Totem of the Russian XX Century Modernism (key)

 

Totem of the Russian XX Century Modernism

Post-Soviet Poetry.

This blog is mostly restricted to the poetry created and inspired during the "short XX Century" (1914-1989). So, post-Soviet poetry is deliberately avoided. I want to include, though, a few examples of Russian-language XX Century poetry, which followed the fall of the USSR.

Party Lines.

Alexander Levin.

Wrap for me, wrap for me, Naked Basil,
In the Party Card three meters long.
Basil will play con on the corner,
Clutching naked revolver--his dong.

But in years of big tribulations,
Party Cards will be falling like flies.
Comrade Lenin forgotten, his nation
"Naked Basil!" will totally cry.

СТИШИЕ ПАРТИЙНОЕ

Заверните мне голого васю
в трёхметровый партийный билет.
Вася сможет стоять на атасе,
согревая в руке пистолет.
Но в период больших потрясений
партбилет словно лист опадёт.
И забывший, как выглядит Ленин,
«голый вася!» воскликнет народ.

1988, 1996.

 In 1996, fall of Communism was not yet perceived as final, as it is now.,.

*"Naked Basil"--is a slang expression with the meaning of F-Oops!

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Zone

This excerpt from the "Zone" by G. Apollinaire continues my subject of early flight, which was previously approached in the entries on Blok and Gumilev. The reader can assess for herself the affinities and differences but, above all, the awe of early XX century man for the beginning conquest of the air.

Zone (fragment)

À la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine

Ici même les automobiles ont l'air d'être anciennes
La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion
Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation

Seul en Europe tu n'es pas antique ô Christianisme
L'Européen le plus moderne c'est vous Pape Pie X
Et toi que les fenêtres observent la honte te retient
D'entrer dans une église et de t'y confesser ce matin
Tu lis les prospectus les catalogues les affiches qui chantent tout haut
Voilà la poésie ce matin et pour la prose il y a les journaux
Il y a les livraisons à 25 centimes pleines d'aventures policières
Portraits des grands hommes et mille titres divers

J'ai vu ce matin une jolie rue dont j'ai oublié le nom
Neuve et propre du soleil elle était le clairon
Les directeurs les ouvriers et les belles sténodactylographes
Du lundi matin au samedi soir quatre fois par jour y passent
Le matin par trois fois la sirène y gémit
Une cloche rageuse y aboie vers midi
Les inscriptions des enseignes et des murailles
Les plaques les avis à la façon des perroquets criaillent
J'aime la grâce de cette rue industrielle
Située à Paris entre la rue Aumont-Thiéville et l'avenue des Ternes

Voilà la jeune rue et tu n'es encore qu'un petit enfant
Ta mère ne t'habille que de bleu et de blanc
Tu es très pieux et avec le plus ancien de tes camarades René Dalize
Vous n'aimez rien tant que les pompes de l'Église
Il est neuf heures le gaz est baissé tout bleu vous sortez du dortoir en cachette
Vous priez toute la nuit dans la chapelle du collège
Tandis qu'éternelle et adorable profondeur améthyste
Tourne à jamais la flamboyante gloire du Christ
C'est le beau lys que tous nous cultivons
C'est la torche aux cheveux roux que n'éteint pas le vent
C'est le fils pâle et vermeil de la douloureuse mère
C'est l'arbre toujours touffu de toutes les prières
C'est la double potence de l'honneur et de l'éternité
C'est l'étoile à six branches
C'est Dieu qui meurt le vendredi et ressuscite le dimanche
C'est le Christ qui monte au ciel mieux que les aviateurs
Il détient le record du monde pour la hauteur

