“Night is the best time for believing in the light.” These words, attributed to Plato, are the epigraph to “Time of Gratitude,” a cycle of poems composed in 1976–77 by the Russian and Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. They mark the emergence from a particularly dark period in the poet’s life following the politically inspired murder of his friend, the poet and translator Konstantin Bogatyrev – an emergence helped, as Aygi wrote more than once, by the example and inspiration of fellow writers from many countries. Aygi doesn’t appear to have suffered greatly from the “anxiety of influence,” and was very much a poet of gratitude, gratitude for the human and natural world, gratitude for the artistic creations of others. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to use this same title for a collection of tributes he wrote for some of the writers who meant the most to him, who enabled him to survive the spiritual and material hardships of a dark age in Russian life.
Gennady Nikolaevich Aygi (1934–2006) was the son of a village schoolteacher in Chuvashia, a non-Russian republic nearly 500 miles to the east of Moscow. His mother, a peasant woman, was the daughter of the last pagan priest of his village. After studying at the Literary Institute in Moscow and working for ten years at the Mayakovsky Museum, he lived and wrote in the literary “underground,” remaining unpublished and unrecognized in Russia until the perestroika of the late 1980s. Thereafter, he became the Chuvash national poet, but it was as a Russian poet that he became known and published throughout the world – and eventually, after a long wait, in Russia. The English-speaking world was behind continental Europe in recognizing Aygi’s importance, but several volumes of his poems have appeared in Britain and America over the years. In the introductions to two of them, Selected Poems 1954–1994 (Angel Books, London, and Hydra Books, Evanston, IL, 1997) and Child-and-Rose (New Directions, New York, 2003), I give a general account of Aygi’s work and career. Child-and-Rose also contains two important aphoristic essays on poetry, “Sleep-and-Poetry” and “Poetry-as-Silence,” while a successor volume, Field-Russia (New Directions, New York, 2007) includes an important interview on poetry titled “Conversation at a Distance.” These would provide a helpful background to the discussion that follows, where I focus on Aygi’s involvement with the writers and painters to whom these tributes are addressed.
For Aygi, poetry was a calling, a commitment of the greatest seriousness. Even so, in an interview of 1985, he remarked: “In general I regard ‘great prose’ as the highest form of verbal art.” He knew himself to be a poet, which was not the same as a “writer” – indeed, he described himself as a “non-writer.” As a result, though he wrote many letters – a remarkable body of writing that should one day be collected – he was always reluctant to write publicly in prose: essays, memoirs, and the like. The texts gathered here were almost all written in response to pressing requests, for particular circumstances, anniversaries, deaths, special numbers of journals, new publications, etc. In a few cases, notably the text on Paul Celan, “For a Long Time: Into Whisperings and Rustlings,” the prose is really a poem. And I have thought it worthwhile to intersperse the prose texts with actual poems, either because these are the only tributes he left to much-loved authors (Baudelaire, Norwid), or because the poems illustrate and illuminate the prose (as with those dedicated to Celan, Shalamov, and Char).
Reading Aygi’s poems, one is struck by the frequency of dedications, quite often enigmatic, simply initials. They are addressed both to personal friends (all over the world) and to artists and writers, both living and dead. There is nothing unusual about this of course, but it is worth stressing that for Aygi poetry was essentially communication, the writing and reading of poetry creating scattered communities of people who could share a vision, a common search. This community crossed language barriers. Aygi himself worked closely with his translators, and he translated poetry from many languages into Chuvash.
It is worth stressing too that this village boy (and he did in fact remain a village boy in many ways until the end of his life, when he was buried in the snowy fields of Shaymurzino) became a citizen of the world republic of letters, a person of wide and deep culture. His poetry may lie outside the mainstream of Russian poetry as conventionally understood, but it creates its own tradition in which his native Chuvash culture (largely an oral culture until the end of the nineteenth century) flows together with European modernism (Nietzsche, and more lastingly, Kafka and Kierkegaard), the poetry of France, and the great Russian artistic movements of the early twentieth century. To these we can add (among others) many figures from earlier Russian poetry (one might mention Lermontov, Batyushkov, and Annensky), Russian prose writers of the twentieth century (notably Platonov and Shalamov), biblical and liturgical texts, religious thinkers – and in the English-language world (though none of them appear in this volume), the revered figure of Dickens and poets such as Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, insofar as they could be found through translation. At the same time, Aygi, who lived for a good part of his life in an underground world of writers, artists, and musicians, was much influenced by the other arts, notably the painters and musicians of the twentieth century – with Malevich as the central figure – but also, over a long period, the much beloved Schubert, who figures in many of his poems.
