Into Primordial Emptiness

First U.S. edition of Ilf & Petrov's travelogue (Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) / Image courtesy of Amazon

In a recent postscript to his weekly American Hour (Американский час) on Radio Svoboda, Alexander Genis articulated a conclusion he’d come to that struck me as remarkable in its insightfulness. The theme of the segment was “America through the Eyes of Russian Writers,” and special emphasis was placed on Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 travelogue One-Story America (Одноэтажная Америка), named for the predominance of houses with just one floor here. Previous episodes had focused on Maxim Gorky, Sergei Yesenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, each of whom had also visited and written about the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. 

Genis, a brilliant essayist, concluded the series by throwing in his own two cents on the subject, extrapolating outward from the commentary by correspondent Vladimir Abarinov and his guest Nikolai Rudensky. That’s when my interest was piqued.

First, a quick tangent: note that Ilf and Petrov’s book was published in English the first time, cleverly, as Little Golden America (trans. Charles Malamuth, 1937) and more recently as Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip (edited by Erika Wolf & translated by Anne O. Fisher, 2007), in an edition that includes the photographs Ilya Ilf took for the Soviet magazine Ogonyok. I recommend the newer book; it’s great fun to flip through!

Now, back to Genis and his insight on Russians in America. I’ll let him speak for himself:

…Vladimir Abarinov has to admit that our fellow Russian writers who visited this country didn’t like it—not Gorky, not Yesenin, not Mayakovsky, and not Ilf or Petrov (to these names, one might add Pilnyak, Ehrenburg, and many others).

Why? Perhaps because they had all come to the New World for new impressions. From dilapidated Europe, the traveler arrived in the land of the machine, where, as Yesenin put it, “every cigarette butt grew into a smokestack.” Not noticing the machine in America was as hard as not finding the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

…Ilf and Petrov’s true heroes are highways, gas pumps, assembly lines, automobiles, dams, electricity, and of course, a bridge (this time in San Francisco). They wanted to wrap it all up and haul it home so they could get to the bright future more quickly.

As for “one-story” America, the two authors, like many other Russian travelers, came to an unpleasant conclusion: this great country is populated by a small people—mercantile, greedy, narrow-minded, and not worthy of America’s technological might.

And now it’s time to pose a question: why is the machine, which was inevitably found in America by Russian writers, absent from the work of American writers? Without technology, all of them managed to get by: Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, and—stepping further into the past—Jack London, Mark Twain, Melville, Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Why weren’t Americans themselves captivated by their technological civilization? Why didn’t the industrial novel spring up here? Why, as Ilf and Petrov asked, didn’t the engineer become a national hero?

Because America is not principally an urban nation. And that’s what the outsiders from the Old World didn’t notice. They looked for America somewhere other than where it prefers to live. Cities in America are the exception that proves the rule…

Setting skyscrapers aside for offices and visitors, Americans themselves have always preferred to live on the first floor of their own home, a little further away from the excesses of technology. Having traded civilization for geography, nature for culture, and artificial landscapes for a natural one, America came out ahead. But you can only evaluate this deal when you learn to travel like an American.

The secret of that art lies right on the surface: it’s in the road, which is an end in itself. Greedily covering mile after mile, the wayfarer dissolves himself into primordial emptiness, vast reserves of which the New World still contains within its shores. Beneath the wheels of the automobile, space takes on an almost physical palpability. The map comes to life, tears away from the page, and moves from two-dimensional abstraction into real life.

America can only be understood on the move.

           

[Translation mine]

           

Fascinating! And to my mind, mostly on the mark. It’s nothing new to say that wilderness and the open road loom large in the American imagination, but it does seem to be true that many visitors from Russia have somehow missed that key point. 

Not surprisingly, though, two Russian writers who don’t fit the city-centric New World pattern are Nabokov and Brodsky: the former wrote one of the classic American road novels, and the latter set some of his finest poems in the woods of New England and small towns of the Midwest. They got the lay of the land better than their machine-head compatriots did.

Leave it to exiles to complicate things!

On Brodsky, Sweat, and Nosebleeds

Undated photograph of Joseph Brodsky by Katarina E. Rothfjell / Image courtesy of the Beinecke Library 

Somewhere in the middle of last week’s episode of the American hour on Radio Svoboda, I heard this fascinating exchange between program host Alexander Genis and Solomon Volkov—the well-known musicologist, expert interviewer, and culture critic—about the poet Joseph Brodsky, whom Volkov had interviewed over a fourteen-year period for his book Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (Диалоги с Иосифом Бродским):

Alexander Genis: Who was the most difficult person for you to interview? And who was the most interesting?

Solomon Volkov: My most difficult interviewee was, of course, Brodsky. Because he was the most difficult person to speak with—the most complicated. You had to, as they say, meet him on his level, or attempt to do so.

Alexander Genis: To tell you the truth, whenever I’d talk with Brodsky, I would always sweat. I just felt so uncomfortable. Due to the exertion of thought, my forehead was wet the whole time.

Solomon Volkov: Dovlatov and I once talked about this very same thing.

Alexander Genis: By the way, Dovlatov would sweat when he talked with Brodsky too.

Solomon Volkov: I told him that after a conversation with Brodsky I would sometimes get a nosebleed. He said with relief, “And here I thought I was the only one who was such a weakling.”

