Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Yale University Press
Chapter Title: Front Matter
Book Title: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Book Subtitle: Russia, Poland, and the West
Book Author(s): CLARE CAVANAGH
Published by: Yale University Press. (2009)
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C L A R E C AVA N A G H
Lyric Poetry and

Modern Politics
RUSSIA, POLAND, AND THE WEST

New Haven &
London
Copyright © 2009 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,

in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the
U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Set in Sabon type by Integrated Book Technology.

Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cavanagh, Clare.
Lyric poetry and modern politics : Russia, Poland, and the West / Clare
Cavanagh.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-15296-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. 2. Russian poetry—20th
century—History and criticism. 3. Polish poetry—20th century—History
and criticism. 4. Politics and literature—History—20th century. 5. Politics
in literature. I. Title.
PN1356.C38 2010
809.1'04—dc22 2009023902
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence

of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Mike, always
Chapter Title: Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Acknowledged Legislation 1
1 Courting Disaster: Blok and Yeats 45
2 Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic 83
3 The Death of the Book à la russe:
The Acmeists under Stalin 109
4 Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility:
The Poem without a Hero 120
5 Avant-garde Again, or the Posthumous Polish
Adventures of Vladimir Mayakovsky 149
6 Bringing Up the Rear: The Histories of
Wisława Szymborska 173
7 Counterrevolution in Poetic Language:
Poland’s Generation of ’68 197
8 The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream:
Czesław Miłosz and Anglo-American Poetry 234
vii
viii Contents
Afterword: Martyrs, Survivors, and Success Stories,

or the Postcommunist Prophet 266
Notes 277
Credits 317
Index 319
Chapter Title: Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments
The debts I have incurred while writing this book are many. Vladimir
Gippius gave his young students “a house, a home” in Russian literature,
Osip Mandelstam recalls. My dear friends and teachers Anna and Stanisław
Barańczak gave me a home in Polish culture many years ago in Boston, and
in my heart I’ve never left. Their generosity—intellectual, literary, culinary,
and otherwise—has left its mark throughout this book, and to say I am
grateful is small repayment. My friend and colleague Gary Saul Morson
supported this project from its earliest inception through the long journey
through to its fi nal publication. His enthusiasm kept it afloat and his criti-
cism set me straight at crucial moments. Saul and Jonathan Brent at Yale
University Press proved stalwart champions of a polemical Slavist’s defense
of poetry, and I owe them more thanks than word limits permit. Lawrence
Lipking read an early version of the book in its entirety: his erudition and
imagination pointed me in new directions. Adam Zagajewski not only pro-
vided the poetry and criticism that inspired much of my argument. He also
read through more versions of this book than I care to recall; great poets
who are also great critics and friends are few and far between, and I’m
lucky to have begun translating a writer thirteen years ago who proved to
be all of these and then some. Lazar Fleishman brought both his critical
acuity and his unparalleled command of Soviet literary politics to bear on
ix
x Acknowledgments
the manuscript, and it is much the better for his kindness. Irena Grudzińska
Gross has lent her erudition, her passion, and her enthusiasm to this proj-
ect in multiple ways. An unnamed reader for Yale was immensely helpful.
Rosanna Warren generously took time to read the penultimate version of my
introduction, while the fi nal chapter is very much the better for Christopher
Ricks’ astute, scrupulous editing of an earlier incarnation. The faults that
remain are of course all my own doing.
Other friends and colleagues—Caryl Emerson, Madeline Levine, Victor
Erlich—generously supplied me with support, conversation, and yes, the
occasional, dreaded letter of recommendation over the many years of this
book’s gestation. My wonderful colleagues Susan McReynolds, Elisabeth
Elliott, and Nina Gourianova have helped in more ways than I can say. I
want to thank Jenny Holzer and Kerin Sulock of the Jenny Holzer Studio
for extraordinary kindness. As if being inspired by a great poet I happen to
translate weren’t enough, I’ve also been privileged to follow the work of a
great artist who takes inspiration from the same source in her meditations
on the public functions of private art. Nice work if you can get it. Jonathan
Galassi, Drenka Willen, Sal Robinson, Krystyna and Ryszard Krynicki,
Anna and Stanisław Barańczak, Natalia Woroszylska, and Adam Zaga-
jewski generously assisted with the permissions process. Yale Press’s edi-
torial staff—Sarah Miller, Ann-Marie Imbornoni, and Gavin Lewis, copy
editor extraordinaire—have been models of patience and persistence. I’ve
been lucky in my graduate help over the years: Jenifer Presto, at the project’s
early stages, and Katherine Bowers and Kolter Campbell later in the game
were both exemplary research assistants and terrific interlocutors.
Chapter 2 fi rst appeared in somewhat different form in Rereading Russian
Poetry, ed. Stephanie Sandler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). An
early version of Chapter 3 was published in Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 1
(Spring, 1996), 125–135. An abbreviated version of Chapter 6 appeared in
Wisława Szymborska: A Stockholm Conference, ed. Leonard Neuger and
Rikard Wennerholm (Stockholm: Royal Academy of Letters, History and
Antiquities, 2006). An early version of Chapter 8 was published in Literary
Imagination, vol. 6, no. 3 (2004), 332–55. I am grateful for permission to
reprint them here.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Coun-
cil of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council generously
provided the fellowship support that made research for the project possible.
The University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Northwestern University sup-
ported the project with research and travel assistance, and the International
Research and Exchanges Board funded a research trip to Poland in the
Acknowledgments xi
summer of 2002. The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at North-
western provided a year’s senior fellowship in 2003–4 to pursue my research
on Miłosz, some of which found its way into the book’s last chapter.
Parents should always use words their children don’t understand, Marina
Tsvetaeva warns. They should also read their children poetry. Ogden
Nash, Robert Frost, “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Cremation of Sam
McGee”—of these only Frost made his way directly into the book that fol-
lows. (I should also mention Shakespeare, particularly with Mickey Rooney
as Puck.) But what my father and mother, John and Adele Cavanagh, gave
me way back then informs this project in ways they themselves could never
have anticipated. I wish I could tell them so today.
Last, but never least, are my nearest relations and best friends, Mike
and Martin Lopez. Martin has lived with this project virtually his entire
life; and he is what made living with it possible. Mike has been my friend,
teacher, editor, advisor, and best support throughout this long, long process.
Daily conversations with a superb critic who is also a scholar of British and
American Romanticism would be good luck enough. When he also leaves
you exactly the right books and bibliographies after those talks; gives you
exactly the advice you need, even when you don’t know you need it; reads
your work; sets you straight; and makes your home the place you do your
best thinking and writing, and your best resting after the thinking and writ-
ing: then you have more than you could ever ask for. And that’s Mike.
Chapter Title: Introduction: Acknowledged Legislation

Introduction: Acknowledged Legislation
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)
“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret

police, not the poets.
—W. H. Auden, “Writing” (1962)
Do not be elected to the senate of your country.

—W. B. Yeats, “To Ezra Pound” (1937)
The Lyric under Siege, and the Mystery of the

Missing Second World
Poetry is power.
—Osip Mandelstam, quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope Against Hope (1970)
What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?
—Czesław Miłosz, “Dedication” (1945)
2 Introduction
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition
might have let him alone.
—Thomas Hardy, from The Life and Work of
Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Milgate (1985)
“What would American poets and critics do without the Cen-

tral Europeans and the Russians to browbeat themselves with?” Mau-
reen McLane asks in a recent review in the Chicago Tribune. “Miłosz,
Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph
Brodsky—here we have world-historical seriousness! Weight! Importance!
Even their playfulness is weighty, metaphysical, unlike barbaric Ameri-
can noodlings!” McLane takes aim at a critical commonplace now well
entrenched among anglophone poets and critics. In anthologies, essays,
and poems alike, the great Eastern Europeans of the century just past—
Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska, et
al.—play the acknowledged, if unofficial, legislators to their unhappily
marginalized, conspicuously unoppressed neighbors to the west. “Only
here do they really respect poetry—they kill because of it,” Osip Man-
delstam remarked to his wife at the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror. “More
people die for poetry here than anywhere else.” There are advantages,
needless to say, to coming from nations where poets are less highly rated.
But to writers reared on the Romantic myth of the poet-Christ, the fate
of Eastern Europe’s modern bards, besieged by history, persecuted by one
repressive regime after another, must seem seductive indeed. Few writers
have ever died of benign neglect.1
If dictators still wished
to read our wrathful, rabid,
well-wrought rhymes, then poetry
would surely change the world.
(Adam Zagajewski, “Thorns” [“Kolce,” 1983])
If only Russia had been founded

by Anna Akhmatova, if only
Mandelstam had made the laws
and Stalin were just a minor
figure in some long-lost Georgian
epic, if only Russia would give up
its bristling bearskin
and live within the word and not
the fist, if only Russia, if only
(Adam Zagajewski, “If Only Russia” [“Gdyby Rosja,” 1985])
Introduction 3
Taken together, Adam Zagajewski’s brief lyrics seem to embody what

Seamus Heaney calls “the unacknowledged legislator’s dream,” the dream
of the unjustly neglected prophets whose fate Shelley famously laments in
his Defence of Poetry (1821). Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators” stand
unfailingly on the side of “great and free developments of the national
will”—but they are spurned by the very nations whose interests they seek
to serve. Shelley yearns for “earlier epochs” in which poets were revered
as priests and seers, even as he ponders the “circumstances of the age and
nation” that might lead once more to the poet’s proper valuation. And his
poetic offspring have inherited his thwarted longings, or so Heaney’s gently
self-mocking little poem suggests:
I sink my crowbar in a chink I know under the masonry

of state and statute, I swing on a creeper of secrets
into the Bastille.
My wronged people cheer from their cages.
(from “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream”)
So runs the fantasy of the would-be prophet, who publicly takes his peo-
ple’s suffering upon himself so that his oppressed, applauding nation might
be free. 2
The poets of Eastern Europe are not immune to such dreams: “If only
Mandelstam had made the laws,” Zagajewski sighs. But they do not dream
in isolation. Their vision of the poet’s mission is shared in key ways by com-
patriots raised on traditions demanding, Miłosz notes, that the poet “speak
in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens.” Beware of answered
prayers, the saying goes. I will deal elsewhere with the less than enviable
historical circumstances—familiar to Slavists, less well known to students
of other traditions—that helped to make Shelley’s dream a reality for his
Russian and Polish contemporaries and their literary descendants. Auden
gets it only half-right in his essay “Writing.” The secret police may be the
true unacknowledged legislators, but it takes the secret police both to make
and to break a nation’s acknowledged, if unauthorized poet-prophets.3
For now, though, I want merely to note the ambivalence that colors both
“Thorns” and “If Only Russia” even grammatically. Both poems are care-
fully couched in the conditional mood: they thus run counter to reality by
defi nition. And that is as it should be, or at any rate, the way it is, Zagajewski
implies. Tyrants make the rules, not poets, and dictators’ deeds change
worlds far more often than artists’ words do. Poetic legislation has its limits:
“No lyric has ever stopped a tank,” Heaney remarks. Indeed, by the mid-
eighties, when both poems were written, Zagajewski had challenged his
4 Introduction
compatriots’ preoccupation with poetry as a form of collective resistance.

He chose to “dissent from dissent,” to break ranks with would-be artist-
legislators by setting his lyric “I” against the defiant “we” that had shaped
his poetic generation. The “unacknowledged legislator’s dream” has a nasty
habit of becoming the acknowledged prophet’s nightmare, as Zagajewski
suggests in his programmatically unprogrammatic Solidarity, Solitude
(Solidarność i samotność, 1985).4
In its original context Heaney’s poem likewise hints at the poet’s ambiv-
alence towards his own nation’s bardic tradition, and more specifically,
towards the demand, and the temptation, to speak for the oppressed Catho-
lic minority of his native Northern Ireland. His poetic portrait of the artist
as would-be martyr forms an ironic coda to the sequence of “bog poems”
from North (1975) that mark Heaney’s most controversial effort to articu-
late his troubled nation’s turmoil in verse. He thus subtly undercuts his own
aspirations to serve as poetic spokesman for his wronged nation’s woes:
“Were those your eyes just now at the hatch?” the would-be poet-savior
inquires from his prison cell. Artistic dissidence generally has a dangerous
tendency “to lead to a certain theatricalization of intellectual life,” Zaga-
jewski notes. Heaney’s suffering writer requires both a captive and a captor
audience in order to realize his redemptive fantasy. 5
My project in the pages that follow is threefold. The book is fi rstly an
overview of twentieth-century Eastern European poetry in its Russian and
Polish incarnations. It is also a comparative study of modern poetry on
both the Eastern and Western side of the great political divide that came to
be known mid-century as the “Iron Curtain.” Finally, it is a polemic with
Western postmodern literary and philosophical theories from French post-
structuralism and deconstructionism to American cultural criticism and
New Historicism. Part of my task will be to track the splendors and miseries
of acknowledged legislation in twentieth-century Russia and Poland, and
to examine ways in which postwar Polish poets particularly have sought to
wrest themselves free from the burdens of barddom that their Western coun-
terparts have been so eager to embrace. In doing so, I hope to complicate
notions of poetry and politics for non-Slavist scholars by testing modern
Anglo-American defi nitions of lyric poetry against cultures in which the
rules of poetic engagement are radically different than those prevailing in
the West. More than this—the Marxist theory that informs, implicitly or
explicitly, so much contemporary Anglo-American critical discourse has yet
to be scrutinized through the lens of those literary traditions dominated by
avowedly Marxist states during much of the century just past. This book
attempts to address that gap.
Introduction 5
I do not pretend to anything like exhaustiveness. Modern poetry and poli-

tics is a vast topic in any of the cultural contexts I discuss, and the list of
Slavic case studies and Western comparisons could be extended indefinitely.
I trace only one possible variant of this story, beginning with Aleksandr Blok
in the early part of the century, moving through the fi rst few decades of
Soviet rule in Russia by way of Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam,
and then crossing, with the victorious Soviet troops, into Poland in the after-
math of World War II. I track two generations of “acknowledged legisla-
tion,” both official and un-, on Polish soil, fi rst through the work of Wiktor
Woroszylski and Wisława Szymborska, and then by way of several members
of Poland’s so-called “New Wave” or “Generation of ’68,” most notably,
Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Adam Zagajewski. I conclude
with Miłosz’s Anglo-American reception as a way of tying together several
strands of my argument: the translator of Yeats, among many other anglo-
phone poets, and lifelong admirer of Whitman comes to exemplify the quint-
essential Eastern European poet-witness to his many admirers in the West.
I have mentioned the preeminence of Eastern Europe’s poet-bards among
their Anglo-American counterparts in recent decades. The Slavist perusing
the Anglo-American scholarship on literature and politics of recent years
will be struck, though, not by these poets’ ubiquity, but by their virtual
absence from such discussions. Why is this? I will turn to likely causes
among non-Slavists in a moment. One thing is clear, though: we Slavists
are partly to blame for this state of affairs. The retrograde Russians “must
deliberately hammer into [their] heads things which have become habit and
instinct with other peoples,” Piotr Chaadaev laments in his “First Philo-
sophical Letter” (1829). Backward Poland is the “parrot of nations,” the
Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki charges in Agamemnon’s Grave (1840).6
Both Russia and Poland have long been obsessed with their marginal status
vis-à-vis the Western culture to which they play country cousins determined
to catch up to their more advanced and civilized kin. Anglo-American Slav-
ists still bear traces of this inherited complex today. In our efforts to keep
pace with apparently more sophisticated modes of literary and cultural
scholarship, we have too frequently adopted Western theoretical models
uncritically, without recognizing the sometimes radical divide that sepa-
rates Eastern European culture from its Western counterparts. Too often
we have been content to play the rude mechanicals at Western theory’s fête
champêtre, without recognizing that we too have something to offer in a
conversation claiming to prize difference, otherness, and outsiders.
Recent theory has taught critics to “resist universalizing cultural dis-
courses,” as Edward Said writes, by recovering the particular peoples and
6 Introduction
places such discourses tend to erase. The scholar’s task is thus to “reclaim,
rename, and reinhabit” the cultural loci left strategically blank in the West’s
“great legitimizing narratives of emancipation and enlightenment.” Said
notes, though, that the term “imperialism” itself runs the risk of “mask[ing]
with an unacceptable vagueness the interesting heterogeneity of Western
metropolitan cultures.” What of the no less interesting heterogeneity found
slightly to the East of the metropolitan cultures that the Slavic nations,
colonies and colonizers alike, envied and longed to emulate? “Nations are
themselves narrations,” Said remarks. The counternarrative he opposes to
the West’s self-serving storytelling in Culture and Imperialism (1993) takes
a revealing shape, one that other postcolonial theorists have followed in
mapping their revisionary histories. This master plot traces the rise of the
great bourgeois capitalist empires of the nineteenth century—chiefly those
of Great Britain and France—and then follows their further fates by way of
their latter-day inheritor, the United States.7
“Historicize, historicize,” the town criers call on the quad. New Histori-
cism and its offshoots, cultural criticism and postcolonial studies, have done
much to fi ll what Conrad called the “blank spaces of the earth,” the con-
spicuous gaps left on the West’s map of conquests and colonizations. More
precisely, scholars employing these methodologies have worked to show that
such lacunae are already, and have long since been, occupied. But every
new theoretical paradigm produces its own brands of blindness as well as
insight. Whether by oversight or design, the cultural critics have largely
turned a blind eye to the historical experience of modern Eastern Europe.
“Contemporary theorists,” Fredric Jameson explains, are “concerned with
the internal dynamics of the relationship between First and Third World
countries . . . which is now very precisely what the word ‘imperialism’
means for us.” He is not alone in his strikingly selective geopolitical pur-
view. Jameson merely articulates the parameters that tacitly defi ne cultural
studies as practiced in the Anglo-American academy today. Why has the
so-called “Second World,” the now-defunct Soviet Union and its satellites,
been banished so peremptorily from sight? Why should Western theorists
turn their backs on the potent mix of literature and politics that has proven
so seductive to their poet-contemporaries? The names Bakhtin and Conrad
strew the pages of contemporary scholarship. But the empire that, in one
incarnation or another, shaped their bearers’ lives and thought is conspicu-
ous chiefly by its absence.8
“This is not a story of the West of Europe,” as Conrad writes in Under
Western Eyes (1911). And I will be using the notoriously un-narrative genre
of lyric poetry to tell my story of literature and politics in Soviet-era Russia
Introduction 7
and Poland. Such an undertaking may seem doubtful: lyrics and large-scale
narrations make for an unstable mix. This is partly my motive in combining
them. “I have felt that the problem of my time should be defi ned as Poetry
and History,” Miłosz remarks in “A Poet Between East and West.” To many
contemporary scholars, his comment pairs virtual antonyms. “The poem is
a device which produces anti-history,” Octavio Paz observes, and the lyrical
resistance to history has become a critical commonplace in recent decades,
largely to the lyric’s detriment.9
Predictably, New Historicism has shown little patience with what it sees
as modern poetry’s suspiciously antihistoricist bent. The common end of all
poetry, Coleridge asserts, “is to convert a series into a Whole, to make those
events that in real or Imagined history move on in a strait Line, assume
to our Understandings a circular motion.” It is this Romantic “grand illu-
sion” that poetry “can set one free of the ruins of history and culture” with
which contemporary criticism must do battle, Jerome McGann argues, since
Romantic poetry “typically erases or sets aside its political and historical
currencies.” For the New Historicists, Nicholas Roe comments, the “escap-
ist poems” of the Romantics and their literary descendants “enact dramas
of idealization in which history is . . . variously ‘displaced,’ ‘repressed,’
‘erased,’ obscured’ or ‘denied’ by the imagination.” Their critical task is thus
to recuperate the suspect process that converts “history into poetry,” Mar-
jorie Levinson explains. Alan Liu frames this confl ict explicitly in terms of
genre. History, he declares, “is quintessentially narrative,” while the “anti-
narrativistic and antimimetic” lyric seeks chiefly to escape or evade history
in its quest for timeless truths.10
Angus Fletcher gives a different account of this intergeneric confl ict in
his New Theory for American Poetry (2004). If the lyric “seems to resist
narrative,” he observes, its “resistance may result from a distrust of the pro-
gressive implications of storytelling generally” (italics in original). Fletcher
does not use the term “progressive” in its political sense. He means simply
the forward temporal thrust that gives any narrative its structure. Yet the
lyric proved resistant to the large-scale Soviet effort to create a historical
narrative intended to be progressive in multiple ways. Time and again, it
played havoc with what Stephen Kotkin calls the “supremely confident nar-
rative of the laws of history and all-purpose explanation of the present”
(and the future, we might add) that the Soviet rulers adapted from Karl
Marx. The modern lyric, as described by McGann, Levinson, and others,
is a deeply conservative, even reactionary genre virtually by defi nition: its
rejection of history is tantamount to an endorsement of the bourgeois status
quo. Fletcher’s remarks suggest, though, ways in which a lyric resistance to
8 Introduction
history as grand narrative might reveal its subversive potentials in a state

consecrated to History with a capital H.11
“So long as the poet, East or West, appears before the public only as a
lyrist, banking on the irresponsibilities traditionally associated with that
role, he will be tolerated by the governing class and allowed to communicate
with his readers,” Donald Davie asserts in Czesław Miłosz and the Insuf-
ficiencies of Lyric (1986): “It is only when he oversteps that pariah’s privi-
lege that he is in trouble.” Lyrical irresponsibilities have sometimes proved
less palatable to the powers-that-be than Davie is prepared to admit. Plato
famously expelled poets from his ideal state, and the Polish poet Aleksander
Wat was quick to see the analogy between Plato’s imaginary republic and
the Soviet-backed regimes of Eastern Europe. “Plato ordered us cast out /
of the City where Wisdom reigns / In a new Ivory Tower made of (human)
bones,” he laments in his poem “Dark Light” (Ciemne świerczadło). This
is not mere Romantic hyperbole, as Wat’s own fate and those of his fellow
poet-pariahs expelled from one ominous ivory tower or another amply dem-
onstrate. “Our epoch is not lyric,” Leon Trotsky proclaimed early on, and
the state he helped to create took such distinctions quite seriously.12
Why is this? Let us return to the problem of defi nitions. “What is poetry?”
Miłosz asks in his poem “Dedication” (1945). “More than one rickety
answer / has tumbled since that question fi rst was raised,” his compatriot
Wisława Szymborska replies nearly half a century later. “The borderline
dividing what is a work of poetry from what is not is less stable than the
frontiers of the Chinese empire’s territories,” Roman Jakobson moans in his
essay “What is Poetry” (1933–34). Fletcher locates the shaky structures and
unstable boundaries that Szymborska and Jakobson see in poetry’s provi-
sional defi nitions squarely in the thing itself. “In a strict sense, every poem
is a state,” he writes, and “states live only when they are always chang-
ing shape.” This shape-shifting state does not exist in isolation. It has a
distinctly social significance. The lyric tests the profoundly social issue of
“human belonging or not belonging” by continuously tracing and retrac-
ing “the boundaries that defi ne inclusion and exclusion,” as it “cross[es]
back and forth between an inner self and a world out there.” It thus must
be ranked, Fletcher argues, among Foucault’s “approximating discourses,”
“those approximate, imperfect, and largely spontaneous kinds of knowl-
edge which are brought into play in the construction of the least fragment
of discourse or in the daily processes of exchange.” Fletcher’s lyric poem,
the inherently unstable state in miniature, might well prove distasteful to a
much larger, better-regulated regime dedicated to what Wat calls the man-
datory, inflexible “semantic instrumentalization of everything. Of the world
Introduction 9
of people and the world of things. Of all human activity, economic, social,
spiritual. Of human beings as such. Of their consciousness, thoughts and
words. And fi nally, of the [state] doctrine itself.”13
Fletcher’s provisional defi nitions provoke a flurry of further questions.
“The orthodox view” of the lyric, he comments, sees it chiefly as “an art
of formal achievements, achievements of form”: “the poem, for reasons
of aesthetic pleasure, comprises a deliberately formed linguistic artifact, a
grouping and organization of words such that the very form of the poem
is an inherent and strongest part of its aesthetic power.” It is surprising to
realize how many varieties of orthodoxy subscribe to this definition. “A
poem should not mean / But be,” Archibald MacLeish announces in his
Imagist “Ars Poetica”; and the poem’s being has been conceived by friends
and foes alike in largely formal terms. There are, of course, the New Critics’
celebrated well-wrought urns and verbal icons. “Poetry achieves concrete-
ness, particularity, and something like sensuous shape,” William Wimsatt
observes, through “the interrelational density of words taken in their fullest,
most inclusive and symbolic character. A verbal composition . . . [thus] takes
on something like the character of a stone statue or a porcelain vase.”14
As their name attests, the Russian Formalists were no less attentive to ques-
tions of aesthetic form, of which poetry was their prime exemplar. “Poetry
is language in its aesthetic function,” Roman Jakobson explains in an early
essay. Viktor Shklovsky elaborates: “Poetic speech is formed speech” and
“poetic perception” is “that perception in which we experience form” (ital-
ics in original). In his later, high structuralist incarnation, Jakobson insists
that in the poem “different levels blend, complement each other or combine
to give the poem the value of an absolute object.” The structuralist’s task is
thus to ascertain what he calls, rather unnervingly, “the mandatory unity”
of this object: “Any unbiased, attentive, exhaustive, total description of the
selection, distribution and interrelation of diverse morphological classes and
syntactic constructions in a given poem surprises the examiner himself by
unexpected, striking symmetries and antisymmetries, balanced structures,
efficient accumulation of equivalent forms and salient contrasts, finally by
rigid restrictions in the repertory of morphological and syntactic constitu-
ents used in the poem, eliminations which, on the other hand, permit us
to follow the masterly interplay of the actualized constituents.” Exhaus-
tive indeed. Such bristling verbal fortresses might well repel the unwelcome
incursions of history, if that is in fact the aim of lyric poetry.15
The lyric has long been seen as an effort to stop time, to seize the moment
and make it ageless: Keats’s notoriously unravished urn provides only the
most obvious example. The lyric reprieve from temporality is achieved,
10 Introduction
in such views, precisely through the artifice of which Keats’s vase is the
emblem. The Grecian urn embodies the lyric poem’s “controlled rejections
of the world replaced by artful vision,” Sharon Cameron argues in Lyric
Time (1979): “The lyric is seen as immortal . . . because it is complete/
completed in and of itself, transcending mortal/temporal limits in the very
structure of its articulation.” This transcendence is in turn graphically rep-
resented by “the lyric’s own presence on a page, surrounded as it is by noth-
ing”; whatever happens in the poem is “arrested, framed, and taken out of
the flux of history.” The lyric, as Cameron defi nes it, is a notably antisocial
genre. The lyric project consists “of the banishing of the social world” as the
poem attends “to no more than one (its own) speaking voice.”16
“How does the lyric represent division, confl ict and multiple points
of view? If seeming to defy the social world from which it is set apart,
how is it coerced back into relationship with that world?” Cameron is
hardly a cultural critic avant la lettre—Lyric Time is clearly closer to Yale-
school deconstruction than to the then-nascent New Historicism. Still, her
questions anticipate what Susan Wolfson calls the “formal charges” that
ideological critics have fi led against both the lyric itself and the critical
schools committed to its formal analysis. For such critics, Wolfson com-
ments, “poetic forms became features to be seen through, read beyond,
around, or against.” Through its use of ostensibly “organic form” to mask
its artifice, moreoever, the Romantic lyric enters into an unholy compact
with its age’s reigning ideologies. Its “refusal of life actually conducted in
actual society” amounts to a “complicity with class-interested strategies of
smoothing over historical confl ict and contradictions with claims of natu-
ral and innate organization.”17
Although this is certainly not her intention, Cameron’s terms—arrest,
framing, banishment, coercion—translate with disconcerting ease into what
David Bromwich has called the “police blotter slang” of recent theory, the
rhetoric used to sentence suspect genres to Jameson’s infamous prison-house
of language—or, alternatively, to force them to make amends through puni-
tive public service. The self-absorbed lyric must be coerced back into society
by all necessary means. “The recovery of [its] ‘excluded’ or ‘suppressed’ his-
torical contexts require[s] vigorous policing” by vigilant critics, Roe com-
ments. Why should this seemingly effete, ineffectual little genre be singled
out for such harsh treatment? The ideological critics themselves suggest
probable causes. “Cultural studies in English-speaking universities,” Vin-
cent Leitch notes, are characterized by “a leftist political orientation rooted
variously in Marxist, non-Marxist, and post-Marxist socialist intellectual
traditions all critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and
Introduction 11
apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic lit-

erary criticism.” Aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, apoliticism: the
lyric in a nutshell, as many New Historicists would have it. The genre thus
becomes a convenient stand-in for postwar criticism generally.18
More than this—these same traits have specific class associations, as
Leitch’s remarks suggest. “The construction of the modern notion of the
aesthetic artefact,” Terry Eagleton asserts, is “inseparable from the con-
struction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and
indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that
social order.” Modern aesthetics, with its dubious commitment to liberation
from history achieved by way of the quasi-autonomous individual imagi-
nation, is thus the “very paradigm of the ideological” in its modern capi-
talist incarnation. This aesthetics, moreover, has a distinct generic profi le.
Through its efforts “to transcend, and to make the reader transcend, con-
crete spatial and temporal circumstances,” McGann contends, Romantic
poetry embodies “the most fundamental of all bourgeois concepts.” The
modern lyric, as the aesthetic artifact par excellence, serves as a pocket-
sized version of aesthetics as such, and Cameron’s little poem stranded on
its lonely page assumes a more dubious identity. With its single speaking
voice privileging private over public experience, individual autonomy over
civic responsibility, and aesthetic independence over social engagement, the
lyric becomes a metonym or synechdoche for the bourgeois subject in all its
illusory, self-sufficient glory.19
Such charges sound oddly familiar to the Slavist. “The lyric—unlike the
novel, whose task it is to legislate the confl ict between social and personal
reality—presents interior reality as if there were no other with which it must
regretfully contend.” The lyric “must attend to no more than one (its own)
speaking voice. This fact makes the self in the lyric unitary, and gives it the
illusion of alone holding sway over the universe, there being, for all practical
purposes, no one else, nothing else, to inhabit it.” “No imaginative fiction
is as resistant to the interruption of its interior speech as the lyric.” These
quotes show Cameron once again anticipating the sins for which the lyric
would be taken to task by the cultural critics. More notably, though, she
unwittingly points us toward a key source in recent critiques of the lyric: the
work of Mikhail Bakhtin. 20
Cameron herself does not cite Bakhtin’s writings, which were largely
untranslated when Lyric Time fi rst appeared. The distinctions she draws
between novel and poem coincide strikingly, though, with the Russian the-
orist’s description of the lamentably “monologic” lyric. Unlike the “het-
eroglossic” novel, Bakhtin insists, with its “diversity of social speech types
12 Introduction
(sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices

artistically organized,” the ruthlessly efficient lyric “strip[s] all aspects of
language of the intentions and accents of other people, destroying all traces
of social heteroglossia and diversity of language” in its quest for “a unitary
and singular language.” The coincidence in Cameron’s and Bakhtin’s views
is apparently just that. It demonstrates only the powerful cultural continu-
ities, bridging nations, traditions, and even political systems, that under-
lie key critical conceptions of lyric and novel alike. But the convergence
between Bakhtin and other recent critics is no accident. “Bakhtin just over-
threw my Yale education,” McGann remarks (he has in mind presumably
his training in New Criticism and old historicism of one stripe or another).
He is not alone in placing Bakhtin at the heart of a critical paradigm shift.
Bakhtin and his circle have served as a “touchstone,” Wolfson comments,
in the recent critical “disdain for formalism.” Indeed, the current “sociopo-
litical disparagement of formalism” is itself, she concludes, a continuation
of postrevolutionary “Russian polemics” between the formalists and their
ideological opponents. Hence perhaps the Slavist’s occasional sense of déjà
vu amidst recent critical arguments on the lyric. 21
“All personality (lichnost’) aside. Make way for anonymous prose,” Man-
delstam announces in “Literary Moscow: Birth of the Plot” (1922). Prose’s
victory coincides quite precisely with the Bolsheviks’ success in the Russian
Civil War (1918–21), as Jurij Tynianov argues in his essay “Interval” (1924):
“Three years ago prose gave poetry the boot. . . . Prose has triumphed.”
If poetic language was the hero of the Formalists’ work by virtue of its
singularity and exclusiveness, then it is no surprise to fi nd it cast in a less
flattering light by the orchestrators of a revolution waged in the name of the
collective, the toiling masses to whom a recherché bourgeois lyricism was
superfluous at best. 22
Bakhtin’s ideologically charged descriptions of poetry in “Discourse
in the Novel” (1934–35) and elsewhere thus acquire a distinctive double-
voicedness from a twenty-fi rst-century perspective. They not only reso-
nate with recent Anglo-American critiques of the lyric. Bakhtin also clearly
shares the generic biases of his own revolutionary era. “The social revolu-
tion of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but
only from the future,” Marx proclaims in The Eighteenth Brumaire, and
his latter-day Soviet disciples took such pronouncements quite literally.
“The poetry of the Revolution is synthetic. It cannot be changed into small
coin for the temporary use of the lyric sonnet-makers,” Trotsky declares
in the early twenties. He grudgingly grants “personal lyrics of the small-
est scope” a temporary residence permit on Soviet literary soil—but only
Introduction 13
until “a new lyric poetry” capable of forging the “new man” emerges to
demonstrate “how socially and aesthetically inadequate” the old poetry
has proven to its newly assigned tasks. Nikolai Bukharin echoes Trotsky’s
comments a decade later in a collectively authored, programmatic speech
on “Poetry, Poetics, and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R.” given at
the First All-Soviet Writers’ Congress of 1934. He insists that the newly
instituted official doctrine of Socialist Realism “is not anti-lyrical.” Like
Trotsky, though, he opposes the old lyricism to the nascent “synthetic
poetry,” which will assist in the engineering of socialist souls that is the
proper project of the Soviet artist en masse: “We are not here speaking of
an antirealistic form of lyric, seeking for a ‘world beyond,’ but of a lyric
which gives poetic shape to the spiritual experiences of the socialist man
who is now coming into being.”23
“Communist individualism,” Bukharin proclaims, “is a contradiction in
terms, an ‘oxymoron,’ a logical solecism.” He was more moderate in this
than many of his fellow revolutionaries. During the fi rst years of Soviet
power, the ideological “attack on the individual self reached the most
incredible extremes,” Zinovyi Papernyi observes. “The complete absorption
of all individuals in a million-headed impersonal mass,” and the new “col-
lective man” to be born once the “soul-encumbered individual man” has
been “mercilessly exterminated”: such were the conversational common-
places of the time in Soviet Russia, an early visitor to the new state recalls.
These notions had obvious generic implications. The new proletarian poetry
typically employed “not the lyric of the personal ‘I’, but the lyric of ‘com-
radeship,’ for the creating subject of proletarian poetry was not the ‘“I” of
the poet’ but the ‘real, most basic creator of this poetry—the collective,”
Aleksandr Bogdanov announces in a postrevolutionary manifesto. By the
end of the twenties, Boris Eikhenbaum laments, both “personal poetry (the
lyric)” and “the lyric ‘I’” were “virtually taboo.”24
In his speech, Bukharin derides the “anti-realistic lyric,” with its unso-
cialist attachment to otherworldly imaginings. Bakhtin was very much
Bukharin’s comrade-in-arms in this, if little else. In “Discourse in the Novel,”
he deplores the “private craftsmanship” that “ignores the social life of dis-
course outside the artist’s study.” And the lyric is his prime example of such
aesthetic isolationism. The lyric poet aspires to the creation of a “unitary and
singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists.” Elsewhere
this scientific anachronism appears in an equally outmoded, quasi-religious
incarnation: the poet seeks an “‘Edenic’ world” to be achieved by means of
“a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a language far removed from the
petty rounds of everyday life, a language of the gods.” Bakhtin’s metaphors
14 Introduction
betray the social and political realities of his day. Language itself, he warns,
may resist the poet’s encroachments, since “not all words . . . submit equally
easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private
property.” And his images in turn call to mind more recent descriptions
of the lyric’s reactionary tendencies: “What we witness” in Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey,” Marjorie Levinson comments, “is a conversion of public
to private property.” The bourgeois lyric strikes again. But why this conver-
gence between critics separated by half a century, not to mention continents,
languages, and political systems? And why Wordsworth? Again, Bakhtin
and his influence on recent scholarship provide clues. 25
Bakhtin’s lyric is an oddly bifurcated genre. It is on the one hand dis-
tinguished by its hermeticism; it constitutes a kind of linguistic bell jar, an
airtight, “monologically sealed-off utterance.” Such a generic recluse would
scarcely seem to pose a threat to society at large. But this “aesthetic object”
achieves its self-enclosure at a high social cost, or so Bakhtin’s imagery sug-
gests. Not only does its poet-maker engage in the illicit appropriation and
seizure of linguistic public property by “stripping all aspects of language of
the intentions and accents of other people, destroying all traces of social het-
eroglossia and diversity of language.” Preoccupied as he is with achieving “a
complete single-personed hegemony over his own language,” the poet pres-
ents a clear danger to others’ language as well. He annihilates his linguistic
opposition in utero; he “destroys in embryo [other] social worlds of speech.”
He is not just a Robin Hood in reverse, plundering the people’s speech for
the sake of lining his own linguistic coffers. He is also, more ominously, a
King Herod of sorts, murdering infant language as it sleeps. 26
It is no surprise to fi nd that “the language of poetic genres” naturally
tends, in Bakhtin’s view, to become “authoritarian, dogmatic and conserva-
tive.” But this is not the worst of its offenses. As his politically charged terms
suggest, poetry does not merely mirror the larger evils of the society it works
so assiduously to exclude. It actively supports the social structures that share
its own hegemonic propensities, Bakhtin implies. At the same time that vari-
ous proto-novelistic genres were subverting the socio-linguistic status quo in
the Middle Ages, he claims, “poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural,
national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the
higher official socio-ideological levels.”27
Large-scale centralization, linguistic and otherwise, enacted at the high-
est socio-ideological levels: it is difficult to read such phrases in a Russian
essay of the mid-thirties without thinking of Joseph Stalin and his policies
of forcible collectivization at all levels of Soviet life. Perhaps by “poetry,”
Bakhtin has in mind the kind of court verse being written in his own times,
Introduction 15
the panegyrics, hymns, and odes composed in the name of the Great Leader
whose “words are like iron weights,” and whose “decrees” fall “like horse-
shoes” on the bodies of his hapless subjects, as Mandelstam writes in the
poem known as the “Stalin Epigram”(1933). I have suggested that Bakhtin
shares his revolutionary era’s generic prejudices. In “Discourse and the
Novel,” though, he may also be tacitly criticizing the newly canonized sys-
tem of genres to be employed by all members of the recently formed Soviet
Writers’ Union, that is, by any author hoping to see her or his words in print.
His descriptions of the lyric are in any case a far better fit for Stalinist liter-
ary politics than they are for the Russian tradition, in place since Romanti-
cism, of poet-rebels who refuse to write their lyrics on what Mandelstam
calls government-sanctioned “police” paper and are punished accordingly
by an autocratic state. Such an interpretation might explain the disparity
between poetry as it appears in “Discourse and the Novel,” and Bakhtin’s
far more sympathetic writings on Pushkin and other poets elsewhere. 28
Bakhtin’s vision of a conservative genre that upholds the political sta-
tus quo dovetails neatly, though, with the narrative proposed by McGann,
Levinson, and others vis-à-vis Romanticism generally and Wordsworth in
particular. Recent ideological critics have charged Wordsworth with helping
“to invent the autonomous individual” in his early poetry, David Bromwich
notes. Their prime exhibit is Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above
Tintern Abbey” (1798), which marks, so the argument runs, his rejection of
a revolutionary politics that engages the world in favor of a subjective, inter-
nal transformation that elides it. In his speech at that First All-Soviet Writ-
ers’ Congress, Karl Radek denounced escapist “Romantic fl ights, such as
those taken by the intelligentsia disappointed in the outcome of the French
revolution.” This is the same trajectory that recent critics see at work both
in “Tintern Abbey” and in Romantic poetry generally. At the poem’s end,
McGann comments, “we are left only with the initial scene’s simplest natu-
ral forms”: “Everything else has been erased—the abbey, the beggars and
displaced vagrants, all that civilized culture creates and destroys, gets and
spends. We are not permitted to remember 1793 and the turmoil of the
French Revolution, neither its 1793 hopes nor . . . the subsequent ruin of
those hopes.” “Between 1793 and 1798 Wordsworth lost the world merely
to gain his own immortal soul,” he concludes. Critics like McGann and
Levinson thus locate the true turning point in Wordsworth’s politics not in
his later, explicitly conservative poetry, but precisely in the closing moments
of the ostensibly iconoclastic “Lyrical Ballads.” It is just one short step, in
other words, from poet-radical to Poet Laureate, from “Tintern Abbey” to
Westminster Abbey and a statue in Poets’ Corner. 29
16 Introduction
Levinson dubs her method “deconstructive materialism.” She calls upon

the critic to identify a poem’s “ideological subtext” by means of a proce-
dure whose origins she describes as follows: “Freud worked out its psychic
economy and Marx produced its political logic.” Levinson’s approach, like
that of McGann and most cultural critics, is explicitly Marxist or “Freudo-
Marxist,” in Frank Lentricchia’s phrase. Revolutions, Marxist dialectics,
and lyric poems: once again, some mention of the Russian Revolution, the
empire it inaugurated, and that empire’s demise less than two decades ago
would seem inevitable, if only to point out the catastrophic misapplication,
if that is the case, of the theory on which so much recent literary scholarship
has relied. “The end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union has defi nitively
changed the world map,” Said concedes in Culture and Imperialism. How-
ever, these defi nitive changes, and the history that precipitated them, remain
beyond the pale not only of his study, but of cultural criticism generally. 30
It is no accident that Wordsworth has become the lightning rod in current
discussions of poetry and ideology. His rejection of the French Revolution
and retreat into lyrical privacy provide ideal exempla of what we ought not
to do and be. “We are . . . as Wordsworth (for example) deliberately chose
not to be—‘citizens of the world’” (italics in original), McGann explains,
and he reminds us that we now read against a backdrop of “Vietnam,
Palestine, Northern Ireland—Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, Chile, Uganda.”
The “Romantic ideology” was born in the wake of one failed revolution,
and McGann attributes its demise to a shift in consciousness following
another social trauma closer to home. The “aesthetic positions” of this
ideology, he claims, “dominate[d] the theory of poetry for 150, 175 years,
more, even to our own day. . . . Up until the Vietnam War, it seems to me
that they held perfect and total sway. They do not hold sway anymore.” Liu
casts his net more widely: he describes the New Historicism as “our latest
post–May 1970, post–May 1968, post-1917, . . . post-1789 (and so forth)
imagination for an active role for intellect in the renascence of society.”
1917 rates at least a mention in passing; but what about its bookend dates
of 1989 and 1991?31
Soviet Russia was “Europe’s last imperial power and “communism turned
out to be the last, and perhaps the highest stage of imperialism,” the histo-
rian Mark Mazower observes; and Mazower places “communism’s demise”
squarely against the broader backdrop of “European decolonization” gener-
ally. Historians and New Historians do not always see eye to eye on such
matters, though. “Only those theories of imperialism which acknowledge
the Marxist problematic are of concern,” Jameson states baldly in “Mod-
ernism and Imperialism”—but this problematic addresses only Marxism’s
Introduction 17
theoretical apparatus and not its historical applications. “Marxism is at

present enduring the most grievous crisis of its fraught career,” Eagleton
acknowledges in the introduction to Marxist Literary Theory (1996). He
pointedly roots this crisis, though, not in “the collapse of neo-Stalinism, or
however the political taxonomists choose to label whatever was under way
in eastern Europe,” but in the capitalist West: “It was not the implosion
of the Soviet world, but the quickening contradictions of the Western one,
which fi rst began to undermine historical materialism.” This implosion has
not helped matters, though, as Eagleton admits: “At least Stalinism and its
progeny seemed to mean that Marxism of some species was here to stay. . . .
It may not have been to one’s taste, but one couldn’t ignore it.”32
Ignoring Marxism in its Eastern European variant has in fact proven all
too easy for contemporary critics, as I’ve argued. There are a few notable
exceptions. In The Politics of Nature (2002), Nicholas Roe notes the irony
of “teaching and writing Marxist criticism and theory while McDonalds
was opening for business in the former Soviet Union.” Thomas McFarland
acknowledges what he calls “the permanent importance of the Marxist
analysis of culture, history, and human activity” in Romanticism and the
Heritage of Rousseau (1995)—but he also addresses its large-scale abuses
in the latter-day “Jacobinism” of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath,
with its toll of “staggering numbers of human beings.” “One of the signal
failures” of contemporary theorists, Mark Edmundson remarks in Litera-
ture against Philosophy (1995), “has been their unwillingness to read Marx
in the way they have so eagerly read Hegel and Kant”: “The question of
whether, or to what degree, Marx’s commitment to a univocal standard of
truth, his truth, inspired his various disciples, from Lenin to Guzmán, to
commit their barbarities remains one worth investigating. For Derrida could
surely have found in Marx, who is Hegel’s most consequential heir, and thus
in some sense the major heir of metaphysics, rather than in Heidegger, the
culminating move in an intellectual tradition devoted to suppressing dif-
ferent interpretations, and perhaps too to suppressing different people, by
whatever means necessary.”33
Eagleton, predictably, sees things rather differently. “The story which
Marxism has to tell” may be “tedious,” he explains in Marxist Literary
Theory (1996), but it is also “more true to the humdrum, vulnerable nature
of humanity” than competing modern narratives of the past have proven to
be. Miłosz for one would not agree. In The Captive Mind (1953) he pres-
ents “dialectical materialism, Russian style” as just the kind of oppressive
metanarrative that Eagleton seeks to overthrow. “Undoubtably, one comes
closer to the truth when one sees history as the expression of the class
18 Introduction
struggle rather than a series of private quarrels among kings and queens,”
Miłosz concedes: “But precisely because such an analysis comes closer to
the truth, it is more dangerous. It gives the illusion of full knowledge; it
supplies answers to all questions, answers which merely run around in a
circle repeating a few formulas. . . . Centuries of human history, with their
thousands upon thousands of human affairs, are reduced to a few, most
generalized terms” (italics in original). “Poetry is . . . a more philosophical
and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, his-
tory the particular.” In The Captive Mind and elsewhere, Miłosz sets Aris-
totle’s famous dictum in reverse. For Miłosz, lyric poetry defends humdrum
humanity in all its particularity against History en masse, whether in the
Soviet Marxist variant or any of the other master plots that the modern age
has proven so adept at generating. 34
“The true enemy of man is generalization,” Miłosz writes in the fourth
of his “Six Lectures in Verse”: “The true enemy of man, so-called History, /
Attracts and terrifies with its plural number.” The poet combats History by
means of his commitment to recuperating the fragile, particular fates erased
by its large-scale narrations:
Still in my mind [I try] to save Miss Jadwiga,
A little hunchback, librarian by profession,
Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house
That was considered safe but toppled down . . .
So a name is lost for ages, forever,
No one will ever know about her last hours . . .
History is not, as Marx told us, anti-nature,
And if a goddess, a goddess of blind fate.
The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot
where her heart was pulsating. This only
I set against necessity, law, theory.
From wartime Warsaw to the banks of the Wye: what can Miłosz’s vanished
Miss Jadwiga possibly share with Wordsworth’s lonely “wanderer through
the woods”? How does the one poet’s purported fl ight from history tally
with the other’s concerted battle against it?35
“The greater Romantic poem” became, in Wordsworth’s hands, a rhe-
torical retreat from social action to aesthetic contemplation, the argument
runs, while Miłosz’s commitment to a “poetry of witness” led to his works
being banned for decades by a repressive state: Can both be said to prac-
tice the same art? And what art would that be? The building of bourgeois
bell jars? The formation of hegemonic monoliths masquerading as objets
d’art? The creation of subversive shape-shifters or of reactionary devices
Introduction 19
containing antihistory? The erasure or the defense of particularity? Let us

revisit Wordsworth’s controversial lyric in a rather different context by way
of addressing these and like questions.
Tintern Abbey versus People’s Poland

Is not the marvelous book of history closed with seven seals to our
poets?
—Nikolai Bukharin, “Poetry, Poetics and the
Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R”
Even apolitical poetry is political.

—Wisława Szymborska, “Children of Our Age”
Under the Communist regime, Miłosz explains in The Captive Mind,

the poet “is free to describe hills, trees and flowers.” “But if he should feel
that boundless exaltation in the face of nature that seized Wordsworth on
his visit to Tintern Abbey,” he warns, “he is at once suspect.” Miłosz should
know. He himself translated Wordsworth’s lyric for an anthology of Anglo-
American poetry that he hoped—in vain, as it turned out—to publish in
People’s Poland at the war’s close. Wordsworth’s poem was polonized in the
wake of a cataclysm that its author would have found difficult to imagine.
Miłosz did his translating in 1945 in Krakow, one of the few Polish cities
spared from wartime devastation: Warsaw, where he spent much of the war,
existed at this point chiefly in name only. And Poland was itself caught up
in yet another battle, a civil war being waged between allies and opponents
of the Soviet occupiers then in the process of forcibly importing their own
revolution westwards.36
Like many younger intellectuals, Miłosz sided with the Soviets for ideo-
logical reasons. The ostensibly democratic West seemed thoroughly discred-
ited by the war’s end. Not only had its states proven fertile breeding grounds
for the fascism that precipitated the war in the fi rst place. At its conclusion
the Western victors had shown themselves all too eager to hand Poland over
to their Soviet allies, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A postwar
present under Joseph Stalin looked bleak at best. But communism held at
least the hope of a brighter future—and what did the West have to offer?
Miłosz would soon fi nd out fi rsthand. Shortly after completing the ill-
fated anthology, he was posted as the new regime’s cultural attaché fi rst
to the New York consulate, and then to the Washington embassy, where
he remained until 1950. His reaction to the West in its North American
20 Introduction
incarnation was mixed at best. But his wartime passion for the Anglo-Amer-
ican poetic tradition continued unabated. For all this, though, Miłosz was
never a great Wordsworth fan (he much preferred William Blake): “Every-
thing I write, I write against nature,” he replied when asked about his taste.
So why does Wordsworth emerge three times at this key juncture in Miłosz’s
own adventures with revolution and engagement? “Tintern Abbey” is prom-
inently featured in the projected anthology of 1945, just as Miłosz decides
to cast his lot with the new Communist regime. It is singled out yet again in
The Captive Mind, the book that marked his public break with that regime
in 1953 (he had received political asylum in Paris two years earlier). 37
Miłosz cites Wordsworth in only one other place, so far as I know. The
British writer makes a brief, uncredited cameo in a letter sent to the poet
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz from Washington in 1949, at the height of Miłosz’s
service to the state. “All this extroverted literature is repugnant,” Miłosz
complains to his friend: “Poetry is ‘recollection in tranquillity’ (przypomi-
nanie sobie w stanie spokoju) and there’s an end to it. Without that detach-
ment, that disinterestedness, you’ve got, and will get, nothing.” “I’m really
struggling,” he continues, “I sense that I have to snap the shackles that bind
my hands and feet.” The shackles he has in mind are both literary and politi-
cal. The relentlessly extroverted writing Miłosz resists is the Socialist Realist
poetry he describes in The Captive Mind: “He [the poet] does not speak for
himself but for the ideal citizen. His results are reminiscent of songs writ-
ten to be sung on the march since the aim is the same—the forging of the
fetters of collectivity that bind together an advancing column of soldiers.”
And the antidote to these “mind-forged manacles” is the solitary “emotion
recollected in tranquillity” that Wordsworth describes in the “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads” (1802).38
Public and private; collectivity and solitude; history and distance; engage-
ment and detachment: the familiar oppositions emerge once more, but their
meanings have changed dramatically. In “Tintern Abbey,” Levinson writes,
the “persona confesses its divorce from an order of collectivity that might
validate poetic achievement, or confi rm the poet’s social and therefore indi-
vidual experience.” In the People’s Republic, though, to embrace collectivity
and engagement meant to serve the state, not to subvert it, while to indulge
in the bourgeois luxuries of introversion, contemplation, and disinterested-
ness was to challenge its dictates. “Communism is the enemy of interioriza-
tion, of the inner self,” Wat observes in his memoirs. This is doubtless why
“Tintern Abbey” would have met with a chilly reception in People’s Poland,
as Miłosz sees it. Raptures and ecstasies were reserved for public occa-
sions and state functions, not private meditations. And the regime would
Introduction 21
have been no happier than more recent critics with Wordsworth’s failure to
address the social conditions that had shaped his solitary landscape. The
most introspective terms in the “Preface”—“tranquillity,” “recollection,”
“contemplation,” and so on—become fighting words when translated into
a different language, time, and place. In Miłosz’s letter, they presage the
break with People’s Poland that would lead him to a very different kind
of isolation, the decades of exile in the West when his writings reached his
compatriots, if at all, chiefly through clandestine channels.39
It is precisely the writing produced under such circumstances—whether
by poets hounded at home or driven into exile by an oppressive state—that
has led Western poets to venerate their Eastern European counterparts in
recent decades. In his introduction to The Faber Book of Political Verse
(1986), the Irish poet Tom Paulin shares his primary targets with his New
Historicist contemporaries. He mocks “the ahistorical school of literary
criticism”—once again the New Critics and their literary offspring—for
fi nding in poetry “a garden of pure perfect forms which effortlessly ‘tran-
scends’ that world of compromise, cruelty, dead language.” For such crit-
ics, “art stands for freedom, while politics is a degrading bondage we must
reject and escape from.” Paulin likewise identifies such notions with specific
geopolitical entities and a large chunk of modern history. “In the Western
democracies,” he comments, “it is still possible for many readers, students
and teachers of literature to share the view that poems exist in a timeless
vacuum or a soundproof museum, and that poets are gifted with the ability
to hold themselves above history, rather like skylarks.” Our ostensibly open
society, with its misguided “liberal belief in the separation of the public
from the private life,” has paradoxically given birth to an airtight, impervi-
ous version of art.40
So far, so good. But here Paulin parts company with the New Historicists
by venturing across what was then the Iron Curtain in search of counter-
models. “Poets such as Zbigniew Herbert, Różewicz, Holub remind us,”
he insists, “that in Eastern Europe, the poet has a responsibility both to
art and to society, and that this responsibility is single and indivisible”: “In
this authoritarian or totalitarian reality there is no private life, no domes-
tic sanctuary, to retire into. Here, any and every action has a political sig-
nificance which cannot be evaded.” Through their commitment, willy-nilly,
to public values, the Eastern Europeans create “the most advanced type
of political poetry” now being written and their less progressive brethren
to the west would do well, he implies, to follow their lead. A key passage
from The Captive Mind that I have cited earlier apparently lends weight to
Paulin’s comments, and I will give it here in full: “In Central and Eastern
22 Introduction
Europe,” Miłosz insists, “the word ‘poet’ has a somewhat different meaning
from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange
words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a ‘bard,’ that his
songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest
to all the citizens.” But Miłosz describes both the strength of this tradition
and its great danger. It is partly the craving to remain on center stage, speak-
ing for and to the nation, that led so many poets, himself included, into the
service of the Soviet “Imperium” following the war, as he argues in The
Captive Mind. Perhaps this is why he cites in the same work not the poet in
revolt, but the poet in retreat, the distanced, disaffected writer—which is to
say, Wordsworth and his controversial lyric—as a prime example of what
the state cannot tolerate.41
Lyricitis
“Good manners, decorum, formality and personal privacy”: these are
the “reactionary” Western traits to which Eastern European poets provide
an antidote in Paulin’s essay. The poet Reginald Gibbons sees the same writ-
ers quite differently. “In much eastern European poetry,” he remarks, “the
idea of privacy seems a defiance of state powers of surveillance, an insistence
that individual powerlessness imposed by the state will not succeed in eradi-
cating identity. . . . What is wanted by the poet is the right to a thoroughly
private life.” Perhaps, Gibbon suggests, the lyric’s creation of a private space
for the individual voice is the best service a poet can render fellow citizens
in a state given to monitoring or confiscating what Miłosz calls “private
thought-property.” The erstwhile poet-dissident Stanisław Barańczak sug-
gests as much in an interview of 1990. “The attempt to save or defend one’s
own personality and the right to individuality generally is,” he insists, “the
most subversive public act” a poet can commit.42
Such notions might seem close to Theodor Adorno’s well-known argu-
ment in “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957). “You experience lyric poetry
as something opposed to society, something wholly individual,” Adorno
explains. “Your feelings insist . . . that lyric expression, having escaped
from the weight of material existence, evoke the image of a life free from
the coercion of reigning practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of
self-preservation. This demand, however, . . . that the lyric word be virginal,
is itself social in nature. It implies a protest against a social situation that
every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold, oppressive.” “The ‘I’
whose voice is heard in the lyric,” he continues, “is an ‘I’ that defi nes and
expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity,” and
Introduction 23
“the greatest lyric works” are those “in which no trace of . . . crude materi-
ality remains.”43
Innate opposition to collectivity and materiality: the defi ning features of
the lyric as Adorno sees it might help to explain the Soviet state’s distrust
of lyric poets on both sides of the political divide. Postrevolutionary Rus-
sia’s most famous lyrical antipodes provide a case in point. “It is as though
all of Russia is divided today between Akhmatovas and Mayakovskys,”
Kornei Chukovsky announced in an influential lecture of 1920. “Between
the two there are millennia. And they hate each other.” According to Chu-
kovsky and others, Akhmatova was the representative of “Old Russia”
with its long, distinguished heritage, while Mayakovsky embodied the still
inchoate potential of the revolutionary future then unfolding. For all their
cultural and ideological differences, though, both poets were diagnosed
with variants of the same disease by Soviet critics in the twenties. This
illness took the form of incurable lyricitis, though its name varied depend-
ing upon the patient. Mayakovsky suffered throughout his brief lifetime
from chronic “mayakovskovitis” (maiakovshchina), while Akhmatova was
apparently plagued for decades by a contagious “akhmatovitis” (akhma-
tovshchina) requiring extended periods of enforced isolation. “Enough of
mayakovshchina,” ran one headline in the state organ Pravda as early as
1921. Party officials were still cautioning that “akhmatovshchina should
be cauterized with a red-hot poker” nearly three decades later. The obdu-
rately individual nature of this ailment appears in the need to personalize
its name in each instance. But the symptoms in each case proved remark-
ably similar.44
Mayakovsky speaks boldly for the nation at large in 1922 when he identi-
fies Akhmatova’s “indoor intimacy” as the sign of her poetic obsolescence.
She will fi nd her “place in the pages of histories of literature,” he concedes,
“but for us, for our age,” she is a “pointless, pathetic and comic anachro-
nism.” Mayakovsky’s own scope may have been larger than the “narrow,
petty, boudoir home-and-family poetry” that Soviet critics found so offen-
sive in his contemporary: “there is nothing in her except love, nothing about
labour, about the collective,” one reviewer complains. But Mayakovsky’s
greater ambitions did not save him from similar accusations. The self-
proclaimed bard of the proletariat was at heart, Trotsky charged, a mere
“Mayakomorphist” who “speaks of the most intimate things, such as love,
as if he were speaking about the migration of nations”; he is “profoundly
personal and individual” in even his most overtly revolutionary epics.45
For Adorno, Mayakovsky’s chief problem would have been his desire to
step outside his “lyric I” to begin with, no matter how worthy the cause
24 Introduction
he espoused. “The less the [poetic] work thematizes the relationship of ‘I’
and society,” Adorno argues, the more fully it expresses, paradoxically,
“the historical relationship of the subject to objectivity, of the individual to
society.” “The lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption,
its detachment from the social surface,” he insists, “is socially motivated
behind the author’s back.” The total “unself-consciousness” of the author
is crucial to the lyric’s fulfilling its—unwitting—social function. The critic
may be sentimental. But the poet must remain naive in order to create the
truly lyrical work of art that constitutes his or her inadvertent contribution
to social criticism.46
In his 1934 address, Bukharin saw just such a hermetic protest at work
in the prerevolutionary poetry of Boris Pasternak. “The bloody hash, the
huckstering barter of the bourgeois world were profoundly loathsome to
[Pasternak],” he notes, and so the poet “seceded, he shut himself up in the
mother-of-pearl shell of individual experiences, delicate and subtle. . . . He
is the embodiment of chaste but self-absorbed labour over verbal form . . .
profoundly personal—and hence, of necessity, constricted.” Certainly the
lyric retreat from society may constitute an oblique form of dissent—etymo-
logically the dissident is, after all, one who insists on sitting apart from the
rest. And a programmatically collectivist society may give special resonance
to this singular mode of resistance, as I have suggested. But what of self-
conscious lyricism as a form of social protest?47
Adorno rules out this possibility—but the later career of Akhmatova
challenges his theory. I will deal with her masterworks Requiem (1935–40)
and the Poem without a Hero (1940–66) at some length in my third and
fourth chapters. Here, though, I want only to call attention to a distinctive
generic form of “double-voicedness” that affects one of Requiem’s most
moving segments, “The Sentence” (Prigovor), the seventh in the sequence
of ten lyrics that form the poem’s narrative core. Requiem was published
in its entirety in Russia only long after Akhmatova’s death. But “The Sen-
tence” appeared without its compromising title in 1940 both in the Soviet
journal Zvezda and in Akhmatova’s collection From Six Books (Iz shesti
knig)—her fi rst volume to see print in Soviet Russia in nearly twenty
years—where she gave it the intentionally misleading date of 1934. (It was
in fact composed in the summer of 1939, as Requiem’s full text reveals.)
The poem reads as follows:
And the stony word descended

