AntiWorlds & The
Fifth Ace
INTRODUCTION
Andrei Voznesensky, Russia's
foremost modern poet, was born in Moscow on May 12, 1933. Part of his early
childhood was spent in the ancient Russian city of Vladimir. During the
war, from 1941 to 1944, he lived with his mother in Kurgan, in the Urals,
while his father, a professor of engineering in peacetime, was in Leningrad,
engaged in evacuating factories during the blockade.
Both Voznesensky's parents
have literary and artistic interests. His mother read poetry to him from
his earliest childhood - Severyanin and Pasternak, he remembers in particular.
Voznesensky recalls seeing his father once during the war when he flew
to Kurgan on leave from the front. He carried nothing with him but a small
rucksack containing some food and a little book of reproductions of etchings
by Goya which powerfully affected his small son. Voznesensky's childhood
apprehension of war in Russia, heightened by Goya's gro tesque and terrible
visions, ultimately gave rise to his most famous poem, "I Am Goya."
After the war the family
returned to Moscow. As an adolescent, Voznesensky thought of becoming an
artist. Then he studied architecture. "I was already writing," he says,
"but mainly I painted. Yet poetry was flowing in me like a river under
the ice." Shortly before his graduation from the Moscow Architectural Institute
in 1957, an event occurred which is the subject of the poem "Fire in the
Architectural Institute." Like other senior students, Voznesensky had spent
his last year on an elaborate design project, which he describes, with
all due modesty, as "a spiral-shaped thing, a bit like the Guggenheim Museum."
"One morning," he says, "we found that a fire had destroyed a year's work.
Whole districts and cities on blueprints had vanished. We were so tired
that we were glad that final examinations had to be postponed. But for
me it was more than a fire. I believe in symbols. I understood that architecture
was burned out in me. I became a poet."
Voznesensky's interest
in painting and architecture is seen in all his poetry, most explicitly
in his choice of themes and images. In "Master Craftsmen" he invokes the
legend that Barma, the architect of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, was
I blinded by Ivan the Terrible so that he might never again design anything
as beautiful. Architectural images predominate in a number of his poems,
such as "The Torches of Florence" and "Italian Garage." "New York Airport
at Night" is one sustained metaphor of the airport as the self-portrait
of the poet.
Certainly the decisive
event in Voznesensky's life came soon after his abandonment of architecture.
This was his meeting with Boris Pasternak. He sent his first poems to Pasternak,
who replied with a letter of praise and an invitation to visit him. "From
that time on I never left his side," he has said. "I moved out to Peredelkino
and stayed near him till his death.... He was my only master."
Voznesensky's earliest
writings are said to be derivative of Pasternak, but, judging from his
first published poems (1958), he quickly found his personal and wholly
original idiom. He shares, however, Pasternak's fondness for the pathetic
fallacy, and his sense of the unity of all organic life is quite Pasternakian:
I know we shall live again as
Friends or girl friends or blades of grass, Instead
of us this one or that one will come: Nature abhors a vacuum.
(from "Autumn in Sigulda")
But, above all, Voznesensky
bears the mark of Pasternak's moral intelligence, which has formed and
armed him, as it has so many others, in the struggle to re-create a genuine
literature for Russia, devastated by Stalin. In Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak
described the enemy:
"It was then [that is,
during World War I] that falsehood came into our Russian land. The great
misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was the loss of faith in the
value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was all out of date
to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune
in chorus, and live by other people's notions, the notions which were being
crammed down everybody's throat. And there arose the power of the glittering
phrase, first czarist, then revolutionary." Pasternak's celebration of
individual values, his passionate insistence on the right of privacy, and
his exaltation of the life of the heart provided the moral climate, above
the miasma of Stalinism, in which Russian literature was revived and restored
in the post-Stalin period. Moreover, Pasternak's forty-seven years of creative
work, from 1913 to 1960, bridging, as it does, the sterile years of Stalinism,
have provided a point of departure from which Voznesensky and other young
poets and writers have been able to proceed to their principal task: to
resurrect the language which had been corrupted by the "power of the glittering
phrase." Not only were such abstract nouns as "freedom," "justice," and
"truth" debased, but the language of life itself was extinguished; this
is perhaps one of the most terrible of the indictments contained in Dr.
