YOUNG PHILOLOGISTS MEET AND DISCUSS LITERATURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PETERSBURG. THE BIRTH OF FORMALISM. LEV JAKUBINSKY. YEVGENI POLIVANOV. POETRY AND TIME: “THE BRONZE HORSEMAN.” POETRY AS THE “DEEP JOY OF RECOGNITION.” SHKLOVSKY, SAYS BLOK, UNDERSTANDS EVERYTHING. YURY TYNYANOV. BORIS EIKHENBAUM. HOW TWO EX-FORMALISTS ARGUED THE DAY AKHMATOVA DIED. DERZHAVIN’S ARRIVAL SPELLS THE END OF FORMALISM. MAN’S DESTINY IS THE MATERIAL OF ART. WHICH HAS TO BE SHAKEN UP ONCE IN A WHILE, LIKE A CLOCK THAT STOPS TICKING. ON THE FUTILITY OF LOOKING AT FLAGS.
I propose, Viktor Borisovich, that we devote today’s conversation to Opoyaz, the now legendary “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”—in other words, to formalism. I’d suggest starting from the very beginning, from its inception.
In that case, I need to go back to my university days. After gymnasium, I enrolled in the Department of Philology. The University of Petersburg was very old, for Russia, and it had famous, very well-regarded professors. One of the most respected in our department was Semyon Afanasyevich Vengerov. I remember he would give the students enrolled in his courses a kind of survey to fill out. We were to explain the reasons why we had chosen that discipline. I said, more or less: because I want to create and lead a new literary school. Several decades later, I had the chance to see that piece of paper again. Vengerov, who was very meticulous and filed everything, had kept it in his records. So, it was there, in the halls of the University of Petersburg, where everyone who would form Opoyaz met for the first time. During one of the first student meetings, in 1912, I believe it was, we were already arguing that Vengerov’s work wasn’t real literary work. That the encyclopedias with dates, the biographies of writers, were antiquated and useless, and anyway, had already been done. Now I’m going to make a confession: I never finished university. Why? Because I didn’t have time, but also because I wanted to occupy myself seriously with literature. I studied rarely, I didn’t take my exams. But at university, where I was able to meet people like Mandelstam, Gumilev, where there was an unbelievable rivalry between students in different disciplines, I met Lev Jakubinsky. He was a linguist, Baudouin de Courtenay’s favorite student. We became very good friends. I remember we used to talk on the phone for hours. Our conversations about literary matters were just as endless. He studied the different functions of language, the functional differences between poetic and practical language, where the word becomes a signal, something like a traffic light, a colored flag. What is today defined as formalism began with these meetings among university students, meetings and discussions that were completely informal. Our group’s first publication didn’t appear until 1916. Many of us in Opoyaz were incredibly knowledgeable, dedicated linguists, people with academic backgrounds. There was also Yevgeni Polivanov. He only had one hand. He’d lost the other when he was young—to imitate a character from the Brothers Karamazov, he lay on the tracks as a train passed over. And the train severed his hand. We became great friends. He was a brilliant man. He studied with Baudouin as well. And he was also a remarkable Orientalist. He himself told me that one day, at the university, as he was listening to a lecture half-asleep, his head back, suddenly he felt something like a jolt to his brain—and, he said, that from that day on he began to understand languages. He knew twenty or so. On the street he could speak to the Gypsies in their tongue, he knew Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, and other, smaller languages. After the revolution he became a Communist, working for Comintern. He had a dream: to create a table of all the languages, like Mendeleev’s. Unfortunately, this truly exceptional man learned to smoke opium in the Orient. After a certain point even that wasn’t enough—he began eating it. And he told me that he found it absurd that people could spend their money on anything other than opium. He was an unbelievable character: one time, he went to the university to present, if I remember correctly, his doctoral thesis. He came to the classroom in a coat but no pants, just underwear. Everybody at the university knew him, so they let it slide. He began to speak; halfway through they told him he’d said enough, but he replied: “Dear colleagues and professors, please allow me to continue. I don’t think you’ve understood anything yet.” The presentation went well and he was awarded his degree.
