaries and facilitating regimentation and hierarchization (while also, perhaps usefully, setting up limits), the border zone is ambiguous and fluctuating. However uneasily, it supports multiple possibilities and an overlay of states. The virtual border zone in Bishop’s poem is a transitional space where the ambiguities of personal and collective experience are brought into play and made vivid but not explicit. Even as it opens out into memory and other alternative realities, it never stops being a tangible, material artifact. Bishop dwells at length on the tactile side of this virtual experience, where hand and eye work in concert with each other and with imagination: “Open the book,” she writes in the poem’s final section, adding in parentheses: “The gilt rubs off the edges / of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.” In its creation of a border zone that is fantastic and palpable at the same time, “Over 2,000 Illustrations” resembles an earlier poem by Bishop called “The Map” (1934). There, an overlay of times, places, and mental states is conjured by an ordinary map, which comes to life as though animated by the speaker’s constant questioning. “Names of seashore towns run out to sea” and “names of cities cross the neighboring mountains,” as though excited by an overflow of emotion; shorelines “investigate the sea”; and Norway, imagined as an anxious hare, “runs south in agitation.”2 We are used to thinking of maps as static representations, but Bishop shows them to be dynamic, full of tension and uncertainty, vibrating with potential movement, displacement, and negotiation. Bishop’s speaker doesn’t just behold the map, she touches it, with hand as well 2 Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map,” in The Complete Poems, 3. 2 as mind: “We can stroke these lovely bays, / Under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,” she writes. The map seems to come alive to the language of touch, an appreciation of texture and thickness: “These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger / Like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.” Contemplation is where the visual and tactile join forces, imbuing the contemplated object with emotion as well as other kinds of resonances: moral, aesthetic, and political. The map’s ambiguities, and the delicacy and liveliness of its borders, emerge out of the same resonances. Even with a two-dimensional, schematic representation such as this map, everything is transitional and provisional, capable of revealing things about the world that history cannot. Bishop’s map both depicts the animation and fluidity that exists between seemingly static, bounded territories, and is itself a virtual border, a transitional space mediating between the speaker’s inner world and the world at large.