THE WORD. POETRY OF WORDS AND POETRY OF LETTERS. MAYAKOVSKY LOVED THE RADIO. AN UGLY, STUPID BOX. ONE MUSTN’T FEAR THE FUTURE. TOLSTOY GETS EDITED. THE OLD SCHOLASTICISM AND THE NEW. THE LIVING RUSSIAN WORD.
In our conversation a few days ago you said that “man lives in the world, but first and foremost he lives in the world of words.” What do you say we talk today about the fundamentally unknown object that is the word?
In the beginning, there was the word. It was probably a declaration. Or a cry. Or perhaps a song, because it’s been proven that not only do birds sing, monkeys sing as well, and this, evidently, brings them some sort of pleasure. It was when man began to hear, to feel the word, that he created poetry. And since then he has tried to hold on to it, fix it, remember it. We know nothing about Homer. All we know is that that he was old and blind. He couldn’t see and he loved to remember, with precision. Homer lived for slovesnost. At the time letters, signs, existed, but literary creation scorned them. Want to know something? In ancient Greece, during trials, everybody had to speak. And if somebody wasn’t capable, he would be taught, for example the injured party would have his speech written and then would recite it. It is not up to me to explain how, when, and why letters came into being, but I think that Plato and all the great men of Greece didn’t care for pismenost. Plato and Socrates fought against written verse. All the great lyric poetry and great drama of ancient Greece is vocal in nature. The Greek world knew how to speak, the Roman as well. As Tyutchev says,
Blessed is he who visits this life
at its fateful moments of strife:
the all-wise sent him an invitation
to speak with them at their celebrations.
I think in the Greek theater a mistake in the actor’s recitation elicited scornful laughter. They liked the word spoken slowly, they loved hearing it. But then, just look at an author closer to us in time, like Shakespeare. To pull Gloucester out of despair, Edgar tells him that down there, far away, there’s the sea, and he jumps into this nonexistent sea. But the man talking to Gloucester doesn’t correct him. He tells him he fell from the dread summit of a chalky cliff. And this scene didn’t provoke laughter in Shakespeare’s theater. He knew his public. The word, faith in the word was stronger than the evidence. People didn’t marvel that Gloucester believed in the words and that a verbal change in circumstances could be as strong as one in real circumstances. Take Plato, I was looking for the Phaedo but I came upon a different dialogue. And I found a very interesting passage. “There is poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers.” Art, therefore, is the passage from non-being to being . . . but how does this passage occur? For the ancient Greeks this bridge was the word, the well-constructed word, conversation, debate. Yes, I’m very fond of their principles of debate.
Which goes back to the notion of art as the collision of structures . . .
Certainly, at the root of poetry there’s not just the principle of repetition: the individual lines correspond, but, in a certain way, through this correspondence, they fight with one another. Think of the stanza in Onegin, where each verse is a world that enters into conflict with the one that precedes it and where many of the final lines actually parody the rest of the entire stanza. I think that even in the Bible each book fights with the others. There are multiple versions of the discovery of Christ’s body. And this can be explained by the fact that the Gospels were initially oral legends, and the differences, therefore, depend on the particular idiom of each legend’s place of origin . . . Art creates worlds that materialize, that enter into being, through conflict. But then the problem arises: how do we hold on to them, fix them? Plato, in the Phaedo, talks about the essence of this process of retention. Socrates doesn’t recognize writing as a great invention—for him it would virtually be comparable to the discovery of chess. That is, man has to speak: it’s his pride, his right. And this is where philosophy comes from. It wasn’t born in a room, within four walls. Philosophy was born on the street. In ancient Greece, all the doors opened toward the outside, toward the street, before opening them they would knock so they didn’t accidentally hit anyone passing by. Yes, poetry knocks before it opens the door to the world and starts a debate. And then came writing. The word “calligraphy” contains kallós, which means beauty, but also order, structure. Letters became art because they were beautiful. And, of course, we all love ancient manuscripts, we recognize the love, the care of those who prepared them. And then came the printing press, typography. Even the pages of incunabula are wonderful, like abstract art objects, a union of white, gray, and black. But I think that poetry, the art of the living word, has suffered a great deal from that great invention, the printing press. Letters have completely conquered literature, which has gone from slovesnost to pismenost. A poetry of letters emerged, poetry started to become calligraphy, and, above all, it became more silent.
In one of our conversations you said that every innovator is also an “archaist.” These words of yours come to mind along with, once again, Russian Cubo-Futurism, where innovation also passes through the recuperation of a sort of “pre-typographical” phase of poetry. I’m thinking of Khlebnikov’s love of ancient manuscripts, the very “anti-typographical” structure of some Cubo-Futurist publications, in addition to, of course, the function of the voice, the strong sense of speech in Mayakovsky’s lyrics, which, one could say, didn’t even knock on the door before going out into the street but flung it open, often hitting passersby . . .
Yes, Khlebnikov would spend his last cent (and he never had much money) on an antique manuscript. And Mayakovsky was the only poet in the world, I believe, to say:
Listen,
comrades of prosperity,
to the agitator,
the rabble-rouser.
Stifling
the torrents of poetry,
I’ll skip
the volumes of lyrics;
as one alive,
I’ll address the living.
Mayakovsky loved the voice in poetry. He wrote his poems not to be read, but for the voice. Yes, he tore verse from the printed page. For example, Volodya loved the radio. With Mayakovsky and the other Futurists, the word became queen again, not only of literature, but of all art.