On my still living breast.
No matter, I was ready,
I’ll fi nd a way to deal with this.
Introduction 25
I’ve got a lot to do today:

I need to strike my memory dead,
I’ve got to petrify my soul,
I have to learn to live again.
If not . . . the hot rustling of summer,

like a holiday outside my window.
I foresaw this long ago,
The bright day, the deserted home.
Why should the poem’s dating prove crucial to its publication? In August,
1939, Akhmatova’s only child, Lev Gumilev, was sentenced to ten years in
a Stalinist labor camp chiefly for the crime of being his parents’ son. (His
father, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was executed for alleged counterrevolu-
tionary activities in 1921.) That date, along with the incriminating title,
would have been more than enough not just to block the poem’s publica-
tion. It might well have condemned Akhmatova herself to the fate, camp or
prison, she had thus far managed to escape.48
During what proved to be a brief respite from earlier strictures against
publishing her work, Akhmatova succeeded in shepherding this poem, in its
strategically abbreviated form, into print under the protective camouflage
of old-fashioned bourgeois lyricism. “Akhmatova’s poems were written long
ago, during the difficult period of the bourgeois family’s decline,” the Soviet
critic V. Pertsov explains in a contemporary review of From Six Books. (It
is worth noting that the review, like the volume itself, were the products
of shifts in official policy, not in public or private taste.) The times have
changed—“the seventeen Soviet years” that separate her last two volumes
mark “a geological era,” he comments—but Akhmatova remains the same:
“Her constant theme is strange, tragic love, love as punishment and suf-
fering . . . the woman’s amorous self-crucifi xion (samoraspiatie).” Akhma-
tova’s outmoded charm and strikingly “narrow experience of life” serve
chiefly to confi rm, he concludes, “our new purpose in life, our orientation
towards the general, not the particular or private (chastnoe), toward the fate
of all mankind,” an orientation that eludes the misguided poet who persists
in “sacrificing herself for love” time and again.49
Memory, loss, unhappy love, a self profoundly at odds with the world
beyond its bounds: Akhmatova laid claim to these quintessentially lyric
topoi long ago, Pertsov notes. But her lyric boxes sometimes contain trap-
doors and false bottoms, she warns in the Poem without a Hero. 50 For
readers like Pertsov, who knew chiefly the earlier work, the key to this brief
poem must have seemed painfully obvious. The fi rst line’s “stony word”
marks the lover’s inevitable rejection. And the second stanza’s chilling “to
26 Introduction
do” list is merely Akhmatova exercising once again her unfortunate ten-
dency to self-punishment following yet another romantic abandonment.
The radiant summer holiday outside her door in the poem’s fi nal stanza was
likely taken by such critics as the joyous Soviet reality—“life keeps getting
better and happier,” the Stalinist slogan ran—in which the poet willfully
refuses to participate.
Any admirer of Requiem will instantly see how wrong such a reading
would be. This poem about isolation yields one interpretation when read
in isolation—that is, outside its assigned position in Requiem—and quite
another when approached in the company of voices that Akhmatova has
assembled for it in her distinctively lyrical epic. “Amorous self-crucifi xion”:
could Akhmatova have had Pertsov’s phrase in mind when she called Requi-
em’s climactic tenth poem “Crucifi xion” (Raspiatie)? The dates she gives
for the poem’s composition, 1940–43, make this at least a possibility. In any
case, “Crucifi xion” only underscores what Requiem’s readers have known
from the start: the suffering “The Sentence” describes is anything but self-
infl icted. “Crucifi xion” marks the moment in the lyrical sequence when the
agonized speaker, who has lost both husband and son to Stalin’s purges, is
fi nally able to frame her own sufferings in a richer, more resonant cultural
context. The community of bereaved women she commemorates in the epi-
logue is both suggested and sacralized here through the figure of the Mother
who takes center stage in Akhmatova’s imaginative recreation of Christ’s
death: “But no one even dared to glance / There, where the Mother stood
silently.” To return to the seventh lyric in its larger context: the “stony word”
that falls on the speaker’s chest is of course no lover’s rebuff. It is instead
akin to the decrees of the “Stalin Epigram” that rain like iron weights on the
bodies of the living. And the spiritual self-annihilation that “The Sentence”
presents as a paradoxical preface to new life is merely the continuation of a
process already begun by the state: “Stalinism means the killing of the inner
self,” Wat comments. 51
What is most lyrical about “The Sentence”—its articulation of intensely
private anguish—is exactly what creates its communal value within the
framework of the larger poem. Giving voice to mute suffering and shared
solitude—“Can you describe this?” a blue-lipped woman asks in the poem’s
opening—is the fi rst step toward creating the community that Akhmatova
evokes in Requiem’s closing lines: “For them I have woven a broad shroud /
Of their own poor words, which I overheard.”52 Pace Adorno, Akhmatova’s
clear, canny consciousness of “The Sentence”’s dual existence as both soli-
tary lament and social gesture permits her to actualize it in two radically
different contexts. “The Sentence” enters Soviet public life by masquerading
Introduction 27
as that obsolete art form, the purely private lyric, while performing its true
public service in private, through illicit manuscripts or clandestine recita-
tions. Pertsov was right to note the persistence of Akhmatova’s lyric gifts,
though neither he nor the Soviet censors could have imagined the subversive
purposes to which they would be put.
Soviet poetry is “a poetry of gladness, profoundly buoyant and opti-
mistic, essentially linked with the triumphant march of the millions and
reflecting the tremendous creative impulses, the struggle, the building of
a new world,” Bukharin announces in “Poetry, Poetics, and the Problems
of Poetry”: “Here we fi nd no fog of mysticism, no poetry of the blind, no
tragic loneliness of a lost personality, no inconsolable grief of individualism
. . . [no] elegant bric-à-brac of the boudoir or the drawing-room.” If Akhma-
tova’s poem shows how private grief may be turned to social purposes in
Requiem, then Mandelstam demonstrates the no less subversive functions
of bourgeois bric-à-brac in a little poem, “I drink to the military asters” (Ia
p’iu za voennye astry), composed during what Akhmatova called the “rela-
tively vegetarian” early thirties. 53
The better-known “Stalin Epigram” derives its defiant force from what
James Longenbach calls its “little collection of fanciful metaphors.”54 The
bag of lyric tricks Mandelstam draws upon in “I drink to the military asters”
consists instead of synechdoches evoking the bourgeois imperial Europe that
played the capitalist Antichrist to Soviet Russia’s messianic Marx:
I drink to the military asters, to all that they’ve scolded me for,
To a noble fur coat, to asthma, to a bilious Petersburg day,
To the music of Savoy pine trees, to benzine in the Champs-Elysées,

To the roses inside of Rolls Royces, to Parisian pictures’ oil paint.
I drink to the waves of Biscay, to cream in Alpine jugs,

To British ladies’ ruddy grandeur, to quinine from distant colonies,
I drink, but I’ve not yet decided which of the two I will pick:
A sparkling Asti Spumante or a Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
“I have strange taste,” Mandelstam admits in a 1909 letter to the Symbol-

ist poet Viacheslav Ivanov: “I love the patches of electric light on Lake
Leman, the deferential lackeys, the noiseless fl ight of the elevator, the
marble vestibule of the hotel, and the Englishwomen who play Mozart in
a half-darkened salon for an audience of two or three official listeners.”
He himself was guilty of composing what postrevolutionary critics called
“chamber poetry”—but as the son of a Jewish tanner, Mandelstam was
hardly to the manor born, and the early letter’s recherché predilections
28 Introduction
betray the anxious longings of an outsider with his nose pressed to the
window of fi n de siècle European culture. 55
The later poem-toast is a different matter. Soviet Jews had to leave Russia
in order to become Russians, or so the joke once ran; their internal pass-
ports excluded them from true Russianness by indicating “Jewish” under
nationality. It took a proletarian revolution for the Jewish tradesman’s son
to be branded with what one unsympathetic contemporary called the “man-
delstamp” of “bourgeois Western civilization.” “This class struggle plays
hell with your poetry,” John Reed reportedly told his Bolshevik comrades-
in-arms. By the thirties, Mandelstam had discovered that poetry can play
hell with the class struggle as well. The Soviet Literary Encyclopedia of
1932 charged him with the “ideological perpetuation of capitalism and its
culture” through his politically dubious oeuvre. But Mandelstam was famil-
iar with such accusations by then, and he had his answer ready in “I drink
to the military asters,” where he sets avant-garde épatage in reverse by way
of his bourgeois slap in the face of politically progressive taste.56
The toast is of course a public gesture par excellence, though Mandel-
stam could hardly have expected to see his poetic taunt in Soviet print. (It
appeared for the fi rst time in its entirety only in an émigré publication in
1961.) The defiant outsider at a feast from which he had pointedly been
excluded still managed to make himself heard, though, to judge by the evi-
dence of the Soviet critic A. Selivansky, who specifically cites Mandelstam’s
Rolls Royces, Savoy pines, and Parisian paintings as evidence of the poet’s
ineradicably bourgeois inclinations in an essay on “The Decline of Acmeism”
(1934). (Acmeism was the poetic movement to which both Akhmatova and
Mandelstam had belonged before the revolution). And at least one Soviet
poet apparently felt the affront of this toast so keenly that he rose from
the dead to avenge the state’s sullied honor. Sergei Esenin had committed
suicide in 1925. Still, Esenin “once even tried to beat Mandelstam,” the
critic Aleksandr Kovalenkov insists. “And with good reason. After all he
was the one who wrote: ‘I drink to the military asters . . . the benzine of the
Champs-Elysées.’”57
If the lyric has been pressed into service as “a weapon in the class struggle,”
as another critic of the Acmeists asserts, then Mandelstam hands his ene-
mies their ammunition himself. “Decadent art,” “gastronomic satisfaction,”
“symbols of the ‘high life,’” and “other typical categories of the exploiting
class” such as the army (the “military asters” represent imperial epaulets),
the nobility, capitalist manufacturers, colonialism (the quinine), even the
church (Châteauneuf-du-Pape): he squeezes all these ideological taboos
into the space of eight exceptionally efficient lines, Aleksandr Zholkovsky
Introduction 29
comments. Suspect foreign place names (including a conspicuously anach-

ronistic, un-Soviet Petersburg) stand alongside product placements avant
la lettre (Rolls Royce, Asti Spumante), and an impressive array of russi-
fied foreign borrowings (benzin, kabina, khinin, and so on). If Akhmatova
uses her alleged bourgeois self-absorption as a form of camouflage in “The
Sentence,” then Mandelstam takes the opposite tack in this aggressively
bourgeois “baring of the device.” No need for critical unmasking here. The
ideological key to what might seem under other circumstances to be the
poet’s own quirky personal tastes is self-evident. Mandelstam hands it to
his critics on a plate, alongside the quinine and the cream. Even his asthma
is ideologically motivated, Igor Chinnov remarks: “The illness evokes the
image of Proust, who glorified the French aristocracy.” Mandelstam’s lyrical
tactics may be radically different than Akhmatova’s. Like hers, though, his
strategies are both highly self-conscious and strikingly effective.58
“Probably I’m just an ordinary bourgeois / defender of individual rights,
I understand / the word freedom without special class distinctions”: the
opening lines of Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Fire” (1983) constitute both a
defense of lyric individuality and a refusal of collectivist class politics man-
dated from above. They also mark the break with another collectivist ethos,
that of mass resistance to state oppression, that I mentioned earlier. 59 Zaga-
jewski’s compatriot Zbigniew Herbert embraces his role of chronicler to a
nation’s woes in his collection Report from the Besieged City (1984)—but he
too draws upon a discredited bourgeois concept to explain his own and his
fellow artists’ protests. “It didn’t require great character at all / our refusal
disagreement and resistance” he insists in “The Power of Taste” (1984):
we had a shred of necessary courage

but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
Yes, taste
in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience . . .
“So aesthetics can be helpful in life,” Herbert concludes. “One should not
neglect the study of beauty.” Militant bourgeois aestheticism and subver-
sive stylistic analysis join forces in the underground army of artists arrayed
against the state in Herbert’s lines.60
Herbert himself laments elsewhere, though, the lyric losses that attend
the poet’s assumption of collective responsibilities, however noble and nec-
essary: “we took public affairs on our thin shoulders,” he complains to a
fellow poet-dissident, Ryszard Krynicki, “recording suffering the struggle
with tyranny with lying.” “But—you have to admit,” he concludes, “we had
opponents despicably small.”
30 Introduction
in our poems Ryszard there is so little joy—daughter of the gods

too few luminous dusks mirrors wreaths of rapture
nothing but dark psalmodies stammering of animulae
urns of ashes in the burned garden . . .
what strength of spirit is needed to strike

beating blindly with despair against despair
a spark of light word of reconciliation
so the dancing circle will last forever on the thick grass

so the birth of a child and every beginning is blessed
The spark of light, the endless dancing circle on the grass: such lyric trifles
are abandoned only at a cost, Herbert suggests. But what exactly is this
cost? What good are poems that do not serve the greater good?61
“O, reason not the need!” Lear begs his daughters: “Our basest beg-
gars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous.” That poorest thing appears to
be poetry itself in Mandelstam’s “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” (1937),
where the poet assembles his own ragtag collective of cripples armed with
“wooden crutches” and led by the unlikely duo of Cervantes’s mournful
knight and Hašek’s Švejk. For and against whom does this haphazard army
fight? Is it pro- or anti-Soviet? Does it constitute a poetic third column of
sorts? I won’t address these much-contested questions here. One thing is
clear, though: the poetic economy binding Mandelstam’s unprepossessing
warriors is anything but Soviet. “The superfluous alone unites us (Nam
soiuzno lish’ to, chto izbytochno),” he proclaims in the poem’s seventh seg-
ment, and the Russian phrase underscores the perversity of his poetic credo.
The name of the Soviet state itself (Sovetskii Soiuz) is conspicuously imbed-
ded in Mandelstam’s imagined community (“nam soiuzno”). But the unify-
ing force Mandelstam envisions could not be further from the utilitarian
ethos guiding Soviet ideology. His programmatic “superfluity” or “excess”
(izbytok) sounds suspiciously close to the parasitic bourgeois aesthetics that
critics saw exemplified in his writing. Certainly the “comradely commu-
nity” (tovarishchestvo) Mandelstam imagines “tapping around the age’s
outskirts” in the poem’s fi fth segment hardly seems based on utility, uniting
as it does “Schweik’s flattened smile” and Quixote’s “bird-like lance” with
a feckless fraternity of prosthetics.62
Mandelstam himself spoke of “I drink to the military asters” as a poetic
joke: “They didn’t even notice the preposterous wine I chose,” he com-
plained to his wife. But its aggressive frivolity provides its social punch,
as I have argued. The tone of his toast is worlds apart from the high seri-
ousness that dominates the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier”—but the
Introduction 31
mismatched weapons and unexpected comrades-in-arms of its fi fth segment

suggest affi nities nonetheless. In a relentlessly use-driven society, whatever
its guiding ideology, uselessness can have its purposes. “Lyric poetry, how-
ever responsible,” Seamus Heaney comments, “always has an element of the
untrammelled about it”: “There is a certain jubilation and truancy at the
heart of an inspiration. There is a sensation of liberation and abundance
which is the antithesis of every hampered and deprived condition.” This in
itself is enough to justify what Heaney calls “lyric action” in a “world that
is notably hampered and deprived.”63
What does he mean by “lyric action”? Like other anglophone poets,
Heaney has looked to Eastern Europe for inspiration in recent decades. It
has been the “tragic destiny,” he remarks, of certain Russian and Eastern
European poets “to feel [the] ‘call to witness’ more extremely than others.”
With his compatriot Tom Paulin, he reveres the “heroic names” of those
poets called upon by history to bear witness, to express “poetry’s solidarity
with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged.” Wit-
ness, solidarity, social justice: we apparently fi nd ourselves once more in the
land of acknowledged legislation to which Paulin opposes the disengaged
art of the West. Indeed, the phrase I have quoted derives from a sentence
that seems initially to reinforce this impression: for Mandelstam, Heaney
comments, “lyric action constitutes radical witness.”64
Heaney’s notion of witness is more unpredictable than these remarks
suggest. Postrevolutionary Russia was profoundly at odds with what Max
Eastman calls the “totally impractical exuberance” of lyric poetry. The
observation might be taken straight from Heaney’s essays on Mandelstam,
where he celebrates time and again the verbal energies he sees as the Russian
poet’s most vital form of lyric testimony. In the late writing, Heaney argues,
“the hedonism and jubilation of purely lyric creation develop an intrinsically
moral dimension.” In Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), Richard Poirier speaks
of “a human need for superfluousness.” Though “the superfluous has to do
with excess and luxury and exuberance and uselessness and desire, none
of which are usually thought necessary to the rational and moral conduct
of life,” he explains, the longing for the unnecessary is nonetheless “a need
anterior to ideology which can nonetheless create an ideology of freedom.”
For Heaney, one suspects, the ideological allegiance of the troops assembled
in the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier” would be less important than the
intricate, exhilarating verbal play that makes the poem’s political affi lia-
tions so elusive to begin with. Lyricism in and of itself as a deeply ethical
stance: this notion, as much as his sense of collective responsibility, brings
Heaney close to the Eastern European poets he admires.65
32 Introduction
The Battle of the Bards

I lived in the plural, we lived
in the plural, among friends
strange to us and friendly enemies,
so rarely on my own, our own, so little
loneliness in such a lonely
land. Even poems said
we, we poems, we lines, we
metaphors, we points. The I
slept like a child beneath the cloth
of a distracted gaze.
—Adam Zagajewski, “In the Plural” (1983)
“I hate the builders of dungeons in the air,” Emerson protests in one

of his lectures. Do lyric poets create such dungeons or help us to escape
their fetters? Is the lyric a miniature mockup of Jameson’s prison-house
or the place where we go to be sprung from such linguistic prisons? I do
not see these questions as merely rhetorical. When a genre invites widely
divergent defi nitions, the truth is often to be found somewhere in between,
possibly in the shape of an ongoing negotiation between the two extremes.
Near the end of The Government of the Tongue (1989), Heaney speaks of
the “problematic relation between artistic excellence and truth, between
Ariel and Prospero, between poetry as impulse and poetry as criticism of
life.” Criticism of life, or even its wholesale reshaping, he hints elsewhere:
how do we reconcile poetry’s urge “to be Prospero, harnessed to the ratio-
nal project of settling mankind into a cosmic security” with the purely
lyric verve Heaney celebrates in Mandelstam and others? What happens,
in another possible scenario, if Ariel turns his back on his lyrist’s calling
in order to enlist, voluntarily or otherwise, in Prospero’s corps of subor-
dinate spirits?66
“We are not prophets, not even precursors,” Mandelstam laments in an
early lyric. Like so many of his own poetic precursors, contemporaries, and
descendants, he longed for the “prophet’s staff and ribbons” that would help
him lead his persecuted people into the promised land. The whimsical lyr-
ist who empties his sack of linguistic tricks into the “Stalin Epigram” also
claims to speak for his silenced nation at large in that poem’s opening: “We
live without feeling the land beneath us” (my italics). The poet says “we”—
but his own voice is clearly the exception to the rule he sets forth in the next
phrase. “Our speeches can’t be heard ten steps away,” he roars, and his lines
Introduction 33
about cowed silence eventually carried, as he apparently intended, to the

ears of the “Kremlin mountaineer” himself.67
This poet-pariah is a far cry from the willful isolationist described by
Bakhtin, Adorno, and others. He sets himself up, improbably enough, as a
peer and rival to the Great Teacher himself. The poet who takes dictation
from the muse in private may turn around and use his rebellious rhymes
to take on dictators. Or even to replace them, at least in overheated poetic
imaginations. “We alone are the Government of Planet Earth,” Velimir Khle-
bnikov trumpets in his “Appeal by the Presidents of Planet Earth” (1917),
and his self-chosen fi rst name, Velimir, means just that, “world ruler.” “We
artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control,”
Ezra Pound warns in 1914. There is little need to rehearse the dangerous
directions that Pound’s taste for power took in subsequent decades.68
In interwar Europe, Lucy McDiarmid notes, “the poet’s wish to create
community through the living voice was complicated from the start by the
existence of his nightmare doppelgänger, the dictator . . . [By] unifying
a large group of people, he seemed to be achieving the poets’ own goal,
and by their very means.” This problem assumed peculiar resonance in
the Soviet Union. Like Marx and Engels (who especially admired Shelley),
Stalin was drawn to poetry as a young man, and the onetime “versifier”
and seminarian proved peculiarly susceptible to the Russian cult of the
poet-prophet. In Stalinist Russia, Benedikt Sarnov remarks, the “position
of prophet was already occupied.” “The greatest genius of all ages and
nations, coryphaeus of learning, glorious commander, founding father, cre-
ator, originator, dearest friend of physical fitness, etc., etc.” also assumed
the role, not surprisingly, of “interpreter and prophet” for the nation, and
indeed for the globe itself. Other applicants need not apply. And woe to
any would-be poetic interlopers.69
Sarnov’s list of epithets reminds us that Romantic poets were not alone
in falling prey to the nineteenth century’s penchant for messianic histo-
riosophy with glorious beginnings and preordained conclusions. Another
originator and founding father, Karl Marx, acquired early on a taste for
the “new Romantic literature” which remained unaltered until his death,
Isaiah Berlin comments: hence Marx’s own language, not surprisingly,
is “that of a herald and a prophet.” “A spectre is haunting Europe—the
spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into
a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and
Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.” The famous opening
of “The Communist Manifesto’ (1848) sounds strangely familiar to read-
ers of another prophetic text written less than two decades earlier. “The
34 Introduction
Polish nation did not die” at the hands of the “Satanic trinity” of Euro-
pean empires who sought to erase it, Mickiewicz thunders in his grandilo-
quent Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage (1832): “Its
body lieth in the grave; but its spirit has descended into the abyss, that is
into the private lives of people who suffer slavery in their country. . . . But
on the third day the soul shall return again to the body, and the Nation
shall arise, and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.” We have only
to substitute “Proletariat” for “Nation” to translate the passage’s last two
phrases from Mickiewiczian nationalist messianism into Marxist materi-
alist eschatology.70
Even the most ardent champions, or critics, of lyric isolationism agree
that the genre enters, knowingly or not, into a variety of relationships
with the world beyond its bounds. What are these relationships and how
does the lyrist express them? The very nature of the “lyric I,” or “lyric
speaker,” or “lyric hero”—the term varies from critic to critic and country
to country—embroils us in problems of defi nition. “I,” “you,” and “we”:
these terms may be the lyric poet’s stock in trade, but their meanings are
anything but clear. Like all personal pronouns, they are what Jakobson
calls “shifters.” Their referents are contextually determined, and alter
depending on who uses them, and how, and when. My “I” is your “you”;
your “we” may or may not include me, just as my “you” may be either
inclusive or exclusive in English at least. My “we,” fi nally, may strike you
as mere rhetoric, a linguistic trick inadvertently expressing not solidarity,
but solipsism. And vice versa.71
“I am called Million—since for millions / I love and suffer torments,”
Mickiewicz’s Konrad exults in Forefather’s Eve, Part III (1832). “We are
hordes upon hordes and hordes,” Blok boasts of the Bolshevik “Scythians”
in his poem by that name. “150,000,000 speak through my lips,” Mayak-
ovsky crows in his fi rst postrevolutionary epic. “A nation of a hundred mil-
lion shrieks” through “my tortured mouth,” Akhmatova insists in Requiem.
What is the function of the lyrist’s “I” in traditions and ideologies—be they
oppressive or oppositional—that live in the fi rst person plural as a matter
of principle? In the chapters that follow, I will trace the relationship of the
poet’s “I” to the various “we’s”—the nation, the people, history’s victims or
its victors, even humanity at large—that have claimed her or his allegiance
in modern Russia and Poland, even as I explore the potential dangers, poetic
and otherwise, attendant upon such demands. I will also explore the dis-
tinctive “lyric strategies” of twentieth-century Russian and Polish poetry,
strategies that challenge accepted notions of lyric engagement in the modern
Anglo-American literary and critical tradition.72
Introduction 35
A Tale of Two Pronouns

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
—St. Paul (I Corinthians 13:9)
“All personality (lichnost’) aside. Make way for anonymous prose.”

Mandelstam’s proclamation comes, as I’ve noted, from an essay on prose’s
victory in the literary battles waged and won during Russia’s years of war
and revolution. Though poetry surfaces only briefly in “Literary Moscow,”
Mandelstam clearly recognizes both the generic and the social implications
of his statement. A revolution fought in the name of the masses has created
a new mass readership, and this readership, in turn, demands a new kind of
writing en masse. It requires “the pure action of verbal masses, bypassing
the author’s personality (lichnost’), bypassing everything accidental, per-
sonal (lichnoe) and catastrophic (the lyric).” The lyric in parentheses: could
there be a more graphic display of the genre’s alleged limitations? It huddles
in its little brackets as History, Narrative, and the Masses pass it by. Cer-
tainly Mandelstam himself feared that he and his age had parted company:
“The revolution stripped me of my ‘biography,’ my sense of personal (lich-
noi) significance. . . . I offer it gifts for which it has no need,” he mourns in
a 1928 questionnaire.73
But there is another way to read Mandelstam’s shorthand definition of the
lyric in retreat. McGann decries the Romantic lyric’s tendency to traffic in
the “personal, subjective and local signs” that it works to convert into “cos-
mic” drama. By confining his lyrics to “private, or generally, inconsequen-
tial, unchronicled, and plastic experience,” Levinson argues, “Wordsworth
suppresses all those large, recorded events . . . not so obsequious to the imagi-
nation.” Mandelstam’s accidental poetics apparently lay him open to similar
charges, just as his response to the later questionnaire might well be taken for
a confession of both personal and generic failure. The fi nal adjective in his
little triumvirate challenges such notions though: why should the intimate,
incidental lyric be “catastrophic”? Perhaps it is because, pace Levinson, the
dangers of suppression go both ways. Lyric poets may indeed be tempted to
erase or resist history—but this resistance may be motivated by the tendency
of “large recorded events,” the action of masses, verbal and otherwise, to
suppress the inconsequential, unchronicled stuff of which both individual
lives and works of art are made. A lyric has never stopped a tank, Heaney
cautions. But tanks can easily crush the fragile forms—be they artifacts,
their creators, or their possessors—that make up our humdrum quotidian,
as Miłosz observes in his exquisite “Song on Porcelain” (1947):
36 Introduction
Rose-colored cup and saucer,

Flowery demitasses:
You lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.
Winds from across the meadow
Sprinkle the banks with down;
A torn apple tree’s show
Falls on the muddy path;
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.
Before the fi rst red tones

Begin to warm the sky
The earth wakes up, and moans.
It is the small sad cry
Of cups and saucers cracking,
The masters’ precious dream
Of roses, of mowers raking,
And shepherds on the lawn.
The black underground stream
Swallows the frozen swan.
This morning, as I walked past,
The porcelain troubled me most.
The blackened plain spreads out

To where the horizon blurs
In a litter of handle and spout,
A lively pulp that stirs
And crunches under my feet.
Pretty, useless foam:
Your stained colors are sweet
Spattered in dirty waves
Flecking the fresh black loam
In the mounds of these new graves.
In sorrow and pain and cost,
Sir, porcelain troubles me most.
(tr. Czeslaw Miłosz and Robert Pinsky)
Bourgeois bric-à-brac once more—but with a difference. Miłosz’s shattered

crockery is moving precisely because it mediates between daily existence
and the realm of art. It demonstrates how easily both worlds fall victim to
the forces of history. The broken saucers exemplify both the fragile forms of
Introduction 37
a vanished quotidian and the no less fragile human beings that once inhab-
ited it, beings now “spattered,” like their dishes, “in dirty waves / Flecking
the fresh black loam / In the mounds of these new graves.” The formal pat-
terns of Miłosz’s poem, beautifully sustained in the translation, commemo-
rate the forms, human and otherwise, that have fallen prey to the “armored
columns” passing periodically through human history: “Not many works
escape the sands and fi res of history,” Herbert reminds us.74
The tacit metaphor that animates Miłosz’s poem and provides its unex-
pected pathos—why should porcelain trouble us most?—suggests another
way of construing the relation between the poet-legislator’s “I” and the
“we” for whom he or she aims to speak. The poet-prophet is ideally larger
than life, more powerful than opponents and constituents alike. “The poet
remembers,” Miłosz thunders in “You Who Wronged” (1950): “The words
are written down, the deed, the date. / And you’d have done better with a
winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.” His words
were in fact inscribed on the monument erected in Gdańsk in 1981 to com-
memorate shipyard workers killed in strikes against the state. Elsewhere,
though, Miłosz insists upon the poet’s “private obligations,” duties sharing
little with the lyrical self-absorption that New Historicists have ascribed to
Wordsworth and his descendants. Wordsworth, Bromwich argues, opposes
“the abstracting tendency of modernization” with the capacity, cultivated
through lyric poetry, “to feel as an individual being rather than as a member
of an aggregate being.” Miłosz is in this sense very much a Wordsworthian.
The lyrist’s duty, as he sees it, does not involve fleeing history or society.
It demands “defending the privacy of the individual” from the dangers of
one collectivizing ideology or another, be it socialist, nationalist, or that of
modern mass culture generally.75
What matters in this line of lyric thinking is not the poet’s power, but his
or her vulnerability to the various historical forces that threaten not just
poems or porcelain, but the individual lives they exemplify. When Man-
delstam speaks of his age “bypassing the author’s personality,” he has, I
suspect, something similar in mind. Indeed his very syntax suggests this
possibility: “the pure action of verbal masses, [in] bypassing the author’s
personality [is also] bypassing everything accidental, personal, and cata-
strophic (the lyric),” or so we might emend his phrase to read. The poet’s
personality is significant, in other words, not because it seeks an exemp-
tion from its age, or because it aspires to some realm of transcendent, ahis-
torical being. Just the opposite. Its very perishability permits it to represent
other beings and things that are likewise accidental and personal and thus
prone to catastrophic erasure by history. The poet symbolizes, in this vision,
38 Introduction
not humanity en masse, but humans in particular, the individual beings of

which the species is made, and the things that these beings choose to make
and keep around them in an effort to imbue the world with what Mandel-
stam calls “teleological warmth.” The poet’s task, Szymborska claims, is
“to pick up what’s been trampled and lost in the triumphal procession of
objective laws.” And to grant it, Mandelstam might add, a precarious safe
haven within the tenuous parentheses of lyric form.76
“I liked him as he did not look for an ideal object,” Miłosz writes in
“Bobo’s Metamorphosis”:
When he heard: “Only the object which does not exist
Is perfect and pure,” he blushed and turned away.
In every pocket he carried pencils, pads of paper

Together with crumbs of bread, the accidents of life.
What happens if we retrieve “Tintern Abbey” from among the world’s

would-be perfect objects and place it amid the scraps and accidents of life
instead, as both Mandelstam’s defi nition and the poem itself invite? Word-
sworth’s lyric, Levinson charges, is a “fragile affair, artfully assembled by
acts of exclusion.” Of course it is: the frailty of human making as balanced
against “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world”
is one of the poem’s great themes. The lyric tests the boundaries of human
belonging and exclusion, Fletcher claims. His comments might be made to
order for “Tintern Abbey.” Human habitation, much like lyric poems, is a
matter of considered, provisional exclusions and inclusions, the poem sug-
gests. “Hedge-rows” and “plots of cottage-ground” shaped through agri-
cultural acts of exclusion may vanish as readily as the verses that mimic
the farmer’s labors (the word verse itself derives from the Latin term for the
plowman’s repeated turnings). Acts of kindness may be overlooked; faint
lines of smoke “sent up in silence” may go unrecognized and unread; city
and country dwellers alike may fi nd themselves “houseless” in an inhospi-
table reality.77
In this line of reading, Wordsworth’s controversial poem helps us to realize
not the lyric’s limits, but its possibilities. Or rather, we come to see that these
limits and possibilities are one and the same. Miłosz picked wisely when he
chose “Tintern Abbey” as his emblem of resistance to an ostensibly limitless
state. For Edmundson, Wordsworth’s poem becomes a paradigmatic modern
text not in its willful evasion of reality, but through the ongoing, inconclu-
sive negotiations it conducts between self and society, “I” and “we”: “The
self that achieves its freedom by skeptically regarding all established beliefs,
social and religious, and making a sustaining myth about its own identity,
Introduction 39
has a vulnerable and tenuous being. Always it is in danger of being shattered

by loss or suffering in that it has no generally accredited story to tell about
how we’ll meet again in a future life, or how later generations will be free
thanks to our sacrifice.” “Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!”
Szymborska exclaims in her poem “Psalm.” She has in mind the permeable
lines that divide one principality or republic from another. The same might
be said, though, of the shaky little poem-states created by Wordsworth and
his latter-day descendants in Britain and elsewhere.78
Wordsworth’s speaker has “no generally accredited story to tell.” Is this a
strength or a weakness? The answer depends largely on whether you see the
lyric as offering its visions chiefly under the sign of completion, or whether
you also admit the possibility of a lyric that is tentative both by choice and
by necessity. In his study of Miłosz, Davie laments “the insufficiency of the
lyric mode for registering, except glancingly, the complexity” of modern
experience. As Christopher Ricks comments, though, “even the most capa-
cious of the ancient genres, epic and tragedy, are vantage-points from which
certain things—and only certain things—can be seen and shown.” Part of
the lyric’s function is thus to ask if the very “idea of sufficiency—whether
sufficiency as achievement or sufficiency to life—is itself insufficient.” “His-
torically, from the Greek Anthology to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, lyric
has been seen to occupy itself chiefly with the private life,” Helen Vendler
observes—but such perceptions run the risk, she continues, of overlook-
ing the lyric’s function as “provisional symbolic structures”: “Since no lyric
can be equal to the whole complexity of private and public life at any given
moment . . . each poem says, ‘Viewed from this angle, at this moment, in
this year, with this focus, the subject appears to me in this light.” The lyric
not only does not seek permanence and impermeability; it questions the very
possibility of such notions.79
The lyric is thus partial in two senses. It is incomplete, and it is partisan;
it represents, by necessity, a particular, provisional point of view. Cameron
reads the white boundaries surrounding the lyric on the printed page as
pointing to the genre’s willed divorce from history. They could just as easily
be seen as signaling its self-conscious insufficiency, its built-in limitations. A
poem’s margins, after all, are scarcely carved in stone; they alter from one
printed version to the next. The company each poem keeps in its different
printed incarnations is equally varied, ranging from footnotes to want-ads
depending upon the venue. And as students of modern Eastern European
poetry know, these margins disappear entirely in versions sung or recited by
heart: unprinted poems have a special function in cultures where the state
controls the means of publication. The soul may select its own society—but
40 Introduction
the same does not hold true for lyric poems. If the modern lyric does aspire
to be context-free, this may simply be wishful thinking, since it has in real-
ity so little say in choosing its neighbors. War and Peace or Buddenbrooks
are unlikely to be memorized in their entirety, reprinted from soup to nuts
in an anthology of everybody’s favorite novels, or copied from some reader’s
flawed memory onto one website or another.
In the lyric, Cameron acknowledges, “meaning is consciousness carved
out of the recognition of its own limitation.” This recognition, though, is
born of “despair of the possibility of completed stories, of stories whose con-
clusions are known, and consequently it is despair of complete knowledge.”
And this despair, in turn, prompts the lyric to sever “incident from context,
as if only isolation could guarantee coherence.” But the incomplete stories
of lyric poetry may also lead, as Cameron’s own exemplary poet suggests,
to a sense of liberation, to the openness that creates “a fairer house than
prose, / superior of windows, more numerous of doors.” “Every beginning /
is only a sequel after all, / and the book of events / is always open halfway
through,” Szymborska observes in “Love at First Sight.” Like many of the
poets I discuss in the chapters that follow, Szymborska experienced early on
the seduction of fi nished stories as embodied in the large-scale narration of
past, present, and future alike offered by Soviet Marxism. Only after her
initial passion had passed into disillusionment—shades of “The Prelude”!—
did she discover the value of having, like Wordsworth, only unaccredited
tales to tell. The unauthorized tales she relays in her mature writing become
her way of challenging the human need for official stories generally.80
One way of conceiving the story I myself tell here would be as a tale of
two pronouns—the lyric “I” and the public “we” that may signify either
affi liation with a state that claims to embody the nation, or resistance to
that state in the name of an oppressed people. Or it may serve, alternatively,
to indicate the desire for this collective function: the unacknowledged leg-
islator’s dream. I have argued for the lyric as a peculiarly context-driven
genre, a genre both invested in and testing the limitations that set it apart
from its larger environment, literary and otherwise. Hans Robert Jauss
speaks of the shifting “horizon of expectations” that individual literary
works generate at different points in their reception history.81 Genres like-
wise generate their own culture-bound horizons of expectations. And there
are distinct advantages to examining the ostensibly private lyric in the con-
text of cultures where it has traditionally performed public functions: in
Russia “every taxi driver can quote Pushkin,” the saying goes. The same
holds for Poland, where a cab driver asked me to pass on his best wishes to
the ailing Miłosz (he recognized the street address I gave), and where I fi rst
Introduction 41
encountered Miłosz’s “Song on Porcelain” sung in a student cabaret at the

height of the Solidarity movement in 1981. The poet’s desire to take his
or her art public is hardly confi ned to Russia and Poland, though, as the
cult of the great Eastern Europeans among recent anglophone poets shows.
Hence the comparative focus of my study, ranging as it does from Whit-
man and Yeats to Tel Quel and its theorists of poetic language (Chapter 7),
and fi nally, to contemporary Anglo-American poetry, with various stops at
points between.
My organization is both chronological, running from the earliest years of
the last century until poems written very near its close (and even beyond),
and geographical, or rather geopolitical: I begin in prerevolutionary Russia,
and move to Poland in the wake of the revolution forcibly imported by its
neighbor to the east. The fi rst four chapters deal chiefly with the varieties
of lyric prophecy, as fi rst Blok and then Mayakovsky struggle to conflate
their lyric gifts and personal narratives with that of a revolutionary state in
the making. Mandelstam and Akhmatova, in their later work, represent the
opposite impulse, or perhaps more precisely, the same impulse taken in an
oppositional direction, as the unprintable poet-bard claims to speak for the
masses oppressed by his or her pseudo-prophetic adversary in what Nade-
zhda Mandelstam called Stalin’s “pre-Gutenberg era.”82
Chapter 5 fi nds Mayakovsky staging an encore appearance as the young
Wiktor Woroszylski uses his revolutionary precursor fi rst to write himself
into a triumphant Communist “we” in the early years of People’s Poland,
and then to envision an alternative “we” by way of the same poet. The
revolutionary writer who initially signifies acquiescence with the party line
gradually becomes an emblem of resistance for his Polish disciple. Szym-
borska also moves from early work in which poetic lines and party lines
converge to a radically different lyric practice. Unlike Woroszylski, though,
she fi nds not a new “we” to replace the old, but addresses instead the quint-
essentially lyric question of what it means to have an individual viewpoint
as she scrutinizes, from fi rst one angle and then another, not so much the
Marxist metanarrative in its Soviet redaction, but our need for such master
plots generally in the face of the “great numbers” that make up human his-
tory, whether past or passing.
I then move from the poets of Poland’s “New Wave” of 1968 and their
complex relationship to their generation’s and their tradition’s collective
voice of opposition, to the case of Czesław Miłosz, a self-professed “pro-
methean romantic” who also articulates as compellingly as any poet of the
past century the obligation, both ethical and aesthetic, to remain faithful
to lyric singularity. Miłosz’s work is the best possible reminder that the
42 Introduction
various lyric impulses and strategies I have been discussing can and do coex-
ist within the same poet and even within the same poem. I have quoted
from the fourth of his “Six Lectures in Verse,” in which he opposes Miss
Jadwiga’s singular fate to Great History. The resurrection of vanished indi-
vidual histories is, though, part of a larger project to rehumanize a fallen
earth through the true Book that counters false “necessity, law, theory,” as
the next lecture reminds us:
The Book is always with us,
And in it, miraculous signs, counsels, orders.
Unhygienic, it’s true, and contrary to common sense,
But they exist, and that’s enough on the mute earth.
The crippled, forgotten librarian will live on in this ideal Book, for, as Miłosz
might exclaim with his beloved Blake, “all that has existed in the space of
six thousand years, / Permanent, and not lost, not lost nor vanished. . . . For
everything exists, and not one sigh nor smile nor tear, / One hair nor particle
of dust, not one can pass away.” Prophecy and partiality go hand in hand
among us humans, as Paul observes in this section’s epigraph.83
Let me return in closing to the problem of limits as revealed in lyric form.
Lyrics resist “the primacy of the One, the Great Idea producing the Ultimate
Theory,” Fletcher insists, precisely by way of their formal limits: “Poetry,
especially lyric verse, focuses larger issues onto limited screens and hence
intensifies social issues to the point where individual writers and readers
can begin, as individuals, to think these matters through according to their
own personal lights” (italics in original). Poetry’s “very formality is social,”
Robert Pinsky remarks, and Fletcher’s own imagery—large issues projected
onto limited screens—calls attention to the peculiarly modern potentials of
lyric form. His language evokes the myriad screens—from Imax to plasma
to laptop or cellphone—on which we receive our bulletins from modernity
each day. Of course these screens had their precedents in previous eras.
Throughout her work, Szymborska calls attention to the framed images and
texts—be they ancient or modern, cave paintings, stained glass, film clips,
postcards, or classifieds—that we have used to communicate through the
ages. One distinctively modern frame surfaces at intervals throughout her
work: this is the form that lends its shape to “Snapshot of a Crowd,” “Fro-
zen Motion,” “Hitler’s First Photograph,” “Negative,” and most recently,
“Photograph from September 11.”84
The affi nities between photography and poetry should be obvious: the
notion of framed moments fits snapshots as well as lyric poems. But the last
lyric in this series calls special attention not just to the limits of photographs
Introduction 43
or poems, which can only pretend to stop time as a way of calling our
attention to time’s relentless motion. It also hints at the limits of critics who
persist in enforcing the boundaries around artworks in ways that the works
themselves resist. By pointing to the limits of her chosen form, Szymborska
demonstrates how and why such formal matters matter:
Photograph from September 11
They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.
The photograph halted them in life,

and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.
Each is still complete,

with a particular face
and blood well-hidden.
There’s enough time

for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.
They’re still within the air’s reach,

within the compass of places
that have just now opened.
I can do only two things for them—

describe this fl ight
and not add a last line.
“Is there then a world / where I rule absolutely on fate? / A time I bind with
chains of signs? / An existence become endless at my bidding?” Szymborska
asks in “The Joy of Writing” (1967) Of course not, and that is writing’s
sorrow. “Chains of signs” bind for a moment at best. Even then their force
holds only in the individual imaginations of readers and writers who are in
turn helplessly time-bound themselves.85
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” Auden commands in his
“Funeral Blues.” But poems can stop neither clocks nor gravity, as both
poets know full well, and Szymborska’s lyric cannot end open-endedly. The
true end of these human stories, with their particular faces and pockets
and coins, lies inexorably just beyond the poem’s frame. But the poet can
resist this foregone conclusion by recuperating a few moments of free fall—
“They’re still within the air’s reach, / within the compass of places / that
44 Introduction
have just now opened”—for her elegy’s subjects. Even then the inevitable
conclusion that Szymborska programmatically refuses will itself be short-
lived. The species will carry on—“Reality demands / that we also mention
this: / Life goes on,” she reminds us elsewhere—and the separate beings she
mourns here will be subsumed into the large numbers that simultaneously
dominate human history and defy human imagination. The singular victims
will become “a contribution to statistics,” to the history that rounds off
its victims “to zero,” since for history, “a thousand and one is still only a
thousand”—and three thousand and one, or two, or three, is still only three
thousand. We know the end of the story that inspires this particular poem
as well as the poet does, or the photographer whose work inspired hers. By
refusing to provide a fi nal line, or rather, by turning her fi nal line into this
refusal, Szymborska urges us to reimagine that ending, to see it as the arbi-
trary conclusion to a few irrepeatable lives that have, for an instant, been
retrieved from history.86
Chapter Title: Courting Disaster: Blok and Yeats

1
Courting Disaster: Blok and Yeats
There have been men who loved the future like a mistress
—William Butler Yeats, “William Blake
and the Imagination” (1897)
I remember once telling a seeress to ask one among the gods who, as
she believed, were standing about her in their symbolic bodies what
would become of a charming, but seemingly trivial labor of a friend,
and the form answering, “The devastation of peoples and the over-
whelming of cities.”
—Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900)
Oh my Russia! My wife!
—Aleksandr Blok, “On the Field of Kulikovo” (1908)
Bardic Gentlemen
In 1981, the Irish dramatist Thomas Kilroy chose to set a production of
Chekhov’s Seagull not in fi n de siècle England, as British theatrical tradition
would have it, but “on an Anglo-Irish estate in the West of Ireland” in the
late nineteenth century. The Slavist need only substitute “Blok” or “Blokian”
45
46 Courting Disaster
for Kilroy’s “Chekhov” and “Chekhovian” in the following passages to see

the affi nities linking the Russia of Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921) with the
Ireland of his near-contemporary, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). “Like
Chekhov’s gentry,” Kilroy observes, “the Anglo-Irish landowning class no
longer exists, having been swept away in the foundation and later develop-
ment of the new Irish state” in the fi rst decades of the twentieth century.
Both the Russian and Anglo-Irish gentry, he continues, “represented and
enacted imperial authority over a much larger, subservient population. Both
played significant roles in the Crown Civil Service and in military command
which did so much to preserve that power in their respective countries. For
both, the source and symbol of that power was the country estate with its
dependent peasantry or serfs and the instability of this property in the latter
half of the nineteenth century marks the fi rst signs of the disintegration of
the empires themselves.” The key difference between the two cultures lies,
Kilroy argues, in the “all-important distinction” of national origins: “The
Anglo-Irish represented a foreign, English power in Ireland,” while Russia’s
gentry “at least shared a common Russian nationality with those around
and beneath them.”1
Well, yes and no. As those who study modern Russian culture realize,
this culture was largely a Western import, as was the language that the
gentry used to distinguish themselves from their peasant subordinates.
Tatyana, Pushkin’s emblematic embodiment of Russianness, must of course
write the letter in which she bares her very Russian soul in French. Laura
Engelstein observes that “Europeanized Russians” “approached their own
native culture . . . as anthropologists confront an alien society.” Yeats him-
self seems to have recognized the resemblance when he announced in 1901
that “all Irish writers have to choose whether they will write as the upper
classes have done, not to express, but to exploit this country; or join the
intellectual movement that was heard in Russia in the ’seventies, the cry
‘To the people.’”2
The Russian populist tradition he evokes was Blok’s own political and
moral legacy by way of his parents and their generation, as he recalls in his
unfi nished epic “Retribution” (“Vozmezdie,” 1910–21). Foreignness, more-
over, was in many ways Blok’s stock-in-trade, however much he resisted it.
His very pronunciation, Kornei Chukovsky notes, was “typical of the gentry,
too elegant and bookish, with recently Russianized words pronounced in the
foreign manner: not ‘mebel’ [furniture], but ‘mebl’ [meuble], not ‘trotuar’
[sidewalk], but ‘trottoir.’” Blok himself worried that the Russian peasantry
he courted so assiduously would dismiss him as a “la-di-da semi-foreigner.”
His fears were well-founded according to the peasant poet Nikolai Kluyev,
Courting Disaster 47
who informed him that the village girls mocked Blok’s “Russian dances [in
verse] as though a young lady from the town with curls and lorgnette had
suddenly come to join their country revels.”3
“Life is illiterate,” Blok insists in his notebooks, and, unlike civilized
Europe, he continues, “Russia is life.” He himself was anything but illiter-
ate. Of his entire generation, he was, Chukovsky remarks, the only writer to
possess “the kind of old-gentry education that no one receives nowadays”:
“It seemed as if fate had purposedly arranged things so that his grandfather,
father and father-in-law were professors and his aunts and mother writers
who idolized books and thrived on them.” This literary environment was,
moreover, foreign literally by definition. The very notion of belles-lettres
(belletristika) did not reach Russia until the eighteenth century, and one
has only to recite the key terms that describe the various forms of literature
(literatura) in Russian to be reminded of the largely foreign provenance of
both the phenomena themselves and the language that defi nes them: avtor,
roman, drama, tragediia, komediia, poeziia, poema, metrika, versifikatsiia,
oda, elegiia, ballada, romans, and so on, not forgetting of course, lirika,
and liricheskii poet. Hence perhaps Blok’s aversion towards his literary
gifts: “Hatred for the lyric is the source of at least half my work,” he insists
in an essay of 1908 (2:63).4
“Hatred for the lyric”—fighting words indeed, coming from the poet
widely heralded in his lifetime and beyond as the premier lyrist of his gen-
eration. Blok himself does not elaborate. But his phrase is rooted, I suspect,
not just in his distaste for the foreignness of his craft as practiced in mod-
ern Russia. New Historicists join forces with postrevolutionary Marxists in
their suspicion for what they see as the egregiously bourgeois genre of lyric
poetry, I’ve argued in my introduction. Like so many Modernists, whether
avant-garde or reactionary, Blok despised the middle class that formed the
greater part of his large prerevolutionary audience. But the roots of the Rus-
sian lyric, were, like Blok’s own, both aristocratic and foreign: Blok’s father
descended from German émigrés who had been granted hereditary noble
status in their adopted country.
Blok’s hostility towards his chosen genre is not only a form of literary
self-hatred. It marks his antipathy towards the landed gentry he reluctantly
represents. Lyricism was for Blok finally a means to a—cataclysmic—end.
Practiced properly, the genre should lead inevitably to its own extinction.
And not just its own. It was ideally to be placed in the service of a revolu-
tion that aimed to eliminate not just the superannuated lyric, but the suspect
classes from which its prime exponents and their audiences derived. Here
Blok shares common ground not with Yeats, whose vision celebrated the
apotheosis, not the extinction, of the artist and his class, but with the decid-
edly unpoetic revolutionaries who would fi nd in Blok’s art, life, and death
fertile soil for the narrative they were themselves in the process of shaping
during Soviet Russia’s formative years.
I will return to this distinction between the two poets later in my discus-
sion. I want to turn here, though, to an equally telling affi nity between these
exemplary members of an endangered aristocracy, namely, the paradoxical
nature of their poetic vocation as they saw it. There is no direct link between
Blok and Yeats, although, like so many Modernists, the common cultural
legacy they shared—from medieval alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborg,
Shelley, and Schopenhauer to Wagner, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky—
made them closer poetic kin than they could possibly have imagined. The
two writers were born, for better or for worse, into nations where acknowl-
edged legislation was both a way of life and a mode of political resistance
for those who chose to follow the poet’s calling. Blok and Yeats both took
to their culturally prescribed artistic missions with a vengeance. They were
energetic, inventive proponents of literary traditions whose poets claimed
powers far beyond those accorded to their less fortunate brethren trapped in
places where their various prophesies and jeremiads went unheeded.
Beyond this, Blok and Yeats both sought to erase the division between lyric
and epic by creating large-scale narrations of self and nation from the pri-
vate, intimate stuff that would seem to be lyric poetry’s stock-in-trade: love,
loss, passion, marriage, family. Both poets worked to forge through their
writing not only the symbolic structure of their own lives—what the Rus-
sian Modernists called “zhiznetvorchestvo,” “life-creation”—but the very
nature of their nation’s past and present as they prophesied its apocalyptic
future. The lyric impulse, writ large, was to bridge the distance between
self, nation, and history.5
For Yeats, Declan Kiberd comments, “nation-building can be achieved
by the simple expedient of writing one’s own autobiography.” His remark
holds equally for Blok. Both writers were antipodes to the powerful strain
of Modernist writing that preached—in its Anglo-American incarnation, at
any rate—a poetics of impersonality in which the poet worked assiduously
to erase all traces of the artist’s life from his creation and to achieve “a con-
tinual extinction of personality,” as Eliot famously put it. “Instead of turn-
ing to impersonal philosophy, [the Irish poets] have hardened and deepened
their personalities,” Yeats insists in “Modern Poetry” (1936). “Art, life, and
politics are inseparable,” Blok explains in the introduction to “Retribution”
(1:477). Finally, both poets found themselves compelled to articulate their
relationship to their nation, past and future, by way of a literary tradition,
and in Yeats’s case even a language, that was alien to the very people they
claimed to represent. For both writers this divide between gentry and people
is articulated in terms of an endlessly thwarted courtship between the poet
and the elusive, beloved nation embodied in feminine form.6
These courtships took dramatically different paths through the poets’ lives
and writing, though. Their divergent careers reflect the schism that divided
Modernists into radical leftists calling for a revolutionary transformation
of the status quo, and their equally radical right-wing contemporaries, who
sought not revolution, but restoration of a an idealized, hierarchical past
order. “Pastists” and “futurists” alike relied of course chiefly upon their
own poetic imaginations to provide the prototype for the ideal society they
hoped to install or reinstate through their writing. Blok envisioned a cosmic
leveling by way of the revolution that would annihilate him along with his
oppressive class. The “great, universal Revolution,” he exults in “Art and
Revolution” (1918) “will destroy the age-old lie of civilization and elevate the
people (narod) to the heights of artistic humanity” (2:230). Once achieved,
this artistic nation will have no further need for the bards who helped to
herald its ascent or even to bring it into being. Here, at least, he agreed with
the revolution’s architects, who saw in art chiefly a tool to be discarded once
its purpose had been served.
Unlike Blok, Yeats hoped to sustain, or create, the aristocratic traditions
to which he laid claim. He aimed to forge a nation in which the Anglo-
Irish ascendancy would continue to lend, by violent means if necessary, its
shaping force to a people who might otherwise remain confi ned to inchoate
potential alone. “Historic Nations grow / from above to below,” he pro-
claims in a late play. Historic nations that refuse to recognize the natural
order of things invite intervention by spurned aristocrats—or aristocrats of
the spirit—whose unimpeded view from above leads them to endorse what
Yeats approvingly calls “the despotic rule of the educated classes.” If Yeats’s
mission might be defi ned as “saving civilization,” then Blok felt compelled
to assist in its demolition.7
The poets were alike, though, in seeing the modern world as teetering
on the brink of a cataclysm that would lead either to its destruction or its
renewal. And like so many of their contemporaries, they perceived this cri-
sis in sexual terms. One need only think here of the ruthless April that
persists in breeding new life from dead earth in the opening lines of “The
Waste Land.” Modern society survives at the price of the sexual instincts it
represses to its peril, Yeats’s contemporary Sigmund Freud warns in Civi-
lization and Its Discontents (1929), and he uses an analogy that seems to
speak directly to Yeats’s and Blok’s shared mission. “Civilization,” Freud
claims, “behaves towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of a population

does which has subjugated another one to exploitation.” Yeats and Blok
were likewise preoccupied with the vexed relations of sex and civilization.
For the poets, though, sexual relations were not the bottom line, but a point
of departure, symbols that mirrored, even shaped, the very structure—or
destruction—of the world’s cosmic order. They were true heirs to a Roman-
tic tradition in which sex, as Mario Praz comments, “[is] the mainspring of
works of the imagination.” All his symbols, Yeats insists in A Vision (1925),
“can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and
the birth of children.” Courtship, marriage, consummation, progeny: all are
key terms in Blok’s and Yeats’s perception of the crisis facing self, nation,
and cosmos alike. They provide the primary narrative thread that yokes, in
each case, the poet’s life to his work, and the work, so he hopes, to the fate
of his nation and the transformative forces it embodies.8
Let us turn here to two poems that mark the earliest stages of the poets’
troubled wooing of the elusive nation, “I Foreknow You” (Predchuvstvuiu
Tebia, 1901; 1:37) and “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time” (1892/95):
And the heavy sleep of worldly consciousness
You will cast off, yearning and loving.
Vladimir Soloviev
I foreknow You. The years pass by—

In one visage alone I foreknow You.
The whole horizon is aflame—and unbearably bright,

And I wait silently—yearning and loving.
The whole horizon is aflame, and the apparition is near,

But I’m terrified: You’ll change Your visage,
And awaken a bold suspicion,

Having changed at last the accustomed features.
Oh how I’ll fall—pitifully, low,

Without mastering mortal dreams!
How bright is the horizon! And radiance is near,

But I’m terrified: You’ll change Your visage.
—Aleksandr Blok
To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuhoollin battling with the bitter tide,
The Druid, gray, wood nurtured, quiet-eyed,

Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold,
And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old
In dancing silver sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,
I fi nd under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
Come near, come near, come near—Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fi ll!
Lest I no more hear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near—I would, before my time to go.
Sing of old Eri and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.
—William Butler Yeats9
I have said that the poems mark the early stages of each writer’s life story
in verse. Both poems are shaped, though, not by narrative progression, but
by circularity: each ends where it begins, in a repetition that resists the nar-
rative line set in motion by the opening. They are courtship poems marked
by a resistance to consummation, and the symbolic nature of the poet’s
beloved in each case shapes the indeterminate outcome of the frustrated
relationship.
For all its fi n de siècle frills and furbelows, Yeats’s lyric is clearly intent
upon emphasizing the Irish folk traditions that he, along with other mem-
bers of the Irish Renaissance, hoped to revive in their writing. Cuchool-
lin (or Cuchulain), Fergus, the Druid, Eri, or Eire, or Erin: all are familiar
figures in Yeats’s early verse, and are intimately linked here to the poet’s
muse, the flower he invokes in what is the opening poem of his collection
The Rose (1892). To the Symbolists, Osip Mandelstam complained, “the
rose is a likeness of the sun, the sun is a likeness of a rose, a dove—of a
girl, and a girl—of a dove. . . . The rose nods to the girl, the girl nods to the
rose.” Yeats’s Rose (who appears, like Blok’s You, exclusively in capitalized
form) is no less multivalent. She is, James Pethica notes, not only a symbol
of “eternal and spiritual beauty” central to the occult Order of the Golden
Dawn in which Yeats was an active participant. She also represents, as Yeats
commented in an early edition, both love and Ireland itself.10
Blok’s lyric does not evoke Russia per se, although the poem’s imagery,
with its flaming horizons and otherworldly apparitions, makes clear that this
is no ordinary sweetheart. Indeed, the capitalized “Ty” (the Russian infor-
mal “you”) throughout the poem was ordinarily reserved for invocations of
God alone, and as such was altered by government censors before the poem
went to press. The poem’s epigraph would have revealed to initiates, though,
that Blok’s “You” was none other than the nineteenth-century philosopher
Vladimir Soloviev’s Divine Sophia, Holy Wisdom, the Eternal Feminine who
promises through her imminent return to earth a revelation “of nature as it
should be, humanity as it should be, the cosmos potentially redeemed and
restored; the ‘world soul’ within all these things growing gently and inevita-
bly, as the corn in the ear, the child in the womb, towards a new life.”11
In another early poem, written just a few days before “I Foreknow You,”
Blok reveals the distinctively Russian nature of the feminine figure he
invokes. The very title of “The Divine Cannot Be Measured by the Mind”
(Nebesnoe umom neizmerimo; 1:36) recalls Fyodor Tiutchev’s famous lyric
“Russia Cannot Be Comprehended by the Mind” (Umom Rossiu ne pon-
iat’); and the Eternal Feminine chooses in fact a distinctively Russian incar-
nation this time around:
And I perceived the Russian Venus,

