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Self on the move: lyrical journeys in the twentieth-century Russian poetry

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Self on the move: lyrical journeys in the twentieth-century Russian poetry

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Content SELF ON THE MOVE: LYRICAL JOURNEYS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY by Maria Salnikova A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES December 2021 Copyright 2021 Maria Salnikova ii Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would not be possible without the support of the USC Graduate School who funded my work and enabled research travels to Russia and Armenia. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my academic advisor Dr. Sally Pratt for her unwavering guidance, profound belief in my work and patience. Your invaluable feedback and encouragement played a decisive role in shaping and completing this dissertation. I am also grateful to Dr. Alexander Zholkovsky for the insightful discussions that brought this work to a higher level. Your unparalleled knowledge of Russian literature and constructive criticism stimulated my thinking throughout working on this project. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. David St. John who provided an insight into Anglo-American travel poetry, as well as the mechanisms of poetic self-identification. In addition, I would like to thank Dr. Sergey Pakhomov and Dr. James McHugh for their contributions. Special thanks to my interviewees Olga Sedakova and Mikhail Mil’chik who kindly agreed to participate in this study and thus enhanced its academic value. Last but not least, my appreciation goes out to my family and friends in Russia and the United States for their understanding and support all through my studies. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................ii Abstract...........................................................................................................................................iv Introduction......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: “Attracted to a Mountain”: The Sense of Self in Mandelstam's Writings on Armenia..........................................................................................................................................60 The Poetic Silence and The Threatened Self......................................................................61 “A Desired Journey to Armenia”.......................................................................................66 Deriving the Semantic Formulae of Armenia as Self.........................................................72 “The Sense of Attraction to a Mountain”...........................................................................89 Into the Other Dimensions of Attraction.........................................................................133 Chapter 2: Brodsky the Traveler: The Liberated Self Against the Quest for Homecoming........144 The Art of Leaving and The Lessons of Self-Alienation.................................................146 The Ulysses Unreturned: Brodsky the Traveler against the Nostos................................175 Elusive Visions of Home: On Brodsky’s Few Late Lyrical Journeys.............................199 Chapter 3: “The Multitude of Eyes”: Metarealism of Vision in Olga Sedakova’s “The Chinese Journey”..................,,,..................................................................................................................234 Between Self and the Others............................................................................................236 Between China and Russia...............................................................................................243 Between Memory, Reality, and Dream............................................................................253 Between Poetry and Icon Painting...................................................................................260 Chapter 4: Conclusion..................................................................................................................275 Bibliography................................................................................................................................287 iv Abstract This dissertation explores the correlation between the place and the sense of self in Russian travel poetry, as well as lyrical manifestations of shifts in perception of space and time that one experiences due to mobility and exposure to foreign cultures. It specifically focuses on transformations of the identity caused by traveling both inside and outside the closed borders of the USSR, as shown in the Russian travel lyrics written in the 1930s through the 1990s. The research evaluates three distinct cases of the traveling Russian Soviet poets, namely Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Olga Sedakova, who each in their own way challenged the condition of restricted freedom of movement and captured their travels through the lens of subjective experience, as opposed to the uniform “we” of the Socialist Realist travelogue bounded by “ideological space.” My analysis of poetic texts reveals that, in the context of the Soviet reconsideration of cultural values and “rewriting” of the world history and geography, the poets like Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova all resort to self-identification with the Other by means of cultural memory embedded in their destinations. This tendency is evident of continuity between these authors’ worldviews and the pre-Soviet discourse of cosmopolitanism and intercultural openness, as well as continuity between their lyrical approaches and the Modernist tradition of lyrical travelogue grounded in curiosity and respect for historical past and cultural difference. 1 Introduction The theme of travel has been central to the world literature across ages, from Homer’s Odyssey to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Kerouac’s On the Road and further into the twenty first century. 1 In Russia the epitome of travel literature has always been nineteenth-century travelogues in prose, such as Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler and Pushkin’s A Journey to Arzrum. This canon of Russian travel writing and its significance for the development of the national literature have been well studied in the field of Slavic literatures and languages. Such scholars as Andreas Schönle, Reuel K. Wilson, Sara Dickinson and Derek Offord provided thorough analyzes of evolution of the travel prose and identified its heyday from the 1780s to the 1830s as a crucial “transitional stage in the movement of Russian literature towards the novel” (Wilson XII) and “realist fiction” in the whole (Dickinson 24). Despite such acknowledgement of the historical impact of travelogues in prose, Russian travel realized through poetry has rarely been examined in the scholarship as a self-contained literary entity. While the researchers of the Western travel literature tend to recognize the poetic input of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth (Helmers, Mazzeo 4), Byron, Rogers, Goethe, Heine (Thompson 2) in the tradition, the importance of travel poetry in the Russian context has not been adequately assessed. To address this lack, I argue that lyrical journeys present fruitful material for tracing the formation of individual poetic subjectivity in Russian poetry. Unlike the travelogues in prose that require stronger narrativity and objectivity, travel lyrics by their very nature facilitate the possibility of deeper authorial introspection. Furthermore, even though they focus on individual perception, travel lyrics reflect the wide-scale mechanisms of self- identification characteristic of whole generations of members of the given culture. In Lydia 1 The scholarly literature on the world travel writing is extremely broad. For more on the development of travelogues in the world literatures see Adams, Porter, Thompson, Fussell, Campbell, Korte, Batten, among many others. 2 Ginzburg’s words, just like any other lyrical genre, travel lyrics “seek the common, the representation of the spiritual life as universal. The representation of spiritual processes in lyrics is fragmentary, but the representation of a human being is more or less summary” 2 (10). Hence, the examination of lyrical journeys in poetry allows one to discover the peculiarities of the integrated self-consciousness of a given epoch. When taking into account the specificity of particular national literatures, travel poetry can also provide a valuable contribution in the assessment of evolution of the national self. This dissertation explores how the individual and, by extension, a shared self manifests itself in the travel poetry of Russian Modernism and unofficial twentieth-century Soviet travel poetry. It is important to clarify right away that my definition of travel lyric is broad – I regard it as a poem suggesting a temporary change of the poet’s environs by means of movement from one geographical place to another. Narrowing this definition is complicated by the fact that the quality of the poetic texts about travel is extremely heterogeneous. Motivations to travel vary widely, including leisure and education, as well as exploration, conquest, diplomacy or pilgrimage. Some lyrical journeys are based on the factual trips taken by poets, while other are purely imaginary 3 . There are texts that take a lyrical persona to distant foreign lands, and those that draw on domestic travel experience. 4 Their chronotopes might suggest calling for or dreaming of a future voyage, taking travel notes on-the-go and thus maintaining the sense of immediacy, or looking back at a trip retrospectively. In addition, what seems to be a lyrical journey can sometimes qualify as a piece of exilic or émigré writing. While exilic poetry is not the focus of this dissertation, the second chapter explores if and in what ways the exilic stance is capable of modifying the poet’s subsequent travel experience. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 3 For more on the fiction and auhenticity in Russian travel writing, see Schönle. 4 For more on the difference between the foreign and the domestic travel in Russia and how the latter shaped Russian national identity, see Dickinson. 3 The increased number of travel lyrics during the Modernist stage of Russian cultural development conditions the significance of this research for Slavic literary scholarship. Specifically, my study focuses on alienation, fragmentation and other displacements of identity and treats them as part of the universal effect of modernity on humanity, as demonstrated by the Russian Modernist lyrical narratives of movement. At the same time, it conceptualizes these transformations of the voyaging self in terms of the twentieth-century Russian culture, which itself underwent major historical shifts and redefinitions: from “Russian” to “Soviet,” from “tsarist” or “bourgeois” to “proletarian” or “popular,” from “wartime” to “interwar” to “postwar,” from “Stalinist” to “Thaw-era,” and so forth. Within this shifting cultural consciousness, the very categories of space, time and self are constantly subject to reconsideration. The travel poems studied in his dissertation showcase precisely these historically determined spatio-temporal and psychological fluctuations. Given the peculiar geographical closeness of the Soviet state throughout most of its history, they also highlight one of the most problematic characteristics of the twentieth-century Russian culture – what Joseph Brodsky called “claustrophobic consciousness” (Polukhina, Brodsky 145) and Evgeny Dobrenko defined as “topographic schizophrenia” of Russian Soviet discourse (180), namely its implicit disconnectedness from the outer world and its cultural heritage, largely perceived as a threatening Other. Rather than exploring this isolating tendency from within, in my work I chose to resort to the reverse logic and concentrate on the three authors who present an exception to the rule. Though separated from each other by a decade or more, in their travel texts the poets Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova each in their own way dare to defy the Soviet geopolitical and cultural isolation, attempt to relate to the Other and to establish a solid transcultural link between their own versions of the traveling self and the alien worlds that they 4 discover. As such, they also posit a continuity between their selves and the pre-isolationist cosmopolitan Russian Modernist identity. Some aspects of this topic have been touched upon in the recent scholarship on Russian travelogues. Beglye vzgliady. Novoe prochtenie russkikh travelogov pervoi treti XX veka (Cursory Gazes. New Reading of Russian Travelogues of the First Third of the 20th century) edited by W. S. Kissel, for instance, is a collection of insightful essays by German Slavists that examine the “historical condition of flight” characteristic of the Russian travel texts created in the tumultuous epoch of the revolutions, the world and civil wars of the early twentieth century. These authors define such pivotal motifs in the travel literature of Russian modernity as: the fusion of myth and science fiction, the poetics of nomadism and intense visuality of the travelogues, their metaliterary quality, a high level of self-consciousness, and the open- endedness of journeys. Rosalind Marsh examines the notion of a voyage as a form of escape from the confines of the prescribed feminine identity in the travelogues of Russian women of the Silver age (“Travel and the Image of the West”). Marina Balina’s article “Literatura puteshestvii” (“Literature of Travel”) in the collection Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (Socialist Realist Canon), edited by Dobrenko and Günther, underscores some vital features of the typical Soviet travelogue – the totality of space, a focus on the borderline (as opposed to what is across or outside it), orientation on the future and resistance to the past, devaluation of the Other, and increasing disinterestedness in the traveling subject. Eric Naiman, Evgeny Dobrenko and other authors of The Landscape of Stalinism formulate such problems related to Soviet travel literature as the amalgamation of the Soviet landscape and ideological discourse, the utopianism of the latter, the sacralization/tabooing of certain loci, the artificial spatial uniformity of the country informed by specific descriptive strategies, and the mythical narrative of the state’s geopolitical, agricultural and industrial transformation that the early Soviet tourism was meant to enhance. 5 The sociohistorical dimension of the topic in question was surveyed by such scholars as Louise McReynolds, Yuri Felshtinsky, Michael David-Fox, Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker, Igor Orlov, A.D. Panov, Ye. V. Yurchikova. In her book Russia At Play, McReynolds describes how the imperial expansion and industrialization of the 1800s provided an increased opportunity of travel in Russia at the turn of the centuries and how Russian first middle-class tourists used travel to structure their identity in the changing society. In his book K istorii nashei zakrytosti (Towards a History of Our Isolation), Yuri Felshtinsky summarizes the history of early Soviet international policies and restrictions on departures up to the 1930s, mainly in the context of emigration. In his article “From Illisory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel and Party: Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period” Michael David-Fox takes a closer look at the formation of the system of patronage relationships between creative intelligentsia and official Soviet institutions, including the allocation of foreign trips in the 1920s. Diane Koenker, in her essay for the collection Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, assesses the establishment of the mass proletarian domestic tourism of the 1930s. Anne Gorsuch’s book All this is your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin traces the paths of its development in the time of late Stalinism and presents an account of those historical conditions under which the hermetic Soviet state opened its borders for both inbound and outbound international mass travel during the Khrushchev’s Thaw and beyond. Substantiated with the massive archival work and the interviews, Gorsuch’s work was also complemented by the research of the Russian historians Igor Orlov and A.D. Panov. Their book Russo Turisto: Sovetskii vyezdnoi turizm 1955-1991 (Russo Turisto: Soviet Outbound Tourism 1955-1991) addresses various aspects of the organization of the mass touristic trips in the USSR, such as the selection and training of the candidates for travel, the issue of authenticity of touristic experience in the official post-travel 6 reports, and even includes the representations of that experience in the mainstream Soviet culture, including literature, music, film and popular anecdotes. However, none of the above-mentioned works approached the theme of traveling through the lens of its transformational effect on the self and/or with the predominant use of the lyrical literary material. Perhaps, Ingrid Kleespies managed to get closest to this task in her fundamental study A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature, demonstrating an intrinsic interrelation between the fluid Russian self and the country’s history of nomadic expansion. Kleespies’ framework is limited with the nineteenth century, however, and only briefly engages with the lyrical modes of expression that imply a heightened state of subjectivity, specifically in her chapter on Pushkin’s poems written in the Southern exile. Carol Avins’ Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity is Soviet Literature: 1917-1934 extends this discussion into the twentieth century but limits the scope of her study to the transitional decades after the 1917 Revolution, focusing on the Soviet perception of the West as “a major dimension of Russia’s self-definition,” thus ignoring other important vectors of movement (2). My work aims to close this lacuna at least in part by considering the traveling lyrical self of the past century amidst the Russo-Soviet modernity – deprived of the freedom of cross-border movement, of ties with the past, of clear understanding of its position in the universal space and history and therefore desperately “longing for the world culture” and generally for the open world, to specify the renowned expression by Osip Mandelstam. My work concentrates on the development of the self in relation to Soviet South, West and East and covers the period from the 1920s through the 1990s. On the example of the lyrical journeys of Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova, I will look into some of the most idiosyncratic changes in the position of the modern traveling subject – alienation or multiplication of self, self-identification with space and time. I argue that the 7 travel poetry serves as a litmus test for the general destabilization of self inherent in Modernist aesthetics, a phenomenon further amplified against the background of the Soviet geopolitical and cultural reconfigurations. Unlike Kleespies and Avins, however, I will shift attention from the oft-discussed category of the national self to the self of the individual and creative “I,” thereby avoiding certain constraints. It is noteworthy, for instance, that at least two of the primary authors that I discuss, Mandelstam and Brodsky, did not fully identify as Russians, due to their Jewish origin. I am generally convinced that all of the poets in the focus of my study were searching for ways to broaden their identity through lyrical travels, rather than trying to reconceptualize it as a certain strand of “Russianness.” I am going to treat an individual travelling self as a flexible construct that is prone to internal transformations under the influence of rapid spatial and temporal displacements implicit in the modern experience of travel. Therefore, the central questions of my project include: in what ways does exposure to travel evoke the displacements of identity in the travelling poet? What changes of the poet’s perceptual ability does it produce? How do the shifts of self on the move correlate to the attendant conversions of space and time? What are the strategies of representation of these modifications in the travel lyrics of the modern Russian poetry? Are these strategies at odds with the official modes of representation of traveling self in the Soviet literature? My primary methodology in this task is the analysis of the number of lyrical travel texts by the following authors – Mandelstam’s 1930 poetic cycle “Armeniia” (“Armenia”), Brodsky’s miscellaneous Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Italian, Dutch and Swedish poems (1960s-1990s), and Sedakova’s 1986 “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” (“The Chinese Journey”) – with a particular attention to the shifts in modes of subjectivity. As correlates with the above-stated orientation on the individual identity, my approach is also highly biographical. All lyrical journeys that I 8 consider in my analysis were inspired by the travels that took place in actuality – Osip Mandelstam’s 1930 trip to Armenia, Joseph Brodsky’s travels around the Soviet Union and abroad in the 1960s-1990s, and Olga Sedakova’s Chinese journey of the 1950s. When possible, I supplement the close reading of the poetry with the authors’ and their contemporaries’ observations on their travels and writing from prose, memoirs and interviews, as well as archival information testifying to their relocations. By juxtaposing the existent accounts of the factual journeys (or in semiotic terms, the signified) with the narratives of the lyrical journeys and their possible interpretations (the signifiers), I hope to show the travel experience’s potential to modify a number of parameters affecting our sense of who we are and where we belong: the perception of our spatial location in general and home/abroad/border in particular, the notion of our place in the world history and culture, our affiliation with the certain nation(s), our experiences of creativity and faith, to name a few. Although my research does make use of some of the central concepts of postcolonial criticism, such as the Other, displacement and unhomeliness, it does not purport to provide a full- fledged postcolonial reading of its central texts. This is in part determined by the fact that the works discussed have already been partially examined from the postcolonial perspective (see, for example, Sanna Turoma’s book Brodsky Abroad) and in part by the assumption that the latter is not a point of key relevance for their interpretation. For example, Sedakova’s “The Chinese Journey” is rather disinterested in (anti-) colonialist ideologies and consciously blurs the lines of cultural difference between the subject and the objects of observation. Likewise, although it is tempting to see Mandelstam’s admiration for primitive lifestyle of Soviet Armenians as exotic othering, his attempt of self-identification with these people is profoundly discordant with the typical manifestations of the idea of colonialist superiority in travel writing. 9 The topic also displays proximity to other humanistic disciplines, such as history, anthropology and cultural studies. At its core is the acknowledgement of the fundamental conflict within different forms of representation of travel in the official, ideologically charged Soviet culture and “art of totality” (Groys 96), on the one hand, and the unofficial Soviet culture whose representatives were often deprived of the travel options available to the elites and/or contested the prescribed ways of narrating about their voyaging, on the other. Additionally, my discussion of the rigid genre prescriptions for the authors of Socialist Realist travelogues inevitably involves the performance theory. In their one-sided literary accounts of trips to the capitalist West or to the “friendly” socialist countries, the official travelers from the USSR willingly participated in what Anne Gorsuch called the “theater of diplomacy” (107) and had to showcase a certain uniform Soviet identity to the foreign world, thus compromising the very notion of authenticity of the self on-the-go. Certain poetic travelogues that I will consider in the end of this introduction manifest precisely this artificially constructed self, as opposed to the key figures of my dissertation chapters. But first, it is necessary to address the mechanism of interrelation between movement and the self, as well as outline the history of travel writing and travel poetry in the Russian literary- historical context. The Nomadic Self and the Beginnings of Russian Travel Poetry The researchers of travel literature and culture unanimously agree on the impact of journeys on the traveler’s psyche. As Eric Leed pointed out in The Mind of the Traveler, “the mental effects of passage… are inseparable from the physical conditions of movement through space” (72). According to Hulme and Youngs, “travel broadens the mind, and knowledge of distant places and people often confers status, but travelers sometimes return as different people” 10 (2). The contemporary criticism concurs: Michel Foucault’s late thought foregrounds the idea of “exploration and self-transformation through a dialogic engagement with alien modes of life” that traveling provides, among other things (Porter 4). In compliance with these statements, I take it as a prerequisite of my research that the travel experience is never confined to exploration of the external world only, but always makes the traveler turn their eyes inward. On the one hand, this self-examination naturally stems from interactions with foreign cultures, which prompt the voyager to compare/contrast oneself to the Other and contextualize the observed cultural difference based on subjective experiences. But it can also be explained by the mere fact of displacement in space and time and the need of the subject to redefine oneself in unfamiliar environs. This process is natural, since the travelers generally have stronger cognitive flexibility, higher creative potential and the more pronounced sense of self – the facts now confirmed by neuroscience and psychological research (Crane). However, it appears that, while switching spatio-temporal parameters, the highly responsive self of the traveler never remains fixed but, on the contrary, is constantly exposed to complex permutations. If this traveler happens to have a creative personality of the poet, one may expect even more dramatic shifts of the identity. From the theoretical point of view, the nature of these shifts can be clarified by illuminating the interrelation between the sense of self and the whereness. As Walker showed, drawing on the studies by Roland Barthes, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Henri Lefebvre and other, there is an immediate relationship between the self and the non-abstract expression of space, that is place. Our personal identity is dependent on our association with the places: “[A man’s] sense of who he is, his sense of the continuity of his self, is itself constituted by place.” Consequently, “the momentary experience of being unplaced [is] sufficient to unsettle the stabilities of identity that depend on place.” In line with Walker’s thinking, I posit that, as a 11 specific case of spatio-temporal displacement, travel always has a potential for displacement or, at least, transformation of the self. When it comes to Russian poetry, it is exactly this metamorphic experience that is reflected in many travel lyrics. However, the internal transformations would be impossible to register without the heightened awareness of lyrical subjectivity that is believed to have found its way into Russian poetry at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The canon of the Russian travel prose was by then partly established and, according to Dickinson, was oriented on “the expression of a natural identity, the discovery of a national culture” against the background of the West (14). While partly joining this current, travel lyrics also provided ways of wording more private, more subjective travel experiences. Because the Russian travel writing originates in prose, the brief discussion of the highlights of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian travel prose and its Western influences is necessary. As already established in the scholarship, the literary mode of travel emerges in Russia in the medieval genre of khozdheniia (“pilgrimages”), then gains ground in the sixteenth-century stateinye spiski (“trip reports”) written by the Russian diplomats from abroad and in the travel diaries by Peter I’s educated noblemen like those of P.A. Tolstoi and B.P. Sheremetyevo. 5 However, it is only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the Russian travel prose takes shape as a genre, following such Western precursors as Moritz's Travels of a German in England in the Year 1782 (1783), Dupaty's Letters on Italy (1788), Göethe's Italian Journey (1816-1817), Heine's Pictures of Travel (1826) and other. 6 5 The travel accounts by P.A. Vorontsov, A.B. Kurakin can be added to this list. For more on the early development of travel writing see Schönle, Dickinson, Wilson. 6 Among other Western travel narratives popular in the eighteenth century are Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727); Henry Fielding, Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755); Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (1766); James Boswell, An Account of Corsica (1768) and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785); Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775). For more in Western influences of the Russian travel writing see Offord. 12 This rise of travel writing was, of course, historically predetermined. As Yuri Lotman demonstrated in his TV series “Besedy o russkoi kul’ture” (“Conversations on Russian Culture”), the eighteenth century was an age of dislocations when most parts of Europe already had solid road systems. While Russians were originally restricted to seasonal traveling due to the poor condition of roads and harsh weather conditions, in the early nineteenth century the first Macadam stone-paved roads, as well as the stagecoach service between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, were introduced. Thus, new opportunities for both foreign and domestic travel opened up, and international communication improved significantly. The typical touristic practice at the time was the so called grand tour, the European journey designed to serve as a form of cultural and social education for young male members of nobility. As Dickinson notes, “the Russian version of the grand tour resembled the classic Western paradigm in many respects” and typically included destinations in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Holland, and England (27-28). All documentation needed at the time was the passport issued by the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. Already in 1777-78 in his Pis’ma iz vtorogo zagranichnogo puteshestviia (Letters from the Second Journey Abroad) “the grand tourist” Denis Fonvizin uses such conventional features of a travelogue as a first-person narrative in epistolary form, the autobiographical report of one’s own experiences and the absence of a unified plot. The authorial self here still takes refuge in the Classicist rationalism. The author is much less interested in his own subjective reactions to the surrounding world than in observing the customs and manners of the French and the Italian who receive his severe moral judgment. The introduction of stronger subjectivity in the travel prose is attributable to Radishchev’s 1790 work Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow) and especially to Karamzin’s 1797 Pis’ma russkogo puteshestvennika (Letters of a Russian Traveler), which set the standard for the travel writing in Russia and caused the influx of 13 multiple epigones in 1790-1830s, such as Glinka, Vel’tman, Bestuzhev-Marlinskii and others. The influence of Western European Sentimentalism, particularly Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and the English “graveyard poetry,” made it possible for the travelling narrator to pay attention not solely to the description of external world unfolding before his eyes, but to his emotional responses to it. To use Lavater’s metaphor mentioned in Karamzin’s Letters, the traveler’s personality and soul become a “mirror” of the surrounding objects (qtd. in Karamzin 153). The text that reoriented the canon of the classic nineteenth-century Russian travelogue is Pushkin’s Puteshestvie v Arzrum vo vremia pokhoda 1829 goda (A Journey to Arzrum during the Campaign of 1829) created when the poet was already straying away from Romanticism. Infamously prohibited from leaving abroad since the appearance of his provocative ode “Liberty” (“Volnost’”) in 1817 (Kleespies 83), Pushkin had to content himself with traveling on domestic routes during his 1820-1824 exile to the South of the Russian Empire (Yekaterinoslavl- Caucasus-Crimea-Kishinev-Odessa) and the 1829 trip along the paths of the Russian military to the Caucasus. A Journey to Arzrum reflects the events of the latter journey. In this prose Pushkin breaks ties with the sensibility of Karamzinian traveler and thus significantly limits authorial introspection. Instead of lyrical self-reflection, he rather resorts to the objective, documentary and descriptive style, as if feeling that “the travel narrative was not the proper place to give the poetic imagination free rein” (Wilson 118-119). In this way, Pushkin makes a move towards Realism, and the literary travelogue in prose enters its transition to the formation of the Realist novel. Therefore, the heyday of the travel prose comes to end in the 1830s, thus restraining advancement of traveler’s subjectivity in this direction. 7 As the Russian travelogues in prose 7 According to Dickinson, after Nicholas I attempted to reduce foreign travel in 1834, literary travelogues started losing their popularity (232-234). Nevertheless, certain travel and road motifs found their place in the novels like Lermontov’s Geroi nashego vremeni (A Hero of Our Time), Gogol’s Mertvye dushi (Dead Souls), and later Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika (A Sportsman’s Sketches) and Leskov’s Ocharovannyi strannik (Enchanted 14 appeared to be too confining for exploring the potential of characters’ self-development, the straightforward and factual travel narrative had to be refashioned “in terms of progress along more metaphorical roads” (Dickinson 237). While one of these roads was novelistic fiction, another was lyrical journeys. Consequently, Russian poetry developing in the first decades of the nineteenth century provided an alternative medium for the traveling author to meditate on the effects of a voyage on his inner world. Having outgrown the poetics of rigid stylistic requirements or, in Ginzburg’s terms, the poetics of “school of harmonious precision,” lyrics turned to individualization. It became clear that “the specificity of the lyric is that a person is present in it not only as an author, not only as an object of portrayal, but as its subject” (10). The concern with the active subjectivity was drawing the Russian poets closer and closer to what Ginzburg defined as a “poetry of thought,” where “lyrical emotion or reflection is related to the persona (naturally, generalized)” (51, emph. Ginzburg). 8 This budding ability of the Russian poets to ponder on themselves as individuals, their place in this world and their personal experiences that mold their inner life gave rise to travel lyrics, among other genres of poetic self-expression. Unlike in the earlier poetry, such as Trediakovsky’s “Ezda v ostrov liubvi” (“Journey to the Island of Love”) or Derzhavin’s “Na vozvrashchenie kniazia Zubova iz Persii” (“On the Return of Count Zubov from Persia”) that mainly use the concept of a journey allegorically for rumination on love or death, the poets of the 1810-1830s reflect on the specific trips to the actual geographical locations. Such poems as Batyushkov's “Na razvalinakh zamka v Shvetsii” (“On the Ruins of the Castle in Sweden”), “Perekhod cherez Rein” (“The Crossing of the Rhine”), Wanderer). Goncharov’s Fregat “Pallada” (Frigate “Pallada”) seems to be rather an exceptional example of a one-time attempt of revival of the travelogue tradition. For further discussion of the decline of travelogue genre see Dickinson: 231-237. 8 For more on Ginzburg’s take on the development of subjectivity in the Russian lyrics see the chapters “Shkola garmonicheskoi tochnosti” (“The School of Harmonius Precision”), “Poeziia mysli” (“The Poetry of Thought”), “Problema lichnosti” (“The Problem of the Persona”) in O lirike (On Lyrics). 15 Baratynsky’s “Nebo Italii, nebo Torkvata...” (“The sky of Italy, the sky of Torquato…”), Pushkin's “Poedem, ia gotov; kuda by vy, druz’ia...” (“Let’s go, I’m ready. Wherever you go, friends…”), “Tavrida” (“Taurida”), “Monastyr’ na Kazbeke” (“Kazbek Monastery”), Kozlov’s “Venetsianskaia noch’” (“The Venetian Night” ) and many other refer to some of the favorite Romanticist locales: Italy, Germany, France, Scandinavia and especially the newly-opened domestic itineraries to the Russian South, namely Caucasus and Crimea, now available due to Russia’s imperial expansion. In most of these poems the travelling self, influenced by the typically Romanticist image of a melancholic exile or wanderer, dreams or longs for the different world embodied in the travel destination, where the poet expects to acquire freedom or a secret knowledge of life. In the spirit of Romanticism, this sought-after world often resembles the heavenly other realm opposed to the worldly below. Naturally, in many instances it remains inaccessible for the persona. The inaccessibility of the other world invariably leads the author to contemplation of his own condition, whether it is his unfreedom, his love or his loneliness. It is during this “Golden Age of Russian poetry” that travelling poets developed a number of typical motifs or, more precisely, typical ways in which the traveling subject could relate to their travel experiences. It is crucial to identify them and provide examples, as they present various forms of “stock” imagery that would be used by their successors in the following years and decades: 1. One of the easiest ways to establish connection with the travel environs is through self- identification with the landscape, which as it were reflects the inner condition of the poet. Some of the fundamental examples include Pushkin’s Southern poems, such as “Pogaslo dnevnoe svetilo...” (“The daylight has gone out...” ) where the wandering poet, self-defined as “the searcher of the new impressions,” longs for the freedom of movement by relating to the unrest of the stormy Black sea carrying his ship and by discerning the distant outlines of the inaccessible 16 foreign shore (146-147). Pushkin’s “The night haze lies on the hills of Georgia...” (“Na kholmakh Gruzii lezhit nochnaia mgla...”) presents a similar case of correlation between the “intimate” nighttime landscape of the Caucasus mountains and the private revelation of the “radiant sadness” that the poet suffers from in separation from his beloved (158). Likewise, Lermontov’s “Tebe, Kavkaz, surovyi tsar’ zemli...” (“You, Caucasus, severe tzar of the earth...”) is an address to the anthropomorphized Caucasus mountain range, whose “proud rocks” the Byronic “exile” chooses as a refuge after “many difficult years” of life in the civilized North, namely Saint Petersburg: “Я сердцем твой – всегда и всюду твой” 9 (296). The self- identification with the idea of liberty embodied in the mountain scenery is immediate. The opposite attitude – dissociation between the self and the landscape – is rarer, but also appears in the travel lyrics of this time period. For instance, Nikolay Yazykov who left for Europe for six years in 1837 to seek medical help for the disease of spinal cord, discredited “the beauty and might” of Rhine in favor of the Russian Volga river in his epistle “K Reinu” (“To Rhine”): “Я волжанин: тебе приветы Волги нашей / Принес я. Слышал ты об ней? / Велик, прекрасен ты! Но Волга больше, краше/ Великолепнее, пышней…” (“K Reinu” 324). 10 The sentiment is clearly in line with the Romanticist interest in the concept of the national path, which originated in the German Romantic philosophy (Kleespies 82) – in Yazykov’s case the encounter with the alien scenery leads to the reaffirmation of one’s own Russianness: “I am from the Volga...” However, the recognition of the discord between the landscape and the traveler’s subjective observations is not limited to poetic accounts of foreign travel. In line with Radishchev’s tradition of critique of Russian domestic destinations, rare examples of politically 9 “I am yours at heart – forever and everywhere yours.” 10 “I am from the Volga country: I bring you greetings from our Volga. Have you heard of her? You are great and beautiful; but the Volga is larger, fairer, grander, and more magnificent...” (“To Rhine” 125). 17 controversial internal travel poetry are also at our disposal, such as Pavel Katenin’s “Kavkazskie gory” (“Caucasian Mountains”). Although lacking first-person narration, the description of the Caucasus in the sonnet is saturated with the pejorative overtones that signal the uneasy, if not hostile relationship between the self and the scenery: “уродливая складь бесплодных камней,” “ряд безобразных стен... ужасных пустотой,” “Цепь пресловутая всепетого Кавказа, / непроходимая, безлюдная страна, / Притон разбойников, поэзии зараза!” 11 (228). In contrast to Pushkin and Lermontov, Katenin criticizes the obsession with Caucasus as the pivotal Romanticist locale on the map of the Russian Empire and refuses to inscribe his “I” into its landscape. The poem ends with a series of rhetorical questions to the Caucasus that dare to put the very validity of the Russian imperial project under doubt: “Без пользы, без красы, с каких ты пор славна? <... > Скажи, проклятая, зачем ты создана?” (228) 12 2. Self-identification or the reverse dissociation with the people and/or customs is another common element of the travel lyrics, many of which therefore qualify to be subject to postcolonial criticism. An example of the positive connection with the alien world and its indigenous peoples can be found in poems by Lermontov, such as “Sinie gory Kavkaza, privetstvuiu vas!..” (“Blue mountains of the Caucasus, I greet you!..”). Lermontov portrays the Caucasus as the utopian land where he spent a part of his childhood and where everything is perfect, including its inhabitants: “все, все в этом крае прекрасно <...> И люди как вольные птицы живут беззаботно; / Война их стихия; и в смуглых чертах их душа говорит” 13 (231). The free, “carefree” life of the Caucasus’ natives is imagined to be an exemplary way of being 11 “An ugly pile of barren stones,” “a row of horrid walls... terrifying in their emptiness,” “The notorious range of the universally celebrated Caucasus, an impassable deserted land, a den of rogues, poetry’s contagion!” 12 “Without use, without beauty, since when are you praiseworthy? <...> Tell me, cursed one, why were you created?” 13 “Everything, everything is beautiful in this land <...> And people live free as birds without worries; war is their element; and through their dark features their soul speaks.” 18 that the poet is able to relate and aspire to – unlike the subject of the above-cited poem by Katenin, whose subject sees the tribes of the Caucasus mountains as razboiniki (“rogues”). A much more detached and sometimes overtly negative approach to the Other can be encountered in travel lyrics about Western Europe – perhaps, a natural consequence of the perceived sense of exclusion from the civilized European world, characteristic of the nineteenth- century Russian culture in general (Kleespies 3). By way of example, one of the most cosmopolitan poets of the Russian Golden Age Prince Piotr Vyazemsky extensively traveled around Europe in the 1830s and was personally acquainted with Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo and other key cultural figures of the time. In the 1850s he visited Europe again for medical reasons and wrote the poem “Venetsiia” (“Venice” ) that, among other things, pictures “the multi-colored caravan” of miscellaneous nations on San Marco square in Venice: Greeks, Turks, Englishmen who are condescendingly equated with the pigeons swarming on the piazza: “Голубей привольных куча, / А тем паче англичан” 14 (Stikhotvoreniia 317). Vyazemsky’s subject’s negative perception of the nineteenth-century European tourists with their travel notebooks manifests in the anxiety that places the very core of the Venetian culture, St. Mark’s cathedral, under a threat. In Vyazemsky’s imagination, its walls are about to be vandalized with the numerous visitors’ pencils: “Дай им волю – и в Сан-Марко / Впишут, не жалея стен, / Святотатственно и марко / Длинный ряд своих имен" 15 . The traveler clearly puts himself in opposition to the hordes of tourists menacing the European civilization – unlike them, he enjoys the Venetian beauty in the solitude of the night. 3. The particular case of the previous motif is the self-identification or dissociation with the foreign environment facilitated by romance, another trend concordant with the Romanticist 14 “There is a bunch of free-flying pigeons here, and even more Englishmen.” 15 “Leave them to their own devices – and in St. Mark’s Cathedral they will inscribe their names, without sparing the walls, in a sacrilegious and dirty manner...” 19 paradigm. Pushkin’s long Byronic poems Kavkazskii plennik (The Prisoner of Caucasus) and Tsygany (The Gypsies) explore the typical colonial narrative of the romantic conquest/advance of a woman native to the foreign environment – the Caucasus and Bessarabia correspondingly. In both, the quest for an indigenous woman’s love ends tragically – despite attraction, the gap between the cultures is impossible to bridge. Likewise, in Odoevsky’s “Chalma” (“A Turban” ) the Russian traveler in the South falls in love with the Turkish girl Roxana who predicts his imminent death and the correspondingly brief time of their love (49). Their open-ended farewell in the finale implies that Roxana’s prophecy will soon become true. In the poems with weaker narrativity the love story might actually never take place. In Pushkin’s “Kalmychke” (“To a Kalmyk Girl”) the passing traveler’s distanced infatuation with the Kalmyk girl’s “savage beauty” 16 lasts exactly “half an hour” while he is changing horses at the station (159). In Pushkin’s “Taurida” the poet sees the unknown Crimean woman whom he is attracted to on the mountain slopes, but ultimately feels unwilling or unable to follow her footsteps (103-105). Similarly, in Vyazemsky’s poem “Noch’ na Bosfore” (“Night on the Bosphorus”) the traveler appears to show interest in the unknown girl among a group of “oriental maids” on a passing caïque (boat). The object of desire remains a “mute shadow” that vanishes into the night as soon as the poet sees her. Thus, the traveling self is lured by the Other in a shape of a woman that eventually remains out of its reach (Stikhotvoreniia 294). 17 16 Remarkably, the othering of the Kalmyk girl is construed through the pointed contrast with Russian “civilized” ladies’ appearance, skills and occupations: “Your eyes are narrow, of course, and your nose is flat, and your forehead is wide; you don’t babble in French; you don’t swathe your legs in silk; you don’t make patterns with bread crumbs as you sit at the samovar in the English fashion; you don’t admire Saint-Mar; you don’t appreciate Shakespeare not a bit; when you have no thoughts in your head, you don’t sing: Ма dov’è; you don’t dance the galop in the Assembly...” (“Kalmychke” 159). In this case, Pushkin’s signature irony echoes the Orientalist discourse. 17 A peculiar reversal of this motif, namely a successful match between a Russian and a foreigner, is offered in the 1838 poem “Brak Gruzii s russkim tsarstvom” (“The Marriage of Georgia and the Russian Kingdom”) by A.I. Odoevsky – an intriguing allegory of international relations between two countries, although not a travel text per se. The poem celebrates the inclusion of Georgia into the Russian Empire – presented not as a military enterprise but as a voluntary marital union of two lovers, a Russian man and a Georgian woman. In accordance with the colonial discourse, the latter’s decision to “marry” the former appears to be voluntary: “There were many suitors, you chose 20 Although preoccupation with “oriental maids” was especially characteristic of the Russian Romanticist age and therefore invites an anti-orientalist critical approach, it would be unfair to state that the poets’ gazes were not also directed to the West. In “O parizhskikh zhenshchinakh” (“On Parisian Women” ) by Konstantin Batyushkov the poet extends admiration to all Parisian ladies rather than the sole beloved. Batyushkov wrote the poem in 1814 in Paris where he traveled as general Raevsky’s adjutant during the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleonic France. Being in paradoxical position of the conqueror in the city that was viewed by his compatriots as culturally superior, Batyushkov sings praises to Parisiennes’ gait, waistline, “half-naked” arms, feet, gaze and “passionate speech”: “все в них очарованье!” 18 (170). Although the first-person narration is seemingly absent, the eroticized description implies an intense subjective response, while the laconic line: “Поэт – на небесах” 19 contextualizes the encounter with the Other as nearly metaphysical experience. 4. Another series of conventional motifs is based on self-identification or, rarer, disconnection with the destination based on the literary, cultural or historical associations. For example, the poet in Batyushkov’s “On the Ruins of the Castle in Sweden,” contemplates the ruins of the Swedish castle through the prism of the Scandinavian history and mythology. The discord between the present-day wilderness and the glory of the destination’s military past prompts the poet to celebrate Sweden’s history and to bend the knee before the fallen warriors’ graves, as if commemorating his own ancestry (171-174). In Vyazemsky’s “Venice” the traveling subject supports the idea of Italian independence from the Austrian invaders and expresses his solidarity by extoling the great painters that Italy owes its glory to: Tintoretto, Titian, Giordano, Veronese and other (Stikhotvoreniia 316). Likewise, in Baratynsky’s “The sky the Giant!” The poet ends his ode to Russian expansion on a highly nationalistic note by appealing to Georgia: “Burn with eternal love for Russia” (178). See also Layton 205. 18 “Everything in them is charming!” 19 “The poet is in heaven.” 21 of Italy, the sky of Torquato…” the traveler’s self strives to see the vestiges of classical Rome and perceives its own belonging to the Roman culture through the poetry of the medieval Italian author Tasso Torquato (219). In a sense, the poet’s attitude turns the geographical space into the cultural one: if the former cannot yet be accessed, the latter may be an alternative. Remarkably, Baratynsky’s drive to reach Italy, the motherland of his beloved caretaker Giacinto Borghese, finally materialized in the 1843-1844 European journey that concluded with the poet’s untimely death in Naples. 20 The Russian diplomat and poet Fyodor Tyutchev’s “Cherez livonskie ia proezzhal polia...” (“I journeyed through Livonian plains...” ) is a noteworthy attempt to comprehend and relate to the destination’s history, however futile. Tyutchev’s traveler is passing through the Livonia region, the present-day Latvia and Estonia, that was then the territory of the Russian Empire. He is overwhelmed with the historical memory inspired by the view of the “livid skies,” the “desolate river” and the overall “dreary” surroundings (66). The scenery is subjectively appalling, as it brings to the poet’s mind the events of the “bloody and gloomy age, when the sons [of this gloomy land], prostrated in dust, were kissing the knight’s spur,” referring to the Middle Ages when this territory was controlled by the Livonian and Teutonic Orders. The latter’s defeat by the Russians in the 1242 Battle on the Ice and the sixteenth-century Livonian war with Russia definitely contribute to the poet’s uneasy perception of the place. Nowadays, the river and the grove appear to be the only witnesses of the distant past. Yet, in the typical Tyutchevian manner, the landscape remains silent about the medieval “world unknown”: “О, если б про него хоть на один вопрос / Мог допроситься я ответа!..” 21 The enigmatic 20 See also one of Baratynsky’s last poems “Piroskaf” – an anticipation of long-awaited arrival in Italy written in 1844 on board of the ship carrying the poet from Marseille to Naples. The “I,” on the one hand, is immersed in the free restlessness of the sea in the here and now, but at the same time is carried over into tomorrow when he would finally see his “earthly Elysium” (201-202). 21 “If only I could get [these witnesses of the past] to answer at least one of my questions about it!” 22 inaccessibility of history through nature motivates the ultimate disconnection between the traveler and the place. 5. Another fundamental consequence of travelling is self-identification with movement in time and space that oftentimes results in the trope defining life as a journey. For instance, in Vyazemsky’s “Gondola” the traveling poet rides the canals in the traditional Venetian boat and amidst “the golden dreams of Venice” also acknowledges the shape and color of the gondola’s carcass that reminds him of a black coffin. The following meditation on shared human experience unfolds as a complex metaphor where life is equated with the ride along the Grand Canal, on-the-go appreciation of the Venetian views with our lifetime carelessness, and the harbor as the end destination with inevitable death: “Не то же ли и в жизни с нами? /Не все ль большим каналом жизни / Мы, убаюканные снами / И беззаботные, плывем?” (V doroge i doma 186). 22 Despite the poet’s rapture at the beginning of the journey, his view of its outcome is irreversibly pessimistic: “Смотри: пред каждой колыбелью / Гроб неминуемый в виду.” 23 A similar attitude can be observed in Odoevsky’s poem “Kuda nesiotes’ vy, krylatye stanitsy?..” (“Where are you racing, winged villages?..”) written on the way to the Caucasus in 1837. The first stanza offers the idealized image of the destination where the traveler is headed – the land of laurel groves, roses and “mighty eagles’ joyful hovering”: “И мы – на Юг!” 24 (174). But contrary to the readerly expectations, the long route appears to lead to death, presumably in the Caucasian War: “И нас, и нас далекий путь влечет... / Но солнце там души не отогреет / И свежий мирт чела не обовьет./ Пора отдать себя и смерти и забвенью!” 25 The poem concludes with a series of rhetorical questions that problematize human whereness and 22 “Isn’t it the same in our lives? Aren’t we all floating along the Grand Canal of life, lulled with dreams, carefree?” 23 “Look: before each cradle there is an inevitable coffin in view.” 24 “We too are heading South!” 25 “We too, we too are attracted by the long journey... But the sun will not warm our soul there and fresh myrtle will not wrap around our forehead. It’s time to give ourselves up to death and oblivion!” 23 specifically the choice of the resting place: what is better – to find final shelter under the “southern cypress” or under the “gloomy pine tree of the North” where one was born? For Odoevsky, death is awaiting, regardless of one’s location. 6. A popular variation of the previous motif is when the self is able to identify with other worlds that as it were become accessible through mental or physical travel, often by way of a dream. Not infrequently the mode of the dream allows the subject to partake of the inapproachable place of travel, like Baratynsky’s dreamer longing for the heavenly Italy in the above-mentioned poem: “Снятся мне долы, лесы благовонны, / Снятся упавших чертогов колонны” 26 (219). On other occasions, the beauty of the visited destination is dreamlike, like in Vyazemsky’s “Gondola” where the poet is metaphorically “rocked to sleep” on the gondola ride, therefore starts seeing the “golden dreams” of Venice. The motif of a dream on the move was further developed by the later generation of poets such as Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet who assign a dreamy mode to their lyrical journeys in poems like Fet’s “Na zheleznoi doroge” (“On the Railroad”), Tyutchev’s “Na vozvratnom puti” (“On the Return Journey”), “Son na more” (“Dream at Sea”). Fet’s poem (1859-1860) appears to be a response to the introduction of railroads and trains in the Russian Empire, namely the construction of the Moscow-Saint Petersburg railway in the 1840s-1850s and the first Saint Petersburg-Warsaw railroad connecting Russia to Europe in the 1850s-1860s. The discovery of a way to cover enormous distances in short periods of time is seen by Fet as pure magic: the locomotive itself transforms into a “fiery snake” that pours “golden sparks” on the snowy road, while the eyes of the subject’s unnamed fellow traveler, a child, turn into “the flowers of a magic tale” (265). This fairy-tale imagery presupposes the dreamy perception of the destination: “И 26 “I dream about valleys, fragrant forests, / I dream about the columns of fallen palaces.” 24 снятся нам места иные, / Иные снятся берега.” 27 The whole poem unfolds in the liminal space between reality and the dream – in some new dimension opened up by movement of the rushing train. Tyutchev’s “Dream at Sea” takes place on a ship carried by the stormy sea waves that lull the poet to sleep. The dream literally arises from the chaos of sounds surrounding the poet and “lifts” the dreamer up to the transcendental world where he has a vision of the green land, glowing air, gardens and labyrinths, palaces, crowds of silent people and mythical creatures. The experience of mobility paired with the displacing effect of dreaming causes the traveler to undergo a temporary shift in identity and imagine himself to be a god walking above the creation: “По высям творенья, как бог, я шагал, / И мир подо мною недвижный сиял” 28 (“Son na more” 64). The poem concludes with the reverse penetration of reality into dream, but there remains a lingering sense of revelation made possible by the journey. Tyutchev’s “On the Return Journey” demonstrates an interesting use of dream imagery in relation to the notion of homecoming, pivotal in the travel discourse. In Tyutchev’s poem, the return home, presumably from Western Europe to Russia, is seen not as a happy reunion with the homeland but an unfortunate arrival to the place with “no sounds, no colors, no movement”: “Жизнь отошла – и, покорясь судьбе, / В каком-то забытьи изнеможенья, / Здесь человек лишь снится сам себе” 29 (151). The melancholic monotony of the Russian landscape prompts one to “see oneself in a dream” – in this case used in a clearly negative sense, that is to live in the made-up version of reality or with the fake sense of identity. The return to the routine native environment even causes one to disbelieve their own travel memories: “Не верит он, хоть 27 “And we dream about other places, we dream about other shores.” 28 “I moved like a god in creation on high / And the motionless universe shone at my feet” (Tyutchev, “Dream at Sea” 12). 29 “Life has receded – and, obeying fate, in some kind of oblivion of exhaustion, a person only sees himself in a dream here.” 25 видел их вчера, / Что есть края, где радужные горы / В лазурные глядятся озера..." 30 This questioning of what homecoming means for the traveler is ubiquitous in the tradition and perfectly reflects the ambivalence of the nomadic Russian self. The series of the typical motifs listed above does not constitute an exhaustive list. It is sufficient, however, for the purposes of this study, as it established a certain canon of Russian lyrical journeys’ writing that the subsequent generations of poets inherited and adapted to their own needs. Characteristically, in the period of Romanticism and the later nineteenth century, as the tradition of travel lyrics is only gaining traction and the cultural-historical background does not provide circumstances for disintegration of the authorial self-consciousness, the potential for destabilization of traveling self is not yet realized in full. This is evident in most of the above texts by the Russian Golden Age poets who develop the introspective mode in travel lyrics, but generally preserve the wholeness of their identity and the spatio-temporal coordinates as they move through space. The curious exceptions are probably the later poems by Fet and Tyutchev whose lyrical journeys cover more subconscious experiences that allow for higher flexibility of self and its susceptibility to transformations, foreboding the Modernist elaboration of the genre. In the nineteenth century, however, while the travel poetry was only coming into being, “the unity of the persona… [that] inseparable feature of Romanticism” (Ginzburg 130) impeded the dramatic displacements of the traveling self. It took a new worldview and a new aesthetic program to reshape literary travel into the experience that is capable of shattering the stability of the poetic identity. In less than a hundred years, that new vision on the subjectivity of a wayfarer was offered by the poets of Modernism. 30 “He doesn’t believe, though he only saw them yesterday, that there are lands where the iridescent mountains gaze into azure lakes...” 26 The Modernist Journey: Towards the Shifting Self The late modern period, encompassing most of the nineteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was characterized by the development of Russian commercial tourism. The expansion of the empire’s borders and the industrialization provided an opportunity for increased mobility. However, while in Europe by the 1840s “railway trains were already reaching thirty-five miles per hour, the first propeller-driven iron steamship... crossed the Atlantic, <...> and Karl Baedeker’s famous guidebooks for travelers had been in circulation for over a decade” (Carr 70), Russia delayed adopting Western technological innovations. The first pocket guides appeared in 1837 (McReynolds 162), while the railroad construction was ongoing since the 1830s-1840s and culminated in the 1891 with the start of the ambitious Transsiberian railroad project. Russia’s first tourist agency was founded in Petersburg by Leopold Lipson, who offered tours to Italy and Spain in 1867 (166). In addition, the emperor Alexander II abolished high fees for passports for travel abroad, causing the number of travelers to increase. Importantly, travel was no longer an elitist privilege, due to the emergence of the middle-class bourgeois “tourists” who found their identity largely in the freedom of movement. As a result, “in the last years of the imperial era, Russia’s tourists... annually, by the tens of thousands, ... sought cosmopolitan and adventurous identities through the multiple opportunities for contrast offered by travel,” although the First World War of 1914-1918 somewhat stalled this quest (192). The cultural perception of the Other shifted as well – as Avins put it, “many found no contradiction in pursuing both Russia’s national traditions and its communality with the West,” or the outer world in general (12). Traveling was so common that even “distinctions between foreign residence and emigration were sometimes vague. Russians abroad... could fully maintain their ties with home, and could return at will” (74). 27 Russia’s men and women of letters were among many who took advantage of the trend. The technological renewal of ways to explore the world largely coincided with the revival of Russian poetry by Modernists, starting with the introduction of Symbolism. In Russia, this pioneering Modernist school arose in the 1890s as a response to the literary endeavors of its French, Belgian, Scandinavian and English predecessors, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Wilde and other. The subsequent schools of Russian Modernism, such as Acmeism, Futurism and other, also took on the “new poetry’s orientation on the West” (M. Gasparov, “Poetika” 12). It comes as no surprise that the Russian Modernist movement so heavily influenced by the Western literary tradition promoted cosmopolitan thinking and wanderlust behavior. Such poets as Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, Nikolay Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky and many other extensively traveled and registered their trip impressions in their poetry and prose. Apparently, in this period of time the interest in travels was especially closely linked to the idea of self-discovery and spiritual self-improvement. Because Modernism reflected a deep rift in the consciousness of certain classes, many artists sought “the possibilities of older cultures, the religions of the Orient and the revival of myth” in search of answers to their questions (Pyman 3). A natural way of exploring these was setting out on a journey. The popular tendency to travel East, towards discovery of Oriental philosophical and religious knowledge, took some of the Modernists off the beaten paths: at different points of time Vladimir Solovyov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, Mikhail Kuzmin headed to Egypt 31 , while Nikolay Gumilev went to Ethiopia. Generally speaking, “frequent travels and their extraordinary purposes served as an expression of liberation, the joy of experimentation and self-assertion of the bohemians” 31 See Lada Panova’s book Russkii Egipet. Aleksandriiskaia poetika Mikhaila Kuzmina (Russian Egypt. The Alexandrian Poetics of Mikhail Kuzmin). 28 (Kissel 17). This understanding of a journey as an activity that defines and creatively advances the artist’s evolving self is also evident in the Modernist onomastics, such as the name of Bely’s literary group “Argonauts,” for instance. That being said, the integrity of the traveling self starts loosening at the time. These changes can be connected with the above-discussed industrialization, globalization, development of mass tourism and the general “democratization of travel after the steamer and the train became popular means of transportation” (Blanton 19). In these conditions of global openness, the traveler’s sense of who they are turns out to be extremely unstable – as they move in the newly- opened vastness of the world space, a consistent idea of the self can hardly be pinned down. As Benjamin Paloff convincingly shows, the reason for that is the reconceptualization of the very notions of space and time caused by the introduction of non-Euclidian geometry and Einstein’s theory of relativity. These scientific innovations evoke what Paloff calls “in-betweenness” of the position of the Modernist character who “in the relativistic space-time… can never know precisely where (or when) he is. He is condemned to wander eternally through an environment that is itself transformed by his movement through” (8-9). This inherent fluidity of the chronotope as it were “infects” the subject. Correspondingly, aliases, masks and other forms of self-disguise and alteration become abundant in the culture of the time. As Mark D. Steinberg notes, “for artistic modernists, Russians included, the creativity and vitality enabled by uncertainty and instability, the mask’s power to enable transformation and transgression, was indeed inspiring and liberating” (86). Noteworthy is also the universal “suggestive quality” of the Modernist language that perfectly suited the representation of relativity of the new world (M. Gasparov, “Poetika” 15). In these circumstances of dramatic flexibility of identity, space and time, the whereness of the traveler becomes an ideal target for experiments with self-identification. Remarkably, it is 29 no longer limited to what one can physically perceive. As Irina Paperno writes, “a major dynamic force behind modernist movements across Europe was a rejection of the positivistic mode of cognition that relied on the surface reality of empirical facts, subject to realistic representation” (3). The reality hindered access to the higher realms of being, thus had to be transgressed by means of artistic effort. The pantheistic worldview of the Symbolists presupposed the existence of multiple other worlds that extend beyond reality, as well as the plurality of realms in the earthly world that correspond to the universal whole 32 (Mints 69, 71). At the same time, the Modernist strategy of life-creation (Paperno 2) also implied the possibility of self-creation and further transformation of selves on these multiple planes of being. In other words, it was no longer impossible for the poet to find oneself simultaneously in Europe and America or imagine oneself to be a Russian and a member of an African tribe, or travel from the earth to the captivating depths of cosmos. In the limitless Modernist universe, anything was possible. The attendant shifts in the protean Modernist identity – the absolute self-identification with the Other, multiplication, fragmentation, alienation of the self and so forth – all reflect the “high level of self-consciousness, self-reflectivity” (Kissel 9) characteristic of the Russian Modernist travelogues in prose and poetry. As I will show further, these various forms of self- displacement signal the enhanced freedom of movement and transcultural open-mindedness intrinsic to the Modernist Russian identity, freedom that tragically overlapped with what Kissel calls historical “condition of flight,” caused by engagement in world conflicts, revolutions and civil wars (4). As such, the consequences of the Modernist cosmopolitan thinking and self- 32 See Valery Bryusov’s poem “Piramidy” (“Pyramids”) as a quintessential example of the pantheistic Modernist drive to erase borders between cultures for the sake of the universal “divine mystery” shared by all nations: “Pyramids! Nations! Wandering on earth, in doubts, in righteousness and evil, live the divine mystery! You are connected not by chance in a family united in spirit! Comprehend your unity, you, Hindus, Greeks, Slavs, Romanians, Turanians, Armenians, Semites and all nations!” (317-318). 30 fashioning extend far beyond the 1930s, usually considered the upper limit of the Modernist period in Russia. Some of the striking changes in subjectivity can be observed in a number of High Modernist travel lyrics. For instance, the idea of open-endedness and limitlessness of space in the Modernist perception is best illustrated by the poetry of Konstantin Balmont, one of the most enthusiastic Symbolist travelers. Balmont traveled around Western Europe in 1896-97 and then to Asia, Africa and South America after settling in Paris in the following decade. In his lyrical journeys the persona easily switches between the spatial coordinates and consequently between the alternative ethnic and national identities, aspiring to a kind of universal self, boundless and all-pervading. After, and perhaps as a result of, his European travels, Balmont developed the conception of “I” that incorporates multiple foreign identities and thereby approaches universality of self- positioning, as seen in the 1905 poem “Samoutverzhdeniie” (“Self-Affirmation”): “О, Брама – индиец, а я – скандинав, а я – мексиканец жестокий, / Я – эллин влюбленный, я – вольный араб, я – жадный, безумный, стоокий” 33 (199). Similarly, in his early texts, such as the 1897 “Bromeliia” (“Bromelia”), Balmont easily mingles the geographic locales, often in the mode of a dream typical for the travel poetry: В окутанной снегом пленительной Швеции На зимние стекла я молча глядел, И ярко мне снились каналы Венеции, Мне снился далекий забытый предел 34 (146). 33 “O, Brama is Indian, and I am Scandinavian, I am a brutal Mexican, I am a lovelorn Hellene, I am a free Arab, I am insatiable, insane, hundred-eyed.” 34 “In alluring Sweden shrouded in snow I silently gazed at the winter windows, and had vivid dreams of the canals of Venice, I was dreaming about the distant forgotten land.” 31 The corresponding effect on the self is destabilizing: “Мы были далеко, мы были не те” 35 (147). In 1907-1912 Balmont traveled around Balearic Islands, Egypt, Australia, Oceania, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Mexico, United States. This experience had further effect on the flexibility of his lyrical persona and caused the mythopoetic self-identification with customs, rituals and legends of peoples indigenous to these lands. The travel lyrics found in Balmont’s 1908 and 1914 collections Ptitsy v vozdukhe (Birds in the Air) and Belyi zodchii (White Architect) present a quaint blend of ethnically stylized verses and folk incantations, whereas their lyrical subject sees himself as a native of Babylon, Mexico, Egypt, China and India at the same time (see, for example, the poem “Golubaia zmeiia” (“Blue Snake”). As in “Bromeliia,” in these collections not only the discrepant versions of the lyrical self, but the actual geographical dimensions fuse. Such is the case with the 1908 poem “Iunoi kubanke” (“To a Young Cuban Girl” ) when the poet confesses to a young girl that he meets on Cuba: “Когда я близ тебя, мне чудится Египет, / Вот – ночи Африки звездятся в вышине” 36 (259). Here Balmont grounds his lyrical journey in the conventional romantic and dream motifs, but also develops them by fragmenting his presence to Cuba, Egypt and Africa at once – the manifestation of the Modernist conviction that the remote parts of the universe are bound by indivisible connections, however hidden from immediate comprehension. Thus, in Balmont’s poetry space and identity become interconnected, so that the numerous locations open up before the numerous “Is.” The similar effect can be discerned in the travel poetry by another Symbolist Maximilian Voloshin who traveled widely around Europe in the 1900s. For example, in the poem “V vagone” (“In a Railway Carriage”) written in 1901 on the train from Paris to Toulouse, Voloshin’s traveler identifies the monotony of a life journey with the movement of the train and 35 “We were far away, we were not ourselves.” 36 “When I am next to you, I envision Egypt, the starry nights of Africa beam brightly on high.” 32 the clicking of its wheels. However, the foreign surroundings recede into the background in the middle of the poem, as the poet starts dreaming that his train is passing through the Russian steppe filled with “sobbing and moaning” of the wind – “the eternal song” of his native land and, by extension, its people. The train as it were doubles in space, carrying the poet through France and Russia at the same time. The dislocation prompts the poet to define his identity as an “eternal nomad” torn between “the distant Rus’” and abroad: Странником вечным В пути бесконечном Странствуя целые годы, Вечно стремлюсь я, Верую в счастье, И лишь в ненастье В шуме ночной непогоды Веет далекою Русью 37 (14). It is noteworthy that the home dimension is viewed as a pointedly negative space, whereas the poet’s wanderings abroad are contextualized as a quest for happiness. This troubled perception of homecoming became another topos of the Russian travel lyrics. One of the leaders of Russian Symbolism Valery Bryusov explored Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy on different trips throughout the 1900s. As a historian, in his lyrical journeys Bryusov often deployed allusions to specific historical events and figures whom he was able to connect to by means of travel and in defiance of seeming anachronicity. The shifts thus mainly occur in chronotope, while the self only responds to the spatio-temporal metamorphosis. For instance, in the 1900 poem “Dante v Venetsii” (“Dante in Venice”) the modern-day Venice with its loud crowds of tourists is instantaneously transformed 37 “Roaming entire years like an eternal wanderer on an endless path, I perpetually seek, believe in happiness, and only in a storm, in the noise of wind and weather at night do I sense distant Rus wafting in the air.” 33 by the appearance of Dante Alighieri on the streets. The traveler trembles in sudden silence, as if witnessing how “the doors into eternity cracked open” on his way (98-99). Similarly, in the 1913 poem “V Gollandii” (“In Holland”) the view of canals, little colored houses and ladies’ bonnets as it were transport the poet back to the age of the great Dutch painters: Это все так знакомо, и кажется: в сказке я, И готов наважденью воскликнуть я: vade! Я с тобой повстречался, Рембрандтова Саския? Я в твой век возвращен, Адриан ван Остаде? 38 (113). Remarkable is also a highly metaliterary text “Ia v more ne iskal tainstvennykh utopii...” (“I didn’t look for lysterious utopias in the sea...”) where Bryusov’s subject describes his past destinations by evoking historical memory of their prior visitors – Lermontov in Caucasus, Pushkin in Crimea, Vyazemsky in Sweden and the Baltics, Baratynsky in Finland and so on: Меж гор, где веет дух красавицы Тамары, Я, юноша, топтал бессмертные снега; И сладостно впивал таврические чары, Целуя – Пушкиным святые берега! 39 (329). What follows is the sense of omnipresence of the persona as a “priest” of many cultures: “Я — жрец всех алтарей, служитель многих вер!” 40 Another maître of Russian Symbolism Aleksander Blok wrote the cycle “Ital’ianskie stikhi” (“Italian Poems”) 41 based on his June 1909 voyage, during which he visited thirteen 38 “This is all so familiar, and it seems like I am in fairy-tale, and I am ready to say: “Vade!” to the mirage. Have I met you, Rembrandt’s Saskia? Am I returned to your age, Adriaen van Ostade?” 39 “Amidst the mountains, where you can sense the spirit of beautiful Tamara, I, a young man, stepped on the immortal snow; And I sweetly drank the charms of Taurida, kissing Pushkin’s sacred shores!” 40 “I am a priest of all altars, a servant of many faiths!” 41 See the comprehensive analysis of the cycle in Gerald Pirog. Aleksandr Blok's Итальянские стихи. Confrontation and Disillusionment. 34 Italian cities. Blok’s ambivalent image of Italy, undoubtedly inspired by Spengler’s decadent view of European civilization in The Decline of the West, stands in sharp contrast with the sentiment of delight associated with Italian journeys since the Romanticist age. Blok builds his cycle on the peculiar correlation between his own dejection and the acknowledgment of the ongoing loss of European culture and history that Italy embodies: “В черное небо Италии / Черной душою гляжусь” 42 (“Ital’ianskie stikhi” 108). Thus, self-identification with the natural and cultural landscape is at the core of Blok’s travel lyrics, but it yields unambiguously troubled emotions. The cycle is also permeated with anticipation of a romantic encounter – with a woman, or a feminine personification of a city (“Флоренция, изменница!” (109) 43 , “лукавая Сиена” (113) 44 ) or, broader, with Italy itself – but happy resolution of any of these interactions remains problematic. Perhaps, one of the most notable examples of Blok’s subjectivity altered by means of voyage can be found in the second part of the 1909 poem “Venetsiia” (“Venice”) that pictures the traveler by the galleries of the Venetian piazza San Marco in a cold night. Here, as if in the delirium of illness, he contemplates a vision of Salome who appears to carry the poet’s own bloody head on a dish: “Таясь, проходит Саломея / С моей кровавой головой” 45 (“Ital’ianskie stikhi” 103). The disengagement with the city, seen as the insidious Salome, induces the disintegration of the self, manifested in physical alienation of the part of the poet’s body, as well as in its further sinister independence: “Лишь голова 46 на черном блюде / Глядит с тоской в 42 “Into the black sky of Italy / with a black soul I stare” (Blok, “Florence” 97). 