Zhivago.
It is in this context
that Voznesensky's immense popularity, inconceivable in the West for a
"serious" modern poet, may be fully understood. If 14,000 people congregated
(as they did in 1962) in a sports stadium to hear Voznesensky read his
poetry, or 500,000 subscribed to buy a book of his poetry (An Achilles
Heart), it is because countless Russians have ceased to attend to the "glittering
phrase," turning instead to the language of symbol and fantasy for the
truths they seek. One result has been the rage for poetry readings which
seized Russia in the post-Stalin decade. Until the crackdown of 1963 severely
curtailed poetry readings, these had become the principal entertainment
of intellectuals and students in Moscow, and in provincial cities, where
poets went by the truckload.
The encounter of poet
and public in Russia is a moving spectacle. Voznesensky, in particular,
has made of the art of recitation something like an act of communion. At
first sight, however, Voznesensky's presence on stage is not overwhelming.
An awkward figure, slight and singularly vulnerable, he stands before the
microphone with his legs stifflyy apart, his Adam's apple bobbing, bearing
the applause and the shouts of acclaim as if they were blows. Then he will
recite from memory for an hour or two, with hardly a pause, in a powerful,
cultivated voice. His awkwardness vanishes; now it is his lis teners who
appear tense, straining forward to capture the flow of a language unheard
of in Russia until now. Most will have brought copies of his books, which
they will follow, like music scores.
Voznesensky's readings
display to the fullest advantage the assonances, rhythms, and modulations
of pitch and intensity which he uses with such virtuosity in composing
his poems. These devices serve his intention rather as a brilliant orchestra
score serves a central musical idea. ("Form isn't what counts," he says.
"Form must be clear, unfathomable, disquieting, like the sky in which only
radar can sense the presence of a plane.") "I Am Goya" begins: "I am Goya
/ of the bare field, by the enemy's beak gouged / till the craters of my
eyes gape / I am grief / I am the tongue / of war, the embers of cities
/ on the snows of the year 1941 / I am hunger..." In Russian the assonances
are devastating: Ya Goya... nagoye... ya gore... ya golos... goda... ya
golod... ya gorlo ... goloi...
Voznesensky reads with
an actor's skill. And his voice, with its amazing range of tonalities and
expression, is an ideal instrument to render the changes of mood and intensity
which are so characteristic of his idiom. Within the same poem, and often
within the same line, he may be tender, playful, mocking, and, finally
and most compellingly, ironic. He is a master of irony and to this end
employs not only his technical resources (for example, punning, juxtaposing,
or rhyming internally a pompous word with far-out slang) but also his alarming
associations, fantasies, and images, as in "The Skull Ballad" where the
severed head of Anna Mons, the mistress of Peter the Great, speaks to the
Czar in these terms:
love is so small who cares for love
in times like these men build
and set a world on pre - you kiss
me State in blood in blood
When reading these lines,
Voznesensky's voice, while it does not seek to imitate a woman's, is pitched,
with uncanny effect, to an extremity of rage.
