Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Churilin, Zabolotskii, Poplavskii Author(s): Simon Karlinsky Source: Slavic Review, Vol.

26, No. 4 (Dec., 1967), pp. 605-617 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2492612 . Accessed: 24/05/2011 02:05
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SIMON KARLINSKY

in Twentieth-Century Surrealism RussianPoetry: Poplavskii Zabolotskii, Clurilin,

ALL

how startledshe was when as HER LIFE Zinaida Gippius remembered a younggirl she was told that the Russian word predmetwas devised and introducedinto the language by Karamzinat the veryend of the eighteenth century.'The discoveryleft her wonderinghow the Russians who lived beforethat time could discuss all sortsof basic thingswithout a word denoting"object" in the language. We may well be startledin a similarway was coined when we stop to realize that the handy adjective "surrealistic" the word did not initiallymean what only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the duringhis tripto Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what FrenchSurrealists theirmovementwas about but from their behavior concluded that they mustbe the French equivalent of his own LEF group.2The Paris-centered in poetry,painting,and cinema, which was to have a considermovement able impact on the arts of this centuryand which contributedthe word to many languages,was, it is rarelyrealized today,primarily "surrealistic" the insightsof Sigmund Freud with those of Karl dedicatedto synthesizing Marx. Although the participants of the original Surrealist movement styled revolutionaryand Marxist, the Soviet cultural establishment themselves refusedto recognizethem as any such thing,and the refusal,we can now plainly see,was motivatednot only by the adherenceof Breton and Eluard by the insistenceof the Surrealist to Freud but also, and overwhelmingly, use revolutionarytwentieth-century to right their on and painters poets techniques and images. At the time when the Soviet cultural policy was about to set up "Socialist Realism" as the only acceptable artisticmethod, viewed fromthe Soviet Union, could Surrealistictechniquesand imagery, the not but appear bourgeoisand decadent. To the Surrealiststhemselves David rejectionby Moscow seemed a tragicmistake.The English Surrealist
2

1Z. N. Gippius, Zhivyelitsa,II (Prague, 1925), 126. Maiakovskii,"Ezdil ia tak,"Polnoe sobranie sochinenii,VIII (Moscow, 1958),334.

This is an expandedand revisedversionof the paper deliveredon April1, 1967,at the of Slavic Associationforthe Advancement of the American second nationalconvention D.C. Studies in Washington,

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Gascoyne described the various developmentsin this protractedmutual misunderstanding and the genuine pain the Surrealistsfelt at being told that theyhad to adhere to techniquesand stylestheyfeltwere antiquated and bourgeois.3The Russian artistsin the Soviet Union faced by similar demandsat the timehad no choice.The Frenchand Spanish poets,painters, and filmmakersof the Surrealistmovementdid have a choice, and the rehad to all inmovement theoriginalSurrealist sultwas thatby the mid-1930s participantswent tents and purposes fallen apart. Various representative each his own way. Andr6 Breton tried to cleave to the earlier Surrealist purityfor the next few decades, Aragon became an orthodox Stalinist in politicsif not in his art, Salvador Dali steadilydriftedtoward wealth and Catholicism, while Luis Bufiuel somehow manages to amalgamate the orientationof the Surrealistsin his later nonoriginal Freudian-Marxist films. Surrealist By the time the movementfell apart, the adjective "surrealistic"became commonlyused and universallyunderstood in broader connotations.A suburban matron understandsperfectlywhen she reads in the society column of her Sunday paper that one of her neighborswent on a surrealistic shoppingspree (how did one expresssuch thingsbeforethe 192Os?). In criticism is commonlyused (without the term"surrealistic" recentliterary to the originalSurrealist movement)to denote the kind of fantasy reference that arises not from the unfamiliar and the traditionallyfantasticbut ratherthe kind of fantasythat resultsfromthe unexpected juxtaposition even prosaic. The classic of images that are already familiarand preferably of this typeof fantasy is provided by Lautr6amont'scelebrated illustration of the encounterbetweena sewdescription (so admired by the Surrealists) table. Three objects not at ing machine and an umbrellaupon a dissecting fantastic effect in themselves all fantastic merely produce an unmistakably by the unexplained fact of their conjunction. Similarly,when Nikolai Zabolotskii (to jump the gun a bit) describesa Leningrad crowd in which one man carriesa boot on a platter and another one sings a poodle-dog,4 context by such ordinary the reader is at once shiftedinto a surrealistic devices in such unexpectedcontext.To the same orderof surrealistic things in the artsbelong the reversalof expectedsize relationships(huge combs or apples that fillan entireroom in Rene Magritte'spaintings); unmotivated reversalin expected sequence of events; separate,independentexistenceof
3 Gascoyne,A ShortSurveyof Surrealism(London, 1936). 4"Odin-sapog neset na bliude/ Drugoi-poet sobachku-pudel'" (Zabolotskii,"Obvodnyi kanal," in Stikhotvoreniia (Washington, 1965), p. 48. The English translation of these lines in The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (ed. Dimitry Obolensky [Baltimore, 1962], p. 419), which reads "One [character]is carryinga boot on a dish, another is chanting the praises of a poodle [he is selling]," deprives the passage of its surrealisticquality by substitutinga ratherforcedprosaic explanation, not really warrantedby the deliberatelyungrammatical Russian original. The new Soviet edition of Zabolotskii (Stikhotvoreniiai poemy [Moscow and Leningrad, 1965], p. 212) prints the version of the poem "Obvodnyi kanal" amended by the poet during the Stalinist period, when he consciously tried to edit all surrealisticimageryout of his earlier work. In this amended version the second quoted line reads: "Drugoi poet khvalu Iude" (The other chants praises of Judas), thus replacing a note. bit of surrealistic whimseywith a not veryappropriate romantic-demonic

