Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi 9781618114440

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WITNESS and

TRANSFORMATION The POETICS of GENNADY AYGI

Liber Primus Series Editor David Bethea (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Editorial Board Caryl Emerson (Princeton University) Svetlana Evdokimova (Brown University) John Mackay (Yale University) Irina Reyfman (Columbia University) Justin Weir (Harvard University)

WITNESS and

TRANSFORMATION The POETICS of GENNADY AYGI SARAH VALENTINE

BOSTON / 2015

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: The bibliographic data for this title is available from the Library of Congress. © 2015 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-443-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-444-0 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave On the cover: Item 1,   by Igor Vulokh. Oil on canvas, 1970. Reproduced by permission of The Igor Vulokh Foundation, Natalya Ohota and Egor Altman. Published by Academic Studies Press in 2015 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

To Robert, Debra, Patrick and Thomas, with love.

Contents

A Note on Transliteration................................................................... viii Acknowledgements.................................................................................ix Introduction. Chapter One:. Chapter Two:. Chapter Three:.

.....................................................................................1 Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic..............27 The Moscow Neo-Avant-Garde............................55 Three Poems Called “Silence”: The Human-Word as Divine Mystery..................93 Chapter Four:. Poem as Reliquary: Violence, Elegy, Witness.................................................................. 129 Chapter Five:. After the Fall: Poetry of the 1990s and 2000s.............................................................. 154 Final Thoughts: A Conversation with Fanny Howe on Poetry Crossing Borders..................................... 176 Bibliography. Index.

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A Note on Transliteration

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or most Russian names in the text I use common Anglicized spellings based on the BGN/PCGN system of Romanization. Therefore -iy and -yy endings are simplified to -y, (as in Gennady), jotization is indicated by y (as in Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Aygi), interconsontal -sh is simplified to –s (as in Mandelstam and Epstein), -ks is rendered –x (as in Alexander and Maxim), and apostrophes are omitted for ъ and ь. However, bibliographical references preserve the Library of Congress transliteration of names to aid those who wish to consult the published sources cited. Other Russian words are rendered according to the Library of Congress system, as are words from other languages, including German, French, and Czech. Transliteration of Chuvash in the text follows the same pattern as Russian; names are generally Anglicized while other words are rendered using the Library of Congress system.

Acknowledgements

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his project is the result of many years’ work and is based on my doctoral dissertation from Princeton University. It all started in a graduate course on Contemporary Russian Poetry, taught by Michael Wachtel, when he came into class with a few copies of strange-looking poems and said to the three of us students, “See what you can make of these.” Immediately I was hooked on the unique and mysterious poetry of Gennady Aygi. I realized there was something special and different about his work, unlike any Russian poetry I had studied or read, and the paucity of critical voices surrounding him reinforced my desire to characterize and articulate the importance of his poetics. This book is the result that desire. I would like to thank my professors and fellow graduate students at Princeton, particularly my advisor Olga Hasty for taking on the far-out project of an anxious and apprehensive grad student; thank you for your constant guidance, reassurance, and support. Dunja Popovic, Cole Crittenden, Laura Brenier and Asya Graf, from endless sessions at Small World Coffee to the granting of dissertation theme songs to late nights at

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Harvey’s Used Books, your friendship and shared travails made the impossible seem possible, the unbearable somewhat less unbearable. After graduate school the project benefitted from the mentorship of senior colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles where I held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship. I cannot find words to thank the late Michael Heim for reading the entire manuscript and editing out all the “grad-student-isms” to make the writing and its author more secure in their authority. I have never known a more humble, more generous, more genius intellect, have never met a scholar more dedicated to the ideals of scholarship and mentorship. Not only did he read my work, he and his wife Priscilla invited me into their home and made me feel part of a community. To Mellon program directors Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, thank you for broadening my intellectual and gastronomic horizons, for helping to enlarge the scope of my research from Russian literature to world literature, for challenging me to strengthen my arguments by engaging critical theory, for bringing together a stellar group of interdisciplinary scholars and for organizing the best postseminar dinners I have ever attended. You proved that academic life can be serious yet convivial, dedicated yet gustatorily magnificent. To my fellow “Mellow Felons” as we called ourselves, Kris Manjapra, Sonali Pahwa, and my cuginetti Alessandra Di Maio, Nouri Gana, and Reem Mehdoui, thank you for your friendship and intellectual engagement; one day we will make good on our plans to meet for a “research” trip in Bellagio, Italy or some other equally scholarly destination. Owing to the relatively small critical body of work on Gennady Aygi, over the years I have had to reach out to scholars in the Slavic field who had both scholarly and personal connections with the poet, and they have been extremely generous with their input and interest in the project: thanks to Gerald Janecek and Gerald Smith for discussing their scholarship and personal experiences with Aygi and his work; Stephanie Sandler for likewise showing interest in Aygi’s poetics and sharing recordings and videos of Aygi reading; John Krueger, scholar of Chuvash, for donating his archives and correspondence with Aygi regarding the compilation of the Anthology of Chuvash Literature to Princeton University’s library so that I could use them in my research; Chuvash poet,

scholar, and Aygi’s contemporary Atner Khuzangai, for aiding me with the translation of Aygi’s Chuvash poetry via email; the poet’s widow Galina Aygi for granting me permission to translate his work; and last but certainly not least, Peter France, Aygi’s lifelong friend and translator, for corresponding and meeting with me numerous times regarding my studies and for being so supportive of my translations of Aygi’s poetry. Though I never got to meet the poet himself, who passed away in 2006, I was able to put a living, breathing personality to the words on the page through the generosity and support of the scholarly community surrounding him. A large part of my study of Aygi has consisted of translating his poetry, some of which had not been previously translated into English. For publishing my collection of Aygi’s selected poems I owe a great deal of thanks to Matthew Zapruder at Wave Books. It is rare that any publishing house will consider a translation manuscript that it did not commission, and I was lucky that Matthew has a background in Russian literature and an appreciation of the avant-garde. He and Wave enthusiastically supported my translations of Aygi’s poems and introduced the work to a new generation of American poetry lovers. For that they have my undying gratitude. A version of the book’s third chapter appeared in Slavic and East European Journal 51 (2008) as “Music, Silence and Spirituality in the Poetry of Gennady Aygi” and was reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 282 (2013). Though many university presses expressed interest in Witness and Transformation’s subject matter and recognized its scholarly merit, not many were willing to take on the risk of publishing a monograph on a Russophone Chuvash poet little known in the United States. Academic Studies Press believed in the project from the moment it surfaced in their inbox. The Press’s anonymous reviewers offered useful and insightful suggestions. The two acquisitions editors I have worked with, Sharona Vedol and Meghan Vicks, have been tremendously cheerful, helpful, and patient as they ferried this first-time author through the publication process. I cannot thank Elizabeth Geballe enough for her thoroughly detailed and perceptive copyedits of both English and

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Acknowledgements

Russian in the manuscript; her keen eye for typos, grammatical, stylistic, and logical inaccuracies is truly remarkable and has made this a much better volume. I must also thank David Bethea for accepting the book into his Liber Primus series; it is an honor to have been chosen and vetted by such a distinguished scholar and editorial board. On a personal note, I would like to thank my parents Debra and Robert Dunn and my brothers Patrick and Thomas Dunn for always loving and supporting me; Courtney Carothers, Tara Anderson and Amy Weiss for a lifetime of fun and friendship; Chris Abani for years of guidance, love, and support; and Derick Keegan, for always being there when I need you. To my feline companions throughout the years, Freddie, Rosie, Minnie, and Mack, thank you for many hours of playtime distraction, furry cuddles, and disquisitions on the importance of napping; you have always helped put things in perspective. Finally, I would like to thank Gennady Aygi, to whom this volume is dedicated. It is my hope this book will spark more interest and conversation around his work, the beauty and significance of which we have only begun to discover.

Introduction

That is why language, the most dangerous of goods, has been given to man . . . so that he may bear witness to what he is . . . —Friedrich Hölderlin What are poets for in a time of need? —Friedrich Hölderlin

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n “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” Martin Heidegger uses key lines and phrases from the poet’s oeuvre to locate that which is most essential in poetry. Because of the potentially broad nature of the project he takes pains to clarify why he chose the work of a single poet, and Hölderlin in particular, for this task. For Heidegger the goal is not to bring together the best or most representative poets, analyze their work, and by identifying common features or themes arrive at a universal truth. It is not to find a concept that holds true for all types

2

Introduction

of poetry for all times, for in Heidegger’s words, “an essence of that kind always misses what is most essential.”1 Instead he sees his goal as something much more specific and urgent: to discover the quality of poetry that will determine its necessity or superfluity in the twentieth century. Therefore he chooses to consider Hölderlin’s work because the poet takes as his subject and obsession the philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical nature of poetry. To Heidegger, “he writes solely about the essence of poetry. . . . He is the poet’s poet.”2 Heidegger’s description of Hölderlin’s work, its subject matter and its larger significance, readily apply to the work of Gennady Aygi. His constant return to the subject of poetry, his repeated reflections on the creative process, and the raison d’être of every word in every line he writes marks his work as primarily concerned with the essence, or Dasein, of poetry. Considering Heidegger’s discussion further helps to put Aygi’s work, which is often considered “unlike anything else”3 in the Russian canon, in perspective. The first notion Heidegger examines is that, in Hölderlin’s words, poetry is “the most innocent of occupations.”4 This leads Hölderlin to the idea of play, and the possibility that the poet’s primary concerns are invention and imagination, the fruits of which have little effect on reality. Indeed the European syllabo-tonic forms of the nineteenth century create a puzzle-like challenge for the poet to overcome in order to achieve maximum freedom of expression within the limits of a predetermined matrix of meter and rhyme. Seen only as sophisticated semantic play or an intellectual exercise, it constituted a grand and subtle game with the potential to impress and transport but not to effect any real change or action. The danger with confining poetry to the domain of this type of play for Heidegger, however, is the perceived association of play with a lack of seriousness, a lack of sustained viability. Play understood in this 1 Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 52. 2 See note on pg. 22. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 52. 3 Vladimir Bondarenko and Vladimir Novikov, “Dialog Nedeli: Slovo—zhivoe i mertvoe,” Literaturnaia gazeta (November 15, 1989). 4 See note on pg. 22. Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 53.

reductive sense is childish, ephemeral, and reduces poetry to the “most innocent of occupations.” In the world of literary criticism the kind of poetry that is most often associated with play is that which is labeled “experimental,” work that deviates from canonical norms and deforms familiar linguistic and poetic structures. In many ways the equation of so-called experimental poetry with frivolous play is ironic, as it is mainly from such “experiments” at various points in history that language, poetry, and tradition have been transformed. Leaving the realm of safe, established language for the unknown also resurrects the danger that Hölderlin sees as a fundamental part of language. Aygi’s work been labeled as “experimental,” a subheading to the common description “avant-garde.” Heidegger notes that play is also associated with a lack of responsibility. Play does not engage in real-world decision-making; it allows the “imaginary” to play itself out in a realm devoid of consequences, a realm in which images, words, and sentiments cannot bring about any change outside the limits of the game. While the discussion concerns poetry as a whole, poetry criticism often characterizes work as accessible or inaccessible based on its perceived level of engagement with the reader and canon, that is, the “real world.” Work such as Aygi’s that creates its own space of engagement is perceived as abstract and difficult. Thus play is seen as at once unserious and abstruse, and the implication is that poets who “play” with language, meaning, and form do so at the risk of distancing and even isolating themselves and their work, like a child in a quiet corner playing with his imaginary friends. Heidegger does not affirm that poetry is not play, rather poetry is not play in the sense that the term is commonly understood, being associated with childishness, lack of seriousness, lack of responsibility, and ephemerality. This metonymic line of reasoning fails to take into account the material of which poetry is made: language. The dream-like reality of poetry obscures the fact that a poem is not made of ideas or images, or at least that these are not its fundamental constituents. Every facet of a poem, from its sound orchestration to its ability to conjure worlds of nostalgia and desire, is a consequence of its language. It is language that makes a poem breathe and live and it is a preoccupation with language that moves Heidegger toward insight into the essence of poetry.

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

4

Introduction

Epstein’s article “Methods of Madness and Madness as Method” makes the connection between Pushkin’s fear of madness and Hölderlin’s and Batyushkov’s actual (clinical) madness. It also makes connections between “poetic madness” and the need for the poet (or artist) to retain a relationship to reason; the absence of reason—the giving of oneself to the totality of the imagination that has severed dialogic ties to reality— cannot sustain or create (or understand) poetry. It is important that other critics situate Hölderlin, his work and philosophy, as influential in the Russian tradition and we can link Epstein’s posited “madness as method” to the idea of philosophical play seen in Aygi’s work, both as a means of creating poetry and escaping the limitations of reason. Pushkin approaches the subject of madness through strictly rhymed and metered verse, which mirrors his fear of madness taking over, a fear that was possibly influenced by his own visit to the mad Batyushkov in 1830, according to Epstein. In “God grant that I not lose my mind . . .” he enumerates the forms his madness would take: “And I would hark my fill of waves / And I would gaze with gladness filled . . . / And strong were I, and free were I . . .” On the surface these seem like states of rapture and joy: freedom, strength, gladness—all positive things. All things one would associate with the free poetic imagination able to soar beyond the bounds of reason into the realm of madness necessary for creativity. But the dark side of total madness is that all of these rapturous states lead nowhere, or worse—to destruction. Thus, Pushkin’s poetic self fears gazing “with gladness . . . / Into the empty skies.” And being free and strong “Like to the whirlwind gashing fields, / [And] breaking forests down.” Instead of madness bringing the poet into harmony with nature it leads him to destroy it.5 Aygi’s verse expresses madness even as the poet himself maintains lucidity. His ecstatically fragmented, syntactically complex, and at times syntactically null phrasing recalls the exclamations of Batyushkov deep in his “Italomania”: “O homeland of Dante, homeland of Ariosto, 5 Mikhail Epstein, “Methods of Madness and Madness as Method,” in Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture, eds. Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 268-270.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

и загораживая — рукою губами!.. — о тайная (где-то в тумане) — с зевами дышащими: слегка — драгоценность: ... and sparking sunrise — with hand lips!.. — o mysterious (somewhere in the fog) yawning breathing lightly – a treasure: ...

Unlike Batyushkov and Hölderlin, who we may consider Aygi’s poetic predecessors and who wrote in structured and rhymed iambs but succumbed to clinical madness later in life, Aygi, who wrote in sprawling free verse that approximates madness, never lost his connection with reason and continued to write compelling verse until his death. Epstein seems to apply ex post facto causality to Batyushkov’s and Holderlin’s illnesses based on their creative poetic imaginations. His argument for method as madness is perhaps more compelling— and more relevant here—than his formulation of madness as method. He hypothesizes that these poets, who were punished for forsaking

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homeland of Tasso! O my beloved homeland!” Aygi often uses this kind of passionate address in poems about his putative homeland, Russia, as in this excerpt from his 1967 poem “And: Awakening: Forest” (“И: ЗАСЫПАЯ: ЛЕС”):

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Introduction

their homelands, Russia and Germany respectively, and casting their gazes to the far shores of Italian and Hellenic antiquity, were trapped in the rapturous hell of their own imaginations and, ultimately, doomed to live out their years and “deteriorate in the same dark spot where they had been born!”6 While he acknowledges that it is unlikely that Hölderlin’s and Batyushkov’s descents into mental illness were karmic revenge for their Weltschmerz, the notion reveals the complex relationship between the poet’s dual nature as a citizen of a nation and a citizen of the world. Where should one’s allegiances lie? Can one’s identity as a poet conflict with one’s allegiance to one’s native language, citizenship, and sense of patriotism? Aygi navigated a similar duality, or multiplicity, in his role as a Chuvash subject of the Soviet Union who came to live in Moscow and its outlying areas, write in Russian, and place himself within the Russian poetic tradition. As a young man he talks about feeling tied to the Soviet cause and believing in communism, but early in his career his work becomes critical of the regime. However, while his work acknowledges the political ills and evils of the Soviet government he waxes ecstatic over the fields and forests of his Russian homeland. Aygi does not express his discontent with the political situation as a desire to be in another time or place, a common trope in the poetry of Hölderlin, Batyushkov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. He does not romanticize antiquity or any other era, and this gives his criticism a clear-eyed realism. The only time-space he acknowledges as politically pure is the spiritual beyond, to which poetry is a portal. Through poetry he transforms the Russian landscape of fields, forests, and urban decay into realms of pure, reverent silence, distilling them to a Suprematist geometry that reveals their spiritual essence. Thus, the Russian landscape simultaneously encompasses the political evil of the Gulag and the spiritual purity of the fields and snow. His poetry is not apologist or escapist; it draws attention to the constant paradox of beauty coexisting with destruction, humanity with inhumanity. If we can link Aygi’s poetics to madness at all, it is madness in the Platonic sense, specifically god-given madness. In her essay “Plato on Madness and 6 Epstein, “Methods of Madness and Madness as Method,” 265.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

the Good Life,” Katja Maria Vogt provides a working description of this second type of Platonic madness:

“Enthusiastic” is certainly an apt description of the rapturous voice found in many of Aygi’s poems. Take, for instance, a line from “Later that Day” (“Тогда тот день,” 1991): И был – огромною молитвой: День! – And it was – immense with prayer – Day! –

A sense of divine inspiration is central to Aygi’s poetic voice. Though he does not describe his own creative process as a visitation from the Muses, God, or gods, he does acknowledge the need for a quiet, dreamlike space in which to enter a state of poetic meditation or prayer. Even if the types of madness we see displayed in the poetic work (and lives) of Hölderlin and Aygi differ in form and consequence, they share a desire to approach an ur-state of spiritual unity Hölderlin called Absolute Being. In “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida posits play as an organizing principle of history and language. For Derrida, play is what lays the groundwork for presence. He returns to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, which reframes the concepts of being and truth as play, interpretation, and the sign (without the logos).8 7 There are generally considered to be three types of madness that Plato describes in the Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, and other works: 1) rational madness, 2) god-given madness and 3) a disordered cognitive state equivalent to mental illness. The first two types are seen as producing positive results, while the third is considered destructive (Vogt 177). Katja Maria Vogt, “Plato on Madness and the Good Life,” in Mental Illness in Antiquity, ed. William Harris (Brill: Leiden, 2013), 183. 8 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 280.

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God-given madness is, like motivational love as discussed in the Symposium, a good phenomenon. Divine inspiration figures in the greatest achievements: creation of poems, healing of diseases, rescue from disaster, philosophical insight. In the phrase that is the ancestor of ‘enthusiastic,’ Plato says that in such conditions, a god is in the agent—the agent is enthousiazôn (Phaedrus 241e, 249e, 253a, 263d).7

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Introduction

Play in this sense is the disruption of presence, an interplay between absence and presence and even perhaps an alternative to absence and presence. What this means is that play—free play in Derrida’s terms— offers itself as an alternative to mythopoeia and history-making based on absolute origins, a stable center, nostalgia for origins, the preservation of purity and natural innocence, and (ultimately) historical guilt. In this traditional framework play is viewed as a lack. The Nietzschean conception of play, however, is an affirmation. It affirms and celebrates the world without center, without origins. It celebrates the non-center rather than grieving the loss or absence of a center that may have never existed. In this framework play is an active worldview, an ethical response to the logocentric discourse of history. Derrida sums up the contrasting views of play and their interpretations of history: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin, which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, through the history of all of his history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the “inspiration of a new humanism.”9

The tension between the two approaches to interpretive discourse that Derrida outlines is the same tension that exists between the conflicting attitudes toward the methods and goals of poetry. Aygi’s work is freeplay in that it celebrates the non-center, the lack of a stable, identifiable origin and in doing so affirms human life and suffering without moralizing or rationalizing the existence of one to support the other. It is this playcentered conceptual approach to history, poetry, and the creative process that sets Aygi apart from his Russian contemporaries and from the Russian canon in general. Aygi was an avid reader of Nietzsche 9 Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 293.

throughout his life and no doubt encountered the ideas that Derrida brings forward here in his own reading. It is also quite possible that, as a student of Western philosophy, Aygi had read Derrida and other deconstructionists whose work was contemporaneous with his. It is less important, however, to establish a direct link between Aygi and these thinkers than it is to recognize the ways in which their conceptual approaches to poetry, history, and interpretive discourse resonate with one another. Heidegger’s goal is not to establish that the essence of poetry is play but rather to set the notion of play and innocence against another observation about the nature of poetry found in Hölderlin’s writings, that the essential function of language is its ability to allow the poet— “man”—to bear witness “to what he is.”10 In an excerpt from a draft of a poem in which Hölderlin sets about distinguishing man from other living creatures, Heidegger notes that man is presented as not only he who can bear witness to what he is through language, but he who must bear witness. Witnessing is the condition in which man most fully expresses his humanity. In testifying and signifying, but also in being answerable for his testimony, man fulfills his existence. Witnessing is not merely an addition to or commentary on man’s existence, but rather an integral part of being, an affirmation of belonging to the world and all that is in it. It establishes what Hölderlin calls “intimacy”: the force that allows things to exist in opposition to one another and yet at the same time be joined together. As Heidegger notes, “man’s being a witness to his belonging among beings as a whole occurs as history.”11 The creation of history, then, is a sustained act of the witnessing of man’s—or in more contemporary terms, humanity’s—role in both the creation and destruction of the world he inhabits, and his intimacy and identity with both processes. A line of reasoning that Heidegger does not take up in his argument, even though his statements about witnessing as part of human existence seem to imply it, is that if the act of witness is not merely an addendum to man’s existence but an integral part of it, each act 10 Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 54. 11 Ibid.

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Introduction

constitutes a transformation of the experience that is being witnessed, and ultimately changes how the witness witnesses. As the observer effect states, observing an event changes that event by nature of the necessarily interruptive quality of the tools of observation. In this case the “tool” is the poet, whose framing of the experience in language ultimately shapes and defines that experience and in turn, changes the act of witnessing— the poem. It is the quantum entanglement in which every poet finds him or herself: that language is always already saturated with history and it is not possible to stand outside of history or language. The task, then, becomes a simultaneous transformation of existence and its language. The trouble, however, is that, unlike in a laboratory, one’s being and the events of human history are not controlled or discrete. Thus the line between being and witnessing is never clear, and the act of witness, then, is not only a part of existence but its essence. The essence of poetry is the essence of existence and vice versa. Heidegger uses the words “man” and “poet” interchangeably to refer to the wielder of language, the creator of poetry, and the witness of human existence on a historical scale. But not every man, woman, or poet has the desire or capacity to use language in this way for these particular ends. This anticipates the conclusion Heidegger makes in his essay, which returns to his original specific aim: to discover an essential poetics in Hölderlin’s work. Precisely owing to this distinction—of who can and must bear witness—Heidegger establishes the poet as a category apart and between. Between the gods, who can see the full unfolding of history before and after our part in it is played, and the people, who are the actors in this history. Thus the essence of poetry is joined to the laws which [sic] strive to separate and unite the hints of the gods and the voice of the people. . . . [The poet] is the one who has been cast out—out into that between, between gods and men. But first and only in this between is it decided who man is and where his existence is settled.12

Hölderlin establishes his world as that of the between, which is why for Heidegger he is the quintessential poet’s poet. This is also the poetic 12 Ibid., 56 (Heidegger’s emphasis).

territory that Gennady Aygi maps out for himself in his work—the field, the forest, the outskirts—between the city and village, between the people and the gods, as spaces consecrated for creativity and worship. The final and most important concept Heidegger develops in his argument for an essential poetics is the time-specificity and timeliness of Hölderlin’s work. For Heidegger it is important that Hölderlin’s poetry not only belongs to its time, but that it establishes and marks a new historical moment, as Heidegger puts it, “the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming.” It is a time of need, of double-lack and double-not: “in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and in the not-yet of the god who is coming.”13 A century of continuous war, poverty, and famine for much of the world, the twentieth century can definitely be described as a time of need from which the gods seem to have fled. Beginning with a revolution and continuing with almost fifty years of war and dictatorship, the Soviet Union experienced its share of the twentieth century’s trials and deprivations. During this time, and despite Russia’s rich literary tradition, voices of dissent and creativity were repressed, and with the exception of manuscripts that were smuggled out and published abroad, the work of many twentieth-century Russian poets and writers was circulated in samizdat (underground press) or remained hidden in drawers until Gorbachev ushered in the period known as Glasnost (meaning openness) in 1989. It is at this time that the work of Aygi and his contemporaries entered general circulation and became critically situated in the interrupted history of Russian letters. Because it had been suppressed for so long, literature was a subject of fierce debate in the press and academy. The critical and popular reception that Aygi’s work received reflects the historical necessity of being able to place it within the continuity of the Russian literary tradition. The fact that this has not yet been possible attests, I think, to his work’s preoccupation with the historical and existential realities of language discussed above and the formal and thematic elements that develop in his poetry as a result. When Aygi’s poetry was published for the first time in the Soviet Union it aroused an immediate response from literary journalists. In a 13 Ibid., 64 (Heidegger’s emphasis).

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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Introduction

1989 interview in The Literary Gazette Vladimir Novikov, a respected Russian literary critic, writes: “There is one avant-gardist more prominent and frightening than the rest—his name is Gennady Aygi. His free verse, which is unlike anything else, appeared in Literary Russia and cast a long shadow on all other poems in the issue. . . . You read him and think: either this is poetry, or I don’t know what is.” This statement points not only to the political censorship faced by poets like Aygi (and other avant-garde poets like Viktor Sosnora and Genrikh Sapgir), but suggests that when he was able to publish, the unprecedented nature of his work made him dangerous—even for the avant-garde. Owing to the characterization of Aygi’s poetry as “unlike anything else” he and his work continue to occupy an uneasy position in the canon of Russian poetry. Aesthetically, critically, and even personally, Aygi’s work elicits strong responses from readers and scholars—both for and against it. There is an international contingent of scholars devoted to his work known as “Aygiists.” Every year they hold a festival of art, literature, and essays commemorating the work of the poet in his hometown of Cheboksary, Chuvashia. There are essay collections based on the proceedings of conferences devoted to discussing, analyzing, and translating Aygi’s work. A seven-volume edition of his collected works was published in 2009, three years after his death. In the popular consciousness as well as in many literary texts, Aygi is heralded as the father of the contemporary Russian avant-garde and one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, not only in Russia but worldwide. His work has been studied for its synthesis of musical orchestration and visual art, its linguistic idiosyncrasies, and its grammatical innovativeness. With his work’s deep spiritual engagement and his method of composing poetry in the trance-like state between sleep and waking, he has been called a shaman, a prophet, and a genius. But critics have also noted that his work’s innovativeness is complicated by its relationship with the Russian poetic tradition. As Sergei Baulin notes, “the poems Aygi wrote were rejected for various reasons—they were too non-standard, not easy to fit into the official canon of classical lyric.”14 14 Sergei Baulin, “Ucheniku Pasternaka dali kvartiru,” Vecherniaia Moskva (March 29, 2001): 6.

Many critics and poets are highly suspicious of his work’s integrity and have called him an “inveterate individualist,” and his poetry “selfindulgent.”15 His personal integrity has also fallen under attack, and he has been accused of everything from illiteracy in the Russian language, pandering to the West, and general charlatanism, to homosexuality, philandering, and rampant drunkenness. Those who have worked closely with him refute these claims, describing him, on the contrary, as saintly and a generally good man. Despite his prolificacy and his acknowledged contribution to Russian and world literature, he remains less studied than many of his contemporaries, a critical silence that signals anything from vague unease or disinterest to disapproval and the desire for his troubling work’s erasure. Yevgeny Yevtushenko represents this attitude best in his introduction to the 1993 anthology Twentieth Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel when he explained why, despite the volume’s encyclopedic scope, he did not include Aygi’s work in it. I have not included poems written in Russian by the Austrian Rainer Marie Rilke, the Chuvash Gennadii Aigi, and the Kazakh Olzhas Suleimyonov, each of whom I greatly respect; but their work, for all its metaphorical merit, belongs more to their national cultures, where they contribute to the general world treasury of literature, than immediately to the theme of this anthology, which is the fate of Russian poetry in the fate of the twentieth century. 16

The distinction Yevtushenko makes here is between the Russian and the Russophone; he denies that Russophone poetry belongs to the Russian poetic tradition, instead placing it in the national tradition of the country of the poet’s birth. It is interesting then, that one of the poets included in the volume is Wilhelm Zorgenfrey (1882-1938), born in Bessarabia, the son of a German father and Armenian mother. Zorgenfrey was 15 Gerald Smith, review of Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry, by Gerald J. Janecek, Slavic and East European Journal 60:1 (2001), 211-212. Smith remarked to me that he excluded Aygi from the collection he edited, Contemporary Russian Poetry, based on his dislike for Aygi’s work. Princeton University, June 2004. 16 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, compiler’s introduction to Twentieth century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward with Daniel Weissbort (New York: Doubleday, 1993), lx.

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Introduction

educated in Saint Petersburg and seems to have been bilingual in Russian and German; he wrote poetry in Russian and was an avid translator of German literature into Russian. Yet, despite his linguistically and ethnically non-Russian background, according to Yevtushenko, “even just one or two of his remarkable poems are an inalienable part of Russian literature and history.”17 The distinction between Russian and Russophone, then, seems fairly arbitrary.18 Other major world literatures have negotiated the conflicts between their national and postcolonial literary traditions: English and Anglophone, French and Francophone, Portuguese and Lusophone, Chinese and Sinophone, just to name a few. The trouble with the postcolonial writer is that he or she reminds the colonizing nation of its colonial past and the circumstances under which the population of the colonized nation came to speak the colonizer’s language. Most of the major traditions listed above have embraced or at least acknowledged the writing of former colonial subjects as part of a literary tradition based not on national boundaries but on the transnational mobility of language and the inevitable power reversal that occurs when a colonial subject wields the colonizer’s language at the level of high art. Denying the importance of Russophone literature to the Russian literary tradition—or to assimilate it without comment, as in the case of Zorgenfrey—is a refusal to acknowledge Russia’s colonial history and the resulting proliferation of Russophone writers whose literary styles, concerns, and subjectivities put them at odds with the narrow and self-congratulatory master narrative of Russian literature. Gerald Smith, editor and compiler of the most authoritative EnglishRussian bilingual anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, expressed his rationale for Aygi’s exclusion in his introduction, which he claimed 17 Yevgeny Yevtushenko, comments to Wilhelm Zorgenfrey entry, in Twentieth century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward with Daniel Weissbort (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 108. 18 Of the three poets Yevtushenko mentions having excluded on grounds of national origin, only Rilke was not a former colonial subject of the Russian empire or Soviet Union. His handful of Russian-language poems, written between 1900 and 1901, stem from his travels to Moscow and St. Petersburg and his acquaintance with literary luminaries such as Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak.

was not based on national origin but on stylistic considerations, when he maintained: “the poets of recent years still find generally adequate the traditional syllabo-tonic repertoire that has been developed and refined over two and a half centuries.”19 In his opinion, the reason for this has largely to do with the instant recognition such form elicits in the Russian readership. While non-Russian readers may find rhymed and metered poems “sing-song [and] juvenile,” to most Russian readers, “this wellwrought formal articulation is essential if the poem is to merit serious attention.”20 Smith admits that his concentration on “‘strict form’ poets reflects [his] own taste, but it does seem also to be the majority taste among serious students of Russian poetry.”21 His exclusion of Aygi’s work from this anthology of representative contemporary Russian verse, then, is based on both formal and personal considerations. He admits that the decision to focus on shorter, syllabo-tonic poems led to Aygi’s exclusion, along with a number of other poets who “arguably rank with” those represented in the volume.22 Though he acknowledges the personal and subjective nature of the anthology, his comments reveal a strong bias, which he believes is also held by “most serious students of Russian poetry,” as to what kind of Russian poetry should be considered critically significant. This bias is perpetuated in another characterization he makes about the difficulty of Russian poetry. Smith notes: “Difficulty is still rare, in all the four senses of the word defined in George Steiner’s classic essay of 1978.”23 It appears in Pasternak, Mandelstam, Khlebnikov and much later, Brodsky.24 Ironically, Brodsky, the poet Smith considers both most unique in and most representative of poetry since 1970, embodies the characteristics he takes to be most rare in the tradition: the disruption of classical syllabo-tonic form and difficulty. Other poets included in the 19 Gerald S. Smith, introduction to Contemporary Russian Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xxx. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., xxiii-xxiv. 22 Ibid., xxiv. 23 Smith, introduction, xxix. The four types of difficulty in poetic language that Steiner defines are: contingent, tactical, modal and ontological. For a full discussion, see George Steiner, “On Difficulty,” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 18-47. 24 Smith, introduction, xxix.

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Introduction

anthology also contradict his stated criteria for inclusion or exclusion, such as Dmitri Prigov, whose parodic reclamations of popular Soviet jargon often dispense with rhyme and meter, and Elena Shvarts, who with her allusive, enigmatic work is widely regarded as one of Russia’s most difficult contemporary poets. What, then, are we to make of what seems to be an active disengagement with Aygi’s work? At first these cases may simply seem like matters of editorial taste, but in fact they are instances of erasure that point to something much larger at stake. The views expressed in relation to Aygi’s work that rationalize him out of the Russian tradition are evidence of a deep-seated logocentrism, even racism that refuses to acknowledge the complexity and heterogeneity of not only the Russian literary tradition but of Russian society itself. With his category-defying poetics and his insistence on claiming both his ethnic Chuvash and European avant-garde identities, Aygi poses a threat to this kind of thinking. When in the course of my research I expressed my astonishment at the wholesale dismissals of Aygi as a poet and the unsubstantiated attacks on his personal character to one of my senior colleagues, she replied, “it seems for Russians you can be an avant-garde poet or an ethnic poet, but you can’t be both.” Aygi’s work—which is often considered impenetrable and difficult— has been fundamentally misunderstood because its literary analysis has focused only on his avant-garde poetics, the influence of so-called Chuvash “folklore” and “nature worship,” or on his controversial biography. In fact, his poetry’s perceived difficulty is evidence not only of the Heideggerian poetics discussed earlier but also of the creation of a new hybrid subjectivity that synthesizes Russian, European, and Chuvash literary and linguistic identities. The result is a unity that is unique in its poetic language and form, and transformational in its capacity to bear witness to the gamut of human emotion and experience, from the evils of the Gulag and Holocaust to the miracle of light on a flower petal and the birth of a child. Moreover, his aesthetic and the subjectivity it engenders fly in the face of the logocentric concept of Russian poetic and ontological identity as preformed and unassailable, exclusionary but never fully articulated or defined. Indeed, Aygi and his work arouse such strong reactions

because such logocentrism can never accurately define what it is; to do so would be to expose its internal contradictions, its reliance on the shaky imaginary of a Russian ideal untroubled by the realities of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all manner of discrimination, violence, and injustice. The Russian artistic traditions, and specifically Russian literature, are precisely the spaces in which this ideal is nurtured and aestheticized into unquestionable truth. Even though Aygi sees himself as an inheritor of this tradition, it is his refusal to acknowledge its unspoken “truth” or ideal that renders him an outsider. If the logos of the Russian ideal as represented by the literary establishment cannot be defined in positive terms, it must constantly affirm its existence by highlighting what it is not. This study focuses on how the most salient features of Aygi’s poetics—his challenging language, ethereal lyricism, and reverberating silence—work to transform the site of Russian poetry from a predefined, exclusionary logos into a space of openness that allows tradition and difference to coexist peacefully. By their seeming simplicity his dreamlike landscapes of forests, fields, and snow create a feeling of being familiar yet uncanny and resonate with the transformational power of the creative act. All of Aygi’s work is trace, the echo of a moment—a present—that is always already disappearing, the incantation of the poem the only means of transforming the disappearing into becoming, an act of fragile creation that must be performed over and over again. The book tracks the emergence of this new subjectivity in Aygi’s poetics over the span of his career and analyzes the development of a language that foregrounds the difficulty of constantly becoming, constantly birthing the hybridized space necessary to achieve fluidity among literary, linguistic, and ontological constraints. Aygi’s poetics have a cosmic reach that is always struggling against the earthbound reality of the prejudices and failings of his historical context. He is, as Heidegger wrote of Hölderlin, that strange breed of both poet and philosopher, the poet’s poet. Born in 1934, Aygi lived through Stalinism, the purges, World War II, the Holocaust, the Soviet labor camps, Khrushchev’s Thaw, the Stagnation, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Thus, while on the one hand his work is the epitome of abstraction, on the other it is obsessed

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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Introduction

with the ethical dilemmas and institutionalized evils of the twentieth century, all the while undercutting the assumptive logic of the forms and traditions within which he works. Central to the discussion are Bakhtin’s concepts of double-voicedness and unfinalizability, Derrida’s trace and différance, and Heidegger’s poetics of temporal “double lack,” as is postcolonial subjectivity as theorized by Spivak and Trinh, among others. The result is a method not only for understanding Aygi’s poetics and his contribution to twentieth-century literature, but also for decoding the assumptions that undergird Russian literary and historical discourse. In addition to its task of analysis, scholarship that focuses on subjects that are little known or unfamiliar bears the burden of introduction. Aygi and his home country of Chuvashia definitely fall into this category relative to Western scholarship as does, arguably, the study of Russian poetry, especially of the late twentieth century. Aygi was born Gennady Nikolaevich Lisin (a Russian surname given to his family during assimilation) in 1934 in the village of Shaimurzino in the Chuvash Republic. The Chuvash Republic or Chuvashia (formerly the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, ChASSR) is located in the center of the European part of Russia, three hundred miles east of Moscow at the northern tip of the Volga heights. Though not far from the Russian capital, Chuvashia lies in a particularly diverse region, bordered on each side by a different ethnic and linguistic group. The Mari-El (or Cheremis) Republic lies to the north, the Republic of Tatarstan to the east; to the south is the Ulianovsk district of the Russian Federation, to the southwest the Mordova Republic, and to the west the district of Nizhni Novgorod. The groups of all these territories have influenced Chuvash language and culture, and echoes of this diversity are found in Aygi’s poems, especially the cycle “Salute-to-Singing,” which includes variations on Chuvash, Tatar, Udmurt, Mari, and Cheremis folk songs.25

25 The Tatars, like the Chuvash, are of Turkic origin, but their languages are quite dissimilar. Tatar is more akin to Bashkir, its neighbor to the east, and to the West Siberian dialects. Like the Mari, the Mordvins are Finno-Ugrian and have had a strong mutual influence on the Chuvash. Karl H. Menges, The Turkic Languages and Peoples: An Introduction to Turkic Studies (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrasssowitz, 1968), 32.

