its Legacy
H
istorians of Russian literature are wont to assign writers and poets to some definable ideological or aesthetic movement. Af-ter his death, Innokenty Annensky was classified as a Symbolist, which is of course essentially correct. But this obscures a good deal, both in his poetry and in his personal relations with other poets of his generation. In Annensky’s own literary and critical articles, Symbolism figures as a very expansive and capacious notion. He considered not only Dostoevsky but even Maksim Gorky to be a Symbolist. In his own poetry he set himself apart from the Russian Symbolists. In his revealing poem “Drugomu” (To the other) Annensky writes about Russian Symbolism with understand-ing and even admiration, but stresses that his poetry is totally different.His personal attitudes toward individual Symbolist poets were complex:
toward Balmont he was benevolent, but slightly mocking; toward Vya-cheslav Ivanov, amicable; and toward Me rezh kov sky and Blok, sharply negative.
Further, the mature poetry of Annensky’s last period contained certain features which seemed to be close not to Symbolism, but to the movements derived from it—Acmeism and Cubo-Futurism. Akhmato-va considered Annensky to be her teacher. She retained this attitude throughout her long poetic career: from reading in proof his Kiparisovyi larets (The cypress chest) in the year of Annensky’s death to dedicating a poem written after World War II to his memory. In addition, the young Vladimir Mayakovsky found Annensky both interesting and essential.
According to the memoirs of Kornei Chukovsky, Mayakovsky “very carefully studied” and “continually declaimed to himself” Annensky’s poems. This note is from 1915; it is supported by the mention of An-nensky’s name in Mayakovsky’s poem “Nadoelo” (It is tiresome) of 1916.
And it is true that the “futuristic” aspect of Annensky’s poetry becomes
1 Translated by Olga Raevsky-Hughes. Originally published as “Veshchestvennost’ An-nenskogo” in Novyi zhurnal, no. 85 (1966): 69–79.
Annensky’s Materiality
evident long before the appearance of Futurism itself in such poems as
“Kolokol’chiki” (Sleigh bells) or “Kek-uok na tsimbalakh” (Cakewalk on cymbals), in which attention is focused on the verbal texture, on the phonetic aspect of the word, on the precise display of the verbal style—
all clearly in counterbalance to the hazy, vaguely magical handling of the word by such poets as Blok or Vyacheslav Ivanov. Such “futuristic”
poems of Annensky’s are considered to be “jokes” despite their almost consistently tragic themes.
Though it anticipates almost all major movements of Russian poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, Annensky’s poetry was formed in the nineteenth. When Annensky is spoken of as a Symbolist, it is usu-ally forgotten that he was considerably older than the major poets of the Silver Age. Annensky is older than Nadson; as a poet he is a contem-porary of Vladimir Solovyov, Minsky, and even Fofanov, who, at some point, was listed (also incorrectly) as a forerunner of Symbolism.
Annensky began writing poetry in 1875. Nowadays it is fairly dif-ficult to imagine the Russian poetic culture of the 1870s and 1880s that surrounded the young Annensky. It was a time when Apukhtin and Nadson were considered masters, when Nikolai Dobrolyubov was taken seriously as a poet, and Mme Chumina was highly rated. One has only to leaf through a reader for professional reciters (Chtets-Deklamator) from the early twentieth century to sense all this false pathos and false poetry.
Had Annensky written Tikhie pesni (Quiet songs) and The Cypress Chest during the antipoetic 1880s, Mandelstam’s Acmeist partisan evaluation of him—which is historically unacceptable—would be comprehensible:
“All were asleep while Annensky was awake. The everyday realist writers (bytoviki) were snoring.”
Those Russian poets who wrote about Annensky tended to empha-size one particular aspect of his poetry and somehow bypassed its es-sence. In his article, Vladislav Khodasevich compared Annensky with Tolstoi’s Ivan Ilich. This is an interesting comparison, but it misses the point, because it is narrowed to this theme only. There is no doubt that the theme of death is central for Annensky, but all his poetry cannot be reduced to endless variations on this theme. Besides the quotations adduced by Khodasevich, the very same Annensky wrote: “I am not afraid of life. With its invigorating noise / It fires one up, it lets thoughts light up.”
