Figures of Clarity: Three Poets’ Voyage toward an Intelligible Poetics. Maria Doubrovskaia Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 ©2018 Maria Doubrovskaia All rights reserved ABSTRACT Figures of Clarity: Three Poets’ Voyage toward an Intelligible Poetics Maria Doubrovskaia The 1910 polemic on the “crisis of Symbolism” began when the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov read a lecture entitled the “Precepts of Symbolism.” This lecture initiated a lively debate on the status of this prominent literary movement, to which many of the leading literary figures of the Silver Age contributed. Although the “crisis of Symbolism” has garnered a great deal of scholarly interest, an important aspect of this debate has remained unexplored. Ivanov’s lecture contained an attack on the notion of clarity, which he interpreted as the word’s “transparency” to reason. He argued that language is neither an adequate expression of thought, nor an accurate representation of “reality.” The lecture was itself a polemical response to a brief article written by Ivanov’s friend, Mikhail Kuzmin, and entitled “On Beautiful Clarity: Notes on Prose.” Published a few months before Ivanov’s lecture, this essay urged respect for the word, advocated such Classical values as precision, economy of means and clarity of expression. Both “On Beautiful Clarity” and the “Precepts of Symbolism” appeared at a time when pervasive loss of faith in the communicative power of language combined with the sense of social and cultural malaise led to a profound crisis that far exceeded the ranks of the Symbolists. Between 1910 and 1917, a number of Russian writers and thinkers proclaimed the word “dead” and offered programs for its revival. For Ivanov, clarity was an Enlightenment notion that he associated with rationalism and blamed for the ills of his age. For Kuzmin, however, clarity represented poetic rather than empirical meaningfulness and had little to do with the kind of empirical “transparency” that Ivanov had in mind. Both poets were after the same goal: a poetics that would bridge the perceived divide between the word and “reality.” Even as Ivanov argued for a language of mystical obscurity in the hope that such an idiom would restore the mystery and meaning of which he believed his age was sapped, he replaced clarity with a kind of Symbolist intelligibility and so a clarity of his own. This dissertation examines Viacheslav Ivanov’s, Mikhail Kuzmin’s and Osip Mandelshtam’s distinct approaches to the concept of clarity as poetic sense, formulated by these poets independently as well as in response to each other. I argue that for all three poets the notion of clarity applies to the specific relationship between the poet and the word, between the image and the word, and between the semantic content and the sound within the word. Since for all three poets, clarity is associated not only with the poetic logos in general, but specifically with the heritage of European Classicism, the Classical ideal works its way into these relationships as the “image” of sense to which the poet must aspire. For each poet, poetic clarity is an explicit concept as well an individual “model” implicit in his poetic identity. Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..ii Note on the Translation and Transliteration………...……………………………………………iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1. The Origins of Clarity and Clarity as the Idea of Origins……………………………23 Chapter 2. The “Identity Poetics” of Viacheslav Ivanov………………………………………...65 Chapter 3. The Clear Glass: Mikhail Kuzmin against St. Paul…………………………………113 Chapter 4. Speech as ‘Epic Gesture’: Osip Mandelshtam’s Response to the Debate on Clarity………………………………………………………………………………..168 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...228 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………238 i Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to all who guided me in the process of bringing this project to its completion. Boris Gasparov, my dissertation sponsor, has expertly helped me navigate one of the most complex and multifaceted incidents in Russian literary history. His faith in my project, not to mention his contribution to the scholarship on the subject itself, has been a great source of inspiration to me. I would like to thank Liza Knapp, my second reader, not only for her insightful commentary on this dissertation, but for her utmost professionalism and commitment to the project. Liza’s advice has guided me on numerous occasions throughout my Columbia years. With her help, I learned to be a better teacher, reader and writer. I will always be grateful for that. I thank Christopher Harwood for his truly illuminating analysis of my writing. Christopher’s astute and witty commentary is itself a pleasure to read. His criticism has already been invaluable to this dissertation and will remain so as I continue to work on this project. Both Liza and Christopher have been extraordinarily generous with their time and energy. Without their “grace under pressure” the defense of this dissertation would not have happened. