John High
Notes on Vanya
This biographical essay
first appeared in The Inconvertible Sky (Talisman House, Publishers, 1997),
selected poems by Ivan Zhdanov in English translation.
I had been trying to find
Ivan Zhdanov for several years when we finally met outside of a football
stadium in Moscow with Andrei Voznesenky in 1987. We began translating one another's poetry at the beginning of
perestroika. But we had never met. I
was then a writer-in-residence at the Lab in San Francisco and the Witter
Bynner Foundation had given me a grant to travel to the Soviet Union. I had first read Vanya's work in some of
'samizdat' publications printed in Paris.
Later that same night of our first encounter, Vanya came to our room
with Aleksei Parshchikov and Aleksandr Eremenko. Our friendship was initiated,
and we've stayed in contact since. I began to publish my translations of Vanya's
poetry in the Five Fingers Review a decade ago. When Ed Foster called me
this past winter to translate a selection of his poetry, I was both thrilled
and intimidated by the task. I immediately wrote Patrick Henry, who worked with
me on a collection of Nina Iskrenko's poetry before her death, and this volume
represents our collaborative efforts. I also had the good fortune to spend time
with Vanya working on the poems in Moscow with the valuable assistance of Mark
Shatunovsky, a true friend and extraordinary writer. I am also indebted to my
teacher and mentor, the wonderful poet Ivan Burkin, who has assisted in my
translations of Zhdanov's poetry for over twelve years.
Zhdanov was born in
Siberia in 1948, and his work has appeared extensively in
I think of Vanya as
something of a 'religious' poet, though his lifestyle is far from that. He's certainly one of the most influential
of the so-called 'avant-garde' poets. Today his work is taught as representing
the late emergence of Russian postmodernism in university as well as high
school courses. Zhdanov himself denies all of this, of course, and has spoken with
me of simple tradition and history as the founding cornerstones of his writing
and influences. During the eighties, the critic Mikhail Epshtein labeled
Zhdanov, along with Aleksei Parshchikov and Aleksandr Eremenko, as a
"metarealist" (some critics earlier used the terms
"metametaphorists" and "citizens of the night").
In his essay for the
Michigan anthology Epshtein acutely observed: "The essence of a thing
comes out in its return to the original, or predetermined, model; death utters
the secret, all-clarifying word on life.
Zhdanov is the master of depicting forms that seem already to have lost
their substance but regain themselves in memory, in times of waiting, in the
depth of a mirror or the shell of a shadow."
On the other hand, Evgeny
Evtushenko and others have compared Zhdanov's lyric poems to those of
Pasternak. The text is a "thing" for Zhdanov, but it is only one of
many that converge in the process of meditative seeing.
I know him as a friend, a
man given to extremes of intelligence, at times near barbarism in his
behavior. His life seems something of
an anachronism. He continues to treat me like a little brother, though neither
of us is any longer young, and he did me the great honor of introducing a
collection of my own poetry in Russian. He was, ironically, one of the last
poets to be given an apartment by the now multi-splintered Soviet Writers'
Union. For years he lived wherever he could in and around Moscow, as he had no
permit to reside in the city, which is why it took me so long to find him. In 1994 he received a government grant for
his work, which was to be allotted to overlooked artists,
writers and scientists.
For me, the image of him remains from a going-away party for my wife Katya and
me at Mark Shatunovsky's apartment, where a group of poets had gathered with
Nina Iskrenko playing old communist ballads on the piano — everyone singing and
dancing and drinking vodka as if it were neither the end or the beginning of a
war.
Copyright © by John High, 1997. All rights reserved.
Articles About Ivan
Zhdanov
Mark Shatunovsky
Charmed Pilgrim
(This essay first appeared
as the introduction to The Inconvertible Sky (Talisman House,
Publishers, 1997), selected poems by Ivan Zhdanov in English translation.)
In 1979 I first saw the world "God" printed with
a capital letter, not counting pre-revolutionary publications. This was not
especially religious literature as we usually conceive of it. It was an
eclectic, densely metaphorical and occasionally surrealist poem by Ivan Zhdanov
called "Radiator's Rhapsody," which appeared in the miscellany Poetry.
A poem so saturated with metaphor and smacking of
surrealism could not possibly leak through the censors' fine sieve into the
rigidly ideologized, maniacally realistic Soviet literature and remain
politically indifferent. Even less could there be a "God" with a
capital letter when Party workers found attending church services were sacked
from their jobs, and every Easter night Western musical programs, so seductive
for those on a strict ideological diet, were shown on television to keep people
glued to their screens and prevent them going to watch the festive church
processions.
