My secret friend, my distant friend,
Look.
I am the cold and sad
Light of dawn . . .
And cold and sad
In the morning,
My secret friend, my distant friend,
I will die.
Maybe, for these lines to reach their address, it will take the same hundreds of years that it does for the light of a planet to reach another planet. As a result, Sologub’s lines continue to live after they have been written, as events, not merely as tokens of emotional experience.
And so, if individual poems (in the form of missive or dedication) can actually address concrete persons, poetry as a whole is always directed at a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet may not doubt without doubting himself. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it. Only reality can call to life another reality. A poet is not a homunculus and there is no reason why one should ascribe to him the characteristics of spontaneous generation.
The matter may be put very simply: if we had no acquaintances, we would not write them letters and would not take pleasure at the psychological freshness and novelty that is characteristic of this occupation.
About the Nature of the Word
But we worry about things, and forget
that only the word glows and shines,
and the Gospel of John
tells us this word is God.
We’ve surrounded it with a wall,
with the narrow borders of this world,
and like bees in a deserted hive
the dead words rot and stink.
N. Gumilev*
The only question I want to ask is whether Russian literature constitutes a unity. Is contemporary Russian literature really the same as the literature of Nekrasov, Pushkin, Derzhavin, or Simeon Polotsky?1 If continuity has been preserved, then how far back does it go? If Russian literature has always been one and the same, then what determines its unity, what is its essential principle, its so-called criterion?
The question I have put acquires a special edge, thanks to acceleration of the historical process. No doubt it would be an exaggeration to consider each year of our present history an entire century, yet something in the nature of a geometric progression, a consistent quickening, may be noted in the stormy discharge of this accumulated historical energy. Thanks to such change in our time, the conception of the unity of time has been shaken, and it is not by accident that contemporary mathematical science has advanced the principle of relativity.
In order to rescue the principle of unity in the whirlpool of change and the ceaseless current of events, contemporary philosophy in the person of Bergson, whose profoundly Judaic mind, obsessed by the urgent practical need of sustaining monotheism, proposes to us a doctrine of the systematization of phenomena. Bergson examines phenomena not through the logic of their subordination to the law of temporal sequence, but, as it were, through the logic of their distribution through space. It is exclusively the inner bond of phenomena that interests him. This bond he liberates from time and examines separately. In this way, interconnected phenomena form a kind of fan, the folds of which may develop in time, while at the same time the fan may be collapsed in a way that allows the mind to grasp it.
Comparing phenomena united in time to such a fan merely emphasizes their inner bond, and instead of the problem of causality, bound so slavishly to thinking in time, which for long held the minds of European logicians in thrall, it advances the problem of connection, without any flavor of metaphysics and, for precisely that reason, more fruitful in producing scientific discoveries and hypotheses.
A science built on the principle of connection rather than causality exempts us from the “foolish infinity” of evolutionary theory, not to mention its vulgar appendage, the theory of progress.
The movement of an infinite chain of phenomena, without beginning and end, is really a foolish infinity that says nothing to the mind seeking unity and connection. It hypnotizes scientific thought with this easy and accessible evolutionism that gives, to be sure, an appearance of scientific generalization, but at the price of rejecting any synthesis or inner structure.
The diffuseness, the unstructured nature of nineteenth-century European scientific thought, by the time of the turn of the present century, had completely demoralized scientific thought. Intellect, which does not consist of a mere aggregate of knowledge, but rather of “grasp,” technique, method, abandoned science, since intellect can exist independently and can find its own nourishment where convenient. Searching for intellect in precisely this sense in European scientific life would be futile. The free intellect of man had removed itself from science. It turned up everywhere, but not there: in poetry, in mysticism, in politics, in theology. As for scientific evolutionism and its concern with the theory of progress (insofar as it did not wring its own neck as the new European science had), it puffed along in the same direction and flung itself on the shores of theosophy, like an exhausted swimmer who had achieved a joyless shore. Theosophy is the direct heir of that old European science which had theosophy as its inevitable destination: the same foolish infinity, the same absence of backbone in the doctrine of reincarnation (karma), the same coarse and naïve materialism in the vulgar understanding of a supersensate world, the same absence of will, the same taste for the cognition of activity, and a certain lazy omnivorousness, an enormous, ponderous chewing of the cud, intended for thousands of stomachs, an interest in everything that at the same time verges on apathy, an omniscience that resembles know-nothingness.
Applied to literature, evolutionary theory is especially dangerous, and the theory of progress is downright lethal. Listen to the evolutionist literary historians and it might seem that writers think only of how to clear the road for those who are to go ahead of them, and not at all about how to finish their own job of work; or that they all take part in some inventors’ contest for the improvement of some sort of literary machine, while it isn’t at all clear where the jury is hiding, or what purpose this machine serves.