Swathed in a heavy tunic,
Impassive in her pureness, joyless beyond measure,
In her features—a peaceful dream.
This Venus does not emerge naked on the half-shell, à la Botticelli. Unlike
her Renaissance precursor, she makes her appearance draped demurely in
a thick tunic—perhaps to fend off the Russian cold? And unlike her name-
sake, she is impervious, passionless, “joyless beyond measure.” This dis-
tinguishes her from her apocalyptic sister in “I Foreknow You,” whose
cosmos-shaking passion is suggested by the fiery sunrise (“the horizon is
aflame”) that prefigures her arrival; by the love, yearning, and terror with
which her would-be lover awaits her; and, perhaps most importantly, by her
volatility, her capacity for change. The verb that denotes this ability in the
poem, izmenit’, does double duty in Russian for both sexual and political
betrayal: Blok uses it in both senses on a single page in “Retribution” to
describe wives deceiving husbands (and vice versa), and the son who betrays
the fatherland (a syn—on izmenil otchizne!) (1:514).12
The “bold suspicion” (derzkoe podozrenie) she will arouse (vozbudish’)

in her hapless lover confi rms the verb’s dubious double sense: this over-
whelming female is both the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Whore
of Babylon. Her capacity for the change and betrayal that will precipitate
his own fall from grace (“Oh how I’ll fall”) terrifies the suitor seeking chaste
changelessness from his still-distant object of desire. The speaker’s duel-
ing emotions of longing and dread determine the poem’s very structure,
which comprises a sequence of six couplets whose rhyme-words cross stan-
zaic boundaries to create quatrains of alternating rhymes. Four of the cou-
plets, moreover, have strongly marked caesuras in each line, and these come
equipped in turn with their own set of insistent, if irregular internal rhymes:
v ogne (l. 3), v ogne (l. 5), mne (l. 6), v kontse (l. 8), mne (l. 12) (literally,
“on fi re,” “on fi re,” “to me,” “in the end,” “to me”). The poem’s would-be
couplings are undercut at every turn.
This courtship would not be a mating of equals in any case. The poem’s
speaker, its “I,” is eclipsed even grammatically by a potentially overwhelm-
ing “You.” This “You” may be capitalized throughout, but the “I,” as Jeni-
fer Presto observes, never appears as a subject at all in the original text.
Russian’s conjugated verb forms permit personal pronouns to be omitted
without running the risk of semantic ambiguity—though this is not stan-
dard practice—and the “I” is elided throughout the poem. From the start,
then, the speaker lays low while his “You” looms larger than life: “Pred-
chuvstvuiu Tebia” (my italics). More than this—forms of the fi rst-person
pronoun appear only in an oblique case (the dative) and a passive construc-
tion (mne strashno; literally, it is frightening to me).13 The “You,” on the
other hand, is clearly capable of dramatic action: “You’ll change Your vis-
age,” the speaker frets. The “I” is diminished still further by the percussive
end-rhymes that emphasize his beloved’s might; fully a third of the poem’s
twelve lines end either in nominative forms of “Ty” or in echoing rhyme-
words (“cherty,” “mechty”).
Yeats’s fussy diction masks a less structurally sophisticated lyric, with its
two stanzas built of neatly paired, monosyllabic rhyme words and its infre-
quent enjambments. Yet his speaker also shrinks from the consummation so
devoutly to be wished as the second stanza opens. “Come near, come near,
come near,” he begs his muse. But just as he seems on the brink of success, he
interrupts himself abruptly in mid-line: “—Ah, leave me still / A little space
for the rose-breath to fi ll!” Both the dash and the unexpected enjambment
work to create the space he now craves as acutely as the proximity he had
urged just moments earlier. The stanza’s closing lines hint at the speaker’s
fears. If she draws too near, he will cease to notice “common things,” and
“seek to hear alone the strange things said, / By God to the bright hearts of
those long dead, / And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.” “Singing
ancient ways” is his self-proclaimed mission, though, and so the courtship
dance must resume as the poem closes. He requires her presence if he is to
achieve his goal—but too much of a good thing is apparently as fatal to this
mission as too little. He’ll miss the “foolish things that live a day,” he com-
plains, if Eternal Beauty has her—or rather, his—way.
But is this really Yeats‘s chief concern? The revival of Gaelic as the lan-
guage of both art and life was very much on the minds of Irish writers at the
time this poem was written. Yeats may have wrapped himself in what Kiberd
calls “the black cloak of a professional Celt.”14 But an Anglo-Irishman could
not claim the Celtic tradition as his birthright, and a thoroughly Gaelicized
nation would hold no place for a self-proclaimed bard singing the ancient
ways in the oppressor’s tongue. To renounce this paradoxical calling,
though, would require Yeats to forfeit his Anglo-Irish identity entirely, to
be consumed by lovely Erin. Hence his resistance to the seductive Rose who
would lure him into learning “to chaunt a tongue men do not know.”
For Blok, Pyman notes, an aggressive, even demonic “eternal masculin-
ity” formed the necessary counterweight to the essentially passive principle
of the Eternal Feminine. In “I Foreknow You” and “To the Rose,” though,
the poets fi nd themselves confronted not by some ideally submissive femi-
nine principle, but by a perverse and potent nation well equipped to outwit
her timid poet-suitors. Yeats’s Helen, we recall, is not the reluctant cause
of Troy’s fall, but its active instigator: “Was there another Troy for her to
burn?” the speaker asks of that latter-day Helen, Maud Gonne, in “No Sec-
ond Troy” (89). Perhaps this is why both Blok and Yeats feel compelled to
enlist a company of fellow worshipers to join in their wary praise of the all-
powerful Lady; she is simply too much woman for one poor poet alone.15
“Many turn-of-the-century nationalisms imagined national community
as a deep emotional bond among men united in the service of a country or
cause personified by a woman,” Marjorie Howes remarks. Both Blok and
Yeats followed suit. “The Rose upon the Rood of Time” opens The Rose.
In its bookend poem, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” Yeats makes his
claim to be accounted “true brother of that company, / Who sang to sweeten
Ireland’s wrong, / Ballad and story, rann and song” (46–47). The rann is “a
verse of a poem in Irish,” Pethica notes. The other genres in Yeats’s list sug-
gest, though, that he is not concerned with Celtic forms alone. Indeed, the
exalted company he keeps in the poem’s second stanza—“Davis, Mangan,
Ferguson”—consists of three Irish nineteenth-century writers and cultural
heroes of whom two were Protestant, while the one Catholic, James Clarence
Mangan, knew no Irish and wrote his poetry, like his fellows, in English.
The company of those who would chase Ireland’s “red-rose-bordered hem”
comprises Protestant and Catholic alike, but they must translate their praise
of Erin into a language that reaches far beyond her borders. The ancient
ways must be sung in a new tongue for their true meaning to be revealed to
the modern age, Yeats suggests. The Lady’s real history is not confi ned to
Ireland alone; it began, after all, “before God made the angelic clan.” And
this, in turn, gives Yeats the necessary distance both to court and resist his
version of Irishness.16
Blok’s tactics are different, but they likewise speak to his dilemma as a
semi-foreigner wooing the ostensibly homegrown beauty. In “The Divine Is
Not Measured by the Mind,” the speaker describes the circle of worshippers
who have gathered to greet the “Russian Venus” (Rossiiskaia Venera) in her
most recent incarnation:
She has come to earth before,

But she is encircled for the fi rst time
By different heroes (bogatyri), different warriors (vitiazi) . . .
And the gleam in her deep eyes is strange . . .
The strange gleam in the eyes of this chaste Slavic Venus hints at her capac-
ity to wreak havoc among her suitors for all her seeming modesty. This time,
though, the speaker has apparently joined forces with the heroic warriors of
ancient Russian sagas and legends, the bogatyri and vitiazi he evokes in the
poem’s penultimate line. The Europeanized gentleman bypasses his trouble-
some Western legacy to become part of a primeval Slavic brotherhood well
qualified to pay suit to the ancient nation-goddess Rus’.17
Like Yeats’s Rose, Blok’s Beautiful Lady both embodies and exceeds the
nation of which she is the emblem. Like Yeats, Blok sought to fuse ancient
Western myths—here his russified Venus—with their indigenous incarna-
tions. “Antiquity,” he asserts in an essay of 1905, provides the key that
“links us with the truth of religion, the nation, and history.” Yeats goes Blok
one better. Like the Greeks, he insists in “Ireland and the Arts” (1901), the
Irish “have a history fuller than any modern history of imaginative events;
and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty.”
(Elsewhere he even purports to fi nd a link between the early Irish nation and
“Slavonian peasants.”) Blok’s poetic mythologies proceed, D. Maksimov
notes, from “‘small-scale,’ ‘local’ historicism to macro-, even metahistori-
cism.” The same holds for Yeats, who calls upon his small nation to reforge
ancient myths for a modern age: “I would have Ireland re-create the ancient
arts, the arts as they were understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in
Greece and Rome, in every ancient land; as they were understood when they
moved a whole people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured
class and made this understanding their business.”18
But it takes a member of a modern leisure class, with the requisite Euro-
pean education, to perceive the larger contexts from which merely local
traditions derive their metahistorical significance. The Modernist cult of the
primitive proved peculiarly congenial to the Europeanized bards of back-
ward nations. It allowed them to stake a claim in a native past to which their
dubious background might otherwise deny them access. And it placed them,
as their nations’ poet-prophets, at the heart of the cosmic revelations in
which their seemingly retrograde peoples would play a leading part. Ireland
was “the most belated race in Europe,” Joyce complained. For Yeats, Ire-
land’s very “technological and economic backwardness” gave it “the benefit
of a spiritual glamour which had faded from the rest of Europe,” Seamus
Deane observes. The task of the Irish artist, Yeats explains, is “to begin to
dig in Ireland the garden of the future, understanding that here in Ireland
the spirit of man may be about to wed the soil of the world.” His language
grows more bombastic elsewhere as he charges Irish artists “to forge in
Ireland a new sword on our old traditional anvil for that great battle which
must in the end re-establish the old, confident, joyous world.”19
For Yeats the Irish had “a crucial, redemptive role to play in the recovery
of European civilization from barbarism,” Deane remarks. Blok plays out
this scenario in reverse: Russia’s “barbarism” is its best weapon against the
“old, exhausted cocotte” of Europe, with her “sacred shopping centers.”
Like all “wild, barbaric nations,” Russia “creates life,” Blok insists shortly
after the failed revolution of 1905. That “idle, thousand-eyed,” gypsy Russia
“has given her very flesh to the world,” though the shape it takes may look
like chaos to jaded Western eyes, he warns (2:45). But “true Russians,” the
“warriors’ descendants” (potomki bogatyrei) on whom the world’s future
rests, will not be daunted by her apparent formlessness. “Blessed beings,”
these heroes have “voluntarily orphaned themselves,” as they wander along
“the boundless plains” destined to give birth to the future of both their own
nation and the species itself (2:32–34). 20
The Irish were “barbaric Scythians,” Edmund Spenser insists in his View
of the Present State of Ireland (1596), and as such required speedy extermi-
nation. Spenser’s lethal insult would become Blok’s ideal as he celebrates the
imminent barbarian invasion of effete Europe by its neighbors to the east in
“The Scythians” (1918; 1:453–454). For all their differences on the uses and
abuses of barbarism, Blok and Yeats shared a vision of a primeval nation
freed not just from the shackles of an alien culture, but from the religious
legacy that had superseded its ancient rites. Nietzsche’s notoriously anti-
Christian stance—“Christianity has cheated us out of the harvest of ancient
culture,” he charges in The Antichrist (1888)—certainly influenced both
writers. But their ambivalence, even antipathy toward Christian culture had
deeper roots. The advantages of Nietzschean “anti-Christianity” to Yeats
are obvious. A Protestant writer could not possibly play the prophet in an
Ireland defi ned by its Catholicism. His best hope lay in bypassing Christian-
ity completely by laying claim to an ancient folk culture that Ireland herself
had half-forgotten. “‘I have longed to turn Catholic that I might be nearer to
the people.’” Yeats records his friend Lady Gregory as saying. “‘But you have
taught me that paganism brings me nearer still.’” His preoccupation with
the occult springs from the same source; the Anglo-Irish ascendancy devel-
oped a modern tradition of occult interests to compensate for its increasing
distance from the actual life of its nation, Foster comments. 21
This fascination with the occult marks yet another trait that the Anglo-Irish
shared with their early twentieth-century Russian counterparts. Blok, with his
Eternal Feminine, sometimes found himself the unwilling center of a modish
mystical coterie inspired by Soloviev’s teachings: “Don’t convert our quests
into mere fashion,” he begs in one essay (2:84). And like Yeats, Blok sought to
merge his esoteric interests with ancient folklore as a way of circumventing the
Christianity that stood, so he felt, between him and his nation. Though they
shared in principle the same Orthodox faith, he was deeply ambivalent towards
their common heritage and sought to heal the rift between poet and people by
reviving “the ancient pre-Christian Slavonic world of myth and legend.”22
Blok and Yeats could not escape the fascination with the poet-Christ they
had inherited from their Romantic precursors, the persecuted Savior who
suffers and dies so that his nation, and through it, humanity itself, might be
freed from all earthly shackles. In their early poetry, though, the suffering
Man-God is supplanted by the Beautiful Lady: hence Yeats’s Rose upon the
Rood, or Cross, of time. The poet does not embody the transcendent; rather
he yearns, and fears, to merge with it. But Yeats’s Rose refuses to stay cruci-
fied, just as Blok’s feminine ideal does not consent to imprisonment within
the single visage he has imagined for her. Blok and Yeats both worried—
with good reason in the event—that they were not prophets, but only latter-
day Pygmalions who shaped the nation in the image of their own confused
desires. In “Poetry and the Tradition,” Yeats speaks wistfully of the “per-
haps imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour.” Blok likewise laments the
solipsistic nature of his cosmic yearnings in “On the Current Condition of
Russian Symbolism” (1910): “And so it has come to pass: my own enchanted
world has become the arena of my private actions, my ‘anatomical theater’
or puppet-show (balagan), in which I myself perform alongside my astonish-

ing dolls (ecce homo!)” (2:151). This did not stop either poet from recruiting
flesh-and-blood women to play leading parts in their symbolic dramas.23
Cosmic Courtship, or Life-Creation and Its Discontents

It is only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any
power and all those things that seem useful or strong, armies, moving
wheels, modes of architecture, modes of government, speculations of
the reason, would have been a little different if some mind long ago had
not given itself to some emotion as a woman gives herself to her lover.
—Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900)
It dawned on me how very much we are strangers to each other, how

little you understand me. For you look at me as if I were some kind of
abstract idea . . . I even gave you a hint about this when I said: “One
must translate the abstract into the concrete.”
—Liubov’ Mendeleeva-Blok, unsent letter to Aleksandr Blok, from
Mendeleeva-Blok, “Facts and Myths about Blok and Myself” (1929)
Let’s admit that although Blok was not the embodiment of my girlish
dreams—a Lermontov or a Byron—he was nonetheless a lot better-
looking than all my friends.
—Mendeleeva-Blok, “Facts and Myths about Blok and Myself”
The Blok of 1901 surrounds his Beautiful Lady with warriors and
heroes drawn from ancient legends. A famous photograph of 1904 suggests
a somewhat more earthbound scenario. The writers Andrei Belyi and Ser-
gei Soloviev—Blok’s colleagues in his mystical endeavors—sit, impeccably
dressed, around a small table holding three objects: a bible, a portrait of
Vladimir Soloviev, and a photograph of Blok’s young wife, the unfortu-
nately named Liubov’ (“Love” in Russian) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok.
(“Even my name . . . set me apart from the commonplace,” she notes rue-
fully in her memoirs.) The writers’ choice of icons was only half-joking.
Blok had known Mendeleeva since childhood; another early photograph
shows the two adolescents costumed as Hamlet and Ophelia for a domestic
production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Their convoluted courtship reached its
apparent climax in 1903, when the two were married at a church located
halfway between their families’ neighboring estates. But the marriage was, if
not doomed from the start—it survived until the poet’s death in 1921—then
destined for a singularly bumpy trajectory. Blok had long worshiped his
lovely neighbor with her “ancient Russian beauty” from both near and far
as the modern Russian incarnation of the Divine Sophia. In a 1902 letter
to Mendeleeva-Blok, he professes his “faith in you . . . as in the notorious
Immaculate Virgin or the Eternal Feminine, if you like.” The 1904 photo-
graph demonstrates that he was not alone in his veneration. 24
But the Eternal Feminine proved to be, unsurprisingly, ill-suited to mar-
ried life: Beautiful Ladies and bedazzled poets make for uncomfortable
bedfellows. Blok’s vision of a companion “still a bride and eternally a wife”
(1:108) proved more congenial in poetry than in life. “I am destined only
to ‘live in white,’ but not ‘to create in white: it may be my lot to test the
Whore of Babylon,” he confesses, with suitably Symbolist obscurity, in a
1903 letter to Belyi. He apparently took this “living in white” quite seri-
ously, and tested Babylon’s Whore by setting up housekeeping with his new
bride in what was by all accounts a “white marriage.” “Naturally, we were
not ‘husband and wife,’” Mendeleeva-Blok recalls in her memoirs: “My life
with my ‘husband’ (!) by the spring of 1906 was completely shattered. His
brief outburst of sensual interest in me in the winter and summer before the
wedding soon (in the two months that followed) had spent itself without
having succeeding in dispelling my girlish ignorance. . . . He immediately
started theorizing that we did not need physical closeness, that this was
‘astartism,’ ‘darkness,’ and God knows what else.”25
Blok’s convictions did not prevent him from experimenting with vari-
ous forms of astartism elsewhere. “I have not possessed 100, 200, 300 (or
more?) women, but only two,” he boasts in a journal entry of 1915. “One
is Lyuba [Liubov’]; the other—all the rest.” The marriage was apparently
fi rst consummated a year after the actual wedding and all physical relations
between the two ceased shortly afterwards, according to Mendeleeva-Blok.
She suggests that Blok’s squeamishness may have derived from the illnesses
contracted in the brothels he had frequented since adolescence: “Physical
closeness meant one thing to Blok: paid sex, and the inescapable result was
disease.” But the metaphor nascent in his venereal ailments proved too
tempting, and the couple translated even this sordid detail into the language
of legend: “The two Aphrodites—Aphrodite Urania and the Aphrodite of
the streets [were] separated by a chasm,” Mendeleeva-Blok explains. 26
Aphrodite Urania, the “heavenly” or “spiritual” Aphrodite versus her
sensual sister Aphrodite Pandemos: the opposition evokes the elusive, tunic-
swathed Venus of Blok’s early lyric, who stands as a tacit rebuke to her more
unruly earthbound counterparts. These multiple goddesses raise a peculiar
question: what does the poet do when he fi nally fi nds “the kind of love it
is possible to feel for a mother, a sister or a wife in one person, in Russia,”

and marries the beloved motherland, or her closest human approximation?
Imagine Whitman setting up housekeeping in his fi nal years with Lady Lib-
erty herself. Unlucky Liberty would certainly have suffered: symbolically
charged marriages with would-be bards pose challenges unknown to lesser
mortals. However much Blok’s young bride (“poor Liubov’ Dmitrievna,” as
a colleague of mine used to call her) may have struggled with her unlikely
ménage, though, it proved remarkably productive for her poet-spouse. 27
Yeats cherished “the twin issues of sexuality (the personal crisis) and Ire-
land (the historically unique culture) . . . as sources of value and of feeling,”
Deane notes. “The universal, higher mysticism” of politics joins forces with
the “lower, personal mysticism” of private life, Blok insists in an autobio-
graphical sketch of 1915. It is, I suspect, no accident that he ceased to identify
his wife with Holy Russia during the brief period in 1904 that led to the mar-
riage’s long-delayed consummation, which took place, conveniently enough,
shortly before the failed revolution of 1905. The two events apparently con-
verged in Blok’s poetic imagination: “Hardly had my fiancée become my
wife when the lilac worlds of revolution enveloped us and swept us into the
whirlpool,” he explains in his notebooks. Crises in both lunar and sublunar
realms coincide as mystic “brides” and “girls” clad in the “red sarafans” of
Russian peasants mingle with “streetwalkers in red skirts” in essays written
in the revolution’s aftermath (2:30–35). Most famously, the Beautiful Lady
of his poetry undergoes a terrifying transformation to become the ambigu-
ous demimondaine known as the Stranger from the poem by that name
(1906; 1:76–77). Variations of this fallen woman will henceforth coexist in
the poetry with the Holy Wife and Sacred Mother whose image “not forged
by human hands” illuminates Russian past and present alike in poems like
“On the Field of Kulikovo” (1908; 1:284–288). 28
The shifting shapes that Blok’s real and symbolic beloveds take in Russia’s
revolutionary year have been thoroughly explored elsewhere, and I won’t
attempt to summarize them here. But Blok was not alone in perceiving the
advent of Russia’s revolutionary years in terms of sexual crisis. After 1905,
“the language of social commentary relied increasingly on emblems of sexual
disorder,” Engelstein observes; and satiric journals of the times represented
disturbing new social realities “as devilish, vampiric creatures, sometimes
ravishing a woman—usually Mother Russia.” The immense popularity of
Blok and his poetry in the years following 1905—postcards bearing his pho-
tograph were widely available, and prostitutes reportedly donned the silks
and ostrich feathers made famous by the beautiful Stranger of the poems—
suggest that his lyric obsessions had a recognizably public dimension. 29
He had company as well in his preference for poetic over genetic off-
spring. Soloviev’s Symbolist disciples opposed in principle and frequently in
practice what the master called “the bad infi nity of the physical reproduc-
tion of organisms.” “If I have a child, it would be worse than my poems,”
Blok comments in his notebooks. The poet Zinaida Gippius went still fur-
ther, providing, incidentally, a compelling argument in favor of unacknowl-
edged legislation: “The abolition of procreation,” she announces, “abolishes
the [sex] act, of its own accord—not by any law, but because of its having
become . . . an unlawful state.” Blok apparently agreed: “The state of pro-
hibition should always remain even in marriage,” he commented shortly
before his wedding. Poor Liubov’ Dmitrievna indeed. But Blok’s stake in
this antireproductive ethos was also deeply personal. His gentry precursors
were, he insists in “The Guardian Angel” (1906), a “generation of slaves,”
and the “family curse” (prokliatie sem’i) he shares with the “angel” who is
simultaneously his “sister, bride, and daughter” dooms them to a fate pre-
cluding procreation. “Will we rise from the grave? Perish? Die?” he asks in
the poem’s fi nal line: mundane reproduction is apparently not among their
options (1:179–180). And this is as it should be, according to Blok. “We are
moneyed, childless people,” he writes in his notebooks, and for him the two
adjectives were, quite properly, virtual synonyms.30
Modernist literature generally demonstrates, Edward Said argues, “the
failure of the generative impulse.” “Childless couples, orphaned children,
aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate
the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence,” and their condi-
tion “is portrayed in such a way as to stand for a general condition affl icting
society and culture together.” All happy families are alike, or so the famous
opening of Anna Karenina would have it, while each unhappy family creates
its own private brand of misery. There are striking similarities for all that
between the frustrated families that mark Blok’s and Yeats’s early experi-
ments in life-creation, poetic and otherwise. I have spoken at some length
about the real-life prototype for Blok’s Beautiful Lady. Yeats’s Red Rose,
his Eire, his Helen and Cathleen ni Houlihan also found their this-worldly
inspiration in a beautiful woman, the “English ex-debutante” turned Irish
nationalist Maud Gonne (1866–1953).31
Yeats fi rst met Gonne in 1889, and was captivated by the girl who had
already “cast herself precisely as the fatale, capricious beauty of whom the
poet dreamt,” Foster comments. She continued to play this role in Yeats’s
life and art for decades. “There was an element in her beauty,” he recalls
in his Autobiographies, “that moved minds full of old Gaelic stories and
poems”: “she looked as though she lived in an ancient civilization where
all superiorities whether of the mind or of the body were . . . in some way
the crowd’s creation,” while “her whole body seemed” at the same time
“a master-work of long labouring thought.” She effortlessly embodied the
fusion of ancient myth and Irish legend, of individual artistic labors and
collective creation, that is his prescription for both national and “super-
terrestrial” transformation.32
And like the Ireland of his dreams, she kept her distance. Yeats courted
Gonne for the better part of three decades, hoping against hope that she
would be worn down by his persistence. She steadfastly refused him, though,
even using their shared occult preoccupations to justify her continued resis-
tance: she conveniently discovered in a dream that the two had been brother
and sister in a past life, hence present-day consummation would be incest.
The relationship was consummated in 1908, but its physical dimension was
short-lived. When Gonne declined his last proposal in 1916, he promptly
turned his attentions to her daughter Iseult, who had the good sense to
refuse her mother’s rebuffed suitor.33
However frustrating Gonne’s resistance may have been to Yeats person-
ally—although a man who proposes to the same woman unsuccessfully
four or five times over the course of a quarter-century presumably derives
some kind of satisfaction from his protracted suffering—it was remarkably
fruitful in other respects. His convoluted courtship proved no less produc-
tive, both poetically and mythopoetically, than Blok’s torturous marriage. I
have mentioned Blok’s poem “The Guardian Angel.” The angel, sister, and
daughter who is the poet’s bride can promise only some unspecified brand
of resurrection beyond the flesh. The heroine of a quatrain written two days
later holds out the possibility of more concrete forms of gratification:
To the Maiden-Revolution
Oh maiden, I follow you—
And is it fearful to follow you
To one who loves your soul,
To one who loves your body? (1:180)
Blok’s revolutionary maiden lures him away from his guardian angel. For
Yeats, though, the Beautiful Lady and the Revolutionary Maiden were the
same. In his Autobiographies, Yeats credits Gonne with igniting the political
passions that he hoped would win her favor: “I was sedentary and thought-
ful,” he recalls, “but Maud Gonne was not sedentary.” The mystic had to
turn activist in order to woo his revolutionary sweetheart. And this was the
inspiration behind “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” which “announced
[Yeats’s] arrival as a frankly political poet” by “fusing occultism and
advanced nationalism in a manner calculated to appeal to Maud Gonne,

and to irritate nearly everyone else,” Foster comments.34
A shared “passion for theatre becomes the most distinctive connection
between the Anglo-Irish and Russian worlds,” Kilroy remarks. Be that as it
may, Blok and Yeats clearly shared a flair for self-dramatization, and their
preoccupation with enacting national and cosmic dramas in the arena of their
private actions lent itself to theatricalization in more public forums as well.
Lyric conflicts writ large were the stuff of which their poetry was made; literal
stages served as convenient way stations en route to the more expansive, less
tangible theaters both poets craved. Blok and Yeats were prolific playwrights,
although only Yeats, true to form, set about creating a theater that would
serve both as a vessel for national self-definition and, at least initially, as a
call for political action. Their respective muses shared their theatrical bent.
Mendeleeva-Blok eventually became a professional actress, although not a par-
ticularly successful one, while Gonne was actively involved in Yeats’s efforts
to forge a national theater. Their theatrical collaboration reached its apogee
in 1902 when Gonne agreed to perform the title role in the premier of Yeats’s
drama Cathleen ni Houlihan at the Irish National Dramatic Society, of which
Yeats was president. Mendeleeva-Blok wisely declined the title role in Blok’s
drama The Stranger, written in the same year as the famous poem; she appar-
ently felt that the line dividing art from life had grown fine enough.35
Yeats’s play tells the story of a courtship cut short by no less than Ireland
herself in the person of the titular Cathleen ni Houlihan, a folk symbol of
the nation. The action takes place in 1798, the date of a famous, abortive
Irish revolt against the British. It is set, though, not during revolutionary
upheaval, but in a prosperous peasant cottage as the parents ready their
son Michael for his wedding to a “fine, comely girl,” his neighbor Delia.
Their minds are fi xed, understandably enough, on things other than their
country’s fate—but the nation would have it otherwise. She appears at their
doorstep as an old beggar with “no man of her own”: “With all the lovers
that brought me their love, I never set out the bed for any,” she tells Michael.
The family welcomes her and she repays them by recounting in parable and
song the nation’s history, the tale of the many men who “died for love of
me.” “It is not a man going to his marriage that I look to for help,” she
explains. Bewitched by her stories, Michael turns his back on family and
bride alike, and follows the mysterious stranger to take his place in the
ranks of the doomed rebels. Renewed by the prospect of new lovers and vic-
tims, Cathleen appears transformed to Michael’s brother Patrick—her next
conquest?—as the play closes. “I saw a young girl, and she had the look of
a queen,” he tells his father in the play’s fi nal line.36
A fellow Protestant nationalist left the premiere wondering “if such plays
should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot
and be shot.” Yeats echoes his fears in a late poem: “Did that play of mine
send out / Certain men the English shot?” (353). But the political and per-
sonal do not part company in the play. As its original casting suggests, the
autobiographical drama of Yeats and his own Cathleen stands close behind
the story of Michael and the vampiric goddess-nation who desires blood-
shed, not the marriage bed. Under the influence of his own imperious and
off-putting muse, Yeats himself could produce only plays and poems, not
progeny. “Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake, / Although I have come
close on forty-nine / I have no child, I have nothing but a book, / Nothing
but that to prove your blood and mine,” he mourn in the lines that introduce
Responsibilities (1914; 101).37
By that time, Blok was already at work on “Retribution,” the extended
poem that unapologetically extolled the end of his own “barren” line. “They
have no exit,” he writes of his kind, “neither in love, nor in children, nor in
the formation of new families.” And rightly so, as Blok saw it: the death of
his own family tree and those like it was the only hope for the emergence of
a liberated, truly Russian people. But Yeats viewed the fate of his country
as vested in the continuation of its Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and he hoped
for a happier ending to his own symbolic tale. He had long been convinced
“that his natal horoscope presented inherent problems for his romantic life,”
Brenda Maddox notes. Experts had assured him, though, “that he could
never expect a better time to overcome the liability of his stars than late in
1917 when the number of favorable planetary conjunctions would be quite
extraordinary.” According to expert predictions, “if 1917 was the year for
his marriage, October was the month.”38
Killing a House
Blok was preoccupied with his ancestry, both as a man and as a poet.
He was the last of the poet-gentlemen, the last of the Russian poets who
could adorn his house with portraits of his fathers and forefathers.
—Kornei Chukovsky, Alexander Blok
as Man and Poet (1924)
But he killed the house; to kill a house

Where great men grew up, married, died,
I here declare a capital offence.
—Yeats, Purgatory (1939)
The historian F. S. L. Lyons speaks of an Irish “revolutionary decade”

that ran from 1912, or the year of the British Third Home Rule bill, to 1922,
the year in which the Anglo-Irish Treaty granting Southern Ireland domin-
ion status was ratified by the Dáil, the Irish Parliament. Russian historians
have sometimes seen that nation’s revolutionary years as spanning nearly
two decades, from the failed revolt of 1905 through 1921, when the Bol-
shevik government solidified its claim to power after three years of bloody
civil war. If we draw these bookend dates closer to the actual revolutions
that transformed nations and overthrew states, we might identify them as
running, in Ireland’s case, from the Easter Uprising of 1916 to the end of its
civil war in 1923, with Russia’s revolutionary years beginning with fi rst the
February, and then the October revolutions of 1917, and ending in 1921, at
the close of its own civil confl ict.39
The near convergence in the dates marking their nations’ traumatic labor
pains marks a radical split in Yeats’s and Blok’s poetic and personal paths.
Yeats’s astrologers had predicted well. He proposed to a young English-
woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, shortly after his refusal by Iseult Gonne, and
the couple was married on October 20, 1917. Their daughter Ann Butler
Yeats was born in 1919; she was followed by a son, Michael, in 1921. Yeats
became a senator in the Irish Free State Government in 1922, and received
the Nobel Prize for literature a year later. The Symbolist visionary had
become an acknowledged legislator at last, though the “smiling public man”
(219) apparently found official legislation less to his taste than its symbolic
equivalent: “Do not be elected to the Senate of your country,” he warned
his friend Ezra Pound. His greatest poetic achievements still lay ahead of
him—as did the dabbling with fascism that marks his most disturbing ven-
ture into prophetic politics.40
Yeats’s successes coincide with Blok’s decline. He wrote what were virtu-
ally his last poems, “The Twelve” and “The Scythians,” in January, 1918,
after eighteen months of poetic silence. He continued to write essays, and he
served the government in various minor editorial and bureaucratic functions
until his death from undiagnosed causes on August 2, 1921. His descent
dovetailed neatly with the triumph of the Soviet state, and the convergence
of the two events seemed no accident to both friends and foes of the new
regime who perceived the poet’s end, regardless of their affi liations, as mark-
ing the death of lyric poetry as such, along with the age and the class that
had spawned it. They read his death, in other words, along Blokian lines,
and I will return to Blok’s posthumous influence on his own obituaries in
a moment. For now, though, I want to address a different set of questions.
How did champion mythmakers like Blok and Yeats confront and recreate
the catastrophes they had long sought once these disasters crossed over from
imagination in reality? And why did their lives and art diverge so radically
at this crucial juncture in history?
“Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) began with explicit references to the
Russian Revolution and the First World War (‘The falcon cannot hear the
falconer / The Germans are [ ] now to Russia come’),” James Longenbach
notes. It was only in later variants that “the poem’s apocalypse became
mythical rather than historical.” “Leda and the Swan” (1924) likewise
began life as a meditation on “the Russian revolution and its aftermath,”
Kiberd comments, though Yeats insisted that all politics had vanished from
the fi nal version. Two of the greatest poems of the modern age thus took
their initial inspiration from the event that marked the end of tsarist rule in
Russia, and the lines Longenbach cites hint at the significance this cataclysm
held for Yeats’s symbolic vision.41
“The falcon cannot hear the falconer / The Germans are [ ] now to Rus-
sia come”: what connects the famous opening line with the second phrase
omitted from the fi nal poem? The Germans had come to Russia twice in
the preceding decade, once by way of the World War that brought down
the monarchy, and the second time in the train car carrying Vladimir Lenin
from Germany back to Russia in 1917. The German leaders hoped—rightly
as it turned out—that the exported revolutionary would end Russian par-
ticipation in the war by overthrowing Kerensky’s Provisional Government.
The Communist regime that replaced it became Yeats’s emblem of the mod-
ern age gone horribly wrong, although not for the reasons we might suspect.
“Democracy, to Yeats, was a bad word; it meant mob rule, as in Russia,”
Maddox comments. Yeats’s mistrust of the masses extended even to his
compatriots: “Let us have no faith in the people,” he urges in a letter of
1911. But Soviet Russia best exemplified the “fi lthy modern tide” (345) that
his poetry was intended to stem. Hence the aristocratic image of falcon and
falconer, which evokes not just the medieval ideal Yeats venerates through a
feudal pastime cultivated by the privileged few. It also summons up a world
in which these few have, however tenuously, mastered the violent, animal
instincts of their underlings and turned them to their own ends. When the
falcons cease to heed their masters and abandon their place in history’s
grand scheme—“History is very simple—the rule of the many, then the rule
of the few, day and night, night and day forever”—then “mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world,” as it had been in Soviet Russia (189).42
How is this madness to be staunched? How is history gone horribly wrong
to be put right again? In his Autobiographies, Yeats celebrates “the symbol-
ism of sex” that gives Blake’s poetry its heightened meanings. Symbolic sex
shapes Yeats’s great poems as well; it provides the key to viewing his own
life through the encompassing code he devised to bridge the gap between
self, history, and nation. Yeats devotes the fi nal chapter of A Vision to the
quasi-historical significance of the mythic rape that is the subject of his con-
troversial “Leda”: “I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece as made
to Leda,” he explains. But we do not need the author’s commentary to see
the larger claims being made for Zeus’s rape of the “staggering girl”: “A
shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof
and tower” (218). Crisis and new creation—the fall of Troy and the rise
of Greece—were born of the forced mating of winged divinity and hapless
maiden. The comment from A Vision reminds us, though, that this is not the
only such meeting to reshape history. Christ and Christianity were likewise
born of an annunciation that took the form of a—rather gentler—encounter
between an otherworldly winged creature and an innocent girl whose child,
conceived through this meeting, will transform the world. “Surely some rev-
elation is at hand,” the poet-seer proclaims in “The Second Coming,” and
he ends the poem anticipating the next earthly avatar of cosmic transforma-
tion: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?”(190).43
These lyrics bookend two other poems, also written in 1920 and 1924
respectively, which celebrate what appear to be more purely personal events.
“A Prayer for my Daughter” begins literally where “The Second Coming”
ends; it appears immediately after the more famous poem in Michael Robar-
tes and the Dancer (1921;190). “Under this cradle-hood and coverlid / My
child sleeps on,” the speaker writes unremarkably enough. But the sleep-
ing child is surrounded by a tempest-driven reality—the howling storm, the
roof-leveling wind, the ocean’s “murderous innocence”—that recalls the
cataclysms of “The Second Coming.” Symbolic and domestic realities inter-
sect, just as they do in the more chilling “Prayer for my Son” (215–216),
which appears a few poems before “Leda and the Swan” in The Tower
(1928). “Bid a strong ghost stand at the head / That my Michael may sleep
sound,” the speaker begs (and just what deity does he address, we wonder).
Bid the ghost have sword in fist

Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.
What latter-day Achilles or Herod wishes to murder the hapless infant?

And why should the poet’s son be singled out for such brutal treatment? The
prayer’s prophetic language and guardian ghosts remind us that the fi rst
offspring of Yeats’s marriage was neither daughter, nor son, but the personal
mythology born of his wife Georgie’s spirit writing, the otherworldly dicta-
tion that led in turn to the encompassing cosmologies of A Vision. The work
was intended, Kiberd notes, “as a kind of Celtic constitution.” It was fi rst
published in 1925, “a juncture when the new state, of which Yeats was by
then a senator, was seeking to codify its own laws and customs.” But it was
also a cosmic autobiography of sorts, and the Yeatses interpreted their grow-
ing family through its prism. Could some prophet “prick upon the calendar
the birth of a Napoleon or a Christ?” Yeats wonders in his introduction.
The lonely feats he foresees in the “Prayer” likewise hint at the lofty com-
pany he anticipates for his male heir. By 1918, Maddox notes, the Yeatses’
hoped-for son “had grown in their imagination to something much grander
than an ordinary baby. It was to be a new messiah, redeemer, or initiate
who, like Christ or Buddha, would introduce a new cycle of history.”44
I will not enter here into the very different, clearly gender-based expec-
tations the poet sets forth for daughter and son in his controversial lyrics.
The poem’s imagery reveals, though, both the spatial realization of Yeats’s
ideal state and the paradigmatic family on which it would be based. Let his
daughter be a “flourishing hidden tree” whose secret verticality will resist
the “assault and battery” of the “roof-levelling wind,” Yeats intones in the
fi rst “Prayer.” Natural heights become pinnacles of human accomplishment
in the prayer for his son, whose future “haughty deed or thought” threaten
the resentful masses who “hate the bays,” the laurel wreaths meant to crown
the triumphant few.45
“The theoretical self-image of the Anglo-Irish was aristocratic and gentle-
manly,” Kiberd comments. In practice, though, “they were a middle class
masquerading as an aristocracy.” “The middle class,” Yeats himself wrote,
is “an attitude of mind more than an accident of birth.”46 For Yeats as for his
beloved Nietzsche, aristocrats are likewise a matter of attitude, not birth.
Hence his purchase in 1916 of the tower that would serve for a time as
his young family’s home, and that lent its name both to the collection of
1928—its image graced the book’s cover—and to the well-known poem.
Descent and heights join forces in “The Tower” and “Meditations in Time
of Civil War” (198–214), which celebrate the achievements of his Anglo-
Irish ancestors, both literal and figurative, while laying out the terms of his
inheritance for the generations of Yeatses, and properly Yeatsian Irishmen,
yet to come:
It is time that I wrote my will,

I choose upstanding men . . .
I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State,
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that spat . . .
(from “The Tower”)
Having inherited a vigorous mind

From my old fathers I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind . . .
These stones remain their monument and mine
(from “Meditations in Time of Civil War”)
In civilization as in nature, Yeats spurns the leveling forces that threaten

to lay the mighty low, be they trees, towers, or the men who planted and
built them. But violence that aspires upwards is another matter. Ireland’s
English conquerors, “rough men-at arms, cross-gartered to the knees” fi rst
ascended the winding stairs he calls home in “The Tower” (200). For Yeats,
Howes notes, “Anglo-Irish civilization is based on barbarism”—but this is
the barbarism of masters, not masses. “Its rich cultural identity originates
in crime and violence,” since “violence and greatness, blood and power go
together.” And this is key to his vision of human history generally: “I think
that all noble things are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of
warfare in the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible war-
fare, the division of the mind within itself” (“J. M. Synge and the Ireland of
His Time,” 1910).47
Yeats’s visionary history moves through cycles, be they gyres, great
wheels, or historical cones. Blok was likewise in thrall to the Nietzschean
notion of a history shaped by repetition, not progress. And violent upheav-
als are crucial to the health of the nation he celebrates as well. “Ceaseless
battle—we only dream of peace / through dust and blood,” he proclaims
in “On the Field of Kulikovo” (1:285). His geometries of history were not
nearly as ornate as those of Yeats or his own compatriots Andrei Belyi and
Velimir Khlebnikov. Still in Blok’s own great effort to meld personal geneal-
ogy with national, even cosmic history, his language inevitably calls to mind
the elaborate charts and diagrams of A Vision. “I began constructing an epic
poem called ‘Retribution,’” he writes in the poem’s preface. “I conceived its
blueprint in the shape of concentric circles, which fi rst became narrower and
narrower, and then the smallest circle, having contracted to its innermost
limits, begins once more to live its own life, to expand and extend what sur-
rounds it and to act, in its turn, upon the peripheries” (1:478).48
The independent life he envisions for the fi nal circle does not extend to
his own family, whose history he sets alongside that of “the nineteenth
century, iron age, cruel age” in the poem (1:484). The death of Blok’s father
in 1909 inspired his unfi nished epic. In it the end of the family line coin-
cides with the end of a society whose demise is long overdue: the nation’s
renewal depends upon it. Blok apparently hoped for some salvation con-
ceived outside the family line proper. But the illegitimate future child he
anticipates in his preface—“the seed is cast . . . into the womb of some
quiet, womanly daughter of another nation” (1:480)—never appears in the
poem itself. This other nation was in fact Poland; the poem’s third chap-
ter is set in Warsaw, where his father lived and taught. But the imagined
offspring meant to represent a redemptive fusion of Russian and Polish
Romantic messianism never fi nds its way into the poem as such.49 And the
unshackled bird of prey that presages disaster for Yeats is thus the poem’s
only hope of future liberation:
Arise, go to the meadow in the morning:
The hawk revolves in the pale sky,
Tracing smooth circle after circle,
Determining which nest
Is least hidden among the bushes . . .
Suddenly—birds twitter and rustle . . .
He listens . . . one instant more—
Descends on straightened wings,
A terrified cry from neighboring nests,
The sad squeal of the last chicks,
Tender down tossed by the wind—
He claws his poor victim,
And once more, raising a vast wing
Flies up to trace circle after circle,
With a hungry, homeless eye
He scrutinizes the lifeless meadow . . .
No matter where you look—he’s circling (1:499)
Blok’s metaphorical nest of gentry comes to a grisly end, as it must. All who
wish to survive history and its depredations should emulate its emissary, the
hungry hawk, and not its sorry prey, who must learn to leave the nest and
make do with homelessness.
“Come build in the empty house of the stare [starling],” Yeats bids the
bees from his new tower home in “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” The
poem’s subtitles reveal his commitment to house-building in past and future
alike: “Ancestral Houses,” “My House,” “My Table,” “My Descendants,”
and so on. The phrases suggest not only Yeats’s drive to will his tradition
into being. They also reveal his awareness of the “threat posed to the aris-
tocracy by the violence of the civil war and the burnings of estates,” Howes
comments. Blok, the poet-gentleman, had inherited the tradition and family
tree Yeats craved the old-fashioned way, by right of birth. And where Yeats
the Anglo-Irish upstart must laboriously build his house in verse and stone,
Blok seeks to annihilate his ancestral estate, at least poetically. “Retribution”
might better have been called “The House That Collapsed,” Chukovsky
suggests. “Manor houses are rotting, moldering, crumbling into dust, with
all their marble, cupids, gold and ivory, their high fences guarding centu-
ries-old linden parks, their six-tiered, sculpted iconostases in the manor
churches,” Blok writes approvingly in 1906, just after the revolution that
had seen so many estates vandalized and burnt by rioting peasants (2:33).
His detailed inventory reveals nonetheless an intimate, loving knowledge
of the way of life whose end he applauds. As Presto notes, Blok devoted
the inheritance he received following his father’s death to “house construc-
tion” (domostroitel’stvo), a thorough-going renovation of the family estate,
Shakhmatovo, which he undertook in the same year that saw the beginning
of “Retribution.” Nonetheless he apparently practiced what he preached when
his own estate was destroyed shortly after the October Revolution: “Do not
fear the destruction of kremlins, palaces, pictures, books,” he bids his read-
ers in 1918 (1:225). After Shakhmatovo was pillaged, Chukovsky recalls,
“it seems as if he hardly noticed the loss. When he related the story of its
destruction, I remember how he waved his hand and said with a smile, ‘Such
was its predestined path.’ In his soul his house had long ago been reduced
to rubble.”50
Come let us mock at the great,” Yeats scoffs in “Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen”:
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind. (212)
His irony would have been lost on Blok, who celebrated the same forces
that Yeats deplored as emblems of the modern age. The “Mother Russia”
(matushka Rossiia: 2:49) he pursues is a pathless expanse that defies all
efforts at civilization. It is an elemental force, “stikhiia,” and its tokens are

the wind, the storm, the blizzard (v’iuga) that overthrow all who would
stand against them. Those who wish to court this amorphous goddess must
abandon home and family alike to take up wandering.
This Russia seems to have triumphed in Blok’s fi nal poems, “The Twelve”
and “The Scythians,” which were written virtually simultaneously, within
the same few weeks early in 1918. The road signs and markers of the old
world have vanished in “The Twelve” (1:534), whose twelve revolutionary
soldiers march through a universe that has been radically reshaped by an
elemental force of nature:
Black night.
White snow.
Wind, wind!
A man can’t stand upright.
Wind, wind—
Over all God’s earth!
So run the poem’s opening lines. The soldiers may celebrate the “world-
wide fi re” ignited by the revolution, but the poem itself is dominated by the
“blizzard” that rages from beginning to end, and that might initially seem
yet another incarnation of “Mother Russia” herself—but has in fact been
utterly transformed. “We both love and hate the Russia so distant from us,”
Blok writes in 1908 (2:95). Ten years later only the hatred remains, or so the
evidence of the late poems suggests.
I have mentioned the assembly of warriors Blok gathers before his Russian
Venus in “The Divine Cannot Be Measured by the Mind.” This masculine
collective convenes once more in “The Twelve.” This time around, though,
they are common Bolshevik foot soldiers, not the heroes of ancient legend,
and they come to bury Russia, not to praise her:
Comrade, grasp your rifle, don’t fl inch,
Shoot your bullet into Holy Rus’ (Sviatuiu Rus’)
That old-timer,
Hut-dweller,
With her fat ass!
But why should we take the soldiers’ matricidal hatred for anything but an
antipode to the myths of a redemptive motherland Blok had cultivated so
carefully over the last two decades?
In “The Twelve,” as critics noted early on, Blok combines his love of com-
mon forms like folk laments, gypsy dances, and “cruel songs” (zhestokie
romansy) with revolutionary slang, soldier’s marches, and street songs
(chastushki) to create a poem in which the bardic gentleman’s lyric mus-

ings have fi nally been drowned out by the maelstrom, the “music of the
revolution.” Was he embracing the revolution? Slandering it? Was the poem
“anathema or hosanna”? Its multiple voices defied easy answers, and its
interpretation proved controversial from the start: it was greeted by both
applause and derision. Some revolutionaries rejoiced as the old world’s most
celebrated poet apparently joined their ranks; while other rebels attacked
not just the boorishness of the poem’s Bolsheviks, but their aimlessness as
they wander uncomprehending through the snow from the poem’s outset
to its ambiguous ending. Many of Blok’s former friends and Symbolist col-
leagues, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge the poet-turncoat on
the streets.51
Chukovsky argues that the poem’s Russia is of a piece with the nation
whose primal passions Blok had embraced early on.52 The poem itself tells
a different story. Whatever it does or doesn’t mean vis-à-vis the revolution,
its storyline, such as it is, is clearly yet another transposition on a theme
that had long preoccupied Blok: the love triangle. I will not enter into the
biographical and literary variations on the theme that run through Blok’s
life-in-art here. But whether the affair involves Belyi, Blok, and Mendeleeva-
Blok themselves, Colombine, Pierrot, and Harlequin in “The Puppet Show,”
or the Poet, the Light Blue Man, and the Stranger in the play by that name,
unhappy triangles proliferate in Blok’s art and life alike. “The Twelve” is
no exception—but its love triangle takes a less exalted shape. The poem’s
central action concerns not revolutionary conquest, but lowbrow, garden-
variety romance, with all its retrograde possessiveness and strife. Vanka, a
renegade comrade-in-arms, has stolen Katka, a common prostitute, away
from a spurned and jealous fellow soldier, Petrukha. Petrukha must choose
his allegiances: will he join the revolutionary brigade in their assault on
their wayward comrade and his beloved? Or will he stay true to the girl
he laments in the poem’s fourth section: “Oh you Katka, my Katka, / Fat-
cheeked Katka.” The poem’s answer is unambiguous. “Halt, halt,” the
unnamed leader shouts:
Andriukha, look sharp!

Petrukha, take the rear!
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat! . . .
And where’s Katka?—Dead, dead!
Shot straight through the head!
This is the only military action the unit actually sees. Small wonder, then,
that the poem sparked arguments in revolutionary circles: the murder of
a common streetwalker and her renegade lover would hardly have ranked
among the revolution’s chief ideological or strategic priorities. Just the oppo-
site. Such anarchic behavior would in reality incur only the wrath of the
powers-that-be, Leon Trotsky protested. Had a Red Guard like Petka actu-
ally been caught, he explains in “Aleksandr Blok” (1924), “he would have
been sentenced to be shot by the Revolutionary Tribunal. The Revolution
which applies the frightful sword of Terrorism, guards it severely as a State
right.” “Were Terror used for personal ends,” he concludes, “the Revolution
would be threatened by inevitable destruction.”53
In his poem, Blok does indeed turn revolutionary violence to deeply per-
sonal purposes, although he struggles to imbue them with suitably political
meanings. The twelve soldiers themselves are fi rst introduced in the poem’s
second part—it has twelve—as is the story of Vanka and Katka. The part
concludes with a revolutionary exhortation—“Keep the revolutionary pace!
/ The relentless enemy never sleeps!”—and a statement of the collective’s
mission, which involves, unsurprisingly, the elimination of this ruthless foe.
And who exactly is this enemy: the bourgeoisie? the forces of world capital-
ism? the tsarist White Guard? No, to all of the above. The section ends with
the lines I quoted earlier: the soldiers’ prime target is none other than “fat-
assed” (tolstozadaia), backward Mother Russia herself.
The “fat-cheeked” (tolstomorden’kaia), fickle streetwalker is just another
incarnation of the vilified, feminized Rus’ who is the Bolsheviks’ chief foe,
and this is why her execution proves so crucial to the revolution’s proletarian
apostles. Indeed, the poem’s opening section, which evokes the range of sym-
bolic bourgeois enemies as efficiently as any revolutionary lampoon, is pop-
ulated exclusively by women or “womanish” men. There is the “old woman
like a chicken” who invokes God’s mother (“Okh Matushka-Zastupnitsa!”)
against the “Bolsheviks who’ll drive us to our grave!”; the “young lady in
furs” who “slips, / and splat—goes sprawling!”; the “long-skirted” priest;
and fi nally the “long-haired” writer-prophet who echoes the distraught old
lady: “Traitors! / Russia has perished!” The imagery comes straight from
the new state’s broadsides, with their benighted, roly-poly babushki, effete
bankers, and portly priests overwhelmed by the forward-looking, virile
forces of the revolution. Postrevolutionary Soviet culture generally revered
“traditionally masculine values at the expense of conventional femininity,”
which was taken to represent the Russian backwardness that the Bolsheviks
were destined to overcome. This cult of masculinity took the form, more-
over, of the kind of collective comradeship shared by Blok’s revolutionary
twelve, who choose, as Vanka’s fate demonstrates, female companionship
over masculine solidarity only at their peril. 54
But Russia is not the only suspect female in Blok’s version of global revo-
lution. In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” (1920) Pound laments the myriads of
young men lost in the First World War for the sake of “an old bitch gone
at the teeth,” the “botched civilization” of rotting Europe. 55 The Europe
of “The Scythians” (1:453–454) has likewise outlived herself. This “old
coquette” is still “comely,” though, and the poet speaks for the new Mongol
horde, the Soviet forces en masse, as he describes the love and hate with
which they will subjugate their seductive foe:
We love flesh—its taste, its color,

And its sultry, mortal scent . . .
Are we to blame if your bones crunch
Between our heavy, tender paws?
Holy Russia will be shot straight out, but the Scythians plan to ravish the
aging courtesan Europe before her long-overdue end. In either case, the
Soviet male collective emerges victorious, and the poet of “The Scythians”
becomes the self-appointed spokesman for this barbaric horde.
Both poems might seem to represent Blok’s desire to sacrifice his Beautiful
Lady—be she harlot or deity—at the altar of a new, hyper-masculine Russia
that has no use for aging earth mothers or otherworldly ladies. But the very
language Blok uses to describe his barbarian conquest sends us back to the
earlier poetry in unexpected ways. “Come from the horrors of war / Into
our peaceful embraces,” the horde bids an understandably reluctant Europe
(these peaceful caresses had pulverized bones just a few stanzas earlier). And
if she refuses, the poet’s collective warns, “you will be cursed / By your ail-
ing, belated descendants” (bol’noe pozdnee potomstvo). The phrase evokes
nothing so much as Blok himself and his Silver Age gentry brethren as
described in “Retribution” and elsewhere. Indeed, his unlikely Mongol horde
possesses a surprisingly sophisticated and au courant European education:
We love all—the heat of cold numbers,
And the gift of divine visions,
We comprehend all—sharp Gallic thought,
And the gloomy German genius . . .
We remember all—the hell of Parisian streets

And the coolnesses of Venice,
The distant aroma of lemon groves,
The smoky vastness of Cologne.
Sultry flesh, Parisian hell, and distant lemon trees: this “barbarian lyre”
is tuned to a peculiarly Baudelairean key. The masculine collective versus
degenerate, feminine Europe: this fight is rigged in unexpected ways. The

enemy appears to have infiltrated the barbarian forces from within; they
have even received the dubious gift of divine visions (dar bozhestvennykh
videnii) that had fi rst sent the young poet off in search of his Beautiful Lady.
For all its bloodthirsty brawling, this horde bears a suspicious resemblance
to the past and class that Blok sought to escape.
Yeats loathed “the irrational, atavistic barbarism of the crowd” that
Blok extols here and throughout his writing56 —but the would-be Scythian
cannot help conceiving this crowd in his own image. Even the barbarians’
conquest of Europe becomes a more aggressive, Bolshevik variation on the
heroic quest for a Beautiful Lady of uncertain reputation. Blok could not
keep his divine visions from intruding into his hymns to a new revolution-
ary reality, and this failing lay at the heart of the storm surrounding his
would-be epic.
Thus far I have focused on the soldiers’—and the poet’s?—assault on
Holy Rus’ and her various feminized incarnations in “The Twelve.” The
most notorious of these beings appears, though, only in the poem’s prob-
lematic conclusion. “Onward, onward, onward, / Working-class people”
(Vpered, vpered, vpered, / Rabochii narod), the soldiers chant as they tramp
through the snowstorm. But they themselves have no idea “what’s ahead”
(chto vpered). How could they? Even Blok claimed to be shocked by his final
lines, which came to him of their own accord and refused to go away:
Ahead (vperedi)—with a bloody flag,
Invisible beyond the storm
Unharmed by bullets
With a tender tread above the storm,
With a pearly haze of snow,
In a white wreath of roses—
Ahead (vperedi)—is Jesus Christ.
What on earth was Christ doing not just leading the forces of revolu-
tion, but usurping the privileged position (vperedi) to be occupied only by
the most advanced social class (peredovoi klass), the proletariat, and their
self-appointed guardians in the Communist Party? Friends and enemies of
the revolution alike were outraged and baffled. But Blok could provide no
explanation. He had always had a vexed relationship with that “feminine
phantom” Jesus Christ, and was dismayed to fi nd him taking pride of place
in his revolutionary epic. “I don’t like the end of ‘The Twelve’ either,” he
confessed at a public discussion in 1919: “I wanted it to turn out differently.
When I got to the ending, I was surprised myself: Why Christ? But the closer
I looked, the more clearly I saw Christ. And so I made a mental note: ‘Yes,
unfortunately, Christ.’”57
Christ alone would be bad enough: but this luminous figure in pearls and
roses is a peculiarly effeminate Redeemer. “Maidenhood, tenderness, femi-
ninity shine through [Christ’s] masculine features,” the Silver Age philoso-
pher Vasilii Rozanov had proclaimed in 1911, hence “we worship the Maid
in the Man.” “The soul of the new man is wavering between the male and
the female principles,” Blok notes in an unpublished essay.58 If we read “The
Twelve” as Blok’s attempt to end this wavering once and for all, to banish
the feminine from both the revolution and his own poetic vision, the poem
proves an unqualified failure. Holy Rus’ has unexpectedly been resurrected
in the person of the risen Christ, who cannot be harmed by the bullets
intended for the motherland and her surrogates. The poet himself, who had
hitherto managed to submerge his own voice and vision beneath the revolu-
tion’s raging music, suddenly resurfaces alongside his unwanted guest. The
poem’s language suddenly turns unmistakably, lyrically Blokian—no slo-
gans or street songs here.
Moreover, the poet-prophet alone is apparently privy to this unnerving
vision: the pearly, tender Christ is hidden by the storm from those he leads.
No one else can see him: is he really even there? Where have we heard this
complaint before? “But You are a vision / I seek salvation”: the doubts Blok
expresses in an early lyric haunt him throughout his writings on his other-
worldly, ambiguous beloved (1:30). I have mentioned that Christ usurps the
position rightfully held by the Party and the proletariat. His situation looks
familiar in other ways as well. He is not just ahead of (vperedi), but above
(nad, as in nadv’iuzhnoi, “above the storm”) his followers; he floats above
the chaos that engulfs them. Above and beyond: this is how the Beautiful
Lady typically appears to her anxious suitor. The Twelve may have thought
they were hot in pursuit of a glorious revolutionary future. But they end by
unwittingly joining in their own creator’s quintessentially lyric quest for the
eternal feminine in her latest, most baffl ing incarnation.
Life and Death Après La Lettre:

The Posthumous Fate of Alexander Blok
In [Blok’s] notebook for January 29, 1918, we read the very signifi-
cant lines: “That Christ is going on before them is beyond doubt . . . It
is He who is with them and there is still no other; should there not be
Another—?” . . . Probably, Blok would have opened his eyes wide in
astonishment and fear had anyone suggested to him that this “Other”
was already living; that he was the great teacher and leader of the
proletariat, at once a real man and the true embodiment of the great-
est ideas which had ever developed on this earth and which made the
sayings of Christianity look naive and old-fashioned; that he was that
very Vl. Ilych Lenin whom, perhaps, he had occasionally encountered
at meetings or on the street.
—Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Alexander Blok” (1932)
The longest way round is the shortest way home—or so it proved for
Blok, to judge by the enigmatic ending of his would-be epic. Yeats’s vision-
ary history was transformed by the marriage that inspired A Vision and
the children who took their symbolic meaning from its pages. His cosmic
historiography now found its key not in thwarted courtships, but in “the
relations of men and women and the birth of children.” I will not enter here
into Yeats’s later poetic and political evolution. (Like so many other great
Russian poets, Blok could claim only an early and a middle period at best.)
At this critical juncture, though, Yeats found a way to convert his courtship
into marriage, to beget progeny who existed on physical and metaphysical
planes alike, and to tie his new family into the life of his nation, both sym-
bolic and actual, as he became not just a mystical, but a literal legislator by
serving in his new nation’s government.
When Yeats died in 1939, after a long, lauded, and controversial career,
even the outbreak of World War II could not defeat his burial plans, which
were once again both specific and symbolically charged. “Many times man
lives and dies / Between his two eternities / That of race and that of soul /
And ancient Ireland knew it all,” Yeats proclaims in his self-designated vale-
dictory poem, “Under Ben Bulben” (1939; 333–336). But Yeats, not Ireland,
knows all when it comes to this particular death:
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid . . .
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
History apparently had other plans: death overtook Yeats in France.