43 “Florence, you deceiver” (Blok, “Florence” 99). 44 “Sly Siena.” 45 “Past galleries in shadow buried / Salome steals... / ...she carries / A platter with my bloody head” (Blok, “Venice” 140). 46 This image of self-alienation was later used not only in the travel, but also in immigration poetry. In Khodasevich’s “Berlinskoe” the poet perceives his isolation from his new life abroad by observing his “cut” head in the reflection of train windows: “И, проникая в жизнь чужую, / Вдруг с отвращеньем узнаю / Отрубленную, неживую, / Ночную голову мою” (162) ("And, penetrating someone else’s life, with disgust I suddenly recognize my decapitated, inanimate night head.") 35 окрестный мрак.” 47 The reader loses sense of the persona’s exact position in space, as the poet objectifies himself by looking with estrangement at his own head which in its turn stares into darkness. It is precisely that “new [epic] gaze” at the event from aside that, in Olga Sedakova’s view, Blok discovered on his Italian journey and made use of in his later oeuvre: “The idea of the «personal myth» of the Artist – the hero of his own tragedy – gives way to a new concept: «the calm contemplator and a necessary witness» (Blok’s authorial commentary to «Girl from Spoleto»)” (“V poiskakh vzora”). It is also worth mentioning that, while upgrading the fundamental model of a lyrical journey mediated by cultural associations, the poet selected the biblical plot which never even took place in Venice. By using “the mask” of John the Baptist Blok expanded his lyrical persona, and at the same time brought in the concealed presence of the ancient Judea into the contemporary Venetian scene. The poet clearly contributed to innovating the tradition by making literary traveling between times, places and also between distinct cultures possible. A similar effect can be witnessed in the Acmeist poet Osip Mandelstam’s lyrics written on his trips of various years to Crimea, where he often stayed at Voloshin’s Koktebel’ summer house. In the 1917 poem “Meganom,” Mandelstam’s poetic imagination fueled by his lifetime desire to partake of the ancient Hellenistic culture 48 transforms the contemporary Crimean space into a Greco-Roman colony that it used to be in the seventh century BC-third century CE. The poet’s psyche is driven southwest into the Black Sea, beyond the Meganom cape, in order to find resting place in the midst of the classical world where it belongs. This orchestrated death as it were presupposes the renewal of the self, mediated by cultural transfiguration: Туда душа моя стремится, 47 “...the head, as darkness deepens, / To pierce it tries with mournful eye” (Blok, “Venice” 141). 48 See Chapter 1 of this dissertation for the in-depth discussion of Mandelstam’s signature “longing for the world culture” and its manifestation in his travel lyrics. 36 За мыс туманный Меганом, И черный парус возвратится Оттуда после похорон” 49 (O. Mandelstam, “Meganom” 98). Another Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova left an interesting exemplar of the purely virtual lyrical journey, the 1917 poem entitled “Prosypat’sia na rassvete...” (“To wake up at dawn...”). The date of the poem’s creation uncovers its biographical context: Akhmatova, separated from her beloved Boris Anrep who stayed abroad after the 1917 Revolution, imagines her voyage on a ship to England and their following meeting. It is important that despite the deployment of the Acmeist poetics of palpability (“green waves,” “salt spray,” “fluffy” traveler’s coat are all described with utmost credibility), the actual journey never took place. In a way, the literary journey became for Akhmatova a form of sublimation of unsatisfied wanderlust. However, even the imaginary voyage exerts its magic on the heroine’s sense of self by means of the chronotopic transposition. As was shown by Alexander Zholkovsky, the abundance of infinitive forms of verbs in the text creates a rhythmic pattern that stresses the importance of course of time, while the space is also dilating – from the ship cabin to the marine expanse (“Prosypat’sya na rassvete. Poetika osvezheniia”). The spatio-temporal tension peaks in the finale which turns the anticipation of the romantic reunion into the miraculous reversal of time: “...предчувствуя свиданье, / <...> / От соленых брызг и ветра / С каждым часом молодеть” 50 (Akhmatova, “Prosypat’sia...” 311). Under the refreshing impact of movement, the heroine miraculously starts to “grow younger” – a metaphor for the travel-induced transformation of the self. 49 “My soul pulls there, / past Meganom’s misty cape, / where the black sail will come / from, after the funeral” (O. Mandelstam, “The asphodels’ transparent...” 94). 50 “...sensing the meeting /<...> / ...grow younger each hour / from the salt spray and wind” (Akhmatova, “To wake up...” 52). 37 The leader of Acmeists Nikolay Gumilev’s 1918 collection Shatior (The Tent) narrates his pre-revolutionary travel experience in Africa, including two expeditions undertaken in 1908 and 1913. The Tent was supposed to be the opening part of the extensive “geography textbook in verse” with rhymed descriptions of the different parts of the world, so the subjective reflections in it were consciously minimized in favor of factual narration about the African nature, people and their customs, more in the manner of the modern travelogues in prose: “Берег Верхней Гвинеи богат/ Медом, золотом, костью слоновой” 51 (“Liberiia” 34). But even behind their reserved descriptive style, these lyrical texts conceal transmutations of the self and space evoked by movement. Remarkably, in Gumilev’s poetic world it is the spatio-temporal terms that are subject to disruption in the first place. The morphing of the self usually follows. By way of example, in “Abissiniia” (“Abyssinia”) the poet takes a nostalgic look back on his African adventures, while visiting the ethnographical museum in Saint Petersburg. At first, the simultaneous focus on the two locales causes the Nile river to magically extend to Neva: “Есть музей этнографии в городе этом / Над широкой, как Нил, многоводной Невой. / В час, когда я устану быть только поэтом, / Ничего не найду я желанней его” 52 (28). The subject recounts his visit to the museum where he touches and smells the “savage things that [he himself] brought” from Africa. 53 As he engages with these memorable items, the Abyssinian world reappears before him, and the identity of a Russian museum visitor is for an instant replaced with the former self of an expeditioner and a hunter: “И я вижу, как южное солнце пылает, /Леопард, изогнувшись, ползет на врага, / И как в 51 “The coast of Upper Guinea is rich in honey, gold, ivory.” 52 “There is an ethnographic museum in this city, on the many-watered Neva, wide as the Nile. When I get tired of being just a poet, I will not find anything more desirable than it.” 53 One might say that it is through the contact with the artefacts from the different world and the attendant recollection of his trips that the poet attempts to recover continuity caused by the spatial and psychological displacement. For more on recollection as a way of releasing the experience of atopia see Walker. 38 хижине дымной меня поджидает / Для веселой охоты мой старый слуга” 54 (29). Through a nostalgic recollection both the place and the persona splinter, so that the traveler as if simultaneously exists on two different planes of reality. Gumilev’s poem “Sakhara” (“The Sakhara”) although largely devoid of the first person singular verbal forms, express the sense of awe that the poet experiences at the sight of the largest desert on earth. A relatively detached, documentary account of the desert, its sandstorms, and the native people’s life takes an abrupt turn in the poem’s finale. The poet envisions the future when the Sahara sands will overtake the whole planet, including Moscow: “Средиземное море засыпят они, / И Париж, и Москву, и Афины,” whereas the humankind’s retailoring of the self will also become inevitable: “И мы будем в небесные верить огни, / На верблюдах своих бедуины” 55 (“Sakhara” 21). The poem concludes with the intriguing “amalgamation of science fiction and myth” that marks many Modernist travelogues (Kissel 6). In tune with his contemporaries’ fantasies of the space conquest, Gumilev conceives of the futuristic scene in which the Martians will visit the earth but will see nothing but “the golden ocean” of Sahara sand from their spacecrafts. A similar effect of time travel is self-evident in lyrical journeys by Russian Futurists, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky. As an official proletarian poet in young Soviet Russia, Mayakovsky was privileged to be sent on a voyage to the West with an assignment. In 1925 he set off on the trip to Europe under the pretext of participation in International Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts exhibition in Paris, where he received an award for the advertising posters with his texts. His vision of Paris bifurcates in the 1925 poem “Gorod (Odin Parizh)...” (“The City (One Paris)…” ) where the traveler consequently addresses “one Paris,” the busy city of 54 “And I imagine the southern sun ablaze, and how a leopard, with its body arched, crawls toward a foe and how in a smoky shack I am awaited by my old servant for a joyous hunt.” 55 “[Sands will] fill the Mediterranean, / fill Paris, and Moscow, fill Athens - / and we, bedouins on camels, / will believe in heavenly fires” (“The Sakhara” 60). 39 “caserns, attorneys, [Herriot’s government]” and “another,” the fascinating, mundane, “the grey one” (143-145). As he strolls along the city streets, he indignantly rejects the allegations of being “a fellow traveler” of the Communist party: ”Но кому я, к черту, попутчик!“ 56 (143) and conjures his own double, the future-born fellow traveler who will accompany the lonely Russian poet in his avant-garde movement through Paris: Мне скучно здесь одному впереди, — поэту не надо многого, — пусть только время скорей родит такого, как я, быстроногого. Мы рядом пойдем дорожной пыльцой 57 (144). In this way, the movement in the fragmented space creates the temporal displacement, as well as the doubling of the persona. In June 1925 on board of the transatlantic liner Espagne Mayakovsky traveled from Paris to Cuba and Mexico and then to the United States, where he visited New York, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The journey to New York inspired his well-known 1925 lyrical text “Bruklinskii most” (“The Brooklyn Bridge”). The poem portrays the traveler standing on the Brooklyn Bridge and being mentally carried away to the future, when after the devastating apocalypse the geologists are able to recreate the past from the remains of the bridge. Again, the 56 “Who am I a fellow traveler to, damn it!” 57 “I am bored here alone in the avant-garde, - the poet doesn’t need much, - only let time soon bear another one like me, a fleet-footed one. We will walk along on the dust of the road.” 40 chronotope’s bifurcation occasions the split of the persona, as the poet looks from the future back at his present self who composes the poetry on the bridge: Я вижу – здесь стоял Маяковский, стоял и стихи слагал по слогам 58 (“Bruklinskii most” 235). In such a way, in Mayakovsky’s lyrical journeys the spatial movement parallels transference in time and causes the lyrical persona to multiply in various temporal dimensions. Although the above poetic interpretations do not purport to be comprehensive, they demonstrate quite well that the members of the discrepant Russian Modernist movements were to the equal extent overtaken by wanderlust facilitated by the technological advance and the relative openness of Russian borders at the turn of the centuries. In words of Mikhail Gasparov, “the longing for the world culture” described by Osip Mandelstam was distinctive not only of a particular school, but of Modernism altogether (“Poetika” 12). This longing naturally nurtured the development of the new Russian poetry that was experimenting with various modes of lyrical subjectivity largely through imitation and modification of the Western literary models. The attendant blurring of spatial and temporal terms in the travel lyrics discussed above reflects not only the relativity of the universe that the Russian Modernists found themselves in, but also modern Russia’s active involvement in apprehension of the spatially unhindered shared human condition. It would take less than a couple of decades for the Russian Modernist cosmopolitanism to yield to the Soviet international isolation, whereas writing lyrical journeys 58 “I see – Mayakovsky stood on this bridge, / building / his lines / syllable by syllable” (Mayakovsky, “The Brooklyn Bridge” 120). 41 would take the form of either an ideological performance, or an unsettled sublimation of the experience of mobility. The Soviet Journeys: Bounded by Ideological Space The 1917 overthrow of monarchy in Russia, followed by the Bolshevik October Revolution, was a turning point in terms of restriction of mass freedom of movement. The Marxist ideology divided the world into two opposing camps – the capitalist and the communist, led by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat accordingly. The tentative borderlines between them were mapped out by the 1920s. However, the categorical distinction “us vs. them” permeated travel writing throughout the Soviet history and drastically impacted the absorption of individual traveler’s identity into the uniform collective “we.” The historian Yuri Felshtinsky points out that the principle of total control over all affairs between the young Soviet republic and abroad was pivotal for the new government since the first months of its existence. By the end of 1917 the policy on entry and exit involved “passports with photographs, «proper stamps» and special permissions with special signatures, special representatives of NKVD [People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs] and NKID [People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs], <...> searches and personal examinations of all, including women, elderly and children” (2). Driven by the ever-present anxiety of “hostile capitalist surroundings,” by April 1919 the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs monopolized the right to issue passports that allowed foreign travel only to those citizens “against whose departure abroad there were no objections on behalf of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs” (qtd. in Felshtinsky 57). Since 1920 the issuance of passports was also controlled by the special department of Cheka. The standard issuance procedure for passports was established at the All-Union level, when “The Provision on 42 Entry in USSR and Exit from USSR” was approved by the Party’s Central Executive Committee on June 5, 1925. Among other requirements, the applicant willing to go abroad had to fill out a questionnaire that inquired into the traveler’s occupation, title, source of income, etc. before and after the 1917 Revolution. As a result, the Soviet authorities had a complete databank about individuals leaving abroad in the 1920s-early 1930s, and were able to use this information against them during the mass repressions (Belkovets and Belkovets 42-43). Concurrently with the introduction of these restrictions, the young Soviet state entertained ambitions of extending the Russian communist project into the international proletarian revolution, and the establishment of consistent relations with foreign states was nevertheless important. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why permission for foreign travel was still relatively easy to obtain until mid- to late 1920s, especially if one had a proletarian assignment that benefited the Soviet international reputation like Mayakovsky’s project at the 1925 exhibition in Paris. As David-Fox has shown, by the mid-1920s the system of regulation of travel abroad for cultural and scientific figures appeared that required “ sponsorship or at least a recommendation from their place of work” (16) and a three-stage approval – at one’s home institution; at the corresponding commissariat (ministry) such as Narkompros (People’s Commissariat for Education); and at the Central Committee’s commission for verification of foreign travel for state institutions. However, “during 1927-8 the war scare, the Shakhtii trial, 59 and the heightened propaganda about foreign sabotage and capitalist encirclement all brought with them greater hostility to things foreign” (David-Fox 22). In 1928 Joseph Stalin’s modernization began against the background of the rupture of Soviet relations with Britain, which, along with rising awareness of the budding German Nazism, created an inertia of military threat (Orlov and 59 The 1928 trial of 53 technical specialists from the Russian town Shakhty who were accused of conspiring with the former owners of the coal mines living abroad. 43 Yurchikova 146) and contributed to the isolation of the 1930s when foreign travel practically ceased (Dobrenko “The Art”180). The WWII was a moment of heightened mobility, as it not only displaced millions of individuals but also presented a chance for many traveling Soviet soldiers to probe firsthand the alleged advantages of life in USSR over the Western life. Stalin’s 1948-1953 anti-cosmopolitan campaign against members of Russian intelligentsia “idolizing West” overlapped with the onset of the Cold War. The political competition between USSR and USA and their allies, the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc, over global dominance lasted until the collapse of USSR in 1991. Such complex event of displacement as the first wave of Russian emigration is, of course, another direct consequence of the 1917 Revolution. The number of Russians who left the county by 1922 is estimated between 844,000 and three million people (Avins 73). Some departed voluntarily, while others were expelled. 60 For many “leaving or staying” became a life-changing decision. The 1922 poem by Vera Inber documents quite accurately the state of existential choice that some of her compatriots found themselves in: Уж своею Францию Не зову в тоске; Выхожу на станцию В ситцевом платке 61 (7). The heroine forgoes her (pre-revolutionary?) memories of France, while looking at the train that is symbolically running towards Moscow. The final stanza manifests the decision to stay in her homeland, however indefinite the future might be: Путь мой не бесплоден, 60 The notorious example is the so called “Philosophers’ steamboat”. In 1922 by order of Vladimir Lenin the ships took 228 Russian intellectuals, including philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semyon Frank, from Petrograd to Stettin, Germany. 61 “I no longer call France my own in yearning; I walk out to the station in a cotton scarf.” 44 Цель найду опять. Только трудно родину, Потеряв, сыскать. 62 Speaking of the general evolution of travel literature after 1917, it is impossible not to stress the tradition’s swift adaptation to the demands of ideology. The future-oriented cultural Soviet utopia foregrounded the myth of transformation of the social order, but also of the country’s citizens – a myth that heavily relied on the deployment of state propaganda. As established by Marina Balina, the genre of travel writing becomes a tool of Soviet propaganda already in the 1920s, a decade before the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress subjected all cultural production to the requirements of Socialist Realism. “It is precisely in the travel sketches of the 1920s that the binary antithesis of “one’s own” and “other” (alien) space emerges, where the other space is deliberately negative and serves the reinforcement of confidence in the excellence of “one’s own,” Balina writes and provides such examples as “Mongol’skie ocherki” (“Mongolian Sketches”) by V. Vasil’ev (1929), “Iaponskie siluety” (“Japanese Silhouettes”) by I. Taigin (1930), “Za rubezhom: Putevye vpechatleniia” (“Abroad: Travel Impressions”) by A. Ioffe (1927) and other (898). Accordingly, every foreign trip is now seen as an opportunity to demonstrate a renewed identity of the exemplary “Soviet citizen abroad,” a highly performative “role of national representative” (Avins 139). Although it is specifically travel prose that underwent the upsurge in this period, the travel lyrics too followed the tendency for polarization of space. The best example is undoubtedly Vladimir Mayakovsky’s travel poetry partly discussed above. Carol Avins provides examples of Mayakovsky’s 1920s travel poems “Parizh (Razgovorchiki s Eifelevoi bashnei” (“Paris (Chats with the Eiffel Tower)”), “Brodvei” (“Broadway”), “Stikhi o sovetskom pasporte” 62 “My path is not fruitless, I will find purpose again. But it is hard, after losing the motherland, to find it again.” 45 (“Verses on the Soviet Passport”) that explicitly posit the opposition between the Soviet identity in formation and the Western capitalist self, as in the finale of the 1926 “Broadway”: Я в восторге от Нью-Йорка города. Но кепчонку не сдерну в лица. У советских собственная гордость: на буржуев смотрим свысока. 63 (“Brodvei” 217). Despite the poet’s genuine amazement with New York’s urban and technological advancement, the ideologically prescribed subjectivity dictates the incorporation of “I” into the uniform Soviet “we” condemning the capitalist reality. In the words of Susi Frank, “in the Soviet case a traveler is understood not as an intrinsically valued individual <...> he becomes a person only through renunciation of individuality and through achieving a collective identity” (Frank 175) 64 . The usual in the conventional travel writing self-identification/disassociation with a destination through various relatable aspects (landscape, people, customs, culture etc.) is now increasingly mediated by ideology. Mayakovsky’s 1927 travel lyrics for children “Prochti i katai v Parizh i Kitai” (“Read and Ride to Paris and China”) 65 is another telling example of othering the hostile West. In an effort to “take” the Soviet children on a virtual trip “around” the globe, the narrator symbolically redraws the geographical map, according to the centrality of the Soviet communist project on it: 63 “I’m delighted / by New York as a city. / But I won’t / doff my cap / in awe. / We Soviets, / after all, / have our pride: / we look down our noses / at the bourgeois” (“Broadway” 113-114). 64 See also Katerina Clark’s The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual for her Proppian analysis of a typical narrative of individual/collective transformation in the forming Socialist Realist Novel. 65 The eponymous cartoon was produced by the Soviet animation studio Soiuzmul’tfilm in 1960. The belated use of Mayakovsky’s travel poetry in animation confirms the long-running importance of educating young generations about the “imaginary geography” within and without the Soviet Union. 46 “Начинается земля, как известно, от Кремля. / За морем, за сушею – коммунистов слушают” 66 (224). The ubiquitous exploitation of the Western proletariat by the powerful and wealthy is again illustrated by the sketches of life in New York and Paris where “картину видишь ту же: / живет богатый хорошо, а бедный – много хуже” 67 (225). The arrival in China, which was already becoming an area of international Communist influence, introduces a completely different scene: the Chinese are deprived of rice and tea by the covetous English colonialists. If the encounter with the West implied a total disassociation between the Soviet collective identity and the visited destinations ruled by the capitalists, then the journey to the transitioning China cause the undivided Soviet “we” to identify with the Chinese “brothers”: Мальчик китайский русскому рад. Встречает нас, как брата брат. Мы не грабители – мы их не обидели. За это на нас богатей английский сжимает кулак, завидевши близко 68 (229). In the end, just as magically as the expansive world first unfolded before the little travelers, it shrinks to the size of the homeland in the poem’s coda: “И вот через 15 дней опять Москва – гуляйте в ней” 69 (229). Mayakovsky’s final piece of advice unequivocally sanctions restrained mobility as if canceling the need to travel abroad altogether – there is nothing better than the Soviet home. 66 "The earth starts, as is known, at the Kremlin. Beyond the sea, beyond the dry land they are listening to the Communists.” 67 “You see the same picture there as well: the rich one lives well and the poor one lives much worse.” 68 “The Chinese boy is happy to see the Russian one. He greets us as brother greets brother. We are not robbers – we did not offend them. Because of this, the rich Englishman clenches his fist when he sees us nearby.” 69 “And in 15 days here it is, Moscow again – take a stroll here.” 47 However, the establishment of ideological control in the 1920s-1930s transforms the domestic travel routes as well. The travel writing of this period reflects the gradual degeographization of the Soviet space and its substitution with the ideological space whose center is the idealized, ever-improving Soviet reality (Dobrenko 188; Balina 898). A typical travel narrative of the time celebrates precisely these improvements, especially the accomplishments of Stalin’s Five Year Plans in the Soviet periphery 70 – the government-funded construction projects, including power plants, oil production sites, railroads etc. In order to cover and glorify the progress in Soviet “construction of communism,” writers were either assigned to these building sites individually or as part of the organized writers’ brigades – the latter facilitated a consolidation of the “collective self” through the common authorship of the accounts of construction (Nicholas and Ruder). Some examples of this type of travelogue include Aleksey Tolstoy’s “Volkhovstroi” (1923), Maxim Gorky’s Po Soiuzu Sovietov (Around the Soviet Union,1929) and the well-known volume Belomoro-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina (The I.V. Stalin White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal, 1934) written by the collective of Soviet authors after visiting one of the largest prison labor camp sites in the world history. As Andreas Guski noted on the example of Gorky’s travelogue, the core of such writing is the extolment based on the opposition of the flawed prerevolutionary past and the immaculate Soviet present-future (166; see also Balina 899-900). The traveler’s individuality is inevitably muted or rather filtered through the ideological genre prescriptions. 70 Cf. the slogans: “Put tourism at the service of the party, at the service of the Five-Year Plan, at the service of the construction of socialism in our country,” “Proletarian tourism serves the cause of the working class!” In the 1920s and 1930s, the development of the Socialist Realist travel writing went hand in hand with the development of hiking, mountain-climbing and other forms of mass Soviet proletarian tourism, which were actively used as a propaganda tool as well – tourists were encouraged to do the outreach work in the visited destinations and share “the program of the greatest advent of communism” with their compatriots in the very remote corners of the Soviet Union (Orlov and Yurchikova 119, 128). 48 Likewise, the ideologization of space and the traveler’s deindividualization occur in the travel lyrics of the 1920s-1930s. The poet’s personal insight into the place is no longer relevant, it is consumed by the common outlook. In his poem on the launch of the Dneprostroi power plant in 1932 Demyan Bedny writes in first person plural: Водой Днепра пороги кроя, Мы на плотине Днепростроя Свершали подвиг трудовой <...> на горе вражеским пророкам... 71 (105). The “hostile prophets” is evidently the capitalist world. In Yaroslav Smeliakov’s “Баллада Волховстроя” (“The Ballade of Volkhovstroi”) the noise of axes and shovels in the arms of laboring workers heralds the construction of “a new paradise” and illuminates with hope the metaphorical darkness that the diseased Communist leader Vladimir Lenin disappeared in (256). The traveler’s individuality is limited to his ability to “listen” to the noise of the construction. The allusion to Lenin as a figurative part of the Volkhovstroi environment is also very typical of the time. The shaping Socialist Realist canon widely used such spatial metaphors where “nature functioned as signifier for Stalin” (Plamper 24), Lenin or even abstract Socialist concepts. For example, Ilya Selvinsky in the 1932 poem “Velikii okean” (“The Great Ocean”) written on board of the Soviet steamship in Japanese sea states that the seamen are fortunate to be able to “embrace Lenin’s horizon / and better comprehend the revolution” (250). In Gorbunov’s “Radost’” (“Joy”) the Soviet polar explorers “превратили дрифт ледовый / в большевистский марш побед” 72 (28). Stalin is the inseparable part of the route to the North 71 “Covering Dnieper’s rapids with water, we accomplished a heroic feat of labor at the Dnieprostroi dam <...> to spite the hostile prophets.” 72 “Turned the ice drifting / into the Bolshevik march of victories.” 49 Pole in Ivanov-Volgar’s “Leti, nasha pesnia!” (“Fly, Our Song!”): “По сталинской трассе, вершиною мира, / Дорога на полюс лежит…” 73 (35) 74 . Generally, in the 1940 poetic anthology honoring Soviet polar expeditioners Pesni Arktiki (Songs of the Arctic) the use of the overarching Soviet “we” prevails over the more subjective narration of the Arctic adventures. Even way less ideologically engaged poet Boris Pasternak in the poem “Volny” (“Waves”) written on his Georgian voyage in 1931 chose to use ideological abstractions in place of the more idiosyncratic descriptions of a location. After contemplating the scenic Caucasus mountain range in a fog, the poet on behalf of the ineluctable Soviet “we” projects the might of the mountains onto that of the “general plan” of the Party: Кавказ был весь как на ладони <…> О, если б нам подобный случай, И из времен, как свозь туман, На нас смотрел такой же кручей Наш день, наш генеральный план! 75 (304-305). According to Zholkovsky, it was the period when the poet adopted the strategy of searching for a common ground with the Soviet regime and strived to upgrade his status of the “fellow traveler” to that of the truly Socialist author (“«Mne khochetsia domoi…»”). 73 “On Stalin’s highway, at the top of the world, The road to the Pole lies...” 74 Note also the common use of the metaphor of the path for reference to the progress of Socialist construction and later the progress in the WWII: “All roads lead to Communism, / And we will rightfully enter it. / We are proudly following Stalin!” (“Vse dorogi vedut k kommunizmu!” (“All Roads Lead to Communism”) by L. Oshanin) (54); “Stalin forged the heroes’ hearts; / Like a bright ray of light, his mighty genius / Illuminated our way to Communism” (“Pesnia o Staline” (“Song About Stalin”) by A. Surkov) (62); “Stalin’s will led us towards heroic deeds” (“Nas volia Stalina vela” (“Stalin’s Will Led Us”) by A. Surkov) (111); “The wise leader leads us by means of Stalin’s eagle-like flight...” (“Iz-za gor iz-za vysokikh” (“From Behind the Tall Mountains”) by M. Ryl’sky) (116); “Who paved the way to the kolkhoz? It was Lenin who paved our way. It was Stalin who paved our way” (“Dorozhen’ka” (“The Road”) by P. Semionova) (130) and many other. 75 “The Caucasus lay as if in the palm of your hand<...> Oh, if only we had a similar situation, and from the ages, as if through fog, from the same kind of cliff’s angle, our day looked at us, our general plan!” 50 It appears that the poet Osip Mandelstam was preoccupied with the similar anxiety of (non)-inclusion into the new Socialist order. His 1930 writings based on the trip of the same year to Armenia are the subject of my study in Chapter 1 of this dissertation. They reflect the self’s tense oscillation between the prerevolutionary past and postrevolutionary present, between his new Soviet homeland and the magnetic Armenian periphery perceived as the cradle of the “world [classical] culture,” hence contextualized as the poet’s true home. Although the journey to Armenia was organized by the party official Nikolay Bukharin with the same purpose of reporting and celebrating the success of industrialization in the transforming Soviet republic, Mandelstam dared to use the opportunity to travel in his personal artistic interest – in order to seek inspiration after a few years of “poetic silence” and to write a non-ideological lyrical journey, the cycle “Armenia” (1930). Correspondingly, if Mandelstam’s 1931 prose Puteshestvie v Armeniiu (Journey to Armenia) and its drafts contain rare references to the Yerevan construction and other manifestations of the Soviet progress, then the lyrical cycle eschews them altogether. My analysis highlights Mandelstam’s consistent focus on Armenia’s cultural, largely Christian, legacy in his lyrical journey that runs counter the requirements of the Socialist Realist travel writing in the making. There is no doubt that, from the official Soviet atheist perspective, the poet’s visits to Armenia’s ancient churches were viewed as an outdated bourgeois form of the Modernist wanderlust for “European space of culture and memory” (Frank 176) – the space that had the utmost value for Mandelstam’s poetic genius shaped amid his educational travels to France, Germany and Italy in the 1900s. The importance of cultural continuity is so intrinsic to Mandelstam’s mindset that even his genuine attempts to register and praise the Soviet reality in Journey to Armenia resulted in awkward hybrid imagery that fused the old and the novel – see, for instance, his account of the march of the Soviet pioneers- “gladiators” on Yerevan streets (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 396) or the 51 paradoxical portrait of the “ancient Komsomol tsarevna” (397) who taught him Armenian. The fact that Zvezda journal’s editor was fired for the 1933 publication of the “Journey” testifies to Mandelstam’s failure to satisfy the expectations of the Soviet literary establishment with his travel writing. As the close reading of the poetic cycle “Armenia” will show, he compensated his unsuccessful efforts to internalize the new Soviet identity with the rediscovery of his poetic voice, a metamorphic experience rooted in the conventional self-identification with the foreign cultural heritage typical of pre-Soviet travel poetry. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the onset of the Khrushchev’s Thaw with its 1956 doctrine of peaceful coexistence between the two world superpowers, USSR and USA, the Soviet tourism was significantly liberalized. The 1957 Festival of Youth and Students brought over 30,000 people from 130 countries to Moscow – the Iron Curtain between the West and the East lifted, if only for a short period of time. In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev himself became the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. The outbound tours organized by the “Intourist” travel agency and the “Sputnik” Bureau of International Youth Tourism were also becoming increasingly available to masses, although the trips to the “friendly” socialist countries of the Eastern bloc (Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, etc.) predictably exceeded those to the capitalist states. The “trains” and later “flights of friendship” meant to enable the communication and exchange of professional experience between the countries were also popular. However, the propagandistic performative aspect was continually maintained – in exchange of permission to travel granted by the Soviet state, the tourist had to play a stipulated role of an official envoy of the nation, an exemplary member of the Soviet society who was willing to “correctly and skillfully explicate the politics of the Communist party and our Soviet reality” to the people abroad, if needed (Gorsuch 107; Orlov and Popov, ch. 8). Accordingly, the selection of the candidates for foreign travel was a rigorous process. The Communist Party’s 52 Central Committee’s 1956 ruling “On Organization of Soviet Citizens’ Travel Abroad” stated that only “politically tested and morally stable progressive workers and employees, engineers and technicians, agronomists, doctors, teachers, workers of science and culture” must be recommended for foreign travel. The candidate was expected to demonstrate “the honor and dignity of the Soviet citizen” and resist numerous “bourgeois temptations” that awaited them abroad (Orlov and Popov, ch. 1, 8). Hence, to go on a trip they had to receive character reference letters from the employer, the local party secretary, the local labor union secretary. The application was then considered by the city or regional foreign travel commission of the CPSU. The reasons for its rejection could be minute: misconduct on prior trips, a recent divorce or even certain details of physical appearance. Sometimes the candidate was also interviewed personally – the commission tested their knowledge of the materials of CPSU’s congresses, history of labor movement and biographies of the leaders of communist parties in the countries of destination (Orlov and Popov, ch. 1). When the screening was finally over, the future traveler was instructed on the objectives of their trip and their behavior while being abroad. Orlov and Popov noted how the Soviet poet and singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky’s 1973 “Instruktskii pered vyezdom za granitsu” (“Instruction Before the Departure Abroad”) and the 1977 “Pesnia dlia ot’ezzhaiushchikh za granitsu” (“A Song for Those Departing Abroad”) covered every single taboo that the Soviet authorities imposed on the outbound travelers at the time – no solitary walking, no romantic or sexual affairs, no gifts accepted from foreigners, no alcohol abuse and so forth: А за месяц до вояжа Инструктаж проходишь даже – Как там проводить все дни: Чтоб поменьше безобразий, А потусторонних связей 53 Чтобы – ни-ни-ни!” 76 (qtd. in Orlov and Popov, ch. 1). The compliance with such instructions was controlled by the tourist groups’ leaders assigned by the “Intourist” and, on special occasions, even undercover KGB officers – “babysitters” (nian’ki), as they were unofficially called (Gorsuch 119-120; Orlov and Popov, ch. 8). They accompanied and closely surveilled the Soviets’ conduct abroad and wrote mandatory post-travel reports that notified the Party of anyone who separated from the group, deviated from specified routes by visiting a night bar or a church, or happened to come in unmediated contact with natives. It would be no exaggeration to state that with so many restrictions and prescriptions the late Soviet foreign travel system represented a kind of the mobile model of the Foucauldian “carceral system” (Foucault 299). By placing outbound travelers in the hermetic ideological space of surveillance, the Soviet regime managed to recontextualize the seeming availability of freedom of movement as means of regulating social behavior and controlling dissenters. Throughout the Cold War the binary opposition “us vs. them” remained an ideological core of such regulation. For Soviet writers and poets, just like for many “ordinary Soviet citizens,” a chance to travel was a privilege and often an award of merit from their superiors. Since the 1950s officially endorsed writers and poets set off on creative business trips regularly, although careful screening was regulated directly by the Writers’ Union (Tiurin 86). Traveling writers and poets were exemplary representatives of the state too, but when they returned, they also became the “disseminators and creators of legends” about the visited destinations (Balina 902). The resulting travelogues were “a sort of pep talk for the Soviet people who were eventually traveling the same 76 “And a month before the voyage You are even given the instructions – How to spend all days there: so there would be fewer shameful actions and no-no-no extraneous relations!” 54 routes. They shaped that expected image of abroad that, due to the lack of foreign travel experience, [the Soviet citizens] were about to probe in practice” (Orlov and Popov, ch. 10). The corresponding myths about life and people abroad were actively promoted: that the proletariat in the capitalist countries was sympathetic to the Soviets, while the privileged classes despised them; that the majority of population in the West are impoverished and the material well-being and comfort are illusory and so forth (Orlov and Popov, ch. 10). Accordingly, although the Soviet travel poetry of the 1950s-1980s covers larger areas on the geographical map than before, the othering of “them” (capitalists) and befriending those who are like “us” (socialists) remains standard. See, for example, Boris Likhariov’s cycle “V strane druzei” (“In the Country of Friends”) written after the journey to Czechoslovakia – clearly an ode to the Soviet-Czech postwar “brotherly” relations. In the 1955 poem “Ne zabudu” (“I Will Not Forget”) the poet recalls his trips to Prague, Moravia and the Tatra mountains and then turns his attention to the more ideologically important destinations: “В Готвальдове, в новом цехе «Свита / Фабрики пятнадцатиэтажной, / Или на заводах знаменитых / Другом был мне всюду встречный каждый” 77 (203). Organized trips to factories, plants, construction sites and the attendant communication with proletarian “friends” were an indispensable part of any Soviet journey abroad, often more important than historical sightseeing. Clearly, most of the times the touristic routes were designed as prescribed, ready-made experiences with an inherent ideological agenda. In the same vein, the poet reminisces how the Czech children showed him passionate “brotherly feeling” and asked him to send their greetings to Leningrad. Finally, the poet’s memory brings him to the final destination – the National Monument at Vítkov in Prague where 77 “In Gottwaldov, at the new workshop “Svita” of the fifteen-floor factory, or at the famous plants everyone I met was my friend.” 55 the Tomb to the Unknown Soldier is located. It is precisely in this “sacralized” space 78 that the Soviet traveler experiences the moment of ultimate togetherness with his Slavic “friends”: “Там под кровлей общей спят герои – / Русские, и чехи, и словаки” 79 (204). Shared memory of human losses in the WWII brings about the traveler’s absolute self-identification with the people of Czechoslovakia. From ideological and political standpoint, shared identity, “heroes,” also reflects unity of “brotherly nations.” Ultimately, the text serves the postwar ideological promotion of the image of the USSR as “the power that liberated the European nations from fascist domination” (Orlov and Popov, ch. 10). By contrast, travel poetry based on the trips to capitalist countries reveals typical negative stereotypes ascribed by the Soviet propaganda to the West – “aggressive foreign politics and exploitation of the Third World, disempowerment and poverty of proletariat, inflation, unemployment, moral crisis and drug addiction” (Orlov and Popov, ch. 12). An excellent example is the travel poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko who, despite his liberal debut on the Soviet poetic scene, was progressively becoming Soviet culture’s representative abroad throughout the 1960s-1970s. In these decades he traveled to the USA, Cuba, Finland, Italy, Latin America and other destinations, often as part of delegations of Soviet writers. The poetry inspired by these travels presents an invariable image of the capitalist world as the space of moral decay, which the traveler cannot identify with. 80 78 It must be stressed that such visits to “sacralized” space (Clark “Socialist Realism”) – the memorial sites associated with either Communist leaders’ biography, or Soviet accomplishments, or the WWII – were obligatory during the Soviet tourists’ “pilgrimages.” For example, the tour to the West Germany included a visit to the house in Munich where Lenin lived in 1900-1902; one could expect to lay flowers to Karl Marx’s grave at the Highgate cemetery when traveling to London; when in Cuba, the Soviet tourists were obliged to pay respect to the Memorial of the Soviet Internationalist Soldier; in Egypt they usually visited Aswan Dam built with the Soviet support in the 1960s (Orlov and Popov, ch. 7). An interesting corresponding example of travel lyrics is young Andrei Voznesensky’s “Longjumeau” (“Lonzhiumo”) (1962-63) – the poet visits the French town where in 1911 Lenin founded the Longjumeau Party School and discerns the late leader’s presence around every corner. The poem is in line with the Soviet Poets of the Sixties’ “return to Lenin’s norms” after destalinization. 79 “There under a shared roof the heroes sleep – Russians, and Czechs, and Slovaks.” 80 The reverse situation – hostility towards Westerners visiting USSR – was also common. See for example, Andrei Dementyev’s 1966 poem “Western Tourists” (“Zapadnyе turisty”) that presents a sharply negative image of West 56 See, for instance, Yevtusheko’s Italian poems 81 , such as “Kolizei” (“Colliseum”) that starts off as follows: Что покажешь сегодня ты мне, Колизей? Рыщут крысы непуганые среди царства ночного, руинного. Педерасты напудренные жмут друг дружку у выхода львиного 82 (“Kolizei” 36). Yevtushenko’s Soviet traveler condemns all the signs of the “decadent West” that he “sees”: “morally wrong” homosexual embrace, a prostitute urinating by the historical monument, heroin trafficking on the streets and so forth. Alienated, he ends up wandering the streets of Rome “while starving for brotherhood” which the decadent capitalist world is apparently unable to offer. In “Zhara v Rime” (“The Heat in Rome”) the protagonist attacks social inequality in the bourgeois world by implying that the shared experience of summer heat is the only thing in common between Italian millionaires and ordinary people: “Объедини хоть раз господ / с простым народом, общий пот!” 83 (61). In “Fakkino” (“Facchino”), by contrast, Yevtushenko’s tourist shows sympathy for the disadvantaged porter in Palermo by identifying with his hard life and labor: “Мы все носильщики, отец, /своих и старостей, и детств....” 84 (47). Note the use of the inclusive “us” that erases the difference between the working classes in the USSR and Italy. Likewise, in such poems as “Sitsiliiskii raikom” (“Sicilian Raikom”) and Ital’ianskie sliozy (Italian Tears) the affinity between the Soviet and Italian proletariat is achieved through German tourists, whose presence is associated with the events of the WWII: “Наши батьки гибли / Не для того, чтоб здесь / Наглеть сынам” (“Our fathers didn’t die so their sons could get impudent here”). 81 The similar attitudes of the Soviet traveler abroad can be observed in Yevtushenko’s poems dedicated to other destinations (USA, Spain, Beirut) – see “Girl Beatnik,” “Cemetery of Whales,” “The Freedom to Kill,” “Barcelona’s Little Streets,” “Belly Dance” and other. 82 “What will you show me today, Coliseum? / Unafraid, rats scour / the ruined nocturnal kingdom. / Pederasts with powdered faces / squeeze each other at the gate to the lion’s den” (Yevtushenko, “Coliseum” 187). 83 “Unite for once the lords with ordinary people, common sweat!” 84 “We all are porters, father, of our old age and childhood...” 57 the references to the Italian Communist Party and the shared memory of losses in the WWII correspondingly: “Что оливы, браток, что березы – это, в общем, почти все равно. / Итальянские, русские слезы и любые – все это одно...” 85 (Ital’ianskie sliozy 329). The above-noted reduction of the concrete variegated cultural and geographical space to the unvaried ideological space imbued with preassigned meanings is evident. Amidst this incessant hostility and suspiciousness towards everything capitalist, the unofficial Russian Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky’s overt efforts to search for his creative identity in the Western culture were truly unique. Brodsky’s early contacts with Anna Akhmatova and his inclusion in the poetic group informally known as “Akhmatova’s orphans” (Brodsky, Rein, Naiman, Bobyshev) determined his reliance on the cosmopolitan Modernist legacy. His interest in his father’s WWII trophies, European cinema and music, as well as his later enthusiasm for Anglo-American poetry by W.H. Auden, R. Frost, T.S. Eliot among many others, became his conduit of information about the external world. Brodsky’s consistent “westward gaze” shaped him as an individual and a poet but also antagonized the Soviet authorities and led to the notorious expulsion from his homeland in 1972, when the emigration of Soviet Jews became officially permissible. Chapter 2 of this dissertation explores Brodsky’s travels both within and without “the Soviet empire,” before and after his forced emigration to the United States. On the example of Brodsky’s pre-emigration Russian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian travel poems, I will trace the formation of the poet’s signature “poetics of withdrawal” telling of his resolve to escape the constraints of the enclosed Soviet ideological space, despite his status of “the restricted to travel abroad” (nevyezdnoi). The attendant self-alienation is a peculiar effect of Brodsky’s wanderlust that signals a radical disconnection between his identity and the native space. 85 “Italian tears or Russian tears / or any other tears – are very much the same” (Yevtushenko, Italian Tears 204). 58 By examining Brodsky’s Italian, Dutch and Swedish lyrical journeys written in emigration, I also intend to uncover the ways in which the experience of exile impacts the identity of the traveler. Brodsky’s European lyrical journeys are informed with highly individualized, culturally determined perception of destinations that drastically differs from the conventional Soviet travelogues. Much like his Western contemporaries, especially the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, Brodsky is also concerned with the ever-present “questions of travel,” such as the tension between departure and return, destination and home – especially since homecoming remains unavailable for him until the collapse of USSR in 1991. As such, Brodsky’s existential “in-betweenness” in the global space is representative of that of thousands other Russian emigres and the “unreturned” (nevozvrashchentsy) who found themselves abroad during the Cold War and up until the present. By the end of the 1980s, the borders of the eroding Soviet state became more and more porous, and the outbound flow of travelers increased. The fourth wave of Russian emigration brought about 1.5 million of the country abroad. The new general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev adhered to the politics of rapprochement with the West, frequented Europe and USA and introduced a new stage of Russian political restructuring, the perestroika, as well as the policy of openness in discussion of political and social issues, glasnost’. By 1990, the governmental support of atheism was also officially denounced. It looks like this newly-found experience of cultural and religious openness inspired the creation of Olga Sedakova’s 1986 lyrical cycle entitled “The Chinese Journey,” that will be analyzed in Chapter 3. “The Chinese Journey”’s chronotope is exceptional, as the author alludes to the travels that took place in the mid-1950s, when she was a little girl. As a daughter of the Soviet official in Beijing, Sedakova spent short time in China that, as a young Socialist state, was then quite often frequented by the Soviets. In the personal interview with me Sedakova admitted her confinement 59 to the ideological space, as in Beijing she stayed “in an isolated Soviet world, not an embassy, but a place where all the officials lived together” (OS 86 ). Nevertheless, this experience of being isolated beyond “the second Wall of China” (OS) did not prevent her from noting rare glimpses of the real Chinese life from the Soviet bus windows. It is precisely these scattered memories that Sedakova releases from the ideology-bound past and molds into the complex single whole – her 1986 lyrical cycle pervaded with spatial, temporal and subjective shifts. The result is a dense lyrical writing that reveals the poet’s internal doubling between “here” and “there,” “now” and “then” and, most importantly, between the sense of “one’s own” and “Other.” By bringing together Russian and Chinese, the Christian and the Taoist perspectives, Sedakova is able to lift above the cultural differences and identify with all aspects of her split identity effortlessly. It is this ultimate transnational openness, appreciation of cultural continuity and rejection of Soviet isolation that unites all three poets whose travel poetry is studied here. In their striving for the open cosmopolitan world, they largely inherited the Modernist strategy of life- and self- creation. Their deliberate efforts to travel and thus transcend the Soviet cultural insulation had an extraordinary effect on their identities that will be explored further. 86 All the quotations from the personal interview with Olga Sedakova on June 29, 2016, will be marked “OS.” 60 Chapter 1 “Attracted to a Mountain”: The Sense of Self in Mandelstam's Writings on Armenia The 1930 journey to Armenia is deemed one of the most momentous and mythically charged events of Osip Mandelstam’s short biography 87 . The outcast poet who had not been writing poetry for years makes a pilgrimage to the blessed Armenian land where the lost poetic voice returns to his owner. Inspired by the voyage, Mandelstam immediately puts pen to paper on his way back in Tiflis and creates new verse, including the lyrical cycle “Armenia” (1930) and a few more Armenian poems in its margins. 88 The miracle of poetry is reborn after five years of silence. It is these Armenian poems of Mandelstam, along with the prose Journey to Armenia published three years later in the journal Zvezda, that are in the focus of the present research. By exploring semantic connections between the poetry and the prose, this study aims to identify the hidden forces behind Mandelstam’s Armenian transformation that brought to life the new poems of 1930-1931. Without belittling the importance of a productive isolation from restless Soviet Russia, or a hypnotic immersion in the world of Armenian history, nature and culture, it argues that the primary source of the “Armenian miracle” was Mandelstam’s regained “consciousness of being right” 89 (“On the Addressee” 45) and consolidation of sense of self perceived against the background of shifting historical eras. In defiance of the precarious living situation and the constant conflicts with the Soviet literary establishment, Mandelstam embraced the 87 For the discussion of the role of Armenian myth in Mandelstam's ouevre see: Jane Gary Harris “Sources, Echoes and Transformations: Mandel’shtam’s Armenian Myth in the Lyrics of the 1930s.” 88 The list of the new poetry created after Mandelstam’s five-year poetic silence extends to the other “First Moscow notebook” poems (1930-1931) which are not related to Armenia and stay behind the scope of this paper. 89 Mandelstam’s definition of poetry in the early essay “O sobesednike” (“On the Addressee”) is the following: “...isn’t poetry the consciousness of being right?” (45). 61 transformative potential of a journey not only to redeem his poetic creativity, but also to assert his self-sufficiency as a thinking individual who staunchly faces the turmoil of changing times. The Poetic Silence and The Threatened Self To better understand the impact of the Armenian journey on Mandelstam’s creative genius, a brief discussion of self-conception in his works and life of that period is helpful. In terms of poetics, the poet’s attitude to his “I” was always reserved. As Mandelstam scholars established, in the poems written before the 1930s the lyrical self is rather muted than pronounced. Lydia Ginzburg discusses the peripheral role of the persona in young Mandelstam as means of “overcoming the vague subjectivity” of Symbolism (Ginzburg 340), while Ilya Serman speaks of the “absence of the personal” in Mandelstam’s poetry created up until the 1930s based on the fact that about 45% of the poems of 1908-1925 lack personal pronoun ia (“I”) (Serman 270). It is only at the turn of the decades that the necessity of “resisting the reality” brings about the clearer defined poetic identity with its own biography, Mikhail Gasparov concludes (“Poet i kul’tura” 357). On the biographical scale, however, what precedes this reinforcement of self- identification is the personal desolation, the gradual professional decline and destitution of the 1920s. Indeed, if in 1911 Mandelstam summarized his conscious neglection of “I” in the couplet: “И, несозданный мир лелея, / Я забыл ненужное «я»” 90 (“Otchego dusha...” 54), Mandelstam of 1924 is already speaking with his age as “человек, который потерял себя” 91 (“1 ianvaria 1924” 137). Apparently, it was the loss of self voiced in this verse that anticipated the poetic crisis of the mid- and late 1920s. Not by accident in the notebook drafts to Journey to Armenia Mandelstam himself describes his creative stagnation in terms of failure in everyday self- 90 “...and, loving an uncreated world, / I forget the unneeded «I»” (“Why is there so much...” 44). 91 “the man who has lost / himself” (“January 1, 1924” 138). 62 improvement: “I don’t live well now. I live without improving myself but squeezing out of me some squirts and remains. This accidental phrase slipped off my tongue once at night after having a terrible pointless day instead of doing any so called «creative work»” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 398). Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs give even broader account of the period: “Poetry has deserted him in the middle twenties and would not come back… [as] there was something missing, something broken inside him. It was not easy to define this something, but it was very crucial, a vital, crystallizing particle, without which it was impossible to live. I could call it his “inner rhythm” or the “spirit of music,” indeed music as such, but this would be to oversimplify” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 534). This disintegration of the inner core and the attendant poetic silence seem to have had various external and internal reasons. At a very surface level, they were a result of the “bourgeois poet’s” consistent harassment in Leningrad and Moscow literary circles with an ensuing withdrawal from the Unions of Writers and Poets, inability to publish poetry in journals and the forced turn to the exhausting low-paid work of the literary translator. The last straw for Mandelstam was the infamous 1929 Eulenspiegel affair in which he was publicly accused of plagiarism by Arkadii Gornfeld, the translator of Charles de Coster’s novel The Legend of Thyl Eulenspiegel. It happened after the publishing house “Land and Factory” erroneously mentioned Mandelstam on the novel’s cover not as an editor of Gornfeld’s old translation, but as an actual translator. The publisher’s mistake cost Mandelstam not only a chance of steady employment and means of livelihood, but also his good name and the public image of self. Behind the indignant tone of Chetviortaia proza (Fourth Prose), whose author seems to assert himself by repudiating the officious Soviet literature and the “shifty gypsyishness of the writing tribe” (186), the reader can discern a desperate cry of troubled self-identification: “I am being mistaken for someone else,” (188) “I am a Chinaman, no one understands me” (182). At the same time, 63 Fourth Prose pictures the public offense to Mandelstam caused by his fellow men of letters as nothing short of “literary emasculation,” which brings to mind Freud’s idea of castration anxiety and its association with a threatened image of self. The Freudian reading of the passage would probably even suggest that the poetic silence torturing Mandelstam has a solid psychoanalytical explanation and can be interpreted as a sort of “poetic impotence.” Apart from the effect of the Eulenspiegel affair, Mandelstam’s feeling of professional abasement must have been coupled with recognition of his deteriorating material and housing status. It looks like the long-running housing problems were particularly responsible for shattering the poet’s idea of who he was and where he belonged in the new Soviet realia. The misfit Mandelstam and his wife could not even dream of requesting a private apartment from the Soviet state and spent the second half of the 1920s moving between dormitories, doma otdykha (“pensions”) and friends’ places in Tsarskoe, Kitaiskaia Derevnia, Kiev, Koktebel and Moscow. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s post-Armenian letter to the party official Viacheslav Molotov portrays the hopelessness of their situation: “Leaving for Armenia, we lost our place and were left literally out on the street <…> Nowhere, not in a single city, it is possible to receive housing. Mandelstam appeared to be homeless on the all-union scale” 92 (Grigor’iev and Petrova 183). As a result, the permanent home, this anchor that helps an individual shape the idea of personal belonging, remains one of the missing blocks in Mandelstam’s concept of self throughout the 1920s. Coupled with recurrent layoff, the lack of home contributed to the sense of instability, as, in Nadezhda Mandesltam’s words, “the chronic unemployment constantly cut the ground from under [his] feet, did not let [him] settle firmly. The struggle of human existence… for many years was destroying a person before my eyes” (qtd. in Grigor’iev and Petrova 183). 92 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 64 In the more profound sense, the problematics of Mandelstam’s self-perception during this decade derives from his disappointment in the aftermath of the Revolution, the sense of disruption of historical continuity and the failure to find his place in the new age. Mandelstam’s 1928 note “Poet o sebe” (“A Poet about Himself”) from the newspaper Reader and Writer speaks for itself: “The October Revolution could not but influence my work since it took away my “biography,” my sense of individual significance” (171). The same kind of insecurity stemming from disconnection from both the spirit of Revolution and the “I” is something Nadezhda Mandelstam refers to in her memoirs: The twenties were perhaps the worst time in M.’s life. Neither before nor after… did he speak with such bitterness about his situation in the world. <…> in the twenties he speaks all the time of his illness, inadequacy and sense of inferiority. <…> One can see from his verse that he thought his illness and inadequacy were caused by his first doubts about the Revolution <…> He feels he is a “double-dealer” for trying to “join the broken vertebrae of two centuries” and for not being able to change his values (Hope Against Hope 173). The time is out of joint for the poet, and it is beyond his power to set it right. Cut off from his past, he is denied access to the present and practically refused of any viable future. Suspended between the worlds of pre-revolutionary time and modernity, Mandelstam is not only virtually roofless – he also exists as if in a state of temporal homelessness which impedes the clear definition of self. To this precarity must be added what Gregory Freidin calls Mandelstam’s “cultural orphanhood” (“Whisper” 436). Born at the outskirts of the Russian Empire as a son of Jewish leather merchant, Mandelstam always struggled to reconcile his status of raznochinets (educated non-noble) with the lofty vocation of the poet, his inborn Jewish identity with the calling of the Christian faith he adopted, and his irresistible desire to keep up with the times with the timeless “longing for the world culture.” One can only speculate as to how Mandelstam’s sense of 65 “cultural orphanhood” progressed when the Socialist Realist paradigm came into being with its consistent misrepresentation of the cultural heritage of the past. It is crucial for our further analysis that all the factors named above make Mandelstam perceive his pre-Armenian life condition in terms of metaphors sharing the idea of suspension or deficiency. One of such metaphors resurfacing both in prose and correspondence is “sleep” interpreted not only as an interruption of constructive “daytime” activity, but also as a “bad dream” or a “nightmare.” For instance, in reference to “literary emasculation” from Fourth Prose Mandelstam writes: “And it was all as terrifying as in child’s dream” (187). In the early 1930 letter about the Eulenspiegel affair he addresses his wife: “Should I tell you what a nonsense it is, what a wild dull dream everything, everything, everything is” (“N.Ya. Mandelshtam” 498). Later, in the 1932 poem “K nemetskoi rechi” (“To German”) the poet would look back at his muteness of the late 1920s as the time when he “slept, faceless, mindless” (“To German” 218), a compelling representation of formlessness of self dormant in expectation of the lost poetic word. Another metaphorical expression of the poetic crisis of the late 1920s is imprisonment. The image of incarceration emerges in Fourth Prose when the narrator once and for all leaves his dreadful temporary residence in the house of the Committee for the Relief of Scholars in Moscow: “When I was moving to another apartment, my fur coat lay across the carriage as it does when people leave the hospital after a long stay or have just been let out of prison” (181). It recurs in the same 1930 letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam in extremely powerful wording: “My dear, it has been hard on me, it always was, but now I can’t even find words to tell you. They confused me, hold me as if in prison, there is no light for me. I want to brush off the lies – and cannot, I want to wash off the dirt – and cannot” (“N.Ya. Mandelshtam” 498). The release of 66 self from the creative confinement associated with Eulenspiegel affair thus presupposes cleansing from slender and opening eyes to the light of objectivity and truth. If the aforementioned tropes are introduced mainly in the meaning of temporary intermission of full life activity, the ultimate metaphor for Mandelstam’s creative block develops the idea of threat to the vital human necessity – breathing. Kiril Taranovsky rightly stresses the prevalence of the image of difficulty in breathing in Mandelstam’s poetry starting in the early 1920s (Essays 10-14), and it is possible to argue that by the end of the decade this kind of imagery reaches its fullest expression. The motif of lack of air appears in Fourth Prose in nearly aphoristic form: “I divide all the works of the world literature into those written with and without permission. The first are trash, the second – stolen air” (181). Complying with the literary standards of the Moscow “writing tribe” thus equals a voluntary suffocation, whereas the piece of independent writing is a bit of fresh air to sustain one’s life. Anna Akhmatova’s memories verify the interconnection between the motif of choking and the failure of poetic creation for Mandelstam: “Most of all in the world [Mandelstam] was afraid of his own [poetic] muteness, calling it suffocation” (qtd. in Lekmanov 111). Nadezhda Mandelstam’s account of the poet’s breaking silence in 1930 also includes the reference to the fatal airless environment he was in: “[The voice] returned the moment it dawned on him he must smash the glass cage in which he was imprisoned and regain his freedom. You cannot write poetry in a glass cage – there is no air” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 534). In such a way, the dreary poemless life is tantamount to existence in vacuum and implicitly to death itself. “A Desired Journey to Armenia” It is in defiance of the combined suppressive atmosphere of sleep, confinement and vacuum that Mandelstam conceived his dream of travel to Armenia. For Mandelstam, “splendid 67 isolation in the alien land” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 535) away from his offenders in Russia was an absolute requirement of self-reset. The need to cut loose from the world that have strangled him for several years motivated the poet to seek the alternative reality which would awaken, rescue him and fill his lungs with poetic air, if only for a short time. At the moment, however, the fulfillment of the Armenian fantasy seemed hardly feasible. The only chance for the Soviet writer to travel around the Union was by receiving an assignment to visit construction sites and industrial centers in the developing republics and glorify their achievements on paper. For such a literary pariah as Mandelstam this sort of assignment could have only come up by intervention of the miracle. It is indicative that the notebook drafts of Journey to Armenia depict the Armenian escape exactly in terms of a cherished dream and a happy chance: “Lightness has interfered into my life <…> I imagined [it] to be a tickling expectation of some every-ticket-wins lottery, where I could pull out anything – a piece of strawberry soap, sitting in the archive in the first printer’s chambers or a desired journey to Armenia of which I could not stop dreaming” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 398). The trip to Armenia is thus understood as a lottery win, a fortunate coincidence of circumstances, a godsend. Yet there was rather specific person who was responsible for Mandelstam’s winning the happy “lottery ticket.” His name was Nikolai Bukharin, he was a known Communist Party figure, a member of its Central Committee and Mandelstam’s only longstanding political patron. It was in 1929, when, according to biographers, Mandelstam made a first attempt to arrange the trip to Armenia through Bukharin. The National Archive of Armenia still keeps Bukharin’s 1929 letter to Saak Ter-Gabrielian, the chair of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Armenian SSR, with a request to find “a job of cultural character” for Mandelstam and assurance that the latter provides the literary piece about his Armenian tour. “You only need to leave him alone for 68 a while and let him work,” Bukharin writes and thus acknowledges Mandelstam’s crisis and a need of creative recuperation. The response to this letter written by the People’s Commissar of Education Askanaz Mrav’ian promised Mandelstam positions of a Russian literature lecturer at the Yerevan University and a Russian language instructor at the Veterinary Institute. However, the teaching trip did not take place not only because of Mravian’s death, but also due to Mandelstam’s starting a new much-needed job of a literary columnist in the newspaper “Moscow Komsomolets” (Nerler). On top of the archival letter with Bukharin's request there is only a big red stamp saying “WAIT.” It is interesting that the literary evidence of the failed 1929 Armenian voyage is found already in chapter 7 of Fourth Prose, right after the admission of blurred identity: “I am a Chinaman, no one understands me” (182). Rejected by the uncomprehending “race” of writers, the narrator urges the reader to join him in his travels somewhere where he would presumably be understood better than in his Russian environs. He indicates that such a travel would have led him to Armenia were it not that his benefactor “the ant People’s Commisar” Mrav’ian passed away. “If I went to Yerevan, I would…,” Mandelstam says and envisions his would-be railroad trip, reading on a train and arrival at the Yerevan railway station (Chetviortaia Proza 351). Despite the actual failure of the first Armenian journey, the accuracy of this account as if causes its materialization and undermines the dreaminess of the “would-be” mode. It is now impossible to say clearly whether the subjunctive mood refers to the opportunity lost in the past or forestalls the future with hope and determination. As the chapter ends, the narrator reaffirms his intent to arrive in Armenia with his “Jewish staff” in the hand, which is both a symbol of return to his true 69 identity 93 and an equivalent of the “holy staff” of moral freedom that in his early essay Mandelstam attributed to Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev entering Rome. 94 In such a way, a trip on a literary assignment evolves into a spiritual pilgrimage with the supreme mission – to recover the righteousness of the poet’s cause. The second attempt to reach the destination of his dream turned out to be more successful for Mandelstam. According to his spouse’s recollections, this time the journey was organized via the “transmission belt” by Viacheslav Molotov upon Bukharin’s request. Although it was arranged as a “second-rate” trip “not exactly in the brilliant style” that the big proletarian writers would be treated with, the Mandelstams were satisfied even with the modest welcome (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 528). In March 1930 the couple finally took off for Armenia, but on the way spent a month at a government dacha in the Abkhaz Sukhumi, like their fellow assigned writers. While expecting for documentation necessary for his transfer to Yerevan, Mandelstam evidently treated Sukhumi as a place of forced stopover rather than a destination in itself. In the drafts of the Journey covering that time the image of Armenia as a desired goal of travel assumes more and more biblical connotations: “Six weeks assigned to me for stay in Sukhumi I considered as a threshold and a sort of quarantine – before the [exodus] call out to Armenia” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 400). In such a way, Mandelstam introduces the metaphorical representation of Armenia central to his writings – the view of that country as a 93 According to Mikhail Gasparov, the quoted fragment also signals the shift of Mandelstam’s attitude to Judaism. “Its isolation and separation from the world unity” is parallel to that of the narrator himself and thereby is appealing to Mandelstam (“Poet i kul’tura” 355). 94 The image of a “holy staff” comes from Mandelstam’s 1914 essay “Piotr Chaadaev” (“Peter Chaadaev”) and is related to the notion of moral freedom or freedom of choice which, in Mandelstam’s thinking, was “the gift of the Russian earth” that Chaadaev brought to the West (56). In the context of Fourth Prose, however, it rather has personal moral freedom as an implication. See more on the importance of this trope in Jane Gary Harris “Sources, Echoes and Transformations: Mandel’shtam’s Armenian Myth in the Lyrics of the 1930s” and “The “Latin Gerundive” as Autobiiographical Imperative: A Reading of Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia. 70 land of covenant, an abundant “land flowing with milk and honey” promised to him as an asylum from the “slavery” of his Russian life. It is not until the end of April that Mandelstam received a long-awaited “pass” to the “promised land” and in early May arrived in Yerevan. He quickly became a part of the Armenian capital’s intellectual life by making acquaintances with the local intelligentsia, such as the painter Martiros Sar’ian, the architect Alexander Tamanian and others. It is also here in the mosque yard in Yerevan that Mandelstam first met one of his closest friends at the time, the biologist Boris Kuzin who was sent on a trip to Armenia to study an indigenous paint-producing cochineal beetle. It is absolutely necessary to point out that Mandelstam’s friendship with Kuzin was a key element, but not the only one, that by his own admission contributed to awakening “the sleeping” poet in 1930: “Я дружбой был, как выстрелом, разбужен” 95 (“K nemetskoi rechi” 180). After two months in Yerevan, in July 1930, the Mandelstams moved to the newly founded dom otdykha located at the former monastery on the island in lake Sevan where they enjoyed healthy mountain climate and spectacular beauty of the Armenian nature. The acquaintance with the representatives of the Armenian scholarship staying at the house was probably the most vivid impression of this trip. In Journey Mandelstam highlights the outstanding intelligence of the European-educated old guard Armenian scholars, such as the ethnographer and historian Asatur Khachaturian, the chemist Stepan Gambarian and others, who thus stand in contrast to the parvenu scientists from his Moscow surrounding. It is also in this nourishing atmosphere of knowledge that Mandelstam made significant progress in learning the contemporary Armenian language. 95 “I was awaken by friendship as by a gunshot.” 71 He advanced to studying the Classical Armenian, or so called grabar, back in Yerevan in August and September under the supervision of Mamikon Gevorkian, the director of the State Public Library of Armenia. The fruits of these studies were Mandelstam’s later attempts in translating the medieval chronicles of Armenian history by Faustus of Byzantium and bishop Sebeos. Altogether his acquaintance with Armenia was constantly deepening through exploration of the rich heritage of Armenian history, script, language and culture. It is known for sure that Mandelstams made several short tours from Yerevan to the nearby historical and natural sights, such as the ancient churches in Zvartnots, Etchmiadzin, Ashtarak village and the foothills of mount Aragats (Alagez). It is highly likely that the travelers did even more sightseeing unattested in Mandelstam’s writings. One of the last such trips outside Yerevan in September revealed to the Mandelstams the darker side of the modern Armenian history. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls the bus ride to Nagorny Karabakh, specifically the town of Shusha devastated by the followers of the Azerbaijani nationalist “Musavat” party in 1920, in the wake of the 1915 Armenian genocide by Turks. The picture of the catastrophe that the Mandelstams witnessed there included the destroyed houses with no roofs or windows and the out-of-use wells once filled with corpses of the Armenian victims. The only town dwellers they met were the squalid Muslim merchants at the market square selling the flatbread the travelers disdained to eat. Mandelstam’s conviction that these people were “the remains of the murderers who ten years ago raided the town” must have aggravated the sense of menace to self and reminded that “it is all the same in Shusha as we have [in Russia], but more graphic,” meaning the same deadly environment of iniquity and destitution left in Moscow (N. Mandelstam, Kniga treti’ia 230). Notoriously, the Mandelstams escaped Shusha for Stepanakert by carriage with the noseless driver wearing the leather mask on his face. This sinister figure would reemerge in the 1931 poem “Na vysokom perevale...” (“The 72 Carriage-Driver”) together with the familiar motif of nightmare haunting the poet as in Russia, so beyond: “Мы со смертью пировали – / Было страшно, как во сне” 96 (167). Such was the factual itinerary of Mandelstam’s travel to Armenia. In September 1930, after the Council of People’s Commissars’ funding was exhausted, the poet and his wife left Yerevan for Moscow with layover in Tiflis. However, it would be inaccurate to state that the Armenian journey came to its end at that point – in purely literary sense, it was only beginning. It is on the way back to Moscow in Tiflis that the nightmare of what was seen in Nagorny Karabakh and what awaited in Russia faded into the background and gave way to final awakening. On or around Nadezhda Iakovlevna’s name day, September 30, 1930, Mandelstam dedicated to her seven short lines of “Kuda kak strashno nam s toboi…” (“Pretty scary for you and me...”), which became the first poem to break the five-year silence. As Nadezhda Mandelstam herself remembers, “he said that [this poem] came first and woke him up” (Kniga tret’ia 162). What followed later in October was the creation of twelve poems of the cycle “Armenia” complemented by five contiguous poems of 1930 and four poems and fragments of 1931, all somehow related to the Armenian theme. It is this verse that sheds some light on the marvelous process of Mandelstam’s poetic revival that started in Armenia. Deriving The Semantic Formulae of Armenia as Self At first reading, however, the cycle “Armenia” seems to be a direct opposite of a manifesto of self-affirmation that one would expect from a recovered poet. Out of twelve poems written in both rhymed and free verse, the lyrical self as expressed by the singular personal pronoun ia (“I”) appears only in five, that is in less than a half of the cycle. However, what 96 “...we were carousing with death - / it was terrifying, like a dream” (O. Mandelstam, “The Carriage-Driver” 200). 