Chapter 8.

Mediation: a dubious ecstasy.

In implementing a complex theme, however, success depends not so much on the seamless fusion of its components as on the persuasiveness of the overall design that mediates the text’s various voices and oppositions. IWH’s rhetoric hinges on an ambiguous and yet ecstatic acceptance of new, Socialist Moscow, seen as a Steeringent but necessary harness. This formulation raises several questions (as is only natural in view of the ‘ambiguity’): How specific is the reference to ‘Socialism’? How does ‘harness’ fit into the thematic cluster outlined above? By what Tolstoyan “labyrinth of couplings” is the transition achieved from the hugeness of the apartment to the acceptability of the harness?

Unlike in some other poems of Second Birth , in IWH, Socialism is never mentioned by name. Rather, it looms behind such elliptical expressions as

 –“growing into” (vrastaiushchei ): a political slogan of circa 1930 that called for the individual farmers’ growing into Socialism;

 –“testaments” (zavety ): a current phrase that referred to the testaments of Il’ich, i. e. Lenin’s legacy;

 –“the task” (zadach[a] ) is reminiscent of Party lexicon, in particular, the title of Lenin’s essay (“Ocherednye zadachi sovetskoi vlasti”);

 –“you build yourself” (stroish’sia ): the verb stroit’ “build/construct,” inevitably conjured up Socialism as its direct object in the propagandistic lingo of the times. Thus, these allusions were sufficiently transparent for contemporary readers.

What is more, the portrayal of Moscow in the poem’s finale seems to have been more or less directly borrowed from Mayakovsky, the  number one herald of poetry’s subjugation to the dictates of socialst construction. His 1926 poem “Two Moscows” (1955-61, 7: 176-79) about the transformation of Russia’s proverbial “Big village” into an industrial Socialist capital, offers striking parallels to IWH.

Mayakovsky has Moscow building itself; enthuses upon sing it rock, rise, and straighten itself; opposes it to old-time hooliganism and rural darkness (cf. IWH, V); imagines the new city rushing the village [like a horse] at cord’s end (cf. IWH’s harness!); proclaims his kind of verse as fastening loose prose down with bolts (cf. the “cramming/denting” of verse in IWH, VIII); and declares that it does not take a visionary prophet (!) to see the Socialist future.

These images, putting down the traditional cult of the poet and glorifying technocratic violence done to life and literature in general and horses in particular were, of course, vintage Mayakovsky–a pro-technology Futuristic persona, yet strongly identifying itself with dogs and horses, and very much in sync with the time’s fixation on ‘slaughter.’[35] A further crystallization of this thematic cluster appeared in Mayakovsky’s “What Are You Complaining Of?” (predating his death by only one year, and Second Birth , by two), where the poet, a denizen of the skies, is called upon to discard his ancient mantles and fasten his Muse with strong ties, like a horse, onto the cart of everyday life.[36]

The ‘horse/Muse taming’ topos may have held several attractions for Pasternak. For one thing, he had his own biographical and poetic investment in the equine motif.[37] He had also been long involved with Mayakovsky’s poetic posture, which he tried to emulate before distancing himself from it.[38] Therefore, having survived Mayakovsky’s tragic death and pondering his own second birth into the Socialist thirties, Pasternak would naturally be faced with the twofold challenge: on the one hand, to adopt Mayakovsky’s program of stepping, for Socialism’s sake, on the throat of his own song and hitching his poetry to the Project’s cart and yet, on the other, to do so on and in his own terms. Such may have been the underpinnings of Pasternak’s feat of self-harnessing,[39] performed in an evasively ambiguous and thus almost natural, non-violent, emotionally agreeable manner. How did he manage this tour de force?

Strategy: a momentum for acceptance.

Coming to grips with reality, i. e. reconciling with life and ultimately with death, is an eternal issue. Art has developed an array of strategies for its treatment and rhetorical resolution. In IWH, Pasternak resorts to one such figure, which is based on the principle of foreshadowing:[40] by placing the undesirable element at the end of a long sequence of its more acceptable versions, the poet creates a powerful momentum for its eventual acceptance.

     In the theory of advertising, this figure–I will call it ‘Acceptance by Momentum’–is known as “yes-response technique.”

