Poems by the prose writers: Dostoevsky, Belyi, Platonov

Ф. М. Достоевский (1847)

F. M. Dostoevsky (1821-1883) had achieved world fame as the novelist, the author of "The Idiot", "Crime and Punishment", "Karamazov Brothers" and "The Possessed." Given his moody disposition, vocal  Antisemitism and violent epilepsy, few people even in literary circles realize that he was a subtle humorist. His claim to poetic fame is based mainly on the absurdist poems of Captain Lebyadkin, a secondary character in "The Possessed." Their influence on the XX century Russian literary modernism is assured by the affinity of early poems of Zabolotsky, of OBERIU group, the fact immediately recognized by his contemporaries, and by composer Dmitriy Shostakovich, who put these poems to the musical score. The latter was as strong a protest against the absurdities of the Soviet regime as Shostakovich could muster without being proscribed despite his world fame and not-too-unfriendly relations with the heads of the Soviet State. All poems of the great writers of Russian prose were deliberately composed in grammatically tortured Russian, which I tried to imitate in translation.

Жил на свете таракан,

Таракан от детства.

И потом попал в стакан

Полный мухоедства.

Место занял таракан,

Мухи возроптали:

«Полон очень наш стакан»

К Юпитеру воскричали.

И пока у них шел крик

Подошел Никифор

Благороднейший старик...

Once there lived a cockroach,

From his childhood he was just a roach,

Cooped in glass with the flies―

Cannibals and likewise,

And his fall has resulted in riot.

Flies had raised their cries to the Caesar:  

“We are all very much so squeezed.”

Then Nichephor approached  

An adorable kind of old geezer…

F. M. Dostoevsky, «The Possessed»,

From the poems of Captain Lebyadkin.  

Андрей Белый (1885)

Andrei Belyi (Bugaev, 1880-1934) was mostly known during his lifetime as a premier Symbolist poet. But now his poems look artsy and dated. Yet, he produced the novel "petersburg", which many consider the Russian answer to Joyce. It is three or four times shorter than "Ulysses" but is certainly one of the most important novels written in Russian in the XX Century. Ironically, Joyce also wrote poems and they were classicist in style and secondary in value. Yet, Joyce's poetic genius is unarguable given his "Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" in Finnegan's Wake. This couplet (from a provocative, to the point of obscenity, song allegedly sang in the society ball in his novel) suggests what Belyi could have become if his Anthroposophic mysticism would not get better of his poetic talent. 

Von Sulitz’ gone, Senator’s gone

In quickly disparition.

The streets, the wards, the yards

Are borne of terrible conclusions.

A patriotic dog he was;

He carried full regalia

But terroristic acts performed

Today by all rapscallion.

Уехали фон Сулицы,

Уехал Аблеухов.

Больницы, гавань, улицы,

Полны зловещих слухов.

Он—пес патриотический,

Носил отличий знаки,

Но акт террористический

Свершает ныне всякий.

А. Белый, «Петербург»

The portrait of Belyi as a child is not random. No other Russian author, may be with the exception of Tolstoi, had so much of his writings dedicated and/or borrowed from the impressions of his childhood and early youth. Because of his anthroposophic leanings, he also fancied himself a kind-of a visionary, a self-assessment which was somewhat justified...

- "Мир - взлетит!" -

Сказал, взрываясь, Фридрих Нитче...

Мир рвался в опытах Кюри

Атомной лопнувшею бомбой

На электронные струи

Невоплощенной гекатомбой;

А. Белый, отрывок из "Первое свидание", 1921.

Источник: Андрей Белый. Сочинения в 2-х томах. М.: Худ. литература, 1990. Том 1.

–        “The world explodes” –

That said imploding Friedrich Nietzsche…

The world was blasted by Curie

By rapturing atomic bomb

On streams of electronic jets—

The disembodied hecatomb.

A.    Belyi, Excerpt from “My first date”, 1921

The most scathing critique of the Soviet regime came not from the old walruses of the Tsarist Russia but in a form of the novel "Chivingur" by the young Communist organizer, Andrei Platonov (Klimentov, 1899-1951). An absolute shock, which this novel has produced was because its author was not entirely unsympathetic to the Communist ideology but also its language. For what was undeniably the greatest novel written in Russian in twentieth century, Platonov invented his own synthetic language based partly on the Communist Newspeak and partly on the jargon of semi-literate and semi-urbanized peasants who formed the backbone of armies on all sides of the Civil War and the new Soviet bureaucracy but also remained the people for whom and in whose name the Revolution was ostensibly conducted. He partially repeated this feat of genius in "The Pit", in which the Soviet state is imagined as bottomless pit swallowing the lives of its diggers, literally and metaphorically. 

        As a genius through and through, he was a very lonely man. To survive in the increasingly hostile atmosphere of Stalinist USSR, he had to dumb down his talent and normalize his language. But his unusual, almost alien outlook broke through even in his later, much weaker short stories. The poems below were written during his youth when he proposed a radical Communist idea of total destruction of the individual and dissolution of human into masses. Yet in some of his late, censored short stories ("Fro", "The Violin of Sartorius"), characters disappear in the "happily ever after" end without much explanation when their suffering is gone. In a short story, "The Garbage Wind", the citizens of the totalitarian state (which meant Nazi Germany for obvious reasons) literally de-evolve into animals growing fur and acquiring canines, which morph their faces into snouts. He remained an iconoclast to the last breath. 

2

Третий год я был комсомолистом,

В сентябре мне стало двадцать лет.

Ни оратором, ни красным гармонистом

Я не значился—

Имел пустой билет.

--Что же Ваня, ты бы хоть влюбился

Или станцию построил на ручье,

Видишь—комсомол зашился,

А ты бродишь как ничей!

                        2

My three years in Communist League (Komsomol)—

In September I will be two scores old.

I did not make it into a Party orator

Or studied an accordion.

My report card has nothing in it.

―Vasya, you must at least fall in love

Or install hydropower at our brook.

See—the Komsomol is all sucked up in it

And you hang out like common twit…

A.    Platonov (Excerpt from “Ivan & Mary”, 1921-1926)