73 compensates for this seemingly impersonal tone is the consistence of using ty (“you), the second person singular pronoun which also implies the existence of a first-person ia (“I”). This resort to the second person is apparently attributable to Mandelstam’s belief in deep interrelation between participants of a speech act. As stated in the early article “On the Addressee”: “When we convene with someone, we search his face for sanctions, for a confirmation of our sense of rightness. Even more so the poet” (45). Devoid of access to his immediate reading audience, the poet finds such interlocutor in Armenia. By doing so, he not only personifies the abstract notion of a country, but above all asserts himself as an author of an addressed speech act, that is essentially in terms of his creative identity. It is through the representation of Armenia that Mandelstam introduces a range of motifs that semantically often relate to the values important in his own self-conception. By witnessing these values in action on Armenian land and voicing them in his verse the poet as if aims to adopt or secure them himself. Thus, the traveler does not focus his contemplative activity solely on the external reality but projects his inner world onto Armenia and translates the nation’s challenges, virtues and weaknesses into his own corresponding emotional states. It is this speculative exchange of ideas and emotions between the persona and the country that guides the traveler’s search for poetic “rightness.” The dominant motifs that serve this purpose have been previously established in the scholarship and include, to give an example, admiration for labor of the Armenians. 97 The imagery developing these motifs, such as a metaphor of an ox that stands for labor, resurfaces throughout the cycle in various combinations, but is never merely redundant. Conversely, it connects the different poems with the invisible magnetic ties, so that a certain image in one poem 97 See Jennifer Baines Mandelstam: The Later Poetry; Irina Semenko “Rannie redaktsii i varianty tsikla Armenia” (“Early Editions and Variants of the Cycle “Armenia”) in Poetika pozdnego Mandelshtama (Poetics of Late Mandelstam); Marina Andreeva Armianskie freski Osipa Mandelshtama (Armenian Frescos of Osip Mandelstam). 74 might elucidate an obscure place in another or aid its interpretation in some other way. As Lydia Ginzburg described this peculiarity of Mandelstam’s poetics: the poems… give a semantic key to each other. Each one of them has completeness, and at the same time they are linked with the cross-cutting symbolism that goes through all Mandelstam’s poetry… However, [these cross-cutting images] do not exist… on their own, but in certain connections. “Every word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in different directions”, Mandelstam writes in “Razgovor o Dante” (354). It is the bundles of meaning that extend from a poem to a poem in “Armenia” and step- by-step contribute to construction of the country’s composite concept in the author’s poetic world. As Mandelstam himself elaborates on this writing principle, the trick of such technique is “to present in the form of a scattered alphabet… the very elements which, in accord with the laws of the transformability of poetic material, will be united into formulas of meaning” (Conversation about Dante 267). Thus, the images arise in a random order and as if by themselves, nevertheless being prepared by the train of the author’s associative thought and pre- arranged for their interconnection in the reader’s consciousness. 98 Crucially, in deriving such formulae Mandelstam frequently combines controversial, almost opposite semantic categories to recreate the essence of Armenia in words. Perhaps, these paradoxical combinations serve as reminders for the slandered poet that everything that this world has to offer has its right and reason for existence, including the best and the worst manifestations of being, human thought and behavior. By reconciling extremes in the spectrum of life phenomena that he observes and ponders in Armenia, Mandelstam as it were balances out 98 The process of development of these seemingly random associations, as Irina Semenko showed, is also reflected in the drafts and early versions of the cycle. The researcher notes that Mandelstam’s priority when drafting out a poem is never a stylistic work, but “sorting through” potential imagery and selecting more and more appropriate variants (Semenko 36). 75 the mutual magnetism of the scattered semantic elements in the cycle with a bit of therapeutic repelling. By way of example, the motif of labor that characterizes Armenia is initially given in coupling of the mutually distinct categories of hard, exhausting, severe and mighty, solemn, beautiful. In the epigraph of the cycle 99 this tension is conveyed through the juxtaposition of the images of an ox, blood and roses: Как бык шестикрылый и грозный Здесь людям является труд И, кровью набухнув венозной, Предзимние розы цветут… 100 (“Armeniia” 145). The short quatrain immediately activates a series of reader’s multidirectional associations. First of all, the figure of an ox undoubtedly has a prototype in the Armenian art: along with such animals as a lion an a ram, an ox as a symbol of power was often depicted in bas-reliefs of Armenian churches and frescoes. 101 But in the context of this poem, the mythical image of a six-winged ox is rather purely metaphorical and embodies the reverence for labor that the Armenian people harbor. The very collocation “six-winged ox” is remarkable for contradictory fusion of the categories of “heaviness” and “lightness,” hence the idea of hard labor that lends wings. Besides that, the ox’s toil gives rise to the image of filling veins with blood at physical exertion, which the association binds with redness of pre-winter roses, that is to the idea of beauty, notwithstanding its fading. The parallelism of concepts of labor and flowering 99 Its status is still debatable among the scholars – it might be an epigraph or a free-standing poem preceding the cycle. See Semenko. 100 “People here see work / like a six-winged terrible bull, / and pre-winter roses bloom / swollen with venous blood” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 179). 101 For example, on the southern facade of the Katoghike chapel at the Geghard monastery there is an image of a lion fighting an ox – the heraldry of the Armenian princes Zakharians. According to G. Kubatian’s hypothesis, the image of an ox from the poem in discussion was specifically inspired by Mandelstam’s trip to the monasteries of Siunik Province of Armenia with their bas-reliefs picturing the winged bulls. See Kubatian G. Vorovannyi vozdukh. Stat’i i zametki (The Stolen Air. Essays and Notes). 76 beauty in Mandelstam’s poetic vision is also clearly supported by the rhyme “trud-tsvetut” (“labor – bloom”). Accordingly, it is the skill of comprehending beauty in labor that the traveler seeks to cultivate in himself. Not by coincidence in another Armenian poem, one of those rare ones where the poet manifests his “I” straightforwardly, he does so in the context of sympathy for the Armenians’ labor effort: “Как люб мне натугой живущий <…> народ” 102 (151). After all, to live in a permanent effort to work and to write is the poet’s imperative as well, and in this light the worship of labor overlaps with Mandelstam’s need for creative rehabilitation. Already in the next, opening poem of the cycle the same motifs recur, now complemented with a new set of “alphabet elements” that expand the semantics of the imagery: Ты розу Гафиза колышешь И нянчишь зверушек-детей, Плечьми осьмигранными дышишь Мужицких бычачьих церквей. Окрашена охрою хриплой, Ты вся далеко за горой… 103 (145-146). The common semantic thread connects this poem to the previous one via the motif of the ox’s toil, this time transferred to the “muzhik’s ox-shaped churches.” The recurrence of the ox imagery allows the reader to ascribe the qualities named in the epigraph to the works of medieval Armenian architecture: they are built with hard labor, but mighty, solemn and beautiful. Additionally, their depiction suggests a new semantic element in Armenia’s portrait: “muzhik’s” churches are apparently built by the ordinary peasants, but also erected as something simple, plain, even primitive or primal. Indeed, this description is quite in accordance with the ascetic 102 “I love this hard-living people” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 184). 103 “[You] rock the rose of Hafiz, cradle / [the children-cubs], nurse, / breathing with the eight-sided shoulders / of a muzhik’s ox-shaped church. // Painted with raucous ocher / you’re all far beyond the [mountain]...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 179-180). Translation adapted. 77 exterior and decoration of a traditional Armenian church with its unadorned faceted cupola, hence “eight-sided shoulders.” The primal adjoins to the representation of children as cubs nursed by Armenia. The image suggests validity of the new semantic element feral, animalistic associated with the country in the cycle. It gains momentum in the second poem where an indefinite cub turns into a drawing lion. The motif of coloring introduced in the previous poem: “окрашена охрою хриплой” – is also picked up here: Ты красок себе пожелала – И выхватил лапой своей Рисующий лев из пенала С полдюжины карандашей. <…> И крови моей не волнуя, Как детский рисунок, просты, Здесь жены проходят, даруя От львиной своей красоты 104 (146-147). Based on this fragment, one of the cycle’s important semantic formulae childish consists first and foremost of the motifs of color pencil drawing and animalism. 105 It is noteworthy that “the bundles of meaning” stretching from the words “lion,” “children’s,” “drawing” are caught up in the ensuing poem almost literally, as the poet marvels: “Ах, Эривань, Эривань! Иль птица тебя рисовала, / Или раскрашивал лев, как дитя, из цветного пенала?” 106 (146). Thereby, the primary characteristics of the manner of drawing is again formulated in terms of simplicity: “simple, as children’s drawings” and beautiful, as manifest in the rhyme “prosty- 104 “You wanted colors, suddenly - / and a drawing lion grabbed / pencils from the pencil-case / with his paw. // <...> // And women walk by, / simple as children’s drawings, / their lion-like beauty / not making my blood leap” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 180). 105 See more on Mandelstam’s adherence to children’s perception of the world on his journey to Armenia in: Wolf Iro “Children’s World View As a Subtext of O. Mandel’štam’s ‘Putešestie v Armeniju’.” 106 “Oh Erivan, Erivan! Did a bird draw you, / or a lion paint you, like a child, out of a colored pencil-case?” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 181). 78 krasoty” (“simple-beauty”). It is highly likely that the children’s drawings signify creative activity in general, which should be simple, spontaneous, somewhat infantile as opposed to the cumbersome work of the officious Soviet artist. At the same time, it is also the Armenian women whom the poet endows with beautiful simplicity of a child’s drawing. The expression “lion’s beauty” connotes the symbolism of that animal in the Armenian culture 107 and forwards somewhat novel semantics of honor, nobleness, grandeur attributed to the Armenians. 108 The poet’s desire to emulate this honorable posture is explicit: “the lion’s beauty” is seen as a gift that he takes over from the locals by simply passing by. The calm of the poet’s blood in presence of the Armenian women stands in contrast with the aforementioned restlessness of blood in the swollen veins and obviously presented positively, in asexual way, as suits the analogy with children’s art. On the other hand, the image of the lion refers the reader beyond the limits of the cycle to a couple of draft poems which explore the nature of the Armenian language: Колючая речь Араратской долины, Дикая кошка – армянская речь, Хищный язык городов глинобитных, Речь голодающих кирпичей 109 (O. Mandelstam, “Koliuchaia rech’...” 151); and: Дикая кошка – армянская речь Мучит меня и царапает ухо… 110 (O. Mandelstam, “Dikaia koshka...” 151). 107 The lions were depicted on tandards of the noble Armenian dynasties for centuries, e.g. on the coat of arms of the princes Orbelians found on the tombstones of Noravank monastery. The present-day Armenian coat of arms includes the depiction of lion and an eagle. 108 Cf. from notebooks of Journey to Armenia: “The smile of an elderly female Armenian peasant is inexpressibly beautiful – there is so much nobility, exhausted dignity and some grand charm of a married woman in it” (O. Mandelstam, “Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 340). 109 “Thorny words on the Plain of Ararat - / Armenian words like wildcats - / predatory tongue of mud-walled cities - / speech of starving bricks!” (O. Mandelstam, “Thorny words...” 184). 110 “Armenian words are wildcats - / [torturing], scratching my ear...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenian words...” 185). Translation adapted. 79 The elements of language and speech, pivotal in the conceptual structure of “Armenia,” absorb the semantics of feral, animalistic present in the image of a wild cat and enhanced with alliteration of “sh,” “shch,” “ch,” “ts”. The latter must reflect the phonetic character of the Armenian language, rich in hushers and thus hard to grasp by non-native speakers. To the idea of wild speech the poet adds the motif of torture and torment embodied in the cat’s scratching, which apparently embodies the complications of the language learning process which Mandelstam must have faced in Armenia. In addition, the difficulty attached to the notion of language per se inevitably reads as a metaphor for the poetic crisis Mandelstam is ought to overcome. Yet the reader is ready to pick another meaning from a “bundle” extending from the phrase “Armenian words”: the language is predatory and even militant, as it emblematizes the nation’s resistance, endurance and resilience. The idea of fortitude and toughness of Armenians who survived centuries of oppression by the conquerors from the neighboring Muslim states is represented throughout the cycle with the imagery related to stones, clay and earth. In the given poem it is the mud-walled cities and the starving bricks that have the ability of speech to herald their hardships to the world. Of course, the metonymical aspect of the image implies that it is the residents of the mud and brick houses, the Armenians themselves, who speak. This proposition is also supported by the folklore Armenian tales whose plots occasionally draw together stones and people, as is the case with the story of how the nonbelievers of the town turned into stones for their little faith. 111 Apart from that, in the sixth poem of the cycle Mandelstam himself establishes an additional connection between the stones and the people: 111 See “The Town of Stone” in 100 Armenian Tales, 411-412. 80 Орущих камней государство – Армения, Армения! Хриплые горы к оружью зовущая – Армения, Армения! 112 (“Armeniia” 148). The mention of the state of screaming stones echoes the poet’s own out-of-cycle confession: “Как люб мне натугой живущий <…>/ Рожающий, спящий, орущий / К земле пригвожденный народ,” 113 which recycles the same exact adverbial participle orushchii (“screaming”) to define the people (151). If in the latter poem the routine cyclicity of people’s giving birth, sleeping and screaming brings to mind the familiar semantic element of simplicity of the Armenians’ earthly life, then in the former poem the screaming stones rather function as a national symbol of defiance to its enemies. This is because Armenia’s call to arms addressed to its mountains creates a specific, historically determined setting of military occupation, which appears even more concrete in the second poem of the cycle: Страна москательных пожаров И мертвых гончарных равнин, Ты рыжебородых сардаров Терпела средь камней и глин. Вдали якорей и трезубцев, Где жухлый почил материк, Ты видела всех жизнелюбцев, Всех казнелюбивых владык 114 (146-147). In this poem the nation’s endurance (“terpela”) is virtually inscribed in the same line as stones and clays, which underscores the stone perseverance of Armenians fending off the attacks 112 “Country of screaming stones – / Armenia, Armenia! / Calling hoarse mountains to war – Armenia, Armenia!” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182). 113 “I love this hard-living people / <...> / giving birth, sleeping, / screaming, nailed to the earth” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 184-185). 114 “Country of musk-shop fires / and dead plains, ripe for the potter, / you suffered red-bearded Moslem / captains among your stones and clay. // Far from tridents and anchors, / where a dull dried-out mainland slept, / you saw all the lovers of life, / all the torture-loving lords” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 180). 81 of sardars, that is the Persian military leaders. The analogy with Mandelstam’s personal situation is quite transparent: the poet suffered from the abuse of his literary oppressors as severely as Armenia who confronted its foreign invaders. This metaphorical exposition overlaps with the semantics of honor and nobleness manifest in the next quatrain of the same poem in reference to “lion’s beauty” that the poet strives to imitate. The cumulative effect of the semantic lines of endurance and honor evokes the idea of defensive attitude Mandelstam inclines to take in resistance to life misfortunes – to stand up for his poetic self with stoic tolerance and unshakeable dignity that he witnessed in Armenians. Despite the positivity of this message of resilience, the poem maintains the semantic ambiguity underlying the whole cycle. Truly, next to the life-affirming image of people’s dignified struggle the reader finds the mentions of “dead valleys” and the Persian executioners, next to representation of constructive activity of drawing – the remark of devastating “musk- shop” fires. That is to say, time and again the poetic text incorporates the contradictory semantic lines of creative and destructive, life and death at once. The interaction of these poles first noted by Irina Semenko (40) seems especially palpable in this poem’s culmination with its paradoxical image of the “young coffins”: Как люб мне язык твой зловещий, Твои молодые гроба, Где буквы – кузнечные клещи И каждое слово – скоба… 115 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 147). The writing engraved on tombstones is reminiscent of tongs and cramps of a blacksmith, based on the visual similarity of these tools to the look of the Armenian alphabet. In this way, the poet likens the act of producing a written speech to that of forging. In contrast to these creative 115 “How I love your ominous tongue, / your young graves / where the letters are a blacksmith’s pincers / and every word is an iron parenthesis...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 180). 82 processes, the object of engraving – the coffins, or the headstones – denote death, hence the “sinister” aspect of the language used with such unfortunate purpose. Nearly oxymoronic incongruence pervades the phrase “young graves,” which might be interpreted literally as “graves of young-aged people” or “recent graves.” The latter reading seems more viable, as it hints at the disastrous consequences of the 1915 Armenian Genocide which surely disturbed Mandelstam’s imagination on his voyage. What prompts the poet to profess affection to the “sinister” Armenian language is exactly this compassion for the nation’s tragic fate and the deference for its speech which equally preserves memory of the most triumphant and the most tragic moments of history. The push and pull interrelation of life and death conjures up another dialectical opposition central to the cycle – that of nature and culture. A typical device in “Armenia” is a conceptualization of cultural phenomena in terms of nature and vice versa, as is the case with the tenth poem where the noise of Ashtarak spring water is tantamount at once to sounds of music, the spinning wheel and the clockwork. Other than that, the distinct interpenetration of nature and culture is apparent in the seventh poem which pictures the seventh-century Zvartnots cathedral: Не развалины, нет – но порубка могучего циркульного леса, Якорные пни поваленных дубов звериного и басенного христианства, Рулоны каменного сукна на капителях – как товар из языческой разграбленной лавки… 116 (147-148). The remains of the temple are denied their cultural semantics in the very opening of the poem by means of double negation and adversative dash: “Ruins – no...” Along with that, the aspect of destruction and death is also negated, since the poet identifies the ruins with the living organic matter, namely the stumps left of the oak forest of the early Armenian Christianity. The 116 “Ruins – no – but poachers cutting a mighty compass forest, / oak-anchor stumps of a wild, fabled Christianity; / bolts of stony cloth, as if plundered from some pagan shop...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182). 83 implication is that although in the new Soviet reality the trees of faith are chopped, their stumps are still rooted in the Armenian soil. What also draws the reader’s attention is that the forest is defined as “compass-like,” perhaps because one can read the ruins’ age as if by circular shapes of tree rings. The Christianity is “wild and fabled” and the décor of the cathedral’s capitals is pagan-like, possibly as a reference to the religious syncretism of the period of its construction. Generally speaking, in these lines the artifacts of Christian culture either transform into the objects of nature which represents this culture's organic animated essence, or shift to the different cultural-religious plane, that of Paganism. This shift anticipates that yearning for “synthesis of cultures” that, according to Mikhail Gasparov, Mandelstam felt especially intensely in his late period (“Poet i kul’tura” 359). In the fourth poem the same convergence of the natural and the cultural is the starting point for unfolding of the quintessential image of Armenia as a living being: Закутав рот, как влажную розу, Держа в руках осьмигранные соты, Всё утро дней на окраине мира Ты простояла, глотая слезы, И отвернулась со стыдом и скорбью От городов бородатых Востока – И вот лежишь на москательном ложе, И с тебя снимают посмертную маску 117 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 147). This is the only poem in the cycle where the representation of Armenia attains absolute tangibility through animation of the inanimate. The device of personification turns the country into a crying woman who metonymically signifies both the victims of invasions and the nation 117 “Wrapping up your mouth like a moist rose, / holding eight-sided honeycombs in your hands, / you spent whole mornings standing / at the edge of the world, swallowing tears. // And you turned from the bearded cities / of the east, in shame and sorrow; / and there you are on a musk-shop bed / and they’re lifting off the death-mask” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 181). 84 mourning over their catastrophic consequences. The woman’s belonging to the living world is emphasized with the natural attributes of her look: her mouth is like a moist rose, and in her hands she holds a honeycomb. Nevertheless, on close reading the natural is reinterpreted as the cultural: the rose as the historical grief for the nation’s sufferings, whereas moistness stands for tears, and the honeycomb as the people’s spirituality conveyed in the familiar image of “eight- sided” Armenian churches. Given Armenia’s segregated position as the outpost of Christianity at the borderline with the Middle East, the confrontation with the “bearded cities of the east” first takes form of an isolation from the rest of the Christian peers: “you... [were] standing at the edge of the world.” It so rapidly develops to the shameful aversion to the Islamic world: “you turned from the bearded cities / of the east, in shame and sorrow,” that the reader fails to capture the moment when it already entails violent death: “they’re lifting off the death-mask.” Paradoxically, what began as an animation of the lifeless geographical abstraction concludes with a transfer back to the realm of dead, thus once again activating the polarization of life and death in the cycle. The dignified separation from the persecutors, even at the cost of doom, is the only attitude that mitigates the poem’s tension and provides a pattern of behavior for the poet who finds himself in the similar situation of adversity. Remarkably, it is also in this poem that a keen reader identifies a metaphor for what must have been the poet’s deepest concern at the time – his protracted poetic muteness. Indeed, there is no obvious justification of the fact that the moist rose denotes precisely the mouth and not the crying eyes or some other part of the woman’s face. It is this exact allocation of the rose at the level of source of speech and the emphatic obstruction of this source: “wrapping up your mouth,” that generates the motif of silence in the text. Having omitted the rose’s original semantics of beauty, the poet hereby draws on the familiar symbolism of torment, specifically the passion of 85 Jesus Christ, universally ascribed to this flower. The tormenting muteness thus must epitomize the silence in memory of victims of devastations, but perhaps also the world’s ignorant unawareness of the Armenian Genocide and the lack of its recognition taking place already in the 1920s. At the more profound level of meaning, of course it serves as a reflection of the persona’s lack of command of his poetic voice. This interconnection between the flower and the speech, particularly poetic, is reinforced as the meaning of “rose” reaches out of its semantic bundle back to the beginning of the first poem: “[You] rock the rose of Hafiz…” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 179 [1973]). Here the poet reinstates in its rights the semantics of beauty inherent in the image of the rose, narrowing it to that of beauty of poetry. This is due to the specification “the rose of Hafiz,” which alludes to celebration of roses in the verse by the fourteenth-century Persian poet and feels pertinent in the context of the Armenian-Persian long-standing cultural crossing. “The rose of Hafiz” in such a way becomes an incarnation of poetic inspiration that one seeks to discover in Armenia. Eventually, it is in the fifth poem of the cycle that all the mentioned meanings of the word “rose” – that of beauty as such, beauty of poetry and torment – come together in a single focus: Руку платком обмотай и в венценосный шиповник, В самую гущу его целлулоидных терний Смело, до хруста ее погрузи – Добудем розу без ножниц! Но смотри, чтобы он не осыпался сразу – Розовый мусор – муслин – лепесток соломоновый – И для шербета негодный дичок, Не дающий ни масла, ни запаха 118 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 147). 118 “Tie a shawl around your arm and bury it / in the kingly sweetbriar, / down to the very center of its celluloid thorns, / boldly, until you hear crackling. / No scissors, but we’ll have roses. / But don’t let them shed all at once - / rose-pink sweepings – muslin – Solomon’s petals – useless even for sherbet, / no fragrance, no oil” (O. Mandelstam, O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182). 86 The everyday specifics of the setting and the indefiniteness of the addressee whose gender is nowhere defined make the reader question whether the “you” of the text is still the feminine personification of Armenia as in most poems of the cycle. By contrast, it seems like the appeal to the second person rather unfolds as the dialogue with self, which the first-person plural form dobudem (“we’ll have”) hints at. If that is true, then the call for plucking the wild rose branch might be interpreted as the poet’s self-persuasion to gain a control of or virtually take in hand his poetic inspiration. The fact that the rose is wild foregrounds the semantics of something organically feral which needs to be tamed in the artist’s hands. It also brings back to mind the image of the “wild cat” of the “prickly” Armenian speech which tortured the persona with its scratching. Evidently, it is precisely the motif of scratching and prickling which comprises the semantics of torment of speech in the making through recognition of the commonality between the cat’s claws and the rose’s thorns. In the context of the given poem, this torturous aspect of obtaining the martyr’s “wreath-bearing” wild rose unambiguously reads as the persona’s struggle to regain his poetic genius. Nonetheless, the courage that he invokes in doing so: “bury it / <...> / boldly, until you hear crackling” makes the whole endeavor a bold self-challenge which would likely bear fruit. Ironically, it is exactly the wild rose’s fruitlessness that comes to light as a result of this effort. The poet’s self-warning not to get the blossoms fall off the bush translates into his worry not to waste the precious energy of poetic imagination and to handle it with care. However, this impulse is immediately countered with the idea of the wild rose’s uselessness in producing either an essential oil, or a Middle Eastern dessert drink of sherbet. But since normally the petals and the fruits of the wild rose are considered suitable for sherbet, the poet’s skeptical remark of the plant’s futility seems highly subjective. It becomes clearer and clearer that the poet approaches not a generalized rose of poetic creativity, but a much more specific plant that he deems barren, 87 namely an embodiment of his own poetic genius impaired and unpracticed at the time of arrival in Armenia. Hence somewhat neglectful comparison to pink garbage and the overall image of “inert substance devoid of taste or smell,” which, according to Boris Gasparov, elsewhere in Mandelstam stands in contrast with fragrant herbs and delicious sparkling drinks associated with poetry since Pushkin (139-140). The choice of the plant for the poem’s key metaphor – a wild rose, that is a variety inferior to the exemplary garden rose – becomes now even more understandable, as the poet understates the value of his creative effort. Because his poetry is far from perfection of the “queen of flowers” and is uncertain to stay with him long after a flash of inspiration in Armenia, he rather regards it as flawed and volatile as the wild rose bloom. Notwithstanding this judgmental stance, the text still has something in store for the reader that strikes a balance between the poet’s self-criticism and self-acceptance. It is none other than the allusion to the “Solomon’s petal” in the poem's end. As a matter of fact, the only fragment in the Bible that links the king Solomon and the flowers is a part of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount narrated in the Gospel of Matthew: And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither fo they spin; and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?.. (KJV Bible, Matt. 6.28-30). It is clear from this excerpt that in his poem Mandelstam employs the same metaphor of clothing to speak of the wild rose’s petals, as also supported by the preceding mention of muslin, a type of thin and fragile fabric. In Mandelstam’s variant of the trope the substitution of the biblical lilies of the field with the wild rose is justified with the fact that both plants are considered wild, their flowers simple and unpretentious compared to those of cultivated plants like a rose. Another ground for juxtaposition is brevity and fleeting nature of the flowers’ lives 88 emphasized both in the Gospel and the poem. The paradoxical twist is that despite the modest look of the flowers, the poet identifies them with brilliance of the royal attire and views their quiet beauty as the God’s gift. This approach is quite in line with his previous statements that celebrated at once beautiful and simple manifestations of life encountered on his journey. The hidden message of the poem is thus in the compassionate acknowledgement of the poet’s genius, however feeble it may be at the moment, and the humble belief in its belonging to Creation, however unavailing it may seem. The ultimate subtext is an invocation of both physical and spiritual security of the poet, whose self would be “clothed,” that is guarded in this God’s world no matter what happens, just as his gift is. Those are some of the principal motifs of the cycle “Armenia” that by Mandelstam’s design propel the reader towards the derivation of the semantic formulae of beauty and childish simplicity, wildness and primitivity, torment of speech, endurance and honor, equilibrium of creation and destruction, life and death. It is with these blocks of meaning that Mandelstam constructs his vision of Armenia as a geographical, ethnical, cultural and historical entity enlivened with the features of the human being. As stated earlier, this vision is also a mirror image of its creator’s own internal struggles and the source of their possible solutions. Looking closely at this complex of motifs and the stance of the lyrical “I” in the cycle, it becomes evident that all the poems examined comply with the invariant theme pervading all Mandelstam’s poetry. As formulated by Alexander Zholkovsky, it is the opposition of instable, insecure, “weak” and “erroneous” subjective principle and the objective external world viewed as something big, alien, “straight,” “simple” and eternal (“«Ia p’iu za voennye…»”). While one pole of this pair is a lyrical “I’ of the poet, another is obviously Armenia. The interaction of these poles unfolds according to the typical motif in which “the personal principle feels itself defective in comparison to, admires, gets inspired… with the force of the objective principle.” 89 Interestingly, this ambivalent force is the evocation of both the ancient culture of Armenia and the simple, rough and sturdy “soil” phenomena like the ox’s toil or stones and clay objects, more characteristic of the late Mandelstam. In this way, the thematic scope of the cycle “Armenia” perfectly fits in the overall picture of the poetic world of Osip Mandelstam. But the theme of the contact between the poet and the world of Armenia begs the question of whether these two extremes actually interpenetrate and how exactly that influences the poet’s unstable self. The further analysis will uncover the keystone dynamical manifestation of the central theme that illustrates the way “the personal principle transcends its weakness and insecurity by adopting the might inherent in the «objective» principle” (Zholkovsky “«Ia p’iu za voennye…»”). “The Sense of Attraction to a Mountain” In the poems discussed above the poet’s self found its expression, but rather disguisedly, in an early Mandelstamian impersonal manner. Indeed, the lyrical “I” in these texts, if appeared at all, stayed only a reflection defined through something or somebody else, be it Armenian people or their fortitude. Grammatically, this was highlighted with the preference for oblique cases when speaking of self, e.g. Dative and Accusative: “как люб мне,” “мучит меня.” 119 It is now time to delve into four more Armenian poems in which the self is voiced more pronouncedly, in the active affirmative Nominative form of ia (“I”). It would also be helpful to draw connections between the poems and the selected fragments of Journey to Armenia, a fine example of the “poet’s prose,” no less challenging for decoding of meaning than Mandelstam’s verse. As we shall see, the magnetism of certain semantic elements in the Armenian writings is 119 “How dear to me...”, “I am tortured...” 90 so powerful that it ignores distinction between poetry and prose and spreads to the text of “Journey,” thus contributing to better comprehension of what these elements signify. What strikes as a common denominator in all four “self-oriented” poems in question is the motif of desperate parting, separation and exclusion from the Armenian realia. Consider the third poem of the cycle: Ах, ничего я не вижу, и бедное ухо оглохло, Всех-то цветов мне осталось лишь сурик да хриплая охра. И почему-то мне начало утро армянское сниться; Думал — возьму посмотрю, как живет в Эривани синица, Как нагибается булочник, с хлебом играющий в жмурки. Из очага вынимает лавашные влажные шкурки... Ах, Эривань, Эривань! Иль птица тебя рисовала, Или раскрашивал лев, как дитя, из цветного пенала? Ах, Эривань, Эривань! Не город — орешек каленый, Улиц твоих большеротых кривые люблю вавилоны. Я бестолковую жизнь, как мулла свой коран, замусолил, Время свое заморозил и крови горячей не пролил. Ах, Эривань, Эривань, ничего мне больше не надо, Я не хочу твоего замороженного винограда! 120 (“Armeniia” 147). The poem refers to the time spent after the departure from Armenia in Tiflis, where it was written in October 1930. In its center there is a clash of two worlds: that of receding Armenia and that of elsewhere, implying approaching Russia. In between there is a poet, who bids 120 “Agh, I’m blind, my poor ear is deaf, / all I can see is red and hoarse oacher. // And – who knows why – I’ve dreamed of Armenian mornings; / I think – I’ll go see how the tomtit’s making out, in Erivan, // How bakers bend down, playing blind man’s buff with bread, / how they pull out flat-bubbled bread, and wet thin pastry / skins... / Oh Erivan, Erivan! Did a bird draw you, / or a lion paint you, like a child, out of a colored pencil-case? // Oh, Erivan, Erivan! You’re not a city - you’re a roasted nut, / I love the crooked turns in your big-mouthed streets. / I’ve fingered my muddled life, like the mullah his dirty Koran, / I’ve anesthetized my time, I’ve spilled none of my smoking blood. // Oh Erivan, Erivan, now I need nothing, nothing, / not even your frozen grapes!” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 180-181). 91 farewell to the world he had left behind and sees a dream of happy morning in Yerevan that represents his journey on the whole. Unlike the past nightmare of Moscow indignity, this is now a pleasant nostalgic dream that the persona clearly enjoys. It is crucial for our interpretation that the separation from Armenia and the return home are associated in the poem with misfunctioning of the poet’s senses. His partial blindness and deafness stated in the opening lines are logically understood as a consequence of parting with the world of Armenia. Opposed to this sensual disability is the poet’s receptivity in the Yerevan dream where he regains his eyesight for a moment (“I’ll go see”) to contemplate the beautiful details of the urban life, like the tomtit’s flight or baking of the lavash bread in the oven. The colorlessness of existence away from Armenia also subsides in the Yerevan vision, as the poet delights in the city portrait as if painted by the mythical bird and lion. Similarly, the sounds of Yerevan return in a dream, since the metonymy “big-mouth streets” points at the loudness of Armenian speech spoken here. Additionally, by referring to baking a fresh lavash bread the poet hints at the sharpening of the other senses, like those of taste, smell and touch: “wet lavash skins.” It is necessary to stress the significance of such sensual acuity associated with Armenia both in Mandelstam’s verse and prose. The intensification of all kinds of sensual perception, as opposed to the preceding poetic “muteness” and attendant dullness of senses, consistently comes to the fore in these works. Sometimes it even takes radical forms of synesthesia, for instance when the traveler admits that he failed to “taste salt” in the insipid Armenian landscape or claims to have “smelled” the rose oil in the translation of Ferdowsi’s poetry. Recreated with the power of five senses, the tangibility of the Yerevan dream is so compelling that it almost outweighs the realism of “here and now” where the poet finds himself in the beginning of the text. In other words, the dream ceases to be merely a dream and rather becomes an opportunity for the poet to relive his Armenian journey. The use of the Imperfective 92 Present Tense verbal forms when referring to the events of the dream testifies to their nearly realistic nature and their continuous aspect, as if they are being truly witnessed at the moment: zhiviot (“living”), nagibaetsia (“bending over”), vynimaet (“pulling out”). 121 The dream thus performs a specific compensatory function, since by reconstructing the slightest nuances of the everyday life in Yerevan in his consciousness the poet as it were reclaims everything he treasured in Armenia. To restate in terms of the invariant suggested by Zholkovsky, in this poem the typical Mandelstamian theme of instability of self is manifested in “deprivation” as a type of “detachment from the favorite values,” specifically complemented and somewhat offset with their “illusory mental possession,” that is the reminiscence of them in a dream (“«Ia p’iu za voennye...»”). This dream dissipates in the penultimate couplet, when the persona is eventually forced to acknowledge his departure and return to the real world. He does so by taking stock of all his “muddled life” until that moment. This is the point when the contrast between the weariness of life outside Armenia and the vividness of the Armenian dream comes into full force. The assessment of the poet’s past is based on the metaphor “life as a book” and appears to be quite regretful: he cannot make sense of his existence, like a mullah who wore down the pages of his Koran in pursuit of book knowledge but avoided to act. Since away from Yerevan the poet envisions himself to be a dogmatic Muslim and not a Christian, this implicit opposition based on the distinction in creeds manifestly alienates him from the traditional Armenian Christian values that inspired him throughout the cycle and certainly marks the ending of his dream. Another component of this alienation is the reference to the “frozen time” 122 that opens up a chain of metaphorical oppositions based on the characteristic “heat – cold,” typical of the Armenian writings. The “frozen time” is clearly counterpoised with the “hot blood” in the same 121 Translations adapted. 122 Translation adapted. 93 line, but also with red-hotness of the city portrayed as a “roasted nut” and the warmth of the oven for the lavash baking seen in the dream. It appears that the ultimate prevalence of the frozen over the warm indicates the poet’s spiritual coldness and lack of the genuine connection to the world outside Armenia, as opposed to proximity to the source of “teleological warmth” that Mandelstam notably associated with the “Hellenistic” domestic objects like the baking pot or the oven from the Yerevan dream. 123 Apart from such interpretation, one should remember that the verb zamorazhivat’ (“freeze”) is polysemantic in Russian and connotes suspension, which is also at play in the poem. By contrast to the playful promptness of the baker’s movements around the fire, the frozenness of the poet’s life works as a sign of his personal stasis outside Armenia and, even broader, his consistent failure to move with the flow of his historical time. Besides these contrasting tokens of dream and reality, another feature that signals the poet’s awakening is merely the shift of emotional intonation. It is noteworthy that while the dreamy middle part of the poem is marked with the affectionate and tender tone complete with the admiring sigh: “Oh Erivan, Erivan!”, the first and the two last couplets employ absolutely different mode of expression. Because these couplets pertain to the gloomy reality, their principal mood might be defined as despondency with a tint of vexatious complaining and nagging. This attitude is not uncommon for Mandelstam’s persona, who, according to Zholkovsky, time and again channels his instability not only into crookedness (“crooked turns”), morbidness (“hoarse ocher”) and other imbalanced physical conditions of the surrounding objects, but also into his own passive-defensive and active-aggressive emotional reactions like offense, anger, reproach and so forth (“«Ia p’iu za voennye...»”). While one of such reactions in the poem is vexation with whatever lies outside the Yerevan dream, another is 123 See “On the Nature of the Word” (80-81). 94 teasing embodied in the dream itself. That is to say, though the traveler surely relishes his dream, being deprived of access to the cherished Armenian realia, he also feels baited by it. In such a way, waking up from the dream of Armenia equals the tease of having it within one’s reach and letting it slip, no matter how hard one wished to retain it. This intricate play of emotional responses ultimately brings the reader to the concluding couplet, where the nostalgic attachment to the world of Armenia unexpectedly turns into categorical repudiation and detachment from that world: “Oh Erivan, Erivan, now I need nothing, nothing, / not even your frozen grapes!” In a manner of speaking, the assessment of the world of Armenia radically changes its sign from plus to minus. This sudden reversal is made especially evident by means of reframing the affectionate address “Oh Erivan, Erivan!” in the new context of vexation facilitated by the multiple meanings of the interjection “Ах!” (“Oh!”). There is a sense that the poet’s emotional instability peaks in these lines and attains somewhat new tinge of infantile denial and whimsicality: if he cannot have what he wants, he does not need anything at all. However, taking this posture at face value would be too sweeping. This kind of provocative indications are also not rare in Mandelstam, who oftentimes “symbolically overcomes deprivation with “wrong” manners, demonstrative gestures, a pose, mischief, [putting] “a good face” [over a bad game]” (Zholkovsky “«Ia p’iu za voennye...»”). In this poem the painful loss of Armenia apparently serves as a bad game, while the good face that masks it is the poet’s final fretful rejection of the Armenian fantasy. The poem, in such a way, appears to combine the real deprivation with the affected one that only acts as means of coping with the genuine troubled feeling. 124 Although the seeming effect of such coping mechanism is that the pull aspect of the poet’s relationship’s with Armenia is being replaced by the push 124 Zholkovsky singles out this motif on the example of another Mandelstam’s poem “Ariost” (“«Ia p’iu za voennye..»”). 95 aspect, it is left up to the reader to judge the authenticity of such abrupt change of bearing. Yet the sensual intensity of the preceding dream experience and its contrast to the reality of the poet’s Russian destination leaves little room to doubt that the anti-Armenian finale is intricately deceptive. What seems especially obscure in such closure is precisely the object of repudiation, that is the “frozen grapes.” In all appearance, these lines have puzzled the interpreters since the moment of their creation, as attested in the memoir by the poet’s Armenian acquaintance Anaida Khudaverdian who heard the draft versions of the poem recited back in Armenia: “Why did not Osip Mandelstam like our grapes? And where did he get the “frozen grapes” here?.. As long as I lived in Armenia, I have never seen the frozen grapes and never heard of such thing” (81-82). This factual inaccuracy can simply be explained by the presumed agricultural ignorance of Mandelstam, who indeed left Armenia in the middle of fall, when it starts getting colder, and in the image of “frozen grapes” might have expressed the denial of very thought of the treasured, “teleologically warm” Armenia “cooling off” and changing its guise. However, exploring the potential figurative meanings of “frozen grapes” seems much more promising, specifically given that at close reading the image reveals its hidden polysemy. One of such interpretations is induced by one of the adjoining poems of the cycle, which brings attention to such a detail of the décor of the Zvartnots cathedral as the grapevines carved on the ruins of its facets, edges, window casings and cornices: “Виноградины с голубиное яйцо, завитки бараньих рогов…” 125 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). The assumed connection between the two poems completely justifies the choice of the epithet “frozen”: as was the case with the “frozen time,” the grapes represent not as much the degree of coldness, as something static and immobile, namely the fruit cast in stone. The rejection to “taste” the stone grapes is 125 “Grapes like pigeon eggs, ram’s-horn curls...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182). 96 thus tantamount to the forced farewell renunciation of the ancient culture that nurtured the poet in Armenia and sacrificial acknowledgement that time has come for bartering this “taste” for the “flavor” of Soviet modernity. Alternatively or rather jointly with the aforementioned interpretations, it is possible that the “frozen grape” also has metaliterary semantics. According to Boris Gasparov’s observation, the taste of grapes in Mandelstam frequently denotes the very taste of poetry, as the poem ”Batiushkov” illustrates: “Только стихов виноградное мясо / Мне освежило случайно язык” 126 (qtd. in B. Gasparov 135). Taranovsky concurs by noting that grape in Mandelstam is a metaphor for “the genuine freshness of poetry” (“The Problem” 150). Although at first glance the disavowal of the coveted poetry in the Armenian text makes no sense to the reader, the idea behind it is clarified again by the choice of the epithet. On closer look, it transpires that the structure of the trope “frozen grapes” directly replicates that of the metaphor of the infertile wild rose from the poem “Tie a shawl around your arm and bury it…” examined above. Both images connote something flawed, deficient and barren, unfit for producing the “volatile, effervescent drinks that symbolize poetry,” that is either sherbet, or wine (B. Gasparov 140). The psychological motivation behind these imagery with respect to Mandelstam’s creative predicament was already discussed. Additionally, the metaliterary aspect of the image of “frozen grapes” is supported by the figurative meaning of oppositions of cold and hot found in the drafts of the cycle “Armenia.” It was noted already that the hotness of the oven in the Armenian dream stands in contrast with the coldness of the grapes in the realistic finale. The draft version of one of the adjoining poems takes the image of the oven even further and links it directly with “burning” of the speech: “В очаг потухающей речи / Открой мне дорогу скорей” 127 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia. 126 “The grape-meat of verse just / accidentally refreshed my tongue” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 213). 127 “Into the hearth of dying speech open the road for me, quickly...” 97 Chernoviki” 467). Here again the drive to merge with warmth of the speech signifies the wish to rediscover one’s poetic gift, while the withering of the fire of speech imparts both the poet’s insecurity and the unease of the process of rediscovery. The usage of the same precise noun ochag (“hearth”) in “Akh, nichego ia ne vizhu...” (“Agh, I’m blind, my poor ear is deaf…”) seems to follow the similar logic. As the Yerevan vision warms the poet up with the dream of baking the hot “bread” of poetic word 128 , the prospect of settling for the “frozen grape” of verse at the awakening from that dream in Russia is intolerable for him and thus rejected. The temperature semantics in “Armenia” is thus extremely significant in relation to the issue of creation and, as this study will further show, actually has more ambiguities in store for the reader than displayed by this particular poem. The same motif of anguish at parting with Armenia is developed in the penultimate eleventh poem of the cycle. The text’s proximity to the closure of the cycle makes it truly a farewell poem. Interestingly enough, its initial line almost literally echoes the opening of the poem “Agh, I’m blind, my poor ear is deaf…” discussed above: Я тебя никогда не увижу, Близорукое армянское небо, И уже не взгляну прищурясь На дорожный шатер Арарата, И уже никогда не раскрою В библиотеке авторов гончарных Прекрасной земли пустотелую книгу, По которой учились первые люди 129 (150). 128 Сf. the fragment of Mandelstam’s essay “The Word and Culture” (“Slovo i kul’tura”), where the semantic parallelism of bread and word draws on the symbolism of the Christian ritual of Eucharist: “The Christian and now every cultured person is a Christian – does not know mere physical hunger, mere spiritual nourishment. For him, the word is also flesh, and simple bread is a joy and a mystery” (70); “The life of the word has entered a heroic era. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering.… Whoever shall rise the word on high and confront time with it, as the priest displays the Eucharist, shall be a second Joshua of Nun” (71). 129 “Myopic Armenian sky / I’ll never see you, / I’ll never squint up / at Ararat’s traveling tent, never again, / and never open a hollow potters’ book, / in a library of clay authors, / book of a beautiful country, / book by which the world’s first people studied” (O. Mandelstam, Complete Poetry 183-184). 98 In the previous poem the persona’s departure from Armenia caused his blindness, and in this one the focus stays on the visual difficulty. However, it implies not the metaphorical loss of senses, but the anticipated impossibility of seeing Armenia again expressed with strong negative adverbs nikogda (“never”) and uzhe (ne) (“(not) anymore”). The poet thus uses one of the “typical Mandelstamian constructions based on the escalation of negation and negated details,” with a characteristic pessimistic opening: “Я не….” (“I will not...”) (Zholkovsky “«Ia p’iu za voennye...»). Supported with the future tense of the verbs, such constructions take the form of pessimistic divinations and foreground the inherent “prophetic” quality of the poetic matter that Mandelstam insisted on. That said, their pessimism is rather premature: as the persona addresses the Armenian realia in the text, he is most likely still present in Armenia and is yet to leave. Nevertheless, the despair of coming departure spreads onto the present and makes the poet experience the future deprivation here and now, before the actual takeoff. As a result, he is left “running through” and clinging to the “values” which will soon slip from his hands and become inaccessible to him: the sky, the mountain and “the book” of Armenian land (Zholkovsky “«Ia p’iu za voennye...»). The poem’s primary addressee is exactly the “myopic Armenian sky.” Its short sight somewhat mirrors the vision problem of the poet, who also looks at the Mount Ararat squinting. It is probable though that the myopia here refers not as much to the physical condition, as to the metaphor of the historical vision that Mandelstam developed just a couple of years later in the prose Razgovor s Dante (Conversation about Dante). There he writes: “…we, the souls of sinners, are capable of seeing and distinguishing only the distant future, but for this we have a special gift. We become absolutely blind as soon as the doors to the future slam shut before us. And in this respect we resemble those who struggle with the twilight, and, in discerning distant objects, fails to make out what is close by” (269). Nadezhda Mandelstam’s comments make 99 clear that Mandelstam referred specifically to “historical vision” misused by his Soviet contemporaries who “lost the most elementary sense of the past [and] constantly boasted of their supposed ability to forecast the future” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 544). As opposed to their farsightedness, the short sight of the Armenian sky must then clearly have a positive aspect. Perhaps, in relation to the Armenian history, the “myopic sky” embodies the supreme transcendental authority, the “historical conscience” that witnessed the shocking chaos of the recent events, hence keeps the uncertain future closed from any imprudent predictions. It is all the more intriguing that it is exactly the future tense forms that the poet keeps negating throughout the text, as though he denies the very idea of future, if this future excludes Armenia. To enhance the effect of negation, Mandelstam pairs the image of visual inaccessibility with the metaliterary motif of departure as loss of access to reading: “И уже никогда не раскрою / В библиотеке авторов гончарных / Прекрасной земли пустотелую книгу” 130 (“Armenia” 150). The metaphor of the Armenian land as a “hollow potter’s book… by which the world’s first people studied” in a typically Mandelstamian way brings together the ideas of nature and culture. The mediator between the two appears to be the image of clay. On the one hand, the poet clearly alludes to Armenia as the geographically defined “beautiful country” with its distinctive loamy soils. On the other, he enriches the image with the cultural implications which at once hint at one of the oldest Armenian traditions of clay pottery and at the forerunner of the proto-Armenian language, the ancient Urartian. Spoken in the pre-Armenian kingdom of Urartu in ninth-sixth centuries BC, the Urartian language was preserved in the form of cuneiform tablets. Made precisely of clay, these tablets would form the “library of the potter authors” that Mandelstam mentions. Thus, “the world’s first people” are those who invented and 130 “.. [and I will] never open a hollow potters’ book, / in a library of clay authors, / book of a beautiful country, / book by which the world’s first people studied” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 183-184). 100 practiced one of the oldest systems of writing, and it is from this highly linguistically oriented event of the past that Mandelstam counts the beginnings of all the humankind. In addition, the images of the primordial beautiful land and the original book of knowledge inspire the associations with the Bible and the Genesis creation narrative with its well-known opening: “In the beginning was the Word” (KJV Bible, John 1:1). As Lada Panova observed, the book implied by Mandelstam is not only a material object, but also a doctrine (uchenie) or even a dogma (verocuhenie), since the people “studied” by it (“uchilis’”) (“Mir”130-131). In this way, the image suggests the reference to the introduction of Christian faith on the Armenian land and, in a broader sense, the beginnings of the world Christian history. “The world’s first people” then connote the pioneer members of the Armenian Apostolic Church who set the spiritual example for the Christendom by adopting the religion as early as in 301 AC. 131 The book which the poet dreads to “never open again” thus covers the immense span of time which incorporates both the Urartian and the early Christian periods of the Armenian history. Apparently, the realization that upon departure from Armenia its historical heritage would be cut off from his life too, blocks the poet’s immediate access not only to the future, but also to the past. Most importantly, it undermines the search for that essential link of times that Mandelstam was craving for in the new Soviet circumstances. As a result, he reaches an unsustainable temporal impasse: the past is withdrawn from the history, the future is manipulated by the state propaganda, and the poet has no other choice left but being forced into the dubious present of the Soviet Russia. 131 Cf.: “For M. the Mediterranean, the Crimea, the Caucasus, constituted the historical world, the book “by which the first people learned to read.” This “historical world,” in his eyes, was limited to the peoples who together made up Christendom, and he regarded Armenia as an outpost “at the world’s age” (“The whole morning of your days at the world’s age / you stood swallowing your tears. / And with shame and pain turned away / From the bearded cities of the East”) (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 468). 101 This compulsory aspect of return is given an extra emphasis in the fragment of another Armenian poem. Labeled as “dicarded,” this text failed to make its way into the cycle. However, it gives an idea of how persistent the motif of parting is in the Armenian verse. As seen before, the persona here nostalgically reminisces about Armenia which he was compelled to leave: В год тридцать первый от рожденья века Я возвратился, нет — читай: насильно Был возвращен в буддийскую Москву. А перед тем я все-таки увидел Библейской скатертью богатый Арарат И двести дней провел в стране субботней, Которую Арменией зовут. Захочешь пить — там есть вода такая Из курдского источника Арзни, Хорошая, колючая, сухая И самая правдивая вода 132 (O. Mandelstam, “Otryvki unichtozhennykh stikhov” 164). As the biographers claim, the poem was written in 1931 as a response to refusal of an official of the writers’ organization, the poet Tikhonov, to provide Mandelstam with work and housing in his native Leningrad after the Armenian trip. Hence the “forced return to Moscow” and the dating within the text (Brown 125; B. Gasparov 125-127). However, the comparison in the poem is made not between Moscow and Leningrad, but between Moscow and Armenia. As Boris Gasparov noted, this creates an illusion that the poet arrives in Moscow straight from Armenia, making 1931 a “poetic time” of his return (B. Gasparov 127). 132 “In the century’s thirty-first year / I came back – no, read: I was forcibly / brought back to Buddhist Moscow, / but still I saw Ararat, before that, / Ararat, rich with Biblical tablecloths, / and I spent two hundred days in the land of the Sabbath, / which they call Armenia. // When you [want to drink] they have water, there, / that flows from the Kurdish spring of Arzni - / good, prickly, dry, / and the most truthful of waters” (O. Mandelstam, “Fragments from Discarded Poems” 197). Translation adapted. 102 Once again, Moscow and Armenia rise as two markedly contrasting worlds, whose discrepancy is defined in terms of the opposition of the Buddhist and the Judeo-Christian cultures. The epithet “Buddhist” ascribed to Moscow goes back to Mandelstam’s 1922 essay “Deviatnadtsatyi vek” (“The Nineteenth Century”), where he shared his vision of the previous century as the “conduit of Buddhist influence in European culture” and outlined the modern-day consequences of such impact (89). In his idea, both the scientific positivism and the mechanical course of the progress are the products of some static alien force, hostile to “thoroughly dialectical and vital conflict of forces which had brought each other to fruition” (90). By this struggle Mandelstam means the practice of active cognition that he viewed as inherent in the Christian European history of the past. In the modern age its importance is unduly forgotten: “Time can go backwards: the evidence of that is the whole course of recent history that with terrifying force has turned from Christianity to Buddhism and Theosophy” (“Skriabin i khristianstvo” 36). The “Buddhist” thus becomes for Mandelstam a synonym of “backward” and even “static,” “lifeless” and “non-cognitive.” This explains the persona’s hesitation and the deliberate correction of the active verbal voice to the passive in the opening part of the poem: “Я возвратился – нет, читай: насильно / Был возвращен в буддийскую Москву.” 133 Due to the introduction of the passive voice, the Moscow reality is portrayed as that which transforms a subject of the action into an object, in other words inscribes him into the Buddhist paradigm of thought and bereaves him of the will to cognize and act. Contrary to this grammatical usage, the days spent in Armenia are described with the active verbal voice: “А перед тем я все-таки увидел… И двести дней провел в стране субботней…” 134 The energy of these verbal forms overpowers the statics of the passive voice, 133 “I came back – no, read: I was forcibly / brought back to Buddhist Moscow...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 197). 134 “...but still I saw Ararat, before that, / Ararat, rich with Biblical tablecloths, / and I spent two hundred days in the land of the Sabbath...” (O. Mandelstam, “Fragments from Discarded Poems” 197). 103 while the attendant assertative intonation outbalances the former vacillation, and hypotactic and paratactic constructions add syntactical variety and harmony to the poetic narration. Curiously, most of the verbs used in the active voice are transitive: uvidet’ (“see”), provesti (“spend”), zakhotet’ (“want”), pit’ (“drink”). That is to say, they take all kinds of direct objects in the text, but the poet stays in the position of the acting subject. The complete predicate zakhochesh’ pit’ (“want to drink”) is only exceptional because it shifts the subject to the tentative addressee, but basically translates the poet’s own experiences into the second person. The very choice of the main verb zakhotet’ (“want”) within the final complete predicate represents the triumph of the free will over coercion in the poem. In this way, the Armenian part of the poem becomes the celebration of the personal right to take free actions as a necessary condition of poetic “rightness.” The volitional act of visiting Armenia embodies the freedom of travel, which for the Russian poets starting with Pushkin frequently overlapped with freedom per se. 135 The idea that for an author both writing and travelling are equal expressions of freedom, or even acts of daring, is something Mandelstam himself posits in the drafts of Journey to Armenia when speaking of the classical literature: “Who did not dare to travel, did not dare to write” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 409). It is his own experience of such a defiant freedom that he comes to share in “V god tridtsat’ pervyi ot rozhden’ia veka...” (“In the century’s thirty-first year…”). It is not surprising that the poem ends with the mention of the sparkling “truthful” water from the Armenian spring Arzni, a kind of “effervescent drink,” which in the Russian poetry traditionally “served as a symbol of freedom 136 , poetry and slaking of «thirst for freedom»” (B. Gasparov 142): “When you [want to 135 Nicholas I’s prohibition on Pushkin’s foreign trips and the poet’s isolation within the borders of the Russian Empire are well-known biographical facts. See the scene of Journey to Arzrum when the narrator delights in the chance of stepping on a foreign land by crossing the Russian-Turkish border. He is soon disappointed with the fact that the borderline territory already belongs to Russia, hence he still is in homeland. 136 It is noteworthy that in the fragment of the poem that follows “In the century’s thirty-first year…” the Moscow tap water is opposed to the Arzni water and depicted as blood. Once again, the focus is on the contrast between the 104 drink] they have water, there...” In a form of casual drinking water recommendation the poet literally shares a ready-made recipe of independent creativity. Significantly, this awareness of personal and creative independence arises amidst the decidedly Christianized scenery of Armenia. The inextricable link between the concept of freedom and Christianity is a natural part of Mandelstam’s cultural philosophy, as stated in the 1915 essay “Skriabin i khristianstvo” (“Skriabin and Christianity”): “Our whole two-thousand- year-old culture, thanks to the miraculous mercy of Christianity, is the liberation of the world – for play, for spiritual joy, for free «imitation of Christ»” (36). Based on this description, the playful and liberal nature of the Christian discourse certainly presupposes dynamics and vigor, in contrast to the Buddhist apathy. In addition, only the Christian creed best integrates the ideas of wholeness, unity and personal individuality: “The Christian world says to Dionysus with a smile: «Well, try and command your maenads to tear me apart: I am integrity, I am a persona, I am a soldered unity»” (37). From here it is but a short step to proclaiming “the spiritual activity in free self-affirmation” as the tenet of all the Christian art (38). Clearly, the 1931 poem explores the similar interplay between freedom, the self and the spirit of the Judeo-Christian culture. It is only through recognition of the successful visual encounter with the Christian Armenia that the poet reconciles with his return to the Buddhist Moscow. It is only the thought of self-assertion and freedom regained there that comforts him in the unfreedom of here. As in “Agh, I’m blind, my poor ear is deaf…,” in attempt to relive this freedom the poet is mentally carried away to the place of his former happiness. Since the physical return there is beyond his will, the feeling of deprivation generates the reminiscences of the place that blend the topoi of the “paradise lost” and the “promised land.” As a result, Moscow atmosphere of violence and the Armenian world of freedom: “I already love Moscow laws, I no longer miss the Arzni water. There are bird-cherry trees and telephones in Moscow, And the days there are known for executions. ... The kitchen sinks pour blood .... And women’s fingers smell of kerosene...” (O. Mandelstam, “Otryvki unichtozhennykh stikhov" 164). 105 Armenia emerges as a legendary beautiful land given to the chosen poet for two hundred days only 137 and untimely deprived of. This cross-conceptual blend is complicated by the cross-cultural overlapping. On the one hand, the country is presented as a “land of Sabbath,” in a clear reference to the Judaic tradition of veneration of the sixth day of creation. Additionally, Sabbath respects the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egypt to Israel, so the allusion to the topos of the “promised land” is absolutely justified. In this context even the image of the spring Arzni that quenches the traveler’s thirst is somewhat parallel to the image of the spring that Moses created of the rock for the Israelites to drink from during the exodus. Thus, Armenia is contextualized not only as a holy land of rest and worship, but also as a land promised to those bereft of the homeland, with possible implications of the Genocide, the loss of the Western Armenia to Turkey, and the following spread of the refugees around the world. On the other hand, the Mount Ararat is covered with the “biblical tablecloth,” which introduces the Christian element into the picture and immediately evokes associations with the legend of the great flood and Noah’s ark’s landing on the mountains of Ararat. Besides, the poet travels “in year 31 from the birth of the century,” that is on “the epically indefinite date”, which can either point to the factual 1931, or “indicate the first century of the Christian era (two years before the Christ’s crucifixion)” (B. Gasparov 127). Evidently, the Judaic and the Christian symbolism are intertwined to produce the composite cultural image of Armenia validated by the act of naming, always important in Mandelstam: “…and I spent two hundred days in the land of the Sabbath, / which they call Armenia” (Zholkovsky “«Ia p’iu za voennye astry...»”). 137 200 days is approximately 6,5 months, which roughly equals the actual amount of time Mandelstams spent on their journey, but not solely in Armenia. Nadezhda Mandelstam apparently makes a mistake when referring to this line in the memoirs: “M. complained that he had been “returned by force” to “Buddhist Moscow,” and kept recalling the “hundred days” he had spent in Armenia” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 549). It is important however that “crushing of the hopes” correlates with the motif of the “paradise lost” and never reсlaimed. 106 Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs elucidate the origin of such hybrid imagery, which apparently had deep personal meaning for the author. As she recalls, Mandelstam always viewed Armenia as both the cradle of the Christian civilization and “a younger sister of the Judean land” (Chetviortaia Proza 351). Beyond that, the idea of cultural continuity also made him regard Armenia as a part of the Hellenistic Mediterranean civilization: “The ancient link between [Crimea and Transcaucasia] (particularly Armenia) with Greece and Rome seemed to him a token of unity of world (or, rather, European) culture” (N. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia 300). 138 Moreover, the belief that his Jewish ancestry originated somewhere in the Mediterranean South 139 added to his perception of this generalized area as his motherland: “For Mandelstam the arrival in Armenia was a return to the native bosom – where everything started, a return to fathers, to origins, to the source” (N. Mandelstam, Kniga tret’ia 467). As said forth, in the drafts to Journey to Armenia he even referred to his trip as an “exodus” into the “promised land,” in a much more specific and personal context than in his poems (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 400). The result of this creative mythologization was Mandelstam’s life-long peculiar yearning for Armenia as a prototype of his native land and an idealized center of cultural syncretism. Generally speaking, the traces of this yearning are present in all the poems discussed in this section, as they all deal with the motif of partition and deprivation. In “Agh, I’m blind, my poor ear is deaf…” the yeaning for Armenia takes form of the morning Yerevan fantasy. In “Ia 138 Cf.: “His conviction that culture, like grace, is bestowed by a process of continuity led M. to see the Mediterranean as a "holy land.”… M. also included the Crimea and the Caucasus in the Mediterranean world. In his poem about Ariosto he gave expression to his dream of uniting them: “Into one broad and brotherly blue we shall merge your azure and our Black sea.” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope 249). 139 Cf.: “M., who was Osip, not Joseph, in his birth certificate, never forgot he was a Jew, but his “blood memory” was of a peculiar kind. It went right back to his biblical ancestors, to Spain, and to the Mediterranean, retaining nothing from the wanderings through central Europe. In other words, he felt his affinity with the shepherds and kings of the Bible, with the Jewish poets and philosophers of Alexandria and Spain, and had even decided that one of them was his direct ancestor: a Spanish poet who was kept on a chain in a dungeon during the Inquisition.” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 501-503). 107 tebia nikogda ne uvizhu...” (“Myopic Armenian sky…”) it finds an outlet in the nostalgic listing of the cherished Armenian realia, although concealed by negations. In “In the century’s thirty- first year…” the recollection of time spent in Armenia brings solace to the persona in the unwelcoming Russia. In other words, in all the named poems the forceful physical separation from Armenia seeks to find compensation in some counterpoising active force that mentally drives the poet back to the world he left. It is possible to label this driving force attraction or pull, as opposed to Zholkovsky’s notion of “detachment from the favorite values” (“«Ia p’iu za voennye astry...»”). In his terms, the attraction would be realized through “the teasing… mental savoring of the inaccessible” and “illusory mental possession” of Armenia, or simply through dreams, reminiscences and ruminations of the destination. It is this work of memory and imagination that creates a certain magnetic aura around Armenia in Mandelstam’s writings and mediates the author’s desire to partake of its history and culture. The dynamism of the pull therefore completely overlaps with the momentum of “active cognition,” this most valuable gnoseological contribution of Christianity to the world. To be attracted to Armenia thus means to actively explore, experience, and perceive it, if only in one’s mind. This is why even the dreamy visions of Armenia in Mandelstam are so wakefully tangible and realistic, as though the poet is incessantly present or pulled into the scene. What comes into play here is the semantic ambiguity of the Russian nouns tiaga (“pull”) and pritiazheniie (“attraction, gravity”), which like in English can equally mean the general action of evoking interest for something or a term of physics. On the one side, the poet is virtually appealed to Armenian historical and cultural landmarks. On the other, he experiences an uncontrollable natural force under the influence of which things tend to move towards each 108 other, that is shift or travel in space. In a way, the whole journey to Armenia is governed by one big “charge” of gravitational force relentlessly driving the traveler to his destination. In a broader sense, the attraction serves as a potent countervailing power aimed at mending the typically Mandelstamian feeling of alienation. By literally including the poet into the “magnetic field” of Armenia, the attraction acts as a remedy for both his actual homelessness and the “cultural orphanhood.” It is highly revealing that in her memoirs Nadezhda Mandelstam astutely defines her husband’s penchant for Armenia as “attraction”: “He was attracted only by Crimea and the Caucasus” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope 250). In another reminiscence she extends this idea to discuss Mandelstam’s yearning for the South as a genetic pull, a sort of an irresistible call of blood: “M. used to tell me that the yearning to travel south [тяга на юг] was in his blood. He felt he was really a southerner who had been thrown by fate into the cold and gloom of the northern latitudes” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 500). In such a reading, the journey to Armenia might be considered as the persona’s attempt of homecoming, either conscious or not. Drawn to Armenia by his lineage myth, the castaway poet searches for and discovers his true “second motherland,” if only for the short symbolic span of two hundred days (N. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia 476). Attraction as the key metaphor for the poet’s attitude to Armenia would be a purely abstract construct, if both the Armenian verse and prose did not provide direct allusions to this physical process. Clearly, if there is a phenomenon of attraction, there must be a specific magnetic source, a geographical marker that radiates the energy of the pull and draws the traveler to Armenia. In the poems discussed in this section such center of attraction is nothing other than Mount Ararat, perhaps the most recognizable symbol of Armenia, although it is located across the border in what is now Turkey. 