The first influences – the first debts – came from Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose impact on the young poet was great and long-lasting, even if he had to free himself from the “Mayakovskism” of which he speaks in his memoir of Boris Pasternak. The interview with the Literary Gazette published in this volume shows him resisting the temptation (strong in the post-Soviet era) to ditch the great bard of the Revolution.
In the 1960s, Aygi had worked in the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow, where he organized several exhibitions of the artists of the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Malevich, Tatlin, Chagall, Guro, Larionov, Goncharova, and others) and acquired an exhaustive knowledge of the poetic and artistic culture of the period. As far as poetry is concerned, the two main figures apart from Mayakovsky were Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh. As can be seen from “Leaves – Into a Festive Wind,” Khlebnikov’s legacy, like Mayakovsky’s, was both positive and negative for Aygi; saluting his enormous achievement as a worker of the Word, he was bound to distance himself from what he increasingly saw as Khlebnikov’s anti-human, “utopian” vision of revolutionary change, a vision which by the Brezhnev years had become inextricably involved with the crimes and horrors of the Soviet regime. Kruchonykh, whom he knew personally, seems exempt from such charges, and here Aygi is above all concerned to rehabilitate for Russian readers an experimental writer who was often written off as a joker, with his early intimations of sound poetry (dyr bul shchil) and concrete poetry. The piece on Kruchonykh is one of an unfinished series of articles introducing selections of poems by largely forgotten poets of the “Russian poetic avant-garde” – Guro, Bozhidar, Gnedov, Filonov, Mazurin. These, together with Georgy Obolduev (the subject of a much longer essay published under the pseudonym of A. N. Terezin in 1979) are more straightforward introductions rather than lyrical tributes, and also seemed too remote from the English-speaking reader to include here.
For Aygi, the central figure of this Russian avant-garde was undoubtedly Kazimir Malevich, not only for his actual paintings and three-dimensional creations, but for the ultimately religious vision of a non-objective art expressed in his writings on Suprematism. Unlike Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, Malevich was in Aygi’s view exempt from the political sins of Futurism; he always spoke of him with reverence, guarded preciously the few works of his that he possessed, and on one occasion took me to pay homage at the cube with a black square that marks the painter’s burial place in western Moscow. He did not write at length in prose about Malevich (just the few paragraphs given here), but he dedicated several poems to the master, of which I’ve included the one that seems the most striking to me.
Almost equally important for Aygi in his early years as a poet was his contemporary the artist Vladimir Yakovlev, a tragic figure, and one of the leading figures in the Moscow artistic underground of the 1960s and 1970s. The artist and the poet inspired and helped one another, and Yakovlev left a number of portraits of Aygi, one of which appears as the frontispiece to the present volume. As well as some poetic notes devoted to Yakovlev’s portraits, Aygi dedicated a number of poems to his friend, of which I’ve chosen two here.
Meanwhile, before his immersion in the underground, the young Chuvash poet had studied at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. As well as contact with young contemporaries (such as Andrey Voznesensky), this brought him a vastly extended knowledge of Russian and world literature, but also the possibility of learning to read foreign poetry in the original. For Aygi, although Nietzsche was a enormously important liberating experience, the foreign poetry that mattered most belonged to France. He set about acquiring enough of the language to read Baudelaire – for him always the first poet of modernity – and eventually became intimately acquainted with the work of many other modern French poets. There are tributes in the present volume to two of these writers, Max Jacob and René Char, the first his “only moral support” during many difficult years in the 1960s, the second “not only a favorite poet, but a friend and teacher.” Many other French poets were constant presences for him – Gérard de Nerval, Pierre-Jean Jouve in particular – even if he did not write separate tributes to them. And in 1968, he simultaneously paid homage to French poetry and enriched his own culture by publishing in Chuvash an Anthology of French Poetry, for which he was awarded a prize by the Académie Française.
