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Вестник Московского университета. Серия 9. Филология. 2019. № 3
Richard Tempest
EMMETS AND EMOTIONS:
REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST CYCLE
OF A. SOLZHENITSYN'S MINIATURES
University of Illinois
2090 Foreign Languages Building, MC-173 707South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL
61801 USA
Solzhenitsyn's reading of nature was that of a city dweller who sees the countryside as distant and exotic; and of a Russian patriot who moralized rural spaces while identifying them as sites of transcendent beauty that hold national values. His "Miniatures," or prose poems, represent a distillation of these authorial attitudes. The "Miniatures" touch upon themes that are central to this writer's prose: history, tyranny, people in nature, people in confined spaces, the poetics of the body, the ethics of artistic creativity, as well as the presence or absence of God in the lives of his countrymen. Always when thing Soviet, things modern intrude into Solzhenitsyn's bucolic spaces, the mood darkens and the text acquires a polemical edge. Yet, but for the references to the Soviet here and now, there is nothing in the "Miniatures" that would have startled or puzzled Ivan Turgenev or Ivan Bunin, while in places these pieces manifest resonances that may be described as Tolstoyan. So, generically and stylistically, the pieces are out of time, though not out of place, which makes them the most problematic of Solzhenitsyn's artistic creations. As an experiment in the archaization ofthe literary text the "Miniatures" may be read as pastiches, a receptor stance that interrogates their genre and style from a Postmodern perspective.
Key words: Solzhenitsyn; prose poems; nature descriptions; sentimentalism; theodicy.
Although Solzhenitsyn had a "hatred for cities, asphalt, tall buildings" [Шмеман: запись за 22.11.1974], he was very fond of Ryazan, the central Russian town where he lived before and during the dawn of his fame. But dearest of all to the author is nature, which he loves in the manner of a town dweller for whom such sylvan spaces possess the charm of remoteness. These attitudes inform the very popular "Miniatures" ("Крохотки"), short, lyrical pieces that eulogize the landscapes of his homeland while deploring their devastation by an industrializing and collectivizing state. The "Miniatures" contain descriptions of animals and birds, which are unapologetically anthropomorphized, as are trees and even insects.
Richard Tempest — Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures (e-mail: [email protected]).
Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn is not a nature writer per se. In his prose, mountains, forests, fields, rivers, and lakes are metaphorical locations of the national spirit, but ultimately evoke the biblical account ofthe Creation, whether they remain pristine or, as so often is the case, are deformed by the hand and machines of man. In either case, the textual representation of these sites is usually scripted as a direct projection of, or an implied-authorial counterpoint to, a given character's ethical stance or situation. Even Solzhenitsyn's unsympathetic characters such as Lenin (The Red Wheel) and Marshal Zhukov ("Times of Crisis") are alive to the beauties of nature, though they respond to them in ways that are expressive of their corrupted inner selves. On the day that news of the February revolution reaches him in faraway Switzerland, the Bolshevik leader climbs one of the hills that overlook the city of Zurich, out of the pragmatic notion that "in the mountains you can stretch your legs and organize your thoughts" [Солженицын, 2008, 12: 697].
Большим куском было видно безмятежное оловянное озеро, и весь Цюрих под котловиной воздуха, никогда не разорванного артиллерийскими разрывами, не прорезанного криками революционной толпы. А солнце — вот уже и заходило, но не внизу, а почти на уровне глаз — за пологую Ютлиберг [Солженицын, 2008, 12: 702].
The antihero's nihilistic imagination transmutes this picture postcard view into a scene of violent class conflict complete with artillery barrage! Lenin is the extreme tourist of revolution.
The shorter works of the 1950s and 1960s hew mostly to nineteenth-century thematic and structural models, so there have been frequent critical comparisons that remark on this very point, e.g., "<...> In the sketch 'A Reflection in the Water' <sic> <...> like the Russian poet Tiutchev, Solzhenitsyn passes from a short description of nature to a philosophical aphorism" [Dunlop, Haugh, Klimoff, 1975: 319].