The Chuvash are the descendants of the Bulgars and Suvars, a heterogeneous ethnic group, possibly of Hunnic ancestry, that built an empire of urban trade and culture in the northern Volga region in the seventh and eighth centuries. Volga Bulgaria, as it was known, was destroyed by the Mongol invasions that swept westward in the centuries that followed. Most of the remaining population was assimilated into neighboring cultures; those who fled to the forests later emerged as an agrarian group ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct from the Tatars or Russians, and these were the predecessors of the Chuvash (from “Suvar”). Chuvashia became a protectorate of imperial Russia in the sixteenth century and became first an autonomous region and then a republic of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In its gentlest variant Soviet policy toward the “nationalities,” as people of the republics were called, took the form of a multiculturalism that celebrated regional and ethnic culture so long as it was performed according to an acceptably folksy model. Soviet art books from the 1960s, for instance, include a number of Chuvash painters and their still lifes alongside those of Russian artists, all of which are done in a bland socialist realist style with the requisite vases of flowers and bowls of fruit. The Chuvash paintings, however, feature various “ethnic” elements such as decorative tapestries and coin necklaces to add an exotic touch and showcase their culture’s individuality. Though they may not have been recognized as more than exotic touches by the Soviet establishment, the beadwork and embroidery of Chuvash clothing and adornment have linguistic, philosophical, and cosmological significance in Chuvash history and Aygi often incorporates this significance into his work. Designs embroidered on sixteenth-century wedding dresses and veils proved to be runic characters of Volga-Bulgarian, the Turkic language used by the ancestors of the Chuvash, providing some of the only remnants of this historic language.26 Embroidery also represented images that were symbolic in the ancient Chuvash tradition of nature worship. Geometric images formed the basis of these patterns: the universe was represented as a square, the Great Goddess as a stylized tree of life, the sun as a circle or a rosette. With language as runic 26 Menges, The Turkic Languages, 32.

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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Introduction

symbol and philosophy as geometric design in his cultural background, it is easy to understand Aygi’s integrative use of the verbal and visual in his poetry. Shapes and their meanings found in Chuvash design also parallel the geometrical forms and spiritual theories of Malevich’s Suprematism, which became a profound source of inspiration for Aygi in the 1960s. Aygi’s father taught Russian literature at the local school and his mother was the daughter of the village’s last shaman. It was his father who introduced him to Pushkin and Mayakovsky, two poets who sparked his interest in literature, and who acquainted him with local writers and artists. In 1950 the sixteen-year-old Aygi became acquainted with the Chuvash poet Peder Khuzangai who urged him to move to Moscow and enroll in the Literary Institute. He did so in 1953, studying under the Soviet poet Mikhail Svetlov. At that time he was writing primarily in Chuvash. Aygi’s first book, In the Name of the Fathers, was published in 1958 in Chuvashia while he was a student in Moscow. The volume included his translations of Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” and Tvardovsky’s “Vasily Terkin.” Publishing was possible for Aygi only because it was done regionally rather than in Moscow, the heart of Soviet culture. In 1959 he was expelled from the Institute, most likely for his acquaintance with Boris Pasternak, whose Doctor Zhivago had sparked anti-Soviet controversy, although the official indictment was that his poetry “undermined socialist realism.” At this stage Pasternak and the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, another mentor, urged Aygi to begin writing in Russian. To guard against the loss of his Chuvash identity, around this time Aygi changed his surname from Lisin to Aygi, an ancestral name meaning “one who is set apart from the crowd.”27 From the 1960s on Aygi lived in Moscow. He worked at the State Mayakovsky Museum from 1961 to 1971 and continued his work as a translator. At the museum he ran a standing exhibit and helped create exhibits of Malevich, Tatlin, and other members of the Russian avantgarde. In 1968 he published Poets of France, a Chuvash translation of 27 The Chuvash spelling of the surname is “Айхи.” “Айги” is the Russified version, but the name by which the author is best known. Aygi translates roughly as “that one, himself.”

seventy-seven French poets, which won the French Academy’s De Fey prize. Aygi continued translation work with Poets of Hungary in 1974 and Poets of Poland in 1987. He also compiled anthologies of Chuvash poetry for translation by Western scholars in Hungarian in 1985, Italian in 1986, English in 1991, and French in 1995.28 Rather than publishing his work in the Soviet Union in samizdat, Aygi published in tamizdat—that is, abroad. In 1975 Aygi’s first major publication, Poems: 1954-1971, appeared in Munich, and in 1982 Winter Noted (Отмеченная зима) appeared in Paris. Beginning in 1962 his work was also printed in periodicals in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan. Only in 1988 was Aygi allowed to publish at home and travel outside of the Soviet Union. In 1991 his selected works, Here (Здесь), were issued with an introduction by Yevtushenko and in 1992 he published the collection Now Always Snows (Теперь всегда снега). A German translation of his collected works came out in Vienna in two editions (1995 and 1998). In addition to sparking a surge of literary activity, the 1990s brought a wealth of honors and prizes to Aygi. Most notable among these are literary honors in Germany, Macedonia, and France (1993-98), the title of Chuvash national poet in 1994, and nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Aygi is a member of the Thaw generation, which stands out in Soviet history because it inherited the task of creating a literature that bridged the cultural and ethical void that was the legacy of Stalinism with the contradictions and discontinuities of the postmodern age. Born in the mid- to late 1930s, this generation came of age during Khrushchev’s brief liberal period in the 1960s. Like many of his generation Aygi lost his father in World War II. The historical events into which these young artists and writers were thrown placed them in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, in the early 1960s they were free to experiment with and 28 Information on Aygi’s publications and honors in the following paragraphs comes from Vladimir Novikov, “Bol’she chem poet: Mir Gennadiia Aigi,” in Razgovor na rasstoianii, by Gennady Aygi (St. Petersburg: Limbus, 2001), 5-14; and Zhurnal’niy Zal, “Gennadiy Nikolaevich Aygi,” accessed June 19, 2004, http://www.magazines. russ.ru/authors/a/ajgi/.

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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Introduction

deconstruct the modes of artistic expression; on the other, the generation of their “fathers,” both their biological fathers and artistic mentors, had been nearly wiped out by the wars and Stalinism, leaving them with no immediate models. This is in large part why Aygi and his generation turned to the art and poetry of the 1920s-30s avant-garde, the last living generation of experimental artists. When Pasternak befriended Aygi he was nearly seventy years old, more of a grandfather than a father figure. The Mayakovsky Museum provided a forum for Aygi and other young artists to meet members of the Futurist avant-garde (like Kruchenykh) and to imbibe the work and ideas of Futurists no longer living. It is very likely that this access, as well as the access provided by his father to him as a boy, influenced Aygi’s lasting attraction to Futurist forms. Form has always been a polarizing issue in the Russian poetic tradition. Since the late eighteenth century rhymed syllabo-tonic verse has dominated the poetic landscape and any deviation from or experimentation with form has sparked fierce debate. While many studies have considered the use of different metrical forms throughout the history of Russian poetry—for instance, the rise of accentual verse among poets of the Silver Age—it has never been clearly established why meter and rhyme have maintained such strongholds on the Russian poetic imagination. While free verse has flourished in the European and American traditions, it has gained only marginal popularity in Russia from the late nineteenth century onwards. Syllabo-tonic structure—or some identifiable variant of it—has been considered requisite for creating Russian poetry as such. As Michael Wachtel illustrates in The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and Its Meanings, meter and rhyme serve as carriers of theme, literary allusions, and collective memory. Because these formal features are instrumental in creating a poem’s meaning, Russian poets and critics alike reason that if they are lacking, the text ceases to be poetry. Thus free verse is considered an entirely separate genre of writing that exists “with its own canons (or rather, their absence).”29 The prejudice here is clear and the prevailing suspicion of free verse as a viable poetic form is one of the main reasons 29 Gleb Shul’piakov, “Figura fiktsii,” NG Ex Libris, May 22, 1997, accessed June 17, 2004, http://www.pressreader.com/russia/ex-libris-ng.

critics turn away from Aygi’s work. How are they to measure work that does not adhere to the rules of versification? It may seem counterintuitive from a Western standpoint to consider one’s primary critical engagement with a poetic text not through interpretation but measurement. Russian poetry criticism is traditionally based on metric analysis, a methodology of counting syllables and ictuses designed for syllabo-tonic verse. Even accentual verse, which allows greater structural freedom, is approachable from a metrical standpoint because it retains a structure of syllable variance based on an established pattern. When the syllable no longer functions as a fundamental structural unit, as in free verse, the poem ceases to “dialogue” with dominant traditional forms and the methods used to approach them. In most cases discussions of Russian free verse have been simply excluded or relegated to a footnote. Nevertheless, free verse does resonate with an important element of the Russian poetic tradition: oratory. Because it relies on internal and aural structural features such as punctuation and sound repetition (in addition to visual features like line breaks and use of white space), free verse holds up when read aloud, dialoging with and continuing the tradition of the Russian poet as orator. Developing only in the eighteenth century—relatively late by Western standards—Russian poetry was dramatically declaimed rather than simply read and was experienced as performance by the audience. The experience of reading poetry silently to oneself from a book is a fairly modern construct within the tradition. Oratory and performance continued to be important aspects of poetry in the pre- and post-revolutionary years of the early twentieth century. Poets met, discussed, and performed their poetry in cafés to eager, sometimes rowdy audiences. The Symbolists’ “Wandering Dog” (“Бродячая собака”) was perhaps the best example of such a prerevolutionary café-cabaret, where poetry readings became performative, multi-media events. Mayakovsky and the Futurists took these performances to a new level in the post-revolutionary era, leaving the urban centers and going on tour to the provinces in order to shock audiences with their wild, bombastic performances and manifestos. In the post-Stalinist Soviet era the public oratory nature of Russian poetry was magnified to monumental proportions. Poets who were

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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Introduction

endorsed by the state, such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, read poetry to audiences of thousands.30 These authors were also briefly touted abroad as representing the freedom and achievement of literature in the liberal post-Stalinist regime.31 Although the poetry of this era was for the most part written in strict syllabo-tonic meter, other forms soon emerged. Alexander Blok popularized the dol’nik and Mayakovsky championed (loose) accentual verse.32 Major early twentieth-century poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Zinaida Gippius, and Blok experimented with free verse, and Kuzmin and Khlebnikov devoted significant attention to it.33 Free verse was particularly associated with Futurists Elena Guro, Kruchenykh, and Burliuk.34 During the Stalinist period, only Kseniia Nekrasova wrote in free verse, but during the Thaw the form was revived by poets such as Yevgeny Vinokurov and Vladimir Soloukhin.35 In his monumental treatment of free verse in Verse and Prose in Russian Literature, Yuri Orlitsky identifies dozens of poets from the late Soviet period who use free verse in some measure, most notably the Lianozovo poets Igor Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir, who will feature later in this discussion.36 Unfortunately, Aygi enters Orlitsky’s discussion only briefly, as an example of a poet (along with Nina Iskrenko) who uses polymetric forms.37 Syllabo-tonic versification is the cornerstone of the Russian poetic tradition, and a poet’s choice of meter carries semantic and thematic weight because it responds to other uses of that meter over the centuries. Aygi’s free verse 30 Ronald Hingley, Russian Writers and Soviet Society, 1917-1978 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), 71. 31 See “Eased Line in Soviet Is Hinted by Two New Works,” New York Times (August 17, 1963); “Some Russians Want to Write as They Please,” New York Times (October 27, 1963), etc. 32 For a fuller discussion of these forms in the Russian tradition see Barry Scherr’s chapter “Non-classical Verse” in Russian Poetry: Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 126-191. Also, Wachtel, “Heirs of Mayakovsky,” 206-238. 33 These poets’ free-verse works and the attendant scholarship are copiously referenced in Scherr, “Non-classical Verse,” 175-183, 314-315. 34 Iu. B. Orlitsky, Stikh i proza v russkoi literature (Moscow: RGGU, 2002), 382. 35 Scherr, “Non-classical Verse,” 178. 36 Orlitsky, Stikh i proza, 387-410. 37 Ibid., 409.

or irregular use of meter sends a clear message to other Russian poets: it marks him as avant-garde and it inscribes his refusal to fall into step with the dominant logos of the Russian poetic tradition that, along with themes, allusions, and other references, is carried along from poem to poem in the structural DNA of Russian verse. The task of this study is not to invalidate syllabotonic forms or characterize them as outmoded, “too rigid to represent the phenomenology of the individual consciousness,” nor is it to determine the supremacy and contemporaneity of “Western” free verse.38 Rather, it is to interrogate why the Russian poetic tradition and the cultural edifice it prefigures have been defined so narrowly as to exclude forms (and the artists that represent them) that deviate from the dominant mode of expression, why a more fluid definition of verse, not as either/or but both/and, has so long eluded Russian poets and scholars of Russian poetry and what are the larger implications of its resistance to expansion and diversification. Formal difference is not the only source of tension in Russian poetry. A recent collection of essays titled Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness addresses the question: why has it been so difficult for scholars and historians—not to mention Pushkin and his contemporaries—to come to terms with Pushkin’s African ancestry? It is well known that Pushkin’s great grandfather was Abram Petrovich Hannibal, an African brought from Turkey as a young boy to be the personal servant, and eventually the godson, of Peter the Great. It is less well known that, seeing the boy’s quick intellect and hardy character (the other young boy brought with him, having barely survived the overland slave route, did not survive the Russian cold) the tsar decided to conduct a kind of anthropological experiment: could a primitive African achieve the same level of advancement as a European if exposed to the same climate and educational opportunities? Thus began Hannibal’s education with private tutors in the Russian court. His success as a military engineer, his attainment of Russian land and title, and his marriage to a Russian woman of aristocratic lineage seem to have answered Peter the Great’s question. While these achievements have been well documented, both by the 38 Marjorie Perloff, “‘Modernism’ at the Millenium,” in Twenty-First-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 158.

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Introduction

poet in his unfinished works about his great grandfather and by scholars and historians since, the civilizational assumption that led to them has not been. The editing out of uncomfortable truths about Russia’s relationship to race and the European slave trade has continued in the twentieth century in the form of the denial that racism exists in Russia, both during and after the Soviet period. The testimony of countless individuals of African, Asian, Central Asian, Indian, and other ethnic descents proves otherwise, as does the recent documentary Black Russians (2003) about the difficulties faced today by African immigrants in Russia and Russians of African descent. Aygi has acknowledged the complications of being a non-Russian poet writing in the Russian language and literary tradition. Though themes of race and postcoloniality do not enter his work explicitly, there is a constant tension between his love for the Russian land and people and his horror at Russia and the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic, imperial power. Though his work often lingers over the Russian landscape and the mysteries of Orthodox Christianity there is an assertion of Chuvash identity, from language and imagery to songs and prayers. He has often played fast and loose with the conventions of the Russian language, and there is something defiant in his brand of avant-gardism, in which language, having reclaimed its importance as a “dangerous good,” is both destroyed and exalted, and wherein the poet dares to face the cost of witness.

CH A PT E R O N E

Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

Do tell Aygi for me that he has made a really important contribution to his people. . . . I don’t doubt that there are dozens of similar cultures also needing their self-expression, but alas, we are two, and the world is great and many. —John Krueger to Peter France on the publication of An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry

D

espite the popular success of Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novel The Quiet Don (Тихий Дон, 1928-1930), the writer was criticized by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP, precursor to the Soviet Writers’ Union) for being “a regional, peasant writer who did not give appropriate weight to workers and their problems.”1 In the years between 1917 and 1934, when the concept of the writer as a representative of Party ideology was still in flux, the “regional” writer was considered a subcate1 Liudmila L. Litus, “Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokov,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 272 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1981), 254 (my emphasis).

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Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

gory of the “попутчики” [fellow travelers], writers sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause but not fully proletarian writers themselves. Rather than focusing on the project of building communism, or, as the critic noted above puts it, on “workers and their problems,” writers who were described as “regional” depicted the life, landscape, and customs of the outlying regions of the nascent Soviet empire. Sholokhov is the best-known regional writer, writing as he did in The Quiet Don about the Don region and its Cossack inhabitants (the book was originally written in Cossack dialect and translated to standard Russian for the Russian reading public). Chingiz Aitmatov, from Kyrgizia, and Vasil Bykov, from Belorussia, are other prominent regional Soviet writers. Unlike Sholokhov, who was an ethnic Russian but grew up within the Cossack culture, these writers ethnically represent the regions from which they come and about which they write. As the chapter’s epigraph demonstrates, even at the height of his success Aygi was still largely seen by his supporters as a writer who represented “his people,” and was doing them, rather than the world at large, a service by making Chuvash literature and tradition available to a wider global audience. Aygi was also considered a regional writer when he moved from his home in Chuvashia to Moscow to study at the Literary Institute in 1953. His regional status initially helped him to be published in the Soviet Union even though avant-garde work was marginalized during the Thaw: “The neo-avant-garde of the 1950s-1960s was clearly marginalized not only in relation to the official culture, but in relation to ‘Thaw’ culture as well. Few authors having an avant-garde influence were allowed to make it to the printing press. . . . Within ‘regional bounds’ Gennady Aygi [could publish] as a Chuvash poet.”2 While there is a sense that Aygi’s regional status helped him to publish while his other avantgarde contemporaries were suppressed, the label placed him “within regional bounds,” which meant that he would continually come up against an expectation of representing “his people,” their arts, traditions, and culture in a way that was palatable and accessible to the general Soviet public. When his European-influenced avant-garde poetry continued to 2 N. L. Leiderman and M. H. Lipovetsky, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura: 1950— 1990-e gody v dvukh tomakh 1 (Moscow: Akademiia, 2003), 377.

subvert these expectations, he found himself critically out in the cold— neither a proper “Russian” avant-garde poet nor a proper “Chuvash” poet. Mikhail Sholokhov went on to win a Nobel Prize for The Quiet Don (1965), and Aygi himself was a Nobel nominee (1991). One might conclude that the “regional” status of these writers did not keep their work from gaining worldwide recognition and, in fact, may have helped set them apart from their literary peers. But recognition for one’s ethnic, linguistic, or cultural background is always a double-edged sword, especially in the highly assimilationist culture of Soviet Russia. Since the authorities wanted to promote an image of the Soviet Union as a place of internationalism, free of racism, they encouraged regional writers.3 But Aygi’s Chuvash origin, and especially his insistence on writing in Chuvash, would be a hindrance if he wished to participate fully in the Russian literary community. Unfortunately, no large-scale study of “regional” writers in the Russian literary tradition exists, just as no study explores the questions and assumptions surrounding ethnic and national difference in Russian literature: “The ethnic aspect of Russian art needs further examination; it needs to be connected both to the issue of Russianness and to the Russian avant-garde practices of creating art with a universal appeal.”4 The canonized version of Aygi’s biography states that in the late 1950s he switched from writing in Chuvash to writing exclusively in Russian on the advice of his mentor Pasternak. This is only partially true. Although Aygi did begin to write the Russian language avant-garde free verse for which he is known at that time (and at Pasternak’s urging), he continued to write a parallel body of work, no less prolific, in Chuvash throughout his career. This work is rarely dealt with by Aygi scholars, as the Chuvash language is a significant barrier, but one glance through a book of the Chuvash poems will tell the reader that many differ strikingly from his Russian poems, as they are written in the classical stanzaic rhymed verse developed in the nineteenth-century Chuvash poetic 3 Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos, introduction to Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 25-26. 4 Marek Bartelik, “Concerning Socialist Realism—Recent Publications on Russian Art: Book Review,” Art Journal 58:4 (1999), 90.

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

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tradition. The reasons for the stylistic and thematic shifts that occur in Aygi’s Chuvash poetry and how they relate to his Russian verse bear closer scrutiny. Questions of Aygi’s ethnic and cultural identity in relation to the Russian tradition do not often come up as a subject in themselves, but they are intimately related to his concept of himself as a writer. When asked by an interviewer where he felt he fit in the “triangle” of Russian literary schools consisting of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the “other Russia,” Aygi responded: “Я всегда чувствовал себя в ‘другой, синтезирующей России’ (видя в этом особый мой долг как человек нерусского происхождения).”5 [I have always felt myself in the ‘other, synthesized Russia’ (seeing in this my particular duty as a person of non-Russian origin)]. Although the interviewer did not ask Aygi to elaborate on how his non-Russianness affected his relation to, position within, or conception of the Russian tradition, it is a subject to which Aygi clearly devoted much thought. The more interesting question is how Aygi’s non-Russianness changes the Russian tradition and what it means for a tradition conceived as belonging to one nation, language group, and ethnicity to account for its inherent difference. The question is particularly relevant in the global era, when peoples, languages, and cultures are no longer defined as fixed within or belonging exclusively to a geo-political entity but are recognized as fluid and migratory. The question of how to account for otherness has long puzzled the Russian literary and critical traditions, on the one hand because Russia has always occupied a position of “otherness” in relation to both the East and West and has long sought to define itself on independent terms, and on the other because the so-called “father” of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, strongly identified with his African heritage, creating a quandary for those who sought to define the Russian people, values, and culture through a literary tradition that had an individual of hybrid ethnicity as its icon. Even though Pushkin himself was several generations removed from his African ancestor, Abram Petrovich Hannibal, his blackness was 5 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 291-292.

an important part of his identity and affected the way he was viewed by his peers, not to mention the way subsequent generations of scholars have interpreted his biography and literary legacy. Pushkin’s blackness was viewed “as a marker of anxiety and ambiguity” by his contemporaries and his “African blood” was often cited as the reason for his passionate, reckless nature.6 Pushkin, however, was proud of his African ancestry, as exemplified in the poem “My Genealogy” (1830), his unfinished novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (Арап Перта Великого, 1827), and in his penchant for sketching self-portraits, sometimes exaggerating his African features, as in his “self-portrait as a blackamoor” sketched in the margins of the aforementioned novel.7 Pushkin’s many portraitists adjusted his painted image to accentuate or downplay his “African” features, a point significant for our study of Aygi, who has been the subject of many portraits in which his Asiatic features are either exaggerated or Europeanized. Pushkin’s blackness also figured prominently in his canonization as Russia’s greatest literary icon and thereby as a representative for the “Russian” people: [T]he . . . dominant mode [of Pushkin scholarship after his death], fed by the same German Romantic vision of history which created the imperative of national purity of blood and hence gave impetus to philosophical and political racism, prompted those who participated in the process of creating an “official” myth to view culture and therefore poetry and poets as the true gauge of national worth. A Russian national poet of the first order thus became necessary to prove the validity of Russia’s imperial enterprise and to assert the health of its growing empire. This . . . tendency, most compellingly expressed by Gogol and Dostoevsky and arguably simply a particularly Russian variant of the pan-European trend, cast Pushkin as the paradigmatic Russian precisely because he was capable of assimilating other nationalities, much as the Russian Empire itself expanded by incorporating neighboring ethnic groups.8

Aygi himself cites Gogol and Dostoevsky as contributors to the creation of the literature of the “other Russia” to which he feels bound rather than 6 Nepomnyashchy and Trigos, introduction, 9-18. 7 Ibid., Figure 5. 8 Ibid., 18-19.

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associating them with either the Moscow or Petersburg schools. But this passage does a great deal more than simply affirm Aygi’s comment: it reveals the relationship between poets and power established by Russian and European imperialism that, at least in Russia, persisted well into the twentieth century; it reveals why Russia needed to establish Pushkin as its “national poet” and finally; it reveals the inherent conflict between this need, the originating philosophy (which called for national ethnic “purity”) and the available national poet, who proudly trumpeted his hybridity. Although Pushkin’s identity forced Russia to come to terms with his (and its) hybrid nature, the way in which this ethnic diversity was incorporated into the idea of Russians and Russianness was—as was still true in post-Soviet Russia—assimilation. This approach is pointedly different from allowing ethnic diversity to exist alongside Russian ethnicity and all it entails in Russian culture. As an approach it is markedly imperialistic, but also an erasure, even in its simplest forms, because it ignores anything not in keeping with the one identity. Many inhabitants of the former Soviet Union are bilingual and bicultural, but even during Soviet times, when the state sought to portray itself as a haven of tolerance and multiculturalism, their hybridity was not discussed as a cultural phenomenon in itself;9 the Russians simply congratulated themselves and the inhabitants of the republics on how well diversity was assimilated into the identity of the Soviet citizen with Russian as its official language and proletarian ideology as its common value. Issues of hybridity, bilingualism, and multiculturalism as they relate to the Russian literary tradition and to the identity of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual are immensely important for Aygi as, unlike Pushkin, he was a completely ethnically non-Russian poet writing in the Russian tradition. Aygi’s ethnic heritage influenced his peers’ physical perceptions of him: some portraits emphasize his Asiatic features (Gennady Alaverdov 1973, I. Makarevich 1974) while others construct for him a more European countenance (Leon Robel 1987).10 Aygi’s own self-portrait sketches (he was prolific in these, as was Pushkin) nearly   9 Ibid., 24-26. 10 These portraits are reproduced in Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 33, 62, 144. For Aygi’s own sketches see 154-164.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Chuvash has its own poetic forms and tradition, which Aygi outlines in his introduction to An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (1991), a collection of prayers, poems, and writings from the thirteenth century to the present that he compiled for translation by Western scholars. Until the mid-nineteenth century the Chuvash maintained an oral tradition and did not have an alphabet.11 The following passage from “Ploughman’s Prayer” (“Сухаçă Кĕлли”), a text associated with ancient Chuvash mythology, expresses their relationship to writing and language: Эй, Çĕр Ашшĕ, Çĕр Ăшăш, ... Пирĕн чавашăн Çырнă Кĕнеке çук, — Тутлă чĕлхепе ăша чĕрепе каланине хуш хурса хушилр. Çырлахăр!12 11 Gennady Aygi, ed., An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, trans. Peter France (London: Forest Books, 1991), xxi-xxiii. See introduction for an informative discussion of Chuvash literature, history, and culture. See also M. Ia. Sirotkin, Chuvashskii folk’lor (Cheboksary: Chuvashskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1965). 12 “Ploughman’s Prayer” (Box 1/Folder 1 5(b)), John R. Krueger Collection of Gennadii Aigi and Chuvash Poetry 1972-1992, Princeton University Library Rare Books Division, Princeton. This document is from the manuscript of An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, made available by Altaic languages scholar John Krueger who served as advisor for the Chuvash to English translations for the project. The Chuvash manuscript of “Сухаçă Кĕлли” differs slightly from the published

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always depict him in a state of concentration. With brow furrowed, hair ruffled, and eyes cast downward (sometimes a hand with a cigarette dangling between its fingers cradles the head), they emphasize Aygi as a writer, which, beyond any national or cultural affiliations, is the way the poet viewed himself. Aygi’s ethnic and cultural background interacted with, informed, and sometimes conflicted with his role as a Russian poet and his concept of himself as a poet of humanity, a poet as such, not bound by labels and political affiliations.

Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

Father of the Earth, Mother of the Earth! We Chuvash have no writing, all that we can do is bow and beseech you with sweet mouths and warm hearts:

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Oh Gods, have mercy!13

In this as in other prayers the tone is one of humility, thanksgiving, and kinship with the earth. Earlier in the prayer the speaker asks the gods to give “strength to the horses, creatures without speech.” This at once creates a parallel between the Chuvash, a people “without writing,” and the horses, “creatures without speech”; it highlights the superfluity of words, language, and writing as means of communication. Yet the people are plowing “with shouting and song.” An acute awareness of speech, song, and silence pervades these prayers, and this is echoed in Aygi’s work as well. Notably, the prayers celebrate the lack of writing, which is also echoed in the theme of silence that pervades Aygi’s work. Many of Aygi’s poems are constructed as prayers and convey similar tones of awe, celebration, closeness to nature, and humility, although their language straddles modernist and post-modernist forms. While similar in tone and organization to Orthodox Christian or Catholic prayers, the “Plowman’s Prayer” maintains a non-hierarchical relationship among its elements that is notably pantheist. The religion is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal; both deities of the Earth are addressed in a syntactically parallel or equivalent manner. Gods, men, animals, and the soil they till are given equal respect and importance. This equivalence points to a deeper idea within Chuvash thinking, namely that multiple ways of being can intrinsically co-exist both independently of one another, yet directly affecting one another in non-contradictory ways. Even though Aygi and most other Chuvash today identify as Orthodox Christian, translation; there seems to be a missing intermediate version of the poem that is not on file in the manuscript. 13 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 6.

the pantheistic spirit of non-hierarchy pervades Aygi’s work and proves subversive to the Western Judeo-Christian-centered mind. In the 1740s Christianity was forced on the Chuvash through mass baptisms and the “Office of Conversion” sought to root out native pantheism; the persistence of the prayer over time could in fact represent a form of subversion, the resistance of a people against imperialist domination.14 Aygi invokes prayer in his poetry in a similar way, echoing his people’s resistance against an imperialist forced conversion, and the Soviet-era believer’s resistance to state-enforced atheism.15 While anonymous oral texts related to folk mythology dominated Chuvash culture before the nineteenth century, during the nineteenth century a literary tradition developed around a few major poets who were innovators of both language and forms. The question of identity has always been central for the Chuvash, whose history and origins are obscure. Thus, part of the aim of the literary tradition was self-definition. The question “Who Are the Chuvash?” opens Aygi’s introduction to the Anthology, and the nineteenth-century poet Maksam Fyodorov addresses the question in his poem “We Are the Chuvash,” which he first published anonymously in the Russian press in 1852: Now all the clerks are asking: Where do the Chuvash come from? We Chuvash are Chuvash. Our kindred are the Tatars, And our language is Chuvash.16

14 Ibid., xix-xx. 15 Although Aygi himself emphasizes the confluence of pagan and Christian tradition and values in his historical writing and poetry, a great diversity of religions and occult movements have arisen in Chuvashia over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Chuvashia, as most other countries, is a complex mixture of sects, groups, and denominations. See L. Iu. Braslavskii, Religioznye i okkul’tnye techeniia v Chuvashii (Moscow: Institut prokrizisnykh issledovanii, 2000). 16 The Chuvash version of this poem is not on file in the anthology manuscript. An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 90-1, Aygi’s translation.

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While Fyodorov’s straightforward assertions may seem tautological, their clear-cut and simple answer defines the Chuvash by implying who they are not: they are not Russians or Tatars, though they are kindred to the latter. This is a statement against assimilation in the 1850s, when Chuvashia was already a protectorate of the Russian empire and the Cyrillic alphabet was being modified to create a written Chuvash language.17 The first great nineteenth-century Chuvash poet, Kestenttin Ivanov, helped formalize the tradition of written poetry using a seven-syllable line common to the folk poetry of Turkish peoples. Aygi notes the ambiguous roots of this form: Because Chuvash poetry began very recently, it is hard to tell what sources, other than oral folk poetry, are responsible for its formal features. The question is complicated by the fact that the classical literature of the Turkic languages, impregnated by the norms of Arabic and Persian poetry, influenced the oral poetry of the Turkic peoples, including those living in the Volga region.18

This form dominated Chuvash poetry for several decades, until the appearance of the greatest innovator of Chuvash poetry, Mikhail Sespel (1899-1922). Sespel used syllabo-tonic rhythm in Chuvash for the first time. It replaced the syllabic system and brought Chuvash poetry, in Aygi’s words, “closer to the Russian poetry, and thus, to world poetry.”19 Aygi also notes the “Futurist” and “Impressionist” quality of Sespel’s images, which brought a heretofore unknown “psycho-physiological individuality” to Chuvash poetry.20 A poem of Sespel’s that Aygi included in the Anthology and recorded in Edinburgh, 1989, is “From Now On” (“Паянтан,” 1922). Паянтан (Юлашки юн тушламĕсем)

17 Ibid., xx-xxii. For a detailed discussion of Chuvash identity and autonomy see V. P. Ivanov, Chuvashskii etnos: Problemy istorii i etnogeografii (Cheboksary: Chuvashskii gosudarstvennyi institut gumanitarnykh nauk, 1998). 18 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, introduction, xxviii-xxix. 19 Ibid., xxx. 20 Ibid.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Асап тăвĕ çине çаруран Çĕршыва çаватса илсе карĕç. Шупашкар хÿмисен юнла тарĕ Çĕмĕрлне чĕремре паянтан. Чĕп-чĕр юнлă – мĕн вăл аллăмри? Çуркалап, мамăкап, каркайлатăп, Юн тымарĕсене татăклатăп, Ман вăл – Сеспель Мишши – юн чĕри. Тирне сÿнĕ çара анчăкла Ют çатан хушшинче çыртăк шырăп, Пĕр йĕпе-сапара кăнса выртăп, Шупашкаршăн выçса йынăшса. Паянтан выçса типнĕ ăшран Сив масар йынашни кăна пулĕ, Мăн арман чулĕне чунăм тулĕ Паянтан, паянтан, паянтан . . .21 From Now On (The last drops of blood) From now on, turned into stones, in heaps, The warm word, frozen, has stuck in the throat, From the forest top day’s light has fled, And death lies over the world from now on.

21 Krueger Collection, Princeton University Rare Books Division. The line of ellipses after the third stanza is not included in the translation.

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Паянтан чулланса, муклашкан Ăш сăмах пăрланса пыра ларчĕ. Вăрмансес тăрринчен шевле тарчĕ, Вилĕм витрĕ çĕре паянтан.

Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

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Barefoot on to the Hill of Torment They have led my Country, led her by the hand. The bloody sweat of the walls of Cheboksary Is held in my shattered heart from now on. All bloody – what is this in my hand? I break it, turn it to dust, to meat, Tearing the veins. It is my heart, Mine, Michael Sespel’s bloody heart. Like a dog that has had its hide ripped off, I shall beg a crust in a stranger’s yard, Some drizzly day I shall drop down dead, Hungrily howling for Cheboksary. From now on from my innards, dried up with hunger, Will come only the groan of the cold graveyard, My soul will be filled with a massive millstone From now on, from now on, from now on . . .22

This poem reflects the influence of many traditions. Its meter is anapestic trimeter, a ternary rhythm often echoed in Aygi’s free verse. While the four-line stanzas and alternating rhyme are reminiscent of Western poetry, the repetition of the title in subsequent stanzas and the poet’s selfidentification in the poem are reminiscent of the Persian ghazal.23 The concreteness of the images—frozen stone, graveyard, millstone—and graphic physiological descriptions—the bloody heart, veins, hands, 22 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 157. Adapted from Peter France’s translation. 23 The ghazal is a Persian (also Urdu) form that consists of couplets with a consistent rhyme and refrain. For an in-depth discussion of the form see Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, eds., Ghzazal as World Literature 2v. (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2005). Kashmiri-American poet Aga Shahid Ali (1949-2001) introduced the ghazal to the West. His poetry collections include The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), The Beloved Witness (Viking, 1992), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (Norton, 1991), and The Country Without a Post Office (Norton, 1997). http://www. umass.edu/wgbycourses/AghaAli.htm (accessed April 9, 2007).

throat—are Mayakovskian, “Futurist” elements also found in Aygi’s early poems.24 The transformation of images in this poem—the word turned to stone, the heart turned to dust and then meat, the country personified— also evokes aspects of Futurist verse. In a discussion of the development of Chuvash poetic tradition, Aygi identifies these tendencies as the “Sespel-European” line.25 This line of development, he notes, forces the poet to break with traditional, folkloric language and establish a voice that is more individual and European. He notes that while such innovation brings Chuvash literature into closer contact with Western forms, it leads to “personal tragedy” for the poets themselves, and “the very shape and texture of the ‘new word’ is marked by dislocation.”26 This observation is characteristic of Aygi—a Chuvash poet who has immersed himself in Russian and European culture—and reveals one source of the sense of loss and dislocation (and the apparent fragmentation) that pervades his work. This is not to say that Aygi believes that combining European and Chuvash tradition invariably results in a loss of the latter. He notes that the very opposite occurs in the most recent development of twentiethcentury Chuvash poetry, which draws on its own rich culture and philosophy: free verse. Originally a variant of European vers libre (firstly in the work of Sespel, and then in my own early poems of the 1950s), this kind of poetry [the “national and formally innovative” type] spread quickly and took on a specifically Chuvash character. The original European and modernist element in it fused in an unexpected manner with another element, the forgotten language of the ancient spells and incantations of the pagan Chuvash.27

Poets developing this hybrid form are Peder Eyzin (b. 1943), Lyubov’ Martyanova (b. 1950), and Raisa Sarbi (b. 1951), and each explores Chuvash folklore, ethics, and aphorisms in his or her own way. Aygi notes that

24 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 102. 25 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 214. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 216.