109 Indeed, the Mount Ararat is repeatedly mentioned in the Armenian writings, either openly or implicitly, simply as “a mountain.” In the opening poem of the cycle “Armenia” Ararat serves as a landmark which figuratively unifies the lost Western Armenia and the present-day republic: “Окрашена охрою хриплой, / Ты вся далеко за горой…” 140 (146). In the penultimate poem of the cycle the traveler bids farewell to the view of the Mount Ararat: “И уже не взгляну, прищурясь, / На дорожный шатер Арарата…” 141 (150). Finally, in “In the century’s thirty- first year…” it is exactly the memory of Ararat that gives the poet a spiritual relief from the violent grip of his Moscow surroundings. The secret of such appeal to Ararat is most likely in the special place that the mountains occupied in Mandelstam’s cultural consciousness. According to Nadezhda Mandesltam, the poet always perceived the mountain landscape as connected with Christianity, implying the seven hills of Rome and the mountains of the Holy Roman Empire: “For M., Christianity was always associated with the mountain country – hence the «cold mountain air of Christianity,» and also the line «the mountains of Siena intercede for us»” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 489-490). Here Nadezhda Iakovlevna backs her argument by citing Mandelstam’s earlier text reflecting the mountain theme, namely the 1919 poem “V khrustal’nom omute kakaia krutizna!..” (“What steepness in a crystal pool!..”). This poetic declaration of love to the Christian art begins with the image of the steep mountains: “В хрустальном омуте какая крутизна! / За нас сиенские предстательствуют горы…,” 142 and features the mountain air of Christianity in its middle: “Вот неподвижная земля, и вместе с ней / Я христианства пью холодный горный воздух” (106). Eventually, the recurrent mention of a mountain leads to the characteristic epiphanic 140 “Painted with raucous ocher / you’re all far beyond the [mountain]...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 180). Translation adapted. 141 “I’ll never squint up / at Ararat’s traveling tent, never again...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 183). 142 “What steepness in a crystal pool! / Siennese mountains intercede for us...” (O. Mandelstam, “What steepness...” 104). 110 culmination: “И с христианских гор в пространстве изумленном, / Как Палестрины песнь, нисходит благодать.” 143 The mountain symbolism is so powerful that it emerges even in the later Mandelstam’s verse of the desparate year 1937: “И ясная тоска меня не отпускает / От молодых еще воронежских холмов / К всечеловеческим, яснеющим в Тоскане” 144 (“Ne sravnivai...” 236). The textual evidence makes it clear that for Mandelstam the mountain imagery coheres with meditations on God’s grace and the universal sense of the Christian culture. When the concept of Armenia as the cradle of Christianity overlapped with the idea of a mountain as a symbol of Christian faith, this combination must have inspired the magnetic image of Ararat as the spatial dominant of Mandelstam’s Armenian writings. As mentioned, Ararat is directly linked to the Judean-Christian history through the legend of the great flood and the belief that the remains of Noah’s ark still rest on top of the mountain. Hence the whole “Armenian myth of origin,” whereby “Armenians are direct descendants of Noah, through his son Japheth” (Panossian 51). The villages and towns around the mountain were believed to be the places where Noah descended from the ark, planted the first vineyard and where his wife died (Bryce 222). Another legend claims that the twelve Chaldea were watching the stars from the mountain, and three of them followed the Star of Bethlehem to welcome the birth of Jesus Christ (223). Accordingly to this rich religious-mythological background, in Mandelstam’s verse the image of Ararat is full of Christian allusions, as it is at once covered with “biblical cloth” and rises like a “road tent,” a counterpart of the Tabernacle. Like a Christian temple, it is a point of contact between the earth and the heaven and a model of the universe. Like a sacred artefact, it deserves reverence and worship. Not without reason the narrator of Journey to Armenia notes: “I managed 143 “Like the song of Palestine, from the wonder-struck / empty spaces of these Christian hills, grace descends” (O. Mandelstam, “What steepness...” 105). 144 “...this bright boredom won’t let me leave / these young Voronezh hills, won’t let me go / to those universal hills – there, clear, distinct, over in Tuscany...” (O. Mandelstam, “No comparisons...” 266). 111 to observe the clouds performing their devotions to Ararat” (O. Mandelstam, Journey 66). Here the mountain practically undergoes personification and becomes a deity, an object of veneration. Apart from the Christian aspect of its symbolism, Ararat is the center of attraction precisely due to its teasing inaccessibility. As we have seen, a number of Mandelstam’s Armenian poems are grounded in the motif of deprivation and longing for inaccessible values. In accordance with this motif and the factual political situation, Ararat becomes a sort of a “ready- made object” that conveys the very concept of the unattainable (Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 222- 231). As the national symbol of Armenia, the mountain has nonetheless nominally belonged to Turkey since 1921, when on the basis of the Treaty of Kars the new borders were established between Turkey and the Soviet Union. Therefore, from Armenian territory Ararat can only be observed, but never reached. It is specifically the fact that the disputed mountain is so clearly visible from Armenia that seems to impart a tone of excruciating tease to Mandelstam’s farewell poems. Ararat in them grows into a sort of elusive mirage that lures the traveler, but always in vain. Approaching the mountain at the borderline only exacerbates the sense of impassability and entails the feeling of wrongfulness: “[Kuzin] had taken that sample [of a cochineal beetle] from the Tatar village of Sarvanlar, about twenty versts from Erevan. From there, you can see Father Ararat quite clearly, and in that dry borderland atmosphere you can’t help feeling like a smuggler” (O. Mandelstam, Journey 50). There is no doubt that in the inaccessibility of Mount Ararat, Mandelstam expressed the tragic memory of its loss, a loss that in 1930 was still fresh in the national consciousness of Armenians. Perhaps because of this vast background of both ancient and modern historical associations, Ararat also becomes for Mandelstam the epitome of the encounter of nature and culture. It is known that this theme in its metaphorical geological interpretation is present in his 112 earlier works, specifically “Grifel’naia oda” (“Slate Ode”). There, according to Freidin, “the rhythm of shifts and releases of accumulated tensions in geological plates serves as a metaphor for human history punctuated by similar cataclysms” (“The Whisper” 431). Omry Ronen points out that in Conversation about Dante the stratification of rocks is described as ‘paleontological clock’ and illustrates both “periodicity… and a synchronizing juxtaposition of phenomena,” crucial for Mandelstam’s conception of history (215). In the poet’s view, history has nothing to do with a progressive march of time, but rather embraces all the times as a “a simple synchronic act” (O. Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante 268), “the sacred bond and succession of events” (“Peter Chaadaev” 54). It thus defies temporal linearity and represents figurative simultaneity and integrity of past, present and future. Furthermore, in Conversation about Dante Mandelstam unambiguously endows a stone, that is a microelement of the mountain, with the capacity to reveal synchrony of discrepant historical times: Mineral rock is an impressionistic diary of weather accumulated by millions of natural disasters; however, it is not only of the past, it is of the future: it contains periodicity. It is an Aladdin’s lamp penetrating the geological twilight of future ages… Dante… was forced to… a synchronism of events, names and traditions severed by centuries, precisely because he had heard the overtones of time (282). Although the Armenian journey predates Conversation about Dante by three years, it is possible that in anticipation of his future essay Mandelstam also saw in Ararat a natural witness of historic changes that accumulated like the multiple strata of rocks, but nevertheless formed the mountain, that is history, as the single whole. 145 What lends support to this assumption is the 145 Cf. Mandelstam’s similar idea of a stone as a part of the Gothic building, a metaphor for the role of a singular person in a composite “construction” of the world human community: “In the Middle Ages a man considered himself just as indispensable and just as bound to the edifice of his world as a stone in a Gothic structure, bearing with dignity the pressures of his neighbors and entering the common play of forces as an inevitable stake” (“François Villon” 39). 113 conscious linkage of Ararat in his writings to the markedly diverse events of Armenian history staggered over large period of time, from the legendary landing of the ark of Noah to the recent Turkish-Armenian war. The conviction in synchrony of historic developments is probably the reason for the general abundance of temporal shifts in Mandelstam’s Armenian prose: the narrator sees the Soviet Yerevan “upended by divinely inspired plumbers” (Journey 50), as in the times of great flood; in his eyes the pioneers march down the Abovian street like “gladiators” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 396); the young Armenian teacher looks to him like the “ancient Komsomol tsarevna” (397). All these anachronistic images are possible, because the reflections on conjunction of the times relentlessly follow the narrator on his journey. Certainly, these reflections are not unambiguous. As Mikhail Gasparov observed, the “argument with his own past” and the characteristic attraction-repulsion to modernity is the typical attribute of Mandelstam’s works (“Poet i kul’tura” 356). The drafts to Journey to Armenia include an Ararat passage which reflects precisely this “maneuvering between the two opposite directions of thought,” namely the hesitation on acceptance of the historic present: Я хочу познать свою кость, свою лаву, свое гробовое дно [, как под ним заиграет и магнием и фосфором жизнь, как мне улыбнется она: членистокрылая, пенящаяся, жужжащая]. Выйти к Арарату на каркающую, крошащуюся и харкающую окраину. Упереться всеми фибрами моего существа в невозможность выбора, в отсутствие всякой свободы. Отказаться добровольно от светской нелепицы воли и разума. Если приму как заслуженное и присносущее [звукоодетость, каменнокровность и твердокаменность, значит, я недаром побывал в Армении.] и тень от дуба, и тень от гроба, и твердокаменность членораздельной речи, - как я тогда почувствую современность? Что мне она? Пучок восклицаний и междометий! А я для нее живу… 146 (O. Mandelstam, “Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 400). 146 “I want to know my bone, my lava, my coffin bottom [, how life will play with magnesium and phosphorus underneath it, how it will smile at me: artho-winged, foaming, humming]. To walk out towards Ararat, to the croaking, crumbling and coughing outskirts. With every fiber of my being, to come up against the impossibility of choice, the absence of any freedom. To voluntarily reject worldly absurdity of will and reason. If I accept as deserved and eternal [being dressed by sound, the “stone-bloodedness” and “rock-hardness,” then I didn’t visit 114 The fragment unfolds as an attempt to reconcile the “eternal” with the “modernity,” idle and futile, however predestined for the speaker: “But I live for it …” Interestingly, the eternal is shown as solid as the stones of Armenia, while the modernity is just a “bundle of exclamations and interjections,” that is an empty place. Nonetheless, the narrator’s preference for any of these temporalities is open-ended. Despite his fascination with the timeless Armenia, he acknowledges his duty to the troubled present and, as a result, stays in the boundary state, which is reflected in the choice of the Ararat borderland as the locale. It is notable that the narrator comes out to this locale deliberately, as if being drawn by Ararat. The cawing, crumbling and coughing of the borderland are the symptoms that mirror his own insecurity. It is no wonder that his speculations on time fuse with the quest for self- cognition represented as a cross of geological and anatomical probe: “want to know my bone, my lava, my coffin bottom [, how life will play with magnesium and phosphorus underneath it, how it will smile at me: artho-winged, foaming, humming]...” The beholder of Ararat is thus not only physically attracted to the mountain, but metaphorically merges with the stony soils of the Ararat valley, as he searches for life in himself like in the underground layers of magnesium and phosphorous. He seeks to discover the “lava” of the self, as if speaking of geological mission to the dormant volcano Ararat. The metonymical connection between Ararat and the self is obvious, and the correlation between the mountain scenery and the issue of change of times is far from random. Remarkably, the final version of Journey to Armenia is way less ambivalent in treatment of that issue. At some point, the insight into synchrony of times entails the Armenia in vain.] and an oak’s shade, and a coffin’s shade, and “rock-hardness” of intelligible speech – how then I sense the modernity? What is it to me? A bundle of exclamations and interjections! But I live for it...” 115 introspection and the awakening of self that the poet searched for throughout his trip: “All… said to me: you’re awake, don’t be afraid of your own time, don’t be sly” (O. Mandelstam, Journey 42). The idea of wholeness of historic time thus explicates Mandelstam’s newfound determination to ascertain the necessity of historical continuity and welcome the Soviet modernity as part of the historical process, however uneasy it might be. The beginnings of this acceptance are definitely outlined in the draft episode taking place along the border with the Mount Ararat. In this way, Ararat stops being merely a spatial reference point that connects the earth and the sky, the Western and the Soviet Armenia. It also becomes a temporal reference point, linking the times. This ambiguity is evident in the following fragment of Journey to Armenia, which directs the driving force of pull even further into the future: “I have [developed] in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain. Now, no matter where I might be carried, it is already speculative and will abide with me” (67). 147 Here the attraction to Ararat as an impellent of the poet’s self is finally named openly, while both its spatial and temporal ubiquity is stressed as well. What also calls attention is the emphatic attachment of “the sense of attraction” to the persona, their merging into the single whole. The metaphorical expression of attraction to the mountain as though sticks to the traveler for life and thus implements the very idea of pull in reality. It is this life-long effect of fascination with Armenia that leads to the rediscovery of sense of self as a part of historical wholeness and prepares ground for the poet to reclaim his poetic creativity. In the eighth poem of the cycle “Armenia” the reader actually gets a glimpse of such creative recovery: 147 Translation adapted. 116 Холодно розе в снегу: На Севане снег в три аршина… Вытащил горный рыбак расписные лазурные сани, Сытых форелей усатые морды Несут полицейскую службу На известковом дне. А в Эривани и в Эчмиадзине Весь воздух выпила огромная гора, Ее бы приманить какой-то окариной Иль дудкой приручить, чтоб таял снег во рту. Снега, снега, снега на рисовой бумаге, Гора плывет к губам. Мне холодно. Я рад... 148 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). What stands out at first reading is definitely the unconventional form of the text. Here, as previously noted by researchers, Mandelstam combines free verse with the elements of the traditional Japanese poetic genres like haiku and tanka (Nerler and Lekmanov 148). Whereas the metric pattern of any of these poetic forms is not observed, the absence of rhymes, the laconicism of the separate lines and specifically the graphic look of the final haiku-like tercet demonstrate the economy of artistic means typical of the Japanese verse. What makes the poem a truly Japanese-influenced text is thus not the nuances of versification, but rather the reconstruction of the mood, the atmosphere of “pure contemplation” characteristic of haiku and tanka (“The Nineteenth Century” 90). Like the wandering haikuist Bashö, the unnamed travelling poet observes his surroundings, meditatively peers into the landscapes of Armenia and strives to intuitively conceive their nature. It is particularly striking how immense the field of his vision is. The three discrete stanzas name a number of locations 148 “Cold, for roses in the snow; / three yards of snow on Lake Sevan, / mountain fishermen [pulled] out a painted blue sleigh, / whiskered snout of well-fed trout / [are on police duty] / on the lime lake bottom. // But in Erivan and Echmiadzin / an enormous mountain [has] drank up all the air; / if [only it] could be [lured] by [some] ocarina / or tamed by a [pipe] / [so that] snow would melt in [the] mouth. / Snow, snow, snow on rice paper, / the mountain [is floating to the] lips. / I’m cold, I’m happy...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182-183). Translation adapted. 117 which the observer looks over – lake Sevan, the cities of Yerevan and Etchmiadzin. All of them are expressly dispersed geographically, as for this penetrating gaze neither long distances, nor obstacles matter. Eventually it transcends even the geographical borders and comes to focus on the paramount landmark of this expanse, Ararat, which rises across the border. The result of this survey is a contemplative model of the Armenian universe that covers practically everything: cities, lakes, mountains and the traveler himself whose power of vision as if connects the spread- out parts of the original historical country. The spatial limits of the poetic narrative are thus decidedly expanded, and the exact location of the observing subject is hardly possible to pinpoint. This is precisely because his visual scope is determined not by the realistic optical capacity of a human eye, but by the boundlessness of the narrative space that haiku commonly presupposes. Quite idiosyncratic is also the temporal setting of the poem. Mandelstam who never saw Armenia in winter picks precisely this season to portray his Hokusai-like poetic landscape. This is surely also a tribute to the Japanese poetic tradition that usually requires a seasonal theme to be developed in the text. Like a haiku, Mandelstam’s poem even features the so called “seasonal word” – kigo – which is meant to indicate the time of action to a reader. The kigo is found already in the first line: it is the noun snegu (“snow”) enhanced by the preceding adverb kholodno (“cold”). Overall, the choice of the wintertime setting as it were hints that if Mandelstam himself had a chance to enjoy Armenia from spring to fall only, the power of his thought allows him to do so in every season imaginable. Such implicit temporal universality correlates with the pervasiveness of his vision in space. The rather conventional implementation of the seasonal theme primes the reader for the insight into the interrelation between the change of seasons and the course of the poet’s life, also typical of haiku. The correspondence of the opening and the final lines of the poem: “Холодно 118 розе…” (“Cold, for roses...”) – “Мне холодно…” (“I’m cold”) unambiguously displays the intrinsic connection between the frozen rose and the poet (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148) and exemplifies that “perfect, self-enclosed and static composition” that Mandelstam attributed to tanka (“The Nineteenth Century” 90). The very image of the rose frozen by the lake points to the notion of sabi, a poetic ideal of the Japanese poets that infers old age, desolation and loneliness. Moreover, the dead flower imagery practically recycles the representation of the frost-withered reeds on the seashore, one of the earliest expressions of sabi by the medieval poet Fujiwara no Toshinari. Given the variety of similar botanical figures in the cycle “Armenia,” the withering rose also looms in the text as a cryptic emblem of poetic silence, on a par with the fruitless wild rose and the frozen grapes. Apart from its metric design, the first stanza epitomizes an exemplary modality of haiku. The observant, hypersensible poet registers the tiniest manifestations of the surrounding reality, and like a true master of haiku, prefers naming the objects to describing them. Like an authentic piece of Japanese poetry, the stanza lacks any evaluative wording and uses simple words that denote things just as they are. This effect of simplicity is doubled by the accentuation of the present tense verb forms or their elliptical counterparts: “холодно” (“[it is] cold”), “на Севане снег” (“[there is] snow on Lake Sevan”), “несут полицейскую службу” (“are on police duty”) 149 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). All the times but present are irrelevant in a haiku, and even the only past tense verb of the stanza vytashchil (“pulled out”) is perfective, that is linked with the present by the causal connection. Regardless of the tenses, the action, specifically motion, is almost removed from the scene: the snow is simply covering the ice of the lake, the fish are shown quite immobile “on a stakeout,” and the reader does not really witness the fisherman pulling out his sleigh, but rather sees the sleigh on the ice as the result of his action. 149 Translations adapted. 119 With this predilection for naming of the realia in the immediate present, Mandelstam perfectly succeeds in recreating mujō, the Japanese term for ephemerality and transience of things. The moment is perceived as fleeting and elusive, and all the things filling this moment appear exactly as they transpire before the eyes of the traveler. In other words, they induce the “here is” effect that Roland Barthes mentions in his research of the antidescriptive nature of haiku: “Neither describing nor defining, the haiku... diminishes to the point of pure and sole designation. It’s that, it’s this, says the haiku, it’s so. Or better still: so!” (83; emph. Barthes). It is as it were by pointing at the objects that Mandelstam uncovers the “fragile essence of [their] emergence” without yet reading into them any obtrusive meanings: here is the snowy lake and a withering rose, here is the sleigh and its owner, and here are the trout underwater. The pure contemplation of these details is all there is to the picture. Even the final figure of fish “on the police duty” not so much compromises this purity, as merely stresses the trout’s watchfulness. The meditative mood thus spreads around the Armenian universe: not only the traveler examines this world with his deliberate gaze, the world itself is incessantly on the lookout for things happening at the moment. In the next stanza the spatial shift to Yerevan and Etchmiadzin takes place, and the image of the Mount Ararat emerges. The change of the scenery, however, involves the change of sensory activity. Ararat enters the picture not as much as visual representation, although the reader learns that it is tall and covered with snow, as a representation produced by the respiratory organs. The result is a peculiar synesthetic perception of the “enormous mountain,” which “drank all the air,” that is both occupied the whole field of vision and left no oxygen to inhale, presumably due to high altitude (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). The urge to “melt [the mountain] snow” in the mouth completes the sensory encounter with Ararat by also engaging the poet’s organs of taste. 120 The inaccessibility of Mount Ararat is central to the quatrain, as the poet feels the need to attract, that is “lure” and “tame” it with a pipe. However, in view of this inaccessibility the tireless observation of the present moment maintained in the first stanza is disrupted. If the first half of the quatrain still uses the perfective verb in the past to capture the state of affairs in the present: vypila (“has drank”), the second half unexpectedly shifts the narration into subjunctive mood: “Ее бы приманить… иль… приручить” (“if only it could be lured... or tamed...”) (148). Things no longer reflect what is, but what could be, as the subjunctive mood might equally convey an uncertain chance, or wishful thinking. In all likelihood, Mandelstam’s usage of grammatical mood reveals the latter. The idea of bringing the unapproachable mountain near the poet becomes another fancy that enables his attraction to Armenia, this time quite literally. As more complex grammar gains momentum in the poem, the simple still harmony of the haiku mode is somewhat undermined. Most importantly, the only paratactical sentence in the whole text: “Ее бы приманить…” (“if only it could be lured...”) shifts the focus from naming what one sees to wishing that something else happens: “... чтоб таял снег во рту” (“[so that] snow would melt in the mouth”) (148). The stirring desire of action thus supplants the detached contemplation, and, once applied, the energy of free will is driving the text. Accordingly, the static imagery of the poem’s beginning gives way to more and more dynamic tropes. It should not come as a surprise that many of them carry the familiar semantics encountered elsewhere in the cycle “Armenia,” and some of them also blend together different nuances of meaning. First of all, the poet complains about the shortage of air in Yerevan and Etchmiadzin. This brings to mind the idea of poetic crisis as suffocation and reminds of the artist’s need to breathe clean, not a “stolen” air of creative work. However, in the context of Mandelstam’s journey the metaphor of air acquires further, specifically Armenian connotations. As Mandelstam wrote of his travel in the draft to Journey to Armenia: “... I got away with my straw 121 basket to Erivan in May 1930 [to the foreign country, in order to feel with my eyes its [power plants], towns and graves, to gather up the sounds of its speech and breathe for a time its most difficult and noblest historical air]” (“Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 395-396). Perhaps, it is this “hardest and noblest historical air” of Armenia mixed with the air of poetic creativity that produces a precious compound substance sought by the traveler in “Cold, for roses in the snow…” (“Kholodno roze v snegu...”). What he fancies is therefore a kind of historical and poetic inspiration skillfully disguised as an act of inspiration in its original non-figurative meaning, since vdokhnovenie (“inspiration”) and vdokh (“inhalation”) in Russian language are cognates. It is all the more intriguing that the urge to breathe in is never underscored in the text. Instead the persona strives for putting the mountain snow into his mouth, so that it could melt to water. The metaphor of suffocation thus intersects with the metaphor of spiritual thirst, or thirst for poetic “rightness” that already surfaced in “In the century’s thirty-first year …” There the sparkling water from the spring Arzni stood for freedom of poetic creativity and, remarkably, also originated in the mountains, as the spring is located in the gorge of the mountain river Razdan. One might even identify Arzni with the mythological Hippocrene spring on the mount Helicon traditionally associated with muses and fabled to inspire those who drink from it. In “Cold, for roses in the snow…,” however, the desired moisture comes not from the source, but straight from the snow-capped peaks of Ararat. It would be inadequate to ascribe the poet’s craving for the mountain snow to the quest for the Hippocrene spring, without taking into account the specific of the locale, namely the figurative meanings related to the Mount Ararat. What somewhat elucidates this specific is the drafts to the cycle uncovered by Irina Semenko. They include the following fragments of the early versions of the poem: “Иль дудкой приманить иль как-нибудь еще”; “«Иль дудкой приручить <пробел> Арарат Арарат 122 Урарту» (зачеркнуто)” 150 (Semenko 54). The second of these variants have definite origins in Mandelstam’s interest in the Armenian historical past, as the name of the ancient pre-Armenian kingdom Urartu is directly linked to the name Ararat. More accurately, the word “Ararat” is believed to have appeared in the Bible as a Masoretic vocalization of the proto-Armenian “Urartu” and have entered the Armenian language with an advent of Christianity (Piotrovskii 33). Apparently, for Mandelstam with his preoccupation with temporal continuity, the etymological pair “Urartu-Ararat” served as an exemplary illustration of how the language is capable of mirroring the succession of times and even creeds. In this light, “taming” Ararat must imply “taming” the essence of the Armenian history through comprehension of its linguistic reflection. The dissection of the language into continuous stages of its development is thus somewhat parallel to stratification of mountain rocks as a metaphor for diverse, but integral human history. Naturally, this history is also explored through connection with the Armenian Christian legacy largely stemming from the legend of the Noah's ark. Perhaps, the vision of Ararat is so undeniably attractive for the persona precisely because its tallest peak, so called Greater Ararat, was once everything left of land after the great flood. It is at once a symbol of the impending doom and the promised survival, the rebirth of the humankind. It is logical then that the poet in search of revival from personal and creative lethargy focuses his attention precisely on the alluring summit with its symbolical “biblical cloth,” as if inviting him to partake of its snow drinks. One should not forget that thawing of snow is generally suggestive of spring and awakening of nature. Along with biblical connotations, this brings about the expectation that consuming the thawed water must exert a certain effect of spiritual regeneration, if not reincarnation, on the traveler. 150 “Or lure with a pipe or some other way”; “«Or tame with a pipe <blank> Ararat Ararat Urartu» (strikethrough)”. 123 As the importance of the Christian Armenian history grows in the poem, even the inaccessibility of Ararat is reconsidered in a new apolitical way. According to the British climber-scholar Viscount James Bryce who scaled Ararat in 1876, “it has long been almost an article of faith with the Armenian Church that the top of Ararat is inaccessible,” and that Noah’s family were the only humans who ever set feet on it (Bryce 220). What hindered the ascent was specifically “the snow on [Ararat’s] summit, which never dissolves, but is increased by each successive fall” (Marco Polo, qtd. in Bryce 218). Furthermore, the snow itself is known to be revered by Armenians as sacred, as proven by the travelogue of Friedrich Parrot, the first climber on the summit. With astonishment he narrates of his fellow climber, the renowned Armenian writer Khachatur Abovian whose “devout zeal… made him, when on the summit, give all his attention to [mounting of] the cross… and from this spot, so dear to him, to carry down to the monastery a large piece of ice, the water from which he kept in a bottle as peculiarly holy” (Parrot 196). When Abovian handed the bottle to the priests of Etchmiadzin, “some tested it, others sprinkled themselves or wetted their faces with it; all looked upon it as a rarity of the highest value” (Parrot 209). From these excerpts follows that the thawed snow of Ararat is much more than the thirst quencher; for the Armenians it is a sacramental which is supposed to infuse those in contact with it with certain spiritual power. It is hard to imagine that Mandelstam who studied Armenian literature and communicated with many Armenian intellectuals, was totally unaware of the cultural and religious symbolism of the snow from the Ararat peaks. It would be easier to make sense of the poet’s mountain sacrament, if one discerns the parallel between “Cold, for roses in the snow…” and the already cited 1919 poem: “Вот неподвижная земля, и вместе с ней / Я христианства пью холодный горный воздух” 151 (O. Mandelstam, “V khrustal’nom omute...” 106). Clearly, the image of the thawed snow to be drunk 151 “That’s the earth, immobile, and she and I drink / Christianity’s cold mountain air...” (O. Mandelstam, “What steepness...” 104). 124 in the Armenian poem strikingly overlaps with that of the cold potable mountain air of Christianity in the earlier verse. As said forth, the poet’s senses operate synesthetically, as the drinkable and the inhalable fuse into one in both poems. Judging by the Armenian text, one might even say that because the mountain drank all the air, the air already became a part of a mountain snow that the poet wants to put in his mouth so eagerly. In doing so, he as though wishes to imbue himself with the “historical air” of holy Armenia, miraculously liquified and frozen. Most significantly, the resemblance between two poems highlights the key word from the 1919 text that qualifies the shared nature of the described ritual: “Крутое “Верую” и псалмопевца роздых, / Ключи и рубища апостольских церквей” 152 (106). As pointed out by the commentators, “верую” (“сredo”) in this fragment is the direct citation from “Veruiu, Gospodi, i ispoveduiu…” (“I believe, oh Lord, and I confess...”), the Orthodox prayer conventionally uttered before the sacrament of Eucharist. This reference makes it clear that in Mandelstam's poetic world drinking the cold mountain air and melting the snow in one's mouth amount to receiving the Eucharist, namely consuming the sacramental bread and wine at the Divine Liturgy. What their consumption traditionally signifies is not only the communion with the divine, but also the promise of resurrection and eternal life: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” (KJV Bible, John 6:54). Likewise, it is renewal, or rebirth of the self that the traveler in Mandelstam’s cycle seeks in Armenia. Because the Christians believe that bread turns into Jesus' imperishable body and wine into his blood, a part of their imperishability is also supposed to transfer to the communicant, that is the traveling poet. By the same token, the Eucharist received by the single believer provides the 152 “...steep Credo, psalm-singer’s quick break, / rags and keys of apostolic churches” (O. Mandelstam, “What steepness...” 104). 125 pledge of eternal life for all the human beings, as on the cosmic scale it redeems the original sin of mankind and defeats death that it brought to the world. It is these individual and universal eschatological aspects of Eucharist that seem to resonate with Mandelstam’s design of his Armenian poem. On the personal level, the castaway subject looks for the ways to restore his self, while in broader sense, he wants to commune with Armenia and the whole Christian world by means of the Ararat snow, considered sacred for centuries. As in his vision Ararat figuratively unites all the times, by receiving the Eucharist he would also come into immediate contact with past, present and future of humanity. It is not until the concluding stanza that the persona succeeds in this endeavor. The fantasy of communion with the Ararat snow starts coming true, as the narration returns to the present tense and meditation on the current moment. However, the contemplative stillness of the first stanza is now by and large abandoned, as the mountain starts to move towards the poet’s lips: “Гора плывет к губам…” 153 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). The force of attraction to the mountain thereby takes over, and the dynamism of its floating triumphs over the “poetry of non-being, and Buddhism in art,” as Mandelstam defined both the gist of his unsettled age and the Japanese poetic paradigm a decade before (“The Nineteenth Century” 90). The lips touch the snow, and although the reader fails to witness the actual moment of their contact, it is possible to trace it by its ramifications in the following lines: “Мне холодно. Я рад…” 154 (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 148). It is at this point that the mountain imparts the poet with the invigorating coldness of the sacramental snow, and the resultant awareness of the long-sought renewal conjures the line with the pronoun ia (“I”), the one and only in the poem. At this climactic epiphanic moment the impersonal tone winds down, as the pronouns mne (“I/me”) and ia (“I”) signal that the reclamation of sense of self has begun. The dots leave this process of self- 153 “The mountain [is floating] to the lips” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 182-183). Translation adapted. 154 I’m cold, I’m happy...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 183). 126 discovery open-ended, presumably because the convergence of the poet and the mountain continues to take place. What casts a shadow of doubt on this reading is seemingly only the line: “Снега, снега, снега на рисовой бумаге.” 155 Here Mandelstam implicitly translates the image of Ararat into its cross-cultural counterpart, the vision of the Mount Fuji favored by generations of the Japanese artists and poets. The snow of Ararat as if appears to have been a product of imagination from the very beginning, an illusion that the persona himself conjured up on a blank sheet of rice paper, or perhaps a reminiscence of an actual piece of Japanese art, a representation of Fuji that he mistook for Ararat. However, if we are to assume that the fictitious snowy mountain appears only on paper, its physical floating towards the traveler’s lips and his distinct sensual reaction, clearly stated in the next lines, somewhat contradict the premise. As an alternative to this interpretation, I would suggest that the final tercet conceals one of the most powerful metaliterary images of the poem. The rice paper commonly used in Japan for fine art printing, including the images of the “ukiyo-e” genre (“pictures of the floating world”) 156 , was also traditionally used for calligraphy and putting poetry on paper. It is possible that Mandelstam consciously introduced the allusion to the rice paper as an imaginary medium for his own Japanese stylized verse. This allows the reader to virtually witness the poetry in the making. As the persona approaches his own self-transformation, the precious substrate of cultural and historical inspiration starts molding into something more material, like the sheet of paper designed for poetic writing. This alteration is totally compliant with the same principle of transubstantiation, the change by which the Eucharist sacramentals are thought to become, in reality, body and blood of Christ. In addition to all the semantical nuances noted above, the melting of the Ararat snow “onto” the rice paper brings about the idea of poetry that is bound to 155 “Snow, snow, snow on rice paper...” (O. Mandelstam, “Armenia” 183). 156 Cf.: “Гора плывет к губам” (“The mountain [is floating] to the lips”) (O. Mandelstam, “Armeniia” 146). 127 shape into its corporeal form against the background of communion with the Armenian history. 157 The evidence of the metatextual connotations of the mountain snow imagery are found in variety of Mandelstam’s essays. In 1924 publication “К юбилею Ф.K. Сологуба” (“For the Anniversary of F.K. Sologub”) Mandelstam constructs the whole allegorical landscape of the Russian poetry by developing the trope of “snow of the Alps”: Sologub’s poetry flowed from Tytchev’s Alpine summits like limpid mountain streams. These streams babbled so close to our domicile, to our home. And yet somewhere in the rosy Apline chill the eternal snows of Tytchev are melting. Sologub’s poems presupposed the existence and melting of eternal ice. There, on the summit, in Tyutchev’s Alps, is their cause, their origin. This is a descent into the valley to the level of life and habitation. It is a descent of the snow, ethereally cold deposits of Russian poetry (perhaps to immobile and egotistical in their icy indifference and accessible only to the courageous reader). Tyutchev’s snows are melting, melting over half a century; Tyutchev is descending to our houses: it is the second act, as indispensable as exhaling after inhaling, as a vowel following a consonant in a syllable; it is not an echo, not even a continuation, but the cycle of matter, the great cycle of Nature in Russian poetry with its Alps and plains <...> It is not to refrains and hackneyed forms that [Sologub] beckons us. The best lesson to be learned from his poetry is this: if you can, if you are able, do something new; if you cannot, then bid farewell to the past, but bid farewell in such a way that you will burn up the past with your farewell (129). Here the snow from the “Tyutchev’s summit” represents the canon of the previous century of the Russian poetry, its enduring legacy, hence the “eternal ice.” Remarkably, breathing is also mentioned in the fragment, and the bed of poetic snow is described with the epithet “ethereally cold,” which amalgamates the air and the water elements, like in the Armenian poem. Strongly stressed is also the immobility and inaccessibility of snow, as only the courageous reader is able to tackle the poetry which rests on the remote and impregnable 157 Сf. the above cited fragment of Mandelstam’s essay “The Word and Culture,” which equates the sacramental bread with the word, as well as the following excerpt, which highlights the word’s inextricable connection to the issue of changing times: “The life of the word has entered a heroic era. The word is flesh and bread. It shares the fate of bread and flesh: suffering.… Whoever shall rise the word on high and confront time with it, as the priest displays the Eucharist, shall be a second Joshua of Nun” (71). 128 “summit,” as on the pedestal. 158 But at the turn of the centuries the time had come for the glaciers to thaw, and what made the snowmelt possible was the momentum of the new Modernist poetry, like that of Sologub. It is known that the poetry of early Russian Modernism was largely influenced by Tyutchev and his poetics of understatement. It was this new poetry that allowed the “Tyutchev’s snows” to turn into streams of water which “descend” from the mountain summit right to the people’s houses; in other words, it enabled this forgotten, “indifferent,” metaphysically dense poetry to find its way to the modern reader, to warm itself with the “teleological warmth” of human way of life. 159 The parallel with moving the snow off the Ararat peaks and down towards the poet’s lips in “Cold, for roses in snow…” is obvious. With that in mind, one might claim that in the Armenian poem the persona is not only preoccupied with self-recovery, but also acknowledges his duty to inscribe himself in the current literary process and create new poetry. He succeeds, as the poetry starts emerging in both oral and written forms. The focus on the mouth area points at the involvement of the organ of speech in the creative process: “The mountain is floating to the lips,” while the meltwater in the mouth echoes the image of “burning ice” of the forgotten poetic word that the poet struggled to recall in the earlier verse: “А на губах как черный лед горит / Стигийского воспоминанье звона” 160 (“Ia slovo pozabyl...” 110). As for the written speech, it has been said that its embodiment emerges in the finale as the sheet of the rice paper. The triple repetitive mention of snow, and nothing else but snow on the paper, appears to indicate that the sheet must yet be completely 158 It is likely that the topographic term of the mountain summit acquires special significance in Mandesltam’s writing in association with etymology of the word “Acmeism” (‘acme’ meaning ‘top’ in Greek), the literary movement that young Mandelstam was a part of in 1910s. In this reading, the snowmelt might refer to the self- imposed decision of reconsidering one’s own poetic background. 159 Cf.: “Hellenism is a conscious surrounding of man with domestic utensils instead of impersonal objects; the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils, and the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth. Hellenism is any kind of stove near which a man sits, treasuring its heat as something akin to his own internal body heat” (O. Mandelstam, “On the Nature of the Word” 80). 160 “...and echoes of Stygian ringing / burn on [the] lips, black like ice” (O. Mandelstam, “What had I wanted to say?..” 110). Translation adapted. 129 blank. This stands to reason, as the sheet amounts to a tabula rasa waiting for the poetic word to leave its imprint on it. The image as if embodies “the best lesson” of the Russian poetry, stated in the piece on Sologub: bid farewell to the past and make the new. At the same time, like elsewhere in Mandelstam, this farewell is being deferred by paying tribute to the literary continuity. In the essay this idea of succession is suggested by the reference to the “circulation of the substance in the Russian poetry,” the realization that the new is not viable without the old, and Sologub is not relevant in the modern world without Tiutchev. The typical Mandelstamian vacillation between the past and the present is thus projected onto the world of poetry. There is no doubt that in the circumstances of the 1930 poetic stagnation this ambivalence was experienced on a much more personal level, as Mandelstam’s own creative choice between the cultural memory and the novelty in his writing. In the 1921 essay “Slovo i kul’tura” (“The Word and Culture”) the same problem of commitment to the culture of the past finds universal dimension. The following fragment highlights Mandelstam’s devotion to the world cultural heritage, while also shedding light on the semantics of the image of the pipe from “Cold, for roses in the snow…”: Today a kind of speaking in tongues is taking place. In sacred frenzy poets speak the language of all times, all cultures. Nothing is impossible. As the room of a dying man is open to everyone, so the door of the old world is flung open before the crowd. Suddenly everything becomes public property. Come and take your pick. Everything is accessible: all labyrinths, all secret recesses, all forbidden paths. The word has become not a seven- stop, but a thousand-stop flute, brought to life all at once by the breathing of the ages <…> For [the modern poet-synthesizer] all the complexity of the old world is like that same Pushkinian flute <…> Classical poetry is the poetry of revolution (72). 130 The classical Pushkinian seven-pipe tsevnitsa (“flute”), the semblance of Pan’s flute identified with the gift of muses and the poetic inspiration itself 161 , here transforms into a thousand-pipe instrument whose play transcends the temporal and spatial boundaries. Enlivened by the “breathing” of all the times and all the cultures, it offers boundless opportunities to the new “poet-synthesizer.” Although this kind of poet acknowledges that the old world is passing away like a “dying man,” he values and partakes of its legacy, which is now open to the posterity as never before. In the closure Mandelstam, still full of hope in the new Communist order, goes as far as identifying the classical poetry with the poetry of revolution, thus making another delusional attempt to find compromise between the past and the present of the troubled Soviet Russia. The similar elements of cultural synthesis can be observed in the Armenian poem. The archaic Pushkinian tsevnitsa (“flute”) is concealed behind the generic Russian noun dudka (“pipe”), which, by chance or choice, shares the common root with the name of the famous Armenian wind instrument duduk. Besides, it also metamorphoses into “ocarina”, an ancient vessel flute of a rounded shape with twelve finger holes and a mouthpiece. Remarkably, the ocarina is considered to date back over 12,000 years and is typical of many world cultures, including Chinese and Mesoamerican, but its modern name derives from the word of the Bolognese dialect of Italian, meaning “little goose.” With all these diverse cultural implications, in a short poetic line Mandelstam manages to encipher a reference to different types of the same musical instrument whose history bridges the gap not only between millennia, but between continents and nations. 161 Cf. Pushkin’s 1821 poem “Muza” (“Muse”): “В младенчестве моём она [муза] меня любила и семиствольную цевницу мне вручила…” (26). “In my young years she loved me, and a seven-fluted, / A fine- toned panpipe gave me...” (“Muse” 10). 131 The idea of historical and cultural continuity, whose representation in the cycle “Armenia” is so manifold, thus finds another expression in the image of the poet’s instrument. As an extension of organ of speech, the pipe is also identified with the poetic skill, yet poorly mastered by the persona, as the subjunctive mood and the words kakaia-to (“some”), kak-nibud’ (“somehow”) contribute to the sense of creative diffidence: “Ее бы приручить какой-то окариной”; “...иль как-нибудь еще” (Semenko 54; emph. mine). 162 It is this poetic potential that is supposed to mediate the attraction, the exchange of historical and cultural inspiration between Armenia and the traveler. Logically, only the music of the poet’s pipe is meant to reach the inaccessible peaks of Ararat, which literally imbues the atmosphere with the spirit of history and takes the beholder across the biblical times to the modern age, from Urartu to Armenia and further across the ancient Mediterranean civilizations. Such music could indeed be an evidence of centuries-old historical and cultural integration and would fulfill Mandelstam’s dream of new synthetical poetry. The search of the lost inspiration, however, takes effort. If Pushkin’s muse hands the “flute” to the future “sun of Russian poetry” herself, Mandelstam’s persona has to find his own ways to bring the mountain to the lips, as “some” luring ocarina seems to be difficult to obtain. The very choice of the verbs “to tame” and “to lure” in conjunction with the pipe trope invoke the additional metaphorical view of Ararat as a wild animal to be captured by the persona, as by a hunter or a snake charmer. The key to the background of this image is hidden in the drafts to the poem, which include the following variant: “Иль дудкой приручить как страуса иль фламинго” 163 (Semenko 54). By projecting the enormous height of the mountain onto the wildlife, at some point Mandelstam apparently conceived the vision of Ararat as a gigantic exotic bird, like an ostrich or a flamingo, which needs to be attracted with the poetic impellent as with 162 “if [only it] could be [lured] by [some] ocarina.” Translation adapted. 163 “Or tame with a pipe like an ostrich or a flamingo.” 132 the “duck call.” Its domestication is thus the necessary condition of the poetic revival craved by the lyrical subject. It turns out that this ornithological image might just as well bear metatextual implications. In the essay Conversation about Dante created only a few years after the return from Armenia Mandelstam speaks about a “bird flock” of the old Italian grammar that submits to the poetic gift of Dante: Just as the letters emanating from the hand of a scribe who is obedient to the dictation and who stands outside literature as a finished product, chase after the bait of meaning, as after sweet fodder, so precisely do birds, magnetized by green grass – sometimes separately, sometimes together – peck at what befalls them, sometimes coming together in a circle, sometimes stretching into a line... <…> The grammar of Old Italian exactly like our new Russian grammar partakes of the same fluttering flock of birds… (281). In this expanded metaphor the letters of a literary piece in the making are compared to the birds feeding on the birdseed. The unfolding of the written speech on paper is thus parallel to their roaming on the grass that “magnetizes” them. This magnetism is produced by “the bait of meaning,” that is the poetic vision of the narrator which always precedes and fully regulates recording of that vision by the scribe. In a similar manner, in the Armenian poem the luring of the giant “bird of Ararat” induces the transference of the poetic vision onto the rice paper and its structuring into the written form. The poet’s way of “baiting” the mountain remains unclear, as the elliptical gap before the climactic stanza obscures the result of search for the “taming” pipe. The reader is left to assume that the precious ocarina of poetic mastery was eventually found, and the act of attraction, that valued interaction between the self and the history, the word and the world culture, at last approached finalization. 133 Into the Other Dimensions of Attraction As partially shown earlier in this study, the phenomenon of attraction is not limited to Mandelstam’s Armenian poetry, but naturally extends to the prose and thereby finds additional elucidation. The quotation on the “development of the sixth sense” seems to be particularly crucial, as it validates the role of attraction as one of central conceptual terms of the Armenian writings. It is necessary to cover some other references, at least in brief, in order to qualify the origins and the influences of the notion of attraction. Surprisingly or not, they will also direct the reader’s analytical mind into the realm of self-cultivation, creation and the mastery of word. First of all, it is remarkable that both the imagery of this poem and the idea of “development of the sixth sense” stated in Journey to Armenia are so physiologically oriented. The relevance of this wording might be clarified with the great interest in biology that Mandelstam took in the late 1920s through friendship with Kuzin. For the insight into the notion of attraction specifically relevant are the premises of the biological theory of Neo-lamarckism and the hypothesis of “embryonic field” by the Soviet biologist Alexander Gurvich. The former sees the evolutionary development not as a result of natural selection, but as a consequence of an impulse that comes from within the organism in response to “invitation” by the environment. Likewise, the latter posits the similar idea that there exists a biological field which preforms species characters already in embryos. Clearly, what spoke to Mandelstam’s personal situation was the definitive anti-determinist orientation of both approaches, namely the belief that the organism is dependent only on its immanent self-effort, rather than on its surroundings. Determined to affirm the superiority of free will of nature over “the boring bearded development,” that is evolution, Mandelstam writes in Journey to Armenia: “As for the thinking salamander, man, he puzzles out the next-day’s weather in order to choose his own coloration” 164 164 Translation adapted. 134 (O. Mandelstam, Journey 45). Obviously, for Mandelstam the development of a special sense organ responsible for the attraction to Armenia amounted to the similar free choice of personal character. It must have served as the best metaphor of conscious personal self-growth, independent of external impact, but capable of foreseeing it. Further in the prose this metaphor is taken even further into anthropological dimension, as it parallels the mnemonic processes in a human brain: All of us, without suspecting it, are the carriers of an immense embryological experiment: for even the process of remembering, crowned with the victory of memory’s effort, is amazingly like the phenomenon of growth. In one as well as the other, there is a sprout, an embryo, the rudiment of a face, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name, something labial or palatal, sweet legume on the tongue, that doesn’t develop out of itself but only responds to an invitation, only stretches out toward [вытягивается], justifying one’s expectation (53-54). The work of memory that provides the recognition of objects and phenomena around us builds on step-by-step remembrance of long forgotten traits. Prompted by the environment, these traits extend into a complete full-fledged recollection, like sprouts of plants. It is indicative that in this fragment Mandelstam uses the Russian verb vytiagivaetsia (“stretches out”) – the derivative of the noun pritiazhenie (“pull, attraction, gravity”) – to speak about the formation of a memory. Apparently, the force inviting this reminiscence bears certain resemblance with the pull of the enormous mountain exerted by the meditating traveler. In the chapter “Vokrug naturalistov” (“Around the Naturalists”) the metaphor of pull finally acquires creative overtones, as Mandelstam equates performance of a music orchestra to the formation of a species character: The environment merely invites the organism to grow <…> When the conductor draws a theme out [vytiagivaet] of orchestra with his baton, he is not the physical cause of the sound. The sound is already there in the score of the symphony, in the spontaneous 135 collusion of the performers, in the crowdedness of the auditorium, and in the structure of the musical instruments (62). Clearly, the use of the non-reflexive form of the same Russian verb vytiagivaet (“draws/pulls out”) in the passage points at the analogy between the extraction of music from its source and the acquisition of the species character, like that of “sense of attraction to a mountain.” It would also be useful to compare this description with the account of the creative poetic process offered by Mandelstam in “The Word and Culture.” There he explores the nature of what he would later call the “incessant form-generating pull” (tiaga) of verse (O. Mandelstam, “Razgovor o Dante” 167): “The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet’s ear touching it” (“The Word and Culture” 72). In both compared fragments, the sounds of music and the sounds of poetry are prefigured with the imperceptible design, the hidden preimage of the future complete form, yet only available to the ear of a conductor, or a poet. It is their common task to elicit these sounds and thereby call art into existence. It seems that Armenia became for Mandelstam exactly such magnetic source of creativity, so that he was able to “pull out” the sounds of poetry out of its magnificent ancient culture and historical timelessness. Like the score and the orchestra invite music into being, so did the cultural and historical memory represented by Armenia invite Mandelstam to reassess his identity and creative problems. It is through the return to the beginnings of Christianity, recognition of Armenia as “a younger sister of the Judaic land”, perceiving its history with his senses and “extracting” inspiration from it that Mandelstam was able to restore his poetic creativity and make it “abide with him,” together with his newly-discovered “sense of attraction 136 to a mountain.” The verse ”grew” out of these elements, like a sprout welcomed by its surroundings or a barren wild rose that by miracle started bearing fruits. Probably, one of the most telling episodes which corroborate the reclamation of creative genius occurs in the final chapter of Journey to Armenia. As the narrator rides the horse up the slopes of the Mount Aragats, also known by its Turkic name Alagez, he meditates on the geological history of the volcano massive and shares his impression of it: The approaches to Alagez are not fatiguing, and it is no trouble at all to [capture it] on horseback, in spite of its fourteen thousand feet sea level… I thought [Alagez] was a monolithic ridge. Actually, it is a system of folds and develops gradually – proportionally to the rise, the accordion of diorite rocks uncoiled itself like an alpine waltz (O. Mandelstam, Journey 69-70). And I felt drawn to it, over the mulberry trees and the earthen roofs of the houses (69). The need to tame or capture the mountain, the insight into the historic layering of its formations, and the distinctly pronounced attraction to it – clearly, all this replicates the motifs highlighted in the above treatment of the image of Ararat, which for a good reason has been known in the Armenian legends as Alagez’s “sister mountain.” As if in view of inaccessibility of Ararat, the narrator feels compelled to approach its twin, the similarly “enormous mountain” located within a day trip from Yerevan. The taming of the mountain thus appears to be more aggressive, as if prompted by the military mission of conquest, inspired by the memory of Tatar- Mongols that once invaded this area: “You ride along feeling you have an invitation from Tamerlane in your pocket” (71). It is this quasi-militant mood that invokes the narrator’s acknowledgement of his literary mission, reassessed against the background of self-recovery: What tense do you want to live in? 137 “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle, in the ‘what ought to be.’” That’s the way I’d like to breathe. That’s what pleases me. There is such a thing as mounted, bandit-band, equestrian honor. That is why I like the splendid Latin “gerundive” – the verb on horseback. Yes, the Latin genius, when it was young and greedy, created that form of imperative verbal pull [povelitel’noi glagol’noi tiagi] as the prototype of our whole culture, and it was not merely “that which ought to be,” but “that which ought to be praised” – laudatura est – that which pleases… Such was the talk I carried on with myself as I rode horseback among the natural boundaries, the nomads’ territories and the gigantic pastures of Alagez” 165 (69). The comparison of a verb to an equestrian introduces the metaphor of speech as travel and brings to mind other relevant statements by Mandelstam: “To speak means to always be on the road...” (“Razgovor o Dante. Pervaia redaktsia” 420); “In modern practice, verbs left literature. They only have an indirect relation to life. Their role is purely instrumental – for a certain fee they transport [us] from a place to a place. <...> Meanwhile, a verb is first and foremost an act, a decree, an ordinance” (412). It is this ministerial role of the verb that needs to be reconsidered as its sacred mission, which Mandelstam formulates as the imperative verbal pull of the Latin gerundive. Gerundive is the verb form that lacks an equivalent in English and can best be translated as passive to-infinitive clause like “the book is to be read.” It thus denotes obligation, necessity and indeed an imperative of the world culture, “that which is to be praised” and that which is to abide with mankind. As Jane Gary Harris has shown, the fact that the narrator delves into the purpose of “verb on horseback,” while actually riding a horse, proves that he “not only discovers but becomes his own imperative” (“The «Latin Gerundive»” 8). Because, as a writer and a poet, he indeed is a part of the world cultural process, Mandelstam implicitly asserts his self-worth as a creator, that very “verb” that pulls the literature forward and assures its immortalization. 165 Translation adapted. 138 It is evident that the fragment under discussion uncovers additional creative semantics of the metaphor of pull: as the poet “feels drawn” to the mountain, he himself draws the poetry towards new horizons. At the same time, he also uses this opportunity to figure out his relationship with the modernity. The problem of choosing the time to live in – that alternative between the past and the present that troubled Mandelstam for life – is thus resolved through the sophisticated wordplay with the polysemantic Russian noun vremia, which stands both for “time” and the grammatical category of “tense.” By proclaiming his wish to live in the Latin Gerundive Mandelstam as if takes his dilemma to the next level, beyond the dichotomy of the old and the new age, into the principally timeless metaliterary realm. This allows him to finally proclaim: “That’s the way I’d like to breathe. That’s what pleases me” (Journey 69), thereby once again stating his recovery from poetic “suffocation” and freedom to follow his own personal and creative choices. It is next to this assertion of independence that Mandelstam places one of the most self- revealing episodes of his prose, namely the paraphrase of the legend of king Arshak from the ancient Armenian chronicles. According to the legend, the Armenian king from Arshak dynasty was captured by the Assyrian ruler Shapukh and kept in the fortress Aniush for years. His imprisonment, parallel to Mandelstam’s own pre-Armenian existential “incarceration,” is described in familiar terms of gradual loss of senses: the king’s ears “have grown dull with silence,” “his tongue is scabby from jailers’ food,” “his voice is as sparse as the bleating of a sheep” (72). But most importantly, the captive king Arshak lacks the air to breathe, while also losing the sense of self appropriated by his imprisoner: “King Shapukh – thinks Arshak – has got the better of me, and, worse than that, he has taken my air for himself. The Assyrian grips my heart. He is the commander of my hair and my fingernails. He grows my beard and swallows me my spit…” (72-73). The metaphor of “stolen air” coupled with the motif of loss of identity and 139 the ostensibly fortuitous first-person narration prompts a supposition that in the guise of the king Arshak hides the actual author of the prose. Likewise, as Gregory Freidin suggested, “no special imagination is required to see Stalin’s features in the «Assyrian»” (Coat 237). In such a circumlocutory manner Mandelstam rethinks the traditional equation between a ruler and a prophetic poet and adjusts it to the political circumstances of his age. For the last time in his prose he broaches the theme of value of sense of self, and does so in the riskiest possible way, in a form of an expressive Aesopian tale that would later be carelessly overlooked by the censor of Journey to Armenia. However, the legend does not end here, leaving some room for Arshak’s restitution. The help comes from Arshak’s former dignitary Darmastat, who did a military favor for the Assyrian king and earned a reward from him. Darmastat’s wish was the following: “Give me a pass to Anuish Fortress. I would like Arshak to spend one additional day, full of hearing, taste, and smell, as it was before, when he amused himself at the hunt or busied himself with the planting of trees” (O. Mandelstam, Journey 73). As repeatedly noticed by the commentators, by this one additional day Mandelstam meant nothing short of his stay in Armenia, as brief as it was, but nonetheless replete with astonishing revelations. Furthermore, if we are to complete the Aesopian reading offered by Freidin, Darmastat must be none other than Mandelstam’s protector Nikolai Bukharin, who made the travel to Armenia possible. The sensational intensity of the Armenian journey in its turn also makes sense, as the active engagement of five senses topped by the development of the sixth “sense of attraction to the mountain” permeates Mandelstam’s Armenian writings. In the drafts to his travelogue he includes what must be the early commentary on the legend about the king Arshak: “The moral to this fable is clear: a person cannot be humiliated. Five senses, in the chronicler’s opinion, are only vassals performing feudal service for the “I” that is reasonable, thinking, and conscious of its own worth” (O. Mandelstam, 140 “Puteshestvie v Armeniiu. Zapisnye knizhki” 412). The role of awaken senses in coming-to-be of the self is thus unambiguously recognized by the author. But it is the reinterpretation of the finale of the legend that makes Mandelstam’s ultimate view of his post-Armenian condition clear. Whereas in the original chronicle after the additional day of sensuous pleasures both Arshak and the loyal Darmastat commit suicide, Mandelstam deliberately omits the tragic ending. In doing so, he must have aimed to demonstrate that Arshak’s prototype is not yet ready for such a fatal outcome. Instead, the traveler returns back to where he left off before the digression, to the narration of his Alagez ascent. In the episode preceding the legend, the wearied horse riders settled for the night in a tent on a slope of the mountain. As the legend ends, however, not only does the sleeping begin, but the horseback riding paradoxically also continues: Sleep is easy in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out, recalls the length of the road. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures, walls you in. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge (O. Mandelstam, Journey 73). What happens in this fragment, as the traveler is falling asleep, is the total dissolution of his persona in the landscape. His body coalesces with the magnificent scenery of the Armenian Highlands that he rode by at the daytime. In contrast to the violent appropriation of the body parts and senses in the Arshak legend, here this yielding of self to the mountain ridges, the meadows and the ravines happens easily and of the traveler’s own accord. At last, in the state of slumber, at the edge of sleep and wake, he as it were completes his attraction to the mountain, which progresses into the total amalgamation of the narrator and the land that so profoundly inspired him. The reader thus witnesses not only the dreamer’s “immuration” into the sleep, but also his farewell “immuration” into the world of Armenia. 141 It would be wrong, however, to deem this dormancy as the sign of the narrator’s spiritual and creative recession in the end of “one additional day” of his life spent in Armenia. The last sentence of the prose makes it absolutely clear that the effect of the “verbal pull,” this driving force of poetry induced by the “attraction to the mountain,” is ongoing. As Mandelstam would write one year later in Conversation about Dante: “In Dante philosophy and poetry are constantly on the go, perpetually on their feet…” (254). In all likelihood, the sleep in the nomad camps in Journey to Armenia parallels the experience of such a suspension of poetry, dynamic and active even when the journey is over. It is possible then that the obligation of “having to ride around some ridge” stands for the author’s readiness to keep creating verse and his determination to overcome the obstacles which might block the way of his poetic “horse” back in Russia. This self-imposed duty once again warrants that adhering to the imperative of the world culture “is ought to be” perpetual by the joint effort of the narrator and his like. Another fragment from Conversation about Dante sheds slightly different light on the contextual role of the ride in the sleep: Any given word is a bundle, and meaning sticks out of it in various directions, not aspiring toward any single official point. In pronouncing the word “sun,” we are, as it were, undertaking an enormous journey to which we are so accustomed that we travel in our sleep. What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road (259). This passage exposes that the ride in the sleep also connotes the thoughtless automatic everyday speech which can be given true meaning only by powers of poetry. It seems that in the finale of Journey to Armenia it is exactly the poetry that is about to stir the dormant horseman up on his ride, like a jolt from hitting “some ridge” which one fails to go around. The traveler’s doze 142 thus echoes the metaphor of poetic “sleep,” that needed to be broken in order for the poetry to come into existence. In this way, the ending of the travelogue makes the reader anticipate another flash of poetic awakening from the rider. At the same time, the “pull” of narration hardly even requires such a dramatic shake-up. Having gained momentum, the story keeps rolling along as if by some “incessant form-generating pull.” Like the poem “Cold, for roses in the snow...” the prose thus ends with open-endedness that leaves the attraction to the mountain and the pull of the ride continuous. Such understatement of the finale is telling of the author’s hope for lingering of their effect and the expectation that his journey into the future of the world culture will not cease. This embracement of his place in culture as seen from the timeless universal perspective is probably the reason why after the return from Armenia Mandelstam reconsiders his “efforts to come to terms with the new era” (N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope 176): The third and final stage in our relations began with his journey to Armenia and return to writing verse. By now he had come out of the hypnotic trance in which the whole country was sunk, and had ceased to regard the new order as the beginning of the millennium. At the same time he began to write verse again – this happened in Tiflis on the way back from Armenia. At last, after many years, he had once more become conscious of the past and renewed his links to it. A “drying crust of a loaf long since taken out” is so inhibited by its dependence on the past that it usually feels quite unentitled to claim any connection with “modernity” <…> Once liberated from this constraint, M. began to live in the present, certain it belonged to him rather than to those who brandished their title deed to it and then proceeded to foretell the future with such aplomb. From the beginning of the thirties M. paid no more attention to these prophets: he had recovered complete inner freedom (N. Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned 263). It seems somewhat of an overstatement to say that this newly found inner freedom was absolute and lasted Mandelstam until the end of his life. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s other memories of her husband’s forced 1930 assimilation in unwelcoming Russia somewhat contradict the above quotation: “An attempt to find the second homeland – Armenia – failed. 143 Returned to Moscow by force – “I returned, no, read: was returned to the Buddhist Moscow by force” – O.M. determined his place in it. The definition appeared to be fairly precise” (N. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia 382). Through these words rather glimpses a recollection of something opposite of freedom. But the most important thing, that is the recognition of an attempt to find “the second motherland” and the second home in historical Armenia, seems to be perfectly true. It is this attempt, while not completely successful, that called the poetry of the 1930s into existence and left its author with a life-long memory of upriamliane 166 (the persistent ones), “a people older than the Romans” (O. Mandelstam, Journey 71). There is no doubt that the model persistence of the Armenians, together with the newly perceived sense of self-value as an individual and a poet, allowed Mandelstam’s journey into the literature to continue not only until his tragic end in the Soviet camps in 1938, but way beyond his lifetime, as if by force of the incessant “imperative verbal pull.” 166 This neologism is a hybrid of the Russian noun armiane (Armenians) and adjective upriamye (the persistent). 144 Chapter 2 Brodsky the Traveler: The Liberated Self against the Quest for Homecoming The 1987 Nobel laureate in literature Joseph Brodsky might rightly be called one of the most well-traveled and global figures of the twentieth century Russian poetry. After his forced exile from the Soviet Leningrad and move to the United States in 1972 until his death in 1996, Brodsky visited over 20 countries and created some of his best poems and essays based on his travel experiences. Arguably, it is in these writings that the poet’s displaced self, torn between Russia and the West, found its ultimate expression. Brodsky’s travelling persona represents a highly impersonal, distanced rendition of the self. He is “a raincoated figure” (“Lagoon” 81) “a double in the mirror” (“Roman Elegies” 274) or simply “a shade” (“Einem Alten Architekten in Rom” 116 [1973]) indifferent to its whereabouts, because for Brodsky “every new country… is, in the final analysis, just a continuation of space” (“Interview with Joseph Brodsky” 62). It is this stance of self-alienation that serves as the most precise self-portrait of Brodsky the traveler and at the same time brings in a considerable controversy. Is self-distancing on the move a dignified assertion of the poet’s freedom from the conditionality of politics, geography, ethnicity and his own biased subjectivity, as implied in Brodsky’s multiple interviews? Or is it perhaps a defensive attempt of escaping one’s true self, while prolonging the state of spatial displacement? On the one hand, Brodsky himself contributed to perceiving his travel works in terms of “poetics of withdrawal,” when he claimed: “…in fact you’re not going somewhere but leaving somewhere. At least, that’s what always happens with me. For me, life is a constant leave- taking” (Volkov 287). That is, for an exile, “departure from” inevitably takes precedence over “arriving in,” as the prospect of the eventual homecoming is never to be realized. In this light, 145 every journey becomes just another link in the chain of endless separations, whereas the physical and the existential distance between the self and the point of initial departure, the poet’s hometown Leningrad, continually grows. At the same time, the facts of Brodsky’s biography, along with certain individual statements and poetic lines, contradict his idea of travel as eternal departure. Instead, they implicitly suggest the importance of the return in Brodsky’s conceptual framework. After all, although the poet never found his way back to Leningrad, he made repeated visits to some of his favorite travel destinations. Probably, one of the best-known places of regular return was Venice, Italy, which in 24 years of life outside Russia Brodsky visited at least eleven times, mostly for Christmas. Other favorite destinations included, Rome, England, Amsterdam and the Swedish seaside, where Brodsky spent most of his summers in the last years of his life. The repeated acts of return to these places mitigate the significance of the preceding departures and aim at mending the trauma of original displacement. Moreover, time and again visions of Leningrad arise through the scenery of the places Brodsky visits. The image of his “native city,” as Brodsky often called it, resurfaces in his mind over and over. Do the travel environs produce these visions in the exile’s consciousness? Is it within travel’s power to compensate for the indefinite sense of home? It is the goal of this study to offer possible answers to these questions. The study’s main focus is the poetics of Joseph Brodsky’s travel poetry. In broader sense, however, it aims to provide insight into the degree to which the trauma of exile determines subsequent travel experiences and the traveler’s perception of self, time and space. Only by inquiring into the development of Brodsky’s ideas on displacement and travel, as well as the markers of authorial subjectivity in his verse, can the reader approach this challenging task. Specifically, this chapter will address several major travel poems by Brodsky, including “Litovskii divertisment” 146 (“Lithuanian Divertissement”), “Pered pamiatnikom A.S. Pushkinu v Odesse” (“In front of A.S. Pushkin’s monument in Odessa”), “V Italii” (“In Italy”), “Gollandiia est’ ploskaia strana...” (“Holland is a flat country...”), “Vot ia i snova pod etim bestsvetnym nebom...” (“Here I am again under this colorless sky...”) and other, as well as essays in English, such as “A Guide to a Renamed City” and Watermark. But first, we must consider the possible origins of Brodsky’s peculiar way of self-representation. It is these early habits that paved the way for Brodsky’s later experiments with the travelling lyrical “I.” The Art of Leaving and The Lessons of Self-Alienation The progression of Brodsky’s treatment of the global space is impossible to explore without discussion of his lyrical subjectivity. It turns out that the Brodskian signature self- detachment is accompanied by accounts of physical relocation quite early in the poet’s ouevre. Brodsky’s conviction that a decent poet avoids speaking of himself in the narcissistic first person seems to stem from the shaping of his existential outlook in his childhood and youth. It is this early formation of the poet’s subjectivity that I take as a starting point for this study. Brodsky’s empirical outlook has been justly defined in scholarship as a cross between stoicism and existentialism. The poet’s lyrical position is largely shaped by the stoic idea of self- discipline and clear judgement, coupled with the existentialist dread before the absurdity of the world and the acknowledgement of an individual’s freedom and responsibility for their development through acts of will. It would be fair to claim that for Brodsky, as for the ancient stoics, “what mattered finally in life was the virtuous state of the soul, not the circumstances of the outer life” (Tarnas 76). 