Since the war prevented the body’s return to Ireland, he was buried at the
church of St. Pancras at Rocquebrune. Even here, though, he was not caught
entirely off guard. As per his last-minute directives, the coffi n was carried—
upwards, of course—along a long, winding road to the top of a hill. But
Yeats’s fi nal dictates were not to be thwarted even by a bona fide worldwide
catastrophe. The poem’s specifications were fulfilled at last when his body
was dug up and reburied near Ben Bulben with all possible pomp and splen-
dor in September, 1948. “Death and life were not / till man made up the
whole.” Be that as it may, Yeats managed his own exit from the world’s stage
with admirable aplomb.59
Unlike Yeats, Blok operates under the sign of courtship from start to fi n-
ish. Even his wooing of the revolution ends by reverting to form; the outlines
of his perpetually thwarted courtship of the Beautiful Lady appear, willy-
nilly, in even his most apparently bloodthirsty hymns to the revolutionary
brotherhood. He could reinvent neither self nor vision in his quest to serve
the revolution he had awaited—or so it seemed—and his physical death
was perceived as a postscriptum to a life-in-art that had already ended long
since. Blok himself encouraged just such an interpretation. Kornei Chuk-
ovsky recalls attending a reading with the poet a few months before his
death: “Onstage some two-bit orator, of whom there were so many in Mos-
cow, merrily expounded to the crowd that Blok was already dead as a poet:
‘I ask you, comrades, where is the dynamism in these lines? They’re carrion,
written by a dead man.’ Blok leaned over to me and said: ‘He’s right. . . .
He’s telling the truth. I am dead.’”60
The spirits planned Yeats’s wedding date well: October, 1917 could hardly
be bettered for international resonance and lasting symbolic impact. Blok’s
death, in 1921, would seem to have been equally well timed—though it is
only in hindsight, of course, that Blok’s end seems preordained and not sim-
ply one more of the countless, unmarked fatalities produced by seven years
of war, famine, disease, and calamity of every kind. His death coincided not
only with the Bolsheviks’ fi nal victory in the Civil War. It also launched the
series of poetic casualties that Jakobson would later commemorate in “The
Generation that Squandered Its Poets” (1931). This series would culminate
nine years later in the suicide of the state’s most famous poetic celebrant,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, just as Stalin assumed the reins of power. The deaths
of the Silver Age’s two greatest life-creators thus bracketed Russia’s fi rst
postrevolutionary decade.
Blok’s death invited—and continues to invite—confl icting interpreta-
tions. Was its cause a suitably symbolic syphilis, à la Ibsen’s “Ghosts”? Or
did he fall prey to the appropriately neurasthenic asthma that would claim
his near-contemporary Marcel Proust just one year later? In either case, its
timing was flawless, at least as far as revolutionary narratives—and poetic

mythologies—are concerned. The death of the great Symbolist coincides not
just with the victory of the Reds over their White opponents, but also with
the triumph of prose over its own class enemy, lyric poetry, that I mention in
my introduction. The demise of genre and artist together underlies the liter-
ary postmortems that emerged in the wake of Blok’s death.
What Mandelstam called Blok’s “posthumous life” and “posthumous
fate” preoccupied literary scholars and revolutionary leaders alike. Blok
overcame “‘the lyrical’ in himself” and perished, Boris Eikhenbaum laments
in an essay called—what else?—“Blok’s Fate” (1921), and “the destiny of
an entire generation,” he continues, was articulated in the poet’s passing.
Leon Trotsky’s eulogy was, predictably, more caustic. “‘The Twelve’ is not
a poem of the Revolution,” he proclaims in “Alexander Blok” (1923). It is
an end, not a beginning, “the swan song of the individualistic art” that was
obliterated with the revolution, and its creator is a thorough-going product
of the “old Russia, of its landlords and intelligentsia” for all his revolution-
ary sympathies. Blok’s “lyric poetry,” Trotsky predicts, “will not outlive its
time or its author.”61
Writing nearly a decade later, Anatoly Lunacharsky takes issue with
his erstwhile comrade-at-arms. “Blok’s works, and, therefore, his whole
personality, are of considerable significance for us,” he insists. But Luna-
charsky’s interest is taxidermical, not literary. “Here we have a perfect
specimen,” he marvels, “a product of the last, decadent stages of the culture
of the nobility.” Blok’s “love affair with the revolution” was thus doomed
from the start. This “scion of several noble families” “was conscious of the
curse which hung over his class” and so sought to embrace a revolutionary
future. But the “last poet of the gentry” could not endure the revolution’s
resolutely unlyrical aftermath. He could not bear an “‘unmusical’ revolu-
tion,” a revolution that “before his eyes had become prose” and so com-
mitted a form of generic suicide: “Thus the poet, in his own way, cried,
‘Morituri te salutant.’”62
It is hard to say what is most striking about these last two commentar-
ies. Is it that two renowned revolutionaries felt compelled, nearly ten years
apart, to write lengthy, learned disquisitions on the life and death of a Sym-
bolist poet? That they saw the need to interweave his story with the story
of the revolution that they themselves had helped to forge? That the revo-
lution was itself shaped by members of the intelligentsia so obviously well
versed in the culture they denigrate in the person of Alexander Blok? Or is
it fi nally the degree to which they rely on Blok’s own interpretation of his
life and art in assessing his relationship to the revolution from their very
different vantage points in 1924 and 1932? “Music of the revolution”; the
“last child of a long line”; the “last scion of a dying class consumed by a
powerful spiral of shocks that would embrace the whole world”: the list
of near-quotations from Blok’s own poetry and prose that punctuate their
essays could be continued almost indefi nitely. The ways in which Blok’s own
vision of his symbolic significance infi ltrated the minds of even the revolu-
tion’s luminaries must be accounted a kind of posthumous success.63
In one of his fi nal public appearances, Blok recalled Pushkin’s death
eighty-six years earlier: “Pushkin was not killed by Danthes’ bullet. He died
from a lack of air. His culture died with him” (2:354). So far as we know,
Danthes’ bullet played a much larger part in the great poet’s death than did
prevailing atmospheric conditions. But not for Blok. The confusion of literal
and literary deaths was of course his stock-in-trade, and it is not surprising
to fi nd Eikhenbaum following his lead. “And then came the abrupt end of
this tragedy,” he mourns: “The stage death to which the whole course of the
play has been directed turns out to be a real death . . . and we are shaken
as spectators are when, in the fifth act of the tragedy and before their very
eyes, the actor bleeds real blood. The footlights are turned off; Hamlet-Blok
is truly dead.”64
Eikhenbaum muddles life and art very much in the style of Blok him-
self. But what are we to make of Lunacharsky’s equally messy conflation
of literal and metaphorical endings? “At the moment of the physical death
of his class,” Lunacharsky insists, “[Blok] exhibited the maximum revolu-
tionary impulse of which the consciousness of the nobility was capable”
(my italics). What is wrong with this picture? For Blok, Pushkin dies not
of bullet wounds, but of suffocation. Eikhenbaum’s tragic hero perishes,
as he must, in the fi fth act’s bloody close, while Blok’s entire class perishes
with him in Lunacharsky’s ideologically foregone conclusion, as the poet’s
physical death merges with the symbolic end of the landed gentry following
the revolution’s triumph. The death of the poet; the demise of an outmoded
genre; the defeat of a doomed aristocracy: literal, literary, and ideological
deaths converge neatly in a life story that Blok had taught admirers and
enemies alike to read. Indeed, Lunacharsky cites “Retribution” at length in
explaining his subject’s fraught life and its timely ending. “[Blok] should be
regarded as a scion of the line of the nobility’s ideologists,” he lectures, “and
his place is—to extend the metaphor—at the end of that line.” 65
“Romantic Russia’s dead and gone,” as Yeats might have put it. Or at
least so it seemed to Blok’s contemporaries. But lyricism proved far harder
to kill than Lunacharsky was willing to admit in his belated obituary. Blok’s
antipode, in Lunacharsky’s reckoning, was Mayakovsky, and Mayakovsky
was, he assures us, “revolted” by “lyricism,” by the “musical chirping” and

“saccharine melodies” of his Symbolist precursors.66 Blok’s death dovetailed
neatly not only with the symbolic life story he had labored to create through-
out his work. It turned out to be a near-perfect fit with the larger narrative
of genres, generations, classes, and nations that the new Soviet regime was
then in the process of creating. The all too lyrical suicide of the revolution’s
self-proclaimed bard and herald at the decade’s close would prove far harder
for the revolution’s mythmakers to digest.
Chapter Title: Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic

2
Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic
I am the poet of slaves, and the masters of slaves.

I am the poet of the body.
And I am.
—Walt Whitman, untitled
Whitman the Futurist

You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ in Russia!
—Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde!” (1856)
In 1913, the French Futurist Guillaume Apollinaire marked his

entrance on the literary scene by figuratively killing off an overwhelm-
ing poetic parent. In the fantastical funeral Apollinaire invents for Walt
Whitman, he celebrates his great precursor’s flesh even as he lays it to rest:
“Everyone that Whitman had known was there . . . the stagedrivers of
Broadway, negroes, his old mistresses and his comerados [sic]. . . . Ped-
erasts came in great numbers. . . . It is believed that several of Whitman’s
children were there, with their mothers, white or black. . . . At sundown,
a huge cortege formed with a ragtime band in the lead. Whitman’s coffi n
followed, carried by six drunken pallbearers.”
83
84 Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic
Due to the size of Whitman’s corpse, Apollinaire continues, the tipsy

pallbearers were forced to crawl on their knees in order to thrust his enor-
mous coffi n into its merely human-sized tomb. “You cannot carry around
on your back the corpse of your father,” Apollinaire insists elsewhere. But
his dubious anecdote demonstrates how difficult it was for modern poets to
dispose of Walt Whitman. He inspired the avant-garde writers of Europe
and the Americas even as they struggled to surpass an outsized poetic par-
ent who is, by his own account, “kosmic,” “lusty, phallic, with the potent
original loins.”1
“I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin,” Whitman announces
in “Salut au Monde” (1881). “I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw” (293).
Posterity justified his grandiose claims in ways that he could not have antici-
pated. Whitman made no secret of his own legislative ambitions: “A few
fi rst-class poets, philosophs, and authors . . . must stamp . . . [the] real
democratic construction of this American continent,” he insists in “Demo-
cratic Vistas” (934). But his poetic politics were taken far more seriously by
Eastern European followers accustomed to heeding bardic wisdom than by
his American contemporaries. Indeed, Whitman was indirectly responsible,
so Czesław Miłosz claims, for changing the shape of modern history by way
of one such disciple, the Montenegrin Gavrilo Princip. Princip, he explains,
took the American poet’s hostility to Europe’s crowned heads too literally
and shot Archduke Ferdinand under his hero’s influence, thus making Whit-
man indirectly “responsible for the outbreak of World War I.”2
Other Eastern European disciples, including Miłosz himself, were more
restrained, though hardly less fervent in their admiration. I don’t intend to
trace the history of Whitman’s reception in Russia here. (I will return to
his Polish acolytes in Chapter 8.) By the time Vladimir Mayakovsky came
to him, though, he had already found two champions on Russian soil, the
Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont and the critic and translator Kornei
Chukovsky, who returned at intervals throughout his life to the task of fi nd-
ing a compelling Russian voice for Whitman’s verse. All modern poetry,
Balmont insists, moves between the poles marked out by Whitman and Poe.
Chukovsky is less sweeping in his claims for Whitman’s influence. But in My
Whitman (Moi Uitman, 1966) he notes that for the poets of Russia’s Silver
Age, Whitman became “the very air they breathed.”3
Mayakovsky was one such poet, as Chukovsky’s account of their fi rst
meeting reveals. The Futurist had already read Chukovsky’s early transla-
tions of Whitman, which he did not hesitate to criticize, though he knew no
English: he spoke, Chukovsky notes, “as though he had written the poems
himself.” The two spent the evening reading Chukovsky’s most recent
Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic 85
translations; and Mayakovsky’s comments on Whitman’s life and writing

point to precisely those places where the future bard of the revolution over-
laps most closely with the celebrant of American democracy. Mayakovsky
“singled out those lines which came closest at the time to his own poetics”:
Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance . . .

[“The waterfall Niagara is a veil for my face” as Chukovsky has it]
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma fi ner than prayer . . .
[I] am not contained between my hat and my boots . . .
I do not require the stars to descend,
They are good just as they are . . .
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of myself . . . (61, 51, 32, 52)
All but one of these quotations derives from the “Song of Myself” (1855,
1881), and it is no surprise that the Russian Futurist should fi nd common
ground with his American precursor in Whitman’s great hymn to himself.
Both poets were specialists in the art of self-celebration, and both constructed
massive bodies in verse to house the monumental egos that are the source
and subject of their work. Both intended these bodies, moreover, to exem-
plify, even incorporate the politics and people of a flourishing revolutionary
state. The two writers found themselves confronted, though, by postrevo-
lutionary societies in which self, poetry, and society held radically different
meanings. Whitman may have suffered from the more or less benign neglect
that unacknowledged legislators have come to expect in most of the Eng-
lish-speaking world. But Eastern European poets pay upon occasion a steep
price for their place in the public domain. Mayakovsky’s fate may be read as
an object lesson in the dangers of acknowledged—or attempted—legislation
in a state where Romantic self-glorification had given way to utopian visions
of an encompassing collectivity achieved by resolute party leaders and not
their poetic minions.
Let me return here, though, to the resemblances between the Russian poet
and his American forebear. “I am not contained between my hat and my
boots,” Whitman boasts, and his claim points to another similarity between
the American poet and his Russian rival. Whitman carefully crafted his
transformation from Walter Whitman, erstwhile schoolteacher, typeset-
ter, house-builder and journalist, to Walt Whitman, flesh and spirit of the
nation. Chief among the props he used in this metamorphosis was the hat
adorning his head in the fi rst of a series of strategically posed photographs
that shaped his image in the minds of readers for generations to come. In
this photograph, Whitman poses as a “working-class rough,” “dressed as
a day laborer in workingman’s trousers, a shirt unbuttoned to reveal his

undershirt, [his] hat cocked jauntily on his head”: an engraved version opens
the earliest edition of Leaves of Grass. 4
Whitman blurred from the start the line that divides life from art, the poet
from his writing. He was an accomplished practitioner avant la lettre of the
life-creation I discuss in Chapter 1, and found a hospitable reception in Rus-
sia’s Silver Age where extravagant self-fashioning was all the rage. It is no
accident that Chukovsky chose Whitman’s ostentatiously proletarian pho-
tograph to open the earliest editions of his translations. Mayakovsky, whose
infamous yellow blouse made appearances in his public performances and
poetry alike, clearly spotted a fellow master of épatage in the poet whose
laborer’s clothes marked his own revolt against the genteel “profession of
authorship” as practiced in mid-nineteenth century America.5
Chukovsky recalls Mayakovsky declaiming a celebrated line from “Song
of Myself”: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (210). He
speculates that such lines inspired Mayakovsky to insert his own name and
biographical particulars into early works like “Vladimir Mayakovsky: A
Tragedy” (1913) and “A Cloud in Trousers” (1914–15). Certainly the ques-
tions Mayakovsky put to Chukovsky suggest that he recognized a rival life-
creator in his American forebear: “How did Whitman read his poetry on
stage? How often did the public hiss him? Did he wear outrageous get-ups?
How exactly did they trash him in the papers? Did he knock Shakespeare
and Byron?” Chukovsky remarks that Mayakovsky appeared to be “measur-
ing [Whitman’s] biography against his own.” More than this—he is clearly
checking the credentials of a formidable fellow Futurist.6
Chukovsky recognized early on the affi nities that linked Whitman to
Futurism. In “Ego-Futurists and Cubo-Futurists” (1914), he calls Whitman
“the fi rst Futurist poet.” Elsewhere he notes that the Futurists “acknowl-
edge only Whitman among the world’s poets.” Mayakovsky himself con-
ceded only that Whitman “wasn’t a bad writer.” But his grudging admission
clearly stems from the same impulse that leads Apollinaire to bury and
praise his poetic progenitor in the same breath. Mayakovsky’s one explicit
reference to Whitman in his verse sheds light on the source of this rivalry.7
In “150,000,000” (1919–20), Mayakovsky’s fi rst effort at a revolutionary
epic, he cuts his—and his fledgling nation’s—American competition down
to size. He peoples his grotesque Chicago, the capital of his caricatured
capitalism, with “all kinds of Lincolns, Whitmans, and Edisons.” Whitman
himself, stuffed into a “snug dinner-jacket” and “rocking like a rocking
chair to an unheard-of rhythm,” apparently serves in Woodrow Wilson’s
corrupt and well-fed retinue.8 Stripped of his worker’s disguise, Whitman
stands unmasked in “150,000,000”: he is not the people’s poet, but the pet
of their bourgeois masters. Through Mayakovsky’s dismissive simile (“rock-
ing like a rocking chair”), Whitman’s iconoclastic poetic rhythms, intended
to regenerate the American body politic, become instead an old man’s senile
fancies, to be replaced presumably by his descendant’s more percussive beat.
Finally Whitman, the titanic force, the prophet “contain[ing] multitudes”
(87), is himself reduced to hordes of mass-produced “Whitmans” (Uitmeny),
a commodity along the lines presumably of Frigidaires or Model-T Fords.
“Who but I should be the poet of comrades?” Whitman asks in “Starting
from Paumanok” (1860, 1881; 179). Mayakovsky’s tacit retort is clear: “I
myself, Mayakovsky.”
Why should Mayakovsky feel compelled to settle scores with his Ameri-
can competitor in precisely this poem at precisely this time? One answer lies
in the company that the “Whitmans” of “150,000,000” keep. Mayakovsky
implicitly refutes all American claims to populist heroics, be they in politics
(Lincoln), technology (Edison), or poetry (Whitman). The revolution and
its offspring are destined to surpass their bourgeois brethren on all fronts,
the poem suggests. But Whitman comes in for particular abuse here, abuse
that his fellow populists-manqués are spared. Another poem of the period
reveals that Mayakovsky alone should be counted as the true poet-genius
in any future reckoning: “I want to stand / in the ranks of the Edisons, /
In Lenin’s rank, / In the ranks of the Einsteins” (my italics; 1:294). Only
the Soviet leader and the revolutionary poet are dignified by grammatically
singular forms. Collectivity is left to lesser luminaries—the Edisons, Ein-
steins, and of course, the Whitmans of this world. Mayakovsky was appar-
ently willing to share the spotlight with his illustrious peer in the political
sphere—though Lenin chose not to take him up on his offer. But the new
state clearly had no place, as Mayakovsky saw it, for two “barbaric yawps”
both operating at “the top of their voice.” In “150,000,000,” he leaves no
doubt as to who will triumph in this shouting match of Titans.
Postrevolutionary Russians saw things differently. Whitman may have
gone largely unnoticed at home during his lifetime—but his success just after
the Russian Revolution exceeded even his prewar fame. And it came right
as Mayakovsky was laboring to establish himself as bard-in-chief for the
new state. In the introduction to the 1923 edition of his translations, Chuk-
ovsky stresses Whitman’s affi nities with postrevolutionary Russian culture.
Cosmism, biocosmism, proletarian poetry, collective verse, political and
sexual liberation, the celebration of technology, the cult of masculine cama-
raderie: all were fi rst rehearsed in Whitman’s writings, Chukovsky suggests.
Many of his compatriots apparently agreed. Poets of the Proletarian Culture
movement (Proletkult) and young revolutionaries alike were drawn to their

American precursor, as Whitman Societies formed in towns across Soviet
Russia. In a diary entry of 1922, Chukovsky recalls his encounter with one
group of fervent young “Whitmanians” (uitmeniantsy): “They want to kiss
and work and die like Whitman,” he marvels.9
This was the reception that the homegrown prophet craved and failed to
gain. Small wonder that Mayakovsky should feel compelled to fi ll Whit-
man’s mythical hat and boots as he worked to commandeer his place as the
premier “poet of the coming democracy.”10 In “150,000,000,” Mayakovsky
announces his programmatic collectivity in typically oxymoronic fashion.
“150,000,000 speak with my lips. . . . No one is the author of my poem,”
he trumpets in the would-be epic’s opening (my italics; 3:91). “I print[ed] it
without my name,” he recalls in his memoirs, and thereby extended an open
invitation to his hoped-for mass audience. “I want[ed] everyone to add to it,
improve it. But nobody did,” he notes ruefully. Could it be that Soviet soci-
ety was unwilling to contribute collectively by means of “his lips” to “his
poem”? Perhaps they did not want to speak, or kiss, or work like Mayak-
ovsky. Or maybe this had never really been Mayakovsky’s goal. “Somehow
they all knew my name though,” he concludes in summing up the poem’s
reception (1:43). For all his ostentatious anonymity—“150,000,000 is the
name of this poem’s master,” he proclaims (3:91)—lyrical self-advertise-
ment, not socialist self-effacement, was Mayakovsky’s stock-in-trade. And
it proved to be increasingly incompatible with a state that bore little resem-
blance to what he called—what else?—“my revolution” (1:42).
Apocalyptic Bodies
With
my own hand
I touch
the bodiless word
“politics.”
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Kazan” (1928)
Most critics see Whitman’s greatest influence at work on the prerevo-

lutionary Mayakovsky, whose outsized self takes center stage, and not on
the postrevolutionary bard who tailors his talents to the needs of the newly
formed people’s state. They emphasize Whitman the “poet of the self,” in
other words, over Whitman the “bard of democracy.” Chukovsky, for one,
locates the apex of Whitman’s influence in Mayakovsky’s epic poem “Man”
(“Chelovek,” 1916–17).11 The poem itself leaves little doubt as to who the
Man in question is. It reads like a Whitmanesque self-apotheosis gone ber-
serk, with suitably perverse stations of the avant-garde cross marking the
poet’s progress: “The Birth of Mayakovsky,” “The Life of Mayakovsky,”
“Mayakovsky’s Passions,” “The Ascent of Mayakovsky,” “Mayakovsky in
Heaven,” “The Return of Mayakovsky,” and fi nally, “Mayakovsky for the
Ages.” The segment Chukovsky mentions points, though, to the place where
self and politics intersect for Whitman and Mayakovsky alike. He cites a
passage in which Mayakovsky invites an awestruck public to admire the
spectacle of his mammoth form:
How should I
not sing myself,
if my whole self
is an undivided wonder,
if my every movement is
an enormous,
inexplicable miracle. (3:67)
Mayakovsky is not simply a poet of the self. Like Whitman, he houses his
monumental ego in a suitably oversized body, and this body is the tortured
hero of all his early work. Only in “150,000,000,” though, does Mayak-
ovsky fi rst attempt to turn his form to the purposes that Whitman’s poetic
self had been crafted to serve early on. In “150,000,000,” he emulates Whit-
man’s feat in creating a poetic body designed to incorporate a youthful,
expansive, postrevolutionary state. Like his precursor, he works to locate
the juncture where the poet’s self fuses with the body politic.
This was the task that Whitman’s self was meant to perform from the
start. “One’s self I sing,” he exclaims in his fi rst “Inscription,” “a simple
separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”
How is this seeming paradox to be achieved? The lyric’s next line gives a
hint: “Of physiology from top to toe I sing” (165). “All comes by the body,”
he announces in “By Blue Ontario’s Shores” (1881), with what is surely an
intentional pun (470): all his writings might be taken as a gloss upon this
statement. Both the preface to the fi rst edition of Leaves of Grass (1855)
and his programmatic letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, written a year later,
demonstrate that for Whitman democracy and poetry are alike rooted in
the physical self. The unfettered body, with its boundless energy and sexual
vitality, is the equivalent of the natural laws of liberty and equality upon
which American democracy was founded. And both self and state are ide-
ally unconstrained by the moral, aesthetic, and political strictures of old
Europe. The poet’s activity becomes exemplary: he is flesh of the nation’s

flesh and bone of its bone. America, democracy, the body, and the bard:
Whitman’s writing maps out the symbiotic relations between what he sees
as coterminous entities. The poet’s own body is a poem (“And I will make
the poems of my body,” 179) and America is both the body politic (“for the
union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to their life than the
union of These States is to their life,” 1330) and “the greatest,” “the amplest
poem” (5, 471). The poetic revolution Whitman effects in Leaves of Grass
will, he suggests, continue and amplify the political revolution begun some
eighty years before his fi rst poems appeared.
In his letter to Emerson, Whitman energetically propounds his new poetic
creed. The task of the truly American writer is to be “electric, fresh, lusty,
to express the full-sized body, male and female—to give the modern mean-
ing of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America”
(1328). The true bard, he insists in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, “is
to be commensurate with a people . . . he incarnates [the nation’s] geography
and natural life and rivers and lakes” (7). His flesh encompasses “the endless
gestation of new states . . . the perfect equality of the female with the male
. . . the large amativeness—the fluid movement of the population” (8). The
poems themselves, in their various redactions, generate multiple variations
on these themes.12 The poet mates with the land that bore him, “attracting
it body and soul to himself, hanging on its neck with incomparable love, /
Plunging his seminal muscle into its merits and demerits” (472). He peoples
its expanses with his offspring: “I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters
fit for these states” (259). And he takes its fertile form for his own: “My ever-
united lands—my body / . . . made out of a thousand diverse contributions
one identity” (323).
Whitman thus takes a traditionally lyric impulse—the desire for one
man or woman—and works to convert it to epic purposes. In Leaves of
Grass he translates “the auto-erotic into the programmatically mystical,
the hetero-erotic into the programmatically procreational, and the homo-
erotic into the programmatically fraternal and democratic,” James Miller
explains. Other critics have been less charitable. All Whitman’s “privacy
leak[s] out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe,” D. H. Lawrence
complains in his Studies in Classic American Literature. (Soviet critics
charged Mayakovsky with similar forms of cosmic sloppiness.) “There had
always been a curious correspondence between Whitman’s body and the
body politic of America,” Betsy Erkilla asserts—though few of his nine-
teenth-century compatriots could be persuaded to perceive it. Whitman
managed nonetheless to craft a myth in which his evolving poetic body and
America’s shifting political fortunes came to seem uniquely congruent to

later generations.13
Mayakovsky attempts to tailor his poet’s body to Soviet requirements
throughout the twenties, from the overgrown Ivan-Russia of “150,000,000”
to the grotesque poet-cum-factory that concludes “Homeward!” (“Domoi!”
1925) and the revolutionary latrine-cleaner who discards ideological cast-
offs in “At the Top of My Lungs” (“Vo ves’ golos,” 1930). But his efforts
were less than successful. Whitman did not have to contend with a state
increasingly intent upon regulating poetry and bodies alike. He was free to
generate his poetic myths, however scandalous, unhampered by the politi-
cal pressures brought to bear upon Russia’s revolutionary poets. More than
this—the very lack of an audience freed him to perceive the ideal fusion of
self and nation as pure potential, a dream to be achieved not at the present
moment, but in a still-ripening future. Hence the endlessly growing “leaves
of grass” that will one day form the very ground beneath our feet. Mayak-
ovsky faced a world in which the much-ballyhooed future had, so the revo-
lution’s makers claimed, already arrived. And its shape, as articulated by
these leaders, was not a good fit for the mammoth form of a compulsively
self-aggrandizing Futurist.
Both friends and enemies agreed that Mayakovsky’s limitations as a polit-
ical poet grew from the distinctive nature of his lyric gift. “Even when he
attempts ‘a bloody Iliad of the Revolution,’ or ‘an odyssey of the famine
years,’” Roman Jakobson comments, “what appears is not an epic but a
heroic lyric on a grand scale.”14 A heroic lyric articulated, of course, by a
heroic lyrist of equally impressive proportions. For all its vast size, the eroti-
cally charged body of Mayakovsky’s poetry resists the fusion of lyric and
epic modes that marks Whitman’s most effective civic verse. Mayakovsky
may have railed against the lyrical clichés that riddle his precursors’ poems
(with Blok among the chief sinners). His own work, though, does not resist
lyricism: it stretches egotistical sublimity to its outermost limits. Lyrical tru-
isms are renewed in his work through what we might call, following Shk-
lovsky, not obnazhenie priema, but voploshchenie priema, not the baring of
the device, but its incarnation.
Mayakovsky never articulated a clear-cut vision of the body’s role in cul-
ture; he left behind no programmatic statement of the kind that punctuates
Whitman’s work from the start. He lacks not only his precursor’s—at times
exhausting—optimism. He is also constitutionally uncivic. “When Maya-
kovsky embarked upon his career,” Lunacharsky remarks, “he was still
beyond the sphere of influence of [that] gigantic social body, the revolution-
ary proletariat.”15 Lunacharsky is characteristically hamhanded here—as
with Blok, he combines his gifted subject’s own imagery with standard-issue
Soviet rhetoric to hammer home his obvious points. There’s something to
his comment nonetheless. Mayakovsky explicitly identifies his body with the
nation only after the revolution’s success made this more or less imperative.
He attempts to imbue his outsized sufferings with social import early on.
But the “rallying cries” he attached post factum to “A Cloud in Trousers”
(“Oblako v shtanakh,” 1914–15)—“Down with your love,” “Down with
your art,” “Down with your social order,” “Down with your religion”—
read like afterthoughts. They are undeveloped appendages grafted onto the
“vast, sinewy bulk” (zhilistaia gromadina) that “moans and writhes” in the
throes of unrequited love throughout the poem (3:550, 8).
Mayakovsky’s poetic body may have been the outgrowth of his “emo-
tional elephantiasis,” as Victor Erlich puts it; or the expression of an insa-
tiable, “mayakomorphist” desire to recreate the world in his own image, as
Leon Trotsky scoffs. It resisted, in either case, his efforts to make it over in
the image of a revolution that ostensibly represented the will of an entire
class, and a party that claimed to speak for the people en masse. The party,
in turn, was ill at ease with the gifts of a flamboyant self-celebrant struggling
to tune the state’s collective marches to the key of his own “backbone flute.”
“The Futurist poets,” Trotsky claims, “have not mastered the elements of the
Communist point of view and world attitude sufficiently to find an organic
expression for them in words; [these elements] have not entered, so to speak,
into their blood.” The Futurists are alien organisms in the new Soviet corpus,
as he sees it. For all their revolutionary grandstanding, they remain the off-
spring of “rebellious persecuted Bohemia,” products of the same bourgeois,
fin de siècle artistic milieu that gave birth to their Symbolist rivals.16
Trotsky is clearly grinding his own ideological axes. But he was not
alone. Chukovsky had charged the Futurists with similar sins a decade
earlier. Only Whitman, he insists, is a bona fide Futurist; unlike his deca-
dent descendants he is a genuinely political poet. His ear is attuned to that
“titanic word: democracy”; his work proclaims the radical social changes
of the coming era and not just bohemian pipe dreams. Whitman’s Futur-
ism, Chukovsky explains, “arose not in a parlor hung with yellow silk, but
amidst the hubbub of the democratic masses.”17 Chukovsky’s claims may
seem puzzling in view of the revolutionary activities that repeatedly landed
the young Mayakovsky in tsarist prisons. And dead prophets hailing from
distant lands are doubtless easier to embrace than strident iconoclasts pro-
claiming their rhymed manifestoes on neighboring street corners. Certainly
the Soviet authorities would fi nd Mayakovsky himself far more congenial
after his death than before.
It is not my goal in any case to establish which poet was more truly Futur-
ist or more authentically democratic. Yet if we take “political” to mean, as
Webster suggests, “consisting of citizens,” then Chukovsky’s assertion that
Whitman was political in a way Mayakovsky was not makes poetic sense
vis-à-vis the distinctive mythologies each poet forges in his work. “This is
the city . . . and I am one of the citizens,” Whitman exclaims in “Song of
Myself” (76), and his poetic body itself serves as an ideal polis. It incorpo-
rates multitudes and accommodates differences as it bridges the gap between
the individual and the collective, the poet and the crowd.
Mayakovsky’s body, on the other hand, is not even big enough for him—“I
feel / that ‘I’ / is too small for me” (3:11)—let alone for the masses he hopes
to incorporate in the revolution’s aftermath. The giant’s form he laments
in “To His Beloved Self the Author Dedicates These Lines” (“Sebe, liubi-
momu, posviashchaet eti stroki avtor,” 1916)—“What Goliaths conceived
me,” he wails (1:122)—condemns him to a self-absorbed isolation that is
the antithesis of Whitman’s idealized self en masse. Mayakovsky attempts
to convert this inflated body, “so huge / and so useless” (1:122), to political
purposes in “Fifth International” (1922). But like some monstrous balloon
in the Macy’s parade, he floats helplessly above a transformed planet he has
grown too large to inhabit: “The earth is invisible. You can’t see your own
shoulders. Only heaven. Only clouds. And my massive head in the clouds.”18
The size of Whitman’s poetic body permits him to become “himself the age
transfigured,” at least in his mythologies (23). Mayakovsky cannot manage
this feat even in his poetic imaginings. His vast body is a defect, a defor-
mity: “Anatomy went insane / On me,” he complains in “I Love” (“Liubliu,”
1922; 1:137). The expansiveness that makes Whitman a mate for his nation
and age, in his poetic vision at any rate, serves only to thrust Mayakovsky
beyond the bounds of the Soviet body politic.
For all their differences, Whitman’s and Mayakovsky’s outsized poetic
bodies share a common heritage. They are alike both in their bardic aspi-
rations and in their quintessentially Romantic orientation. They share the
Romantic dream of a “rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a
renovated earth where he will fi nd himself thoroughly at home,” a rebirth
brought about by “the visionary poet as both herald and inaugurator of a
new and supremely better world.” The model for all such Romantic vision-
aries is, of course, Christ himself, whose body unites “all categories in iden-
tity: Christ is both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of God, the tree
of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone which the builders
rejected, and the rebuilt temple which is identical with his risen body.” Both
explicitly and implicitly, Whitman and Mayakovsky model their outsized
selves on the god-man whose apocalyptic body is the vessel through which a
truly cosmic revolution is achieved.19 But would-be poet-saviors take many
shapes, and Whitman’s poet-Christ differs from Mayakovsky’s in telling
ways. His poet is the Redeemer whose body “filleth all in all” (Ephesians
1:23). The “kosmic” poet, Whitman proclaims, is he “who includes diversity
and is Nature”: “Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, / not
for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, / The past, the
future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together. (“Kosmos”; 516–17).
“Not in him, but off from him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their
full returns,” Whitman reminds us in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (475).
Grotesque and eccentric: the terms are made to order for Mayakovsky’s
poet-Christ, who sees not Whitman’s relentlessly healthy universe, but only
the damaged and the incomplete. He is Christ on the cross, Christ in revolt
(“Father why have you forsaken me?”), condemned by God and man alike
to agonies so outsized that they blacken the cosmos and crowd all merely
human griefs from view. “I am where pain is—everywhere,” he proclaims
in “A Cloud in Trousers”: “I nailed myself to the cross / In every drop of a
torrent of tears” (3:16). In “War and the World” (“Voina i mir,” 1915–16),
he rebukes the “rotting souls” of the dead for their small-scale sufferings:
You’ve got it good!

But how I am
supposed to bring love to the living
crossing battle lines,
through the cannons’ thunder?
If I stumble,
the last particle of love
will sink forever in the smoking abyss. (3:36)
Blok got his revolutionary redeemer all wrong, Mayakovsky charges in

“About That” (1923). That “gentle” “little man (chelovechek)” “calm and
kind” with his head swathed in a “wreath of moonbeams” “is no Jesus,” he
insists. But his own politically correct Christ as exemplary “Young Com-
munist (komsomolets)” appears and vanishes in the space of a few lines,
only to be replaced shortly thereafter by the solitary Savior Agonistes who
is Mayakovsky’s poetic trademark (3:157–158).
“The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them,” Whit-
man exults in “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855, 1881; 118). When Maya-
kovsky looks around him, though, he sees not Whitman’s community of
kindred bodies, but a sea of menacing human flesh: “the meat-massed, bull-
snouted horde” (3:39). These are not fellow forms to be consecrated through
the poet’s flesh, but enemies bent on his annihilation: “Crucify him, crucify
him” (3:16) Mayakovsky’s poet-Christ responds with a singularly gruesome
salvation. “If you don’t up and slit people’s veins,” he explains in “War and
the World,” “the infected earth / itself will die” (3:42). The form of com-
munion he proposes is no less unsettling: “I myself, / flaying the skin from
the living, / gnaw the world’s meat” (3:55). 20
“Who degrades or defi les the living human body is cursed,” Whitman
pronounces in “I Sing the Body Electric.” “Who degrades or defi les the
body of the dead is not more cursed” (124). One incident Chukovsky recalls
in his memoirs points to the rift that divides Mayakovsky’s poetic body
from his precursor’s. Chukovsky had just recited his recent translation of
“This Compost” (1881) to Mayakovsky. Much of the poem must have been
to Mayakovsky’s taste—though he admitted only that it was “amusing”
(zaniatno). “Where have you disposed of their carcasses [i. e. the carcasses
of the ‘sour dead’]?” Whitman asks the earth. “Where have you drawn off
all the foul liquid and meat?” But Mayakovsky attacked Chukovsky for his
supposed mistranslation of another line: “I will not touch my flesh to the
earth as to other flesh to renew me” (495). He mocked Chukovsky’s “mushi-
ness” (patoka) in rendering Whitman’s “flesh” as the Russian equivalent,
plot’. Mayakovsky did not know English. He insisted, though, that Whit-
man must have meant “meat” (miaso), and Chukovsky not only acceded,
but claims later, oddly enough, to have found “meat,” not “flesh” in the
English original. 21
Chukovsky and Mayakovsky thus agree to a Bloomian misprision, whereby
a strong poet of the present willfully misconstrues the work of a powerful pre-
cursor.22 They “mayakomorphize” Whitman’s body, transforming his “flesh”
into “meat”—and the misreading speaks to the rift that divides the Russian
poet from his predecessor. Whitman is of course the optimist incarnate, the
poet-redeemer sent to put the world to rights. His poem celebrates “the res-
urrection of the wheat,” as it extols the earth’s capacity to restore dead mat-
ter to new life through the “prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops” that spring
from “endless successions of diseas’d corpses.” It praises the “divinity” of
an earth that turns mere “meat” into transfigured “flesh.” The words them-
selves appear in proximity in the poem’s opening segment, as Whitman con-
trasts his living “flesh” with the “foul meat” of “distemper’d corpses” that rot
beneath the ground (495–497). Whitman tacitly tells of his own Christ-like
restoration to life through the miraculous bounty of the earth.
Mayakovsky’s mistranslation undoes this miracle, appropriately enough,
for such wonders do not exist in his poetic cosmos. If Whitman’s universe is
apocalyptic, in Northrop Frye’s sense—“man attempts to surround nature
and put it inside his (social) body, [in] the sacramental meal”—then Maya-
kovsky’s exemplifies Frye’s vision of the demonic cosmos, “the world of the
nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion,” “the
world that desire totally rejects”—or that totally rejects desire. 23 Mayak-
ovsky’s poetry details the agonies of “human meat” (chelovech’e miaso;
1:70). The scent of his own “burnt meat” (zharennoe) permeates “A Cloud
in Trousers” (3:12); a “red snow / of juicy chunks of human meat” marks the
outbreak of hostilities in “War Is Declared” (1:70); and sexual intercourse
is a hideous “wallowing of meats in down and quilting” in “War and the
World” (3:40). Mayakovsky’s human meat can never be redeemed, for God
and the devil are alike made of meat in his relentlessly fleshy cosmos (3:98,
3:28). In this world resurrection means only to succumb once more to the
tortures of the flesh: “Buried bones rise from the burial mounds, / And meat
grows over them” (3:58).
According to Chukovsky, Mayakovsky revised Whitman’s line to read: “I
will not press my meat to the earth so that her meat might renew me.” The
misreading is apt, since the world itself is made of meat in Mayakovsky’s
vision. Mating with this world leads not to spiritual redemption, but to
stomach-turning reproduction:
The whole world will sprawl like a woman,

all heaving meat, ready to give in;
things will come to life—
their thingy lips
will lisp:
“la-di-da, la-di-da, la-di-da!” (3:18)
I spoke in my fi rst chapter of the programmatic resistance to procreation that

marks that poetics of Russia’s Silver Age. Mayakovsky outdoes his Symbol-
ist rivals and then some. In the demonic realm, Frye notes, “the Eucharist
symbolism of the apocalyptic world” fi nds its parodic counterpart in “the
imagery of cannibalism.” In Mayakovsky’s bloodthirsty cosmos, one either
eats or is eaten, while the poet-savior reigns as its premier “cannibal.” “I
myself, / flaying the skin from the living, / gnaw the world’s meat,” he boasts
in “War and the World” (3:55). 24
In Whitman’s vision, spirit and flesh are indivisible: “I am the poet of the
body, / And I am the poet of the soul” (46). Flesh threatens to consume the
spirit in Mayakovsky’s poetic cosmos. Some demon of incarnation seems to
pursue him as one lofty abstraction after another succumbs to the horrors of
the flesh. Thoughts lie “dreaming on a sodden brain, / like an obese lackey
on a greasy couch,” or “crawl from the skull, sick and clotted, / like clumps
of blood” (3:7, 28); a metaphorical heart aflame with passion reeks of “burnt
meat” (3:12), while “the little corpses of dead words rot” (3:14). Shklovsky
may have seen “the resurrection of the word” at work in the Futurists’ ver-
bal experiments.25 Time and again, though, Mayakovsky seems to preside at
its—gruesome—funeral.
In Mayakovsky’s pre- and postrevolutionary writing alike, the good and
the bad, or rather the better and the worse, are divided not by abstractions
like ideology or virtue, but by how much meat they have on their bones.
“I’ve / hated fat people / since childhood,” Mayakovsky announces in “I
Love” (3:136), and his visceral reaction takes the place of political ortho-
doxy even in the explicitly propagandistic “150,000,000.” The revolution-
ary Mayakovsky is a hunger artist. His ill-fed collective hero, Ivan-Russia,
literally incorporates hordes of ravenous “human and animal carcasses”
whose political fervor is fueled by starvation alone (3:96–97). The enemy in
this Bolshevik comic book is an implausibly obese Woodrow Wilson “swim-
ming in fat”: “Wilson chows down, / his fat expands, / his bellies grow, / one
story on top of another” (3:93, 110).
Both Lenin and Trotsky objected violently to Mayakovsky’s perverse par-
able. Lunacharsky, Lenin fumed, “should be horsewhipped” for abetting
such outrageous publications. 26 And no wonder. One would be hard put to
fi nd the “positive hero” in this bizarre battle of a rebellious Russian “pig-
let” squashed by the bloated American “elephant” Woodrow Wilson (3:93).
These extremes—the grotesquely diminished “carcass” versus the grossly
overfed human “stomach in a Panama hat” (1:88)—are the only bodies that
keep Mayakovsky company within the world of his poetry. There is “noth-
ing on earth in between” (3:116). Even his giant’s form affords him more
anguish than joy. “I’ve been given a body / What do I do with it?” Mayak-
ovsky might ask with the young Mandelstam. Unlike Mandelstam, though,
he fi nds no answers. In this nightmarishly corporeal cosmos, the body is
both inescapable and repellent. 27
“The average man of a land at last only is important,” Whitman insists
in “Democratic Vistas” (72), and Whitman’s ideal hero is precisely the
“divine average” (182) that his imagined democracy demands. “The man
with one ear,” the man with one arm,” “the man with one eye and one
leg,” “the man without a head”: these are the disciples of the reluctant mes-
siah “Vladimir Mayakovsky” in the “tragedy” by that name (3:341–359).
Whitman’s corporate self holds room for outcasts; he embraces “the blind,
the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks” (266, 294). But these bodies must
be made whole through the poet’s ministrations, for the true goal of this
“most robust poet” (1328) is “to help in the forming of a great aggregate
Nation . . . through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclos-

ing individuals” (1328, 668). The future will hold no cripples, for the poet’s
body wills it so.
Whitman’s ideal vigor is far removed from the maimed forms that limp
across the pages of Mayakovsky’s verse. It is difficult to imagine two critics
further apart on the political spectrum than Trotsky and Yuri Karabchievsky.
Both agree, though, that pervasive fragmentation plagues the poet’s work.
“In the entire creative personality of Mayakovsky,” Trotsky claims, “there
is no necessary correlation between component parts; there is no equilib-
rium.” Karabchievsky seconds his complaint: “The fragmentary, fractured
nature of all his work means that . . . the excerpt is always better than the
poem, the line is always stronger than the stanza.”28 Both critics have in
mind the construction of Mayakovky’s verse. And the poems’ famous, frac-
tured “step-ladder” construction does indeed embody his fragmented vision
in the same way that Whitman’s expansive, quasi-biblical lines are meant to
project an ideal wholeness. But their comments hold for his poet’s body as
well. Mayakovsky’s poetic self is both oversized and incomplete. “I’ve been
crippled by love’s ailment,” Mayakovsky moans in “About That” (3:177).
His misshapen form flaunts its scars in poem after poem: he’s “as lonely as
the last eye / Of a man going blind” (1:59); he is made of “lips alone” (3:7);
his hypertrophied heart bursts from his chest (3:137–138); and his bloodied
soul is torn to shreds time and again (1:57; 3:178; 3:53).
What is true of Mayakovsky’s body is true of the world at large. The
poet cannot escape the stunted specters who fi rst make their appearance
in “Vladimir Mayakovsky.” He may dream of a glorious Soviet future
without cripples (2:34); but the postrevolutionary present is peopled by
“wholesale consumers of crutches and prosthetics” (2:400). Whitman was
no stranger to the shattered bodies that populate Mayakovsky’s poems. He
served as a nurse during the Civil War and the chief impetus to his tak-
ing on such work was a visit to his brother, then recuperating in an army
camp. “One of the fi rst things that met my eyes,” Whitman recalls, “was
a heap of feet, arms, legs, & c. under a tree in front of a hospital.”29 Whit-
man tended to such fractured bodies in life and poetry alike. His verse
may extol whole, healthy forms; yet all bodies, well or ailing, are part of
the larger body politic in Whitman’s vision, and each member must be
healed if the whole is to survive. “From the stump of the arm, the ampu-
tated hand,” Whitman writes in “The Wound-Dresser” (1865, 1881), “I
undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood”
(444–445).” “Agonies,” he exclaims in “Song of Myself,” “are one of my
changes of garments; / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . / I
myself become the wounded person” (65). He is both the injured and their
savior as he ministers to the crippled body of the nation—or so his writings
would have it. And his version of wholeness must have seemed both politi-
cally and poetically imperative to a poet aiming to save a fractured nation
through his various ministrations.
All injury tends towards wholeness for Whitman’s miraculous physi-
cian, who heals wounds as easily as he changes his clothes. But wholeness
was illusory to Mayakovsky, whose poetic imagination tended relentlessly
towards dissolution. Certainly the reality that surrounded him did little to
dispel such a notion. World war, revolution, civil war, disease, and famine:
Russia was spared little in this century’s fi rst decades, and these sufferings,
not surprisingly, fi nd their way into Mayakovsky’s poetry. In Mayakovsky’s
Resurrection (Voskresenie Mayakovskogo, 1985), Yuri Karabchievsky
charges the poet with crossing the line from metaphor into reality through
poetic incitements to violence that too often mirrored Bolshevik practice.
“Our feet know / which corpses / to walk on,” Mayakovsky warns in one
controversial lyric (1:182). 30 Frequently, though, one feels something like
the opposite: the horrors of war seem to exist chiefly to provide grisly objec-
tive correlatives for Mayakovsky’s tortured imagination.
The broken limbs Whitman mends in “The Wound Dresser” are both
literal and symbolic; they belong to real victims and to Whitman’s larger
poetic vision at once. In “War and the World,” Mayakovsky relishes the
“monstrous hyperboles” (3:44) that World War I has furnished for his
art: “Human meat had been minced for miles around Kovno,” he exults
(3:49–51). In the poem he describes the kind of spectacle that horrified
Whitman: “In a rotting wagon four legs for forty men” (3:51). But his reac-
tion belongs exclusively in the realm of Mayakovskian hyperbole: through
the powers of the Futurist poet-Christ, “chopped off legs / will seek out /
their masters, / severed heads will call out their own names” (3:58). Maya-
kovsky did no military service. Nonetheless he sees himself as the war’s
greatest casualty: “Each of my stanzas is a chest pierced through by every
lance, / a face contorted by every gas” (3:52). “War and the world” is
Mayakovsky’s constant theme: the world lays siege to the body, and the
body revolts against both its master and the cosmos. His talents fi nd their
best outlet in times of war and revolution, of worldwide confl agration. For
all Mayakovsky’s hymns to the coming utopia, he is more at ease with a
state in shambles than with a thriving community at peace. Or so, at any
rate, we might speculate. His times provided him with no such refuge—
though Soviet attempts at postrevolutionary stabilization would put him
to the test.
Cosmic Consummation
The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today. . . .
[I]f he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself and
hang on its neck with incomparable love and plunge his semitic mus-
cle into its merits and demerits.
—Walt Whitman, “Preface,” Leaves of Grass (1855)
From the heaven of poetry

I throw myself
into communism,
because
without it there is no love
for me.
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Homeward!’
Whitman’s celebration of sexuality was not intended merely to release

the American people from the straitjacket of outdated European mores. It
marked his own efforts to unleash the “the measureless wealth of latent
power and capacity” of a still-expanding nation (944). His verse, he insists,
is a “song of procreation,” and his voice is “strong with reference to con-
summations”: “Sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me!” (248,
609, 183). An exhausting agenda, to say the least. Still as a poet, at any rate,
he practices what he preaches. “My lovers suffocate me!” he complains in
“Song of Myself,” “crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin”
(80). His voracious poetic lovemaking is not undertaken for its own sake.
Its goal is the creation of a mightier nation: “This day I am jetting the stuff
of far more arrogant republics” (73). To this end he courts his country (“For
you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!” [272]), his reader
(“Camerado, this is no book. . . . It is I you hold and who holds you” [611]),
the earth (“Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth! /
Smile, for your lover comes!” [47]), and God himself (“As God comes a lov-
ing bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night” [29]). Only through constant
couplings can he bring about the new race and nation, “beautiful, gigantic,
sweet-blooded” (610), that his verse is intended to inaugurate. This symbolic
procreation will create, ideally, a people that surpasses its precursors both
physically and politically. Similarly grandiose notions would be voiced, in a
rather different context, by early leaders of the Soviet state.
Mayakovsky is no less obsessed with procreation, though it takes a rather
different shape in his verse. “Through life I drag / millions of enormous pure
loves / and millions upon millions of tiny, sordid lovelets,” he complains in

“A Cloud in Trousers” (3:23). Indeed all of his poetry reads like an extended
quest to fi nd the one object, be it public (the state) or private (a woman “as
large as me” [2:373]), that can answer his large-scale needs. But “A Cloud
in Trousers” also suggests why Mayakovsky’s “gigantic love” (liubovishcha;
1:122) is doomed to remain unrequited. In his poetic cosmos, procreation
breeds not liberation, but endless repetition, “millions upon millions of tiny,
sordid lovelets” (liubiata—the coinage suggests progeny or spawn). “Copu-
lation,” Mayakovsky warns, is a “bloody game,” the “wallowing of meats in
down and quilting, / As people crawl on top of each other to sweat, / shak-
ing cities with their creaking beds” (3:40, 45). His courtship of the world is
the antithesis of Whitman’s. The globe itself is willing—“The whole world
will sprawl like a woman, / all heaving meat, ready to give in”—but the
poet resists, for he knows what will follow. For Whitman such coupling
leads to the creation of “a hundred millions of superb persons” who will
people a vital new nation (609). For Mayakovsky, though, it breeds only
hordes of subhuman “things” destined in their turn to become obscenely
genteel papas “sleeping sweetly, eyeless, earless, /. . . . While [their] children
play croquet, / On [their] bellies” (3:18, 1:88). Procreation perpetuates the
relentlessly fleshy, bourgeois status quo that Mayakovsky is determined to
destroy. It will trap him in a “familial perpetuum mobile” (2:151). 31
Mayakovsky apparently fi nds an ideal mate in the revolutionary nation
whose red body sprawls beneath him in “Fifth International.” Like Blok
before him, though, he resists the culmination of his symbolic courtship. He
keeps his distance from his beloved, with his “giant’s head” planted fi rmly
in the clouds. Only in the twenty-fi rst century, when worldwide revolution is
achieved and Soviet Russia presumably no longer requires his services, does
he resume his human form (“Mayakovsky! Be a person again!”) and return
to earth.32 He leaves a strategic gap in the middle of “Fifth International,”
and the ellipsis is telling. It allows him to circumvent the kind of imaginative
consummation with his native land that Whitman articulates in his verse.
And it permits him to escape the merely human time in which revolutionary
nations adjust their utopian expectations to a less than idyllic reality.
“Let’s reconstruct the human race,” Mayakovsky exclaims in “I Protest”
(“Protestuiu,” 1:360). One of the defects to be erased is the mundane copu-
lation he associates with capitalist decadence. “In Chicago . . . [they] hugged
the effeminate stump of meat . . . kissed all over, stripped naked, rollicking,”
he insists in what is perhaps yet another dig at his American poetic rival
(“150,000,000”; 3:115). But the revolution did not succeed in remaking the
species overnight, and the attractions of home and family persisted into the
radical twenties. The Soviet Mayakovsky thus found himself forced to con-
tinue railing against the inexplicable attractions of “family happiness,” with
its “broads,” “love,” “children,” and “dear little old daily life” (staren’kii,
staren’kii bytik): “How many ideals have died . . . beneath the blanket!” he
laments (2:51–54, 149).33
It is not entirely clear how Mayakovsky expects the denizens of Russia’s
brave new world to reproduce.34 But Soviet Russia should not proceed by
time-honored routes that breed only continuity where there should be radi-
cal change. “Can’t you see the enemy’s menace / behind love’s pleasures?”
he warns his straying comrades (3:25). The enemy he has in mind is not just
the worldwide bourgeoisie, but time itself. “I’m against time, that thiev-
ing murderer,” he proclaims in “I Protest” (2:360). Elsewhere time has a
distinctly female face. It is woman, after all, who threatens to ensnare him
in time’s vicious circle: “Hurry up and die, old woman . . . Here we come,
a gang of your young grandsons” (1:358). But Mayakovsky’s ideal nation is
also no country for old men: “My country is an adolescent . . . May we grow
a hundred years without old age” (3:332). And his ideal revolution ends time
itself as it attains “Eden” with a single stroke (2:289): “A thousand years of
‘Formerly’ collapse today,” he proclaims in “Revolution” (1917; 1:131).
In “A Cloud in Trousers” Mayakovsky sketches a portrait of the revolu-
tion’s ideal bard, who bears of course the poet’s own name:
I don’t have a single gray hair in my soul,

And no senile tenderness!
The might of my voice has expanded the world,
and I come forth—a beautiful
twenty-two-year-old. (3:1)
Critics have pointed to Whitman’s influence on Mayakovsky’s beautiful

boy.35 His likely source in “Song of Myself” is telling, though. Unlike Maya-
kovsky, Whitman was a latecomer both to poetry and to the revolution he
celebrates; and this belatedness informs his sense of his own and his nation’s
selfhood. Like Mayakovsky, Whitman is careful to identify his age. But the
self he celebrates is no longer young—though it is, he stresses, admirably fit.
“I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin / Hoping to cease not
till death,” he announces in “Song of Myself” (188). Elsewhere he painstak-
ingly places himself in relation to a revolution that has likewise reached
maturity: “Full of life now, compact, visible, / I, forty years old the eighty-
third year of the States . . .” (287).
Mayakovsky, the bard of youth, has no use for age. “Let’s kill the old
people, / and turn their skulls into ashtrays” he modestly proposes in
“150,000,000” (3:99)—a suggestion to which Trotsky responded in mock

horror, “Ash-trays made of skulls are inconvenient and unhygienic.” In
“Democratic Vistas,” Whitman insists on the “ceaseless need of revolutions,
prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations
of ideas and men” in poetry and politics alike (991). His pronouncement
might seem to anticipate Futurist calls to “place the world on a new axis.”
But Whitman is himself middle-aged as he undertakes his great project, and
unlike Mayakovsky, he is not the coeval of the revolution he celebrates. By
the time he turned to poetry this revolution was already history; he thus
could not conceive, like Mayakovsky, of a “revolution that places a period
after the past” (2:39). He must forge a different myth, and a different kind
of mythic time, and the equivalence he fi nds between himself and a nation
flourishing in its prime is key to his poetic mythology.36
“America is not fi nished, perhaps never will be,” Whitman proclaims in
his letter to Emerson (1333). In his verse he monitors both the Union’s “end-
less unfolding” in time and the growth of his own self as “projected through
history” (49, 177). “Span of youth! Ever-pushed elasticity! Manhood bal-
anced and florid and full! . . . Old age superbly rising! Ineffable grace of
dying days!” he exclaims in “Song of Myself” (80–81). His task is to respond
to the evolving shape of the nation that is at once his parent, his child, his
lover, and his very self. “The proof of a poet,” he declares in the fi rst Leaves
of Grass (1855), “is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has
absorbed it” (26). By this reckoning, Whitman was a failure. His love affair
with his nation went largely unrequited in his lifetime. In spite of his popu-
list aspirations, “the great mass of American people remained, and would
remain, all but oblivious to his work.” And this in turn became yet another
feather in the revolutionary cap that Soviet Russia placed upon his head: the
“bourgeois” American public’s neglect of their great bard was read as indi-
rect testimony to the innately “socialist” leanings that placed him beyond
the pale of his nation’s politics. The modern poet wins by losing, though, so
Jean-Paul Sartre suggests, and Whitman’s vision was designed to accommo-
date apparent disappointment. “Whether I come to my own today or in ten
thousand or ten million years, / I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal
cheerfulness I can wait,” he announces in “Song of Myself” (46). “Poets to
come!” he proclaims elsewhere, “You, a new brood . . . you must justify me”
(175). Here certainly he found some vindication. 37
“I know the amplitude of time,” Whitman boasts in “Song of Myself”
(46). Mayakovsky could make no such claim. It is one thing, after all, to
court rejection by the benighted bourgeoisie and another to be spurned
by the proletarian masses and their masters. Mayakovsky’s vision left him
with little room to maneuver when the Bolshevik revolution—inevitably—

failed to fulfi ll his Futurist fantasies. His poetic body, titanic and eternally
“twenty-two,” was not designed to withstand the vicissitudes of time: his
confession, in a late poem, that “I’m no longer twenty, / I’m thirty and then
some,” reads like an admission of defeat (2:369). His poet’s body was at
its best during war and revolution, where its outsized agonies found their
match in the bloody anguish of the age. It was a poor fit for a state attempt-
ing to regain its economic and political equilibrium through compromise
(Lenin’s New Economic Policy) and coercion (Stalin’s Five Year Plans).
The state did not hesitate to remind Mayakovsky of his defects. Larger-
than-life lyricism does not a revolutionary poet make, Trotsky warns in
Literature and Revolution, as he mocks both the poet’s monstrous body
and the generic confusions it creates: “Mayakovsky has one foot on Mont
Blanc and the other on Elbrus . . . [he] speaks of the most intimate thing,
such as love, as if he were speaking about the migration of nations.” A world
in which Mayakovsky is the measure of all things produces both physical
and generic aberrations. The avant-garde colossus who straddles continents
sings of love and politics in the same breath—and small wonder, since the
same unrequited passion propels both kinds of song. The revolution, like so
many other beloveds, had failed to return Mayakovsky’s affection, and the
new state had little use for epic laments sung by bourgeois bohemians with
revolutionary pretensions.38
Trotsky’s own prescriptions for physiological correctness reveal that Maya-
kovsky was hardly alone in his overblown imaginings. The state in its postrev-
olutionary “constructive” phase, Trotsky explains, requires that we outgrow
“man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony” as we master the
“processes of [our] own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the
blood, digestion, reproduction”; we will then achieve a new level of “social
and biological” being and be better prepared to serve the collective’s need for
“social construction.”39 Trotsky would soon find himself discarded by the
revolution he had helped to shape. His vision here, though, is of a piece with
postrevolutionary dreams of a new species of Soviet “machine-men” who
would dispense with the “lyrical disorder” of their less enlightened brethren.
These new men require a new brand of lyrics, Trotsky explains, a poetry that
promotes “the psychological unity of the social man.” Mayakovsky’s lyrical
and anatomical disharmonies were hardly what he had in mind.40
Mayakovsky himself seemed to sense that his brand of physiological fan-
tasy did not meet the state’s specifications as early as “Fifth International”
(1922): the larger the poet grows, the further he moves from the nation. On
one level the poem celebrates Russia’s revolutionary successes; on another, it
admits that the poet is a poor fit for the state he ostensibly serves. Following
“Fifth International,” Mayakovsky’s poetic body is no longer the protago-
nist of his political poems—though its enemies, the bloated forms of the old
tsarist and new socialist bourgeoisie, continue to proliferate. Two bodies
cannot occupy the same space at the same time, the physicists warn. And
by 1924, the task of embodying the state had clearly passed to the politi-
cal, and not the poetic, avant-garde. The place at center stage was taken by
another monumental form, that of the nation’s martyred leader, Vladimir
Lenin. In his epics, odes, and elegies Mayakovsky praises Lenin with what
were already canonical clichés: “Lenin is still more living than the living,”
“the most humane of men” (3:186, 194). But Lenin also takes on attributes
of Mayakovsky’s poet-Christ. He is “larger than the largest” (1:367); the
nation rises on the blood of his suffering body (1:276, 364; 3:237, 246);
and he speaks with the “voice of thunder” (1:276). The once-proud poet is
humbled by the master’s posthumous presence: “I am happy. / The flowing
water of a resounding march / carries off my weightless body. . . . I rejoice
to be a fragment of [his] strength” (3:251).41
Lenin’s body may live forever, but Mayakovsky’s will not, or so an image
from his fi nal, unfi nished epic suggests. “At the Top of My Lungs” ostensi-
bly celebrates the poet’s legacy to his “comrades in posterity”:
Rummaging
in today’s
petrified shit,
studying the twilight of our days,
you
may
ask about me, too. (3:333)
Mayakovsky’s “ponderous, crude, palpable” verse “will break the bulky

mass of years,” he announces. But the terms in which he envisions this poet-
ry—“an ancient, ominous weapon” pokes out from “petrified shit”—evoke
the graveyard or the junkyard more readily than the dialogue “of the living
with the living” that he promises his descendants (3:333–335). Whitman’s
poetic body was designed to last a lifetime and beyond. In his farewell poem
“So Long!” (1860, 1881) he bequeaths his readers the living form incarnated
in Leaves of Grass: “Camerado, this is no book. . . . / I spring from the
pages into your arms—decease calls me forth” (611). The inheritance Maya-
kovsky leaves his descendants is more ominous. “With the passing years,”
he mourns in “At the Top of My Lungs,” “I come to resemble / excavated,
long-tailed monsters” (3:336). Mayakovsky’s monstrous body has become
a dinosaur, an antediluvian skeleton able perhaps to amuse the occasional

passerby or edify some future researcher. But it cannot embody the drives of
a nation pressing forward into the future through the first Five Year Plan.
In this passage, moreover, Mayakovsky does not speak of how he will
appear to comrades in some distant future. He has already become an out-
sized relic of days gone by, not the Soviet standard bearer he had claimed to
be. Like Blok before him, he had outlived himself, or so he feared. Rather
than Whitman’s life in death (“decease calls me forth”), Mayakovsky fi nds
himself, at the age of thirty-three, condemned to a kind of death in life. His
giant’s body perishes not just at the hands of a state that has no use for its
anarchistic energies. Like the dinosaur he evokes, it expires from built-in
limitations. “All the middle ground has been destroyed,” Mayakovsky
exults in “150,000,000” (3:116). For Mayakovsky’s poetic body, there is no
happy medium, no golden mean: it occupies center stage or it vanishes from
the scene. It is more living than the living or the deadest of the dead. Forced
to choose between the Soviet state of the future and his avant-garde “song
of myself,” Mayakovsky opts not just to step on the throat of his song, but
to throttle the mammoth body it celebrated.
The Immortal Mayakovsky