Besides the Futurists’ explosive return to the “word as such,” to me it seems that throughout the Russian poetic tradition of this century there exists a sort of cult of “vocality.” A particular “ritual” of declaiming poetry on the part of the poets themselves, experienced as a primal moment in the relationship between poet and audience, and which, for its quality and scale, is without parallel in, for example, the Italian poetic tradition, or Western poetry in general.
I remember how Blok used to declaim. He would recite his verses as if they were written on the wall. Slow, uninflected. He spoke magnificently. Pasternak too. And Mandelstam lived in the realm of poetry being born, poetry that had just been uttered. Each line gives birth to the next, one by one, and they’re all legitimate children. It’s too bad they have to be killed. They have to be printed . . . Ah, if only people understood that the birth of poetry is itself poetry. The structuralists, unfortunately, came to the knowledge of art from literature, from “letters.” Not from the sound, but the grammar. But the word fixed on the page has another time, it never disappears, a stanza stays right there before your eyes, but its recital lives only in memory. Those are absolutely different things.
You yourself, as you told me one day, like speaking better than writing.
Speaking, without question. Debate. You know, I’ve been a raving orator, tirelessly polemical. The living word . . . like the stupid, ugly square box I work for so often and that really amuses me . . .
Do you watch television, Viktor Borisovich?
No, I don’t. I just like talking about it. It’s another way to unite gesture and word. It has other rules for representing the past, other times. For example, we know that in the theater you can’t leave characters hanging over an intermission. In television you can. In written literature, you could even choose not to describe a person, a landscape. These elements also exist in film, you see them, and in television as well. And since it’s to be found in everyone’s house, it’s also to be found in everyone’s consciousness. I don’t mean to say that now people talk like they do in TV commercials, just as sometimes people speak or write journalistically. But in the battle between newspapers and television, anyway, I’m for TV: at least there, there’s the living, spoken word, the sound of the word.
But don’t you think, seeing that this “box” is, by now, in every consciousness, that it’s guilty—guiltier than newspapers precisely insofar as it possesses the allure of the spoken, of live sound—of a negative and irreversible linguistic leveling?
This is a very serious issue, you see. Of course, children watch it and they get their language directly from the television screen. And thus their linguistic upbringing, their wonderful semantic errors, the wonderful “transgression” Khlebnikov talked about, are disappearing. By now, anyway, television can’t be taken out of daily life. Perhaps one day people will say: before television and after television, just as today we say: before cinema and after cinema. That beautiful thing that is dialect will disappear, the complex variety of individual languages will vanish. Here in Russia, every village speaks a different language. Of course, this is a problem that must be reflected on. The new means of communication certainly represent a loss, a loss in creativity. But one needn’t be afraid of technology. At one time people were afraid of trains, they thought that rail traffic was going to cause horrible catastrophes. But people ought to love the future.
But I was talking about language, Viktor Borisovich. And, I could also respond with the wisecrack that I definitely can’t imagine Anna Karenina dead beneath a television.
Yes, it’s right to be afraid for language. Because, on top of that, they don’t know how to do things right in that little box. For example, our age, our literary consciousness has already developed the compositional techniques of the screenplay in an extremely refined way. But instead they show endless police series that are extremely weak precisely from the point of view of the script’s composition. They’re scripts without conflicts. Or rather, the conflict is always a transgression of the law: “man and law,” as we call them in Russia. Someone commits a crime, someone else finds a solution to the crime. Whereas literature reached Crime and Punishment over a century ago. It reached the point of asking: what is transgression really? . . . Yes, this box slips into our consciousness, but . . . but then I should say something else too: Today, in such a turbulent time in history, we can’t occupy ourselves with creating all this scientific terminology, either . . . Look, if we take a book on linguistics, a structuralist book—I do have them, you see, I’m not unaware of them—they’re written in another language, a language they created in which only structuralists can express themselves. It’s jargon. Not a language.
How can a language be created? Who creates it?
Let me put it this way: Gogol’s language is more the language of language. But it’s language. Tolstoy’s language is language. How do I know? Simple. When I turn in my book manuscripts to publishing houses, every time I quote from Tolstoy I always write “Tolstoy” in the margin. Otherwise the proofreader or editor would undoubtedly change some of the words. And when Tolstoy was alive, with all the respect everyone had for him, they would make up to two thousand edits in one book. And the editor was certainly no idiot. The fact is that Tolstoy wrote in the language of the future, in the language to come. Whereas the editor wasn’t even writing in the language of the present, but the language of the past. Khlebnikov, with his whole mystical approach to language, also lived in the living language. But no one can live in a non-language, no one can live in a no-man’s language. The language of professors is always ugly . . . In Russia, when we were under tsarism, there was a special theater commission, composed of famous second-rate professors. They were executioners who tortured the body of Chekhov’s work. And today we find ourselves facing a new scholasticism—though, don’t get me wrong, scholasticism had its place—which is a branch that has broken off the tree, a fruitless branch. We need to concern ourselves with the creation of new living language, and not with conventional jargon. In chemistry, for example, when they discover a new element they give it a name; in language, we don’t create new phenomena, we give new names to old phenomena.
And what is the destiny of these new names? Why do some words die out and others come into being?
Words become tedious. Or they become dull like knives with overused blades. Or they become sacred.
One last, direct question: in your opinion, which poet or which writer from this century has done the most for the Russian language, for the living Russian word?
More than anyone, Khlebnikov, who has still not been read thoroughly enough. The lesson to be learned from Khlebnikov’s prose hasn’t yet come to fruition, but its time will come, and writers will be reading him.