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Poetry As Apophasis; Or, Vvedensky in Love

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Poetry As Apophasis; Or, Vvedensky in Love - 1 - Poetry as Apophasis; or, Vvedensky in Love Thomas Epstein Respect the circumstances of place. Respect what happens. But nothing takes place. Respect the poverty of language. Respect low thoughts. 1 Alexander Vvedensky2 Poetry, language and thought: this is the crossroads at which the poetry of Alexander Vvedensky (1904-1941) takes root. But it is a paradoxical meeting, for what results is not so much a synthesis of this trinity but rather a collision of meanings in which silence triumphs over voice, non-sense over meaning, fragmentation over unity — an unsettling compound that this brief essay will set out to explore. First, though, and especially for the non-Russian reader, a context must be developed — by turns literary, biographical, and cultural — within which to situate our analysis. I Russia has always been a land of profound contrasts: the splendor of St. Petersburg’s numerous palaces and the misery of its general population; the utopianism of Russia’s historical aspirations and the all too frequent nightmare of its various realizations; the greatness of its poetry and the tragedy of so many of its poets. For better or worse, the life of Alexander Vvedensky can serve as a model for what might be called ‘Russian fate.’ 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. The epigraph for this article is taken from the poetic dialogue entitled “A Certain Quantity of Conversations” (1936-37). 2 In normative transliteration his name is Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenskii. For the purposes of this article I have chosen to anglicize his name. - 2 - Alexander Vvedensky was born in St. Petersburg in December 1904 —only months before the Russian revolution of 1905 — into a highly educated and successful family: his father was an economist and his mother one of the city’s leading physicians, no mean feat for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. The years of Vvedensky’s childhood coincided not only with the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution but with what many consider the finest flowering of modern Russian culture, not only in poetry but in music, art, and philosophy. In poetry this period saw the rise of three distinct movements, all of which Vvedensky was exposed to: Symbolism (which comprised two generations, one led by Merezhkovsky, Gippius amd Sologub, the other by Blok, Bely and Ivanov), Futurism (led by Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky) and Acmeism (Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam). In this competitive and highly charged atmosphere Vvedensky nevertheless managed to come to the attention of his elders at a precocious age. By his mid-teenage years he had sent his poetry to his poetic idol Alexander Blok (there was no written answer but what got back to him second-hand was not encouraging); by his twentieth birthday he was under the wing of two of Petersburg’s leading Futurists, the zaumnik Aleksandr Tufanov and the theater director Igor’ Terent’ev; in 1926 he and his poetic comrade-in-arms Daniil Kharms3 had two poems published in the yearly anthology of the Writers Union; soon after that, they were in correspondence with one of the giants of the Soviet poetic avant-garde, Boris Pasternak, and no less an artist than Kazimir Malevich was seeking to collaborate with Vvedensky and Kharms in a venture that was to combine theater, poetry, music and painting; from 1927 to early 1930 he and Kharms were leaders of the last great Soviet-Russian avant-garde organization, Oberiu4; and in 1930 Mikhail Kuzmin was confiding in his diary that he considered Vvedensky the leading light of the young generation. But these, as it turned out, were false signals: the 3 Daniil Kharms (1905-1942, real last name Iuvachev) is the best known of the group of writers and artists centered around Vvedensky and Kharms. Although very little of his poetry has been translated, several excellent volumes of prose are in print. He is also the subject of numerous monographs, the best of which remains Jean-Philippe Jaccard’s Daniil Harms et la fin de l’avant- garde russe (Bern, 1991). 4 Oberiu, or Ob’edinenie real’nogo iskusstva, translates as “The Association for Real Art.” It was a short-lived group (late 1927-early 1930), disbanded under political pressure after the group’s famous, and to many notorious, “Three Left Hours.” Held in December, 1929, this group performance featured theater, poetry, cinema, and music. Oberiu is generally considered the last large-scale avant-garde grouping in post-revolutionary Leningrad. - 3 - publication in the Writers Union anthology proved to be the only publication of adult poetry during his lifetime (like Kharms, Vvedensky wrote children’s verse for economic and social survival). This brief period of acclaim and public visibility was followed by arrest and exile (1931-32), then a return to a Leningrad of danger, obscurity, and