Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
I will start by citing a fragment from Lidiia Ginzburg’s Literature in Search of Reality that has intrigued me since I first read it:
Есть сюжеты, которые не ложатся в прозу. Нельзя, например, адекватно рассказать прозой:
Человек непроницаем уже для теплого дыхания мира; его реакции склеротически жестки, и о внутренних своих состояииях он знает как бы из вторых рук. Совершается некое психологическое событие. Не очень значительное, но оно—как в тире—попало в точку и привело все вокруг в судорожное движение. И человек вдруг увидел долгую свою жизнь. Не такую, о какой он привык равнодушно думать словами Мопассана: жизнь не бывает ни так хороша, ни так дурна, как нам это кажется. … Не ткань жизни, спутанную из всякой всячины, во множестве дней—каждый со своей задачей… Свою жизнь он увидел простую, как остов, похожую на плохо написанную биографию. И вот он плачет над этой непоправимой ясностью. Над тем, что жизнь была холодной и трудной. Плачет над обидами тридцатилетней давности, над болью, которой не испытывает, над неутоленным желанием вещей, давно постылых.
Для прозы это опыт недостаточно отжатый, со следами душевной сырости; душевное сырье, которое стих трансформирует своими незаменимыми средствами.
There are plots that do not lend themselves to prose. It is impossible, for instance, to relate adequately in prose;
A man is already impervious to the warm breath of the world; his reactions are sclerotically rigid, and he knows about his inner states as if second hand. A certain psychological event occurs. Not a very significant one, but it has—as in a shooting gallery—hit the mark and set everything about in convulsive motion. And all of a sudden the man sees his long life. Not with indifference, the way he got used to thinking about it according to Maupassant: life is hardly ever as good or as bad as it seems to us.. Not the fabric of life, a tangle of all sorts of things, days on end, each with its own task.. He suddenly sees his life plain as a skeleton, resembling a poorly written biography. And now he cries over this irremediable clarity. Over life’s having been cold and difficult. He cries over thirty-year-old slights, over pain he does not feel, over the unquenched desire for objects he has long since stopped wanting-
For prose, this experience is insufficiently condensed, with traces of emotional rawness, the soul’s raw material that verse transforms by its own indispensable means. (Lidiia Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti. Stat’i, esse. zametki [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987], p. 333.)
In this penultimate fragment of the “Notes of 1950-1970,” everything is enigmatic, beginning with the genre. Much has been written about the combination of criticism, memoirs, and imaginative prose in Ginzburg’s later texts. But this time she has also produced a kind of quasi-poetry, the non-writing of which the reader is invited to witness. This meta-poem in prose boasts a plethora of poetic effects. It resorts to 1) imagery: “the warm breath of the world”; 2) alliteration: proSTuiu, kak oSTov (lost, as befits poetry, in translation: “plain as a skeleton”); 3) near-rhymes:- vsIACHiny—zadACHei— plACHet (lost, too); and 4) verbal play on secondary lexical meanings, a constituent feature of poetic language as defined by Ginzburg’s mentor, Iurii Tynianov; the word v tire can be taken to mean either “in a shooting gallery” or, more whimsically, “between dashes,” especially since this phrase is surrounded by dashes, while the next word is v tochku.lit. “period” (un poetic ally tran slated as “mark”).
In addition, as “real poetry” is wont to, the fragment refers to other texts; it treats not only of life but of literature, which it corrects and rewrites. The only explicit quote is from Maupassant, but other subtextual voices can be heard. Perhaps, Pasternak: for example, compare Ginzburg’s dushevnoe syr’e (“the soul’s raw material”) with his Vsia dushevnaia burda (“All the emotional junk-brew”; Lieutenant Schmidt), and also her / vot on plachet.. (“And now he cries…”) with Pasternak’s Vnezapno vspomnit vsiu ee/ I plachet vtikhomolku (“He suddenly sees all of her/ And falls to crying softly”; “Parting”). Or maybe that dushevnoe syr’e comes from Mandel’shtam’s Poiu. kogda gortan’—syra, dusha—sukha (“I sing when my larynx is moist, my soul, dry”)? The pain that does not hurt sounds familiar, too—Akhmatovian? The reader has an uneasy feeling of being quizzed.. But all along, despite the grammatica! third person, there is a certainty that the lyrical subject is Ginzburg herself, that we are reading a poem of her own: part draft, part interlinear, part auto-review.
The lyrical stage is set from the start by [he meditative formula Est’… (“There are…”), invoking an entire tradition of such openings. The tradition begins probably with Batiushkov, and it goes. by way of Lermontov (Est’ rechi—znachen’e/ Temno il’ nichtozhno… [“There are speeches—whose meaning/ Is obscure or insignificant.,.”]), Tiutchev and many others, down to Mandel’shtam (Est’ tsennostei nezyblemaia skala… [“There is an unshakable scale of values.-.”]) and Akhmatova (Est’ tri epokhi u vospominanii… [“There are three epochs in remembering…”]).