“The canvasser rings the doorbell. The door is opened by a suspicious lady-of-the-house. The canvasser lifts his hat. ‘Would you like to buy an illustrated History of the World ?’ he asks. ‘No!’ And the door slams… Hence… we [must] start a person in the affirmative direction. A wiser canvasser rings the doorbelll… ‘This is Mrs. Armstrong?’ Scowlingly–‘Yes.’ ‘I understand, Mrs. Armstrong, that you have several children in school.’ Suspiciously–‘Yes.’ ‘And, of course, they have much home work to do?’ Almost with a sigh–‘Yes’ [and so on]… [T]hat second canvasser is destined to go far! He has captured the secret of getting, at the outset, a number of ‘yes-responses’” (Overstreet 1925: 16-17).

The analogy with advertising may sm crude,[41] but it offers a pertinent perspective on IWH as the poet’s attempt to “sell” (to the reader, and, more importantly, to himself) the new, tight, and unattractive harness of Socialism. Pasternak’s “harness commercial” relies on a staggered process to make the critical transition almost imperceptible, if not welcome, by having it follow on the heels of steps that raise no objections; hence, incidentally, the poem’s considerable length. But, of course, adapting the ‘Acceptance by Momentum’ technique to his artistic goals, Pasternak deviates from its skeletal formula, enriching it in at least two respects.

First,  his acceptance is circumscribed with reservations; note the concessive phrase in stanza III (Puskai… I po takoi.. ). The new Moscow is accepted in the spirit not so much of Pushkin’s encomium to Petersburg in the introduction to The Bronze Horseman (“Liubliu tebia, Petra tvoren’e…”) as of Lermontov’s ambivalent “Motherland” (“Liubliu otchiznu ia, no strannoiu liubov’iu…”). In other words, the yes-response technique becomes a yes-and-no response technique.

One characteristic manifestation of this ambivalence is the obsessive, if somewhat obscure, use of expressions with ominously ‘criminal’ connotations (“lifetimeness–boss around–to be no fools…–bribes–under investigation–…”). Each of these words is employed figuratively, but their cumulative effect is clearly negative. It is reinforced by the similarly ambiguous, but ‘ideologically positive’ effect of the tongue-in-cheek officialese.

Second, Pasternak diversifies the technique by engaging simultaneously four aspects of the self-harnessing process–temporal, spatial, emotional, and stylistic, as the speaker comes to like something that is unfamiliar, confining, disagrable, and altogether unpoetic. As a result, the poem’s rhetorical design becomes more multifaceted and thus beter naturalized–rather than stark and obvious. Added to the original length of its melodic line and its major key/minor key ambivalence is the polyphony of several levels of discourse.

3. The four reasons

Time: new = old .

This rhetorical equation is inherent in the very technique of affirmative responses, designed to smooth the transition from the earlier stages of a process to its payoff in the end. Such a technique should prove all the more relevant in the temporal sphere. Thus, the temptation to pass off the unfamiliar Socialist new for the familiar traditional old finds an iconic expression in the structural properties of the chosen compositional figure. This momentum (actually, a familiarization device) also gets a boost from the ‘homesickness’ component of the theme: nostalgia by definition means looking forward to a return back to the familiar past.

The rhetoric of familiarization pervades the text of IWH. In the manner of a fortune teller who first gains the customer’s trust by divining his past and only after that proceeds to predict his future, the path into the unknown future under construction is beaten, in IWH, through the familiar sites of Moscow’s domestic life and landscape.

These scenes, comprising three quarters of the entire text (stanzas I-VI), are saturated with ‘habitual’ motifs: homecoming, taking off one’s coat, sedentary life, pre-dinner constitutional, the cycle of day following night (V-VI). In stanza IV, the theme is sounded openly: “AGAIN, with the FAMILIARITY of their song…”; once announced, it begets the structural leitmotif of the “song” that will reverberate through to the end of the poem–the sequence of seven anaphoric repetitions of the retrospective word “again” (opiat’ ).[42]

On the microrhythmical scale, this is echoed by the choice of meter in stanzas IV-VI: they stress the familiarity of the Moscow cityscape in the most ‘regular’ forms of iambic tetrameter (the most frequent fourth form, with the unstressed third foot, and the most “normal,” fully-stressed first form). Thus the theme of familiarity is expressed even on the subliminal, “musical” level of the text and, what is more, Pasternak almost literally fulfills his promise “to write badly,” namely, in the meters of a Demyan Bedny.

