| One hundred and fifty years ago Arthur Rimbaud was born The fate of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has everything that is needed for a legend. He tried to make his short life unique, not fitting under any scheme, even under the biography of the “damned poet.” A young provincial from a godforsaken town in the Ardennes, he began with an attempt to re-enact the main plot of French literature of the 19th century - the “conquest of Paris”; time after time he ran away from his parents' home to the capital, which was surrounded by Prussian troops and gripped by the uprising of the Paris Commune. It is unknown what he would have become if he had gotten there at the height of events; but he was too late - the war ended, the commune was suppressed, and Rimbaud was left to conquer the marginal world of poetic bohemia. It was too boring for him. They tell how the eminent poet Theodore de Banville, having undertaken to take care of a homeless young talent, rented him a neat room in the attic of his house, and he, as soon as he entered, began to tear off his clothes and throw them out the window with screams until he was left completely naked; “I can’t,” he told Banville, “cross the threshold of such a clean, immaculate room in my lousy old stuff.” This “happening” is all about Rimbaud—fury, sarcasm, rejection of any stable order.
With such inclinations, he did not take root in bourgeois Paris and, not highly valuing the reputation of a “brilliant young man,” he set off to wander around England and Belgium with Paul Verlaine; the homosexual romance of the two geniuses was replete with stormy passions and furious quarrels, one of which ended with a gunshot wound for Rimbaud, and for Verlaine with a stint in a Belgian prison. And then the most amazing turn in Rimbaud’s fate happened: in the mid-1870s, only twenty years old, but already a famous poet, he abandoned creativity and turned into an ordinary adventurer - either a hired soldier in the Dutch colonies, or an employee where first in Cyprus, then finally an arms dealer in Abyssinia. It was difficult to believe such a disregard for poetry, which he likened to clairvoyance back in the early 70s - for many years after Rimbaud’s death there were rumors that in Abyssinia he continued to write poetry and created almost forty thousand unknown lines. .. All these were just legends: a colonial merchant, who returned to his homeland in 1891 to soon die in a Marseilles hospital, instead of manuscripts, wore a belt with a grotesquely weighty symbol of capital - eight kilograms of hard-earned gold.
A hooligan who became a hoarder, a poet who became a huckster - these metamorphoses indicate that Rimbaud felt equally alien in any role in life, even in his work. Yes, in his youth he wrote with inspiration about poetry as clairvoyance, an otherworldly experience to which a “systematic disorder of all senses” leads, he raved about mystical correspondences between colors and sounds of speech, imagined the poet as a racially inferior person of “bad blood”, lost among the rich and ruthless technical civilization - all this is a typical poetic mythology of late French romanticism. What was original was not so much the ideas as the way of experiencing them - Rimbaud crossed the poetic culture of his time like a meteor, mastered it in a matter of years and threw it away. This path was strikingly similar to the fate of his contemporary, almost the same age as Isidore Ducasse (better known as Lautréamont), who, as a twenty-four-year-old youth, died unknown in besieged Paris a few months before Rimbaud appeared there and disappeared from the memory of literature, only to be triumphantly rediscovered half a century later.
The possibility of such rapid, ephemeral, transient poetic destinies was in itself a sign of the era when literature finally convinced itself of the need to abandon tradition. “You need to be absolutely modern” - these words of Rimbaud became her slogan. He himself understood “modernity” in a literal, truly “absolute” sense - he is a poet of the moment, not a lightweight, but a dazzlingly intense moment, from which only a thought, a word, an artistic speech can emanate. This moment is not subject to any philosophy or aesthetics, and Rimbaud demonstratively chooses low, indecent, repulsive subjects: say, the vaguely erotic bliss of a boy whose older sisters pick out lice from his hair - this is still the most decent... An intense experience of the present, rejection of any order and project was at the same time the poetics of his poems and his behavior, starting with violent hooligan antics and ending with a slight refusal of the prophetic dignity.
But here’s the problem: as it turned out, “modernity” taken to its logical limit abolishes man as a historically and biographically responsible being, forcing him to live in a memoryless and hopeless present like a thing. That is why Rimbaud’s most famous poem, “The Drunken Ship,” was written from the perspective of an inanimate object—a ship traveling the seas without a crew on board. He still retains the ability to “get drunk” with wondrous impressions and deep dissatisfaction with himself, like the tramp-poet himself, but the sonorous stanzas of the Alexandrian poems (poetic meter is the only order with which Rimbaud was reconciled) are already pronounced by some incorporeal, inhuman lips . The idea of overcoming man was in the air in those years, and Rimbaud was one of the first to test it on himself, showing that man is overcome not by the mythical “superman”, but by literature.
We are still experiencing and trying to somehow assimilate this uncomfortable experience. Sergey ZENKIN |
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