SURREALISM

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partsof familiarobjects or of parts of human anatomy (Lautreamontprobably did not know Gogol's "The Nose" when he wrotehis prose poem about in a the man who encountersone of his own hairs as a fellow-customer brothel). typesof imageryusually goes hand in hand with Interestin surrealistic in the subconscious,in delirium,in free association,in automatic interest writing,and, of course, in dreams. The logic of most of our dreams is as Lev Tolstoi well realized. Aleksei Remizov's unlikelyto be surrealistic, of his own dreams in his book Martyn Zadeka varnished transcriptions But not all dreams in literaturehave to are almost inevitablysurrealistic. us pertinentexamples in this respect: be surrealistic. Gogol's work offers the dream of the Mayor in The Inspector General-the one about the two a popular sayrats which sniffed at him and then went away (contributing prosaic ing to the Russian language as theyleft)-is certainlya perfectly and realisticdream. Levko's dream in "May Night," on the other hand, is with its water nymphs,evil witch, and the crumbling pure romanticism, house becomingnew again. But Gogol also provides us with an authentidream in his "Ivan FedorovichShpon'ka and His literary cally surrealistic Aunt." Here the hero dreams that his futurewife is a bolt of textile,and in his hat and in his later in the dream his wife is located simultaneously scene of thisdream,in which Shpon'ka dreams pocket.An equally fantastic whichis reallyhis aunt, becomes thathe is a bell being hoistedatop a belfry doubly surrealisticwhen a preciselyidentifiedcolonel of a certain regiShpon'ka that he ment,who happens to be passingby, assuresthe terrified descendantof this colonel is to is in facta churchbell. A twentieth-century be found in Velimir Khlebnikov'spoema "Gibel' Atlantidy"(The End of in the person of the passer-by Atlantis), (putnik) who strollspast the cataclysmic scene at the end of the poem, when a continentis collapsing and sinkinginto the ocean. If the bizarreand the unusual placed in believable make a romanticallyfantasticimpression,the efor prosaic surroundings fectof theprosaicand the believable placed withina bizarreor incongruous demonstrate, likely context is, as Gogol's colonel and Khlebnikov'spasser-by to be surrealistic. And, of course, a genuinelysurrealistictype of fantasy of resists any kind of paraphrasableexplicationand excludes any possibility allegoricalinterpretation. Once the specifictype of imagination entailed in surrealisticimagery and look at a numberof Russian writers becomesclear,one can take a fresh though works.Gogol and Khlebnikovemergeas major Russian surrealists, not full-time ones. Tatiana's dream in Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin acquires a new look, as do the dreamsof Anna Karenina, the deathbed delirium of Andrei in War and Peace, and the dream of Andrei'syoung son at the end of that novel. Some of the best-known poems of Konstantin Sluchevskii, Nikolai Gumilev (especially "Zabludivshiisia tramvai"), and Georgii movement And althoughthe Surrealist surrealistic. Ivanov are authentically had no discernible impact on Russian literature-there was no Russian Surrealismin the sense that there was Czech or Serbo-CroatianSur-