What was the reaction to the debut of the young—but, as it would seem, aggressive—theorists of formalism?
Ah yes, we were aggressive, very. We certainly weren’t gentle with our elders. But that was the era, it was indispensable. Anyway, the circle of old professors didn’t make much of an effort to include us. Consequently, problems arose.
And what was the relationship between Opoyaz and the Moscow linguistic circle?
We had meetings with them, naturally. Jakobson often came here, he would stay in Petrograd. But they were two distinct groups. The fundamental difference between the Moscow group and the Petersburg group, I think, is that the Muscovite group, especially Jakobson, held that literature was a phenomenon of language, whereas we held that literature was one of the phenomena of artistic expression. But if literature is an exclusively linguistic phenomenon, it becomes impossible to understand how the translation of literary works is possible, or why the great upheavals in history could enter into literature without entering into language.
In this sense, if I’ve understood you correctly, you consider Muscovite formalism closer to the approach of contemporary structuralism.
That’s probably true. In any case, their position is mistaken. It only allows you to study poetry, not prose. Anyway, I too was one of the first to make this mistake when, under Kruchenykh’s influence, I wrote that poetry is an art exclusively of words, even if those words are nonsensical.
Are you alluding to your essay “On Poetry and Trans-sense Language”?
I am . . . But of course, that was pure insolence, I wanted to make a splash, shock people. As I’ve said, it was the era. Poetry, all poetry, even the most apparently “meaningless,” is bound to its time and must be read in the context of that bind. Which is not merely a relationship of influence. And I don’t really like that word. What’s flowing into what? Neither time nor poetry are vessels into which something can be poured. Poetry, you see, lives in its own particular time. Poetry and real life, for example, age at different rates. Common time consists of years, decades, whereas poetry lives in centuries. The time of poetry is essentially the time of writing, of creation. Between the beginning and the end of a poem, there’s an entire poetic destiny, and thinking that the first and second verses are contemporaries is an error. The time of poetry is the time of the creative act, the time of the making and changing of the poet’s relationship with the world. It’s the time of sensation, of the perception of reality.
Yes, but then where can one find the traces of this bind, this intersection of real time and poetic time?
Let’s take an example from Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” which everybody knows. It begins with the verses: “There, by the billows desolate, / He stood, with mighty thoughts elate, / And gazed . . . ” “He,” of course, is Peter I, Peter the Great. And the poem ends with the flooding of Petersburg and the destruction of the house of Parasha, the woman loved by Yevgeny, a petty clerk, a civil servant. At the beginning of the poem Pushkin has Peter saying: “And here a city by our labor / Founded, shall gall our haughty neighbor.” The city, Petersburg, will be founded, but this new city will also be the site of Parasha’s ruin. In other words, the hero’s story will turn out to be another man’s fate. A hundred years after Peter decided to build the city, a hundred years later, a girl dies. How does Push-kin establish this continuity? In a poetic, nonlinear way. If at the beginning he writes: “The moss-grown miry banks with rare / Hovels were dotted here and there . . .” he’s talking about the houses, the “shelter” of the “wretched Finns,” at the end of the poem we’ll again see a “frail hut,” the small, rickety house of a petty bureaucrat. You see, this collision of epochs, of history, of destinies . . . without that, you can’t understand the structure of a work.
You have “confessed” to Kruchenykh’s influence on one of your early critical works. This reaffirms, even if it’s no longer necessary, the interrelatedness of the avant-garde and the formalist “school.”
I did, but about that essay—where I cite various examples of the glossolaliac language of mystical sectarians—I want to tell you a story. Once Polivanov told me that one of the examples of glossolalia I cited was actually from Old Tibetan. The text had been transmitted orally, and even though its meaning is no longer understood, it had become part of religious language. Originally, however, those words had a meaning and were fully comprehensible.
In that essay, to argue for trans-sense language’s right to a place in poetry, you also bring up a fascinating problem, about which much more could be said—namely, that sort of rhythmic “sound-picture” that precedes poetry and that, once poetry is formed into words and written down, determines our perception of it.
