The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors
288
The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors
288Hardcover(First Edition, 1)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843312222 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2006 |
| Series: | Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies |
| Edition description: | First Edition, 1 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
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The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova
Living in Different Mirrors
By Alexandra Harrington
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2006 Alexandra HarringtonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84331-222-2
CHAPTER 1
Missing Centres, Hints and Evasion – Epistemological Uncertainty in the Early Period
Akhmatova's early poetry contains abrupt tense shifts, hints, evasions and truncated narratives, as well as displaying an interest in the workings of memory; all of which suggests that it may be viable to think in terms of an epistemological dominant. That possibility will be explored in this chapter through close readings of well-known early lyrics that draw out their more avant-garde features. The poems selected display, in embryonic form, devices that become primary in the later period. The discussion focuses primarily on what Eikhenbaum calls Akhmatova's 'initial manner' of her first two books Evening and Rosary, in order to throw the shift in her work into the greatest possible relief by highlighting the beginning of the process.
Although McHale's epistemology / ontology dichotomy seems to offer an apposite way of exploring the shift in poetics and sensibility that takes place over the course of Akhmatova's career, some modification is required for two main reasons. First, Acmeists were intolerant of any suggestion that poetry constituted epistemology. Indeed, this was the central issue in their polemic with their Symbolist predecessors. Second, an epistemological dominant accompanied by elisions and information gaps is an inherent feature of most lyric poetry, the inevitable result of pressures of form.
Epistemology and Ontology in the Debate between Acmeism and Symbolism
The modernist (epistemological) questions mentioned by McHale – How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it and with what degree of certainty? How is knowledge transmitted? What are the limits of the knowable? and so on – lie at the heart of Symbolist theory and practice. Consequently, disagreement over the formulation of, and answers to, such questions motivated Acmeist debates with Symbolism. The terms of this polemic merit consideration not only because they bear upon epistemology, but also because Akhmatova employs various aspects of Symbolist poetics in her later poetry. The issue of Akhmatova's anachronistic adoption of certain features of the Symbolist idiom will be examined in later chapters of this study, but some preliminary description of the Acmeist polemic with Symbolism will place Akhmatova' s early conception of the self and the world in context.
The Symbolists (who dominated the Russian poetic stage from roughly 1890 to 1910) understood poetry as a form of epistemology; that is to say, a 'special type of cognitive activity' with the potential to supersede philosophy or scientific enquiry. They were prolific essayists and theorists and, although their combined theoretical output is far from unified or internally consistent, there are broad areas of agreement which make it possible to extrapolate the central features of Symbolist thought.
Symbolist views on art and reality developed in reaction to the nineteenth-century emphasis on rationalism and logic and were shaped in implicit and explicit opposition to the reliance on reason in the philosophical systems of thinkers like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his followers. Kant had argued that all knowledge of the external world is relative, dependent on the observing subject. He held that intellect was the only reliable means of attaining knowledge, by which he meant the knowledge of phenomena as they appear to us, not as they essentially are, as things-in-themselves. For Kant, nothing that we have to say about the noumenal, essential world can be objectively true and such absolute knowledge is relegated to the hypothetical categories of faith or metaphysics.
Symbolists, not content with this position, devoted themselves to the quest for new modes of artistic perception capable of providing a means of grasping a reality existing beyond the bounds of the intellect alone. While they accepted the Kantian argument that intellect provides us with a means of apprehending phenomenal reality, they strove to extend that reality by exploring the realm beyond rational cognition. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, a founder member of the Symbolist movement, wrote in 1892, at its inception –
The newest theory of knowledge has erected an indestructible barrier which for ages divided the concrete earth accessible to people from the boundless and dark ocean lying beyond the bounds of our consciousness. And the waves of this ocean no longer can intrude into the inhabited earth, into the realm of exact science. The foundation, the first granite monoliths of cyclopaedic construction – the great theory of knowledge of the nineteenth century – was laid by Kant. From that time, work on it has proceeded without interruption, the barrier is rising ever higher and higher.
This dissatisfaction with Kant runs throughout Symbolist theory, uniting the first generation of Symbolists (such as Merezhkovskii, Konstantin Bal'mont and Valerii Briusov) with their younger contemporaries (such as Blok, Belyi and Viacheslav Ivanov). In 1922, Ivanov (one of Symbolism's most erudite and consistent theorists) was still expressing concern about what he perceived as an acute contemporary spiritual crisis stemming from the Kantian notion that human knowledge is necessarily relative.