In fact, the entire text of IWH is a metrical compromise between the early Pasternak’s modernist preference for the stress the first foot and the more traditional statistical predominance of the second, favored by the Soviet literary Thermidorians, looking back to nineteenth-century classics (s M. Gasparov 1974: 94).[43]

The concerted action of the plot, lexicon, and rhythm is also joined by the “poetry of grammar,” which, appropriately, takes the form of an original use of the future tense.[44] That tense would be–and is–quite in order in the poem’s finale, which anticipates the imminent assumption of the Socialist harness and the poet’s subsequent hard-earned passing into the memory of the generations to come. The future tense, however, makes its appearance in the text well ahead of time, as early as stanza I; it pervades stanza II, disappears briefly in III, and is firmly back in control from IV on. This grammatical device greatly facilitates the difficult task of “riding into the unknown”:[45] the presentation of perfectly habitual situations (such as entering one’s apartment, taking off one’s coat, going for a walk before dinner. etc.) under the grammatical guise of future events desensitizes the reader to the distinction between present and future. The poet, as it were, repeatedly cries wolf at the slightest provocation, and when the “wolf” does appear, the vigilance has been lulled and the Socialist harness gets accepted automatically, without alarm or objection.

Space: confinement = expanse .

The poem’s finale has Moscow both narrowed into a harness for the poet and expanded into the wide (and ever widening) audience for his verses. This crucial neutralization of the largely spatial opposition crowns a series of much more attractive variations on the same theme.

The spatial plane of IWH is overdetermined by the treatment of Socialism as landscape, which, in turn, is based on the Pasternakian contact betwn indoor and outdoor space. The poem’s nostalgic theme (whose spatial aspect consists of returning to one’s native city and home) and the technique of ‘Acceptance by Momentum’ concur to produce a plot featuring a long chain of displacements and other spatial interactions. Moreover, from the start, an equation is established between being enclosed (in the apartment; at the desk) and being at large (in the apartment’s hugeness; growing into the testaments of the days); as early as stanza I, on entering the apartment, the poet is emblematically illuminated by streetlights. Furthermore, both the closed and the open spaces are (at least, in part) positively valorized (as is characteristic of Pasternak’s poetic world[46] ), thus preparing eventual acceptance of the harness.

Another aspect of IWH’s spatial ambiguity is its paradoxical dynamics of motion, combining at all times the opposites of mobility and slackness.

While inside the apartment, the speaker, rather than remaining passive (as prompted by the spatial restrictions, as well as his sadness, and the reflexive-passive verbs in stanza I), swings into active movement (“enter,” “pass through, “cutting”). The momentum he thus acquires sends him coursing through the streets of Moscow, but this expanding movement is accompanied by a decrease in his activeness: stanzas IV-VI omit the first person from the narrative, turning the acting subject into an unmentioned (!) passive witness and emotional experiencer of the activities of the landscape and the elements.

The two concluding stanzas complete this symmetrical composition by an ambiguous fusion of confinement with expanse and energy with passivity.

On the grammatical level, this is iconized by the equal distribution of the subject/object roles between the poet and Moscow (“[I] will put [lit. enclose!] into words–how you… build yourself”; “I will accept you–you  will cram/memorize me”), thus illustrating the fairness and reciprocity of the contract.

Such is the spatial dynamics that leads to the emblematic image of Moscow-as-harness from its embryonic prototype–“the hugeness of the apartment.”

Flings: desiring the unpleasant .

The emotional plane of the ‘Acceptance by Momentum’ technique consists of admixing some positive elements to the inevitably negative tonality of the poem and thus anticipating eventual self-harnessing, in a carefully dosed vaccination or medication with “a spoonful of sugar.” This strategy draws naturally on Pasternakian admiration for the world even at its saddest, the deliberate ambivalence of Second Birth ‘s rhetoric, and the bitter-sweet nature of the poem’s nostalgia.

The pivotal find is the characterization of the longed-for apartment as “inducing sadness.” Surely, it would be more natural to long for joy and happiness, but then, the mood of grudging concession and acceptance (“Puskai… I po takoi…”; “I ia primu…”) is best suited by the seemingly tautological, while actually oxymoronic, ‘nostalgia for sadness.’ And yet, the sadness imparted by one’s own apartment is “one’s own”–acceptable, familiar, sweet. The same goes for the speaker’s voluntary confinement at the desk and the minor-key but ‘passionate’ involvement with the gloomy winter landscape, which, so to speak, immunizes him against the dangers to come.[47]

Having from the start slipped into a melancholy mood and sunk ever deeper into it as the poem unfolds, the poet and the reader develop a willingness, indeed, a sort of strained enthusiasm for Socialism. To schematize the poem’s emotional route, skipping the intermediate stages: “I want to go into… sadness… harness.”