In that same year I was invited to read my poetry along
with other young poets at the Central House of Workers in the Arts, next door to
the sinister building on Lyubyanka Square1.
On a frosty December night, when darkness falls early in Moscow and the street
lamps emit a weak, suspended light to dispel the winter gloom, I dimly saw a
distant crowd of people stamping their feet by the entrance, asking for tickets
all the way from the subway. It was tempting, of course, to regard this rush to
attend a poetry reading as referring to me, but common sense whispered that I
shouldn't flatter myself, as this was my first public reading. This pack of
youths doing all it could to slip past the staunch ticket-taker had come to hear
Ivan Zhdanov read with two of his friends, Aleksander Eremenko and Aleksei
Parshchikov, who had already become a canonical trinity making waves in the
underground.
Without perceiving it, the country had entered an era of
liberal bureaucracy. The totalitarian kingdom of socialism still seemed an
indestructible thousand-year reich. Brezhnev and his full clip of aged communist
godfathers were still alive, fostering social immobility and economic stagnation
with a sacral trembling. But in this tightly sealed atmosphere a leak appeared,
a widespread poetry boom, mistakenly called the "third wave" (in fact
it should have been called not a "wave" but a "leak,"
"the last leak of socialism"), which, in spite of the reigning common
sense was not ignored steadfastly in the press. Lengthy critical articles and
reviews began to appear in the officially sanctioned newspaper "Literaturnaya
Gazeta," dedicated in the main to this canonized trinity of poets, who had
along the way acquired the name "metarealists", or even "metametaphorists".
This was a typical Soviet phenomenon: to discuss or condemn works that almost no
one had access to, just as happened with Pasternak's novel and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag
Archipelago.
The biggest "leak" of the "third wave"
was Ivan Zhdanov, whose book Portrait, published by the Sovremennik
publishing house in 1982, contained none of the normally obligatory words, such
as "Party," "Communism," "socialism,"
"Lenin," "Revolution," "motherland," or
"Russia," and once more contained the word "God," although
now with a capitulatory lower-case letter. Alongside appeared an abundance of
such non-poetic and ideologically useless words as "radiator,"
"can opener," "bronchitis," "X-ray"; that is, an
utterly apolitical modernism.
How do such paradoxes occur? What has to be done to carry
them out? A practical person would say such a thing would take "blat,"
or pull, and as always he would be wrong.
Ivan Zhdanov could have had no blat in principle, born the
eleventh son in a peasant family in a backwoods village near Barnaul in the
far-off Gorny Altai region of Siberia. As regards his resume, of course, such
origins were an undoubted plus in the eyes of the functionaries from the state
apparat, practically all of whom had, by definition, sprung from this same class
in what had recently been a primarily peasant country, although this never
hindered them in following state and Party policy and destroying their own
age-old peasant way of life.
But Ivan Zhdanov’s “Aryan” origins were undermined
in the eyes of those same functionaries by his questionable, intellectually
saturated poetics, which deviated as far as possible from vulgar realism and
destroyed their class-based doctrines of literature at the roots. One literary
bureaucrat who became acquainted first with Zhdanov’s work, and only later
with the author himself, said with astonishment: “I thought he was a lad who
only knew the way from the grand piano to the bookshelf.”
By that time, however, Ivan Zhdanov was not a lad at all.
He had tramped down the most varied roads, doing stints as a factory worker, a
roughneck on an oil derrick in Yakutia, a “crackpot, healed” by doctors in a
psychiatric hospital where he was dragged by the dean of the journalism
department at Moscow State University, who also dismissed him from the
ideological faculty, which had no room for unstable psyches. A string of jobs
followed: stagehand in several Moscow theaters, a short-term
desk-job at the Bibliophile Society, a turn at the state film company,
MosFilm, then back to the theaters, and finally an elevator repairman for
MosLift, Moscow's elevator board. And all this without a permanent residence and
the permanently looming threat the police would expel him from Moscow because he
had no residence permit. For the same reason he periodically had to flee Moscow
and return to Barnaul. During the first such flight he managed to graduate from
the Barnaul Pedagogical Institute.
It should be noted that this biography was typical for the
opposition-minded intelligentsia, or even for dissidents, suggesting as it does
the idea of a conscious deviation from conformism. But in Ivan Zhdanov's case it
was misleading. So many falsely intellectual notions proved upon inspection to
be no less unconsciously classist. I had known him for several years already by
this time and was well informed about his epic Altai roots, yet I was struck by
the incompatibility of his extremely patriarchal origins (the eleventh son in a
peasant family) which I learnt of in the annotations to his first book, with his
acutely modernist poetry, ascribed in class theory to the dyed-in-the-wool,
degenerate and decadent urban intelligentsia.