The work referenced in this quotation belongs to the first cycle of "Miniatures," written between 1958—1960. As a reader, rather than a scholar, I confess that I found these texts resistant — not to an explication de texte, which they readily, and even gratefully, open themselves up to — but to an elucidation of the authorial sensibility, or sensibilities, that they simultaneously convey and conceal.
To begin with, the "Miniatures" display an elegiac, anti-industrial aesthetic that would have been recognizable to John Ruskin. Solzhenitsyn's seventeen "microstories" [Mahoney, 2001: 161] and one "Prayer" ("Молитва") started circulating in samizdat almost as soon as their author became a public figure and they remain among his best-read works, at least in Russia. The "Miniatures" represent the writer's divagation into the genre of the prose poem, artistic territory once staked out by Ivan Turgenev and subsequently explored by a succession of authors, nature
lovers of the same melancholic bent. They bear resemblance in theme and tone to Ivan Bunin's prose fragments of1930 such as "The Idol" ("Идол") and "The Calf's Head" ("Телячья головка")1. The ultimate generic referent, however, is the petits poèmes en prose by Charles Baudelaire (1869), the inventor ofthis "oxymoronic genre," although his settings were entirely urban [Wanner, 2003: 18]. That said, while Baudelaire's prose poems are "recognized as <his> breakthrough to poetic modernity" [Wanner, 2003: 18], Solzhenitsyn's own exercises in this formal vein constitute something entirely different, a topically themed experiment in the archaization of the literary text. In this regard, they represent an exception within the corpus of his literary productions.
The "Miniatures" show an ever-enduring Russian space, which the communist project had tried to level and then to rebuild as a technocratic utopia. Nostalgic and often mournful, they rue the Soviet uglification of the countryside, anthropomorphise trees and animals, and occasionally feature individual characters or relationships. The autobiographical imperative that operates across Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre remains in evidence: the "Miniatures" are a record of the author's peregrinations, by train, cycle, and on foot, across the Soviet Union. In this itinerant sense, they anticipate the descriptions of the countryside around the village of Rozhdestvo in The First Circle, where he lived in the 1960s, or even the appreciations of the Swiss and North American landscapes in his second book of memoirs, Between Two Millstones ("Угодило зёрнышко промеж двух жерновов"). A metonymical stress on the historical and the actual is blended with an elaborate, metaphor-rich descriptive style to produce discrete meditations on life, death, history, nature, and beauty. Like other non-Modernist artists, Solzhenitsyn is sentimental in the sense of Friedrich Schiller: "<...> The sentimental poet is always concerned with two opposite forces, has two modes of representing objects to himself, and of feeling them; they are, the real or limited, and the ideal or infinite; and the mixed feeling that he will awaken will always testify to this duality of origin" [Schiller, 1911: 296]. The "Miniatures" are suffused with both attitudes, which the stories and novels contain in more expansive form.
When the author showed his prose poems to Tvardovsky the latter was unimpressed, dismissing them as "jottings on your scribbling pad, for future use" [Solzhenitsyn, 1980: 26]2, in effect, an editorial rejection. Hurt but not discouraged by this verdict, Solzhenitsyn began to distribute the pieces privately "to good people" [Solzhenitsyn, 1980: 87]. As a result, they were among the first of his texts to circulate in samizdat, where they enjoyed
1 I am grateful to Anna Arkatova, who prompted me to make this connection.
2 Cf. " [The 'Miniatures'] read like excerpts from a private notebook of random sketches" [Locke, 1971].
an immediate success. This kind of landscape writing has always evoked a sympathetic response with Russian readers, although a non-nature-loving receptor might find the "Miniatures" a touch too maudlin, too saturated with pathetic and affective fallacies, too prone to moralise the countryside and its people — the finer feelings pervading them redolent of William Wordsworth in full Lake District flow. Yet Solzhenitsyn's sentimentalism, unlike Wordsworth's, never turns into self-preoccupation or self-pity.