The emotional (as well as spatial) plot bridging the gap between the apartment and the harness is reinforced by the formal structures of the text. Thus, the narrative curve, leading from the sad enclosure of the first stanzas,f through the expansion and lightening in the middle, to the dark and scary contraction in the end, is accompanied by a similar patterning of IWH’s rhyme scheme.

The rhyming starts with closed vowels in closed syllables ending in voiceless consonants (ogrOmnost’, grUst’, tonkorEbrost’ ). Then the vowels widen and the syllables open up (zadAchi, dnEi, napEva ). But in the dark alley-ways there again appears the narrow U , and the syllables get blocked with consonant endings (strast’, vikhr’ ); still, a degree of wideness and openness is retained (strAst’, MoskvA ), coupled with the poignancy of the narrow, or rather, sharp I , punctuating the moment of creativity (vIkhr, mYshtsei ). The poem ends on the gloomy chord of four rhymes, all featuring U followed by voiceless consonants (kak Upriazh’–bezUmstv–zazUbrish’–naizUst’ ). This brings us full circle back to the beginning (naizUst’–grUst’ ), emphasizing the link between the harness and sad apartment.

Aesthetics: sublimation of harness.

In meeting the artistic challenge of poeticizing the utterly unpoetic harness, Pasternak had the support of two prestigious trends in Russian poetry: the Realist, prose-oriented civic tradition (harking back to Nekrasov and even the later Pushkin), with its attention to the humble details of the life and work of everyman, in particular, the peasant; and the Futurist promotion of real work, in particular its tools, over art as such.[48] In a sadly ironic twist (mirroring the general irony of the populist revolution turned tyranny[49] ), Pasternak’s present task was to press this democratic/iconoclastic legacy into the service of oppression–by extolling, to paraphrase Pushkin, the charms of the harness.[50] For a means of naturalizing this difficult conceit, Pasternak could and did tap another honorable topos–the Romantic image of poet as scapegoat, i. e.  a sublime, yet trampled upon, sufferer.

How were these heterogeneous hypograms reconciled in Pasternak’s own esthetic credo? Not only did it aim at mediating between high and low, at finding “poetry underfoot” (1985b: 173), and bearing witness to the “intercourse of rapture with the everyday” (1985b: 54); it also featured an appropriate figure of the poet: a human embodiment of the unity of ‘pain, weakness, humility, trifling existence, overwhelmed passivity, and submission to one’s duty’ with ‘supernatural powers of observation, flights of imagination, and contact with the world’s vastness and eternity.’ By the 1930s, the focus in this image had effectively shifted, to stress its self-sacrificial and obligational aspects.[51]

As regards IWH’s specific themes, an important esthetic solution may have been prompted by the motif of ‘homecoming.’ Despite his many travels and paeans to exotic landcapes, Pasternak remained–and with time increasingly so –the poet of Moscow and its environs (poet-dachnik ), behind whose tree trunks he was always able to discern the sea anyway.[52] In the thirties, the modesty of such tastes acquired an additional meaning as a principled refusal to participate in the so-called “creative trips” of official Soviet writers: “And what if, for instance, I was once captivated by the way Pushkin and Tiutchev journeyed and still do journey through their books and I have given up all the strength of my heart to the difficulty of this sort of journeying, which means neglecting the ease–all too dply rooted among us nowadays–of stage-performance tours?” (1985b: 175). In this sense, the poet’s voluntary confinement at home by the writing desk, in IWH, is another ambiguous, Aesopian mixture of ‘collaborationist’ and ‘dissident’ stances.

     The “encounter of rapture with the everyday” overdetermines the symbolic significance of most images in IWH, e. g.:

the painful ecstasies of the passe-muraille poet; the lifetime task of penetrating the future without leaving the desk; susceptibility to (Christ’s?) passions in the vicinity of home; heart collapsing in an enthusiastic response to Moscow’s upsurge.

     The peak of this high-wire esthetic act is reached

First comes the acceptance of the harness, proclaimed with self-sacrificial sublimity: the verb prinimat’ means both “accept” and “assume,” as in the assumption of responsibility, chastisement (kara ), monastic vows (postrig ), and the way of the cross. Then follows the jarringly bureaucratic, as well as elevatedly archaic, phrase (Tekh radi… ), which is made even more cumbersome by the inverted word order and extrametrical stress (on Tekh ), to seal the bartering of self-imposed harness for future poetic madnesses.

