Great Poet, Fantastic Stories!

I toast, in honor of tonight's deep dark eerie monumental post…To The Future!

I saved an article I read in relation to my Soulmate, I just knew! I put it away for safe keeping. He was out there, Somewhere In…Poetry and Literature and Time.

Irreverence and praise for the scandalous soul of Russia's sacred Pushkin

Stephen Margulies THE BALTIMORE SUN

1994

Scandal! Russian literature -- despite its long-winded heroism through sordid centuries of tyranny -- is as much known for scandal as for idealism. Gogol scandalized his progressive admirers when he published "correspondence" seemingly supporting the czar. Osip Mandelstam scandalized Soviet writers when he slapped a well-established official Soviet novelist. The revolutionary poet Mayakovsky was a shouting, strutting, garish scandal in and of himself.

For Russians, Alexander Pushkin is not only the Shakespeare of Russia, he is also a combination of Jefferson and St. Francis. His monuments and medals are everywhere, and both Marxists and czarists have bowed down before his image.

His influence on poetry and prose has been unremittingly beneficial, as if the whole future of Russian literature were constantly being formed in Pushkin. Without Pushkin, there would have been no Dostoevski, Chekhov, Akhmatova or Nabokov. But Pushkin's rather jokeless worshipers forget that his own life was scandalous and even humiliating, amid all the music of his genius.

Resembling his near-contemporary Mozart in more ways than one, Pushkin himself admitted that the exhilarating perfection of his art was the product of an "utterly vulgar" heart. It would be fairer to say that Pushkin, though an aristocrat, was earthy, a sadly lucid exuberant human who could let the long tricky breezes of this planet sweep him anywhere through the realms of reality and fantasy.

He was killed in a duel over his wife's honor in 1837, before the age of 40. Before this "romantic" climax, his life was considered by many to be either foolish or scandalous. Political and sexual escapades more than once got him exiled. The czar personally censored the popular poet. After his death, Pushkin became, for most Russians, a hero of liberty and justice, an ardent singer praising the Russian land and its many peoples. As long as they had Pushkin -- who outdid the West in both elegance and energy -- Russians could claim that Russia, after all, was not backward.

Yes, Pushkin is perfect, endlessly effervescent yet as truthful as gleaming mud. All possibilities are contained in him, both for realism and for visionary experiment. But Russians have too often forgotten that part of Pushkin's greatness comes from his naughtiness, perhaps even from his squat oddity, his blessed marginality. Soviet statues of Pushkin pose him like Lenin. He did not look like Lenin.

Vladimir Nabokov did not forget any of this in his translation and commentary on Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin." Nabokov produced an inspiring scandal of unchained scholarship. Less well known is that Nabokov used Pushkin in what must be one of the great novelist's few moments of political activism.

In 1942, Nabokov lectured on Pushkin in Atlanta at Spelman College, a black college for women. Charmed with the college's president and the student body, Nabokov delighted in emphasizing Pushkin's Ethiopian ancestry: "Pushkin provides a most striking example of mankind at its very best when human races are able to freely mix."

The Pushkin ironies and scandals continue. Pushkin is really too alive even for his admirers. The most recent Pushkin scandal involves "Strolls With Pushkin," a sinfully enjoyable essay by the Russian-born novelist and critic Andrei Sinyavsky, who now lives in exile in Paris.

"Strolls With Pushkin" is a piece of literary criticism -- or, at least,meditation -- though it is signed with Mr. Sinyavsky's carefully outrageous pseudonym "Abram Tertz," the name of a legendary Jewish bandit. In the late 1960s and early '70s, Mr. Sinyavsky was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp for publishing books abroad without permission, using this pseudonym.

"Strolls With Pushkin," astonishingly, was sent to Mr. Sinyavsky's wife in the form of letters from the prison camp. Apparently, high literary meditation is what soothes Russian writers in jail. Far from using brutality as an excuse to be brutal oneself, Mr. Sinyavsky, in another volume of prison letters titled "A Voice From the Chorus," contends that "when all is said and done, a camp gives the feeling of maximum freedom."

Since the publication in Russia recently of the insufficiently reverent "Strolls With Pushkin," Mr. Sinyavsky has been attacked for nihilistic frivolity and heartless aestheticism. Alexander Solzhenitsyn attacked him for daring to "shake Pushkin's altar," for having the criminal audacity to treat Pushkin like a mere human.

Yet Mr. Sinyavsky, though he adores art and celebrates the triumph of artistic freedom in Pushkin, is neither frivolous nor an "aesthetic nihilist." It is prison, it is near lethal humiliation, that has taught him the redemptively elusive nature of art. Art is where we meet what is not us! And what is not us will save us: "In a fairy tale about beauty and love there is the phrase: 'He was not himself any more.' We long to be not ourselves. This is what matters most."

This is why Pushkin is great -- because Pushkin is not Pushkin! And this is why Mr. Sinyavsky's irreverence is really religious, far more religious than the grim-lipped piety of Mr. Solzhenitsyn. In "Strolls With Pushkin," Mr. Sinyavsky wishes to free Pushkin from Pushkin, to free the spirit of the artist from idol-worshipers such as Mr. Solzhenitsyn. The artist must be freed even from his own greatness.