Here in the contrast
between the slight, and rather modest, private person of Voznesensky and
his commanding public presence, one glimpses the nature of his truest debt
to Pasternak: a sense of the poet as prophet. "The poet is two people,"
Voznesensky has said. "One is an insignificant person, leading the most
insignificant of lives. But behind him, like an echo, is the other person
who writes poetry. Sometimes the two coexist. Sometimes they collide; this
is why certain poets have had tragic ends. Often the real man has no idea
what path or what action the other will take. That other man is the prophet
who is in every poet.... When a man writes he feels his prophetic mission
in the world. The task of the Russian poet today is to look deep inside
man. When I read my poetry to a great number of people, their emotional,
almost sensual expression of feeling seems to me to reveal the soul of
man - now no longer hidden behind closed shutters, but wide open like a
woman who has just been kissed." Voznesensky's popularity has made him
enemies in the literary and political establishment. The hacks who built
their careers on writing odes to Stalin now feel threatened when huge printings
of Voznesensky's books sell out in a single day, while their own books
molder away unsold in the bookstores. The bureaucrats, whose careers and
tastes were formed by Stalin, are scarcely more attuned to Voznesensky
and other modern poets; their authority is undermined, they feel, when
people are seen to respond with more enthusiasm to poetry than to agit-prop.
Conservative critics
often accuse Voznesensky of "formalism" (experimentalism) and ambiguity.
To the first charge he answered, in his poem "Evening on the Building Site":
"They nag me about 'formalism.' / Experts, what a distance / You are from
life! Formalin: / You stink of it, and incense." And again in "Antiworlds,"
he wrote: "Ah, my critics; how I love them. / Upon the neck of the keenest
of them, / Fragrant and bald as fresh-baked bread, / There shines a perfect
antihead..." To the charge of ambiguity, he replied in "Who Are We?": I
am myself / Among avalanches, like the Abominable / Snowman, absolutely
elusive."
Criticism of Voznesensky
mounted, in most menacing fashion, in 1963, during the vast official campaign
against Russia's liberal-minded modernist writers and artists. The campaign
was launched by Khrushchev at the now famous Manege exhibition of modern
art, where he denounced the painters in a torrent of scatological abuse
and equated their work with homosexuality - "and for that," he said, "you
can get ten years." Khrushchev's fury turned quickly to the writers, whom
he abused in much the same terms he used against the painters, at closed
meetings held between government leaders and writers, artists, and other
intellectuals. In its public aspect, the campaign raged for seven months
in the press, and at writers' meetings held all over the country where
Stalinist mediocrities proceeded to vent their pent-up anger and jealousy
on nearly every young writer who had received public acclaim during the
last years - particularly Voznesensky and Evtushenko. They called for an
end to the editions of 100,000 copies, the favorable reviews, and the trips
abroad for writers who, they claimed, flout Party opinion and play the
game of Western bourgeois ideologists ("with one foot on Gorky Street and
the other on Broadway") in their "rotten, overpraised, unrealistic, smelly
writings."
In classic purge style,
recantations were demanded of the writers. Here Voznesensky, together with
most of the other writers, proved to be "absolutely elusive." Many maintained
silence, or defended themselves; although the writers were hardly offered
a forum in the Soviet press, reports from foreign Communist observers indicated
widespread defiance at the writers' meetings. Even recantations deemed
fit to print in the newspapers were often ambiguous or ironic. This was
Voznesensky's response to a savage attack on him by Khrushchev: "It has
been said at this plenum [of the board of the Soviet Writers' Union] that
I must never forget the stern and severe words of Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev].
I shall never forget them. I shall not forget not only these severe words
but also the advice which Nikita Sergeyevich gave me. He said: 'Work.'
I do not justify myself now. I simply wish to say that for me now the main
thing is to work, work, work. What my attitude is to my country, to communism,
what I myself am, this work will show." (Pravda, March 29, 1963.)
The campaign petered
out in late June of 1963. It had failed utterly in its objective to cow
the writers and humiliate them before the nation, and to re-establish controls,
on the Stalinist model, over literature. The writers had clearly won a
moral victory. The authorities had to settle for an undeclared truce with
the liberal writers which has been maintained (with some grave lapses)
during the first two years of the post-Khrushchev era. The writers who
were under fire in 1963 gradually reappeared in print, and poetry readings
were resumed, but by no means on the same scale as before.