In accordance with IWH’s master figure and in a feat of iconic showcasing of the high/low esthetic, the climactic harnessing sweeps in on the crest of a powerful  momentum generated from the quotidian/negative material of stanzas IV-VI. On the plot level, the modest details are whipped up into an ominous condensation of darkness, passions, and ‘subjugation’:

The winter’s relatively mild khoziainichat’ , “to keep house, boss around” (in IV), leads all the way to podsledstvennykh , “under investigation” (VI), while the rather placid horizontal movements, “right and left” (IV) and “during a walk” (V), give way to more dramatic–and submerging!–vertical ones: “start falling from the sky” and “cover” (VI); this downward plunge is then followed by the climactic counterpoint of ‘collapsing’ and ‘rising’ (VII).

On the level of poetic syntax, this is echoed by the crescendo resulting from a skillfull manipulation of the ostensibly monotonous repetition of the anaphoric opiat’ , “again” (itself emblematic of life’s routine). The incidence of the anaphoras combines with the variations in sentence length and structure to yield the impression of a simultaneous expansion of the lungs and quickening of the pulse.

On one hand, after anaphoric regularity has been established, with the word opiat’ occurring in every other line (IV, V), the interval suddenly contracts (VI), an effect that is enhanced by the alliterative mimicking of opiat’ in the very next word, povaliat , “will start falling” (VI, 1).

    On the other hand, the sentences that begin with opiat’ gradually merge, becoming longer and more complex: from two separate two-line sentences (VI) to two two-line sentences with a common subject (“darkness”; V) to two separate sentences with the expanding one-plus-three pattern (VI) to four-line complex sentences with subordinate clauses (VII, VIII). Just as the maximum sentence length and complexity are attained (in VII), the acceleration of the opiat’ occurences peaks. After a poignant reconfirmation, as opiat’ is once again phonetically replicated by the next word (opavshei , “slumped”; VII, 1),[53] opiat’ disappears from the text.

Thus, launched by the ‘low,’ yet highly energized trifles, the poem develops the impetus that transports it into the lofty celebration of the down-to-earth and demeaning Socialist harness.

4. Conclusion

What is, on balance, the dialogic nature of IWH? Pasternak, who had shortly before declared that he “was not born to look three times differently in the eyes” of history[54] was, indeed, changing with the times–experiencing a “second birth.” Steering his ambiguously ‘adaptive/subversive’ course between the Scylla of Mayakovsky’s extreme pro-Bolshevism and the Charybdis of Mandelstam’s extreme defiance (both of which led to tragic premature deaths), he was able to survive. Indeed, he lived to undergo a third major transformation of his literary identity (manifested in Doctor Zhivago and the later poetry) and become a harbinger of post-Stalin dissidence. The secret of Pasternak’s “miraculous” survival (which may well have been due to sheer luck–or Stalin’s inexplicable personal liking) can be related, on the literary level, to the very “organic” and “soft” way in which he tackled the harsh challenges that faced him, prefiguring his eventual embrace of Christianity.[55]

Rather than a mere Aesopian compromise with the powers that be, IWH (and Second Birth as a whole), exhibits a profoundly idiosyncratic and consummately artistic treatment of the ‘collaborationist’ theme and engages in a multidimensional poetic intercourse with predecessors and contemporaries (Pushkin, Briusov, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, the ‘apartment topos,’ etc.). That probably is what accounts for the puzzling hybrid of a truly great poem with a conduit for such Orwellian equations as ‘Sadness is Joy,’ ‘Ugly is Beautiful,’ ‘Confinement = Freedom.’ To quote another major contemporary, Anna Akhmatova: “If only you knew, out of what trash,/ Verses grow, unfamiliar with shame…” . Akhmatova’s ‘pro-low’ esthetic credo expressed in these famous lines from “Tvorchestvo” (1940), is very much akin to Pasternak’s views. All the more pertinent, if sad, is the irony of their unexpectedly provocative applicability to IWH (and the poetics of Second Birth in general) in the ideological sense. In blander–theoretical–terms, however, “I Want To Go Home…” can be summed up as a case study in intertextual approaches to evolution: we actually see the poet change in response, i. e., by responding, to the master discourse of his epoch.

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