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Vyacheslav I. Ivanov's Poem “Nudus Salta!” and the Purpose of Art1 Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “nudus salta!” and The Purpose of art 1 How painful to walk among people And pretend to those who have not perished, And talk about the game of tragic passions To those who have not lived as yet. And, peering into one’s own dark nightmare, To find order in the disordered whirlwind of feelings, So that by art’s pale glow They would learn of life’s fatal fire! [Kak tiazhelo khodit’ sredi liudei I pritvoriat’sia nepogibshim, I ob igre tragicheskoi strastei Povestvovat’ eshche ne zhivshim. I, vgliadyvaias’ v svoi nochnoi koshmar, Stroi nakhodit’ v nestroinom vikhre chuvstva, Chtoby po blednym zarevam iskusstva Uznali zhizni gibel’noi pozhar!] —Alexandr Blok, May 10, 1910 I heard a call from heaven: “Abandon, priest, the temple decorated by devils.” And I fled . [Ia slyshal s neba zov: “Pokin’, sluzhitel’, khram ukrashennyi besov.” I ia bezhal . .] —Vyacheslav I. Ivanov, “Palinodiia,” 1937 1 From Russian Literature 44 (October, 1998): 289-302. 306 Critical Perspectives “Nudus salta! The purpose of art— Uncovered, unfettered To show what you are, To relate the dark sensations Of hidden sanctuaries— All that swarms in potholes Under the glittering, smooth ice— To unseal the dead house, Where hides from light of day Unconscious Sodom.” Sacred to me is the enclosure of the Muses. To the fires of pure altars My gift—the best lamb of the herd And fruits, the first of the garden, Not a nest of bats. Dear to the Muses are the mountain rock spring And in the deserts of nature Caraway and thyme and wild grass. Pour purifying waters, After turning away, into the underground darkness. [“Nudus salta! Tsel’ iskusstva— Bez pokrovov, bez okov Pokazat’, kto ty takov, Temnye povedat’ chuvstva Zapovednykh tainikov— Vse, chto v omutakh roitsia Pod blestiashchim, gladkim l’dom— Raspechatat’ mertvyi dom, Gde ot bela dnia taitsia Podsoznatel’nyi Sodom.” —Mne sviashchenna Muz ograda. Zharu chistykh altarei Dar moi—agnets luchshii stada I plody, perviny sada, Ne gnezdo netopyrei. Muzam gornyi kliuch porody Mil i v pustyniakh prirody Chobr i tmin, i dikii zlak. Lei chistitel’nye vody, Otvratias’, v podzemnyi mrak.] —Vyacheslav I. Ivanov Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “nudus salta!” and The Purpose of art 307 Ivanov’s untitled poem “Nudus salta! Tsel’ iskusstva” (“Dance naked! The Purpose of Art”) appears in his Roman Notebook (Rimskii dnevnik, 1944) and is dated February 18, 1944.2 Three earlier versions of the poem date from February 15 through February 17, 1944.3 In those few days, the poem underwent some small, but significant, changes. “Nudus salta!” consists of four stanzas of five lines each. On the semantic plane, the poem may be divided into two parts, each consisting of two stanzas (referred to in this discussion as parts one and two). The first two stanzas of the poem appear in quotation marks. At the opening of poem, an unnamed speaker, the poet’s antagonist, issues a command, “Nudus salta!” (Dance naked!), declaring in sum that the “purpose of art” is to disclose without inhibition the carnal underground of human nature.4 Art in this perspective engages in a kind of erotic danse macabre. In part two of “Nudus salta!” that is, the third and fourth stanzas of the poem, the poet himself steps forth, and without engaging in any direct polemic with his unnamed antagonist on the question of 2 See Ivanov’s collection of poems entitled Rimskii dnevnik (1944) in Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. (Bruxelles: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1979), 3:594–595. 3 The original variants may be found in the archives of Vyacheslav I. Ivanov in Rome. 4 Ivanov’s allusions in the first two stanzas of “Nudus salta!” are unmistakably to the ancient Greek “Mysteries of Dionysus,” a religious cult of suffering and sacrificial death; this cult was characterized by orgiastic passion rites in which music and dance and drink liberated worshippers from inhibitions and restraints, social and sexual, and plunged them into a state of Dionysian “rapture” and “madness.” Ivanov discussed, and in a certain sense, celebrated the Dionysian cult in his series of lectures The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God: An Essay in a Religious and Historical Description (Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga: Opyt religiozno-istoricheskoi kharakteristiki”) published in Novyi put’ in 1904, and later in his unpublished manuscript of the same title and work in 1917. Ivanov embraced the Roman Catholic faith in Rome in 1926, and in the 1920s and 1930s underwent a religious-spiritual renewal. In his poem “Nudus salta!” composed during World War II, Ivanov casts a critical eye at the darker side of the Dionysian cult, even as he remains captivated by transcendental elements of the Dionysian