These static or moving pictures in words depict forests, fields, rivers and lakes, historic churches and bell-towers, villages nestling in the folds of a gently undulating landscape, a garden after a summer shower, a puppy playing in the snow, a duckling squeaking for its mother. The geography is central or northern Russian, although "A Storm in the Mountains" ("Гроза в горах") offers a bombastic celebration of primordial nature in the Caucasus: "Стрелами Саваофа молнии падали сверху в Хребет <...>" [Солженицын, 2006, 1: 541]. "The City on the Neva" ("Город на Неве"), a much superior production, is a reluctant paean to St. Petersburg, an ekphrastic sketch of the city skyline that treats it as an instance of pure architectural form, beautiful but heartless: "чуждое нам" [Солженицын, 2006, 1: 542]. The imperial capital, the lyrical/historical subject reminds us, was built by eighteenth-century slave labor: "Косточки наших предков слежались, сплавились, окаменели в дворцы — желтоватые, бурые, шоколадные, зелёные" [Солженицын, 2006, 1: 542]. There is no mawkishness here, just a terrible sadness about the millions of lives sacrificed over the centuries on the altar of the state's ambition. St. Petersburg is but a cemetery resting on unhallowed ground.
More typical is "Along the Oka" ("Путешествуя вдоль Оки"), where the travelling persona contemplates a succession of riparian views and identifies village churches, now fallen into ruin, as the cynosure of a quiet, wounded beauty. In an arresting death image, these decaying houses of worship with their missing crosses and "gaping holes between <...> rusty ribs" are likened to cadavers greeting the traveler from afar [Ericson, Mahoney, 2006: 624]. The piece ends on a wistful note, which is disrupted by the rattle of raucous modernity:
В эти камни, в колоколенки эти, наши предки вложили всё своё лучшее, всё своё понимание жизни.
Ковыряй, Витька, долбай, не жалей! Кино будет в шесть, танцы в восемь. [Ibid.]
Once again, the poetic/prose I adduces a historical memory, but on this textual occasion, we learn, the nation's forefathers and their labours have not just been forgotten, they were desecrated.
Always when thing Soviet, things modern intrude into Solzhenitsyn's bucolic spaces, the mood darkens. The poetic/prose persona shudders at
the sight of an automobile, a rubber-pawed, smoke-spewing monster that is a ghastly replacement for a horse or a camel, "that two-humped swan" [ibid.: 619]. Solzhenitsyn disliked mechanical conveyances of every kind other than trains and, by extension, streetcars. Death is a frequent subject: in "The Elm Log" ("Вязовое бревно"), a piece of firewood about to be sawed up is likened to a man with his head on the execution block, and "The Fire and the Ants" ("Костёр и муравьи") describes a colony of the tiny insects perishing when they swarm into the flames: "<...> Какая-то сила влекла их назад, к покинутой родине!" [Солженицын, 2006: 549]. There are Tolstoyan resonances here. One thinks of the scene in Childhood («Детство»; 1852) where little Volodya Irtenyev is distracted by the sight of worker ants going about their business on the forest floor, though as creepy-crawly symbols Solzhenitsyn's emmets carry a heavier burden of meaning. The aforementioned "Reflection in Water" ("Отраженье в воде") is a stark statement of religious faith that could have come from the pen of Tolstoy in one of his bleakest moods: "Если до сих пор всё никак не увидим, всё никак не отразим бессмертную чеканную истину, — не потому ли, значит, что ещё движемся куда-то. Ещё живём?.." [Солженицын, 2006, 1: 540]. "The Old Bucket" ("Старое ведро"), on the other hand, is wistfully self-referential. The narrator takes a walk in a Byelorussian forest that holds traces of wartime trenches and dugouts, which remind him of "another wood like it nearby" [Ericson, Mahoney, 2006: 620], where he had seen action many years ago. "A Poet's Ashes" («Прах поэта») describes an abortive visit to the grave of Yakov Polonsky, a nineteenth-century lyrist. The Solzhenitsyn persona is told that the ancient monastery where the gentle Romantic was entombed is now a prison, and thus out of bounds:
— А вот скажите, тут по карте получается могила Полонского, поэта. Где она?
— К Полонскому нельзя. Он — в зоне. Нельзя к нему. Да чо там смотреть? — памятник ободранный? Хотя постой, — надзиратель поворачивается к жене. — Полонского-то вроде выкопали?
Ну. В Рязань увезли, — кивает жена с крылечка, щёлкая семячки.
Надзирателю самому смешно:
— Освободился, значит.