In his poem “Pamiati Annenskogo” (In memory of Annensky), Gu-milyov found more precise and convincing words to convey the nature of Annensky’s poetry, more so than in his review of The Cypress Chest (see Pis’ma o russkoi poezii [Letters on Russian poetry]), which is more or less accurate, but at the same time too concise. One might also point to Marina Tsve taeva’s insightful comparison of Annensky and Bryusov in her lengthy and vicious article about the latter. Speaking of Bryusov’s socio-literary activity, she quotes (apparently from a letter to her from Pa ster nak): “Bryusov was the first, Annensky was not the first,” and draws her own conclusion: “Someone unique cannot be the first.”
True, Annensky was in a way a unique poet. True, he was first of all a Symbolist poet, perhaps the only true Symbolist in all of Russian poetry.
If we accept the prior role of French poetry in this movement, then—
in light of the depth of his penetration into the very essence of French Symbolism—this “A” should precede all the “Bs” of Russian Symbolism, if not chronologically (Annensky became a Symbolist only in the twentieth century, after Me rezh kov sky, Bryusov, Balmont and Sologub), then by his authenticity, by his ability to respond to French Symbolism’s most signifi-cant phenomena.
French Symbolism was perceived one-sidedly in Russia. The Russians began with Verlaine (without forgetting the Parnassians), and then came the enthusiasm for Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who nowadays seem much less interesting. The major poets were nearly overlooked: Baudelaire was mostly reflected in Sologub, although very idiosyncratically; Mallarmé was written about with respect, but was little known; and there was almost no recognition of Rimbaud, nearly until the time of Poplavsky.
It was Annensky who assimilated the prose of Huysmans and the po-etry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé as no one else in Russia did. Therefore, Mandelstam’s words about Annensky’s inability to respond to influences remain incomprehensible. Influence as such is no hindrance to original-ity, and if in Annensky’s translations from Mallarmé we at times do not recognize the source, his original poems demonstrate a deep knowledge of both Mallarmé and Baudelaire.
Annensky’s literary genealogy is not limited to French Symbolism.
To elicit the sources and influences on Annensky’s poetry is just as easy, fascinating and, in the end, fruitless, as to trace the sources of the various poetic styles of Pushkin. Annensky is a poet of wide range, and his style
Annensky’s Materiality
(or styles) often move ahead of or retreat from his own methods of the 1900s, the years when he was working on The Cypress Chest. Some traces of the 1880s, the years when he was taking shape as a poet, are perceptible in this collection:
Forget about the nightingale on the fragrant flowers, But do not forget the dawn of love.
This is not as bad as it seems on first reading, but nonetheless these lines inevitably remind one of Nadson. They could have been written by Apollon Maikov (about whose poetry Annensky once wrote a serious ar-ticle); and in that case, we would have had a Chaikovsky song set to this text. But one has only to turn a page in the collected poems of Annensky, and we find his “Verbnaia nedelia” (Palm Sunday), a remarkable and rare example in Russian poetry of true Surrealism:
Into the yellow dusk of dead April Taking leave of the starry desert Palm Sunday was floating away
On the last, lost snow-bedecked ice floe;
It was floating away in the clouds of incense, In the dying of funeral bells,
Away from the icons with bottomless eyes, And from Lazaruses forgotten in a black hole.
The white moon on the wane stood high, And for all those whose life is irretrievable, Burning tears were flowing over the palms Onto a cherub’s rosy cheeks.
Excluding the somewhat Blokian ending, nothing similar to this poem with its Baudelairian personification (quite unlike either the alle-gorical personification in the poetry of the eighteenth-century Russian Baroque, or Tyutchev’s struggle between winter and spring) can be found in Russian poetry before Mandelstam’s late surrealistic poems (for exam-ple, about the “six-digital falsehood” [shestipalaia nepravda]) and some pieces by Poplavsky.
Annensky’s Symbolism comes both from literature and from life.
“As a reward (for humiliation and disappointments) life leaves him a few symbols,” he writes about a poet in his Vtoraia kniga otrazhenii (Second book of reflections). And in a depressing but precisely depicted situation of one of the poems of The Cypress Chest, a wooden doll in the waves of a waterfall becomes a symbol of human life, and additionally enriches the poet with a new understanding of pity for a thing. In the poet’s critical ar-ticles, no less than in his The Cypress Chest, symbolistic dream and life are constantly intertwined, and Annensky never lets life (not death, as Kho-dasevich would have it), even for a moment, disappear from view. This is one of the permanent features of his poetry, and in this is its unique charm.