Pupille Christ de l'oeil
Vingtième pupille des siècles il sait y faire
Et changé en oiseau ce siècle comme Jésus monte dans l'air
Les diables dans les abîmes lèvent la tête pour le regarder
Ils disent qu'il imite Simon Mage en Judée
Ils crient s'il sait voler qu'on l'appelle voleur
Les anges voltigent autour du joli voltigeur
Icare Énoch Élie Apollonius de Thyane
Flottent autour du premier aéroplane
Ils s'écartent parfois pour laisser passer ceux qui portent la Sainte-Eucharistie
Ces prêtres qui montent éternellement en élevant l'hostie
L'avion se pose enfin sans refermer les ailes
Le ciel s'emplit alors de millions d'hirondelles
À tire d'aile viennent les corbeaux les faucons les hiboux
D'Afrique arrivent les ibis les flamands les marabouts
L'oiseau Roc célébré par les conteurs et les poètes
Plane tenant dans les serres le crâne d'Adam la première tête
L'aigle fond de l'horizon en poussant un grand cri
Et d'Amérique vient le petit colibri
De Chine sont venus les pihis longs et souples
Qui n'ont qu'une seule aile et qui volent par couples
Puis voici la colombe esprit immaculé
Qu'escortent l'oiseau-lyre et le paon ocellé
Le phénix ce bûcher qui soi-même s'engendre
Un instant voile tout de son ardente cendre
Les sirènes laissant les périlleux détroits
Arrivent en chantant bellement toutes trois
Et tous aigle phénix et pihis de la Chine
Fraternisent avec la volante machine

Maintenant tu marches dans Paris tout seul parmi la foule
Des troupeaux d'autobus mugissants près de toi roulent
L'angoisse de l'amour te serre le gosier
Comme si tu ne devais jamais plus être aimé
Si tu vivais dans l'ancien temps tu entrerais dans un monastère
Vous avez honte quand vous vous surprenez à dire une prière
Tu te moques de toi et comme le feu de l'Enfer ton rire pétille
Les étincelles de ton rire dorent le fond de ta vie
C'est un tableau pendu dans un sombre musée
Et quelquefois tu vas la regarder de près
 .....

Zone

This is the rear end of the ancient world
With the Eiffel tower shepherding hordes of bridges in the morning
You lived enough within the Greek and Roman antiquities

Yet, and the automobiles will become ancient
As the only religion being supported by the vessels
As simple as the airport hangars

The only Europe which did not fade away
Is Christian and Pius X most modern European
And those, whose windows observe hate and revenge
Are afraid to enter Church in the morning to confess.
There are prospectuses and catalogues and billboards
Which sing in voices high. That's new poetry for you and
There are also magazines for the prose and pocketbooks
For thrillers, celebrity portraits and thousands of other titles.

I see that morning jolly street, but I forgot the name
Nine with which the sun sounds the alarm
Managers, workers and pretty stenographers
Are passing by here from Monday morning to Saturday evening
In the morning sirene is sounding three times
The clocks are in a fury and they ring till noon
The inscriptions and signatures on the show windows
And house plaques cry in the manner of frightened parrots
I love the grace of that busy business street
Somewhere in Paris between Aumont-Thieville and Avenue of Baths.

The street is young, and you are only a toddler,
Whose mother dresses you only in white and blue
You are very pious and very ancient like your pal Rene Dalize
You don't like anything like the processions of the Church
It's nine o'clock and the gaslight is down and you leave ...
You both pray at college's chapel all the night
When that adorable amethyste abyss
Rotates eternally proclaiming the flamboyant glory of Christ.
This is the beauthiful lily that we all cultivate
This is the mane of the red horse which trembles in the wind
This is a pale and orange colors of the quite sea
This is a tree which covers all the clergy
This is a double potion of pride and eternity
This is a star with six rays
This is the Lord who died on Wednesday and was resurrected on Sunday
This is Christ who soared to the sky higher than all aviators
He accomplished the world record of the climb.

One pupil in the eye of Christ
All twenty pupils of centuries that he knew and made
And changed into a bird the century that like Jesus climbs into the air
When devils in their crevasses raise their heads to look up
They strive to imitate Simon the Magus of Judea
They cry that they know how to fly wholly
While the angels perform aerobatics jolly
The Icarus, Elijah and Appolonius of Thiane
Soar in skies behind the first aeroplane.