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Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

Eyzin expresses “genuinely Zen Buddhist ideas . . . though knowing nothing of Zen Buddhism”:

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A dark day. In autumn mud green winter corn.28

This “Zen” quality of the short, meditative lyric is present in Aygi’s work as well. Aygi’s early work, like Eyzin’s, is driven by concrete images, a feature that falls away or takes new forms in later work, which relies on image-concepts. As in the Chuvash free verse Aygi describes, his early work elaborates an “everyday metaphor.” It embodies both the SespelEuropean and “national and formally innovative” traditions in its transformation of images, emphasis on the physical, and meditation on the everyday. Evocations of childhood, which predominate in his early work, are also tied to Chuvash themes. This connection arises again in Aygi’s later work. Many poems in Veronica’s Book (Тетрадь Вероники, 1979), dedicated to his baby daughter, are variations on Chuvash and Tatar folk songs or contain Chuvash words and refrains. The predominance of supplicatory prayer in the Chuvash tradition characterizes both Aygi’s earlier and later work. In his discussion of Chuvash poetic tradition, Aygi quotes Nietzsche: “Latent in language is a philosophical mythology.”29 Such a supposition is loaded when applied to Chuvash, a language of mysterious origin whose characteristics are still the subject of much debate. Chuvash is identified as a Turkic—or Turkicized30—language, although there is considerable doubt as to whether it is Turkish in 28 Ibid., 216-7. 29 Ibid., 214. 30 It is likely that Chuvash underwent two phases of Turkicization: a pre-Tatar (Bulgarian influence) and a Tatar one. This would account for the completeness with which Chuvash, whatever its origin, was converted into a Turkic language and may also account for the uniqueness of Chuvash’s “Turkishness” when compared with other Turkic languages. Menges, The Turkic Languages, 61.

origin.31 Much of the difficulty in determining its roots stems from the region in which it formed; the middle Volga, where the ancestors of the Chuvash settled, was a migration site for many nomadic groups that were ethnically and linguistically diverse. Before the arrival of the Bulgars and Suvars (“Chuvash” comes from the name “Suvar”) the area was populated by Huns, who are thought to be the original ancestors of the Chuvash and the source of their language. But the Huns were themselves comprised of various ethnic groups, each with its own dialect or language variant, making it nearly impossible to trace any particular features. Indeed, the only basis for claiming Chuvash’s Hunnic origin is the fact that it is so unlike all other Altaic languages. Its cases, morphology, phonology, and lexicon are puzzlingly unique, displaying only vague similarities to other Turkic languages, and even to disparate languages among these.32 31 Chuvash was characterized as a Turkic language by the German linguist and explorer Julius Klaproth in an article “Comparaison de la langue des Tchouvaches avec les idiomes turks” in 1828. Ibid., 2. The most complete historical picture of Chuvash available is that it is the only extant language of the Bulgar branch, its only known predecessor Volga-Bulgarian (Great Bulgarian, Hunno-Bulgarian), which is preserved only in fragments and runic inscriptions. For reasons still unclear to linguists, Chuvash contains many elements of unknown origin, even considering the influence of neighboring East Slavic, Finnish and Tatar languages. Ibid., 53-61. 32 Nevertheless, some changes Chuvash has undergone in these systems can be characterized: • As a result of phonological development, the dative and accusative cases of Chuvash have coincided (-γa, -yγ > -a). The directional –ałła, comittional –pa(-ła), adverbialis –ła, terminativus –ťťen, and causalis –šăn are also cases not found in other Turkic languages. • Chuvash shows many vocalic changes from common Turkic, such as (a > u, y > a, ü > e, etc.). Proto-Turkic vocalic length has resulted in vowel splitting and disyllabity (kĕvak > *kők “blue”, compared with Turkmen gők and Mongol kökä) or disappearance (pĕr, per “ice”, compared with Turkmen būđ and Jakut būs, mūs). Vowels have undergone extreme reduction, dulling, and develarization. • Consonant changes have occurred: j- > ś- (occassionally > ţ’/č; č > ś, s- > š-; *đ > z > r; -z-, -z : r (as in Mongol and Tungus); š : l (as in Mongol and Tungus); q- > x-/ j- // zero. • The plural suffix in Chuvash is –sem, whereas in other Turkic languages it is some form of –lar. Pronomial –n- in pronomial inflection has been preserved. • The numerals used in Chuvash are those of common Turkic. The suffix used with ordinals is –m + -š(ĕ) (also the 3rd person possessive ending). In the nominative, 1st and 2nd person pronouns have a proclitic, anaphoric element e-:singular e-bĕ, e-zĕ,

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Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

The only feature of Chuvash that is relatively regular is the syntax. This is interesting because two of the most puzzling features of Aygi’s poetry are his distinct, often cryptic organization of words and phrases in a poem and his penchant for hyphenation. Both of these features may be illuminated by attending to the syntactic particularities of his native language. Chuvash, like other Turkic languages, reverses the subject-verbobject word order common in Western languages. In Turkic languages, all modifiers and modifying phrases come first, followed by a verb, into which information about the subject and negation is agglutinated by the addition of particles and endings. Even “prepositions” in Chuvash are “post-positions.” Whereas in Russian one ending may represent, say, gender and case (or tense and number), in agglutinative languages each ending is morphemic, or has only one meaning. Therefore, in Chuvash and other Turkic languages, one must agglutinate several morphemic endings to convey all the information required. Not only does this foster the practice of forming words of many parts that can be added or taken away as context demands, it fosters the concept of a word, a combination of letters with no spaces in between, as a phrase. Whereas in Russian or English one relies on word order and small autonomous words (prepositions, conjunctions, relative pronouns, etc.) to convey the complete meaning of a phrase, agglutinative languages build the additional meaning into the word itself. Building additional meaning into a single word-phrase is exactly what Aygi accomplishes in his poetry through hyphenation. Perhaps because it has undergone less Western (or modernizing) influence,





and plural e-bir, e-zir; in the oblique cases, they have the stem man- and san-, pl. pir- and sir-. •  The demonstrative pronouns in Chuvash are unknown elsewhere in Turkic languages. The reflexive 1st, 2nd and 3rd person pronouns in sing. and pl. are also unknown elsewhere in Turkic: xam, xu and xaj(ě), pl xaměr, xăvăr and xăjsem. • The verbs also are “far digressing [in] development.” There are different suffixes of the nomina verbalia; the common Turkic and common Tungus aorist suffixes –r and –ra seem to be lacking. Traces of an independent negative verb still seem to be found with an placed before imperatives. • The lexicon contains many words of Finnish, Slavic, and Quman origin, and especially of “unknown” origin. Menges, The Turkic Languages, 66.

Chuvash agglutinates endings more heavily than other Turkic languages.33 Thus, Aygi’s native language, with its tendency to agglutinate and reverse SVO word order, at least partially provides a basis for his linguistic innovations in Russian. “[F]or me, poetry is . . . the type of ‘action’ and ‘linkage’ best expressed in the words ‘sacred act.’” 34 The act of linking is important for Aygi, both as a poetic philosophy and as a poetic device, and his use of hyphenation is one of the most obvious acts of “linking” that occurs in his work. In one sense, combining two or more words with a hyphen may not seem like a particular innovation in Russian; such phrases are common in colloquial Russian and the language of fairy tales. But the kinds of words Aygi combines and the thematic thread that runs through them proves that he is not simply borrowing a stylistic trope. Rather, his compounds are part of a poetic vision that draws on his culture’s past while remaining consistent with the modernist poetics he develops in his Russian poetry of the late 1950s and 60s. The Chuvash poetry that Aygi continued to write throughout his career engages with the Sespel-European tradition, using a syllabo-tonic structure and alternating rhymes. Consider the poem “To Mother” (“Аннене,” 1954): Аннене Эсĕ хирĕç ан тух эп киле таврăнсан, Уçса хур алăка, тухса кай пахчана. Кулленхи ал ĕçне сак çине хăварсам – Тахçанах ман валли çыхакаи чăлхана. Çĕр улми калакне таянтар кĕтессе, Кăранташ татăкне хур эс кантăк çине, Эп ăнланăп хамах кĕсьери конвертсем Ма тĕл-тĕл сарăхса, хуралса пĕтнине. 33 This has changed somewhat due to Russian influence, in which separate words are used to denote gender, etc., but most older Chuvash still agglutinate endings in their writing and speech. 34 Aygi, “From ‘A Few Remarks concerning My Poetry,’” trans. Pierre Joris, boundary 2 26:1 (1999): 42.

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44

Сăмахпа эс каллех упкелеймĕн мана: Упкев- манăçать эп килте пулнă чух. Ăсатса янă чух-ятламаççĕ çынна . . . Эп киле таврăнсан эсĕ хирĕç ан тух.35 To Mother Do not confront me when I come home: Open the door, leave the garden. I have left my needlework on the bench – I’ve had stockings that fasten for a long time. Put the spade in the corner, Place the pencil stub on the window. I have read the envelopes in my pocket a hundred times: That is why in places they are faded, the endings blackened out. You will not be able to reproach me again: Shamefully, he forgets that I was at home as I ought. They will barely chide a man when they let him go . . . When I come home do not confront me.

The setting for this poem is the Chuvash village, the speaker one of its inhabitants, although at the time of writing Aygi lived in Moscow. In the original, the meter is iambic pentameter, and the rhymes, which are alternating abab, are all dactylic in the first stanza, dactylic and feminine in the second stanza, and feminine and masculine in the third. Such intricate syllabo-tonic structuring shows that Aygi is fully capable of writing traditional verse, even if in his Russian poetry he opts for more innovative forms. Although Chuvash language and forms play a significant role in Aygi’s Russian poetry he by no means translates from Chuvash when he is composing poetry in Russian, nor does he graft Chuvash grammar onto Russian words. He himself has said that he does not think in Chuvash 35 Gennadiy Aygi, Surkhi Yepkhu: Savasempe Poemasem (Shupashkar: Chavash keneke izdatel’stvi, 1990), 34.

when composing poetry in Russian, and that, when composing, he rarely thinks in words at all. He does admit, however, that “it is entirely possible that there are times when a few hazy ‘Chuvash’ concepts require incarnation in the word.”36 Let us simply take this as an affirmation that while composing, Aygi is aware of his dual-language status, and that this may result in some conscious (and certainly much unconscious) interplay between the languages. Just as agglutination allows Chuvash to build in meaning for gender and case, more abstract concepts such as mood and possibility can be built into words.37 In Aygi’s Russian poetry, certain words related to his main themes (field, forest, flowers, trees, light, child, God, etc.) recur as parts of hyphenated or invented words. He seems to treat these theme words as “morphemes,” units of meaning that can be freely combined with other words to create a complete thought. Consider Aygi’s use of hyphenations in “Pines-with-birch” (“Сосны-с-березой,” 1977): СОСНЫ-С-БЕРЕЗОЙ сквозь Бога Сосен тень-излученье: береза-дитя38 Pines-with-Birch through God’s Pines shadow-illumination: a birch-child39

36 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 22. 37 John R. Krueger, Chuvash Manual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 176. 38 Aygi, Selected Poems, 137. 39 Ibid., 136. Adapted from France’s translation.

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Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

A central aspect of Aygi’s poetic philosophy is a vision of the universe as an organically connected whole, echoed in his view of poetry as both “linkage” and “sacred act.” If all things in the universe are connected to one another and part of a greater whole, then the words we use to describe them must be linked in a similar way. Although the divine enters Aygi’s work largely through the Chuvash folk tradition, Christian themes and imagery permeate it as well. Chuvash spirituality has always been marked by dualism or “двоеверие”.40 The relatively late (sixteenth-century) conversion of the Chuvash to Orthodox Christianity allowed them to retain many aspects of their native religion in contemporary culture. However, heavy post-World War II Soviet assimilation resulted in cultural changes—the predominance of Russian language, industrialization, urbanization, and atheism— that distanced the Chuvash from their native traditions and beliefs. When open spiritual practice became possible in the mid-1980s with the onset of perestroika, Orthodox Christianity emerged as the main form of organized religion.41 But many practices today, such as the mass pilgrimage that has evolved from the coinciding of Troitsta (the feast of the Trinity) with Semik (a harvest feast), show that the traditions are well integrated.42 This dualism or tradition blending is evident in Chuvash poetry as well, which for Aygi is distinguished by its organic synthesis of pagan and Christian culture.43 Aygi establishes the “linking” framework in the title by hyphenating the entire phrase. Does the preposition “with” already show that the pines and birch are connected in some way? Yes. Perhaps they are close to one another or the same size, but Aygi does not merely want to express a comparative relationship between trees in this poem. By hyphenating the phrase, he creates a concept that is greater than the sum of its parts. The pines and the birch tree are no longer separate, but part of each other, revealed in their true state of connectedness through the poet’s 40 Olessia P. Vovina, “Building the Road to the Temple: Religion and National Revival in the Chuvash Republic,” Nationality Papers 28:4 (2000): 702. 41 Ibid., 696. 42 Ibid., 701. 43 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 26.

grammatical innovation. The element of the divine is introduced (or strengthened) in the first line in the phrase “God’s Pines.” What pines are these? Surely the phrase evokes “God’s Cedars,” familiar from the Bible, but no particular pines come to mind. This is probably intentional, Aygi’s way of saying that all pines (and all trees and all everything else) are “God’s.” The divine is again invoked in the next line in the paradoxical image of “shadow-radiance.” In Aygi’s scheme, even apparently opposite phenomena constitute parts of a single image. In the last line, the birch from the title returns, this time not explicitly linked with the pines, but with a new image: a child. Thus, Aygi creates a chain of continuity among God, nature, and humans; the birch is not only part of the trees around it, it is also part of the child that is near it, climbing it, playing near it, perhaps sitting at its base. Of course this is not the only way to understand the images in this poem. The phrase “birch-child” could indicate that the birch is a sapling, a “child birch.” Indeed, this kind of compound specifically recalls Aygi’s Chuvash roots. In Chuvash agricultural terminology, words for the stages of human development may also express the stages of growth in plants. Phrases such as “rye mother,” “child potato,” “cabbage baby” have existed in the language since ancient times and are still widely used because the Chuvash have always acknowledged the kinship between plants and humans.44 Chuvash folklore also links animals and humans: a maiden marrying a bear is a common fairytale plot.45 Perhaps the closest bond is felt between humans and the land. The festival Sinze celebrates the pregnancy of the Earth, during which no one is allowed to disturb the earth, tread on her with bare feet, work in the fields, or take stones from her.46 Another ancient tradition illustrates this bond quite literally. After a year of bad harvest, a young man of few prospects is found. He is dressed as a bridegroom and is escorted by a group of villagers, equipped 44 G. A. Degtiarev, “Traditsionnie nazvaniia morfologicheskikh chastei, etapov rosta i protsessov ontogeneza v sel’skokhoziaistvennykh kul’tur v chuvashskikh dialektakh,” Chuvashskii iazyk: Istoriia i sovremennost’ (Cheboksary: Chuvashskii gosudarstvennii institut gumarnitarnykh nauk, 1994): 16-20 45 S. G. Grigor’ev, trans., Chuvashskie skazki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971), 6. 46 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, introduction, xviii.

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with wagon and shovels, into the fields of a neighboring village at night. There he is ceremonially married to the earth, and the villagers load the soil into their wagon with shovels so the groom can bring his bride back to the village. From then on the man is considered “married to the soil.” The bond with the soil is present not only in folk culture, but in Chuvash intellectual life as well. Aygi has written that there has never been an “elite” culture in Chuvashia and even the ancient high priests were peasants in their everyday life. The Chuvash intelligentsia of the nineteenth century never grappled with feeling superfluous to society because they worked alongside the peasants, even in the most difficult times.47 Of course, some social and cultural stratification must have occurred between the intelligentsia and the peasants, even if Aygi observed the disparity to be less dramatic than in other cultures. Aygi has also written that the pantheist past of the Chuvash (he uses the Russian word “язичный” [pagan]) has helped them retain their connection to the natural world. Chuvash poetry has “never known the alienation of humans from nature” because the culture has maintained its pantheistic perception of the world. He characterizes the relationship between the poet and nature as a “peasant-steward” relationship because the poet focuses his care and attention on the details of nature and not on his own personality.48 This view of Chuvash culture, while romanticized—surely no nation that underwent Soviet industrialization and cultural assimilation could have emerged with an Eden-like relationship to nature intact, if it ever had one to begin with—points at least to the Chuvash emphasis on respecting the natural surroundings as both a pragmatic and a moral/ethical priority. These principles inform Aygi’s poetry as well, although one still perceives him as a poet who has broken away from the national character in his engagement with Russian, Western, and Eastern thought and literature. On the one hand, Aygi often refrains from expressing his thoughts and feelings directly in his own poetry, letting the language of the poem make us aware of his sense of awe before the universe. In “Pines-withbirch,” nothing is related in the first-person. Even though the persona 47 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 26. 48 Ibid.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

. . . I was born and raised in the Chuvash countryside, surrounded by unending forests. The windows of our hut looked straight out onto the field—the field and forest made up “my entire world.” Having become acquainted through world literature with the “world-oceans,” the “world-cities” of different nations, I strove to ensure that my world, the “Forest-Field,” did not fall behind other cultural “worlds” in literary significance . . . . . . . Я родился и вырос в чувашской деревне, окруженной бескрайними лесами, окна нашей избушки выходили прямо в поле,—из поля и леса состоял для меня—“весь мой мир.” Знакомясь по мировой литературе с “мирами-океанами,” с “мирами-городами” других народов, я старался, чтобы мой мир, “Лес-Поле,” не уступал бы по литературной значимости другим общеизвестным “мирам” . . . .49

The field and forest were not only special landscapes for Aygi, they have central meaning in Chuvash folk mythology.50 One scholar writes: “Like other Zoroastrians, the Chuvash understand God to be all of nature, and therefore have not erected temples of worship and do not erect them to this day, performing, instead, the ‘chuk’ or worship under the open sky, in the bosom of nature.”51 Traditional Chuvash religion sees nature as the temple based on the tradition of kiremet, sacred groves (or spirits of the dead), from the legend of a god resurrected in a tree growing on ashes that symbolizes the rebirth of humankind through nature.52 49 Ibid., 155. 50 Ibid., 156. 51 Vovina, “Building the Road to the Temple,” 700. 52 Ibid.

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describes a scene in the forest, he does not indicate whether he is in the scene somewhere himself or how he feels or what he thinks about it. Rather, the poem achieves a Zen-like universality. On the other hand, while the poem is only three lines long, its idiosyncratic word forms and grammar mark it as unmistakably Aygi’s. The field and forest images that pervade Aygi’s poetry stem directly from his experience of growing up in Chuvashia. Even in his expository prose, Aygi uses hyphenated phrases to express them:

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The belief that the field and forest are the literal or symbolic dwelling place of spirits contributes to their significance in Aygi’s work. Although Aygi’s linguistic and cultural background may have provided him with a particular model for attaching meanings to one another, he is not the only poet to use hyphenation in this way. The nineteenthcentury Victorian poet Gerald Manley Hopkins is notorious for his use of hyphenations and invented words. In his poems, as in Aygi’s, the coinages reflect the poet’s exuberant mode of expression: Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!   The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!   Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!   Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!— Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!   Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse   Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows. (“The Starlight Night”)

The compounds in this poem—fire-folk, circle-citadels, quickgold, wind-beat, whitebeam, mealed-with-yellow, etc.—create a transfigured vision of a rapturously perceived natural world. The need for novel words and phrases arises because the poet finds available forms inadequate, quotidian. The same holds for Aygi, who is primarily concerned with revealing connections between the earthly and divine. Consider the poem “Field near Ferapontovo” (“Поле за Ферапонтовым,” 1967), an instance of “worship under the open sky”:

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

ПОЛЕ ЗА ФЕРАФПОНТОВЫМ И. М. о небо-окно!.. –

ветр – до земли – сквозь короны светил: без шума без веса: в поляну-окно! – и сосуда прозрачно-холодного в отверстие – веянье: в окно человека (над полем по полю): в чистую Чашу ума-восприятия!.. – и – в довершение мира соборно-сияющего: творящее Смысло-Веленье свое (Разговору подобное) Светоналичностью: ветр-озаренье! – из солнца-окна удаляющегося: в ясное:

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о в далекое чистое окно сотворенное:

Chuvash Poetics: Forming an Aesthetic

незамутненное: поле-окно53 Field near Ferapontovo to I. M.

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oh sky-window! . . . — oh into the distant window pure and created: wind – to earth – through crowns of stars: without noise without weight: into the window-clearing! – into the transparent-cool vessel’s opening – the breath wafted: into the window of man (over field through field): into the pure Cup of mind-perception! . . . — and – completing the together-shining-world: creating its Meaning-Commandment (resembling Conversation) with Lightpresence:

53 Aygi, Selected Poems, 78-9.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

wind-illumination! – from sun-window moving away: into the clear: limpid-untroubled:

In this poem, Aygi imbues natural elements with spirit, which is signified by the word “window.” This he links with four different terms, creating sky-window, window-clearing, sun-window, and finally, fieldwindow, to indicate that they are all portals to the spiritual realm. The poem begins and ends in the field, even though it journeys far beyond it in many of the lines. Circularity is a feature of the Chuvash free verse that Aygi discusses in his Anthology. This poem, like its Chuvash counterparts, is essentially a meditation on an everyday object. Aygi describes these Chuvash poems as creating a “circular space” that departs from and returns to a single image or thought. He creates his own version of such a circular, meditative poem in Russian. In poems like “Field near Ferapontovo,” most of the lines—even if they are joined by idiosyncratic grammar—can be read as parallel, mini-meditations on the theme of the poem’s main image, which is often stated in the title. Aygi’s later work often follows this pattern. In addition to “window,” “light” too indicates spirituality. The wind is a “wind-illumination,” the world “communally-shining” with “Lightpresence,” a rare example of an unhyphenated compound in Aygi’s work. There are compound phrases of a more abstract nature in this poem as well: the synesthetic modifier “transparent-cold” and the phrases “mind-perception” and “Sense-Command.” Here Aygi’s act of linkage lends a sense of action to concepts commonly considered as passive. In describing the air as “transparent-cold,” he draws our attention to both the sensuality and the purity of something we usually perceive in the negative, or rather, do not perceive at all. In “mind-perception” Aygi 54 Ibid. Adapted from France’s translation.

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field-window54

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stresses that the mind is not merely a thing, but the process of perceiving as well. The phrase “Meaning-Command” shows that there is no passive meaning in the universe, that everything which means demands to be acknowledged. Like the phrases that incorporate elements of the natural and spiritual world, these phrases, too, emphasize that everything around us—even things we do not see—are filled with life.

CH A PT E R T W O

The Moscow Neo-Avant-Garde

In the sixties, during the “Khrushchev period,” at the forefront of the opposition to power stood not dissidents, but artists . . . —Gennady Aygi1

I

n 1953 Aygi finished his schooling at the Batyrevsky Pedagogical Institute in Chuvashia and traveled to Moscow to enroll in the Literary Institute. It is also the year that, with the death of Joseph Stalin, nonconformist art tentatively emerged in the Soviet Union. The principles of socialist realism, as set forth in Stalin’s 1932 decree “On the Reconstruction of Literary-Artistic Organization” and his 1934 speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, were grounded in a straightforward (representational, figurative) approach to subject matter, strict adherence to optimistic Soviet themes, and accessible, traditional 1 “В шестидесятые годы, еще в ‘хрущевский период,’ на переднем плане сопротивления властям стояли не диссиденты, а художники.” Drugoe iskusstvo, eds. Leonid Prokhorovich Talochkin and Irina Georgievna Alpatova (Moscow: Khudozhestvenaia galereia Moskovskaia kollektsiia, 1991), 1:113.

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forms. The official definition of socialist realism headlined in The Literary Gazette (Литературная газета) on May 25, 1932 was “honesty and truthfulness of revolutionary, socialist realism.” It was also defined more broadly by the painter Aleksandr Gerasimov in his 1939 speech as “an art realistic in form and socialist in content.”2 Socialist realist art with its propagandistic content was inimical to the thematically and stylistically experimental art and literature of the immediate pre- and post-revolutionary periods, which it replaced and thereby repressed. One of the main categories of art deemed unacceptable under socialist realism was “formalism,” which referred to styles and movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, and Surrealism—the principle avant-garde movements of the turn of the twentieth century. Writers and artists creating works of this type were branded as “formalists,” “nonconformists,” or “dissidents” and were denied work and living space, materials, and public exhibitions, all of which were readily available to members of the Soviet Writers and Artists Unions. A number of nonconformists maintained their official status in the Union by writing or illustrating children’s books while continuing to create “unofficial” works privately. The avant-garde was most active in Russia from the 1910s to 1930, although modernist movements such as Symbolism began as early as the 1890s. Avant-garde artists suffered during the Great Purges of 1934-38, and repression remained severe through the last years of Stalin’s reign. Although Khrushchev opened the doors to freer expression with his “Secret Speech” in 1956, by 1958, “the state had little remaining tolerance for the increasing expressions of dissent from the world of belles lettres.”3 The “Secret Speech” was Khrushchev’s address to the Twentieth Party Congress that denounced Stalin’s criminal excesses against the Party (though, notably, not against the people of the Soviet Union) during his regime. It initiated the Thaw, which technically lasted from 1956-1964, until the end of Khrushchev’s term of office, although in reality freedoms were curtailed nearly as soon as they had been allowed. 2 Bartelik, “Concerning Socialist Realism,” 90. 3 David MacFadyen, Joseph Brodsky and the Soviet Muse (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 10.

Aygi’s situation as a young neo-avant-garde poet in the capital illustrates how precarious and short-lived was the interlude of tolerance. Aygi came to Moscow knowing the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the best known Futurist and poet of the Revolution, but during his time at the Literary Institute and later, when he worked at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow, he became acquainted with the work of other important avant-garde writers and artists—particularly Kazimir Malevich—which would have a formative influence on his poetry. His first literary mentor in Moscow was Boris Pasternak, who lived near Aygi’s Peredelkino dormitory. At the Moscow Literary Institute Aygi studied poetry with Mikhail Svetlov, a noted Soviet poet. At the time he was still writing mostly in Chuvash, providing Russian interlinear translations for his mentors to evaluate his work. Aygi knew Pasternak as the author of Doctor Zhivago, a poet struggling with the unfamiliar form of the novel and a writer concerned with the vicious criticism and public attacks that surrounded Zhivago. Pasternak was accused of portraying the White Army in a sympathetic light, thus betraying the Bolshevik cause. He refused the Nobel Prize he received for the novel in 1958 for fear of being exiled from the Soviet Union.4 Their conversations often centered on the news of the day, the polemics surrounding Doctor Zhivago, and the opinions of various writers who were in contact with Pasternak. Besides influencing his poetic style, Aygi’s acquaintance with Pasternak helped him strengthen and articulate some of his basic ideas about life, poetry, and the poet’s role in society. Pasternak served as a literary father figure for Aygi, although at seventy the author was more like a grandfather to the twenty-two-year-old poet. Later Aygi would recall his idealized impression of the older poet as a divine being of “Apollo-like beauty.”5 The young Aygi came to revere Pasternak as a mentor through something akin to a religious conversion described by

4 Information in this section about Aygi’s relationship with Pasternak is from “Obydennost’ chuda (Vstrechi s Borisom Pasternakom. 1956-1958),” Aigi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 99-114. For more on Pasternak and the scandal surrounding Doctor Zhivago, see Ronald Hingley, Pasternak: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1983). 5 Ibid., 99.

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his roommate at the Moscow Literary Institute at that time, the Bashkir writer Rim Akhmedov: A metamorphosis occurred for Aygi with regard to Pasternak’s poetry . . . At first, in 1953-1954, he would oppose me violently whenever I tried to drill into his head what seemed to me elementary truths. He would violently attack and mock me. After a while he started to think about it, and admit reluctantly, “Yes, there’s something to it.” Later, having passed a decisive turning point in his thinking, he suddenly made the discovery for himself and cried, “Why, this is genius after all!” And living with Pasternak’s poetry became an everyday necessity for him, just as performing a prayer ritual is to a believer. 6

When Akhmedov describes Aygi’s relation to his mentor’s work as a ritual of prayer, he characterizes Aygi’s attitude toward poetry in general. For Aygi, poetry was a practice in which a spiritual orientation was as integral to the poem as considerations of style and subject matter. This complex of considerations developed in Aygi’s poetry in the 1960s as his engagement with avant-garde art and Malevich deepened, but inklings of it were present in his response to Pasternak’s work. Freedom, “здешность” [presentness], and the “обыденность” [everydayness] of miracles in everyday life were the subjects of many of Aygi’s discussions with Pasternak, discussions that proved formative to Aygi’s poetics. Aygi recalls how Pasternak explained the ideas of miracles and presentness to him: Miracles are, after all, simple. They are near, everywhere, constantly. When there is a text in front of you, you are conversing with the spirit of the author himself . . . A miracle is . . . look, you are sitting in front of me—that too is a miracle. . . . [P]eople think that the meaning of existence, the most essential, most important thing is somewhere out there, “in other worlds!” No, everything is here—right now, at this very moment! The eternal, non-transient-absolute—here! And we are beautiful here—and mystery, and miracle and our own endlessness— everything is here!7 6 Ibid. 7 “Чудо, – ведь это просто. Это рядом, везде, постоянно. Когда перед вами текст, вы общаетесь с духом самого автора . . . Чудо, – вот, Вы сидите передо мной, это тоже – чудо. .  .  . [B]ообще думают, что смысл существующего, самое

Pasternak’s recognition of miracles in what are usually considered simple, everyday events made a profound impression on Aygi, who went on to make it a central aspect of his poetics. Even the ecstatic, emphatic style Pasternak uses to describe this ineffable yet omnipresent concept influenced Aygi’s language both in his poetry and essays and became a hallmark of his style. One poem Aygi wrote during his early years at the Literary Institute, “Beginning” (“Завязь,” 1954-56), he included in translation in his collected works Winter Noted (Отмеченная Зима, 1982) to illustrate his transition from Chuvash to Russian.8 His recognition of the poem as a poetic milestone demonstrates his keen awareness of how both the linguistic structures and cultural philosophy inherent in a language are key organizing elements of his poetics. ЗАВЯЗЬ (Из одноименной чувашской поэмы) Р. А. пускай я буду среди вас как пыльная монета оказавшаяся среди шуршащих ассигнаций в шелковом скользком кармане: звенеть бы ей во весь голос да не с чем сталкиваться чтобы звенеть когда гудят контрабасы и когда вспоминается как в детстве ветер дымил дождем в осеннее утро – существенное, главное – где-то там, “в других мирах”! Нет, все – здесь, сейчас, вот – в это самое время! – вечное, непреходяще-сущностное – здесь! И прекрасны мы – здесь, и тайна, и чудо, и наша нескончаемость, все – здесь!” Ibid. 108-109. 8 Gennadii Aigi, Otmechennaia zima (Paris: Syntaxis, 1982), 562.

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пускай я буду стоячей вешалкой на которую можно вешать не только плащи но можно повесить еще что-нибудь потяжелее плаща и когда перестану я верить в себя пусть память жил вернет мне упорство чтобы снова я стал на лице ощущать давление мускулов глаз9 Beginning let me be in your midst a dusty coin turning up among rustling banknotes in a slippery silk pocket: it would ring at the top of its voice but there’s nothing hard to ring on when double basses boom and memory tells how in childhood the wind smoked with rain on autumn mornings let me be a standing coat-rack on which you can hang not raincoats only but something besides that weighs more than a coat

9 Ibid., 491.

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The emphasis on everyday objects (dusty coin, rustling banknotes, silk pocket, raincoat) and fragmented physiological images (memory of veins, eye-muscles’ pressure), the vivid portraits of everyday scenes, and the complex but continuous grammar recall the Mayakovskian elements of Aygi’s early work. Pasternak, who referred to them derogatorily as Aygi’s “Mayakovism,” urged the poet toward uncluttered, evocative language and sparse but effective imagery, elements that in fact characterize Aygi’s mature work, in which full sentences give way to grammatical fragments, visual images are replaced by abstractions, and everyday images are always linked to a spiritual or cosmic beyond. Although the images and scenes in the poem are vividly wrought, the poem’s subject and addressee remain somewhat unclear. The evocation of fond childhood memories and “smoked rain on autumn mornings” gives the poem a romantic cast, and the persona’s supplication in the final stanza for the addressee to return him to his physical body suggests intense physical intimacy. Still, this poem cannot refer to romantic love, as the addressee is “вас” [you, plural, or formal singular].11 One feature pointing to the poem’s theme is the subtitle, “From the Chuvash epic of the same name.”12 “Beginning” is a direct translation of the fourth section of this poem, while another of Aygi’s early poems, “Introduction to an Epic” (“Вступление к поэме,” 1957) is a loosely

10 Adapted from France’s translation in Aygi, Selected Poems, 31. France does not include the subtitle or dedication in his English translation, but this subtitle and dedication are included in Léon Robel’s French translation of the poem found in his monograph on Aygi. Robel, Aïgui, 96. 11 France’s translation is misleading in that it translates “let me be in your midst” as “let me be around you,” and “silk pocket” as “silk purse,” thus creating the impression that Aygi is addressing a woman to whom he wishes to be close. 12 “Чĕрĕ тĕвĕ,” Aygi, Poeziia-kak-molchanie, 50-55.

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and when I stop believing in myself let memory of veins make me firm again and again I shall feel the eye muscles’ pressure10

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translated version of the epic’s first section.13 Most important is the poem ’s dedication. In his French translation of “Beginning” Leon Robel notes that “R. A.” stands for Rim Akhmedov, Aygi’s roommate at the Institute. Like Aygi, Akhmedov was a non-Russian poet writing in the Russian tradition. His poetry focuses on the flora and landscape of his native Bashkortostan as much of Aygi ’s poetry focuses on the landscape of Chuvashia. And like Aygi, he was also considered a “regional” poet. Akhmedov was also part of the group of young poets who visited Pasternak at Peredelkino, and, as described above, it was Akhmedov’s insistence that helped the headstrong Aygi appreciate Pasternak’s work. With their similar backgrounds and positions as relative outsiders in the Russian tradition, Aygi and Akhmedov shared a rare experience, and it is not surprising that Aygi would dedicate a Russian-language version of a poem originally written in Chuvash to his Bashkir friend. Yet Akhmedov cannot be the poem’s addressee because the “you” addressed is either formal, indicating a polite relationship or a relationship to an authority figure, or plural. As a close friend and peer, Akhmedov would clearly be addressed as “ты” [you, informal], even if the poem’s speaker represented someone other than Aygi himself. Addressing a young person as “вы” would indicate irony or mockery, tones absent from this poem. Because this is the only place in the poem the pronoun “you” appears, it does not help to clarify the identity of the addressee. If the addressee is a group, however, the nature of the theme becomes one of service, inclusion, or kinship. Aygi has been described as a poet’s poet, as much of his poetry is about poetry and the act of writing. Given that he dedicated “Beginning” to a fellow poet, he may well be saying, “Let me be in your midst, poets.” A notable feature of Aygi’s work and his concept of poetry is that, while many male poets conceive the Muse as a divine female figure or some such variation (like Blok’s “unknown woman”) he eschews a gendered embodiment of poetic inspiration. For Aygi, poetic inspiration comes from both God and nature. In his poetics these entities are not non-gendered, as in an egalitarian Christian framework, but, originating from Chuvash folk 13 Aygi, Otmechennaia zima, 363.

religion—recall the gods addressed in “Plowman’s Prayer”— encompass both male and female genders. Thus, in “Beginning” the addressee is most likely the male and female poets and the (male and female) spiritual and natural forces that inspire poetry. When Aygi addresses the Christian God directly, as he does in many of his later poems, he uses the standard informal “you.” This comparison further shows the complex nature of theme and address in “Beginning”; with its multiple addressees, both earthly and heavenly, the poem becomes a prayer of supplication, much like “Plowman’s Prayer” for a good crop and a good harvest. Although the language of “Beginning” is oriented toward everyday objects, the ambiguous subjectivity and the deconstruction of experience point to a style that emerged in Aygi’s work of the 1960s and beyond, in which abstract realms and relationships are evoked in elliptical phrases and carefully unconsummated grammar. Its ambiguity creates the slightly unsettling effect that would mark Aygi’s work for years to come. His stanzas, lines, and phrases, though complete and satisfying in themselves, leave the reader searching for their exact “meaning” or placement in the poem as a whole—not because the pieces do not fit together (which would simply be the mark of bad poetry), but because there are always several ways one can join the pieces, and each variant comes with its own set of meanings, its own epiphany. The effect can be troubling because the poem (or the poet) does not give the final word on which variant, if any, is correct. Rather, the reader is challenged to allow all variants of meaning to coexist and thus reveal the poems’ intent, which is to create a sacred space where all life—animate, inanimate, earthly, cosmic, and spiritual—can be experienced and held in awe. Like many of Aygi’s themes, this one was shaped in part by Pasternak. Discussing Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak characterized prose for Aygi as a place “where everything should exist simultaneously . . . , as in Bruegel.”14 Aygi clearly applied the concept to his poetry. It is telling, then, that Aygi writes in free verse, which is considered by Russian scholars such as Mikhail Gasparov to be stylistically closer to prose than to syllabo-tonic 14 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 101 (Aigi’s emphasis).

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poetry.15 If end punctuation were added where appropriate and line breaks were removed, “Beginning” could be rendered as coherent, if somewhat clunky, prose. This is not the case for most of Aygi’s poetry, which features a fragmentary grammar relying on rhythm and stanzaic organization. The question, then, is not whether Aygi ’s free verse is similar to prose in its “prosaic” language and grammar, but rather whether it is similar in the relation of its parts to the whole and in its ability to convey life’s rich diversity—Pasternak’s everything. When describing prose, Pasternak uses an analogy from painting. Though Bruegel is far from avant-garde, the analogy must have resonated with Aygi, as the visual arts would provide the primary model for his work in the 1960s. In addition a literary mentor, Pasternak was something of a father figure to Aygi. He knew Aygi had lost his father when he was young and took it upon himself to fulfill paternal obligations such as blessing Aygi’s first marriage and caring for Aygi when he was sick.16 Pasternak’s death thus had a profound impact on Aygi, all the more so because it occurred in tandem with his mother’s death in 1960. The tragedy marked a turning point in Aygi’s life, signaling a transition from boyhood to adulthood: “Thus, from this terrible double blow, my youth ended.”17 His psychological and emotional evolution at the time is reflected in his momentous shift from writing poems in Chuvash and translating them into Russian to writing directly in Russian. Although Pasternak advocated the shift for stylistic reasons, another poet Aygi knew and respected framed the issue in a way that may have resonated even more with the young poet. Aygi writes extensively about his acquaintance with Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet who was very popular in the Soviet Union and lived for an extended period in Moscow. Hikmet identified with Aygi’s predicament of coming from a “маленький народ” [small nation] but wanting to be part of a “большая литература” [great literature].18 If he urged Aygi to write in Russian it was not in order to leave his connection with 15 Mikhail Gasparov, Russkii stikh nachala XX veka v kommentariiakh (Moscow: Fortuna Limited, 2001), 12-16. See also Iu. B. Orlitskii, Stikh i proza v russkoi literature (Moscow: Rossiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universistet, 2002), 321-341. 16 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 111. 17 “Так – от страшного двойного удара – кончилась моя юность.” Ibid., 114. 18 Ibid.