You see, this is something that Mayakovsky has written about too. “I go about waving my hands and mumbling almost incoherently, slowing down so as not to disturb my mumbling, or mumbling quicker in order to keep time with my feet [ . . . ] Gradually, you begin to extract individual words from the roar. Some words bounce off never to return, others stick, are turned over and over and inside out dozens of times, until you feel that the word has fallen into place . . .” That is, even Mayakovsky says that the rhythm comes first, and then the composition, the “message,” the key word that gives the entire poem its meaning. And in this process, the word tests the space around it, just as we grope for things around us in the dark.
That image brings to mind the words of another great Russian poet, Mandelstam, who said that poetry is the “deep joy of recognition . . .”
Yes, poetry is the “deep joy of recognition.” That’s it. The poet searches, gropes in the dark, and my dear contemporaries, so prolific in words, the structuralists, who filled the world with terminology . . . You see, they don’t know this thing, this affliction of the presentiment of art and the joy of recognition. Only the great poets do. They know they’re going to write. They don’t know what will come out, whether it will be a boy or a girl, they only know that it will be poetry. Only the poet knows this tortuous search for the word, the physical joy of “recognition,” and sometimes, also the anguish of defeat. Again, take Mandelstam: “I have forgotten the word I wanted to say. A blind swallow returns to the palace of shadows . . .” I knew Mandelstam, I remember him rushing down the stairs of the House of Arts declaiming these verses. You see, a poem is born from struggle. A rhythm, a word, like an echo, then a word with a different meaning, in the dark you only see individual, separate things, but then, little by little, your eyes adjust to the change in the light, they can see, and it’s poetry.
Viktor Borisovich, I understand that you too have written something in verse. I’ve seen some of your poems in the 1914 First Journal of Russian Futurists. Have you also experienced this “affliction of presentiment”?
No, never, absolutely not. One might ask, therefore, how I can even talk about it. You know, one time Blok said to me—we were walking, it was night time, the Northern night, a white night, the stones were just barely pink, the Neva clear blue, and, God, since I’ve embarked on such a picturesque description, I might as well add that the sky had glints of scarlet. So, Blok and I were walking and talking. We talked for a long time that night. And at a certain point, he says to me: “Why is it that you understand everything?” Only that, it’s terrible, but I don’t remember at all what we were talking about. I still wonder today: what did I do to deserve such a compliment from this great poet? But I must say that I do understand a few things. Not everything, of course. But some things.
Allow me to return the question of poetics for a moment. You’ve written a lot about Mayakovsky, and, among other things, about how he revolutionized poetry. But don’t you believe that Mayakovsky’s new poetry, and in general, much of modern Russian poetry, would have been unthinkable without Khlebnikov? Khlebnikov, who says “a line of verse is the movement, or dance, of a figure who enters at some doors and exits at others.”
Sure, I agree with you. And don’t forget to put this line from Khlebnikov in the text of our conversation. The dance of a figure who enters at some doors and exits at others—there lies all the indeterminacy and richness of art. Man lives in the world, but first and foremost he lives in the world of words. And from the “displacements,” from what seems discordant, from transgressions, often comes a new harmony. Khlebnikov talked about the child’s marvelous transgression. Rhyme, but perhaps not just rhyme, all poetry, might predate the world, might already live on the child’s lips as soon as he starts to babble, to realize that sounds can be put together.
That brings to mind another question. What role did Andrei Bely’s research on Russian prosody have in the emergence of the formal method?
Sure, Bely was a big influence. On all of us. Of course, not everything he wrote was correct. But first you have to read Bely, then you can criticize him. You should be afraid of the books you agree with, not the ones you disagree with. You should be afraid of the books you haven’t read, not the ones you have. Khlebnikov, for example, knew Bely by heart. I mentioned Bely’s errors. With metrics, Bely draws the rhythm, makes a diagram of the meter. But these are only the traces, the footsteps of poetry. It’s a spatial graph. But in poetry, as I was saying, there’s the time element. You also have to take into consideration the pace of a poem.
Assuming all the responsibility for the long digression this time, I’d like to ask you to go back to your memories of the University of Petersburg, Vengerov’s irreverent students . . .
