Sadistic Quatrains

The so-called “sadistic quatrains” (or, infrequently, two-liners, which are among the most expressive) represented obvious reaction on the pretentious moralization of the Soviet era and were quoted and alluded by the Underground and Conceptualist poets, Grebenschikov among others. Sadistic rimes usually begin as fairy tales “once upon a time” and often ‘objectify’ children and women, sometimes with erotic overtones, the trope, which was widely used by Daniil Kharms in 1920-1930s. They typically depict senseless act of murder and/or demolition as ironic and laughable affair.

One little boy has been fishing on ice 

Monster icebreaker was quick to suffice. 

Never have seen you such laughable sight—

Half-boy-- on left, and half-- on right side.

Мальчик на озере льдинку колол,

Сзади подкрался к нему ледокол.

Нету картины печальней/смешнее на свете—

Слева пол-Пети и справа пол-Пети.

Once an old geezer procured hand grenade,

And he approached the village Soviet.

He armed the gadget and slammed through the door,

It does not matter for him anymore.

Дедушка в поле гранату нашел,

И к исполкому неспешно пошел.

Дернул колечко и бросил в окно—

Дедушка старый, ему все равно.

One little boy has procured machine gun,

Entire village is already gone.

Маленький мальчик нашел пулемет―

Больше в деревне никто не живет.

Stark naked broads fly through the sky—

Village bathhouse was hit by missile. 

Голые бабы по небу летят—

В баню попал реактивный снаряд.

(Compare this latest one with the "October Song" at http://russiancentury.blogspot.com/2012/07/crisis-of-russian-poetry-in-1970s-with.html) 

Sadistic quatrains had their deep prehistory both in erotic quatrains of the Old Russia and the political ditties of other, less-than-vegetarian epochs of the Russian/Soviet history (the flourishing of the literary form discussed above happened to be in the rather calm Khruschev and Brezhnev years). Below, I quote the two-liner about murder of the Communist leader S. M. Kirov (1934), for which many a prankster could be given a baseline 10 year sentence in the Gulag. Agricultural metaphor was a probably signature of yesterday's peasants who became St. Petersburg (Leningrad) urbanites only recently. 

Good cucumbers grow late
And tomatoes,
Stalin scratched our Kirov straight--
--Hot potatoes!

Огур-р-чики! Помидор-р-чики!
Сталин Кирова пришил, в коридорчике. 

Nicolai Gumilev

N. Gumilev (1886-1921)

He was made of the stuff of legends, during his lifetime and after his untimely death in the Bolshevist gaols. Dashing and handsome, of noble birth, Gumilev was most eligible bachelor of the Tsarskoe Selo, the residence of the Summer Imperial Court, only to marry elegant--she later became one of Amedeo Modigliani’s girlfriends--but unglamorous Anna Akhmatova, the future Russian classic. Gumilev has been a founding leader of Akmeist movement and his patronage was essential to early development of A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam and G. Ivanov. Adventurer by nature, he traveled and fought in Africa, volunteered as a cavalry commander during World War I and was famous for many love affairs. His own poetry represents a curious mixture of kitsch and unexpected discoveries, the fact obviously recognized by Anna Akhmatova: 

Когда б вы знали, из какого сора

Растут стихи, не ведая стыда.

Could you ever known from what kind of trash,

Poems shamelessly flourish? 

The Eagle is not the best poem of Gumilev. It is not even a very good poem. But it is very characteristic of the pre-Great War generation, which mixed Nitzschean dreams of self-realization with Edwardian pomp and circumstance. Of course, few of these intemperate young men would live to see a horrible world ushered in by their dreams and those who would, entered it permanently scarred. 

The Eagle

The Eagle was flying forward and above

To Holy See through portals of the ethers,

His master flight was beautiful enough

And sheening were his hazel feathers.

Where lived he? May be lived, restrained,

Been jailed by King in cage of sudden glory

And always cried when Spring, the Girl, thus came,

Who loved the Prince’s sole melancholy.

Or, may be in the cabin of some wiz,

When he looked through a tiny hole in cellar

He was entrapped by brightening zenith

Whose powers burnt his heart as being stellar.

But never mind! Twas’ playing song of lust

He was revealed Azure skies of perfection.

His soaring up three days and night had last

And Eagle perished strangled by affection.

He died alas! But also could not fell

Included thus in circles of Planets action,

Beneath him laid the abyss of the Hell,

But weak they were, the forces of attraction.