Alexander Genis: And who was the most interesting person to interview?

Solomon Volkov: The most interesting was probably Brodsky too. Because he reasoned with such focus, he would approach the conversation with a great sense of responsibility. In the course of the conversation he would sometimes say what none of my other interviewees would ever say. Specifically, he’d say, “Hold on, Solomon, let me talk it through again. I want to say it in another way, more concise, better, and so forth.” That is, he approached these sessions very responsibly, and to a certain degree, I think, he was worn out by them just as much as I was.

Poor Dovlatov! Poor Genis and Volkov! You know you’ve encountered a great one when you’re sweating and bleeding.

Speaking of Sergei Dovlatov, his 1983 novel Pushkin Hills (Заповедник) has just been published by Counterpoint Press in a translation by Katherine Dovlatov, the author’s daughter, and earlier this month, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog posted James Wood’s afterword to the book. Counterpoint also reprinted Antonina Bouis’s translation of Dovlatov’s 1986 story collection The Suitcase (Чемодан) just a few years back.

Long live émigré lit!

Counting on Gandelsman

Vladimir Gandelsman / Image courtesy of Стороны света

This week, poet and translator Vladimir Gandelsman won the Moscow Count award, an annual prize of fifty thousand rubles (about $1800) given for the best book of poetry published that year by a Moscow press. The book in question is Ode to a Dandelion (Ода одуванчика), which was put out by Russkii Gulliver and includes poems that the poet wrote between 1975 and 2007. Gandelsman cut his teeth among the Leningrad poets in the 1970s, who were under the sway of Joseph Brodsky, and since he immigrated to the U.S. in 1990, he has divided his time between New York and St. Petersburg. Besides writing his own poetry, Gandelsman has translated many English and American poets into Russian (though none of those translations appear in the new book), including Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Anthony Hecht, and even Dr. Seuss (Кот в шляпе). Radio Svoboda listeners may also know him from his frequent contributions – often about contemporary poetry, especially Brodsky – to Alexander Genis’s American hour on the program “Over the Barriers” (“Поверх барьеров”).

English translations of Gandelsman’s poetry have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Metamorphoses, and John High’s Crossing Centuries, but none of those texts are available online. Therefore, to give you a taste of Gandelsman, I’ve translated (very hastily) the final two stanzas of “Ode to a Dandelion,” the title poem of his prize-winning book:

If you move at all, fluff will fly from

the dandelion, that unlucky flower.

I remember my mother’s whisper:

“Giving birth…” (about my aunt) “…she died.”

And then she’d do some sewing.

Or, let’s say, she’d sweep the floor.

An act of dispersion.

There, she’s done it.

Like a lamp, flickering as it hangs,

I’ll carry it off into a vacant lot,

and just then the light of

the dandelion will meekly fade.

Gone, beyond our ken.

Blow! It will tremble just a bit,

you’ll hear a distant clatter,

and out it will go.

(Шевельнись - и слетит с одуванчика / пух, с цветка-неудачника. / Помню шепот / мамы: "...роды..." - (о тетушке) - "...умерла". / Села штопать. / Или, скажем, пол подмела. / Распыления опыт. / Вот он, добыт. // Точно лампу, моргнувшую на весу, / на пустырь его вынесу, / и вот-вот свет / Одуванчика сгинет безропотно. / Там, где нас нет. / Дуй! - он дернется крохотно, - / в мире что-нибудь лязгнет, - / и погаснет.)

A Stream without a Main Current? On Russian Poetry after Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky / Image courtesy of magictoken

Had Joseph Brodsky not died in 1996, he would have been 70 years old this past Monday. The Russian-speaking Internet is abuzz with opinions about the Nobel laureate’s birthday and what it means for his body of work. Many commentators focus on the tragedy of his untimely death—a death particularly painful to Russian readers because Brodsky is almost universally recognized as a genius who breathed a new kind of life into the Russian language. How ironic, then, that he ultimately became U.S. Poet Laureate! (Brodsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, after which he taught at American universities for over twenty years, beginning with my alma mater, the University of Michigan.)

Brodsky’s friend and fellow poet Anatoly Naiman, writing in Kommersant, argues that “observing—much less celebrating—the 70th birthday of a person who died at 55 is, generally speaking, absurd. That several of his peers who were close to him in his youth are alive confirms without a doubt that he certainly could have been alive now. And that he left us means that it was not written in the book of fate, or written at his birth, or wherever such things are written, that he would reach seventy. For such figures after death another kind of counting takes over in the calendar: the next date is set at 100, then 150, 200.” If there is a bright side to any of this, Naiman continues, it is that Brodsky the person—as opposed to Brodsky the poet—hasn’t yet been forgotten: “Today’s date is simply an occasion to reminisce about him while there are still those who can remember.”

Another Leningrad poet and contemporary of Brodsky’s, Yevgeny Rein, writes in Literaturnaya Gazeta that Brodsky left a gaping hole in literature that has yet to be filled: “And now, fourteen years after his death, in Russian poetry there invariably continues to be felt a certain emptiness. Poetry seems to have persisted, but it has come to look like a stream on whose bed rush a few dozen rivulets. This stream no longer has a main current, so swimming out into deep waters is impossible.”