With us, there was Yury Tynyanov. He was a little younger than me. And he was a better student than me, he took all his exams . . . I cherish his books. In one he wrote the dedication: “If I hadn’t met you, my life would have been spent in vain.” Yet he had a great life. We’re not the ones who invent ourselves, it’s time that invents us. It invents us then it abuses us. Yury wrote poetry, beautiful verses in the style of Derzhavin, he loved Küchelbecker, the poetry of the Pushkin era. He had a deep understanding of poetry, he would talk about the “density” of verse. He said that the poetic word, because of a line’s power of compression, became more “effective” than the prosaic word. Yury wrote that splendid book that is Archaists and Innovators. I remember I suggested he change the title, I mean, put a hyphen instead of the and. Because an innovator is always an archaist. For example, the taste for folk decoration played an enormous role during Manet’s times. In other words, I’m referring to that return that’s always there—in every moment of rupture and innovation—to the earliest sources, the primordial sources of the arts. And the Russian archaists . . . It was the War of 1812 and it turned out that the Karamzinists didn’t have the right words for that reality. The archaists, Shishkov, had them. Russia came out of 1812 with new challenges, new tasks . . . And literature too came out changed. You can’t understand Hermann and Raskolnikov without Napoleon. Just as you can’t understand Balzac’s heroes without him. But what was I talking about? “I have forgotten what I wanted to say. And a bodiless thought returns to the palace of shadows . . .” Yes, I was talking about my friends from Opoyaz. Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum. I met him later, in 1916. He was a professor, a scholar. He had written in Apollon. He was four or five years older than me. He wrote an extremely interesting essay, “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ is Made.” Interesting and important, focused on skaz, oral speech in Gogol. Gogol began with the word, of course, there’s no arguing that. But beyond that, in Gogol, there’s the revolt of the little guy. Even the name Akaky . . . According to legend, Akaky was a humble, meek friar; when he died and was buried, the starets who had oppressed him in life turned to him, during his eulogy, and said: “Are you resting, Akaky?” And Akaky, dead, responded: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” that is, with the words from the Sermon on the Mount. In other words, there’s humility and docility in the very name Akaky. But Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich rebels at the end, he speaks with the language that only the coachmen in the square use to express themselves. And at a certain point he says, I couldn’t care less if you’re a general. It’s the revolt of the poor. A rich man, a millionaire who read the story, said: “How can people not make a fuss about this book in which some lowly man goes around stealing furs?” Akaky Akakievich rebels in death. He’s a ghost in revolt. Also, in many respects, Eikhenbaum’s work was taken up by Vinogradov. And his title was a response to my “How Don Quixote Is Made.”
Now that you mention it, Viktor Borisovich, it would be interesting to find out what you think of that today: how is Don Quixote made?
When I wrote about Don Quixote I wanted to show how much parody there was before parody. In Cervantes there are three degrees of parody. There’s Boiardo, Ariosto, and many others. But then there’s another problem. Why, how, to what end, did this story of parody of parody come about? You see, explaining how long literary schools last by saying, as I did at one time, that a literary school comes into being because the previous one has become tedious—this is how, at most, one could explain how trends change: why today people wear tight pants and tomorrow they wear baggy ones. But it can in no way explain, for example, Pushkin’s rise and fall. And, in general, the great problems of humanity—how Akaky Akakievich should live, what Golyadkin has to do, what the “poor folk” have to do—these problems exist and we can’t say yes, we want them, or no, we don’t. They surround us, and when Push-kin said, “I’ll shed tears over a work of imagination,” you can be sure he wasn’t crying over one of Lotman’s books. He had other problems, other scores to settle, there were other conflicts in his work, even if Pushkinian, from the Pushkin era. And when Pushkin began the Onegin, he immediately wrote: “This is the beginning of a long poem which will, probably, never see completion.” It was ’25, before the revolt, and no one knew what would happen . . . Art always echoes with the screech of icebergs scraping against the ship, keeping it from moving forward . . .