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realism-the broadened definition of the termas outlined above enables us to consider three extremely interesting Russian twentieth-century poets as surrealists. These threeare not the only possible candidatesfor such a designationwithin Russian poetry(a thoroughsearch for surrealistic imagery will certainly reveal it in a numberof prerevolutionary, Soviet,and 6migr6 Russian poets), but they are the most likely, the most obvious, the most thoroughly surrealistic ones. The surrealistic poetryof Tikhon Churilin (birthdate variouslygiven as 1885 and 1892; d. 1944?) was mostly written duringthe second decade of the present centuryand thus belongs chronologically with the Acmeist and Futuristgeneration of prerevolutionary Russian poetry.Nikolai Zabolotskii (1903-58), it is becomingmore and more clear, is the most important and interesting poet to develop so farin the Soviet period and environment. His contemporary Boris Poplavskii (1903-35) is probablythe mostoutstanding poet produced by the Russian emigration.Because of the frequently reactionaryorientationof Russian literarycriticism,both in the Soviet Union and at timesin the emigration, these threepoets have been by and large overlooked and neglectedfor decades. The poetryof Zabolotskii is a major revivalat the presenttime,both in the Soviet Union going through and abroad. In 1965 thereappeared almost simultaneously two large collections of this poet's work,one in the Soviet Union and one abroad,5which made available for the first time in almost threedecades Zabolotskii'sstartlinglyoriginal early work,his first collection Stolbtsy(Columns) and the long-bannedpoema on collectivization "Torzhestvozemledeliia" (The TriAlso in 1965, attracting umph of Agriculture). considerablyless attention, there was privatelyprinted in Paris a small edition of Boris Poplavskii's slim posthumousbook of verse,Dirizhabl' neizvestnogo napravleniia (Dirigible of Unknown Destination). The volume contained some of his most remarkableand successful poems,which clearlyplace Poplavskii among the major Russian poets of the twentieth century. But if Zabolotskii is finally given the recognitionhe so richlydeservesand if Poplavskii has a certain minorityfollowing among Russian speakers abroad,6 Tikhon Churilin's person and poetrymight possiblybe the single most thoroughly forgotten phenomenon in the whole historyof Russian letters.Certainly,even the secondarypoets of the Karamzinian epoch receivemore attentionin Soviet publicationand criticism.
5See the preceding note. The Soviet edition, edited by A. M. Turkov, offersa more comprehensiveselection of Zabolotskii's poetry,but the almost simultaneous Washington volume, edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff, is indispensable in that it offers the text of the collectionStolbtsyand of a few later poems as originallypublished by Zabolotskii. In the new Soviet edition, Stikhotvoreniiai poemy, the poems of this collection have been quite systematically tampered with (apparently by the poet himself in the 1940s) with the clear aim of eliminating all surrealisticimageryand of making the syntax, the grammar, the spelling,and the punctuation of the original poems more customary, more prosaic, and less startling. 6 "I did not meet Poplavski, who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas ... His plangent tonalities I shall never forget,nor shall I ever forgivemyself the ill-tempered reviewin which I attackedhim for trivialfaults in his unfledgedverse" (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory [New York, 1966],p. 287).

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journals published in the heyday Yet, if one looks throughthe literary his poetryrepresentedthere alongone easily finds Futurism, of Russian side Khlebnikov,Maiakovskii,Kamenskii,and the various Burliuks.A poet of peasant origin, Churilin became insane shortly after beginning his literarycareer around ig9o. After several years of treatmentat mental volume published his first thereafter he was cured and shortly institutions Death; Moscow, after smerti (Springtime of verse, Vesna posle 1915). The of the poems and several acclaim, critical volume met with considerable wrote about fromit were widelyanthologizedat the time.Nikolai Gumilev Vesnaposle smerti:
The poems of Tikhon Churilin are on the borderline betweenpoetryand somefor prophets and exciting.It has long become customary significant thingextremely moraliststheirlaws, and philosopherstheir to use verse to expresstheirrevelations, deductions.Everyvalid or even simplypeculiar world view tends to be formulated in verse.It would take us too long to establishthe causes forthisin thisbriefnotice. But, of course,this tendencyin the majorityof cases has nothingin common with poetry. point exception [to this rule]. From the literary Tikhon Churilin is a fortunate of view, he is connected with Andrei Belyi and more remotelywith the Cubohis verse in such a manner that usual, succeedsin twisting He frequently Futurists.7 even tritewords assume the quality of some kind of pristinesavageryand novelty. at timesactuallyinsane. His themeis a human being on the veryverge of insanity, describe birdies and little flowers, his poems But while real madmen incoherently of genuineravings: severelogic and theimagery retaininsanity's
KHKanIY - B nOCJIetHIHi pa3. Ilo6piIarn IIOMbI31H KIIKary - B noCJIetHHI pa3. C KPOBaBOlo BORO1O Ta3

ero. 4 BOJIocbI,

Be,ab BbI ceCTpa?