The rays were shooting back and forth the space,

Some emanations both sublime and chilly,

Not due to rot, he got conserved his pace

Observing stars by eyes as dead, as thrilling.

Not once, the Angel’s horn declared The Day,

Not once, the worlds were wrecking into Abyss,

But was untouched by all this vainly play

His sarcophagus eternal in the Heavens. 

Interesting facts, of which there are many:

-- Gumilev was so bad at school that only protection of I. Annensky (see the entry) saved him from expulsion. 

-- His son with Anna Akhmatova, Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), who survived 15 years in Stalin's Gulag, was famous off-the-beat historian and mystic in his own right. 

--Gumilev befriended future Haille Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia and Rastafarian deity before his ascension to the throne. 

Russian Hölderlin

Велимир Хлебников (портрет В. Маяковского)

Хлебников (автопортрет)

Хлебников (1916)

Хлебников в будущем (карандашный портрет Б. Григорьева, 1916)

Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) 

Velimir Khlebnikov was the embodiment of the Russian Futurist movement and larger than life illustration to the proverbial notion of the “mad genius”. Co-author of the Futurist manifestoes (together with Mayakovsky, Benedict Lifschitz, etc.) he defied all social conventions. Fellow poets, their illiterate servants, or Persians whom he met during Soviet invasion into Iran regarded Khlebnikov as a saint or a holy fool (urodivyu, in Russian). He traveled on the roofs of railway carriages. During botched Soviet attempt to support Iranian revolution where he served in a propaganda unit, he deserted, but did not return to Moscow and vagabonded instead around the Caspian Sea, earning the nickname of ‘Russian Dervish’ by the Persians.

Remarkably, this, the most difficult for understanding Russian poet of the late Silver Age, is the one most adequately translated into English. The titanic work of Paul Schmidt led to multivolume collected works. Brilliant and wicked Anna Akhmatova, once noticed that all what Maykovsky wrote before the Revolution was genial and garbage thereafter, but for Khlebnikov this was vice versa. Her pointed observation largely rings true, but even before his remarkable fount of post-Revolutionary creativity he wrote such masterpieces as Bobeobi (1908-1909), "Spells by Laughter" (1909), Menagerie (1909) or "Shaman and Venus." (1912) 

            Like Lautreamont, Khlebnikov created a personal mythology, with his ‘317 Chairmen of the Globe’ (including Khlebnikov himself, but also, e.g. Woodrow Wilson and Sun Yatsen, the founder of the Kuomintang), ‘Missus Lenin’ and numerological mysticism. Remarkable feature of his genius was his Mozart-like consistency in producing masterpiece after masterpiece. Khlebnikov’s tombstone in Novodevichii Monastery in Moscow is a genuine pre-historic female figurine from the steppes between the Black and the Caspian Sea, near which he was born. Some of the modern theories locate the original Indo-European populations in these steppes, fittingly enough, for the poet, for whom unity of Slavonic, Persian and Hindu cultures was interwoven with mythology of his “supersagas”. 

People, nations and the years
Altogether disappear,
As the water crystal clear 
In the nature's fluid mirror. 
Sky casts net where fishes we;
Gods are specters at the dark sea. 

Люди годы и народы
Исчезают навсегда,
Как прозрачная вода,
В гибком зеркале природы.
Небо--невод рыбы--мы,
Боги--призраки у тьмы.

References to Paul Schmidt's Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3


The death of the founder of Ego-Futurists Ivan Vasilievich Ignatiev--he ran after his newly wed wife with a razor--but unable to kill her, slit his own throat (Feb. 2, 1914) prompted the following epitaph by V. Khlebnikov:

И на путь меж звезд морозных
Полечу я не с молитвой;
Полечу я мертвый, грозный,
С окровавленною бритвой.

Into dark where stars are frosty
Will I carry not the prayer;
I will fly as horrid corpse
Carrying a bloody razor.

                    1914

Even in these four short lines Khlebnikov put a lot of covert meaning; for instance calling Ignatiev "грозный" he makes a pun on his first and second names (identical to Ivan the Terrible).  

