Of contemporary Russian writers, Rozanov8 has felt this danger more keenly than any other, and he spent his whole life struggling to preserve a link with the word, on behalf of a philological culture, which would base itself firmly on the Hellenic nature of Russian speech. My attitude to just about everything may be anarchic, my world view a complete muddle, catch-as-catch-can; yet there is one thing I cannot do—live wordlessly; I cannot bear excommunication from the word. That was more or less Rozanov’s spiritual makeup. This anarchic and nihilistic spirit acknowledged only one authority—the magic of language, the authority of the word. And this, mind you, not while being a poet, a collector and threader of words beyond any concern for style, but while being simply a babbler or a grumbler.
One of Rozanov’s books is called By the Church Walls. It seems to me that all his life Rozanov rummaged about in a swampy wasteland, trying to grope his way to the walls of Russian culture. Like several other Russian thinkers, like Chaadaev, Leontiev, Gershenzon, he could not live without walls, without an Acropolis. The environment yields; everything is mellow, soft, and pliable. Yet we want to live historically; we have within us an ineluctable need to find the firm hard kernel of a Kremlin, an Acropolis, no matter what this nucleus might be called, whether we name it “state” or “society.” The need for this nucleus and for whatever walls might serve as a symbol for this nucleus determined Rozanov’s whole fate, and it definitely acquits him of the accusation of anarchic tendencies or lack of principle.
“It’s hard for a man to be a whole generation. All there is left for him to do is to die. It’s time for me to decay, for you to blossom.” And Rozanov did not live; rather, he went on dying a clever, intellectual death, as generations die. Rozanov’s life was the death of philology, the dessication, the withering of letters, and that bitter struggle for the life that glimmers in colloquialisms and small talk, in quotation marks and citations, and yet all the same remains philology and only philology.
Rozanov’s attitude to Russian literature was as “unliterary” as it could be. Literature is a social phenomenon; philology is a domestic phenomenon, of the study. Literature is a public lecture, the street; philology is a university seminar, the family. Yes, just so, a university seminar where five students who know each other and call each other by first name and patronymic listen to the professor, while the branches of familiar campus trees stretch toward the window. Philology: it is a family because every family sustains itself by intonation and by citation, by quotation marks. In a family, the most lazily spoken word has its special shading. And an infinite, unique, purely philological literary nuancing forms the background of family life. This is why I deduce Rozanov’s inclination to domesticity, which so powerfully determined the whole tenor of his literary activity, from the philological nature of his spirit, which, in incessant search of the kernel, cracked and husked his words and colloquialisms, leaving us only the husk. No wonder that Rozanov turned out to be an inutile and unproductive writer.
How awful it is that man (the eternal philologue) found a word for it—“death.” Can it be named at all? Does it really have a name? A name is already a definition, already a “we-know-something.” Rozanov defines the essence of his nominalism in such an original way; a perpetual cognitive motion, a perpetual unshelling of the kernel, ending with nothing, because there is no way to crack it. But what kind of a literary critic is this Rozanov? He’s always only plucking at everything, he’s a casual, chancy reader, a lost sheep, neither here nor there.
A critic has to know how to devour his way through volumes, picking out what he needs, making generalizations: but Rozanov plunges in over his head into the line of almost any Russian poet, as he got stuck in that line of Nekrasov’s: “If I ride at night along the dark street,” the first thing that came to mind one night in a cab. The Rozanovian commentary: one could scarcely find another verse like that in the whole of Russian poetry. Rozanov loved the church for that very same philology for which he loved the family. Here is what he says: “The church pronounced such amazing words over the deceased, as we ourselves would scarcely know how to utter over a father, a son, a wife, a dead mistress; that is, she has felt that any man dying or dead was so close, so ‘near her spirit’ as only a mother can feel her own dead child. How can we not leave her everything in return for this . . . ?”
The antiphilological spirit with which Rozanov wrestled had burst loose from the very depths of history; in its own way, it was just as much an inextinguishable flame as the philological fire.
There are on earth just such eternal oil-fed fires; a place catches fire accidentally and burns dozens of years. There is absolutely no way to snuff them out. Luther showed himself to be a bad philologue because, instead of an argument, he let fly an inkwell. The antiphilological fire ulcerates Europe’s body, growing dense with flaming volcanoes in the land of the West, making an everlasting cultural wasteland out of that soil on which it had burst forth. There is no way to put out the hungry fire. We must let it burn, while avoiding the cursed places, where no one really needs to go, toward which no one will hurry.
Europe without philology isn’t even America; it’s a civilized Sahara, cursed by God, an abomination of desolation. The European castles and Acropolises, the Gothic cities, the cathedrals like forests, and the dome-topped basilicas would stand as before, but people would look at them without understanding them, and even more likely they would grow frightened of them, not understanding what force raised them up, or what blood it is that flows in the veins of the mighty architecture surrounding them.
What an understatement! America has outdone this Europe that for the time being is still comprehensible. America, having exhausted the philological supply it had carried over from Europe, somehow panicked, then took some thought and suddenly started growing its own personal philology, dug Whitman up from someplace or other; and he, like a new Adam, began to give names to things, provided a standard for a primitive, nomenclatural poetry to match that of Homer himself. Russia is not America; we have no philological import trade; an out-of-the-way poet like Edgar Poe wouldn’t germinate here, like a tree growing from a date pit that had crossed the ocean in a steamer. Except maybe for Balmont, the most un-Russian of poets, alien translator of the Aeolian harp, of a sort never found in the West; a translator by calling, by birth, even in the most original of his works.
Balmont’s position in Russia is that of being the foreign representative of a nonexistent phonetic power, the rare instance of a typical translation without an original. Although Balmont is actually a Muscovite, between him and Russia there lies an ocean. This is a poet completely alien to Russian poetry; he will leave less of a trace in it than the Edgar Poe or the Shelley who were translated by him, although his own poems lead one to assume a very interesting original.
We have no Acropolis. Our culture has been wandering until now and has not found its walls. But to make up for it, every word of Dal’s dictionary is a kernel of Acropolis, a small castle, a winged fortress of nominalism, equipped with the Hellenic spirit for incessant struggle with the formless element, with the nonbeing that threatens our history on all sides.