Chuvashia behind, but to bring the ethos of his home country onto the stage of world literature. Aygi’s association with Pasternak at a time when the latter’s loyalty to the Soviet cause was in question cast a shadow of political suspicion over the young poet, despite his somewhat protected position as a regional poet. In 1958 Aygi was expelled from the Literary Institute “for writing a hostile book of poems, which undermines the foundations of the socialist realist method.”19 The book in question was Aygi’s first volume of poetry published in Chuvash while he was a student at the Institute. Having landed in Moscow without a residence permit, Aygi had to find employment or leave the city. In 1961 he found a post at the Mayakovsky Museum, which gave him access to a lively community of avant-garde artists and writers, both from the early twentieth century and of his own generation. His position at the museum consisted of setting up exhibits for the work of artists such as Malevich, Tatlin, Guro, and Chagall, and he worked there until 1971. There he met literary critic Nikolai Khardzhiev, whose friendships with Malevich, Kharms, and Tynianov gave him a personal link to influential artists who had died under Stalinist oppression. Khardizhiev also introduced him to artists such as Tatlin who were still living. In addition Aygi became friends with avant-garde figures David Burliuk and Aleksei Kruchenykh as well as neo-avant-garde artists Igor Vulokh, Igor Voroshilov, and Ivan Makarevich, who were of his own generation and went on to illustrate many of his books. Another important figure Aygi befriended was musician and composer Andrei Volkonsky. Born Prince Andrei to Russian émigré parents in Geneva in 1933, Volkonsky returned to the Soviet Union with his parents during the “east-west honeymoon” that followed World War II. Although he found himself in a hostile environment in Soviet Russia because of his aristocratic lineage, it proved useful to his avant-garde friends. In Russia Volkonsky continued to correspond with his friends in the Western avant-garde. He helped his circle gain access to foreign literature (Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, and the 19 “за писание враждебной книги стихов, подрывающей основы метода социалистического реализма.” Ibid., 110.

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Encyclopedia of Abstract Art) and introduced them to medieval and Renaissance music as well as the latest avant-garde music from Europe. In short, his connections with Western Europe were a leading factor in the development of Moscow artists in the 1960s.20 Volkonsky was also one of a handful of influential figures in the art world who furnished young artists with a place to exhibit—namely, his home. Along with the art collector George Costakis, art historian Ilya Tsirline, and the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, Volkonsky held what were known as “apartment exhibitions.”21 Official sponsorship of public nonconformist art exhibitions ended on December 1, 1962, after Khrushchev commissioned one for the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Moscow Artists Union featuring young, independent artists. When the art was unveiled, Khrushchev was horrified at the non-representational works, which resembled the “dangerous” modernist, “formalist” aesthetic of the turn of the century. He stigmatized them as “мазь” [grease] and had the exhibition dismantled. Thus began a new period of repression for nonofficial artists with many branded as enemies of the people. Khrushchev’s plan for dealing with the unofficial artists was made clear in the January 1963 meeting between Party officials and members of the Artists Union, in which he said the unofficial artists “should not be locked up in prison, but a madhouse will do.”22 Yet the apartment exhibitions that rose out of the oppression were not the same as the private gatherings that occurred among close-knit groups of artists in the 1930s. In Stalin’s time, unofficial poets like Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam had to be on guard against potential informers in the group, because if the authorities got word of the writers’ activity, the apartment would be stormed, the artists arrested and sent to labor camps (where a number of them, including Mandelstam, died), and the manuscripts, if any were found, would be destroyed. Although Khrushchev actively suppressed unofficial artists, the repression had to be mediated with an apparent attitude of openness to save face before 20 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 42-43. 21 Olga Medvedkova, “Russian Non-Conformist Art, 1960-1980,” accessed March 26, 2007, http://www.stria.ca/Brochetain/rnoncon.html. 22 Ibid.

the international press. Thus, while public venues were off-limits, the private exhibits were tolerated by the authorities, though most of the time they were closed down shortly after they had begun. In some cases they lasted only fifteen minutes.23 Throughout the early seventies, under Brezhnev, unofficial art made itself known in the public realm only rarely. A reprieve on artistic suppression occurred in 1973 after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords opened the Soviet Union temporarily to international cultural exchange. It was in this hopeful period that the infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition” was mounted in 1974. An open-air collection of work by neo-avant-garde painters, it was demolished by bulldozers, water canons, and dump trucks ordered by the authorities. Even though it was held in the wastelands of the Moscow suburb Beliaevo, far from the city center, the event was still deemed dangerous. In 1975 a group of unofficial artists who had been working as illustrators was allowed to showcase their paintings in an “official” exhibit in the city’s center for the Moscow Illustrators Club. Art scholar Olga Medvedkova provides some insights into the effect this exhibit had on the public: Malaia Grouzinskaia Street [the location of the exhibit] quickly became the scene of spectacular queues. Official culture may have hounded the underground movement and refused to recognize the non-conformist artists, but they still generated a huge amount of interest among the public. Furthermore, political dissidents and ideological non-conformists were irresistibly attracted to the company of underground painters, poets and musicians.24

Although these artists were not necessarily political dissidents, they were artistic dissidents persecuted for their unwillingness to compromise their artistic values and were thus seen as ideological enemies of the State. The desire to create individual, apolitical art was itself a political statement, and the nature of the work of the artists in the Moscow underground had obvious implications for their relationship to the State, but it also had implications—positive ones—for their relationships to one another. The difficult position in which the non-conformist artists found 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

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themselves strengthened their mutual bonds and allowed them more creative freedom. Medvedkova continues:

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[T]he Soviet underground thus became a sort of crossroads for cultural exchange and discussion. Within the movement there was total freedom. Independent of any kind of ideological, artistic, or political dogma, the artists . . . were able to give their creativity fairly free expression. One could compare the atmosphere of the underground movement to that of the “salons” of the Russia described by Pushkin, as a sort of brotherhood of the elite always ready to learn and discover.25

Unlike the artists of the turn-of-the-century movements—the Symbolists, Acmeists and Futurists—the artists of the late-Soviet Moscow avant-garde did not write fiery manifestoes criticizing rivals with different aesthetic philosophies. They were more interested in exploring the diverse realms that art could encompass rather than in focusing on what it could not. A particularly good example of the cross-generic, avant-garde influence is a pair of poems Aygi wrote during this period: “Untitled” (“Без названия,” 1964) and “On Reading the Poem ‘Untitled’ Aloud” (“О чтении вслух стихотворения ‘Без названия,’” 1965). In “Untitled” Aygi relies heavily on non-lexical items (graphic symbols, geometric shapes, musical phrases) in the poetic text and shows an increasingly visual/ spatial orientation toward how the poem appears on the page. БЕЗ НАЗВАНИЯ

ярче сердца любого единого дерева

25 Ibid.

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и: (Тихие места – опоры наивысшей силы пения. Она отменяет там слышимость, не выдержав себя. Места не-мысли, – если понято “нет”).

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Untitled

brighter than the heart of any single tree

and:

(Quiet places – supports of the highest strength of singing. It takes away hearing there, unable to hold back. Places non-thoughts – if you understand “non”).

This poem represents many characteristics of Aygi’s poetry of the 1960s, primarily his debt to Malevich. Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) was one of the pioneers of non-figurative painting and avant-garde art theory during the post-Revolutionary period. His greatest legacy to art has been the work and writings surrounding his theory of Suprematism, which not only produced a new abstract style of painting but served as a key to an entirely new perception of spirituality and the universal order. The theory, which Malevich developed in essays such as “From Cubism to Suprematism” (1915), “On New Systems in Art (Stasis and Speed)” (1919) and

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“God Has Not Been Dethroned: Art, Church and Factory” (1922) and paintings such as his famous Black Square (1914), was his answer to what he considered the end of the figurative era. The goal of Suprematist painting was to portray objects in their simplest, most essential form, which Malevich and his followers considered geometric shapes such as the line, square, triangle and circle. The canvas was no longer subject to the quotidian concepts of right and left, up and down, or the laws of gravity. Instead, it was seen as a cosmic space, as real as but separate from our law-governed universe. Suprematism also reframed the goal of art: a painting was no longer merely an image of the things of this world reflected back to the viewer, but, like a religious icon, was a portal for the viewer into the realm of cosmos and spirit. As such the painting itself was never “finished”; it depended on the presence of the viewer. The aim of Suprematism and other turn-of-the-century avant-garde movements was to erase the separation between form and content in art, drawing attention to the medium—be it language, music, or paint—and forcing the audience to recognize a work of art as its own reality, not merely a copy of (and therefore inferior to) the “real” world. The Suprematist approach as applied to poetry is visible in “Untitled,” where the “theme” or “content” is impossible to sum up in a single phrase or discuss in isolation from its formal aspects. Malevich’s personal background provides some key points of resonance with Aygi as well. Although he began as an adherent of Futurism, which was a primarily urban movement, Malevich was staunchly anticity.26 He was a Ukrainian of Polish peasant stock and, much like Aygi, chose to celebrate peasant life and mysticism over the triumphs of the industrial metropolis. Like Aygi, who was inspired by the patterns and meanings of Chuvash embroidery, Malevich found the bold lines and primary colors characteristic of Suprematism in the woodblocks and painted eggs of Ukrainian folk art.27 Religious mysticism was similarly 26 Gilles Néret, Kazimir Malevich 1878-1935 and Suprematism, trans. Chris Miller (Köln: Taschen, 2003), 8. Notes on Malevich in this section will be taken from Néret. Néret, in turn, locates much of his material in Jean-Claude Marcadé, Malevich (Paris: Casterman, 1990). 27 Ibid., 10-11.

important for Malevich, for whom “subject becomes ritual.”28 Malevich even considered Russian icon painting a “superior form of peasant art.”29 It was through studying icons that he realized he did not need to “learn anatomy and perspective, or to render nature in all its truth, but to gain an intuition of the nature of art and artistic realism.”30 Just as Malevich bypassed what were considered the necessary formal elements of Western painting, Aygi bypassed the traditional formal elements of Western and Russian poetry in his free verse. It is important to note that the realism of which Malevich speaks and which is implied in Aygi’s poems takes the form of abstraction because it seeks to portray a reality beyond the common domain. This is similar to the Cubo-Futurist notion of “Universal realism [. . .], where profound realism was imperceptibly transformed into luminous spiritualism.”31 This space is evoked in Malevich’s and Aygi’s work through a neutral color palette of white, gray, and the representation of transparency and light. These Suprematist colors (and non-colors) create the painting’s (or poem’s) “metaphysical” plane. Sometimes, as in “Untitled,” the brighter colors of Malevich’s palette enter Aygi’s poems,32 but this is rare. Although Aygi often writes about nature, blue skies and green grass seldom figure in his work; the trees in “Untitled” are not accompanied by a descriptive color but are portrayed in an abstract setting. In this poem, color literally appears in the form of red squares, an image found in some of Malevich’s most famous Suprematist paintings, such as Black Square and Red Square (1920) and Eight Rectangles (1915). Another of Malevich’s best known works, White on White (1917), or as it is commonly referred to, White Square, is crucial to Aygi’s approach to poetry. Just as the painter layers an almost imperceptible shade of white over a white background (which has been painted over a layer of white undercoat on a white canvas), Aygi creates poems that layer themselves with the same transparency and subtlety over the canvas of the page. 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 21. Malevich’s autobiographical writings, quoted in Néret, Kazimir Malevich, 21-22. Gleizes and Metzinger, “O kubizme” (1912), quoted in Néret, Kazimir Malevich, 37. See the back cover for the full-color reproduction of the poem.

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Another concept that Malevich and Aygi share is that the “rhythm” of a book of poetry includes elements of the visual arts.33 The unity of poetry and art in Futurist art books at the turn of the twentieth century is reflected in the Russian verb “писать,” which means both “to write” and “to paint.” “This confusion speaks to the original form of the act of representation, when calligraphy was naturally pictographic, whether it served to transmit information or create magic relationships with the mysterious forces of the world.”34 The dual nature of the word is a fundamental aspect of Aygi’s understanding of poetry and its relationship to the other arts. “Untitled” illustrates the many ways in which rhythm, the word, and other art forms coexist in Aygi’s poetry. In “Beginning” Aygi used anaphora and sound repetition, but here the repetition includes visual and pictographic patterns as well as sound. The red squares, the dominant feature of the poem, evoke an ineffable, spiritual realm, indicating what is beyond words in poetry. Through mixing media in poetry, Aygi constructs an image system that is designed to create non-images: he uses shapes and a consciously visual layout to signify what cannot be seen; the shapes do not signify something visual within the poem, but rather something musical. He uses sound orchestration in his language and sound-signifying vocabulary to convey what cannot be heard. He creates meaning through apophatic means, using negatives (“Без названия,” “не вы-держав,” “не-мысли” and “нет”) to convey what is. Readings and performances were especially important aspects of the creative process for Aygi and his fellow avant-garde artists. But how does one “read” the red squares that feature in “Untitled?” Aygi anticipated such difficulty, for he provided the reader (or performer) with a step-by-step guide in the form of a companion poem: О ЧТЕНИИ ВСЛУХ СТИХОТВОРЕНИЯ “БЕЗ НАЗВАНИЯ”

33 Ibid., 44. 34 Marcadé, quoted in Kazimir Malevich, 44.

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Пауза, не превышающая первую. Строка: “ярче сердца любого единого дерева” произносится четко, без интонирования. После длительной паузы:

Снова длительная пауза. Строку: “и:” следует произнести с заметным повышением голоса. После паузы, вдвое превышающей предшествовавщую, прочитывается прозаическая часть: медленно, с наименьшей выразительностью.35 On reading aloud the poem “Untitled” The title is stated calmly and softly. After a long pause, there follows:

35 Aigi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 33.

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Спокойно и негромко объявляется название. После продолжительной паузы следует:

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A pause, not longer than the first. The line: “brighter than the heart of any single tree” is pronounced distinctly, without intonation. After a long pause:

Another extended pause. The line: “and:” should be pronounced with a noticeable intensifying of the voice. After a pause twice as long as the previous one, the prose section is read: slowly, with as little expressiveness as possible.36

Again, the layout incorporates a visually rhythmic pattern using text, space, and graphic. But in this case the graphic is a fully notated line of music signifying that chords are supposed to be played where the red squares occur, whereas the white space is to be indicated by pauses of various length (corresponding to the size of the white space in the text). The poem even gives directions as to the volume and intonation of voice 36 A literal translation of the word “по-/вышение” would be “heightening,” but I wanted to preserve the hyphenation of the prefix across the line break, thus “in-/tensifying.”

to be used when pronouncing the lines of text, and—perhaps surprisingly—it calls for minimal expression. Multimedia performance was common among Futurists at the turn of the century, but the poem’s tone of seriousness and reverence toward its subject runs counter to the Futurists’ tendency toward irreverence, provocation, and humor. There may well be an element of humor intended in Aygi’s strict instructions, although it is in keeping with his poetics of paradox to juxtapose music and silence, poetry and prose, expressiveness and monotony. Also, it seems reasonable to interpret the “instructions” in earnest, as the artists of the 1960s strove to emulate, rather than ironize, the work of their predecessors. The Futurists themselves, however, were also pranksters who liked to play and shock, so it would not be wholly unlikely that a “Futurist” work of this kind would delight in playing with the listener’s expectations. In any case, the poems emphasize performance, which is the legacy of Futurism. “Untitled” and its instructional companion poem dramatize the relationship between the poem as it appears on the page and the poem as it is performed. They create the complex layering effect that is present in many of Aygi’s poems because both poems are intended be experienced simultaneously. Aygi’s status as an outsider in the Russian tradition, a status that many of his peers and mentors shared, was heightened by his role as a neo-avantgarde artist, which was enough to place him on the periphery of art movements in the late-Soviet period. In many ways, Moscow provided a map for the exclusion the neo-avant-garde encountered, primarily from the State, but from other literary groups as well. As the Soviet capital the city also was the site of the power struggle between non-conformist artists and the State. A number of forces drove avant-garde artists not only to the political and social periphery, but to the city’s geographic periphery as well. The artists of the Lianozovo group and the Barrack poets, who were also exploring avant-garde forms at this time, were Aygi’s acquaintances and shared his experience of existing on the city outskirts. Moscow’s architecture has reflected its political and cultural power from the fifteenth century, when, with its newly built Kremlin cathedrals, Moscow was the seat of Russian Orthodoxy and trumpeted as the “Third

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Rome,” to the twentieth century, when it became the new Soviet capital and was reconstructed into a modern center of industry. The connection between architecture and nation-building was evidenced not merely by the city’s physical buildings, but by an ideological and psychic architecture of oppression that became fully instantiated under Stalin and came to shape much of individuals’ experience as Soviet citizens. Before the system of oppression was fully instantiated, the Futurist avant-garde of the 1920s depicted newly industrialized Moscow, with its cutting-edge Constructivist designs, as the city of exuberance and possibilities, as their city: the city of the future. But everything changed when Stalin took power in the 1930s. With a growing housing crisis brought on by the economic and political hardships of communism, residence in the city was used as a reward for those who were unequivocally loyal to the Communist Party. Writers unrecognized by the Writers Union, which certified writers as professional and thus qualified them for residence in Moscow, were left to find their own means of support, a nearly impossible task in a nation of state-run enterprises. Those who refused to write according to the dictates of socialist realism were threatened with imprisonment and exile to Stalin’s many labor camps. One such persecuted unofficial writer was Nikolai Zabolotsky, who survived eight years of labor camps and exile before returning to Moscow in 1946.37 Although he was allowed to return to Moscow he was cut off from the cultural and literary life of the city. Because of his unofficial status he could not find a place to live and could not publish much of his poetry.38 Viktor Sosnora, a member of the younger generation and the Leningrad avant-garde, describes Zabolotsky’s predicament in his poem “Moscow in Fences,” (“Москва в заборах,” 1984): Zabolotsky’s inability to write without the aid of alcohol (“no longer paste the form of rhyme in rows / no help from nymphs or alcohol”), and the realization that the camp experience has left him a mere shadow of his former self as a poet and a human being (“I am a prison corpse, come back in fashion”).39 37 Darra Goldstein, “‘Moscow in Fences’: Viktor Sosnora at the Gate,” Russian Review 15 (1992): 232. 38 Ibid. 39 “уже не склеить форму рифмы в ряд / нет помощи от нимф и алкоголя” and “я труп тюремный, вновь вошедший в моду.” Ibid., 230.

As Sosnora follows Zabolotsky’s anguished course through his postcamp life in Moscow, the city itself becomes imbued with a peripatetic and haunting despair.40 Although no fences appear in the poem, Sosnora’s awareness that the work of the most important writers would not be preserved and passed on under current political conditions (“one cannot write the New Hagiography with a rifle”) leads him to the realization that for unofficial writers, physical, creative, and psychic mobility in Moscow and, by extension, in the Soviet Union, is an impossibility.41 Although Sosnora has identified the fundamental incompatibility of the Soviet system and the writer’s creative freedom, “Moscow in Fences” does not offer an easy resolution, ending, as it does, with the line: “all translations—are acts of falsehood.”42 Like Aygi, [Sosnora is of the Thaw generation] those poets born between 1932 and 1938 who began writing in the 1950s.43 Even though Khrushchev’s Thaw afforded artists creative freedoms unknown in the Soviet Union since the 1920s, it was short-lived and complicated by the conditions Sosnora describes. Eventually unofficial poets and artists found Moscow effectively off limits to them, if they were not barred from residence there altogether. Their answer—and often their only option— was to turn to the city’s outskirts as a place to live, gather, and gain the creative space, far from the eyes of the censors and informers, that was necessary for their artistic production. The result was a generation of avant-garde poetry in which Moscow’s outskirts—a barren region of industrial sprawl peopled by factory workers and those too poor to afford residence in the capital—became a powerful motif laden with aesthetic, political, and ethical commentary. The outskirts became a recurring motif that took on multiple resonances among avant-garde artists. In the poetry of the Lianozovo “Barrack” poets Igor Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir, the depiction of the outskirts was an absurdist and Futurist-inspired reaction

40 41 42 43

Ibid., 231. “нельзя писать с винтовкой Четьи Новы.” Ibid., 230 “все переводы—это акт неправды.” Ibid. Irene Kolchinsky, The Revival of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde: The Thaw Generation and Beyond (Munich: Otto Sagner, 2001), 10.

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to the Soviet architecture of oppression, whereas in the poetry of Aygi it was a space with transformative and transcendental power. The Lianozovo group of poets and artists was named after the suburb in which they congregated. Because the outskirts region was so ill defined the terms “suburb,” “village,” and “outskirts” are used interchangeably to denote it. The indeterminacy also characterizes the complex and overlapping relationships of an emergent hybrid space whose narratives the neo-avant-garde was attempting to define. The Lianozovo group met at the home of Oscar Rabin and his wife Valentina Kropivnitskaya, two unofficial artists who portrayed the region in their paintings. While Kropivnitskaya’s work depicted dark but enchanted scenes of the forest beyond it, Rabin’s work focused on the industrial wasteland of the village itself, especially the ramshackle buildings, or barracks, that were the main architectural features of the town. Rabin’s work led to the creation of the “Barrack” school of painting, which “focused on the grim realities of the living conditions of the average Soviet citizen.”44 Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, and Vsevolod Nekrasov are the best known poets associated with the Lianozovo group. They treated themes similar to the those of the visual artists and were inspired by the work of Valentina Kropivnitskaya’s father, Evgeny Kropivnitsky (1893-1979), a poet and artist of the older generation whose ironic, Futurist-inspired verse described the “poverty, ugliness, and squalor” of everyday life in the industrial outskirts of Moscow.45 Kropivnitsky was thus hailed as the founder of the Barrack school of poetry, and the younger poets became known as the Barrack poets. Their work, which took inspiration from the linguistic experiments of Kruchenykh, carved out a new space for depicting the violated world that the Soviet Union had become. Moscow was no longer the Futurists’ city of innovation and promise. It had become the seat of officialdom and a symbol for the false triumphs and lies about Soviet life perpetuated by the state. To combat its false reality, the Barrack poets conveyed the brutal conditions they saw around them in unflinching detail, while the irony and absurdist elements in their work signified their 44 “‘Barrack in Lianozovo,’” Visual Arts Library, accessed December 24, 2006, http:// www.legacy-project.org/index.php?page=art_detail&artID=21. 45 Kolchinsky, Revival of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 99.

thumbing their noses at the state. Their shift of focus effectively subverted the dominant power structure that placed the physical and ideological architectures of Moscow at the center of Soviet power, transferring it to the marginal, grotesque architecture of the outskirts. The Barrack poets not only described the life and architecture of the outskirts, they “created” its space in their poetry. Each poet expressed it in a different way. Igor Kholin (1920-1999) created the voice of the outskirts in his zaum-inspired plays on sound. One poem highlights the cadences of vulgarity: Дан твою рап Рап твою дап Доп твою дить Роп твою тить Дить твою рить Рать твою дать Ведь твою теть Теть твою меть46

This piece uses nonsense words, which are impossible to translate, joined by “your” to mimic the rhythm and intonation of vulgarities that were common in the language of the working-class residents of the outskirts. In toying with the unprintable phrase “ёб твою мать” [I fucked your mother], the poem debunks the myth of the Soviet worker as model citizen that was perpetuated by Party propaganda. By deforming this recognizable phrase ad absurdum, Kholin opens up the language and the voice to multiple possibilities. The repetition may represent a barrage of vulgarity from one source or a chorus of barrack voices flinging curses at a common enemy or at one another. The multiple interpretations and the absurdist impulse of the piece disorient the reader enough to leave one

46 Igor Kholin, Izbrannoe (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 322, quoted in Kolchinsky, Revival of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 101. As the poem is entirely nonsense sound play on a Russian phrase there is no effective or adequate way to translate it into English.

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more avenue for the poet: to use absurd curses to signify his own protest against the state. Like Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir (1928-1999) employs a cacophony of voices to evoke the subversive space of the outskirts, but he uses visual imagery as well, as in his poem “Conversations on the Street” (“Разговор на улыце”): . . . Сделала аборт В ресторане накачался Не явился на концерт У бухгалтера инфаркт Присудили десять лет Смотрят а уж он скончался Я и сам люблю балет47 . . . She had an abortion He got drunk in a restaurant He did not show up at the concert The accountant had a heart attack He got ten years While they were looking about he died I like ballet myself48

Such “conversations” create a montage of scenes and voices, giving a sense of the hectic, disjointed, and dismal state of everyday Soviet life. Yet the alternating abaacbc rhyme scheme forces the reader to create connections between the non-sequiturs, even while its unsymmetrical pattern confounds poetic expectations, increasing the tension and sense of chaos. The combination of non-sequiturs and particularly the comment on ballet following the litany of large and small tragedies recorded in the preceding lines create an absurdity that heightens rather than diminishes the tragedy and desolation of the scene. Sapgir builds the space of the outskirts like a 47 Genrikh Sapgir, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh t. 1 (Moscow: Tret”ia volna, 1999), 42, quoted in Kolchinsky, Revival of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 103. 48 Ibid. Kolchinsky’s translation.

bricklayer, making each line of the poem a row of bricks cemented to the next by only a thin layer of white space; each line is a structural necessity. The lack of punctuation and transition between lines contribute to the poem’s montage effect. Each line describes an unfortunate incident and identifies the urban landmark (hospital, restaurant, concert hall, prison, etc.) where the misfortune takes place. In this way Sapgir builds tragic experience into the physical landscape that he maps in the poem. Through the floating lines of dialogue cut off from their immediate contexts (none of the lines is a response to any of the statements made in the poem) Sapgir also creates a sense of alienation—between the voices and the tragic scenarios they describe and between the poet and the daily lives he observes and chronicles. Because of its novel subject matter—the city outskirts—and its revival of long-avoided Futurist aesthetics, the work of the Barrack poets leaves the reader with a sense of unease. Mikhail Epstein comments on this aspect of the 1960s Moscow avant-garde as follows: The new Moscow poetry provokes in the reader a feeling of aesthetic unrest—a certain loss of orientation. Complaints can be heard about its code and its over-complexity. However, the complexity doesn’t come from the language itself, but rather from the principal loss of a solid center . . . .49

Although Epstein attributes the loss of orientation to the disappearance of the traditional lyrical hero in the poetry of the Moscow avant-garde— which is indeed a feature of Kholin’s, Sapgir’s, and Aygi’s work—the subversion of the dominant power structures that their work accomplishes in its creation of new architectures of place and experience and in its shift from center to periphery in large part account for their feeling of unrest. By relegating unofficial poets to the outskirts, the Soviet powers sought to restrict their physical mobility and access to the creative community, literally distancing them from the dominant

49 Mikhail Epstein, “Like a Corpse I Lay in the Desert,” in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, trans. John High with Julie Gesin and ed. John High et al. (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, 2000), 77.

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culture. The American poet Lyn Hejinian comments on why this strategy proved unsuccessful:

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Mobility of persons may be circumscribed, but their ability to carry out conceptual shifts, to move ideas has flourished. In Russian postmodern poetry . . . borders have been at stake, but they are interior borders. Russian poetry has undertaken to cross the concentric rings of perception, going inward across waves of effects to the instant the stone first drops in the pond.50

In addition to crossing the concentric rings of perception inward, the avant-garde poets burst through Moscow’s golden ring and moved their lyric center outward into the uncharted territory of the outskirts, where they were able to synthesize and express difficult truths about Soviet life in their work. The Barrack poets found themselves aesthetically marginalized and used this marginalization, symbolized by the outskirts, as material for asserting their non-conformity. But while the Barrack poets’ subversive use of the outskirts was a major innovation in establishing both the narrative and the ideological architecture of liminal space, their work still operated within the architecturally encoded system of oppression.51 Like Sosnora, they recognize the failure of the Soviet system vis-à-vis its artists and citizens, but, other than exposing the dark underbelly of daily experience, they offer no way out, no middle path. This is why the tone of their work, while at times humorous, is emotionally detached if not despondent, and the subversive world of the outskirts they create is ultimately dystopian if not grotesque. Whereas they cast an ironic or absurd light on the desolation of the outskirts—and on Soviet life in general—Aygi recognized that amid desolation lies the creative force for transformation and rebirth, and moved beyond the concept of Moscow as the constructed center of power, locating the center of oppression not in a particular geographic location, but in the psyches of the people who inhabit its spaces. Aygi was acquainted 50 Lyn Hejinian, “Preludes,” in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry, ed. John High et al. (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, 2000), 3. 51 For a discussion of the role of architecture in establishing the power of Soviet authority see Neil Leach, ed., Architecture and Revolution (London; New York: Routledge, 1999).

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ОКРАИНА: ЗИМА БЕЗ ЛЮДЕЙ это сияние света от света по облицовке (о звонкости мертвой ковкость пустая!— о ровно-свободного бездушия чистого рядом высоты!)— даже — цветение (соками времени) — по блеску безжизненному лже-современных домов! — это сияние: кровь —

52 Kolchinsky, Revival of the Russian Literary Avant-Garde, 111. Kolchinsky does not name the “obscure” artists with whom Aygi associated, but she is most likely referring to artists Igor Volukh and Ivan Yakovlev.

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with the Lianozovo poets but did not ultimately join their group, opting instead for a more obscure group of artists and filmmakers.52 The fact that Aygi associated with visual artists rather than poets is significant because it elucidates the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of his work and echoes his affinity with Malevich. His approach to the outskirts is best represented in the poem “Outskirts: Winter without People” (“Окраина: Зима без людей,” 1982), where the outskirts represent a pure, creative space, close to nature and far from the contaminated city:

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пусто-бесцветная — стужи! — душа холода — столь без-дыханья-живых-эмфатически-строго ясно высоко достойного —

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себя самого53 Outskirts: Winter without People this shining of light from the world along the revetment (o empty malleability of dead resonance! — o of smooth-free pure soul-lessness near the heights!) — even — flowering (with the juices of time) — along the lifeless gleam of faux-modern buildings! — this shining: blood —

53 Gennadii Aigi, Teper’ vsegda snega (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1992), 241.

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of itself Here the outskirts set the poem far from the structures of power manifest in urban architecture and government regulations. Instead of focusing on the bustle of urban activity, Aygi turns his gaze inward to the soul and outward and upward toward the sky. “What is pure” here is the soul unencumbered by the strictures of politics and ideology—not just mainstream Soviet ideology, but ideology of any kind. The “pure” is also present in the Suprematist landscape he creates with his cold, light-infused winter field and sky, images that create a generative and liberating metaphysical space—generative because they contain the potential for endless renewal and liberating because they free the soul from the polemics that are merely symptomatic of a deeper imbalance. For Aygi these architectures of emptiness, these internal architectures, are much more fundamental than any structure of brick and mortar and represent an ethical, rather than political or aesthetic, dilemma. Aygi’s focus on internal transformation and transcendence presents an alternative to the despair of the Barrack poets and expands the narrative of the outskirts to include a landscape of wonder and hope.

As Aygi and his contemporaries in the Moscow neo-avant-garde worked out a new poetics specific to their needs as non-conformists, certain poets in Leningrad came together under a different aesthetic umbrella to pursue a similar redefinition, and they were seen as equally hostile to the official literature. They consisted of Joseph Brodsky and his group, sometimes known as “Akhmatova’s children” because they drew inspiration from the Acmeist, neo-classicist poetry of the turn of the century, and particularly from Akhmatova who was a mentor for them just as Pasternak was for Aygi. Although the impetus for the Leningrad group

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the empty-colorless — cold! — soul of cold — so without-breath-alive-emphatically-stern clear high worthy

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diverged from the Moscow underground’s approach to poetry, it did so in service, ultimately, of the same goal. One might assume from reading Brodsky’s violent attacks on free verse that he could have nothing in common with a poet like Aygi. But if one also listens to his fervent assertions that a poet must address not only current readers but also (even primarily) his ancestors, and when one takes into consideration that he, like Aygi, was a singer of a lost capital (Petersburg) and a poet striving to restore the splendor and authority of the poetic Word, it is clear that he and Aygi had similar aspirations but adopted diametrically opposed means for realizing them. In an essay entitled “Politics/Poetics” Lev Loseff explores the political imagery in Brodsky’s poems of the late sixties but notes that for Brodsky poetry was an autonomous ideological activity, and expressing aesthetic views was more important to him than expressing political ones.54 Thus he notes: “Brodsky’s paradox was that the polity sensed something subversive in the very linguistic matter of his verse even before he introduced any political themes.”55 Loseff contends that it was Brodsky’s use of English and Western European poetics at a time when the Soviet utopia was trying to demonize the West that earned his otherwise classically-written poetry its subversive status. The coexistence of the classical and subversive in Brodsky’s work has long fueled debate about the extent of his political dissidence. Loseff notes that one Soviet colleague, after reading the exiled Brodsky’s poems, exclaimed: “It turns out that not only are [the poems] not anti-Soviet, they’re not even avant-garde; they’re straight out of the classics!”56 The phrase “not even avant-garde” reiterates the perception of his style, rather than his poems’ content, as indicative of political deviance. As Brodsky’s poems are formally traditional, this Soviet reader is at a loss for finding the locus of subversion in his work. Loseff does not discuss Brodsky’s Jewishness as part of his “subversive” subjectivity. Brodsky was quite aware of his position as a Jew in Russian society, remarking in one of his essays that he preferred the derogatory term “жид” [kike] to the official “еврей” [Jew] that was marked on his 54 Lev Loseff, “Politics/Poetics,” in Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics (London: MacMillan Press, 1990), 34. 55 Ibid., 35. 56 Ibid.

passport, perhaps because it at least made plain the resentment and hatred directed toward Soviet Jews, whereas in the language of officialdom it remained a seething subtext.57 Like Aygi, Brodsky’s non-Russianness informed his relationship to the Russian language and literary canon. His awareness of difference is most often conveyed by the tone of his work, which is often questioning, ironic, sarcastic, or defiant. The ways in which tone translates into word choice and rhymed pairs in Brodsky’s work gave the Soviet reader pause. His choice of rhymed words in particular is complex and idiosyncratic, and this individuality coupled with a defiant tone, even within the framework of “classical” syllabo-tonic poetry, was perceived as threatening by the authorities. Brodsky addresses the way aesthetic choice and tone intersect with politics in his 1987 Nobel lecture (“Uncommon Visage”): Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary . . . taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not a guarantee, then a form of defense, against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly with literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of a political demagogy. The point is . . . that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer—though not necessarily the happier—he is.58

This statement clarifies the threat that the avant-garde and other unofficial artists posed to the Soviet State, even though they far from controlled the media or any other means of mass persuasion. As Aygi notes, the artists the State considered most harmful were “poor, superfluous, but nevertheless—artists”.59 The freedom of thought and the propensity for individual experience evinced by their uncommon aesthetics threatened the very foundations of a system that strove to collectivize both experience and thought. An essayist on Aygi writes: “Aygi’s metaphysical hieroglyphs . . . 57 Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One,” in Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987), 8. 58 Joseph Brodsky, “Uncommon Visage,” in On Grief and Reason (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), 49-50. 59 “бедные, никому не нужные, но, все-таки – художники.” Talochkin and Alpatova, 113.

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did not pose a threat, it is true, to the superpower (the poet was not a dissident sensu stricto), but they slipped out of ideological control, or at least pedagogical control, control of  ‘correctness.’”60 This stylistic “correctness” was a key component in the State’s effort to maintain society’s ideological structure through art. Both Aygi and Brodsky departed from it in different ways. The post-Stalinist period also signaled a shift from the established order to the chaos of the unknown. Cruel as it was, Stalin’s regime created the illusion of an ordered universe within the Soviet Union. After discrediting the regime and its order, Khrushchev and his administration did not know how to proceed. David MacFadyen interprets Khrushchev’s infamous display at the United Nations (thumping his shoe on the podium) as his inability to “cope with a primal instinct to claim the world anew, to refashion it in the wake of a lapsed father.”61 If, as MacFadyen states, a country’s leader represents a “microcosm of social self-definition,” we can imagine an entire country thumping its shoe upon the podium of the new era; at once menacing and impotent, the gesture attempts to stave off the encroaching chaos. It is precisely this descent into chaos and incoherence that Brodsky and his fellow Leningrad poets strove to avoid by adhering to the strict poetic forms of Akhmatova, which “held firm in the wake of a sewagelike, amorphous flow of ubiquitous Soviet propaganda.”62 MacFadyen notes that in Brodsky’s case “the metrical schemes . . . provide a sense of rigidity” that guarantees that the lines will not “spill across the page.”63 Ordering the formlessness of the cultural and psychological content of the post-Stalinist period was a necessity for the Thaw generation, and the difficulty of this task, as well as a fear of failing, helps explain the explosion of lyric poetry in the 1960s. Socialist realism produced a barrage of posters, slogans, and other forms of popular culture intended to subsume individual creativity beneath a collective identity. In addition to serving as a means for order, 60 Edward Bal’tsezhan, “Gennadii Aigi i dilemmy abstraktsionizma,” in Mir etikh glaz-2, edited by O. A. Ulangin (Cheboksary: Chuvashskii gos. khud. muzei, 1997), 10. 61 David MacFadyen, Brodsky and the Soviet Muse (Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 11. 62 Ibid., 12-13. 63 Ibid.,

strict verse form served as a defense against this onslaught. Another Petersburg poet Anatolii Naiman has characterized Akhmatova’s formal strictness as “a defensive stance, her Petrine pose against an external flood.”64 Brodsky considered her conservatism as a “safeguard against a brash (and self-deluding) rush towards unbridled novelty.”65 These statements reveal the paradoxical position poets held in the post-Stalinist era. Naiman invokes the age-old Petersburgian and Pushkinian image of the bronze horseman standing defiantly before the onslaught of natural disaster and creates a curious reversal of the poet as tyrant (form as the imposition of the poet’s will over tyranny) and tyranny as natural forces (the flood) gone awry. This, it would seem, signals the poet’s triumph over the state. Brodsky is not as quick to declare victory and proceeds into the new era with caution. Just as he feared his lines “spilling across the page,” he fears that other poets will use the chaotic nature of their historical moment as an excuse to rush into the “self-deluding” novelty of free verse: As far as literature (and poetry in particular) is concerned, any attempt to use the two world wars, thermonuclear weapons, social upheaval, or the apotheosis of methods of oppression to justify (or explain) the erosion of forms and genres is simply ludicrous . . . . The unprejudiced individual cringes at the mountain of bodies that gave birth to the mouse of vers libre.66

Clearly Brodsky is not without his prejudices, but his comments are representative of the suspicion with which many Russian poets regard free verse. One reason Brodsky is so antagonistic to free verse is that, unlike Aygi and other poets of the neo-avant-garde who conceive poetry as primarily spatial, Brodsky conceives of poetry as a primarily temporal event. Metrical forms are for him “units of time in language.”67 In her essay on Brodsky’s prosody, A. N. Andreeva writes: Apparently Brodsky was convinced of meter’s ability to organize not only poetic language and not merely poetic time, but physical time as well. Meters and measures represented for him something akin to laws 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Joseph Brodsky, “Poetry as a Form of Resistance to Reality,” PMLA 107 (1992): 220. 67 A. N. Andreeva, “Prosodiia v teorii i praktike I. Brodskogo,” in Poetika Iosifa Brodskogo, ed. A. N. Kudinova (Tver: Tver. gos. univ., 2003), 205.