Characteristic of this kind of opening is also the negation that follows it:
EST’… kotorye NE… (“THERE ARE.. [such] that DO NOT..). Compare Akhmatova’s famous: Est’ v blizosti liudei zavetnaia cherta,/ Ee ne pereiti vliublennosti i strasti (“There is in human intimacy a secret boundary,/ Neither being in love nor passion can cross it”.)
In fact, negative rhetoric pervades the fragment: “do not lend themselves, it is impossible, impervious, not… significant, not.. the way, life is hardly ever… (ne byvaet… /… ni… ni.. ), not the fabric, irremediable, does not feel, unquenched. insufficiently. indispensable.” This, too, is a well-known strategy – poetry likes to speak of what is not. Pushkin’s “The Talisman” and Mandel’shtam’s recurrent openings to the effect that “I can not … see/ hear/ enter… the famous Phaedra/ the- tales of Ossian/ the glass palaces …” easily come to mind.
Ginzburg’s discourse is full of contradictions. The words “it is impossible to relate” are followed by an actual telling- The pain is not felt, but brings forth tears. The experience is declared insufficiently condensed, yet we find ourselves reading something general, almost abstract. This latter paradox is essential. On the one hand, a certain emotional outburst (“all of a sudden…”) takes place, the person starts crying, the text reverberates with pain, cold, slights, convulsions. On the other, all this is related in a highly detached manner, as if second-, if not third-hand- Not only is an objective third-person voice substituted for the speaker’s subjective First person; Lidiia Ginzburg pointedly replaces her autobiographical female self with a conventional masculine persona: chelovek, on (“a man [in the sense of ‘person, human being’], he”).
Literature, keen on distancing itself from “raw material,” has evolved techniques of framing and point-of-view. Ginzburg’s short fragment uses manifold framing. The outer frame (the first and last paragraphs) is provided by disquisitions on prose and poetry. Enclosed inside is the picture of a person, who is at first impervious to the outside world, but is then galvanized into convulsive motion- This makes him peek deeper still, inside another frame, where he sees his entire “long life.” However, even there there is no ‘life’ proper, but yet another text: a “biography”- and a “poorly written” one at that. In any event, this hopeless, indeed, “irremediable,” text triggers an emotional outburst (foreshadowed and prepared by the first “convulsive motion”). Cutting through the inner boundaries, it fuses the person’s past and present, after which follows the closure of the outer frame.
The three planes are linked not only by their direct emotional impacts but also by an elegant parallelism. The two insets portray the person’s “real-life” hardships: the innermost, the totality of his long lifetime; the intermediate, the one convulsive moment. The outside frame echoes this with the speaker’s laments about the enormity of the artistic task and confessions of envy for the other literary mode (alas, what- I’m writing is mere prose, not poetry!). But this, in turn, is just one more rhetorical figure from poetry’s repertory.
The abundance of poetic devices does not by itself turn a text into a poem sensu stricto. According to Tynianov, everything hinges on the dominant, or the constructive principle, of the text. What. then, is the fragment’s dominant?
The tension that permeates the text lies between its lyrical-poetic nature and its dry, formulaic abstractness, which smacks – especially in a piece treating intimate subjects – of pseudo-science and insensitivity. The fragment is rife with scholarly terms: “adequately, reactions, sclerotically, a certain psychological event, biography, transforms.” To be sure, this discourse mode is naturalized—”motivated,” in Formalist terms—by the book’s and its author’s acknowledged literary-scholarly status. But in the context of the fragment’s very special lyrical tenor and rhetoric, the “scholarly mode” becomes conspicuous—defamiliarized. as it were. It produces the fresh effect of an intellectual-prosaic element invading the emotional confines of poetry.
This, in turn, means that an “extra-poetic.” namely, “scholarly,” discourse finds its way into the text’s poetic atmosphere—in keeping with the genera! trend toward prosaization in Russian poetry (a poetry, let it be said, (hat did not have its seventeenth-century metaphysicals, nor had flirted with intellectual ism until Baratynskii and Tiutchev). The push toward prosaization gained momentum in this century, assuming two major forms, different to the point of contrast. One strategy, which can be labelled as “Futurist,” aimed at a conceptual schematization of the text. The other, “Primitivist,” produced “bad, unskilled writing” (i.e., skaz and its cognates, from Zoshchenko to Limonov). Khlebnikov and Brodskii managed to combine both. Ginzburg is, of course, closer to the former strategy: that of metaliterary conceptualism-But she is not alien to the latter: a “poorly written biography” and “insufficiently condensed experience” naturally result in “inadequate” prose.
The above is but a scholarly declaration of love. a study in envy, an attack of anxiety of influence- Lidiia Ginzburg has left us no room for meta-transcending her text, which has ii all: a man a la recherche du temps perdu. a character in cerca d’autore. a critic in search of a genre. Ail one can pretend to is the role of a grateful connoisseur of the findings, which, so un-Picasso-like, have disguised themselves as mere searchings.