| What a joy, my previous column in the newspaper Vremya Novostey (dedicated to the results of the census of the best Russian poets in the Russian Journal) caused a slight ripple of literary polemics. Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, the author of the census idea, reproached me - however, surrounding the reproach with polite reservations - of “poetic racism” and adherence to “true values.” That's how strict it is. And just because I doubted: two hundred and forty of the best is not too much? It turned out that it was not enough. According to the final count, there are 274 of them.
“It (that is, my review) reveals a confidence that has no metaphysical basis that poetry can be true and sometimes not so true.” While (according to Kuritsyn): “Poetry is the fire inside a person, and not a convention of specialists...” Let’s bashfully skip the “fire”, but I can’t skip the “convention.” It's too interesting. It turns out that by expressing my own opinion, I am imposing a corporate opinion on someone. I'm depriving someone of their freedom.
My dear opponent still confuses something. Most likely intentionally: he is an experienced literary duelist. He’s not easy at all, this Kuritsyn. And his ideas are not simple, they have a hook, a trick with another serial number. (In general, if we treat poetry as one of the artificial languages, we immediately fall into a complex system of theoretical traps.) But something can be said quite simply, isn’t it? Like, for example, T.S. Eliot: “If you had no confidence in the critic’s ability to distinguish a good poem from a bad one, you would not have much confidence in the value of his theoretical constructions.” In this phrase there is no doubt that such a difference exists, and the direct task of criticism is to point it out. That is, within the general flow of cultural events, to discover different, opposing elements and somehow separate them. Apparently, doubt appeared later, in new times. Which ones?
I must also be not one of the simple ones, and I use this pseudo-polemic to continue my statement. First of all, it is important for me to understand who is encroaching on whose freedom. Who is the defendant, who is the plaintiff. It seems that I am the defendant, because - it is unknown on what grounds - I question someone else's taste, someone else's opinion about the best, the enemy of the good. No, let me explain.
For example, I can only write about “true values” under torture. And not because I fundamentally deny such concepts. But between two seemingly similar statements “the truth is” and “the truth is, I know it” there lies an abyss that I cannot overcome even in two leaps.
I understand that the phrase “I feel” is not proof that the nature of such “feeling” is infinitely dependent, and the results require the most impartial verification. That “criticism of intuition” is the main problem, the main questioning of our time, and the entire experience of the past century simply implores us to trust our intuition not recklessly. That the main condition of any system of concepts should be the probability of error.
But you see: I said “probability”. My would-be opponent would say “the inevitability of error.” Feel the difference. The question is how much uncertainty you can accept. Are you, for example, able to come to terms with the fact that, under the guise of seemingly completely reasonable arguments, the confidence that your personal experience can be reliable and real is taken away from you? Are you ready to lose your rights? Actually, it can be simpler, quite simple: are you ready for defeat?
And I think that no less abyss separates another pair of seemingly related statements: “one cannot definitely say what poetry is” and “nothing definite can be said about poetry.” They are opposite in meaning. The first comes from the fact that poetry does not have distinguished features; it is a special state of speech. Speech on the way to language. And she does not have her own language zone; she does not exist on a reservation, but lives freely and unidentified among us. From the second statement it follows that everything declared to be poetry is such. The conviction of the impossibility of identification and criterial evaluation apparently implies that all poems are equally good. Read: equally bad. And if we read even more carefully, we learn that there are no longer any poems in the world. (Perhaps it never happened.) What is there? There are some strange - and in their strangeness indistinguishable from each other - literary objects, suitable only for extraneous operations, for some kind of readymade, musical accompaniment or amusing poetic lists. Well, since I know for sure that this is not so, the entire logical chain falls apart, no one is caught on the hook, at least within the boundaries of this article.
It seems to me that art (after all, we are talking about art now) confirms the possibility of reality. Reality is its nature. It’s hard not to feel how in every success, in every masterpiece, life (according to Kharms) “wins in an unknown way.” But this really doesn’t happen every time. Not even too often.
So infrequently that there is a desire to disavow and ultimately simply cancel such victories. To do this, as it turns out, is not so difficult: you just need to put a ban on some kind of self-confidence . No victory - no defeat. Such an aesthetic practice (or system of judgment) is convenient in that artistic endeavors have no risk of failure. The only important thing is that something began and took on design outlines, albeit vague ones. The idea is important, the project is important. Application equals implementation. But precisely in this case, it is impossible to do without conventional agreements.
As always, a generally fair demand for equal rights immediately turns into a demand for advantages. Actually, the period of “storm and stress” of such artistic design began when this - obviously additional - field of art was declared the first and only, and all efforts of another kind were taken out of consideration and forgotten as an unpleasant memory. According to Russian chronology, everything was determined by the 80s of the last century, and by the mid-90s it became commonplace. It has learned to appropriate the rights and signs of reality and even successfully hide its utopian essence - for the time being.
Some things can be better expressed through the words of others. I have already quoted Octavio Paz and Nikolai Punin in previous articles, and I will do it again. “A poetic work is not a literary form, but a meeting place between poetry and man. This is a verbal device that contains, generates, radiates poetry” (O. Paz). For some reason, ideas about the unenviable future of poetry always seemed meaningless to me. The definition of the Mexican noble helps, it seems to me, to explain this bewilderment of mine. The meeting may not take place, but this does not exclude its possibility. The “meeting location” cannot be changed.
It's a shame, of course. It’s not because of poetry that I’m offended; it won’t hurt me. It's a shame that people stop distinguishing living words from dead ones, and stop feeling how bad they smell. After all, they are not giving up poetry, but something in themselves. “Truly, in art there is nothing disinterested, objective, “pure”, because this is the most personal matter of all human affairs” (N. Punin). Mikhail AIZENBERG
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