II.
Somebody once managed to photograph the eye of a fish. The picture showed a railroad bridge and several details of the landscape, but the optical law of fish-vision showed all this in an improbably distorted manner. If somebody managed to photograph the poetic eye of Academician Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky4 or of the average member of the Russian intelligentsia, how for example he sees his Pushkin, the result would be a picture no less unexpected than the world seen by the fish.
Distortion of the poetic work in the perception of the reader is an inevitable social phenomenon, difficult and useless to combat: easier to bring electrification to Russia than to teach all literate readers to read Pushkin as he is written, rather than as their emotional needs require and their intellectual capacities permit.
As distinct from musical notation, for example, poetic notation leaves a fairly big gap, the absence of a large number of signs, indications, pointers, implications, which alone make the text comprehensible and coherent. Yet all these nonexistent signs are no less precise than musical notes or dance-hieroglyphs; the poetically literate reader supplies them on his own, eliciting them from the text itself, so speak.
Poetic literacy does not in any case coincide with ordinary literacy, with reading the alphabet, or even with literary erudition. If the percentage of ordinary and literary illiteracy is very high in Russia, poetic illiteracy is absolutely abysmal, and all the worse for being confused with ordinary illiteracy, so that anyone who knows how to read is considered poetically literate. The above has a special relevance to the half-educated mass of our intelligentsia, infected by snobbism, having lost their native feeling for the language, essentially rendered languageless, amorphous in relation to language, tickling their long-dulled language-nerves with cheap and easy stimuli, dubious lyricisms and neologisms, often alien and hostile to the essence of Russian speech.
It is the demands of this milieu, declassed in the linguistic sense, that current Russian poetry is obliged to satisfy.
The word, born in the most profound layers of speech-consciousness, has to serve the deaf-mutes and tongue-tied, the cretins and degenerates of the word.
Symbolism’s great merit, the correct stance it took with regard to the Russian reading public, was in its pedagogy, in its inborn sense of authority, the patriarchal weightiness and legislative gravity with which it educated the reader.
One needs to put the reader in his place, and along with him the critic he has reared. Criticism should not consist of the arbitrary interpretation of poetry; this should give way to objective, scholarly research, to the scholarship of poetry.
Perhaps the most comforting thing in the whole situation of Russian poetry is the deep and pure ignorance, the unknowingness of the people about their own poetry.
The masses, who have preserved a healthy philological sense, those layers where the morphology of language begins to sprout, strengthen, and develop, have quite simply not yet entered into contact with individualist Russian poetry. The Russian lyric has not yet found its readers. Perhaps it will find them only after the extinction of those poetic luminaries that have already sent out their rays of light to this distant and as yet unattained destination.
About an Interlocutor
What is there about a madman, tell me, that produces the most frightening impression of madness? The distended pupils—because they are unseeing, because they focus on nothing in particular, because they are empty. Or his mad speeches, because, even while turning to you, the madman does not take you into account, does not consider your existence, as if he did not wish to acknowledge it, because he is absolutely uninterested in you. In the madman, we fear for the most part that uncanny, absolute indifference that he turns toward us. Nothing frightens a man more than another man who has no concern for him. There is deep significance in that cultivated pretense, that politeness, we continually use in order to emphasize a certain interest in each other.
When a man has something to say, he usually goes to people, seeks out listeners. But a poet does the opposite. He runs “to shores of desert waves, to deep-sounding groves.” The abnormality is obvious . . . A suspicion of madness falls on the poet. And people are right when they call him mad, who addresses inanimate objects, nature, and not his living brothers. And they would be in the right to recoil from the poet as from a madman if his word were not really addressed to anyone. But this is not the case.
The view of the poet as “God’s creature” is very dangerous and basically incorrect. There is no reason to think that Pushkin, for instance, in his little song about the bird,1 had the poet in mind. But even with regard to Pushkin’s bird, the case isn’t really so simple. Before it can sing forth, it “heeds the voice of God.” Obviously he who orders the bird to sing listens to it. The bird “shook its wings and sang” because it was bound by a “natural contract” with God—an honor to which even a poet of the greatest genius dares not aspire . . . To whom then does the poet speak? It’s a disturbing question, and very contemporary, because to this very day the Symbolists have avoided posing it sharply. Symbolism completely neglected the, as it were, contractual relationship, the mutuality that accompanies an act of speech. (I speak, and that means I am listened to, and not for nothing, not out of kindness, but because there is an obligation.) The Symbolist poets turned their attention exclusively to acoustics. They hurled sound into the architecture of the soul and, with that self-absorption characteristic of them, followed the sound’s meanderings through the archways of another person’s psychology. They would reckon up the sonic increment issuing from good acoustics and call this computation magic. In this regard Symbolism recalls “Prestre Martin” of the medieval French proverb, who himself serves Mass and listens to it. The Symbolist poet is not only a musician, he’s a Stradivarius at the same time, the great artisan of the violin, preoccupied with estimating the proportion of the “box” in relation to the psychology of the listener. It is precisely depending on these proportions that the stroke of the bow either acquires a regal fullness or tends to sound squalid and unconvincing. Yet, gentlemen, a piece of music nevertheless exists independently of the player or the instrument or the place! Why then should the poet be so anxiety-ridden about the future? Where finally is that supplier of living violins for the poet’s needs—those listeners whose psychic apparatus is up to Stradivarius’ “helix”? We don’t know, we never know where such listeners might turn up . . . François Villon wrote for the Parisian rabble of the mid-fifteenth century, yet we find in his poems a living charm . . .
Everybody has friends. Why doesn’t the poet turn to his friends, to those people who are naturally close to him? The shipwrecked sailor throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment, and it has his name in it and what happened to him. Many years later, walking along the dunes, I find it in the sand, I read the letter, I learn when it happened, the testament of the deceased. I had a right to do this. I did not unseal someone else’s letter. The letter sealed in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, then, that I am its secret addressee.