Whatever the outcome
of the campaign, the force and character of the attack on Voznesensky,
and other writers, were bound to be profoundly wounding. Voznesensky was
at first sent into virtual exile (it was announced that he was spending
his time in factories near Vladimir), and for many months he wandered about
the country:
Beware, my darling. Hush. Not a sound,
While I charge noisily
From place to place around Russia,
As a bird diverts the hunters from its nest.
(from "My Achilles Heart")
His poems of that period
are often love poems. It is love that defends and saves man from that which
oppresses him:
When trouble licked at me like flame,
I dived into Riga, as one would into water,
And through a straw as fair as your hair,
You gave me your breath and your breath was air.
(from "Oza")
Among his most affecting
poems are a group suffused with the raging pain of that period. Among these
are "Self-Portrait," "Give Me Peace," "My Achilles Heart," "The Ballad
of Pain," and "The Monologue of Marilyn Monroe." (The last two poems are
not included in this collection.) Most of these poems appeared, however,
a year or two after the campaign against Voznesensky. His first major poem
to be published after the campaign was "Longjumeau" (Pravda, October 13,
1963), a tribute to Lenin. Longjumeau was the Party school near Paris associated
with Lenin. While the subject is, of course, eminently "acceptable," and
the poet is extremely respectful of Lenin, he is by no means sycophantic.
Moreover, the poem shows clearly that Voznesensky was not disposed to yield
in any way to criticism of his use of language. "Longjumeau" overs splendid
examples of his inventiveness in this regard: he has Lenin, while playing
a Russian form of skittles (gorodki), throw a stick and smash "empires,
/ churches, future Berias" (tak chto vdrebezgi imperii, / tserkvi, budushchie
berii). Bold and startling in its play with the grimmest of names, imperii-berii
is also characteristic of Voznesensky's semantic exploitation of rhyme,
as opposed to purely phonetic rhyming: Beria had, of course, an empire
himself. Another instance of his use of this "rich" sort of rhyme was singled
out by the writer Samuil Marshak in a posthumously published article (Novy
mir, No. 9, 1965) on the work of young Russian poets. This is the rhyme
vayateli (sculptors) and voiteli (warriors) in "Master Craftsmen," a poem
about embattled artists. Such rhymes, besides being ingenious phonetically,
reinforce the whole meaning of the poem.
In general, Voznesensky
stands out among the other young poets in the Soviet Union for the resourcefulness
with which he handles language. Probably none has a greater range than
he. Together with Evtushenko, he has pioneered the emancipation of Russian
poetic language from the restriction from which it has long suftered and
given back to it something of the freedom which it enjoyed in the twenties.
Where necessary for his poetic purposes, he never hesitates to introduce
slang, neologisms, and the jargon of modern technology. In "Oza" he complains
that his "throat is sore from technical terms." However, his use of slang
and technical jargon is for the most part very disciplined. There is no
question of his using this language, as lesser poets sometimes do, to flaunt
his "emancipation," to indulge in the tiresome shock effects which are
all too common during the sort of poetic revolution which is going on in
Russia at the moment. If he chooses an unusual word or expression, it is
not for its own sake, but because he thinks it is best suited to th e achievement
of a particular effect. A characteristic device is his sudden, unexpected
use of a slang word to bring about an abrupt change of emotional pitch.