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Catherine Evtuhov and Anna Frajlich-Zajac, my fourth and fifth readers, for stepping in on very short notice. I would also like to thank my wonderful team of translators and editors. Genevieve Arlie was the first reader on my friends’ committee. She has edited the first chapter of this dissertation and translated all the Russian texts into English. Kirsten Lodge offered her expert skills as the translator of Kuzmin’s prose and poetry in the second chapter. Margo Shohl Rosen performed the impressive feat of translating Mandelshtam’s poetry and prose into English. As if that were not enough, she also translated Andrei Bely and every other bit of Russian that appears in the third chapter. Finally, I thank Leah Friedman for editing the footnotes and the bibliography and for transliterating from the Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet. Finally, I would like to say a special thank you to Ona Nierenberg, who has been a steadfast source of kindness, encouragement and insight. Thank you for showing me a new world. ii Note on the translation and transliteration Throughout the dissertation, I use the Library of Congress transliteration system. In the body of the dissertation Russian names are written as they are commonly spelled in English. Genevieve Arlie translated from Russian into English in the first chapter, Kirsten Lodge in the second chapter and Margo Shohl Rosen in the third chapter. iii On Beautiful Unclarity: an Introduction In Russia as in the West the year 1910 marked the time of great cultural upheaval. In Virginia Woolf’s famous essay on Modernist literature, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” the author observed that “human character changed” “in or around” December of that year. She suggested that as a result, “all human relations” were transformed, and that “when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”1 Woolf’s essay, of course, focuses on the latter. The advent of Modernism was not quite as abrupt as Woolf suggests. Rather, it was the result of a complex, nearly pan-global process that took place over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century, now known as the “linguistic turn.” Vladimir Feshchenko’s monograph Laboratory of the Logos provides a thorough overview of international literature dedicated to this shift and outlines its origin in a “complete reevaluation of long-standing scientific and artistic traditions.”2 At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century these transformations were accompanied by a profound sense of crisis in society at large as well as on the level of the individual. Thomas Harrison’s study 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance provides a vivid overview of the kind of new idiom that emerged as the result of this cultural process. The scholar believes that the year 1910 “signals the end of a Western, humanistic tradition” and “the termination of its guiding objective.” According to Harrison, the prevalent idiom of the period 1 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 2-3. 2 Vladimir Feshchenko, Laboratoriia logosa: iazykovoi eksperiment v avangardnom tvorchestve (Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur), 29. The author lists some of the major modernist projects that defined the “linguistic turn” of the first half of the 20th century: reconstruction of the Hebrew language, considered “dead” since the first century AD, “purification” of Turkish language, creation of literary Norwegian and Estonian languages, creation of artificial languages such as Esperanto, experimental literary movements in France, Great Britain, Russia and other countries, emergence of formalism in literature, structuralism in linguistics and ethnology, etc. 1 between 1908 and 1914 was predicated upon the contradiction between the drive for self- realization and the inability to overcome the pervasive sense of “self-loss” that yielded this drive in the first place. Numerous iconic texts and artworks that date to this time probe the creative potential of discord between experience and language.3 One such text is Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony (1911), in which the composer outlined the process whereby he broke with the rules of consonance and embraced the language of musical discord. Harrison observes that the entire Theory of Harmony is “presented as though it were nothing more than an internal conversation <…> Aiming only ‘to make things clear to himself,’ the artist pursues clarity in open confusion.”4 According to the scholar, in the years leading up to World War I the vacuum left by the disappearance of the overarching humanist “guiding objective” inspired artists to seek subjective, personal clarity amidst “dissonance.” In Russia the question of discord and clarity also emerged in the year 1910, where it was interpreted according to Russia’s specific historical and cultural situation.