The Emergence of Russian Subjectivity: A Critical Introduction to the New Poems of Alexei Makushinsky, part 2

For example, the second part of “Two Variations on the Themes of Philip Larkin” begins with an epigram from Larkin: “Never such innocence again.”  Here the viewer admits, “You think, how could this happen; you see fields and faces / Untouched by the trenches, the continuation / Of discontinued lives; you think if … if … this or this would have happened — as if the shadows / Of hero chances walk by, confused.”   In the unraveling of this scene the viewer imagines the parades that worshipped soldiers, showering them with flowers, and yet how little all of this in reality connects to the viewer in his current stances: “You think what’s all this to you?  In reality you yourself don’t / know … And to the bayonet of the 1 you measure a 7, and / walk out into the street, where has stayed that, which was able / to remain from the past.  So little.”  The feeling invoked is that of removal, yet it isn’t cold.  The fact that the slaughter-house is still out there, somewhere, in the hills, churning its “products,” familiarizes us with the fact that all of these shadows, these remnants of soldiers smiling and dying, are all around us, past, present, and future.  In this light our simultaneously rational and irrational traveler is a testament to the wandering eye that seeks removal from time to time, but can’t stray far from his history.

A focus on architecture imbues the manuscript with yet another level or sense of simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the idea and the viewer; the mention of monuments, cities, turrets, cobblestones and fountains, all are depicted as deserted, if only in the sense that they have surpassed their momentous nature and have been living like immortal, thus outdated, signifiers of a very particular history.  But the viewer somehow is hooked to these testaments.  For example, “The Fountain” illustrates what is confusion between reality and representation in that the viewer begins the poem by describing “Large-headed children, frozen at the water” but continuing the next stanza with “They play (or make the appearance of playing) / with a frog, a little stone, a little fish.”  The possibility of choosing what they might be playing with at first suggests their fast and impervious movements in the fountain as they play — then the viewer announces: “They’re made of stone.”

The narrator falls back on his own childhood experiences that are exemplified by this statue: “I used to catch sunspots in the pond, caught tadpoles, / caught frogs (for what?).  Smell of smoke / mixed with the smell of dusk, / lawn and mire.  Nothing changes.  The seventh / sits inside of me, just as / immobile, as these six.”  In this cast of perception the statue becomes a mausoleum or a tomb, ‘embodying’ the positions of youth and innocence, which are necessarily lost.  The statement that nothing changes is common enough but when coupled with the idea that a seventh frozen, dead child sits inside the viewer, both permanent and useless as these embodiments of childlike wonder, it creates an unease not as easily shed as the predilection of catching slimy amphibians.  Even trees are immobilized in the poem that begins with: “Always very straight — even if / bent by the wind — stand / the trees.”

Conversely, there is a marked distinction between this poem and the aforementioned “The Fountain,” in that the speaker differentiates himself from the structures of the trees: “As straight, as we / wanted to be.”  The inability of permanence also has a negative effect, however, in this poem; it allows emotional instability.  The poem’s final stanza reveals: “And just as straight, bent by the wind, / stand the trees. As straight as I couldn’t / stand in front of this / enormous, without you, emptiness.”  I’d argue that pain is good here.  It is the human, transient nature of emoting that has saved this viewer from being an entirely passive, “stone” traveler on no road — there is an urgency to be consistently moving, if not to change the landscape and to erase periphery, but to document his own thoughts and reactions to objects (and ideas) that will soon be forgotten.

In fact, in “Let’s Talk about Bicycles” the speaker finds himself on a rusted two-wheeler and learns live in the momentum: “…riding away even farther / through the clear evening, along the sky, sparkling on the wet / asphalt, finding the balance — or / suddenly being found by it.” Similarly, in the poem “And always the wish to drive off to the very borderless border,” although the viewer might see himself as a made example of the past, and thus fixed: “all in all he, who / in the beginning of his life believed so much in fate, in the movement / of thought in time, in that time has stayed”, he still has “only the wish / to drive off / to the very borderless border, where there is plenty of light / to see these walls from smooth stones, this sea, shining behind them.”  There is so much life and light in this distinction, the cinematic notion of leaving it all behind, if only to come face to face, again and again, with the past and its monuments.  In fact it is the remnant of the wish “to see” that implies a more humanistic, and even spiritual, salvation.

Aside from the distinction of the blurring of “self” versus periphery and the mirroring of a conceptual light and image (rather than the static, authoritative presence of self), Makushinsky uses several epigrams by and alludes to poets and philosophers that unveil the author’s kinship with the poetic conception of this “self” in the world.  Key figures include R.M. Rilke, Philip Larkin (“here is unfenced existence: / Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach”), Elizabeth Bishop (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”), Mark Strand (“…how to explain / Our happiness then, the particular way our voices / Erased all signs of sorrow that had been, / Its violence, its terrible omens of the end?”), and Wallace Stevens (“The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns…”).  Because Makushinsky’s poems have a specific slant or focus, it is easy to perceive why he chooses the particular lines of these poets in the context of each of his pieces, rather than choosing them merely for the sake of the popular name: this is the most outward “facing the sun” that the he completes — looking toward the West and relying on the words of influential writers so as to say it right.

A name not alluded to in the manuscript that crossed my mind as I was reading and translating Makushinsky’s work was John Ashbery. David Perkins wrote on John Ashbery that he “dwells on the impossibility of credibly imagining any reality.”  Furthermore, the cyclical patterns of digression and impression that are characteristics of Ashbery’s work trigger the assumption that he is all the more concerned within his environment that there is no credibility of a certain reality.  I believe the same of Makushinsky.  One of my favorite poems, “Train into Frankfurt,” embodies the distancing of perception from objective reality and the continuous flux in security versus insecurity when the speaker looks at the world:

Train into Frankfurt

Everything is saddening, said the Prince of Ganja, even
these transparent pages, this white, rose
scattering of branches.  Because spring tells me
about fall, about the flow of time, because
flowers will fall apart and leaves will wilt. Even the monk thought
about that, which lies behind words, which
he might have spoken in reassurance, and which
he later did not speak in reassurance, of which, that
behind all words and thoughts, leaves, branches,
lies or, perhaps, thought he, moves,
like us, closing in, slipping, swimming through
the ripped —open light of a landscape, where the chains
of trees scatter across slopes, and a buoyant
cloud takes off above the bell tower, mountain peaks
disappear in a glittering fog.  Cars
didn’t hurry behind the train, in the window across
the corridor, to where suitcases were already carried out
on little wheels, bags were carried out, there was a city,
large turrets on a sunlit horizon.

Even the points of reference are unreliable.  The reliance on the “information” of spring signifies that the speaker is grappling with more than “transparent pages” — the conception of knowledge and permanence.  The fluctuating assurance in the monk’s perceptions is connected to the larger themes of natural mortality, which “rips” open the likeable/permanent landscape.  The familiar appearance of architecture in the depiction of turrets and a city ironically further impermanence, in that cities and turrets are everywhere, much like trains and bags — we are consistently moving through space and time tethered only by ideas of gravity, and nothing holds us back from death.  It is this borderline obsession of attaching oneself, and simultaneously detaching oneself, from a landscape and tangibility of space and time that permits a comparison between Ashbery and the Russian poet.

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