They strive to rise to Holy Eucharist
The plank of host that was set eternally high by the priests
And when the plane appears without splashing wings
The sky explodes in millions of swallows
The wings bring us the crows, the falcons and the owls
From Africa come ibises, flamingos and marabous
The Roc Bird which by the bards and the poets was made famous
Came keeping the Adam's cranial--the first head--in her talons
The eagles turn on the horizon with the powerful cry
And from Americas a tiny colibri flies.

Arrive from China Pi-His long and supple
Who have one wing and fly only as couple
And here is the dove of immaculate spirit
Who is escorted by the lira-bird and the feathered peackock
The phoenix which his own rebirth engenders
The same instant it turns into flaming cinders
Sirens, which guard the perilous straits
Arrive sing trios quite operatic
And all the eagles, phoenixes and Pi-Hi from Cathay
Do fraternise with the machine which flies

Now you march in Paris alone among the fools
Hordes of the mooing buses turn in front of you
You are torn apart by the anguish and love
As if you never achieve what you love
If you were living in ancient times you would join the monastery
That you hate your voice being suppressed by the priests
You mock yourself and laugh at Hell by crackling laughter
Its sparkles reaches the bottom of your life
This is a hanging picture in the dark museum
And sometimes you look at it

......................

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). Requiem.

Anna Akhmatova, the Grand Dame of the Russian poetry and the belle of the Russian silver age, did not enter earlier because she belongs with Boris Pasternak to the neo-classicist wing of  the poetic endeavor. Yet, she was a pupil and wife of Gumilev, a friend of Mandelstams and a mentor to Brodsky. She also was a lover of Modigliani and Isaiah Berlin. If this were not enough, her Requiem was not only a masterpiece of Russian XX century poetry, easily comparable to J. Alfred Prufrock or the Waste Land, but also a watershed between the poetry of the first half of the XX century centered on St. Petersburg and its second half centered on Moscow.

Requiem written in the memory of the victims of Stalinist terror--among whom were her third (common law) husband, art historian,  Punin (died in the camps after the death of Stalin) and her son Lev Gumilev (spent 15 years in Gulag)--is not only a monument to her civic consciousness but also the great work of art. Read it.

P. S. Anna Akhmatova Requiem is one of the most translated Russian poems in English and I defer to the earlier translators. One of rather faithful translations is provided by Evgeny Bovner.

P.S. Akhmatova and her comedienne friend Faina Ranevskaya in their later years were accomplished conversationalist broads pronouncing brush, harsh and hilarious judgments on the contemporary literary and political scene. 

Ferdinand Zeheshtern

Finally, I exercise the privilege of all creators of anthologies, namely publish my own verse (with my own translation). The poem describes the collision between Chinese and Aryan mythologies of people getting control of the waters as an act of creation.

 Legend of Yu the Engineer

Six princes in council;
Six banners fly:
Guyn has screwed up
He must die.

Yao had said his very wise word:
"Yu will obtain his shovel and sword.
Yu has his legs joint at the knees,
His hands are all split up, like bushes of trees,
He must have been begotten by Earth,
Yu will obtain his shovel and sword."                      

Wise Yu has in the place of his face            
Something all vague and out of place                                          

                                                                      

By Mother Earth he must have been born

He will yoke up the watery storm

Who has reopened the watery pass
Who Vraetona fucked in his ass?

Years are gone and eons have passed
Yet Yao's sayings are all that will last:
"He who has his body crippled and wrought
Must've been begotten by powerful gods."

Six princes in council;
Six banners fly:
Gyun had screwed up.
He must die.

Под шелест шести
Ванов знамен
Гунь в распиздяйстве
Был обвинен

Яо промолвил мудрую речь
Юю доверим воды стеречь
Юю доверим воды стеречь
Вот кто получит заступ и меч.

У Юя ноги срослись до колен
Неразделимы в цельности члены
Знать он рожден самою землей
Вот усмирит кто смерч водяной

У мудрого Юя на месте лица
Неразличимо все до конца
Знать он рожден самою землей
Вот усмирит кто смерч водяной

Кто отворил потоки для вод
Демона Вритру выебал в рот?

Годы проходят, идут времена
Помнят сказание племена:
"У Юя ноги срослись до колен
Знать божеством всемогущим рожден."