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)

Владимир Маяковский (1893-1930) 

There were but a few poets in history achieving god-like status in the afterlife. Mayakovsky was one of them, not entirely for his poetry though. Pioneering as a futurist in 1910s he demonstrated a remarkable lyrical talent. Yet his stature during his lifetime was propped up by his qualities as a first-rate polemicist (compare this to T. Marinetti), huge frame, rude words and exceptionally loud voice. Despite his psychotic rages, Mayakovsky was widely respected among intellectuals, even by avowed anti-Communists, such as Marina Zvetaeva.

            Influence of Mayakovsky on the Soviet canon cannot be overrated. In his poems “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”(1924) and “Good!” (1927), he developed an officially accepted version of Soviet mythology, which was repeated, sometimes verbatim in Stalin’s “Brief Course of the History of the VKP(b)”—one of the defining documents of the Soviet civilization. Modern historians of the USSR frequently overlook the fact that in the late twenties, there were still several competing versions of the Communist orthodoxy. Mayakovsky’s version probably won Stalin’s favors by resolute dispensation with “proletariat” and “world revolution”, as the main subjects, and replacement of them with the “Party” and its “Leaders”.

Since his suicide in 1930, Mayakovsky’s image became a household article from Castro’s Cuba to Mao’s Beijing and his awful statue, erected in the middle of Moscow, somewhat of a shrine. These days his talent undergoes reassessment and, similarly to Leconte de Lisle, Theophile Gautier, Paul Fort and other geniuses of the day, his star becomes dimmer and dimmer, yet still discernible in the firmament of the Russian poetry and a must in national poetry anthologies. One of his early opuses, typical of the Futurist period, is provided below.

Я сразу смазал карту будня,

Плеснувшись влагой из стакана.

Я увидал на блюде студня

Косые скулы океана.

На чешуе жестяной рыбы

Прочел я зовы новых губ.

А вы ноктюрн сыграть смогли бы

На флейтах водосточных труб?

1913

I smothered map of my today

By heaving liquid from the glass.

And noticed on gefilte plate

The Ocean’s Asian cheekbones.

The scales of signpost fishes tins

Were carved by challenge of new pout.

Oh, could you play me some Chopin

On shining flutes of water-spouts?

For comparison, I provide here (much better) translation by Dorian Rottenberg (probably, a pseudonym). He was a master translator of Russian and Eastern European literature but I know nothing of his real identity and whereabouts. 
Even if alive, he must be a very old man now because Google lists books translated by him as early as 1957. 

What About You?

I splashed some colors from a tumbler
and smeared the drab world with emotion.
I charted on a dish of jelly
the jutting cheekbones of the ocean.
Upon the scales of tin salmon
I read the calls of lips yet mute.
And you, could you have played nocturne
with just a drainpipe for a flute?

This translation has been taken from "Three Centuries of Russian Poetry", Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1980.  

Konstantin Vaginov

K. Vaginov (1899-1934)

Konstantin Vaginov, member of Oberiy had more renown as a prose writer (“Kozlinaya pesn’”, the Goatsong, "Bambochas", "Garpagonesque".). Vaginov is not really a pseudonym but a Russification of his father's real name, Wagenheim. His father, a high-ranking member of Tsarist federal police, the Gendarmerie, had to change his German-sounding name during World War I. Despite slender, even effeminate looks and aesthetic pretense not unlike Wilde's (and that in post-Revolutionary Petrograd!) he fought in the Red Army unlike many "revolutionary" poets who excelled only in the fields  of venery and Bacchus. Obviously, he enjoyed the "vagina" association of his adopted name as much as Dmitry Prigov enjoyed the affinity of his (birth) name with English "prick", which many considered a smart pseudonym. In his later days, Vaginov abandoned avant-guard esthetics for classical transparency mixed with nostalgic melancholy. Dying from TB, he wrote this short poem, in which he already speaks of himself in the third voice. 

The war and hunger passed like dream,
They left but ugly smell in mouth,

We were Church bells on high, that ring,

But only the temptation counts.

Not that our closest friends enthralled

To see his mouth moving slowly,

The wrinkled gorges in his skull

With morbid sight of deadly sorrows.

New people are walking through the streets,

The beat of other generation,

They laugh at our pride, and spit

At our heartfelt tribulations.

Vaginov, who started under Gumilev as a member of “Singing Seashell” (Zvuchaschaya Rakovina, the last Akmeist society) was untypical in many other respects. Unlike other members of Oberiy, who were future-oriented in their creative activity, he was looking up to the past. One of the expressions of this outlook was prose poem "The monastery of Our Lord, the Apollo." This searing attitude towards history allies him with Cavafy though there is no reason to expect that he was  acquainted with his work. 