Ho6yAbTe C HHM XOTb 1O yTpa.8

KyAa-c?

They've shaven Kickapoo-for the last time. They've washed Kickapoo-for the last time. A pail with bloody water And his hair: What should be done with it? Aren't you the sister? Stay with him at least until morning.

publication of his book.9 In i929, while writing her monograph on the

Vesna posle smertialso made a very strongand lasting impressionon with Churilin at the time of the Marina Tsvetaeva, who became friendly

7Gumilev's parallels are certainlyvalid, but one can't help suspecting that the term "surrealistic,"nonexistentat the time, conveyswhat he was tryingto express with greater precision. 8 Quoted fromN. S. Gumilev,Pis'ma o russkoipoezii (Petrograd,1923),p. 205. The article originallyappeared in Apollon, No. 1o (Dec.), 1915. It may be worthwhileto point out that popular dance (see the name Kickapoo was known to the Russians of 1915 as a currently also Maiakovskii's "Oblako v shtanakh") and conveyedno associations with either minstrel shows or Li'l Abner. 9In 1916 Churilin dedicated to Tsvetaeva a fragmentfrom an autobiographical prose

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for Churilin's first painter Natal'ia Goncharova (who did the illustrations book), Tsvetaeva rememberedChurilin and his book in several passages. heard about this Natal'ia Here are two representative quotations: "I first Goncharova fromTikhon Churilin,a poet. A poet of genius. To him and circulated by him were given the best poems about the war, not sufficiently or appreciatedat the time.Nor are theyknownnow." 10And in onlytwohundred copies.The it seems, I can see it, thishugebook,published, Churilin where theinsaneasylum spenttwo after thedeparture from book,written death.There was a versein it thatsaid moreabout imafter years. Springtime andvolumes: volumes mortality than
BbITbMOIeTYMPY Ha(IeCpO BOcKpeCHY! I shallbe resurrected forcertain!

I shall die possibly

death." and ofrecent thesignofresurrection bookunfolded The entire (shla) under did we learn froma memoirof Lilia Brik that Churilin's Only recently "The End of Kickapoo" (the same poem that Gumilev quoted in his review) was one of Vladimir Maiakovskii'sfavoritepoems and that Maiakovrecitedit in such a manneras to bring out the tragictheme skii frequently of the poem.'2 Few thingsillustratethe paradoxes and vicissitudesto which the evalRusssian poetryis subject as does this case of a uation of twentieth-century by Gumilev,Tsvetaeva, and poet so highlyregardedand taken so seriously in aestheticapproach) and so totally Maiakovskii (with all theirdifferences criticism. neglectedby recentSovietand 6migr6 in his first book is, to be sure, a veryspecial case. Churilin's surrealism is due to the poet's desire to conveythe mental Much of the special imagery statesof paranoia and delirium.Already in Vesna posle smertithere is a strongtendencytoward what the Surrealistslater were to call automatic writing.In Churilin's second book of verse,L'vu-Bars (To Lion-[From] the tendencytoward free association based on 1918),13 Leopard; MVoscow, phonetic patterngets almost out of hand at times.But in this volume as en avance in his deliberateagglomerations well Churilinremainsa Surrealist of unrelatedand disturbing images. The followingpoem fromVesna posle smertimight perhaps be used to illustratethis poet's art. Within twelve to tell,relying only on the use of imageryand of sound lines,withno story
poem "Iz detstvadalechaishego" (Out of Remotest Childhood), which appeared in the collection Giulistan 2 (Moscow, 1916). On his friendshipwith Tsvetaeva see my book Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (Berkeleyand Los Angeles, 1966),p. 40. 10 Tsvetaeva, "Natal'ia Goncharova," Volia Rossii (Prague), V-VI (1929), 47. 1 Ibid., p. 49. 12 Iu. Brik, "Chuzhie stikhi," in V. Maiakovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1963), p. 344. The extent to which Churilin has been forgottenin the Soviet Union can be gauged by the fact that the committeeof distinguishedSoviet scholars that edited thisvolume were unable to state his correctdates in the index. 13I wish to thank Professor Vladimir Markov forprovidingme with a copy of this otherwise utterly unobtainable volume.