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of nature: they are constant for all ages and allow the poet to move along the temporal axis in any direction. 68

Thus Brodsky’s seemingly conservative poetics offer him and his poetry the freedom to exist in any time period he chose—a welcome alternative to remaining mired in the contemporary moment. The neo-avant-garde, however, sought to exist beyond time and thus expanded the realm of poetry (by incorporating ideas from painting and music) to include principles of organization that were spatial but not bound by space-time. In his essay “Gennady Aygi and the dilemma of abstractionism” Edward Bal’tsezhan writes: “Like Malevich’s paintings, Aygi’s lyrical visions are organized between polar opposites: the unique expendability of the concrete object and the universal immutability of abstraction.”69 Consider Aygi’s creation of “non-figurative” images in his 1966 poem “Once again: in breaks between sleep” (“Снова: в перерывах сна”). СНОВА: В ПЕРЕРЫВАХ СНА смотрящее всегда перестает: и день! и мир!.. единственное есть непрекращающее – по его ли облику душа скользит:

68 “По-видимому, Бродский был убежден в способности метров упорядовать не только стихотворную речь и не только поэтическое время, но и время физическое. Метры и размеры представлялись ему чем-то подобным законам природы: они едины для всех времен и позволяют поэту перемещаться по временной оси в любом направлении.” Ibid., 206. 69 Bal’tsezhan, “Gennadiy Aygi,” 13-14.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

как прах! – и свет не открывается смотрящего всегда! – и зыбкий прах:

осыпается70 Once again: in breaks between sleep that which watches always ceases: and day! and world!.. unique is the unceasing – it is along its visage that the soul slides: like dust! – and the world of the watcher does not always open! – and the shifting dust: not illuminated! – is shed

70 Aygi, Otmechennaia zima, 118.

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не озаренный! –

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The Moscow Neo-Avant-Garde

Here we see the interface of the sleeping, waking, and spiritual worlds, but while evoking their physical or visual aspects, Aygi stops short of describing them as something the reader can easily visualize. It is precisely the interface of these worlds that he seeks to describe, an interface that has no recognizable visual representation. However, their lack of conventionalized visual referents makes them no less real, hence the connection with non-figurative painting. The abstract artist creates a unique visual (or verbal) representation of a sphere of existence we know to exist but for which we lack an established vocabulary. If Brodsky’s poetics allow him to move freely along the time axis, the neo-avant-garde, seeking to transcend time and space, moves freely in infinite dimensions.

CH A PT E R T H R E E

Three Poems Called “Silence”: The Human-Word as Divine Mystery

Life today has been infected by Anti-Connection, AntiWord, Anti-Creativity, and the Human-Word has been transformed into a vulgar parody, the Human-Weapon. I wish this Celebration of Poets were also a Celebration of Poetry, and in turn, a Celebration of the Word in its highest sense; to be the living essence of humanity, the Word-in-Action of Humanity. —Gennady Aygi in his 1993 acceptance speech of the international Macedonian Golden Crown prize for poetry.1

I

f for Heidegger the essence of poetry lies in the poet’s power to bear witness to his humanity—or inhumanity—Aygi takes the identification a step further in stating that the essence of humanity is poetry, and more 1 This chapter is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference “At the Edge of Heaven: Russian Poetry since 1970,” Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, December 3, 2005. Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 146.

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specifically, poetry as “Word-in-Action.” In his formulation of language, the “Word,” is not merely a tool or a good bestowed upon humanity by the gods but our essential nature; the poetic word is indivisible from the person of the poet or witness. Without the word there are no poets, no humanity. Thus does he create the formula above, shifting the focus of a literary award ceremony to a broader philosophical question that takes into account our alienation from the creative act. He gently rebukes our “celebrations” of poetry and literature and our relegation of creativity and art in general to specialized functions, museum exhibits, readings, awards ceremonies, and the classroom. Placing poetry on this kind of pedestal, while seeming to increase its cultural value by framing it as an activity of the cultural elite, actually isolates it from the human element, without which it ceases to have or make meaning. Aygi conceived of poetry in a broad sense, referring not only to the verses written on paper or recited by a so-called poet, but also to the creative impulse that is inherent in the daily life and interactions of human beings. To use a Christian analogy, for Aygi poetry is the Word made flesh, and like Jesus Christ, it is fully human yet fully divine. The concept of divinity here is Christian, but Aygi does not recognize the hierarchy implicit in the Christian worldview. Fields, trees, flowers, insects, and stars are also fully human and fully divine. In fact everything embodies this mystery, including humanity. For Aygi the only equations are those of analogy, and his preferential use of colons speaks not of an idiosyncratic or avant-garde relationship to grammar, but of a philosophical argument. The colon in its appositive usage indicates that two words are grammatically parallel and/or have the same referent. Colons of this nature appear with especial frequency in his titles: “Consolation: field,” “Field: mist,” “Face: quietness,” “Note: Apophatic,” “Wind-radiance: departures,” and even “Field: bridge: grass.” Consider the terms as parallels or analogs of one another, and the colon transforms into the symbol that most Americans born before 1990 will recognize from the SAT in the “analogies” section (the section was removed from the standardized test in 2005).2 2 Adam Cohen, “An SAT without analogies is like: (A) A Confused Citizenry . . .” New York Times, March 13, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/opinion/13sun3. html (accessed September 25, 2011).

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Poverty: money:: (A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove.3

Analogies of this type are meant to highlight the similarity of the relationship between different concepts. All of the word pairs in the multiple choice answers are related to each other, but not necessarily in the same way the terms “poverty and money” relate. Only (B) hunger: food describes the same relationship (the former is caused by lack of the latter). Unlike the above example Aygi’s analogies do not have discrete matching pairs. Consider the analogy: Consolation: field:: (A) Field: mist; (B) Face: quietness; (C) Wind-radiance: departures; (D) Note: Apophatic.

The absurdity of trying to complete this analogy according to the textbook rules above is immediately clear, but it highlights an important aspect of Aygi’s philosophical position. It is not possible to complete the analogy because all the concepts exist in the same relationship. Instead of a: b:: c: d, Aygi’s analogies would look like a: b: c: d: e: f and so forth. Consolation: field: mist: face: quietness: wind-radiance: departures: bridge: grass and so on ad infinitum. This is not just to say that “everything is related to everything else” in a vague or general way. Recall the 3 Ibid.

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Thus, Consolation “is to” field, Field “is to” mist, Field “is to” bridge “is to” grass. In our analogies the first segment of the formula, a: b, indicates the semantic relationship that must be deduced in order to correctly identify the second segment, c: d. In full, the analogy is written a: b:: c: d and is read a “is to” b “as” c “is to” d, where c and d are words in a list of multiple choice answers that have the same relationship as the words a and b. In his New York Times op-ed piece on the subject, Mark Cohen uses an example from an old Miller Analogies workbook:

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second aspect of the appositional use of the colon, which marks terms as having the same referent. In Aygi’s conception of the universe all things exist in a state of divine mystery (fully human yet fully divine) in a non-hierarchical way. So it is not an error to use the phrase “fully human” to describe things like trees, wind, and fields because humanity is nothing more than one of the many manifestations of creativity on earth. One could as easily say that here the human being is fully field yet fully divine, fully wind, fully grass, fully radiance. Eventually the need for the conjunction “yet” becomes unnecessary because it presupposes an opposition or contradiction between the concepts it connects; to be fully human one cannot be fully divine. Without wading too deeply into Christian theology, Aygi challenged that belief with simple analogies that did not presuppose a distinction between humanity, creativity, and divinity. There is only one thing that stands in opposition to these, and it is violence. Aygi mourned the reconfiguration of the Human-Word into the Human-Weapon and his poetry reads like an elegy for the twentieth century, for the destruction we continue to wreak on ourselves, for the loss of our humanity, and for our alienation from the poetry of our true nature. The long seventies were a dismal period in Soviet history. Extending from the end of the Thaw to the beginning of perestroika (1968-1985), it included the infamous period of economic “застой” [stagnation] and was marked by signs of large-scale social and existential crisis, “when the bankruptcy of former notions about reality is felt, when former symbols of faith have been discredited, when an acute need for radical change in the existing order of things begins to ripen.”4 Under Brezhnev, writers felt the intensified ideological yoke of socialist realism, but rather than forcing them into silence, it produced a burst of creativity; writers like Trifonov, Aitmatov, and Bykov produced their best work during this period.5 Still, a psychological split was taking place in society at large: if during the early Stalinist period many actually 4 N. L. Leiderman and M. N. Lipovetskii, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura 1950e-1990e gody v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Akademiia, 2003), 2:12-13. 5 Ibid., 13.

believed in the communist ideals that socialist realism was purported to serve, by the time Brezhnev regressed to Stalinesque politics, the polity had become disenchanted with both the philosophy of Soviet society and the method of socialist realism. The universal lack of faith in the project of Soviet socialism during the seventies made the strict enforcement of socialist realism during this period all the more unbearable: “[C]ommunist incantations were uttered from tribunals and podiums. People listened to them, applauded on command, repeated them if necessary, but it all had taken on the character of a moribund ritual that had to be performed—out of deep-rooted habit or fear of incurring the wrath of the powers that be.”6 One recalls the chilling image of an auditorium deafened by the enthusiastic, extended standing ovation given to Stalin by officials, each of whom was too afraid to be the first to stop applauding. Thus are elements that were so creative in the avant-garde—performance, ritual, incantation—twisted into a grotesque mockery by the State. The widening rift between the beliefs people were required to express in public and those they actually held led to the growing awareness that “it was impossible to go on living this way.”7 Yet, the authorities fiercely suppressed dissent. There was no return to Stalinist purges, but individuals regarded as suspicious were forced out of their professions, hounded by the KGB, barred from major cities, and sent to asylums, Siberia, or other remote regions. Aygi lost his ten-year post at the Mayakovsky Museum in 1971. No longer working at the museum, Aygi lived on the outskirts of Moscow throughout the 1970s, earning his living as a translator. Peter France describes Aygi’s position at this time as “precarious,” his earnings “meager.”8 Nevertheless, the outskirts represented a rich, creative space for Aygi, and, as France notes, even amidst poverty the poet remained

6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 14. 8 Peter France, “Gennady Aygi,” The Guardian, February 25, 2006, http://books. guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,17174700.html (accessed February 26, 2006).

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surrounded by his favorite landscape: the field and woods.9 Thus, economic and geographic isolation did not translate into creative stagnation. If in the 1960s Aygi explored the resonances between poetry and the visual arts, in the 1970s he looked to music for a defining role in his poetry and its companion form, silence. Both figure in Aygi ’s creative process, which is predicated on poetry as a “sacred act of linkage.” He carefully distinguishes between the two kinds of silence that are operative in his poetics: molchanie, lack of speech, and tishina, lack of sound. His poems, essays and interviews provide much commentary on the distinction. It is crucial not only for understanding Aygi’s poetry but also for understanding the urgency of creativity for other poets during the seventies and the position of unofficial poetry. Gerald Janecek elaborates on the distinction between molchanie and tishina and the importance of these concepts in Aygi’s work in his essay “Gennady Aygi’s Poetry of Silence [Molchanie].”10 He begins by linking silence in poetry to silence in music, in particular John Cage ’s 4’33” (1952), a piece in which the pianist sits at the piano and does not play for the duration of the allotted time so that the murmuring in the auditorium and sounds from outside become the focus of attention.11 Sounds that are usually tuned out, usually considered background noise, are for Aygi the “шорохи-и-шуршания” [rustlings-and-whisperings] the world makes when one stops to listen. Stopping and listening, Janecek notes, is “молчание” [molchanie: silence, muteness], the voluntary withholding of sound, whereas “тишина” [tishina: silence, stillness, quietness] is the absence of sound or noise.12 Both of these words translate most naturally into “silence” in English, so in this discussion I use the transliterated Russian to clarify which kind of silence is being considered. Janecek discusses several of Aygi’s poems that engage themes of silence and notes Aygi’s debt to the classics of Russian poetry, particularly   9 Ibid. 10 Gerald Janecek, “Poeziia molchaniia u Gennadiia Aygi,” in Minimalismus zwischen Leere und Exzess, ed. Mirjam Goller and Georg Witte (Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 2001), 433-446. 11 Ibid., 433. 12 Ibid., 433-434.

Tiutchev, Mandelstam, and Pasternak, who also explored the multivalent richness of silence.13 Janecek’s study concludes with some of Aygi’s thoughts on molchanie and tishina from the poet’s poem/essay “Poetryas-Silence” (1992). The focus of Janecek’s study is Aygi’s minimalist poetics and how silence is expressed in his poems through brevity and abbreviated phrasing.14 It is as much a philosophical concept as a theme; it is also rhythm and landscape. Expressing silence in some form has always been a central concern of Aygi’s: “Silence entered into my poems in the form of large conceptual pauses with temporal duration . . . . Now I want more and more for a whole poem in some way to represent silence ‘itself ’ . . . .”15 This passage, taken from a 1985 interview, shows that Aygi’s methods for incorporating silence into his work continued to evolve throughout his career. Silence is an overt theme for Aygi in the 1970s, evinced in the title of his collection Silence-warning (1974) and in the many poems from that period that contain “silence” in the title: “Silence,” “Holy-place: Silence,” “You Are my Silence,” “Silence and Smile,” and “Face: Silence.”16 Notably, it is stillness (tishina) rather than 13 Ibid., 434. Janecek provides an extensive footnote referencing Tiutchev’s “Silentium,” (1833), Mandelstam’s “Silentium” (1910), Pasternak’s “Silence” (“Тишина,” 1957) and “Forest Poem” (“Лесное,” 1914), and a number of other poems, including Genrikh Sapgir’s collection Silence (Молчание, 1963), which I discuss briefly in this chapter. 14 Ibid., 436. 15 “Тишина входила в мои стихи в виде больших смысловых пауз с временным протяжением . . . . Теперь, мне все более хочется, чтобы одно цельное стихотворение каким-то образом представяло собой—“саму” тишину . . . .” Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 159 (Aygi’s emphasis). 16 In Russian the title of the poem “Holy-place: Silence” is “Бла-место: тишина.” “Бла,” [holy or blessed] is an interesting and problematic term in the title of this poem, and it is used in other instances in Aygi’s work of this period: in the poem “Holy-place: variation,” [“Бла-место: вариация,” 1973] in which appear the phrases “Holy-Rot” [“Бла-Гнили”] and “Blessed-Is-The-Pole” [“Бла-Есть-Столб”]. “Бла” is probably an abbreviation from the root благ-, which yields Church Slavonic “благий” [good, Greek agathos], “благословен-” [blessed, Greek eulogemenos] and the contemporary Russian “блажен-” [blessed, Greek makarios]. The Beatitudes all begin with the word “блаженный” [blessed, Greek makarioi], as in “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven” (Dr. Francis McLellan, personal correspondence). Also, given Aygi’s interest in spirituality, it is possible he is transliterating the term “bla” from Tibetan medicine, meaning “the soul which is coming into being” [inkarniruiushchaiasia dusha] (Vostokov). Therefore, in the translations I have chosen

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muteness (molchanie) that predominates in the titles during this period, although muteness is constantly present in Aygi’s work as a way of being—the poet’s voluntary withholding of sound in order to listen and contemplate. Muteness can also signify involuntary silence, as that which is imposed by the State on unofficial writers. Stillness is the embodiment of creative silence, an uncluttered space full of potentialities. Exploring the resonances and tensions among the various meanings and how they connect to music and spirituality in Aygi’s work provides great insight into his concept of creativity and the role of the poem in the process. Aygi’s juxtaposition of muteness and stillness underscores his awareness that the poet exists in two worlds: the world of political coercion, in which the poet’s voice is muzzled into forced silence, and the world of stillness and poetic freedom, in which the poet is able to tap into and sit with his creative forces. This is not merely a distinction between external and internal worlds. Stillness (tishina) exists prior to the poetic word but remains part of it even after the word is spoken or written and becomes a part of the people who share the poetic experience.17 The concept of silence as something the poet moves within, works with, but is not bound to is equivalent to poetic freedom. Stillness is also part of the natural world, and exists for Aygi primarily in the field, forest, and flowers. But Aygi is not the only poet of his generation who recognized the natural world as a regenerating force. In post-Thaw Soviet society, many poets reacted to the degradation of their environment: cities built as paeans to industrial progress had become labyrinths of drab concrete, and outskirts that had provided fresh air and expanses of countryside were now factory towns polluted with industrial waste. Poets seeking respite from the blighted world around them turned to nature as a source of beauty and spiritualized silence.18 This is expressed in Andrei Voznesensky’s 1963 poem “Silence!” (“Тишины!”).

“holy” and “blessed,” variants that seem to express the notion of divine goodness present in the possible sources. 17 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 158-159. 18 Leiderman and Lipovetsky, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura, I: 117.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Silence I want, silence . . . My nerves are, what, fried? Silence . . . so that the pine’s shade, tickling us, can shift, cooling like mischief, along the spine to the little toe, silence . . .

Voznesensky uses a playful vernacular tone, focusing on the frazzled nerves of the speaker and healing images of relief, and the poem has a regular meter and rhyme scheme. The pine and shade or shadow are frequent images in Aygi’s poems, and seem to universally evoke a soothing, calming presence. Here Voznesensky also uses a technique found often in Aygi’s work: heavy repetition of sibilants and fricatives: tishiny khochu, tishiny, obozhzheny, Tishiny, shchekocha, peremeshchalas’, kholodyashchaia shalost’. These sounds evoke the whispering of the forest—Aygi’s “rustlings-and-whisperings”—a mysterious, esoteric language. Despite differences in tone and form, both poets are drawn to the healing powers of tishina in the natural world. This theme along with the outpouring of lyric poetry points to the emergence of a neo-Romantic tendency in 1960s poetics. Aygi’s work is often compared to Romantic poetry with its fragmentary form, exuberant meditations on landscape, and prevalence of nature imagery. Unlike the Romantics, however, Aygi did not exalt in 19 Ibid., 121.

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Тишины хочу, тишины . . . Нервы, что ли, обожжены? Тишины . . . чтобы тень от сосны, щекоча нас, перемещалась, холодящая словно шалость, вдоль спины, до мизинца ступни, тишины . . . 19

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idealized or idyllic versions of people, places, and things. He saw the bare, gray bones of Soviet reality and found what was redeemable. Whereas stillness was an antidote to Soviet reality, muteness could be the consequence of menacing political forces. Such a sense is evoked in Genrikh Sapgir’s 1963 collection Silence [Молчание]. Вырвали язык из гортани! Остался человек И небо — Молчание Какая радость Какое страшное звучание — Молчание20 They ripped my tongue from my throat! There remains the person And sky — Silence What joy What frightening resonance — Silence

Sapgir’s choice of Silence for the title of his collection is an ironic cultural commentary in addition to its obvious political significance, written as it was during a time in the Soviet Union when poetry was read to packed auditoriums in theaters, museums, and stadiums in a declamatory style and enjoyed huge popularity as a form of public entertainment.21 His use of the word nebo creates a play on words: Is it “небо” [sky] or “нëбо” [the roof of the mouth]? In Russian the dieresis over the “e” is not usually added in printed texts, and many poets use this ambiguity to their benefit. From the second possibility (the roof of 20 Ibid., 124. 21 Double irony due to the fact that Sapgir was precisely the kind of poet who read at such venues in the declamatory style.

the mouth), we get a literal picture of what remains when the tongue is ripped from the throat (the person and the roof of the mouth), from the first (sky), a figurative one (the individual surrounded by a vast emptiness). Sapgir’s use of the word “звучание” [sounding] gives him room for subtle irony as well, since in addition to indicating a sounding or resonance, it has a figurative meaning of “significance,” as in “пъеса огромного звучания” [a play of great significance]. Evoking this underlying meaning allows Sapgir to undercut the oxymoron of the “sound of silence” with the politically resonant “significance of silence.” Aygi makes similarly elliptical and poignant references to censorship and totalitarianism connected with the theme of silence. He approaches the distinction between muteness and stillness in his 1956 poem “Silence” (“Тишина”). ТИШИНА 1 в невидимом зареве из распыленной тоски знаю ненужность как бедные знают одежду последнюю и старую утварь и знаю что эта ненужность стране от меня и нужна надежная как уговор утаенный: молчанье как жизнь да на всю мою жизнь 2 однако молчание – дань, а себе – тишина. 3 к такой привыкать тишине что как сердце не слышное в действии как то что и жизнь словно некое место ее

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Three Poems Called “Silence”: The Human-Word as Divine Mystery

и в этом я есть – как Поэзия есть и я знаю что работа моя и трудна и сама для себя как на кладбище города бессоница сторожа.22

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Silence 1 in the invisible glow of pulverized melancholy I know uselessness like the poor know their last piece of clothing and old utensils and I know that this uselessness is just what the country needs from me reliable like a secret pact: muteness as life and for my whole life 2 However, muteness is a tribute – and for myself – silence. 3 to grow accustomed to a silence that like the heart is inaudible in action like life 22 Aygi, Otmechennaia zima, 363. The dates for this poem are listed in Razgovor na rasstoianii as 1954-56 (15) and in Otmechennaia zima as 1956-57. There are also typographical differences between the poems in each of these volumes. In Razgovor na rasstoianii, “однако” in section 2 is capitalized “Однако,” and the first line of section 3 is split (perhaps more elegantly): “к такой привыкать тишине / что как сердце не слышное в действии.” Although Razgovor na rasstoianii was compiled by the poet himself, it contains only selected poems along with essays, interviews and other works by and about him. I have therefore used the version in Otmechennaia zima, his complete collected poems up to the time of publication, as authoritative.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

In this poem solemnity prevails as the young Aygi considers the poet’s duty to his country and his art, his dual roles as citizen and creator, and the hindering of both by an oppressive state. He speaks of the uselessness or worthlessness of what we can assume is the task of writing poetry from the authorities’ point of view. He also acknowledges the difference between the regime and the country it claims to represent. The country and its people need from him precisely the thing (his poetry) the regime deems unnecessary. This also shows his understanding of the relationship between poet and censor: this tension must exist, at least in the Soviet context, for they define one another. Because he is discussing the role of the poet from the point of view of repression, the kind of silence he evokes is muteness. He sees the position of the poet in the Soviet Union as something of a paradox, a perpetual enforced non-speaking. In section two Aygi compares the purposes of molchanie and tishina. By not revealing who or what is the recipient of molchanie as a “tribute,” Aygi opens the door to various interpretations. Taking into consideration the context of political repression established in the first stanza, one may assume he is referring to tribute exacted by the authorities as payment or appeasement. However, as the second half of the line considers tishina and the poet’s own creative world, tribute here may refer to an act of homage paid to something worthy of quiet contemplation. The line thus shows the inextricability of repression and freedom: the poet’s muteness is a reverential act when he is forbidden to publish for refusing to betray his sense of poetic truth; it is a silence maintained in service of a higher cause. Molchanie can also be part of the creative process; the poet must remain to perceive the stillness he translates into poetry.

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as if some place of hers and in this I am – as Poetry is and I know that my work is both difficult and for itself alone like the sleeplessness of the night watchman at the city graveyard

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In the third section Aygi further describes the silence in which creativity flourishes. Echoing his sentiments on the link between silence, the poetic word, and humanity, he asserts that poetry and the quiet space from which it emanates are not separate from life, but integral to it. He achieves this by comparing creative silence to that most essential organ, the “inaudible heart.” Illustrating the connection another way, he depicts life as “место” [a place] in which the speaker and poetry abide. The final image, however, brings the reader back to the solemnity of the poet’s duty by comparing it with the silence and alertness of the living (the night watchman) in the face of death’s silence. Aygi acknowledges that the poet’s job is lonely and at each step he must grapple with mortality in the context of the immortal. By likening the poet to the night watchman at the graveyard, he returns to the question of uselessness and necessity introduced in the first stanza. Why must the night watchman be silent? He could scream out loud, and the dead would not hear him. His silence is “for himself alone,” the poet’s decision, rather than a condition forced upon him. Silence is necessary for the guard to maintain his alertness, which is the essential feature of his job, and Aygi acknowledges the difficulty of the task—of remaining alert and silent while surrounded by fields of corpses that are silent by virtue of their inability to speak, unlike the poet who chooses not to. The theme of corpses and silence recurs in later poems such as “Now Always Snows” (“Теперь всегда снега”). Even at this early stage, Aygi compares the poet and the watchman—one who observes in silence. But underlying the silence is the presence of music, though not explicit in “Silence” it becomes so later. In “Poetry-as-Silence” he states: “Listening – in place of speaking. . . . Pauses are places of reverence: before – Song.”23 Aygi’s spiritual philosophy does not foreground participation in organized religion, but divine mystery, as the unifying force of humanity. Leon Robel notes:

23 “Слушание – вместо говорения. . . . Паузы – места преклонения: перед – Песней.” Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 238.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

For Aygi, the word is spiritual in essence and the act of writing is a spiritual practice. He has said: “for me, poetry is, irrevocably, the type of ‘action’ and ‘linkage’ best expressed in the words ‘sacred act.’”25 This position is particularly well expressed in “Now always Snows,” in which he links images of God, light, and snow to evoke silence, creativity, and the poet’s duty to his country, a continuation of “Silence”: Теперь всегда снега Н. Б. как снег Господь что есть и есть что есть снега когда душа что есть снега душа и свет а все вот лишь о том что те как смерть что есть что как они и есть признать что есть и вот средь света тьма и есть когда опять снега О-Бог-Опять-Снега как может быть что есть

24 Robel, Aïgui, 118. 25 Gennadiy Aygi, “99 Poets: An International Poetics Symposium,” trans. Pierre Joris., boundary 2.1 (1999), 42. This text was written in 1969-70 and first published in Kazak’s 1975 edition of Aygi’s poems.

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The religiosity imbuing Aygi’s work is not intended to bring one Church into conflict with another, nor does it aim at any exclusion; on the contrary, it stresses the fraternal link between all humans . . . . As expressed in his poems, it may . . . be accepted and freely reinterpreted by anyone.24

Three Poems Called “Silence”: The Human-Word as Divine Mystery

а на проверку нет как трупы есть и нет

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о есть Муляж-Страна вопроса нет что есть когда Народ глагол который значит нет а что такое есть при чем тут это есть и Лик такой Муляж что будто только есть страна что Тьма-и-Лик Эпоха-труп-такой а есть одно что есть когда их сразу нет — о Бог опять снега! — их нет как есть одно лишь Мертвизна-Страна есть так что есть и нет и только этим есть но есть что только есть есть вихрь как чудом в миг нет Мертвости-Страны о Бог опять снега душа снега и свет о Бог опять снега а будь что есть их нет снега мой друг снега душа и свет и снег

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

о Бог опять снега и есть что снег что есть26 Now Always Snows

like snow the Lord is all there is when all there is is snow when the soul is all there is the snows the soul and light but still just this that there are those like death is all there is to know that they are even here darkness is also part of light when the snows come again Oh-God-Again-The-Snows as maybe all that is to come but there is no way to know for sure as corpses do and do not exist of there is the Papier-Mâché-Country no question what it means to exist when The People is a verb that means to not exist

26 Gennadiy Aygi, Teper’ vsegda snega: Stikhi raznikh let 1955-1989 (Moskva: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1992), 175-6.

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to N. B.

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and what does it mean to exist what’s the point of this being even the Holy Face is just a Mold that is as if there only is the country that is Darkness-and-Holy-Face Epoch-Is-A-Corpse but there is one thing that exists when these are suddenly no more —oh God again the snows!— they are not just as this one thing is only Numbness-Country they are such that they are and are not and only by virtue of this exist but there are things that only are a whirlwind as if by a miracle is in a moment Death-Country is no more oh God again the snows the soul the snows and light oh God again the snows but should it be that they are not the snows my friend the snows the soul and light and snow oh God again the snows and snow is all there is

“Now always Snows” is longer than many of Aygi’s lyric poems, which can consist of a single phrase, word, or letter.27 But it retains a feeling of 27 Janecek, “Poeziia molchaniia,” 436. For a discussion of such poems see 440-444.

brevity and gravity with its short lines, word and sound repetition, and incantatory rhythm. It is opposed to the ritual incantation and performance demanded by Soviet ideology, which destroyed meaning and left society emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually bereft. It explores what it means “to be” in a country numbed and deadened by such false worship. Aygi mocks its carnivalization of faith, transforming images of papier-mâché into images of death, likening the country to a papiermâché death mask for the age. Yet inextricable from this dark work is the insistent invocation of forces that can overcome despair. Images of God, light, and snow counterbalance the darkness, creating a Suprematist “white on white” palette. Kazimir Malevich, who founded of Suprematism as an artistic philosophy in the 1930s, used blocks of minimalist colors like red, white, and black to create abstracted “landscapes” that signified an entrance into a divine field. Similarly minimalist landscapes frequently occur in Aygi’s work. In “Now always Snows” the whirlwind recalls the apocalyptic associations of the snowy whirlwind out of which Jesus steps at the end of Alexander Blok’s pivotal 1918 poem, “The Twelve.” This cosmic purification is Aygi’s answer to the world of “moribund ritual” fostered by the State. Although neither molchanie nor tishina appear in this poem directly, the overall feeling is one of silence. Nothing makes a sound: the snow is silent, the light is silent, even the people, portrayed as masks or corpses, are silent. The silence of death is played against the silence of prayer: “Oh God, again the snows” is both an invocation and invitation for the snows to come and cover or sweep away the ruins the country has become. But the poem is not only a supplication; it is also a contemplative soliloquy on the nature of God. It opens with the analogy between the Lord and an area covered by snow; both share a quiet omnipresence, gentle but powerful. The space Aygi creates is a boundless non-space. The repeated line “the snows the soul and light” creates a landscape that is not entirely visualizable, and the repeated negatives (no, not) and complicated syntax create a space of indeterminacy—something that both exists and does not. Thus, while engaged in an act of molchanie—quiet contemplation—the poet creates a space that embodies, becomes, tishina.

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The kind of transformation Aygi believes is possible through poetry is grounded in a concept of religion in which words are vehicles for creating a connection between the human and the divine.28 Although Aygi builds his idea from the Latin root religio, it is not a traditionally Christian approach.29 It is a poet’s religion, and the religion of one who is comfortable with multiple belief systems coexisting in a single context. “Now Always Snows” refers to Christian concepts—God, the Lord, the soul—in a magical, pre-Christian incantation that characterizes the “Iron Charm,” a Chuvash charm for curing sickness, that begins: “Seventy-seven times there is a dawn, rising and growing red,— when blood at last flows from this dawn at the blow of an axe, only then let Khunadi’s blood appear. I spit and I blow, may she be cured at once. From man comes goodness, from God comes grace.”30 This stanza repeats, with minor alterations (the image of red dawn becomes a white star and a red sun), two more times to complete the charm. The repetition of images and phrases and the invocation of the Christian God in a magical context resonate with the intermingling of belief systems. Rather than perform ritual actions (“I spit and I blow”) to make the charm or prayer more effective, Aygi focuses on the ritual of poetry. Ritual actions exist in the Christian context as well: lighting candles, praying at certain times of day, repeating prayers a certain number of times, and using icons and holy images are all ways to make one’s prayers more effective in the context of organized religion. For Aygi neither the Christian nor the pre-Christian rituals are adequate; poetry itself is the 28 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 161. 29 Ibid. The Latin religio, “reverence for the gods” or “conscientiousness” has several possible origins: relego, Latin re (again) + lego in the sense of “read” (“reread” referring to the repetition of scripture), or lego in the sense of “choose” (rendering “go over again” or “consider carefully”); religare from ligare “to connect,” hence “re-connection” or “to bind, return to bondage” (emphasizing servitude to God); and res (ablative re) + legere “to gather” (since organized religion involves a gathering of people). Yet another possible source is religiens “careful” (opposite of negligens), rendering “a particular system of faith.” Aygi refers to a commonly accepted etymology that is often considered incorrect. Among modern writers in the Russian tradition, Viacheslav Ivanov is notable for his awareness of the complex etymology of this oft-cited root. For our purposes, identifying the “correct” definition is not the issue, what matters is the one operative in Aygi’s poetry. 30 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 29. Original text not available.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Beautiful are the moments when impressions and images appear in a single alloy with the word, immediately “in the word.” . . . Such a thing rarely happens for me: perhaps once or twice a year. Прекрасные минуты, когда представления и образы возникают в едином сплаве со словом, непосредственно “в слове.” . . . Такое со мной бывает редко: скажем, один-два раза в год.31

Aygi characterizes the words of poetry as “religio-worms” as they work in a slow, tireless, unglamorous way to sew divinity back into the all but barren soil of our daily existence.32 It is this process that distinguishes the poetic word from the mundane word and allows it to retain and transmit the silence and the sense of the sacred. When violence and injustice enter his work, as they do in “Now always Snows,” he uses the “religio-worms” of the poetic word to transform them into a ground for solace, for molchanie and tishina. Aygi was aware of the complexity of his project, namely making violence an integral part of creation. To express silence, the poet must violate it; thus the birth of ideas, poems, and individuals includes a great deal of violence and pain. Aygi explores the issue in “Silence” (1965). ТИШИНА Как будто сквозь кровавые ветки пробираешься к свету.

31 Ibid., 21. 32 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 161 (Aygi’s emphasis and capitalization).

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ritual act of worship that must be performed and in the process a poem is created. He stresses the process of poetry rather than the finished product; indeed, poems for Aygi are never finished, but part of an unending quest for silence and grace. Accordingly, he holds that the word is not the primary element of which poetry is made, and describes the process of eliciting words as an arduous one:

Three Poems Called “Silence”: The Human-Word as Divine Mystery

И даже сны здесь похожи на сеть сухожилий.

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Что же поделаешь, мы на земле играем в людей. А там – убежища облаков, и перегородки снов бога, и наша тишина, нарушенная нами, тем, что где-то на дне мы ее сделали видимой и слышимой. И мы здесь говорим голосами и зримы оттенками, но никто не услышит наши подлинные голоса, и, став самым чистым цветом, мы не узнаем друг друга.33 Silence As if through bloody branches you clamber towards the light. And here even dreams resemble a network of tendons.

33 Aygi, Selected Poems, 40-41. See Janecek, “Poeziia molchaniia,” 435-436 for another discussion of this poem.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

What can you do? We on earth play at being people.

by the fact that somewhere in the depths we made it visible and audible. And here we speak with voices and are seen in shades of color, but no one will hear our true voices, and, having become purest color, we will not recognize one another.34

Part of Aygi’s philosophy is the recognition that while the poetic act is a participation in the divine mystery, all creation prefigures loss and disruption of the existing order. “Silence” begins with a chaotic, birth-like passage into a strange world in which one cannot distinguish between dreams and reality.35 The corporeal world is designated as “here,” but the speaker’s position or location in the poem is not clear: is he (assuming a male voice) “here,” or observing from a distance? In the next stanza we are catapulted to “там” [there], which in Russian can signify heaven, the “other world,” or life after death. In this stanza, too, the speaker focuses on dreams, but those of the airy realm of gods as opposed to the physical realm of mortals. This is also the realm where stillness resides. But the activities Aygi elsewhere proclaimed as a means of communing with this 34 Ibid. Adapted from Peter France’s translation. 35 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 112.

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But there – are refuges of clouds and partitions of the dreams of god, and our silence, that has been broken by us,

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silence are now represented as having “broken” it, and the earthly dream world is now cast as “the depths.” The references to audibility and visibility recall Aygi’s observations about music and painting: “it occurred to me that music is the overcoming of audibility with the Audible, painting, the overcoming of visibility with the Visual.”36 These comments acknowledge the paradox of art: in transcending what is readily audible or visible the artists creates something that can be heard or seen. More generally, the triumph over “быт” [the everyday] creates a cultural product that inevitably becomes a part of the everyday and is eventually incorporated into the world of the mundane. But perhaps transcendence through art is really possible, and the “Audible” and “Visual” denote what is knowable through sublime or “authentic” perception. Aygi makes the distinction between the “audible” and the “Audible”—between the mundane and the sublime—in the sixth stanza. The voices with which we speak in the mundane world are not our “authentic” voices. In the visual realm Aygi makes a similar contrast between the “hues” in which we see each other in this world and the “pure light” that is our true nature, and he notes that when we achieve this true nature, we will not recognize one another because the mundane features of color and sound will have been removed. The visible concept closest to “pure light” is that of white light, which contains all colors of the visible spectrum yet has no color itself. This is another reason that images of light and non-color play a central role in Aygi’s poetics. It is part of his Suprematist palette, but as white light, rather than the white hue created by painter’s pigment, it is not a symbol of blankness or a political reference, but a symbol of all-presence. The erasure of color, of physical form, is also an erasure of the difference that divides human beings on earth. Aygi was acutely aware of his status as a non-Russian in the Russian context and gravitated toward artists and writers who shared a sense of outsiderness. As a bilingual, bicultural native of a colonized nation and as a “regional” or ethnic 36 “мне пришло в голову, что музыка – преодоление слышимости – Слышимым, живопись – преодоление видимости – Видимым.” Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 158.

minority poet, the matrix of Chuvash-Russian-Soviet-cosmopolitan identity he embodied was a difficult one. The disembodiment of the poetic voice is not accidental. He is constantly pulling our attention away from the particulars of identity, race, language, and nationality, guiding us to a more unified, consubstantiated vision of humanity. To discussions of “civilization” and “culture,” he has responded that “civilizations are merely separate periods of a unified Culture” that has existed “since the Creation of the World.”37 Aygi was a vocal champion of Chuvash literature and culture throughout his career and clearly valued the particulars of his own culture. He also writes passionately about the Russian “родина” [motherland], implying a strong filial connection to that land and its people. It is not, perhaps, accurate to say that, as in Osip Mandelstam’s famous formulation, Aygi had a nostalgia for world culture, but the notion of participating in a “unified [world] Culture” (Aygi’s capitalization) does echo that sentiment. Nostalgia implies sentimentality along with a sense of longing and loss. In Aygi’s case I believe there is longing and loss, but not sentimentality. There is also hope, a quality that is alien to nostalgia; in nostalgia one has already given up hope either for the return of the desired time or object, or for the possibility for something better down the road. In The Future of Nostalgia Svetlana Boym clarifies that: Mandelstam’s nostalgia for world culture is not a longing for a unified canon but for creative and cultural memory that unfolds like a fan on the masquerade. This nostalgia is not retrospective, but prospective. It is the vision of the poet who is radical and traditional, modernist and classicist at once, who holds to a paradoxical belief that the “classical poetry is a poetry of revolution.”38

This description of Mandelstam’s nostalgia for world culture does in fact sound similar to Aygi’s belief in a “unified Culture” that has existed “since the Creation of the World,” but here Aygi is opposing culture to civilization, which remains firmly intact in Mandelstam’s Hellenic-centered model of Petropolis as a utopian imaginary. The notion of maintaining an idealized civilizational model based on ancient Greek culture is so 37 “цивилизации – это лишь отдельные периоды единой Культуры . . . с Сотворения Мира.” Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 239. 38 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 141.

