The old psychology only knew how to objectivize representations and, while overcoming naïve solipsism, regarded representations as something external. In this case, the decisive instant was the instant of what was immediately given. The immediately given of the products of our consciousness approximates them to objects of the external world and permits us to regard representations as something objective. The extremely rapid humanization of science, including in this sense epistemology, too, directs us onto another path. Representations can be regarded not only as the objective-given of consciousness, but also as man’s organs, quite like the liver or the heart.
Applied to the word, such a conception of verbal representations opens broad new perspectives and allows one to speculate on the creation of an organic poetics; not of a legislative, but of a biological character, destroying a canon in the name of a closer inner approximation to the organism, possessing all the features of biological science.
The organic school of the Russian lyric has taken upon itself the tasks of constructing such a poetics. I refer to the school that rose from the creative initiative of Gumilev and Gorodetsky in the beginning of 1912, to which Akhmatova, Narbut, Zenkevich, and the author of these lines were officially attached.10 The very modest literature of Acmeism and the scarcity of theoretical work by its leaders render its study difficult. Acmeism arose out of repulsion: “Away with Symbolism, long live the living rose!”—that was its original slogan. It was Gorodetsky who in his time tried to graft onto Acmeism the literary world view called “Adamism,” a sort of doctrine of a new earth and a new Adam. The attempt did not succeed. Acmeism did not adopt a world view; it brought in a series of new taste sensations, much more valuable than ideas; mostly, the taste for an integral literary representation, the image, in a new organic conception. Literary schools do not live by ideas, but by tastes; to bring along a whole heap of new ideas but not to bring new tastes means not to make a new school but merely to form a poetics. On the other hand, a school can be created by tastes alone, without any ideas. Not the ideas but the tastes of Acmeism were what turned out to be the death of Symbolism. The ideas seemed to have been partly taken over from the Symbolists, and Viacheslav Ivanov himself helped a good deal in constructing Acmeist theory. Yet behold the miracle: new blood flowed in the veins of Russian poetry. It is said that faith moves mountains, but with regard to poetry I would say: it is taste that moves mountains. Because a new taste developed in turn-of-the-century Russia, we saw such giants as Rabelais, Shakespeare, Racine pick up stakes and move our way to be our guests. Acmeism’s upward thrust, its active love for literature with all its difficulties, is unusually great; and the lever of this active love is precisely a new taste, a masculine will to poetry and to a poetics, in the center of which stands man, not flattened to a pancake by pseudosymbolism, surrounded by symbols, that is by utensils, possessing literary representations, too, as a creature possesses its own organs.
More than once in Russian society we have had moments of inspired reading in the heart of Western literature. Thus, Pushkin, and with him his whole generation, read Chénier. Thus, the following generation, the generation of Odoevsky, read Schelling, Hoffmann,11 and Novalis. Thus, the men of the sixties read their Buckle,12 and, although neither party in this case possessed any dazzling genius, a more ideal reader could not be found. The Acmeist wind turned over the pages of Classics and Romantics, and these came open to the very place the age most needed. Racine opened to Phaedra, Hoffmann to The Serapion Brothers. We found Chènier’s iambs and Homer’s Iliad.
Acmeism was not merely a literary, but also a social phenomenon in Russian history. It brought a reinvigorated moral force back into Russian poetry. “I want to sail my free boat everywhere; and God and the Devil I’ll glorify alike,” said Briusov. This wretched affirmation of the void [nichevochestvo] will never repeat itself in Russian poetry. So far, the social pathos of Russian poetry has risen only to the conceptual level of “citizen”; but there is a higher principle than “citizen”—the concept “man” [muzh].
In distinction to the old civic poetry, the new Russian poetry has to educate not only the citizen but also the “man.” The ideal of complete manliness is prepared by style and by the practical demands of our time. Everything has become heavier and bigger; so man, too, must stand more firmly, because man should be the firmest thing on the earth and should regard his relation to the earth as that of diamond to glass. The hieratic, that is to say, the sacred character of poetry, is dependent on the conviction that man is the firmest thing in the world.
The age quiets down, culture goes to sleep, a people is reborn, having given its best forces to a new social class; and this whole current bears the frail boat of the human word into that open sea of the immediate future, where there is no sympathetic understanding, where dreary commentary replaces the fresh wind of the hostility-and-sympathy of one’s contemporaries. How then can one rig this boat for its distant trek, without having supplied it with everything necessary for so alien and so precious a reader. Once more I compare the poem to an Egyptian boat of the dead. In this boat, everything is equipped for life; nothing is forgotten.
Yet I see many objections beginning to arise and something of a reaction to Acmeism as it was originally formulated; a crisis similar to that of pseudosymbolism. For composing a poetics, pure biology won’t do. However good and fruitful the biological analogy might be, with its systematic application a biological canon comes into being, no less oppressive and intolerable than the pseudosymbolical. From the physiological conception of art, “the superstitious abyss of the Gothic spirit” stares out. Salieri13 is worthy of respect and burning love. It is not his fault that he heard the music of algebra as loudly as that of living harmony.
In the place of the Romantic, the idealist, the aristocratic dreamer of the pure symbol, of an abstract esthetic of the word, in place of Symbolism, Futurism, and Imaginism, we now have the living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not the idealist-dreamer Mozart, but the stern and strict master craftsman Salieri, who now holds out his hand to that master of things and material values, the builder and producer of the material world.
Note
Note: This translation was originally published in Avion 2, no. 4 (1976).
* Reprinted, with slight modifications, from Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev, translated by Burton Raffei and Alla Burago, by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright © 1972 State University of New York.
Notes about Poetry
Contemporary Russian poetry didn’t drop from heaven. It was anticipated by our country’s entire poetic past—after all, didn’t Iazykov’s1 clicking and clattering anticipate Pasternak, and doesn’t this one example suffice to show how the poetic big-guns converse with one another in connecting salvos, not at all embarrassed by the indifference of the time that separates them? In poetry, it’s always wartime. And it is only in epochs of social idiocy that there is peace or a truce. The root-conductors, like regimental commanders, take up arms against one another. The roots of words battle in the darkness, each “deriving” from the other sustenance and vital juices. The Russian conflict of unwritten secular speech, that is of the domestic root word, the language of peasant laymen, with the written speech of monks, with the hostile, Church-Slavic, Byzantine document, is felt to this day.