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associationsand patterns, Churilin takes the reader fromcomfortable placidityto the vergeof namelessterrorand back. The finalsuicidal mood is also a feature of severalotherof his poems. HA CB5ITKAX flOJIHO4Lb
HOTIHO'qb. iacKe, B AiaCKe, C rJI5CKaMH nOJRCTYriaeT THXo-THXo-THXoHbKo iujia 6bl flOTIHOqb, IIOJIHOqb.
flpHAMO IpIHO-IIb5HOIO

fIJIaMsI JmAilrbI JlaCKOBOIi IIOTyxaeT: HOaHOqb.

npHCTyIJaeIlb,

flOJIHOqb.

BblOrOi4

4bJPbI00 Tbl -

BbIOrOIO norieBaeWb, IIOJIHOqb.

Cpe6poCTpyHHOH'

ROMpOIO ROHHMaemb, rOJIHO4b. JIaelElb, iiaeELlb JOJIHO4b. C IJICKOH, B KaCKe, IOJIHOqb.

BazanaihKoi,
-I

H 1yi1Jia Ha KjiaO6me

naiaoio,

YTPO. CTpyHbI ao-6pbIe AOMpbI - re

MeTbI B3MeT, MeTeJIbHbIe,3aCbInIalOT IIOJIHO'Ib. 0, MOrHJIa MIJIaa, - rARe Tbl? rjue Tbl, HOJHOIb.14

COJaHxe CBeTI4T,BeC'HOe, - rAe TbI, rAe TbI, nlOJIHOqb?

TbI, HOJIHOtb?

MIDNIGHT AT CHRISTMASTIME
The flame of the gentle lamp is dying: midnight. In helmet, in mask, with dances, she approaches-midnight. Quiet, quiet, so quietly, won't you go away, midnight? Direct, heady, drunken, you attack, midnight. Like a blizzard (just look at itl), in blizzard gusts you sing, midnight. With silver-stringeddomra you taunt, midnight. Balalaika-like,, sled-dog-like, you bark and bark, midnight. -And [then] she went off to the cemetery-the dancing, helmeted midnight. Morning. Kindly domra strings-where are you, midnight? The eternal sun is shining-where are you, where are you, midnight? Whirling blizzard swirls [gradually] cover midnight. 0, sweet grave, where are you? Where are you, midnight?

Afterthe October Revolution Churilin underwenta political conversion and devoted himselfto the "theoryof Communistculture." He wrote no verseafter192o, havingcome to considerlyricpoetry"not a valid aesthetic 15 As late as 1925 he was consideredsufficiently well known aim in itself." to have a sizable sectiondevoted to his poetryin the popular and important Russian poetrycompiled by I. S. Ezhov and anthologyof twentieth-century E. I. Shamurin.16Because his poetry was available in this widely read was collection,it is reasonableto assume that his use of surrealistic imagery
Tikhon Churilin, Vesna posle smerti(Moscow, 1915), p. 57. statementas quoted in the bio-bibliographicalnote on him (which for all its brevityis apparently the most detailed factual source on this poet) in I. S. Ezhov and E. I. Shamurin,Russkaia poeziia XX veka (Moscow, 1925),pp. 588-89. llIbid., pp. 314-16. Twelve poems by Churilin are included.
15Churilin's own