But the immortal Mayakovsky lives on.
—Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Innovator” (1931)
Resurrect me!
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “About That” (1923)
Or so it seemed. But poets who end their lives in spectacular, spectacu-

larly well-timed fashion may in fact be guaranteeing their future immortal-
ity. This proved to be the case for Mayakovsky. He may have outlived his
welcome in Soviet Russia, but he left behind a beautiful corpse, according
to at least one eyewitness report. “His face,” Boris Pasternak records, “had
returned to the time when he called himself a beautiful twenty-two-year-
old. Death had caught a facial expression which rarely falls into its clutches.
It was the expression with which you begin a life, not end it.” The deathbed
scene might have been scripted by Mayakovsky himself.42
He also left behind a dilemma for a state that found itself faced with the sui-
cide of its best-known artist at a crucial moment in its own self-transformation.
The motivations for Mayakovsky’s self-inflicted death have been endlessly
debated: were they political, personal, or some unwieldy amalgam of the

two? I do not intend to weigh in here with further speculations. For the
state, though, there could only be one answer. Political dissatisfaction was
not an option, hence the poet’s reasons must have been by default entirely
private. “The preliminary investigation indicates that his act was prompted
by motives of a purely personal nature,” the official newspaper Pravda con-
cluded the morning after the suicide. This seeming solution in fact created
further ideological problems, complications that state officials found excep-
tionally difficult to explain. “It is very strange,” Jakobson remarks, “that
on this occasion such terms as ‘accidental,’ ‘personal’ and so forth are used
precisely by those who have always preached a strict social determinism.”43
“Accidental,” “personal”: where have we heard these terms before? They
make up two-thirds of the triumvirate that form Mandelstam’s prescient,
parenthetical description of a postrevolutionary lyric that is also, ominously,
“catastrophic.”44 Mandelstam’s generic defi nition was a perfect fit for the
official postmortem. Mayakovsky had been killed, the state concluded, by
his own lyricism. He had fallen prey to the kind of retrograde writing long
since relegated to Trotsky’s famous dustbin. The revolution’s bard was dead,
shot through the head by a lyrical class enemy who had infi ltrated the ranks
of the faithful. This was not suicide, in other words, but generic assassina-
tion. If this summary sounds farfetched—and it does—then let us turn to
one of Mayakovsky’s official eulogists, Anatoly Lunacharsky, for a version
of the poet’s death worthy of the master himself at his most grotesque.
Like other party leaders, Lunacharsky railed against Mayakovsky’s “lyri-
cal whining” during the poet’s lifetime. The Mayakovsky he conjures up
posthumously is a different matter. This poet was from the start “revolted
by all lyricism,” Lunacharsky insists in “Vladimir Mayakovsky, Innovator”
(1931), and this, in turn, “undoubtedly was the influence of his dormant
Marxist feelings,” he assures us. It took only the Bolshevik revolution to
bring this nascent Marxist to the fore, since at heart the poet was on the right
track from the start. “Mayakovsky was a materialist”; “Mayakovsky was
a hard worker”; “Mayakovsky [was] poetry’s labourer,” “producing poems
which are a ‘product of production.’” As a “big man”—Lunacharsky follows
the poet’s lead in stressing his “Herculean frame”—Mayakovsky knew he
had found his match in the no less “Herculean, vast scope” of the proletar-
ian revolution and its leader. “He came upon these tremendous phenomena
on his life’s road” and “he saw . . . that this was what he had been yearning
for, a direct realisation of the gigantic process of reconstruction!”45
So why did this happy giant have to die? This is where Lunacharsky’s
tendentious tale takes its bizarre Gogolian twist. Mayakovsky, it turns out,
had an evil twin, a “soft petty bourgeois” armed with “sentimental lyric[s].”
“You dare not speak in the name of Mayakovsky!” the poet warned this
insidious double time and again while grabbing him “by the neck most
forcefully, passionately and triumphantly” and “bend[ing] it in two.” The
double somehow survived these repeated neck-wringings, but was appar-
ently so incensed when Mayakovsky fi nally “stepped on his throat” that
“the double killed him for this.” Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice says.46
The fate of this murderous double remains unclear in Lunacharsky’s lit-
tle fable: he suggests that he may have taken fl ight with Trotsky who is also
mysteriously implicated in Mayakovsky’s demise. But announcements of
the good Mayakovsky’s death proved premature in any case. “The ‘metal’
[i.e. ‘Stalinist’?] Mayakovsky,” “the revolutionary Mayakovsky” “lives
on,” courtesy of “the creative revolutionary vanguard of humanity” which
“proclaims itself to be . . . not an ally of Mayakovsky’s double, but an ally
of the Mayakovsky in whom his socio-political personality became crystal-
lized [sic].”47
But the double likewise failed to die. He survived in legend and writing
alike, and the poet’s perpetual fragmentation and self-contradiction proved
to be his most vital gift to future poets and readers. He bequeathed sev-
eral selves to posterity: the lovelorn lyrist, the avant-garde iconoclast, the
revolutionary standard bearer. These mismatched Mayakovskys continued
to quarrel posthumously, and their mutual incompatibility would stir con-
troversy decades later in another fledgling state, the postwar Polish People’s
Republic. But that is another story.
Chapter Title: The Death of the Book à la russe: The Acmeists under Stalin

3
The Death of the Book à la russe:

The Acmeists under Stalin
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in
the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe
from the enemy if he wins.
—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” (1940)
Did they publish André Chenier? Did they publish Sappho? Did they
publish Jesus Christ?
—Osip Mandelstam, quoted in Anna Akhmatova,
“Mandelstam” (1954)
In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida apocalyptically pro-

claims what he calls “the death of the book,” the death, that is, of the self-
contained, organically unified, self-explanatory text. The postmodern age,
he continues, has replaced the now defunct book with the notions of “writ-
ing” (écriture) and of a “text” that undermines or explodes any metaphori-
cal bindings that might attempt to confi ne it within the safely “logocentric”
limits of a single, self-sufficient volume. “The destruction of the book, as it
is now underway in all domains” is a “necessary violence,” Derrida claims.
The rhetorical violence with which he marks the unnatural death of the
109
110 The Death of the Book à la russe
book fi nds its counterparts in the famous proclamations of Michel Foucault

and Roland Barthes, whose respective essays “What Is an Author?” (1969)
and “The Death of the Author” (1968) commemorate the passing of the
autonomous, individual creators of the objects known in less enlightened
ages as “books.” “[The work] now attains the right to kill, to become the
murderer of its author,” Foucault announces. His phrase—indeed, all the
phrases I’ve cited—are bound to give the Slavist pause, not least because
such metaphors have had, in recent Russian history, an uncomfortable habit
of realizing themselves as they pass from theory into practice.1
“There are some countries where men kiss women’s hands, and others
where they only say ‘I kiss your hand.’ There are countries where Marxist the-
ory is answered by Leninist practice, and where the madness of the brave, the
martyr’s stake, and the poet’s Golgotha are not just figurative expressions.”
Roman Jakobson’s observation dates from 1931; it is peculiarly apt, though,
in the postmodern philosophical context in which Barthes, Foucault, and
Derrida operate. All three theorists developed their concepts in an environ-
ment in which men “only say ‘I kiss your hand,’” that is to say, in which the
literal implications of “the death of the author” remain unactivated. They deal
explicitly with the development of “literature,” the “author” and the “book”
in Western, “bourgeois capitalist” civilization. The notion of the author,
and the concept of the autonomous human subject that underlies it, are “the
epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology,” Barthes explains, and “the
image of literature” in bourgeois culture is, as a consequence, “tyrannically
centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions.”2
What happens, though, when an actual tyrant centers his attention on the
author’s person, life, and passions? The student of Stalinist-era writing is
uneasily aware of the cultural specificity of Barthes’, Derrida’s and Foucault’s
dead authors and books. All the world’s a text, these theorists proclaim; and
within this textual kingdom, Derrida claims, “the ‘literal’ meaning of writ-
ing [is] metaphoricity itself.” All three theorists are provocateurs or, as Allan
Megill puts it, responsive or “reactive” thinkers who seek “to attack received
ideas, to demolish previous platitudes.” They are practitioners of what their
great precursor Friedrich Nietzsche calls “the magic of the extreme.” Their
dead authors and books trace their lineage back to the God whose death
Nietzsche proclaims in The Gay Science (1887). Like Nietzsche, they require
a bland backdrop, middle-of-the-road, middle-class, complacent, common-
sensical, for their extreme pronouncements to have the desired effect. Like
Nietzsche, they demand an audience “made up of us folks here—living in the
‘ordinary’ world, earning money, raising families, catching buses, experiencing
pleasure/leisure of various sorts, and undergoing the vagaries of nature.”3
The Death of the Book à la russe 111
Like Nietzsche, or Blok or Mayakovsky, for that matter, these theorists

need a bourgeoisie to shock. Unlike the poets, though, they are not the prod-
uct of a government increasingly preoccupied with eliminating not just its
middle-class enemies, but the writers whose work betrayed, willy-nilly, their
suspect origins and thus could not be shaped to state purposes. They require
a context in which texts are not responsible for the actual deaths of their cre-
ators, in which books may metaphorically bomb in the marketplace or die,
in filmed form, at the box office, but are not literally destroyed by anxious
writers in their quest for self-preservation or by a state determined to main-
tain absolute control over its master script of past and present alike. “The
twentieth century has given us a most simple touchstone for reality: physical
pain,” Czesław Miłosz comments; one might extend his thought and say that
the true test of any theory of authorship must be a dead body.4 The dead
authors and books of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida can retain their purely
metaphorical status only in a society that has long since lost the habit of liter-
ally destroying writers and texts for their verbal crimes against the state. If
the literal meaning, in other words, of phrases like “the death of the author”
or “the end of the book” is the first meaning that comes to mind, as it does
for the Slavist, it undermines the very core of these theorists’ arguments. It
undoes our capacity to conceive of language as mere metaphoricity or of the
world as pure interpretation. Indeed, in such contexts, we begin to perceive
language not metaphorically, but magically: we need only try the discomfit-
ing experiment of pronouncing “fatwa” and “Salman Rushdie” in the same
sentence to experience the urge to knock wood or spit over our shoulders.
The “author” was born, Foucault remarks, “only when [he] became sub-
ject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse is considered trans-
gressive . . . an action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful
and unlawful, religious and blasphemous.” This also describes exactly the
kind of situation in which the real-life author (not the “author” in quota-
tion marks) may be called upon to die for his or her transgressive verbal
actions, and this is the sort of culture in which Osip Mandelstam and Anna
Akhmatova found themselves living and writing during the period of so-
called “high Stalinism,” that is, from the early 1930s until the outbreak
of World War II and the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union. “Do calm him
down! It’s only in bourgeois countries that they shoot people for poems,”
Mandelstam’s prison guard implored his wife shortly before the poet was
sent into exile. Mandelstam himself, however, took a perverse pride pre-
cisely in the murderous ways that the Soviet state chose to express its regard
for his chosen calling. “If they’re killing people for poetry,” Nadezhda Man-
delstam recalls her husband saying during their years of exile in the 1930s,
“that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it . . . that means poetry is
power.” Such power has its limits, needless to say; the kind of valorization
that leads poets to nonmetaphorical scaffolds and prison cells lends itself all
too readily to the posthumous mythmaking that views both life and work as
mere preludes to the martyr’s unhappy fate. Whether poetry should ideally
be a matter of life and death is a vexed question, to say the least. The fact
remains that in certain circumstances, the poetic word has consequences
that far outreach the limits of postmodern écriture. What I want to address
now are the distinctive forms of poetic power that Mandelstam and Akhma-
tova derive from writing in a society that paid poets the dubious compliment
of taking their persons and their texts with the utmost seriousness. 5
In her memoirs, Nadezhda Mandelstam speaks of writing in the “pre-
Gutenberg era” of Russian literature, and her phrase suggests the nature
of the “death of the book” as it took shape in Stalinist Russia. By the early
1930s, both Akhmatova and Mandelstam had undergone what Akhmatova
calls a “civic” or “civil” “death” (grazhdanskaia smert’—a more literal
translation might read “death as a citizen”). They became official non-
persons, practitioners of a suspect genre and adherents of an outmoded,
“pastist” poetic philosophy, Acmeism: “It does not make new poets of you
to write about the philosophy of life of the Seventeenth Century into the
language of the Acmeists,” Trotsky had warned early on. The purported
defenders of bourgeois subjectivity ceased to be subjects in any publicly rec-
ognized sense. Both writers were virtually barred from print. As literature
and the arts were transformed into handmaidens of the state, only those
writers willing to contribute to what Mandelstam calls “the book of Stalin”
(stalinskaia kniga), the epic text of Soviet letters and life then being scripted
by the master artist, Stalin himself, had access to the paper, printers and
presses that would guarantee their works a public, “civic” life.6
Their poetry continued to live, however, a furtive, underground existence
as it was written on scraps of paper and hidden, or circulated in manuscript
among friends, or read aloud and hastily memorized. Such a situation would
scarcely seem conducive to the cultivation of the poetic power Mandelstam
celebrates in his remarks to his wife. Yet it is just at the time that the fi nal
nails were being driven into Mandelstam’s and Akhmatova’s civic coffi ns,
the time of the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) and the official birth
of Socialist Realism (1932), that Mandelstam pronounces his own social
command (sotsial’nyi zakaz) for himself and his fellow Acmeist. “Now we
must write civic verse” (Teper’ stikhi dolzhny byt’ grazhdanskimi), Akhma-
tova recalls him announcing in 1933; and the ironies of his proclamation are
manifold. In the fi rst place, he and Akhmatova had been barred from public
life precisely for their failure to write civic poetry, or at least the kind of civic
poetry the regime required. They were considered lyric poets par excellence,
famed or defamed as the composers of “chamber poetry.” As such, they
were unwelcome in a state that demanded, with increasing insistence, only
triumphal marches and collective hymns to accompany the nation’s unin-
terrupted progress towards a glorious future. The dweller in the personal
and accidental realm of lyric poetry could claim no civil rights in a state
dedicated to the eradication of all that is private, personal, and unplanned.
According to the new work plan for poetry, poets could speak for and to the
people only by renouncing their lyric selves as they “dissolve in the official
hymn,” in Akhmatova’s phrase.7
Under Stalin, Eikhenbaum remarks, the “lyric ‘I’” became almost taboo.
How could practitioners of a forbidden genre, noncitizens barred from pub-
lic discourse, hope to speak for and to the larger audience that a truly “civic
poet” requires? For Akhmatova and Mandelstam do indeed produce their
most ambitious, audaciously “civic” poetry precisely at the height of Stalin’s
terror—I have in mind Mandelstam’s sequence of “Verses on the Unknown
Soldier” (“Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate,” 1937) and Akhmatova’s famed
Requiem (Rekviem, 1935–40). Mandelstam provides a tacit answer to this
question by way of the example of civic writing he gave Akhmatova. He
followed his social command—“Now we must write civic verse”—with a
recitation that was in effect his declaration of a sui generis form of civil, or
civic, war (grazhdanskaia voina), that is, of war waged against the state on
behalf of its citizenry. The poem he recited to Akhmatova was the famous
“Stalin Epigram” (1933), a lyric published only posthumously that proved to
be, nonetheless, his death warrant.8
We live without feeling the land beneath us,
Our speeches can’t be heard ten steps away.
But whenever there’s enough for half a chat—

Talk turns to the Kremlin mountaineer.
His fat fi ngers are plump as worms,

And his words are as sure as iron weights.
His mighty cockroach moustache laughs,

And his vast boot-tops gleam.
A mob of thin-necked chieftains surrounds him,

He toys with the favors of half-humans.
One whistles, another mews, a third whimpers,

He alone bangs and pokes.
He forges one decree after another, like horseshoes—

One gets it in the groin, another in the head, the brow, the eye.
Every execution is a treat

And the broad breast of the Ossetian.
On hearing the “Stalin Epigram,” Boris Pasternak reportedly exclaimed:

“This is not a literary fact, but an act of suicide.” Mandelstam’s interroga-
tor likewise saw his unauthorized lines as exceeding the reach of literature
proper: they were a “provocation,” a “terrorist act,” he charged. And Man-
delstam apparently ceded the point: the poem was, he confessed, “a widely
applicable weapon of counter-revolutionary struggle.” All three agreed that
these were not words, but deeds.9
They were actually a little of both. They exist on the boundaries between
language as metaphor and language as action, and thus incidentally illus-
trate the difficulties of speaking, as Barthes and Derrida do, of language as
exclusively metaphorical. The poem itself concerns the possibilities and dan-
gers of different kinds of speech. Mandelstam contrasts the inaudible “half-
conversations” of those who oppose or fear Stalin and the dehumanized
mewing and whining of those who support him with the language of the
Great Leader himself, who demonstrates the real-life consequences of his
speech on the bodies of his subjects as he energetically forges new decrees:
“One gets it in the groin, another in the head, the brow, the eye” (Komu v
pakh, komu v lob, komu v brov’, komu v glaz). The energy and efficiency
of Mandelstam’s diction and syntax in these phrases enact the power of the
language he describes.
Mandelstam counters this form of language as action with his own verbal
deed, the epigram, and he authorizes the collective “we” he requires for his
civic verse precisely by way of his linguistic feat. The poet-prophet is exempt
from the linguistic limitations he perceives in the citizenry at large. “Our
speeches can’t be heard ten steps away,” he thunders. The phrase itself dem-
onstrates, though, that he himself is prepared to proclaim vo ves’ golos, at
the top of his voice, what he insists the Russian people think but dare not
say aloud, as the subsequent line reveals: “But whenever there’s enough for
half a chat— / Talk turns to the Kremlin mountaineer.” Unlike the leader
who reserves the powers of speech for himself alone—“He alone bangs and
pokes” with his words like “iron weights”—Mandelstam derives his ver-
bal authority and force from the multitudes whose innermost thoughts and
fears he claims to articulate.
I have been speaking of the “Stalin Epigram” as a form of action, a
deed, and I do not mean the terms metaphorically. “Burn with your word
(glagolom) the hearts of men,” God bids the poet in Pushkin’s “Prophet”
(Prorok, 1826). In his notebooks of 1931–32, Mandelstam recognizes the
real-life implications of certain kinds of speech: “Only in government
decrees, in military orders, in judicial verdicts, in notarial acts and in such
documents as the last Will and Testament does the verb [or “word”—the
modern Russian for “verb” coincides with the Old Russian term for “word,”
glagol] live a full life.”10 By treating his “Stalin Epigram” as a de facto will
and testament, Mandelstam could complete the prophet’s mission and com-
pete with those verdicts and decrees whose “full lives” threatened to deprive
him and other Russians of their own more vulnerable existences. Poetic
legislation thus trumps the murderous official variety.
Mandelstam was prepared to take the real-life consequences of his verbal
act—“I’m ready for death,” Akhmatova recalls him saying—and the poem
precipitated his fi rst arrest in 1934, which was followed by three years of
internal exile, a second arrest in 1937, and fi nally his death early in 1938 in a
gulag transit camp. Indeed, according to auditors who witnessed his clandes-
tine recitations of the “Stalin Epigram,” Mandelstam appeared to be staging
performance-provocations intended to reach the ears of his epigram’s sub-
ject. He recited the poem to selected groups of friends and acquaintances,
some of whom were almost guaranteed to pass it on to the authorities. The
poem in fact existed only in performance—Mandelstam himself transcribed
it for the fi rst time only at his police interrogation in 1934—and it was as
oral performance that it precipitated his arrest.11
This is no accident. “Those rhymes must have made an impression,”
Mandelstam remarked in the wake of Stalin’s call to Pasternak.12 They did
indeed. In the epigram, Mandelstam describes the ominous power of Sta-
lin’s spoken words. Through his performance of the epigram, Mandelstam
demonstrates the equal force of the poet’s speech. The poet’s voice, con-
demned to “civic death” in the private domain, may seem inaudible—but it
travels much further than “ten steps away.” It bypasses the whole elaborate
state apparatus designed for the control and repression of the written word
to reach the ears of the leader himself, who is compelled to countermand
it through the verbal action that took the shape of the orders that led to
Mandelstam’s arrest and exile. The “Stalin Epigram,” as poem and provo-
cation, thus paradoxically becomes Mandelstam’s most direct testimony to
the power and efficacy of the spoken poetic word.
In Derridian philosophy, Western civilization revolves around an illusory
opposition between “fallen,” artificial, written language and untainted,
“natural” speech. We fi nd a similar dichotomy at work in Mandelstam’s
late poetics—and yet, once again, the context in which Mandelstam lived
and worked gives this opposition a very different coloration than it assumes
in Derridian thought. “Writing and speech are incommensurate,” Mandel-
stam insists in “Conversation about Dante” (1933), and in “Fourth Prose”
(1930) he leaves little doubt about where his own preferences lie. “I have no
manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives,” he proclaims. “I have no hand-
writing, for I never write. I alone in Russia work with my voice, while all
around me consummate swine are writing.” There is an element of truth in
Mandelstam’s characteristic hyperbole; he did in fact compose aloud and on
his feet, and he and his wife transcribed the lyrics only after they had been
completely formed in the poet’s mind and speech.13
For the Mandelstam of “Fourth Prose” and the revealingly titled “Con-
versation,” though, the idea of a corrupt and fallen written language is based
not on Western cultural mythologies but on Soviet reality. When all agencies
of printing, reproduction, and distribution lie in the hands of the govern-
ment, any author “who fi rst obtains permission and then writes” becomes
involved in an act of collaboration with the state whose blessing he has
received. He composes his work on what Mandelstam calls “watermarked
police stationery” and his “authorized” writings thus take their place in a
continuum that begins with state-sponsored poetry and ends with the state’s
most ominous decrees: “Crude animal fear hammers on the typewriters,
crude animal fear proofreads the Chinese gibberish on sheets of toilet paper,
scribbles denunciations, strikes those who are down, demands the death
penalty for prisoners.”14
In such a society, only unauthorized speech or, specifically, oral poetry,
readily transmissible through the voice alone, can speak a language free of
complicity in state atrocities; only the poet who works “from the voice” can
hope to challenge its monopoly on written language. “They have sullied the
most pure Word, / They have trampled the sacred Word (glagol),” Akhma-
tova writes in a lyric of the period, and Western logocentric mythologies are
not what is at stake here, as Akhmatova’s own poetry makes clear. In the
prose text that opens Requiem, Akhmatova derives the authority to com-
pose her tribute to the purges’ victims not from any official source but from
an unauthorized, oral communiqué from an anonymous fellow sufferer:
In the terrible years of the Ezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the
prison lines of Leningrad. Once somebody “identified” me. Then a blue-
lipped woman standing behind me, who had of course, never heard my
name, came to from the torpor characteristic of us all and asked me in a
whisper (everyone spoke in whispers there), “But can you describe this?”
And I said, “I can.”
Then something like a smile slipped across what had once been her face.
As in the “Stalin Epigram,” the poet justifies her civic, collective “we” by
virtue of her ability to articulate aloud what other suffering Russians only
whisper.15
Akhmatova resembles Mandelstam in her emphasis, here and elsewhere,
on the face and mouth that articulate what Mandelstam calls “sounds for-
bidden for Russian lips.” Both poets had drawn from the start on what Shk-
lovsky terms “the articulatory dance of the speech organs” in creating their
verse. Both Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Eikhenbaum comments in 1923,
derive their poetic force from “the mimetic movement of the lips, the inten-
sification of purely linguistic, articulatory energy.” They turn this energy
to new purposes in their later work. “A human, hot, contorted mouth /
Is outraged and says ‘No,’” Mandelstam writes in a poetic fragment from
the thirties. Akhmatova and Mandelstam insistently call attention to the
mouths, lips, and tongues that fi rmly root speech in the body that may be
called upon to account for its verbal crimes against the state. Mandelstam
makes these lips the basis for a defiant “underground” poetics in the open-
ing lines of one late poem. “Yes, I lie in the earth moving my lips, / But every
schoolchild will learn what I say,” he announces defiantly from the grave to
which he has been confi ned following his “civic funeral.”16
Oral poetry is not the only genre that Mandelstam and Akhmatova prac-
tice in their efforts to avoid signing their names to the massive, collective
text being spun out by the state apparatus with the assistance of the obedi-
ent tribe of hired scribes whom Mandelstam denounces in “Fourth Prose.”
Mandelstam and Akhmatova were effectively barred from print throughout
the 1930s. They could have no hope of seeing their own names and poems
printed in anything remotely resembling a conventional book, and the writ-
ten form that their poems took were handwritten copies scrawled on scraps
of paper or laboriously transcribed by hand into unprepossessing school
copybooks. I’m thinking now of Mandelstam’s “Moscow” and “Voronezh
Notebooks” as well as the “burnt notebooks” Akhmatova commemorates
in the Poem without a Hero (1940–66). “It is more honorable to be learned
by heart, to be secretly, furtively recopied, to be not a book, but a copybook
in one’s own lifetime,” Maksimilian Voloshin had written shortly after the
revolution. His words proved prophetic.17
Mandelstam follows Voloshin’s lead as he makes a virtue of necessity
by turning humble, unpublished scraps of paper into a crucial genre of the
underground poet. In the “Conversation about Dante,” Mandelstam inverts
the apparent order of things as he condemns “official paper” to oblivion and
assigns true permanence only to the rough drafts (chernoviki) that cannot
be captured on official paper and made to serve official purposes. “Rough
drafts,” he insists, “are never destroyed. . . . The safety of the rough draft
is the statute assuring preservation of the power behind the literary work.”
It is a theory made to order for poets denied access to official paper of any
sort, and Akhmatova provides testimony to its efficacy and force in the fi rst
dedication to her Poem without a Hero. “Since I didn’t have enough paper,
/ I’m writing on your rough draft,” Akhmatova explains, and the rough
draft she has in mind can only be a page taken from one of Mandelstam’s
perpetually unfi nished notebooks. She thus bears witness to the power of
the unprinted word and to the indestructibility of the rough draft that has
already outlived its less fortunate, more perishable creator.18
Akhmatova creates a telling variant on this poetics of the incorruptible
rough draft in her late work. “Manuscripts don’t burn,” Mikhail Bulgakov
proclaims in a famous phrase.19 In Akhmatova’s poetics of the unofficial
text, manuscripts do burn, and poems do perish—and this is precisely what
guarantees their integrity and, fi nally, their immortality. In her Stalin-era
writings, Akhmatova cultivates the genre of the “burnt notebook” and its
subsidiary, the “poems written for the ashtray”: the phrases’ meanings are
both literal and metaphorical. 20 She was in fact forced to burn her private
archives more than once, in the hopes of keeping illicit writings out of official
hands. Some of the burned texts vanished for good—but others survived,
either in her own memory or in the memories and copybooks of friends.
This literal destruction and resurrection of the poetic text prompts the
metaphor that enables Akhmatova, the banned lyric poet, to take on Stalin
himself as she forges her own collective, civic voice to speak for the masses
who have been either figuratively or literally obliterated by Stalinist col-
lective rhetoric. The lyric poem can fall victim to Stalinist oppression just
as the lyric poet can, and their voices are suppressed for the same reason:
they speak for the private, individual realm that the regime was bent upon
destroying. In this distinctive redaction of the Romantic myth, poem and
poet alike become arch-victims, the most fitting representatives of the mil-
lions of victims, whether living or dead, whose individual selves the state
had worked to efface in the name of the collective.
For both Akhmatova and Mandelstam, their civic authority is under-
written by their very perishability and the perishability of their works. It is
precisely because the poets and their poems are subject to literal, physical
death that they are authorized to speak for the dead and dying victims of a
nation under siege by its own rulers. In their greatest “civic” poems, Man-
delstam and Akhmatova turn Stalinist rhetoric on its head, as the artificial
collective imposed from above meets its match in the genuinely communal
voice that rises from below, through the throat of the poet prematurely
consigned to civic burial. In the “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” Man-

delstam employs the militaristic rhetoric of the Five Year Plans, with their
class warfare, enemies of the people, saboteurs, provocateurs, and wreck-
ers, to recruit his own idiosyncratic infantry of misfits and ne’er-do-wells.
And, as Susan Amert demonstrates in her study of the late work, Akhma-
tova in her Requiem counters the state’s inflated rhetoric of the “mother-
land” with her own “song of the motherland” woven from the wails of the
wives and mothers left behind by Stalin’s victims. “I renounce neither the
living nor the dead,” Mandelstam announced shortly before his own death.
And in their civic poetry Mandelstam and Akhmatova speak for both the
living and the dead by virtue of their faith in the lasting power of dead
authors and dead books. 21
Chapter Title: Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility: The Poem without a Hero

4
Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility:

The Poem without a Hero
If only Russia had been founded

by Anna Akhmatova . . .
—Adam Zagajewski, “If Only Russia”
Haunted Houses
Remorse—is Memory—awake—
Her Parties all astir—
A Presence of Departed Acts—
At window—and at Door—
—Emily Dickinson, “Remorse—is Memory—awake” (1863)
“Il faut que j’arrange ma maison (I must put my house in order),” said
the dying Pushkin.
—Anna Akhmatova, “A Word about Pushkin” (1952)
I found when I had finished my lecture that it was a very good house,
only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in
Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall (1982)
120
Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility 121
In 1884, a middle-aged widow began work on a house in California’s

Santa Clara Valley, near San Francisco; the construction ended only with her
death several decades later, in 1922. The builder’s name was Sarah Winchester.
Her deceased husband, William Winchester, had inherited a vast fortune from
his father, who had manufactured the first successful repeating rifle, a weapon
whose lethal efficiency had influenced the outcome of the Civil War. The cou-
ple’s only child had died in infancy, and William himself fell victim to tuber-
culosis in 1881, leaving Sarah the sole heir to the family’s ill-gotten—as she
thought—wealth. The grieving widow came to believe that her husband’s and
child’s deaths were the work of the many unhappy spirits whose lives had
been cut short by the rifles that bore the family name. “You must start a new
life,” a medium told her, “and build a home for yourself and for the spirits
who have fallen from this terrible weapon too. You can never stop building. If
you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die.”1
Mrs. Winchester took the medium at her word. “She had her pick of
local workers and craftsmen,” a local historian records, and for nearly forty
years, “they built and rebuilt, altered and changed and constructed and
demolished one section of the house after the other.” There were no blue-
prints: Mrs. Winchester presumably chose not to provide angry ghosts with
a readymade road map to the intentionally baffling building. She sketched
out tentative plans instead on scraps of paper and tablecloths. The house
eventually grew to include some 160 rooms—doubts still exist as to the
precise number—of which approximately forty were bedrooms. She slept in
a different room every night in order to evade the vengeful phantoms that
might otherwise trouble her sleep; an elaborate system of bells alerted ser-
vants to her whereabouts. Mrs. Winchester and her builders devised other
ways to outwit the restless spirits that plagued the unhappy house. “There
were countless staircases which led nowhere; a blind chimney that stopped
short of the ceiling; closets that opened to blank walls; trap doors; double-
back hallways; skylights that were located one above another; doors that
opened to steep drops to the lawn below; and dozens of other oddities,”
according to the local chronicler. 2
What does Mrs. Winchester’s perpetually unfi nished Mystery House (its
tour book title) have to do with Anna Akhmatova’s incomplete magnum
opus, Poem Without a Hero? An unfi nished epic born of Stalinist Russia
would seem initially to share little with an architectural oddity that now
serves chiefly to draw tourists to an unprepossessing corner of the Bay Area.
Both, though, are the work of women who could not shake the sense that
they were haunted by the sins of the past, their own and others’: “How can
it turn out / That I’m to blame for all,” the speaker laments in the Poem
122 Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility
(2:125). Their only hope for some form of salvation, however problematic or
provisional, was to labor away at their life’s work by way of atonement—or
evasion. Akhmatova began writing the Poem in 1940, “the year in which
worlds collapsed” (1:229), and the year in which she completed her master-
piece Requiem (1935–40). Unlike Sarah Winchester, she apparently planned
to fi nish her project: ‘The Poem’s text is fi nal. No future additions or omis-
sions are foreseen,” she wrote hopefully at the end of several variants (2:367).
Still each ostensibly completed version ended, like its precursors, by requir-
ing endless amendments, appendages, and renovations. “[I] was continually
adding to and revising something that was to all appearances fi nished,”
Akhmatova confesses in one of her numerous prose commentaries on the
Poem. She kept rewriting it until her death in 1966, and arguments continue
to this day as to which of the poem’s many manuscripts came closest to its
author’s fi nal wishes.3
My guess would be that this confusion, like the intentionally bewildering
structure of the Mystery House, is precisely the legacy its creator intended to
leave for future generations of baffled admirers. The Poem became a ready-
made companion piece to Requiem, a “fellow traveler” (poputchitsa) that
“walked beside it,” Akhmatova remarked in 1961. The pair seems singularly
ill matched in several respects. Indeed, their creator herself commented on
the incongruity of placing the “funereal” Requiem alongside her “motley”
Poem, at once “clowning and prophetic”: Requiem, she remarked, would
have been better served by a sisterly “Silence” at its side.4
Akhmatova speaks here of tone, and she is right: Requiem’s wrenching
sobriety is scarcely a fit for the danse macabre of the Poem’s fi rst part or
the satiric wit of the second. Other disparities are just as glaring. Like so
many modern verse epics, both Requiem and the Poem create their own
forms rather than adhering to time-honored templates. These forms could
not be more different, though. Requiem is both encompassing and compact;
a nation’s torments are miraculously contained within the space of eight or
ten pages. The Poem, on the other hand, incorporates three wildly disparate
sections, with varied lengths, structures, tones, and topics—not to men-
tion addenda ranging from stage directions to quasi-scholarly footnotes and
bits of ostensibly private correspondence. It also comes encumbered by an
unwieldy entourage of proliferating variants and commentaries: “Again the
Poem doubles,” Akhmatova observes in 1961, “something going alongside—
another text . . . since the Poem is so capacious, not to say bottomless.”5
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn fi rst heard Requiem read in the early six-
ties, he criticized what he saw as its inappropriate lyric self-absorption, and
thus inadvertently echoed the Soviet critics who repeatedly attacked both
Akhmatova and her chosen genre for their bourgeois self-preoccupation.

“But really, the nation suffered tens of millions, and here are poems about
one single case, about one single mother and son,” he chided the poet: “I
told her that it is the duty of a Russian poet to write about the suffering
of Russia, to rise above personal grief and tell about the suffering of the
nation.” He could not have been further from the mark. As Susan Amert
notes, the sequence of ten lyrics that presents the speaker’s Stalin-era Via
Dolorosa is framed by the magnificent opening and closing texts that imbue
the lyric “I”’s singular suffering with collective resonance:
The hour of remembrance comes again.
I see, I hear, I sense you:
She who scarcely reached the window,

And she who no longer treads native ground,
And she, who tossed her pretty head

And said: “Coming here is just like coming home.”
I wish I could call you all by name,

But the list’s been taken, there’s nowhere to look.
For them I wove this wide shroud

Of their own poor words, which I overheard.
I remember them always and everywhere,

I won’t forget them in new grief,
And if others shut my tortured mouth,

Through which a nation of a hundred million shrieks,
Then let them recall me in turn

On the eve of my memorial day . . . (1:369)
Lyric and epic merge in Requiem, as Akhmatova counters the Soviet’s “state
hymn” (2:125) of enforced collectivity with her own collective voice made
up of the shattered selves and unheard words of the nation’s tormented
mothers and wives, including, of course, Akhmatova herself, who is both
poet-prophet and fellow sufferer.6
The poet who ends Requiem defiantly proclaims her mandate to speak
for the “hundred million” victims whose sufferings she commemorates.
But Akhmatova’s situation, as poet and person, was far more complex
than Requiem’s magnificent conclusion might suggest. The imagined mon-
ument—the poet as stone-clad Niobe—that concludes Requiem is Akhma-
tova’s retort to the bombastic mass grave that Mayakovsky celebrates in
“At the Top of My Lungs” (1930): “Let our common monument be / the
socialism built in battle,” he crows. As Amert observes, the “nation of a

hundred million” for whom Akhmatova claims to speak in Requiem is
likewise a challenge to Mayakovsky’s self-proclaimed collective authority,
this time in an earlier work, “150,000,000” (1920): “150,000,000 speak
through my lips,” he insists in the poem’s opening. Neither the ordinary
reader nor the Soviet state saw fit to endorse his grandiose assertions in
his lifetime. But were Akhmatova’s pronouncements any better founded?
She never saw Requiem published in its entirety in her native land—it
fi rst officially appeared in Russia only in 1988—though the periodic cul-
tural thaws initiated by Khrushchev repeatedly raised her hopes. Instead a
small circle of confidants committed the poem to memory, and Akhmatova
would occasionally recite it to carefully selected individuals or groups. She
feared even to write the full poem down, as her ritual of poem-burning
attests. Even after Stalin’s death Lydia Chukovskaya was reluctant to call
the work by name in her clandestine Akhmatova Journals. The poem that
claimed to speak for an entire nation could scarcely make itself heard even
among the chosen few to whom it had been entrusted.7
“We cannot sympathize with a woman who does not know when to die,”
the Soviet critic Viktor Pertsov wrote of Akhmatova in 1925. In her bitterly
ironic “On the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Literary Career,”
Akhmatova quotes from memory the review cum obituary that had marked
the beginning of her protracted “civic death,” with its intermittent, short-
lived resurrections, some forty years earlier.8 In the decades following Perts-
ov’s pronouncement, Soviet readers, if they read her at all, saw her chiefly
through the prism of a state censorship that presented her at best as a relic
of a long-vanished past: “I’m so quiet, so simple, Plantain, White Flock,”
Akhmatova writes mockingly in the Poem (2:125). She had remained frozen
in time, the beloved—or reviled—“poetess” of the early collections, Evening
(1912), White Flock (1917), Plantain (1921), and especially Rosary (1914).
Akhmatova laments her enforced solitude time and again in Chukovs-
kaya’s Akhmatova Journals. But such isolation can prove an—ambiguous—
blessing to a poet reared on the Romantic myth of the poet-martyr, the
poet-outcast: “No, without the hangman and the scaffold / The poet can’t
exist on earth,” she writes only half-ironically in one version of her poem
“Dante”(1936; 1:236). Chukovskaya recalls Akhmatova reciting a defiant
poetic credo directed against those who would consign her to a premature
“civic” burial:
They’ll forget me? Here’s what startled them!
I’ve been forgotten a hundred times,
A hundred times I’ve lain in the grave,
Where I may be today.

And the Muse grew mute and blind,
Moldered in the earth like a seed,
So that afterwards, like the Phoenix from the ashes,
She might rise in the sky-blue ether.
“Did they publish Sappho? Did they publish Jesus Christ?” (2:187). Akhma-
tova quotes Mandelstam’s phrases in her memoirs on her friend—but he
was not alone in his vision of the unpublished poet as oppressed redeemer.
Akhmatova seems to refer obliquely to Mandelstam’s fate when she notes that
“eleven people knew Requiem by heart, and not one of them betrayed me”;
of the eleven to whom Mandelstam recited his infamous “Stalin Epigram,”
one proved to be a Judas, as the poet himself apparently anticipated.9
“Because he cannot escape the task of raising his voice against cruelty and
injustice, the poet is par excellence the victim in a repressive society, a prop-
erty which [Requiem’s] ‘I’ shares with others of her trade,” Kees Verheul
remarks; and, as Nancy Anderson observes, “for Akhmatova in the late 30’s
Russia was a nation of victims.” Anderson also notes, though, that the Soviet
Union’s population at the time was about 170,000,000. What has become
of the 70,000,000 not counted among in Requiem’s 100,000,000 sufferers?
Certainly prosodic necessity plays a part in her choice here. Still, it is diffi-
cult to imagine her voluntarily ceding 50,000,000 Russians to Mayakovsky,
whose “150,000,000” gave a rough approximation for the entire country’s
population at the time the poem was written. The question, though, is not
her grasp of Stalin-era demographics; it is rather the nature of the collective
voice and vision she conceives in her involuntary isolation.10
“Innocent Rus’ [the noun is grammatically feminine in Russian] writhed /
Beneath bloody boots, / And the tires of the Black Marias,” Akhmatova
writes in Requiem (2:363). Clearly the nation’s oppressors, the wearers
of bloodied boots and drivers of Black Marias, are not to be numbered
among its true constituents. Does this division lie then, as the phrase I’ve
just quoted suggests, along the lines of gender? Are the suffering women
Akhmatova commemorates the true embodiment of an authentic, non-
Soviet Rus’? In an essay on Requiem as a women’s epic, Stephany Gould
notes that the female population of Soviet Russia in the late thirties came
close to the figure Akhmatova gives in her poem. But even here the poet’s
“we” proves problematic. Chukovskaya recalls reading Sofi a Petrovna,
her then-unpublished novella about the purges, aloud to Akhmatova in
1940. Like Requiem, the novella concerns women’s sufferings under Sta-
lin—but Chukovskaya’s vision differs markedly from Akhmatova’s in one
regard. Like Akhmatova’s speaker, and Akhmatova herself, Chukovskaya’s
eponymous heroine loses her son to Stalin’s purges. Unlike her poetic coun-
terpart, though, Sofia Petrovna refuses to recognize the wives and mothers
she meets in the prison lines as fellow victims: “She was sorry for them, of
course . . . but still an honest person had to remember that all these women
were the wives and mothers of poisoners, spies and murderers.” She follows
the Party line that ruthlessly divides the faithful from the saboteurs and
traitors surrounding them even as that policy undoes both her son and her
own sanity. The “we” upon which Sofia Petrovna relies allies her with the
perpetrators, not their prey.11
Requiem’s attempt to voice the experience of an authentic “we” as a chal-
lenge to the State’s enforced collectivity must have seemed a heroic, but
doomed endeavor when the poem was fi rst read and recited. In the event,
time proved Akhmatova right. The poem is internationally acknowledged as
both a masterwork of modern writing and one of the past century’s greatest
testaments to an age of mass terrors. The lines in which the speaker yearns
to call each vanished companion by name are now “inscribed around the
memorial stone that commemorates the victims of repression in her adopted
city of St. Petersburg,” Catherine Merridale comments. In violating the
State’s interdiction forbidding mourning—the “traditional languages of
mourning” tempted forward-looking Soviet citizens to “face backward into
time, remember, brood on the realities of loss,” the Bolsheviks warned early
on—Akhmatova managed to become, at least posthumously, her nation’s
“muse of weeping.”12
But Akhmatova’s role as chief mourner for a stricken people is more com-
plex than Requiem’s defiant epilogue suggests. “I called down death on
those I loved,” she mourns in a poem written in 1921: “My word / Foretold
these graves”(2:209). Her lines proved all too prophetic. Her suspect poetry
and her personal fame would lead in coming decades to the repeated arrests
and protracted imprisonments of her son, Lev Gumilev. His unfortunate
last name, a lasting reminder of the poet-father executed for alleged coun-
terrevolutionary activities in the state’s early years, did not help matters. Her
third husband, Nikolai Punin, was imprisoned in 1935 at least partly for the
crime of being married to Akhmatova.13 The very poem in which Akhma-
tova struggled to articulate the nation’s sufferings under Stalin might easily
have led, had it been discovered, to further sufferings for the son whose fate
she laments, as she well knew. Moreover, as Sofi a Petrovna reminds us,
totalitarian systems are expert in implicating their victims in their crimes;
all who survive do so by the grace of the very state that has tormented their
families and friends. Akhmatova’s lament in the Poem’s second section—
“How can it turn out / That I’m to blame for all”—finds its counterpart in
a parallel phrase from Part One: “So how could it have turned out / That
I’m the only one still living”(1:106). Her Silver Age cohort of poets and art-
ists, the dramatis personae of the Poem’s fi rst part, had largely vanished by
1940, from one more or less ominous cause or another. Survivors’ guilt is a
powerful force, especially when coupled with the inescapable complicity in
an immoral system that was the regime’s stock-in-trade.
“Isolate, but preserve”: Stalin’s dictate on Mandelstam’s fate was followed
far more faithfully in Akhmatova’s case. Unlike Mandelstam and countless
others, she survived the terror of the thirties, although at a great price. She
escaped the devastating Nazi siege of Leningrad by way of a state-sponsored
airlift to Tashkent organized in 1941 to ensure the safety of important cul-
tural figures: “In the flying fish’s belly / I was saved from the evil pursuit,”
she recalls in the Poem (2:131–32). The fi fties saw her son in and out of
camps, while she endured her persecutions not in prison, but in various tiny
rooms in Moscow and Leningrad, with a small group of friends to assist her.
“Ask my women contemporaries (sovremmenitsy),” Akhmatova writes in a
passage omitted from later versions of the Poem:
Convicts, exiles, captives,

And we’ll tell you,
How we lived in frenzied fear,
How we reared our children for the scaffold,
The torture-chamber and the prison.
Pressing our blue lips shut,

Maddened Hecubas
And Cassandras from Chukloma,
We’ll thunder in a soundless chorus
(We, crowned with shame):
“We dwell on the far side of hell.”
Amert speculates that the stanzas were dropped from later variants “for
censorship reasons.” Certainly it is difficult to imagine this passage being
any more palatable to the authorities than the earlier Requiem. And yet
Akhmatova did apparently hope against hope that Requiem might appear
in Soviet print one day, but she never tried to make the finished poem more
acceptable to the regime through strategic omissions or alterations. Just the
opposite. She carefully monitored the memories of the select few who had
learned the work in its entirety to check for mistakes and deviations.14
I suspect that Akhmatova had other reasons for excluding the offending
stanzas. The chorus of outraged wives and mothers, past and present, she
evokes here is clearly of a piece with the Stalin-era women whose ranks are
joined fi rst by the grief-stricken widows of Peter the Great’s streltsy, his mil-
itary elite, and fi nally by the mother of Christ herself in Requiem. Akhma-
tova’s speaker enters this particular chorus by way of the back door, though.
“Ask my contemporaries,” she commands the unnamed “you” (ty) to whom
she speaks: it is her contemporaries, not she, who swell the ranks of Stalin’s
female “convicts, exiles, captives” (katorzhanok, stopiatnits, plennits). She
joins in their “we” (i tebe rasskazhem my) only once they have been trans-
formed from prisoners themselves into the mothers of Stalin’s victims and
martyrs; “we reared children for the scaffold,” she reminds her unnamed
auditor. “The Poem takes its voices both from beyond the ‘barbed wire,’
and beyond the ‘Iron Curtain,’” Roman Timenchik notes. But the voices
that reach her from beyond camp walls in the poem’s “Epilogue,” its third
and fi nal segment, are not her own:
From beyond barbed wire,
In the dense taiga’s very heart—
I don’t know the year—
Now a handful of camp dust,
Now a tale from a chronicle of terror,
My double goes for interrogation. (2:130)
This double endures the fi rst-hand agony that Akhmatova herself had eluded
by chance or fate. “Always through her own ‘non-death (nepogibel’),” she
heard “sounds from there, from the mirror world of the taiga (taezhnogo
zazerkal’ia),” Chukovskaya comments. “She discerned the sounds and out-
lines of the other, inevitable destiny she had miraculously escaped.” Akhma-
tova had not been forced to follow the “funeral route” to the east “along
which they led my son,” as she writes in the Poem’s epilogue (2:132). She
had likewise been spared the bombardment that had left her beloved “city
in ruins” “seven thousand kilometers away” from her safe haven in Tash-
kent (2:129). What comes under siege in the Poem is instead precisely the
choral “we” of the omitted stanzas and of Requiem, the “we” that trium-
phally asserts the speaker’s right and obligation to speak for all the suffering
women of her tormented nation.15
“150,000,000 is the name of this poem’s master,” Mayakovsky crows in
the opening of his would-be revolutionary epic. As the poet Anatoly Nay-
man observes, Requiem is not simply a repudiation of official Soviet writ-
ing. It is also a continuation of the genre that Mayakovsky hoped to initiate:
“Strictly speaking, Requiem is the ideal embodiment of Soviet poetry that
all the theorists describe. . . . This is poetry which speaks on behalf of the
people and for the people. Its language is almost that of the newspaper;
it is accessible to the people.” “The hero of this poetry is the people,” he

remarks. But “who is the hero of the poem without one?” as Lev Loseff
asks. The secondary literature attempting to identify the poem’s prototypes
and locate its enigmatic hero is vast, and I will not attempt to summarize
it here. What interests me is the conspicuous absence of a coherent hero in
the Poem. The speaker-heroine of Requiem may contain multitudes. but
the Poem’s attenuated speaker might well complain with Mandelstam that
“there is not enough of me left for me.”16
One of the Poem’s key features, Kees Verheul observes, is “the peculiar
lack of stability in the personal identity of the I.”17 Instead of multiple sub-
jects subsumed into the speaker’s defiant voice, we get a self split into pro-
liferating alter egos and doubles, as the poet’s voice alternates with or is
transmitted by the series of personified nouns that ventriloquize the poem as
it progresses. Its narrative, such as it is, is advanced or interrupted at various
points by “words out of darkness” (slova iz mraka, lines 161–179); an uniden-
tified voice (221–350); an unnamed woman or her shadow (ten’), (206–221);
the wind, which “recalls or prophesies” 351–398; Silence (Tishina) which
recites lines 399–439; the poet’s conscience (sovest’, 440–451); a theme
(tema) rapping at the window (454–455); and the curiously disembodied
“author’s voice” (golos avtora) which concludes the poem and which is pre-
sented in much the same way as sui generis earlier narrators such as “the
wind” or “Silence.”18 This is not to mention all the other human voices and
quoted texts that have their say in other passages, or the human doubles
who may or may not speak for the poet herself.
I have not yet identified the most important of these poetic surrogates,
though: this is the Poem itself, or better, herself. Poema, the Russian word
for “epic” or “narrative poem” as opposed to lyric, is grammatically femi-
nine, and Akhmatova is quick to exploit the possibilities that this bit of
grammatical serendipity affords. Within the Poem proper, it is easy enough
to distinguish the Poem as text from the poema as character. Near the end
of the Poem’s second section, “Obverse” (Reshka), the poema herself awak-
ens to wrest temporary control of the text from its ostensible creator:
But the hundred-year-old enchantress
Awoke suddenly and wanted
To make merry. I’m beside the point . . .
. . . . . I had no idea how

To rid myself of this lunatic:
I threatened her with the Star Court
And chased her back to her native garret—(2:127)
The poet apparently does not pack the poema-Pandora back into her box
quickly enough, though. The interloper manages to commandeer the fi nal
two stanzas of “Obverse,” in which she contradicts the poet’s account of the
genre’s literary origins: “My only genealogy / Is sunshine and legend, / July
itself brought me forth”(2:127).
The poema’s cameo performance as narrator is relatively short within
the Poem itself. But the line between the two blurs beyond the boundar-
ies of the poetic text proper. A personified version of the Poem features
prominently in two of the prose texts appended to later variants. “It came
to visit me for the fi rst time at the House on the Fontanka on the night of
December 27, 1940 . . . I hadn’t summoned it,” Akhmatova explains in “In
Place of a Preface,” while in the “Letter to N.,” she complains that “the
Poem has tracked me down time and again, like attacks of an incurable
disease” (2:99). Many poets have, of course, been subject to unexpected
visitations of the muse; there is nothing so unusual in this. But this par-
ticular muse cum doppelgänger seems to have demonstrated remarkable
persistence. One of the Poem’s most salient features, Akhmatova writes
in her notes, is “how it has persecuted me”(3:157). She details the nature
of this torment in other prose fragments: “Sometimes the Poem aspired to
become a ballet, and then nothing could hold it back”; “More than any-
thing, it tormented me in Leningrad in 1959, turning again into a tragic
ballet.” And she is not the Poem’s only prey: “People simply come in off
the streets and complain that the Poem has tormented them,” Akhmatova
moans. At times the Poem bears a disconcerting resemblance to Gogol’s
renegade “Nose.” What should be a mere appendage of its owner asserts
its independence and upstages its would-be master: “It really was behaving
very badly, so much so that I fully intended to deny that it was mine, like
the owner of a dog that has bitten someone in the street who assumes an
air of ignorance and strolls off without quickening his pace.” “Rumor has
it,” she complains elsewhere, “that it is trying to overpower other works of
mine that are in no way related to it, and, in this manner, to distort both
my literary development (such as it is) and my biography.”19
Akhmatova receives her “social command” (sotsialnyi zakaz) in Requiem
from the anonymous “woman with the blue lips” who asks “Can you
describe this?” to which the poet replies unhesitatingly, “I can.” The fi nished
poem represents the fulfi llment of that promise: self, society (as opposed to
state), and poetic form function in perfect accord. The Akhmatova of the
Poem, on the other hand, takes her marching orders from “the old shaman
woman” that is the work itself. Akhmatova is answerable neither for the
poem (“it might be better if it were anonymous,” she comments), nor to its
audience. In the prefatory “Letter to N.,” she relishes the outrage of those
“women” who greet the apparently incomprehensible work with “sincere
indignation”(2:98). She is, moreover, fully responsible neither for herself as
speaker nor as biographical entity: the poem threatens to usurp her very life
story, she insists. 20
In Requiem, as Amert demonstrates, Akhmatova takes Soviet forms and
turns them against the very state they are meant to celebrate, in part by fi ll-
ing these forms with profoundly un-Soviet content. 21 The Poem’s structural
complexity and its programmatic inaccessibility mark it, on the other hand,
as formally anti-Soviet.
He shouldn’t be very unhappy
Or, more important, secretive. Oh, no!—
The poet should be flung wide open,
And obvious to his contemporaries. (“The Reader,” 1959; 1:253)
Akhmatova’s sardonic prescription for Soviet poetry is reversed in the

Poem’s many variants: one of its incarnations within the text is after all
the “Confusion-Psyche” (Putanitsa-Psycheia, 2:101) who appears in the
“Second Dedication.”22 “The Soul selects her own Society— / Then—shuts
the Door”: the Soviet poet lacks the luxury of lyric isolation, of ignoring
the “Majority” and neglecting “Emperors,” that Dickinson claims in her
famous poem. “My editor was unhappy,” the poet remarks in the Poem’s
second part, “he growled, ‘There are three themes at once’”:
Having read the fi nal phrase,

You don’t know who’s in love with whom.
Who met whom when and why,

Who is dead and who’s alive,
And who’s the author, who’s the hero—
And why today we need such
Debates on the poet . . . (2:123)
Akhmatova might seem simply to be rehearsing what had long since become
standard attacks on Modernist obscurity (she was reading Eliot and Joyce
while the Poem was being written). But inaccessibility had ominous impli-
cations in a state that demanded that poets’ doors be left “wide open” at
all times. 23
“The Poem shouldn’t have a living room” (V ‘Poeme’ ne dolzhno byt’
gostinoi), Akhmatova remarks to Chukovskaya by way of explaining one
excision. This was also her way of limiting the public space in an intention-
ally hermetic construct. She herself, she comments elsewhere, is forced to
“enter my own Poem by way of the back stairs.” The funhouse structure
of the Poem—“this box has a triple bottom,” Akhmatova warns (2:126)—
defeats easy access even for initiates. Requiem was intended as a common
monument, accessible, in principle, to an entire nation of victims—but the
Akhmatova of the Poem takes delight in thwarting even the cultural elite
that is presumably its intended audience. She returned more than once to
the multiple interpretations it generated with feigned shock and dismay:
“When I hear that the Poem is a ‘tragedy of conscience’ (Viktor Shklovsky
in Tashkent), an explanation of why the Revolution took place (I. Shtok in
Moscow), a ‘Requiem for all of Europe’ (a voice from the mirror [i.e., Isa-
iah Berlin]), a tragedy of atonement, and God knows what else, I become
uneasy. . . .” But both the poet-author and the poet within the Poem, its
would-be speaker, can claim no superior interpretation; they likewise lose
their way time and again in the very work they both inhabit and create. 24
“Break down the four-square walls of standing time,” Ezra Pound bids
his fellow Modernists in an early lyric. Akhmatova puts his prescription into
practice in the spectral house that is the Poem’s chief setting. It is a space
meant to confound all who enter. The stage directions that open Parts One
and Two place the action in the House on the Fontanka (Fontannyi dom),
part of the former Sheremetiev complex in Petersburg where Akhmatova
lived, by her reckoning, “for thirty-five years” (the actual tally was appar-
ently much shorter). Her little room expands to include places from across
time and space: the Sheremetiev Palace ballroom, a theater, the Wandering
Dog Cabaret, her editor’s office, and her friend Olga Glebova-Sudeikina’s
bedroom. These rooms behave, in turn, like the uncanny chambers of a
Gothic penny dreadful: ceilings expand and contract, walls part, spec-
ters and demons appear in mysterious mirrors. Even segments of her own
Poem are apparently delivered by the haunted house’s phantasmal hands
and voices. A furtive “conscience” drops charred manuscripts upon her
windowsill and disappears (2:120), while the wind wailing in the chimney
recites her rhymes (2:122). When she is forced to abandon the House on the
Fontanka, and evacuate her beloved Leningrad, the poet herself becomes a
ghost in Part Three, haunting the city under Nazi siege: “My shadow falls
on your walls / My reflection appears in your canals / My footsteps sound in
the Hermitage’s halls” (2:131). 25
“I live as if in someone else’s house, a house I dreamed, / Where I perhaps
have died,” Akhmatova writes in a poem of 1957 (2:293). Homelessness is
a recurrent theme in the late work; at times indeed it seems as if she called
down death not just on the people she loved, but on the places she cherished
as well. “The main feature of my biography,” she tells Chukovskaya, “is
that all the houses I’ve lived in have been erased from the face of the earth.”
From her exile in Central Asia, she imagines her home as the Poem itself:
I can see my poem (poema)
From the road’s bend—it’s cool there,
As in a home, where the darkness is sweet
And the windows are open from the heat,
Where there’s not a single hero,
But the poppies spill across the roof like blood. (1:269)
Even in welcoming Tashkent, the Gothic mansion that is Akhmatova’s home

in verse is haunted by the specter of some obscure, unpunished crime. The
reminiscences of the Poem’s fi rst part “are centered around an unspecified
motif of CRIME [sic],” Verheul observes. The fi nal part, too, is shaped by
guilt as a double marches to the doom that the poet herself has escaped.
“Sins and poets don’t mix,” the speaker insists in Part One (2:108). But she
herself is dogged by a sense of impending retribution for some unnamed
transgression. “Whose turn is it to grow fearful, / To start, recoil, yield /
Atone for an ancient sin,” she asks; “No one will judge me,” she reassures
herself a few lines later (2:106). The respite is short-lived, though: “I punish
myself and not you,” she tells a fellow culprit elsewhere (2:112). 26
“Won’t you tell me . . . the answer to my life,” the speaker begs at the
end of one section (2:118). Akhmatova herself refuses, though, to give any
of her readers the fi nal word on her unfi nalizable opus. She is bemused
by the confusion she strews among critics and admirers as she collates the
multiple interpretations which become, in turn, part of the ever-expanding
Poem’s extended family of notes, quotes, and commentaries, both others’
and her own. Its endless construction becomes a way of deferring indefi-
nitely the questions of personal and poetic responsibility that it both raises
and deflects.
The Life of the Poem

I asked if she would ever annotate the Poem without a Hero . . . She
answered that when those who knew the world about which she spoke
were overtaken by senility or death, the poem would die too; it would
be buried with her and her century.
—Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (1980)
There is no death—we all know that.

