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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
There can be little doubt that the name Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) would be near the top of any list of important twentieth-century Russian writers neglected both in and outside their homeland. Even though he was regarded as an original and major poet by writers as diverse as Briusov, Blok, Gumilev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, Kuzmin still awaits rehabilitation in the Soviet Union and rediscovery in the West. There are some signs of a partial rehabilitation in Soviet Russia today, but the chances for a full rehabilitation—a major publication of his works—are slight. Obstacles to a Western rediscovery exist as well. Clichés die hard and perhaps no harder than in literary history. Kuzmin himself must share part of the blame for the major one. By writing the article “On Beautiful Clarity” he unwittingly gave critics and literary historians the tag for comments on his verse. That the article is about prose and that Kuzmin chose not to republish it in his one volume of collected essays is ignored.
1. Elena Ermilova called for study of Kuzmin in a short article in Literaturnaia Gruziia (no. 7, 1971), which concentrated on Kuzmin’s poetry of the 1920s. Tsvetaeva’s memoir of Kuzmin, “Nezdeshnii vecher,” appeared for the first time in the Soviet Union in the same issue. Gennadii Shmakov, a young Leningrad critic and translator and the only authority on Kuzmin in the Soviet Union, has done much to bring about a renewed interest in Kuzmin. His most recent article, “Blok i Kuzmin (Novye materialy),” in Blokovskii sbornik, no. 2 (Tartu, 1972), is an excellent introduction to the poet’s life and works.
2. “O prekrasnoi iasnosti: Zametki o proze,” Apollon, 1910, no. 4, pp. 5-10.
3. The quotations are from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s introduction to An Anthology of Russian Verse, 1812-1960 (New York, 1962), p. xxxviii. The sections on Kuzmin in Mirsky and in Renato Poggioli, The Poets of Russia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), are representative of the same views. For a detailed discussion of Kuzmin’s critical reputation in Russia and the West see Vladimir Markov’s article on Kuzmin’s poetry in volume 3 of The Collected Poetry of M. A. Kuzmin (in Russian), ed. J. E. Malmstad and Vladimir Markov (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1974).
4. A. Korneev, the author of the entry on Kuzmin in the Kratkaip. literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 3, p. 875, has a better record than his Western counterparts. After outlining the standard clichés, he adds that Kuzmin’s late works were more and more characterized by “caricature, the grotesque, devices of so-called ostranenic” and “modernist tendencies close to surrealism.”
5. Forel' razbivact lëd: Stikhi, 1925-1928 (Leningrad, 1929). Three thousand copies were published.
6. I have not used the text published in Forel' razbivaet lëd but that printed in 1927 in the Leningrad literary miscellany Koster. In Koster the text matches exactly an autograph of the poem I examined in Leningrad. The Forel' version contains one clear misprint (persianka instead of persiianka in line 2) and two probable errors: stalkivaiut instead of stalkivaet in line 11; nelomlennaia instead of ne lomannaia in line 33. The title also differs in Forel': “Temnye ulitsy rozhdaiut temnye chuvstva.”
7. This translation aims at conveying nothing more than as literal a meaning as possible. It can hardly, for example, convey the oddity in the Russian context of words like imaginatsiia and liutsifericheski. Andrei Bely’s use of “Liutsifericheskim putem” in the poem “Mag” in Urna (Moscow, 1909) is the only other use of this word in the form of an adjective or adverb I am aware of in Russian poetry.
8. Nabokov, Vladimir, Despair (New York, 1966), p. 54.Google Scholar
9. An earlier work entitled Mary’s Tuesday (V tornik Meri) of 1921, a puppet show in verse “for live or wooden puppets” (dlia kukol zhivykh ili dereviannykh) is also extremely cinematic. E. F. Gollerbakh noted this in his review of the play in Kniga i revoliutsiia (no. 12, 1921, p. 42). He called it a “cinematographic film” (kinematograficheskaia fil'ma).
10. The motif of escape or flight which appears in the poem occurs in several other poems of the cycle, which concludes with a voyage. Another theme in the cycle is loneliness and the poet’s ability to conquer it, possibly by means of his poetic fancy. This complements the theme of the past, which is connected with the motif of lost friends and the memory of them, a frequent theme of Kuzmin’s verse in the twenties. These themes are most frequent in the cycle’s five titled poems. The theme of love predominates in the three poems of the cycle entitled “Vynoski.” Therefore, the use of juxtaposition underlies the cycle as a whole as well as individual poems.
11. The famous Anichkov Bridge which crosses the Fontanka Canal at Nevsky Prospekt was colloquially known in Leningrad as the “Anichkin Bridge.” Another account of the accident (in Zhizn' iskusstva, no. 26, 1924) mentions the Anichkov Bridge and identifies Iazykov as an official of the former Mikhailovsky Theater, Goldshtein as the administrator of the Studio of the “Akdrama,” Rodionov as a sailor, and Klement as an “instructor,” not an engineer.