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familiar to his two younger contemporaries, Zabolotskii and Poplavskii, duringtheirformative years. These two poets presenta fascinating contrastin termsof environment, personality, and literary orientation, but there is also a set of equally fascinating,at timesuncanny,parallels in theirindividuallydeveloped styles, their systemsof imagery,even the chronologyof their literarycareers. Both are metaphysical poets. Both were born in 1903,Zabolotskiion April 24, Poplavskii exactlyone month later on May 24. Both came fromfamilies of liberal minded Russian intelligentsia.Zabolotskii's parents,however,were of peasant origin,and Poplavskii's came fromthe nobility;but the intellectualand educational level of the two familiesappears to have been about the same. Poplavskii spenta part of his childhood abroad; after 1919 his familyemigrated, firstto Constantinople,then to Paris. Poplavskii'sliterary associationsin the Russian Paris of the 190os, his contacts with Merezhkovskii and Gippius, with Khodasevichand Otsup, with the French literaryworld could not have been in the least bit similar to Nikolai Zabolotskii's simultaneousexperiencesin the Red Army,his literaryapin children'sjournals under the tutelage of Samuil Marshak, prenticeship and his association with the young Evgenii Shvartsand with Konstantin Vaginov in the literary group Obreuty(Ob"edinie real'nogo tvorchesta).17 The literaryinfluencesand parentage of these two poets could not be more diverse.The only possible influencetheycould have shared is that of Mandelstam. Otherwise,the undoubted literaryprogenitorof Zabolotskii, the poet who influenced him more than anyone,is of courseVelimir Khlebnikov. The impact of Khlebnikov would be obvious even if the name of this poet did not recur in Zabolotskii'spoems. The profundity of Zabolotskii's love and gratitudeto his literary in the oddly masteris demonstrated touchinghomage that the forest animals pay to Khlebnikov'sgravein "The Triumph of Agriculture."Poplavskii's literarygenealogy, on the other hand, leads us straightto Aleksandr Blok, the Blok of the mysticaland lyrical prose essays most of all. In his own literarycriticismPoplavskii veneratedLermontov,Dostoevski,and Rozanov. He thoughtPushkin deand human compassion.But Poplavskii's void of deeper insight, mysticism, less than one half of his literary Russian literarybackgroundconstitutes roots,far more importantbeing the impact of French poetry,Baudelaire above all but also Rimbaud, Lautr6amont,and Apollinaire. At times,eshe almostappears a Frenchmanwho peciallyin his essaysand prose fiction, has somehow learned to write idiomaticallybut not always correctlyin Russian. both poets made theirliterary Continuingtheirodd parallel chronology, and most surrealistic debuts in periodicalsin 1927. Zabolotskii'sfirst book, and most Stolbtsy, appeared in 1929 in Soviet Leningrad. Poplavskii's first surrealistic book, Flagi (Flags), was printed in Estonia and published in Russian 6migre Paris in 1931. It is hardly likely that Zabolotskii and Poplavskii ever knew of each other's existence,even though Zabolotskii's
17

Note real'nogo,not realisticheskogo.

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pressby Khodasevich,who failed Stolbtsy was briefly reviewedin the 6migr6 to grasp its originality and thoughtthe whole thinga possible hoax,'8 and quoted in an articleby the Poplavskiiwas mentionedadversely and briefly Soviet criticZelinskiiin the 1930s.'9 Quite independently, each of themdeand theydevised vised a system of imagery thatwe now can call surrealistic, with the interit simultaneously with each other and also simultaneously national group of official Surrealists. In theirearly poetryboth Zabolotskii and Poplavskii describea big city seen as a phantasmagoria-at times because of the fantastic juxtapositionof realia but mostlybecause of the genuinelydreamlikeabsence of logical motivationforwhat is decribed.At its mostextreme, thisillogical cityis a nightmare. Thus in Zabolotskii:
floIoHiHlik H3 AapcKoroAoMa 6exaj! yiniam ropao 14JeT HlJ1cOiHKIIno Ero
IO'CTOIJIbULbI BeayT lOJt Y3,Ubl

OH -B Me HbIX o'cax, nepenIOHIaTbIX. paMax, lHepenIoJIHeH AO ropjia IIOA3eMHOiI BOAOHN. 20

from theroyal housel has escaped The corpse thestreets, The corpse walks through proudly lead himbyhisbridle; Tenants webbedframes, He is wearing copperspectacles, water .. subterranean with up tohisthroat. Chock-full and in Poplavskii:
H 3aAIamI 3BOHOR. HO BOT rpOXHyRIfAOflbm3aE BecHa noaIHMaaTacbno JIecTHHueMojjqa.

H/1 OMHHJI, 'ITO OH OJAHHOK. KaKAb1if ABApyr BCn KpHwaji, OAiHHOK! 3aAbIXaqCbOT wejIqH. H B PeBe yTpa, HDB I1eHIH HOGIH, B riyXOM KJIOKOTaHHH BelIepa B napKe, BCTaBaJa ymepine roJbi c oApa
H oAp HecaH
KaK HOqTOBbie
MapKH.21

doorslammed and thebell started Butnowtheentrance barking. thestairs. wassilently Springtime mounting
18 Quoted in the commentary edition of Zabolotskii'sStikhotvoreniia, to the Struve-Filipoff pp. 312-13. Khodasevich also advanced the supposition that Zabolotskii might be a genuine madman or cretin.Vladimir Nabokov shows a better perception of the literarytechnique involved in his recent statementthat "Zabolotskii found ... a method of writing,as if the 'I' of the poem were a perfectimbecile, crooning in a dream, distortingwords, playing with words as a half-insaneperson would" ("An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov," conducted by Alfred Appel, Jr., Wisconsin Studies in ContemporaryLiterature, VIII, No. 2

of A. K. Tolstoi's poem "Vasilii Shibanov." 21"Vesna v adu," Flagi, p. 2o. The image of "dead years" probably comes from Baudetercetof his sonnet "Recueillement." laire's defuntesAnnees in the first