Misled in turn by his solid pedigree and his innovative
poetics, the Communists, the national-patriots, the “back-to-the-earth
movement” and the postmodernists frantically tried to tame Zhdanov and enlist
him in their ranks, but none of them succeeded. Therefore if one is to speak of
Ivan Zhdanov having blat, he must recognize any blat Zhdanov had resulted from
this unlikely combination which impressed people from the most diverse schools.
It was simply that when Ivan Zhdanov recited his verse at
that 1979 reading in the Central House of Workers in the Arts, the indisputable
self-sufficiency of a self-originating source was present, intensified by his
manner of reading his verse not to the outside world — that is, not appealing
to his audience as would have logically been warranted — but inwardly, to
himself. The lines seemed to occur within him, and he supervised their
development as he revealed their occurrence in a somnambulistic, monotonous
rustling of words.
A slight inarticulateness in his pronunciation gave the
impression that you were observing this occurrence through a dark, magic crystal
in which you could just make out the poems’ characteristic, thinly populated
and biblically primordial landscapes where individual, contemporary characters
were placed — characters, that is, from our densely populated communal
apartments and our strained contemporary society
in general. And in their transformation in the poetry, their deliverance
from the crush and press of our life, they became mythical heroes who discovered
anew the worth and sense of the existence they had squandered in never-ending
communal quarrels and scraps. In the depths of Zhdanov's dark landscapes, the
social dimension, which indisputably rules the everyday world, lost its
authority, and some of its significance as well.
Transformed into the primordial, ultimate and timeless
landscapes of Zhdanov's poetry, a father, mother or sister,
who live and perish in obscurity, or a beloved woman, who is invoked
simply as "you," ceases to be the poet's own father, mother, sister or
lover and becomes a generic Father, Mother, Sister or Lover. Any city
transplanted in these landscapes becomes Babylon, any building in that city, the
Tower of Babylon. And including these people and places in generically specific
relations, he extracted them from their customary, particular social context and
transported them into a primordial void where everyone — communists and the
intelligentsia, national-patriots and cosmopolitans, members of the
“back-to-the-soil” movement and modernists — found themselves in one
common dimension from which no one is ever finally free and where each of us
sooner or later remains alone with his fate and his conscience. This is why,
sensing in Ivan Zhdanov a call to ultimate truth, various groups sought to win
him over to their side. But this call gave them nothing to sink their hooks
into, and even the publication of his book failed to recruit him into their
ranks.
So for all these reasons, when I first heard Zhdanov read
his work, I recognized in him a perfectly clear incarnation of a revered
archetypal character, the charmed pilgrim of Nikolai Leskov's fiction, who with
an abundance of physical strength and psychological resources mastered that
which is, in theory, beyond the strength of man. As if Zhdanov — growing up in
the Altai backwoods, a place so remote that communist class-based propaganda
reached it only in a watered-down form — did not know how harmful modernism
was said to be. For that reason, in the few models of modernism that made it to
his village — cut-out reproductions of paintings by Salvador Dali, René
Magritte or Paul Delvaux published once in a great while in the popular magazine
"Ogonyok," or monographs on modernism, couched in abusive or
denunciatory language, which their authors had fought to see into print, or
works of Russia’s own modernists from the early years of this century that
circulated semi-legally — in these, Zhdanov recognized material possessing a
new expressiveness suitable for making contemporary myths that would be both the
work of the author, in the modernist vein, and the work of no one, like
anonymous folk verse: myths impossible to unify because ignorant of unification,
whose very achievement forced the reader to recognize their indisputable
universality.
So Ivan Zhdanov was published when others were forbidden
to publish and was accepted by those who should not have accepted him. The image
of Leskov's charmed pilgrim, wandering through life like a somnambulist, passing
unharmed over ground that fell away beneath the feet of others, was repeated in
characters who appeared in Zhdanov's poems, be it Odysseus, or Orpheus, or a
nameless lyric hero who quit the home of his youth only to realize the
inevitability and simultaneously the futility of the journey he had undertaken.
A particular vision of the universe, canonized in the poems, could be found in
this image: the land of youth — for Zhdanov the hills of his youth, his
precious Altai, to which it was as impossible for him to return as to step twice
into the same stream — which served as a traditional, universal reference
point, conditioned by the primordial, generic, ancestral nature of popular
legend, of myth. This amalgamation of the morphology of archaic myth with
modernist myths that seemed to have lost all connection with their prototypes
astonished his contemporaries — residents, as they were, of totalitarian,
socialist slums where the difference between things was determined by how
closely their ideological aims conformed to regulations, where one thing was
declared harmful, another useful, one life-giving, another still-born. In
Zhdanov’s poetry ideological opposites not only met without causing one
another obvious harm, they entered into a complementary relationship, thanks to
which the life of archaic myth was extended into the present, and kinless
modernist myth forged blood ties with the genesis of the whole world. This is
why prophets of various persuasions, not seen among us since the days of the Old
Testament, resumed their work in his poetry, and an ordinary hill in the steppe
country, lost in the expanses of the central Russian lowlands a thousand
kilometers from the original, acquired the ability to transform itself into
Golgotha.