—Akhmatova, Poem without A Hero
Akhmatova intended the Poem to be “a synthesis of the most impor-

tant themes and images of her entire oeuvre,” A. I. Pavlovsky observes. Ana-
toly Nayman concurs: “In every sense, this work lies at the center of her
oeuvre, her fate, and her biography.” Akhmatova had hoped at one point to
write an autobiography that would combine “the narrative of my life and
the fate of my generation.” The Poem, which threatens to take over both her
literary development and her biography, has apparently supplanted the prose
work intended to fuse her own life story with that of her contemporaries. It
becomes, in other words, the kind of master poem that Lawrence Lipking
calls, following Stevens, a “harmonium,” a work in which the aging poet
seeks both to summarize her or his life in art and to align it with the greater
story of the age that shaped and was shaped by that life. The term “har-
monium” may originate with Lipking and his Life of the Poet (1981). The
impulse it designates, though, is an ancient one, as Lipking demonstrates;
he traces its origins back to Virgil, whose “master creation” is the “sense of
an inevitable destiny: his life as a poet.” Lipking fi nds his prime exemplar of
the modern “harmonium” in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935–42), whose dates
coincide very nearly with those of Akhmatova’s Requiem. The work it influ-
enced, though, was Requiem’s eccentric companion piece, which takes one
of its many epigraphs in altered form from Eliot’s late masterwork.27
Akhmatova received a copy of the Quartets in 1947 from Boris Paster-
nak, who found the American poet’s obscurity too far removed from his
own stripped-down later style to be of much interest. But Akhmatova took
to Eliot’s poem instantly. “Ruins and waste lands are my specialty,” she
writes in a letter of 1943. Small wonder that she should be drawn to the
work of a poet who had made his reputation and become the voice of his
generation with his own Waste Land in 1922. Akhmatova may not have
known Eliot’s early masterpiece (I suspect that she did, although I have no
direct evidence). But she would have found traces of the earlier poem’s deso-
late landscape scattered throughout the later work. The Quartets revisit the
waste lands of European culture in the aftermath of one war from the midst
of yet another conflagration—-“The parched eviscerate soil / Gapes at the
vanity of toil, / Laughs without mirth. / This is the death of earth (“Little
Gidding,” 1942)—as the poet struggles to synthesize his own beginnings
and ends with those of his troubled century. 28
“My future is in my past” (2:122): the epigraph to the Poem’s second part
has no direct counterpart in the Quartets, although Akhmatova attributes
it to Eliot in early versions of the text (2:387). It echoes several of the Quar-
tets’ best-known phrases, though, as V. N. Toporov notes: “Time present
and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future”; “In my beginning
is my end,” and so on. Toporov scrupulously traces the many echoes and
reminiscences of Eliot’s work in the Poem. For all that, though, the differ-
ences between the works are fi nally more salient and more significant than
their similarities. The middle-aged Eliot was urgently concerned, Lipking
notes, with meeting his own criterion for poetic success, which involved the
creation of the poetic masterpiece that would reveal “a significant unity in
his whole work.” “An aging poet in this state of mind has no time for inci-
dents or interruptions; he needs to arrive at his destination,” Lipking com-
ments. The destination at which Eliot arrives by the Quartets’ conclusion
seems determined at least in part by this very need to end conclusively and
meaningfully, and to bring us along with him. “What we call the beginning
is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is
where we start from,” he reminds us, perhaps too insistently as the poem
draws to a close. “We shall not cease from exploration,” he proclaims in
another well-known passage, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be
to arrive where we started / And know the place for the fi rst time.” The
tentativeness with which he begins the Quartets—“Time present and time
past / Are both perhaps present in time future” (my italics)—is replaced in
its ending by a programmatic assurance that includes both the poet and his
audience: “we call,” “we shall,” “we will,” he intones.29
“I was born in the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Tolstoy’s Kreutzer
Sonata, the Eiffel Tower, and it seems, T. S. Eliot,” Akhmatova writes in
her “Pages from a Diary”(1957). The date is off by a year in Eliot’s case—
but to these virtual contemporaries the century whose birth they witnessed
must have seemed very different indeed. Such distinctions would not have
been lost on Akhmatova as she fi rst encountered the Quartets. The voices of
her Poem come at times from beyond the Iron Curtain, Timenchik reminds
us. The Eliot of the Quartets represents one such voice; the curtain had
descended in 1946, just a year before Akhmatova came upon his little book.
This was also the year of the infamous Zhdanov Resolution that marked the
end of the relative cultural leniency of the war years. The resolution singled
out Akhmatova and the prose writer Mikhail Zoshchenko as relics of a rep-
rehensible bourgeois past that had no place in the newly triumphant Soviet
socialist state. “The counterrevolutionary poetess” was excluded from the
Writers’ Union shortly afterwards; and any hope of publishing her work
in state-controlled presses—and there were no others—vanished with her
Union membership.30
The extended poem in which Eliot brings his life in art to its necessary
conclusion not only managed to appear in print. Its claims to be a fitting end
to a lifetime of writing were ratified by the Swedish Academy when Eliot
received the Nobel Prize in 1948. For Akhmatova, the state, not the artist,
claimed the right to place the period at the close of her life’s work, and this
period had been placed in a prerevolutionary Russia long since consigned
to history’s dustbin. Her borrowed epigraph takes on new meaning in this
context. Even those admirers who remembered her work knew her chiefly,
with a few exceptions, as the lady love poet of Russia’s vanished Silver Age,
as Akhmatova complains repeatedly to Chukovskaya. Her artistic present
and future had been officially confi ned to a history that meant only one
thing in Soviet terms: “the accursed tsarist past.” Perhaps the programmatic
inconclusiveness of her Poem—so unlike Eliot’s desire to reach “the end of
all his exploring” in the Quartets—represents in part her right not to end in
spite of repeated efforts to strike her name “off the lists of the living.”31
The Eliot of the Quartets, like all aging poets, is “haunted by the ghost of
his past,” Lipking remarks. For much of her Soviet-era existence, Akhma-
tova was herself viewed as the ghost of both her own and her nation’s history.
Following the Zhdanov Resolution, the most ruthless of her many “civic
deaths,” she led what she calls an “almost posthumous existence.” This was
not the fi rst of her protracted “posthumous” periods: until the publication
of her wartime poetry, the Soviet poet and editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky
had “thought she was long dead, along with Blok, Briusov, and Gumilev,”
he notes in his diaries. “Every attempt at a continuous narration in memoirs
is a falsification,” Akhmatova comments in her “Pages from a Diary.” Her
observation may seem a mere Modernist truism, dating as it does from the
late fi fties. But Modernist clichés take on new meaning in what Akhmatova
called the Soviet “Royal Court of Wonderland.”32
Both her life and her work were fi lled with gaps not of her own making:
“imposed lacunae and censor’s omissions” punctuated the biography and
poetry alike, Chukovskaya remarks. “Will they guess what’s been left out?”
Akhmatova asks Chukovskaya while preparing one of the several abortive
Selected Poems that she hoped would one day fi nd their way into print. Her
question held for the life-in-art as well, which was distorted on both sides
of the Iron Curtain, as she complains to Chukovskaya. The chief Western
sources of information were no less distorted, she argues, than their Soviet
counterparts. “They act as if I wrote nothing for twenty years. . . . And how
could they possibly know, since I couldn’t appear in print,” she fumes.33
The Poem, Akhmatova moans in her notebooks, aims to distort her
life and work alike. It engages, in other words, in the same sort of sabo-
tage that has been infl icted upon Akhmatova by the Soviet state—or so
her mock-serious lament suggests. Her comment provides yet another way
of approaching the Poem’s various forms of difficulty: it is a peculiarly
inharmonious harmonium. The state strives to strip Akhmatova of respon-

sibility for both life and art, and the Poem mimics its inhospitable master.
Akhmatova suggests the state’s invasive power in several ways. The omit-
ted lines and stanzas that punctuate Part Two remind us with their ghostly
ellipses of the censor’s role in shaping Soviet art, and of the venerable tradi-
tion of Russian censorship: the device is borrowed, of course, from Pushkin’s
Onegin. She refers in the same section to another long-standing Russian tra-
dition, the trick of smuggling contraband content into literature by way of
Aesopian language: her poem has “a triple bottom,” she warns, and is writ-
ten in “mirror script” (2:126). But the author herself is fi nally “beside the
point,” she confesses a few lines later (2:127). The threats to her autonomy
derive from two sources: the Poem itself, that “century-old enchantress”
who repeatedly usurps her role as author (2:127); and a regime that opposes
in principle the very notion of the poet’s “I.” “Will I dissolve in the state
hymn,” she worries (2:125). The threats come from different sources and
are treated with different degrees of seriousness—but their end result in
each case is the diminution of an autonomous speaking subject. The poem’s
would-be hero is in either instance consigned to a less than heroic role.
Akhmatova dramatizes her plight as poeta non grata in the Poem in other
ways. Endings and origins coincide by the conclusion of Eliot’s Quartets.
The life that is the Poem’s ostensible subject, on the other hand, stubbornly
refuses to add up. This is not simply a matter of the intentional gaps and
inconsistencies that riddle the work, nor of the multiple doubles drawn from
different times and places who make it difficult at times to ascertain who is
leading what life when and where. In Soviet Russia’s “pre-Gutenberg era,”
a work that never officially appeared in print continued to lead a mysterious
half-life in the multiple variants that made their clandestine way through the
literary underground, regardless of authorial intent: unofficial texts have
no copyrights. Akhmatova turns this situation to her advantage with the
Poem. “The Poem’s text is fi nal,” she claimed on more than one occasion.
But by circulating multiple, confl icting manuscripts, she undermined—in-
tentionally, I suspect—the capacity of any reader, contemporary or future,
to determine which is the fi xed, authoritative version of the text, and which
is merely a wayward draft gone astray. For all her disavowals of responsi-
bility for the headstrong Poem, Akhmatova makes sure that the fi nal word
always lies with an author who, willy-nilly, must hide behind the scenes,
waiting to abridge, expand, or annotate each time the work seems in danger
of reaching its conclusion.34
For Mikhail Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson comments, “death is the ultimate
aesthetic act, a gesture that turns the whole of my life over to the other
person, who is then free to begin an aesthetic shaping of my personality.”35

Through her unwillingness or inability to fi nish her magnum opus, Akhma-
tova resists such fi nalization, at least for her life in verse. She thus limits the
freedom of readers hoping to fi nd the key to the life in the work. I use the
present tense here advisedly; the controversies around the Poem’s variants
demonstrate that Akhmatova succeeded in keeping the upper hand even
from beyond the grave. Seen this way, the question of poetry and responsi-
bility seems to have come full circle, with Akhmatova asserting her power
even as she dramatizes and laments her impotence, poetic and personal, in
the Poem and the texts surrounding it. Indeed, the Poem’s fi rst part par-
ticularly raises and complicates questions of the poet’s responsibility for the
very state of affairs that has led to her oppression.
The Theater of the World

Soviet political theater acquired a mythic dimension in the mid- to
late 1930’s, when Stalin cast himself as father of the nation. Earlier in
the decade the nation had been the fatherland, but now it became the
homeland or motherland in implicit union with the great father.
—Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin! (2000)
Thus far I’ve interpreted Akhmatova’s quasi-Eliotian epigraph as a

response to a state that repeatedly attempted to relegate the poet and her
work to a long-dead past. But this is only one possible interpretation of her
gnomic phrase. Another variant—“As in the past the future ripens / So the
past molders in the future” (2:107)—appears early on in the Poem’s fi rst
part, entitled “Nineteen Thirteen: A Petersburg Tale.” And the “diabolical
harlequinade” (2:122) that dominates the Poem’s most extended segment
suggests ways in which the Soviet future may indeed have germinated in
Akhmatova’s, and Russia’s, not so distant history. When Akhmatova read
an early version of the Poem’s opening to Marina Tsvetaeva, Tsvetaeva
responded “rather acidly,” Akhmatova recalls, that “it takes nerve to write
about all those harlequins, columbines, and pierrots in 1941.” Harlequins,
Columbines, and Pierrots: it doesn’t require much effort to recognize the
stock figures that were Blok’s signature in “The Puppet Show” (1906) and
elsewhere. Blok’s poetic personae and their paramours are recurring char-
acters in the “Petersburgian diaboliad” (2:108) that dominates Part One:
the “Heroine,” Akhmatova’s friend, the actress Olga Glebova-Sudeikina,
plays the roles both of Blok’s “Columbine” and the “Donna Anna” from
his “Steps of the Commendatore” (2:112); while Blok himself appears, inter
alia, alongside his own Commendatore at one point in the Poem, and as
the besotted cavalier who sends a rose to his unknown lady in “The Res-
taurant” at another (2:114). His chief role, though, is the demonic “man-
epoch” (chelovek-epokha: 2:412), who sets the tone both for this Petersburg
Walpurgisnacht, and for the age it embodies. 36
Shortly before her death Akhmatova referred to the Poem as a “polemic
with Blok.” Why should Blok be Akhmatova’s embodiment of an age
gone terribly wrong? “All the women [in the Stray Dog Cabaret] turned
into Columbines, young men who could love Columbines—into Harle-
quins, and enthusiasts and dreamers—into poor and sad Pierrots,” one
of Akhmatova’s contemporaries comments. Blok was arguably his age’s
most accomplished practitioner of the “life-creation” I discuss in Chapter
1, and he inspired his admirers both by his own example and through the
work that expanded not just their repertoire of roles, but also the rules on
how to play them. What Akhmatova gives us in Part One is life-creation
gone berserk. It is virtually impossible to draw a clear-cut line between
the real-life figures taken from her prerevolutionary past and their theatri-
cal counterparts, drawn largely from a fi n de siècle stockpile of favorites:
Faust, Dorian Gray, Don Juan, Casanova, Salome, the Demon, miscella-
neous fauns and bacchantes, and so on. 37
“Is this a mask, a skull, or a face,” Akhmatova’s puzzled speaker asks in
Part One (2:106). The skull here is no accident: Silver Age “life-creation”
had a nasty habit of turning into something far more sinister, Vladislav
Khodasevich suggests in his tellingly titled Necropolis (1939). The “cran-
berry juice” shed by Blok’s hapless Pierrot in “The Puppet Show” “some-
times turned out to be real blood” when Symbolist dramas were played out
in reality, Khodasevich warns. And “Renata’s End” (1928), his cautionary
tale of life-creation gone awry, gives a variant of the story underlying the
Poem’s fi rst part. In the essay, Khodasevich describes the stormy life and
death by suicide of a young would-be writer, Nina Petrovskaya, who makes
the mistake of falling in love fi rst with Blok’s erstwhile companion-in-arms
Andrei Belyi, another champion “life-creator,” who soon abandons her “all
too human love” in his quest for a transcendent “Woman Clothed with
the Sun”; and then with the self-consciously demonic Valerii Briusov, who
promptly makes artistic capital of their affair by writing it into his novel
The Fiery Angel. 38
Nina Petrovskaya killed herself only in 1928, after years of failed efforts
to transform her life into art, to convert “her personality into an epic poem
(poema),” Khodasevich tells us.39 Akhmatova’s thwarted “dragoon Pier-
rot” (2:115), the young poet Vsevolod Kniazev, did not outlive the Silver
Age culture that shaped and fi nally destroyed him; he committed suicide in
1913 upon discovering the infidelity of his chosen “Columbine,” Glebova-
Sudeikina. In other ways, though, their stories are strikingly similar. As
commentators have noted, Kniazev’s ghost haunts Part One, from the “First
Dedication” bearing his initials, to the fourth chapter’s epigraph, taken
from one of his lyrics (2:101, 110, 119). Why should the death of a “silly
boy” “who couldn’t bear his fi rst injuries” (2:120) prove the fulcrum around
which the Poem’s enigmatic opening act revolves? Well, in the fi rst place, he
is the single figure foolish enough to attend the sinister masquerade clad only
in his hapless human face: “You came here without a mask,” the speaker
reproaches him (2:111). Like the unfortunate Nina, his love also proves all
too human, and the blood he sheds is genuine: “Why does a trickle of blood
/ Inflame your petal cheeks?” the speaker asks (2:111).
And like Nina Petrovskaya, he has the ill fortune to fall in love with some
of the era’s premier “life-creators”: fi rst, the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and, more
to the point for my purposes, Glebova-Sudeikina, in whom Akhmatova saw
the age personified. “Olga Sudeikina was a woman of her time down to her
toes, hence closest of all to Columbine,” she comments in one prose frag-
ment. The actress becomes Blok’s female foil in the Poem, a walking theater,
a “human role” (chelovek-rol’), as one memoirist called her, who continues
to play her various parts regardless of the toll they take on those around her
(2:380). Khodasevich uses Nina Petrovskaya’s troubled life to critique the
“life-creating method” that he was the fi rst to identify. He takes Blok to task
for placing her death “in quotation marks”—“Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya
is ‘dying,’” Blok writes in his notebooks—and rejects the Silver Age “cult
of personality” that replaces “genuine, personal, concrete emotion” with its
ersatz Symbolist substitute for the sake of cosmic drama. I have mentioned
the language of guilt and retribution that runs through the Poem’s fi rst
part—and I am far from the fi rst reader to see the work as what Shklovsky
calls “a Poem of Conscience.” Can Akhmatova’s Silver Age morality play be
read then, like Khodasevich’s essay, as an attack on the lethal “life-creation”
it so skillfully recreates?40
Certainly the entire Poem—indeed all of Akhmatova’s late writing—
works to undermine the Silver Age clichés she exposes in Part One. “There is
no death—we all know that / It doesn’t bear repeating” (2:109), the speaker
remarks sardonically. In the Poem itself, though, the dragoon’s—very real—
suicide is only a prelude to the spectacular “range of deaths”(2:120) that
would soon become available to artists and ordinary mortals alike. The
poet “bears no guilt for anything. . . . / Poets and sins don’t mix” she com-
ments elsewhere (2:108). But the entire work bears witness to the force of at
least one poet’s sense of responsibility. It is the speaker’s “old conscience,”

after all, who serves as her obdurate muse by unearthing the “burnt tale” of
love and betrayal that becomes the unruly Poem (2:120).
The speaker is to blame for everything, she laments (2:125). But why is
this speaker—who is clearly meant to represent Akhmatova as both poet
and biographical entity—responsible for the amoral Silver Age antics of her
contemporaries? In the same prose fragment where Akhmatova identifies
Glebova-Sudeikina as the age’s female incarnation, she also absolves her-
self of any obligations for her dubious heroine’s behavior: “this shadow has
assumed a separate existence and no one—not even the author—is responsi-
ble for her.” Here as elsewhere, though, the Poem operates at cross-purposes
with the author’s own commentary. Glebova-Sudeikina was in fact one of
Akhmatova’s closest friends for many years; and the speaker herself con-
fesses that this “Columbine of the 1910’s” is “one of my doubles” (2:114).
We needn’t go far afield to seek out the real-world affi nities between the two
women that led to this particular doubling. Akhmatova’s theatrical bent is
evident in her many portraits, self-created or otherwise, and her contem-
poraries noted her flair for self-dramatization early on. “She holds herself
like a queen in exile,” the critic Lydia Ginzburg remarked following the
revolution. The Poem hints at her theatrical gifts; the “black beads” and
“lace shawl” the speaker wears while entering the world of her past evoke
the characteristic costume of Akhmatova’s early photographs and poetic
self-portraits (2:106). And the pose she assumes before speaking—she turns
“half-way” (vpoloborota: 2:105)—echoes Mandelstam’s famous miniature
of Akhmatova as tragic queen, “Half-way turned, oh sorrow” (“V pol-
oborota, o pechal’,” 1914).41
Time and again, moreover, Akhmatova implicates herself in her friend’s
most serious transgression: the suicide “is at your threshhold! / Across it . . . /
May God forgive you,” she writes in the Poem (2:120). Whose lines are
these? Does the speaker address her erring heroine? Or does the poet’s own
conscience—who delivers the incinerated manuscript a few lines later—
reproach her for half-forgotten sins? Akhmatova hints more than once in
her conversations with Chukovskaya that she too had caused the suicide of
a young man in the heyday of Symbolist life-creation and was thus complicit
in the sins of her Silver Age contemporaries.42 Be that as it may, within the
Poem itself Akhmatova manages once again both to suggest and evade the
question of her own answerability by way of her ambiguous doublings and
shifting speakers.
All this still begs Tsvetaeva’s tacit question: why on earth should Akhma-
tova resurrect her long-dead Harlequins and Columbines in 1941? Why
dredge up some obscure Pierrot’s suicide while worlds collide and crumble?
In “Renata’s End,” Khodasevich attacks the Symbolist theatricalization of
life that denigrates, even destroys “real feelings” along with the real human
beings who possess them. Akhmatova’s goal is fi nally, I think, quite dif-
ferent. Scholars have noted the puzzling overlap between her evocation of
Kniazev’s “senseless” suicide (2:120) and Mandelstam’s death in the gulag
in 1938. The Poem’s fi rst dedication bears Kniazev’s initials—“To the
memory of Vs. K” (2:101)—but it is followed by the date on which Man-
delstam was presumed to have died, December 27. Why would Akhmatova
evoke in the same breath a “silly boy”’s romantic suicide, and the death of
a friend martyred under Stalin? “I’m ready for death”: Akhmatova recalls
Mandelstam’s phrase both in her memoirs and in the Poem’s fi rst part
(2:109), where it serves as a grim reminder of the real fate awaiting those
poets who survived the Symbolists’ satanic revelries unscathed. Both poets
choose death—but one assumes the noble role of poet-martyr, while the
other ends his life from thwarted love and wounded pride. By linking such
disparate poet-victims, Akhmatova does more than merely accuse her Sil-
ver Age masqueraders of fiddling while Rome burned. Does she hint that
their frivolous toying with life and death, a game that led more than once
to real bloodshed, prepared the way for the large-scale life-and death-cre-
ation of the Great Impresario himself, Joseph Stalin? Does her forgotten
poet-suicide prefigure in some way the massive bloodletting of the decades
yet to come?43
Perhaps. But the year of Kniazev’s death provides a more convincing link
between 1913 and 1941. From her vantage point in the early 1940’s, at the
onset of yet another worldwide cataclysm, the poet sees what her misguided
revelers cannot: “Along the legendary embankment / Not the calendar, but
the real / Twentieth Century drew closer”(2:118). “He didn’t know which
threshold / He stood on, and which road / Would open before him,” she
writes of her love-struck poet. The words hold for all the “phrasemongers
and false prophets” who populate the Poem’s fi rst part (2:120, 107). Caught
up in their petty, self-provoked tragicomedies, they miss the advent of the
true cosmic drama then upon them, the drama that was still unfolding as
she wrote and rewrote a lifework intended to be both retrospective and pro-
phetic. This was the drama of the true Twentieth Century, a cosmic battle
being waged by the one true State against the Poet and the Nation, and the
fate of the human race hung in the balance. This was the drama that Man-
delstam had anticipated when he spoke his appropriately prophetic line in
1934. This was the battle Akhmatova begins in Requiem and continues in
the Poem Without a Hero.
The gaze of the Romantic poet-prophet, Ian Balfour writes, “penetrates

beyond the props of everyday history to the theater of the world under the
aspect of eternity.”44 Unlike Khodasevich, Akhmatova does not advocate a
retreat from theatricality in favor of more mundane human emotions and
experience. Just the opposite. “My lips no longer / kiss, but prophesy,” she
had written in 1915 (1:146). As a young poet, she may have fallen prey to
Silver Age errors, but the price she had paid—and continued to pay—for
past sins had also enabled her to take up her prophet’s staff at last. She her-
self consents to play “the role of the fatal chorus” this time around; she will
be her own collective in this cosmic drama (2:114). But she will also serve
as the prophet who foretells and even directs the drama’s action, as well as
taking a leading role in the theater of modern history that the Poem enacts
and predicts.
“She looked and moved like a tragic queen” and spoke “like a princess
in exile,” Isaiah Berlin remarked of his encounters with Akhmatova in
Leningrad just after the war. Did he realize that he was repeating almost
verbatim phrases fi rst uttered decades earlier? Berlin recognized the poet’s
uncanny “genius for self-dramatisation.” She was no less skilled at staging
those around her—in art at least, if not always in life. Berlin not only inad-
vertently became one of the Poem’s most symbolically charged characters,
the “Guest from the Future” whose shadow falls on the fi rst part’s maca-
bre revelries (2:107). He proved to be one of its most astute interpreters
as well, and Akhmatova integrates his remarks on the Poem into its ever-
growing prose appendices. The meetings between Berlin and Akhmatova
have been well described by Berlin and others, and I will not retell the story
here. I want to focus instead on the part he played in the world-historical
drama that Akhmatova saw at work in her life and strove to embody in
the Poem. 45
Berlin’s spectral presence in the poem provides yet another gloss on
Akhmatova’s borrowed epigraph. The “Guest from the Future” “cannot
penetrate” the ghost-fi lled ballroom that is one of the Poem’s chief sets.
He is reflected, nonetheless, in “all its mirrors,” and Akhmatova sets the
stanza describing this mysterious guest smack in the middle of the haunted
“white hall” fi lled with shadows from her past (2:107). The future—in the
form of the stanza describing its human incarnation—is thus poetically
embedded in the midst of the personal and cultural past that dominates
the Poem’s opening segments. In Akhmatova’s eyes, Berlin must have lent
himself remarkably well to just such a juxtaposition. This young stranger
from England, who was only the second foreigner she had met since 1917,
knew not just her language and her culture, but even several friends who
had formed part of the prerevolutionary milieu in which Part One of the
Poem is set. Akhmatova’s intuition, “almost second sight,” had warned her
to expect nothing less, she informed him.46
But the “Guest from the Future” was no mere reminder of past glories
and shames. Akhmatova “saw herself and me as world-historical figures
chosen by destiny to begin a cosmic conflict,” Berlin comments. Indeed,
circumstances seem to have conspired to imbue Berlin’s visit with super-
natural significance. His very name invited cosmic interpretation, combin-
ing as it did Old Testament prophecy with the city whose fate might be, as it
soon seemed, to trigger the outbreak of World War III. Their first visit was
interrupted, moreover, by no less a personage than Winston Churchill’s son
Randolph, who had foolishly gone looking for his friend. Of the Big Three,
the former wartime allies, only Roosevelt was missing—since Stalin was,
of course, always present in spirit, if not in fact. “Who is the third who
walks always beside you,” Eliot asks in The Waste Land. Akhmatova and
her Poem are likewise shadowed by a mysterious “Other” whose spectral
footsteps echo alongside their own. Uncanny doublings are, of course, the
stuff the Poem is made of—but suspect Russian poets always recognized the
possibility that their words might fi nd an eager, if less than cordial, auditor
in very high places. One identity for the Poem’s enigmatic companion and
auditor might well have been, if not Stalin himself, then one of his many
proxies. Indeed, shortly after Berlin’s visits, a microphone was conspicu-
ously installed in the poet’s ceiling.47
In the modern poet’s “heart of hearts,” Auden observes, “the audience
he desires and expects are those who govern the country.” Such expecta-
tions were sometimes fulfilled in Stalin’s Russia, where a poet’s defiant
words could reach a distant leader’s ears, as Mandelstam had proven. And
that ruler in turn might consult with yet another poet in the process of
determining the blasphemer’s fate, as in the famous phone call Stalin made
to Pasternak about Mandelstam: “He’s a master, isn’t he?” he asked the
flabbergasted poet. Stalin had taken an active interest in Akhmatova’s fate
for many years. “Where is Akhmatova? Why isn’t she writing?” he report-
edly asked at a meeting of literary prize winners in 1939—though he knew
full well the answers to both questions. Akhmatova took pride in Stalin’s
“unflagging interest in her,” according to one informant’s report. And he
was intrigued by her meetings with Berlin: “So our nun now receives visits
from foreign spies,” he allegedly remarked. Akhmatova saw Berlin’s visits
as partly to blame for her public fall from grace by way of the Zhdanov
Resolution. In her “mysterious fate,” he proved to be “the precursor of all
my misfortunes,” she writes in a later poem (1:293).48
The troubles he had caused were not limited to her life alone, the Poem’s
“Third Dedication” suggests: “He will not become my dear husband / But
we will earn the right / To trouble the Twentieth Century” (2:102). Their
illicit conversations had far-reaching consequences, she insisted when she
met Berlin once more twenty years later in Oxford: “we—that is, she and
I—inadvertently, by the mere fact of our meeting, had started the cold war
and thereby changed the history of mankind,” he recalled.49 Akhmatova
was in earnest. Her vision of the poet’s responsibility towards history has
shifted radically since Requiem: she no longer simply preserves a forbidden
past for posterity, as she had in the earlier poem. Through her words and
actions, she actively, if at times unwittingly, changes the course of history
in the making. Isaiah Berlin, the lifelong foe of historical master plans and
fi xed fates, whether singular or collective, inadvertently becomes Akhma-
tova’s star-crossed accomplice in this predestined endeavor. “Beneath which
starry signs / Were you and I born to woe?” she asks in a poem commemo-
rating their encounters (1:284). This is the sweeping vision of poetic respon-
sibility that fi nally shapes the Poem—or more precisely, that refuses to let it
take a fi nal shape.
For the Poem’s ending, true to form, has no fi nal form. The different
stanzas that conclude two of the fullest versions suggest, though, the nature
of the prophetic vision that possessed Akhmatova in the last decades of her
life. In one edition, the Poem concludes as follows:
Seized by mortal dread
Of that which has become dust,
And knowing the time for vengeance,
With dry eyes downcast,
Wringing her hands, Russia
Walked before me to the east. (2:132)
A more recent edition includes a fi nal stanza found in a number of

manuscripts:
And en route to meet her own self,
Unyielding into dread battle,
As if from the mirror into reality,—
Like a hurricane, from the Urals, from Altai,
True to her duty, young
Russia went to save Moscow.50
In both variants, Russia herself (Rossiia) becomes the last and most potent
of Akhmatova’s doubles: the nation springs from the mirror world of the
Poem into reality itself, as the second text would have it. But this is no
longer the meek, tortured Rus’ who writhes beneath her tormentors’ feet
in Requiem. The violent potential implicit in the fi rst ending (“knowing
the time for vengeance”) is realized in the second, where “young Russia”
(molodaia Rossiia) plunges steadfast into battle (civil war?) in order to save
the nation’s revered ancient capital (another feminine noun, Moskva), pre-
sumably from the masculine state that had found its most ferocious embodi-
ment in the Great Father, Joseph Stalin. Blok follows a long tradition of
poet-prophets by courting the enigmatic Rus’ that both surrounds and
eludes him. Akhmatova puts a new spin on this Romantic tradition. As a
woman poet, and a woman poet explicitly identified with old-world Russia
by friends and enemies alike, Akhmatova can go her male colleagues and
precursors one better. She and embattled Russia are female comrades-at-
arms—the spurned, long-suffering woman takes revenge—or even mirror
images. Shoulder to shoulder, they are ready to take on even the great dicta-
tor, the usurper father Joseph Stalin himself. She is thus the best and most
fitting prophetic mouthpiece for her troubled nation and its destiny.
In either version, the Poem ends open-endedly—Russia’s fate remains
unknown—but this is the openness of a prophetic vision, not a Bakhtinian
novel. The prophet walks a fi ne line, Balfour remarks. If his or her pro-
nouncement is too specific, too narrowly construed, it dies with its creator
or with the crisis that fi rst called it forth. This is the scenario Akhmatova
anticipates when she tells Berlin that the Poem “would be buried with her
and her century.” If the prophecy is too general, though, it loses its appeal
to those contemporaries to whom it is at least partly directed, and whose
situation it purports to address. Akhmatova claimed to despise “vaticina-
tion,” “the poet’s eye peering into a dimly discernible future,” Berlin recalls.
(This was during the same visit in which she informed him of their shared
world-historical mission.) Her own Poem belies her claims, not least by its
resistance to conclusion. Both fi nal stanzas end in future-tending motion;
the repeated verb form “shla” ([she] “went” or “was going”) signals goal-
driven action in progress, though attainment of the goal remains in doubt.
By ending the Poem in multiple ways, moreover, Akhmatova projects the
activity of interpretation into the future; neither its final version, nor its fi nal
meaning can ever be fully resolved. “Your Horoscope Is Long Since Cast,”
one of the Poem’s unearthly voices tells the speaker (2:116). But the poet
alone is privy to this otherworldly prediction. The rest of us are left guessing
at meanings that may still be unfolding as we read. 51
The modern poet longs to gain the ear of the world’s legislators, Auden
warns. Akhmatova was not alone in her conviction that the poet played a
key part in shaping the postwar world’s fate. In 1962, nearly two decades
after her encounters with Berlin, she met another illustrious foreign guest
in Leningrad, Robert Frost. The purpose of his trip, which was sponsored
by the American government, was to foster cultural bonds between the two
superpowers. But Frost’s plans were more ambitious. He encountered a
number of eminent writers, and was duly impressed by Akhmatova’s solem-
nity and sorrow. She was less taken by the ostentatiously folksy Frost, whose
talk mixed poetry with lumbering and profits. “It was not fitting,” she com-
mented, “for a poet to reason in this manner.” She recognized their shared
eminence; “we’re both candidates for the Nobel Prize,” she told Chukovs-
kaya. But the “muse of weeping” had more in common with the self-styled
poet-farmer than she guessed. 52
Frost overtly resisted all varieties of “postwar apocalypticism,” James
Longenbach remarks. “It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going
down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God,” Frost explains in his
“Letter to ‘The Amherst Student’”(1935). For all his studiedly homespun
ways, though, he was “deeply committed to his poetic-prophetic-political
role,” his Russian-language interpreter, the Slavist F. D. Reeve, commented.
“Frost prophesied the union of ‘poetry and power’ during the Kennedy pres-
idency,” Tom Paulin remarks, “because he shared Yeats’s dangerous ambi-
tion of recovering the poet’s ancient right to full membership of the state
council.” The backwoods prophet dreamed of meeting not only poets and
artists, but, more importantly, the Soviet Union’s commander-in-chief him-
self, Nikita Khrushchev. His dream was realized after some doing, and he
and the Soviet leader talked for several hours. “We were charmed with each
other,” Frost recalled. “The poet’s role in government,” he told Khrushchev,
was to bestow “character”—but his goals were not limited to character-
building alone. He apparently hoped to resolve the confl ict that Akhma-
tova, by her reckoning, had inadvertently begun through her meetings with
Isaiah Berlin. During his talk with the Soviet premier, Frost suggested that
East and West Berlin be reunited, thus ending the Cold War. Not surpris-
ingly, Khrushchev proved less than amenable to his guest’s suggestions. The
American poet’s forays into acknowledged legislation proved ineffectual,
though Frost himself may not have realized it. “We’re playing a great world
game and with some style,” he exclaimed delightedly after his visit. The
game that Khrushchev was playing, though, was clearly public relations,
and not the prophetic politics to which his would-be collaborator aspired. 53
“We sat opposite one another in cozy armchairs,” Akhmatova told
Chukovskaya after her meeting with Frost. “I thought, ‘every time that
he was accepted somewhere, I was cast out. When he was rewarded, I
was disgraced.’” But the life of the “disgraced poet” (1:236) has peculiar
compensations, at least in its Stalinist incarnation. The very seriousness

with which the dictator, whose visions of history are no less messianic than
the poet’s, takes his literary opponents would seem to encourage cosmic
imaginings. Certainly that was the impression Berlin took from his meet-
ings with Akhmatova and Pasternak alike. Pasternak, he recalls, returned
repeatedly to the “cosmic turning points in the world’s history, which he
wished to discuss with Stalin.” He saw World War II, like the revolution, as
a “necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit,”
to which his still-unpublished Doctor Zhivago was destined to contribute.
Pasternak “wished his work to travel over the entire world, to ‘lay waste
with fi re’ (he quoted from Pushkin’s famous poem The Prophet) ‘the hearts
of men,’” Berlin remembers. 54
In her conversation with Berlin, Akhmatova excoriated Chekhov for “the
absence in his world of heroism and martyrdom, of depth and darkness and
sublimity.” But a world made up only of executioners and martyrs, evil over-
lords and heroic victims, may prove perilous to poets in their writing and
lives alike. “Do not want to die for us, / do not want to live for us, / Live with
us,” the Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki bids his fellow writers at the height of
the Solidarity movement of 1980–81. Easier said than done. How does the
poet live with traditions demanding prophetic revelation or glorious self-
immolation for the sake of the oppressed nation, if not for human salvation
as such? “I loved them. / But I loved them haughtily,” Cassandra confesses
in Wisława Szymborska’s “Soliloquy for Cassandra”:
From heights beyond life.
From the future. Where it’s always empty
And nothing is easier than seeing death.
I’m sorry that my voice was hard.
Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried,
Look down on yourselves from the stars. . . .
Is the prophet’s haughtiness, or the martyr’s ardor, the best way to chal-
lenge a regime with its own claims to cosmic prophecy, and its own litany
of martyrs to the sacred cause? This was the quandary facing Poland’s poets
as they set about rebuilding their nation and their traditions following the
Second World War under the unsought auspices of the same messianic state
that had shaped Akhmatova’s poetry and fate.55
Chapter Title: Avant-garde Again, or the Posthumous Polish Adventures of Vladimir

Mayakovsky

5
Avant-garde Again, or the Posthumous

Polish Adventures of Vladimir Mayakovsky
Lenin
is still
more alive than the living.
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” (1924)
He lives! He simply can’t stop living!

—Wiktor Woroszylski, “Once More on Immortality” (1949)
On Various Mayakovskys
That wasn’t a man, that wasn’t a poet; that was an empire, the coming
world empire.
—Aleksander Wat, My Century (Mój wiek, 1977)
In 1948, the young Wisława Szymborska found herself at the center

of a controversy on the proper nature of progressive poetry in the fledgling
People’s Poland. Like many young intellectuals and writers, she was at the
time a true believer in the ideology espoused by the nation’s new rulers. Her
poetics had not kept pace with her politics, though, or so some aggrieved
readers complained in the columns of Dziennik literacki (Literary Gazette).
149
150 Avant-garde Again
A group of puzzled students had, at their teacher’s suggestion, written to

Szymborska asking her to decipher her poem “Saturday in School,” which
had recently appeared in the paper. Their instructor, one S. Lewiński,
explained in his own letter that his pupils were well-versed in avant-garde
poetics, having covered “the futurists, expressionists, picadorians, skama-
ndrites, quadrigists, meteorists, cadrists, czartakians, helionites, and prole-
tarianists.” They were baffled, though, by Szymborska’s elusive imagery and
oblique metaphors, which would likewise be incomprehensible, Lewiński
warned, to the ordinary “worker and peasant.” He urged her to abandon
her avant-garde allegiances and follow the lead of a poet whose “stylistic
simplicity” never fails to “astonish and delight us.” Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Lewiński continued, “is an inspired poet of the masses”: “This is a prophet
(wieszcz) whose poems ‘Lenin,’ ‘Good,’ or ‘Left March’ won’t strain for a
moment the brains of a shepherd from Kazakhstan or a lumberjack from
Komi. They’ll understand the poems instantly, absorb them, experience
them, enriching in the process both their intellect and their class conscious-
ness.” “Do our revolutionary Polish poets write this way today?” he con-
cludes. His question is clearly meant to be answered in the negative.1
Szymborska apparently took Lewiński’s challenge to heart. She provided
her disgruntled readers with a prose gloss to the enigmatic lyric clarifying
its ideological content: “The full burden of labor rested on the shoulders
of the proletariat, bent by oppression, but the fruits of that labor served
to satisfy the property-owning classes and not the needs of entire nations
. . .” And she also excluded all dubious avant-garde experiments from her
debut volume Why We Live (Dlatego żyjemy, 1954), whose poems are by
and large as self-explanatory as their titles: “What a Soviet Soldier Said to
Polish Children in the Days of Liberation,” “Our Worker Speaks Out on the
Imperialists,” “An Old Working Woman Reminisces over the Cradle of the
People’s Constitution,” and so on. 2
Lewiński’s rhetorical query begs a more pressing question, though: did
Mayakovsky himself ever really write this way? Not according to Soviet
critics during his own lifetime, including, as we have seen, such luminar-
ies of the revolution as Trotsky, Lunarcharsky, and Lenin himself: “Nekra-
sov I acknowledge, but Mayakovsky—excuse me, I can’t understand him,”
he confessed. Jacek Łukasiewicz remarks that Lewiński was at least partly
right about Mayakovsky’s comprehensibility among the Komi woodcutters:
the lumber camps of the Komi Autonomous Republic were largely staffed
by forced laborers drawn from the intelligentsia “who had frequently com-
pleted Europe’s best universities” and were thus intellectually equipped to
tackle Mayakovsky’s linguistic experiments. “I ought to be the poet of the
Avant-garde Again 151
people,” Mayakovsky insisted shortly before his suicide in 1930. But he was
plagued throughout his brief career as the self-proclaimed bard of the revo-
lution by charges of obscurity, irrelevance, and narcissistic self-absorption,
as I’ve discussed elsewhere. “The workers and peasants can’t understand
you” ran the standard charge. 3
Only after his death were his “petty-bourgeois” origins, “anarchist-
individualist tendencies” and “bourgeois Bohemian” aesthetics fi nally for-
given him, when Joseph Stalin himself rectified years of neglect by proclaim-
ing in 1935 that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented
poet of our Soviet epoch.” His statement, needless to say, was not based
upon a critical reevaluation of the great poet’s works. “This shift in official
Soviet attitude was predicated by the pressing needs of cultural politics of
the moment,” as Lazar Fleishman remarks. “On the one hand, it pretended
to be a further manifestation of the anti-RAPP stance of Soviet leadership.”
(RAPP was the acronym of the short-lived Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers.) On the other, “Mayakovsky was advanced to rebuke Bukharin
(and his followers) who at the Congress of 1934 put forward Pasternak as
a genuine expression of Soviet ideals in lyrical poetry.” “Indifference to his
memory and his works,” Stalin concluded, “is a crime.” Under Stalin, Boris
Pasternak remarks, “Mayakovsky began to be forcibly imposed, like potatoes
under Catherine the Great.” His comment might seem initially to explain
both the unrecognizably Socialist Realist Mayakovsky of Lewiński’s letter
and the seriousness with which Szymborska and others apparently took this
sanitized, radically simplified bard of the revolution. Poland became, after
all, a satellite of the Soviet state when Stalin’s reign was at its height, and
words like “indifference” and “crime” were not to be taken lightly.4
But Mayakovsky did not require Stalin’s intervention to make his pres-
ence felt in Polish poetry. He had been an active force on the Polish literary
scene since shortly after the First World War, and he actually visited Poland
twice, fi rst in May, 1927, at the invitation of the Polish Pen Club, and then
for a week or so in 1929, not long before his suicide. But Mayakovsky’s “leg-
end had preceded him,” another Futurist, Anatol Stern, remembers. “He
had been among us long before he fi nally appeared.” “Mayakovsky’s influ-
ence came early, by the very beginning of the twenties,” Aleksander Wat
comments. “It reached Poland in 1918. I was reading Mayakovsky in 1919,
1920.” Wat was both a founding member of Polish Futurism, a younger
sibling of the Russian and Italian movements, and a leading leftist intel-
lectual, although he apparently never actually joined the Communist Party.
For Wat, as for so many other avant-garde writers then and later, Maya-
kovsky represented the ideal fusion of “the avant-garde position, formal
innovation” and “communist, revolutionary writing”: “Mayakovsky is the

model, the archetype, the prototype for the mixing of those two elements,”
he concludes.5
Mayakovsky himself applauded Wat as a “born futurist,” and Wat seems
to claim the Soviet writer as the exclusive property of Polish poetry’s more
radical elements: “What Bryusov, Balmont, and Blok were for the Skama-
ndrites, especially [Julian] Tuwim, Mayakovsky was for the futurists. He
came as a revelation.” But the Skamandrites, Modernist poets who espoused
a more traditional poetics, also fell beneath Mayakovsky’s spell. “The poetic
shock I experienced reading Mayakovsky for the fi rst time,” Tuwim recalls,
“can be compared only to the unforgettable shock you feel at the voice and
vision of a sky riven by lightning bolts. Riot, uproar, thunder, flame—ev-
erything new, without precedent, miraculous, astounding, revolutionary.”
Tuwim went on to translate what Edward Balcerzan calls the “bible of East-
ern European Futurism,” Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers,” while his fel-
low Skamandrite Antoni Słonimski tackled the exuberantly revolutionary
“Left March,” among other works.6
Translating Mayakovsky apparently became a cottage industry among
Polish poets in the twenties. Translators flocked to Mayakovsky from across
the political and artistic spectrum. They included not only politically lib-
eral poetic traditionalists like Tuwim and Słonimski, but also, more predict-
ably, avant-garde leftists such as Stern, Bruno Jasieński, and Włodzimierz
Słobodnik, alongside the more aesthetically conservative, avowedly commu-
nist poets Władysław Broniewski and Witold Wandurski. His fi rst, official
visit to Poland caused a “genuine storm,” Stern recalls. Poets and journalists
alike were struck by his “cosmic voice” and “massive form”—“Are they all
that big back there?” one spectator wondered—while “swarms of [govern-
ment] spies tracked his every move,” Wandurski remembers. Mayakovsky’s
fans and translators packed the Wats’ apartment for a private reading at
which “the living, speaking locomotive” proceeded to “roar and reel” his
way through “Left March”: “the windowpanes shook and the doors of a
cubist cupboard burst open of their own accord,” one witness reported.7
Mayakovsky’s suicide produced the same kind of aftershocks among his
Polish admirers that Svetlana Boym describes amid their French counter-
parts in Death in Quotation Marks (1991). Soviet officialdom wrote off the
suicide as a strictly personal affair: his death “has nothing in common with
the public . . . activity of the poet,” the official report announced. The state’s
representatives could scarcely do otherwise. For them to admit that their
most visible poetic representative might have had reasons to be dissatisfied
with the shape that Soviet life, literary or otherwise, was taking under the
leadership of Comrade Stalin would be tantamount to committing politi-

cal—and not just political—suicide themselves. Mayakovsky’s failure as a
poet, his insurmountable lyricism, becomes his private failure as well; and
his regrettably individualistic death is safely cordoned off from the trium-
phal march of Soviet history.8
But neither the poet nor the ideology he claimed to represent could be
faulted by the Polish poets who had taken Mayakovsky as their model of the
avant-garde artist who successfully places his gifts in the service of the revo-
lutionary regime. A whole issue of the radical journal Miesięcznik literacki
(Literary Monthly) was devoted to anxious discussions, and evasions, of the
suicide. The openly pro-Soviet, avowed communist Władisław Broniewski
found one solution to this dilemma by interpreting the ambiguous event
as a “death sustained in battle” in a poem entitled “April 14,” the date of
Mayakovsky’s suicide:
But the song won’t fall silent
raised on high from the catacombs to the forum:
it will fly higher
than the crematorium’s black smoke.
Let the word, like radium,

scorch the tissues of our hearts.
All praise to the fallen!
We march onwards.9
Mayakovsky’s word will scorch hearts, or at least some hearts, more effec-
tively than that of Pushkin’s prophet (“Burn with your word the hearts
of men”) ever could: radium’s afterlife far exceeds that of even the most
divinely inspired would-be bard. Indeed, Broniewski takes his poetic
radium straight from the master’s verse: “Poetry is the same as mining
radium,” Mayakovsky boasts in “A Conversation with the Tax Inspector
about Poetry” (1926). The hero may have fallen, but the struggle will live
on, Broniewski promises.10
And it did. “The battle for Mayakovsky” (“Batalia o Majakowskiego”)
became the rallying cry for a group of young postwar Polish poets eager, as
their master had been, to lend their voices to the new state’s collective hymn
of praise. But whom were they battling? And which Mayakovsky were they
fighting for? Was it the Bohemian bard whom Trotsky mocks in Literature
and Revolution? Or was it his antipode, the well-behaved spokesman of the
proletariat whom Lewiński uses to rebuke Szymborska and other misguided
Polish practitioners of avant-garde poetics après la lettre? What happens
when “mayakovshchina,” the “mayakovskovitis” for which Soviet critics
had castigated the poet and his followers during his lifetime, becomes the
“majakowszczyzna” embraced by a new generation of young Polish com-
munist writers? “I viewed the world revolution through the prism of Maya-
kovsky,” the poet Wiktor Woroszylski confesses in his memoir A Return to
My Country (Powrót do kraju, 1979). What revolution and which Mayak-
ovsky did he see?11
Majakowszczyzna, or the Death and Polish

Resurrection of Vladimir Mayakovsky
“Your poem is really ‘I and Lenin,’ while I want Lenin without your ‘I.’”
“What you really want is poetry without my ‘I . . . ’”
—A conversation with Vladimir Mayakovsky, from
the memoirs of Ilya Selvinsky (quoted in Wiktor
Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, 1965)
The individual!
Who needs him?!
The single voice
is weaker than a squeak.
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” (1924)
It’s bad for a person

to be alone,
Woe to one alone! One alone’s no soldier!
—Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”
In his quasi-epic “About That” (1923) Mayakovsky anticipates his

posthumous fate once “the slaughter is done”: “The poet’s tatters,” he
predicts, will “shine over the Kremlin / like a red fl ag in the wind.” This
ragged body-cum-banner was triumphantly hoisted in 1950 by a pugna-
cious group of openly pro-communist poets whom critics sardonically
christened the “pimply ones” (pryszczaci) in honor of the still-adolescent
complexion of their spokesman, a “pimply Bolshevik from Łódź” by the
name of Wiktor Woroszylski (1927–96). In his manifesto “The Battle for
Mayakovsky,” Woroszylski declared war on the poetic classicists who
edited the influential journal Kuźnica (Ironworks), Ryszard Matusze-
wski, Seweryn Pollack, and Adam Ważyk. Their prorevolutionary senti-
ments were at odds, he argued, with an artistic traditionalism that had not
kept pace with the political realities and requirements of the new Polish
People’s Republic. “What haven’t the opponents of ‘majakowszczyzna’

defended?” Woroszylski charged: “They’ve defended fi ne craftsmanship
and cultural tradition against the blockheads and barbarians. They’ve
defended perfect classical form against the brutes who shatter stanzas.
They’ve defended a poetic language subtly woven of Ledas, Endymions,
and Persephones from the incursions of nonpoetic elements such as PPSer
[pepesz, slang for a member of the Polish Socialist Party], socialist compe-
tition (współzawodnictwo), Pstrowski [a celebrated shock worker whose
face would one day grace the 100-złoty note], ZWM [the Fighting Youth
Union].” “Our revolt,” he later explained, “took shape in language and
form, in rhythmic and phonetic rasping, in prosaicized phrases, imprecise
rhymes, and brutal, colloquial diction.”12
So far so good. Modern poetry has a long and distinguished history of
aggressively “unpoetic” writing. From Wordsworth to Whitman, from
Baudelaire and Rimbaud to avant-gardists of every stripe: poets through-
out the last two centuries have periodically imported intentionally banal,
“unlyrical” elements of language and life into their verse as a way to shake
up a readership grown accustomed to fancier poetic fare. And Futurists,
Dadaists, and Surrealists were alike in their embrace of Soviet Russia’s
budding dictatorship. Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Wat, Jasieński, Breton,
Aragon: all saw their linguistic experiments as speeding the birth of the
brave new world emerging from the ashes of the old life that their poetry
had helped to incinerate. Both the program and the patron adopted by
Poland’s “pimply ones” would seem to place them squarely in what was by
1950 a recognizably modern tradition of avant-garde rebellion. Woroszyl-
ski managed “to include everything” in the manifesto that Alicja Lisiecka
calls “the most typical pamphlet of postwar Polish literature”: “political
fanaticism, the wrath and ‘maladjustment’ of rising stars in a constellation
of heavenly bodies with readily recognizable surnames, indiscriminate per-
sonal attacks, a fascination with the writings of their Soviet colleagues, the
rebellion of ‘Romantics’ against ‘classics,’ the present against the past, the
young against the old.”13
“Every Romanticism picks the classics it must combat,” Woroszylski
himself later confessed. “Battle, fronts, attacks, retreats, victory”: these
were the categories, he remarks elsewhere, through which he and his angry
young friends perceived their mission in poetry and society alike. What
better model could they fi nd than the poet who had commanded his cad-
res of like-minded artists to man “the barricades of hearts and souls” in
his “Order to the Army of the Arts” (1918): “To the streets, Futurists, /
drummers and poets!”14 But the movement to which Woroszylski and his
contemporaries recruited their polonized Mayakovsky was an avant-garde

with a difference. This avant-garde had a history; it was burdened by a leg-
acy of failed fusions between experimental poetics and left-wing politics.
The radical experimentation that marked Russian poetry of the twenties
had been squelched by no less than Joseph Stalin himself—though Mayak-
ovsky himself had done his best to help by rejecting his radical colleagues
at LEF (the Left Front of Art) for the budding Socialist Realists of RAPP
shortly before his suicide.
Early Polish fans of Mayakovsky’s politics and poetics like Wat, Broniewski,
Wandurski, and Jasieński, moreover, later found themselves in various Soviet
prisons and camps, from which not all of them emerged alive. Even when
they themselves survived, any dubious avant-garde tendencies they might
have harbored did not.15 Woroszylski and his fellow Mayakovskovites—
Krzysztof Gruszczyński, Tadeusz Urgacz, and Andrzej Mandalian—had to
battle not only their classicizing contemporaries, but also the avant-garde
precursors who had, so they thought, fatally misinterpreted the shape that a
truly socialist Mayakovsky should take. The proletarian prophet celebrated
by the sermonizing schoolteacher S. Lewiński joins forces with the Mayak-
ovsky embraced by the pimply young Turks of postwar Polish poetry. The
martyred patron saint of rebellious writers from Broniewski and Breton to
Frank O’Hara, Nicolas Guillen, and Julia Kristeva unexpectedly becomes
the scourge of the very poetics he had helped to invent.
More than this—the battle for Mayakovsky was also a battle with Maya-
kovsky and even a battle against Mayakovsky, or so Woroszylski’s early
poetry suggests. Trotsky had announced the lyric’s end shortly after the
revolution—and Mayakovsky’s irrepressible lyricism becomes Exhibit A
in Trotsky’s case against the self-proclaimed standard bearer in Literature
and Revolution: “When he wants to elevate man,” Trotsky charges, “he
makes him be Mayakovsky.” Anatoly Lunacharsky likewise called for an
end to Mayakovsky’s incessant “lyrical whining” in another postrevolution-
ary attack. Mayakovsky was unable to overcome what he himself called
his “melancholic, sentimental lyricism,” and his contemporaries saw even
would-be revolutionary epics such as “Vladimir Ilych Lenin” and “Good!”
(1927) as “steeped in individualism,” suffused in a “personal, lyrical” into-
nation. He tried time and again to “step on the throat of my own song,”
as he writes with a mixture of rue and pride in his fi nal, fragmentary epic
“At the Top of My Lungs” (1930). But he never managed to suppress this
song to his own—or anybody else’s—satisfaction. It remained to his self-
proclaimed disciples in Soviet Russia and its satellites to fi nish the job that
Mayakovsky himself had left half-done.16
The new man demanded a new kind of lyricism, Trotsky and others had
announced early on. And this new lyric poetry was to be resolutely anti-
lyrical, born not of subjective perceptions, but through the “objectivity of
historical necessity.” Trotsky allowed for small-scale lyrics as a stopgap
measure until a truly Soviet poetry emerged to take their place: a kind of
NEP for poetry. Postwar Polish poets and critics were less tolerant. “Poet-
ics arises from ideology and fulfi lls an ideological function,” Adam Ważyk
announced in an early essay—and only those who fail to recognize this
function will fall into the capitalist trap of “speaking theoretically about
a ‘personal’ lyric.” Only “capitalist society,” he warns, fosters the false
division between “the socio-political sphere” and the “private, individual
sphere” that makes the ostensibly “personal” lyric possible. “Marxism has
successfully liquidated the contradiction between man’s private and social
natures,” another postwar critic crowed: “The Socialist Realist poet will
write a personal poem about Nowa Huta [the new steel works outside Kra-
kow] and a political poem about love.” The purely personal lyric seemed
destined to go the way of the dodo—although ideology, not biology, would
drive the last nail in its coffi n.17
The young Woroszylski may have opposed Ważyk’s neoclassical poetics,
a poetics he saw as singularly ill-suited to appropriately Socialist Realist
content. He would have had no argument, though, with Ważyk’s mixing of
ideology and genre. In his redefi nition of lyricism, Ważyk carefully explains
the necessity for quotation marks around the dubious adjective “personal”
that so often and misleadingly accompanies the word “poetry”: “I place
the term in quotes since I see great peril arising from the very defi nition.”
Woroszylski is no less scrupulous in his debut volume There Is No Death!
(Śmierci nie ma! 1949). In “About Love—A Chaotic Tale” (“O milości—
gawęda chaotyczna”), he sardonically deflates the erotic “histories that capi-
talism calls ‘private’” and that feed its ostensibly intimate verse: “that’s not
love, it’s bourgeois hysteria,” he explains.18
Another poem from the same collection places tacit quotation marks
around the personal lyric poem indirectly, by way of its aggressively anti-
lyrical—and anticapitalist—frame. The poem takes as its starting point a
brief newspaper citation concerning recent events in the United States: “The
court pronounced a death sentence on Rosa Lee and her children.” The
story, as Woroszylski re-creates it in the poem’s opening and closing sec-
tions, concerns the brutal beating of a black woman in the American South
by her employer, one Mr. Startford. She and her two adolescent sons resist,
which leads ultimately to Startford’s death and their subsequent execution
for his premeditated murder. Woroszylski draws a suitably Socialist Realist
conclusion from this horrific tale. In America, he reminds us, “there are only
two colors: black and white. / But the judges didn’t know the third color /
. . . which was called—The Red First of May!”:
the workers vow that Sammie Lee,
the workers vow that Wallace Lee,
the workers vow that Rosa Lee
will live on in the red banner.
So the story doesn’t end: it begins.
Rosa Lee lives on!19
“Is there any question today that the strongest emotions—the strongest
precisely in a poetic, artistic sense—come to us from the newspapers, with
their straightforward, naked narrative of the deep changes taking place
among the Polish workers?” Woroszylski exclaims in a programmatic piece
entitled “The War for Literature in People’s Poland”(1951). “Rosa Lee”
combines his vaunted newspaper aesthetics with the impassioned critique of
American social injustices that was de rigueur among Soviet Socialist Real-
ists and their epigones. Mayakovsky himself had pointed the way early on as
he reminded Soviet readers of the “unemployed workers” who “flung them-
selves headfi rst into the Hudson [sic]” from the span he both celebrates and
condemns in “Brooklyn Bridge” (1925). Woroszylski’s poem proves most
interesting, though, in its middle section as he clumsily works to combine
social and aesthetic criticism by way of a personal poetic association. The
Rosa Lee who is his poem’s subject reminds him of a poem commemorating
a different victim with a similar name:
I remember I once read a poem,
a good poem, Edgar Allen Poe wrote it,
and it wasn’t your ordinary poem,
but a lament for a dead woman, a tribute,
and her name still sticks in my memory,
the name of a white woman: Annabel Lee.
Woroszylski proceeds to quote whole chunks of Poe’s poem in Polish trans-

lation. But he also takes pains to add key details omitted by his gifted, if
misguided precursor:
And afterwards—(he didn’t write this, but I know)—
the poet’s lonely evenings dragged on
and the roar of alcohol filled his head, glowing like the great city’s windows,
and the poems also died slowly,
like pastel, frail, flossy-haired women
at dawn in hotel rooms. 20
Poe’s poetic fantasy is, like the poet himself, a product of the poisonous
pseudo-privacy born of urban, capitalist existence, Woroszylski reminds
us. Poe’s lonely hell is as artificial as Baudelaire’s infamous paradise; both
his lyrics and their refi ned female victims are the stillborn children not
of some imaginary kingdom by the sea, but of modern capitalist alien-
ation in the making. Moreover, both the lyric poet and his favored genre
stand indicted of neglecting the evils of the society they ignore in cre-
ating their insular fantasies—or so Woroszylski suggests by way of the
awkward, parodic revision with which he begins the poem’s third and
fi nal section:
This story took place not so long ago
in a land where the freedom’s not free—
there lived a woman whose name the courts know
as the Negress Rosa Lee.
(Było to bardzo, a bardzo niedawno / w republice, gdzie wolność się cli—
/ żyła tam kobieta i nazwało ją prawo / Murzynką Rosą Lee).
What does this all have to do with Mayakovsky? A few clues emerge
from the strongest stanza in what is by and large an all too typical exer-
cise in Socialist Realist political and poetic correctness. The poem comes
to life fully only in the passage where Woroszylski imagines the melancholy
afterlife of “Annabel Lee”’s unhappy author: “He didn’t write this, but I
know,” the Polish poet confesses parenthetically. His perspicacity derives
partly, of course, from the “infallible Marxist master key” that offered him
and like-minded contemporaries a failsafe way to interpret human history
from its barbaric beginnings all the way through to its foregone communist
conclusion.21 Other passages hint, though, at deeper affi nities between the
self-avowed communist poet and his seeming American antipode. Woroszyl-
ski’s speaker concedes that Poe’s poem is “good,” apparently good enough
“to stick in his memory” long after his initial reading. After citing various
excerpts, moreover, he gives a rather surprising account of “Annabel Lee”’s
reception among his revolutionary colleagues:
I read this poem to my comrades—they said it’s not like that,
but Annabel Lee’s death moves me even though it might not be real,
since it happens that way, just love and suddenly your whole life,
it happens that way, just hair and lips and eyes.
So you’re really wrong not to believe—
that’s the whole point, other things hurt even worse, hit even harder.
The speaker’s comrades respond appropriately to the poem’s dubious bour-

geois content. His own reaction is less predictable. The revolutionary flag
bearer unexpectedly becomes an apologist for Romantic passion: where

have we seen this paradox before?
“From the heaven of poetry / I throw myself / into communism / because /
without it there is no love / for me,” Mayakovsky exclaims in “Homeward”
(1925)—but communism and love made for uneasy bedfellows at best for
the would-be bard of the coming utopia. It is, I think, no accident that
Woroszylski christens another early poem “About Love—A Chaotic Tale.”
The title’s fi rst part sends us back to one of Mayakovsky’s most notori-
ous efforts to fuse his quest for “love the savior” (spasitel’-liubov’) with
the emergence of the new Soviet state, his quasi-epic “About That.” The
fi rst section of Mayakovsky’s poem refers directly to Oscar Wilde and the
scandalous “love that dare not speak its name”: it is called “The Ballad of
Reading Gaol” (“Ballada redingskoi tiur’my”). But the unspoken word of
Mayakovsky’s title—“That” is his coy substitute for “love”—is more banal.
It refers simply to the garden-variety bourgeois passion which had long been
the stock-in-trade of poets, and which this particular poet has found himself
unwilling or unable to overcome:
In this theme,
both personal
and petty
sung time and time again
I’ve spun like some poetic squirrel,
and I mean to go spinning again. 22
The second part of Woroszylski’s title—“A Chaotic Tale”—might easily

be his tacit critique of the unstable mixture of philistine passions and pro-
gressive politics that makes up Mayakovsky’s epic lament for lost love. He
and his contemporaries preferred what had become Mayakovsky’s canonical
texts, the poems that were required reading for generations of Soviet school-
children, “Good!”, “Vladimir Ilych Lenin,” and “At the Top of My Lungs.”
Woroszylski recalls reciting Artur Sandauer’s translation of “Good!” from
memory along with his fellow Mayakovskovites, and Balcerzan describes
the postwar enthusiasm provoked by the programmatic throat-stomping
that concludes “At the Top of My Lungs.” Woroszylski’s “About Love” ends
with an exhortation to just such collective self-throttling. The true poet, he
insists, must defeat his lyric impulses and learn to “howl like a revolutionary
agitator,” “bawl” “in a bass of bellowing poems.”23
The older Woroszylski was ruthless toward both himself and his genera-
tion of “dreary sectarians, thick-skulled schematists,” “rigid, doctrinaire
epigones of Mayakovsky, lacking both imagination and talent.” He did not
renounce his early allegiances, though. Instead he sought time and again
to revise his youthful misreadings of his Russian master’s life and art by
returning to an ever more complex portrait of poet and writing alike. In
1952, Woroszylski left Poland for Moscow, that Mecca of budding revolu-
tionaries, where he completed his doctoral dissertation on Mayakovsky’s
lyric poetry in 1956. This stay also marked the beginning of the long process
of disillusionment that culminated in his ejection from the Party in 1966
over his support for the revisionist Marxist philosopher Leszek Kołakowski.
The research, both official and unauthorized, that he conducted on this and
subsequent trips led to the publication of his acclaimed biography, The Life
of Mayakovsky (Życie Majakowskiego, 1965), which appeared in English
translation in 1972. The book in turn became a play entitled The Death of
Mayakovsky (Smierć Majakowskiego), which was produced in Warsaw in
1967. Neither the biography nor the play made it past the censors in Maya-
kovsky’s homeland, though; and I will return to Woroszylski’s provocative
life of the poet later in my discussion. 24
The play’s title alone is enough to alert us to one key source of con-
troversy in biography and drama alike. There is No Death! Woroszylski’s
debut volume proclaims, and in this he follows the lead of the Mayakovsky
who enthusiastically endorsed the Soviet dream of “abolishing death.”
“Official Marxism-Leninism,” Irene Masing-Delic remarks, saw “genuine
immortality in ‘the preservation of the results of human activity’”—she
takes her quotation from the Soviet Atheist Dictionary of 1983—and it
categorically rejected “any form of personal immortality in either transcen-
dental or earthly regions.” Socialist immortality may, however, be achieved
by way of revolutionary martyrdom, and this is the fate that Mayakovsky
envisions in “At the Top of My Lungs”: “I don’t give a damn for monumen-
tal bronze / I don’t give a damn for marble slime / . . . Let socialism, built
in battle, be our common monument.” Like the Lenin of his famous paean,
Mayakovsky will live on in the glorious heaven on earth that his work has
helped to forge. This is how orthodox Soviet thought came to interpret,
or elide, Mayakovsky’s own less than glorious suicide. A fi lm biography I
saw as a student at Leningrad State University in the late seventies ended
not with the poet’s death, which went unmentioned, but with what was
presumably his miraculous assumption into the Soviet pantheon as a cam-
era panned heavenwards while the narrator intoned Mayakovsky’s famous
lines from his early poem “Listen” (“Poslushaite”): “If the stars are switched
on—- / it must mean somebody needs that? / it must mean somebody wants
them there?” The poem itself predates the revolution by several years. In
its late Soviet incarnation, though, Mayakovsky’s unspecified “somebody”
could easily be taken for that strategically unnamed socialist luminary who
had fi rst placed Mayakovsky’s star in the revolutionary fi rmament where it
now twinkled so brightly. 25
This is also the kind of immortality that Woroszylski foresees for his Rosa
Lee. Her defiance costs both her own and her children’s lives, but she sur-
vives nonetheless in the minds and deeds of the workers she inspires. Woro-
szylski endorses the programmatic optimism of the newborn People’s Poland
throughout the collection, which reads, as its euphoric title suggests, like a
communist valediction forbidding mourning amidst the unfolding glories of
the revolutionary “fi rst day of creation” one poem extols. The volume’s fi nal
poem, “Once More on Immortality” (“Jeszcze o nieśmiertelności”) sums
up its insistence on the new communist creed that supersedes Christianity’s
feeble previous efforts at transcendence:
So, if he wanted to fi nd
immortality in our times
the Israelite worker Christ
wouldn’t die on the cross,
he’d be a Communist Party member.
a volunteer, with a grenade belt,
who’d perish beneath the imperialists’ fi rst tank . . . 26
“Once more on immortality”: perhaps the Polish poet as would-be Soviet

prophet—“Literate young [workers] collectively / read the Manifesto like a
sermon”—protests too much. I have said that Woroszylski’s battle for Maya-
kovsky might also be read as a battle with Mayakovsky, and the quote I’ve
just given is a case in point. Mayakovsky was, of course, no stranger to the
figure of the crucified Christ who dies at the hands of an ignoble present
so that the glorious future might be born. But the martyred Mayakovskian
poet-Christ would hardly have allowed himself to be laid, for all his pro-
testations, in the tomb of the unknown soldier that is the likely destiny of
Woroszylski’s proletarian savior. Anonymity was never Mayakovsky’s strong
suit. Moreover, crucifixion, not armed battle, was his preferred mode of mar-
tyrdom from his earliest poems on: “Crucify him, crucify him,” hostile audi-
ences cry in “The Cloud in Trousers.” These crucifixions sometimes take the
shape of a singularly challenging form of suicide: “I have nailed myself to the
cross,” he announces in the same poem. And his metaphorical crucifi xions,
whether imposed or self-inflicted, are not provoked by revolutionary motiva-
tions alone. The “nails of words” that pin him to the paper at the end of “The
Backbone Flute” are driven by thwarted love, not revolutionary fervor.27
Love, martyrdom, and suicide: these quintessentially lyrical, supremely
un-Soviet, themes unify the whole of Mayakovsky’s life and writing, as
Roman Jakobson observes. “caution, political poets, / trumpeters of

the imagination, stevedores of feelings,” Woroszylski warns in one early
poem, “I summon you to cooperative labor in the name of the miner
Pstrowski”: “Who will provide more, provide better, more and better /
poetic coal to warm / their comrades from the cities, villages and abroad?”
Selfless poetic shock workers, not spectacular poet-Christs, are what the
socialist state requires from its would-be laborers of the imagination. The
Mayakovsky who thought and wrote otherwise must be carefully excised
from the hearts and minds of his latter-day Polish acolytes—even if it
means that they themselves must tacitly fight the master under whose ban-
ner they claim to march. 28
Love, Death, and the Socialist State