[Spring 1967], 148). 19Kornelii Zelinskii,Kriticheskie pis'ma, Book II (Moscow, 1934), p. 144. paraphrases the beginning line surrealistically 20 "Ofort,"Stikhotvoreniia, p. 29. The first

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And each one suddenlyremembered he was lonely. Shouted, I'm lonely! chokingwith bile. And in night'ssinging, in morning's roar, In evening'sdampened boiling in the park, Dead yearswould arise fromtheirdeathbed And carrythe deathbed like postage stamps. But at other times, life in this city is bearable, for it can be merely astounding and fantastic, rather than tragic. But even when the two poets describe something realistic or prosaic, the undertone of a visionary surrealism is unmistakable. Here are some beer-hall barmaids in Leningrad during the NEP period, as seen in Zabolotoskii's "Krasnaia Bavariia" (Red Bavaria): Id B TOM 6yTbIJOHO,M paio CupeHbl apOFIIH Hiaxpaio KPHBOF1 3CTpaabI. Ha nOpyicH
M

OHH IPOCTepali
MaJIHpOBaHHEIe

6bIIW OTTaaHbI

riia3a.

K He6ecaM
pYKH

M earn 6yTep6poA OT CKyK4.22 And in thatparadise of bottles Sirens [felt]chilled on the edge Of a crookedstage. Under security They were issued eyes. heavenward They stretched [their]enameled arms And ate a sandwichin theirboredom. And Poplavskii's circus parade passing a beer hall in the south of France in "Poslednii parad" (The Last Parade):

A CKBO3b ropoA nlOat AeTCKHM, 3CKOPTOM rIog 6paBypHbI4 PeB nlOMITbIX Tpy6,
JIyLquia51 H3 MIO3HK-XOJ1bHbIX TpyrIll.
COJIHtLe rpeno BbITepTbIe lnJIIOH, pO3oBbIe aylt
npoxo)Kei.23

HIPOxo,HIaB rIO3aX MOJIOaeIIKHX

A B TeHr InHBHbIXCMOTpJRHPOHIH.
Mx 6OmbIHee

Y.nbi6aimcbMY3bIKe

While throughthe town,escortedby children, To the jaunty roar of bashed-intrumpets, There marchedin rakishposes The best of music-hall companies.
22

28 Flagi,

p. 23. Stikhotvoreniia, p. 34.

SURREALISM

615
velvet[upholstery], The sun warmedthe threadbare While in the shade of beer halls mugswere staring. Their large pink souls music. Smiled at the passer-by

In Zabolotskii's surrealistic Leningrad and Poplavskii's equally surrealisticParis (or, in his case, also the French Riveria or some megalopolis levitate,die, and kill each other casually of the future)people constantly withoutanyone being reallyhurt; seasons,timesof day, or planets are personifiedin accordance with their respectivegenders in Russian: night, the moon casually walk around among the populace. All these springtime, are Baudelairian-that is, theyare not explained in terms personifications of any paraphrasable allegory.Even Zabolotskii's powerfulpersonification of the nightin the formof a winged witch in "The Triumph of AgriculPoplavskii ture"is not easily reducible to a symbolof evil and misfortune. is more specifically poetic, for there is more of a French elegance in his visions. Zabolotskii's surrealismin Stolbtsyoften draws on a surrealistic an abundant supply of quesworld of communalkitchens, Zoshchenko-like of the NEP period. tionablefood,and thefleamarkets An extremely device widely used by Zabolotskii is a simple surrealistic if the the sum will not be affected reversalof components.In mathematics sequence of the componentsis altered. In art this can make all the difference. Hence the senseof unrealityachieved by Zabolotskiiby the veryprimthingsupside down: itivemeans of turning H

Ha nepeipecMeBBepx HoraMH!24
And rest thosewenchesin peace Upended at the crossroads!

STHX reBOK yfOKO'i

or CnHi, )opBapa, 3aqoM

HanlepeA!25

in reverse! Sleep, 0 forward,

or
4
JleTaflKHH3y
KU3Hb Tpeiaaa KaK KOpblTO,
roJIOBojI.26

And life chatteredlike a trough Flyingabout head downwards.

manin Zabolotskii's Even fish, poem "Rybnaialavka" (The Fish Store), gillsin reverse: age to use their
p. 40. 24"Ivanovy," Stikhotvoreniia, 2 "Futbol," ibid., p. 27.
26"Tsirk,"ibid., p. 67.