Pushkin can give us the shock of the vividly dull: "An old woman was crossing the dirty yard." Or he can reveal Apollo himself to us: "His eyes shine . . . His countenance is terrifying." Both images liberate the poet and the poet's readers. Both free us from ourselves. Mr. Sinyavsky, in the long run, equates the freedom of art with the freedom of the soul: "Pure art . . . is a force that was born in the heart . . . like love, like religious feeling . . . impervious to control . . . The spirit wafts where it will."

Mr. Sinyavsky scandalized the priests of Pushkin by telling of Pushkin's unattractiveness to women, by expatiating on his excessively long fingernails and odd dress, by relating his vulgarity as well as his sublimity. Worse than all that, Mr. Sinyavsky insists upon the needful coexistence of the sublimity and vulgarity. In terms of Pushkin's masterpiece, "The Bronze Horseman," Pushkin is the frighteningly monumental statue of Peter the Great and the pathetic poor clerk who hallucinates that he is being chased by the statue. Mr. Sinyavsky knows that scandal can be sacred. After all, in the New Testament, Jesus is called "a scandal."

Mr. Margulies is a poet and a curator at the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Title: "Strolls With Pushkin"

Author: Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky); translated by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Slava I. Yastremski

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

The scandalous and the sacred, sublimity and vulgarity, were curious combinations I thought. After reading this article I understood better who my Soulmate is. The Nietzsche quote reminded me of the article, which seems to be kept behind a paywall nowadays, so I recopied the entire thing.

…the redemptively elusive nature of art. Art is where we meet what is not us! And what is not us will save us. And so you are a fricking comedian, a silly trickster, the playful phunny phunnest entertainer! "In a fairy tale about beauty and love there is the phrase: 'He was not himself any more.' Or as you put it, “one Hell of an ugly fairy dairy tail!! LOL!

Sinyavsky was a literary critic for Novy Mir, a Russian language monthly magazine when he was convicted of Anti-Soviet agitation. He served six years at a Gulag camp where he wrote letters to his wife, Maria Rozanova, twice per month. In 1973, Sinyavsky emigrated to France where he became a professor of Russian literature and published autobiographical and retrospective works. A few memorable quotations from the letters he wrote to his wife:

“We are not outcasts or prisoners, but reservoirs. Not men, but wells, deep pools of meaning.”

“I often sit down to a letter not because I intend writing anything of importance to you, but just to touch a piece of paper which you will be holding in your hand…”

“Oddly enough, all this idle chatter in my letters is in large measure not so much self-expression on my part as a form of listening, of listening to you – turning things over this way and that and seeing what you think about them. It is important for me, when I write, to hear you. Language thus becomes a scanning or listening device, a means of silent communion – absolutely empty, a snare or net: a net of language cast into the sea of silence in the hope of pulling up some little golden fish caught in the pauses, in the momentary interstices of silence. Words have no part in this, except in so far as they serve to mark off the pauses. We use them only to jolly ourselves along as we make our way towards silence, perfect silence.”

https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/abram-tertz/

Yes, that’s it exactly! I would like to touch a piece of paper or anything which you held close to you. I’ve thought the very same thing!! We are setting listening snares and nets while we are physically apart, 2be2gether.

Andrei Sinyavsky's inverse is Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet who felt drawn to the Russian Revolution, studied at the Department of Economic and Social Studies at the University of Moscow and got himself arrested when he returned to Turkey for working on a "leftist" magazine. Like Sinyavsky, he was sentenced to hard labor, but he escaped back to Russia to get out of it. He did eventually get arrested and serve prison time in Turkey, where he letters to his wife during confinement, as Sinyavsky did.

I love you

like dipping bread into salt and eating

Like waking up at night with high fever

and drinking water, with the tap in my mouth

Like unwrapping the heavy box from the postman

with no clue what it is

fluttering, happy, doubtful

I love you

like flying over the sea in a plane for the first time

Like something moves inside me

when it gets dark softly in Istanbul

I love you

Like thanking God that we live

Revolutionary Commie Superhero, you are so phunny and creative and original I’d even read the phone book if you wrote it! If you are ever in need of a phone, I had a friend whose family kept their trusty, reliable rotary phone until around the year 2000. Yes, you could call upon me during an emergency, such as I urgently need to hear the sound of your voice. I know how to use a rotary phone. Landline phones work during a power outage. Power is sent directly from the power company through the phone lines. They have backup battery and generators to make the phone stay operational for over a week when the power is out.

Let’s conclude with a Russian song. R U listening? Rachmanioff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Variation 18, is the melody Richard hums to Elise in Somewhere in Time. It is the explanation for why he disappeared in front of her eyes when he looked at a penny in his pocket from 1979. When she heard the melody in 1934 it confirmed he was from the future! The Never-Ending Story is of course, to be continued…