There is a good example in "Hunting a Hare": The almost unbearable tension
that the hunters feel at the end of the chase, the sense of mystic awe
which the death of the hare induces in them, is suddenly broken - only
to be strangely heightened - by the comment of one of the hunters in the
cynical language of the criminal and the police interrogator: okhmuryaet
(roughly: "He's putting it on"). Another good example of a startling change
of key in a solemn context is in "Autumn in Sigulda," where, speaking of
his own tombstone, the poet uses the word bul'dik, which is adolescent
slang for a lump of rock. Voznesensky's use of words out of their normal
context can be playful and ironical in a way which does not always please
his critics. A case in point is the deliberately anachronistic introduction
of the term stroitel'stvo (literally, "construction," in Soviet political
rhetoric: e.g., "the construction of communism") in his poem "The Skull
Ballad," which relates to the time of Peter the Great (see the note on
this poem) . His rhymes, too, sometimes suggest a lack of piety which creates
a feeling of Unease, as it is no doubt intended to, among the strait-laced,
right-minded citizens whom Voznesensky likes to tease (as in "Wall of Death,"
where he brackets them with Vestal Virgins). The names of venerable figures
(not excluding Lenin) and awe-inspiring institutions are quite likely to
be rhymed impishly with some apparent1y incongruous colloquialism. In "Oza,"
for example, the famous Soviet atomic research station in Dubna is rhymed
with the slang phrase for "kicking the bucket" (ne dam ya duba... Dubna).
This, needless to say, implies no disrespect for Dubna, but only disdain
for pomposity and literal-mindedness. Apart from his superb mastery of
contemporary Russian idiom, Voznesensky also brings to his craft an impressive
knowledge of his native poetic tradition. His own original manner is enhanced
by an easy familiarity with Mayakovsky and Pasternak, both of whom have
influenced him, as well as with the classical Russian heritage. In "Oza"
particularly there are echoes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Blok.
His wide linguistic range
is matched by the thematic variety of his work. The present collection
has been divided into eight sections. The first seven group together poems
that are more or less akin to each other. The eighth section consists of
seven of Voznesensky's most recently published poems.
Part 1: "I Am Goya" consists
of work in which the poet focuses his attention on war, death, violence,
and injustice. Here his vision of the world, like that of Goya, is haunted
and horror-struck. Sometimes he speaks of his own anguished state (as in
"My Achilles Heart"), but more generally, as in "Someone Is Beating a Woman,"
he is concerned with the plight of other people. In "The Skull Ballad"
and "The Cashier" there is an attempt to generalize in allegorical form
about the human condition. He seems to be saying that the world lies in
evil and that man is a deaf-mute, like the hapless invalids in the store
beating hopelessly against the glass-protected cashier's cubicle: "Drumming
of knuckle and palm / On the glass plate; / So bellowed the psalm / Of
my dumb fate." In "Hunting a Hare" the pursuit of a dumb animal is made
into a symbol of blind and unmotivated cruelty: "The urge to kill, like
the urge to beget, / Is blind and sinister..." Yet in all this there is
no absolute despair, and sometimes even a hint of possible redemption:
people can be touched or moved by the evil they see done, or even by the
evil they do themselves. The poet has been attacked by some of his Soviet
critics for dwelling on the "immutability" of human nature (see the note
on "The Skull Ballad"), but what he rejects is only a facile and complacent
belief in progress, not the idea of progress itself.
The last poem in this
group, "Sketch for a Poem," one of Voznesensky's most recent works, is
a surrealist vision in which a number of the poet's preoccupations - the
plight of women, the precarious nature of existence, the Protean quality
of life - are thrown into nightmarish relief. Part 2: "Give Me Peace" consists
of poems of a more intimate and personal kind in which the dominant note
is that of retreat, even escape, into love and nature. Some of them, as
explained earlier, are closely connected with his own personal difficulties
in the past few years ("Dead Still" and "Give Me Peace"), but the general
sense binding all these poems together is the supreme value attached to
personal relations, and the ultimate primacy of nature over history and
the doings of men. If love is salvation and a refuge, to be deprived of
it is the greatest misfortune and one which holds the most terror for the
poet, hence the melancholy counterpoint to the comparative serenity of
"Dead Still," "Bicycles," and "Give Me Peace" in "Autumn," "First Frost,"
and "You sit, pregnant and pale..." where the miseries of loneliness, separation,
and abandonment are shown in all their unrelievable bleakness.