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comforting and necessary to Mandelstam that in his famous poem “Insomnia, Homer, Taut Sails” it is a list of the names of Odysseus’s ships and a vision of them riding homeward on the waves of the Black Sea that finally lull the restless poet to sleep. Perhaps more necessary than the civilization of ancient Greece to Mandelstam is the connection thereby created between memory and loss. It is significant that in “Insomnia, Homer, Taut Sails,” it is on the verge of sleep that the poet pictures most vividly the exploits and tales (real or imagined) of Odysseus, Homer, and a cast of characters from antiquity. As the poet slips into sleep he finds himself in the scene; the dreamer becomes the dream and recaptures the lost world of a great literary age. A moment of panic arises in the third stanza, however, when the poet realizes there is no place for him in this fantasy. Precisely in the moment of greatest rapture (“And Homer and the sea—all moves as if by love” [И море и Гомер все движимо любовью]), the poet becomes aware of his disorientation and entreats his literary predecessor to guide him (“Куда же деться мне?” [What should I do? Where should I go?]). Instead of guiding the lost poet, Homer remains impassive (“И вот, Гомер молчит . . .” [From Homer—no reply . . .”]) and the poet is overtaken by the crashing waves, their roar driving the rest of the dream into oblivion. It would seem here that Mandelstam is acknowledging the desperation of nostalgia, that ultimately, there is no going back. The Russian word “сон” can mean both dream and sleep, and like Mandelstam, Aygi takes advantage of the ambiguity in his writing. Whereas in Mandelstam’s poem death is a presence that exists just outside the frame of the dream, Aygi brings it front and center as part of the creative space of sleep and poetry. For him, the silence that exists in death, poetry, and music is a free creative space of contemplation, a withholding of speech to appreciate or become part of the world around us. He plays on these relationships in the second stanza of another poem entitled “Silence.” ТИШИНА (Стихи для одновременного чтения двух голосов)

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

—ма-à....— (а во сне те же самые живы глаза)

Silence (Verses for simultaneous reading by two voices) —ma-a....— (and in sleep those very same eyes are alive) —..............a-ma.

Has the speaker emerged into a world of waking life or lucid dreaming? Because son embodies the gray area between reality and fantasy, life and death, it is an essential part of the creative process and as such is linked to the divine. In the following passage Aygi describes the state in which he often composed poetry, on the verge of sleep and waking: [I]t is a special kind of “sleep” [or “dream”], it is, rather, a great intensifying of all my spiritual energies, an intensifying of memory, thought, imagination, hearing, and vision. It seems to me that this tensing cannot be equated with the concept of “thought”—there is something greater here . . . . [Э]то особенный “сон”, это, скорее,—большое напряжение всех душевных сил, напряжение памяти, мысли, воображения, слуха и

39 Aygi, Otmechennaia zima, 463.

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—.............. à-ма39

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зрения. Мне кажется, что это напряжение нельзя отождествлять с понятием “мышление”, здесь—что-то большее . . . .40

It is no ordinary sleep, but a period of supreme alertness, when perceptive faculties are functioning at their peak. In other words, when the body is still and conscious thought has quieted down the poet can experience the world of creative silence most fully. The irony here (of which Aygi is fully aware) is that the state that outwardly most resembles death is internally the most alive. The short poem “Silence” is both deceptively simple and hopelessly complex. The subheading “Verses for simultaneous reading by two voices,” though strange as an instruction for poetry, which generally presupposes a single reader, is common in music, in which designations such as “a piece for two voices” are standard. As if anticipating the reader’s confusion, Aygi adds a note to clarify his intentions for the poem’s performance: “The first and last lines are pronounced by a male voice, the others by a female voice (it should create the impression of continuity with the male voice)” [Первая и последняя строки прозносятся мужским голосом, остальные—женским (должно создaваться впечатление непрерывности мужского голоса)].41 Like the subheading, these seem like instructions for a musical piece rather than a poem. Aygi’s reference to musical conventions emphasizes his concern for sound and performance. This is strange for two reasons. First, the poem is so brief that there is not much text to orchestrate. Second, and related to the first point, it is entitled “Silence,” and would seem, with its use of ellipses and white space, to highlight the absence or clearing of sound rather than its presence.42 But perhaps these features are not as contradictory as they appear. Leon Robel has commented, “as the role of silence grows in Aygi’s work, the more music is felt.”43

40 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 21. 41 Ibid., 594. 42 See Janecek, Sight and Sound, Chapter 6 for a discussion of Aygi’s use of grammatical punctuation as orchestration. 43 Robel, Aïgui, 79.

Aygi was friends with many of Moscow’s “young composers,” who were referred to thus in the press for their abandonment of classical composition in favor of the atonal avant-garde methods being developed by their European counterparts. In particular Sofia Gubaidulina, whose focus on spirituality, religiosity, silence, and the natural world in her work is similar to Aygi’s. Just as the poets of Aygi’s generation sought to express the connections between sound, silence, and the spiritual in their poetry, the composers in his circle of friends were searching for means to incorporate these concepts into their work. Often the work of poet and composer overlapped, and several composers of this era have set Aygi’s poetry to music. Sofia Gubaidulina (b.1931) is an avant-garde composer of RussianTatar descent. She is considered one of the foremost composers of her generation. She has set many of Aygi’s poems to music and shares his yearning for humanity’s return to its common spiritual origins. One of her most famous—and most spiritually-oriented—works, Silenzio (1996), attests to her belief that the essence of the spiritual can be found in silence and that the essence of silence, in turn, can be found in music. The link between classical composition and socialist realism was much stronger in the music world than in literature.44 Throughout the twentieth century, poets who opposed socialist realism and the official culture surrounding it—poets such as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Brodsky—often wrote using classical poetic forms. Their work maintained its artistic integrity and its oppositional stance, however, because the poetic tradition has accorded these forms (the sonnet, the Alexandrine, iambic tetrameter, etc.) much rich, pre-Soviet semantic cultural value. Moreover, meaning in poetry can be subverted on the semantic as well as the formal level, so that even if these poets’ work uses the meters and rhyme schemes coopted by hacks of socialist realism, cultural subversion could still occur. Poetic forms commonly occurring in propagandistic verse could be used with integrity if the rhythm and language were varied in unexpected ways. 44 Peter J. Schmelz, “Volkonsky and Unofficial Music in the Soviet Union,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58.1 (2005): 141.

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In music, however, form carried different connotations. Young composers who sought to oppose the stifling constraints and moral evils of socialist realism turned toward serialism, a modernist atonal technique: . . . serialism signified a reaction against communism, a communism signaled musically by tonality, an emphasis on melody, and overall accessibility. . . . Serialism (and “difficult” music in general) became a symbol of intellectual and moral integrity, while less complex, tonal music was equated with Socialist Realism and its most egregious artistic products . . . .45

Soviet composers who sought to free music from its socialist realist confines gravitated toward Aygi both as friend and collaborator. The first composer in the Soviet Union to experiment with serialism was Andrei Volkonsky, a close friend of Aygi and the most influential member of his avant-garde circle. Soon other students at the Moscow Conservatory began similar experiments. Inspired by the innovative musical trends in the West, these students, who would be called the “young composers”—a title with negative connotations in the Soviet press—developed their own brand of serialism, or twelve-tone composition. Most of its incarnations involve mapping out a work through mathematical analysis, which runs counter to Aygi’s intuitive method for creating organic, biological rhythms in his poetry. Nevertheless, just as Aygi went beyond the known territory of traditional syllabo-tonic versification, the young composers turned away from the accessible rhythms and melodies that dominated the official music in search of more intellectually challenging and, as they saw it, more ethically responsible sounds. Their common goal and penchant for innovation brought them together in a way that minimized the conceptual differences in their approaches. The new mode of composition allowed Gubaidulina to branch out into new realms of creativity in a manner akin to Aygi’s “organic” approach. Of her work she writes: “There are composers who construct their works very consciously, I ‘cultivate’ them. And for this reason everything I have assimilated forms as it were the roots of a tree, and the 45 Ibid., 143. This article contains an extended discussion on the “young composers” and the development of avant-garde music in the Soviet Union.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Keeping silent occurs in Russian poetry, strange as it may seem, more than anywhere else in Pushkin’s poetry, in the final three years of his life. Dotted lines, phrases cut off by ellipses appear more and more often, as if to say, “what else is there to say,” and “there’s no point.” Умалчивания в русской поэзии, как ни странно, больше всего у Пушкина, в последние три года его жизни. Все чаще отточия, оборванные фразы с многоточием. Вроде: “что тут еще говорить,” и—“ни к чему.”47

Religion as religio is also an important concept for Gubaidulina, and like Aygi, who grounds his discussion in terms of poetry, she grounds her discussion of it in musical terms: I am a religious Orthodox believer and I understand religion literally, as re-ligio—the restoration of a connection, the restoration of the Legato of life. Life tears a person to pieces. One must repair one’s wholeness—that is what religion is. There is no more serious reason for the composition of music than spiritual restoration. Я религиозный православный человек и религию понимаю буквально, как re-ligio—восстановление связи, восстановленние Legato жизни. Жизнь разрывает человека на части. Он должен восстанавливать свою целостность—это и есть религия. Помимо духовного восстановления нет никакой более серьезной причины для сочинения музыки.48

46 Sofia Gubaidulina, introduction to Sofia Gubaidulina (Hamburg: Sikorski Musikverlage, 2005), 5. 47 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 238 (Aygi’s emphasis). 48 Valentina Kholopova, Sofiia Gubaidulina: Putevoditel’ po proizvedeniiam (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2001), 3-4.

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work its branches and leaves. One can indeed describe [the works] as being new, but they are leaves nonetheless, and seen in this way they are always traditional and old.”46 Such connections between tradition and innovation (not to mention the nature analogy) resonate with Aygi’s work. He traces the theme of silence (molchanie) in Russian poetry back to Pushkin:

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Gubaidulina approaches the discussion of religion/religio as a believer of the Orthodox Christian faith but also as a composer, likening renewed spirituality to the flowing, unbroken notes of a legato phrase. Her metaphor is akin to Aygi’s metaphor of “religio-worms,” words that, through the alchemy of poetry, work to break down difference and reconnect the individual with the divine. Both Gubaidulina and Aygi seek to restore the human connection by means of their art, and their concepts of spirituality are intertwined with their creative processes. Gubaidulina and Aygi met in 1971 through Gubaidulina’s husband, the poet Nikolai Bokov, who was a mutual friend. When they became acquainted Aygi confronted Gubaidulina about her use of ancient poetry in her compositions. In his opinion: Contemporary composers should really have an interest in contemporary poets, but you are writing for ancient texts from Egypt. . . . We have the same life, the same problems. I think we contemporary artists need one another’s support.49

Aygi’s comments refer to Gubaidulina’s cantata “Night in Memphis” (1968), which uses ancient Egyptian texts translated into Russian by Anna Akhmatova and Vera Potapova. At the end of that encounter, Gubaidulina asked Aygi for a few copies of his poems, which she had heard him read the previous week. “I gave her a number of poems without any hope,” Aygi recalled. A week later Gubaidulina called to tell him that she was working on a cycle of romances that incorporated some of the poems he had given her, and wanted to ask him about some of the accents. These poems were incorporated into one of her earliest works, “Roses” (1972), five romances for piano and soprano.50 She also used Aygi’s poetry in “Now Always Snow,” (1993) a composition that takes its title from Aygi’s poem, one of her latest. “And: The Feast is in Full Progress” (1993) is another of her works that takes its title and lyrics from Aygi’s work. Aygi was much impressed by Gubaidulina’s ability to integrate music and silence as well as

49 Michael Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 2001), 148-50. 50 Ibid.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

her ability to combine music and poetry. Aygi’s comments upon hearing the first performance of “Roses” were:

In the early 1970s, while writing “Silence” (1973), Aygi was much absorbed in the project of integrating poetry and music. The first and last lines are read, or sung, depending on how one interprets Aygi’s instructions, by the male voice, and the parenthetical phrase in the middle lines is read or sung by the female voice. According to Aygi’s instructions for creating a “continuity” of sound—a legato effect, if you will—the long “a” of the first syllable in “mama” read by the male voice blends into the beginning and ending “a”s of the female voice: “а vo sne” [but in sleep] and “glaza” [eyes, my emphasis]. Thus, the poem achieves a matryoshka-like effect (one of Aygi’s poems from around this time is “Five Matryoshkas” (“Пять матрёшек”)) of a phrase within a phrase, or a poem within a poem. As a result, the listener hears the entire poem as essentially one word. Indeed, this little poem embodies Aygi’s project of connectivity, of blending music, poetry, silence, and spirit. In doing so, it also highlights the oral nature of poetry: to be effective it must be heard. Aygi has created a work of high modernism that harkens back to the genre’s oral roots. It is no coincidence that Aygi chooses the vowel “a” as the sound that unites the two voices in “Silence.” Many of his poems contain lines and passages composed entirely of the sound/letter “a”: “aaa” in “Poem-Play,” (“Стихотворение-пьеса,” 1967), “aaaáAAAÁaaaá” in “Little Island of Daisies in the Clearing,” (“Островок ромашек на поляне,” 1982), and an entire poem, “Tranquility of a Vowel,” (“Спокойствие гласного,” 1982) that is simply the letter “a.” He has noted that he always associated this sound with the color white, and this synesthetic connection is further evidence of the interpenetration of elements in his poetic world.52 51 Ibid., 150-1. 52 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 21.

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Before [in compositions using poetry as lyrics] the music would overwhelm the poetry. It was secondary to the music. . . . This concert shows that poetry and music are equal, it shows the triumph of the marriage of music and poetry.51

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The union of voices in the poem is all the more intriguing in that it joins a male and female voice, each with a specific part. Whose voices are they? Whom do they represent? As it is the male who reads “mama” and the female who reads the lines “but in sleep these very same eyes are alive,” they may represent a mother and son. The cry “mama” suggests that the male is an adult dreaming he is a child. On the verge of sleep or a dream, the male voice cries out for the mother, who has died, and the mother, brought “alive” through the dream, answers from inside it. In this way, Aygi shows how the dream state can make the living appear dead and bring the dead back to life. He highlights different kinds of silence: the silence of sleep, in which the body remains mute while the mind experiences creative silence through the dream, and the silence of death, in which the body is rendered forever mute but the soul is released into “there,” the other realm where creative silence resides and difference ceases to exist. Although the voices are distinctly male and female and represent distinct individuals, they are still part of a single consciousness—the dreamer’s. In dramatizing the scenario of the dreamer’s deceased mother voicing her presence from within the dream, Aygi implies that life and death are not isolated from each other but, like all other elements in his poetry, interpenetrate. Of course, this is not the only possible interpretation of “Silence.” Gerald Janecek provides a slightly different reading of the poem.53 The inherent ambiguity leaves much room, as many of Aygi’s poems do, for multiple, even conflicting interpretations to be discovered and to coexist. It is one of the features of Aygi’s work that has been remarked upon by both his supporters and detractors, and the notion always leads back to a characterization of his work as “difficult.” In an article entitled “The Legacy of Difficulty in the Russian Poetic Tradition” Pamela Davidson discusses the problem of difficulty in relation to contemporary critical responses to Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Cor Ardens. Ivanov’s work is notoriously difficult, and just as his could be considered the most “difficult” poetry of the Silver Age, Aygi’s can easily be considered the most “difficult” of the late-Soviet period. Davidson is clear in her 53 Janecek, “Poeziia molchanie,” 438-439.

definition of difficult poetry, which she characterizes as “poetry of which it is not easy to discern the meaning.”54 Difficulty, she notes, arises for two main reasons: complexity of subject or theme, such as poetry with a “marked philosophical orientation,” and formal complexity, which may consist in “a proliferation of recondite allusions or references, the use of private and subjective imagery, an elliptical style, unusual or loose syntax, [and] archaic, ornate or foreign language.”55 For better or worse, Aygi’s poetry contains both kinds of complexity, which is to say it is abstract and philosophical in theme, so much so at times that, as in the case of “Silence,” it is difficult to determine exactly what the theme or subject is. He employs obscure or personal allusions, an elliptical, fragmentary style, grammar and syntax that is “unusual” to say the least, and archaic (and at times foreign) language. Davidson notes that perceived difficulty, however, is also dependent on factors external to the poet’s work: Poetry is generally deemed difficult when there is a gap between the poet’s practice and the expectations or knowledge of the reader. Since expectations are largely conditioned by habit, and knowledge is developed through familiarity, it is evident that difficult poetry is a relative concept subject to shifting perceptions . . . . With hindsight, difficulty as a category can often be seen to have played a pioneering and innovative role, as Tynianov demonstrated in Arkhaisty i novatory.56

In this case, as, Davidson argues, was the case with Ivanov, Aygi’s contemporaries and readership may simply not have been ready for the work he produced. Though he chastised Gubaidulina for using ancient poetry in her compositions, he often employed words and spellings that evoke Old Church Slavonic. However, one cannot simply describe his work as archaic (which was the description often leveled against Ivanov). He borrows the fragmentary formal structures of Futurist verse and the artistic principles of Suprematist painting. Add to that the expectation that many of his contemporary readers had of the “regional” writer from a 54 Pamela Davidson, “The Legacy of Difficulty in the Russian Poetic Tradition: Contemporary Critical Responses to Ivanov’s Cor Ardens,” Cahiers du Monde russe 1-2 (1994): 250. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. (Davidson’s emphasis).

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minority nationality to either write in classic, “accessible” iambic form with bits of local color and culture woven in, or to recreate the oral tradition of folksongs on paper. Even when Aygi did turn to his “native” Chuvash and middle Volga culture for inspiration, he brought not only the songs but also the cultural philosophy into dialogue with the avantgarde approach that is his work’s hallmark. It is perhaps not accidental that one of Aygi’s leanings was toward liturgical Old Slavic. Davidson notes that the tradition of difficulty based on esoteric content in Russian poetry goes back to the earliest translations and commentaries on the Bible. [T]he whole concept of sacred meaning [gives] rise to a symbolic form of expression which requires decoding through interpretation and commentary. . . . [I]n translation [the Hebrew language of the Bible] has undergone a process of “obscuration”—particularly in the case of its Church Slavonic and Russian versions. This has led to a much greater nationally inherited tradition of the sense of the “difficulty” of a sacred text—a consciousness which has in turn had an important philological bearing on Russian poetry.57

Returning to the supreme importance of the Human-Word as divine mystery in Aygi’s worldview and his belief in the power of poetry to enact (or reenact) that transformation, one sees the DNA of a Russian poetic tradition based on close scrutiny and contemplation of a sacred text reemerge with new life in the war-torn world of the twentieth century.

57 Ibid., 251.

CH A PT E R F O U R

Poem as Reliquary: Violence, Elegy, Witness

когда средь-трупов-быть-Пора когда Провинцию-живых-Пора-покинуть when Time-to-be-among-corpses comes when Time-comes-to-leave-the-Province-of-the-living —Gennady Aygi

O

ne of the most important interventions in the study of twentiethcentury poetry, if not the most important, is Carolyn Forché’s formulation of the poetry of witness. The anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness is a collection of work from poets all over the world—many from the former Soviet Union—who write in conditions of extremity, where the personal cannot be extricated from the historical and where the poem serves as both trace and event, a cocreator that both makes and undoes the violence that it witnesses. Poetry of witness is defined by the circumstances under which it is written and the position of the writer in relation to these circumstances. Poetry of witness is usually written by witnesses, victims, or survivors of

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tragic historical events whether the events have been historically documented or not. These are poems written in the aftermath of an event rather than in retrospect or as a summary of what happened. The notion of aftermath implies a temporal continuum in which the event or its effects and reverberations are still very present and real. It removes the false boundaries we place on events and atrocities as occurring during a specific time-bounded period, after which we can declare the event “over.” It is poetry written from a place of trauma, a desire to make containable the uncontainable moment of ongoing tragedy; it is transformative without seeking redemption, either for the poetic self or the oppressor. It does not justify or exculpate either the self or the oppressor and it allows the space for personal grief, mourning, and the expression of loss without losing sight of the self ’s social complicity and the impossibility of removing oneself from the complex web of relationships that create historical experience. Carolyn Forché’s primary intervention in defining poetry of witness was to alert the West, and as she puts it, North Americans, that the aesthetic of the “personal” we enjoy in our poetry thanks to our not living under military dictatorship or other politically oppressive conditions is not necessarily enjoyed or even an option for poets elsewhere in the world who are writing under conditions of war, oppression, and other kinds of extremity. These conditions give rise to an aesthetic of awareness and urgency that makes facile distinctions between the personal and political impossible. Of course Forché is speaking from the space of privilege in characterizing North American society as free and peaceful: [W]ars . . . are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people’s cities. . . . We do not live under martial law; there are nominal restrictions on state censorship; our citizens are not sent into exile. We are legally and juridically free to choose our associates and to determine our communal lives.1

While she cautions that we should not see our social lives as merely a product of our own choices and notes that “larger structures of the 1 Forché, Carolyn, “Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness,” American Poetry Review 22 (March/April 1993): 9.

economy and state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality,” she does not account for the vast number of Americans whose experience is tantamount to life under martial law and other forms of social, political and economic oppression and censorship. While the comparison she draws is necessary for her argument and is undoubtedly true for those integrated into and successful in white mainstream American society, it erases the possibility of atrocity and witness here and marks poetry of witness as, by definition, that which is experienced and written elsewhere. Putting this oversight in the original formulation aside for a moment, the most important aspect of poetry of witness, as Forché marks in her anthology’s title, is that it is poetry “against forgetting,” against the historical amnesia that threatens to seep into the collective consciousness of a society that is all too eager to move on in the wake of horrific events.2 It reminds us of our humanity by refusing to turn away from atrocity. It is not alienating because it does not have a political agenda. It is not partisan, and even if it is politically oppositional it has no message beyond speaking against injustice. It overlooks the political and moral in favor of the ethical, which is always a more complex negotiation. Poetry of witness can be linked to elegy; it is poetry about loss in every sense. The difference, however, is scale. The traditional elegy seeks consolation for the loss of an individual by placing the loss in a rational, historical, or cosmological context in which the sense of grief and knowledge of mortality are ameliorated by their place within the higher order structures of nature and the universe or a belief in the immortality of the soul.3 For twentieth-century poetry of witness the scales of tragedy and atrocity are so immense that there are no rational structures within which to restore balance and belief. In “An Elegy for Myself: British Poetry and the Holocaust,” John Harris writes: The first problem facing any attempt to write about the atrocities of those times is that of conceiving their scale, both in sheer numbers 2 Carolyn Forché, ed., Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, (New York: Norton, 1993). 3 See Sharon Bailey’s discussion in footnote 9 in “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem,” SEEJ 2 (1999): 324-346.

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and in terms of the lack of humanity which caused them . . . . Secondly, in claiming that we can conceive the horror of the Holocaust we lay ourselves open to the accusation that by imposing a critical form and structure on it we are ipso facto justifying it; by attributing a rationale of any sort to it, we admit that the Holocaust could be seen as a rational act.4

Forché characterizes the twentieth century as a century that has lost the structure of narrative, granting poetry, which operates on a logic of nonlinear and metonymic association and can accommodate spatial, linguistic, and temporal fragmentation and interruption better than narrative prose, particular power to approach the atrocities of our times. Poetry of witness comes from a complex subjectivity, which complicates its relationship to traditional elegy. In her article “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem,” Sharon Bailey describes the relationship between the writer of the elegy and the person or object that has been lost: [W]hile an elegy may be (and usually is) occasioned by death, it is more accurately defined as a poem about loss. Consequently, the grammatical subject of the elegy, so to speak, is the poet who experiences the loss, and the deceased, who functions in the poem only by his/her absence. The suffering of the survivor is, even in traditional criticism, a recognized aspect of the elegy. The tragedy of death (or arrest in the case of Requiem) is not so much the changes that have taken place for the victim, but rather the implications of that event for the lives of the survivors.5

The difficulty with placing poetry of witness into this rubric is that there is often no clear line between victim and survivor. While there is a definite line between those who perish in an event and those who live to tell or write about it, the positional subjectivity of the poet of witness is not the same as that of an elegist. There is no safety for the poet of witness, even if the writer is not in immediate danger; the threat of violence and the unfinalizability of the magnitude of tragedy create the urgency and 4 Quoted in Sharon Bailey’s “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem,” 338. 5 Bailey, “An Elegy for Russia,” 328 (author’s emphasis).

uneasy openendedness of poetry of witness as opposed to the staid tones of mourning that are often found in traditional elegy. Like Akhmatova’s Requiem, Aygi’s work that engages the violence and tragedy of the Holocaust, the Gulag, and other twentieth-century atrocities is both witness and elegy. Though Aygi’s work is often considered esoteric and abstract, much of his poetry is intensely engaged in the events—and injustices—of his time and is full of personal, emotional responses to loss on all scales. When dealing with loss in a poem Aygi is the epitome of the elegist-cum-witness: he believed that loss is never a strictly private event but one that creates a link between the departed, the survivor, and the community: “The person has died, but my pain for him is not only my ‘personal affair.’ That person continues to exist in my pain” [Умер человек, но моя боль по нему – не только мое ‘личное дело.’ Человек продолжается в моей боли].6 It is not only in the pain—or memory—of the living that the departed survive. The poet’s ability to transcend death through art is a central aesthetic and ethical concept that defines Aygi’s approach to witness. He defines art as “the presence and continuity of the essence that does not disappear with the death of the ephemeral” [наличие и продолжительность сути, не исчезающей со смертью преходящего].7 In this sense, the existence of language and its function as a good that man uses to bear witness to what he is is the higher-order structure that reminds Aygi of poetry’s transformational power even in the face of the gravest tragedies and gives his work an austere optimism. As survivor and poet of witness, Aygi is aware of the deficiencies of language, the imperative for silence for which horrific experience often calls, and the knowledge that the magnitude of our cruelty very well may render us irredeemable. His deconstructive use of language mirrors Derrida’s in the sense that what may at first seem like simply “difficult” writing is actually the writer’s struggle to enact, by avoiding conventional linguistic and grammatical structures and building language from 6 Aigi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 23. 7 There is also a close link between this idea and the idea of the re-emergence of the “event” as the cornerstone of postmodern thinking. See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2004).

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the ground up, the creation of a new relationship between the word (signifier) and referent (signified) in which the boundaries of the referent are not assumed to be fast; rather, they are fluid: victim and survivor; poet and man; destruction and creation. Often, through the metonymic aegis of language and the careful machine of poetry, terms that seem to occupy opposite poles of meaning are made to occupy the same space and referents slide into one another, creating an uncomfortable loss of distinction and disorientation of values and assumptions heretofore seen as fixed. The context of the Soviet 1980s is crucial when considering Aygi’s poetry of witness, elegy, and disruption. Soviet society was undergoing profound cultural upheaval and ethical reckoning for the political horrors that were perpetrated during the previous decades. Gorbachev’s inauguration in 1985 marked the end of the repressive period that followed the Thaw. In the years that followed artists and citizens alike struggled to deal with the Stalinist horrors of the past. Although work camps had been officially closed, the loss, ugliness, pain, and injustice they created were still fresh in the social consciousness, and though the fog of repression was clearing, it still had not completely dispersed. This combination of individual grief and social consciousness characterizes Aygi’s work from the 1980s. Stalinist oppression gave rise to a generation of Russian poets of witness, most notably Akhmatova, who saw it as their duty to chronicle and memorialize those people and events that were omitted and erased from official headlines and history. Aygi takes this imperative one step further, perpetuating not only the memory but also the experience of the departed in his poetry. His emphasis on a “presence” and “continuity” that has the ability to transcend death evokes the concept of the soul and refers back to Orthodox Christian thoughts on transubstantiation as a necessary part of the process of transformation. Thus, a poem written by a survivor or witness becomes the soul of the departed—whether one believes in an afterlife or not—and a reliquary for the experience of tragedy that cannot be put into words; the pure vessel for an unnamable essence that persists in the face of human loss and political injustice. Images of grief and suffering are present throughout Aygi’s oeuvre, but in the 1980s they are particularly imbued with historical and ethical

significance as he moves more fully into his role as poet of witness. In their reference book on twentieth-century Russian poetry and culture, Leiderman and Lipovetsky characterize Aygi’s work as: “poetry after Auschwitz and Kolyma when human values have been uprooted and all that remains is a bleeding wound, unceasing pain.”8 In his 1949 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno famously implies that “poetry after Auschwitz” is impossible.9 While we know that Adorno qualified this statement somewhat later on, the call for silence in the face of such monstrosity is understandable. George Steiner speaks of the dilemma of chronicling or writing within certain points in history: The temptation to silence [is] the belief that in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impermanent . . . . The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance of language as creator and bearer of humane, rational truth.10

To this list I would add that in the face of great tragedy such as Auschwitz art seems not only trivial or impermanent but also the height of hubris; the presupposition that life and human history may go on uninterrupted or without being permanently altered or disfigured such that art is still a thing that can and should be created—that it is even still possible to create—seems an unthinkable collusion with the perpetrators of that tragedy, as if by continuing to wake, eat, go about one’s day, and worst of all to produce art and rejoice in its beauty is to tacitly admit that not only were tragedies like Auschwitz and Kolyma possible, they were rational and necessary because death always reinforces the desire to live among the living and in that sense strengthens adherence to the social order. This awareness resonates in the final lines of Aygi’s memorial poem for Varlam Shalamov, “Pine on Rock”:

  8 Leiderman and Lipovetsky, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura, 1: 391. Aygi significantly addresses these themes in his long poem about Raoul Wallenberg, “Final Departure.”   9 Theordor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 58. 10 Quoted in Bailey’s “An Elegy for Russia,” 338.

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We will return to the city – to the Province of the Living. Where things will be different hereafter – the space-and-body of Poetry: those living for life do not know Its language.

The poet is aware of the dissonance created by death and the strong desire for those left to return to the refuge of everyday life, but his insistence is clear: we have been changed, poetry has been changed, and it is only possible to truly honor the loss—both personal and historical—by relinquishing the desire to preserve one’s own life at all costs. It is a serious demand that Aygi places on the poet and the communal readership to not fall into the trap of “living for life,” thereby reinforcing the rationale of the atrocity provided in the first place. When he writes of the “Time-to-beamong-the-corpses” and the “Time-to-leave-the-Province-of-the-living” he is not only talking about physical death; he is talking about relinquishing the overwhelming desire to preserve one’s own life at the expense of another’s. The hope is that if we can do that, there will never be another Holocaust or Kolyma. Adorno’s formulation became so iconic because it addresses the unarticulated desperation rooted deep in our collective consciousness that somehow we must answer for these atrocities in some way; we cannot and must not escape them. To characterize Aygi’s work as “poetry after Auschwitz” is to recognize this underlying imperative in his work. For him, it seems that poetry is the only thing that is not barbaric to write after Auschwitz. Later, Adorno famously recanted his statement, saying: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems.”11 It is fair to say that mid-to-late-twentieth-century poetry in the Western world and beyond is a tradition in mourning, not only for the atrocities that Auschwitz represents, but for all the other genocides, wars, enslavements and other barbaric cruelties committed in the name of civilization throughout modern history. The writing of lyric poetry is probably the gentlest mapping of order onto the chaos of an era constantly torn apart by violence, and the most approachable means of stitching together of the shattered and fragmentary into a whole that acknowledges the global scale of our loss. In his 11 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362-363.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

article “War, Poetry and Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq,” Nouri Gana describes Arabic poetry today as:

This is an excellent way to characterize Aygi’s Russian-language poetry as well, especially the later work that seeks to reconcile large-scale tragedy, personal grief, and personal responsibility. Aygi was first allowed to travel abroad in the summer of 1988. In Budapest he wrote “Final Departure” (“Последний отъезд”), dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who in 1944-45 saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to the camps. With eight sections containing five to ten stanzas each, the poem is dramatically longer than most of Aygi’s works and stresses the significance of both the subject matter and the historical circumstances under which it was created. Moreover, unlike most of Aygi’s work, it contains overt political and historical references: это город боярышников – август Восемьдесят Восьмого – и ясным его средоточием единственная всечеловеческая рука – это очень давно простая уже Простота вечности-нищенски-простенькой: как истоптанные туфельки в Стро-е-ниях Вечных для Печей и Волос . . . –13

12 Nouri Gana, “War, Poetry and Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq,” Public Culture 22 (2010): 41. 13 Aygi, Slovo-vorona, 196-207.

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[P]ostelegiac and intensely metapoetic in a very specific way: it is an accentuated yet attenuated form of poetry that simultaneously bears the burden of representation but never ceases to undermine any form of consolation or resolution of mourning; it is a poetry that emerges from the full consciousness of its impossibility, or, worse, its futility and discomfiting complicity in Arab suffering.12

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it is the city of hawthorns – August Eighty-Eight – and by its clear center the only all-human hand – it was very long ago the already simple Simplicity of poor-little-simple-eternity: like the little worn-out shoes in the Eternal Con-struc-tions for Ovens and Hair . . . –14

Budapest, where a statue commemorates the Swedish diplomat became the “city of hawthorns,” linking the fate of the Holocaust victims in that city to Christ’s thorny sacrifice. This image is in contrast with Wallenberg, the “only all-human hand.” Aygi inserts the poem’s date of creation, “August 1988,” between these images to form a bridge between the historical events of the Holocaust and his own historical moment. This intention is echoed in the poem’s structure, as the date carries over a line break. Thus Aygi does not place himself, as the poet, at a safe distance from the atrocities he is describing; he positions himself among them, so close that he can even describe the remains of a child’s worn-out shoes in the gas chamber. He brings together all the participants: victims, savior, murderers, plus the poet (himself) and undercuts the “everlasting” gas chambers by deconstructing or dismembering the very word “con-struc-tions” and emphasizing an eternity that is humble and poor, an eternity of the meek. The poem is a vessel for ashes, but ashes that represent not only destruction but purification. Such direct treatment of political themes in Soviet literature was possible only after Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika were initiated in 1985, when bureaucratic organs such as the Writers Union were divested of ideological power and relatively free discussion of Soviet society, history, and literature began to appear in the media. Official publications such as The Literary Gazette (Литературная газета), which had been previously dominated by conservative criticism of 14 Ibid. Adapted from Peter France’s translation.

politically acceptable (read: socialist realist) works, began to publish articles on “complex poetry,” the name given to the modernist and post-modernist work of younger poets such as Ivan Zhdanov and Nina Iskrenko. In Moscow and Leningrad literary and artistic circles formed to serve distinct aesthetic concerns. In Leningrad, groups carried on the Akhmatovian and Brodskian tradition of reconstructing culture, while conceptualists like Dmitri Prigov, who were more concerned with its creative deconstruction, dominated Moscow. The experimental writing that poured forth from all sides—markedly in prose, in the genres or styles of fantasy, mythology, parable, and the grotesque—earned the 1980s the label the “fantastic decade.”15 Another significant feature of the time was the publication of “returned literature” [возвращенная литература] of suppressed dissident, exiled, and non-socialist realist writers. The influx of heretofore-unknown masterworks created the realization that Russia’s twentieth-century literary history would have to be reexamined and reconceptualized.16 Such major shifts in literary and cultural history had disturbing results for erstwhile underground writers like Aygi. Polemics spurred by the discussion of previously banned literature and newly discovered classics often eclipsed discussion of contemporary literature, especially poetry, so while it was possible to publish experimental work for the first time, it received little critical attention. Additionally, the dismantling of the Soviet monolith removed the very thing that had made underground culture compelling and possible; once authoritarian power had been weakened, the underground ceased to be. Writers who had previously inhabited its tension-filled cultural space and cultivated methods for writing “between the lines” were now faced with the challenge of adapting their styles to an open system in which that tension and the need for Aesopian language had disappeared. Many found the change painful: some realized they had nothing to say in the new context, others could not manage to write without constraints. 15 Ibid., xix-xx. 16 Deming Brown, The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7.

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The possibility of expressing individual or private concerns in a literature that had been dominated by the ideology of the collective also became an issue for writers. This individualist perspective was quickly adopted by some as liberation from ideological and aesthetic strictures, but others were uneasy with the sudden shift away from a literature that had always focused on the concerns of the collective. On one hand, the expression of personal grief and loss was an act of resistance against imposed de-personalization; on the other hand, some considered disregard for the collective or social ramifications of such sentiments as a mark of privilege. Aygi was of the latter opinion: for him, suffering was never merely a “personal affair.” Discussing the perspective found in poems by the Chuvash poet Vaslei Mitta about having survived labor camps he wrote: In the poems of other—foreign-language—poets on this theme I hear the complaints of an exclusive personality, the indignation of a person from an elite culture. . . . [Mitta], in speaking about the greatest hardships of his time, never draws attention to himself—his words could be spoken by any zek [prisoner], any farmworker, any “simple” man. В стихах других—иноязычных—поэтов на эту тему я слышу жалобы исключительной личности, возмущение человека элитарной культуры. . . . [Митта], говоря о самых больших страданиях своего времени, нигде не дает знать именно о себе,— его словами мог бы сказать любой зек, любой земледелец,—любой “простой” человек.17

A poet’s participation in “elite culture” cuts him off from the human experience of suffering alongside other human beings because it foregrounds his position of privilege. When the elite poet focuses on his experience of suffering alone, he in effect signals that it is more important than the experience of others who suffered in the camps. Because of this, such poetry cannot transcend death, cannot become a pure vessel in Aygi’s model; it treats the concerns of the living without regard for the sacrifice of the departed.