Then the first poet rose to his feet and recited a poem about a girl who
broke off with her beloved, a young man working at the lathe next to
her own, because he was lazy and failed to fulfill his production quo-
tas. The young man did not want to lose his girl, and so he proceeded
to work with such enormous zeal that the red star of a socialist hero
of labor was soon pinned to his machine.
—Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere (1973)
The middle-aged lady . . . said: “Why do you want to meddle with

love, comrades? Love will be the same till the end of time, thank
goodness.”
The organizer replied: “Oh, no, comrade, you are mistaken!” . . .
“Then where’s the difference?” asked the lady.
“Here: that in the past, love—even the greatest love—was always
a kind of escape from social life which was distasteful. But the love of
today’s man is closely connected with our social duties, our work, our
struggle for unity. And that’s where its new beauty lies.”
—Kundera, Life is Elsewhere
Death. In those days of compulsory joy it too belonged among the

forbidden topics.
—Kundera, Life is Elsewhere
In an essay written near the end of his life, Woroszylski reminisces

about his participation in a Polish conference dedicated to Mayakovsky
in 1993. The conference prompted him, he recalls, to “think about ‘my
Mayakovsky,’ who changed so much for me as the years passed”: “At fi rst he
thrilled me with his ruthless negation of the existing world and bombastic
faith in an ideal new world. Then I became fascinated by his enigmatic fate,
marked for tragedy from the start up through its fi nal, fatal end. I tried to
decipher it by compiling documents, inadvertent disclosures, and contradic-
tory accounts in my book The Life of Mayakovsky. Still later, after a long
break, I returned to my abandoned readings and noted with astonishment
the iconoclastic imagery of crosses, crucifi xions, Golgothas—alongside his
passionate hope for the birth of a different existence, which might be termed
the longed-for “civilization of love.”29
Love, death, and crucifi xion: by this account, Woroszylski recognized
these key themes in Mayakovsky’s poetry only after the decades that had
produced a manifesto, a short-lived movement, a dissertation, and a lengthy,
meticulously researched biography (the Polish edition runs to some eight
hundred pages). It strains belief—not least because Woroszylski, unlike some
of his contemporaries, was not confi ned to the Mayakovsky available in Pol-
ish translation, who was subject, like his less illustrious literary colleagues,
to the censor’s prohibitions and whims. His satirical plays, to give just one
example, could be published only after Stalin’s death; a 1956 production of
Mayakovsky’s Bathhouse in fact marked the beginnings of the Polish Thaw
(Odwilż), which, like its Soviet counterpart, initiated the posthumous relax-
ation of Stalinist cultural restrictions. 30 Woroszylski apparently picked up a
good working knowledge of Russian during a childhood spent in Poland’s
easternmost provinces. He later went on, as I’ve mentioned, to receive a
doctorate in Russian literature at Moscow State University, and produced
biographies not just of Mayakovsky, but of Esenin, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and
other Russian writers. He became, in short, a recognized expert on Russian
literature generally and Mayakovsky in particular.
How could Woroszylski have missed what seems so obvious to far less
knowledgeable readers of Mayakovsky today? My guess is that he didn’t—
though he may have been loathe to admit it—and that his battle for and with
Mayakovsky took place along lines fi rst mapped out by the master himself.
A passage in the preface to Woroszylski’s Selected Poems of 1982 suggests
as much. “What do I now know about my former self and my youthful
poems?” Woroszylski asks, and his answer invites us to read between the
lines of both his Mayakovsky and the poetry inspired by him. “They were
Romantic,” Woroszylski confesses: “I searched for the meaning of life in the
simplified world that made up the terrain of my poetic experiences—and I
found it most often in a beautiful death. I was probably reacting in part to
the many deaths, deaths lacking all heroic justification, that I had witnessed
during the war. . . . But I see as well the instinctive rejection of ordinary
life in which, all ideology to the contrary, the shivers of Romantic emotion
rarely seized me.”31 We should expect nothing less from the ardent reader of
Poe who briefly tips his hand in “Rosa Lee.”
Elsewhere Woroszylski confesses that “in twentieth-century poetry I
acknowledged only the Russians, with Mayakovsky and Esenin at the fore.”
One would be hard-pressed to come up with two modern specialists more
adept in the art of beautiful dying than these spectacular suicides who left
lyrics alongside or in lieu of fi nal letters: Esenin famously wrote his last poem
in his own blood. Indeed, Woroszylski’s biography of Mayakovsky con-
cludes with Pasternak’s description of the poet’s miraculously rejuvenated
corpse. “His face,” Pasternak recalls, “restored the time when he called
himself the beautiful twenty-two-year-old, because death had captured a
facial expression which rarely falls into its clutches. It was the expression
with which you begin life, not end it.” The biography’s closing lines call to
mind Woroszylski’s confession that the urge to write the life stemmed from
his need to decipher its enigmatic ending.32
But we need not leap ahead to the mid-sixties to find Woroszylski’s preoc-
cupation with Mayakovsky’s suicide and with death, beautiful or otherwise,
at work in his writing. Why We Live runs the title of Szymborska’s debut
volume: Woroszylski’s fi rst book might easily be called Why We Don’t Die.
It opens with a poem entitled “On the Reverse Side of Wincenty Pstrowski’s
Obituary” (“Na odwrocie nekrologu Wincentego Pstrowskiego”), which
commemorates the death and resurrection of postwar Poland’s most lauded
shock worker, a coal miner who exceeded his quota many times over before
his—apparently short-lived—death. “Can you wake a corpse? You can!”
the speaker exults. He proceeds to outline the means by which the dead
are resurrected in the newborn People’s Poland. Death itself, for starters, is
politically incorrect. She (the noun is feminine in Polish) is a “black marke-
teer, mired in the swamp,” but since all right-(or rather left-)minded Poles
have recognized “that there is no death,” “she flees through Dakota,”
a state presumably chosen so that Woroszylski could create his very Maya-
kovskian rhyme of “w błocie / na Dakocie” (“in the swamp / through
Dakota”) while signifying the prescribed larger ideological oppositions.
Moreover, he concludes,
All our miners resurrect
Pstrowski daily
with dynamite and pickaxes.
Pstrowski rolls along, rough, black, heavy—
on carts, freightcars, steamers.
And on Saturdays after work,

maidens, Silesian and otherwise, burst into song
about Pstrowski.
The volume concludes, moreover, with “Once More on Immortality,” which

ends with the following lines:
let’s put paid
to this immortality business
with the most immortal point of all
which is called
c o m m u n i s m . 33
Between these relentlessly optimistic bookends, we fi nd, though, not only

the predictable paeans to workers’ achievements—the poems Woroszylski
hopes will serve as “pocket Dneprostroys,” model factories in miniature,
for present and future Polish proletarians—and hymns to fallen comrades
both at home and abroad, whether in war-torn Spain, Soviet Russia, or the
American South. The theme of collective resurrection through labor gives
way to a different consideration of death elsewhere, though. I have already
mentioned Woroszylski’s “About Love—A Chaotic Tale.” It is preceded by
another poem with the conspicuously un-Soviet title of “An Intimate Let-
ter” (“List intymny”). Chaotic love and private correspondence—the titles
themselves suggest the suspiciously lyrical terrain that Woroszylski treads
here. The fi rst takes the form of a missive from the poet to a despairing com-
rade who apparently cannot reconcile himself with the shape his longed-for
revolution has taken. “It can be tough: your neck bent / by others’ business,
others’ battles. / It’s tough: to be grown over by a home, / a third skin, a
world of trivialities,” the speaker writes sympathetically, even as he coun-
sels his downcast colleague to “keep your eyes glued / to the pocket-sized
poster of your party membership card.” The “intimate letter” thus ends by
discouraging intimacy in favor of solidarity with the “imperishable” work-
ing class taken en masse.34
The next poem is less sympathetic as it recounts the cautionary “chaotic”
tale of a “certain student from Łódź / who committed suicide . . . / from love!”
In his “comic land of curtains and family portraits,” where “Papa trades
hard currency, while mama / puts up jam and gossips,” their “son, a student
. . . —threw himself out the window from love!” Love, suicide and “little
old daily life” (staren’kii, staren’kii bytik): this ill-fated triumvirate looks
strikingly familiar to any reader of Mayakovsky. “Love’s boat has smashed
up on daily life (byt),” the Soviet bard laments in the poem he incorporated
into his own final “intimate letter.” In an equally well-known earlier piece he
had fulminated against precisely such lyrical pseudo-disasters. “Why up the

number of suicides?” he chides Esenin in the poetic reprimand he wrote fol-
lowing the peasant-poet’s death. “You’d be better off increasing ink produc-
tion!” Woroszylski rebukes his dead student by way of an even better-known
literary self-immolation: “Of course, woman is fickle, hence young Werther’s
sorrows, / but if I met him, I’d say—So what’s your problem, / friend, there’s
no demand for Werthers nowadays!”35
The stricken Werther, a lovesick student, a despondent revolutionary
mired in the quotidian: it doesn’t take any great leap of imagination to see
Mayakovsky’s ghost lurking behind the poems’ various heroes and antihe-
roes. “About Love” is, among other things, a slap in Mayakovsky’s own
incurably Romantic face. Love takes a new and different shape in People’s
Poland, Woroszylski reminds us repeatedly. “Today / even on the newspa-
per’s third page / you can learn about great love,” he insists in “About Love”:
“So this party secretary in Opole, Comrade Mrochen, / don’t ask him about
love, take a good look at his labors, / and you’ll hew your own epic called ‘I
love.’” The sneer at Mayakovsky’s own “I Love” (“Liubliu”), a typically out-
sized lyric-cum-epic of 1922, is unmistakable. “An Intimate Letter” and “A
Chaotic Tale” form Woroszylski’s tacit rebuke to the unhappily bourgeois
lyric tendencies that his precursor was unwilling or unable to outgrow. 36
“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” Santayana famously
remarked. Those who revise the past are likewise destined to reenact it,
or so Woroszylski’s example suggests. His lightly concealed combat with
Mayakovsky marks not only an effort to outdo his overwhelming precursor
both ideologically and aesthetically. By tacitly challenging Mayakovsky’s
own versions of love and death, he apparently works to suppress equally
suspect tendencies in himself. “It’s always like that with me,” Woroszylski
confides en passant in “About Love”: “I start out lyrically, / Eyes beyond
compare, the sun, / Then I pick up speed and howl like a revolutionary agi-
tator.” His Mayakovskian bellowing is called upon time and again to stifle
his equally Mayakovskian passion for the retrograde poetic warblings that
lead to untimely lyric deaths.37
“He can’t stop living,” Woroszylski proclaims of a singleminded socialist
who falls in battle but lives on in grateful proletarian hearts in “Once More
on Immortality.” Mayakovsky’s posthumous resilience in postwar Poland
was apparently due less to stalwart revolutionary virtue than to the ongoing
confl ict between self, song, and (socialist) society that animates his life and
work. The poet himself may have died, inappropriately enough, at his own
hand, but the struggles that led to his premature end did not perish with
him. The fight for, with, and against Mayakovsky lives on, both within the
work of individual poets and in the programmatically collective communi-

ties they inhabit—or so Woroszylski’s own later life and work suggest. The
fate of another aggressively pro-Soviet artist, Woroszylski’s friend and com-
rade-in-arms Tadeusz Borowski (1922–51) demonstrates the persistence of
the “Mayakovsky problem” in postwar Poland. A precociously gifted poet,
Borowski received what Jan Kott calls a true twentieth-century “European
education.” His leftist parents were persecuted under Stalin in the thirties,
while he himself was active in the Polish underground resistance under Nazi
domination in World War II, and spent the last part of the war fi rst in
Auschwitz, and later in Dachau. His wartime experience not only produced
the thinly disguised autobiographical tales on life in Auschwitz that remain
his lasting contribution to modern European fiction. It also led him, like so
many other young Polish intellectuals, to embrace the communist ideology
that promised a glorious future to replace the corrupt bourgeois democratic
past whose failures, so the argument went, had led to the rise of the fascist
nations and a cataclysmic war. He joined the Party shortly after the war and
devoted his considerable talents to propagandizing for the new state.38
Like Woroszylski, Borowski was an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union’s
official bard. “The true writer of the working class is not Eulenspiegel [a
code name here for the poet Konstanty Gałczyński], but Mayakovsky,” he
announced in 1950, the same year that saw the appearance of Woroszylski’s
manifesto and short-lived movement. Borowski’s suicide a year later pro-
duced the same kind of shockwaves sent out by Mayakovsky’s death twenty-
one years earlier. Borowski himself spoke obsessively in his fi nal days of
the “Mayakovsky case,” Miłosz recalls, and his compatriots were quick to
perceive the parallel. “Borowski’s suicide,” Wat remarks, “was similar to
Mayakovsky’s. Borowski would come to see me when Stalinism was at its
height to talk about his own schizophrenia, his profound disenchantment,
his excessive zeal as a communist, his fanaticism as a means of destroying
himself.” His acute political disillusionment was compounded, moreover,
by the kind of disastrous love affair that Mayakovsky laments in his fi nal
lyric. The true revolutionary, Woroszylski writes in his poem “Nowotko”
(1952), “loves, suffers, and burns for a million.” Closer to home, though,
yet another gifted communist had just died for the same volatile, politically
incorrect mix of ideological and personal reasons that had prompted his
precursor’s suicide two decades earlier.39
Woroszylski’s paeans to various glorious deaths on officially approved bat-
tlefronts earned him a place of honor in a 1955 anthology of Socialist Realist
verse entitled The Poetry of People’s Poland (Poezja Polski Ludowej): “A
communist’s death / is never lonely. / I loved deeds and people, / the deeds and
people will remain, / . . . so it’s not hard to die.” But his poem on Borowski’s
death—“he could have lived on and on, / so why this funeral?”—was itself
buried without its telltale dedication in the middle of his collection Father-
land (Ojczyzna, 1953), where it is bracketed by the hymns to socialist col-
lectivism, entitled “We” and “About Us,” that open and close the volume.
“The planet shakes / from the march of our million feet,” Woroszylski exults:
“Daily labor knows each of us / like childhood friends.” In “After a friend’s
death,” though, he mourns the loss of his strategically unnamed companion,
which was, he observes, even crueler than the “deaths of childhood friends.”
The impulse behind that most lyrical of genres, the elegy, quietly undermines
his programmatically collective bombast. But the poem’s true subject was
disclosed only after communism’s fall, when it appeared, dedication intact,
as the opening lyric in Woroszylski’s From Travels, Sleep, and Dying: Poems
1951–1990 (1992).40
In the collection’s afterword, Woroszylski calls this poem the fi rst of his
early works to raise the questions that would preoccupy him in his mature
writing. He returned years later to Borowski’s troublesome suicide in his
novel Literature, published only in the émigré press.41 The urge to decipher
Mayakovsky’s equally baffling death marks the impulse behind his monu-
mental biography, as Woroszylski comments. Love, death, and the collective;
Romanticism, lyricism, and the Soviet State: why should these particular
combinations of conflicts and contradictions continue to absorb Woroszylski
long past his youthful infatuation with Marxist utopias in the making?
Let us return in this context to his description, in 1993, of the biogra-
phy’s beginnings. “I became fascinated,” Woroszylski recalls, by Mayak-
ovsky’s “enigmatic fate, marked for tragedy from the start up through its
fi nal, fatal end.” He tried, he continues, “to decipher it by compiling docu-
ments, inadvertent disclosures, and contradictory accounts in my book The
Life of Mayakovsky.” Both the impulse behind the book and the method
that informs it are revealing. The mature Woroszylski identifies Romanti-
cism as the heart of the ardently pro-Soviet “majakowszczyzna” that shaped
his early postwar years. But a deeply Romantic notion of the poet informs
his later, more skeptical work as well. “Now I understand that the primary
category of poetry is fate,” Woroszylski remarks in the preface to a volume
of selected poems that appeared in 1982, a year he spent interned in a gov-
ernment camp for dissidents after the imposition of martial law in Decem-
ber, 1981.42 It is the same notion that underlies the biography written some
fi fteen years earlier.
If Woroszylski’s goal is to trace Mayakovsky’s life through to its tragic,
preordained conclusion, why does he choose his unorthodox method of
compiling documents, disclosures, and contradictory accounts? Why does

he include not only the poet’s own writings and remarks, but the voices of
family members, friends, enemies, rivals, politicians, and journalists, among
others? Why does he not confi ne himself to Mayakovsky’s own eminently
Romantic view of his martyr’s path through the minefields of fi rst, imperial
Russia, and then the Soviet state? In his earlier life of the nineteenth-century
Russian novelist Saltykov-Shchedrin, Woroszylski “experiment[ed] with the
possibility of identifying completely with my hero and speaking in the fi rst
person ‘as Saltykov.’” This “nineteenth-century utopian who wanted to
change the world,” “an engaged writer whose maximalism lay at the heart
of both his personal suffering and his extraordinary opus,” clearly shares
common roots with the Mayakovsky who haunts Woroszylski’s imagination.
Why then does he decide to present Mayakovsky, as he writes, “from the
outside, avoiding all conjectures, hypotheses, and personal emotions”?43
The Woroszylski of the mid-sixties is not only a disillusioned Marxist.
He is also a Romantic who has learned to recognize and resist his own
revolutionary Romanticism, or so the evidence of the biography suggests.
“I contain multitudes,” Whitman boasts. “150,000, 000 speak with my
lips,” Mayakovsky insists. Mayakovsky’s disciple and translator Władysław
Broniewski later became the involuntary practitioner of yet another variety
of group authorship in a 1949 volume of Mayakovsky translations, when
his then-suspect name was replaced by the politically impeccable nom de
plume “collective translation.” Long past his early infatuation with Marxist
utopianism, Woroszylski shared his favorite’s yearning to fi nd a group, a
“we,” capable of accommodating or absorbing his complex poet’s “I.” This
endlessly thwarted quest for an adequate collective is a chief theme of the
biography. Likewise, throughout his turbulent life, with its difficult passage
from devout Marxist to staunch dissident, Woroszylski himself “thought
and spoke in the plural about ‘we,’” one friend recalls. But this “we”—in
its later stages, at any rate—was anything but simplistic. The word “our,”
Woroszylski himself remarked in the early eighties, “signifies different com-
munities, sometimes tiny, sometimes vast. At times, it may mean history as
such, with all its pathos and poverty.”44
His notion of history had changed since the early years when it meant
annihilation of a despised “world order” and all merely “ahistorical life” for
the sake of the “glorious march of history towards universal happiness” in
which he and his like-minded comrades would inevitably take the lead. “My
little histories descend from History,” Woroszylski observed in a late volume
tellingly entitled Histories (1987). Małgorzata Łukasiewicz comments that
the phrase encapsulates the “parabola of Wiktor’s adventures with history”:
“great, rapacious History . . . disintegrates into a multitude of small, indi-

vidual histories.” She contrasts these little histories with Woroszylski’s mon-
umental earlier biographies of Mayakovsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pushkin,
and Esenin.45
In fact, though, the Mayakovsky biography is evidence that Woroszylski’s
notions of history and self had already undergone a sea change since he fi rst
launched his “battle for Mayakovsky.” The book is proof positive that such
a battle can never be won. It tells an inconclusive tale pieced together from
a variety of stories, large and small, recounting the adventures of various
Mayakovskys drawn toward and dissenting from a diapason of “we’s.” For
the young Woroszylski, self was to be subsumed entirely in the grand for-
ward march of Marxist history, and he impatiently hammered his Mayak-
ovsky into the prescribed collective shape that Mayakovsky himself had been
unable to assume. By 1966, he had recognized that a single “I”—particu-
larly one as rich and troubled as Mayakovsky’s—comprises many selves and
many histories. The book is assembled chronologically from documents of
all kinds—memoirs, autobiographical writings, love letters, political invec-
tives, artistic polemics, poems, newspaper articles, state documents, and so
on—with a minimum of authorial commentary. Just as no one relationship,
no one kind of “we”—be it familial, ideological, emotional, literary, subver-
sive, or conformist—can exhaust the complexity of the self that forms and
is formed by others, so no one genre—lyric, epic, manifesto, letter, reminis-
cence, jeremiad, proclamation, denunciation, and so on—can exhaust the
personality that shapes and is shaped by the shifting histories that surround
it. I suspect that such notions, no less than the sometimes unofficial sources
Woroszylski turned to in retrieving his little histories, led to the book being
barred from Russia even after its successful publication in Poland.46
The biography itself may have been banned in Mayakovsky’s homeland.
But it was politically inexpedient to repress completely the works of the poet
who inspired it. “Paradoxically,” Andrei Sinyavsky recalls, “many Soviet
young people arrived at dissidence via Mayakovsky, via the revolution’s offi-
cially recognized poet”: “In the early sixties in Moscow, young people began
gathering by Mayakovsky’s statue to read poems and argue about every-
thing under the sun. For some, the statue on Mayakovsky Square became a
baptism of fi re, even the execution place of unofficial Russian poetry. Oth-
ers waited there for the plainclothes agents they knew were coming. Thus
Mayakovsky was transformed from standard bearer of the revolution and
the Soviet state into . . . a symbol of opposition.” His comment underscores,
yet again, Mayakovsky’s irresistible appeal to the rebellious young, even if
in this case they are rebelling against precisely the leftist ideology that led to
his enshrinement in the fi rst place, and that has traditionally formed part of
Mayakovsky’s appeal to generations of Western avant-garde admirers.47
Woroszylski’s case is more complex. In Chapter 2, I spoke of Mayak-
ovsky’s programmatic resistance to maturity, his refusal to step beyond the
limits set by avant-garde time frames demanding immediate, apocalyptic
transformation. Woroszylski’s half-century of reading Mayakovsky demon-
strates that Mayakovsky can, despite his own best efforts, be read maturely.
The very complexities and contradictions Mayakovsky struggled to erase
from his life and writing can be used, as Woroszylski proves, to develop a
vision of lyric, personality, and history that runs counter to the very credo
the Russian poet had embraced in his early attempt to escape from his many
Mayakovskys embroiled in their multiple, inconclusive histories.
Chapter Title: Bringing Up the Rear: The Histories of Wisława Szymborska

6
Bringing Up the Rear: The Histories

of Wisława Szymborska
The historian calmly leafs through Gilgamesh, that most ancient epic
of humankind, and immediately latches on to what he needs, i.e. “one
of the earliest testaments to the formation of the state leadership’s
social base.” The poet isn’t equipped to relish the epic for such rea-
sons. Gilgamesh might just as well not exist for him if it holds only
such information. But it does exist, because its titular hero mourns
the death of his friend. One single human being laments the woeful
fate of another single human being. For the poet this fact is of such
momentous weight that it can’t be overlooked in even the most suc-
cinct historical synthesis.
—Wisława Szymborska, from Nonrequired Reading (1996)
The reality of wool and that of the finished suit; that’s how one might
see the relationship of history as we know it in deeds, in action, in
textbooks, and history as unused potential. . . . We shouldn’t think
that things could never turn out otherwise in the history of politics,
art, music, literature. We must keep in mind the vast supplies of wool
from which our suits are made. Rough bales of that wool, secured
against time’s ravages, are packed in scrupulously guarded ware-
houses. My guess is that their stockrooms don’t just hold wool for
173
174 Bringing Up the Rear
coming centuries. They also store the unused wool of distant times,
the wool of events that never came to pass, nations that were never
realized, cities that remained unbuilt, the wool of people who were
never born, of those who died too soon, of those whose lives didn’t
turn out, the wool of unwritten epics and symphonies, of unpainted
pictures, of thoughts that never came to mind, the wool of a world in
which fate worked differently.
—Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty (1998)
Little history picks up where Great History leaves off.

—Tadeusz Nyczek, 22 × Szymborska (1997)
On a recent train trip from Krakow to Warsaw, I began chatting with

the other occupant of my compartment, a retired engineering professor
who collected stamps. He asked where I was from and how I happened
to know Polish. I told him I was a Slavist who’d been drawn to the lan-
guage by way of Poland’s great postwar poets, some of whom I happened
to translate. The usual response I get when Poles, be they cab drivers or
Ph.D.’s, fi nd out that I’m a non-Pole who’s learned Polish well enough to
translate their poetry is enthusiasm, to say the least: Poland’s a wonderful
place to be a translator with an obviously non-Slavic last name. But this
engineer’s response was telling in a different way. When I mentioned my
admiration for Szymborska, Miłosz, and Herbert, he said that of the three
he could only read Herbert, since only Herbert had never been affi liated
with the Communist Party.
Technically speaking, he was right—though his remark demands qualifi-
cation in ways I won’t attempt to address here. After the war, Miłosz served
in the Polish diplomatic corps for several years before seeking political asy-
lum in France in 1951; I’ll return to this episode in my fi nal chapter. And
Szymborska, like Woroszylski and so many other young artists, embraced
the party as what seemed to be the only possible salvation from a Europe
whose “bourgeois nationalism” had apparently been discredited not just by
the rise of fascism, but also by the failure of Western democracies to recog-
nize and combat its threat early on. For Poles particularly, the Western com-
mitment to liberty and justice had a suspiciously hollow ring. The Allies not
only failed to honor their pledges to protect Poland from foreign aggression
at the war’s outset. At Tehran and Yalta, they had, through Churchill and
Roosevelt, quietly signed away its future sovereignty as well.
Szymborska joined the Party at the age of nineteen in the early fi fties—at
the same time that the stubbornly unaffi liated Herbert was busy writing
Bringing Up the Rear 175
his unpublishable poems “for the desk drawer,” in the Polish phrase. She
returned her party card only in 1966, in a show of support for the philoso-
pher Leszek Kołakowski, who’d been expelled from the party earlier that
year. In an interview of 1991, Szymborska speaks of the unexpected benefits
she drew from her years as a true believer. “If it weren’t for the sadness, the
sense of guilt,” she comments, “I might not even regret the experience of
those years. Without it, I wouldn’t know what belief in the one true cause
really is. And how easy it is not to know what you don’t want to know.
And what mental gymnastics you’re capable of when you’re confronted with
other worldviews.” “Reality,” she remarks elsewhere,
sometimes seems so chaotic, so terrifyingly incomprehensible that you long

to uncover its permanent order, to distinguish once and for all between
what’s important and what’s trivial, what’s outdated and what’s new,
what’s useful and what’s obstructive. It’s a dangerous temptation, since so
often a theory, an ideology that promises to classify and explain everything
instead sets up a barrier between the world and [our notion of] progress.
My retired engineer was clearly far from Marxist. But his schematic take
on his poetic compatriots illustrates precisely the tendency to tidy up messy
realities, past and present, that Szymborska sees at work in her own early
embrace of Marxist doctrine. “Once a communist, always a communist”—
the life story is as unequivocal and clear-cut as the deceptively straightfor-
ward curriculum vitae she proposes in “Writing a Resumé”: “Memberships
in what but without why.”1
He is not alone in his reductive retrospection. In their sui generis biogra-
phy of the poet, Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęszna recall meeting Szym-
borska’s former high school teacher, one Sister Mianowska, who refused to
discuss “that lady who won the Nobel Prize.” She couldn’t forgive Szymbo-
rska’s early hymns to Lenin and socialism, or her elegy—“heartfelt,” Szym-
borska comments—on the death of Joseph Stalin. 2 Her Nobel Prize was not
received with universal jubilation. Several months after the award had been
announced, an irate hotel receptionist in Warsaw felt compelled to explain
to me how I’d been taken in. Szymborska had engineered the whole thing,
she insisted, from the early espousal of communism when that served her
purposes to the split with the Party that would guarantee her favor in the
West and eventually bring her to the attention of the Swedish Academy.
Szymborska apparently possessed Cassandra’s gift without its unhappy
consequences. She knew that decades of scraping by on piecemeal editorial
work were a safer bet than any lottery. They were bound to lead to Stock-
holm, wealth, and glory in the end.
It is just this kind of narrative that Szymborska comes to suspect in her

mature writing. Time and again she warns against both clear-cut histories
derived from hindsight and foregone futures constructed with the help of
one ideology or another. More than this: she mistrusts narrative as such,
the human proclivity, as she views it, for using more or less Procrustean
storylines to tidy a recalcitrant reality. This might seem initially to bring
her into line with what Frederic Jameson calls the postmodern “incredulity
toward metanarratives.” But Szymborska is an awkward postmodernist,
not least because of the genre she uses to undermine all manner of master
plots. The New Historicists share, of course, the postmodern suspicion of
the Western “grand narratives” that they seek to replace with less biased
accounts of history and culture. But they are no less suspicious towards the
notoriously “antinarrativistic” lyric that seeks an unwarranted exemption
from human making and being. I’ve dealt with these anti-lyric biases at
some length in my introduction. It may be worth mentioning, though, that
the very term “New Historicism” implicates its practitioners indirectly in
the kind of progress-based Western metanarrative they disclaim. The adjec-
tive that precedes this most recent brand of historicism cries out, after all,
for its inevitable Madison Avenue companion, “improved.”3
Such inadvertent investment in large-scale storytelling is part of the
human project as such, Szymborska’s poetry suggests. Indeed, Marxism’s
success in the American academy might be dictated partly by deep-seated
narratological needs, or so we might speculate on reading her work. She
herself steers clear of the kind of generalizations that I am guilty of here:
“I prefer myself liking people / to myself loving humanity,” she explains in
one typically self-effacing lyric (214). Still, the species as viewed through the
shifting lens of her poems seems driven by a persistent narrative impulse,
which operates on every level to which its senses, knowledge, and imagina-
tion have access. The post-Marxist Woroszylski dissents from the Great
History he had earlier embraced by creating in his poetry and prose an inter-
locking network of “little histories.” He shares his project with a range of
postwar Polish poets who might be called the “little historians” and whose
ranks would include Miłosz, Herbert, Różewicz, and Białoszewski, among
other luminaries. One could easily assemble an anthology of postwar Pol-
ish lyrics dedicated to recuperating alternate histories, vanquished histories,
and vanished histories of all sorts from these and other writers’ work. Cer-
tainly Poland’s experience of seeing its own history rewritten time and again
by one conquering nation or another has sensitized its writers to the ways
in which individuals and peoples alike may be revised or deleted entirely by
official chroniclers past and present.
But beleaguered nations also breed mythologies best embodied by long-

suffering or martyred bards, mythologies to which even the most skeptical
poets may succumb: “Perhaps I was born so that the ‘Eternal Slaves’ might
speak through my lips,” Miłosz muses in The Captive Mind. You would
search Szymborska’s mature writing in vain for a similar pronouncement.
The work of the poet is “hopelessly unphotogenic,” she explains in her
Nobel lecture (xiii). The poet’s life is equally unprepossessing as she pres-
ents it, or declines to present it, in the poems. She gives us no “Retribution,”
no Quartets, no Poema either with or without a hero. She makes no effort
to place an equals sign between her own life and that of her age or nation.
Szymborska is arguably the greatest of Poland’s “little historians” precisely
because of her immunity to barddom and the seductive counternarrative it
provides for poets raised in the traditions of unhappy, captive nations.
There are “poets with biographies” and “poets without biographies,”
Boris Tomashevsky notes. There are the poets, that is, whose works and
lives are inextricably entwined in their readers’, and their own, minds:
Byron, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Whitman, Rimbaud, Blok, Mayakovsky,
Akhmatova, Miłosz . . . the list could be continued indefi nitely. And then
there are the writers who strive to keep their private lives behind scrupu-
lously shut doors. The mature Szymborska is a poet without a biography
par excellence, largely due to her own resistance to clear-cut narratives both
in writing and in life. The younger poet, though, had her biography handed
to her ready-made: the Soviet-style Socialist Realism imported to postwar
Poland provided foolproof templates for citizens and states alike. In Social-
ist Realist writing, “individual human fates, like the fates of lyric ‘I’s,” Jacek
Łukasiewicz remarks, serve only “as models for problems set by the Party as
it directs both the nation’s industrialization and the development of socialist
consciousness among its inhabitants.” Szymborska’s early poetry is replete
with such exemplary “I’s.” “I want to die a communist,” one noble Soviet
soldier predictably proclaims in the title poem of her fi rst published volume,
Why We Live (1954). Another early poem fi nds ways to fi ll the interval
between birth and death with suitably communist content: “It’s not enough
that my heart’s on the left side. / I want to think, to act, to speak. . . . It’s
not enough to reject your class. It’s harder / to live usefully among the peo-
ple.” But even this is not enough, another lyric suggests: “Dying, I want to
befriend / a young communist medical student.”4
Life and death by the book: this is the formulaic existence that Szymbo-
rska dissects in a later poem on the hagiographic afterlives of heroes. “Yes.
she loved him very much. Yes, he was born that way. / Yes, she was standing
by the prison wall that morning. / Yes, she heard the shots” (“Pietà,” 88).
The poem was based, her biographers note, on Szymborska’s 1954 visit to
“the mother of Nikola Wapcorow, a Bulgarian poet and communist shot by
the Nazis in 1942.”5 Her pilgrimage thus coincided with the publication of
Why We Live; she clearly must have registered the limits of the formulas she
was helping to promulgate, to judge by the way she revises them a decade
later. Here what is unspoken speaks loudest. The mother’s rote answers
serve inversely to underscore the particulars of intimate experience con-
cealed behind the official party line.
Szymborska’s poem could easily be taken as political commentary, a cri-
tique of censorship perhaps, or of Socialist Realism’s attempt to eliminate
the line that divides public from private existence: “Marxism has liqui-
dated the contradiction between the private and social natures of human
beings,” one postwar critic exults.6 But such readings would be misleading.
“We are children of our age, / it’s a political age. / . . . all affairs—yours,
ours, theirs—are political affairs,” Szymborska writes in “Children of Our
Age,” from People on the Bridge (1986).7 “Apolitical poems are also politi-
cal,” the poem continues, in a line that sounds uncomfortably familiar to
any habitué of English departments today. And indeed, the poem’s pur-
ported master key for unlocking all the world’s messy mysteries—variants
of the adjective “political” (polityczny) appear twelve times in the space of
twenty-odd lines and conclude each of its fi rst six stanzas—stands revealed
as purely academic by the poem’s end. This politics consists exclusively of
the ritual repetition of its own name. It has no bearing on the larger real-
ity it purports to explain: “Meanwhile, people perished, / animals died, /
houses burned, / and the fields ran wild / just as in times immemorial / and
less political” (200–201).
After her early experience as a true believer, “Szymborska never again
drafted her poetry into any kind of battle,” Nyczek remarks. “After the
difficult crisis of the fi fties,” Szymborska herself explains, “I understood
that politics was not my element.” In Communist Poland, she saw her task
not as opposing the regime per se, but as “appealing to those cells in the
reader’s brain which hadn’t yet submitted to the invasion of the Polish
People’s Republic.” “Politics is a vampire that wants to suck all the juices
out of us,” she comments elsewhere. A prose piece from the early eight-
ies implicitly addresses her own leap from the political avant-garde to the
poetic rearguard. “The poet can’t keep up,” she laments, “he lags behind.
In his defense I can only say that someone’s got to straggle in the rear. If
only to pick up what’s been trampled and lost in the triumphal procession
of objective laws.” The poet abandons the advance guard of Great His-
tory’s triumphal progress, in other words, to take her place in its wake
where she tends to the world’s hidden histories; she becomes the poetic
patron saint of “lost and overlooked things,” the literary caretaker of a
cosmic lost-and-found.8
The implications are clear for Soviet Marxist historiography, with its
conveniently prefabricated master plots for individuals and nations alike.
And Socialist Realism followed suit: it “denigrated lyric poetry” in favor of
forms governed by a “storyline” (fabula). But Szymborska uses her poem to
poke holes in more than one kind of story. The mother’s ritualized retelling
of her noble child’s life and death in “Pietà” is familiar from countless vari-
ants in the nightly news and Sunday papers: its very title suggests a template
applied to suffering mothers and martyred sons throughout the ages. In
one talk, Szymborska recalls a fi lm in which Charlie Chaplin, unable to
close his overflowing suitcase, simply snips off all the bits and pieces that
don’t fit: “That’s how reality fares when we try to squeeze it into the suit-
case of ideology.” The ideologies she has in mind are not confi ned to East-
ern Europe’s recent totalitarian past. They are the inevitable explanatory
tales we construct in our ceaseless, doomed efforts to whittle our unwieldy
human experience down to more manageable proportions. Lyric poems thus
become crucial because of their antinarrativistic tendencies; they pick up the
bits that the storyline proper leaves out.9
If “Pietà” concerns, at least in part, the Soviet system and its formulas
for secularized sainthood, then another poem, written some two decades
later, provides an equally unsettling look at another kind of hagiography.
“In Broad Daylight” provides a young Polish poet-martyr, Krzysztof Kamil
Baczyński (1921–44), with the “ordinary” biography and mundane daily
existence denied him by his heroic early death from a German bullet:
Sometimes someone would

yell from the doorway: “Mr. Baczyński, phone call for you”—
and there’d be nothing strange about that
being him, about him standing up, straightening his sweater,
and slowly moving toward the door.
At this sight no one would

stop talking, no one would
freeze in mid-gesture, mid-breath
because this commonplace event would
be treated—such a pity—
as a commonplace event. (192–193)
“A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,” Walter Benjamin famously remarked,
“is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five”—or
at least so he “will appear to remembrance.” What chance does an extraor-

dinarily gifted young poet who dies in the Polish Home Army heroically
resisting his nation’s invaders have of being remembered as anything other
than an extraordinarily gifted young poet who dies in the Polish Home
Army heroically resisting his nation’s invaders? Baczyński’s fate looks dis-
comfitingly made to order for a national tradition that, in Julia Hartwig’s
words, gives up its best “for the dragon of force and violence to devour / The
young boys the beautiful girls / the best minds the most auspicious talents.”
But his fate was not foreordained, Szymborska reminds us: “About his ear,
just grazed by the bullet / when he ducked at the last minute, he would / say:
‘I was damned lucky.’” And it does not exhaust the human potential for
banality as well as greatness that a different outcome—“a jamb, a turn, a
quarter inch, an instant” (111)—might have unlocked.10
“In Broad Daylight” was published in Szymborska’s collection The Peo-
ple on the Bridge, which appeared in 1986, at the height of martial law. It
came out, that is to say, in a Poland besieged by its own rulers whose poetry,
“under the shock of December 1981 [when martial law was declared], had
wrapped itself in a pall, clutched the nation’s flag in one hand, a rock in the
other, and headed for the barricades.”11 The time was ripe for a corrective,
however gently applied, to the Polish cult of the poet-bard. The anecdotes
with which I began this chapter point to the high status of poetry in Polish
society even today: one would be hard-pressed to produce American engi-
neering professors or hotel clerks with strong opinions on Robert Pinsky or
Rita Dove either way. But they also point to the perilously close association
between poetry and politics in Polish society: woe to the poet who fails to
fulfi ll his or her obligations as the nation’s unofficial legislator in the face
of foreign oppression. In “In Broad Daylight,” Szymborska tacitly reminds
us that state ideologies are not the only form of tunnel vision to hamper
recognition of ordinary experience and particular, irrepeatable lives. The
oppositional ideologies cultivated to counter the state’s official story can be
just as ritualized and confi ning as the doctrines they were devised to resist.
Both heroic biographies, whether poet’s or communist’s, end necessarily in
martyrs’ deaths.
But what about the miracle of ordinariness? What about the resistance
hero who survives fascist and totalitarian terrors only to be faced with the
commonplace indignities of old age? Such are the unphotogenic trials that
an aging Baczyński would confront: “Goateed, balding, / gray-haired, in
glasses, / with coarsened, weary features, / with a wart on his cheek and
a furrowed forehead, / as if clay had covered up the angelic marble.” “The
price, after all, for not having died already / goes up not in leaps but step
by step,” she reminds us (192). Szymborska rejects the heroic biographies

proffered by victorious state and captive nation alike in favor of the miracles
of daily existence in which she “really see[s] nothing ordinary.”12 Or so the
story I’ve told thus far suggests.
Such oppositions are far too easy, though, as Szymborska’s tacit disman-
tling of competing Polish and Soviet martyrologies implies. If everyday exis-
tence is so ideally ideology-free, then how do we account for the unquenchable
thirst for master narratives that has apparently shaped human history from
its beginnings? This is the message suggested by another poem dating, like
“Pietà,” from the sixties. In “A Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish,” Szymborska
turns to a vanished matriarchal culture far removed from the “paternal state
socialism”13 of the postwar Polish People’s Republic. Yet the prehistoric fetish
to whom Szymborska gives voice in this lyric—in a characteristically vir-
tuosic act of poetic ventriloquism—speaks to the same drive for a stripped-
down, simplified version of human history that shapes more recent doctrines
and myths. Or rather, it embodies such drives in their purest form:
The Great Mother has no feet.

What would the Great Mother do with feet.
Where is she going to go.
Why would she go into the world’s details.
She has gone just as far as she wants
and keeps watch in the workshops under her taut skin . . .
From the Great Mother—messy reality held in check by the cult of unen-
cumbered fecundity—to the Great Father and Teacher, Joseph Stalin and
beyond: the human need for Great Histories survives the manifold forces
that topple these histories time and again. Rather than seeking to escape
from these master narratives into our private lives, then, we would be bet-
ter advised to track down their sources in the commonplace stories that we
tell ourselves and one another every day. This, at any rate, is one message
underlying a series of lyrics that deal not with heroes and martyrs, but with
the tales told by those who miraculously manage to escape the potential
calamities awaiting us at every turn—those lucky enough, in other words,
to lead an ordinary life.
“Anyone who has lived through wars and revolutions knows that in a
human anthill on fi re the number of extraordinary meetings, unbelievable
coincidences, multiplies tremendously in comparison with periods of peace
and everyday routine. One survives because one was five minutes late at a
given address where everybody got arrested, or because one did not catch a
train that was soon to be blown to pieces.” Miłosz’s comments on Doctor
Zhivago might almost serve as a prose gloss to Szymborska’s well-known

poem “Could Have.”
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the fi rst.

You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck—there was a forest.

You were in luck—there were no trees.
You were in luck—a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
a jamb, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant.
You were in luck—just then a straw went floating by.
As a result, because, although, despite.

What would have happened if a hand, a foot,
within an inch, a hairsbreadth from
an unfortunate coincidence.
So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave,

reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me. (111)
“Was that an accident, fate, or providence?” Miłosz asks.14 Szymborska’s

response is to rephrase the question. She gives not the story of a single survi-
vor, but a template for creating the narratives survivors use to explain their
apparently miraculous escapes—and recent American history lends grim
testimony to its accuracy. The artist Jenny Holzer chose to commemorate
September eleventh by projecting this poem, in English translation, onto a
Manhattan skyscraper and photographing it for the New Yorker magazine.
And indeed, anyone with friends or friends of friends living in New York
at the time heard shocked versions, in the fi rst phone calls, of Szymbor-
ska’s poem: the train was late, the car didn’t start, the meeting was post-
poned. “My apologies to chance for calling it necessity,” Szymborska writes
elsewhere (142). How do we weave the stories that create apparent necessity
out of terrifying chance (“you were in luck”)?
This is the question that lies behind “Could Have.” Szymborska shifts the
emphasis of the survivor’s tale from the syntagmatic to the paradigmatic, as
Roman Jakobson would say. She shifts attention from the “axis of combina-
tion” to the “axis of selection” by breaking down the syntagmatic elements
of the survivor’s tale, the sequence of events that leads by apparent necessity
to the miraculous reprieve.15 “I was in luck, it happened farther off, I was
saved because it was raining in the forest, if they’d been a quarter inch closer,
if I’d been an instant later, I would never have squeaked through”: such
would be one version of events pieced together from Szymborska’s poem.
It would be contradicted, though, by the other, equally plausible accounts
assembled from other options. “Earlier,” “later,” “nearer,” “farther off,”
“but not to you”—so runs a partial inventory of the possibilities presented
in the fi rst stanza alone. The ostensibly singular survival stories that fur-
nish this plethora of possibilities end paradoxically by affi rming a shared
need for a distinctive narrative structure to convert terrifying happenstance
into ineluctable fate. To put it more humanly—the poem creates commu-
nity from seeming isolation. Our lives may be different, but our stories are
fi nally the same: “Listen, / how your heart pounds inside me.”
I used the word “happenstance” a moment ago—and this is no accident.
This is the term that Stanisław Barańczak and I used to translate the Polish
“przypadek” that begins a later lyric, “Seance,” which opens as follows:
Happenstance reveals its tricks.
It produces, by sleight of hand, a glass of brandy
and sits Henry down beside it.
I enter the bistro and stop dead in my tracks.
Henry—he’s none other than
Agnes’s husband’s brother,
and Agnes is related
to Aunt Sophie’s brother-in-law.
It turns out
we’ve got the same great-grandfather. (242–243)
“It has to mean something,” the poem’s speaker insists—and it does. The
ways we weave the connective tissues that link our fates and keep our ordi-
nary lives from feeling random may be dubious: “We want to shout: / Small
world! / You could almost hug it! / And for a moment we are filled with joy, /
radiant and deceptive.” What we do share, though, are the strategies by
which we forge these illusory connections. As it turns out, we’ve got some-
thing in common after all.
We want neat beginnings and tidy endings with tightly plotted chapters
in between, Szymborska suggests as she works to unravel these carefully
patched-together life stories. It is no accident (once again) that the poem
I’ve just cited comes from a collection called The End and the Beginning
(1993). “Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, / and the book of events
/ is always open half through” (245): so reads the inconclusive conclusion
to “Love at First Sight,” which sympathetically dismantles the persistent
romantic fable of its title. The poem itself gently pries open the lovers’ air-
tight narrative to happenstance’s more uncertain charms:
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet

to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifl ing a laugh,
and then leaped aside. (244–245)
If and when the lovers’ tale reaches the desired denouement, it will only
be followed by yet another episode in the never-ending story, Szymborska
warns in “A Tale Begun”:
The world is never ready
for the birth of a child.
Our ships are not yet back from Winnland.

We still have to get over the S. Gothard pass.
We’ve got to outwit the watchmen on the desert of Thos,
fight our way through the sewers to Warsaw’s center,
gain access to King Harald the Butterpat,
and wait until the downfall of Minister Fouché.
Only in Acapulco can we begin anew. (210–211)
But we never do begin anew. Only “the detail / is unyielding,” Szymborska

insists elsewhere (87). Here, though, the details are endlessly mutable: “We
haven’t got the trucks, we haven’t got the Minghs’ support. . . . No news so
far about the Tartars’ captives.” What remains intact is the framework used
for a tale begun time and time again.
Our tales about beginnings meet their match in the conclusions we reach
about our endings, or so other lyrics suggest. In her exquisite “Elegiac Cal-
culation,” Szymborska questions the human need for closure of a different
kind, as she carefully dismantles the formulas and conventions we use to

ease ourselves by an impassable divide:
How many, after a shorter or longer life
(if they still see a difference),
good, because it’s beginning,
bad, because it’s over
(if they don’t prefer the reverse),
have found themselves on the far shore
(if they found themselves at all
and if another shore exists)— . . . (236)
Another poem suggests the larger implications of the tidied-up afterlives we

try to give the dead:
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,
but gods, nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow . . .
The dead sit before us comically, as if on buttered bread,
or frantically pursue the hats blown from their heads.
Their bad taste, Napoleon, steam, electricity,
their fatal remedies for curable diseases,
their foolish apocalypse according to St. John,
their counterfeit heaven on earth according to Jean-Jacques . . .
We watch the pawns on their chessboards in silence,
even though we see them three squares later.
Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different—which is to say, completely different . . . (118)
“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” the saying goes. But Szymborska does not

merely expose our tendency to treat past histories as a series of “foregone
conclusions,” in Michael André Bernstein’s phrase. Her concern is fi nally
with what Frank Kermode calls the “anthropomorphic paradigms of apoca-
lypse” we use “to give ourselves meaning.”16 She not only hints at the teleo-
logical impulses that have shaped Western history from its Judeo-Christian
origins—“the foolish apocalypse of St. John” is of course itself a teleologi-
cally minded rereading of the Hebrew Bible, the text that provided Western
culture with its most enduring paradigm of end-directed history—to more
modern incarnations, from Rousseau’s “counterfeit heaven on earth” to
Napoleon and the Romantic cult of the Great Man, to technology and the
worship of progress (“steam, electricity”).
We are of course the latter-day inheritors of all these variations on a teleo-
logical theme, the poem’s fi nal lines remind us: “The most fervent of them
[the dead] gaze confidingly into our eyes: / their calculations tell them that
they’ll fi nd perfection there” (118). “Our twentieth century was going to

improve on the others,” Szymborska comments ruefully in “The Century’s
Decline.” We were to be, in other words, the proof in the pudding, the
pièce de résistance of all our benighted precursors’ grand designs. Need-
less to say, we’ve let our ancestors down in a large way: “Too many things
have happened / that weren’t supposed to happen, / and what was supposed
to come about has not” (198–199). And if we have failed to redeem their
various myths of progress—“good and strong / are still two different men”
(198–199)—then whence do we derive the authority with which we, their
enlightened offspring, so blithely dismiss their misguided prophecies? Aren’t
we falling back on the same notions we mock?
In the late sixties or early seventies, when “The Letters of the Dead” was
likely written (it appeared in 1972 in the collection Should Have), one phrase
in particular must have resonated with Szymborska’s compatriots. Rousseau
was not the only great modern thinker whose prophesied “heaven on earth”
had proven false. The promised land of the Polish People’s Republic was also
a sham: the materialist kingdom of Marx, in its Soviet imperialist redac-
tion, had spectacularly failed to materialize on Polish soil or elsewhere. Even
erstwhile true believers had become diehard skeptics. In The Captive Mind,
Miłosz argues that Marxism’s enduring appeal lies largely in its capacity
to combine our most pervasive, propulsive teleological traditions into one
compelling, quasi-scientific master plot: the Enlightenment cult of progress
meets Romantic historiosophy by way of Isaiah. “He reads one after the
other / Isaiah and Das Kapital / then in the fervor of discussion / confuses
his quotations,” as Zbigniew Herbert writes of his alter ego in “Mr. Cogito
and a Poet of a Certain Age.”17
Szymborska suggests something similar as the arch-apocalyptist John
joins forces with the proto-Romantic Jean-Jacques and two key nineteenth-
century technological advances, steam and electricity. The young Szymbo-
rska had conflated such traditions unironically in an early hymn to Lenin:
“The grave in which this Adam / of a new human race lies / will be crowned
by flowers / from planets still unknown,” she exults. The history which
began with Adam will fi nd its culmination not in Christ or the Second Com-
ing, but in the interplanetary apotheosis of the Soviet state’s founding father.
Lenin himself was not immune to such interplanetary fantasies, as an inter-
view with H. G. Wells reveals. “If we succeed in making contact with other
planets,” he told the writer, “all our philosophical, social, and moral ideas
will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become
limitless.” All our theories will need to be adjusted upwards, in other words;
our notion of progress will be inflated to cosmic proportions.18
What does the mature Szymborska make of such quasi-scientific fictions?

Instead of extending Western teleological tendencies onwards and upwards
ad infi nitum, she turns them against the very notions of progress that under-
pin Soviet Marxism. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” became, in Soviet
hands, the justification for an inevitable class struggle with a preordained
outcome: only the proletarian righteous would survive, while lesser spe-
cies (aristocrats and, of course, the despised bourgeois) would be forced to
step aside or, ideally, vanish from the face of the earth completely, much
like their doomed analogues in the animal kingdom, the dinosaurs. In the
ungainly, but remarkably seductive amalgam that was Soviet communism,
the anthropocentricism in which the Judeo-Christian tradition is rooted—
“let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” (Genesis 1:26)—joins hands
with the Darwinian evolution and proletarian revolution that are catalyzed
in turn by the nineteenth century’s boundless faith in technology taken to
cosmic extremes.
In her early poetry, Szymborska subscribed wholeheartedly to this
vision: “Humans, earth’s inhabitants / are the highest form of matter,” she
announces in Why We Live.19 What if, the later poet asks, we deprive such
human-made teleologies of their anthropomorphic conclusions? What if
evolutionary changes and technological advances have not stopped with us
(and why should they)? We look down on the so-called lesser species with
whom we share the planet: “A dead beetle lies on the path through the
field. . . . The horror of this sight is moderate” (151). How might we look
in turn when “seen from above” (151)? One of the many “miniseries” that
run throughout Szymborska’s work concerns this question, as she hands
pride of place in the great chain of being to various hypothesized observers
from outer space. Human progress looks pitiful indeed when viewed from
this perspective:
He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand né fi n
a fl int, a rocket ship . . . (“No End of Fun,” 106)
Perhaps our grand historical schemes scarcely register on their intergalactic

monitors:
Maybe thus far we aren’t of much interest?
The control monitors aren’t usually plugged in?
Only for wars, preferably large ones,
for the odd ascent above our clump of Earth,
for major migrations from point A to B?