The chasm between art and real life, the poet as theurgist and myth-maker—these concepts, so typical for the Russian Symbolists, are totally alien to Annensky. A variety of concrete details from everyday reality is necessary for the poet to make his poetry come to life. A late confes-sion from Akhmatova, “Had you known from what trash / Verses grow without shame,” was long before anticipated by her teacher Annensky in his article on Gorky’s play Na dne (The lower depths), where we read:
“Poetry, a tenaciously surviving creature, does not distinguish between a stable, a drink, the old or the young, a christening or a funeral. Its forms are infinitely various.” None of the Russian Symbolists (perhaps with the exception of Fyo dor Sologub) would have dared to underline the substra-tum of the living reality of all art in such a sharp and crude way. It was only Vladimir Mayakovsky who went beyond Annensky, calling poetry a “capricious old woman,” a “nasty piece of rubbish” (kapriznaia baba;
presvolochneishaia shtukovina)—but then he is Mayakovsky.
Everyday details and, at times, everyday spoken expressions play an enormous role in Annensky’s verse. He knows how to convey and reflect a mood as no one else does, a personal mood, the atmosphere of a person’s soul, so to speak, precisely, by using an everyday detail presented with complete clarity and precision. At times in his verse such a detail acquires a value of its own. Only Annensky could define Crime and Punishment as “a novel of the sultry odor of slaked lime and drying oil, and, even more so, a novel of ugly oppressive rooms” (Annensky’s italics). Convey-ing in a critical article the contents of Lermontov’s “Vykhozhu odin ia na dorogu” (Alone, I come out onto the road), using images relatively close to the original, Annensky, characteristically, adds: “I slow my step on the
Annensky’s Materiality
crushed stone of the roadway.” From here the path leads not only to the Acmeists, but to the poetry of Pa ster nak as well.
Without attempting to exhaust the topic, we will try to trace this
“materiality” in some themes of The Cypress Chest. There are no real women in this book (excluding quasi-folkloric stylizations, such as “Mi-laia” [Darling], and the bourgeois, everyday scenes à la Che khov). How-ever, throughout the whole book a symbolic feminine figure is present:
woman—dream—life, and perhaps at the same time, even death. We will quote again the Second Book of Reflections: “Beauty for a poet is either the beauty of a woman, or beauty as a woman.” Despite her insubstantial-ity, this woman is presented visually. Blok’s Strange Woman has “a figure draped in silk,” rings and ostrich feathers, but we cannot imagine her face.
And Annensky has not only her “tenderly swaying figure,” but also “fixed eyes,” “a white wreath in a braid in disarray,” “you yourself—all atremble—
arise!”—and, especially impressive, “a moist glimmer of crimson smiles.”
We recognize her. We saw her in portraits by painters of the end of the nineteenth century—Gustave Moreau, Franz von Stuck, and Vrubel, with her mysterious, indeed, motionless glance and dark head of hair. She has an affinity with The Blessed Damozel of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and verse. Her more distant relatives are the passionless Negro women of Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
Annensky has a recognizable connection with the fine arts of his times. His intérieurs bring to mind the overripe, banal—and captivat-ing—style of Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil). An affinity with this style is also suggested by such titles as “Struia rezedy v temnom vagone” (A stream of fragrance of mignonette in a dark train car) or “Buddiiskaia messa v Parizhe” (A Buddhist mass in Paris). The poet achieves precise shades of colors with the exactitude of a Postimpressionist. If we trust the calcula-tions of Amédée Ozenfant, the favored colors of French poets, both the Romantics and the Symbolists, were rose and blue. Annensky often uses two colors that were the least in demand by French poets: yellow and vari-ous shades of lilac (18% and 7%, according to Ozenfant). In Annensky at every turn there is “yellowness” (recall van Gogh’s yellow Bedroom), and it has, more often than not, depressing emotional associations: “yellow dusk of dead April,” “wet yellow boards,” yellow water given to someone from the cross in the Kiev caves, “yellow steam of the Petersburg winter,”
“yellow and slippery country house.” The color of lilac, the color of
“Ame-tisty” (Amethysts) (the title of two Annensky poems) and of “Sirenevaia mgla” (Lilac mist), is less gloomy, rather dreamy.2
There is a connection also with Japanese painting, perceived through a Western European prism. Such poems as “Nezhivaia” (Lifeless) and
“Ofort” (An etching) are clearly reminiscent of graphics with the Japanese bent fashionable at that time.