Despite other differences, both generations of Symbolists were preoccupied with the investigation of that which lies beyond our immediate perception, although the second generation displayed a greater propensity for serious philosophical enquiry. Both Belyi and Ivanov, for instance, undertook extensive independent studies of epistemological questions. They were influenced by the thought of Vladimir Solov'ev, upon whose religious philosophy they drew, both in their art and in the theoretical elaboration of their own systems of knowledge.
Solov'ev argued that an answer to the epistemological problem of the difference between relative and absolute knowledge was to be found in the categories of intuition and faith. He believed, as Kant did not, in the possibility of metaphysical knowledge and set forward what he saw as 'logical proof' of the attainability of objective knowledge of essences. James West outlines his argument –
If subjective knowledge were the only form of human knowledge, Solov'yov argues, then I would be forced to deny my own existence, even as a subject, for even though I have only subjective knowledge of external things, I myself cannot be a projection of my own subjective consciousness; if I existed at all, it would have to be as a projection of some other consciousness, existing outside myself, and such there cannot be if everything outside myself is a figment of my own consciousness. The only truly logical supposition is that I can have objective knowledge of my own existence, though every other phenomenon (to which precisely the same applies) is only experienced by me subjectively?
This objective knowledge of one's own existence can then, Solov'ev contends, be extended to give objective knowledge of things external to the self, such as other beings and the inorganic world, ultimately making knowledge of the metaphysical essence of the cosmos possible.
The second-generation Symbolists believed, like Solov'ev, that it was possible for an individual subject to have knowledge of the essential world. They espoused a dualistic view of reality as consisting of the two distinct realms of the phenomenal and noumenal (the former empirical, apprehended by the intellect and the latter metaphysical, grasped by an act of intuition). Reality in Symbolism is thus conceived as plural, separated into spheres or realms which coexist but which are apprehended by different means. Symbolist poetry frequently invokes other orders of reality; Blok, for instance, mentions 'distant worlds'.
There is an obvious parallel between this view of reality and ideas expounded by Fedor Dostoevskii, the impact of whose thought upon Symbolism is impossible to overestimate. In Dostoevskii's 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov (Brat'ia Karamazovy), one of Father Zosima's discourses is entitled 'Of Prayer, of Love and of Contact with Other Worlds' ('O molitve, o liubvi i o coprikosnovenii miram inym'). Here he remarks –
Many things on earth are hidden from us, but in return for that we have been given a mysterious, inward sense of our living bond with another world, with the higher, heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say that it is impossible to comprehend the essential nature of things on earth. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and made his garden grow, and everything that could come up came up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds.
In terms of their poetic practice, Symbolists believed that poetry should operate by suggestion in order to convey a sense of what is hidden from us and to establish contact with other worlds. Their vocabulary is selected with a view to shedding concrete connotations and creating a mysterious vagueness and open-endedness. Symbolist poetry is full of dark abysses, dreams, mist, fleeting shadows, indistinct forms and exotic colouring (lilac, azure, amethyst, gold), all of which convey a sense of other-worldliness and hint at that which lies beyond the bounds of ordinary perception. As they were primarily preoccupied with the invisible and unknowable that lies beyond the external surface of things, Symbolists also frequently employed negative constructions, describing something by reference to what it is not, and reducing the representation of the material plane.
In the early decadent stages of the movement, Symbolists were even doubtful whether art ought to represent the phenomenal world at all. The second wave of Symbolists (Ivanov, Belyi, Blok) however, began to advocate a return to reality, coming to see art as a means of accessing the 'higher' reality through perception of the real, empirical world. Ivanov, the main advocate of this 'realistic Symbolism' describes the artistic process as follows. The artist perceives the 'more real' higher reality and ascends in search of it. He then descends from his vision in order to express it in terms of the 'lower' reality, the material world. The goal of Symbolist art, then, was to penetrate the exterior, phenomenal world in order to grasp reality in its essence, to access the noumenal through the artist's intuition, and to convey it to the reader by means of the artistic device of the symbol. In other words, the Symbolists wished to work out a 'system of specific relations among things of this world that would automatically call into being a world of experience and meaning beyond the specific system'. According to Ivanov, therefore, art 'enables us to become aware of the interrelationships and the meaning of what exists not only in the sphere of earthly, empirical consciousness, but in other spheres too'. He also writes –
Religion is the bond uniting all that is real, and is knowledge of realities. Art, drawn into the sphere of religion by the magic of the symbol, inevitably runs the risk of becoming masked in the hieratic forms of non-religious reality, unless it adopts the slogan of realistic symbolism and myth: a realibus ad realiora [from the real to the more real].