It was while he was a student at the Literary Institute that Aygi got to know and love Boris Pasternak. The circumstances of their meeting are revealed in “Everyday Miracle,” a text written more than thirty years after the conversations it describes. Pasternak was an enduringly important figure for the younger poet, and this in spite of the radical differences between their poetic ambitions. When I first met Aygi in 1974, we walked through the woods and talked for hours about the writer known here as “the classic.”
If Nietzsche had been the first overwhelming experience of European modernism, he was largely replaced in the 1960s by Kierkegaard and Kafka (both first read in French). There is no written tribute to the Danish philosopher, who was largely responsible for Aygi’s return to Christianity. But Kafka, discovered for the first time in 1961, became the subject of several poems, and of the deeply felt piece translated here, “O Yes: Light of Kafka.” In the same decade, Aygi first read another writer who was to have a key role in his thinking about the tragedies of the modern world, and of the Soviet Union in particular – Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales. This plainly written, immensely powerful evocation of life in the Gulag wasn’t published in Russia for many years, but circulated in samizdat; first read in 1965, it became a talismanic work for young Aygi. It seems that the younger writer only met Shalamov once – on the rather difficult evening recorded in “An Evening with Shalamov,” but his tragic themes echo through Aygi’s verse for the next fifteen years. (The same is also true, though less directly, of Andrey Platonov’s work, often alluded to by Aygi, though not the subject of a written tribute.)
As for poets, apart from the Chuvash, the Russians, and the French, the most significant figure was probably the nineteenth-century Polish writer Cyprian Kamil Norwid, represented here by the poem “Reading Norwid.” In an interview in 1985, Aygi declared: “In the most difficult periods of my life, my thoughts turned frequently and intensively to Nietzsche and Baudelaire, and more recently to Norwid”; elsewhere, he wrote that two great Poles – Malevich and Norwid – had possessed the gift of “universal Language.” For his knowledge of Polish writing Aygi was much indebted to the dedicatee of this poem, his close friend and older contemporary at the Literary Institute, Wiktor Woroszylski, the author of the widely admired Life of Mayakovsky. It was Woroszylski who first translated Aygi and thus launched his international reputation. Having published his Chuvash anthology of French poetry, Aygi began work on a similar volume for Polish poetry; he recruited a team of translators, though he translated Norwid himself. Aygi also masterminded a Chuvash anthology of Hungarian poetry, and started to compile additional anthologies for Breton and Scottish poetry.
The literatures of two other countries figure significantly in the present collection of tributes: Sweden and Chuvashia. While Tomas Tranströmer was perhaps not such a talismanic figure as the writers cited above, Sweden was important for Aygi, not least because the Swedish cultural service abroad took an active interest in Chuvash culture – to this day, there is a thriving group of Chuvash poets, artists, and intellectuals who cultivate (with readings, music, drink) the memory of Sweden’s national bard, Carl Michael Bellman. So Aygi was glad to write a preface to a selection of translations from Tranströmer, whom he loved and admired.
But of course Aygi’s central concern was Chuvash culture, and I regret that it only figures in the present book in the form of an essay on Mikhail Sespel (as well as a section devoted to the poet Vasley Mitta in “Everyday Miracle”). Aygi’s homage to his Chuvash predecessors and his native culture takes a different form, the Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, which he arranged to be translated into different languages (the English version appeared in 1991). In the introduction to this anthology, which ranges from ancient heathen prayers to poems of the 1980s, he gives an overview of the history, the culture, and the poetic tradition of his homeland, together with brief accounts of four of the most important poets: Konstantin Ivanov, Mikhail Sespel, Peder Khuzangay, and Vasley Mitta. A further act of homage to the poetry of the peoples of the Volga can also be found in his evocative little volume Salute – to Singing: One Hundred Variations on Themes from Folk-Songs of the Volga Region (Zephyr Press, Brookline, MA, 2002). The first sequence of variations ends with a heartfelt quatrain that could well be applied to the present volume:
And where we stood
may there remain
the shining of our
benediction.
—peter france
Edinburgh, February 2017