Part 3: "Who Are We?"
has as its unifying theme the problem of identifying oneself and others,
the ambiguity and deceptiveness of outward appearances, the difficulty
of finding one's bearings in life. "Foggy Street" gives an idea, through
the appropriate image of a world shrouded in fog, of the confused notion
we have even of people we think we know well. In "Who Are We?" the poet
proclaims the elusiveness of his own personality, and in "Antiworlds,"
borrowing the concept of "anti-matter" from modern physics, he talks in
a half-comic, half-serious vein of the possibility of assuming other identities
or of communicating with one's "double" in the "antiworld."
Part 4: "The Parabola"
is concerned with the fate and role of the artist. In "The Torches of Florence"
and "Fire in the Architectural Institute," Voznesensky touches rather selfdeprecatingly
on some of the vicissitudes of his own career, but in most of the poems,
particularly "Leaves and Roots," "Master Craftsmen," and "Parabolic Ballad,"
he treats more seriously of the artist's historical calling as prophet,
rebel, witness, and martyr. To illustrate his theme, he ranges through
several countries, mainly Russia, but also Italy and Georgia.
Part 5: "The Triangular
Pear" shows the poet's preoccupation with certain aspects of the modern
world, his ambivalent feelings about its technology and its hectic tempo,
which both enthrall and disturb him. Most of this group of poems were written
under the influence of the impressions he gained during his journey to
America in 1961.
Part 6: "I'm a Family
of Seven" is a miscellany of poems in a lighter vein, sometimes humorous,
or whimsical.
Part 7: "Oza" is the
poet's most ambitious work, in which he attempts to give a more elaborate
statement of his view of the world. Despite the bewildering complexity
of the poem's structure, its alternation of prose and verse, and its abrupt
changes in mood ranging from the lyrical to the satirical (with elements
of mystification and parody), the work nonetheless has certain unifying
threads. One is the chronicle of an ill- starred secret love affair. Never
wholly abandoning this crucial personal theme, the poet moves from time
to time to a speculative plane, expressing ideas on the state of the world
in general, the history of his country, and man's condition. He is at once
fascinated and repelled by modern technology, which is personified by the
cyclotron and its master (who appears as the Scientist or the Toastmaster)
. On this theme, the poem in Section XII is most explicit: "All progress
is retrogression / If the process breaks man down." In "Oza," as in many
of his other poems, Voznesensky is engaged in a defense of love and of
the free human spirit against "pseudo-progress" and the "god-damned machine,"
which, when it gets into the hands of the soul-less and heartless, begets
oppression. Here, it is the poet who comes forward as the essential guardian
of human values.
The translation of Voznesensky's
work presents the usual difficulties of interpreting the whole complex
of cultural references, even of everyday sights and sounds, a knowledge
of which the poet takes for granted in his native audience, but which are
unfamiliar or at best exotic to an audience rooted in a different tradition.
It would be unrealistic not to admit that all translation, particularly
of poetry, is to a certain extent doomed to failure, except when it deals
with the abstractions of science or the international commonplaces of journalism.
The peculiar flavor of the original can never, of course, be rendered,
but meaning and imagery, if not the wealth of associations and allusions
of the original, can survive the crashing of the language barrier. This
collection, apart from being an attempt to present the work of a young
Russian poet who speaks with particular urgency to the world at large,
is something of an experiment in verse translation. The six American poets
who contributed to this volume made their versions in close collaboration
with Max Hayward. They have tried to convey, in the terms of their own
poetic idiom and vision, the essence of what Voznesensky says in Russian
to his compatriots.
This bilingual edition
includes (in Part 8: "The Fifth Ace") seven poems published in the Soviet
Union late in 1966 in a collection of Voznesensky's work entitled Akhillesovo
serdtse (An Achilles Heart). All the translations were made by Stanley
Kunitz in collaboration with Vera Dunham.
The Editors
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