147 This conscious prioritization of the inner over the outer had produced the peculiar relationship with the self which placed personal ethics above the commonly accepted concepts of national, ethnical and religious identity: The individual’s goal is, above all, to understand what they are. The first question they ask themselves must address not whether they are American, Italian, Swedish, Swiss or Japanese; not whether they believe in God or what philosophy they adhere to. The question is the following: am I a coward or, perhaps; brave, honest or dishonest with people; how do I treat the opposite sex? 167 (Polukhina, Brodsky 674). The self-identification is thus considered a duty one owes to oneself, however his or her individuality is defined by purely moral categories, independent of any externally imposed affiliations. In fact, the denial of the impact of externally imposed affiliations on Brodsky is so consistent, that it became a specific “trademark” feature of his discourse on the essence of self, succinctly articulated in his well-known statement: “I identify myself as a Russian poet, an English-speaking essayist and a citizen of the United States of America. I think I am incapable of inventing a better definition for myself” (377). Here what seems to be an affirmation of the cosmopolitan’s self can equally be interpreted as a deliberate blurring of identity, a rebellious evasion of labeling oneself in a single unambiguous way. What glimpses between the lines is Brodsky’s rejection of bias of human society, which limits free individuals by prescribing to them their image of self and designating their place in the world based on race, nationality or confession. The reality for Brodsky is that the only true limiting force comes from within: it is one’s own moral compass. From this disregard for externalities follows the extreme fluidity of Brodsky’s national identity, whose definition in the interviews, depending on the occasion, fluctuates from a “bad 167 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 148 Jew” (103) to “one hundred percent Jew” (333) to “more American than the Americans themselves are” (700) and further. Playing loose with these essential characteristics speaks of nothing but their low priority in the poet’s self-determination. To make a confident judgement of oneself one must rather strip oneself of tags and assess one’s own existence from strictly humane perspective. From here it is only one step to radical self-estrangement, which, according to Brodsky, constitutes the best viewing position of oneself: I think it’s indecent to notice the self. Well, in Russian, you see, Russian uses the word ‘one’ [nekto; некто] as a concept. My preference is not to say ‘I,’ not to talk about the person but rather to describe what it is. Not to be shrill or sentimental. You know? I do indeed tend to depersonalize the first-person, as much as I can. Apart from anything else, it yields to a description. It yields a description (“Genius in Exile” 434). The only way to speak impartially of oneself is to detach from the self, to put some distance in between and to treat it as an object of one’s own observation. It is from this effort that the vision of the self as a certain estranged “one” (“nekto”) emerges in Brodsky’s poetry, in correlation with the stoic belief in the power of clear, unclouded judgement. Yet, given the story of the exile’s life, it is difficult to distinguish between the effect and the cause, that is to separate Brodsky’s lyrical practice of self-alienation from his complex biographical background. Indeed, does he alienate from his persona based solely on his moral convictions? Or is it, as Valentina Polukhina suggested, a consequence of his exilic experience, since “«I» in exile is destined to the disintegration of the persona” (Bol’she samogo sebia 36)? In contradiction to Brodsky’s distrust of external determinism of human life, his first memories of alienation focus on school years, when the stance of detachment evolved as a result of his ethnicity. Unlike Osip Mandelstam, Brodsky was never directly exposed to Judaism, but as with Mandelstam, Jewishness gave rise to uneasy feelings related to selfhood. The anti-Semitic 149 environment in the schools of Stalinist Russia provoked a constant need for self-defense. 168 This discrimination engendered the feeling of being an outsider: “I remained apart, more an observer than a participant” (“Joseph Brodsky” 48). 169 In his English essay “Less Than One,” however, Brodsky defines this psychological isolation as a natural reaction to the stranglehold of the totalitarian state on the young people’s minds. He remembers, for instance, the omni-presence of Lenin’s and Stalin’s portraits in the Soviet classrooms and the early development of his ability to ignore them: “I think that coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson in switching off, my first attempt at estrangement. <…> in fact, the rest of my life can be viewed as a nonstop avoidance of its most importunate aspects” (6). Mastering the art of switching off reality thus creates a distance between the self and the ever-hostile surroundings, which allows both to judge the outer world dispassionately and to defend oneself from it. As Brodsky put it in the essay, it is as if the “I” created a seashell around itself, unaffected with either the course of time, or whatever happened outside (16-17). When mere estrangement from the outside reality is insufficient for total isolation from it, the solution is radical self-withdrawal, that is to say, leaving. When Brodsky left the high school to start working at the age of 15, this gesture served as an attempt at achieving personal independence. Later he would call leaving the school his “first free act” and take it as a starting point for his future departures: “It was an instinctive act, a walkout. <...> I’ve been walking out ever since, with increasing frequency” (“Less Than One” 13). In a sense, the early withdrawal from the constraining environment of the school was the lead-up to the later experience of exile. 168 At the same time, Brodsky perceived discrimination as a useful test for the authenticity and resilience of the self: ““It is a sort of a mark. People call you “yid,” you are followed by anti-Semitic remarks; to some extent a person becomes an outcast. But maybe that is good: it compels you to probe sooner what you are” (Polukhina, Brodsky 170- 171). 169 Later the nationality line in his passport would preclude Brodsky from entering aviation and submarine schools, and the infamous anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot of 1952-53 would put his family at risk of being expelled from Leningrad. 150 The self-preserving instinct of leaving manifested itself as “vague but happy sensation of escape, of a sunny street without end” that in the later poetry would translate into the repeated lyrical escapes (11). It is at this point of Brodsky’s biography that travel, much like travel in Mandelstam’s life, becomes a form of escape from the oppressive Soviet pseudo-reality. Leaving the Soviet classroom marks Brodsky’s first attempt at extricating himself from physically and ideologically bounded space into the expanse of the unpredictable real world: “[In the Soviet Union] you are taught beginning in childhood to exist in enclosed space. For you, the rest of the world is pure geography, an abstract subject taught in school, and not a reality at all” (Polukhina, Brodsky 93). Brodsky admitted that while he was working a number of jobs at the Leningrad factories after leaving school in the late 1950s, he never stopped dreaming of travelling around the world (27). The easiest way to fulfill this dream for a young citizen of the closed state was setting off on geological expeditions around the Soviet Union. Without being able to cross national borders, geologists were nevertheless free to travel to the remote corners of the USSR, where the grip of the all-controlling centralized state was slightly loosened 170 . This was exactly the path to the outer world that Brodsky opted for. In a few years after he joined his first geological mission in 1957, he visited the White Sea coast, Eastern Siberia, Central Asia and other distant “lands of the empire.” In addition to the feeling of personal independence they provided, these trips granted him his first opportunity to write poetry: 170 In the interviews Brodsky describes his early geological trips as the experience that built a sense of community between the poets of the Leningrad school, who, like him, were driven to the far corners of the country by their wanderlust and craving for the freedom of movement: “The Leningrad poets, this Leningrad school, had more in common than anyone else, for the following reason. The thing is every poet wants to travel – at least at that time we all, being young, wanted it very much. Of course, none of us had enough funds to afford it. In addition to everything else, relocation within the territory of the USSR was more or less regulated by the government. So it was not easy to get on a train and go wherever it went, wherever you wanted to go – there would be problems with a residence permit etc. Hence, quite many of us worked in geology. At that time geological expeditions hired people with no specialized education, because they simply needed a workforce: backs, arms, legs. And for a number of years many of us set off on expeditions to various parts of country. And in addition this was a certain kind of shared uniting experience” (Polukhina, Brodsky 146). 151 “Geology... gave [me] an opportunity to travel a lot. I traveled around almost all the regions of the Empire. I saw very different landscapes. Gradually I started writing” (187). It is specifically on these expeditions that Brodsky was inspired by the book of poetry Poiski (The Search) written by the geologist Vladimir Britanishsky (Loseff, Iosif Brodsky 39). Brodsky’s own first poetic experiments are dated 1957 and largely reflect the expeditioners’ way of life. It would be no exaggeration to claim that the freedom and mobility of Brodsky’s early travel experience created an enabling environment for the birth of his verse. However, it is also the development of the poetic skill that precluded Brodsky’s reintegration into the Soviet society and extended the sense of separation from it. Later in emigration Brodsky would stress that during his youth in Leningrad his perception of the self as a castaway among the fellow Soviets would intensify specifically after writing poetry: “I remember back in Leningrad, I wrote a poem and went out afterward in the evening to Liteinyi Prospect and I felt <...> that I was among people with whom I had very little in common. Just fifteen minutes before my head had been filled with what <...> had never occurred to them” (Volkov 276). In the end, creative isolation predisposes a person to a solipsistic outlook, as it aims at excluding the external world from the picture: “When you do that other thing [poetry] 171 , you become in the end a product of your own words, which are in no way connected to the world that surrounds you” (Polukhina, Brodsky 589). It should not come as a surprise that the idea of pushing off the surrounding reality and leaving it behind becomes central in the poetry of the young Brodsky long time before his 1972 emigration and even before his 1964 exile to Norenskaia village. Driven either by the wanderlust, or his wish to get away from the surrounding reality and the people, the persona in 171 Specification in square brackets mine. 152 early Brodsky time and time again takes on the traits of a wanderer, a loner, relentlessly pursuing the ideal of udalenie ot (“withdrawal from”). Years later, in the 1990 interview Brodsky would define his predisposition to withdrawals as an insight that visited him as early as at the age of 22-23: When I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I had a feeling that something else possessed me. And that I was not interested in my surroundings. That all of it was a springboard at best. A place that one should leave. Everything that happened, all these... breaks with people, with the country. All this... is only an illustration of the tendency toward greater and greater autonomy that could even be compared to the autonomy at least of a spacecraft, if not of a celestial body. Throughout human life you are affected by two forces, two gravitations – one that pulls you toward the earth, home, friends, love; and the other that pulls you outward a little bit. And so it happened to me <...> that I have suffered from penchant for ruptures [страсть к разрывам], not even a [real] penchant for ruptures, but a pull outward, away from home. <…> Indeed, I have always been pulled outwards, not to the other place, not to the other apartment, the other bed, but simply... to eternity <...> Sooner or later a moment comes when earthly gravity ceases to work, when you are in power of outward pull. And then it is already impossible to return (Polukhina, Brodsky 526-527). The dichotomy of two “gravities” — the one that pulls the subject outward and the one that pulls back, toward home, — strikingly resembles the play of gravitational forces in Mandelstam’s writings on Armenia. It is noteworthy that Brodsky delineates his wanderlust as strast’ k razryvam (“penchant for ruptures”), which alludes to the lines by another major Russian poet and Mandelstam’s poetic antagonist Boris Pasternak: “Но как ни сковывает ночь / Меня кольцом тоскливым, / Сильней на свете тяга прочь / И манит страсть к разрывам” 172 (“Ob’iasnenie” 302). This “penchant for ruptures,” triggered in case of Pasternak’s subject by parting with the beloved, for Brodsky clearly elevates to the status of life philosophy, allowing to secure the most precious human right for independence. This “tendency to autonomy” also lends effect on the sense of self, specifically the feeling that “something else possessed [the poet],” 172 “And yet, no matter how the night / May chain me within its ring of longing, / The pull of separation is still stronger / And I have a beckoning passion for the clean break” (Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago 530). 153 where “something else” directly stands for alienation from his Soviet identity. The ingenious self-identification with a celestial body, or a spaceship receding into eternity is inspired by the innovative space discourse of the 1960s and implies powerful self-transformation through alienation. The existential position of departure and self-withdrawal thus becomes the poet’s conscious lifetime choice, said to have formed around 1962-63, even before the Norenskaia exile, and declared valid at the moment of the interview, in 1990. As we shall see in Brodsky’s poetry of various years, this “penchant for ruptures” is so powerful that it typically outweighs alternatives, leaving little to no chance to homecoming. Brodsky’s poetry of 1960s already reflects this aspiration of movement “away from.” Compare the following fragments: “Нет, уезжать! / Пускай куда-нибудь / меня влекут громадные вагоны” 173 (“Sad” 30), “Уезжай, уезжай, уезжай, / так немного себе остается” 174 (“Uezzhai...” 47), “Я уезжаю, уезжаю, / опять мы дурно говорим” 175 (50), “когда придет октябрь – уходи” 176 (Peterburgskii roman 107), “Уезжать, бежать из Петербурга” (106), “Я бежал от судьбы, из-под низких небес…” 177 (“Nochnoi poliot” 197), “… как хорошо <...> из комнат, бесконечно дорогих, / любовью умолкающей дыша, / навек уйти, куда-нибудь спеша” 178 (“Iul’skoe intemezzo” 73). In these and other examples the poet’s separation can take either physical, or temporal form, manifest itself as a painful parting with the loved ones, or an adventurous flight into the unknown. In any case, all the examples follow the common vector of 173 “No, to leave! Let the enormous railway carriages pull me somewhere...” 174 “Leave, leave, leave, there is so little left for yourself <..> leave behind the words, behind the houses, behind the grand backs of those you knew.” 175 “I am leaving, leaving, we are speaking badly again.” 176 “When October comes, leave...” 177 “I ran from fate, from under the low skies...” 178 “How good it is... to leave eternally precious rooms forever, while breathing with dying love, while hurrying somewhere...” 154 unfolding of the lyrical movement: they embody one and the same “bitter rumble of leaving” that guides the poet out and away (50). Despite the usual lack of specific destination, the scenery surrounding the wanderer on his way is often recognizable as Brodsky’s native city, Leningrad. A common type of Brodsky’s early poems can be specifically defined as narrated “on-the-go,” and by analogy with lyrical journeys, considered “lyrical walks” around the native city. Some of the early poems reflect this quality already in their titles: “Ot okrainy k tsentru” (“From the Outskirts to the Center”), Shestvie (The Procession), “My vyshli s pochty priamo na kanal...” (“We walked out the post office and straight to the canal...”) etc. According to the friends’ memoirs, exploring Leningrad on foot was indeed Brodsky’s favorite pastime. 179 The visions of Leningrad in such “lyrical walks’” poems vary but frequently render the intrinsic connection between the walker and his surroundings. In such longer early poems as Peterburgskii roman (A Petersburg Novel) or The Procession, for instance, the poet’s flight is repeatedly identified with the Neva river’s flow: “Бежит река, и ты бежишь вдоль брега, / и быстро сердце устает от бега, / и снег кружит у петроградских ставень...” 180 (Shestvie 123- 124); “Уходишь осенью обратно, / шумит река вослед, вослед...“ 181 (Peterburgskii roman 56). “The great commitment of carrying oneself somewhere” (56) into the mysterious unknown, may also involve crossing the city canals, like the Rubicon: “и по Садовой зашагает вдаль / мой грозный век, а я, как и всегда / через канал, неведомо куда” 182 (Shestvie 112). “The 179 As Brodsky’s Dutch friend Kees Verheul recalled: “Чтобы быть самим собой вне дома, он нуждался в пространстве и движении. Многие из наших лучших разговоров происходили на улице, по дороге к кому- нибудь в гости или во время бесцельных прогулок по городу” (Verheul 21). Not by coincidence, years later Brodsky would compare himself along with all Leningrad pedestrians to nomads, the Bedouins: “In his youth, at least, a man born in this city spends as much time on foot as any good Bedouin” (“A Guide to a Renamed City” 89). 180 “The river runs, and you run along the bank, and soon your heart gets tired from running, and the snow swirls along the Petrograd shutters, wave a hand - now you have left everything.” 181 “In the fall you go back, the river follows, follows you with its noise...” 182 “And my dreadful age will walk far along Sadovaia street, and I, as usual, will cross the canal and walk I don’t know where.” 155 hungry look” of the post-war Leningrad with the “gray mirror” 183 of its river, which taught [Brodsky] “more about infinity and stoicism than... mathematics and Zeno,” thus furthers both the sense of withdrawal and alienation of the moving poet (“Less Than One” 5). It would be fair to assume that the very genius loci of Leningrad, or as Brodsky preferred to call it, “the native city,” drives the poet and the surrounding realia further and further along the river, towards the Gulf of Finland and the sea: “и лишь Нева неугомонно / к заливу гонит облака, / дворцы, прохожих и колонны / и горький вымысел стиха” 184 (Peterburgskii roman 57). In “A Guide to a Renamed City” written years later Brodsky elaborated: “There is something in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly flowing, departing water that instills in one’s soles an almost sensual desire for walking” (89). Indeed, the image of the poet and his poetry being carried towards the bay sheds some light on Brodsky’s perception of the place of the city in the Russian literary and cultural paradigm. Taking a marginal position on the geographical map of Russia, open to the stormy Baltic sea, the city of Peter I embodies for Brodsky the opposite of the “continental, claustrophobic Russian consciousness,” as in the very beginning of its history it allowed the nation to take an outside look at itself, from the newly-opened Western perspective. The openness to the sea for Brodsky thus equals the openness to the West, and determines the birth of the Russian literature and culture: The people that found themselves in Petersburg were the first Russian social class educated in European sense; they realized that they were, as it were, on the edge of the empire, in a condition that allowed them to look at that empire from the side, if you will. What a writer needs first and foremost is an element of detachment. And this element of detachment was provided by Petersburg purely physically, that is geographically. The discovery of 183 Translaion adapted. 184 “And only the Neva river incessantly drives the clouds, the palaces, the passers-by and the columns, and the bitter fiction of the poem to the gulf.” 156 Petersburg for literature was like the discovery of the New World, like a discovery of America; that is to say, as if you turn out to be within your own culture, but also outside it. And you look at your own country, your own nation if not from a certain mountain than at least from an elevation. <...> And the sea? What about the sea? One can speak a lot about the sea. In general, it never became a part of Russian national consciousness. <...> In the twentieth century, I think, among all the poets only the Muscovite Pasternak, oddly enough, let himself write about the sea on a serious scale. “Year 1905,” then “Waves” and so on. But even in Pasternak it had a somewhat Muscovite character. This was an attempt at domesticating the sea, or at the very least, it is not an idea of space, not an idea of eternity, not a thought about how to sneak away from here. Petersburg is an absolutely different city. Petersburg is indeed located on the edge. Its appearance is absolutely European. But besides the appearance, the fact that it is open to winds and is located on the Baltic Sea shore is fraught with rather curious effects. Oftentimes it seems that the air smells of European gasoline or European perfume. Or the clouds have an imprint of the neon flashes of Europe, as if they came here like photographs. Or as a cumulus movie projected above the world, and here it comes to Russia. There are many European signs in the air. I think, this often has an impact [on a person]. Not to mention the special smells alien to the continent (Polukhina, Brodsky 144-146). Based on this quotation, the practice of estrangement, so conspicuous in Brodsky’s poetics, seems to have been cultivated by living at the edge of the empire that cuts into the sea, that is into the open expanse, the eternity of discoveries and meanings that comprise the European culture. From this edge, tantamount to krai zemli (“end of the Earth”) in folklore, Brodsky’s point of view acquires the height that is necessary for any poet to judge the world around him. From this edge, where the sea breeze carries European clouds, the smells of gasoline and perfume, it is possible to establish at least some contact with the West. Finally, from this edge, Brodsky contemplates what most continentally-oriented poets before him overlooked – the constantly hidden opportunity to explore the boundless space before him, to “sneak away.” Much like Mandelstam, Brodsky finds himself drawn west, towards European civilization, and hence he openly subscribes to the Acmeist “yearning for the world culture.” The inaccessibility of this culture from behind the Iron Curtain only amplifies the desire: “Infatuation with foreign culture, foreign world is especially intensified, when you know that you will never see them with your own eyes” (Polukhina, Brodsky 84). 157 In the essay “Spoils of War” written years later (1986) Brodsky specified why exactly the young Soviet people of his generation perceived the West as a “source of culture” (Polukhina, Brodsky 172) and how they were able to partake of that culture despite the obstacles created by the totalitarian state. By “catching” the radio waves on the Philips receiver, his father’s trophy from WWII, young Brodsky was able to tune into the broadcasts in English, German, Polish, Hungarian, French, Swedish languages, and listen to the Western jazz music. Equally precious were vinyl records of classical music, foxtrot and tango by Columbia and His Master’s Voice labels brought by Alexander Brodsky from the Eastern Front (“Spoils of War” 16-17). Another medium was cinema, specifically the pre-war Hollywood and European films that were taken as war trophies and screened in Soviet movie theaters with no credits (Brodsky names The Sea Hawk, the Tarzan series, Waterloo Bridge, That Hamilton Woman among other). Watching these films served as “the only way [for Brodsky’s generation] to see the West” (12) 185 and became a sublimation of forbidden foreign travel experience. 186 The Western lifestyle becomes an object of imitation for young Brodsky and his like who visit trendy Soviet “cocktail-halls” to purchase “handmade” pictures of Western movie stars or X-ray film audio recordings of jazz music, and drink milkshakes while “think[ing] [they] were in the West” (13). When spotting a foreign car in Leningrad, they take the opportunity to “fly one into the incoherent foreign past and land one inside a large black Lincoln <...> next to some platinum blonde...” (18). 187 These imaginary travels in time and space allow the Leningrad 185 Cf.: “Some of us became quite adept at determining the location in which a film was shot, and sometimes we could tell Genoa from Naples or, to say the least, Paris from Rome, on the basis of only two or three architectural ensembles. We would arm ourselves with city maps, and we would hotly argue about Jeanne Moreau’s address in this film or Jean Marais’s in another” (Brodsky “Spoils of War” 12). 186 Cf. the later interview: “J.B. I understood that I want to leave when I watched the first <Western> movie. A.M. To emigrate? J.B. Emigration? No, why? I simply wanted to go and look. To live the other life for a while, as they do in novels. I did not have a special wish to emigrate” (Polukhina, Brodsky 715). 187 Cf. a series of the imaginary scenarios where Brodsky surrounds himself with the artifacts of Western culture that once astonished him in the USSR: “Let’s turn the light off, then, or let’s shut our eyes tight. What do we see> A U.S. aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. And it’s me there on the deck, waving. Or by the 2CV’s wheel, 158 “sixty-ers” to step into Westerners’ shoes and, yet again, to withdraw from the Soviet reality, if only momentarily. Because Brodsky’s affection for the Western culture with its stress on individualism is antagonistic to the very essence of the Soviet society, it naturally causes both spatial dislocation and a shift in identity: “And the more I think of it, the more I become convinced that this was the West. <...> With our instinct for individualism fostered at every instance by our collectivist society <...> we were more American than the American themselves” (14; emph. Brodsky). In the essay’s finale he labels his delight for encounters with everything Western with the term “joy of recognition” from Mandesltam’s 1921 essay “The Word and Culture.” Naturally, the “recognition” and identification with the Western leads to the displacement of one’s own: Brodsky admits that for his generation the Western civilization and its artifacts eventually became more “recognizable” than home (21). In parallel to the exploration of the Western music and film, Brodsky’s early interactions with Western culture also occured through extensive reading (Polukhina, Brodsky 565). Subscribing to the Soviet journal “Foreign Literature” was a way to access few translated works of literature approved by the censorship in Soviet Union (“Spoils of War” 12). In the absence of other sources, it is through Polish language that Brodsky connected to the world of European culture. In late 1960 he makes acquaintance with the student from Poland Zofia Kapuscinska, who inspires his passion for the Polish poets, such as Gałzyński, Tuwim, Harasymowicz and others. He reads Polish magazines 188 , such as Przekrój, where certain translations of the modern works of Western literature were openly published: “I think, I first read 80 percent of contemporary European literature in Polish” (Polukhina, Brodsky 443). Thus, Poland becomes Brodsky’s driving. Or in the “green and yellow basket” rhyme of Ella’s signing, etc., etc. For a man is what he loves. That’s why he loves it: because he is a part of it” (21). 188 The Museum of Anna Akhmatova in the Fountain House in Saint Petersburg still keeps the issues of the Polish satirical journal Szpilki from Brodsky’s personal pre-emigration library with his comments and drawings on their pages. 159 “window to Europe,” and, perhaps, the first specific destination of the desired escape, as the ending of the 1962 poem dedicated to Kapuscinska implicitly suggests: “Да в тени междуцарствий елозят кусты / и в соседнюю рвутся державу. / И с полей мазовецких журавли темноты / Непрерывно летят на Варшаву” 189 (“Pogranichnoi vodoi...” 182). Coincidentally or not, it is specifically at the end of the year 1960, that Brodsky for the first time plots his escape from the country, not in the direction of the West, but through the less secure Southern border. In Lev Loseff’s biography of Brodsky, this incident is given the name of the “Samarkand episode,” and described as an adventurous plan to hijack an airplane that spontaneously came to Brodsky’s mind as he was visiting his friend, ex-pilot Oleg Shakhmatov in Uzbekistan. 190 Although Brodsky’s idea was never carried out, it was known to KGB and certainly contributed to the case against him later on (Loseff , Iosif Brodsky 58-59). These manifestations of the “outward gravity,” or “penchant for ruptures” confirm Brodsky’s early urge to look above and beyond the Soviet reality in search of ways out. 191 However, in the collectivist totalitarian Socialist society the idea of the poet’s independent withdrawal overlaps with the idea of forceful displacement. As Brodsky stated in the later interview, “A person who starts to create their own independent world sooner or later becomes an alien body for society, becomes an object for pressuring, compression and exclusion of all kinds” (Polukhina, Brodsky 8). In this way, the metaphor of the self as a celestial body pulled out 189 “And in the shade of interregnums the bushes are squirming and striving to reach the neighboring country. And from the fields of Mazovia the cranes of darkness are steadily flying toward Warsaw.” 190 Brodsky and Shakhmatov planned to get on a small scheduled flight, then stun a pilot, take control over the aircraft and flee to Afghanistan or, in Shakhmatov’s version, the American military base in Iran across the border. Presumably, the plan failed, because Brodsky changed his mind about inflicting pain on the pilot (Loseff, Iosif Brodsky 58-59). 191 Brodsky later confessed that thoughts of escape haunted him half of the time he spent in USSR: “When I say that for a Russian the idea of defection is fairly natural, I am speaking from experience. I remember that in prison and exile I spent half my time thinking about how to run away. Actually, it was the same at liberty. I had all kinds of plans – for instance, running away in a hot air balloon. Or in a submarine with a chainsaw motor. I can’t even remember all the ideas I had, but none of this was very serious. <...> The plan to escape in an airplane went pretty far. I rejected it only at the very last moment. <...> Ever since, the feelings a person has before escaping are more or less understandanle to me” (Volkov 169). 160 and away into the space is overlaid with the metaphor of a foreign object that is expelled from its environment by some outer physical force. Brodsky as it were discovers a reversal of Archimedes’ principle, according to which it is not a body immersed in fluid that displaces it, but the other way around. It is this effect of displacement that Brodsky experienced himself starting from 1960, when he was first confronted by repression from the Soviet authorities. Making contacts with foreigners visiting and studying in USSR, such as the young Americans Ralph Bloom and Peter Viereck, as well as writing ideologically tainted poetry that sought insight into timeless existential issues rather than celebrate the ideals of the Socialist order, led to repeated arrests and interrogations by the KGB. These were followed by surveillance, detention in a psychiatric hospital and harassment in the news media, which culminated in 1964 in the publication of the libelous article “Okololiteraturnyi truten’” (“Pseudo-literary Drone”) on pages of the Evening Leningrad newspaper. The persecutions ended in a notorious trial by which Brodsky was officially found guilty in social parasitism. The Soviet system pushed the troublesome poet outside of its domain, as he was increasingly perceived as a “foreign body,” threatening the very foundations of Soviet society. This is why, in addition to the motif of voluntary leaving, Brodsky also deploys the motif of escape or pursuit in the poems of the early 1960s, as if something forces his subject out of his native city. In The Procession the poet addresses his own writing with the plea: ...по сумраку, по свету Петрограда гони меня – любовника, страдальца любителя, любимчика разлада. Гони меня, мое повествованье, подалее от рабства или власти куда-нибудь – с развалин упованья на будущие искренние страсти. 161 Куда-нибудь. Не ведаю. По свету. 192 (Shestvie 122). Despite the clear metaliterary orientation, the text implicitly reveals the political context by naming the true pursuer – the Soviet authorities, the focal point of slavery and power: “as far away as possible from slavery or power” 193 . What rises to the forefront against the backdrop of the repressions is also the motif of non-return, yet somewhat ambivalent at this point of Brodsky’s poetic evolution. On the one hand, the verse of the early 1960s provides quite a few examples of poet’s being driven so far out of his native environs, that years before his biographical exile Brodsky repudiates the possibility of coming back, whether in a dream: “…и по Морской летит троллейбус / с любовью в запертом окне. / И нет на родину возврата…” 194 (Peterburgskii roman 62), or on the actual bus trip where he is being “followed” by the non-returnability: “…и вот – автобус голубой, / глядишь в окно, и безвозвратность / все тихо едет за тобой” 195 (“Tri glavy” 38). In this light, one cannot fail to agree with Mikhail Lotman that in Brodsky’s case “creative biography anticipates the actual one” and “already in the early poems... there are astonishing revelations of his future destiny,” namely the anticipation of eventual non-return to his hometown 196 (234). 192 “...pursue me in the twilight, in the light of Petrograd, me, a lover, a sufferer, an enthusiast, a favorite of discord. Chase me, my narrative, as far away as possible from slavery or power, to a place somewhere – from the ruins of hope to future sincere passions. To a place somewhere. I do not know. Around the world.” 193 Cf. A Petersburg Novel (1961), where the unnamed passerby is chased by the city itself towards the Neva river and identifies with a non-random namesake of the protagonist of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, Evgenii who was chased and driven mad by the embodiment of the absolute power, the statue of the city’s founder Peter the Great. By doing this, Brodsky positions his persona as a prey of the high and mighty as early as in 1961, but pointedly, not yet an exile: “Гоним, но все-таки не изгнан, / один – сквозь тарахтящий век / вдоль водостоков и карнизов / живой и мертвый человек” (65). (“Pursued but still not expelled, alone – through the rattling age, along rain gutters and cornices, a person alive and dead”). 194 “And a trolley bus flies along Morskaya street with love in the locked window. And there is no return to the homeland...” 195 “And here it is – the blue bus, you look out the window, and non-returnability quietly follows you.” 196 See also “From Outskirts to the Center” (1962). The ambiguity of the poem, comprised of the celebration of return and the expectation of the posthumous disappearance, builds up and manifests itself fully in the final lines, which in Brodsky’s case were bound to appear prophetic: “Сколько раз я вернусь – но уже не вернусь…” (“Ot okrainy k tsentru” 204) (“How many times I’ll return – but will not yet return”). 162 Young Brodsky’s attention to the narratives of displacement and disengagement could not but inform the development of his lyrical subjectivity. As Brodsky felt himself being forced out of the Soviet society into the world of prisons and interrogations, the only way of reacting he found appropriate was self-alienation. The poet as if followed his own advice given in the poem The Procession: “оказываясь в гуще и гурьбе, / быстрее выбирайся и взгляни / хоть раз – не изнутри – со стороны” 197 (Shestvie 114). In the later interviews he shared that it was the idea of non-attachment common in various Eastern philosophies that partly inspired his stance in the difficult time of persecutions and surveillance: I had a friend, older than me. He was into various forms of Oriental wisdom when they had not yet become trendy. And he once asked me: “Iosif, do you really think that you are your body?” “Of course, not,” I replied, and then it all began. The detachment from myself began. <...> Of course, in those days it was what one called self-defense; when you were grabbed, led to a cell and so on, you disconnected from yourself. And this principle of self-detachment is an extremely dangerous thing because it very quickly transitions into instinctive condition. <...> When you are on your own, you automatically disconnect from both evil and good. And that is dangerous (Polukhina, Brodsky 528). In such schools of thought as Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, the attachments to one’s own physical body, pain, emotions and even identity are generally considered the obstacles on the way to liberation and enlightenment. Much in the same way, the physical and psychological suffering that Brodsky went through in the Soviet mental hospitals and prisons must have made him aware of the temporary nature of a human body and the need of letting go of strong attachments to it. It is this repressive experience that must have formed his habit of stepping back while observing whatever happens to his physical self from the heightened perspective. The beginnings of this process are seen in the very early verse, often in the above- discussed context of leaving. Based on these examples, it is even possible to assume that the 197 “When you find yourself amidst the crowd, hurry to get out and for once take a look not from within, but from without.” 163 motif of physical withdrawal from a place (udalenie ot) naturally entails the motif of psychological alienation from the self (otstranenie ot). For example, the elements of self- estrangement may appear in the imperative form of the self-instruction to forget oneself, as the train carries the subject away: “Так, поезжай. Куда? Куда-нибудь, / скажи себе: с несчастьями дружу я. / Гляди в окно и о себе забудь. / Жалей проездом родину чужую” 198 (“Iiul’skoe intermezzo” 70). In “From Outskirts to the Center,” the moving subject starts questioning his self, as if feeling misplaced in the landscape of his hometown by the new generations: “Неужели не я, освещенный тремя фонарями, / столько лет в темноте / по осколкам бежал пустырями...” 199 (203). The apotheosis of this pre-exile state of split of the self is “Polevaia ekloga” (“The Field Eclogue”) presumably written only a year before the infamous 1964 trial and the expulsion to Norenskaia village. Here Brodsky already accepts the halo of the “true exile” and explicitly connects this condition to the lack or reduction of identity. The “nobodiness” is directly affirmed through the figure of the self as a “no one,” wandering along the road into the narrowing perspective of the forest: “настоящий изгнанник – никто... /<…>/ Кто бредет по дороге в пальто, /Меньше леса, но больше оврага” 200 (279). What started as a technique of self-defense against the repressions was gradually becoming an ingrown attitude, almost an “instinct” and the signature mode of Brodsky’s poetic subjectivity. While Eastern philosophy might have impacted this stance in part, later on Brodsky shared another source of his strategy of self-alienation. It is known that one of the greatest influencers on young Brodsky’s spiritual evolution was the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, 198 “So go. Where to? Somewhere or other. Tell yourself: I am a friend of misfortunes. Look into the window and forget about yourself. Grieve over someone else’s homeland while passing by.” 199 “Was it really not me, so long in the dark, who ran across the shards in the deserted lots by the light of three lanterns <...> Was really it not me? Something has changed here forever. Someone new rules [here]...” 200 “[The true exile] is not the one who is everywhere, obnoxious even to his own shadow...”; “the true exile is nobody <...> [The one] who wanders along the road in a coat, less than a forest but more than a ravine.” 164 whom he met in Komarovo in 1961 and kept in touch with until her very death. It was largely Akhmatova whose detached vision of her past misfortunes and of her enemies in the Soviet establishment inspired Brodsky to take a similar position: “Her position is a position of an individual who looks at the world from an immense distance, a position of someone who does not allow herself to scream in pain – although she had more than sufficient reasons for that” (Polukhina, Brodsky 449). Not only the surrounding world, but even the self in Akhmatova’s poetry is subject to distancing, as the poet who shares her personal experience of tragedy, such as the death of the loved ones or the arrest of the son, inevitably represents two separate people: the actual survivor of the tragedy and its narrator. It is not coincidental that Brodsky finds the following line from Akhmatova’s “Rekviem” (“Requiem”) the best in the poem: “I realize that to this madness / The victory I must yield, / Listening closely to my own / Delirium, however strange” (qtd. in Volkov 226). The perception of one’s own delirium as somebody else’s exemplifies that ambivalence or, in Brodsky’s words, “splitting of conscience,” that distinguishes a skillful poet: Akhmatova is describing the state of the poet who is looking at everything that is happening to her as if she were standing off to one side. <...> The writer can suffer his grief in a genuine way, but the description of this grief is not genuine tears or gray hair. It is only an approximation of a genuine reaction, and the awareness of this detachment creates a truly insane situation. Requiem is constanly balancing on the brink of insanity, which is introduced not by the catastrophe itself, not by the loss of a son, but by this moral schizophrenia, this splitting – not of consciousness but of conscience. The splitting into sufferer and writer (Volkov 227). Brodsky is convinced that what makes poets “exit” their own physical body and assess their condition from outside of it is precisely the realization of the gap between the intensity of the empirical experience and the inadequacy of its description. The emotion expressed in a work of literature is only mimetic of the “authentic reaction” to an event experienced by an author. 165 Hence the characteristic co-existence of a narrator and a sufferer in a single author, reminiscent of the psychiatric diagnosis of split personality. Occasionally, Brodsky also defines this co- existence a polyphony with a shift of voices, or “masks.” 201 What divides these voices is essentially time that the author must take to analyze the past from a distance. While the narrator belongs to the present moment, the sufferer apparently belongs to the past. It is natural then that the latter’s point view embodies stronger subjectivity, while the former aspires to an impartial stance of “self-negation” and “self-liberation” (Polukhina, Brodsky 489-90) and, at long last, the unburdening of the self from the past. It is this paradoxical amalgamation of the self-asserting and self-negating tendencies that, in Brodsky’s opinion, nurtures creativity of every poet. What is required from the creative mind is to find a balance between the two incarnations of the self. Brodsky confessed that he often found himself “crucified between these two worlds,” as the very value of literature consists in the “blend of self-negation and will” (Polukhina, Brodsky 470). Based on the above discussion of the internal split between the sufferer and the writer, it is hardly surprising that the practice of poetic departures from the self continued for Brodsky against the background of his first profound personal tragedy. Following the conviction in parasitism in 1964, the poet was exiled to the village Norenskoe in the Russian North, where he was obliged to do the corrective work in the local sovkhoz. The background of this event included not only aforementioned series of exhausting arrests followed by a trial but, more importantly, the infidelity of the beloved. While Brodsky was away in a mental institution in Moscow, on New Year’s Eve 1965 Basmanova had an affair with their mutual friend Dmitrii Bobyshev – an event that would repeatedly resurface in Brodsky’s poetry as a quintessential 201 “This is first of all a piece for several voices. A requiem is a polyphonic work where the author needs to wear masks. This is exactly the process of detachment. When you start behaving yourself like a professional, immediate experience recedes into the background, it becomes an instrument that generates a sense of one’s own inadequacy, deficiency in poetry” (Polukhina, Brodsky 304). 166 betrayal (Loseff, Iosif Brodsky 86). One may assume that it is mainly from this traumatic experience that Brodsky struggled to distance himself during his stay in Norenskaia. His manual in mastering the art of self-distancing and alienation was again his reading. In Norenskaia Brodsky read extensively, primarily English and the American poetry, which he had been obsessed with since encountering it first in the 1937 Gutner anthology of poetic translations, then in the typewritten translations by Andrei Sergeev. Now he was attempting to read this verse in the original, using Louis Untermeyer’s Anthology of English and American poetry shipped to him by friends. It was then that he chose Robert Frost and W.H. Auden as his literary mentors, whose writing he would aim at once to copy and “outdo” in his own verse, as if driven by the Bloomian “anxiety of influence.” The “pseudoneutrality” of Frost’s intonation reminds Brodsky of the similar “muted note” of Akhmatova’s tragic poetry, full of emotional potential, yet still reserved (Volkov 85). The same impersonal neutrality of lyrical voice strikes him in Auden, whose lack of egocentrism, the non-attachment to the self produces “поэзия, лишенная всякого нарциссизма, — [Оден] редко пользуется первым лицом единственного числа, и странным образом написанное им внушает ужасающее чувство объективности” (Polukhina, Brodsky 177). What provides this disinterested, neutral poetic tone is specifically the device of literary estrangement. In the later interviews Brodsky uses various terms to label this practice, including otstranionnost’ (“detachment”), otstranenie (“detachment”) otchuzhdenie (“alienation”), “understatement.” All these notions, however, describe one and the same crucial characteristics, which, in Brodsky’s idea, epitomizes the whole Anglo-American literary tradition: “The main quality of English speech and English literature is not statement but understatement – detachment, even alienation in a way. This is a look at the phenomenon from aside” (Polukhina, Brodsky 150). It is precisely this “vision of a phenomenon from the outside” that attracted young 167 Brodsky in the English and American poetry that he was reading in Norenskaia, specifically in Auden: “I think what really attracted me to Auden first is the detachment. It’s an ability to look at familiar or unfamiliar phenomenon, the familiar especially, from a slightly altered perspective. That is, to look with bewilderment at something which you know” (“Genius in Exile” 434). As first noted by Valentina Polukhina (Joseph Brodsky: A Poet 238), the practice of “bewildered staring at something known” strikingly resembles the device of “defamiliarization,” described by the pioneer of the Russian Formalist school Viktor Shklovsky in the article “Art as Device” (“Iskusstvo kak priiom”) as early as in 1917. The “ability to look at familiar or unfamiliar phenomenon, the familiar especially, from a slightly altered perspective” that Brodsky admires in Auden practically coincides with the creation of “the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things” (80) that Skhlovsky famously studied on the example of Leo Tolstoy. This vision leads to withdrawal from the automatism that became our default mode of perceiving the reality, in other words to the “detachment from the clichés,” such as the “undermining of the lyrical” that Brodsky notes in Auden (Polukhina, Brodsky 152). The result of such perceptive transformation is the poet’s “very vivid receptivity,” Brodsky’s equivalent of the Shklovskian “transferring an object from its usual sphere of experience to a new one” (93), which comprises the very purpose of the poetic obraznost’ (“imagery”). 202 It is possible to assume that the “undermining of the lyrical,” which elevates Auden to the heights of the poetic discourse and defamiliarizes his judgement of the reality, must have been 202 It is doubtful that Brodsky consciously resorted to the Shklovskian defamiliarization as a poetic device, when conceiving his early verse and the mode of subjectivity. His general attitude to Formalism was far from unquestioning approval, which becomes evident from his succinct verbal opinion, quoted by Lev Loseff: “Искусство не прием” (negating the title of Shklovsky’s well-known article). At the same time, Loseff stresses that Brodsky was “well acquainted with Shklovsky’s manifesto” (meaning the 1919 article “«Ulla, ulla,» marsiane!”; Loseff, Iosif Brodsky 287), which is at least telling of his possible awareness of Shklovsky’s theoretical findings. Skhlovsky’s own reaction to the 1971 Brodsky’s poem “Nature Morte,” on the other hand, alludes precisely to the poet’s unique manner of perception and depiction of inanimate world, perhaps akin to defamiliarization: “After reading Brodsky’s freshly written poem with the sinister title “Nature Morte”, Shklovsky said, it seemed to me, not without terror: «No one has yet described things in this way»” (Loseff, “Niotkuda s liubov’iu” 316). 168 connected for Brodsky specifically with the search of a new, detached and selfless lyrical voice. A series of poems written in 1964-65 in the condition of “internal exile,” as Susan Sontag would later call it (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 2: 326), construct an idiosyncratic concept of the self reduced to “shadow” and other third-person denominations, as if meant to reidentify the poet in a new defamiliarized language: “То в холоде, а то в тепле / ты все шатаешься, как тень...” 203 (“Orfei i Artemida” 63); “Номинально пустынник, / но в душе – скандалист, / <...> / устремляется в чащу…” 204 (“Pod zanaves” 141). As can be seen from these examples, the defamiliarized vision of the self is especially distinct in Brodsky when coupled with the above-discussed motif of movement. The difference is that the pre-Norenskaia model of unrestrained withdrawal into the unknown is replaced here with the spatially constrained, purposeless wandering. The confined setting of the small Northern village surrounded by woods appears to be the direct opposite of the openness and the perspective that fills in the Petersburg seascape, so that Brodsky is bound to admit: “the lack of a horizon [in Norenskaia] drove me crazy, because all they had there were hills, endless hills. <...> our native city is especially pleasant in this regard. You stand on Liteiny Bridge and everything that happens past the Troitsky Bridge is the end of the world. Or, the opposite. A way out to a new world” (Volkov 82). In Norenskaia the way out is closed from all the directions, so that the only available path lies through the Dantesque dark woods, the epitome of feeling alone and lost on a life journey. Overall, the futile tundra lands, the abstract coldness of the woods and the special properties of the Northern light that illuminates this picture create the impression that “there’s nothing to do there, either as a moving body in the landscape or as a spectator” (77). 203 “Sometimes in the cold, sometimes in the warmth, you totter around like a shadow...” 204 “Nominally a hermit, but a troublemaker at heart <...> goes into the thicket...“ 169 It is exactly this displacement of the self as a moving body irrelevant in the still Northern landscape that happens in the poem “Novye stansy k Avguste” (“New Stanzas to Augusta”) written in 1964 with dedication to M.B. (Marina Basmanova) and having Byron’s poem “Stanzas to Augusta” as its literary pretext. It represents another “lyrical walk,” akin to the Leningrad “on- the-go” poems, but for the first time in Brodsky the poet’s “split of conscience” becomes an absolute leitmotif. The poem starts with the exile's acceptance of reaching an impasse, as he refuses to follow migrating birds with his gaze and stoically rejects the vector of return to Leningrad: “Все птицы улетели прочь./ Лишь я так одинок и храбр / Что даже не смотрел им вслед” 205 (Brodsky, “Novye stansy” 90). In the following stanzas the subject strolls through the desolate forest “without memories,” while the surrounding “nature settles its accounts with the past” (“New Stanzas” 60) and forces the wanderer to face the wilderness of this no man’s land, an embodiment of absolute oblivion and non-being. The free iambic verse coupled with grammatical and syntactical parallelisms recreates the monotonous pace of the walk, which turns into an extended meditation on whatever arises before the poet’s eyes. The “colossal monotony” of the Northern scenery thus provides a perfect backdrop for the act of defamiliarization, while the deliberate protraction of the walk allows for that intensity and duration of perception that propels de-automatization of the reader’s consciousness (Shklovsky 93). It is specifically the Brodskian “look from the outside” that makes this defamiliarization possible, as in the deadlock of the Russian North the mere existence has nowhere else to direct its gaze, but at itself: “Здесь... жизнь отступает от самой себя / и смотрит с изумлением на формы, шумящие вокруг” 206 (“Novye stansy” 92). 205 “The birds had all flown south. / I was so much alone, so brave, / I did not even watch them go <...> I need no South” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 57). 206 Here... life steps back from itself / and stares astonished at its own / hissing and roaring forms” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 59). 170 Just like the life astonished with its own look, the poet too carries out the detached exploration of his relationship with the self. The defamiliarized vision of the self comes up first in the form of the anti-Narcissistic fear of one’s own reflection in the brook: “Склоняясь к темному ручью, / гляжу с испугом” 207 (90), which would later turn into the complete tracelessness of the reducing subject: “вода затягивает след” 208 (93). Then, alienation finds manifestation in the distorted visions of the self and the appearance of the poet’s doppelgänger – his “shadow” that gets lost among the forest phantoms, the doubles of life itself: И образ мой второй, как человек, бежит от красноватых век, подскакивает на волне под соснами, потом под ивняками, мешается с другими двойниками, как никогда не затеряться мне 209 (91). The rapid, unstoppable flight of the poet’s double into the forest as it were embodies the potential of escape unavailable for the exiled poet himself. Finally, the defamiliarization peaks at what serves as the exemplary use of the stance of self-alienation in young Brodsky – the eerie, grammatically absurd detachment from the first person, driven to the brink of self-repudiation: “Да, здесь как будто вправду нет меня, / я где-то в стороне, за бортом” 210 (92). What happens is that very split into the sufferer, still holding onto his nominal “I”, and the observer Remarkably, Brodsky admits that “New Stanzas” and specifically these lines with their strong motifs of alienation were the turning point in his poetic evolution: “There were lines which I recall as a poetic breakthrough of sorts... Maybe not a big deal but it was important for me. Not so much a new way of seeing, but if you know how to say it, it gives you freedom for other things as well. And then you are invincible” (qtd. in Jangfeldt, Iazyk 43). “Liberating the other things” might refer to the similarly detached treatment of the lyrical self, as it provides the poet with “invincibility.” Translation mine. 207 “I bend down over a dark stream, / and recoil in shock” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 58). 208 “The water covers up my tracks." (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 61). 209 “My shadow runs, like a thing alive, /from these reddened eyelids, galloping / on waveback under pines and weeping willows. / It loses itself among its shadowy doubles / as I could never do” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 58). 210 “It’s as though I’m not really here, / but somewhere on the sidelines, somewhere overboard” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 59). 171 looking with the cold impartiality of the stranger and leaving that “I” “overboard” along with the stock of all its traumatic memories. In this sense, the self-alienation is tantamount to self-liberation from the trauma, however, rather psychological liberation than physical. The poet’s body is hopelessly trapped in the gloomy wilderness, as the only available escape route, by air, is cut off: whereas the birds had all flown south, the wanderer admits that he by contrast “по небесам... курс не [проложит] меж звёзд и капель” 211 (93). However, “shoving off” from the forest (92) helps driving his spirit out of the misery, causing the physical wandering to become incessant, almost compulsive, leaving the poet to wonder at the poem’s end how to slow “from run to walk” (94). 212 “New Stanzas to Augusta” serves as an excellent example of Brodsky’s detachment from the restricted physical body, combined with the soul’s tenacious advance to the metaphysical. The motifs of outward movement, albeit restricted, and self-alienation work in conjunction and complement each other, sharing the potential of carrying the poet away from his environs into the higher realm, where the “I” is immanently free regardless of the limits of the geographic space and the corporeal body. 213 The effect of this outward gravity, or “centrifugal force,” as Brodsky also calls it, becomes especially palpable against the unfreedom of the exile. It is therefore possible to state that the Northern exile shaped and solidified what we call Brodsky’s poetics of withdrawal. The detachment that strikes in his subject’s self-identification 211 “Will not set [his] course across the sky between the stars / and raindrops” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 60). 212 This emphatic refusal to slow down brings to mind the lines of Brodsky’s letter to I.N. Medvedeva written in the exile the same year: “I sped up and went too far, and I will never stop until my very death... Inside of me there is some incredible eternity and detachment, and I am speeding up more and more” (qtd. in Polukhina, Iosif Brodsky 98). From this quote it is evident that the need of perpetual movement out and beyond, induced by acceleration, parallels the development of otreshionnost’ (detachment). 213 Such deployment of the motif of escape, as Iakov Gordin has shown, is typical for Brodsky. Much like Pushkin whose leitmotif in the late years was escape from vanity and movement to “a certain light” (“The Wanderer,” 1835), Brodsky searches for the “breakthrough [to the places] higher than God,” where the world can be observed detachedly, as it were from the bird’s-eye view (Gordin 238) (see “Bol’shaia elegiia Dzhonu Donnu” (“Elegy for John Donne”, 1963)). This pursuit of the distant and clearly superhuman perspective of the world structures many Brodsky’s poems by expanding their visual focus, but also conveys the mere semantics of irrevocable departur 172 becomes a necessary element of lyrical subjectivity inherited from Auden and Frost. In the 1994 essay “On Grief and Reason” dedicated to Robert Frost, Brodsky actually summarized the American poet’s “freedom” and “utter autonomy” by directly identifying this author’s alienation with the familiar “outward gravity”: … [Frost] is very free. Dangerously so. The very ability to utilize – to play with – this sort of material suggests an extremely wide margin of detachment. <...> Where does he go, you may ask, with all this detachment? The answer is: into utter autonomy (245); ... what you ultimately get out of this poem ["Home Funeral”] is...the vision of its ultimately autonomous maker. The characters and the narrator are, as it were, pushing the author out of any humanly palatable context: he stands outside, denied-re-entry, perhaps not coveting it at all. <...> this utter autonomy, strikes me as utterly American. Hence this poet’s monotone, his pentamentric drawl: a signal from a far-distant station. One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonetheless in the grip pf a different gravitational force: outward (266). It becomes evident from these quotations that the poet’s autonomy, or, in other words, the isolation from his lyrical characters is seen as an advantage, a guarantee of his “dangerous freedom.” It also turns out that this autonomy is inseparable from the practice of detachment, which implies a peculiar viewing position of a writer as an outsider to his own plot, or, metaphorically, a homeowner who avoids entering his own house. And of course, the excerpt directly refers the reader back to the metaphor of self as a wanderer being pulled away from home, like a spaceship breaking away from the earthly gravity. Thus, following the “penchant for ruptures” and practicing alienation are parallel, often concurrent processes. Interestingly, Brodsky’s early verse make it possible to assume that the space imagery associated with the “outward gravity” came to life around the time of the Norenskaia exile. In the 1964 poem “Einem Alten Architekten in Rom” the image of the self as an astronaut leaving the Earth for the unknown is already present, and though the yearning for home is recognized, the final word belongs to the “penchant for ruptures” as well: 173 Так астронавт, пока летит на Марс, захочет ближе оказаться к дому. Но ласка та, что далека от рук, стреляет в мозг, когда от верст опешишь, проворней уст: ведь небосвод разлук несокрушимей потолков убежищ 214 (“Einem Alten Architekten in Rom” 85 [2001]). Compare this excerpt with the lines from the 1966 “Neokonchennyi otryvok” (“The Unfinished Fragment”) where the astronaut’s longing for home is no longer in picture, as he is “bereft of return” per se: Но что ж я, впрочем? Эта параллель с лишенным возвращенья астронавтом дороже всех. Не склонный к полуправдам, могу сказать: за тридевять земель от жизни захороненный во мгле, предмет уже я неодушевленный. Нет скорби о потерянной земле, нет страха перед смертью во Вселенной… 215 (170). The withdrawal into space here is tantamount to approaching death, thus implies near- death impartiality to one’s losses and the metamorphosis of the self into the estranged “inanimate object” and the “nobody” of Brodsky’s many future poems. At the same time, the poet’s facing death as a result of his withdrawal is seen not through the usual lens of tragedy of human mortality, but, on the opposite, promises the fearless, stoic poet liberation from the earthly attachments. 216 214 “An austronaut who streaks / toward Mars longs suddenly to walk on earth. / But a caress remote from loving arms, / when miles take you aback, stabs at your brain / harder than kisses: sepration’s sky is solider than any celinged shelter” (Brodsky, “Einem Alten Architekten in Rom” 119 [1973]). 215 “What am I saying though? This parallel with an astronaut deprived of a return is the most precious. Not prone to half-truths, I can say: buried in the haze far, far away from life, I am already an inanimate object. There is no grievance over the lost earth, no fear of death in the universe...” 216 As the poet Olga Sedakova said about Brodsky, “the fact that a man does not close his eyes to his own mortality liberates him from a host of things <…> It would be hard to find a better point of view from which to observe our world, such wide vistas! It’s ‘the view of the planet from the moon’..., and for observing one’s own self: it is also a liberation from the self” (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 1: 280). In “The Unfinished Fragment” Brodsky 174 It can be argued that, starting from around the mid-1960s, the position of withdrawal and detachment away from the fathomable reality and the self as its part towards autonomy and independence strengthens in Brodsky’s poetry and keeps gaining momentum against the backdrop of the author’s emigration from the Soviet Union in 1972. Indeed, in Brodsky scholarship the idea of malleability of the poet’s identity is an acknowledged, if not a commonplace fact. 217 Clearly, the abundance of doubles, masks, etc. in Brodsky’s self- representation directly correlates with the practice of self-alienation. However, its connection and frequent pairing with the motifs of wandering and departure is hardly ever discussed, therefore is of special interest for the travel poetry scholar. Without dwelling on the variety of alienated guises of Brodsky’s self as described by scholars, it is still essential to highlight at least one of them, that is “self as a cultural mask”, since this image of the subject to a great extent contributed to what David Bethea calls Brodsky’s “creation of exile,” namely the “sense that Brodsky is, despite all the vagaries of history and a genuinely tragic fate, the source and shaper of his own alienation from life” (46). What fostered this process was Brodsky’s self-estrangement through the identification with the classic authors and mythological heroes, whose life stories are structured around either an exile or a long-lasting journey: Ovid, Theseus, 218 and other. Reliance on the archetypes of mythological consciousness and the force of “outward gravity” thus brought Brodsky to construction of his own myth of exile years before the adopts exactly this detached viewpoint “from the moon,” or more specifically “from the Universe,” to the depths of which his liberated self is headed. 217 Valentina Polukhina did an extensive work in this regard by having examined Brodsky’s poetry and offered a catalogue of dualistic images of self deployed by the poet throughout his career: self in a mirror, self as a cultural mask, self as an object, self as a part of his body and so forth (Bol’she samogo sebia 43-55; 70-88). 218 See, for example, “Otryvok (“A Fragment”, 1964-65) and “Ex Ponto (Poslednee pis’mo Ovidiia v Rim” (“Ex Ponto (Ovid’s Last Letter to Rome),” 1965) written in Norenskaia, as well as “Po doroge na Skiros” (“To Lycomedes on Skyros,”1967). 175 emigration. 219 There is no doubt that by the time of Brodsky’s departure from the USSR, the poetics of withdrawal and the technique of self-alienation had become inextricable components of this myth. The Ulysses Unreturned: Brodsky the Traveler against the Nostos If it were possible to choose one quintessential image from Brodsky’s gallery of “masks” in his pre-emigration period, it would probably be the image of Ulysses (or in the original Greek, Odysseus). Already in 1961 Brodsky writes a poem with a telling title “Ia kak Uliss” (“I Am Like Ulysses”), set on a trip to the winter Moscow and opening with an ode to escapes and departures: “гони меня, ненастье, по земле / хотя бы вспять, гони меня по жизни” (136) 220 . More than a decade later the image of Ulysses (Odysseus) is still relevant, but in the light of the biographical events the semantical emphasis shifts to the issue of returnability. In the 1972 poem “Odissei Telemakhu” (“Odysseus to Telemachus”), written in the year of emigration, the central element of the Odysseus myth – the pursuit of homecoming, or in Greek terminology nostos, – is already abandoned, as wanderings had lasted too long to discern the home island: И все-таки ведущая домой дорога оказалась слишком длинной, как будто Посейдон, пока мы там теряли время, растянул пространство 221 (27). As Andrei Ranchin pointed out, the allusion to Mandelstam’s interpretation of the theme: “Odysseus came home, full of space and time” (“Golden honey...” 94) here translates into its 219 According to Andrei Sergeev, when the Soviet authorities compelled the poet to permanently leave the country in 1972, Brodsky said to his friend that “he would make his expulsion into his own personal myth” (qtd. in Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 2: 187). 220 “Drive me around the earth, stormy weather, if only backwards, drive me through life.” 221 “But still, my homeward way has proved too long. / While we were killing time there, old Poseidon, / it almost seems, stretched and extended space” (Brodsky, “Odysseus to Telemachus” 168). 176 direct reversal: the return is impossible, time is lost, and the space between Odysseus and his son (that is Brodsky himself and his son Andrei Basmanov, to be left in Leningrad) insurmountable (Ranchin 446). Brodsky as it were rewrites the Odysseus myth and undoes its well-known finale. Thus, the myth of exile is being created along the pattern of withdrawal, but also with the growing sense of irrevocability of withdrawal. Not surprisingly, it is the travel verse that absorbs both tendencies, while the emigration from the USSR is yet only anticipated. 222 When looking into the history of Brodsky’s travels during his last years in the USSR, one sees the peculiar overlapping of his poetics of withdrawal with the geographical map. According to Polukhina’s chronicle of the poet’s life, in 1965-1972 Brodsky made at least 16 trips to the different corners of the Soviet Union. If we are to believe Yakov Klots that during these years Brodsky visited Lithuania at least 10 times (16), then the number increases to at least 20 trips. It appears that, having left Norenskaia, Brodsky pounced on the opportunity to quench his wanderlust, which in regard to his prior confinement clearly had a compensatory function. In 1965-67 the magnetism of “out there” reappears on Brodsky’s agenda, as he makes acquaintance with European and American students, some of whom would become his long-time friends: Giovanni Buttafava and Fausto Malcovati from Italy, Kees Verheul from Netherlands, George Kline from the US (who would later become Brodsky’s translator), Veronique Schilz from France and many others (Polukhina, Iosif Brodsky 115-149). The list of international friends grows with the names of Thomas Ventslova, Ramunas and Audronis Katilius, Pranas Morkus and other Balts, after August 1966, when Brodsky makes his first trip to Lithuania and visits Vilnius, Suderve and Trakai. The following summer together with his friend poet Anatolii Naiman Brodsky travels to Koktebel’ with a press card from the children’s magazine Campfire. 222 “Odissei – Telemaku” was written in USSR, before the emigration on June 4, 1972, as Thomas Ventslova’s diary testifies: “And today he [Joseph] came with a big stack of poems. I am copying two poems [“A sketch” and “Odysseus to Telemachus”]. <...> I assume that in “Telemachus” there is something autobiographical” (“O poslednikh trekh mesiatsakh...”). 177 In 1967-68 he is sometimes in Lithuania, sometimes in Kaliningrad, and sometimes in Tartu in Estonia. He greets the New Year of 1969 in Tomashevskiis’ house in the Crimean Gurzuf, and travels to Ukrainian SSR at least six more times in the three following years, specifically to Yalta, Koktebel’, Odessa. In Fall 1972 he revisits Lithuania, in April 1972, a few months before emigration, he visits Armenia. What strikes as a common aspect in all these travels is Brodsky’s preference for the geography of the edge, that is the remote borderline corners of the Soviet Union, predominantly on the seashore. Just like in the seaside Leningrad, the poet seeks to approach the frontier area if only to sense the proximity of abroad, which is by default tantamount to freedom. But if the “liberal” seafront location of Leningrad is somewhat offset by its centralized political position, that does not apply to the periphery. Actually, Brodsky’s close Leningrad friend Mikhail Mil’chik shared with me that, as a member of the generation raised behind the Iron Curtain, Brodsky always aimed for transgressing the insularity of the country by picking the travel destinations as distant as possible from the center, or in the poet’s own words, “as far away as possible from slavery or power” (Shestvie 122). Just as proved by Mandelstam’s Armenian experience, in the context of an enormous centralized state, fleeing to the periphery amounted to a breath of fresh air. The more so because the local authorities in republics tended to be more lenient, and everyday life there was not so tightly controlled by the totalitarian Soviet state. Brodsky showed interest to such boundary zones as early as 1963, when in the capacity of a freelance journalist in Campfire magazine he made his first trip to Kaliningrad, formerly known as the Prussian town Königsberg, and the closed military port Baltiisk. Given an official journalistic task, “Brodsky used it as a pretext for traveling to former Germany, to the forbidden, almost westernmost point of the Soviet Union as it existed at that time” (Ventslova, Stat’i o Brodskom 103). After breaking through to the western borderline, he turned his attention 178 eastward. Mikhail Mil’chik was shocked when once in the late 1960s he learned from Brodsky about his voluntary visit to the so called “Big House,” the KGB central office in Leningrad (Mil’chik). Brodsky, who had been avoiding surveillance for years, willingly showed up in front of the security officers in order to request the pass into the Kamchatka border zone. At the time this territory was inaccessible for ordinary Soviet citizens, but open to geological expeditions, which Brodsky repeatedly tried to join. The trip never happened, as Brodsky did not receive permission from the KGB and feared to use his friend’s pass instead. 223 Yet the persistent pursuit of ways to penetrate the secret geographical area located at the very border between the familiar and the unknown, demonstrates the poet’s growing desire to transgress boundaries, a yearning reminiscent of Mandelstam’s attraction to the unreachable Mount Ararat. If the Kamchatka trips failed, then it was apparently repeated journeys to the western borders that compensated for it. Travels to the Kaliningrad region in 1963 and 1968 mentioned earlier were just a part of such pilgrimages. The coastal republic of Lithuania, which was only annexed by the USSR in 1940, becomes Brodsky’s long-time object of attention starting in 1966. Perhaps, the poet was drawn to its location at the outskirts of the Soviet state by the sea, its historical proximity to Poland, and its consequent rootedness in the Western culture, still very much palpable even under the Soviet rule. 224 It is this implicit orientation of Lithuania to the West that made Brodsky claim: “For a Russian, Lithuania is always a step in the right direction” (Ventslova, “Na okraine imperii” 39), clearly implying the need for westward expansion of the national mindset. At the same time, Brodsky also recognizes his “отсутствие права и смысла 223 According to Brodsky’s friend, geologist Genrikh Steinberg, “… there is a long story about my many attempts [to sign Brodsky on expeditions] in ’66, ’67, and ’68. <...> There was nature, hot springs, volcanoes... Bit in ’66 and ’67 we could not get Joseph a pass to go to Kamchatka; at the time it was a border zone.” When in 1968 Steinberg finally made the appointment not in Brodsky’s, but in their common friend Mikhail Meilakh’s name, Brodsky gave up on the Kamchatka adventure at the last moment out of fear of surveillance (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 2: 122-123). 224 In Mil’chik’s words, for many Soviet intellectuals in the 1960s-70s Lithuania was a peculiar version of the “Soviet Europe,” as it offered unique, exotic experience that was not readily available in other parts of the country: from discovering original medieval and baroque architecture to exploring the night bars of Vilnius. 