17 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 27.

The ability to achieve a merging of self with others while discussing highly personal and painful themes is a characteristic Aygi speaks of elsewhere as belonging to Chuvash poets and is indeed an ethical position he consciously maintains in his own poetry. One’s reaction to and responsibility in the face of death are central to his definition of art as “the presence and continuity of an essence that does not disappear with the death of the transient” [наличие и продолжительность сути, не исчезающей со смертью преходящего]. Aygi enacts this philosophy in his poem written upon the death of Vaslei Mitta in 1958. Even in so early a poem he bridges the personal and collective experience of losing a major poet: Прощальное

Памяти чувашского поэта Васлея Митты

было—потери не знавшее лето всюду любовью смягченное близких людей полевых – будто для рода всего обособленное! – и жизнь измерялась лишь той продолжительностью времени – ставшего личным как кровь и дыхание – лишь тою ее продолжительностью – которая требовалась чтобы на лицах от слов простых возникали прозрачные веки и засветились – от невидимого движения слез18 18 Aygi, Teper’ vsegda snega, 11.

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Parting

In memory of Chuvash poet Vaslei Mitta

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it was – a summer that knew no loss softened everywhere by the love of dear meadow people – as if set apart for the generation! – and life was measured only by that continuity of time – that became personal as blood and breath – only by its continuity – which was necessary so that transparent eyelids appear on faces from simple words and light up – from the invisible motion of tears

Images of family, “meadow people,” and faces create a strong awareness of the collective. Instead of proclaiming his personal loss, the poet melts into the collective; although the poem may not read as if “any farmer could have said it,” it is the grief and joy of the farmers that Aygi foregrounds. Although the impetus behind this poem is Mitta’s life as a political prisoner, in 1958 it was impossible to name it directly. Instead, Aygi turns the “parting” in the title into a communal gathering in the poem itself. The phrase the summer “knew no loss” evokes the mystery of the Resurrection; even though he has died, he returns to life. Aygi exposes our limited conceptions of life as that which we can measure in “blood and breath.” He transforms these images by expressing a new continuity, one in which words create “transparent” eyelids and “invisible” tears. This is the ethereal body of the poem.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Aygi’s treatment of such themes develops his later work, such as “Bidding Shalamov Farewell” (“Прощаясь с Шаламовым”), which was written on January 19, 1982, two days after its subject’s death.

лишь у голодного (если он тверд и свободен в забвеньи) – есть отрешенно-спокойная (ни для кого) чистота!.. – в холод крещенский такою – (твердости тверже: основой безмолвия самого чистого) – словно в пустой бездыханности поля в молчаньи-стране простота завершилась – до абсолюта-иссушенности гулко до-выдержанная: свет – человеческий: будто последний! – жизни для стужи-России и книги без адреса19 19 Ibid., 242.

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Bidding Shalamov Farewell

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only one who is hungry (if he is firm and free in his forgetting) – has detached-tranquil purity!.. (for no one) – to take into the cold of Epiphany – (harder than hard: as the foundation of purest silence) – as if in the barren stillness of a field in silence-country simplicity has been achieved – to absolute-exhaustion resoundingly self-possessed to the end: human – light: as if the last! – of life for bitter-cold-Russia and a book with no address

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) is known for his Kolyma Tales (Колымские рассказы), which chronicle his experiences as a prisoner at Kolyma, the gold mines in far northeast Siberia that were the Soviet Union’s deadliest

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

Я не люблю слова “потрясен,”—слишком часто мы его произносим. Со мной происходило нечто иное: какая-то тяжелая, могучая поступь вошла в пространство, в меня, в судьбу . . . 21 I do not like the word “stunned”—we use it much too often. With me something else was occurring: some kind of heavy, powerful gait entered into space, into me, into fate . . .

In “Bidding Shalamov Farewell” Aygi creates a paean to Shalamov’s model of suffering—his perseverance amid boundless emptiness, hunger, and cold—and thus voices a strong political protest without naming it as such. It is also an ethical stance, which in the culture of the time was a means of withstanding the unspeakable dehumanization caused by the regime. In contrast to the poem for Mitta, which ends in the focused image of tears on the faces of mourners, the poem dedicated to Shalamov expands to an (inhospitable) image of Russia and an emblematic (addressless) book. Notably, it contains no overt reference to feelings of grief. Rather than focusing on the “I” who experiences the loss, the poem opens with “he” (the departed) and describes his life and suffering. The community evoked is larger than in Mitta’s poem, to include all of Russia and a mysterious book with no address. The tone is also much 20 The essay can be found in Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 186-189. Interestingly enough the volume also contains the dedication Shalamov wrote to Aigi in a book of his poems (the 1968 meeting took place when Aigi attended a private reading of Shalamov’s poetry): Поэту Геннадию Лисину . . . я не верю в свободный стих, но в поэзию—верю! (“To the poet Gennady Lisin . . . I don’t believe in free verse, but I believe in poetry!”). 21 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 186.

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labor camps. Although Aygi met the author only once (an encounter he describes in his essay “An Evening with Shalamov” [“Один вечер с Шаламовым,”])20, he felt a profound connection to the author and his work. Reading Shalamov’s prose, which he ranks with Platonov’s Foundation Pit (Котлован), produced an effect on him that he describes in his essay:

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starker. Despite its grief, “Parting” is a sunny work, perhaps reflecting the optimism of the young poet and his cherishing of his native culture. The images of comfort and consolation evoked in “Bidding Shalamov Farewell” are brutally hard—so hard as to be purifying. The cold is “of the Epiphany,” and the “barren stillness” and hardness of the place provide a pathway to experiencing pure silence, pure simplicity. Aygi uses these images to transform abject suffering into profound transcendence—what could be described as the experience of perfect emptiness, or enlightenment. Through the systematic stripping away of the physical world the individual and poem become all soul. The style and imagery in “Bidding Shalamov Farewell” exemplify Aygi’s treatment of suffering in his mature work; the suffering of others commands respect, one’s own suffering should be joined with that of others, and suffering in general, while great in the human realm, is small in comparison with nature and the cosmos. The power of the Soviet state lay in its ability to isolate people from one another through fear and mistrust, which in turn intensified the anxiety and vulnerability that enable totalitarianism. What saves such poems, with their insistence on emptiness, lifelessness, barrenness, etc., from seeming depressing or pessimistic is that the language Aygi uses to create motifs of suffering is the very language he uses to transcend it. Just as silence in Aygi’s poetry indicates creative potentiality, so emptiness becomes a place to reconnect with the holy essence that has been obscured by human folly. It is the expansiveness of boundless space that allows Aygi to place a somber depiction of suffering in a larger, cosmic context. Using images, neologisms, visual and grammatical constructions, he clears the ground of cultural debris. His insistence on the removal of the human from the cluttered world, along with the general fragmentary nature of his work and the liberties he takes with grammar and syntax, may seem to indicate his allegiance to the deconstructive program of postmodernism, yet Aygi never considered himself a postmodernist and even expressed ambivalence toward the ideas and literature associated with the movement. Mikhail Epstein characterizes Russian postmodernism by its “principled eclecticism and fragmentariness, the refusal of all-encompassing

worldviews and narratives.”22 Although Aygi’s work is consciously fragmented, his are not pastiches of simulacra, the detritus of a world without referents. Rather, they resemble haiku, brief but profound evocations of a universe in which a sense of the whole is immanent. Aygi also maintained a belief in the primacy of the word, which postmodernism, along with concepts of “author” and “text” as such, eschews. One similarity between his project and postmodernism is that, even though his poems often contain references to Christian divinity, he avoided the typically Russian messianism of the writer as a teacher of “the way to live.”23 He presents what is debased and redemptive with equal poetry, and if he offers consolation, it is personal rather than prescriptive. Aygi’s belief in the redeeming power of poetry is based on emptiness, which allowed him to come into contact with the holy absolute.24 With his focus on emptiness, Aygi’s approach to the divine is apophatic rather than cataphatic, that is, it emphasizes “the unknowable nature of God” [непознаваемость Бога].25 Aygi does not depict barren, desolate landscapes, as in “Bidding Shalamov Farewell,” merely to evoke barrenness and desolation. On the contrary, they create a sense of expansiveness, quietude, and solemnity that allow him to usher in intimations of the divine. The cold is bitter, but it is also brings an epiphany; the country is hard and silent, but it is through silence that “simplicity”—always a “positive” concept in Aygi’s poems—is achieved. With this austere model of redemption, he creates a “poetry after Auschwitz” that refuses to give in to the postmodernist tendency toward cynicism while recognizing the complexity of redemption in the postmodern age. If Aygi’s poetics of emptiness offers a somber look at the possibility of human redemption, it also creates a space of freedom and transcendence. By systematically removing all traces of human endeavor (and 22 Mikail Epstein, Postmodern v Rossii: Literatura i teoriia (Moscow: Izadanie P. Elinin, 2000), 5. 23 Rajendra Chitnis, “Russian Postmodernism,” The Literary Encyclopedia (January 23, 2004), accessed February 26, 2006, http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics. php?rec=true&UID=1365. 24 Leiderman and Lipovetsky, Sovremennaia russkaia literatura, 1:391. 25 Aygi, Teper’ vsegda snega, 311.

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human corruption) from his landscapes, he is not being nihilistic after the fashion of Turgenev’s Bazarov, but clearing the ground for meditative contemplation of the cosmic, natural, and spiritual worlds that human clutter has obscured. For Aygi, all human acts—from the creation of death camps to writing poetry—disturb the harmony of the natural-divine world, and thus all, to some degree, create suffering. His concept of emptiness, then, connotes “without people.” The 1982 poem “Outskirts: Winter without People” set far from the realm of human activity, creates a “pure” space for his worship-in-poetry to take place. The markers of the human sphere—in this case, urban high-rises—are portrayed as tawdry, lifeless, and false. The poet laments that they exist so close to what is pure, presumably the earth and sky, and takes measures to efface them and restore a space that can become imbued with spiritual essence: light is projected along the façade of some buildings, flowering natural life along others. The images that remain—of the void, colorlessness, and cold—provide a model for what is perfectly balanced, perfectly whole. It may seem counterintuitive that such images are the ones that signify positive qualities and communion with the spiritual; after all, Aygi does use empty to describe the sound associated with the lifeless highrises. But this is an example of how Aygi’s image system does double duty; just as he develops nuanced concepts of silence—tishina as opposed to molchanie—he depicts landscapes that are evacuated because the life there has died or been sucked out of them, and landscapes that are empty because those lifeless elements have been removed. Molchanie characterizes his apophatic depiction of the divine. I have been using the term “landscapes” to describe the kind of abstract spatiality Aygi creates in his poems because it implies a conceptual framework that is spatial; indeed, Aygi’s primary metaphor for divine “empty space” is the field. But the space he creates in these poems is not merely physical, nor does he intend it be visually conceivable or located on earth. Thus, “landscape” is shorthand for an expansive dimensional reality that is wholly abstract. Because a mental grasp of such a concept is difficult to achieve and easily unmoored, Aygi begins with familiar images—the field, cold, light, snow—the concatenation of which evokes,

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

and then departs into, the abstract transcendent realm, as in “And: Place – of the Ancient Sign” (“И: местo – давнего знака,” 1985): там – где когда-то народ был – полем а место:

– серединою миропространства! –26 there – where once the people was – the field and the place: head-radiances: – the center of worldspace! –

Aygi uses the transformative properties of the instrumental case to create a series of equivalencies that move from the recognizable to the conceptual. He starts with the graspable images of народ [people] and поле [field] and ends with the constructions of головы-излучения [heads-illuminations] and миропространство [worldspace]. He links them with phrasing and grammatical constructions that continue through line breaks and punctuation. Together these features create a counter-balancing tension, which gives the text an otherworldly look and feel, while providing semantic continuity and grounding. Aygi’s poetics acknowledge that at some point we must leave the “Province of the Living,” but this does not imply ambivalence toward life. On the contrary, awe at the everyday miracle of life was a theme in his poetry since his early days as a student of Pasternak. But part of his purpose in constructing such vast spaces of emptiness in his poetic landscapes is the recognition of a space representing the realm beyond our physical, mortal life. He was clearly awed and attracted by the 26 Aygi, Selected Poems, 188-9. Adapted from France’s translation.

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головы-излучения:

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Siberian tundra, the elemental power and extremity of the landscape. The tension between its beauty and its brutality, between its status as a mostly uncultivated expanse of virgin wilderness and its status as the site of the most deadly labor camps in Soviet history, gives these poems particular power. The fact that this recognition is spatial rather than merely conceptual is important because it creates an alternative “worldspace” to that of political governance, hierarchy, and oppression in which the world’s atrocities take place. By transforming a landscape associated with barrenness, exile, and political oppression into a space of poetry, reverence, and communion he witnesses and pays tribute to the sacrifice of the departed. This space offers transcendence, not escape: a way to contain the act of witness in a larger framework and a reminder that amidst cruelty there can also be beauty and peace. Inherent in Aygi’s depictions of emptiness and death, as in the landscape of Kolyma, is a belief in art’s ability to transcend them. He develops his perspective in another eulogy to Shalamov, written on the same day as “Bidding Shalamov Farewell” (January 19, 1982). Стланик на камне   Землю и почву – более суровую знал он, чем ту, в кото- рую ныне хороним.   Прощаемся с Шаламовым.   Тело Литературы, мясо Поэзии, при «градусах» ада ко- лымского, оторвать от железа, с кусками железа, с его плотью! – такое он совершил.   Был – как умерший при жизни для жизни. Говорил – Абсолют: свет, из костей выживаемый, более верный, чем если бы был – из “душ”.

Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi

  Мало уже значит, что тело его – мертвее земли. (С ним это было и раньше, я знал, чтó бывало с рукой, которую он подал мне дважды; прочтите в его томе чтó бывало – с умом).   Остваляем здесь то, из чего было выжато – все, ставшее Геометрией (не видим, но знаем) Трагедии.   Вернемся в город – в Провинцию Живых. Где будет иное отныне – пространство-и-тело Поэзии: живые для жизни не владеют Ее языком.27 Pine on Rock   The earth and soil he knew were harsher than that in which we bury him today.   We are bidding Shalamov farewell.   Literature’s body, Poetry’s meat, in the “degrees” of Kolyma’s hell, to tear from iron with chunks of iron, with his flesh! – this he achieved.   He was like one dead in life for life. He would say – Absolute: light, squeezed from bone is truer than if it were from “souls.”

27 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 167.

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  (Живые? – да были – “постольку поскольку”: строили комнаты-“романы” – говоря об освенциме-мире; а было: пожарище – на месте что “было”! – с замерзшим-в-незримость кайлом-“языком”).

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  (The living? – they were – “to an extent”: they built rooms-“novels” – speaking of the Auschwitz-world; and it was: a conflagration – in the place that “was”! – with its freezingto-invisibility ice-pick “tongue”).   It means little now that his body is deader than earth. (With him it was like this even before, I knew what happened to the hand which he offered to me twice; read in his tome what happened to his mind).   We leave here things everything was squeezed from, become the Geometry (we do not see, but know) of Tragedy.   We will return to the city – to the Province of the Living. Where things will be different hereafter – the space-and-body of Poetry: those living for life do not know Its language.

A metaphor for the poem’s subject, stlanik is a Siberian dwarf pine known for its ability to thrive in the most inhospitable conditions. By creating images of a scrubby pine growing out of a rock, Aygi uses landscape to echo the suffering and perseverance of the departed as well as to evoke the experience of all victims of the Siberian labor camps. The poem is written in a rhythmic prose, which is common in Aygi’s later work. The gravity of the occasion—Shalamov’s funeral, real or as conceived by Aygi—may dictate the form, as may the claim in the work that, though Shalamov was primarily a prose writer, the world of poetry will be different after this day. In “Pine on Rock,” Aygi not only pays tribute to Shalamov’s suffering but also acknowledges the general tragedy of the labor camps and their anonymous victims. In the sixth stanza, he evokes his concept of art as that which outlives us: “It means little now that his body is deader than earth. . . . read in his tome what happened to his mind.” In these lines and throughout the poem, Aygi minimizes the importance of the fact that Shalamov’s physical body is lifeless and about to be mingled with

the earth on which it labored. Phrases such as “Literature’s body,” “Poetry’s meat,” and “light . . . from bones” link the body with images that, in Aygi’s framework connote immortality. In the penultimate stanza the body that is to be buried is abstracted further, becoming the “Геометрия Трагедии” [“Geometry of Tragedy”], and in the final stanza it is transformed to the image of ultimate expansiveness, emptiness, and immortality: “Poetry’s space-and-body.” The final lines remind us that there is much more beyond our daily existence; that those who live for life alone will not be able to participate in the transformative act. In light of poetry’s potential for transcendence, Aygi guides us beyond the suffering and death of the individual and the tragedies of history to an acceptance predicated on the value of witness, language, and the continuity of art.

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CH A PT E R F I V E

After the Fall: Poetry of the 1990s and 2000s

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he dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the entrance of Russia into the global market brought changes that affected the permeability of national and cultural borders. Individuals from Siberia and the Caucasus (and everywhere in between) could no longer afford travel to Moscow as prices for travel and accommodation had risen from communist rates to Western standards. Although the influx of foreign businesses created more jobs on the whole, many people found themselves left out of the economic boom. A political transition that was touted in the West and elsewhere as bringing freedom could also circumscribe their mobility and access to world culture. The same contradiction made itself felt in literature and the arts. While some underground poets were stymied by the lack of a totalitarian system against which to rail or silenced by the sheer sense of dislocation created by carrying a national identity that no longer existed, others— particularly Aygi—blossomed with the opportunity to engage openly with the rest of the world. In the 1990s Aygi experienced a flurry of publishing, travel, and creativity. He published at least sixteen volumes between 1991 and

2006—over a book a year. Several were art books reminiscent of the Futurist works of the 1920s: Three Poems (Три стихотворения, 1991), In Nekrasov’s Trenches (В окопах Некрасова, 1995), Richter Plays (Играет Рихтер, 1997) and Word-crow (Слово-ворона, 1997) represent Aygi’s collaboration with artists and composers to create works that emphasize the visual, and include drawings and paintings by the artists. The same holds for Aygi-Malevich 1 (Айги-Малевич 1, 1994), a Paris volume dedicated to Aygi’s sixtieth birthday. Kiev Film Studios produced a documentary about Aygi in 1992: Winter Benders: Absolute Aygi (Зимние кутежи. Тот самый Айги).1 During this period his work appeared in collections of experimental writing such as Third Modernization (Третья модернизация, 1990) and Broken Prose (Рубленная проза, 1994). Aygi also traveled extensively in the 1990s. After his first trip abroad to Hungary in 1988, he went to Warsaw in 1989, Edinburgh in 1992, Berlin and Perugia, Italy in 1993, Gotland and Paris in 1994 (where his sixtieth birthday was celebrated with readings, conferences, and the publication mentioned above), Vienna in 1995, and Saint Gallen and Tokyo in 1997. During these trips he attended conferences, gallery openings, and exhibitions, gave readings and participated in events held in his honor and in the honor of other notable world literary figures and artists. All this recognition suggests that despite censorship in the late Soviet period Aygi’s work found its way into the world and was embraced by the international community. Indicative of this newfound recognition was his nomination in 1991 for the Nobel Prize. Aygi never described himself as a postmodernist nor did he express any sympathy for postmodern literature or theory. On the contrary, when speaking about his own influences or extemporizing on poetryrelated themes, he referred to the classics of Russian literature—Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky—and the artists and writers of Russian Futurism—Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Malevich. He also frequently cited his favorite French poets—Paul Célan, René Char—and 1 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 214. Though this project is referenced in several places I have not been able to find a copy of the film.

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other favorites such as Kafka and Chuvash poets Mikhail Sespel and Atner Khuzangai, thus creating a lineage of mentors and luminaries from seemingly incompatible camps (Pushkin and Khlebnikov) and placing himself firmly at their head. While he linked himself most explicitly to the modernist tradition, he frequently took pains to qualify the link.2 But he came to the fore in the late-Soviet period, in which, according to Mikhail Epstein, the “postmodern relativity of ideas” reached its height and “ . . . the difference between facts and ideas was virtually erased.”3 Epstein argues that all Soviet culture can be described as a totalitarian “postmodern pastiche.”4 By responding to the problem of ethics in Soviet culture, Aygi was engaging with these patently postmodern themes whether he was aware of it or not. Here I should note that, in general but especially in the Russian context, postmodern and postmodernism are problematic terms. Epstein’s accounts of Russian/Soviet postmodernism are based on Baudrillard’s (rather than Foucault’s) approach, that of simulation, “where models of reality replace reality itself, which then becomes irrecoverable.”5 This is the basic notion of the postmodern condition with which I will work. Broadly speaking the postmodern era is marked by its “privileging of variety over singularity, and of freedom over obligation.”6 While these general features hold for Russian postmodernism, Epstein contends that it still developed differently in Russia partly because it sprang from late communism rather than late capitalism and as such “a postmodern relativity of ideas arose from [the Soviet Union’s] ideological, not economic, base.”7 The reason Epstein gives for the influence of ideology over economy in the Russian context is an emphasis in the Russian 2 See discussion in Chapter Two. 3 Mikhail Epstein, trans. and ed. A. Miller-Pogacar, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 153-159. 4 Ibid., 153. 5 Ibid., 189. 6 Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Russian Cultural Studies. An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 395. 7 Epstein, After the Future, 157-8.

philosophical tradition on wholeness, “which . . . spawned a political totalitarianism that . . . tried to envelop all of life into a single ideological principle.”8 While this emphasis on wholeness may have translated into ideological totalitarianism in the political context, in Aygi’s work it is expressed as poetry’s ability to link the word with humanity and spirituality. This made him particularly relevant in the post-Soviet period, when large-scale fragmentation—of identity, nation, culture, and values—and a desire for wholeness competed in the national psychology. Another idiosyncratic aspect of Russian postmodernism according to Epstein is that, whereas in the West postmodern forms and critical discourse developed in tandem from the 1960s onward, in Russia postmodern forms such as conceptualism and metarealism that developed in the 1960s were not chronicled until the 1990s. The 1990s are therefore a key period in Russian cultural history; not until then did a discourse for cultural phenomena other than a Soviet ideological framework emerge, a discourse that could describe the art and literature of the recent past in its own terms and create continuity between the otherwise disjointed Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Aygi never explicitly expressed his views on postmodernist thought, writing, or culture in Russia or abroad, but in a 1985 interview he made his views on contemporary Russian and world poetry very clear: “Скажу прямо, что у меня впечатление, что ‘что-то сгнило в датском королевстве.’” [I’ll say directly that my impression is that ‘something’s rotten in the kingdom of Denmark.’]9 He went on to explain that in contemporary poetry the connection between the word and thoughts, humanity and “с чем-то Бóльшим” [something Higher] was missing and lamented the contemporary tendency to “проклинать мир” [curse the world, Aygi’s emphasis], a world, which he considered part of divine “творение” [creation].10 It is in this interview that he first expressed the idea that the poetic word should act as the Latin root religio, meaning “connection,” accusing contemporary poetry of having lost its sense of the   8 Ibid., 301.   9 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 161. 10 Ibid. Aygi excludes from the discussion the achievements of unnamed contemporary poets whose work he supports.

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sacred and contemporary poets of having abandoned the poet’s duty to reveal the deep connections he perceived between the sacred and mundane, citing Dostoevsky’s belief that “everything on earth . . . lives through mysterious contact with other worlds.”11 Aygi’s affirmation of the spiritual essence of poetry is as far from the modernist (Futurist) conception of poetry that he claims as a major inspiration as it is from the postmodern.12 It more closely resembles Symbolism’s spiritual orientation; like the Symbolists Aygi believed the poetic word is the antidote to mundane reality and language. However, Aygi and the Symbolists part ways in their conceptions of where the spiritual inheres. For the Symbolists, the poetic world is the portal through which one can escape the mundane realm and enter a mystical beyond; for Aygi, the poetic word reveals the spiritual essence of the here and now and links it to the universal. But while Aygi has distinct opinions about how poetry should be written his work was never polemical. Though quite outspoken in his interviews and essays he considered poetry a place for worship, not politicking, and refused to take a polemical approach in his work. Creating a spiritual postmodernism may seem like an impossible project or simply a contradiction in terms, but many Russian poets since the 1960s have strong spiritual themes in their work. In addition to Aygi, Olga Sedakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Nina Iskrenko, Elena Shvarts, not to mention Joseph Brodsky, develop dialogues with the spiritual in their work, even if it is to question, satirize, or negate it.13 These poets embody different faces of Russian postmodern poetry: Sedakova and Zhdanov are considered metarealists while Iskrenko and Shvarts, like Aygi, do not fit easily into conceptual categories. The prevalence of spiritual themes in the work of a number of writers was largely due to the “underground” nature of religious and spiritual activity in the atheist Soviet state; it provided 11 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 161. 12 Affirmation of the spiritual is, however, central to the visual aesthetic theories of Malevich’s Suprematism, which Aygi cites as an even greater influence than the poetry of Russian Futurism. 13 For a discussion on spirituality in Elena Shvarts’s poetry see Stephanie Sandler’s short article “On Elena Shvarts,” Modern Poetry in Translation New Series 20, ed. Daniel Weissbort (London: University of London, 2002), accessed March 11, 2007, http:// www.arlindo-correia.com/040904.html.

non-establishment writers with another form of social protest, another set of answers to the ethical questions of the postmodern age and their own spiritual beliefs. The emphasis on the spiritual for Russian postmodern poets brings out another difference between Western (or at least American) and Russian postmodernism. Russian poets affirm a “presence” that Western postmodern writers have long ceased to recognize, while Western postmodernism is a literature of “absence,” a meditation on the “emptying of the sign.”14 But Aygi’s work of the 1990s creates links between Western and Russian postmodernism. One of the main shifts he makes is structural. Although there is no shift in the major themes occurring in his work, there is a move toward a serial, telegraphic style. Many poems of this period consist of series of fifteen to thirty numbered one-line sections containing meditations on a single object, event, or circumstance (although at times the reader must work to find the thread of a coherent subject matter). Representative of these poems is the 1993 “Summer with Angels” (“Лето с ангелами”) that he wrote in Berlin while trying to stop smoking. This, he wrote, accounts for the hallucinatory, transformational images in the poem: the smooth, upturned petals on a pot of white cyclamens (given by a friend in sympathy for his situation) become a rowdy bunch of angels. Here are several sections from the beginning of the twenty-eight section poem: 1. Пролог к «ангельским» багателям ветер: Бог потерял тетрадку со стихами о цикламенах 2. Появление цикламенов ангелы играют в карты конечно же ангельские

14 Marjorie Perloff, “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?” Postmodern Culture 3 (1993), accessed March 10, 2007, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/ v003/3.2perloff.html.

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3. Осень: туман падают птицы улетают листья на юг 4. Продолжение цикламенов

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гуси Бога идут на водопой 5. Другие цветы справа от цикламенов (рождественская звезда) называются «мама выходит замуж»15 1. Prologue to “angelic” bagatelles wind: God lost his cyclamen poem notebook 2. The appearance of cyclamens angels play cards of course angel cards 3. Autumn: fog birds fall leaves fly south 4. Continuation of the cyclamens God’s geese go to pond 5. Flowers to the right of the cyclamens (Christmas star) called “mama is getting married” As the poem continues the postmodern context emerges:

15 Aygi, 2001 246-7 (Aygi’s emphasis).

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11. Of course once again about these mag-ni-fi-cent with compasses and rulers angels in heavenly constructors bureau […] 19. Here’s Ts-25 angels are the People’s assessors

Even in this heavenly nicotine-withdrawal-induced meditation on a flower garden elements of “Soviet pastiche” cannot help but filter in. Likewise, the “angels” find themselves participating in everyday culture: “angels at race track,” “angels on plane” [ангелы на ипподроме, ангелы в самолете]. Subtexts of old age (“and falling days of youth turn up old age” [и падая дни детства взрыхляют старость]), fertility (“mama under red sun harvests rye” [мама под красным солнцем жнет рожь]), and temporality (“seconds stopped and put on little white hats” [секунды остановились и надели белые шляпки]) also appear, creating a rich, complex fabric of themes and images. This poem could easily be termed metarealist, which in Epstein’s words is “not the negation of realism but its expansion into the realm of things unseen, a complication of the very notion of realism, revealing its multidimensionality . . . and including a higher, metaphysical reality, like that made manifest to Pushkin’s prophet.”16 Indeed, this seems to be precisely the task of Aygi’s work. Aygi’s poetry of the 2000s is in many ways the fullest expression of his lyrical aesthetics of silence, transcendence, and desire approaching the sacred. While the 1990s saw his work expand into long, lineated prose pieces, the work of the final decade of his life contracts into short, 16 Epstein’s afterword to Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 281 (Epstein’s emphasis).

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11. Конечно же снова о них умо-по-мра-чи-тель-ных с циркулями и с линейками ангелы в небесном конструкторском бюро […] 19. Вот и Ц-25 ангелы народные заседатели

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vivid lyric. The work of this period seems to be the most personal; the pronouns “I” and “you” which rarely appear in Aygi’s work and signal not only a personal subjectivity but also the speaker’s relationship with another person, suddenly make an appearance. They are meditative and melancholy, radiating a sense of calm, a steady light. The language is straightforward; there are fewer of his characteristic neologisms and linguistic acrobatics, and punctuation is reduced to primarily m-dashes and parentheses. Nevertheless these poems, with their concentrated lyric form, are resonant with longing and acceptance. They exert a stronger emotional pull on the reader than much of the earlier work because the poet who is master of form and language shows a greater vulnerability in these lines; the need for human companionship, fear of death, the poet as witness to his own mortality. Most of Aygi’s work can be characterized as poetry of resistance to the state that ruined the lives of many of his friends and countless others, to human destruction, to the desecration of the natural world by urban pollution and waste, to the voids of despair, genocide, and violence. Even his linguistic experimentation can be viewed as resisting the conventional forms of communication and speech that keep language and thought locked in the realm of the mundane. His ecstatic spiritual appeals and religious invocations resist a godless existence bereft of awe and wonder, thus resisting political ideology that does not recognize anything greater than itself. His elegies are a resistance against forgetting, his celebratory work against despair. Poetry of witness written in the wake of atrocity is always poetry of resistance, even if the work is intensely personal, but in Aygi’s work of the 2000s the quality of resistance—at least in the political sense—recedes and makes room for a struggle within the poetics that is much more intimate and as such possesses a different kind of urgency than his politically motivated work, though it is no less vital. During the late Soviet period the reinstatement of previously banned literature and the newly open critical press often eclipsed discussion of contemporary literature, especially poetry. During this tumultuous period Aygi’s work maintains the balance between public and private, but his work in the decades that follow turns much more deeply inward, to

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explore human frailty, love, and loss. Take for example “Cнова – в снега” (“Once again—Into the Snow”):

а вы запеваете – а я удаляюсь постепенно в снега (как когда-то: фигурою темнеющей в сумерках где-то все дальше) и сломанная доска выступает там – средь развалин в брошенной хижине (пели шептались потом плакали очень давно – а оказывается для счастья немало) и далее лес словно во сне открывается – и вы запеваете (хотя – и не надо бы ибо ведь все уже кончено) вы продолжаете (а ведь и без нас глубоко уже зреет золотом поблескивая вечность) вы продолжаете все приглушеннее петь Once Again – Into the Snow and you begin to sing – and I am disappearing slowly into the snow (like before: a figure darkening in the dusk somewhere far away) and the broken board appears there – among the ruins

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Cнова – в снега

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in the abandoned shack (they sang whispered then cried long ago – it seems from great joy) and in the distance the forest as if in a dream opens – and you are singing (though – you needn’t for it’s already over) you go on (though even without us eternity is already ripening shimmering like gold) you go on though you’re becoming too muffled to sing

There is a tension between silence and music in Aygi’s poetry that remains significant until the end of his career. Perhaps the music of composers such as Gubaidulina with whom Aygi collaborated in the 1960s and 1970s continued to resonate in his later work. “Once again” begins and ends with singing, though the singing is placed in opposition to the speaker’s diminishing ability to hear or connect with it. Is the speaker falling asleep? Is he (assuming the speaker is masculine) under some kind of sedation? Is he dying? Or is he waking from a dream world he wishes to recapture? The ambiguity of the speaker’s position is consistent with Aygi’s aesthetics of multiple possibilities and potentialities rather than singular meaning in his poetry. Aygi seeks to express quietness or silence in this poem as well as the singing itself, and the speaker’s vision seems to drift from the immediate surroundings—a hospital room, perhaps, or a bedroom—to distant fields and a scene of what at first seems like decay and refuse. But there is something sanctifying in the scene of abandonment evoked by the broken boards and ruined shack, something that bespeaks the lasting memory of what was, despite

the ravages of time, rather than its erasure. At this point in the poem a “they” appears, which seems to belong to the history of that place: “they sang, whispered then, cried long ago, it seems from great joy.” In a Mandelstamian move Aygi has overlapped the ancient mythic past and the unvarnished present to achieve a sense of great longing and nostalgia. The speaker seems more connected to the mysterious “they” who do not exist in his own time than he is to the person who is in the room with him, singing a song that can barely be heard. It seems the “noise of time,” as Mandelstam famously termed it, is so powerful as to block out the present, for the present contains ruin, decay, death, and the necessity of facing loss. But it is the vision of those very ruins that evoke a joyous past for the speaker in which he can vicariously take part. Aygi contextualizes loss in his work through a discourse of emptiness. In Aygi’s framework emptiness is not an accompaniment to suffering, a consequence of it, but a means of transcending it and an opening out into the eternal. For Aygi it is only within such empty spaces that one may cut through the layers of life’s despair to achieve contact with a pure and holy essence. Consider the line from “One again”: “though even without us eternity is ripening, shimmering like gold.” This beautiful and melancholy image holds a key to the encoded symbolism that is woven throughout Aygi’s work. The phrase “without us” is important because it highlights humanity’s insignificance in the cosmic order; eternity does not need us, the universe does not need us, but it is beautiful and we need it. Aygi’s concept of emptiness, then, pointedly connotes “without people.” This viewpoint is further developed in his poem “Поле — без нас” (“Field: Without Us”). Aygi’s distancing of people from the space of this poem, as pointedly established in the title, clears the ground, as it were, so that the soul can regain its balance. Поле — без нас дорога все ближе поблескивает: будто поет и смеется! легка — хоть и полная — тайн!

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словно все более светится светом ее Бог — долго-внезапный!.. – о пусть не споткнется—и пусть доберется до брошенной деревушки! ласточки реют – светясь словно воздушная – все ближе над полем веет – теперь уже чем-то “домашняя” дорога – как шепот! как чье-то дыхание в дверь

Field – Without Us the road glimmers, ever closer: like it’s singing and laughing! light – though full – of mystery as if shining brighter with its own light God – endless and sudden!.. – o let it not falter – let it reach that abandoned little tree! swallows sing – shining like air – over the field ever closer the wind blows – with something already “homey” road – like a whisper! like someone’s breath at the door

Again, singing opens the poem, but now it is the road; the path to eternity personified, beckoning. In a review entitled “Into the Mysticism of Gennady Aygi,” Thade Correa describes how his poetry reaches into the “eternal void”: Aygi perceives everything in existence as perched on the edge of disappearance, each individual person named, every pine, every field and flower, every patch of light, is all the more precious to the poet, because

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The poet laments that we exist so close to what is pure, yet are constantly on the verge of destruction, destroying the very source of our nature. The poem works to restore a space that can become imbued with spiritual essence: light, snow, emptiness, God, all symbolic of eternal silence, eternal regeneration. Aygi was one of the artists of his generation who recognized the creative potential of the outskirts, where he and others were forced to settle in order to avoid persecution, but the field remained his touchstone for poetic solitude and spiritual transcendence. Consistent with the paradoxical temporality Aygi weaves into his snow-covered universe, God appears “endless and sudden,” just as the title of “Now Always Snows” denotes a condition that is at once immediate, unexpected, and eternal. It is perhaps the most perfect expression of ecstatic experience. And in the midst of that ecstatic realization eternity reaches out to the poet in the form of a road, beckoning, “homey,” asking us to transcend our mortal, earthly path and enter into the realization of God. “Field – Without Us” is a poem about death, but it is also a poem about life. Perhaps surprisingly, in this moment when the poet is much closer to death and mortality and facing it squarely, there is none of the despair of his earlier work, but rather joy. Aygi recognizes emptiness in the Buddhist sense, a oneness, a returning. There is expectation, recognition, as of a reunion with a long awaited friend. And because of this the pain and immanence of death inherent in the lines is all the more heart wrenching. Russia and Chuvashia share a history of Christianization in societies that possessed strong indigenous pre-Christian beliefs. While Russia’s Christianization occurred as a means of securing political power by Princess Olga and is recorded in the Chronicles, in the 1740s Christianity was forced on the Chuvash through mass baptisms by the Russian Empire’s “Office of Conversion,” which sought to root out native pantheism.17 However, dvoverie, or the coexistence of “pagan,” folk, and Christian 17 Ibid., xix-xx.

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irreducibly singular and fleeting. . . . [T]o die or disappear, for Aygi, is simply to return to the silence, the whiteness, the shimmering eternity out of which all existences rise and then return.