Под шелест шести ванов знамен
Гунь в распиздяйстве был обвинен.

                                    1962

Империя. Рондо.

                                    «Его палаццо из палацц

                                    За струнной изгородью лиры.»

                                                И. Северянин

Стоит безмолвно, безнадежно,

Окутанный во мрак Китая,

То Сталиным слывущий Брежнев,

Иль в Брежневе воскресший Сталин.

По небесам не ходят волны

И мрак Китая столь подвержен

Кресту, что держит Брежнев Сталин,

Но отвергает Сталин Брежнев

У стен недвижного Китая

Стальной щетиной искореженной

Гордится мощью намекая на

имя то чье тело --Сталин то

тело то чье имя --Брежнев

                                    1972

Empire. Rondeau.

                           "Palazzo, fairest of palazzos 

                             Behind his lyre's stringed palisade"

                                        

                                          Igor Severyanin

It lurks and lurks in deadly silence

Sunk in the darkest void of China

That's brezhnev who's becoming stalin

Or stalin's resurrected brezhnev.

The waves o'er sky are not that falling

And yet the void maintains the Crosses

Whose firm support is brezhnev-stalin

But are rejected stalin-brezhnev.

At china walls of sleepy China

The heap of mangled steel corrosive

Maintains in name the body stalin

The name which has the body brezhnev. 

Christian corner: Korkiya, Kibirov, Kekova, Sedakova

Technically, we transcend our "short twentieth century" convention because the most active period of these poets fell on the first post-Soviet decade. Korkiya's epic "Hosts (forty by forty)" is the poem, which concluded the Soviet period in Russian literature both due to its content and circumstances of its emergence on the literary scene. Korkiya's "The Hosts", Kibirov, Kekova and Sedakova were the brightest poetic constellation of post-Revolutionary Russia.

In contrast to the West, the extreme social conservatism was always since Archpriest Avvakum (Habbakuk), a fellow traveler of literary modernism in Russia. Even for T. S. Eliot, his turn to ultra-conservative political stance coincided with the evolution of his literary taste to a more traditionalist viewpoint (hence, "The Criterion"). In Russia, literary innovation and traditionalist, sometimes even obscurantist social views (Dostoevsky, Gumilev, G. Ivanov, I. Brodsky) frequently went hand-in-hand. Because of that, American campus-based literary culture was frequently overlooking the Christian wing of the Russian poetry, especially when it did not express social protest, which is still the hallmark of "Russian-ness" among the Western Slavists.

Т. Кибиров. 2011

Currently, Timur Kibirov (pseudonym of Zapoev, i.e. Mr. Hangover), an Ossetian, i.e. nominally Moslem named after Timur the Lame, undeniably the greatest poet of the late Soviet, early post-Soviet literature almost ceased secular poetry writing. Korkiya mostly moved to (sometimes poetic) drama. Yet, some of Kibirov's literary output, e.g. his short poem "Travel from A? to Z?" burst into being as something as monumental as the Divine Comedy, or Beowulf, something I cannot and do not yet dare to translate. In that short epic poem, Kibirov runs the course of Russian history through the mythological combat to the death between two unrecognized brothers or father/son. Each contest is staged in the language and imagery of the historic epoch starting with traditional saga-ballad ("былина") and ending with tape-recorded drivel of Russian declasse yokels in the late Soviet Union.

Svetlana Kekova's poetic work had the same watershed quality as characterized Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky according to Anna Akhmatova. She suggested that all that Khlebnikov was writing before the Revolution was hackwork and genial thereafter, while for Mayakovsky it was just the opposite. Her pre-revolutionary, pre-Christian conversion poetry was a talented imitation of Brodsky (myriad of contemporary Russian poets imitated Brodsky with different degree of proficiency). Only when she turned to unrestrained Christian declamation, her poetic talents had fully developed. Unlike the majority of Russian poets (with notable exceptions of Vyacheslav Ivanov and I. Annensky), who were indifferently educated, Kekova has a PhD in Russian literature and an author of literary studies in her own right.