cult. Citations in this essay to Ivanov’s important study Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God refer to a translation (in process) of this work by Dr. Carol Anschuetz. The Russian original manuscript is in the archives of Vyacheslav Ivanov in Rome. 308 Critical Perspectives the purpose of art, announces his devout commitment to the Muses and to both a classical and pastoral world where art and the artist are characterized by their sacrificial and devotional functions. In the final line of the poem, the poet returns to the theme of the underground and suggests that the artist can play a role by tempering underground passions. Part one of the poem posits a Dionysian netherworld of “dark . sensations” (temnye . chuvstva), a chthonic realm of passions out of sight and off limits. The unknown speaker calls for a kind of artistic bacchanalia in which one would dance “uncovered” (bez pokrovov) and “unfettered” (bez okov) and would “show what you are” (pokazat’, kto ty takov). He alludes darkly to a “hidden sanctuary” (zapovednyi tainik),5 roiling “potholes” (omuty)6 under the ice (pod l’dom),7 and finally, to a “dead house” (mertvyi dom), where lies hidden from light of day “unconscious Sodom” (podsoznatel’nyi Sodom)—a reference that would seem to encompass both the notion of a repressed subconscious world of unbridled sexual impulse and desire and the idea of almost anthropomorphic Sodom. Ivanov’s end rhymes in the second stanza (l’dom, mertvyi dom, Sodom), foregrounding the sound and word “dom” (house) lead the reader to the nethermost house of debauchery: Sodom. In an early draft of “Nudus salta!” the “dead house” is in fact a place where “where an unconscious Sodom is hiding from punishment” (gde ot Bozh’ikh kar taitsia / podsoznatel’nyi Sodom). In a second version of the poem, “a spellbound Sodom” (zakoldovannyi Sodom) is hiding from God’s punishment. In the final version of the 5 For a discussion of Ivanov’s concept of “Zapovednyi tainik,” see footnote 12 of this essay. 6 “Omut”—pothole, whirlpool, deep hollows at the bottom of a river where currents swirl. A well-known Russian proverb runs “V tikhom omute cherti vodiatsia,” literally, “in a quiet hollow under the water devils are at play”; figuratively, “a quiet, reserved person is capable of doing things that one would never expect of them.” 7 “Pod l’dom” (under the ice): the phrase “l’dom” may be an indirect reference to the once popular historical novel, The Ice Palace (Ledianoi dom, 1835) by Ivan I. Lazhechnikov (1792–1869). The “ice house” or “ice palace” actually existed. In Lazhechnikov’s novel, it is is a symbol of the despotic reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna; it casts a shadow on all aspects of the novel’s intrigue and passions. The veiled allusion to the “ice palace,” then, is a fitting image for Ivanov’s dark and ominous underworld. Vyacheslav I. Ivanov’s Poem “nudus salta!” and The Purpose of art 309 poem, Ivanov replaces the words “from God’s punishment” (ot Bozh’ikh kar) with “from the light of day” (ot bela dnia), thus veiling the notion that “Sodom” is perhaps the devil, the great antagonist of God, and that our violent sexual unconscious or subconscious has been confined here in some kind of spellbound state. These suppositions are echoed in somewhat different imagery in Ivanov’s early study, The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (Ellinskaia religiia stradaiushchego boga, 1904; 1917), where he writes that “the principle of cosmos and order in everything, having effected a profound transformation of our inner primeval chaos yet not transformed it altogether, has outwardly subdued it and confined it to the sphere of the subconscious, whence it breaks out volcanically in destructive eruptions.”8 Our violent carnal instincts, Ivanov suggests in “Nudus salta!” have been committed to a deep dungeon or “dead house.” Art’s purpose, according to the unnamed speaker, is explore and celebrate its interior. On the esthetic plane, his command to “unseal the dead house” (raspechatat’ mertvyi dom) is a call to depict the human nature in a wholly naturalistic way, that is, to show people what they are. The corollary of this naturalism on the plane of human behavior is that everything is permissible. Naturalism for Ivanov, as for Dostoevsky, posits a thoroughly despiritualized view of the world; it is evidence of moral-esthetic bankrupcy. The image and concept of a “dead house” in Ivanov’s poem, of course, signals Dostoevsky’s strong moral and literary presence. The call to unseal the “dead house” and to awaken the unconscious Sodom brings to mind Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1861–1862), where a world of violence and moral degradation is disclosed in a variety of ways. Yet in a more direct way, the poem echoes the lubricious and lugubrious world of “contemporary corpses” in Dostoevsky’s fantasy-grotesque, “Bobok.
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