12. No. 26 (Ivanova’s portrait was on the cover) contained the article by Volynsky, an obituary by Gvozdev, and a paragraph describing Ivanova’s death. No. 27 contained an article entitled “Lidochka Ivanova” by Nik. Nikitin and “Pamiati Lidii Ivanovoi” by “G. M-v.” No. 28 featured various brief articles on the incident under the heading “K gibeli L. Ivanovoi.”
13. Krasnaia gazeta (vechernii vypusk), June 18, 1924, no. 135, p. 3. All quotations, unless otherwise identified, are from this article.
14. In Bernard Taper’s biography, Balanchine (New York, 1963), the incident is referred to as a “mysterious accident” (p. 72).
15. Geva, Tamara, Split Seconds (New York, 1972), p. 1972.Google Scholar
16. Ibid., p. 319.
17. Ibid., p. 320. Geva’s account and those of Balanchine and my Leningrad informant establish the probability that Ivanova was murdered. But they remain theories and secondhand accounts. Even though faked “accidents” were a speciality of the secret police (see Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror, New York, 1968 Google Scholar), reasons for skepticism remain, chief among them the great risk for the murderer himself which such an accident represented. Ultimately, of course, objections are of no importance in analyzing the poem: What is important is that rumors circulated about the death and that Kuzmin believed and used them in his poem.
18. Seti: Pervaia kniga stikhov (Moscow, 1908), p. 4.
19. Kuzmin’s view of the ballet is remarkably similar to that of W. H. Auden, another admirer of the dance, who wrote in an article entitled “Ballet’s Present Eden”: “Ballet time … is a continuous present; every experience which depends on historical time lies outside its capacities. It cannot express memory, the recollection of that which is absent, for either the recollected body is on stage and immediate or it is off and nonexistent. … Since suffering, as human beings understand it, depends on memory and anticipation which are alien to the medium, it may be said that nobody suffers in ballet: if they did, their movement would become unbalanced and ugly… . In other words, all real ballets take place in Eden, in that world of pure being without becoming and the suffering implied by becoming” (souvenir program for New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker, 1954, unpaginated).
20. Nezdeshnie vechera: Stikhi, 1914-1920 (St. Petersburg, 1921), pp. 125-29.
21. The poem “O, zavtrak, chok!,” no. 3 of the cycle “Severnyi veer” in Forel' razbivaet lëd, p. 44.
22. Paraboly: Stikhotvoreniia, 1921-1922 (St. Petersburg and Berlin, 1923), p. 108.
23. Taper reports that Balanchine refused to take the twenty-seven-year-old Danilova into a company he was forming because she was “too old” (Balanchine, p. 144). She was, in fact, just reaching her peak as a dancer and would enjoy deserved fame for more than twenty years after that, but she was too old for the company Balanchine had in mind.
24. Kuzmin may also be using the term in a specifically occult or alchemical sense. See notes to this poem in volume 3 of The Collected Poetry of M. A. Kuzmin (in Russian), cited in note 3.
25. Again compare Auden’s (see note 19) similar view of the ballet: “No character in a ballet can grow or change in the way that a character in a novel changes; he can only undergo instantaneous transformations from one kind of being to another…. In its dazzling display of physical energy, on the other hand, the ballet expresses, as no other medium can, the joy of being alive. Death is omnipresent as a force of gravity over which the dancers triumph; everything at rest is either a thing, or it is asleep, enchanted or dead” (italics my own).
26. In occult terms the Da Vinci drawing represents man the microcosm. Interestingly enough, the same Volynsky who was Petrograd’s leading ballet critic had written a wellknown book on Da Vinci in 1899 (reprinted in 1909). This association may have suggested the image to Kuzmin. Moreover, Kuzmin was certainly aware of the early Russian Symbolist view of Da Vinci as some kind of magician. For example, Merezhkovsky in his poem “Leonardo Da Vinci” (first published in 1895 in Severnyi vestnik, a journal edited by Volynsky) calls the artist a kudesnik, and as late as 1916 Balmont wrote of the artist, “I mag — o kazhdoi taine bytiia / Sheptal, ee kachaia” (in the poem “Leonardo Da Vinci,” Sonely solntsa, mëda i luny, Moscow, 1917).
27. In Forel' razbivaet lëd one poem was, in fact, removed by the censor, undoubtedly because of its open reference to the Kronstadt uprising. It appears only as a row of dots. The text can be found in the notes to the cycle “Severnyi veer” in volume 3 of The Collected Poetry of M. A. Kuzmin (in Russian).
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