6 i6

SLAVIC REVIEW

H xca6pb1 aIwnT Hao6opoT!27

And thegillsbreathe backwardsl Occurringin the finallines of each of the quoted poems, theseinexplicable reversals end the poems on thenote of utterunreality. Another of Zabolotskii's amazinglydirect ways of achieving surrealistic ostranenieis his constantuse in his early poetryof burlesquelydistorted from Pushkin-bits of Onegin or Ruslan i quotations or reminiscences Liudmila or the strange collage of themes and phrases from Skazka early poem "Iskushenie" (Temptation), o tsare Saltane in his magnificent time in the recentSoviet volume. We find a similar published for the first use of literature forostraneniein Poplavskii's"Podrazhanie Zhukovskomu" in which the whole point of the titleseems to be (Imitationof Zhukovskii), the total absence of even the remotestconnectionbetween the poem and Zhukovskii. As their gifts matured, the respective ideologies of Zabolotskii and Poplavskii began to play a more overt role in their poetry.Here, despite the similarity of some of their imageryand poetic devices, they are quite different fromeach other. Zabolotskii'sideology,or rather his philosophy similarto VictorHugo's but more of life,is a kind of animism, a pantheism, directly inspiredby the philosophyof Nikolai Fedorov, by the Soviet utopian biologist Tsiolkovskii,and by the image of the union of humanity withgods and animals as outlined in Khlebnikov'sutopia Ladomir. Poplavskii, on the other hand, was a chaotic Christianmysticfascinatedby the of Dostoevskiand by the mysticaltrancesof St. Teresa of bogoiskatel'stvo Avila. in the early 1930Simagery Both poets chose to give up theirsurrealistic to the Parisian school of fashionableexistential Poplavskii out of deference angoisse that became dominant in the emigre literatureat that time. His chas (1936) and V venke iz voska (Paris, 1938), twolatercollections, Snezhnyi attestto his genuine mystical experienceand were praised forthatreason by his literary As poetry thesebooksare oftenamorphousand at times associates. besimply dull. The recent publication of Dirizhabl' reveals a synthesis and his earlier surrealismand visual inventween Poplavskii's mysticism tiveness.The result is some of his most personal and importantpoetry. Poplavskiidied in Paris in utterindigence,a victimof a bizarreexperiment with drugsin 1935 at the age of thirty-two. Zabolotskii,subjected to a savage campaign of vilificationin the party press led by the notorious Ermilov, triedto achieve a more traditionalstyleof poetry.His "Triumph of by the partycritics:a poem about Agriculture"was totallymisunderstood the collectivizationthat used surrealistic imagerywas assumed ipso facto to be hostile and dangerous. Around 1934 we see both Zabolotskii and Poplavskii almost willingly tryingto give up the most distinctiveand personal featuresof their poetic personalities(tryingunsuccessfully-but exercisedin such diverse the similarity of ideological pressures so similarly
27

Flagi.

SURREALISM

6I 7

environments is noteworthy). Two years after Poplavskii's senseless and tragic death Zabolotskii's ordeal by labor camps began. He returned in 1946,a brokenman, tubercularand possiblyan alcoholic. In the last twelve yearsof his life he wrote a number of conventionalpoems in the eclectic nineteenth-century manner approved by the authorities.He remained a tremendously gifted poet to the end, and in some of the quasi-realistic poemsof his last period he managed to scale the heightsof poetry, which is all the more amazing because he was clearlyworkingin an alien medium. Poplavskiionce wrotethat a second-rate poem by a great poet is preferable to a good one by a mediocrepoet. He could have been speakingof Zabolotskii'slast period. to The vivid-and unique early work of these two poets offers testimony somethingelse as well: division of Russian literature into Soviet and emigreis at times a mere convention.Division of poetry into good and mediocre,however,remains eternallyvalid. Both Poplavskii and Zabolotskii are good poets and deserveto be known as such. Together with their predecessor Churilin,theycan now be seen to forman extremely interesting Russian poetry.A further minor strain within twentieth-century study of the work of these three poets and a comparison of their work with the achievements of the French,Czech, and Yugoslav Surrealists would deepen our understandingof the origin and uses of their surrealistictechniques and enhance our admirationforthe matchlessscope and varietyof Russian in the first threedecades of our century. poetry