Innocentii Annensky (1855-1909)

Иннокентий Анненский (1855-1909)

Менада. Александра Экстер для постановки Фамира-Кифарэд (1916). 

Russian modernist revolution had its predecessors. One of them was XIX century scholar and education official, Innocentii Annensky. He not only created a number of oeuvres of completely new sensibility and form, but also translated Verlaine, Mallarme and Francis Jammes into Russian. In keeping with Symbolism's reassessment of classical heritage, Annensky provided a new, commented translation of Euripides. As Mallarme in France, he was an informal leader of the circle of young St. Petersburg  poets. Very unusually for a Russian cultural figure and Tsarist official, he seemed to be a man of quiet dignity and sweet disposition.  His Greek-themed play, Famira of the Cither, was even in tune with futurist-inspired spirit of 1910s and was staged with decorations and costumes by Alexandra Exter. One of his most famous poems, "Petersburg", which I provide below is traditional in form but its outlook shares  more with Akhmatova, Blok and Gumilev than with his own generation.

Petersburg

Yellow acid corroding granite,

Yellow snow of Petersburg’s weather

I don’t know, who are you, and who are we

But I know: we sintered together.

Were created by Royal fiat

Or survivors of Swedish invasion

From the past we retained only stones

Only stones and the horrible visions.

Only stones we received as his heirs

And Neva of the yellowish color

And the deserts of horrible squares

Where people were hanged by watchtower.  

All that we have possessed on this Earth,

All what have made our power and glory,

In dark laurels giant on the horse

Will not give playing child any worry.

He was dashing and cunning and rough

But the stallion betrayed all his cares,

Tzar could not squelch the vermin by hoof

To this snake we reserved our prayers.

No wonders, nor kremlins, nor hails,

No tears, nor smiles, nor illusions.

Only stones from the frozen deserts

And the thought of the damned confusion.

Even May, when over the streams,

Polar Night lights her magical fires,

Does not bring us the mirthful dreams

Only poison of fruitless desires.

 Петербург

Желтый пар петербургской зимы,

Желтый снег облипающий плиты…

Я не знаю где вы и где мы,

Только знаю, что крепко мы слиты.

Сочинил ли нас царский указ?

Потопить ли нас шведы забыли?

Вместо сказки в прошедшем у нас

Только камни да страшные были.

Только камни нам дал чародей,

Да Неву буро-желтого цвета,

Да пустыни немых площадей,

Где казнили людей до рассвета.

А что было у нас на земле,

Чем вознесся орел наш двухглавый,

В темных лаврах гигант на скале,―

Завтра станет ребячьей забавой.

Уж на что был он грозен и смел,

Да скакун его бешеный выдал,

Царь змеи раздавить не сумел,

И прижатая стала наш идол.

Ни кремлей ни чудес ни святынь,

Ни миражей ни слез ни улыбки…

Только камни из мерзлых пустынь

Да сознанье проклятой ошибки.

Даже в мае, когда разлиты

Белой ночи над волнами тени,

Там не чары весенней мечты,

Там отрава бесплодных хотений.

Cit. Иннокентий Анненский. Стихотворения и Трагедии. Ленинград, "Советский Писатель" 1990. 

Valery Brusov (1873-1924), Leader of Russian Symbolism

Михаил Александрович Врубель

Третьяковская галерея, Москва

1906

His contemporary literary fate was much happier than in posterity. A leader of Russian symbolist movement, Brusov became an imposing figure for his generation. Yet, he suffered a scathing re-appraisal of his literary significance, starting from a mean-spirited and unjust essay by Marina Zvetaeva (which could be recorded during her bouts with insanity), which largely defined his image for later generations. I cannot attribute the universal posthumous hatred inspired by Brusov to anything specific rather than his class origins. Certainly, he was not politically correct: a Nietschean and ostentatiously atheistic in an Orthodox country; he was close during the First World War to the Russian People’s Union, a proto-fascist party, only to join the Communists after the Revolution. He whored, wrote pornography and died from an overdose of morphine.