Although the artistic product of this approach begins to sound more like McHale's description of postmodernism in that it is concerned with different levels of reality and different worlds, Symbolism begins by posing epistemological questions – who knows what, how it is known and how this knowledge is conveyed. McHale, having set out his premise regarding the epistemological and ontological dominants of modernism and postmodernism respectively, points out that a philosopher might object that epistemological questions cannot be divorced from ontological questions, and vice versa. But 'even to formulate such an objection, the philosopher would have to mention one of these sets of questions before the other set'. Symbolism's point of departure was questions about knowledge, but epistemology was not an end in itself as far as the Symbolists were concerned; rather it was a necessary means of addressing ontological questions. Symbolism is characterized by an 'epistemological peculiarity'; 'namely the idea that to know the empirical world in the higher sense, to know it in the light of an intuitive apprehension of the only "real" order, is to "create" or "recreate" empirical reality in a more real form than that in which it is given to us'.
In this way, Symbolist art ultimately aspired to world creation. The artist becomes the builder of a new world, a theurgist, the ultimate purpose of whose art is to act as a positive force in shaping a new spiritual reality. The very notion that the artist is capable of creatively transforming life is ontological in its implications – to transform the world is necessarily to bring about a change in our mode of being, in the self. As one critic observes, Symbolism 'represents a theory of being (ontology) based on a way of knowing (epistemology), art serving as the prism through which the mysteries of life may intuitively be grasped'.
Symbolists make an ontological distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. Ivanov, for instance, suggests that the 'lower' reality which must be transcended by the artist is of 'lesser ontological value' than the higher –
Realistic symbolism in art leads the soul of the spectator a realibus ad realiora, which latter reveal themselves in realibus; from reality on the lower plane, a reality of lesser ontological value, to the more real reality.
This attitude towards material reality was the crux of the problem with Symbolism as far as Acmeists were concerned and their departure from their predecessors was prompted largely by their dissatisfaction with the Symbolist theory of knowledge and its implications. Even while they acknowledged their debt to them, Acmeism's main theoreticians, Gumilev and Mandel'shtam, criticized the Symbolists for devoting themselves to investigating an unseen reality. Gumilev wrote –
Russian Symbolism directed its main energies into the realm of the unknown. By turns it fraternized with mysticism, then theosophy, then occultism. [...] And it has the right to ask the movement coming to take its place whether it can boast only of its animal virtues, and what attitude it takes toward the unknowable. The first thing that Acmeism can answer to such inquiry is to point out that the unknowable, by the very meaning of the word, cannot be known. The second, that all endeavours in that direction are unchaste. [...] How can we remember our previous existences (if that is not a patently literary device), the time we were in the abyss, with myriads of other possibilities of being, of which we know nothing, except that they exist? For each of them is negated by our being and each in its turn negates it. [...] The principle of Acmeism is always to remember the unknowable, but not to insult one's idea of it with more or less likely conjectures.
Symbolist poetry, in subjecting the empirical world to a process of dematerialization and according it lesser value than an unknown, ideal world, was effectively blasphemous to the Acmeists, who sought in their poetry to restore value to the phenomenal world. Sergei Gorodetskii described their polemic with Symbolism as follows –
The struggle between Acmeism and Symbolism [...] is, primarily, a struggle for this world, sonorous, colourful, having form, weight, and time – a struggle for our planet earth. [...] Symbolism, in the end, having filled the world up with "correspondences", turned it into a phantom, important only in so far as it is transparent and translucent with other worlds, and reduced its worth as itself.
Instead of seeking 'other worlds' beyond this one in an attempt to move from the 'real to the more real', Acmeists took their themes from everyday life and viewed the poet as a craftsman, rather than as a priest or seer. They regarded poetry not so much as a means of revelation or discovery, but as a way of communicating perceptions about material and psychological reality. Acmeism strove to represent and celebrate the world of everyday experience. In his programmatic article of 1913, 'The Morning of Acmeism' ('Utro akmeizma'), Mandel'shtam uses an architectural metaphor to set out Acmeist values –
Genuine piety before the three dimensions of space is the first condition of successful building: to regard the world neither as a burden nor as an unfortunate accident, but as a God-given palace. Indeed, what can you say about an ungrateful guest who lives off his host, takes advantage of his hospitality, all the while despising him to the depths of his soul, thinking only of how to deceive him? Building is possible only in the name of the "three dimensions", for they are the conditions of all architecture. That is why the architect must be a good stay-at-home, and the Symbolists were poor architects.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova by Alexandra Harrington. Copyright © 2006 Alexandra Harrington. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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