The theory of progress in literary studies is the coarsest, most repulsive façade of academic ignorance. Literary forms change, some forms give way to others. But every change, every such innovation, is accompanied by bereavement, by a loss. There can be no “better,” no progress of any kind in literature, simply because there is no literature-machine of any kind, and there’s no finish line to which you have to rush to get ahead of anybody else. This senseless theory of betterment is not even applicable to the manner and form of individual writers—here every innovation is similarly accompanied by bereavement and loss. Where does the Tolstoy who in Anna Karenina mastered the psychological power and the highly structured quality of the Flaubertian novel show the animallike sensitivity and the physiological intuition of War and Peace? Where does the author of War and Peace show the transparency of form, the “Clarism”2 of Childhood and Boyhood? Even if he had wanted to, the author of Boris Godunov could not have repeated the lyceum poems, and similarly no one now could write a Derzhavin ode. Who likes what better is another matter. Just as there are two geometries, Euclid’s and Lobachevsky’s, there may be two histories of literature, written in two different keys: one that speaks only of acquisitions, another only of losses, and both would be speaking of one and the same thing.
Returning to the question of whether Russian literature is a unity and, if it is, what the principle of that unity might be, let us cast aside the amelioration theory from the very beginning. Let us speak only of the inner connections of phenomena, and above all let us try to seek out a criterion of possible unity, the core which allows the various dispersed phenomena of literature to unfold in time.
The only criterion that can serve to indicate the unity (conditional, to be sure) of the literature of a given people is that people’s language, to which all other criteria are secondary. The language, although it changes from period to period, although it does not stand still and congeal, retains a certain common constant that to the philologist’s mind at least is blindingly clear. An inner unity remains. Any philologist grasps when a language retains and when it changes its personality. When Latin speech, which had spread to all the Romanic lands, brought forth new bloom and began sprouting the future Romance languages, a new literature began, childish and impoverished compared with Latin, but already “Romance.”
When the vibrant and graphic speech of The Tale of Igor’s Men3 resounded, thoroughly worldly, secular, and Russian in its every turn of phrase, Russian literature began. And while Velemir Khlebnikov, the contemporary Russian writer, immerses us in the very thick of Russian root words, in the etymological night dear to the mind and heart of the clever reader, that very same Russian literature is still alive, the literature of The Tale of Igor’s Men. The Russian language, like the Russian national identity itself, was formed out of endless mixtures, crossings, graftings, and foreign influences. Yet in one thing it will remain true to itself, until our own kitchen Latin resounds for us, too, and on that powerful body which is language, the pale young runner-shoots of our life come up, as in the Old French song about Saint Eulalia.4
The Russian language is a Hellenic language. Due to a whole complex of historical conditions, the vital forces of Hellenic culture, which had abandoned the West to Latin influences, and which found scant nourishment to prompt them to linger long in childless Byzantium, rushed to the bosom of Russian speech and communicated to it the self-confident secret of the Hellenic world view, the secret of free incarnation, and so the Russian language became indeed sounding and speaking flesh.
While Western cultures and histories tend to lock language in from the outside, hem it in with walls of church and state and become saturated with it in order that they might slowly decay and slowly come into bloom as the language in due course disintegrates, Russian culture and history are washed and girdled on all sides by the awesome and boundless element of the Russian language, which does not fit into church or state forms of any kind.
The life of language in Russian history outweighs all other factors through the ubiquity of its manifestations, its plenitude of being, a kind of high goal that all other aspects of Russian life strive to attain without succeeding. One can identify the Hellenic nature of the Russian language with its capacity for achieving concrete modalities of existence. The word in the Hellenic conception is active flesh that resolves itself in an event. Therefore, the Russian language is historical even in and of itself, the incessant incarnation and activity of intelligent and breathing flesh. There is not a single other language that stands more squarely opposed than the Russian to merely denotative or practical prescription. Russian nominalism, that is, a doctrine of the reality of the word as such, animates the spirit of our language and links it with Hellenic philological culture, not etymologically and not literarily, but through a principle of inner freedom that is equally inherent in them both.
Utilitarianism of any sort is a mortal sin against Hellenic nature, against the Russian language, quite regardless of whether it be a tendency toward a telegraphic or stenographic code, whether for reasons of economy or simplified expediency, or even whether it be utilitarianism of a higher order, offering language in sacrifice to mystical intuition, anthroposophy, or word-hungry, omnivorous thinking of any kind.
Andrei Biely,5 now, turns out to be a painful and negative phenomenon in the life of the Russian language. This is only because he pursues the word so single-mindedly and yet is guided in this pursuit exclusively by the fervor of his own speculative thought. He gasps, with a kind of refined garrulity. He cannot bring himself to sacrifice a single shading, a single fragment of his capricious thought, and he blows up the bridges he is too lazy to cross. As a result, we have, after momentary fireworks, instead of a fullness of life, an organic wholeness, and a moving balance, a heap of paving-stones, a dismal picture of ruin. The basic sin of writers like Andrei Biely is their lack of respect for the Hellenic nature of the word, their merciless exploitation of it for their own intuitive goals.
Russian poetry more than any other brings up as a motif again and again that ancient doubt of the word’s capacity to express feeling:
How can the heart express itself?
How can another understand you?
(Tiutchev)6
—Thus our language secures itself from unceremonious encroachments.
The rate at which language develops is not the same as that of life itself. Any attempt to adapt language mechanically to the requirements of life is doomed in advance to failure. Futurism, as it is called, is a conception created by illiterate critics that lacks any real content or scope; it is, however, more than a curiosity of philistine literary psychology. Futurism acquires an exact sense if one understands by it precisely this attempt at a forced, mechanical adaptation, this lack of faith in our language itself which is at one and the same time Achilles and the turtle.
Khlebnikov busies himself with words, like a mole, and he provides for the future by burrowing enough passageways in the earth to last for a whole century. The representatives of the Moscow metaphorical school who call themselves Imaginists, on the other hand, exhaust themselves adapting our language to modern life. They have remained far behind language, and it is their fate to be swept away like litter.
Chaadaev,7 when he wrote that Russia had no history, that is, that Russia belonged to no organized cultural system, omitted one circumstance—and that is language. Such a highly organized, such an organic language is not merely a door into history, it is history itself. For Russia, a defection from our language would be a defection from history, excommunication from the kingdom of historical necessity and sequence, from freedom and expediency. The “muteness” of two or three generations could bring Russia to its historical death. Excommunication from language has for us a force equal to that of excommunication from history. Therefore it is absolutely true that Russian history walks on tiptoes along the edge, along the bank, over the abyss, and is ready at any moment to fall into nihilism; that is, into excommunication from the word.