Just as Rozanov is the representative in our literature of a domestic Hellenism that plays the holy fool and the beggar, so Annensky9 is the representative of heroic Hellenism, philology militant. The poems and tragedies of Annensky can be compared to the wooden fortifications, the stockades, which were set up deep in the steppe by the appanage princes for defense against the Pechenegs as the time of the Khazar night came on.
Against my dark fate I no longer feel injury;
Stripped and unpowered was Ovid once, too.
Annensky’s incapacity to submit himself to any kind of influence, to be a go-between, a translator, is immediately striking. With a most original swoop he seizes the foreign in his claws, and still in the air, at a great height, he haughtily lets his prey drop, allowing it to fall by its own weight. And so the eagle of his poetry, that had entaloned Euripides, Mallarmé, and Leconte de Lisle, never brought us anything in its clutch but some tufts of dry grass—
Hark, a madman is knocking at your door
God knows where and with whom he spent the past night,
His gaze wanders and his speech is wild,
And his hand is full of pebbles.
Before you know it, he empties the other hand.
He showers you with dry leaves.
Gumilev called Annensky a great European poet. It seems to me that when the Europeans come to know him, having humbly instructed their future generations in the study of the Russian language as former generations had been instructed in the ancient languages and classical poetry, they will take fright at the audacity of this regal predator, who has seized from them their dove Eurydice and carried her off to the Russian snows; who has torn the classical shawl from the shoulders of Phaedra, and has placed with tenderness, as becomes a Russian poet, an animal hide on the still-shivering Ovid. How amazing Annensky’s fate is! He fingered universal riches, yet saved for himself only a miserable pittance; or rather, he lifted a handful of dust and flung it back into the blazing treasure house of the West. Everyone slept while Annensky kept vigil. The realist moral chroniclers [bytoviki] were snoring. The journal The Scales did not yet exist. The young student Viacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was studying with Mommsen and writing a Latin monograph on Roman taxes. And at this time the headmaster of the Tsarskoe Selo lyceum was wrestling long nights with Euripides, assimilating the snake poison of crafty Hellenic speech, preparing an infusion of such strong, bitter-as-wormwood poems as no one had written before or would write after him. For Annensky, too, poetry was a domestic affair, and Euripides a domestic writer, just one continuous citation and set of quotation marks. Annensky perceived all of world poetry as a shaft of light thrown off by Hellas. He had a sense of what distance means, felt its pathos and cold; and he never tried to bring together externally the Russian and the Hellenic world. The lesson Annensky’s creative work taught Russian poetry was not Hellenization but an inner Hellenism adequate to the spirit of the Russian language, a domestic Hellenism so to speak. Hellenism is a baking dish, a pair of tongs, an earthenware jug with milk; it is domestic utensils, crockery, the body’s whole ambiance; Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth felt as something sacred; it is any personal possession that joins part of the external world to a man, any clothes placed on someone’s shoulders by a random person, accompanied by that very same sacred shudder with which
As the swift river froze
And winter storms raged,
With a downy hide they covered
The holy old man,
Hellenism means consciously surrounding man with utensils [utvar’] instead of indifferent objects; the metamorphosis of these objects into the utensil, the humanization of the surrounding world; the environment heated with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any stove near which a man sits, prizing its warmth as something related to his own inner warmth. Finally, Hellenism is the boat of the dead in which Egyptian corpses set sail, in which everything is stored that is needed for continuation of a man’s earthly wanderings, including even an aromatic jar, a hand mirror, and a comb. Hellenism is a system, in the Bergsonian sense of the word, which man unfolds around himself, like a fan of phenomena liberated from temporal dependence, commonly subordinated to an inner bond through the human “I.”
In Hellenic terms, the symbol is a utensil, and therefore any object drawn into the sacred circle of man can become a utensil; and therefore, a symbol, too. And so we may ask whether Russian poetry needs a deliberately contrived Symbolism. Is this not a sin against the Hellenic nature of our language that creates images as utensils for the use of man?
Essentially there is no difference between word and image. The word is already a sealed image; one may not touch it. It is not suitable for daily use; no one will light a cigarette from the icon-lamp. Such sealed images are also very much needed. Man loves interdiction, and even the savage puts a magical ban, a “taboo,” on certain objects. And yet, the sealed image, removed from use, is hostile to man; in its own way, it is a scarecrow, a bugbear.
All that passes is merely a likeness. Let’s take an example: a rose or the sun, a dove or a girl. For the Symbolist not one of these figures is interesting in itself; but rather the rose is an image of the sun, the sun is an image of the rose, the dove is an image of the girl, and the girl is an image of the dove. The figures are gutted like a stuffed owl and packed with a strange content. Instead of a symbolic forest, a taxidermist’s shop.
That is where professional Symbolism is headed. The power of perception has been demoralized. Nothing is real or authentic. The terrible contredanses of “correspondences,” all nodding to each other. Eternal winking. Not a single clear word; only hints and implications. The rose nods at the girl, the girl at the rose. Nobody wants to be himself. The epoch of Russian poetry dominated by the Symbolists surrounding the journal The Scales was quite remarkable indeed. Over two decades, it developed an enormous structure that stood on clay feet and might best be defined as the epoch of pseudo-symbolism. Let this definition not be understood as a reference to Classicism, denigrating the beautiful poetry and fruitful style of Racine. Pseudoclassicism is a nickname applied by academic ignorance that has since been fastened to a great style. Russian pseudo-symbolism is really pseudosymbolism. Jourdain discovered in the maturity of his years that all his life he had been speaking prose. The Russian Symbolists discovered that very same prose—the primal figurative nature of the word. They put a seal on all words, all images, designating them exclusively for liturgical use. This has very uncomfortable results—you can’t get by or get up or sit down. Impossible to light a fire, because it might signify something that would make you unhappy.
Man was no longer master in his own house; it would turn out he was living in a church or in a sacred druidic grove. Man’s domestic eye had no place to relax, nothing on which to rest. All utensils were in revolt. The broom asked holiday, the cooking pot no longer wanted to cook, but demanded for itself an absolute significance (as if cooking were not an absolute significance). They had driven the master from his home and he no longer dared to enter there. How is it to be then with the attachment of the word to its denotative significance? Isn’t this a kind of bondage that resembles serfdom? But the word is not a thing. Its significance is not the equivalent of a translation of itself. In actual fact, there never was a time when anybody baptized a thing, called it by a thought-up name. It is most convenient and in the scientific sense most accurate to regard the word as an image; that is, a verbal representation. In this way the question of form and content is removed; assuming the phonetics are the form, everything else is the content. The problem of what is of primary significance, the word or its sonic properties, is also removed. Verbal representation is an intricate complex of phenomena, a connection, a “system.” The signifying aspect of the word can be regarded as a candle burning from inside a paper lantern; the sonic representation, the so-called phonemes, can be placed inside the signifying aspect, like the very same candle in the same lantern.