179 находиться в этом городе [Вильнюсе]” (39), that is, much like Mandelstam, he is interested in the theme of the historically and culturally independent, but small and vulnerable nation occupied by the oppressors, in this case the imperial Soviet power. As Viktor Kulle has noted, it is precisely the Lithuanian experience that brings about Brodsky’s invariant theme of the empire and its provinces, that is the centralized tyranny and disempowered citizens of the spread-out state (qtd. in Klots, Brodskii v Litve 12). Indeed, such poems as the 1967 “V Palange” (“In Palanga”) and the 1968 “Anno Domini” argue in favor of Kulle’s observation. The self-detached image of a subject at the edge the empire, explicitly described as Roman, but implicitly Soviet, has recurred in Brodsky’s poetry ever since (“Post Aetatem Nostram,” “Pis’ma rimskomu drugu” (“Letters to a Roman Friend”) etc.). It is hardly a coincidence that, with his growing interest in the theme of empire, Brodsky resorts to visiting the Ukrainian SSR and its southern regions that once belonged to the ancient empires, specifically the Crimean Peninsula and the Northern Black Sea coast. Starting in the seventh century BCE this area was a Greek colony, later a part of the Kingdom of Pontus which was annexed by Romans and became a distant province of the Roman Empire in the first century AD. It is specifically this timeframe that comes to mind, when Brodsky refers to the Black sea’s old Greek name, the Euxinus Pontus, in his early exilic poems, such as the 1964-65 “Fragment” and the 1965 “Ex Ponto (Ovid’s Last Letter to Rome).” Thus, although Ovid was expelled to what is now Romania, Crimea and the Northern Black sea coast in general are still largely conceptualized by Brodsky as the place of the Latin poet’s exile and confinement. If one also remembers Pushkin’s dreams of fleeing by the sea from the paradigmatic poem “The daylight has gone out... ” written on a ship on the way to the Crimean town Gurzuf in 1820, as well as the 180 peninsula’s role in the history of the Russian emigration a century later, 225 Crimea and the North Black Sea region emerge as the opportune locale for plotting an escape, that is for exercising Brodsky’s poetics of withdrawal. Characteristically, the common visual reference point for both the Baltic and the Southern Ukrainian landscapes and one of the common escape destinations in Brodsky’s late Soviet travel poetry is the sea. In the poem “Letters to a Roman Friend” (1972) Brodsky, under the mask of the Roman poet Martial, would summarize the advantage of distancing from the capital and settling on the remote seacoast as follows: “Если выпало в Империи родиться, / лучше жить в глухой провинции у моря. / И от Цезаря далеко, и от вьюги. / Лебезить не нужно, трусить, торопиться” 226 (“Pis’ma rimskomu drugu” 11). By extension, the absolute value of freedom in the enclosed empire is only known to those living in the sea: “Только рыбы в морях знают цену свободе” 227 (“Konets prekrasnoi epokhi” 311). But apart from its contribution to liberating distancing from the center, the sea in this period is also perceived by Brodsky both as a state borderline, that is a prohibitory sign, and a medium of a possible, if only speculative, escape, that is a permissive sign. On the one hand, the borderline as an obstacle for escape is frequently indicated by a sea horizon, which delineates space (M. Lotman 230) and sets up the limits of the visual scope, of what is known and permitted. On the other hand, the common vector of Brodsky’s subject’s movement, often towards or into the sea, becomes the explicit manifestation of the concept of escape, quite in the vein of Pushkin during his Southern exile. The attendant self-alienation, usually by assuming a cultural “mask,” or reducing or 225 It was precisely in Crimea that the White Russian Army made their last stand against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War in 1920. When resistance headed by General Wrangel was defeated, some white officers escaped from Crimea to Istanbul by sea. 226 “If one’s fated to be born in Caesar’s Empire / let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore. / One who lives remote from snowstorms, and from Ceasar, / had no need to hurry, flatter, play the coward” (Brodsky, “Letters to a Roman Friend” 59). 227 “Only fish in the sea seem to know freedom’s price” (Brodsky, “The End of a Beautiful Era” 38). 181 removing the self from the text whatsoever, is also quite typical. This allows to speak of Brodsky’s pre-emigration travel poetry as one of the expressions of his poetics of withdrawal. The further analysis will explore a few such poems inspired by the journeys to the Soviet republics of Lithuania and Ukraine. For example, the 1971 cycle “Lithuanian Divertissement” is by and large structured as a typical travel narrative based off the poet’s trip to Lithuania and the immediate touristic experience at the Dominican Church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius (“Dominikanaj”), the “Neringa” café (“Café Neringa”) and so on. What stands out in the cycle is its second poem “Leiklos,” where the realis mood yields to the subjunctive, while the self-detachment and the motif of departure practically merge and facilitate each other. The poem is named after the street where Brodsky frequently stayed in Vilnius, in Katiliuses’ house. Curiously, Leiklos translates as “foundry,” which is also the name of Liteinyi prospect in Leningrad, not far from Brodskys’ house. Next to Leiklos there also once was the Jewish ghetto, where Brodsky’s Lithuanian friends certainly took him on a tour (Klots, Brodski v Litve 147). The complex of these facts and associations amalgamated in Brodsky’s poetic fantasy about the alternative life that the ethnically Jewish poet might have had, if he was born on Leiklos street a hundred years ago: Родиться бы сто лет назад и, сохнущей поверх перины, глазеть в окно и видеть сад, кресты двуглавой Катарины; стыдиться матери, икать от наведенного лорнета, тележку с рухлядью толкать по желтым переулкам гетто; вздыхать, накрывшись с головой, о польских барышнях, к примеру; дождаться Первой Мировой и пасть в Галиции – за Веру, Царя, Отечество, – а нет, 182 так пейсы переделать в бачки и перебраться в Новый Свет, блюя в Атлантику от качки 228 (“Litovskii divertisment” 418). As Alexander Zholkovsky has convincingly shown, by deploying infinitive writing, with its typical subtext of meditation on “inobytie” (“an alternative way of being”), Brodsky managed to alienate his persona by “by [projecting] himself onto a certain former, although kindred – Jewish, grandfather-like... hypostasis” (“Infinitivnoe pis’mo”). This turned out all the more credible, given that his ancestors on the mother’s side indeed derived from the Lithuanian towns Rokiškis and Baisogala (Ventslova, “Na okraine imperii” 31). However, what makes the poem relevant in terms of poetics of withdrawal is not only the technique of self-alienation, but definitely also its finale, which at once develops the imaginary life script of the poet’s Lithuanian double and anticipates the outcome of the Soviet chapter of the author’s life: “[set] off to the New World” (Brodsky, “Lithuanian Divertissement”). The emigre character’s imaginary path from Lithuania to the New World lies presumably through the Baltic sea and the Atlantic ocean, which thus serve as the ultimate means of escape towards the new life. If in “Leiklos” the possibility of escape is accepted, albeit under the fantastic transtemporal circumstances, many Brodsky’s poems of the time focus on the improbability of departure and the prohibitory aspect of the sea imagery. As Lev Loseff noted, the motif of immobility or the stop of movement was used in Brodsky’s work already in Norenskaia – see, for instance, the 1964 poem “Pis’mo v butylke” (“A Letter in a Bottle”) (Loseff, “Politics/Poetics”). In the late Soviet travel poems too, the hopelessness of the poet’s plans of escape is an extricable 228 “To be born a century ago / and over the down bedding, airing, / through a window see a garden grow / and Katherine’s crosses, twin domes soaring; / be embarrassed for mother, hiccup / when the brandished lorgnettes scrutinize / and push a cart with rubbish heaped up / along the ghetto’s yellow alleys, / sigh, tucked up in bed from head to toe, /for Polish ladies, for example; / to live long enough to face the foe / and fall in Poland somewhere, trampled— / for Faith, Tsar and Homeland, or if not, / then shape Jew’s ringlets into sideburns / and off to the New World like a shot, / puking as the ship’s steel spine churns” (Brodsky, “Lithuanian Divertissement”). 183 element of the poetics of withdrawal, as it draws attention to the realistic condition of the “no- fly” author tied to his home country and blocked from the exposure to the “outward gravity.” 229 In the poem “S vidom na more” (“With a View of the Sea”), written in the Crimean Gurzuf in October 1969, the plans of escape are ironically and implicitly encoded as futile. The poet depicts himself using the image, which would become classic in his later travel poems: a lonely wanderer sitting in a café in the cold season, drinking coffee or smoking a cigarette, while contemplating the scenery, often the sea, and meditating on his existence. In “With a View of the Sea” his self-alienation is stressed by the use of the third person when speaking of himself, and finds specific reflection in the portrait of “I” as an implicit present-day reincarnation of Pushkin, the author of the poem “Prorok” (“The Prophet”), who visited these places only a century and a half ago: “свершивший туалет без мыла/ пророк, застигнутый врасплох / при сотворении кумира, / свой первый кофе пьет уже / на набережной в неглиже” 230 (Brodsky, “S vidom na more” 308); “затем что автор этих строк, / ... пророк, / который нынче опровергнут, / утратив жажду прорицать, / на лире пробует бряцать” 231 (309). What follows after the morning coffee is an attempt at sea swimming, which can also be interpreted as a futile parodical attempt of escape by the sea: “Потом он прыгает, крестясь, / в прибой, но в схватке рукопашной / он терпит крах…” 232 (309). The beginning of the next stanza: “Затем он покидает брег” 233 alludes to the same concept of escape, since the archaic noun breg (“coast”), 229 For instance, in another poem of the cycle “Lithuanian Divertissement,” “Palangen,” the perspective of departure for the subject, shown detachedly as a “wandrerer” and an “exiled tzar” sitting at the sea shore, is already null: ”...a traveler sits in the dunes / his eyes cast down and sucks at his wine-flask / like a king in exile with no scald’s high tunes. <...> Now before him the world’s thin hem of sand / and not faith enough within to walk on waves” (Brodsky, “Lithuanian Divertissement”). As elsewhere, the coast is seen as the edge of the world, however the sea no longer opens up the space before the subject, but, on the opposite, closes it off. The view of the sea equals hopelessness of the dreams to cross it. 230 “A prophet sits, / having performed his brief toilette. / Caught unawares creating his / own idol, on the pier he sips / the first black coffee of the day / in a serene déshabillé” (Brodsky, “With a View of the Sea”). 231 “...because the author of this verse ... is these days / discredited officially. / His thirst for prophecy has gone. / He twangs his lyre and sings a song” (Brodsky, “With a View of the Sea”). 232 “After, he leaps, crossing himself, / into the waves! But hand-to-hand / he is defeated“ (“With a View of the Sea”). 233 “Now he leaves the coast behind” (Brodsky, “With a View of the Sea”). Translation adapted. 184 used instead of the modern Russian bereg, likely alludes to Pushkin’s dreams of escaping the Black sea coast and by extension the Russian empire while in the Southern exile, as stated in the 1824 poem “K moriu” (“To the Sea”): “Не удалось навек оставить / Мне скучный, неподвижный брег…” 234 (“K moriu” 180). Brodsky, however, consciously deceives the reader’s expectations. What seems to be the departure by the sea turns out to be delving into the continent, that is the opposite of the expected: “Затем он покидает брег. / Он лезет в гору без усилий...” 235 (“S vidom na more” 309). Thus, Brodsky clearly identifies with Pushkin in his unwilling confinement within the borders of the motherland and the lack of ways to flee it. Still, it does not prevent him from celebrating the merit of leaving one’s home and heading to the sea, in search of the exit from this confinement: “Приехать к морю в несезон, / помимо матерьяльных выгод, / имеет тот еще резон, / что это – временный, но выход / за скобки года, из ворот / тюрьмы…” 236 (309). If the “imprisonment” in the Soviet space is unavoidable, at least the traveler is left with an opportunity to break out from the “prison” of time by fleeing into the different “season,” as the Crimea in October, when the poem’s action takes place, still boasts rather warm temperatures. The conclusive stanza takes the form of the imperative that would become the poet’s signature travel recipe for his like, loners with a predilection for estrangement and isolation: “Когда так много позади / всего, в особенности – горя, / поддержки чьей-нибудь не жди, / сядь в поезд, высадись у моря. / Оно обширнее. Оно / и глубже. Это превосходство – / не слишком радостное. Но / уж если чувствовать сиротство, / то лучше в тех местах, чей вид / волнует, нежели язвит” 237 (310). The sea has 234 “Alas, Fate thwarted me from weighing / My anchor off the cloddish shore...” (Pushkin, “To the Sea” 61). 235 “Now he leaves the coast behind / and climbs the hillside at a canter...” (“With a View of the Sea”). Translation adapted. 236 “To hit the beach out of le saison /(quite apart from being dirt cheap)/ is advantageous for this raison: / a man can for a while escape / the brackets of the year, the gates /of prison” (“With a View of the Sea”). 237 “O when so much has been and gone / behind you—grief, to say the least— / expect no help from anyone. / Board a train, get to the coast. / It’s wider and it’s deeper. This / superiority’s not a thing / of joy especially. Mind you, if / one has to feel as orphans do, / better in places where the view / stirs somehow and cannot sting” (“With a View of the Sea”). 185 an advantage over the poet’s misery in its depth and vastness. If the sea view is not capable of completely curing the persona’s “orphanhood,” at least it has the power to “stir” him and bring him reconciliation with his confined condition. In the lack of other escape routes, the seaside itself becomes the poet’s final destination. However, the extreme expression of the theme of non-escape in the wake of the final liberation is without a doubt “In front of A.S. Pushkin’s Monument in Odessa” written either in 1969 or 1970 and published only in 1994. Brodsky retrospectively dedicated the poem to his Leningrad friend Iakov Gordin, who explained the dedication as a “memory of our long-standing arguments about the limits of freedom – in the end of the 1950s” (Pereklichka vo mrake 206- 207). It is precisely the tension between the indomitable desire to escape and the fettering insularity of the state border that Brodsky’s subject explores in the poem. The poem is written in iambic meter with varying number of feet and all masculine rhymes: AAABBB. It starts with the traveler’s wintertime arrival in the Odessa port by the sea: “...однажды поутру / с тяжелым привкусом во рту / я на берег сошел в чужом порту” 238 (Brodsky, “Pered pamiatnikom” 338). The chronotope is typical for Brodsky’s travel poetry: seaside in a cold season. In view of the impossibility of the escape, the arrival leaves a “heavy aftertaste in the mouth,” and the port is negatively seen as “alien.” The next three stanzas capture the subject’s movement from the edge to the city center, away from the sea and the port: “Я двинул прочь” 239 (338). There in the heart of Odessa he reaches his final destination, Pushkin’s monument erected in 1888 in honor of the poet’s anniversary and in commemoration of his Southern exile and ascends the Potemkin stairs leading to the statue. Один как перст, как в ступе зимнего пространства пест, там стыл апостол перемены мест 238 “Once in the morning I went ashore at an alien port with a heavy aftertaste in my mouth.” 239 “I started to walk away.” 186 спиной к отчизне и лицом к тому, в чью так и не случилось бахрому шагнуть ему. Из чугуна он был изваян, точно пахана движений голос произнес: "Хана перемещеньям!" – и с того конца земли поддакнули звон бубенца с куском свинца. Податливая внешне даль, творя пред ним свою горизонталь, во мгле синела, обнажая сталь. И ощутил я, как сапог - дресва, как марширующий раз-два, тоску родства 240 (338-339). At this point, Brodsky resorts to Pushkin’s fundamental “sculptural myth,” as described by Roman Jakobson, but reverses the concept of a statue coming to life, as in Kamennyi gost’ (The Stone Guest), Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman), and Skazka o zolotom petushke (The Tale of the Golden Cockerel) among others. Rather, he focuses on the notion of a living poet becoming a lifeless statue. Contrary to Pushkin’s own summary of his poetic achievement from his renowned 1836 poem “A monument I’ve raised – not built by human hand...”: “Я памятник себе воздвиг нерукотворный...” 241 (“Ia pamiatnik...” 340), the key element here is not the great poet’s “monumental” contribution to Russia’s literature, but the physical statue erected in his honor. Because the properties of the signifier (motionless stone) are metonymically transferred onto the signified (the poet), the poem is grounded in the opposition of mobility and immobility, 240 “All alone, like a finger, like a pestle in the mortar of winter space, there the apostle of wanderlust was freezing, with his back to his fatherland and facing that [sea] whose edging he had never had occasion to step across. // He was made of cast-iron, as if the voice of a kingpin of movement has said: “The end to relocations!” – and from the other end of the earth the jingling of a bell with a hunk of lead agreed. //Seemingly malleable distance, creating its horizontal line before him, looked blue in the haze, exposing steel. And I sensed, as wood senses a boot, as a marching person senses “One-two”, the melancholy of kinship.” 241 “A monument I’ve raised – not built by human hand...” (Pushkin, “Monument” 203). 187 or more specifically, Pushkin’s wanderlust and lack of mobility represented by his Southern exile. Pushkin’s urge to travel is immediately celebrated by Brodsky who elevates the great Russian poet to the status of “apostle of wanderlust.” Quite accurately, the statue is pictured as turned away from the continent, that is, away from the restraining “fatherland,” while facing “that whose edging he never had occasion to step across,” namely the liberating Black sea. The paraphrase “к тому, что так и не случилось...” (“that [sea] whose edging he never had occasion...”) uses the Dative case, thus evoking the title of Pushkin’s southern poem “To the Sea,” that he started working on before leaving Odessa in 1824. The heavy cast-iron material of the statue is seen as a pledge to maintain the poet’s stillness, as if commanded by some pakhan (“kingpin”) of movement. In criminal Russian slang, this noun stands for a “boss,” or a “kingpin,” and its association with the faraway clang of a presumable lead bullet implies the lawless Russian/Soviet authorities. The rhyme sequence “chuguna-pakhana” prepares the focal rhyme “khana” within the command to Pushkin’s statue: “Хана перемещеньям!” 242 The predicament of movement is iconically represented by the split of that phrase with the enjambment. The line of the sea horizon is exposing its “steel,” thus closing off the space in front of Pushkin’s monument with a semblance of a steel blade. The overall abundance of metal imagery generates the semantics of heaviness, duress, and hopelessness of escape. It is this inescapability that makes Brodsky’s subject identify with “frozen” Pushkin and feel the common “melancholy of kinship” between the two. 243 The following two stanzas extend the lines of this affinity, as Brodsky superimposes his self onto Pushkin’s: 242 “The end to relocations!” 243 The mere fact that Pushkin’s monument in question is not a full-size statue but a “legless” bust also adds to the sense of inescapability. 188 Поди, и он здесь подставлял скулу под аквилон, прикидывая, как убраться вон, в такую же – кто знает – рань, и тоже чувствовал, что дело дрянь, куда ни глянь. И он, видать, здесь ждал того, чего нельзя не ждать от жизни: воли. Эту благодать, волнам доступную, бог русских нив сокрыл от нас, всем прочим осенив, зане – ревнив 244 (339). By projecting his “I” onto the exilic identity of Alexander Pushkin, Brodsky fantasizes about the possible scenario in which Pushkin, just like himself, was facing the sea breeze while dreaming of “sneaking away” from Odessa and, in the same manner, saw hopelessness everywhere around him (as shown in the inner rhyme “дело дрянь, куда ни глянь” 245 (“delo drian’, kuda ni glian’”)). Another commonality between the two, according to Brodsky, was the expectation of freedom, considered one’s natural right, “something one cannot but expect from life.” Although this freedom is “available to waves,” Brodsky concludes, it is completely closed off for his compatriots by the “god of Russian fields,” the embodiment of confined Russian self- consciousness. The next stanza presents a parody of poetic escape, as Brodsky’s subject observes how “грек на фелюке уходил в Пирей, и стайка упырей вываливались из срамных дверей” onto the Odessa boulevard. The Greek’s departure to Piraeus on a trading felucca boat embodies the movement out and abroad, inaccessible for the poet. In a similar way, the presumably drunk 244 “Perhaps, he too was turning his cheek towards north-east wind, calculating how to get out of here, who knows, at the same early hour, and he too sensed that the deal is tough wherever you look. // He too must have been waiting here for something one cannot but expect from life: freedom. This grace, available to waves, was hidden from us out of jealousy by the god of Russian fields, who bestowed us with everything else.” 245 “The deal is tough wherever you look.” 189 flock of upyri (literally “nighttime vampires” or, in slang, “jerks”) falling out of the local bar or brothel is an ironic reference to the poet’s own unfulfilled “outward gravity.” His stillness and the attendant disgust with his existential condition are introduced via Rabelaisian naturalistic reversal of a Russian fairy-tale ending “И я там был, мед-пиво пил,” 246 also frequently used by Pushkin. In Brodsky’s rendition, the “fairy-tale” of Soviet life ends not with a feast but with a hangover: “И я там был, и я там в снег блевал.” The growing sense of disappointment with the poets’ immobility brings the reader to the final three stanzas: Наш нежный Юг, где сердце сбрасывало прежде вьюк, есть инструмент державы, главный звук чей в мироздании – не сорок сороков, рассчитанный на череду веков, но лязг оков. И отлит был из их отходов тот, кто не уплыл, тот, чей, давясь, проговорил "Прощай, свободная стихия" рот, чтоб раствориться навсегда в тюрьме широт, где нет ворот. Нет в нашем грустном языке строки отчаянней и больше вопреки себе написанной, и после от руки сто лет копируемой. Так набегает на пляж в Ланжероне за волной волна, земле верна 247 (339-340). 246 “And I’ve been there, drank honey and beer...” 247 “Our gentle South where the heart used to unload its saddlebag is an instrument of the power whose principal sound in the universe is not its churches’ bell-ringing designed to last for centuries but the rattle of fetters. // And he was molded from their scrap, he who did not leave by sea, he whose сhoking mouth pronounced “Farewell, free element” in order to dissolve forever in the prison of latitudes where there is no gate.”// In our mournful language there is no line more desperate and written more in spite of oneself and afterwards copied for a hundred years. In the same way wave after wave come to the Langeron beach, loyal to the land.” 190 The Russian/Soviet Empire’s south that once brought such relief to the poets’ hearts resonates in the universe not with timeless ringing of its churches’ bells but with rattle of fetters. 248 The audible image yields to the physical sense of heaviness, as Brodsky identifies the material of Pushkin’s monument as those very fetters’ scrap. Pushkin’s statue thus appears figuratively shackled to its position, just like the poet remained forever confined within the borders of his country. Pushkin’s famous farewell to the Black sea from “To the Sea”: “Прощай, cвободная стихия!” 249 (“K moriu” 180) uttered in choking was, according to Brodsky, his last cry for freedom before the poet’s disappearance in the “prison” of the continental Russia, away from sea-gate to the abroad. Naturally, this immersion into the continent counters both poets’ unrealized “penchant for ruptures.” The most desperate line in the Russian language: “Прощай, свободная стихия!” written “despite [Pushkin’s] self” receives its eventual metatextual embodiment in the last sestet. Brodsky imagines its endless copying by Pushkin’s successors and readers as a repetitive surge of a tidal wave on the Odessa beach, Lanzheron. The wave’s persistent “loyalty to the ground,” that is its return to the seashore, reads as an analogy of the forced Russian “homeward gravity.” Atypically for Brodsky but in accord with Pushkin’s “mask” he assumes, the sea as if reverses its outward vector and shuts down an escape route. Perhaps, such a pessimistic finale stands in line with Brodsky’s futile biographical attempts of immigration in his last years in Soviet Union. Friends remember that in the late 248 It is likely that this stanza is intertextually connected to the finale of Pushkin’s 1833 poem “Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma...” (“God grant that I not go insane...”). In the poem Pushkin’s subject dreams of freedom: “Were I but left alone and free... I’d harken to the pounding waves...” (“God grant that I...” 186). This imaginary seaside liberty is then contrasted with the confinement of a fettered madman: “But here’s the rub: go mad and see / How dreaded as the plague you’ll be; They’ll pen you up with no release, / They’ll chain you to a madman’s fate...”). Pushkin’s conclusive stanza contains the same antithesis of pleasant sounds outside the prison and the rattling of fetters as Brodsky’s: “And in the darkness I shall hear / No songbird’s voice serene and clear, / No rustling murmur of the oak - / But my companions’ cries of fright, / The cursing of the watch at night, / The shrieks, the clanking of the yoke” (187). 249 “Farewell to you, unharnessed Ocean!” (Pushkin, “To the Sea” 61). 191 1960s his romance with the British student of Slavic studies Faith Wigzel could have ended in marriage and emigration if only she was not banned from visiting the USSR. 250 Brodsky’s another escape fantasy of the time was fleeing homeland by jumping off a fishing boat somewhere by the Swedish or Danish coast. 251 From his later interviews it follows that prior to emigration Brodsky also requested visas to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Italy, but to no avail (Polukhina, Brodsky 306). It is this sense of hopelessness and improbability of departure that permeates some of Brodsky’s late Soviet travel poems, such as “In Front of A.S. Pushkin’s Monument in Odessa,” “With a View of the Sea” or “Palangen”, which all secure the role of the sea in his poetics as an ultimate escape route and the ultimate destination of his aspirations of freedom. It was not until 1972 that Brodsky caught an actual opportunity to “sneak away” from the “prison of [Russian] latitudes.” In expectation of Richard Nixon’s visit to USSR, the Soviet authorities started to allow its Jewish citizens to emigrate. On May 12, 1972 Brodsky was called to the local Leningrad OVIR (the visa and registry department) and under the threat of further persecution compelled to accept an invitation to immigrate to Israel. Whether Brodsky fully endorsed or internally resisted the invitation, remains an open question, perhaps serving as an illustration of the ever-present tension of “homeward” and “outward” gravities in his life and oeuvre. 252 What followed the departure is well-known to Brodsky’s readership: landing in 250 Cf. interview with Brodsky’s Leningrad friend Genrikh Steinberg: “In 1968, I vbelieve it [attempts to leave USSR prior to 1972] had to do with his love of some English girl. <...> I only knew that there were marriage plas, but since the appropriate services knew of this as well, the girl was not allowed entry into the Soviet Union. That was when he got the otion to end up abroad in order to...” (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 2: 129-130). 251 Genrikh Steinberg reminisces: “And that same year, ’68, he had asked me whether it would be possible, if he were working on a fishing boat, if it would not be too difficult to pass through the narrow straits (Kattegat, Skagerak), jump off the boar and swim ashore. I told him it was totally hopeless” (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 2: 130). 252 Despite Brodsky’s multiple plans of escape and attempts to emigrate, he later claimed that he did not want to leave his homeland forever: “I didn’t even want to leave Russia. They forced me. I wrote Leonid Brezhnev at the time that I would rather he let me participate in the literary process in my own country, if only as a translator” (Volkov 184). The published text of the aforementioned 1972 letter to the General secretary of the Communist party Leonid Brezhnev also develops the theme of “homeward gravity” and return, both physical and metatextual: “I believe that I will return, because writers always return – if not in person, then on paper. I want to believe that both 192 Vienna, accepting Karl Proffer’s invitation to teach at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and settling in the United States, where the poet kept his official residence until his death in 1996. It is a common place in Brodsky’s scholarship that the experience of exile from USSR finalized shaping of his persona. Valentina Polukhina claimed that “the authorial «I» changed significantly due to the exilic experience” (Bol’she samogo sebia 35) and outlined general patterns of its transformation: the increase of pejorative metaphors used for self-definition, the increasing impersonality and anonymity, the enhanced fragmentation of the self and the corresponding rise of synecdoches denoting it, objectification of the self, often in metatextual terms. The scholar’s conclusions are that “emigration is responsible for disintegration of the «I,» since there is a direct connection between experience of exile and metonymical account of the displaced author’s «I»” (36), “metaphorical use of «objects» instead of the authorial self is more convincing in poems written in exile” (37). All these instances of self-portrayal are telling of the elaboration of Brodsky’s techniques of self-alienation in emigration, making him “an alienated person living in no man’s land called exile” (35). Such scholars as David Bethea and Sanna Turoma contextualize this effect in terms of critical theory and specifically the contemporary theories of exsilium and displacement, drawing on works by Julia Kristeva, Michael Seidel, Edward Said (Bethea 39-47; Turoma 18-21), Caren Kaplan (Turoma 26) and others. Bethea’s discussion of the exile’s dual or stereoscopic vision that perceives all things “against the memory of these things in another environment” (Said 55) seems especially relevant for Brodsky. From the poet’s memories of his first years in the US it also follows that the sense of being caught between two “lives” and two cultures haunted his one and the other are possible. <...> I am asking you to give me a chance to keep living in Russian literature and on Russian soil. I don’t believe that I am guilty before my motherland” (Polukhina, Brodsky 452-3.) Predictably, Brodsky never received a response from the Soviet leader. 193 selfhood, 253 perhaps causing what Homi Bhabha and others labeled “unhomeliness” (“The World and The Home”). The trauma of linguistic and cultural displacement results in the subject’s not being at home in himself and places him/her in the psychological limbo. The concept of loss or lack, central in the displacement discourse, as it were extends to the very core of the identity of the displaced. The intensified poetic imagery of self-alienation appears to parallel this process in Brodsky after his emigration. What strikes in Brodsky’s case is his consistent stoic resistance to bemoan the event of his displacement and his persistence to convert the exile “into a positive mission, whose success would be a cultural act of great importance", to use Said’s words (qtd. in Bethea 44). In the condition of loss and absence, it is the native language that becomes the absolute presence that guides that mission: “Language is an awfully private thing. By being displaced, you arrive at the ultimate privacy. It’s a tête à tête between you and your langage. There are no mediators” (Brodsky, Interview with Joseph Brodsky 63). Moreover, it is specifically the effect of displacement that is beneficial for both ontological and linguistic self-determination: “being out of your existential context helps to winnow a cleaner notion of yourself, of what you are both physically and linguistically” (64). Even the situation of compelled bilingualism and cultural in- betweenness, generally understood in critical theory as oppressive, is reimagined by Brodsky as gaining “his own point of view” while sitting on top of the mountain and contemplating its two slopes at once (Volkov 186). The proclaimed constructive effect of displacement is thus totally in line with Brodsky’s repeated refusal to dramatize his exile and accept the status of a victim (Polukhina, Brodsky 71, 191) 253 From the 1979 interview: “......for the first two or three years, I sensed that I was acting rather than living. Well, more acting as though nothing had happened. Presently I think the mask and the face have got glued together” (Interview with Joseph Brodsky 62). 194 It is this consistent downplaying of the exilic trauma through the contact with the language that became Brodsky’s commonplace mode of discourse on his existential condition in emigration. It also dramatically impacted his travel poetry after 1972. Curiously, this experience of grounding oneself in native language is time and again reflected upon in context of space travel imagery. In Brodsky’s 1987 essay “The Condition We Call Exile” the exiled’ writer’s face-to-face encounter with the language is said to create a new selfhood characteristic of “the autonomous, spacecraft-like mentality” (31). Here Brodsky reconfigures the already familiar space travel metaphor for “penchant for ruptures” in terms of linguocentrism: ...[exile] accelerates tremendously one’s otherwise professional flight – or drift – into isolation, into an absolute perspective: into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. <...> Perhaps a metaphor will help: to be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will never retrieve you). And your capsule is your language. To finish the metaphor off, it must be added that before long the capsule’s passenger discovers that it gravitates not earthward but outward” (32). 254 The concept of the outward gravity that draws the space traveler out and away from home is specified in terms of the exile’s withdrawal into the isolation and emptiness of the outer space and his survival by means of his “capsule,” namely his native language. It is the intimate one-on- one relationship with his native language that is supposed to shelter the émigré writer from the surrounding nothingness and sustain his creative work in exile. As Brodsky’s Leningrad friend Evgeny Rein noted, in a sense Russian language became for Brodsky a substitute of Russia in emigration, “more concentrated, purer and free of any of the constraints of reality; it is Russia’s best face” (Polukhina, Brodsky through the Eyes 1: 77). This metatextual repossession or rather return to his homeland through its language parallels the growing denial of a chance to reunite 254 Curiously, in the 1991 interview the space tourism metaphor appears in a broader ethical context pertaining to both a writer and a human being: “An advantage of this situation, namely life outside fatherland, literature outside fatherland, is that there is no one else to blame. <...> In a sense you find yourself in a state of something like a space vehicle, an autonomous system that either survives in space or doesn’t” (Polukhina, Brodsky 158-9). 195 with his family 255 and return to the actual geographical space of Russia and Leningrad, repeatedly manifested in Brodsky’s poetry, essays and interviews of the post-emigration period: “мне не вернуться домой” 256 (“Polden’ v komnate” 174), “they will never retrieve you” (“The Condition” 32), “I cannot imagine myself a tourist in a country where I grew up and lived for thirty-two years. <...> People do not return to places where they experienced love” (Polukhina, Brodsky 464). 257 Perhaps, it is this inaccessibility of Russia that generates the sense of uniformity of global geographical space and the poet’s alleged disregard for the specifics of his physical location, including the place of his new residence, United States: “What has America become for you after all these years? - <...> The same that it has been before – just a continuation of space” (Polukhina, Brodsky 228). In the 1975 poem “Kolybel’naia Treskovogo Mysa” (“Lullaby of Cape Cod”) whose action is already set in the US this ever-present uniformity of space is foregrounded and verified by the consistent holding of a pen in one’s hands, that is the never- changing act of writing: “...Ибо у вас в руках / то же перо, что и прежде. В рощах / те же растения…" 258 (“Kolybel’naia” 84). Even outside of the US, the refusal to differentiate his whereabouts follows the poet in his travels where it can serve, for example, as a parallel to ubiquity of vicious human nature, like in the 1975 “Meksikanskii divertisment” (“Mexican Divertimento”): "Скушно жить, мой Евгений. Куда ни странствуй,/ всюду жестокость и тупость воскликнут: "Здравствуй, / вот и мы!” <…> / Как сказано у поэта, "на всех 255 According to Lev Loseff, since 1972 Brodsky’s parents applied for exit permits twelve times but were denied them under the excuse that the trip would be “unreasonable” (Iosif Brodsky 259). 256 “I will never come home.” 257 Note how, according to the interviews, Brodsky’s idea of non-return to his motherland is once again related to irrevocable withdrawal of an autnonmous body into space: “A person throughout their existence, I think, is transforms into a more and more autonomous body, and to return from this psychological cosmos to more intelligible emotional reality is already unthinkable. <...> I doubt that I will ever return to my fatherland. I doubt it a lot...” (Polukhina, Brodsky 376). 258 “...for after all // the device in your hand is the same old pen and ink / as before, the woodland plants exhibit no change / of leafage...” (Brodsky, “Lullaby of Cape Cod” 120). 196 стихиях…” / <...> / От себя добавлю: на всех широтах" 259 (“Meksikanskii divertisment” 100) 260 or the 1977 “V Anglii” (“In England”): “Человек приносит с собой тупик в любую точку света” 261 (“V Anglii” 164). Brodsky’s persona seemingly repudiates his own pre-émigré propensity to certain destinations by claiming: everywhere you go, it is all the same, or to cite a well-known Russian idiom, it is not the place that graces the man, but the man the place (“не место красит человека, а человек место”). Essentially, the universality of the world space serves for Brodsky as a synonym of that emptiness and indefiniteness that he time and again finds himself in exile. As Yuri and Mikhail Lotmans showed, from the onset of the exile Brodsky’s poems ““permeated with the sense of transcendentality, abroadness in a literal sense. This is existence in a vacuum, emptiness <...> the author’s location remains indefinite, sometimes unknown to himself” (736). The scholars cite the poems “Niotkuda s liubov’iu” (“From nowhere with love...”) and “Odysseus to Telemachus” as quintessential examples of Brodsky’s persona being lost or trapped in space: “Ниоткуда с любовью, надцатого мартобря...” 262 (“Chast’ rechi” 125), “Мне неизвестно, где я нахожусь, что передо мной...” 263 (“Odissei Telemakhu” 27). The “ousting of the persona” from this world, akin to cutting a hole in his photograph, thus reads as natural finalization of this absolute opustoshenie (“emptying out”). Similarly, Lev Loseff writes about the deprivation of Brodsky’s “capacity to identify with his surroundings and thus to be fulfilled” in emigration (“Home and Abroad” 37). He highlights the importance of the poet’s personal myth by establishing the correspondence between 259 “Life is a drag, Evgeny mine. Wherever you go, / everywhere dumbness and cruelty come up and say, “Hello, / here we are!” <...> “In all the elements...” as the poet has said elsewhere. <...> In every latitude, let me add” (Brodsky, “Mexican Divertimento” 95). 260 The line contains another intertextual allusion to Pushkin, specifically the poem “K Viazemskomu” (“To Vyazemsky”): “На всех стихиях человек - / Тиран, предатель или узник” (“K Viazemskomu” 298) (“And all the elements show man / A tyrant, traitor, or in chains” (“To Vyazemsky” 103)). 261 “A man takes is own blind alley with him wherever he goes / about the world” (Brodsky, “In England” 138). 262 “From nowere with love the enth of Marchember sir...” (Brodsky, “A Part of Speech” 103). 263 “I don’t know where I am or what this place / can be...” (Brodsky, “Odysseus to Telemachus” 168). 197 Brodsky’s frequent self-definition as nikto (“nobody”) and Odysseus, who introduced himself as Nobody to the cyclopes Polyphemus and thus escaped death (38). The persona’s nobodiness thus corresponds to him writing his verse from niotkuda (“nowhere”). Interestingly, the above- discussed reframing of the Odysseus myth, or more precisely the denial of its essential narrative element of return, correlates with uniformity of global space, as stated in “Odysseus to Telemachus”: “все острова похожи друг на друга, / когда так долго странствуешь” 264 (“Odissei Telemakhu” 27). Brodsky’s persona as it were is asking himself: if all islands are alike, what is the point of returning to Ithaca? 265 The alleged denial of “homeward gravity” and the ensuing refusal to discern the difference in geographic space become the self-imposed characteristics of Brodsky in his guise of Ulysses unreturned. The complete indifference to and independence from his location in space as though grants him the existential liberty that he sought back in homeland. The wanderings of alienated and thus liberated Nobody are supposed to turn the visited areas of the world map into the blank spots, as if erasing them and leveling any geographical difference: “Там, где ступила твоя нога, / возникают белые пятна на карте мира” 266 (Brodsky, “Kvintet” 151). It is Brodsky’s extensive post-emigration travel experience, however, that calls the authenticity of this stance into question. Indeed, in the years following his emigration Brodsky’s extreme enthusiasm for traveling took him on journeys all over the world: from Mexico and Brazil to Italy and 264 “To a wanderer the faces of all islands / resemble one another” (Brodsky, “Odysseus to Telemachus” 168). 265 In the 1993 poem “Itaka” (“Ithaca”) non-return is actually substituted for the return to what seems to Odysseus as either a wrong island or a home island that changed beyond recognition: “То ли остров не тот, то ли впрямь, залив / синевой зрачок, стал твой глаз брезглив...” (“[You don’t know] whether the island is wrong, or whether indeed your eye became squeamish, having poured blueness into the pupil”) (Brodsky, “Itaka” 138). Perhaps, these lines reflect Brodsky’s conviction that his assimilation in the new post-Soviet Russia 20 years after his departure would be problematic: “First of all, my age is not fit to start anew, and I would have to start anew, because it is a completely different country. The country that I left twenty years ago does not exist” (Polukhina, Brodsky 667). 266 “Wherever you set your sole or toe, / the world map develops blank spots...” (Brodsky, “Sextet” 263). 198 Turkey. 267 The Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House stores the collection of postcards that Brodsky mailed to his parents in Leningrad, as well as souvenirs from different corners of the world: a piece of ancient Roman marble, an ashtray from Pisa, a retablo from Mexico. These journeys inspired multiple poems and essays ranging in tone from admiring (in Watermark or “Rimskie elegii” (“Roman Elegies”), for example) to authoritative or condescending (“Mexican Divertimento,” “Flight to Byzantium,” “After a Journey”). In her book Brodsky Abroad Sanna Turoma did extensive work by critically assessing some of these works from postcolonial perspective. Her analysis, as well as the evidence found in the displaced poet’s biography and post-émigré travel verse, shows that various destinations bring about distinct lyrical experiences in Brodsky, while traveling per se likely becomes a way of compensating for the deprivation of freedom of movement experienced in the Soviet Union. These works give the sense that Brodsky’s movement around the globe in his post-emigration period could hardly be seen as leaving “blank spots” on the map but rather as filling these spots in with his own powerful poetic associations. If we were looking for the poet’s own confession regarding his traveling preferences, it would make sense to address the late poem “Doklad dlia simpoziuma” (“A Presentation for the Symposium”) written in 1989 on the Torö island in southern Sweden. Although not a travel poem per se, the free-verse “Presentation” serves as a late Brodsky’s aesthetic manifesto that surprisingly also determines his predilections as a traveler. The poem is largely grounded in Brodsky’s conviction that vision is the biological organism’s evolutional means of adaptation to the ever-hostile environment: “Зрение – средство приспособленья / организма к враждебной среде” 268 (62). Only when encountering something truly beautiful, the human eye’s alertness to 267 See Valentina Polukhina’s book Iosif Brodsky. Zhizn’, trudy, epokha (Joseph Brodsky. Life, works, epoch) for the full chronology of Brodsky’s travels. 268 “Vision is an organism’s means of adaptation to hostile environment.” 199 the surrounding danger wanes: “Прекрасное не таит / опасности. Статуя Аполлона не кусается...” 269 . The aesthetic instinct thus serves the natural biological instinct for self- preservation: “Эстетическое чутье / суть слепок с инстинкта самосохраненья / и надежней, чем этика” 270 . Furthermore, if the poet’s self was to be synecdochally reduced to his vision through hypothetical detachment of the eye from the body, the eye would isolate itself in specific geographical locations: “Но, отделившись от тела, глаз / скорей всего предпочтет поселиться где-нибудь / в Италии, Голландии или в Швеции” 271 (63). This lyrical confession stands in direct contradiction to the poet’s statements on the consistency of geographical space. Clearly, it offers a testimony of late Brodsky’s pronounced penchant for certain travel destinations. It raises a final set of questions that this chapter aims to resolve: why specifically Italy, Holland and Sweden are said to grant the sense of aesthetic and existential security to the poet’s self? What evidence of this security can be found in the travel poetry inspired by these places? What modes of subjectivity do travels evoke in the exiled poet? Finally, what happens to the poet’s tendency for non-return and “penchant for ruptures,” as the displaced self continues relocating? The analysis of the three poems dedicated to the above- named locations – “In Italy (1985), “Holland is a flat country...” (1993), and “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” (1990), along with a few supporting extracts from the essays and interviews, – will help the reader reach the answers. Elusive Visions of Home: On Brodsky’s Few Late Lyrical Journeys None of Brodsky’s destinations received as much scholarly attention as Italy, which the first poem in question is dedicated to. It is exactly Italy that became Brodsky’s main point of 269 “The beautiful does not hide danger. A statue of Apollo does not bite...” 270 “The aesthetic instinct is a model of the instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.“ 271 “But, after separating from the body, the eye will most likely prefer to settle somewhere in Italy, Holland or Sweden.” 200 attraction on his first Christmas vacation in the West in December 1972-January 1973. According to Polukhina, in his lifetime the poet visited Italy at least 24 times (Iosif Brodsky). In his interviews Brodsky calls Italy “a paradise on earth,” a place that represents a perfect cosmos, “the way the world order should be” (Polukhina, Brodsky 211-2). Much like Mandelstam, Brodsky also perceives Italy as the “cradle” of Western civilization and the focal point of Russia’s “longing for the world culture”: “[Italy is] the cradle of our civilization <...> Italian impressions are especially acute... because they refer directly to you, to your culture” (Volkov 202). 272 The richness of the Italian impressions also entails the wish to assimilate into a pattern of Italian life, rather than simply being a passing by tourist: “to live, to be, and not to file through like a tourist” (202), “get somewhere and settle in. Just knocking around from one place to another and looking from side to side – no, I don’t much care for that” (201). The desire to belong to Italian life and culture as an insider apparently reaches is strongest manifestation in Brodsky’s favorite Italian city of Venice, which became the subject of his multiple poems and the essay. The typically Brodskian propensity to ponder the alternative versions of his life that we witnessed in “Lithuanian Divertissement” is relevant for the Venetian narrative too: “If reincarnation exists, I would like to live my next life in Venice – to be a cat there, whatever, even a rat, but by all means in Venice” (Polukhina, Brodsky 101-102). “Having failed to be born here” (Brodsky, Watermark 46), the poet hopes to achieve that in his next incarnation, or at least to end his current existence in this “inimitable” “work-of-art” city: “I would... rent a room on the ground floor of some palazzo <...> and, when the money got short, instead of boarding a train, buy myself a little Browning and blow my brains out on the spot, unable to die in Venice of natural causes” (33). The death among the city’s “dying beauty” (102) is perceived as an eternal 272 Cf. the interview to Pyotr Vail: “First of all, this is where everything came from... Everything originated in Italy and then climbed over the Alps. Everything that is to the north of the Alps can be seen as a sort of Renaissance” (Brodsky and Vail 206). 201 stay in Venice and a far more attractive perspective than getting on a train following the customary “penchant for ruptures.” The story of the poet’s pre-emigration obsession with Venice is well-known and included in the essay Watermark written in 1989 upon the request of the Conzorzio Nuova Venezia (Venice Water Authority). According to its author, the dream of the Venetian journey was first inspired in Brodsky by reading Mikhail Kuzmin’s translation of Henri de Régnier’s Venetian novella, which was later identified in scholarship as the 1919 L’Entrevue (Mednis, “Semiotika oshibki” 136-137). Its narrative revolves around the protagonist’s encounters with an old Venetian palazzo’s ex-owner who appears from behind the looking glass. The novella’s action set on “damp, cold, narrow streets” and its “topography aggravated with mirrors” immediately established congruence between Venice and Brodsky’s hometown: “For somebody with my birthplace, the city emerging from these pages was easily recognizable and felt like Petersburg’s extension into a better history, not to mention latitude" (Brodsky, Watermark 31). The same sense of inherent belonging to the place of his dreams follows from Brodsky’s account of his first visualization of Venice, when he saw photos of St. Mark’s square covered in snow in one of the 1960s issues of Life magazine. The Soviet dissident’s intense attraction to the West and the Western culture manifested itself in a vow “that should I ever get out of my empire, should this eel ever escape the Baltic, the first thing I would do would be to come to Venice” (33). From the account of the poet Evgeny Rein who shared that magazine with his friend follows that Brodsky’s reaction to the photographs aligned with his relentless pursuit of “outward gravity”: “I will see this,” Brodsky said. “Remember what I have just said. I will be in Venice in winter...” (ch. “Venetsiia zimoi”). The metaphor of the self as a fish persistently searching for its way out of the inescapable Soviet Baltics and into the Adriatic Sea resurfaces in the essay time and again. 202 The interrelation of the Petersburg and the Venetian themes in Brodsky’s ouevre has been previously analyzed by Lev Loseff in the article “Realnost’ zazerkal’ia: Venetsiia Iosifa Brodskogo” (“The Reality of the Looking Glass: Joseph Brodsky’s Venice”). What is especially relevant for the present research is Loseff’s observations on the impact of Venice on the poet’s subjectivity. Even before the visual image of Venice arises in front of the Watermark’s protagonist, the smell of seaweed that greets him upon his first nighttime arrival to the Venetian stazione induces the familiar Petersburg sensations: Before my retina registered anything, I was smitten by a feeling of utter happiness: my nostrils were hit by what to me has always been its synonym, the smell of freezing seaweed <...> One recognizes oneself in certain elements <...> No doubt the attraction toward that smell should have been attributed to a childhood spent by the Baltic <...> It is a molecular affair, and happiness, I suppose, is the moment of spotting the elements of your own composition being free. There were quite a number of them out there, in a state of total freedom, and I felt I’d stepped into my own self-portrait in the cold air (Brodsky, Watermark 8-10). The olfactory sensation evokes not only the memories of the poet’s early years by the Baltic sea but also the idea of “recognition” of the self in the water element. The “joy of recognition" of the foreign culture that Brodsky celebrated in the finale of “Spoils of War” yields here to its opposite – the acknowledgment of the native in the alien. In what appears to be a purely chemical reaction, the poet experiences identification with the self fragmented into the myriads of seaweed odor molecules. It is important that this process transpires yet without the involvelement of the sight. Registering a familiar smell 273 and linking it to one’s own biography is presented as a spontaneous, almost instinctive process. In many ways, this enounter with a seaweed smell also adheres to the pattern of uznavanie (“recognition”), as described by Shklovsky in “Art as Device” (81). It is precisely in 273 Cf. the description of the Baltic smells from “A Guide to a Renamed City”: “The seaweed-smelling head wind from the sea has cured here many hearts...” (89). 203 the “unconscious-automatic domain” (79) that the Russian formalist locates our routine perception, the “recognition” of a thing without seeing it. Although Shklovsky ascribes strictly negative connotations to “recognition” and favors “defamiliarization” that leads to “seeing” the genuine nature of the thing, it is hard to deny that it is the sense of something alien perceived as familiar that makes the strongest impression on Brodsky’s subject in Watermark, and not the other way around. It is the repetitive interaction with the smell that causes the recognition of the genius loci and the ensuing rise of self-fulfilling memories and a feeling of joy, without any participation of vision. 274 There is no doubt that these implicit patterns of “recognition” stand in tension with the signature defamiliarizing ways of self-representation in certain Italian and other works of Brodsky. For example, the fragmentation of the self into a mass of free molecules in the above passage clearly is an analogy of the disjointed avant-garde “self-portrait,” and only the step “into” this recognizable image endows some wholeness to the selfhood. Other ways of self- portrayal in the Venetian verses include objectifying oneself as a passerby looking over one’s own shoulder (“San Pietro” 156), or one’s own shadow that recoils from the self (“Venetsianskie strophy (1)” 235) or an estranged image of “постоялец, несущий в кармане граппу, / совершенный никто, человек в плаще” 275 (“Laguna” 44). In the latter, “the protagonist... is portrayed as a classic stranger, an anonymous person, in the spirit of postwar literature and cinema imbued with existentialism” (Loseff “Realnost’”). In a similar way, the perfect 274 The concept of “blind” recognition – with a sense other than sight – strikingly resembles Mandelstam’s statement from “The Word and Culture” that Brodsky already referred to in “Spoils of War”: “A blind man recognizes a beloved face by barely touching it with seeing fingers, and tears of joy, the true joy of recognition, will fall from his eyes after a long separation ”(“The Word and Culture” 72). In both cases the sense of joy/happiness arises from strictly tactile/olfactory interactions with something dear and cherished. The difference is that Mandelstam speaks about the recognition of the poem’s preimage by its author, while Brodsky’s subject in “Watermark” takes recognition as a means of reclaiming his own identity. 275 “A nameless lodger, a nobody, .../ a bottle of grappa concealed in his raincoat” (Brodsky, “Lagoon” 79). 204 wintertime Venetian landscape described in the finale of “Venetsianskie strophy (2)” (“Venetian Stanzas II”) does not leave any room for the observing anonymous subject: Я пишу эти строки, сидя на белом стуле под открытым небом, зимой, в одном пиджаке, поддав, раздвигая скулы фразами на родном. Стынет кофе. Плещет лагуна, сотней мелких бликов тусклый зрачок казня за стремленье запомнить пейзаж, способный обойтись без меня 276 (Brodsky, “Venetsianskie strophy (2)” 240). The lonely poet sitting in his chair and contemplating the lagoon while writing is an outsider making futile endeavors to fit or at least “remember” the surrounding environment with his eye pupil. One of Brodsky’s interview statements clarifies the relevance of the constant look at oneself from aside in Venice and confirms Loseff’s cinematographic analogy: “A person views himself – whether he likes it or not – as a hero out of some novel or movie in which he is always in the frame. My crazy idea is that Venice should be in the background” (Volkov 198). Indeed, many Venetian poems are written as if from the standpoint of the director who at once stages his own film and acts in it, thus merging the positions of the subject and the object and drawing on the theme of metacreativity over and over again. Parallel to these displacements in subjectivity are, of course, the overlappings of the Petersurg and Venetian landscapes. In Brodsky’s first Venetian poem “Lagoon” the Petersburg statues of sphynxes share “brotherhood” with the Venetian lions, 277 whose claws first take shape of a hammer and sickle that then ironically turns into a kukish (“fig sign”). In Brodsky’s “San 276 “I am writing these lines sitting outdoors, in winter, / on a white iron chair, in my shirtsleeves, a little drunk; / the lips move slowly enough to hinder / the vowels of the mother tongue, / and the coffee grows cold. And the blinding lagoon is lapping / at the shore as the dim human pupil’s bright penalty / for its wish to arrest a landscape quite happy / here without me” (Brodsky, “Venetian Stanzas II” 308). 277 Cf. from the interview with Volkov: “To say nothing of the fact that this Venetian lion is obviously another version of the Petersburg sphinxes. That’s why there’s a Petersburg sphinx on the cover of my The End of a Beautiful Era and a Ventian lion on the cover of A Part of Speech” (189). 205 Pietro” the Venetian fog nebbia clearly creates a phantasmagorical “twilit and dangerous [atmosphere]” of a typical Petersburg text 278 , which is also hinted at in the poem’s title. In Watermark the similarity between the narrow streets of Venice and the Petersburg labyrinths of streets and “courtyard wells” is explicit, although Brodsky generally sees Leningrad as a city of broader perspectives. 279 Time and again in Brodsky’s ouevre, two cities appear to reflect each other in Baltic/Adriatic waters like two juxtaposed mirrors. The mirror motif thus naturally resurfaces in Brodsky’s Venetian texts as “the archetypical instrument of signification,” where a mirror is “a generator of dangerous illusions, signifiers that have lost their connection to the signified, Doppelgängers” (Loseff “Realnost’”). 280 Venetian mirrors either reflect, or establish symmetry, or open up “reverse” spaces beyond time and space. As Lev Loseff showed, in different forms the mirror motif is present in “Lagoon,” “Venetian Stanzas I and II”, and Watermark. It appears that it is also relevant for the short poem “In Italy” (1985), which provides a glimpse into the relationship between the poet’s Leningrad memories and the Venetian present. This poem is also a pertinent example of how the intrinsic mechanism of recognition counterbalances Brodsky’s signature detached subjectivity and his seemingly unequivocal “penchant for ruptures.” As such, “In Italy” is just one of the texts that point at the latency of the theme of homecoming in Brodsky’s late works: Роберто и Флер Калассо 278 See Toporov, V.N. “Peterburg i «Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury»” (“Saint Petersburg and “The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature”) 279 From the same interview: “Of course, outwardly, Venice has parallels with familiar places. That is, you could say that Venice is similar to my native city, but in fact there is an absolutely different principle of spatial organization. Above all, there’s less of it, less space” (Volkov 191). For more on the similarity and dissimilarity of the two cities’ landascapes see Lev Loseff article “Realnost’ zazerkal’ia: Venetsiia Iosifa Brodskogo” and “Brodsky v Venetsii.” 280 Loseff points out the popularity of the mirror motif amidst the Soviet writers, artists and intellectuals against the backdrop of semiotic discussions of 1950s-60s and names the poetry of Evgeny Rein, Stanislav Krasovitskii and speficially Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “The Mirror” as examples (“Realnost’”). 206 И я когда-то жил в городе, где на домах росли статуи, где по улицам с криком «растли! растли!» бегал местный философ, тряся бородкой, и бесконечная набережная делала жизнь короткой. Теперь там садится солнце, кариатид слепя. Но тех, кто любили меня больше самих себя, больше нету в живых. Утратив контакт с объектом преследования, собаки принюхиваются к объедкам, и в этом их сходство с памятью, с жизнью вещей. Закат; голоса в отдалении, выкрики типа «гад! уйди!» на чужом наречьи. Но нет ничего понятней. И лучшая в мире лагуна с золотой голубятней сильно сверкает, зрачок слезя. Человек, дожив до того момента, когда нельзя его больше любить, брезгуя плыть противу бешеного теченья, прячется в перспективу 281 (Brodsky, “V Italii” 280). The four quatrains of the poem are composed in accentual verse with the use of the coupled rhymes (AAbb). By opening the text with the coordinating conjunction followed by the past tense: “И я когда-то жил в городе...” 282 , the poet immediately creates the sense of continuity and recognition: there used to be another city in his life just like the one in front of his eyes. Although no toponyms are mentioned in the text, the autobiographical remark in the first line unravels the reference to Petersburg 283 , while the Venetian landscape only becomes detectable in the third stanza through the mention of the lagoon and the intertextual allusion to 281 “To Roberto and Fleur Calasso. I, too, once lived in a city whose cornices used to court / clouds with statues, and where a local penseur, with his shrill “Pervért! / Pervért!” and the trembling goatee, was mopping / avenues; and an infinite quay was rendering life myopic, // These days evening sun still blinds the tenements’ domino. / But those who have loved me more than themselves are no / longer alive. The bloodhounds, having lost theur quarry, / with vengeance devour the leftovers – herein their very // strong resemblance to memory, to the fate of all things. The sun / sets. Faraway voices, exclamations like “Scum! / Leave me alone!” – in a foreign tongue, but it stands to reason. / And the world’s best lagoon with its golden pigeon // coop gleams sharply enough to make the pupil run. / At the point where one can’t be loved any longer, one, / resentful of swimming against the current and too perceptive / of its strength, hides himself in perspective” (Brodsky, “In Italy” 340). 282 “And I, too, once lived...” Translation adapted. 283 Brodsky’s reluctance to name his hometown directly also seems to be an extension of his exilic myth and his Odyssean tendency to negation. Brodsky often avoids using the toponym in his essays and interviews by replacing it with the euphemism “native city.” The confusion caused by the Soviet renaming of Saint Petersburg into Leningrad problematizes the choice of the toponym even more – see “A Guide to a Renamed City.” 207 the opening lines from Akhmatova’s 1912 poem “Venetsiia” (“Venice”): “Золотая голубятня у воды...” 284 (100). What adds complexity is Brodsky’s claim that the beginning of the poem was also influenced by his Milanese walks, hence the dedication to Roberto Calasso, his Italian publisher and the resident of Milan (Brodsky and Vail 173). The semblance between Venice and Milan leads to a peculiar spatial distortion, since the text “The text “starts with the Milanese facades but in the end there emerges «the golden dovecote» <...> It is «in Italy» precisely because it does not take place in a specific city, but the mood is Venetian” (173). It is precisely due to the complex combination of spatial and temporal displacements – between Petersburg and Venice with its Milanese preimage, between the past and the present – that “In Italy” produces such a profound poetic effect. The first stanza is set in the poet’s past – and in Petersburg which arises like a mirror reflection of the Italian landscape. The architectural image of the statues as if “growing” 285 from the facades of Petersburg buildings brings to mind classical statues that, according to Brodsky, so fascinated him in Italy and spoke a familiar aesthetic “language” that made him feel “at home,” regardless of whether he was in Venice, Milan or Rome. 286 The image of the local Petersburg’s (then Petrograd’s) philosopher from the second and third lines alludes to the eccentric Russian 284 As published in Akhmatova’s 1914 book “Rosary”: “Золотая голубятня у воды, / Ласковой и млеюще- зеленой; / Заметает ветерок соленый / Черных лодок узкие следы” (“A golden dovecote by the water, tender and thrillingly green; A salty wind mixes up the narrow wakes of black boats”) (“Venetsiia” 100). 285 Translation adapted. 286 From the interview with Brodsky: “I remember when I came to Italy for the first time in 1973, after spending a half a year in the States; when I walked around Rome, I couldn’t understand what it was. I didn’t know the language and nevertheless I felt myself at home (it was winter) to a greater extent than in London or the States where I knew the language to a certain degree. This nagged at me for a while until it occurred to me that the circumstances evoking this feeling were the facades, the statues, the stucco work and so on. It was simply that all of this was language. And this language always addresses you in comprehensible dialect, something that absolutely does not happen in France, for example, or in Germany” (Polukhina, Brodsky 432). Cf. in “Watermark”: “It’s also the marble lace, inlays, capitals, cornices, reliefs, and moldings, inhabited and uninhabited niches, saints, aint’s, maidens, angels, cherubs, caryatids, pediments, balconies with their ample kicked up calves, and windows themselves, Gothic ot Moorish, that turn you vain. For this is the city of the eye; your other faculties play a faint second fiddle” (23- 24). 208 Modernist writer Vasilii Rozanov who would be hard to identify without Lev Loseff’s autobiographical commentary: Joseph called and asked me where Rozanov calls out: “Molest! Molest!” I could not remember anything like it. I recalled something about chaste prostitution – how unmarried girls had to walk the streets at night and modestly, with a flower in their hands, wait for a man. That wasn’t it, he needed exactly “Molest!” <...> Having not found an invocation to molestation, I wrote a letter to a major expert on Rozanov, the old poet Erii Pavlovich Ivask. <...> [Ivask] said that there is nothing of the sort in Rozanov. I reported all this to Joseph. But he kept it the way it was originally written. He believed in the memory of heart more than in sorrowful memory of mind (Loseff, Meandr ch. 1). Thus, although Rozanov “running around” Petrograd and calling “Растли! Растли!” (“Molest! Molest!” 287 ) seems to be a plausible scene, it appears to be Brodsky’s inaccuracy, perhaps preserved for the sake of the successful, nearly homophonic rhyme: “rosli – rastli.” What seems to be more relevant in the context of the poem is Rozanov’s connection to both Brodsky’s hometown and Italy, Venice included. While Rozanov lived in Petersburg (then Petrograd) from 1893 until the 1917 Revolution, he also traveled to Europe for the first time in his life in 1901. On this voyage he visited Venice among other Italian cities, and it is specifically St. Mark’s Cathedral that left him delighted – upon reading Rozanov’s 1909 travelogue “Ital’ianskie vpechatleniia” (“Italian Impressions”) one can easily imagine its inspired author “running around” 288 the city and specifically St. Mark’s square in awe. The idea of inevitable temporal decline is predictable in the context of the Russian Venetian text (Mednis “Venetsianskii tekst”) and first emerges in the ending of the first stanza: “и бесконечная набережная делала жизнь короткой.” 289 Although the self is detachedly unnamed, it is possible to discern here the poet’s own autobiographical image concealed in the 287 Translation adapted. 288 Translation adapted. 289 “An infinite quay was rendering life short.” Translation adapted. 209 landscape of the Petersburg of his past. Remarkably, this self is imagined receding into the endless embankement, quite in line with some of his early Petersburg “on-the-go” poems and the self-proclaimed “penchant for ruptures.” However, the vastness of the Petersburg spaces is absurdly incongruent with the brevity of a human life. Through the linguistic interplay between the concepts of distance and time (that both can be long and short), the spatial extent of the poet’s hometown is attributed a temporal effect of his life’s transiency. The second stanza transfers the poet into the present. Despite the physical distance dividing him from Petersburg, the traveller claims to be perfectly aware of the events happening in his hometown at this precise moment, as if witnessing them with his own eyes: “Теперь там садится солнце, кариатид слепя.” 290 The time of the action – sunset – further consolidates the concept of approaching the temporal end, this time the decline of a day. The statues that used to grow on the Petersburg houses reappear in the present as a certain marker of unchangeablity, now in a more specified guise of caryatides. The personification of the Petersburg caryatides “blinded” by the setting sun frames a sharp contrast with the unnamed diseased Petersburgers, “those who have loved” the speaker “more than themselves.” The date of the poem’s creation (1985) helps identify these Petersburgers accurately – the poet’s parents, Maria and Alexander Brodskys, died in Leningrad in 1983 and 1984 correspondingly, without having seen their only son for more than a decade. The jarring discrepancy between the lifeless statues that survived the march of time and the poet’s once living parents who didn’t reveals the tragic autobiographical context of the poem. What follows is a three-line digression that shifts attention from the poet’s reexperiencing the Petersburg reality to exploring his own mnemonic activity: “Утратив контакт с объектом / преследования, собаки принюхиваются к объедкам, / и в этом их 290 “Now the sun is setting there, blinding the caryatides.” Translation adapted. 210 сходство с памятью, с жизнью вещей." 291 The metaphorical chasing of an object by the hounds might allude to the infamous persecution of Brodsky, as Polukhina suggested (“Akhmatova i Brodsky”), but it is hardly logical that by the “leftovers” the poet implied himself. It rather appears that the figurative loss of an object of surveillance iconically highlighted by the enjambment applies to the loss of the physical reminders of the poet’s late parents. The hounds are tantamount to the poet’s own memory incapable of holding the track of the lost “scent” of the loved ones. All it can preserve is the “leftovers” – the fragmented reminiscences of their shared Petersburg past. It is this theme of fundamental inadequacy of human memory that constitutes the core of Brodsky’s poem quite literally marking the divide between the Petersburg and the Venetian “halves” of the poem. Indeed, the mention of memory opens the third stanza and thus symmetrically splits the text in half leaving the Petersburg scenery behind as a mere recollection. The poet is carried over again – this time into the Venetian “here and now.” In a mirror-like manner, the details of his Venetian surroundings reflect the above-described Petersburg/Petrograd reality. The action is similarly set during the sunset, and the sounds of the random screams in Italian: “гад! / уйди!” 292 echo Rozanov’s nonsensical cries: “Растли! Растли!”. Ironically, the screams prompt someone to leave, which the traveler comprehends and takes personally even in spite of the language barrier: “Но нет ничего понятней.” 293 It is this final withdrawal that the reader will witness in the next verse. Interestingly enough, the detailed topography of this final verse can be decoded from the above-mentioned intertextual borrowing from Akhmatova. “Золотая голубятня у воды” from the poem “Venice” is generally considered an indication that Akhmatova describes Venice 291 “The bloodhounds, having lost theur quarry, / with vengeance devour the leftovers – herein their very // strong resemblance to memory, to the fate of all things” (Brodsky, “In Italy” 340). 292 “Scum! / Leave!” Translation adapted. 293 “But there is nothing more comprehensible.” Translation adapted. 211 while standing somewhere on St. Mark’s Square (Tsiv’ian). 294 In Brodsky’s poem, the image of the golden dovecote is paired with the mention of the lagoon whose view “blinds” the speaker – thus if one was to establish the poet’s precise wherabouts, they would likely conclude that he faces the water from either the St. Mark’s piazzetta, or the depth of the piazza. Additionally, the intertext from Akhmatova extends the series of references to the outstanding Petersburgers who once visited Venice and perpetuated the city in their writing, along with Rozanov and Brodsky himself. At the same time, the allusion to Akhmatova might have been necessary for Brodsky to highlight the divide between the Soviet Union and the West that was ultimately the cause of his isolation from his parents. In her 1957-1958 poem “Vse kogo i ne zvali, – v Italii...” (“All those not expected in Italy...”). Akhmatova who was then restricted to travel contrasts her fate to that of the lucky official Soviet writers traveling to Italy: “Все кого и не звали, – в Италии, / Шлют домашним сердечный привет...” 295 (201). She regrets that she will never again “exchange glances with Leonardesques” and “breathe in the for forbidden silence of the places she has never seen.” Instead, she is stuck in the Sovet Union as if in a vaccum, behind the “looking glass”: “Я осталась в моем зазеркалии, / Где ни света, ни воздуха нет.” 296 It is the same situation of confinement and isolation that Brodsky’s own parents faced after their son’s emigration. The fact that his parents never saw the beauty of Venice with their own eyes and forever remained at the other side of the “glass” clearly parallels the content of Akhmatova’s text. The idea of the restricted freedom of movement thus comes to the forefront here, just like in the poem on the Odessa monument to Pushkin. If such intertextual reading is 294 In favor of such reading also speaks the mention of the “lion on a marble pillar” in Akhmatova’s poem – the famous Lion of Venice surmounted on the granite column on St. Mark’s Square. T. Tsiv’ian writes that the square might metonymically stand for the whole city of Venice: “One can assume that it is Akhmatova’s ”viewpoint,” a place from where she overviews the city. <...> This is Piazetta, - if we define what “the golden dovecote” is: the Campanile (which can be compared to the dovecote in terms of architecture), the Doge’s Palace (in terms of golden coloration and proximity to water), - but perhaps it is Venice itself with its pigeons?” (“Stranstvie Akhmatovoi”). 295 “All those not expected in Italy / Send warm greetings home...” 296 “I stayed behind my looking glass, / Where there is neither light, not air.” 212 valid, it is also possible to presume that the title of Brodsky’s poem “In Italy” might have been borrowed directly from Akhmatova’s poem’s title line. The effect that contemplating “the world’s best lagoon” 297 has on the poet multiplies the series of mirror reflections in the poem. If in the second stanza it were the caryatides on the Petersburg facades that were being blinded by the sunset, the final stanza pictures the poet squinting at the setting Venetian sun with his own “watering eye pupil.” 298 It is this image of an eye as a primary sense organ, a biological safeguard and a processor of beauty, that would later resurface both in Watermark, “A Presentation for the Symposium,” along with other texts. In Watermark he would name Venice “the eye’s beloved” (80), a city where “the eye... acquires an automony similar to that of a tear” (35) and completely subordinates the body to the point that “one [becomes] what one looks at – well, at least partially” (26). Interestingly, this recognition of the self in whatever one beholds is linked in Watermark with the broad metaphorical concept of time as water, first in terms of the evolutionary history of the mankind: “This city is a real triumph of the chordate, because the eye, our only raw, fishlike internal organ, indeed swims here <...> Its exposed jelly dwells with atavistic joy on reflected palazzi, spiky heels, gondolas, etc., recognizing in the agency that brought them to the existential surface none other than itself.” (24) The same idea of recognition is then reframed in the context of history of Venice reflected in its waters: “It is the same water that carried the Crusaders, the merchants, St. Mark’s relics, Turks, every kind of cargo, military, or pleasure vessel; above all, it reflected everybody who ever lived, not to mention stayed, in this city, everybody who ever strolled or waded its streets in the way you do now” (71), including 297 Cf. the same idealized view of Venice in Brodsky’s interview: “Just Venice – better not of earth created. If some idea of order exists, then Venice is the most natural, well thought out approximation of it” (Volkov 198). 298 The parallel between the statues and the self is even more remarkable in the light of the following quote from Watermark: “One’s guilty conscience would be enough to identify oneself with any of these [Venetian] marble, bronze, or plaster concoctions – with the dragon, to say the least, rather than with San Giorgio” (62). 