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beliefs is common to both Russian and Chuvash culture. Aygi is aware of this resonance, and by evoking both Christian and pre-Christian beliefs in his work, he allows the two cultures to overlap, representing a complex reckoning with mortality for both of his peoples, Russian and Chuvash.18 The subversive mingling of Christian and “pagan” religiosity in his poetry also points to a deeper idea within Aygi’s thinking, namely that multiple ways of being can intrinsically co-exist both independent of one another, yet directly affecting one another in non-contradictory ways. The persistence of the prayer is a form of witness, in this case to our mortality and our striving to comprehend it. What Aygi accomplishes in “Field – Without Us” is representative of all his poetry: a statement that is simple and joyous but infused with an enduring sense of loss; a subjectivity forever teetering on the boundary of life and death, mortality and eternity; images of earthly abandonment and the ineffable glory of God. Over time his aesthetics grew in sophistication and precision, but his whole poetic career can be understood as an exploration of the very nature of poetry, of its place in the world in a time of need. Much fruitful discussion can come from considering Aygi’s work not only for its qualities of poetic and theoretical innovation within the canon of Russian poetry but within the framework of gender and transnational studies. Noting the subversive approach to gender in Aygi’s work—and potentially in the work of other avant-garde poets—both enriches and complicates the current body of work on gender in Russian literature because it taps a source that may have been considered unlikely and in doing so opens the door to the possibility of discovering a dialogue on gender in a the work of a broader range of poets and writers. It also creates more potential for comparative analysis between Aygi’s work and the work of poets from other traditions. Aygi has noted that his subversive approach to gender came from the corrupt models of masculinity he experienced growing up in post-World 18 Although Aygi himself emphasizes the confluence of pagan and Christian tradition and values in his historical writing and poetry, a great diversity of religions and spiritual movements have arisen in Chuvashia over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Chuvashia, as most other countries, is a complex mixture of religious groups and denominations. See L. Iu. Braslavskii, Religioznye i okkul’tnye techeniia v Chuvashii (Moscow: Institut prokrizisnykh issledovanii, 2000).

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Я всегда хотел иметь дочь. . . . Думаю, что это лишь отчасти объясняется безсознательным бунтом против “культа сыновей” в народе, в котором я вырос,—с детства отталкивало меня мужланство (скажем, хемингуэйистского типа) и тянула к себе неопределимо-“священная” женственность. . . . Достаточно сказать, что в деревне, в которой я рос, было 200 дворов, а с войны не вернулось более двухсот мужчин (часть вернувшихся стала ядром,—я это свидетельствую,—колхозной и сельсоветовской мафии,—их насилие и жестокость совершались именно по отношению бедной женственности . . . ).19 I always wanted a daughter. . . . I think this is only partly explained by an unconscious revolt against the “cult of sons” in the people among whom I grew up; from childhood on I was repelled by manfulness (of the Hemingway type for instance) and attracted by an indeterminately “sacred” femininity. . . . I need only say that in my village there were two hundred households and that more than two hundred men failed to return from the war (some of those who did return became the nucleus of the collective farm and village council mafia—I can personally vouch for this—and their violence and cruelty were directed against poor femininity . . . ).20

The hegemonic relationship he described between the Hemingwavian “cult of sons” and the “poor . . . sacred” femininity they oppress mirrors the totalitarian relationship between the Soviet government and the Soviet people. Rather than simply painting the women of his village as victims, he shows how a cultural disposition toward favoring the birth of sons over daughters coupled with the historical context—the loss of many husbands, brothers and sons in the war—made room for a 19 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 142. 20 Gennady Aygi, trans. Peter France, Veronica’s Book: With notes on sleep-and-poetry (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989), 7-8. Adapted from France’s translation.

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War II Chuvashia, when traditional values of communal labor, respect, and modesty were replaced by mafia intimidation and violence. He discusses this in Veronica’s Notebook (Тетрадь Вероники, 1984), a book inspired by the birth of his daughter, which proved to be a life-changing event for him. Heavily gendered images rarely appear in Aygi’s poems, and here he discusses why:

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powerful, corrupt few to oppress the women who made up the majority of his community. As a child of no more than ten or eleven during the period he describes, he related to the powerlessness of the women and the fear that prevailed during that time. Aygi’s preference for a daughter over a son is a reaction against a culture dominated by patriarchy and his worldview rests on a matriarchal concept of family and lineage. Although it was his father who introduced him to the great works of Russian literature, it was his mother who represented the shamanic heritage (her father was the village’s last shaman) with which he closely identified—so much so that he gave up his father’s name (Lisin) in order to choose a name that better reflected both his ethnic and literary heritage as one marked by the twin signs of poetry and shamanism.21 The opposition of coarse manhood to sacred femininity is a constant theme in Aygi’s reflections on family and poetry, both of which he conceives as having matriarchal lineages. Since he associates poetry with the feminine, it is this “line” he wishes to cultivate, both in his poetry and his life: Появление дочери было для меня, прежде всего, обновлением женскости и женственности в моем роду (и случилось это, когда родовые корни,—словно все еще, где-то, огненно-горящие,—все более воспламенялись во мне самом).22 The coming of a daughter was for me, above all, a renewal of womanliness and femininity in my lineage (and this at a time when my family roots—as if they still flamed brightly somewhere—were burning ever more intensely within me).23

On one level, the association of womanhood with poetry is not at all unique; the Muse has always been an image of purest womanhood, from the Symbolists’ and Romantics’ concept of the Eternal Feminine to Blok’s 21 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii. Aygi wrote that Pasternak used to refer to him as “marked” [отмечанный], which relates to the Chuvash name “Aigi,” or in its Chuvash spelling, “Айхи,” meaning “he, that one, himself ” [тот самый]. 22 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii 125. 23 Aygi, Veronica’s Book, 7. Adapted from France’s translation.

“beautiful lady” [прекрасная дама]. However, as noted in the discussion of “Beginning,” Aygi’s treatment of the feminine in poetry does not reflect the typical poet-muse relationship, whereby the female muse inspires but remains separate from the poet. For Aygi, poetry is an expression of inspiration, which he interprets as the expression of a feminine presence. Additionally, neither poetry nor inspiration is separate from the poet himself, so Aygi’s assertion that poetry or inspiration is feminine means that he acknowledges the “feminine” in himself. Again Aygi’s commentary on the birth of his daughter proves useful for examining his relation to matriarchy, the feminine, and the duality of gender within poetry and the poet. The image of his mother crystallizes these relationships for Aygi: Рождение дочери я воспринял как возвращение, воскресение моей матери. Моя мать, умершая рано, до сих пор видится мне как некое святое свечение, видится в жизни, которая, . . . была превращена чуть ли не в “естественный” ад. . . . Для меня, и “народ”—это просто моя мать и ее страдания.24 The birth of my daughter was for me the return, the resurrection of my mother. My mother, who died early, still appears to me as a kind of sacred shining in the midst of a life which has been all but transformed into a “natural” hell. . . . For me the “people” too is simply my mother and her sufferings.25

In Aygi the concept of motherhood is intrinsically bound to his concept of humanity. He considers “the people”—a nation, not merely in the political sense, but as in all humanity—as an extension of his mother, another surprising reversal of a masculine archetype (humanity as “man”) for a feminine one. But equally important to Aygi was the articulation and the duty of fatherhood. While he saw Chuvash and Russian culture as dominated by patriarchy in political, public, and family life, he sought to redefine the concept of fatherhood in a positive way, especially as it related to literature, to downplay themes of dominance and foreground themes of nurturing and connectedness: 24 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 125. 25 Aygi, Veronica’s Book, 8.

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[Я] давно задумывался над тем, почему в мировом искусстве существуют даже каноны материнства, а чувство отцовства в литературе означает, как правило, лишь “отцовский инстинкт.” . . . [В] “Тетради” моей дочери я попытался утвердить принципиaльное “патеринство” . . . .26 [L]ong ago I began wondering why in the world of art there exist canonic forms of motherhood, whereas paternal feeling in literature generally means no more than the “paternal instinct.” . . . [I]n my daughter’s “Notebook” I tried to give shape to the principle of “fatherhood”. . . .27

It may be his position as outsider to the canon that allowed him to view from the side, question all discourses—those of gender as well as ethics and aesthetics—and create a representation of fatherhood so different from the one defined in his time, in which the father is not a Stalinesque figure of terror or a local bully but is nurturing and attentive, intimately bound to the roles of mother and family. Not only his outsider status but also his experience of existing in two cultures strengthened his awareness of the imbalance between representations of motherhood and fatherhood in literature and enabled him to compare Russian and Chuvash forms of language, religion, and literature. In the introduction to An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, he noted that the Chuvash language has no gender, “so that the people, sun and the Volga can all be called ‘father’ or ‘mother.’”28 This clearly contrasts with Russian, in which every word has an inherent gender, and with Christianity, in which all deified figures (except the Holy Spirit) are embodied as a specific gender. Chuvash cosmology, on the other hand, does not gender its gods. Recall “Ploughman’s Prayer,” in which the gods are addressed as “Mother of the Earth, Father of the Earth.” This cosmology informs Aygi’s metaphysical conceptualization of poetry and humanity in the universal order as parts of a greater entity in which gender differentiation, like all forms of differentiation, is trivial. That Aygi’s position subverts the traditional power relationship between male and female in literature is clear from the 26 Aygi, Razgovor na rasstoianii, 143. 27 Aygi, Veronica’s Book, 8. 28 Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Literature, xxiv.

blending of the male and female voices reciting their parts simultaneously in “Silence” (1973). This position, which tends toward the feminist, ultimately transcends gender discourse in its effort to create an ethically principled gender-unified (not gender-neutral) view of humanity. The same can be said of Aygi’s relation to the study of minority ethnic writers in a transnational context. Multidimensionality is a key term for postcolonial, transnational, minority, and migration studies. The discourse of diversity is still relatively new to the Russian context but is emerging in studies that consider the heterogeneous makeup of the Soviet Union and its condition in the post-Soviet aftermath. And like other features of Russian literary and cultural studies, the Russian discourse on diversity takes a different form from that of its Western counterparts. The identity construct of “homo Sovieticus” was effectively homogenizing—more so, arguably, than other national identity constructs— because it was explicitly enforced by law. The dissolution of the Soviet state made it possible for different interest groups based on political views, regions, genders, and nationalities to emerge, thereby encouraging “the formation of a variety of corporate identities that . . . take the place of the single and compulsory identity that had been imposed upon all of the Soviet nations in the recent past.”29 Epstein uses a patently Russian approach to cultural diversity in the post-Soviet period—that of “transculture,” which has roots in the culturology developed by the MoscowTartu School.30 He “privileges Bakhtinian ‘outsidedness’ (‘finding one’s place on the border of existing cultures’) in its ‘approach that every particular culture is incomplete and requires interaction with other cultures.’”31 His is a fresh, egalitarian approach to multiculturalism, affirming the equality of all cultures in recognition that no single culture can exist on its own. This approach all but abolishes the notion of “cultures” as separate geographically or linguistically defined entities in favor of “culture” as a complex worldwide network from which any discrete part is inextricable and the boundaries of which are indiscernible. 29 Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 395. 30 Ibid., 399. 31 Ibid., 399-400.

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In practice, however, questions of identity and the place of these identities in post-Soviet society are bound up with Russia’s imperialist history and its rough transition to democratic sovereignty. There is a small but growing literature on minority ethnic presence in post-Soviet Russia, but most of it focuses on political and economic mobilization.32 Minority ethnic writers have yet to be treated as a group representing a unique set of circumstances, interests, and contributions. A question that is currently receiving attention is how the “regional” writer of Soviet times becomes the post-Soviet writer representing a national, linguistic, or ethnic minority. The problem of defining minorities in the post-Soviet world is particularly complex because of the problem of defining the Russian majority. Caught between Europe and Asia, Russians have long sought what they tend to call “the Russian idea.”33 Communism seemed to provide that unique status, but after 1991 the question again arose. A 1996 poll taken by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion shows results for who, in the new post-Soviet circumstances, could be considered Russian.34 55 percent of those polled responded that anyone who lived in Russia and considered him or herself Russian was Russian, while 36 percent maintained that to be Russian was a matter of genetic ancestry. Of the characteristics most important for a Russian to have, 54 percent said they must “share the traditions of the Russian people,” 53 percent that they must be native speakers of Russian. Another important trait was sharing the “moral ideals” of the Russian people (40 percent), while least important, surprisingly, was membership in the Orthodox Church (19 percent). While these opinions sound more inclusive than exclusive, they do not begin to address the complexity of identity for someone such as Aygi, who was bilingual, bicultural, and living in his adopted country. The poll seems to argue that everyone wants to assimilate into a monolithically Russian identity and that “amnesty” may be extended to them. Of course, 32 For one such discussion, see Dmitry Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 33 See the historical anthology of Russian thinkers’ ruminations on the subject, Russkaia mysl’. 34 This study and the following statistics are cited in Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 393.

a single opinion poll does not provide the final word on these issues even if it points to trends in the developing discourse on contemporary Russian and non-Russian identities. What about those who wish to affirm a more complex heritage? How does this identity construct dialogue with the cultures, languages, and traditions of its former Soviet republics and protectorates? Issues of identity, ethnicity, and subjectivity are immanent in Russian literature from Pushkin to the twenty-first century. The task remains for scholars of Russian literature to recognize and begin to speak, as other post-colonial and transnational literatures (French and Francophone, English and Anglophone) have done, of Russian and Russophone literatures to account for the complex position of minority ethnic writers such as Aygi writing in the Russian tradition. In the emerging field of Russian postcolonial and transnational minority studies, Aygi’s work provides important links between traditions and gives us an opportunity to reshape the discourse on “Russian” literature.

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Final Thoughts: A Conversation with Fanny Howe on Poetry Crossing Borders

O

n March 22, 2008 I talked with American poet Fanny Howe about her relationship to poetry in translation, particularly the work of Gennady Aygi. Writing from the 1960s until today, Howe is a contemporary of Aygi’s from across the Atlantic and shares his themes of silence, contemplation, parenthood, and writing against political oppression. Though Aygi and his work are well known throughout Europe, Russia, and Asia, he has a small but growing following in the United States. I also spoke to Howe about her experiences as a translator, as she has translated A Wall of Two, a book of poems by the Karmel sisters who were Buchenwald survivors, from the Polish. Over the course of the interview she provided many insights, not only on Aygi and the process of translation, but on how poets encounter one another’s work through translation and how translation reveals affinities in poets of diverse aesthetics and different national traditions. Howe first encountered Aygi’s work through her publisher at New Directions, who was issuing a translation of Aygi’s work Child-and-Rose in 2003 and asked her to blurb it. Not necessarily a very intimate first connection, but she says in reading Aygi’s work she found a “brother,” a resonating

voice. His exploration of spiritual and religious themes as well as his placement of these themes in an avant-garde aesthetic resonated with her, as did his emphasis on fatherhood and the birth of his daughter (family is an important theme for Howe). These stylistic and thematic resonances led to what Howe calls recognition among poets. She prefers this term to influence, the word often used to describe the relationship of encounter, particularly if poets belong to different eras, traditions, or generations. For Howe the term influence is inadequate. She compares the absurdity of its logic to saying that “fish are influenced by seaweed”: there is clearly a relationship there, a shared context—even a shared habitat or environment, if you will—but it is ridiculous to characterize the relationship as influence. Rather, Howe suggests, it is something more organic that links poets who write in similar styles or with similar impulses in disparate contexts at the same point in history. Aesthetic and thematic sensibilities arise in different parts of the world at the same historical moment (think of global modernism) because it is necessary to speak to current conditions that have not yet been articulated by existing forms. Howe and Aygi can be linked to contemporary poets across the globe whose brief, at times experimental, lyrics resonate with the need to give voice to experience on the cultural and aesthetic periphery and perhaps most importantly, to write engaged poetry that speaks to the flagrant breaches of humanity and human rights in the modern age. The mechanism by which these poets encounter one another’s work across cultures is translation. Howe has read Aygi and Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, among others, in translation and sees a close connection between their aesthetics and her own. Chinese poet Bei Dao read Aygi in Chinese and writes an introduction to Child-and-Rose (the Chinese text is translated into English) describing how Aygi’s work resonates with him both in style and in terms of the poet’s ethical engagement. From a critical stylistic perspective, these poets—Howe, Aygi, Dao, and Ali—may seem to exhibit more differences than similarities. Howe and Aygi deal with spiritual themes in their work, but Dao and Ali ostensibly do not. Aygi and Dao share fragmented, haiku-like brevity in much of their work, while Howe’s and Ali’s work is more narrative. Aygi’s work

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is often abstract, while Ali’s work is concrete and visceral, and so on. But what these poets recognize in one another’s work goes beyond style, beyond even the language of origin. At a 2008 lecture at UCLA, Italian scholar and philosopher Gianni Vattimo spoke about rethinking Heidegger’s position on being. One of his points was that, when Heidegger speaks about the context in which beings exist (“beings” different from “Being” with a capital B), the kind of background that is necessary to foreground beings is silence, but as Vattimo notes, that silence is not neutral or objective. It is the silence of the vanquished, those whose stories are erased from history, that provides the contrast and context for “beings,” those whose stories (and therefore existence) are preserved and ratified from generation to generation. Vattimo’s point was that we often have to look very far into the background to decode the content of the silence, what has been erased, and what possibilities the silence holds. The four poets brought together here all write into that silence, foregrounding it in various ways: Aygi often writes about Holocaust and Gulag victims, Howe has worked with the poetry of Holocaust survivors, Dao writes in the wake of Tiananmen Square, and Ali writes about the loss of loved ones in the violence of the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Structurally, these poets make use of white space, interruption, and fragmentation in varying degrees. Often, silence as such, or different kinds of silence, is explored as the poem’s central theme. The foregrounding of silence is not lost, but perhaps magnified in translation. When a poem is taken out of its cultural context, the reader does not have the same attitudes, prejudices, and expectations that a reader from its culture of origin may have; after all, it is our shared cultural context that creates a collusion with silence and erasure in the first place. In-group familiarity can get in the way of recognizing or accepting the intervention into the cultural understanding a poem stages. Our knowledge of cultural schemas (a concept from sociology and has been incorporated into the emerging study of cognitive poetics), or shared cultural information, tends to fill in a poem’s “silences” by simply assuming content—essentially filling in the blanks—for what is not there. While this is a useful and necessary reflex in everyday life, it is inimical to the study

and reading of poetry, because the task of poetry, especially avant-garde poetry, is precisely to interrupt conventional forms of meaning and create new connections. Like Aygi, Howe considers disrupting conventional grammar a political intervention because everyday language is the carrier of cultural assumptions. Both poets incorporate different degrees of disruption and fragmentation in their work and while I would not label Aygi a “Language poet” (Howe makes it clear that she does not consider herself one either, although she references Jorie Graham as a kindred voice), the impulse—to expose the silences, the fault lines of our language and beliefs—is very present and recognizable in their work, even in translation. As Howe says, recognition does not lead a poet to adopt another’s style or method, but acts as a confirmation or affirmation that one’s activity resonates on a global level and is part of something greater than one may have originally realized. Aygi’s poetry of witness is another aspect that resonates with Howe. During our talk Howe spoke of her experience compiling and translating the poems of Heina and Ilona Karmel, two sisters who survived the death camps at Buchenwald and were able to smuggle out scores of poems written during their time there. The collection became A Wall of Two: Poems of Suffering and Resistance from Krakow to Buchenwald and Beyond (2007). She describes the translation process as essentially living with the poems over a four-year period. As is often the case in translation projects, she worked with a native Polish speaker. Visual artist Arie Galles translated the poems from Polish into literal English, and she then rendered these line-by-line approximations into poetry. The manuscript went through many incarnations, Howe observed, as she switched translators mid-way through the project and changed the way she conceptualized the project, throwing out some translations and choosing new ones, reworking older translations and so on. In the end she says only about two thirds of the material she worked on ended up in print. Howe describes amassing facts and studying history and finally traveling to Buchenwald, at which point she realized she couldn’t take the work or her experience of it any further. Though research informed her translation process, like Aygi she personally knew the survivors whose

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work she memorialized in another language. Howe and the Karmel sisters had taught creative writing together in 1978 at MIT. The Karmel sisters had written two novels each, but, except for a few selections, had not published their poetry. It was only later, after both sisters died, that their children approached Howe, as a poet and a friend, and asked her to consider translating and publishing the poetry manuscript. Although the project took years of personal investment, Howe’s translation of A Wall of Two was not about her own work; it was about allowing the poems to survive, to exist, through her translations—to save them and the experience they chronicled from receding into silence. The silence of obscurity is a different kind of silence from the reverent, creative font discussed above. Like Aygi, who was himself a translator and eulogized many of his fellow writers in his poetry, Howe’s work is an act of witness, a testament both to the atrocities of the twentieth century and our potential to overcome them through human perseverance and art. Because the Karmel sisters’ poems had not been published in their native Polish and existed only in manuscript form, they had not been read by anyone apart from the authors, family members, and perhaps some close friends. Thus, the work lives in translation, far from the time and place in which it was written, with the prospect of engaging a new generation of readers. Eastern Europe is one of the richest repositories of twentieth-century poetry of witness, and it continues to produce important voices in global poetry in the twenty-first century. One of these is Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort. Like many languages of former Soviet republics, Belarusian is all but dead as a literary language. Under Stalin Russification was enforced to the point that speaking and printing Belarusian was made illegal. As late as 1998 a Belarusian newspaper was closed for using pre-Stalin (pre1933) orthography. Even now there is very little possibility to write for a Belarusian readership, most of whom speak better Russian than Belarusian, and contemporary Belarusian literature is almost non-existent. But Mort and her work, translated by the poet with the help of Franz Wright, have been embraced by American readers, and Mort’s first book Factory of Tears, has been published with facing-page translations of the Belarusian poems, allowing the original language to remain uncensored and keeping its literary culture alive.

Gennady Aygi not only bore witness to his own and other poets’ experiences through his work, he was a historian and translator of Chuvash literature as well. The historical anthology of Chuvash poems translated into English and French, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (UNESCO 1991), passed through several hands—and crossed several borders. In Russia, Aygi translated the poems from Chuvash into Russian, and Edinburg scholar Peter France translated them from Russian into English. A third American scholar, of Mongolian and Altaic languages, John Krueger, checked the correspondence between the English versions to the Chuvash originals. Chuvash is on UNESCO’s list of European endangered languages and is little known outside of Chuvashia. Aygi, who made his living as a translator during Soviet times, wanted to bring his native language and culture onto the world stage. In fact, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1991 for his efforts at promoting Chuvash literature and culture throughout the world. It’s likely that, without Aygi’s efforts and those of his co-translators, Chuvash would have no literary presence outside its country’s borders. Translation not only gives obscure or politically or stylistically risky work a second life, but it also provides a point of contact for writers in the target language. One theme that ran through my discussion with Howe was her view that American poets have become hyperspecialized, which she sees as corresponding to poets’ (and other writers’) incorporation into academia from the 1960s onward. She mentioned that often poets don’t talk to other poets who don’t share their aesthetic or political views, and thus the circles for dialogue become smaller and smaller. But hopefully, even if American poets are not talking to one another across stylistic boundaries, they can still encounter different voices in translation. Howe notes that she has come to know other contemporary Russian poets—Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Andrei Voznesensky among others—through translation. In an age when we have more access to the world than ever before, Howe cautions us not let our flood of high-tech information drown out the voices of writers like the Karmel sisters and Gennady Aygi, who remind us of the cost at which we have attained our current world—and who also remind us of its beauty.

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Bibliography

Index

A

Absolute Being, 7 Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, 129 Aitmatov, Chingiz, 28, 96 Akhmatova, Anna, 66, 85, 88–89, 121, 124, 134 Requiem, 132–133 Akhmatova’s children, 85 Akhmedov, Rim, 58, 62 Ali, Taha Muhammad, 177 analogies, 95–96 Andreeva, A. N., 89 apartment exhibitions, 66 Auschwitz art, 135 avant-garde artists, 65, 168 during Brezhnev’s era, 67 during Khrushchev’s era, 66, 88 Moscow life, 75–77, 81 during Stalin’s reign, 56, 66, 76 “young composers,” 121–122

Aygi, biography of, 17–18, 20–22, 29 college, 55 documentary, 155 ethnic heritage, 32–33 mentors, 57 parents, 20 status as an outsider in the Russian tradition, 75–76 trips abroad, 155 Aygiists, 12 Aygi’s work, 133. see also poetics of Aygi An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, 33, 36, 53, 172, 181 Broken Prose, 155 as a Chuvash poet, 28–30 difficulties in literary analysis, 16–17 ethnicity in, 29–30, 32–33, 116–117, 170 gender in, 62–63, 168–173 Here, 20

Index

196

infleunce of Chuvash language and culture, 18 and life in Moscow, 5 link with other thinkers, 8–9 literary criticism of, 3, 11–12 madness as method, 4–7 mysteries of Orthodox Christianity in, 26 In the Name of the Fathers, 20 Now Always Snows, 20 overt political and historical references in, 137–138 passionate address of homeland, 5 as “poetry after Auschwitz,” 135–136 Poets of France, 20 Poets of Hungary, 21 Poets of Poland, 21 preference for femininity, 169–171 publications, 21 representations of motherhood and fatherhood, 171–172 Russian landscape in, 5 sense of divine inspiration, 7 Smith’s rationale for exclusion of, 14–15 themes of nurturing and connectedness, 171–172 Third Modernization, 155 of translation, 20–21 use of free verse, 5 Winter Noted, 59

B

Bailey, Sharon, 132 Barrack poets, 78–79, 81–82, 85 rhythm and intonation of vulgarities in poems, 79–80 Baulin, Sergei, 12 Belarusian literature, 180 Black Russians, 26 Blok, Alexander, 24, 62 “The Twelve,” 111

Bokov, Nikolai, 124 Boym, Svetlana, 117 The Future of Nostalgia, 117 Brodsky, Joseph, 15, 85–90, 121, 158 poems of, 86, 92 “Uncommon Visage,” 87 “Bulldozer Exhibition,” 67 Burliuk, David, 65 Bykov, Dmitry, 96

C

Cage, John, 98 calligraphy, 72 Célan, Paul, 155 Chagall, Marc Zakharovich, 65 Char, René, 155, 181 Chuvash culture, 19, 117, 171 Christianity influence, 35, 167–168 Chuvash’s Hunnic origin, 41 oral tradition, 33 Chuvash embroidery, 70 Chuvash ethnicity, 16, 18–19, 41 Chuvash identity, 35–36 Chuvash language, 41–43, 41n31–32, 44 Chuvash paintings, 19–20 Chuvash poetic tradition, 29–30, 33 alternating rhymes, 43–44 dualism, 46–47 free verse in, 38, 40 importance to peasants, 47–48 link between animals and humans, 47 “psycho-physiological individuality” of poems, 36–38 relationship between the poet and nature, 48–49 similarity with Turkic language, 40–41 syllabo-tonic rhythm in poems, 36, 43 “To Mother,” 43–44 tradition of kiremet, 49

Index

D

Dao, Bei, 177–178 Davidson, Pamela, 126–127 Derrida, Jacques, 7–8, 18, 133 views of play and their interpretations of history, 7–8 dol’nik, 24 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 31, 155, 158 double-voicedness, 18 Dragomoshchenko, Arkady, 181

E

Epstein, Mikhail, 81, 146, 156, 161, 173 argument for method as madness, 5 “Methods of Madness and Madness as Method,” 4 Russian postmodernism, 156–157 ethnicity Aygi’s, and literary tradition, 29–30, 32–33, 116–117, 170 Chuvashs, 16, 18–19, 41 Cossacks, 28 Huns, 41 hybrid, 30 idea of Russians and Russianness, 32 minority ethnic writers, 174–175 national ethnic “purity,” 32 and national identity constructs, 173 non-Russianness vs Russian tradition, 30 Russian art, 17, 29 in Russian literature, 29–30, 175 experimental poetry, 3 Eyzin, Peder, 39–40

F

Forché, Carolyn, 129–131 France, Peter, 97 free play, 8 free verse, 5, 12, 22–25, 29, 38–40, 53, 63–64, 71, 86, 89 Futurism, 36, 39, 56–57, 68, 70–72, 75, 78–79, 81, 127, 155, 158 Fyodorov, Maksam, 35–36

G

Galles, Arie, 179 Gana, Nouri, 137 gender in Aygi’s work, 62–63, 168–169, 171–173 in Chuvash language, 42, 45, 172 in Russian literature, 168 Gerasimov, Aleksandr, 56 glasnost era, 11, 138 Gogol, Nikolai, 31, 155 Graham, Jorie, 179 Gubaidulina, Sofia, 121–122, 127, 164 “And: The Feast is in Full Progress,” 124 discussion of religion/religio, 123–124 “Roses,” 124–125 Silenzio, 121 Guro, Elena, 24, 65

H

Hannibal, Abram Petrovich, 25, 30 Harris, John, 131 Heidegger, Martin “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” 1 poetics, 18 Hejinian, Lyn, 82 Hikmet, Nazim, 20, 64 Hölderlin’s work, Heidegger’s description of, 11 act of witness, 9–10

197

twentieth-century, 39 Chuvash Republic (Chuvashia), 18–19 Chuvash spirituality, 46 Cohen, Mark, 95 Communism, 174 Correa, Thade, 166–167 Costakis, George, 66

198

Index

distinguishing man from other living creatures, 9 idea of play in poetry, 2–3 intimacy, 9 language, 3 literary criticism of, 3 nature of poetry, 9 time-specificity and timeliness, 10–11 use of words, 2, 10 Homer, 118 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 50 Howe, Fanny, 176–181 aesthetic and thematic sensibilities, 177 on Ali’s work, 177–178 degrees of disruption and fragmentation in conventional grammar, 179 term influence, 177 translation works, 176 A Wall of Two, 176 A Wall of Two: Poems of Suffering and Resistance from Krakow to Buchenwald and Beyond, 179–180

I

inveterate individualist, 13 Iskrenko, Nina, 139, 158 Ivanov, Kestenttin, 36 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 126 Cor Ardens, 126

J

Janecek, Gerald, 98–99, 126

K

Kafka, Franz, 156 Karmel, Heina, 179–180 Karmel, Ilona, 179–180 Khardzhiev, Nikolai, 65 Kharms, 65

Khlebnikov, Velimir, 15, 24, 155–156 Kholin, Igor, 24, 77–79 Khuzangai, Atner, 156 Khuzangai, Peder, 20 Kropivnitskaya, Valentina, 78 Kropivnitsky, Evgeny, 78 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 65, 155

L

language, importance in poetry, 3 Leningrad group, 85, 139 Lermontov, Mikhail, 155 Lianozovo group of poets and artists, 77–78 Lisin, Gennady Nikolaevich. see Aygi, biography of; Aygi’s work logocentrism, 16–17 Loseff, Lev, 86

M

MacFadyen, David, 88 Makarevich, Ivan, 65 Malevich, Kazimir, 57, 65, 69, 111, 155 Black Square, 70 Black Square and Red Square, 71 Eight Rectangles, 71 “From Cubism to Suprematism,” 69 “God Has Not Been Dethroned: Art, Church and Factory,” 70 “On New Systems in Art (Stasis and Speed)”, 69 peasant life and mysticism, influence of, 70–71 White on White, 71 White Square, 71 Mandelstam, Osip, 24, 66, 117, 121, 165 Greek culture, 117–118 Mari-El (or Cheremis) Republic, 18 Martyanova, Lyubov, 39 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 57, 155 Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow, 22, 57, 65

Medvedkova, Olga, 67–68 Mitta, Vaslei, 140–141 Mordova Republic, 18 Mort, Valzhyna, 180 Factory of Tears, 180 Moscow Literary Institute, 57–58 Moscow’s architecture, 75–76

N

Naiman, Anatolii, 89 nationalities, 19, 31, 117, 173 minority, 128 Nekrasov, Vsevolod, 78 Nekrasova, Kseniia, 24 neo-avant-garde, 57, 65, 67, 75, 78, 85, 89–90 Nietzschean conception of play, 8 Novikov, Vladimir, 12

O

observer effects, 10 Orlitsky, Yuri Verse and Prose in Russian Literature, 24 otherness, 30–32 other Russia, 31–32

P

Pasternak, Boris, 22, 57, 121 Doctor Zhivago, 20, 57 perestroika (1968–1985), 46, 96, 138 Peter the Great, 25 Platonic madness, 6–7 poetic madness, 4 poetics of Aygi, 17–18. see also Aygi’s work ambiguity, use of, 118 analogies, 94–96 approach to the outskirts, 82–85 Aygi-Malevich 1, 155 “Beginning,” 59–64, 72 “Bidding Shalamov Farewell,” 143–147, 150

Child-and-Rose, 176–177 Christian theology, influence of, 46, 96, 112–113, 134 Chuvash language and forms, role of, 44–45 contrast between the “hues” and the “pure light,” 116 dealing with loss, 133 depictions of emptiness and death, 146–148, 150–151, 165 distinction between molchanie and tishina, 98–99, 105, 111, 123, 148 divine element in, 47, 50, 94 everyday events, 58–59, 61, 149 “Field: Without Us,” 165–168 field and forest images, 49 “Field near Ferapontovo,” 50–53 free verse, use of, 24–25, 38 humor, elements of, 75 “Introduction to an Epic,” 61 juxtaposition of muteness and stillness, 100, 103 Mayakovskian elements in, 61 metaphysical hieroglyphs, 87–88 nature of construction, 34 In Nekrasov’s Trenches, 155 nostalgia, 117 “Now always Snows,” 107–112, 124, 167 “Once again: in breaks between sleep,” 90–91 “Once again-Into the Snow,” 163–164 “On Reading the Poem ‘Untitled’ Aloud,” 68 “Outskirts: Winter without People,” 83–85 Pasternak’s influence, 57, 64–65 personal grief and loss, expression of, 140–142, 144–146 philosophical argument of poetic word, 93–94 “Pine on Rock,” 151–153

199

Index

200

Index

“Pines-with-birch,” 45, 48 “Ploughman’s Prayer,” 33–34, 63, 172 project of integrating poetry and music, 125–126, 164 references to audibility and visibility, 116 repetition of sibilants and fricatives, 101 Richter Plays, 155 ritual actions, 112–113 1960s, 98 1970s, 98 1980s, 134–135 1990s, 154–155, 159 2000s, 161 “Silence,” 103–105, 113–115, 118–120, 173 silence (molchanie), v, 99–100, 106, 118–120, 123 Silence-warning, 99 spiritual philosophy, 53–54, 106–107, 158 “Summer with Angels,” 159–161 themes, 46, 58, 63 Three Poems, 155 universe, conception of, 96 “Untitled,” 68, 72–74 use of hyphenations, 45–46, 50, 53–54 Veronica’s Book, 40 Veronica’s Notebook, 169 vision of the universe, 46 visual arts, elements of, 72 Volga culture, influence of, 128 Western forms, 38–39 Word-crow, 155 poetry criticism, 3 poetry of witness, 162 Aygi’s, 133–134, 179 defined, 129–130 elegy and, 131–132 post-Thaw Soviet society, 100 Potapova, Vera, 124 Prigov, Dmitri, 16, 139

Pushkin, Alexander, 30–31, 155 African ancestry of, 30–31 approach to madness, 4 The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, 31

R

Rabin, Oscar, 78 race, 117 in Russian language and literary tradition, 26 regional writer, 27–28 religious mysticism, 70–71 Republic of Tatarstan, 18 Richter, Sviatoslav, 66 Robel, Leon, 62, 120 Romantic poetry, 101 Russian art, ethnic aspect of, 17, 29 Russian artistic traditions, 17 Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), 27 Russian icon painting, 71 Russian language and literary tradition concept of the writer during 1917–1934, 27–28 ethnicity, 29–30, 175 gender in, 168 late eighteenth century, 22–23 post-Stalinist Soviet era, 23–24 pre- and post-revolutionary years, 23–24 race in, 26 Russophone literature, 13–14, 175 syllabo-tonic structure of Russian poetry, 22–23 twentieth-century, 11, 175 Russian poetic tradition emphasis on the spiritual, 158–159 free verse, use of, 24–25 oratory and performance, 23–24 postmodernist, 156–158 syllabo-tonic versification, 22–23 twentieth-century, 135

Index

Russian postmodernism, 146–147 Russophone poetry, 13–14

Tsirline, Ilya, 66 Tynianov, Yury, 65, 127

S

U

T

Tatlin, Vladimir, 20, 65 Thaw generation, 21, 24, 28, 77, 96 Trifonov, Daniil, 96

Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness, 25 unfinalizability, 18 universal realism, 71

V

Vattimo, Gianni, 178 Vinokurov, Yevgeny, 24 Vogt, Katja Maria, 7 Volga Bulgaria, 19 Volkonsky, Andrei, 65–66, 122 Voroshilov, Igor, 65 Voznesensky, Andrei, 100–101, 181 “Silence!”, 100–101 Vulokh, Igor, 65

W

Wachtel, Michael The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and Its Meanings, 22 Wallenberg, Raoul, 137 Weltschmerz, 6 witnessing, 9–10 womanhood and poetry, 170–171 Wright, Franz, 180 Writers Union, 76

Y

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 13–14 Twentieth Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Steel, 13

Z

Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 76 Zen Buddhism, 40 Zhdanov, Ivan, 139, 158 Zorgenfrey, Wilhelm, 13–14

201

“Salute-to-Singing,” 18 Sapgir, Genrikh, 12, 24, 77–78, 80–81 “Conversations on the Street,” 80 poetic tradition of, 102–103 Silence, 102 Sarbi, Raisa, 39 “Secret Speech” of Khrushchev, 56 Sedakova, Olga, 158 Sespel, Mikhail, 156 “From Now On,” 36–39 Shalamov, Varlam, 144 Kolyma Tales, 144 “Pine on Rock,” 135–136 Sholokhov, Mikhail The Quiet Don, 27–29 as regional writer, 28 Shvarts, Elena, 16, 158 Smith, Gerald, 14–15 socialist realism, 55–56, 76, 88, 97, 121–122 socialist realist art, 56 Soloukhin, Vladimir, 24 Sosnora, Viktor, 12, 76–77, 82 Soviet culture, 1990s and 2000s, 156 Soviet Jews, 87 Soviet socialism, 97 Soviet society, 134 Christianization of, 167–168 Steiner, George, 15, 135 Suprematism, 69–70, 111, 127 Svetlov, Mikhail, 20 syllabo-tonic versification, 22–24 symbolism, 158, 165 Symbolists’ “Wandering Dog,” 23