Viktor Borisovich, you’ve talked about the beginnings of Opoyaz, the “circle” of students that had formed around ’12 at the University of Petersburg; could you tell us now something about the end of Opoyaz and, in general, about the final days of Russian formalism?
Well, after the revolution, we (Tomashevsky, Zhirmunsky, Vinogradov, Tynyanov, and I) taught at the Zubov Institute. The owner of the building that housed the institute was, of course, Count Zubov. And—want to know something?—that same count, right when Yudenich was approaching Petrograd, asked to enter the Party. Yudenich was at the gates, you can easily imagine how being a Communist at that time wasn’t among the most advantageous of positions. But his request was not accepted. I’m telling you this to give you an example of how devoted and willing our intelligentsia was in those days. I can cite another example for you. There was a writer in Russia who I think is completely unknown abroad, a children’s writer called Charskaya. For the number of books she wrote she was definitely the most important writer of children’s books. Her characters were frequently pupils in girls’ boarding schools. I remember my sister had several of her books. Charskaya was an actress at the Alexandrinsky Theater. A modest actress, she always played minor roles. Then she was “bought” by the publisher Vulf, which published everything she wrote—and it was a lot—providing her a monthly stipend equivalent to what a schoolteacher would get. After the revolution, her heroines had become daughters of Communist parents and they mopped the floors, they looked after the house. Charskaya also requested membership in the Party. She was not accepted. And her son, if memory serves me right, died in the civil war here. But I was talking about the Zubov Institute, or rather, the Institute of Art History. It was on Saint Isaac’s Square. It was like a university, a newly founded university. There were many, many students. I remember that one of them was a fireman. It was a fantastic school. I liked working there. And I was very well liked. When the Institute closed down—I mean, it didn’t exactly close, but, it transformed, let’s say—there was a joke circulating among the students. A professor had been sent to direct the Institute, a member of the Academy of Sciences called Derzhavin. It was the collapse of formalism . . . And the students, parodying Derzhavin the poet’s “Ode on the Death of Prince Meshchersky,” the verse where he says, “Where once a feast was spread a coffin lies,” would say, “Where once a feast was spread a coffin lies, and on that coffin sits Derzhavin” . . .
So the scholars in Opoyaz held public lectures, took part in debates . . .
Yes. All the time. Even at the Hall of Columns. One time, I remember, Bukharin was there, as a respondent. We often held conferences at the Tenishev Institute . . .
And do you remember the last, or one of the last, of these lectures? Or when the Zubov Institute was “transformed”? You see, Viktor Borisovich, I’m trying to put the dates together to figure out the “effective” end of Opoyaz.
I don’t know, I don’t recall. In the second half of the ’20s, anyway, the formalist group, as such, no longer existed. As far as I’m concerned, the story went like this. Erenburg’s magazine Vesch [The Thing] was published abroad. And in it I had an article in which I begged Jakobson to come back to Russia so we could create a big formalist school. But at the time I was having serious political troubles. For my part, I didn’t think it was right, seeing as my case had been closed so calmly and magnanimously by Chairman Sverdlov. But then it was reopened. A long time later. It was no laughing matter, my head was at stake. So I fled. Later, back in the Soviet Union, I had more problems over a book, Hamburg Account. Have you read it? Well, they got really angry at me: What’s the meaning of this Hamburg account, why tally up a score in some other city? And what kind of score is it supposed to be if no one is responsible for it? . . . You ask me about the end of formalism—you see, we found ourselves surrounded . . .
Yet besides this “surrounding” from the outside, there were also some centrifugal tensions on the inside, theoretical disputes between various members of the group, so they say. I’m thinking, for example, of the dispute between Opoyaz and Zhirmunsky.