[Солженицын, 2006, 1: 538]
This is the only flash of humor in the entire cycle. The joke, though macabre, is not bad, even if it is articulated by one of those squat servants of the gulag who in the good old days used to torment the zeks with wolfish dedication. The authorial voice is pointedly civil, employing the grammatically correct language of the city gentleman or intellectual, while his interlocutor, a prison guard, uses jailhouse jive. Ortega y Gasset's el hombre masa has learned to speak Russian.
The shortest and strangest of these pieces of poetic prose or prosaic poetry is "Approaching the Day" ("Приступая ко дню"), in which the sight of some thirty-young people "bending, squatting, bowing" in a forest reminds the poetic/prose subject of a religious congregation [Ericson, Mahoney, 2006: 623]. Upon closer inspection, he discovers the secular truth of the matter: "Нет, это не молитва. Это зарядка" [ibid.]. The temple of nature has been converted into a gym, in keeping with the modern cult of the body: an offensive development on a variety of fronts.
By way of contrast, the cycle ends with an actual "Prayer" ("Молитва"), penned just after the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". In this orison, the writer (the empirical, believing Solzhenitsyn) gives thanks to God for allowing him "to send mankind a reflection of your rays" (Ibid.: 625) (я смог послать человечеству/отблеск лучей Твоих [Солженицын, 2006, 1: 554]), a phrase that echoes, perhaps inadvertently, Akhmatova's identically titled poem of 1915:
Так молюсь за Твоей литургией После стольких томительных дней, Чтобы туча над тёмной Россией Стала облаком в славе лучей.
[Ахматова, 1979: 109]
This coda to the cycle adumbrates a theodicean connection that aligns the tragic history of twentieth-century Russia to the Creator's Plan, with the writer assuming, humbly or otherwise, a mediating artistic function between God and country. The "Prayer" is an intensely personal statement of faith, as prayers often are, but there is more to it than that. Personal, yes, but not private: this is a published text, after all. Tzvetan Todorov reminds us that prayers "<coincide> with a speech act that also has a nonliterary existence" [Todorov, 1990: 21], and the religious poetry of St. John ofthe Cross, John Donne, and Akhmatova herself is a case in point. A literary prayer or a prayer that becomes a fact of literature invites an exegetic treatment that must be supported by two different conceptions of the text, as an expression of a believer's faith and an aesthetic production. Since Solzhenitsyn's "Prayer" constitutes part of, or is at least formally appended to, a published literary whole, it qualifies on both counts.
In the "Miniatures" the author is writing against the twentieth-century loss of faith in nature as a site oftranscendent beauty and source of spiritual solace. This numinous stance is in evidence even — especially — when the places he visits have been poisoned and wounded by politics or war. Here, as elsewhere in the oeuvre, his reception of the countryside rests on a traditionalist acceptance of the national value of landscapes and the living things that inhabit them. How very different from the "wakeful" and "hopeful" wanderers on the beach in Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse, with their modern (Modernist) "imaginations of the strangest kind — of
flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision therein" [Leaska, 1984: 69]. Solzhenitsyn's own vision is of a natural world that remains unatomised and unscattered, and always very Russian.
At the same time, the "Miniatures" all touch upon themes that are central to this writer's prose: history, tyranny, people in nature, people in confined spaces, the poetics of the body, the ethics of artistic creativity, as well as the presence or absence of God in the lives of his countrymen. But for the references to the Soviet here and now, there is nothing in these texts that would have startled or puzzled the very same Turgenev or Bunin. So, generically and stylistically, the pieces are out of time, though not out of place, which makes them the most problematic of Solzhenitsyn's literary creations. In our knowing, quotational culture his prose poems will tempt some receptors to approach them with tongue firmly planted in cheek or fingers tightly crossed: to consume them as pastiche. And yet. The narrative/poetic voice is so ingenuous, the works so patently defenseless against a mocking reader response that, perhaps, they remain invulnerable to such sly treatment. Perhaps.
References
1. Dunlop J., Haugh R., and KlimoffA. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials, 2nd ed. N.Y.: Collier Books, 1975.