The word “God” with a capital letter is, of course,
essential to such poetry. Therefore, during one of the charged discussions in
the Kirill Kovaldzhi's experimental literary seminar, once quite famous in
Moscow, where the poetic splash later called the "Third Wave"
occurred, when Zhdanov was asked to define the meaning of this new poetry, he
replied: “the cultivation of a new conscience.” Later, speaking about the
meaning of Russian literature as a whole, he brought this thought to its logical
conclusion: “the writing of a new patristic literature."
But Ivan Zhdanov’s “God” is not the bankrupt god of
comic books on biblical themes intended for children and those suffering from
intellectual dystrophy, nor the god of pulpits and sermons puffed up with
self-importance, but the “orphaned god” who in one of his poems
“enters" the night which “isn't chosen," — that is, a God of the
marginal and the outsiders, and therefore a God of the absolute majority,
because whoever we might be, each of us, individually, is alone with himself,
marginal, an outsider2. This is why,
in the waning days of our totalitarian society, when we all instinctively strove
to escape the oppressive collective existence thrust upon us by the system and
involuntarily were marginalized, Zhdanov’s poetry was in demand from so many
quarters.
It seemed that shortly the whole country would hear him,
that the whole world was ready to pay heed. Russia seemed poised to cast off
totalitarianism, and revelations were expected from her that would save the
world. Zhdanov's poetry was actively translated into other languages. A new book
came out in Paris. He was invited to international poetry festivals.
But less than six years later, in an era of revived
capitalism, Ivan Zhdanov's countrymen, who so recently seemed determined to get
rid of their oppressive collective existence, have quickly and without the
slightest internal resistance allowed themselves to slip into the crowd of mass
culture's consumers. The overwhelming majority of them was beguiled by the
mirage of a modernist, capitalist paradise. They made it legal to write the word
"God" with a capital letter, and did so with the most vulgar banality.
That same majority fell into banalities of a criminal hue which the Western
world outgrew long ago and which were of no interest to anyone. They proved
incapable of catching a single word about the "orphaned god" or nights
not chosen. Once more the majority chose its own night; but now instead of the
night of socialism, they chose the night of capitalism. The Russian boom passed.
Any world-saving revelations that might have been heard from Russia went unheard
even here. The country was converted from the pathos of saving the world to
realizing the egoistic slogan "every man for himself."
And while the Western way of life, with its avant-garde
material culture, failed to save Russia, with its arrival the avant-garde poet
Ivan Zhdanov, who had once broken out of the underground under socialism, was
shoved back down again. He returned to his old unstable existence, although, it
is true, he now had a one-room apartment he managed to wrangle from the once
mighty Union of Soviet Writers as it collapsed before our eyes. Thus as it
vanished this organization which had embodied conservatism supported an
avant-garde poet left without means by the avant-garde economic and political
changes in Russia, just as he had been in the classical Soviet era. Ivan Zhdanov
has now gone even deeper and more hopelessly into the underground.
This is no longer an ideological underground, but the
underground of life itself, which stands opposed to practical human activity,
focused ultimately and unswervingly on extracting immediate profit and material
benefit.
The phenomenon of Ivan Zhdanov is the result of a
strategic natural combination. At the back of beyond a boy was born with perfect
poetic pitch. He therefore skirted the ideological and aesthetic extremes which
traditionally proved the ruin of poetry, literature and culture generally at
that time, and more unerringly than others restored poetic space to the ethical
balance essential to Russian cultural perception. In this thoroughly human dimension, the milieu of the avant-garde
does not become an end in itself, and world views do not harden into ideology.
At the rupture of two eras — the old lie weakened and the new lie not yet in
force — he saw in the emerging dawn not a distorting mirror but genuine
eternity where modernism and realism, avant-gardism and conservatism, "the
eleventh son of a peasant family" and the refined intellectual all were
reconciled. And in the reflected light of this eternity all the new deceptions
now raining down on our heads continue to be invalid.
___________________________________
1) Headquarters of the former KGB (now FSB).
2) The poem referred to is "Such a night isn't chosen..."
Translated by John High and Patrick Henry
Copyright © by John High and Patrick Henry, 1997. All
rights reserved.