213 perhaps Rozanov and Akhmatova; by extension, this water “contains reflections, including mine” (20). Thus, much like Mandelstam who sees Mount Ararat in temporal terms, Brodsky identifies the water of the Venetian lagoon with time, memory and their effect on all being. In the Leningrad poetry of the 1960s the flow of the Neva water was already associated with time. In Watermark Brodsky elaborated this vision of time as water and explained that it was inspired by the biblical image of God’s Spirit hovering over the surface of water at the time of creation: “I always thought that if the Spirit of God moved upon the face of water, the water was bound to reflect it <...> I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water... to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it” (34). In one of the interviews, Brodsky elaborated on his personal nostalgic response to the vision of time rising from the water: “Think about your native city, which also stands on the water” 299 (Volkov 193). It is largely this symbolic fascination with water at the turn of a year that ritualized Brodsky’s regular journeys to the Venetian lagoon on Christmas and New Year, including a 1985 trip when “In Italy” might have been written. 300 It is thus the same problem of continuity that once preoccupied Mandelstam that Brodsky is presented with when facing the Adriatic Sea. Unlike Mandelstam, however, Brodsky is more interested in the course of personal, rather than historical time, at least as the poem “In Italy” 299 “It’s my crazy idea, if you like. The New Year. The changing year, the changing time; time rising up out of the water. I’m reluctant to talk about it because it’s pure metaphysics. These crazy ideas of mine – about time and water – started back in the Crimea. I realized something there for the first time. I remember, I celebrated the New Year in Gurzuf. As midnight approached – at about quarter to twelve – I went outside to look at the sea and the bay. There was a cloud coming in off the bay onto the dry land. Moreover, I was high up on a hillside, so the cloud was moving below me, and I had a good view of it. It was moving like those biblical clouds the Lord or I don’t know who is supposed to be inside. I remember having the feeling that this cloud was a fog risen up from the water, transformed into a giant sphere. Or rather, a disheveled sphere. And it touched the ground exactly at twelve... Everything in the world is chemistry, but you can look on this in a somewhat different manner. Think about your natie city, which also stands on the water...” (Volkov 193). 300 According to Polukhina, Brodsky traveled to Italy at least twice in 1985: on New Year in early January and in April. The poem “In Italy,” however, does not refer to seasons and is not attributed a precise date in Brodsky’s collection, so the timeframe of the narrative is open to interpretation. 214 testifies. If the big water is capable of “the big water is capable of connecting and dividing, merging and demarcating” (M. Lotman 239), then it is specifically the temporal element intrinsic to the global ocean that makes it possible for the poet to “cross the bridge” between his Petersburg past and Venetian present, if only for a moment. The inextricable geographic link between the Adriatic and the Baltic seas (Watermark 90) as it were presupposes the implicit connection 301 between Brodsky’s “incarnations” (10-11) 302 and prompts a repeated return 303 to Venice, so similar to the poet’s hometown. The metaphor of a water cycle thus becomes applicable to the concept of a temporal cycle. In this sense, one cannot but agree with Thomas Ventslova who claimed that “space for Brodsky is related to the linear principle <...>, time to the principle of regularity, to a cycle, a repetition, a return” (Stat’i 41). It is this symbolic background of water imagery that allows for the climactic shedding of a tear in “In Italy.” In typically Brodskian stoic fashion, the ambivalent phrase “зрачок слезя” 304 conceals the act of crying under the pretense of the poet’s being blinded by the water shining in the sun. The reader not at once realizes that it is not the sunlight, but the image of the Venetian lagoon itself that causes the poet’s tears. This happens because what glimpses beneath the surface must be the mirror view of the Petersburg “lagoon” – most likely the Spit of Vasil’evsky island framed by the “endless embankement” from the first stanza. 305 It is this 301 “And if we are indeed partly synonymous with water, which is fully synonymous with time, then one’s sentiment toward this place improves the future, contributes to that Adriatic or Atlantic of time which stores our reflections for when we are long gone. <...> out there, in its equivalent of the Adriatic or Atlantic or Baltic, time-alias-water chrochets or weaves our reflections – alias love for this place – into unrepeatable patterns...” (Watermark 90). 302 In Watermark Brodsky time and again refers to his Soviet life as a “previous incarnation” (10-11). The word choice is noteworthy, as the Hindu notion of samsara implies the endless cycle of rebirths driven by karma. The concepts of cyclicity and contunity are thus naturally ebmedded in the term. 303 The concept of return is generally important for many Brodsky’s Venetian texts, although somewhat disguised under the context of dream. For example, in Watermark Brodsky writes: “Italy,” Anna Akhmatova used to say, “is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” He mentions his “attempts over all these years to secure that dream’s recurrence <...> To put it bluntly, I kept returning myself to the dream, rather than the other way around” (88). Note also the agency of the speaker in the last sentence, as opposed to self-detachment in other works. 304 “Making the pupil tear.” Translation adapted. 305 In a personal interview with me, Brodsky’s friend Mikhail Mil’chik confirmed that one of Brodsky’s favorite itineraries in Petersburg led to Peter and Paul’s Fortress’ Trubetskoy Bastion with its views of Vasil’evsky island. 215 double exposed image of the two cities both located on water, between the West and the East, element and culture that the poet starts recognizing himself in. In this poignantly nostalgic context, the final implicit allusion to the loss of the poet’s parents is natural. In a mirror-like manner, the middle lines of the final quatrain reflect those of the second one. However, in the finale the absence of “those who loved [the subject] more than themselves” translates into the iconic impersonal sentence that highlights his utmost loneliness in the world: “Человек, дожив до того момента, когда нельзя / его больше любить...” 306 As anticipated earlier in the image of hounds losing track of a prey, under the force of time the image of the poet’s parents fades away from the Venetian present. Concurrently, the poet’s self- reference with the use of personal pronouns yields to the universally pertinent “chelovek” (“one” or “a person”). By deploying his detached subjectivity in a new way, Brodsky makes loneliness of orphanhood an imminent feature of human condition, impending over all and everyone. Strikingly, if in the Petersburg part of the poem the subject follows the flow of Baltic water along the embankment, the detached “man” from the finale feels “resentful” about going against the current. Thus, unlike in the earlier travel poetry where Brodsky’s lyrical self time and again found himself drawn towards the big water in search of spatial freedom, in “In Italy” the poet turns his back on the sea. This happens in the conclusive line, as the traveler is “hiding into the perspective,” somewhere in the opposite direction from the Venetian lagoon. Presumably, he is heading towards the depth of the St. Mark’s piazzeta and then piazza, “into the perspective of the Procuratie buildings” that frame the square and offer arched entrances into the streets of San Marco district (Loseff “Real’nost’”). But on the metaphorical level, the poet’s withdrawal undoubtedly reads as receding into the perspective of time towards the future, as supported by 306 “At the point where one can’t be loved any longer, one...” (Brodsky, “In Italy” 340). 216 the polysemantism of the Russian noun perspektiva (“prospective”). 307 The traller bids farewell with his late parents from across the Venetian/Petersburg lagoon and withdraws from the scene towards his own inevitable demise. In this way, “In Italy” serves as Brodsky’s poetic model of a looking glass. The mirror- like design of its four quatrains indicates Brodsky’s fascination with the Venetian chronotope where “everything is reflected in everything. Hence the constant transformations. <...> apart from everything else, it is incredibly beautiful, because there is this antithesis, this possibility of transformation” (Volkov 192). Although the poem’s action ends in Venice, that is on the opposite side of the “looking glass” that Akhmatova wrote about, it is only the correlation with the Petersburg past that endows poetic meaning to the transformations transpiring in the text. Reconnecting with Petersburg and processing attendant memories is necessary for both coping with the effect of displacement and maintaining the further movement, as shown in the final line. By choosing to recede into the Venetian half of the “looking glass,” Brodsky creatively reframes his “penchant for ruptures.” As said above, in “In Italy” he withdraws not out into the liberty of the sea, but into the depth of the city. Hence, as the verb “hides” suggests, it is Venice that accepts and shelters the orphaned poet – bereft both of his family and homeland – on the path towards his future. Perhaps, this sheltering grants the poet that very safety that his eye finds in the Italian beauty (“A Presentation for the Symposium”). Four years later in Watermark Brodsky would elaborate on how his ever-present desire to stay in Venice and contemplate its beauty is tantamount to shedding a tear: 307 Cf. the poetry of the same period, specifically the 1985 text commemorating Brodsky’s mother: “Мысль о тебе удаляется, как разжалованная прислуга / <...> Где там матери и ее кастрюлям / уцелеть в перспективе, удлиняемой жизнью сына!” (“Mysl’ o tebe...” 26) (“The thought of you is receding like a chambermaid given notice. / ... /What can remain of a mother with all her saucepans / in the perspective daily extended by her son’s progress?” (Brodsky, “In Memoriam” 341)); also: “В прошлом те, кого любишь, не умирают! / В прошлом они изменяют или прячутся в перспективу” (“In the past those who you love did not die! In the past they metamorphosed or hid in the [perspective]”) (Brodsky, “Vertumn” 89. Translation adapted). 217 By rubbing water, this city improves time’s looks, beautifies the future. That’s what the role of this city in the universe is. Because the city is static while we are moving. The tear is proof of that. Because we are headed to the future, while beauty is the eternal present. The tear is an attempt to remain, to stay behind, to merge with the city. But that’s against the rules. The tear is a throwback, a tribute of the future to the past (96). In the light of this statement, the watering eye pupil 308 in “In Italy” indicates that Brodsky’s common resistance to nostos becomes challenged by the wish “to remain... to merge” with his hometown’s mirror double. The crying poet’s “hiding” into San Marco thus at once manifests his “breakup” with Petersburg memories and a desire to amalgamate his self with the twin of his native city. As such, daydreaming of Petersburg in Venice provides a viable substitute for homecoming. In defiance of politics and geographical distance, the continuity between the Russian and the Italian halves of the poem opens up a possibility of a momentary dreamlike return home, as if by walking through a mirror. Indeed, “In Italy” presents one of rare poems in Brodsky’s Odyssey where the “penchant for ruptures” is outbalanced with so far repressed “homeward gravity.” Accordingly, it is not the detached subjectivity, but the recognition of the self in the beheld landscape of the past that comprises the core of the poem’s design. The theme of memory is also in focus of a short poem “Holland is a flat country...” written by Brodsky in Amsterdam in September 1993. The Netherlands and specifically Amsterdam have been another favorite travel destination of his since 1973 – according to Polukhina, the poet made at least 12 trips to the country throughout his lifetime (Iosif Brodsky). When commenting on “Holland is a flat country...” to Pyotr Vail, Brodsky admitted that ““[he] 308 Remarkably, the image of a “watering eye” is common in other Italian poems by Brodsky. Cf.: “A drowning city, where suddenly the dry / light of reason dissolves in the moisture of the eye” (“Lagoon” 80); “In the low December sky / the gigantic egg laid there by Brunelleschi / jerks a tear from an eye...” (“December in Florence” 132). In “Venetian Stanzas II” “the eye pupil is “executed,” that is blinded by the water glow, much like in “In Italy”: “And the blinding lagoon is lapping at the shore as the dim human pupil’s bright execution” (308). 218 has a special relationship with Holland <...> Amsterdam – it turns out that I know it because I spent many years in New Holland. In Holland your feet know where they are taking you <...> You find yourself in a familiar idiom. This is your native city – after all, from where did Peter get everything?” (Brodsky and Vail 163). A special connection between Holland and the poet’s psyche is thus largely shaped by Brodsky’s devotion to his hometown designed by its founder Peter the Great after Amsterdam. It is also noteworthy that the association between the cities is framed via the linguistic metaphor. Much like the classic statues of Italian cities that share common “language” with Petersburg’s caryatides, the mere planning of the Netherlands’ capital invites the poet to recognition of his hometown in the familiar “idiom.” On his journeys to the Netherlands Brodsky usually visited his old friend, the Dutch slavist Kees Verheul who left recollections of these visits in his memoirs Tanets vokrug mira. Vstrechi c Iosifom Brodskim (Dance Around The World. Encounters with Joseph Brodsky). It is to him that Brodsky dedicated the poem under discussion, which ultimately captures not a strictly Amsterdam scenery but a more generic Dutch landscape: Кейсу Верхейлу Голландия есть плоская страна, переходящая в конечном счете в море, которое и есть, в конечном счете, Голландия. Непойманные рыбы, беседуя друг с дружкой по-голландски, убеждены, что их свобода — смесь гравюры с кружевом. В Голландии нельзя подняться в горы, умереть от жажды; еще трудней — оставить четкий след, уехав из дому на велосипеде, уплыв — тем более. Воспоминанья — Голландия. И никакой плотиной их не удержишь. В этом смысле я живу в Голландии уже гораздо дольше, 219 чем волны местные, катящиеся вдаль без адреса. Как эти строки 309 (Brodsky, “Gollandiia...” 136). The poem is written in free iambic verse, with irregular alternation of 5- and 6-feet lines and no rhymes. The marine theme clearly dominates the text, and irregularities of the meter might iconically represent the turbulence of the sea. At the same time the use of iambus places the text among some of the classic Russian poems on the sea (such as Pushkin’s iambic poems “To The Sea,” “The daylight has gone out...”). Kees Verheul thus recalls the circumstances of the poem’s presumed conception and creation: In Summer 1993 Brodsky visited Holland twice. <..> The encounter happened in our apartment [in Hague] with a view of the Northern sea and its beach. I remember that the guest in the armchair turned away from me and looked out of the window all the time while I was retelling the content of my recently published novella. The plot of this work [revolves around] the flood that happened in my native provincial town exactly on my birthday, when I turned six years old (Verheul 246). One of the important intertexts in Verheul’s novella, as he admits, was Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman that tells the story of the destructive 1824 Petersburg flood. Verheul assumes that the motifs of bicycle-riding and flooding in Brodsky’s poem might have been inspired by his story. He also recalls that, according to Brodsky’s New York friends, the poet was extremely anxious to watch the news reports about river floods in the Netherlands in winter 1993 (248). It is as though the motif of excess of water was “overflowing” the poet’s consciousness, while the 309 “To Kees Verheuil. Holland is a flat country, turning eventually into the sea, which is, in the end, Holland. Uncaught fish, conversing with each other in Dutch, are convinced that their freedom is a mixture of engraving with lace. In Holland you can’t climb mountains, die of thirst; it is even more difficult to leave clear tracks by leaving home on a bicycle, even more so leaving by sea. The memories are Holland. And they cannot be contained by any dam. In this sense, I’ve already been living in Holland much longer than the local waves, rolling into the distance without an address. Like these lines.” 220 proximity of the Northern and the Baltic seas might have reminded him of a global water cycle that he reimagined in terms of temporality. Indeed, in “Holland is a flat country...” seawater is ubiquituous and all-consuming. The poem starts with a tautological statement that perfectly captures this overabundance, first in spatial terms: “Голландия есть плоская страна, / переходящая в конечном счете в море, / которое и есть, в конечном счете, / Голландия” 310 (Brodsky, “Gollandiia...” 136). The enjambment iconically represents the smooth transition and continuity between Holland and the sea, whereas the repetition creates the rhythm equivalent to monotonous rocking of waves. The flatness of the Netherlands’ continental terrain is ascribed to the sea and vice versa and establishes the overall horizontal spatial orientation of the poem. As Brodsky shared with Vail, “the flat Dutch surface – I have had an attachment to this kind of thing since childhood” (164). The vastness of the Northern Sea’s landscape that so mesmerized Brodsky from Verheul’s Hague apartment’s window thus clearly overlaps with his reminiscence of the spacious Baltic prospects. The metaphor of the North Sea as an extension of the Netherlands continues further on with the image of its personified fish conversing in Dutch as if they were the Dutch citizens. The freedom of the uncaught fish aligns with the common post-Romantic notion of the sea as a source of liberty, a view that Brodsky himself endorsed in early poems 311 . The “mixture of engraving and lace” is at once a metaphorical reference to the sea’s gray water and foam and a direct allusion to the traditional Dutch cultural artifacts. As such, the educated underwater conversation on freedom, engraving and lace emerges as a playful scene with a touch of “irony and sarcasm” that Brodsky generally attributes to Dutch art (Brodsky and Vail 164). 310 “Holland is a flat country, turning eventually into the sea, which is, in the end, Holland.” 311 Cf. the already quoted “Konets prekrasnoi epokhi” (“The End of a Beautiful Era”): “Only fish in the sea seem to know freedom’s price” (Brodsky, “The End” 38). 221 The poem further develops the idea of all-presence of water in the Netherlands, as the poet returns to the discussion of its relief and weather conditions: “В Голландии нельзя / подняться в горы, умереть от жажды...” 312 The lack of mountains in the marine country and the accordant impossibility of ascension must be indicative of the Dutch’s “longing for a vertical line <...> desire of a vertical, since in reality it is not meant to be” (165). Similarly, the “water- filled” Dutch reality excludes the probability of dying of thirst. Finally and most importantly, the predominance of water in the Netherlands makes a traveler leave no trace, regardless of their means of transportation: “еще трудней – оставить четкий след, / уехав из дому на велосипеде, / уплыв – тем более” 313 (Brodsky, “Gollandiia...” 136). The motif of tracelessness is common in Brodsky’s poetry and is time and again associated with water. The tracelessness reminds the reader of Brodsky’s traveller’s typical anonymity and impersonality – as “New Stanzas to Augusta” demonstrated, when “water covers up... tracks” (61), it typically relieves one of set identity and association with any given place. However, the caesura in the line: “уплыв – тем более. Воспоминанья – / Голландия” 314 (Brodsky, “Gollandiia...” 136) suggests a certain turning point, that is the reorientation of the poem’s discourse into the temporal plane. Having explored the spatial and libertarian dimensions of the Northern Sea, Brodsky concludes with a discovery of its pivotal aspect – much like in “In Italy,” the view of the seawater invites the memorial theme. The absolute identification between the poet’s memories and Holland undoubtedly unfolds along the same pattern of equating time and water. The abundance of enjambements in the conclusive six lines of the poem as if iconically illustrates the overflowing of memories at the sight of the Dutch landscape: “И никакой плотиной / их не удержишь.” 315 It is at this moment 312 “In Holland you can’t climb mountains, die of thirst.” 313 “It is even more difficult to leave clear tracks by leaving home on a bicycle, even more so leaving by sea.” 314 “Even more so leaving by sea. The memories are Holland.” 315 “And they cannot be contained by any dam.” 222 that the poet’s self paradoxically does not erase itself from the landscape but comes to the forefront: “В этом смысле я / живу в Голландии уже гораздо дольше...” 316 The placement of the poem’s only personal pronoun ia (“I”) at the end of the line is emphatic and is telling of a moment of positive recognition of the self in its marine surroundings. This climactic recognition can only be elucidated via the reference to the poet’s past. What is it that sustains the traveler’s long-time “residence” in the “Holland” of his memories? Is it only the familiarity of the open marine space that brings his Baltic youth to mind and as it were “revives” his Petersburg self? As is the case with “In Italy,” the connection between what one beholds and what one remembers seems to be more personal. The early source of the “Dutch memories,” as established by Verheul, might be the 1965 poem “Prorochestvo” (“A Prophecy”) that Brodsky dedicated to his beloved M.B. It is likely that a number of motifs and images were transferred from “A Prophecy” to “Holland” where they found a new interpretation. “A Prophecy” is Brodsky’s early post-idillyc fantasy that places the lyrical subject and his beloved in hypothetical romantic isolation, somewhere on the seashore separated from the continent by a giant dam: “Мы будем жить с тобой на берегу, / отгородившись высоченной дамбой / от континента...” 317 (“Prorochestvo” 125). The future tense imparts the mode of oracular potentiality to the poem. In this speculative future, the lovers spend days in blissful alienation from the outside world playing cards, gardening and listening to the noise of water. Though the poetic landscape is likely inspired by the Baltic seaside 318 , the poet names their whereabouts “their reverse Holland,” that is an alternative version of the real country 319 : “В 316 “In this sense, I’ve already been living in Holland much longer...” 317 "We’ll go and live together by the shore; / huge dams will wall us from the continent" (Brodsky, “A Prophecy” 55). 318 It is remarkable that the 1960s is the time when the plan of the largest Leningrad dam – now Saint Petersburg Flood Prevention Facility Complex (from Lomonosov to Kotlin Island to Cape Lisiy Nos) – was conceived. Alternative plans of flood prevention were discussed as well. It is possible that Brodsky’s poem was inspired by that ongoing engineering discourse. 319 The “reversal” of the self-constructed “Holland” is also evident from the reverse function of the dam: it serves to protect the characters not from the water element but from the hustle of the continent. 223 Голландии своей наоборот / мы разведем с тобою огород / и будем устриц жарить за порогом / и солнечным питаться осьминогом.” 320 The plenty of seafood echoes the mention of the Dutch fish in “Holland.” The surplus of water manifests itself in the noise of tides and rains and the ever-present sight of waves in the mirror behind the speaker’s back. The prophecy also foretells the birth of the lovers’ child who would be left on his own after his parents would be carried away into the sea and the “new era” by the ebb flow: “Мы будем в карты воевать, и вот / нас вместе с козырями отнесет / от берега извилистость отлива…” 321 (125-126). After the lovers’ final disappearance and presumable death in all- consuming seawater, their offspring would cross over the dam and supposedly start a new life on the continent. It is highly likely that “Holland is a flat country...” is informed both with the intertextual link to “A Prophecy” and Brodsky’s biography. As discussed above, the poet’s relationship with an addressee of the 1965 poem M.B., namely the painter Marina Basmanova, ended far from an idyllic family life captured in “A Prophecy.” Their son Andrey Basmanov’s name was prefigured in the 1965 text: “И если мы произведем дитя, / То назовем Андреем или Анной” 322 (125), however Brodsky remained separated from both the son and his mother until the end of his life. The bitterness of separation and unfulfillment that we witnessed in “Odysseus to Telemachus” might have resurfaced in the 1993 text at the encounter with the Northern sea, that is the “overflowing” memory itself. 323 In addition, the association between 320 “In our reversed, small Netherland / we’ll plant a kitchen-garden, you and I; and we shall sizzle oysters by the door, and drink the rays of the sun’s octopus" (Brodsky, “A Prophecy” 55). 321 “We shall wage war at cards until the tide’s / retreating sinyosities draw us, / with all out trumps, down and away...” (Brodsky, “A Prophecy” 56). 322 “And if / we make a child, we’ll call the boy Andrei, / Anna the girl…” (Brodsky, “A Prophecy” 55). 323 Thematically, “Holland” is very similar to the 1989 poem “Dorogaia, ia vyshel segodnia iz domu pozdno vecherom...” (“Brise Marine”) where the “rank seaweed [of the New York Bay]” directly attends the reminiscence of M.B. that the poet aims to distance himself from. In that poem time and memory stand in contrast: “Having bimped into memory, time learns its impotence” – thus, the memory of M.B. overpowers even the annihilating forces of time (Brodsky, “Brise Marine” 364). 224 M.B. and the Netherlands might have been reinforced by the fact that Basmanova “had Dutch ancestry” (Verheul 130). It is as though the remembrance of this unrealized 1965 prophecy that so strikes the traveler in the Dutch landscape that he contemplates in 1993. If “A Prophecy” imagined the lovers’ common future residence in the Holland of their dreams (“we’ll go and live”), then by the end of “Holland” the poet is lonely and his memories of the past start dominating over reality (“я живу в Голландии,” 324 that is in one’s own remembrance). Whereas in the former the dam could shelter a happy family from the external world, in the latter no dam is capable of holding the influx of sorrowful reminiscences: “никакой плотиной их не удержишь.” 325 Remarkably, just like “A Prophecy,” “Holland” ends with the description of an ebb, that is the manifestation of the inexorable water/time cycle: “я / живу в Голландии уже гораздо дольше, / чем волны местные, катящиеся вдаль...” 326 (136). Much like in “In Italy,” the reconnection with his memory of the Baltic “reverse Holland” and with another incarnation of his self allows the poet to situate himself in this temporal cycle and comprehend an encounter between his past (or rather unfulfilled future in the past) and his present. Despite this glimpse of “homeward gravity,” it is still the alienation of the displaced that has the final say in the poem. If the ebb in the 1965 text took both lovers in their togetherness and heralded the coming of “the new era,” its “addresslessness” in the conclusive metaliterary simile of the 1993 poem reflects both the loss of true home and the poem’s implicit addressee, M.B.: “...чем волны местные, катящиеся вдаль / без адреса. Как эти строки” (“Gollandiia...” 136). Just like in the early exilic poems, the conclusive non-addressee orientation of the text is meant to distance the poet from what he left behind in 1965 Leningrad and its seaside suburbs. 324 “I’ve been already living in Holland...” 325 “And they cannot be contained by any dam.” 326 “I’ve already been living in Holland much longer than the local waves, rolling into the distance without an address. Like these lines.” 225 This distancing is significantly less tangible in the final poem of our analysis “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” written in Sweden in 1990. As noted above, this Scandinavian state becomes the final destination for Brodsky’s “traveling eye” in his aesthetic guide “A Presentation for the Symposium” also written on the Swedish Torö island a year earlier. According to the poet’s longtime Swedish friend Bengt Jangfeldt, Brodsky first visited the country in summer 1973, 327 then in 1987 to receive the Nobel Prize, and since then he traveled to Sweden every year until 1994, mostly in summer (166). The cool seaside climate was beneficial for the poet who by that time already had had a few heart attacks (169). As friends’ recollections testify, the overall vicinity of the Baltic sea had a fascinating effect on Brodsky. In Stockholm he used to stay in the Reisen Hotel that faces the bay and its ships and several times stayed on board of the Mälardrottningen Yacht and Hotel, literally in a cabin (Jangfeldt “Komnaty”). Much like in Verheul’s account of their Hague encounter, Brodsky can’t take his eyes off of the seaview that opens up from the Stockholm Thiel’s Gallery’s tower room, as if frozen in his place (Jangfeldt, Iazyk 167). Clearly, the scenery inspires a memory of the Baltic landscape that Brodsky saw so many times before, but from the other side of the sea border. Hence Brodsky’s multiple parallels between the Swedish and the Russian landscapes, predominantly those characteristic of the Leningrad region or adjacent Karelia. After a 4-hr cruise around Stockholm and Sweden’s south east coast archipelago in 1987 Brodsky shared with Jangfeldt that the trip reminded him of the Russian Karelian Isthmus: same skerries, granit and old summer houses (167). In the 1989 letter to Iakov Gordin he wrote that “главное – водичка и все остальное – знакомого цвета и пошиба. Весь город – сплошная Петроградская сторона. <…> Ужасно похоже на детство, не то, которое было, а 327 In Polukhina’s account, 1974 (Iosif Brodsky 226). 226 наоборот” 328 (qtd. in Jangfeldt, Iazyk 167-169). It is exactly this resuscitation of the childhood memories that comes into focus in the poem “Here I am again under this colorless sky...,” perhaps the most poignant text on homecoming in Brodsky’s late oeuvre: Вот я и снова под этим бесцветным небом, заваленным перистым, рыхлым, единым хлебом души. Немного накрапывает. Мышь-полевка приветствует меня свистом. Прошло полвека. Барвинок и валун, заросший густой щетиной мха, не сдвинулись с места. И пахнет тиной блеклый, в простую полоску, отрез Гомеров, которому некуда деться из-за своих размеров. Первым это заметили, скорее всего, деревья, чья неподвижность тоже следствие недоверья к птицам с их мельтешеньем и отражает строгость взгляда на многорукость – если не одноногость. В здешнем бесстрастном, ровном, потустороннем свете разница между рыбой, идущей в сети, и мокнущей под дождем статуей алконавта заметна только привыкшим к идее деленья на два. И более двоеточье, чем частное от деленья голоса на бессрочье, исчадье оледененья, я припадаю к родной, ржавой, гранитной массе серой каплей зрачка, вернувшейся восвояси 329 (Brodsky, “Vot ia i snova...” 92). The poem is written in accentual verse with a simple rhyme sceme aabb and the use of only feminine rhymes. It is dedicated to the Stockholm poet Tomas Tranströmer, Brodsky’s 328 “The main thing is the water and the rest is of familiar color and type. The whole city is just like the Petrogradskaia storona in St Petersburg. <...> It is an awful lot like childhood, not the one I had, but the opposite.” 329 “Here I am again under this colorless sky piled with the feathery, crumbling bread of the soul. It’s drizzling. The field vole greets me with a whistle. Half a century has passed. // Periwinkle and a boulder, overgrown with a thick scruff of moss, haven’t moved. And the dull, simply striped piece of cloth in the style of Homer, stuck here because of its size, smells of seaweed. // The first to notice this were most likely the trees, whose immobility is also a consequence of distrust for the birds with their pacing and reflects the rigor of a glance at multiple-handedness, if not one-leggedness. // In the local impassive, smooth, otherworldly light the difference between a fish going into nets and an alconaut’s statue getting wet under the rain is only noticeable to those who are used to the idea of division by two. // And more like a colon than a quotient from dividing a voice by eternity, an offspring of glaciation, I crouch to the native, rusty granite mass by means of a pupil’s grey drop that returned where it came from.” 227 friend and a renowned admirer of Swedish nature. It is likely that the narrative’s precise place of action is the Runmarö island of the Stockholm archipelago where Tomas Tranströmer’s summer residence was located. It is there that Brodsky visited him in summer 1990 when the poem was created (Jangfeldt, Iazyk 262-263). From the very first lines the text displays the idea of the persona’s return to his natural environs. The immediate reinforcement of active subjectivity at the recognition of the familiar scenery is manifested through the affirmation of ia (“I”) in the spondee: “Вот я...” (“Here I am...”) in the opening line. As such, “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” demonstrates a rare combination of the non-detached active voice and a motif of homecoming, typically repressed in Brodsky. In the first stanza the poet finds himself under the colorless sky of Sweden that is covered with “bread of... soul,” which is how St. Augustine addressed Lord in his “Confession.” Additionally, the Russian epithet “перистым” brings to the reader’s mind the collocative pair “peristye oblaka” (“feathery clouds”) and reminds of Brodsky’s other Swedish poem “Clouds” (“Облака”) written in 1989. In “Clouds” the lyrical subject admires the spectacular Baltic clouds whose reverse side can be seen by God only and names them “изванья существованья без рубежа” 330 (66), since these clouds’ unhindered transgression of the Soviet and Swedish borders aligns for the poet with the spiritual transcendence. 331 Hence, by deploying the metaphor of the clouds as the “bread of soul,” Brodsky at once establishes the lyrical mode of a confession and introduces the metaphysical dimension to the poem. The revelation that follows is at it were witnessed by God himself from above the magnificent Baltic clouds. 330 “The limpid / sculptures of limit-/ less genesis.” (Brodsky, “Clouds” 405). 331 It is the same Baltic clouds that in are said to bring the reflections of the European neon lights to isolated Leningrad, “as if they came here from a photograph” (Polukhina, Brodsky 144-146) – the exchange of the clouds between Russia and Europe, umimpeded by politics, is thus reciprocal. 228 As we move on from the first to the second quatrain of “Here I am again under this colorless sky...,” the poet’s multiple sensory faculties 332 become involved in the process of recognition and reconnection with the “native” scenery, as he is greeted by the cry of a vole, inhales the familiar smell of seaweed 333 , beholds the rocks which have not moved from their place half a century later: “Прошло полвека.” The imprecise “eye rhyme” “polveka-poliovka” (“half a century-vole”) likely points at Brodsky's tendency to identify rodents with time “gnawing” on humans and all the being. 334 It is thus the theme of time and specifically a cyclical return that shapes the semantics of the very first stanzas. It soon becomes clear that the countdown has started from the poet’s childhood years spent in the same ecological environment, only about a half thousand miles away. As Brodsky himself commented on the resemblance of the Swedish landscape to that of the Russian North, where he grew up: Sweden <…> Granite, moss, when you see it all, you see yourself. The continuation of the childhood, the youth. Yes, the Baltic. But in its pure form <…> This is where you are at home, right? For the person who grew up on the Karelian Isthmus, as it occurred with me, it is exactly like coming back home, and plus specifically back to childhood. Because in Sweden they keep many things that gradually disappear in the fatherland. <…> It resembles childhood, resembles some kind of 1940s, all sorts of little water buses, little ships and such. Resembles in detail, in the smallest particulars: the mushrooms are the same <…> The moss is the same, and the granite. You know from which direction the wind will blow and the mosquito will come (Brodsky and Vail 169-170). Perhaps, it is this treatment of the Swedish land as an extension of “home,” “childhood” and “youth” that underlies the metaphorical comparison of the unnamed isle where the action 332 As opposed to the deliberate repudiation of sensory engagement in the 1964 poem “New Stanzas to Augusta” characterstic of “penchant for ruptures”: “With all five of my senses / I shove off from the forest...” (60). 333 Note the similarity in the effect of inhaling the seaweed smell in Sweden and at the Venetian stazione, as shown in Watermark. 334 Cf.: “...and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice / rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece / of ripened memory...” (Brodsky, “A Part of Speech” 114). See also: N. Strizhevskaia “O semantike obraza myshi/krysy v poezii Brodskogo” in Pis’mena perspektivy: O poezii Iosifa Brodskogo (“On Semantics of the Image of a Mouse/Rat in Brodsky’s Poetry” in “Writngs of Perspective: On Poetry of Joseph Brodsky”), pp. 281-289. 229 takes place with a “Homer’s cut.” A series of geographical displacements grows, as the image of the Swedish island overlaps not only with the Leningrad precincts but also with one of the Greek islands. Given Brodsky’s long-time preoccupation with the Odyssean theme, it is highly likely that the classical prototype of the Swedish island is Ithaca shown as a dull, unremarkable sight, just like in earlier poems: “блеклый, в простую полоску.” Correspondingly, the persona must yet again identify himself with the paradigmatic Greek homecomer. The following two stanzas continue the poet’s exploration of his immediate surroundings. In the third quatrain he clearly posits the antithesis between the animate and inanimate nature: the immobility of the trees, as opposed to the pacing birds, becomes a pledge of the above-said unchangeability of this place after the poet’s half-a-century “absence.” Brodsky prepares the visual climax of the finale in the fourth quatrain by placing focus on the northern light that he hailed elsewhere, mainly in connection with Leningrad. For instance, in “A Guide to Renamed City” he wrote: “Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It’s the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light... a walker’s thoughts travel farther than his destination...” (89). It is precisely this “impassive, smooth, otherworldly” light that fills in the Swedish landscape in “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” The “sharpness” of sight that is activates demonstrates a quaint correlation between a fish swimming into the net and a depersonified local “alconaut” (a Russian slang for “alcoholic”) under the rain. The verse at once underscores the same surplus of water/time as in Holland – via the images of the ever-present sea and pouring shower – and a peculiar ability of the northern light to take one’s vision “further than [its] destination,” that is to reveal affinity between otherwise discrepant objects. In the long run, it is an equivalent affinity between Swedish and Russian nature that delineates the text’s whole design. 230 The concept of metaphorical rediscovery of one’s own home finds its ultimate expression in the poem’s conclusive stanza. In the cold light of the North the focus of both poet’s vision and memory sharpens to the point that his eye pupil drops a tear with which the poet metonimically “crouches to the native <...> mass” of rocks, as if to the native soil: “я припадаю к родной, ржавой, гранитной массе / серой каплей зрачка, вернувшейся восвояси” 335 (Brodsky, “Vot ia i snova...” 92). The phrase alludes to the expression “припадать к родной земле” (“fall, crouch to the native ground”), which is a fixed Russian collocation for paying respect to one’s native land and has powerful patriotic connotations. The theme of the approaching end and the need to reassess one’s standing in the world in its view thus lurks in the final quatrain. The tear that the subject sheds over the Swedish rocks is emphatically endowed with a gray color, which Brodsky associated with time just like water. 336 As the tear is directed “vosvoiasi,” that is literally “where it came from,” or homewards, the persona is finally experiencing both the spatial and the temporal comeback to the starting point of many preceding departures. The attendant changes of the self are represented by the mathematical operation of dividing one's own voice by timelessness. Seemingly, the metaphorical division resembles the previous acts of self-fragmentation typical of Brodsky. However, in denying himself a passive role of the quotient, the poet rather assumes the active function of the division sign, thus asserting himself as a maker of his relationship with his own voice and time. The stressed position of ia (“I”) in the opening syllable of the penultimate line supports and completes the statement of the poet’s agency with which the poem started. What happens is thus the same recognition of the self in what one beholds that guided the poet in both “In Italy” and “Holland is a flat country...” – as Brodsky stated in regard to Sweden: 335 “I crouch to the native, rusty granite mass by means of a pupil’s grey drop that returned where it came from.” 336 Cf.: “Think about all those wrinkles on the water, the folds… Especially when the water if a gray color, that is, the same color as time ought to be” (Volkov 192). Remarkably, in “Less Than One” the Neva river was also characterized as a “gray mirror” (5). 231 “когда на все это смотришь, то видишь себя” (Brodsky and Veil 169-170). The eye discerns the ultimate beauty in the Italian, Dutch and Swedish landscapes precisely because their veiled backdrop is Russian. It appears that water is largely connected with temporal imagery and to various degrees serves as a catalyst of such apperception in all the mentioned texts. When the intensity of recognition reaches a certain critical point, as in “In Italy” and “Here I am again under this colorless sky...,” the eye also tends to exude water itself as if in the attempt to merge with the global ocean of time. The tear is thus a significant marker of a return to the familiar environs. In the essay “The Condition We Call Exile” Brodsky would reframe this image of the poet crying at the encounter with his memory in his typical self-ironic fashion: “... a writer in exile is, by and large, a retrospective and retroactive being. <...> Like the false prophets of Dante’s Inferno, his head is forever turned backward and his tears, or saliva, are running down between his shoulder blades” (27). It is this retrospective mechanism, Brodsky continues, that is embedded in the consciousness of the displaced author and, surprisingly, serves the same purpose of security that the traveling eye is seeking in the Italian, Dutch and Swedish scenery: ...the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienced; and the species’ capacity to revert, to run backward – especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well – is extremely strong in all of us, quite irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built into us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don’t do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present – for, in other words, slowing down a bit the passage of time. See the fatal exclamation of Goethe’s Faust (Brodsky, “The Condition We Call Exile” 29). It is this wishful retardation of the course of time, an attempt of making a moment “not pass away” that moulds the complex double- and triple-exposed images of Petersburg/Venice/Milan, the Baltic and the Northern Seas, the Swedish and the Russian countrysides in the above-discussed poems. The mind’s necessity to revisit the past when it finds 232 itself in the new environment, that is to apperceive the new experience, enables the visions that combine many locales at once. In the essay “A Place as Good as Any” Brodsky even ventured to describe a “composite city” (38) that fuses all visited destinations in the traveler’s mind and compared it to a gigantic octopus that feeds on our consiousness and grows a new tentacle with every journey. This marine monster reflects the complexity of the displaced poet’s nostalgia that makes use of the overlay of multiple poetic motifs and images in an attempt to reconnect to the places and the “incarnations” of the self that were once lost (35-36). In this way, in such late travel poems as “In Italy,” “Holland is a flat country...”, “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” the quest for homecoming, that original gravitational force that resists the pull of wanderlust, seems to outweigh the typical Brodskian “penchant for ruptures,” at least in part. Not every trip leads to separation and alienation – on the contrary, the closer the displaced traveler approaches the end of journey of life, the more his mind and memory start redirecting him towards the fading image of now inaccessible home in Saint Petersburg. This tendency intensifies in the locations resembling homeland, located predominantly at the “edge of the world” by the sea, like the poet’s own “native city.” At the encounter with these places the “poetics of withdrawal” typical of the pre-emigration poetry recedes into the background, as the Odyssean self-estrangement (that of the “observer”) yields to the conscious self-affirming agency (that of the “sufferer”), and the position of non-return gives place to the acceptance of the foreign scenery as the closest thing to his native land available to the traveling persona. The encounter with this scenery generates the feeling akin to the security of nostos that the poet was deprived of upon his displacement: by anchoring his senses in the recognizable signifiers of the native landscape, as it is captured in his memory, the “unhomely” traveler feels himself “as if he is at home” on foreign land. Yet again, these transformations 233 serve to confirm that travel has an immense potential to shift a poet’s self-perception and to reframe their understanding of where they belong in this world. 234 Chapter 3 “The Multitude of Eyes”: Metarealism of Vision in Olga Sedakova’s “The Chinese Journey” Ol’ga Sedakova remains one of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary Russian literature. The problem lies in multivalence of her poetry which embraces simplicity and complexity, abstraction and specificity, lucidity and obscurity, and detachment and engagement. The reader is left feeling that each separate poem has a false bottom, that every phenomenon described has layers upon layers that lie hidden the surface. 337 The genesis of this feeling lies in Sedakova’s vision of the world. In terms suggested by Mikhail Epstein, Sedakova’s way of seeing is “metarealistic” and the primary device of her verse is “metabola,” This trope, according to Epstein, conveys interconnections between phenonema without recognizing any discrepancy between reality and whatever one my see as its counterparts: that which is “true” and that which is “illusory,” that which is portrayed “directly” and that which is portrayed “figuratively.” In short, the metabola produces multidemensional images that reveal adjacent equivalent worlds. Further, the existence of multiple realities implies “the absence of the lyrical hero, who is replaced – for good or ill – with a sum of visions, a geometrical spot of points of view equidistant from the “I” or, which is the same, expanding it to “super-I” consisting of multitude of eyes” (Epstein 124). Given this tendency to multi-faceted contemplation of diverse realities, what poetic “device” could be more productive than travel, with its multiple yet fleeting locations and 337 For Sedakova, however, such intricacy is not a way to confuse the readers. More likely, by writing and reading she and her readership join their efforts in comprehending the meaning of her texts, whereas an author is no superior to a reader in his means of obtaining knowledge. According to Sedakova’s own words: “It seems to me that Elliott said somewhere: I will conceive this thought when I utter it. When it is uttered, it will become clear to me… Anyways, it is not the case when one talks in riddles. [You should] say exactly as much as you understand at the moment” (OS). 235 cultural impressions? When a person is in the process of traveling, the world naturally breaks down into myriad smaller worlds that can be taken in from different angles. Perhaps, it is because of this transformative potential of traveling that for Sedakova a literary form of travelogue appears to be “a genre granting [its author] with the amazingly new freedom. The journey justifies everything – certain ease, carelessness, the [story]lines that were begun and abandoned” (OS 338 ). 339 Commenting on her recent book in prose Tri puteshestviia (Three Journeys) Sedakova emphasizes the importance of travel in her works in the context of the paradoxically concrete ephemerality and the specific modes of involvement and perception of the traveling narrator. The narrator is not the protagonist of the story… Of course, there are a lot of things happening to him too – but happening, as one perceptive critic has noticed, the same way things happen to [Lewis] Carroll’s Alice. Alice will wake up, and the figures of her dream will be carried away by the wind like a pack of cards. Nothing fatal has happened. A dream and a journey are similar spheres of being 340 (“Novaia kniga”). In a personal interview with me, Sedakova also discusses the time metamorphoses that a journey inevitably involves: Travel is a much lighter time, because in travel you have way less connections, responsibilities than in a routine life. It is a festive mood, even if it is a business trip. In travel something happens with time too, because when you visit Italy or Africa for the first time, the new clock starts ticking. Here, in Rome, let us say, my life is only beginning. It is a constant freshness of perception. 338 All citations from the personal interview with Olga Sedakova on June 29, 2016, will be marked “OS.” Interview translations are my own. 339 Although in the cited fragment Olga Sedakova means specifically her experience with travelogues in prose, it would be fair to assume that the liberating force of travel writing spreads onto her poetic texts as well. 340 Translation mine. 236 Dreams and time shifts are only a few of the metarealistic dimensions in which Sedakova’s visions flow together and find their way out into poetry. But what are the others? How is it that she simultaneously envisions multiple worlds from various points of view? This essay will examine the multi-faceted subjective vision in Sedakova’s poetic world in her poetic cycle from 1986, “The Chinese Journey” 341 . The cycle represents nothing less than the poetic “story” of a contemplative existential journey that takes place in China, Russia, the depths of self, and the whole universe. As such, it likely holds the key to a major portion of Sedakova’s oeuvre. Between Self and the Others In his book A Poetics of Composition, Boris Uspensky discusses the ways diverse visual perspectives operate, interconnect and interpenetrate in a work of literature. In short, a multiplicity of visual positions is formed by the intricate interweaving of reincarnations and reidentifications of an author and his characters. In addition, Uspensky traces the way this process is reflected within a text in terms of ideology, phraseology, time, spatial relations, and psychology. In an assertion reminiscent of Bakhtin, Uspensky states that the process starts with the overlap of the worldviews of the author and his heroes visible in the textual material (8-11). Sedakova’s poetry amplifies this ambiguity of identity and point of view to an extreme degree, as noted by Stephanie Sandler in “Thinking self in the poetry of Olga Sedakova.” The line between an author and a lyrical subject in a first-person narrative of a poetic text is already tenuous, but in Sedakova’s “The Chinese Journey,” this line becomes even less distinct as the poet’s voice expresses points of view that continually shift. The use of pronouns and verbs throughout the cycle is indicative in this sense. Sedakova 341 Translation mine. The alternative translation “The Chinese Travelogue” is not used here as it fails to express polysemy of the title. 237 starts with the conventional use of the first person singular pronouns and verb forms implying the existence of a standard first-person persona on a journey, as seen in the lines: “И меня удивило” 342 (“Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 327), “Деревья мои старые” 343 (329), “Только увижу / путника… шла бы я за ним, плача” 344 (332), “в тысяче лиц я узнаю” 345 (337) and the like. In addition, however, she sporadically changes the standpoint by switching from first person singular forms to first person plural pronouns and verbs. It is significant that these do not necessarily indicate a specific referent, for example: “ибо только наша щедрость / встретит нас за гробом” 346 (327) , “Не довольно ли мы бродили, / чтобы наконец свернуть / на единственно милый / … путь?” 347 (329) and “По белому пути … мы уйдем когда-то” 348 (341). 349 By becoming an indefinite “we,” the traveler seems to proliferate to encompass all travelers of all times. Moreover, if we read the image of a travel route as a metaphor for a life’s path – a central concept of the cycle – the “we” may be intuitively deciphered as a “humankind” on its way from birth to death and further to the unknown. Thus, paradoxically the subject is both undetermined and manifold or universal. Looking at particular instances of shifts in meaning reflected in the use of pronouns, for example in the poem “Neuzheli i my, kak vse…” (“Will we really part...”) one might say that the plural subject’s identity is indeed emphatically vague and, because of that, multivalent: 342 “I was surprised by...” All the English translations are quoted from Olga Sedakova “The Chinese Travelogue” translated by Richard McKane. 343 “My old trees.” 344 “I shall only see / the pilgrim… I would walk after him in tears.” 345 “I recognize in a thousand faces.” 346 “For it is only our generosity / that will meet us beyond the grave.” 347 “Have we not wandered enough / to finally turn off / onto the only, dearest… road.” 348 “On the white road / …we will / go too one day.” 349 The same peculiarity might be noticed in relation to the third person objects in Sedakova’s text. Consider the use of the pronouns ego (“its”) and ono (“it”) in the epigraph to “The Chinese Journey” from Lao Tzu: “Если притупить его проницательность, освободить его от хаотичность, умерить его блеск, / уподобить его пылинке, то оно будет казаться ясно существующим” (“If you could dull its perspicuity, free it from chaos, limit its gleam, / liken it to a grain of dust, then it would seem to exist clearly”)). The object stays completely indefinite without taking into account the reference to the context in Lao Tzu’s Tao The Ching. 238 Неужели и мы, как все, как все расстанемся? Знающие кое-что о страсти быстрее конца, знающие кое-что о мире меньше гроша – пусть берут, кому нужен, – знающие, что эта раковина – без жемчужин, что нет ни единой спички, свечки, плошки, кроме огня восхищенья, знающие, откуда приходят звучанье и свеченье, – неужели мы расстанемся, как простые невежды? Не меньше, чем ивы вырастать у воды, не меньше, чем воды следовать за магнитом звезды, чем пьяный Ли Бо заглядывать в желтое, как луна, вино и чем камень опускаться на дно, любящие быть вместе – неужели мы расстанемся, как простые скупцы и грубияны? 350 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 339). The we-subject appears here intentionally uncontextualized. Nowhere in the poem is the pronoun “we” circumscribed or defined. All the reader knows about the subjects is that they are together but about to part, and that the thought is unfathomable for the speaker. It is logical then that in his article “Neuzheli..?” Alexander Zholkovsky suggests defining the identity of the poem’s subjects as a female character and her beloved. This assumption is supported by the poem’s mention of “[those] loving to be together” and “knowing something about passion swifter than the end,” the description suggesting a certain romantic feeling. However, their 350 “Will we really part, / part like everyone else? / Knowing something / about passion / swifter than the end, / about the world smaller than a penny – / let they who need it take it – / knowing that / this shell has no pearls, / that there is not a single match, candle or lampion / only the fire of rapture, / knowing from where / sonorousness and luminescence come. / Will we really part, like simple ignoramuses? / No less than the willow growing by the waterside, / no less than the water / follows the magnet of the star, / than drunk Li Po looking / into the wine, yellow as the moon / and than a stone sinks to the bottom: / loving to be together... / Will we really part like simple misers / and boors.” 239 characteristic features extend further, shedding new light on who they are. They are able to see a world “smaller than a penny,”, know the “fire of rapture” and are opposed to “ignoramuses” and “misers and boors.” This broadens the identities of the lovers into the role of chosen ones, those who can perceive the truth of the world even in its tiniest manifestations 351 and recognize their like in the crowd. It also outweighs the motif of love as such and make it possible to regard the characters as artists, philosophers or, more broadly, contemplators of truth. The point is that the “unnamedness” of the subjects allows for understatement. This then results in a diversity of potential interpretations of the subjects’ positions without the possibility – or necessity – of choosing “the right one.” Occasionally a first-person persona proceeds to identify herself with a seemingly specific third-person character, as in the “Tol’ko uvizhu...” (“I shall only see...”), and in this case their joint identity is more than a simple combination of their “I’s”: Только увижу путника в одежде светлой, белой – что нам делать, куда деваться? Только увижу белую одежду, старые плечи - лучше б глаза мои были камнем, сердце – водою. Только увижу что бывает с человеком – шла бы я за ним, плача: сколько он идет, и я бы шла, шагала таким же не спорящим шагом 352 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 332). 351 As Sedakova comments on the pecularities of her vision in “The Chinese Journey,” “the twinkle of something small” is constantly present in her cycle. “[Those] knowing… about a world smaller than a penny” apparently are the contemplators who “want to see something very very small, but what contains everything… The most important thing is very very small” (OS). In this sense, they definitely are able to master the truth unknown to the others. 352 “I shall only see / the pilgrim in his bright white raiment, / what can we do, where can we go? / I shall only see the white raiment, the old shoulders. / It would be better if my eyes were stone / and my heart water! / I shall only 240 Unlike most poems in the cycle, this one involves a defined character, an old traveler in white clothes. The authorial persona follows the old traveler along the road. Although the narration proceeds in first person forms, it nonetheless incorporates the traveler’s voice as well. The linguistic device that allows for such a multiplicity of the viewpoints is a type of indirect discourse introduced with no quotation marks or verbs denoting utterance: “что нам делать, куда деваться?” 353 This occurs without any markers indicating a change of speaker, and results in a feeling that both travelers merge in a single whole and utter the question together. As Uspensky puts it, “[such cases] combine speeches belonging to two different authors: to the speaker himself, and to the person about whom he speaks. In other words, we can observe in the author’s speech a shifting of point of view” (35). Moreover, another layer of meaning is added to this construction if we think about the pronoun nam (“we, us”) as a signifier of all the humanity, as in the examples mentioned above. Ultimately, there is a substantiation to this in the final stanza when the traveler, the author and their combined “I’s” all blend into the generalized “man”: “Только увижу/ что бывает с человеком – / шла бы я за ним плача…” 354 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 332). Thus, following the old man on the road the author seems to pick up the diverse identities left after him on the way. She becomes their ghostly counterpart, their shade, being separate and one with all of them. Even though she is behind them, just catching up, she still marches in step: “…и я бы шла, шагала / таким же не спорящим шагом.” 355 In this way, a single text not only doubles, but triples the identities of the lyrical subject and at the same time unites them, and lifts the authorial statement to a universal scale. see / what happens to a man – / I would walk after him in tears. / I would walk as far as he did, / with an unhurried pace.” 353 “What can we do, where can we go?” 354 “I shall only see / what happens to a man – / I would walk after him in tears.” 355 “I would walk as far as he did, / with an unhurried pace.” 241 While the shift of human points of view is more or less natural and credible, the exchange of identities between the author and inanimate objects in Sedakova’s text is much more striking. As noted before by Medvedeva (173-174), in the multi-dimensional poetic world of “The Chinese Journey” the landscape easily reveals its animacy. Throughout the Chinese journey the stars, sun, trees and even houses demonstrate human qualities, namely the ability to speak and listen. Sedakova herself acknowledges that for her animacy of the natural surroundings is a matter of course: The poets generally talk to the world and listen to it more than the people of other professions. For me it is absolutely natural, and when I water the garden, for instance, I don’t have auditory hallucinations, but I communicate with every plant I water and cut. I hear its response, and I am not even speaking of cats or other animals and birds… Communication exists, and I cannot say they are inanimate (OS). In “The Chinese Journey” their animacy, however, can only be transmitted through the mediation of the author. This is when her “I” multiplies again to make the communication possible.By way of example, in the “Prud govorit...” (“The pond speaks…”) the central figure provided with first person speech is the pond: Пруд говорит: были бы у меня руки и голос, как бы я любил тебя, как лелеял. Люди, знаешь, жадны и всегда болеют и рвут чужую одежду себе на повязки. Мне же ничего не нужно: ведь нежность – это выздоровленье. Положил бы я тебе руки на колени, как комнатная зверушка, и спускался сверху голосом как небо 356 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 328). 356 “The pond speaks: / if I had hands and voice, / how I would love and cherish you. / The people, you know, are greedy and always sick / and tear other’s clothes / for bandages for themselves. / I need nothing: / tenderness means getting healthy again. / Like a tame wild animal / I would put my hands on your lap / and descend from above / as 242 By making the pond vocal, here Sedakova truly fulfills what she conceived as an “attempt to adopt a vision that the Taoist writers always write about, that is looking passively at most. Not to ferret the object out, but to look with the empty eyes and wait until one of them will start talking” (OS). Indeed, having been an active agent and the speaker in the preceding poem, in “The pond speaks…” the lyrical subject recedes into the background, gives way to the speaking pond and becomes just a listener, an addressee of the pond’s message. Technically, this transformation is conducted by means of a direct speech metaphorically ascribed to the pond after a short introduction: “Пруд говорит…” 357 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 328). But regardless of the seeming passivity of the poet, on a closer look her presence remains implicit in the text. As was the case in a slightly different context in the previous poem, the pond’s direct speech is transcribed with no quotation marks, as if the text were simply a continuation of authorial speech – an indicator that the perspectives of the author and the pond intermingle. Additionally, the very fact that Sedakova endows an inanimate thing with the gift of speech while stating its voicelessness – “был… бы у меня… голос” 358 – tells the reader that the pond’s remark is actually a combination of voices of the author and the nature. The author has not disappeared from the text. Rather, she has hidden there between the lines with her doubled identity. On the one hand, she shares her “I” with the pond to make it speak. On the other hand, she adopts the viewpoint of the pond, directing its words toward herself as a listener. As in the other cases, the blurriness of viewpoints creates a sense of detachment from any particular voice, thereby providing the necessary conditions for a universally significant authorial claim. The contrast between the apparent inanimacy of nature and its humanly kind the sky, voice-like.” 357 “The pond speaks…” 358 “If I had… a voice...” 243 pronouncements only underscores this universality. Indeed, the very meaning of the pond’s words in “The pond speaks...” consists in a simple idea that love and tenderness are an irrefutable counterbalance to the world’s greediness and selfishness. In “Kryshi, podniatye ppo kraiam...” (“The roofs are raised at the edges...”), words are put into the “mouths” of pagodas’ rooftops as a warm personal greeting: “Что вы? неужели? рад сердечно!” 359 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 334). In “Padaia, ne padaiut…” (“They fall, though they don’t fall...”) trees are treated as the only appropriate communicators of words of love normally uttered by people: “Деревья, слово люблю только вам подходит” 360 (329). Because they are divided among different identities, these utterances take on the value of the highest truth applicable to anything and anyone in the world. All these examples reveal how easily Sedakova’s authorial speech transfers from a subject to an object and back again. “There were no intentionally designed devices here. It is a very common perception for me, when you look at objects or a person and stop seeing him from the outside, and begin to look from his standpoint,” she says (OS). Hence, it is not only her character who is speaking or listening, it is all the objects and beings around her. Switching between the “I’s” is the way both animate and inanimate objects in her world gain their voices. In most cases, it is also necessary to put human significance into their words to make them speak. Once this is accomplished, it is difficult to draw a distinction between the voices of the poet and the objects in the poem. Voices are undefined, yet joined and mutually identified at the same time, especially because they speak with the voice of universal order. Between China and Russia 359 “What do you mean? Really? I’m happy to the / bottom of my heart!” 360 “Trees: for you alone the word "I love" is worthy.” 244 Sedakova creates the same uncertainty and multivalency in the context of space and time. Interpreting Sedakova's cycle in terms of space, an attentive reader would be puzzled beginning with the title, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” (“The Chinese Journey”). A title of this type typically establishes the location of the action described in the poetic text. However, the use of the adjective “kitaiskoe” (“Chinese”) immediately raises the question: why is it “The Chinese Journey,” rather than the more definite formulation “The Journey to China,” following Radishchev’s Putshestvie iz Sankt-Peterburga v Moskvu (A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow) and Pushkin’s Pusteshestvie v Arzrum (A Journey to Arzrum)? What is Sedakova’s purpose in using “Chinese” as an adjective here, as opposed to the prepositional phrase “to China?” I will argue that the Sedakova uses the adjective in order to incorporate all the possible polysemy of collocation. To the ear of a Russian speaker, “китайское” could equally mean “to China,” “within China” or “in a Chinese manner – à la chinoise.” The latter is the simplest way of interpreting Sedakova’s work, treating it as a refined and decorative piece of Chinoiserie that deploys extravagant imagery in the manner of Nikolay Gumilev’s “Farforovyi pavil’on” (“Porcelain Pavillion”). Such a reading would, of course, be superficial because Sedakova plays on a whole spectrum of meanings illuminating not only the subject’s identity in the context of a journey, but also her place in textual time and space, as well as her relation to the Chinese thought and culture. As the author herself identified the vast variety of possible meanings behind the title: “Least of all I meant travel to China here. It is a journey within China and as if in a Chinese manner. Around China and around conceptual China, to that effect. Though, of course, I did not want any stylization with that. The main inspiring image for me certainly were the works of the classic Chinese painting” (OS; emph. mine). Not only the interest in the Chinese art, but quite specific biographical events were likely to provide the basis for “The Chinese Journey.” It is frequently noted that Sedakova wrote her 245 cycle based on the impressions of her childhood in China, where she spent a year at the age of 6 while her father worked as a military advisor in Beijing, and perhaps based just as much on a nostalgic re-creation of that time. It is in China where she first went to school, a school for Soviet children. As a matter of fact, Sedakova recalls that in Beijing she experienced life “in an isolated Soviet world, not an embassy, but a place where all the officials lived together and for the most part did not go beyond the wall. So we were surrounded by the second Wall of China” (OS). The occasional trips beyond the limits of the wall must have triggered the future poet’s insatiable interest in her Chinese environs. The fact that Sedakova was six years old at that time is even more remarkable, as, according to Piaget and Weil, this age corresponds with the phase in psychological development when the child’s imagination and the creative activity fulfill the leading function, a strong empathic ability forms, and the first idea of self-consciousness emerges. It is also the time when a person acquires the first fragmentary knowledge of ethnic identity (561-578). It is likely that for Sedakova, the journey to and from China became a test or experiment related to a double national and cultural identification at this crucial stage of development. Sedakova’s budding comprehension what it meant to be Russian was surely underscored and complemented by her fascination with the unfamiliar, the unknown, “the Chinese,” as a colorful, exotic force that nurtured her imagination and welcomed her esthetically as her new home. This feeling of being at home is probably the reason why recalling the time she spent in Beijing Sedakova even refers to China as her native land: Actually, this memory [of China] is almost objectless. Most of my memories are about that atmosphere, the sky, and all such things, not about events or specific landscapes. There remains a profound feeling of motherland of a kind, since the childhood years always stay deeply with you. Therefore, whenever I see something authentically Chinese, I quiver – that is the message from there (OS). 246 As she recollects her later encounters with the Chinese way of life, Sedakova elaborates: “In the mature years, I first saw the Chinese things in Chinatown in America. Naturally, these were all the archaic forms; probably, you cannot see anything like that in China itself by now. I felt like everything inside of me shook: here it is, my dear [rodnoe]. That was very strange” (OS). The use of the very specific Russian words rodina (“motherland”) and its cognate rodnoe (“dear”) in these statements testifies that in the course of Sedakova’s personal becoming China must have acquired a special status of “a second motherland.” On the other hand, there is no denying the fact that the poet remains Russian by birth, and the Chinese mindset and culture never become fully approachable for her. Although it has always been “something beloved and familiar,” Sedakova admits to be “clearly acknowledging that there is much [in China] you do not know and do not even attempt to get to know. That would be curiosity… That is why I never studied China, as the sinologists would do” (OS). It is this complex attitude to China that creates ambivalence of the poet’s national position in “The Chinese Journey.” Unlike Said’s brand of Orientalism, which emphasizes “one’s own” (European) versus “the other” (Oriental), Sedakova’s feelings of “one’s own” (Russian) and “the other” (Chinese) intermix and place the poet in a state in which she represents both “the Russian” and “the Chinese” at the same time. And though the lyrical “I” speaks from the posture of an adult nostalgically looking back at places she has been, her voice is still tinged with this childlike doubleness of national belonging. 361 The positions of a native and a foreigner mingle already in the very first poem of the collection, “I menia udivilo…” (“I was surprised by...”): 361 The fact that “The Chinese Journey” engages the childlike perception of the world was confirmed by Olga Sedakova in the interview: “Sure [it is China seen by Olga Sedakova the child], there even emerges the child’s voice: “Как ребенок ребенку, / умирая от собственной смелости, / сообщает…,” meaning the poem “Lodka letit...” (“The boat flies...”) (OS). 247 И меня удивило, как спокойны воды, как знакомо небо, как медленно плывет джонка в каменных берегах. Родина! вскрикнуло сердце при виде ивы: такие ивы в Китае, смывающие свой овал с великой охотой… 362 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 327). In A Poetics of Composition, Uspensky notes that the shift in authorial viewpoint is especially apparent at the phraseological level when calling the same objects different names: “A distinction between several points of view may be clearly shown when different forms of address (representing different points of view) collide in a single sentence” (22-23). This is exactly what happens in these lines with the poet’s exclamation “Rodina!” (“Motherland!” 363 ) in relation to China. The reader wonders if the poet’s point of view is situated outside or inside her Chinese environs. On first reading, it appears that the exclamation refers to China and points to the poet’s immersion in the Chinese setting. However, the word rodina is so powerfully charged with associations with Russia, that getting rid of that connection seems impossible. And indeed, the following line distances us from the “warm” motherland image by calling the same land “China” with detachment, now suggesting that the poet’s point of view has shifted to the mental and cultural space of Russia. The demonstrative pronoun “such” indicates that there might exist the other land or reality where the willow-trees are “just like” the Chinese, namely, Russia. Likewise, the poet’s astonishment in the statement “how familiar the sky is” could also suggest a link to Russia. In such a way, the image of Russia “gleams” through the lines of the poem about China. 362 “I was surprised by / how calm the waters were, / how familiar the sky was / and how slowly the junk sailed past the rocky banks. / My home country! my heart screamed when I saw / the willows: / those willows in China are the same, / washing clean their oval shapes at will, / for it is only our generosity / that will meet us beyond the grave.” 363 Translation mine. 248 But it is also there simply inasmuch as the cycle was written in Russia, at the poet’s family estate in the village of Azarovka, Tula region, and for Sedakova “every poem is to some extent a portrait of the place [where it was composed]” however “far away [this portrait] is left out of the immediate content of the poetry” (“Zametki” 47). That is why in the personal conversation Sedakova mentions that the “landscapes [of “The Chinese Journey”] are rather of Azarovka, these very willow-trees” (OS). For the same reason she shares her admiration for the Chinese painting hanging on the wall of her terrace, as the image perfectly reproduces the look of Azarovka hills and forest facing her house. That is, Azarovka is present in the Chinese scenery of the cycle, as much as the Chinese painting mirrors the scenery of the actual Azarovka. As in real life so in poetry, the two landscapes merge together. They are situated both in Russia and in China, and the lyrical subject of “The Chinese Journey” finds herself in two places at the same time. In “I menia udivilo…” is Sedakova describing Russian willows that remind her of China, or Chinese willows that remind her of Russia? Is it the Chinese sky that brings “the familiar” Russian one to mind, while the strong nationally-tied image of a floating junk contrasts this reminiscence? All the versions are possible. All the realities penetrate into each other and have an equal right to exist in Sedakova’s text. Visions of China as a home and a travel destination vary throughout the cycle. The complexities of multiple points of view related to “one’s own” that incorporates “otherness” (or related to “other” that incorporates “one’s own-ness”) are particularly evident in “They don’t fall, though they fall…”, “S nezhnost’iu i glubinoi…” (“With tenderness and depth...”), “The roofs are raised at the edges…”, “Neschasten...” (“Unhappy...”). In “They don’t fall, though they fall…” the poet addresses trees possesively as “my old trees” (329), in “With tenderness and depth...” she calls the setting sun “our homely light” (“Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 337). In “The roofs are raised at the edges…,” on the one hand, the poet is welcomed by the rooftops as a 249 guest: “Что вы? неужели? рад сердечно!” 364 (334), while in “They don’t fall, though they fall…,” on the other hand, she treats the Chinese trees as a frequent visitor: “Сколько раз мы виделись, / а каждый раз, как первый….” 