Viktor Zhirmunsky was my friend. A very cultured person; he’d had a Heidelbergian-German education. He left Opoyaz very quickly. He wrote a great deal on verse, and some of his pages can sink they’re so dense, impenetrable even. Let me tell you something: one day, the day when Anna Akhmatova died, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland there were two people arguing furiously. It was me and Viktor Zhirmunsky. We met there and he said to me: “I know you so well, I’ve learned so much from you, but you, admit it, you’ve never read my books.” And I said: “Listen, if the question is whether I read them or not, yes, I read them. But say I really read them all the way, well, that I cannot.” Then we walked for a while, and we talked about Opoyaz. He had a dacha in that area, he was a professor. He had some vodka in the cellar. I’ve never been a drinker. And Viktor Maksimovich probably didn’t drink either. Yet we drank a whole bottle that day. And we didn’t even get drunk, because we were too sad. Our disagreements, in general, were like the fights in Gogol—do you remember “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”? I mean, they were fights over nothing. There was a bitter moment, however, when I published Notes on the Prose of the Russian Classics. In that book I rejected everything: father, mother, dog, cat. I’m at fault, I realize that. And even before that I committed another misdeed. I had written Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, and when I came back to Moscow, I made some changes to the book, i.e., I tried to lessen the erotic tension. Gorky got really mad at me. And Tikhonov told me: “After something has been written it belongs to literature, you can’t touch it, it’s not just yours anymore.”
And if today, at almost sixty-five years after its inception, you were to give an overall assessment of your experience with formalism?
Opoyaz was able to cover fairly broad territory, it was recognized in the academic sphere, but it was never able to master that other domain to which it owes its existence and for which it creates literature. Words are never a tower, or rather, if they are, they’re a watchtower, a tower from which you look out onto the world. In other words, art has always had its vicissitudes, it has always lived in blood. Art has a particular life, a life that doesn’t run parallel to real life, but remains in eternal conflict with it. I never finished my work in Opoyaz, and in general, the theorists of Opoyaz were never able to fully answer this question: how social problematics, entering into the sphere of art, change their essence. Today, I believe that Dostoyevsky cannot be considered apart from the penal colony, the city of Piter, from Fourier, the year 1848, the destruction of Europe. Tolstoy can’t be separated from the pre-revolutionary era, from the assassination of Alexander II (and note that, during those years, Tolstoy was writing about nonresistance). You can’t read War and Peace outside of Russia, outside the nineteenth century, Decembrism, the destiny of man. Man’s destiny too is the stuff of art.
And do you think that if there hadn’t been external pressures and if there had been the time and a way, Opoyaz, at least you in Opoyaz, would have naturally come to this “revision”?
I’m certain of it. You see, I’m not suggesting—as some have said—the end of formalism, but overcoming it. After all, what did Opoyaz accomplish? It made the first, violent impact. An impact that had to be made, with all its extremes. Art, like a clock that’s stopped ticking, has to be shaken up. We provided that jolt. We were attacked, the pressure was strong, very strong, but we planted many seeds. There were already some students, and they continued and concluded the work we began. It was difficult, but they did it.
With this “overcoming,” you don’t refute—in fact, I’d say you reaffirm, if you prefer, “enstrangement” as the basis for artistic vision.
The world exists, a world we struggle with, always and forever, just as Robinson Crusoe struggles with nature on a desert island. We struggle with the world, but we don’t see it. Robinson sits at a table and draws up a ledger, makes a tally: what’s good and what’s evil. But art doesn’t tally up, it doesn’t recognize, it sees. To touch, feel, perceive, this is the strength of art, which looks at the things of existence with wonder. Art is continuous astonishment. Wonder gives rise to a new perception of the world, man feels the world, makes it his own. Because of art it’s as if we take off our gloves, rub our eyes, and see reality for the first time, the truth of reality. We’re not the ones who create words. Words already exist, in the lexicon. Even when we build a car we’re not doing everything from scratch, it’s as if we were building it out of old parts from other cars. As if we were giving the old cars new meaning. Art, poetry make use of words, of preexisting structures, but through their collision they overcome and revive them, giving them a palpable and practicable sense.
And what do you think, today December 26, 1978, of what you wrote in one of your books from the ’20s, Knight’s Move: “[Art’s] color has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress”?
I’ll just say that there’s no need to stand around staring at flags. Because sometimes something turns out to be revolutionary that we knew to be anti-revolutionary, and then it turns out to be anti-revolutionary . . . and so on. But, of course, that theory of mine was incorrect.