But other Russian literary figures were hardly averse to different kinds of inebriation. Morphine addiction brought no infamy neither to Michael Bulgakov, nor to Count Alexei K. Tolstoy, XIX^th century historic playwright, who also died of the habit. Fellow symbolists Balmont and Blok drank tirelessly, as did Venedict Yerofeev, the greatest Russian novelist of the second half of the XX^th century. Brusov’s own amorous misadventures were no match for Blok’s. Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s atheism in the early XIX^th century was much more scandalous. Rabid anti-Semite, gluttonous, alcoholic, card-carrying Communist and self-proclaimed Count, Alexei N. Tolstoy was a veritable monster, and a Stalin’s crony. Yet, he was never despised to a degree, to which Brusov was condemned in posterity.

            What distinguished him were his humble class origins. Sons and daughters of the Silver Age, who by birth either belonged to nobility (Akhmatova, Gumilyov), or to academic elite of the highest caliber (Blok, Zvetaeva, Pasernak) probably could not excuse Brusov, the head of the Symbolist movement, his origins of a son of a prosperous lumber or clothing merchant.  Higher circles of St. Petersburg intellectual elite, usually tolerant to commoners as long as they pretended to be country bumpkins, simply could not stand Brusov who challenged their intellectual superiority on their own ground. Their revulsion stuck.

            Yet, the whole poetic development of the XXth century would be impossible without him. Generation after generation, Russian poets (with remarkable exclusion of Esenin, who was himself of the peasant stock) were afraid to recognize Brusov’s influence on their work, so he remains a Darwinian ape of Russian poetry in search of literary re-discovery by more sympathetic commentators.  

Cover

Your

Pale Legs.

From “The Departments of Delirium”

II

Magic Mirror

All was going very-very normal

The houses stood up like hats or clouds,

The tram banged like a horse-cart of old

To scare away the pedestrians,

And the snowy-blizzard rush

Beat, before our very eyes, a speed record.

But mine eyes of the fifty-something

Are too old to follow the Party line.

From the books, museums and stage, the driblets (despite all my votes “Yeah”),

Like a mirror shards from the fairy tale by Andersen

Are in my eyes again, sore. 

Over greenish-yellow lotus columns

Over dynasties of Nineveh,

Finally rises gold and ebony

Of the Grecian Zeus.

And on the edges of Moscow streets—zebu,

Small, caught in binoculars “Zeiss”.

Why then the verse shouldn’t stutter

Between Prick-or-Treaties of Versailles,

If the Mars perihelion (oh, science!)

Comes only once in fifteen years!

Cannot one go to an ancient travel agent

And book a trip to the Aegean?

What would be the poet’s advice?

Bare one’s thoughts to the bone,

Live by the counts of one’s own pulse:

One, twenty and forty.

Even if according to some learned calculus

Party will issue another orders.

Till now—even if you are unplugged and rewired,

Let’s go and collect some sap

On the shores of Global Amazon—

Where the Revolution just wakes up

The Humanity. I blubber—

Gather the golden rubber. 

Волшебное зеркало

Все шло—точь-в-точь обыкновенное;

            были дома нахлобучены;

Трамвай созвонен с телегой,

            прохожим наперекор;

И дождь мокроснежьего бега

            Пред нами ставил рекорд.

Но глаза! Глаза в полстолетие

            партдисциплине не обучены:

От книг из музеев со сцены—

            Осколки (как ни голосуй!)

Словно от зеркала Г. Х. Андерсена,  

            Засели в глазу.

Над жёлто-зелеными лотос-колоннами,

над всякими Ассурбанипалами,—

Вновь хмурился золото-эбур,

            Фидиев Zeus,

И на крае Неглинной—зебу,

            Малы как в цейс.

Как же тут стиху не запутаться,

            между Муданиями и Рапаллами,

Если оппозиции Марса (о наука!)―

            раз в пятнадцать лет,

И в Эгейю у старого Кука

            взять невозможно билет!

Поэту что ж посоветовать?—

            настежь, до нéголо помыслы!

Отсчитывай пульс по минутам:

            сорок, восемьдесят, сто!

Хотя бы по линзам, выгнутым и вогнутым,

            иначе постановило СТО.

Доныне,—пусть проволоки перепутаны,—

            мы—охотники по-смóлы!

Где Октябрь загудел впросонки

            Человечества я учу—

Собирать вдоль мировой Амазонки

            Золотой каучук.

19 ноября 1922

Cited according to: Валерий Брюсов. Избранные стихотворения. ОГИЗ, Гослитиздат 1945.
Wherever it is possible by the Blogger.com format, I try to preserve the authors' original orthography and placement of lines on the page.