2. Ericson E., Mahoney D. The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005. Wilmington: ISIBooks, 2006.
3. Leaska M. The Virginia Woolf Reader: An Anthology of Her Best Short Stories, Essays, Fiction, and Nonfiction. Wilmington: Mariner Books, 1984.
4. Locke R. Solzhenitsyn's Short Fiction, The New York Times. 16.07.1971.
5. Mahoney D. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.
6. Schiller F. On Simple and Sentimental Poetry, The Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1911. Vol. 8.
7. Solzhenitsyn A. The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
8. Todorov T. Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
9. Wanner A. Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
10. Akhmatova A. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy. <Poems and tales in verse> M.: Sovetskiipisatel' <Soviet writer>, 1979.
11. Solzhenitsyn A. Sobranie sochinenii: v 30 tt. <Works: in 30 vol.> M.: Vremia <Time>, 2006—.
12. Schmemann A. Dnevniki. Tetrad'II(noiabr' 1974— avgust1975) <Diaries. Notebook II (November 1974 — August 1975>. URL: https://azbyka. ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Shmeman/dnevniki/2 (accessed: 04.03.19)
Ричард В. Темпест
МУРАВЬИ И МУРАШКИ: РАЗМЫШЛЕНИЯ
О ПЕРВОМ ЦИКЛЕ «МИНИАТЮР» А.И. СОЛЖЕНИЦЫНА
Иллинойский университет
2090 Корпус иностранных языков, MC-173 707South Mathews Avenue, Урбана, IL
61801 США
Солженицын понимает природу и как горожанин, для которого она представляет собой нечто отдаленное и даже экзотическое, и как русский патриот, видящий в ней нечто наполненное нравственным содержанием и национальными ценностями. Это авторское восприятие присутствует в концентрированной форме в солженицынских «Крохотках», или стихотворениях в прозе. «Крохотки» затрагивают центральные темы в творчестве писателя: историю, тиранию, человека в пространстве природы, человека в ограниченном пространстве, поэтику тела, этику художественного творчества, а также присутствие или отсутствие Бога в жизни русских людей. Когда современность вторгается в буколические места, описанные автором, тональность изложения становится более мрачной и текст обретает полемическую остроту. Тем не менее, за исключением ряда конкретных упоминаний советской современности, «Крохотки» не озадачили бы ни Тургенева, ни Бунина. В то же время в этих текстах присутствуют толстовские отзвуки. В жанровом и стилистическом отношении «Крохотки» оказываются как бы вне времени, но не вне пространства, что делает их самыми проблематичными художественными творениями Солженицына. В своем качестве авторского эксперимента в русле архаизации литературного текста они могут быть прочитаны как пастиши, как попытка рефлексии над жанром и стилем с постмодернистских позиций.
Ключевые слова: Солженицын; стихотворения в прозе; описания природы; сентиментализм; теодицея.
Cведения об авторе: Ричард В. Темпест — доцент Отделения славянских языков и литератур Иллинойского университета в Урбане-Шампейне (e-mail: [email protected]).
Список литературы
1. Dunlop J., Haugh R., and Klimoff A. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical
Essays and Documentary Materials, 2nd ed. N.Y., 1975.
2. Ericson E., Mahoney D. The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings, 1947-2005. Wilmington, 2006.
3. Leaska M. The Virginia Woolf Reader: An Anthology of Her Best Short Stories, Essays, Fiction, and Nonfiction. Wilmington, 1984.
4. Locke R. Solzhenitsyn's Short Fiction // The New York Times. 16.07.1971.
5. Mahoney D. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology. Lanham, 2001.
6. Schiller F. On Simple and Sentimental Poetry // The Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller. N.Y., 1911. Vol. 8.
7. Solzhenitsyn A. The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, trans. Harry Willetts. N.Y., 1980.
8. Todorov T. Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter. N.Y., 1990.
9. Wanner A. Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story. Evanston, 2003.
10. Ахматова А. Стихотворения и поэмы. Л., 1979.
11. Солженицын А. Собрание сочинений: В 30 т. М., 2006—.
12. Шмеман А. Дневники. Тетрадь II (ноябрь 1974 — август 1975). [Электронный ресурс.] URL: https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_ Shmeman/dnevniki/2 (accessed: 04.03.19).