Korkia, from "The Hosts" (excerpts)

To the thousandth anniversary of Russia’s Conversion to Orthodoxy

  

---

            We are naïve, we are sublime,

            We fly through currents of the Ethers,

            In our weightlessness, extreme,

            And frolicsome, as band of cripples.

            We’re passing by an old Third Rome,

And all the downtown Crosses,

            There are no pastures o’er us,

            Which would not turn in our pastiche.

            The ashes of ten centuries

            Fall, fall on poor of the soul  

            And secretly, the forty hosts

            Are wailing, as the Earthen Mothers.

            The fact that they do not exist,

            As does the Nature, our Mother,

            Sheds glimpses of some Secret Light

            On perestroika’s gh^o/_astly years. 

  

            Fly high, the crutch, Ostankino,

            For Ethers is a plainly vacuum,

            Where only cosmic dust is not

            Entangled in “War and Peace” discussions.

            Our times rewind as VHS 

            And the idea pops straight out

            And crawls-- from primordial marsh;

            Amphibian—to solid ground.  

            Life winds throughout back and forth

            as rivers turned by Soviet bosses.

            While our way of sorrows,  

           Sails to Byzantium from Normans.

            We are amazed by silence, which

            conjures us by the people’s voices.

            Some have as mother Motherland,

            But I keep Freedom as my mistress...

....................................................................................

             I love the sum of total good,

            And to the manly strength that roams,

            I love vaginas of subway

            Which till 1 AM remain wide open.

            This love False Dmitri barely knew,

            He marched to field of Kulikovo,

            To get renamed Donskoi anew,

            But fell on ice of the Sadovoy.

            His handsome corpse would pay last dues,

            Of his grim fate took no nonsense.

            St. Jury’s Day proscribed the Jews, 

            Which was for Ivan’s heart bit warming.

            He murdered son and heir, the B.,

            Appointed Cossacks to the “service”,

            By founding the KGB

And took greenbacks in lieu of corvée.

But Habakkuk, the Archpriest,

Confused the folk, and Razin, Sten’ka,

Ignited fire from his dark thoughts

And threatened Tsar with this Inferno.

Then Peter suddenly decides

To hand Alaska to his neighbors.

He killed his son, and being hideous, 

He hurried to Afghanistan

To scare his enemies, the Swedes.

....................................................................................

Khan Karl-Adolf-Napoleon

Surprised the Kalmyck and the Cossack

But the wild bunch of Amazons

Defeated the barbarian rank.

Tsaritsa Katya raged, forlorn,

But forced her march to Angles Terra,

She killed her “rebel on the throne”

            And got remarried, to Voltaire.

            Their first offspring was kind of wit,

            The second—kept in Maltas forum,

            And third—he died before his sleep

            But keeping in with all decorum.

            He sent Pouchkíne, the Fatalist,

            To Holy Hills, for absolution,

            Where he, already in his grave,

            Described Sodom of Revolution.

            

...............................................

                         And in the streets is Spring, you hood,

                        and warmth, Blue Sky, Red Flying Banners.

                        Rage, rage, you, the Star Wormwood

                        In the concrete slabs of Chernobyl.

                        “Salute, the Third Rome, I salute,

                        Continue chat a little bit later,

                        Minherz, remember Germantown,

                                   

                        Did you forget your cuckoo’s crown?”

                        Why do these voices always come?

                        Who comes inviting them by dawn?

.................................................................

                        But there is no Savior Christ,

                        And truths became at once uncertain

                        When Holy Star of Bethlehem

                        Illuminated Iron Curtain. 

---

Olga Sedakova, like Svetlana Kekova, has a PhD in philology. She works not only as a poet but as a practicing theologian, Dr. Theol. Honoris Causa. Given a practical retirement of Kibirov from secular poetry altogether, she remains one and only great Russian poet.

Her theology despite her insistence on strict Orthodoxy has a definite Renaissance quality to it. She, for instance, glorifies Elena Schwartz, deceased St. Petersburg sapphic poetess and the reference to her memory on Sedakova's web site contains a statue of Sappho below bas-relief of a Love Genie with phallic ornaments.