365 (329) Similarly, the expression: “Впрочем, в Китае никто не болеет” 366 (334) creates the sense of an observation taken from travel notes or a guidebook written by a curious and attentive foreigner. At the same time, the same person calls the Chinese sky “милое небо над милой землей” 367 (335), suggesting an extremely close, possibly immersive position in Chinese space and culture. The ambiguity of the spatial position of subject permeates the text of the cycle. The perception of China as a homeland is mingled with the perspective of a foreigner who examines, learns, describes the difference of the “other,” and is occasionally surprised. Even more important, the issue of national identity is not just doubled, but ultimately tripled as Sedakova generalizes China into a land of heavenly joy and peace for all humankind denoted by the word “chelovek” (“a man”). In the poem “The roofs are raised at the edges…,” she describes a landscape of dry shores, silver yellowish rivers and “the script” of the bushes as “все, что мило видеть человеку” (“everything dear to man”) (334). Meanwhile, as in case with shift of the subjects, by multiplying the national affiliations the very issue of national identity is erased. Wherever the traveler belongs to, he is welcome to dissolve in the healing scenery of the blissful land. As an instance of further generalization, in the poem “They don’t fall, though they fall…” the Chinese journey aggregates the life journey becoming “the only dearest one” for the all-embracing “we,” that is the humankind: “Не довольно ли мы бродили, / чтобы наконец свернуть / на единственно милый, / никому не обидный, / не видный / путь?” 368 (329). The 364 “What do you mean? Really? I’m happy to the / bottom of my heart!” 365 “How often have we seen each other, / but each time like the first…” 366 “However, no one is sick in China.” 367 “The dear sky over the dear earth.” 368 “Have we not wandered enough / to finally turn off / onto the only, dearest, /invisible road, / that offends no one?” 250 spatially specific trip through China merges with the path of kindness and harmlessness of a human, thus canceling out any geographical identification of the route. Regardless of the national identity of the traveler, a similar spatial ambiguity can be traced in Sedakova’s transference from one spot to another within the world she is exploring. As Uspensky points out, normally the spatial authorial perspective in a work of literature is equivalent to that of the linear perspective in painting. The world is observed from the point of view of the person who describes it, and the spatial characteristics of the described events are attached to the position of the describing subject (A Poetics of Composition 57). This classical situation is reproduced in some poems of “The Chinese Journey.” The poet’s location is pinned to the very point in space where her characters are, as in the poem “I shall only see…” already quoted above, for instance. Here, indeed the poet follows the wanderer in the white clothes, becomes his fellow-traveler and shares his spatial position for the most part of the poem. However, in contrast to the principle articulated by Uspensky, the traveler’s perspective in “The Chinese Journey” is often not attached to the location of the poet or lyrical subjects. Uspensky calls this discrepancy “spatial indefiniteness,” when the concrete definition of spatial position or proportions becomes irrelevant for the author (A Poetics of Composition 59, 80). One might say that the poet transcends the conditional character of her spatial whereabouts as the direction of her gaze loses connection with the only possible realistic location of her physical body. She is rather endowed with a gift of continuously seeing and perceiving things spatially remote from herself and each other. It feels as if the author has left her body and become “a floating eye,” or to use a contemporary example, a camera on a drone. To illustrate, in some situations the viewpoint of the subject might slip from one object to another reproducing “the sequential survey” resembling the camera motion in the cinematic narration (Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition 60-62). The striking instance is the fragment of 251 “They don’t fall, though they fall…”, a description of rush of the author’s thrilled heart over the rapidly changing Chinese landscape: Сколько раз мы виделись, а каждый раз, как первый, задыхается, бегом бежит сердце с совершенно пустой котомкой по стволу, по холмам и оврагам веток в длинные, в широкие глаза храмов, к зеркалу в алтаре, на зеленый пол 369 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 329). The scenes flash by and include places which cannot be reached or scaled with ease by the physical body of the traveler, such as the tree’s trunk or the “gullies of branches”. Instead of the body, it is the heart that experiences the ecstasy of encounter with the scenery through mediation of the vision. As we will see later in discussion of the Orthodox Hesychastic perspective, the heart as if “breaks” causing the shift of perception. The motion of glance replaces the motion of body, speeds up the displacement in space and grants the author with the fantastic ability to rapidly cover the view that cannot be contemplated from the single standpoint at once. Hence, the deformations of the objects on her way, another perceptional feature of a moving observer noted by Uspensky (A Poetics of Composition 62). The branches bend fusing together the images of the woods and the ravines. The “eyes of the churches”, that is the windows, become simultaneously “long” and “broad”, a clear instance of spatial disproportion. At other times the traveler’s viewpoint completely loses touch with her real physical motion and even with her visual scope. It becomes entirely independent in its motion. Consider the poem “Tam, na gore...” (“There, on the hill…”): 369 “How often have we seen each other, / but each time like the first / my breathless heart races / with a completely empty bag / along the trunk, over the hills and gullies of branches / to the long, broad eyes of the churches / to the mirror on the altar / on the green floor.” 252 Там, на горе, у которой в коленях последняя хижина, а выше никто не хаживал; лба которой не видывали из-за туч и не скажут, хмур ли он, весел, - кто-то бывает и не бывает, есть и не есть 370 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 330). The mountain is completely inaccessible for mortals, a fact underlined by the negative constructions: “выше никто не хаживал” 371 , “лба которой не видывали…” From this also follows its incomprehensibility: “и не скажут: хмур ли он, весел” 372 (“and one can’t tell if it’s glum or happy”) – no judgements can be made about what cannot be seen. But the author is given a superpower of watching the place hidden from the sight of any human. Her moving eye sequentially embraces the mountain from its “lap”, the middle slope with the last cabins on it, to its “forehead”, the inaccessible top where she happens to find the unknown mysterious “somebody”. With her look she enters an absolutely secret spatial domain, although her actual physical whereabouts remains indefinite. Actually, in this poem the spatial indeterminacy reaches its absolute, as the reader loses track of the poet’s position in space. But instead we get a concept of an all-seeing author, a counterpart of Creator observing the world from above. This idea of the all-embracing authorial vision is further amplified in the text as more and more abstract categories are metaphorically brought into the text. In the final poem of the cycle “Pokhvalim nashu zemliu…” (“Let us praise our earth...”) the poet generalizes her spatial standpoint as follows: 370 “There, on the hill / on whose lap / where the last hut stands / and no one ever ventures higher: / whose forehead cannot be seen behind the clouds / and one can’t tell if it’s glum or happy – / someone comes and doesn’t come, to be and not to: / the size of a swallow’s eye, / of a crumb of dry bread, / of a ladder on a butterfly’s wings, / of a ladder throw n down from the sky, / of a ladder, wliich no one wants to climb, / tinier than anything a bee can see and than the word is.” 371 “No one ever ventures higher.” 372 “Whose forehead cannot be seen.” 253 Похвалим нашу землю, похвалим луну на воде, то, что ни с кем и со всеми, что нигде и везде – величиной с око ласточки, с крошку сухого хлеба с лестницу на крыльях бабочки, с лестницу, кинутую с неба 373 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 345). The line “что нигде и везде” (“which is… everywhere and nowhere”) may be taken as a quintessential formula defining the author’s treatment of space throughout the cycle. Just as the subjective or national identities are obliterated by their multiplication, the poet’s spatial ubiquity turns into “nowhere”. Yet, just as the multiplicity of the points of view conveys the universal nature of her claims, the poet is spatially “everywhere”. The paradox of being “everywhere and nowhere” makes the poet supernaturally omnipresent and gives her the unique artistic power of permeating the diverse spatial dimensions of her poetic world. Between Memory, Reality, and Dream The web of ambiguities becomes even more tangled when readers ask themselves where on the time axis the action takes place. This issue relates to the whole mode of narration: by being inconsistent in the use of the verb tenses Sedakova makes the subject’s location purposely vague: is the subject physically present in China, or is the cycle a nostalgic recreation in the poet’s mind, a play of imagination, or even foreshadowing of the certain events to come. 373 “Let us praise our earth, / let us give praise to the moon on the water, / that which is with no one and with everyone, / everywhere and nowhere – / the size of a swallow’s eye / of a crumb of dry bread, / of a ladder on a butterfly’s wings, / of a ladder thrown down from the sky.” 254 In other words, the poet travels as if in the verbal prototype of a time machine, moving not only between past, present, and future, but also with occasional detours into the conditional or hypothetical. And to make things even more complex, these options sometimes overlap. The verbal modality that prevails in the fifteen poems is the present tense. The most obvious interpretation is that the greater part of events in the cycle is happening here and now, before the eyes of the poet and reader. This time pattern is found in abundance in the collection, for instance in the poems “Znaete li vy...” (“Do you know…”), “The roofs are raised at the edges…,” “Fleite otvechaet fleita...” (“Flute answers flute….”) or in the above-mentioned “They don’t fall, though they fall…:” Падая, не падают, окунаются в воду и не мокнут длинные рукава деревьев… 374 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 329). The present tense here is equivalent to the present continuous in English. It is highly descriptive and observational and reveals the contemplator in the speaker. Time flows gently, as if it slows down to focus the poet’s gaze on the undramatic process of an action. The current moment is captured in its continuity and conveyed with the accuracy of a movie camera. This results in a strong sense of the reader’s presence and involvement in the text: the reader joins the poet in studying the Chinese scenery along her way. The poem takes on the authenticity of a real- time journey. But even more significantly, the present tense reveals a multiplicity of time dimension in Sedakova’s poetry – the domain of what happens beyond the limits of time, always and every time. In this capacity it bears analogy to the present simple in English expressing unchanging 374 “They don’t fall, though they fall, / my old trees dip into the water / but do not get their long sleeves wet…” 255 action. This feature of Sedakova’s present tense gains intensity from the beginning to the end of the cycle as the trip through China broadens into an existential journey, in such poems as “Velik risovalshchik, ne znaiushchii dolga…” (“Great is the artist who knows no debt...”), “Mozhet, ty persten’ dukha...” (“Perhaps, you sre the precious ring of the spirit…”), “Kogda my reshaemsia stupit’...” (“When we decide to set out….”). In “Unhappy…” the concept of universality of action is explicit: Несчастен, кто беседует с гостем и думает о завтрашнем деле; несчастен, кто делает дело и думает, что он его делает, а не воздух и луч им водят, как кисточкой, бабочкой, пчелой; кто берет аккорд и думает, каким будет второй, – несчастен боязливый и скупой. И еще несчастней, кто не прощает: он, безумный, не знает, как аист ручной из кустов выступает, как шар золотой сам собой взлетает в милое небо над милой землей 375 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 335). The verbs beseduet (“talks”), delaet (“does”) beriot akkord (“plays a chord”), dumaet (“thinks”), ne proshchaet (“does not forgive”) 376 clearly refer to a generalized human being whose fear, stinginess and unforgivingness bring him constant misery at all times. However, in the final quatrain of the poem, authorial speech seems to slide from a description of generalized 375 “Unhappy / is the person who thinks of tomorrow while talking with / his guest. / Unhappy / is the person who does something and thinks that / he does it, / and not that the air and sunlight rule him, / like a brush, a butterfly, a bee, / he who plays a chord and thinks / of what comes next – / unhappy, timid and stingy. / Even more unhappy / is the person who does not forgive: / insane, he doesn’t know that the stork comes out /tame from the bushes, / that the golden ball / will soar of its own accord / into the dear sky over the dear earth.” 376 Translations in present tense are mine. 256 action to observation of what is going on in front of the poet, that is, the stork coming out of the bushes and the golden ball, or the sun, rising as a symbol of human virtue 377 . The two dimensions of the present overlap in one piece of text leaving no single interpretation available to the reader. The actions combined in the poem occur at the moment of speech and always, existing both in the present and beyond the time axis. The use of the past tense is much rarer in “The Chinese Journey,” but it also often produces an effect of time combinations. What most of these instances share is a close connection between the past and the present, as in “Great is the artist who knows no debt...” or “With tenderness and depth…,” where the past experience is only mentioned as a cause of the current state of things. Consider as another example the interrelation of tenses in “They don’t fall, though they fall…”: “Сколько раз мы виделись, / а каждый раз, как первый, / задыхается, бегом бежит сердце…” 378 (329). The meeting repeated many times in the past is lived through as if it was a first encounter in the present, and the grammatical forms of the present are correspondingly transferred to the description of the past events. In the opening poem “I was surpised…,” quoted above, which sets the terms for the whole cycle, the modality of the past is applied to the subject: “и меня удивило” 379 , “вскрикнуло сердце” 380 . The past tense forms tint the lines with tones of retrospection, alternating with the present tense forms: “как спокойны воды, / как знакомо небо, / как медленно плывет джонка в каменных берегах” 381 (327). Moreover, the openness of the beginning “И меня удивило” (“[And] I was surprised”) introduced with the conjunction “и” 377 The image of a golden ball as a virtue generates in the Christian tale about the Saint Francis of Assisi cited in Sedakova’s prose “In Praise of Poetry.” God asked Francis to make him a sacrifice and, after the saint admitted that he has nothing, offered him to look for it in his bosom. When Francis pulled three golden balls out of the bosom, he was told that these were three virtues he had without realizing it. 378 “How often have we seen each other, / but each time like the first / my breathless heart races…” 379 “I was surprised.” 380 “My heart screamed.” 381 “How calm the waters were, / how familiar the sky was / and how slowly the junk sailed past the rocky banks.” 257 (“and”) suggests that some initiation preceded the sensations of the first poem. The key is to unriddle what it was exactly that evoked the Chinese imagery, amazing in its familiarity: is the poet sinking into a reverie of what was once seen in the past? Or perhaps she is describing a real arrival at the place of this recognizable landscape? As is typical with Sedakova, there is no single precise answer. From the very first lines the positions of the subject in the time continuum are superimposed, as the poet employs her superpower of existing both “then” and “now” simultaneously. Thus, the introductory poem sets up everything that follows within a mode of uncertainty. Contrary to the assumed transparency of the cycle’s title, Sedakova offers us few hints as to when and under what circumstances the Chinese Journey is undertaken. The occasional references to the future tense disclose another gift of the poet, the ability of foreseeing the events that await her. This can be read in the poems “Will we really part…” when the poet foretells the separation with the uncertain “you” or “Po belomu puti, po kholodnomu zviozdnomu oblaku...” (“They say, they have gone on the white road...”) foreshadowing the end of the life journey of all the humans. The poem “The boat flies…” provides an outstanding example of the superposition of times including the future: Лодка летит по нижней влажной лазури, небо быстро темнеет и глазами другого сапфира глядит. Знаешь что? Мне никто никогда не верил. (как ребенок ребенку, умирая от собственной смелости, сообщает: да, а потом зарыли под третьей сосной). Так и я скажу: мне никто никогда не верил, и ты не поверишь, только никому не рассказывай, пока лодка летит, солнце светит и в сапфире играет 258 небесная радость 382 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 333). In substance, this piece embraces almost all the time dimensions noted in this study. The poet starts with a portrayal of the night in the present continuous modality: “letit” (“flying”), “temneet” (“darkening”), “gliadit” (“looking”) 383 . She then unexpectedly turns her eyes back to the past, to a seemingly uncontextualized memory that is some kind of personal secret that remains unrevealed: “Мне никто никогда не верил” 384 . Further, in the next few lines the reader is rapidly transported to the present simple mode as the author introduces the generalization: “как ребенок ребенку… сообщает” 385 . That is to say, she asserts that her confession resembles the daring tone of an unidentified child who gives away a secret about an unknown treasure hidden under a pine 386 . When it finally comes to the future tense the poet’s speech works as a prophecy. She seems to know what her addressee may not yet know, namely what she will say and what the reaction to her words will be: “…я скажу: / мне никто никогда не верил, / и ты не поверишь...” 387 . The omniscient author seems to run a few steps beyond what is known to her at the moment. It is as though she has moved half-way into the future already. In the final segment of the poem the future actually arrives as a beginning of a new day, apparently an 382 “The boat flies / in the lower wet, blue sky. / The sky darkens swiftly / and looks with eyes of another sapphire. / Did you know? Nobody ever trusted me, / like a child dying of his own boldness / says to another child “Yes / and they bury something under the third pine...” / So I say: / nobody ever trusted me / and you won’t trust me either, / but don’t tell anyone. / As the boat flies, the sun shines / and the sky’s joy plays in the sapphire.” 383 Translations in present continuous are mine. 384 “Nobody ever trusted me.” 385 “Like a child… says to another child.” 386 Olga Sedakova shared the story of the mysterious “something” hidden under a pine in her interview with me: “«Как ребенок ребенку...» By the way, this can be a biographical detail. «А потом зарыли под третьей сосной...» Because the children of the employees of the Soviet embassy in Beijing all communicated with each other, while the parents were away for work, and had some secrets. And we buried something all the time, this is that very age when all these things are done. We buried it in the Beijing ground. I can even tell a sad factual story. At that time there was a sparrows' extermination campaign in China. That was something frightening, and in general I saw a lot of strange things… All the population runs around the street – imagine what it looks like from a child's perspective – and claps, makes noises and does not let these birds to land, so that they fall down and die of exhaustion. That was the strategy. They did not shoot them, they simply attrited them. And because of that all the ground was covered with poor birds. And we, children from Russia, buried them quitely” (OS). 387 “I’ll say: / nobody ever trusted me / and you won’t trust me either…” Translation in future tense adapted from Olga Sedakova “The Chinese Travelogue” trans. by Richard McKane. 259 inappropriate time for telling the secrets: “только никому не рассказывай, / пока лодка летит, солнце светит / и в сапфире играет / небесная радость” 388 . It seems that, by looking into the future, the author literally hastens its advent. By the end of the poem the time gets concentrated, speeds up and turns the night into the day. What has recently been the future becomes the present, therefore the concluding tercet brings the reader back to the grammatical “here and now.” The narration has come full circle from the present tense in the opening lines through the variety of interchangeable and overlapping time modalities back to the present in the ending. Eventually, Sedakova's freedom of use of different perspectives allows her to exceed the bounds of the any form of conceivable time and enter a hypothetical realm. The device that serves that purpose is the subjunctive mood of the verbs brought in in such poems as “The pond speaks…” and “I shall only see….” In the former, for instance, the pond’s wish to love and cherish the traveler seems absolutely fantastic and disconnected from any specific time frame: “были бы у меня руки и голос, / как бы я любил тебя, как лелеял” 389 (328). The action attributed to the pond does not belong to anywhere on the time axis, rather it goes far beyond it, to the sphere of the dreamlike and the timeless. The instances like this bring back to mind Sedakova’s own comparison of a journey to Alice’s wanderings in Wonderland in a state between reality and the fantasy. It is true that, if not the whole Chinese journey, but definitely the certain events and figures on the traveler’s way could be something like a dream in which anything can happen and linear time can be undermined. Instead, the current of time is displaced and multilayered. In other words, if there existed the time machine that could take travelers back to the future, forward to the past and back and forth to the present, Sedakova’s poetry could describe the experience it would provide. 388 “But don’t tell anyone. / As the boat flies, the sun shines / and the sky’s joy plays in the sapphire.” 389 “If I had hands and voice, / how I would love and cherish you.” 260 Between Poetry and Icon Painting In the light of all the complexities noted above, the concept of “a journey” articulated in the title of the cycle will not conform to any a single definition. It can be interpreted not only as an actual transference from a point to a point or a reference to an established literary genre, but also as a journey between personae, through time and space. As we have seen, the poet consciously rejects the linear description of what happened and when it happened on her journey, and rather prefers to act as a strobe light, briefly lighting up discrete faces, moments and locations. To quote Sedakova’s own words, in “The Chinese Journey” “[the self] can flash in the different spots” (OS). How do these moments unite in a single whole, how do they comprise a route, an actual journey? How do these scattered impressions shape a holistic landscape or a picture of the world? Is there any real connected motion between the destinations implied in the narration? Perhaps surprisingly, some of these questions can be clarified by demonstrating connections between Sedakova’s artistic method and Russian Orthodox icon painting based on the system of reversed perspective mentioned earlier. First of all, one can hardly avoid noticing that the multitemporality of the existence of Sedakova’s personae echoes the principle of diachronic description of events in the icons. That is, in certain icons the events that take places at different times are depicted within the same image. In the Dormition of the Mother of God icon, for instance, this effect is achieved by means of juxtaposition of the figure of Mary lying in the coffin by Christ who receives her soul upon death and another image of her ascended to Heaven in the upper part of the icon. Another example would be the Nativity icons where Jesus is often depicted not only laying in his manger next to Mary, but also as the baby being washed by the midwives in the side image. Two discrepant moments, present and future, coexist in these icons because time as portrayed in icons is cancelled and everything becomes eternity. Likewise, 261 in Sedakova the wordly physical laws of time are eliminated. The splitting of the authorial presence between the present and the future noted in “The boat flies…”, for example, appears to be based on the same iconographic principle of the cancellation and the surpassing of time. It is not unusual that the time modalities ascribed to the characters’ actions change radically within the same text, as the whole time background of the cycle resembles Bakhtinian “great time” “approaching secular eternity, a kind of saecula saeculorum of human communication,” or “long historical continuity” (Reed 146). If the iconographic device of diachrony sheds light on the essence of multitemporality in Sedakova’s poetry, then there could well be a connection between the spatial organization of the icon and her poetic texts. Just as reversed perspective might seem spatially disproportional to a contemporary viewer, the displacement of loci in Sedakova may confuse the reader as a narrative blunder. However, there is definitely the meaning behind the ways both treat space. What becomes crucial for deciphering their common spatial structure is the notions of gaze and its motion. Essentially, the very concept of the reversed perspective implies the multiplicity of the viewing positions noted above as a feature of Sedakova’s texts. As Uspensky writes in The Semiotics of Russian Icon: “The system of inverted perspective results from the use of a multiplicity of visual positions, which is to say that it is connected with a dynamic visual gaze and a subsequent summation of the visual impression that is received in a multilateral visual embrace” (31). The viewing position is first of all the vision of the artist himself. Unlike in the system of linear perspective, in icons the so-called vanishing point is placed at the site of the viewer, that is the painter, with the lines of perspective expanding out from him. Therefore, unlike the Renaissance or the post-Renaissance artist, the icon-painter does not observe the world of the icon from the outside and from the single still position but views it from inside the iconic space and is constantly moving around there with his gaze. Hence the multi-sidedness of his 262 vision and the occasional visual distortions that he experiences in motion, such as the refractions of the architectural images or horizon. It is by adding together all these visual impressions that the painter gains the total vision of the world of the icon. The in-depth versatile studying of the objects results in perceiving the world as it is, not as it may seem as opposed to the linear perspective approach (Uspensky, Semiotics of Russian Icon 248). In a similar way, Sedakova explores the space around her by constantly moving between the spots with her gaze, examining them from many angles. It is now possible to comprehend how a text devoted to a journey almost completely lacks the verbs of motion typically attributed to the process of traveling. She does not need to move physically: it is “the floating eye” that travels. It is the changing dynamics of the viewing position that allow the poet to be instantly carried from the foot of the mountain to its unreachable top or to rush through the forest to the temple with lightning speed. As a result of this multifaceted view, the traveler gets the integral iconic vision of every single locus on her way. Moreover, she positions herself as an essential part of the landscape, just as the vision of the icon-painter functions within the icon. As is the case with the icon painter, the interior position of the observing poet also provides not just a superficial version of reality, but an intrinsic, authentic image of the world. This principle is true for the multiplicity of positions within the separate poems, but it is absolutely applicable to the whole cycle as well. In addition to the discrepancies that need to be unified at the level of each particular text, the reader also has to deal with the issue of a compositional nature of a cycle as a collection of relatively isolated texts. If one is to treat each independent poem as a new discrete locus on the poet’s path, their sequence in the entire text of the cycle should take the shape of a one great journey. The issue of how to integrate them in all their heterogeneity into one single whole, or into an integrated route for a journey, is resolved again through the analogy with icon painting. The texts of the poetic cycle are in essence 263 equivalent to the “images within the image” in the Russian Orthodox iconic tradition or the so called kleima. Kleima are the independent miniature scenes inside the hagiographic icon that are routinely allocated at its edges and develop the subject of its central composition. As Uspensky states in “A Poetics of Composition,” kleima exemplify a work “that involves the principally greater freedom in choice of time (than in other forms of art) … we can pick any scene of a painting as a starting point [for reading the work] and move from it in arbitrary direction” (104). Nevertheless, all these “images that represent the separate microspaces organically (indivisibly) merge in a common space of the painterly work,” (193) submit to its general composition and together form the single narrative of life, trials and death of the saint. It is the multiplicity of the viewing positions discussed above that enables the artist to combine the free-standing pieces of the story in one icon, substantially disrupting linear concepts of both time and space. In precisely the same way Sedakova unites the sensations of the different places and times expressed in the shorter poems into her extensive travelogue. Regardless of the seeming discrepancy of the cycle, she insists that “«The Chinese Journey» is cohesive, and it is even possible to follow the minimal plotline there – it is a passage of a day. Everything begins in the morning and ends at night. At least, this should be evident from a poem to a poem” (OS). Indeed, by the end of the cycle the holistic spatiotemporal image of the world opens up before the eyes of the traveler, the image produced by the visual motion between and among multiple sights and time marks. Between Christianity and Taoism Where do this sharpening of perception and expansion of the world eventually take Sedakova, is an ultimate question one should ask while reading “The Chinese Journey”. Clearly, the metarealism of Sedakova is more than just a distinctive feature of her style of writing. As a form of cognition and self-determination, it has its higher purpose. To all appearance, the texts of 264 Sedakova’s own essays suggest to treat her contemplative technique as a meaningful spiritual practice lying at the intersection of two more worlds – Orthodox Christianity and Taoism. At long last, such experience turns out to be transformative, both for the person perceiving and the reality percieved. The origins of such experience are explicated in the essay “The Light of Life,” where Sedakova notes the singularity of “the way of perception which the Russian Orthodox tradition forms (or aims to form) in a person,” the particular “way of seeing the world” that it cultivates (679). Any believer should develop this hypersensitive perception to return to the “first vision,” the vision of a human being as it was intended and created by God before the Fall of Man, through purification of senses. This inner contemplative activity, or in the Church terms Hesychastic prayer, is a skill of “[attaining] new eyes and new ears and [looking] not in the ordinary human manner, as the sensual one looks at the sensual things,” but “[looking] at the sensual things as the immaterial one,” to quote Simeon the New Theologian (681). It is hard not to recognize in this description the ways of exploration of the world of the traveling poet in “The Chinese Journey,” practically bereft of her corporeal form in her multiple incarnations and converted into the non-physical “floating eye.” It is no harder to read immateriality in the way she abstracts the pond, or the mountain, or the whole idea of the voyage. It is also natural to see her “eye” constantly changing the viewpoint, as Hesychasm implies “the permanent critics of one’s perception; a constant effort to “change aspectus,” to use the words of L. Witgenstein” (682). Not by mere chance in biblical Greek the word for this critical endeavour is “metanoia,” literally “change of mind,” using the same prefix of transcendence as the terms “metarealism” and “metabola” crucial for understanding Sedakova. Apparently, to transcend the reality one should first transcend the perceptive patterns of his mind and turn his gaze to the new directions as Sedakova does space-, time- and subject-wise. 265 More than simply a “change of mind,” in the Russian Orthodox naming the moment of the dramatic overturn of perception is also called “umilenie” or “sokrushenie serdtsa,” literally translated to English as “breaking of heart.” In her essay Sedakova explains that at the climax of the Hesychastic meditative practice the inner center, the heart of believer, as if collapses. As a result, everything that used to be “one’s own” in the person dies out leaving him open in the “spiritual poverty” and ready to meet The Other, the Divine Being and His World (682-683). In other words, the believer abandons the Self, stops all rationalistic thinking and starts comprehending everything from the point of view of the heart. One can presume that with the poetic persona of Sedakova this happens already in the poem “They don’t fall, though they fall…,” where the scenery is contemplated through the personified rushing heart: “Сколько раз мы виделись, / а каждый раз, как первый, / задыхается, бегом бежит сердце / с совершенно пустой котомкой / по стволу, по холмам и оврагам веток” 390 (“Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 329). Broken and purified with “a change of mind,” the heart becomes the main perceptive organ where all the further metarealistic visions of “The Chinese Journey” come from. It is through the heart that all the visions multiply to break through the walls that isolate the person in his self and confine his perception. As soon as these walls are shattered, the traveler is left unprotected to the world and “confident in something Other,” a state Sedakova defines as being close to the happiness of a child (“Light of Life” 683). Here again, as in Sedakova’s real life, the travel and the childhood appear to share the same enigmatic cognitive experience. What awaits the believer at the outcome of this trial is the most important issue. According to Sedakova and the fathers of church, “at the end of this long path one is expected to acquire the integrity of self-giving (that means, divine) creature, the simplicity of the child and the direct heart’s vision of the uncreated Light, which is Life itself” (683). In other words, the 390 “How often have we seen each other, / but each time like the first / my breathless heart races / with a completely empty bag / along the trunk, over the hills and gullies of branches.” 266 eventual aim of experiments with perception is to see the Divine Light that illuminates all the being and that is invisible to the uninitiated. As Christ’s body was once transfigured on the Mount of Tabor in the rays of the mysterious uncreated light, the light that permeates the earthly creation eventually transfigures the believer and brings him to the unique experience of universal unity with the Divine, or deification. In “The Chinese Journey” the points of contact with the illuminated universe are scattered along the way of the traveling poet. At some moments they are marked with the presence of the actual light or shining, such as the triumphal rise of the “golden ball” over the earth in the poem “Unhappy…” that can only be seen by the thoughtful and the forgiving one: “[безумный не знает] как шар золотой / сам собой взлетает / в милое небо над милой землей” 391 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 335). Likewise, only the devoted can discern the brightest “fire of admiration,” as they are “знающие… что нет ни единой спички, свечки, плошки, / кроме огня восхищенья, / знающие, откуда приходят звучанье и свеченье” 392 (339). The light, in its various forms, kindles or glimmers throughout the cycle, but never fades away completely as in succession of the sun, moon and room illumination of “With tenderness and depth…:” Так зажигайся, теплый светильник запада. фонарь, капкан мотыльков. Поговори еще с нашим светом домашним, солнце нежности и глубины, солнце, покидающее землю, первое, последнее солнце 393 (337). 391 “Insane, he doesn’t know that the stork comes out /tame from the bushes, / that the golden ball / will soar of its own accord / into the dear sky over the dear earth.” 392 “Knowing that / ... / that there is not a single match, candle or lampion / only the fire of rapture, / knowing from where / sonorousness and luminescence come.” 393 “So let the warm lamp of the west / give light, / and the street lamp, the moth trap. / Talk to our homely light, / sun of tenderness and depth / sun deserting the earth / the first and the last sun.” 267 Here the Divine light is everpresent as the sun that is eternally “the first” and “the last one” in the process of alternation of night and day. From the position of Hesychasm, the domestic light might be viewed as its counterpart “at home” of the believer, that is his heart. Thus, communication between the outer and the domestic light represents the unceasing exchange of signals between the universal Divine and the Divine of the heart. At the same time the Chinese journey is “illuminated” not only in connection to representations of the physical light, but also in the visions of the holistic world surrounding the poet. It is important to remember that the nature of this world is essentially iconic, which is true in Hesychastic sense too. In “The Light of Life” Sedakova justly points out that the icons are the best mirrors of the right perception of reality (687). That is because iconic figures themselves are saturated with light, and even a background of a painting is technically often called “a light” as it is poured all around the space of an icon. Likewise, one might define the mere picturesque scenery of “The Chinese Journey” with a concise word “light,” as it radiates the absolute beauty, a testimony of God’s presence on earth. In Sedakova the whole world is a depiction of the unseen light, just as an icon is. Also similar to an icon, this world has a healing effect on the person’s soul. Like a believer communicates with the Divine Light in a prayer before a sacred image, in Sedakova the poet comes into contact with light that took shape of the world’s beauty. But an icon is more than a “transmitter” of light, it is its contemplator to the same extent as the poet is. As Sedakova claims in her essay, what makes the believer see the invisible light in the icon is that all the images depicted on icons are themselves contemplating the invisible. “They are shown in a state of prayer. Through contemplating them we follow the contemplation which is in them, while they contemplate something that cannot be seen on the icon. It is a depiction of a prayer that 268 gives birth to a prayer. It is not a picture. It is a mirror” (692). It is not easy to convey the state of prayer in the world of “The Chinese Journey” hardly populated with characters, if we don’t keep in mind that the central character of the cycle, the landscape, is deeply personified. As a living creature, it is endowed with the ability to observe and sympathize with the poet. It ponders whatever it witnesses. Its capacity to contemplate echoes the poet’s own curiosity for the world. In a certain sense the world in Sedakova’s cycle can be viewed as a reflection of her own contemplation. By looking at the initiated poet the world as if observes the gleams of the Divine Light itself. It is not a mere chance that there are so many instances of animation of nature through the act of looking. At one moment, as if provided with eyes, the landscape takes an astonished look by bending “the surprised brows of pagodas” (“Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 334). At another, the sky changes its gaze and transfigures in the water reflections: “Небо быстро темнеет и глазами другого сапфира глядит” 394 (333). Eventually, the world emanates the religiously profound affection peering from the stone at the chosen ones: “в тысяче лиц я узнаю, / кто ее видел, на кого поглядела / из каменных вещей, как из стеклянных / нежная глубина и глубокая нежность” 395 (337). The Divine Light shines through these stares and glances, bringing the tenderness and the depth of “umilenie” to the heart of the faithful. The image of the magnificent sighted world in “The Chinese Journey” is a striking evidence of not only diffusion, but its own active experience of the Divine Light. In this way, in mutual contemplation and insight not only the poet, but the whole world around her becomes deified. As Father Kallistos Ware puts it, in such deification, man is not saved from his body but in it; not saved from the material world but 394 “The sky darkens swiftly and looks with eyes of another sapphire.” 395 “I recognise in a thousand faces / who has seen it, / whom it has looked at, / the tender depth / and the deep tenderness / that gazes out from stones as out of glass.” 269 with it. Because man is microcosm and mediator of the creation, his own salvation involves also the reconciliation and transfiguration of the whole animate and inanimate creation around him... In the "new earth" of the Age to come there is surely a place not only for man but for animals: in and through man, they too will share in immortality, and so will rocks, trees and plants, fire and water” (Ware 183). Very likely, it is this illuminated “new earth” that Sedakova describes in one of the concluding poems of the cycle “They say, they have gone on the white road…” as indefinite “there:” …никто не проживет Без этого хлеба сиянья. Пора идти туда, Где всё из состраданья 396 . (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 341) “There,” on the “new earth,” no one will survive without all-forgiveness and mercy that give birth to the luminescence in the human heart. “There” not only everyone, but everything is an amalgamation of being in the rays of the Divine Light. All it takes is to partake of “the bread of [its] shining,” as one partakes of Christ’s body and blood at the Eucharist. All it takes is to make a step and “go there,” towards the gleaming source. The motif of advancing on this path takes us back to the enigma of the title of the cycle and, ultimately, to the issue of crossing the Orthodox ideas and the Chinese Taoist colouring. On the one hand, it is known from the writings of Hesychasts that the movement to purification of perception can be a long and laborious process – or more accurately, a way. In this context the “travel” part of the title reveals its extra meaning. Now it is not only the actual journey, or the course of life, it is the spiritual way of the believer towards the Divine Light or, in Sedakova’s own words, “путь, похожий на свечу” 397 (342). On the other hand, under the quaint Chinese 396 “No one can survive/ without this bread of shining. / It is time to go there / where everything is compassion.” 397 “The road that is like the candle.” 270 “cover” this kind of spiritual journey also takes the form of Tao, that is a Way that everything earthly follows. The central concept of Taoism, Tao is the cause and the end of all things, but also the way of being an individual should take in his lifetime. As Hieromonk Damascene claims based on Ji Ming Shen’s interpretations of Tao The Ching, the Taoist longs to return to the state of the primordial man much like the Orthodox Christian seeks for his original nature before the Fall (Hieromonk Damascene). The characteristic of this state is “a pure, one-pointed consciousness of direct apprehension of reality”, or what the father of Taoism Lao Tzu called “the pristine simplicity, the uncarved block, the return to the baby” (78). From here comes his awareness of himself as an immortal spirit, objectively perceptive, and thus selfless. One need not mention a striking resemblance of this description to a child-like open-mindedness noted by Sedakova in her essay on Hesychastic ways of comprehension of the Divine. In a similar surprising way, the ideas of immediate contemplation, the Divine Light and deification reverberate in the certain Taoist concepts. Sedakova herself points out the kinship: “Yes, there is such a depth where [Christianity and Taoism] come together, not as a creed, but as some spiritual experience. What they share – I think, most of all the negative aspect, namely the opposition to some common material crude view.” In support of this analogy, Sedakova finds “great likeness in how [the Hesychasts] describe the inner, or, as they call it, intelligent vision and what it looks like for the Chinese. It seems to me it is somewhat very related” (OS). That is, essentially the principle of the Orthodox contemplative “prayer of a heart” finds parallels in intense watchfulness that is supposed to draw the Taoist to merging with Tao. The issue of view is probably the most crucial similarity between the Christian and the Taoist philosophies, but it is not the only one. To touch it briefly, the power of the Divine Light has a distant counterpart in the Taoist energy of Te, generally translated as “virtue.” In the same way as the “light of life” is the manifestation of God’s concealed presence around us, the 271 uncreated energy of Te is a mode of existence of Tao on earth that cannot be perceived otherwise. Lao Tzu taught that Te should be cultivated in oneself like the Hesychasts promoted the ways of self-improvement on the way to seeing the divine. More than just a clue to individual perfection, the energy of Te, or virtue, can bring the whole world to its integrity: “Cultivate virtue in your own person, And it becomes a genuine part of you… Cultivate it in the world, And it will become universal” (Lao Tzu 78). Like the world can become deified through the human inner effort, by same means it comes to union with Tao. Without making extreme generalizations, it is fair to say that the Taoism and the Hesychasm share much in their theoretical and practical approaches – a fact previously noted by theologians and religious scholars, such as Alexander Men’, Evgenii Torchinov 398 and others. With all obvious distinctions, two religious and philosophical systems ultimately further the same teaching of release from self and merging with the universe through the incessant act of contemplation and comprehension. It is this world-bounding, deeply humanistic idea, not just a whimsical panreligious gesture, that allows Sedakova to fuse Taoistic and Orthodox content on pages of “The Chinese Journey.” It is this universality of thought that makes the poet settle the mysterious “someone… who is and is not” on the top of the mountain in “There, on the hill…” – who would claim with certainty, whether the inhabitant embodies the incogitable Tao or inconceivable Orthodox God? It is the common notion of unity of all creation that lets Sedakova find a place for the Taoist imagery in glorification of the deified world in the conluding poem of the cycle “Let us praise our earth…:” Похвалим нашу землю, похвалим луну на воде, то, что ни с кем и со всеми, что нигде и везде… 399 (Sedakova, “Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 345). 398 See Alexander Men’ (45-57), and E.A. Torchinov (339-349). 399 “Let us praise our earth, / let us give praise to the moon on the water, / that which is with no one and with 272 Composed in the manner of Francis of Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun,” the poem intentionally transcends the tradition of the Christian religious song by introducing the discernible image of Tao that knows no end and no beginning, that is everywhere and nowhere. In such a way, in the triumphant finale of the cycle, the divine glory of Tao and Logos get inseparably merged in the beauty of being. As if erasing boundaries by means of her poetic language, Sedakova reminds the reader: it is not the terms that matter, when the message they convey is essentially the same. It is not the confession that is important, when the universal truth is accessible to everyone. Truly, “The Chinese Journey” is not a poetry for the Orthodox or Taoist believers, it is the poetry for all the people of the world. Therefore, it comes as a no surprise that Olga Sedakova avoids prioritizing either the Orthodox, or the Taoist lines of “The Chinese Journey.” In fact, she refuses to treat them as manifestations of a creed, but rather prefers to look at them as ways of thinking. On the one hand, she admits the influence of Orthodoxy on formation of her vision: “Even when you are not thinking about that, … you still in some sense prepared by the Orthodox paradigm or some other. I think that my view somewhere in depth, spontaneously and unconfessionally remains Orthodox. In the way I understand it, not externally clerically” (OS). On the other hand, she states that the Taoist philosophy equally strongly affected the ways she sees and understands the world: Taoism and the like Oriental thoughts always appealed to me and was easily comprehensible, more comprehensible than many Western ideas. Usually those who study the Oriental art necessarily oppose the ways space and time are organized for the Western man, and for the Eastern one. In this contrast the way they describe the Eastern is always spontaneously closer to me. It is more alive and less programed. But naturally, everyone, / everywhere and nowhere…” 273 this is not a religious conviction, it is a perception. I do not know that Taoism as a religion is. I have no idea. These are the skills of thought that are close to me (OS). Such unrestricted outlook on the nature of both confessions finally brings the poet to the conclusion about her own creative process: “You know, when you write poetry you do not think much of the religious affiliation. The only thing that speaks here is what actually is deep in you, what is present not only when you have to state the faith, but something inside” (OS). This is the reason why “The Chinese Journey” cannot be called a religious poetic cycle in a strict sense of word. Without a doubt, such labelling would detrimentally narrow the destination of Sedakova's work. As the poet mentions in another interview: “I am Orthodox by conviction, but I would never want, nor would I dare, to make that a literary profession of faith. If I were to call myself an Orthodox poet,… I would have to vouch for my conformity to canon law… There is no way I can do that…. For me poetry is unthinkable without openness of meaning, whilst religion in art, according to the common view, involves a prescriptive, engaged approach of one’s knowing how the thing is going to end” (Polukhina, “Rare” 239-240). It is this intercultural openness, broadness of outlook that underlie the mindset of Sedakova and simply do not let her totally adhere to one and only doctrine. There is no contradiction, confusion or indecision in her balancing between Christianity and Taoism. Rather, there is the inherent open-endedness of her mentality that offers the reader the all-embracing cognitive experience, a gift that all true art ultimately provides. “Everyone, everywhere, anytime” – if the formula of metarealistic vision existed, for Olga Sedakova this triad would be its components. By means of multiplicity of identities, spatial and time coordinates the poet achieves the unique polyphonic quality of her text open to variety of interpretations. More than that, through such a kaleidoiscopic sight the blend of religious and philosophical worldviews arises. Seemingly incompatible and even opposed, they nevertheless 274 produce the superior composite meaning that goes beyond the reader’s idea of discrepancies. At the core of this meaning is the concept of universal truth, comprehensive, interconnective and open for the world to learn. 275 Chapter 4: Conclusion This project was undertaken to trace and assess the developments in both lyrical subjectivity and individual identity in the twentieth-century Russian travel poetry, as exemplified by three authors representing various periods and circumstances of the Soviet history. My goal was to probe the reconfigurations in the individual perception of selfhood and “whereness” caused by the externally imposed condition of living in the closed borders of the Soviet Union and the restricted freedom of movement overall. The study has shown that, when viewed against the foil of pre-revolutionary mobility, these shifts reflect the unsettling psychological impact of ideological space, in which the totality of the Soviet population gradually found themselves starting in the late 1910s-1920s. Though separated from each other in time, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky and Olga Sedakova shared an effort to find their way out of confining ideological space through both physical and literary travels that were highly imaginative, inventive, and meant to transcend geographical boundaries with the power of mental transference. In doing so, they disregarded the ideological element required by the official Soviet travelogue and instead adopted or modified conventional ways of identifying with foreign worlds common in the Russian tradition of lyrical journeys since the nineteenth century. As a result, in these lyrical journeys the collective selfhood typical of the Soviet travelogues gives way to the enhanced subjectivity of individual poetic voices that seek to exist in the borderless world, in transnational unity. My analysis of modern lyrical travelogues also revealed that, in the context of the Soviet reconsideration of cultural values and “rewriting” of the world history and geography, the poets like Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova all favor self-identification with the Other by means of cultural associations or, more precisely, cultural memory embedded in their destinations. In this 276 sense, their literary journeys serve the purpose of cultural preservation at a time when cultural heritage, specifically religious religious heritage and, in a broad sense, pre-revolutionary heritage, was being endangered by ideological structures. This tendency is indicative of continuity between these authors’ worldviews and the pre-Soviet discourse of cosmopolitanism and intercultural openness, as well as continuity between their lyrical approaches and the Modernist literary tradition of lyrical travelogue grounded in curiosity and respect for historical past and cultural difference. In Leonid Livak’s terms, they all share the Russian Modernist sensibility – “a sense of staring into a spiritual, cultural and social chasm between past and present” (9) in a period when Socialist utopianism was wholly consumed with the attempts to marry the present with the future. As such, they demonstrate Livak’s observation that the temporal limits of the Russian Modernist culture extend way beyond the establishment of Socialist Realism in the 1930s. Overall, the study underscores the idea that the unofficial Soviet lyrical travelogues, like those in focus of this dissertation, tend to adhere to the model of “the voyage of escape” rather than “the voyage of discovery,” to use the terms offered by the scholar Andrew Wachtel (128). What is thus “escaped” is the ubiquity of ideological space, along with the binary oppositions “us vs. them” and “past vs. present” that underlies Socialist Realist discourse on travel. Although “discovery” is a necessary element of the insatiable Modernist “longing for the world culture,” in Mandelstam and Brodsky it is clearly secondary to the initial act of “shoving off” (Brodsky, “New Stanzas” 60) necessary to get away from the confinement of the homeland. Sedakova is a special case, since she seems to achieve ultimate freedom by discounting the restraining domestic ideological space altogether, as if it does not exist: in the cycle treated here, Russia appears simply as rodina (“motherland”). Perhaps, this experience is dictated by the growing 277 freedom of movement characteristic of the late Soviet 1980s, when Sedakova’s cycle was created. Characteristically, the original act of departure and further relocations are controlled by a driving force that is given various names by various authors. Osip Mandelstam calls it with the physical term tiaga (“pull”) or pritiazhenie (“attraction”), the drive that during his Armenian journey draws him closer and closer to the source of cultural magnetism – Mount Ararat, which is strongly linked in his consciousness to early Christian history. In a similar way, Joseph Brodsky defines his wanderlust in Pasternakian terms strast’ k razryvam (“penchant for ruptures”) and tiaga proch’ (“outward pull, gravity”), using the technological metaphor of a spacecraft slowly escaping earth’s gravity and receding into outer space. Olga Sedakova’s entry into the China of her childhood is achieved via the dynamic power of all-penetrating “floating eye,” as it were directing the poet’s mental travels and providing her with the “remote access” to the distant landscapes. For all three authors, the implementation of this driving force within the closed Soviet borders entails the inevitable tension between the views of travel destinations and home. Paradoxically, in their attempts to exit the hermetic Soviet space, Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova cannot help but glance back to the familiar home world, as if tied to it by an invisible thread. For Mandelstam, due to his exclusion from Moscow literary life, the visions of home are pronouncedly grim and homecoming is seen as nothing short of forced displacement into an unwanted, impassive, thus “Buddhist” environment (“Fragments from Discarded Poems” 197). Likewise, Brodsky’s “penchant for ruptures” is geared toward pushing away from Soviet reality and implies a conscious diminution of the power of “homeward gravity,” which is always weaker than its opposite. The return to homeland is thus deliberately rejected by the émigré poet, while at the same time it is implicitly made possible by means of mental transference to his 278 hometown Leningrad in the late lyrical journeys of the 1980s-1990s, such as “In Italy,” “Holland is a flat country...” and “Here I am again under this colorless sky...” Finally, unlike Brodsky and Mandelstam, in her “Chinese Journey” Sedakova readily embraces both the visions of her Russian home and the Chinese destination and avoids taking a fixed position in space by splitting her presence in between the two locations and thus turning them both into “home.” It generally appears that through journeying in space all three poets managed to acquire a special sense of homeland outside of Russia, whereby “home” is largely understood in cultural terms. Not by coincidence, Nadezhda Mandelstam calls Osip’s infatuation with Armenia an attempt at seeking “the second motherland” in the region that he perceived as a part of the ancient Mediterranean world, where he presumably came from (N. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia 476). Inspired by the kinship between classical culture and the culture of Armenia as well as its Christian legacy, Mandelstam defines his wish to stay there as metaphorical merging of his persona with the Armenian landscape and Mount Ararat specifically. Brodsky, though existentially “homeless” like Mandelstam, states that the experience of exilic displacement helped him find home in the Russian language, a home that shelters the author in emigration as a space capsule protects an astronaut in the depths of the cosmos. Moreover, Brodsky’s desire to be born and die in the beautiful city of Venice signals a cultural affiliation with the place that strikingly resembles his native city, Leningrad, with its classical architecture and abundance of water. In line with Mandelstam’s thinking, Brodsky sees Italy as “a cradle of civilization” where he “feels at home” (Volkov 202; Polukhina, Brodsky 432) – one of many alternative “would-be” homelands that the poet implicitly lays claim to in his verse, along with Lithuania and Sweden. Sedakova’s perception of China as “a motherland of a kind” (OS) is explicit and intensified, largely due to the early exposure to her prolonged travel experience at the age of six when her sense of national identity was just being formed. However, just as Armenian and Italian culture 279 delight Mandelstam or Brodsky, Sedakova’s vision of the Chinese world as “my dear/native element” (rodnoe) is also furthered by the fascination with the Chinese philosophy, art and culture, as follows from her statements on the influence of the traditional Chinese painting on her work and her in-cycle allusions to Lao Tzu and Li Bai. At the same time, Sedakova’s work also rests on abundant references to Christian culture, which she, much like Mandelstam, aims to secure and celebrate, in this case on par with Taoist wisdom. The precise effect of travels on the lyrical “I” is unique in every specific case but is generally oriented on the ultimate (re)integration of the persona. Mandelstam’s account of his figurative coalescence with the ancient Armenian mountains is telling of his endeavor to reconcile the pre-Soviet past with the Soviet present and thus resolve the internal crisis of temporal belonging. But first and foremost, the travel experience provides the inspiration that was unavailable to Mandelstam for years and helps him reclaim the core of his poetic identity – his lyrical voice, which he had once lost. In a way, it is this newly discovered capability to write poetry that helped Mandelstam cope with his further, however short, existence in the ideological space back in “Buddhist” Moscow. As opposed to Mandelstam, Brodsky deliberately seeks not the wholeness of the self, but self-alienation, a split into body and mind, “the sufferer and the writer” (Volkov 227) that works as both “self-defense” from the encroachment of Soviet authorities on his liberties and the efficient poetic technique that he inherits from his literary mentors Akhmatova, Auden and Frost. A peculiar combination of self-detachment and outward movement is characteristic of Brodsky’s travel lyrics, producing what I call the typically Brodskian “poetics of withdrawal.” The poet’s incessant urge to “sneak away” (Polukhina, Brodsky 145) under the third person’s guise or a literary mask (Odysseus, Ovid, Pushkin) is telling of the inner discord with both the self and whereness, caused by confinement in “the prison of [Russian] latitudes” (“Pered pamiatnikom...” 340). It is only in the travel poems 280 written in emigration, when the opportunity to return to Russia is no longer feasible, that the Italian, Dutch and Swedish visions of home induce the self-assertive stance of the “I,” as manifested in both the use of personal pronouns and the resurfacing motif of homecoming. Sedakova’s perception of China as a second home, on the other hand, naturally presupposes the doubling of the persona, equally invested in both the Russian world where she comes from and the Chinese world she revisits. Within the Chinese world that she explores, Sedakova’s “I” seems to diffuse itself all around her, allowing for multiplicity of viewing positions, like the multiplicity of vision of isometric perspective of Russian Orthodox icons. Yet, just like the multi-angled icon is painted by a single artist, so do Sedakova’s dispersed versions of the self comprise wholeness, when taken together. It is this implicit holistic omnipresence in the space of her lyrical cycle that allows Sedakova to speak about shared behaviors, emotions and concerns uniting all humanity. The influence of Modernist strategies of self-displacement are, of course, evident in all of the above-mentioned works. All these transformations of identity occur according to patterns of conventional pre- Soviet self-identification with different places, that is the propensity to compare and contrast one’s own and the Other, uninhibited by the requirements of ideology. As said above, the cultural self-identification prevails in work of Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova alike, perhaps due to a certain compensatory mechanism meant to mend the forced deprivation of exposure to authentic foreign cultures. However, it is clear that all three poets also connect to their destinations through relating to the landscapes that instill a certain mood or memory in their minds. For Mandelstam, it is undoubtedly the Armenian Highlands whose inner forms and motion remind him of the shifts in the world history, such as the 1917 Revolution that he himself witnessed. For Brodsky, it is the limitless world ocean that links the distant parts of the world, such as Russia and the United States where he found himself in the second part of his life. For 281 Sedakova, it is the Chinese pagodas, rivers and trees that she shares her subjectivity with in order to demonstrate their animation and interconnectedness of everything in the world. Within these landscapes all three poets draw on intense sensory experiences – predominantly visual in Sedakova, visual and olfactory in Brodsky, multisensory in Mandelstam. Comparably, self-identification with life of the native people finds the highest expression in Mandelstam’s cycle “Armenia,” where the Armenians’ heroism and resilience in the face of the Muslim oppression, rather than their accomplishments in the new Soviet construction, become the object of Mandelstam’s admiration and a model for his own endurance and stoicism amidst the detractors back in Moscow. Brodsky is dissimilar to Mandelstam in this regard, as he tends to “wall off” the other people, at least in the biographically inspired confession-style travel poems that were analyzed in this study. Still, the projection of his lyrical self on the unnamed Vilnius Jew in “Leiklos,” for example, is evident of his ability to find “one’s own” in the life of the foreign minority, even though in a form of imaginary alternative life scenario. Sedakova’s sympathy for everything “authentically Chinese” includes, of course, the life of local people (OS), but ultimately it is the law of kindness and compassion that she passionately advocates for as it embraces all humankind. Self-association with the foreign environment by means of romance is completely absent in Mandelstam but is partly manifested in Brodsky and Sedakova. In Brodsky, it clearly culminates in “Holland is a flat country...” where the view of the Northern Sea brings up the memories that transport the poet back to his past happily spent with the beloved M.B. at the Baltic Sea, as described in the early poem “A Prophecy.” In Sedakova, the hints at the romantic motif are included in such poem as “Will we really part...”, but romance is canceled out by anonymity, ambiguity and, essentially, all-inclusivity of lyrical voices in the poem. 282 Another typical motif “life as a journey” resurfaces in Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova to an equal degree. Mandelstam develops it into “writing as a journey,” as seen in his famous metaphor of the self as the Latin Gerundive verb “riding” on a horseback, that is asserting his rightful place in the world literature process. Brodsky resorts to the view of life as a “walk into the perspective” in the poem “In Italy” and deploys the “life-journey” analogy in most of his Odyssean verses. Sedakova advances the same idea of life as a journey “on the white road [into] the starry sky” (“Kitaiskoe puteshestvie” 341) and into the unknown in “They say, they have gone on the white road...” and “I shall only see...” The standard motifs of the Russian lyrical journeys are all represented in the travelogues that were subject to close reading in this study. However, it is specifically the motif of the otherworldly, the journey as a dream that is telling of the Soviet travelers’ consistent deprivation of freedom of movement, that may be the most important. In the work of all three authors, the actual or potential inaccessibility of the desired destination invites various forms of mental travels, be it dreams, memories, or acts of imagination. This is clearly the case with Mandelstam, as his persona is first teased by the proximity of Ararat across the border with Turkey, then tortured with the realization of the futility of his attempts to either revisit, or stay in Armenia: “Myopic Armenian sky / I’ll never see you...” (“Armenia” 183), and is eventually left dreaming of the Yerevan streets and Alagez hills when back in Moscow. Brodsky also fantasizes about his “exodus” from Lithuania to the inaccessible New World in “Leiklos,” only to find himself in that world in reality and, in reverse, start envisioning inaccessible native Leningrad, when contemplating Venetian reflections or Swedish clouds. Sedakova aims to make her “Chinese journey” to the childhood destination that she never revisited in actuality, and makes it possible through the power of thought and imagination. The modality of her journey remains open- 283 ended, as it is never entirely clear from the text alone whether it takes place in reality or becomes a construct of memory and/or fantasy. These attempts to mentally approach desired destinations, maps and borders notwithstanding, signal the inherent transnational and transcultural openness that is common of the mentality of all three authors in discussion, contrary to the condition of restrained freedom of movement that they were subjected to. The attendant dreamy, unrealistic mode of narration oftentimes reflects the futility of their biographical efforts to break through either their isolation, or limitations of the Soviet travel experience. Dreaming of their travel destinations in lack of chance to reach them is the only way to reunite with the valuable part of the biography associated with these places, such as the memory of poetic inspiration, the loved ones or the childhood. It is with their common literary effort that the imagined borderless global space is created, where free relocations are available to everyone, regardless of their eligibility. The scope of this study was limited to three discrete poetic cases; by no means does the study aim to reach conclusions that apply to the whole corpus of Soviet Russian travel poetry. At the same time, it is crucial to underscore that, although this work focused on the writings by three Russian poets and intellectuals, the described experience of isolation within the national borders applied to millions of ordinary citizens of the Soviet Union who shared exactly the same condition and, voluntarily or not, complied with it. In this light, the research should prove useful in expanding our understanding of how any given individual’s internal resistance to externally imposed cultural and socio-political isolation can altering the notion of where, when and who we are in terms of national, ethnic and cultural belonging. In the situation when national borders are close, the human self naturally aspires to compensate for the deprived travel experience, that is to mentally cover insurmountable distances and reach unattainable cultures in order to, in Brodsky’s words, become “a part of what [it] loves” (“Spoils of War” 21). In such an indirect 284 way, one can reclaim a fundamental human right of freedom of movement, as formulated in the Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right of freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” This essential idea of value of freedom of movement is especially relevant in year 2021, when, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on travel have been introduced by many of the world’s governments. Further research on national poetries in the states that have restricted travel (e.g. the countries of the Eastern Bloc, North Korea) is an essential step in confirming the results of this dissertation. This would help elucidate the pivotal issue: does the experience of isolation in enclosed geographical space have a uniform impact on the self in different national environments? Thought-provoking questions for future research can be derived from juxtaposing various alterations in representations of selfhood and spatio-temporal structures, as shown in the twentieth-century travel poetry from the USSR and from divided Germany, for example. Further work is certainly required to uncover the complexities related to interrelation between various forms of identity and travel. Given the importance of privilege in distribution of trips for cultural and political Soviet elites (Gorsuch 766; David-Fox 8), it would be interesting to trace the effect of such privilege on the social identity of litterateurs and other artists. Gender identity is another dimension of selfhood that can be fruitfully explored in the context of the Soviet tourism. Sedakova, for example, consciously obscures or evades gender issues in her “Chinese Journey, ” but what does it mean to be a Soviet traveler who articulates gender? Studies regarding the perception of inbound tourism in the Soviet and the world travel poetry would also be worthwhile. They could usefully explore what were the Soviet citizens’ typical responses to visitors from both the capitalist and the socialist worlds, and what these responses could tell about their self-consciousness: is the sense of identity secure or threatened, 285 when hosting the Other in the self-contained Soviet state? Conversely, foreign accounts of Soviet tourists abroad could reveal the “flipside” of the transformations of the identity explored in the present research: if, for example, Sedakova sees China as a homeland of sorts, how did the Chinese view the daughter of the Soviet military advisor living in Beijing in the 1950s? Would they relate to her split sense of identity, or would they see it as cultural appropriation? Multiple questions remain about the transitional periods before and after the isolation of the Soviet period. Considerably more work will have to be done in order to determine how the Russian poetry of the 1920s gradually adapted to the newly-enforced travel restrictions. Such research will have to examine the evolution of Russian travel lyrics throughout the first decade(s) of Soviet rule. A detailed focus on pre-revolutionary patterns of literary travel would establish how and when exactly the notion of ideological space creeps into Russian travel poetry. Another fruitful area of research could be the close reading of the poetry produced as a result of travel across the republics of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and the subsequent decades. In what ways was the travel between republics meant to shape the “Soviet identity” of the new citizens of the state? If Moscow’s resident Osip Mandelstam was able to make progress in resolution of his crisis of identity in Armenia, what developments of the self awaited an Armenian or an Uzbek on a journey to Moscow? The question still remains relevant today, when thousands of migrants from the ex-Soviet republics still live outside of their home countries, on the territories of the former Soviet Union. A further study could assess the long-term effects of perestroika and glasnost’ on contemporary Russian poetry on travel. What effect did the new openness of the Russian borders have on the individual perception of the self as a traveler? On the national identity, no longer “Soviet”? What are the specific forms of literary subjectivity that render the newly-found 286 freedom of movement? A study that traces the transition of lyrical subjectivity from the Soviet 1980s to the 1990s and further could be carried out to answer these questions. Furthermore, given the ever-rising numbers of citizens who, according to the recent surveys, have pondered leaving Vladimir Putin’s Russia (“Emigratsiia”), serious attention must be given to the present-day interrelation of travel and migration processes. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation explores the correlation between the place and the sense of self in Russian travel poetry, as well as lyrical manifestations of shifts in perception of space and time that one experiences due to mobility and exposure to foreign cultures. It specifically focuses on transformations of the identity caused by traveling both inside and outside the closed borders of the USSR, as shown in the Russian travel lyrics written in the 1930s through the 1990s. The research evaluates three distinct cases of the traveling Russian Soviet poets, namely Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Olga Sedakova, who each in their own way challenged the condition of restricted freedom of movement and captured their travels through the lens of subjective experience, as opposed to the uniform “we” of the Socialist Realist travelogue bounded by “ideological space.” My analysis of poetic texts reveals that, in the context of the Soviet reconsideration of cultural values and “rewriting” of the world history and geography, the poets like Mandelstam, Brodsky and Sedakova all resort to self-identification with the Other by means of cultural memory embedded in their destinations. This tendency is evident of continuity between these authors’ worldviews and the pre-Soviet discourse of cosmopolitanism and intercultural openness, as well as continuity between their lyrical approaches and the Modernist tradition of lyrical travelogue grounded in curiosity and respect for historical past and cultural difference.

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Creator Salnikova, Maria (author)

Core Title Self on the move: lyrical journeys in the twentieth-century Russian poetry

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Slavic Languages and Literatures

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 10/01/2021

Defense Date 08/18/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag displacement,identity,journey,Literature,mobility,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,Russia,Russian literature,Russian poetry,self,Slavic literature,Travel,travel literature,travel poetry,travelogue

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Advisor Pratt, Sarah (committee chair), St. John, David (committee member), Zholkovsky, Alexander (committee member)

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