Music, whether concert or chamber, plays a limited role in Annen-sky’s poetry. True, he describes both piano and violin performances, a vocal recital, and a symphony orchestra. But the concept of music as such, if it appears (for instance, in the poems “Smychok i struny” [Bow and strings] or “On i ia” [He and I]), is very often intentionally intermingled with other notions—that of happiness, poetry, foreboding of threatening events, and so on. Here Annensky moves along the same path as Blok and Bely, in whose poems and articles the term “music” very often car-ries a special mystical meaning that has very little to do with music as art (mixing various notions, which are still occasionally overused by some émigré critics who have no relationship at all to Symbolism). The best explanation of this Nietzschean term is given by Annensky himself in his article on Tolstoi’s Vlast’ t’my (Power of darkness), where he demonstrates Tolstoi’s antimusical nature: “But here I understand music as something else: I consider music the most direct and most enchanting assurance for man of the possibility of a happiness that exceeds not only reality, but even the most daring fantasy.” This is not, of course, what Blok meant by “the spirit of music,” but still it is closer to Blok’s symbol-metaphor than to any real musical art.
With Nietzsche showing the way, among the most recent compos-ers Wagner seemed the most congenial to Russian poets of the beginning of the twentieth century. Blok felt it necessary to attend performances of the Ring of the Nibelungs, which he found boring. It is difficult nowadays to take seriously Kuzmin’s “discussions” of Tristan in his novel Kryl’ia (Wings). An excellent description of a symphony concert in Andrei Bely’s narrative poem Pervoe svidanie (The first rendezvous) clearly depicts a
2 After this article was written, a book in English on Annensky was published: Vsevolod Setchkarev, Studies in the Life and Works of Innokentij Annenskij (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). The book has an interesting chapter on Annensky’s colorism, with a detailed analysis of the colors and shades mentioned above and with an indication of their percentages.
Annensky’s Materiality
performance of some score by Wagner. In one of his most characteristic poems (“O net, ne stan …” [Oh no, it is not your form …]), Annensky also refers to Parsifal, but at the same time intuits that the waltz ringing in the
“banal and motley hall”—rather than the operatic music of Wagner, to which he appeals in his soul—is closer to his theme, to the expression of a
“longing for beauty radiating somewhere far away.”
The real music in Annensky’s poetry, the presence of which gives this poetry a totally new and special sound, is much more interesting than Wagner and Nietzschean mystical music. His concrete sound, or rather noise instrumentation, is at times reminiscent of the experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry with musique concrète in the 1950s, when re-cordings of rain, a train, or the beating of a heart were used as musical ma-terial. In Annensky’s poems we encounter an impressive collection of all kinds of bells, large and small: “the ringing bells of a funeral,” “wounded brass,” “the brass language of funereal languor.” The sighs of a train; the remarkably depicted and realized crackling of an alarm clock to which two poems are devoted; the clicking of billiard balls; the noise of rain, of trees, of a railroad station; the buzz of a mosquito; a barrel organ; the hiss of a pendulum—The Cypress Chest is filled with tangible, well-formed sounds depicted in relief, up to and including the completely stunning, totally un-expected military wind band that performs the poems of the poet:
To you I send my verses, which once Soldiers played in the distance!
Only your trumpets, without quatrains Sang them more mournfully and softly.
All these noises are extremely expressive, and, with their associations, open up as it were aural windows into the inner world of the poet.
The artistic application of these everyday sounds and noises in An-nensky’s poetry allows us to make a comparison which at first might ap-pear rather unexpected: a comparison with the eleventh chapter of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. In his book on the novel, the commentator Stuart Gilbert gives the subtitle “The Sirens” to the eleventh chapter, pointing out that it corresponds to the episode of the sirens in The Odyssey, and that all its principal images and comparisons come from the area of musi-cal art. Essentially, Gilbert is, of course, correct: in this eleventh chapter
a good deal is relayed about concerts, about singers, about opera. How-ever, the primary emotional content of the episode in the bar described in this chapter—the feelings and moods of the protagonist of the novel, Leopold Bloom—is conveyed not by conversations about music, not by a Donizetti aria performed in the bar, not by an excerpt from the operetta Floradora hummed by the barmaid Lydia Douce. The main emotional weight of this chapter is carried by the noises: the bell on the carriage of
a good deal is relayed about concerts, about singers, about opera. How-ever, the primary emotional content of the episode in the bar described in this chapter—the feelings and moods of the protagonist of the novel, Leopold Bloom—is conveyed not by conversations about music, not by a Donizetti aria performed in the bar, not by an excerpt from the operetta Floradora hummed by the barmaid Lydia Douce. The main emotional weight of this chapter is carried by the noises: the bell on the carriage of