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Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Churilin, Zabolotskii, Poplavskii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Simon Karlinsky
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Extract

All her life Zinaida Gippius remembered how startled she was when as a young girl she was told that the Russian word predmet was devised and introduced into the language by Karamzin at the very end of the eighteenth century. The discovery left her wondering how the Russians who lived before that time could discuss all sorts of basic things without a word denoting “object” in the language. We may well be startled in a similar way when we stop to realize that the handy adjective “surrealistic” was coined only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the word did not initially mean what it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the French Surrealists during his trip to Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what their movement was about but from their behavior concluded that they must be the French equivalent of his own LEF group.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 1967 , pp. 605 - 617
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1967

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References

This is an expanded and revised version of the paper delivered on April 1, 1967, at the second national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Washington, D.C.

1 Z. N. Gippius, Zhivye litsa, II (Prague, 1925), 126.

2 Maiakovskii, , “Ezdil ia tak Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, VIII (Moscow, 1958), 334.Google Scholar

3 Gascoyne, , A Short Survey of Surrealism (London, 1936).Google Scholar

4 “Odin—sapog nëset na bliude/ Drugoi—poët sobachku-pudel’ “ (Zabolotskii, “Obvodnyi kanal,” in Stikhotvoreniia (Washington, 1965), p. 48. The English translation of these lines in The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (ed. Dimitry Obolensky [Baltimore, 1962], p. 419), which reads “One [character] is carrying a boot on a dish, another is chanting the praises of a poodle [he is selling],” deprives the passage of its surrealistic quality by substituting a rather forced prosaic explanation, not really warranted by the deliberately ungrammatical Russian original. The new Soviet edition of Zabolotskii (Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Moscow and Leningrad, 1965], p. 212) prints the version of the poem “Obvodnyi kanal” amended by the poet during the Stalinist period, when he consciously tried to edit all surrealistic imagery out of his earlier work. In this amended version the second quoted line reads : “Drugoi poet khvalu Iude” (The other chants praises of Judas), thus replacing a bit of surrealistic whimsey with a not very appropriate romantic-demonic note.

5 See the preceding note. The Soviet edition, edited by A. M. Turkov, offers a more comprehensive selection of Zabolotskii's poetry, but the almost simultaneous Washington volume, edited by Gleb Struve and Boris Filipoff, is indispensable in that it offers the text of the collection Stolbtsy and of a few later poems as originally published by Zabolotskii. In the new Soviet edition, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, the poems of this collection have been quite systematically tampered with (apparently by the poet himself in the 1940s) with the clear aim of eliminating all surrealistic imagery and of making the syntax, the grammar, the spelling, and the punctuation of the original poems more customary, more prosaic, and less startling.

6 “I did not meet Poplavski, who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas … His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse” (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory [New York, 1966], p. 287).

7 Gumilev's parallels are certainly valid, but one can't help suspecting that the term “surrealistic,” nonexistent at the time, conveys what he was trying to express with greater precision.

8 Quoted from Gumilev, N. S., Pis'ma o russkoi poezii (Petrograd, 1923), p. 205 Google Scholar. The article originally appeared in Apollon, No. 10 (Dec), 1915. It may be worthwhile to point out that the name Kickapoo was known to the Russians of 1915 as a currently popular dance (see also Maiakovskii's “Oblako v shtanakh“) and conveyed no associations with either minstrel shows or Li'l Abner.

9 In 1916 Churilin dedicated to Tsvetaeva a fragment from an autobiographical prose poem “Iz detstva dalechaishego” (Out of Remotest Childhood), which appeared in the collection Giulistan 2 (Moscow, 1916). On his friendship with Tsvetaeva see my book Marina Cvetaeva : Her Life and Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), p. 40.

10 Tsvetaeva, , “Natal'ia Goncharova Volia Rossii (Prague), V-VI (1929), 47.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 49.

12 Brik, L. Iu., “Chuzhie stikhi,” in V. Maiakovskii v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Moscow, 1963), p. 344 Google Scholar. The extent to which Churilin has been forgotten in the Soviet Union can be gauged by the fact that the committee of distinguished Soviet scholars that edited this volume were unable to state his correct dates in the index.

13 I wish to thank Professor Vladimir Markov for providing me with a copy of this otherwise utterly unobtainable volume.

14 Tikhon, Churilin, Vesna posle smerti (Moscow, 1915), p. 57.Google Scholar

15 Churilin's own statement as quoted in the bio-bibliographical note on him (which for all its brevity is apparently the most detailed factual source on this poet) in I. S., Ezhov and E. I., Shamurin, Russkaia poeziia XX veka (Moscow, 1925), pp. 588–89.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., pp. 314-16. Twelve poems by Churilin are included.

17 Note real'nogo, not realisticheskogo.

18 Quoted in the commentary to the Struve-Filipoff edition of Zabolotskii's Stikhotvoreniia, pp. 312-13. Khodasevich also advanced the supposition that Zabolotskii might be a genuine madman or cretin. Vladimir Nabokov shows a better perception of the literary technique involved in his recent statement that “Zabolotskii found… a method of writing, as if the ‘I’ of the poem were a perfect imbecile, crooning in a dream, distorting words, playing with words as a half-insane person would” (“An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” conducted by Alfred Appel, Jr., Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII, No. 2 [Spring 1967], 148).

19 Kornelii Zelinskii, Kriticheskie pis'ma, Book II (Moscow, 1934), p. 144.

20 “Ofort,” Stikhotvoreniia, p. 29. The first line surrealistically paraphrases the beginning of A. K. Tolstoi's poem “Vasilii Shibanov.“

21 “Vesna v adu,” Flagi, p. 20. The image of “dead years” probably comes from Baudelaire's ddfuntes Anne“es in the first tercet of his sonnet “Recueillement.“

22 Stikhotvoreniia, p. 23.

23 Flagi, p. 34.

24 “Ivanovy,” Stikhotvoreniia, p. 40.

25 “Futbol,” ibid., p. 27.

26 “Tsirk,” ibid., p. 67.

27 Flagi.