semi- starvation. Following the repression of 1936 that cost the lives of many, including one of his best friends (the poet Nikolai Oleinikov), there was a kind of escape, into loneliness and creativity, to Kharkov, the hometown of his third wife. Finally, inevitably, there was his gruesome death in December 1941 from dysentery while on forced transit from Kharkov to Siberia. Although it is true that fate was merciless to all who lived to the 1930s (to mention only three: suicides by Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva, death on the way to internment for Mandel’shtam), Vvedensky’s elders managed to live their poetic, personal and even political lives on the public stage. It was Vvedensky’s fate — and that of millions of others — to be slaughtered in silence and seemingly forgotten forever, consigned to Stalin’s ‘dustbin of history.’ But forever is a long time. And thanks to Yakov Druskin it didn’t come; or at least it hasn’t come yet. This ‘revival’ or second life of Vvedensky (and of Kharms) began with an act of rescue: in December, 1941, in siege-bound Leningrad, Druskin, ill and starving, along with Kharms’s second wife Maria Malich, trudged across the city to Kharms’s bombed-out apartment building to take charge of a trunk full of manuscripts.5 Druskin transported these materials to Siberia during the evacuation of Leningrad, then kept them hidden through the 1940s and 1950s. Only in the 1960s did he begin to share them with an emerging generation of young avant-garde Leningrad artists, poets, and thinkers. (This did not prevent one of them, Mikhail Meilakh, from serving jail time for ‘illegally’ publishing Vvedensky’s complete works abroad, with the Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1979.) What was discovered changed both our understanding and the course of 20th century Russian literature: in Kharms, Vvedensky, Vaginov and Oleinikov the young underground writers of the Leningrad and Moscow 1960s and 70s found the 5 This turned out to be, with a few minor exceptions, the only surviving archive of Vvedensky’s work. Although there is some dispute (Vvedensky himself was legendarily unconcerned about the preservation of his works), the scholar Mikhail Meilakh, who is usually a very reliable source, estimates that we probably have less than twenty-five percent of Vvedensky’s complete oeuvre. - 4 - ‘missing link,’ the third generation, in the transmission of Russian Modernism. Here was poetry and prose written in the shadow of the Silver Age but with a decidedly post- apocalyptic, metaphysical and absurdist sensibility that perfectly resonated with the rising underground cultures of Moscow and Leningrad.6 With perestroika and glasnost’, Vvedensky and Kharms were finally brought to light and recognized as two of Russia’s signal twentieth century poets, and for many in post-perestroika Russia their lives became both a warning and a talisman to guard against the various temptations of post- Soviet life. What then was Vvedensky’s artistic credo? In literary terms one might say that his poetic sensibility combines the Russian Symbolist concern for transcendence, God, and ‘other worlds,’ with the Futurist orientation toward syntactical and semantic deformations that draw attention to the artifices of language. In terms of method it is clearly to the Russian Futurists, and especially to Velemir Khlebnikov, 7 that Vvedensky owes his poetic beginnings. However, unlike most Futurists (Western European well as Russian), Vvedensky was neither a nihilist nor a Utopian world-maker, he was a believer, an apophatic Christian: the semantic kenosis to which he subjects language has a theological purpose. In analyzing his critique of language, poetry and thought we must keep in mind the absurd faith (particularly pronounced after 1930) that fires his poetry: the alogical communication for which his poetry strives is an act of communion. For this reason we must radically distinguish between Vvedensky’s deformations of poetic language and Futurist practice: the former is religiously inspired and oriented toward communication, the latter is linguistically inspired and oriented toward expression. Moreover, while in one way or another the Futurists sought to overcome meaning, Vvedensky celebrated and used non-meaning and non-sense to suggest, in a kind of poetic apophasis,8 a transcendent meaning that simultaneously underpins and negates our See Meilakh, M., ed. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, Vvedenskii, Aleksandr (Moscow, 1993), Vol. 1, pp. 7-9. 6 In the international context the work of the Oberiuts can be seen to prefigure, in a number of ways, the Western European literature of the Absurd. 7 Thankfully, we have the late Paul Schmidt’s English translations which do manage to give an authentic feeling for the achievement of this amazing and truly monumental figure. 8 A good and brief overview of this theological term can be found in Yaroslav Pelikan’s The Melody of Theology (Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 6-8. - 5 - human understanding.
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