Or “maybe just the opposite”:
They’ve got a taste for trivia up there?
Look! on the big screen a little girl
is sewing a button on her sleeve.
The radar shrieks,
the staff comes at a run. (“Maybe All This,” 248–249)
“God is in the details,” it’s been said. Perhaps our extraterrestrial observ-
ers take delight in the tiny, human particulars that get overlooked in the
“triumphal procession” of the ideally teleological histories we construct
for ourselves time and again? Perhaps advancement doesn’t necessarily
mean endless expansion of the big picture? Perhaps progress doesn’t actu-
ally progress the way it should? Perhaps there’s something to be said for
fi ne-tuning?
If this is true, it may be time to review the way we imagine our collective
past as well, to see what’s been lost or abandoned en route to our predes-
tined future. “If I’m perceived as a person who lives by modest observations,
details, I won’t protest since that’s the way it is,” Szymborska has remarked.
The poet Julian Przyboś, she continues, “concluded [from my poems] that
I’m myopic. That is, I can only really see small things from close up. I don’t
see large panoramas so precisely.”20 Szymborska’s poetic myopia proves a
useful corrective to panoramic pasts as well as radiant futures. In “Census,”
she points to the inescapable sins of omission that plague even the great nar-
ratives on which the Western tradition is based:
On the hill where Troy once stood,
they’ve dug up seven cities.
Seven cities. Six too many
for a single epic.
What’s to be done with them? What?
Hexameters burst,
nonfictional bricks appear between the cracks,
ruined walls rise mutely as in silent fi lms . . .
“History rounds off skeletons to zero,” she notes elsewhere. “A thousand

and one is still only a thousand” (“Starvation Camp near Jaslo,” 42). In
“Census” she laments the unnamed masses who never make it close enough
to history’s pages even to be rounded off: “reckless squatters jostle for a
place in history / . . . Hector’s extras, no less brave than he, / thousands and
thousands of singular faces” (81–82).
“There are no empty spots . . . in the dense fabric of history,” Szymborska
writes in a prose piece on Montaigne. “Or rather, there are—there’s just no
way to prove their existence.” The poet, though, can make us aware that
each narrative we spin out of the past, however accurate, excludes by neces-
sity countless other plot lines, whether potential or actual, major or minor.
More importantly, as a disillusioned graduate of the Joseph Stalin school
of teleological progress, she can warn us to be on our guard against what
Bernstein calls “apocalyptic history” in his study of Foregone Conclusions.
His book deals specifically with the misrepresentations of the Holocaust
that results from transforming possible outcomes into inescapable endings:
“No one came to Frau Hitler in Braunau and said, ‘Unto you the Führer is
born.” 21 The comment might stand as an epigraph to one of Szymborska’s
best-known poems, “Hitler’s First Photograph”:
And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!
Will he grow up to be an L.L.D.?
Or a tenor in Vienna’s Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don’t know:
printer’s, doctor’s, merchant’s, priest’s?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies fi nally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Bürgermeister’s daughter? . . . (196–197)
It is a shockingly inappropriate opening for the twentieth century’s most

infamous biography: could Hitler have ever been an infant? By surround-
ing him, moreover, with the kitschy props and silly chatter that are the
standard accoutrements of every happy, well-fed baby—“A little pacifier,
diaper, rattle, bib, / our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is
well”—Szymborska pushes us towards the impossible. The name Adolph
Hitler becomes equivalent not to Satan or the Antichrist, but to the kid next
door, the neighbors’ noisy newborn who keeps you up at night.
Apocalyptic history lets us off the hook. The Antichrist’s brand of evil is
Evil with a capital E; it is qualitatively different from our own petty flaws
and peccadillos. Moreover, the future of the Antichrist is foreordained;
it can’t be contained by merely mortal efforts, and it has nothing to do
with our mundane daily routines. Szymborska’s poem suggests otherwise.
“Where will those tootsy-wootsies fi nally wander?” the speaker asks, and
the question would have been genuinely open back in 1889, unimaginable as
that is in hindsight: in Braunau, “a small, but worthy town . . . no one hears
howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.”22
Beware of the ways we tell tales, Szymborska warns. In “Census,” she
pulls threads from the epic tale that sets Western literature in motion. She
tackles an even more celebrated beginning in “Lot’s Wife,” written in the

mid-seventies. Her revisionary history turns back to the beginning to end
all beginnings, to Genesis and the roots of the Judeo-Christian teleological
tradition. It recalls the famous cautionary tale, elliptical in the extreme, that
describes the punishment of the righteous Lot’s unnamed wife, who violates
Jehovah’s prohibition while fleeing her sinful hometown of Sodom. “But his
wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis
19:26): this is the biblical account in its entirety. Szymborska turns from the
unremembered masses to a single unnamed victim whose fate has become
synonymous with the kind of “feminine” disobedience that prompted all
our earthly travails.
Lot’s Wife
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot’s neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn’t so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now—every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.

It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn’t breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It cannot be excluded that my eyes were open.
It’s possible I fell facing the city. (149–150)
Szymborska replaces the single sentence of Genesis with forty-four lines

containing no fewer than twenty-five possible explanations for the behavior
that the Bible describes so perfunctorily. The poem thus joins the company
of Szymborska’s many poem-lists in which a harried speaker struggles to
keep up with a reality that resists all efforts to contain it in lyric form. This
particular list, though, is even more unruly than usual. This is due not just
to the speaker’s own confusion—she herself doesn’t know precisely why she
did it—but to our confusion about the speaker. Who is turning back here?
The answer seems clear enough—Lot’s wife herself. And to what does she
return? The picture begins to blur the minute we ask the question. The poem
responds not to the biblical text itself, but to subsequent versions of events:
“They say (Podobno) I looked back out of curiosity” (my emphasis). This
wife responds not to Genesis itself but to later, apocryphal attempts to sup-
plement the official story by aligning it with Pandora’s box or Eve’s tempta-
tion. She looks back, in other words, neither to Sodom itself, nor to Genesis,
but to ways in which the biblical account has been amplified and distorted
over time. Szymborska’s speaker is what Dostoevsky would call a “fantastic”
narrator, whose ability to tell the story we are hearing is contradicted by the
very story he or she tells. (William Holden’s dead screenwriter in Sunset Bou-
levard is a prime example.) A pillar of salt has been posthumously endowed
not just with consciousness and speech, but with the awareness both of her
own history and of the subsequent histories of that history.
The least we might expect from such a long-sighted speaker would be an
effort to set the record straight. But the poem’s second line already warns us
not to anticipate precisely what the first line seems to promise: a direct eye-
witness account. The speaker doesn’t say she “had other reasons” (miałam
inne powody) for turning back apart from curiosity; she says she “could
have had other reasons” (mogłam mieć inne powody). The speaker herself,
in other words, isn’t quite sure why she did it. What follows is not so much
a defi nitive version as a catalogue of possibilities, a list of every reason that
might conceivably have led to her fatal faux pas. She gives us not history,
in other words, but hypotheses. Moreover, her various conjectures refuse to
hang together: they range from the sublime (“hoping God had changed his
mind”) to the ridiculous (“a hamster on its hind legs tottered on the edge”),
from petty spite (“to savor their terrible fate”) to pragmatic self-preservation
(“checking for pursuers”). They span the spectrum of human emotion and
encompass the range of life on earth, from insect to reptile to mammal
and even beyond, up to the God who may or may not be the cause of her
anguished fl ight.
The only possibility she omits is one that might form the basis of a single
coherent narrative: this string of speculations cannot be reassembled into a
satisfyingly straightforward chronicle of events. The implications of this are
manifold. In “May 16, 1973,” Szymborska reminds us how little we retain
of even what we might reasonably claim to know best, our own fi rst-hand
experience: “I was fi lled with feelings and sensations. / Now all that’s like
a line of dots in parentheses” (246–247). In “Lot’s Wife,” as elsewhere,
Szymborska suggests that human motivations are contradictory, confused,
and varied; that we ourselves never fully remember the whole story of our
lives (if indeed we know it to begin with); and that we give an unequivocal
account of our own histories only by reducing or even falsifying the per-
sonal past we purportedly represent.
Such confusion, moreover, is endemic to the kind of mass fl ight from
the shattered city that Lot’s wife recalls, as Szymborska knew all too well
from her experience in wartime Poland, and as newspapers and broadcasts
continue to remind us daily. “Some people flee some other people. / In some
country under a sun / and some clouds. / They abandon something close to
all they’ve got,” she writes in a lyric written some two decades after “Lot’s
Wife” (“Some People,” 262). The frantic fl ight of Szymborska’s speaker is
both irretrievably particular and all too common; neither the fi rst-person
singular, nor the third-person plural can do it justice. Her story, moreover,
cannot be safely confi ned to the past tense, exiled to the epic beginnings of a
tradition of which we are the improved, latter-day inheritors. Human pasts
are—so these poems suggest—both endlessly repetitive and irrecoverably
personal. As such, they defeat all efforts to provide them with a comfortably
fi xed and fi nal narrative form.
Throughout her writing, Szymborska resists the notion of “existential
historicism,” that is, a faith in our imaginative capacity to enter fully into
a distant mind formed by a vanished past:23 if we ourselves can’t be trusted

to provide a reliable record of our own histories, how on earth can we ade-
quately represent the lives of others? As she unpostmodernistically insists,
though, “reality demands” that we must try (232). She uses other viewpoints
time and again in her writing, be they those of tarsiers, terrorists, or extra-
terrestrials. But she employs them to expand the resources of what one of
her cosmic visitors calls human “speech’s personal best,” “the conditional”
(106): that is, our ability to say “what if,” to imagine, however imperfectly,
a world or worldview other than our own. The use of the fi rst-person in
“Lot’s Wife” is especially puzzling, though. The temporal perspective fits
the modern Polish poet far better than the hapless wife of ancient chroni-
cles. Indeed, the poem’s fi rst two lines read more smoothly when revised to
eliminate this discrepancy: “They say she looked back out of curiosity / But
she might have had other reasons.” The whole poem could easily be altered
to read as a series of speculations posed by a contemporary writer imagining
a past she cannot access, a past that may never have actually existed: “She
looked back mourning her silver bowl. / Carelessly, while tying her sandal
strap,” and so on.
Such revisions would help make sense of the oddly modern turns of
phrase that surface in the poem’s conclusion: “I looked back for all the rea-
sons given above”; “It cannot be excluded that my eyes were open”; “It’s
possible I fell facing the city.” “For all the reasons given above”: this is the
answer to a questionnaire or a multiple choice exam, not an explanation for
personal past behavior. Like the other phrases, it betrays the disconcertingly
double-voiced speaker’s roots in the modern age. The bureaucratic jargon
is a typically twentieth-century way of framing, distorting, or even eras-
ing individual biographies. This kind of language would be all too familiar
to unwilling adepts of “newspeak” (nowomowa), the “hermetic poetics”
of double- and triple-talk employed in the People’s Republic24 —though the
bureaucratese that Szymborska evokes here is also familiar to anyone versed
in any of the many non-Soviet dialects of red tape and paperwork spoken
today. By inserting these distinctively modern phrases into the monologue
of her ostensibly archaic speaker, Szymborska calls attention, in typically
oblique fashion, to the distinctively modern vantage point—both hers and
ours—from which we view this or any distant history.
She also calls to mind certain habits that have remained unchanged, so
she claims, from ancient times to our own. In a brief prose piece, Szymbo-
rska recalls the posthumous fate that befell the single woman ever to reign
in ancient Egypt: “Soon after Hatshepsut’s death . . . they energetically set
about erasing her name from the list of pharaohs. Every cartouche bearing
her name, every likeness of her as pharaoh, every written reference to her
was destroyed. We know this sort of thing very well from other sources.
Through large stretches of our twentieth century undesirable political per-
sonages were likewise forced to vanish from public memory from one day to
the next. Their names disappeared from newspapers and encyclopedias, and
palm trees suddenly sprouted over their pictures in group photographs.”
“Trimming history to fit present needs,” she concludes, “is an iron rule of all
satraps.” Szymborska knew such rescripted histories at fi rst hand. The very
subject of history, Sheila Fitzpatrick notes, was banned for a time from post-
revolutionary Soviet school curricula “on the grounds that it was irrelevant
to contemporary life.” The Soviet state had not managed to obliterate his-
tory completely in the name of the radiant future by the time “Lot’s Wife”
was written some fifty-odd years later. It had, however, perfected the art of
periodically airbrushing its own past, and those of its colonies, in pursuit of
its shifting interests. 25
History belongs to the victors: the phrase has a special resonance for
Poles, whose nation has been bisected, trisected, and even excised from the
map of Europe at various points over the last two centuries. Postwar Polish
writers have become specialists, as I’ve suggested, in “episodes inscribed on
the margins of Great History,”26 and Szymborska’s version of “Lot’s Wife”
clearly draws upon her experience of history used and abused by coloniz-
ing powers, totalitarian dictators, or some combination of the two. But this
does not exhaust its frame of reference. The problem is not simply that the
Lots of the world (and the wrathful deities who back them) are all too often
entrusted with the task of recording our past. Humans invariably revise
their own histories in the process of relating them, she suggests. And this
proclivity is writ large when states undertake the retelling of entire races
and nations both in life and on the page. This tendency is not confi ned to
the victors—though they generally have better luck in making their versions
stick. But victims, be they persons or nations, can likewise skew history to
their own purposes, and Szymborska is wary of contributing either to the
official version of events or to a counter-history designed to supplement or
subvert the official story.
“Who will mourn for this woman? / Is she not the least of losses? / My
heart alone will never forget / She who gave her life for a single glance.”
So ends Anna Akhmatova’s version of “Lot’s Wife” (1922–24), composed
in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s years of revolution and civil war.
“Time, forward!” was the fledgling state’s rallying cry—but Akhmatova
defiantly turns back to commemorate a long-vanished woman who likewise
refused to obey commands from on high as she, too, turned back to bear
witness to a perished past. She thus performs what Szymborska sees as a key
function of the lyric poet in an age of Great History: “One single human
being laments the woeful fate of another single human being.”27
Unlike Akhmatova, though, Szymborska does not seek to restore a for-
gotten past in her own “Lot’s Wife”: she calls attention to a missing his-
tory only to render it still more inconclusive. Early Soviet denunciations of
the lyric were echoed decades later by postwar Polish poets struggling to
renounce bourgeois “lyric lamentations,” “individualism” and “formalism”
in the name of a collective “poetry that would speak to the sensibilities of
workers and peasants, that would enter the hearts of the [nation’s] most pro-
gressive people.” Instead of taking her place in the state-orchestrated collec-
tive hymn to the coming future, Akhmatova uses the fi rst-person singular
voice of the lyric poet to commemorate a single vanished past: an isolated
heart recalls a solitary glance. 28
Szymborska is no less suspicious of Great Histories, and no less insistent
upon the need for lyric supplements to cast doubt upon canonical pasts and
foregone futures. But Akhmatova’s defiantly single-minded speaker knows
precisely what she’s retrieving and why. Szymborska is the child of a differ-
ent age; for the reformed True Believer, uncertainty itself becomes a virtue.
The lyric’s self-consciously inadequate witness provides the best defense
against would-be authoritative histories large and small. “Four billion peo-
ple on this earth, / but my imagination is still the same,” she laments in “A
Large Number.” “It’s still bad with large numbers”:
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,

but what I reject is more numerous,
denser, more demanding than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses . . . (145)
Each choice is a loss. Every history we choose to tell—whether plural or

singular, public or private, authorized or not—is told only at the cost of
countless other stories that might have been, that were but went unseen,
that were seen and then forgotten or erased. Both personal narratives and
grand master plots are rooted in a deeply human need to make consequence
of chaos.
I have used “we” repeatedly in this chapter, and in this I have followed
Szymborska’s lead. “We are,” “we read,” “we watch,” “we call,” “we still
don’t see,” “we just don’t know,” “we may well be”: her poetry is replete
with verbs in the fi rst person plural. But this is a plural with a difference, as
my last examples suggest. Szymborska rejects the staunch collective based on
Common Knowledge in favor of a more unstable community derived from
shared uncertainty. “We lived in the plural,” Adam Zagajewski laments in a

poem of the mid-eighties; he has in mind not just the enforced collectivity of
a sovietized society, but the oppositional collectives forged to combat their
state-imposed counterpart. He and his fellow poets of Poland’s “Generation
of ’68” would come to see the lyric’s task as defending an “I” endangered
by an ever-expanding variety of “large numbers,” including at times that of
their own dissident community. 29
The “large number versus the single being” is the great theme of Szym-
borska’s poetry, Zagajewski argues in his review of her collection A Large
Number (1976). Her writing demonstrates that “poetry must take its direc-
tion from particularity, specificity, individualism,” Stanisław Barańczak
insists in his own discussion of the volume. But the relationship between the
poet’s “I” and the large number is more fraught than these remarks suggest.
What does it mean to have an individual viewpoint? What does it mean to
be a single self? What is the “I,” lyric or otherwise? Szymborska’s speakers
range from tranquillizers to lemurs to Lot’s wife and beyond, as yet another
poet of ’68, Julian Kornhauser, notes. Even when she speaks as something
approximating herself, though, it is only to cast that self into doubt: “Why
after all this one and not the rest? / Why this specific self, not in a nest, but
a house? . . . Why on earth now . . . and why on earth?” (128).30 The lyric
viewpoint, in turn, becomes the basis of a new kind of collectivity. “We,”
such as we are, are brought together by our need for a shared story that
turns out differently, we insist, each time we tell it:
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
(“Nothing Twice,” 20)
Chapter Title: Counterrevolution in Poetic Language: Poland’s Generation of ’68

7
Counterrevolution in Poetic Language:

Poland’s Generation of ’68
It is possible to speak of revolutionary poetry or art, in the sense of

poetry or art which awakens emotions favorable to revolution, that
is, which contributes to the destruction of the existing institutions of
power. However, when leaders call for revolutionary poetry or art
they have nothing like that in mind; quite the opposite, they want
poetry and art which help to stabilize their domination.
—Leszek Kołakowski, “Revolution—
A Beautiful Sickness” (1979)
Streetfighting East and West

“The Generation of ’68”: the term will seem self-evident to any aging
baby boomer. The student rebellions of 1968 shook college campuses and
city streets, after all, from Berkeley to Berlin, from Paris to Prague and War-
saw. Only a few months and some eight hundred miles seem initially to sepa-
rate the upheavals that convulsed Warsaw in March 1968 from the student
strikes that shook Paris in May later the same year. Both rebellions were, as
Daniel Cohn-Bendit remarks, “anti-authoritarian revolts” par excellence. In
both capitals, students resisted a hated state and its tainted offshoots—the
academy, the courts, the press—by taking to the streets in unprecedented
197
198 Counterrevolution in Poetic Language
numbers, provoking the despised establishment to strike back with police

action and mass arrests. And in both cases this anti-authoritarianism took
a self-consciously linguistic turn: language itself became a key battlefield in
the struggle of generations. In Poland, students and writers alike sought to
subvert the pervasive “newspeak” (nowomowa) imposed by a regime that
demanded absolute control not just over the minds and bodies of its inhab-
itants, but over the very relationship between language and the reality it
ostensibly described. Polish students called for the linguistic recuperation of
the “unrepresented world,” the everyday reality erased or distorted beyond
recognition by the Polish dialect of a Sovietspeak that claimed monolithic,
monologic rights to both representation and reality as such.1
The French revolts likewise focused on a “guerilla war of speech acts” that
worked to disrupt the “verbal rituals” and “forms of linguistic exchange”
on which the status quo relied. May of 1968 “opened up a Pandora’s box
of language,” Yve-Alain Bois comments. We in the American academy still
live with this Parisian Pandora’s theoretical offspring today, as tenured pro-
fessors and anxious job-seekers alike embrace the esoteric vocabulary and
anti-authoritarian worldview of theorists whose visions were shaped in funda-
mental ways by the experience of May, 1968: Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, and others.2
These theorists have taught us, among other things, to “interrogate”—
with a vengeance—the seeming transparency of ordinary speech. The
phrase “Generation of ’68” is a case in point. Its seeming obviousness con-
ceals as much as it reveals—but Western commentators have turned a blind
eye to its richest contradictions. Dennis Hollier’s thumbnail description of
the student revolts provides a prime example of such blindness. “The years
1966–1970,” he observes, “witnessed the emergence of an international stu-
dent movement, whose chief centers were Berkeley, Berlin, Milan, Paris, and
Tokyo, and whose mobilizing theme was the Vietnam war.” His list of cities
in revolt stops short at the Berlin Wall, and his reluctance to venture past
Checkpoint Charlie is telling. “I supported the May 1968 movement,“ one
of Poland’s premier dissidents, Adam Michnik, comments in an interview
with Cohn-Bendit, himself a participant in the French revolts, some twenty
years after the fact. Such support was a one-way street. Paris’s protesters
were oblivious at best to the protests being held—and suppressed—just a
day’s train ride away to the east. And their intellectual inheritors have gener-
ally sustained this less than illustrious tradition. 3
The chief international event catalyzing the Warsaw revolts, Michnik com-
ments, was not Vietnam, but the “Prague Spring” of 1968 that blossomed
under the leadership of Alexander Dubček, who held out the possibility of
Counterrevolution in Poetic Language 199
a “socialism with a human face” not forged by fiat from afar, but gener-
ated by the more local desires of individual nations and their inhabitants.
“Polish students were chanting Dubček’s name in the streets of Warsaw,”
one historian notes. “We cried out, ‘Poland awaits her Dubček’!” Michnik
recalls. The subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, in which Pol-
ish troops took part, marked, he adds, “the worst [day] in my life.” For
Parisian students and intellectuals, though, the short-lived Prague Spring,
if acknowledged at all, met as often as not with “incomprehending, even
hostile reactions.” Its participants were, one leftist group charged, “willing
victims of petit-bourgeois ideologies (humanism, liberty, justice, progress,
secret universal suffrage).” Warsaw’s riots went unmentioned.4
Prague and Vietnam: the catalysts of the student uprisings East and West
point to a fundamental schism in the anti-authoritarian revolt that was,
Cohn-Bendit notes, “our generation’s common experience.” This rift fi nally
led Michnik to recognize the “profound difference” between himself and his
Western counterparts, for all their shared anti-authoritarian sympathies. In
the Eastern bloc, protests against American participation in Vietnam were
mandated from above: they meant supporting the establishment, not resist-
ing it. Members of a communist society were expected, even required, to
protest en masse the invasion of a fledgling people’s democracy by the forces
of bourgeois capitalist aggression. The Soviet bloc status quo came close,
in short, to the program espoused by the Parisian resistance, at least in this
regard—though the official newspapers attacked the Parisian protesters no
less viciously than their Polish counterparts, Michnik remembers. But Pol-
ish students could openly protest neither the invasion of Prague, nor their
own country’s—involuntary—participation in quelling the very dreams to
which they themselves aspired. 5
The People’s State’s crackdown against the March protests was swift and
effective: Michnik met the news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia while
awaiting trial for his participation in the ’68 protests. He subsequently
spent eighteen months in jail in what proved to be the fi rst of many impris-
onments for his dissident activities, and was thus unable to complete his
undergraduate degree.6 Like many of the Polish protesters, he had begun
his dissident career as a Marxist revisionist hoping to reshape the state
from within. The regime’s response to the Warsaw protests, combined with
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, helped to disabuse him and like-
minded thinkers of the notion that Eastern bloc communism might prove
amenable to such reforms.
Parisian students fighting for a utopian socialist future to replace a tar-
nished bourgeois present could hardly be expected to sympathize with their
contemporaries resisting the incursions of a leftist utopia in power. French

students and intellectuals may have rejected the Stalinism that precursors
like Jean-Paul Sartre had defended so stalwartly. They inherited, though,
his reluctance to criticize, or even recognize, the phenomenon of left-wing
oppression generally—a reluctance shared by their American intellectual
descendants. The Algerian war marked French intellectuals’ turn away,
Danielle Marx-Scouras remarks, “from Moscow to the Third World.”
They realized with a shock that Sartre’s generation had neglected French
complicity in Third World oppression even while espousing Marxist egali-
tarian ideals, that diehard leftists could, in other words, combine the theo-
retically uncombinable by “being simultaneously Stalinist and imperialist.”
The Soviet Union was thus “not necessarily at the vanguard of history.” By
“shifting from Russia to the Third World,” however, France’s “New Left”
could bolster “Marxism while condemning both Stalinism and colonial-
ism.” Stalinism and imperialism, Stalinism and colonialism: the terms are
used here as virtual antonyms. These intellectuals need only have turned to
their own divided continent, though, to fi nd the Soviet empire actively sus-
taining Stalin’s legacy by violently enforcing his imperial claims on unwill-
ing colonies closer to home.7
Revolutions and Poetic Language

If I had the time, I could show that Stalin was logocentrist.
—Jacques Derrida, Moscou aller-retour (2005)
There is, it seems, a hidden link between theories of literature as écri-

ture . . . and the growth of the totalitarian state.
—Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture (1980)
Prague, Michnik remarks, was only one formative experience for young
Polish dissidents in the spring of 1968. He cites a key local catalyst as well.
Polish students fi rst took to the streets, he recalls, when the government shut
down a production of the great Romantic Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefather’s
Eve for its anti-Russian sentiments. Both the production itself and its abrupt
conclusion marked, one student commented, “one of the culminating points
in the life of my generation.” Another student participant, the critic Tadeusz
Nyczek, comments that Mickiewicz “became the hero of the ‘March genera-
tion’; mass meetings were held around his statue in Warsaw and Cracow,
and his name became the slogan for freedom of the word.” One would,
I suspect, search in vain for a comparable phenomenon among the other
student insurrections of ’68. It points to the surprising—to Western eyes,

at any rate—centrality of Romantic poetry in Polish resistance movements,
and not among students alone. A striking worker would later pin lines from
Byron’s “Giaour” in Mickiewicz’s translation to a makeshift altar in the
Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, the birthplace of the Solidarity Movement in
1980; resisting dockers and miners circulated excerpts from Mickiewicz and
his fellow Romantic Juliusz Słowacki at meetings and demonstrations.8
I can’t speak to the place of Romantic poetry in the French student upris-
ings and workers’ strikes. I would guess, though, that Hugo’s impact on
revolutionary politics in recent French history was less noticeable than that
of Mickiewicz in Poland. Poetry played a key role just the same in the theo-
ries generated by the upheavals of 1968; Kristeva’s monumental Revolu-
tion in Poetic Language (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974) was not
an isolated event. “Mao Zedong is the only man in politics and the only
communist leader since Lenin to have frequently insisted on the necessity
of working upon language and writing in order to transform ideology,”
Kristeva insists in an essay on Barthes.9 The revolutionary leaders appar-
ently worked hand in glove, for theoretical purposes at least, with the great
modern innovators in poetic speech. Mao and Mallarmé, Lenin and Lau-
tréamont: such unexpected pairings are standard fare in the writings of
both Kristeva herself and her fellow participants in the avant-garde literary
group Tel Quel, whose affi liates included at various points Lacan, Barthes,
Foucault, Derrida, and other theoretical luminaries.
Epigraphs drawn from Mallarmé and Marx adorn Tel Quel’s collective
manifesto “Division of the Assembly.” The document attempts to trace the
aesthetic and political genealogy of the “cultural revolution” that emerged
in the wake of May, 1968: “To specify the historical dimension of what is
‘happening’ now, we have to go back beyond effects situated in the 1920s
and 1930s (Surrealism, Formalism, the development of structural linguis-
tics) in order to more correctly situate a more radical break at the end of
the last century (Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Marx, Freud).” “Ideas do not
exist separately from language,” Marx proclaims at the manifesto’s out-
set. He might well have been puzzled, though, by its subsequent summons
“to articulate a politics logically linked to a non-representational dynamic
of writing: that is: an analysis of the misunderstandings provoked by this
position; an explanation of their social and economic characteristics; a con-
struction of the relations of this writing to historical materialism and to
dialectical materialism” (italics in original). The guidelines for radical trans-
formation are even more impenetrable elsewhere. At one point Tel Quel
charges its revolutionary confreres with the incendiary task of “inscribing a
theoretical ‘jump’ in relation to which Derrida’s ‘Differance’ situates a posi-

tion of reorganization.”10
Tel Quel’s call to fuse revolutionary politics and avant-garde aesthetics
would be enough to send us back to the historical avant-garde even with-
out the manifesto’s parenthetical mentions of various precursor movements.
Tel Quel’s guiding spirit, Philippe Sollers, makes the point more cogently
elsewhere: “One cannot make an economic and social revolution without
making at the same time, and on a different level, a symbolic revolution.”
Similar notions inspired both French Surrealism and the Russian avant-
garde in its theoretical (Formalist) and poetic (Futurist) incarnations alike.
“History occurs the fi rst time as tragedy and the second time as farce,”
Marx famously remarks in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852). Tel Quel’s
members were determined not to repeat the mistakes of their Surrealist pre-
cursors, who had, Marcel Pleynet comments, begun as avowed revolution-
aries only to end as a bourgeois “salon phenomenon.” Tel Quel’s theorists
took their forerunners to task on several fronts, denouncing, among other
things, the “Trotskyist ‘deviation’” that had led the Surrealists to misunder-
stand both the true function of dialectical materialism and the proper “rela-
tions between intellectuals and the revolution.” The members of Tel Quel,
“monomaniacs of the idea of Revolution,” were forced to look elsewhere for
an ideal fusion of innovative linguistic theory, radical poetic practice, and
revolutionary politics.11
They found it, under Kristeva’s guidance, in the Russian revolution and its
immediate aftermath, a period in which, as they saw it, avant-garde aesthet-
ics and politics not merely coexisted, but collaborated in the creation of a
truly revolutionary state. In “The Ethics of Linguistics”(1974), Kristeva cel-
ebrates “the aesthetic and always political battles of Russian society on the
eve of the Revolution and during the fi rst years of victory,” as she laments
the advent of “Stalinism and fascism” that put an end to a febrile decade of
radical experimentation in art and life alike. By this point, Stalin was fair
game. Even Sartre had fi nally denounced his former allegiances by the early
sixties (although Nikita Khrushchev had beat him to the punch by several
years). Still the myth of a revolutionary Russia shaped in equal parts by
avant-garde artists and radical Marxists survived to inspire French theorists
of revolutions, poetic and otherwise, a half-century later.12
“Poetry is a bayonet thrust into the belly of its time. . . . Words take to the
streets, attack, practically force their way into houses.” The phrases, taken
from Krzysztof Karasek’s “Through the Firing Holes of Mouths” (1971)
would be at home in any Futurist or Surrealist manifesto. With one key
difference: the early twentieth-century avant-garde struggled to disrupt the
linguistic complacency of its favored enemy, the bourgeoisie, in hopes of

furthering the communist revolution that would, so it hoped, transform its
poetic practice into political reality. The “Generation of ’68,” on the other
hand, turned its verbal weapons against the very “Utopia in power” that
their avant-garde precursors and contemporaries had sought. The boundary
between art and life, between word and deed was no less permeable for the
Polish poets than it had been for previous avant-gardes: “reality emulates
the linguistic poetry / that pursues it,” Ryszard Krynicki claims in a poem
from the early seventies. The poets of “Generation of ’68”—or the Polish
“New Wave,” as the movement was also known—were “poets of contesta-
tion” who sought, no less than their Western counterparts, to operate “on
the borderlines between life and art.” But the nature of their political oppo-
nent and the peculiar status of the poet in Polish society led to new permuta-
tions on these quintessentially avant-garde preoccupations.13
“They aim water cannons / at our mouths, I’m becoming a Surrealist, / I’m
defenseless, I desire, / the whole thing is a lie.” These lines are taken from
Wit Jaworski’s “May 68 (Image)”: read in translation, both the poem’s title
and the lines themselves would seem to point to France, not Poland.14 Even
a cursory glance at the manifestoes and poems of Poland’s “Generation of
68” reveals touchstones shared by Tel Quel and their Polish contemporaries:
Surrealism, Formalism, structuralism, Marxist dialectics, Bakhtinian car-
nival. Both movements were preoccupied, moreover, with problems of lan-
guage and representation: linguistic poetry, in one variant or another, was
central to the enterprise of the Poles as well as the Parisians.
But the Polish “ground zero of literature” (Zagajewski) looked radically
different than the “writing ground zero” embraced in revolutionary Paris.
Czesław Miłosz refers indirectly to the rift that divides Western European
theory from Eastern European practice in his Nobel lecture of 1980; and his
remarks suggest key ways in which the Polish cultural terrain differed from
its Parisian counterpart in 1968. “There is, it seems, a hidden link between
theories of literature as écriture, of speech feeding on itself, and the growth
of the totalitarian state,” he claims. “In any case, there is no reason why the
state should not tolerate an activity that consists of creating ‘experimental’
poems and prose, if these are conceived as autonomous systems of reference,
enclosed within their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet con-
stantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search of reality is
he dangerous.” His remarks are nothing if not provocative. Contemporary
literary critics would no doubt be quick to dismiss his linkage of French
literary theory and totalitarian practice as mere reactionary rhetoric. And
Miłosz’s own experience had taught him many times over that totalitarian
regimes are not hospitable to experimental modes of artistic expression in a

world where art, like everything else, exists not for its own sake, but for the
good of the state. Still his apparent hyperboles were verified in important
ways by the experience, linguistic and otherwise, of Poland’s poetic “Gen-
eration of ’68.”15
More surprisingly, though, Miłosz fi nds unexpected support for his
yoking of écriture and totalitarian states among the writings of the Tel
Quelians themselves. I have mentioned their fondness for coupling revolu-
tionary leaders with esoteric poets in their texts. The pairing that begins
Jean-Joseph Goux’s “Marx and the Inscription of Labour” (1968) is par-
ticularly revealing. Goux begins with citations from Derrida’s De la gram-
matologie (1967) and Marx’s Das Kapital, and argues for Marx as a key
precursor to Derridean antimetaphysical linguistics: “Marx’s critical anal-
ysis, considered in its relation to writing, undermines the system of the
sign. It denounces not only the assured distinction between linguistic and
non-linguistic signs but above all the linguistic (and political) mystification
of signifier, signified and referent.” Marx and Derrida both do battle, that
is, with accepted bourgeois standards of referentiality, with the seemingly
transparent language whose function is not to reveal, but to obfuscate the
world’s hidden order in hopes of upholding the political and social status
quo. Their followers in Tel Quel continued this linguistic battle to the same
end. “Reality as such,” Danielle Marx-Scouras comments, “does not exist
for Tel Quel.” As Foucault remarks, “It is the world of words that creates
the world of things.”16
Certainly the leaders of the former Eastern bloc hoped that language
might, if not precisely create “the world of things,” then at least conceal the
sorry state in which Marx’s utopian dreams found themselves some hun-
dred years after the fi rst volume of Das Kapital made its debut. French
students and theorists discovered with a shock that the ostensible plural-
ism of French democratic society in fact masked hidden forces of power
and repression, that “a university examination and a police interrogation”
were akin in ways belied by the academy’s pretense of scholarly objectiv-
ity and neutrality.17 The students of Warsaw and Krakow had no illusions
about the relations between power and language, or about the source from
which the power controlling both their language and their reality emanated.
Their strikes were prompted, after all, by a Soviet-backed government shut-
ting down a Polish play for its anti-Russian sentiments. But the conclusions
they drew from their experience were radically different from those of their
Parisian contemporaries, to judge at least from the works of the poets who
served as their spokespersons.
The theorists of Tel Quel questioned the very notion of referentiality in

the wake of their discovery that words referred not to objects, but to com-
plex political and ideological systems that shifted meanings in ways that
had no bearing upon either some form of objective reality or the desires
and capacities of individuals struggling to articulate their personal experi-
ence. Language is always fi nally metaphorical, and writing, or écriture,
is ultimately self-referential, a series of texts engaging neither with the
world as such, nor with individual writers, but with other texts in an end-
less, intersubjective mise en abîme. The task of the Tel Quelian—who is
of course not a “writer” in sensu stricto—thus becomes to unmask this
hidden relationship of texts in hopes of liberating us from the illusion of
language as representation.
Poland’s poets of ’68 were all too familiar with the notion of an encom-
passing system of language that referred to no world beyond itself, and that
shifted its meanings not in response to some extralinguistic reality beyond its
borders, but in accordance with one tacit political agenda or another. “The
hermetic poetics of socrealism” is, after all, the logical extension of what Fran-
çois Furet calls the “compulsory and fictitious language” of the totalitarian
state, a language “insulated from reality and leading inexorably to unity.”18
For these poets—most notably, Ryszard Krynicki, Stanisław Barańczak, and
Adam Zagajewski—the rejection of representation that Tel Quel celebrates
in “Division of the Assembly” signified not avant-garde subversion, but the
linguistic status quo, the state monopoly on speech and print that they sought
to resist in their verse. The poets of ’68 had seen their forerunners seduced
by myths of avant-garde poetry and politics imported from the East in the
aftermath of World War II. They could not share, however, their Polish pre-
cursors’—or French contemporaries’—enthusiasm for the early years of the
Russian revolution. As true children of the Soviet system, the first generation
born and educated in the Polish People’s Republic, they were unwilling heirs
to what proved to be the revolution’s lasting linguistic legacy.
“We alone are the government of the Planet Earth,” the Futurists had
proclaimed in 1917. The Futurists’ “we” apparently included their political
as well as their artistic brethren; they generously planned to share world
dominion with their more practical-minded colleagues. But as Mayak-
ovsky’s later career demonstrates, the love affair between the political and
the poetic avant-garde in revolutionary Russia was one-sided from the start.
The fledgling Soviet state initially tolerated the Futurists and other would-be
poetic revolutionaries for lack of more trustworthy, and comprehensible,
alternatives. Lenin articulated the role he imagined for art in his future
regime early on, and it was anything but avant-garde. Art was to be “a cog
and a screw” in the “great Social-Democratic mechanism,” he announced in

“Party Organization and Party Literature” (1905): it would be not subver-
sive, but submissive, a tool in the hands of the socialist state. His prophecies
proved far more accurate than those of his Futurist contemporaries.19
The young state’s relationship to language was nothing if not utilitarian—
but it did not lack for imagination. The new leaders proved no less adept
than their avant-garde contemporaries at what the Futurists called “lan-
guage creation.” And the vast web of official abbreviations—NEP, VAPP,
RAPP, MAPP, Agitprop, Proletkult, Gosizdat—that was the state’s fi rst step
towards casting what Martin Malia calls its “logocratic spell” on the Soviet
masses answered the new government’s needs far more successfully than
any “transsensical” Futurist incantations. 20 One early coinage in particular
presaged the regime’s gift for inventing a self-contained code that served
chiefly to keep unsavory realities at arm’s length. In 1917, it christened the
fi rst incarnation of what would later become the KGB as the Cheka, short
for “Chrezvychainaia komissia,” or “Extraordinary Commission”: the
incarceration and execution of suspect individuals and groups lay among
the extraordinary functions concealed behind both its august title and cir-
cumspect acronym. Poland’s postwar rulers thus inherited a linguistic sys-
tem developed through decades of exhaustive experimentation conducted
under a wide range of historical and political circumstances. The poets of
’68 began to challenge the state-held monopoly on both language and repre-
sentation at a time when the regime could no longer hope to conceal the gap
between the reality of daily life in People’s Poland and the elaborate codes
devised to paper over discrepancies between the radiant socialist future and
a less than glorious quotidian.
The Re-represented World

Calling things by name is literature’s only chance. . . .
—Julian Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski,
The Unrepresented World (1974)
WRITING IN ITS PRODUCTIVE FUNCTION IS NOT REPRESENTATION .

—Tel Quel, “Division of the Assembly” (October, 1968)
If somebody claims to have created a “revolutionary chair,” one may

be sure that it is a chair on which it is impossible to sit.
—Leszek Kołakowski, “Revolution—
A Beautiful Sickness” (1979)
“The unrepresented world” (świat nie przedstawiony), “the unfal-

sified world” (niefalszowany świat), “the unduplicitous world” (świat nie
zakłamany): the similarities between the three phrases are obvious. All three
combine a conspicuously negated adjective with a single noun, “world.”
And all refer to the undoing of some form of obfuscation, linguistic or oth-
erwise, designed to distort or conceal this much-maligned world. But the
disparities in their sources are as telling as the similarities in their form and
sense. The fi rst two terms are rallying cries taken from the writings of key
figures who emerged on the literary scene in the late sixties, Julian Korn-
hauser, Zagajewski, and Barańczak. The last phrase derives, though, from a
recent history of the Polish People’s Republic co-authored by one of Poland’s
premier dissidents, Jacek Kuron.21 I have referred thus far to Poland’s mili-
tant students and its dissenting poets by the same name, “The Generation
of ’68.” This confluence is not simply a matter of convenience. Nor is it a
sop to the illusions of avant-garde poets who longed, like their European
precursors and contemporaries, to speak not for some like-minded coterie
or clique, but for a generation or a nation.
I have mentioned the role that Mickiewicz played in the uprisings of 1968.
He was not the only poet whose impact helped to shape subsequent events.
In an interview of 1993, Michnik speaks of the political and cultural “cli-
mate created by the poetry of Barańczak, Krynicki, and Zagajewski.” The
generation’s poets “worked out a new language for its conversation with
reality,” he remarks elsewhere: “We ceased to be slaves of others’ words.”
It is no accident that modern Poland’s most distinguished dissidents should
evoke their generation’s poets in describing the political changes that began
in 1968 and culminated over a decade later in the birth of the Solidarity
movement. “The organization of a democratic opposition, of an independent
[underground] press and publishing houses, and of free trade unions”: the
poets of ’68 fostered all three developments both by example and through
active participation.22
Poems by Barańczak, Krynicki, Zagajewski, and others circulated not
only among students and dissidents, but also among the disgruntled citi-
zens whose numbers were legion in a grotesquely inefficient state backed
by a long-hated neighbor. Why should this particular avant-garde have suc-
ceeded where so many others had failed? How did the Polish sixty-eighters
manage to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between poetry and
public, in a way that eluded Futurism, Surrealism, and the countless other
isms that proliferated in the fi rst part of the twentieth century? Certainly
the Polish tradition of unauthorized bards who speak to and for the nation
at large had primed both artists and audiences alike for just such writing.
And the poets of ’68 were acutely aware of the social burden laid upon
them by their Romantic precursors: “If you live in the world’s center,” Zaga-
jewski writes in an early poem, “you must account for everything / The liv-
ing and the dead are watching you.” The entire generation emerged “under
the sign of Romanticism,” Nyczek remarks. And the programmatic essays
of Barańczak, Kornhauser, and Zagajewski reveal a sustained effort both to
revise their Romantic legacy and to reclaim it from their immediate precur-
sors in Polish poetry. 23
But this heritage alone would not be enough to guarantee this particular
generation’s success: the modern Polish tradition has had its share of eso-
teric avant-gardes whose vast aspirations were in inverse proportion to their
contemporary popularity. We must look elsewhere for the causes of this
unexpected phenomenon; and the contrast between Poland’s sixty-eighters
and their Parisian counterparts in Tel Quel proves instructive here. Both
groups were, as I’ve noted, obsessed with questions of language—but they
turned their linguistic inquiries in very different directions. This is where
we begin to see the distinctiveness of Poland’s sixty-eighters not just on the
international scene, but among the historical avant-gardes whose heirs they
were no less than their Parisian contemporaries.
“Today’s authentic art goes hand in hand with revolutionary activity,”
André Breton had proclaimed. “Like the latter, it leads to the confusion and
destruction of capitalist society.” The early twentieth-century avant-garde
consecrated itself to what Maurice Nadeau calls “a totalitarian activity of
creation” designed to overthrow a world in thrall to the loathed middle class.
Everyday speech would be replaced by a subversive poetic dialect designed
to disrupt bourgeois reality, not reproduce it. In a manifesto of 1926, Bréton
celebrates “that enormous enterprise of re-creating the universe to which
Lautréamont and Lenin dedicated themselves entirely.” Only Lenin and his
successors on the political vanguard fi nally succeeded, though, in the avant-
garde task of reshaping, if not the universe, then at least a large chunk of
Europe and Asia. The avant-garde dream of re-creating the language that
articulated this brave new world thus fell to them, and not their poetic con-
freres. The Soviet language, Andrei Sinyavsky remarks, serves not “as a
means of communication among people,” but as “a system of incantations
supposed to remake the world,” or failing that, at least provide “a substitute
reality.” One would be hard pressed to fi nd a better thumbnail sketch of the
avant-garde poetic project generally. 24
The Polish poets were, like their avant-garde precursors and contempo-
raries, leftist in their sympathies, at least initially. Their opponents, how-
ever, were not the complacent bourgeois who had been the bane of vanguard
artists from Baudelaire to Mayakovsky, from Rimbaud to Aragon, Jasieński,

Wat, and beyond. The Soviet-backed state deprived Poland’s “Generation of
’68” of what would have been its traditional target, the middle class, and
its traditional medium, the experimental language that Kristeva celebrates
as “the very place where the social code is destroyed and renewed.” For a
poetic avant-garde, be it Futurist, Surrealist, or Tel Quelian, the enemy of
poetic language is everyday language, with its assumptions of transparency,
communicability, and ready exchange value, “like prices on merchandise,”
as Marx complained. The avant-garde poet insists upon an artistic code that
takes risks beyond the reach of mere mortal practitioners of daily speech. 25
Poland’s poets of ’68 approached things differently. The regime claimed to
speak in theory for the masses whose lives and voices they distorted beyond
recognition in practice. The very name of the Polish People’s Republic (Pol-
ska rzeczpospolita ludowa), betrayed the state’s stranglehold on its subjects’
language; the Polish people had little to do with the shape of their postwar
nation, which was not a republic by any stretch of the imagination. The
poets of ’68 accordingly set out not to disrupt the representative functions
of language, but to restore them. They strove to use this reclaimed speech to
represent precisely the quotidian experience—“conferences and children’s
camps,” “party meetings and soccer matches, the Race for Peace and politi-
cal jokes, hospitals and parade banners,” “Houses of Culture and brawls at
village weddings,” “libraries and beer halls”—disdained by the communist
state and avant-garde artists alike. In The Mistrustful and the Arrogant
(1971), Barańczak sets forth his generation’s poetic program by quoting
Wittgenstein—“the limits of my language are the limits of my world”—only
to dismiss him. “For the poet-‘linguists,’” he insists, “language is instead a
window on the world.” The reactionary position rejected by Paris becomes
the subversive stance of Poland’s poets in revolt. 26
What did this poetry look like in practice? To begin with, only one branch
of the “Generation of ’68” laid claim to the title “linguistic poetry” proper.
Language was the generation’s shared “field of operation”—but the two
chief groups disagreed on the strategies that would open windows onto an
unrepresented reality. The Krakow-based movement that christened itself,
with typically avant-garde braggadocio, NOW (TERAZ), endorsed what
they called “straight speaking” (mówienie wprost). If the state program-
matically refused to call things by their true names, then these poets—with
Julian Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski at their helm—would compensate
for its failures with a vengeance. But before discussing the “straight speak-
ers,” I want to turn to the “linguistic poets” proper, and to Ryszard Krynicki
and Stanisław Barańczak particularly. Krynicki and Barańczak were the
chief exponents of a Poznań-based linguistic poetics that worked to expose

the contradictions of a state language that claimed to speak for Polish real-
ity as such. Their task, as Barańczak saw it, was to unmask the “conflicts,
heterogeneity, and ambiguity lurking beneath a surface of harmony, accord,
and transparency.” As Krynicki put it, “unequivocality is fatal.”27
Barańczak speaks of an ongoing “duel with the newspaper” as the move-
ment’s modus operandi. A guerrilla war conducted not from building to
building or room to room, but from phrase to phrase and word to word
would be more like it. Krynicki’s early poetry combats the univocal speech
he fears by wreaking linguistic havoc with official formulas, or by register-
ing the ways in which reality itself rejects or revises such phrases. To fl ip
through the pages of Krynicki’s early work is to encounter a kind of Social-
ist Surrealism derived from the linguistic and existential phenomena pecu-
liar to life on what he calls the “Planet Fantasmagoria” of People’s Poland.
One brief early lyric begins with a typically untranslatable pun. “Act of
Birth” (akt urodzenia) takes its name from the bureaucratic term for “birth
certificate,” that is, the document registering one’s official right to exist. The
privilege of such existence is dubious, though, as the poem itself reveals:
Act of Birth
born in transport
I came upon the place of death
the cult of the individual unit

of measures
and weights
the military unit
progressive paralysis
paralyzing progress
each day I listen to

the latest news
I live
in the place of death
This act of birth unexpectedly delivers the poet into the place of death, or
at least a place of dead language, the reified officialese he modifies in order
to effect a true linguistic act of birth by the poem’s conclusion. The poem
may end in death; its fi nal phrase seems to compress an entire lifetime into a
premature obituary. But the poet himself is no longer governed by his birth-
place, as the poem’s fi nal, active verb suggests: “I live” (żyję). 28
“Act of Birth” begins, though, with ominously passive, impersonal

forms: “urodzonemu w transporcie, / przypadło mi miejsce śmierci,” liter-
ally, “the place of death befell / me, born in transport.” The expression “in
transport” (w transporcie) adds to the complications of an already trouble-
some delivery. With the outbreak of World War II, the phrase came to des-
ignate the mass deportations, either into Soviet exile or to Nazi or Stalinist
camps, that displaced Polish citizens in the millions from 1939 to 1946. It
speaks both to the poet’s own origins—Krynicki was born in 1943 in a
work camp in Austria, where his parents served as forced laborers under
Hitler—and to the fate of what he calls elsewhere his “portable nation”
(ruchomy kraj). 29 Like the poet, postwar Poland was itself born “in trans-
port,” as its boundaries were forcibly shifted some 150 miles westward in
accordance with Stalin’s demands at Tehran and Yalta, resulting in new
mass migrations of uprooted populations.
The poem’s second and third stanzas effect another form of linguis-
tic transformation. Nikita Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Sta-
lin’s “cult of personality” (kult jednostki in Polish) is converted fi rst into
weights and measures, and then into military jargon by way of yet another
untranslatable pun: the Polish “jednostka” can designate both a single
human being and a unit in various senses. Krynicki’s wordplay unpacks
the contradictions contained within Khrushchev’s famous phrase. The
fl aws of the Soviet state cannot be traced to the crimes of a single dicta-
tor, however monstrous. They lie in the reduction of the individual human
(“jednostka”) to a single, quantifi able unit in a quasi-objective system
(“jednostki / miar i wag”) imposed and sustained by one military unit or
another (“jednostki wojskowej”). Such procedures had been part of the
Marxist-Leninist project since its own bloody act of birth some fi fty years
earlier. They were alive and well in the People’s Poland that gave birth in
turn to Krynicki’s poem.
The poem’s fourth stanza begins with a fi xed phrase imported not from
politics, but pathology, “progressive paralysis” (paraliż postępowy). The
stanza’s two lines remind us, though, that “progress” and its various deriv-
atives were key terms in a Soviet Marxist lexicon that worked to evoke
through magical incantation the transformed reality it could not achieve
in practice. By shifting the regime’s beloved catchword into a different lin-
guistic context, Krynicki tacitly reveals the underlying reality that the state-
mandated talk of progress works to conceal. The relentless forward motion
that the state extols marks instead its ideological dead end. In another poem
of the period, reality itself, in the form of a failed neon light, pulls the plug
on the state’s ideologically charged forward motion by creating its own
untranslatable pun. The slogan “The press speeds progress” (“prasa toruje
postęp”) becomes “the press poisons progress” (“prasa t_ruje postęp”) by
way of an unlit letter “o”: “the press hastens progress” versus “the press
ha_te_s progress” might be one imperfect translatorly solution.30 The state’s
decline is induced, such puns suggest, by its refusal to confront the gap
between theory and practice, its efforts to paper over a troublesome reality
with self-perpetuating Soviet Marxist jargon. The state’s version of “prog-
ress” is in fact “paralyzing”; it produces not forward motion, but stasis, that
is, the place of death.
“There’s no news in the Truth and no truth in the News”: so runs the old
joke about the two chief Soviet Russian newspapers, Pravda (The Truth)
and Izvestiia (The News). Regardless of its ostensible content, the “latest
news”—the news the poet listens to as “Act of Birth” draws to its conclu-
sion—consists of endless updates on the unchanging state of affairs that
Krynicki describes in another early poem, “The World Still Exists”:
nothing changes
you wait each day for an apartment allocation
you wake up the world still exists
you get home from work the world still exists
you read in the paper
that the Chinese have discovered a bone
which may revolutionize science
and topple Darwin’s theory
you go to bed drift off
before hearing all the latest news
you sleep dream about nothing
you wake your bones won’t revolutionize science
you go to work along Red Army Street
the world still exists nothing’s changed
along the street’s left side
depending on which way you’re headed
along with the entire nation
along the leftist side
along the street’s ultraleftist side
along its levitating side
along its far left wing
you see a slogan the street’s highest goal is man
along the right etc. the slogan the street’s highest
you can’t make out what’s below
raindrops airplanes snowflakes fall below
nothing’s changed
cars slam the enigmatic letter
into the asphalt &

time flows in immobility like an electrical current
but your child coming home from preschool already knows

that the highest goal is
etc.
Hegelian bad infi nity meets Soviet Marxist progress in People’s Poland, as
daily life, with its numbing repetitions and endless deprivations, gives the lie
to the lofty rhetoric imposed on that reality from above: “the street’s highest
goal is man.” Under the new dispensation, the street—the symbolic locus
of subversive energies in political revolutions and modern poetry alike—has
been plastered over by progressive slogans and bombastic place names that
bear no relation to the ordinary life passing down its ideologically charged
sidewalks. “Minor league reality” (drugorzędna rzeczywistość) is the best
antidote to revolutionary bombast, though, in the program of the sixty-
eighters. The poet, himself a citizen of this cut-rate quotidian, may not be
able to change the world. But he can at least expose the grotesque gaps
between radical rhetoric and pedestrian daily practice by staging absurdist
linguistic collisions between the two as he trudges along the street’s “leftist
side, its ultraleftist side, its levitating side, its far left wing.”31
“You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands”:
Eliot’s lines, taken from his early “Preludes,” exemplify the tacit elitism
that marks the relationship of political and poetic avant-gardes alike to the
urban masses that are their ostensible subject. Like many of Krynicki’s early
lyrics, “The World Still Exists” gives us instead a vision of the street that
the ruling elite can hardly understand. The poem is scarcely a straightfor-
ward description of urban reality in the People’s Republic. Still its very title
must have read like a provocation or battle cry when it fi rst appeared in the
early seventies. The world still exists in spite of the regime’s best efforts to
transform it, or failing that, to conceal it behind a smokescreen of Marxist-
Leninist slogans the way that crumbling buildings were once covered in
outsized murals of Marx and Lenin. “Poetry has ceased to be incompre-
hensible,” Krynicki writes in an early version of the poem. Krynicki himself
is not an easy poet—far from it. The forms of difficulty he employs in his
early poetry, though, are designed not to defy language’s representational
capacities, but to expand them, to open up new possibilities for depicting a
spurned reality.32
His fellow Poznanian Stanisław Barańczak employs different tactics in
orchestrating his poetic skirmishes between the language of the state and
the speech of daily life. In The Mistrustful and the Arrogant, Barańczak
aligns Bakhtin’s “carnival” with the forces of oppositional poetry directed

against “whatever is stable, official, immobilized, reified.” In one of his
best-known lyrics, he uses recognizably Bakhtinian techniques to draw the
body into battle as he punctuates an official’s ideally self-referential speech
with a sound track of less dignified bodily functions:
A Delineated Era
We live in a delineated era (clearing throat) and thus
we must, isn’t it the truth, take this fully.
into account. We live in (pitcher
glugging) a delineated, isn’t it the truth,
era, an era of unending struggles on behalf, in
an era of increasing and intensifying and
so on (gulping water), isn’t it the truth. Confl icts.
We live in a delineated e (glass
clinking) ra and I’d like to underline this,
isn’t it true, that certain guidelines
will be outlined along these lines, sentences
will be lined out that don’t adequately line up, in addition
calculations out of line with, isn’t it the truth, will be realigned
(expectorating) of those who. Any questions? I don’t see any.
Since I don’t see them, I see that I’ll be called on to express,
expressing in conclusion the conviction that
we live in a delineated era, that’s the
truth, isn’t that the truth,
there is no other.
In “The World Still Exists,” Krynicki brings the street’s official redaction
into uncomfortable contact with the street as lived experience. In “A Delin-
eated Era,” Barańczak disrupts a spew of fluent bureaucratese by including
all the mundane acoustic accompaniments that we are meant to edit men-
tally from such pronouncements. In both cases, the official linguistic version
of events is undermined by the verbal representation of a reality best passed
over in discreet silence. 33
Barańczak’s speaker also provides a prime example of what we might call,
following Miłosz, “totalitarian écriture.” This speaker aims at absolute inclu-
siveness by way of a language so ideally self-generating and self-referential
that expressions and phrases can be relied upon to fi nish themselves with-
out undue exertions on his part: “an era of unending struggles on behalf,
in / an era of increasing and intensifying and / so on.” Indeed, there is no
real speaker, no particularized human subject, to speak of in “A Delineated
Era.” The pronouncement could be delivered by any of a multitude of adepts
grown fluent in the officially mandated dialect of statespeak, just as any

body placed at a podium might produce the poem’s disruptive soundtrack
of generic gulps and glugs. The poem’s self-propagating officialese proves
nonetheless to be as playful an etymologist as any Western practitioner of
écriture. Words take on a life of their own in the absence of an individualized
speaker, and one root in particular sends out various shoots and branches
as the poem progresses: “I’d like to underline this, / isn’t it true, that certain
guidelines / will be outlined along these lines, sentences / will be lined out
that don’t / adequately line up, in addition / calculations out of line with,
isn’t it true, will be realigned . . . of those who.” In Polish the key forms all
derive from a single root meaning “line,” kres; I’ve tried to approximate this
wordplay in my English version.
But are these phrases really entirely self-referential? A closer look reveals
what Seamus Heaney calls “the government of the tongue” at work between
the lines. The guidelines to be outlined along certain unspecified lines
apparently serve to guarantee that “sentences / will be lined out that don’t
adequately line up.” The poets of this generation were no strangers to the
censor’s operations. Much of their work was published either abroad or
underground; what did appear through official conduits seldom survived the
censor’s pen intact.34 Linguistic self-referentiality came at a cost in People’s
Poland. Language could not be left to its own devices. It had to be tended,
guarded, monitored, while suspicious words and phrases were taken into
custody or banished into linguistic oblivion.
More than this—the perpetrators of such gaffes and blunders were them-
selves in danger of being overruled, or so one strategic ellipsis suggests: “in
addition / calculations out of line with, isn’t it true, will be realigned . . . of
those who.” My English version cannot do justice to the artfully mangled
syntax of the Polish original. In either case, though, “of those, who” (tych,
którzy) is left dangling ominously at the phrase’s fractured end. “The game
of autonomous language itself came into being in precisely the place where
man had just disappeared,” Foucault claims.35 Barańczak’s little poem sug-
gests that this game plays out differently in totalitarian states. “Those who”
refuse to disappear of their own volition, “those who” tamper with the
game’s rules, may be forcibly removed from print and perhaps from other
places as well. The manner in which they will be stricken from the record is
left conspicuously unsaid.
Barańczak is as adroit as any deconstructionist in unpacking the para-
doxes concealed in apparently commonplace turns of speech. The speak-
er’s most conspicuous verbal tic contains exactly the kind of linguistic
self-contradiction that delighted Derrida. In the space of the poem’s twenty
lines, he repeats five times the untranslatable “nieprawda,” a seemingly empty

phrase, a placeholder much like “you know,” “isn’t it,” “you don’t say,” and
so on. The word, however, holds two totally incompatible meanings. It is
both declarative in a negative sense, meaning “untruth, lie, falsehood” (nie-
prawda), and interrogative in a positive sense, meaning “isn’t that so?” “isn’t
that the truth”? It means, in other words, both “isn’t it true?” and “it isn’t
true,” and Barańczak exploits the word’s double sense in the poem’s fi nal
lines, which I have given as follows: “that’s the / truth, isn’t that the truth, /
there is no other” (“taka / jest prawda, nieprawda, / i innej prawdy nie ma”).
The truth is whatever the state says it is, and in the absence of any metaphysi-
cal truth, of Prawda with a capital P, falsehood (nieprawda) will do as well
as anything else. Given the speaker’s impeccable credentials—he is, after all,
the mouthpiece of the state—the question is clearly rhetorical.
Barańczak takes on the ambiguities of daily speech in the People’s State
from a different angle in another lyric, “And Nobody Warned Me”:
And nobody warned me that liberty
might also lie in this: I’m
sitting in the station house with drafts of my own poems
hidden (how ingenious!) in my long johns,
while five detectives with higher educations
and even higher salaries waste time
analyzing trash they’ve taken from my pockets:
tram tickets, a dry cleaning receipt, a dirty
handkerchief and a baffl ing (I’ll die laughing) list:
celery carrots
can of peas
tom. paste
potatoes;
and nobody warned me that captivity

might also lie in this: I’m
sitting in the station house with drafts of my own poems
hidden (how grotesque!) in my long johns,
while five detectives with higher educations
and even lower foreheads have the right
to grope the entrails wrested from my life:
tram tickets, a dry cleaning receipt, a dirty
handkerchief and most of all that (I can’t bear it) list:
celery carrots
can of peas
tom. paste
potatoes;
and nobody warned me that my entire globe

lies in the gap that parts opposing poles
which can’t be kept apart. 36
The key to Barańczak’s lyric lies in two disparate interpretations of the

suspiciously innocuous detritus pulled from the hapless poet’s pockets after
he’s been hauled in for interrogation. The poem’s heart is not the interroga-
tion itself, nor is it the hidden poems. It is a tiny written document that is
neither political nor poetic, but personal and pragmatic: a shopping list,
handed to him by his wife perhaps as he headed out to work that morning.
“The personal is the political,” ran the slogan in the sixties—but the five
detectives with their higher educations need no training in reading politics
into the most unlikely places. Even the seemingly harmless confession that
William Carlos Williams tapes to his refrigerator in “This is Just to Say”—
I have eaten
the plums
that were in the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast . . .
—could easily be given a sinister spin by a suspicious state and its army of
well-trained subordinates, Barańczak’s poem suggests. 37
But the problem here is not how the state interprets the poet’s grocery list.
The poem’s chief ambiguities lie elsewhere. “Nobody warned me,” the poet
mourns in the lyric’s conclusion, “that my entire globe / lies in the gap that
parts opposing poles / which can’t be kept apart.” What are these opposing
poles that are both segregated and inseparable? The answer is not entirely
clear, but it surely involves the space between poetry and the state. The two
are apparently kept at a safe distance in the poem’s fi rst stanza by the poet’s
stratagem of concealing his lyrics in his long johns, while well-paid apparat-
chiks waste their time analyzing trash. The joke is on these functionaries—
“I’ll die laughing”—in the poem’s opening lines. This situation is reversed
in the poem’s second stanza. Or rather, the situation remains unchanged,
but the poet’s interpretation of this situation shifts diametrically. What had
been the emblems of freedom, ingenuity, and farce are transformed into
their opposites, captivity, grotesquery, and violation: “I can’t bear it.”
Why? Well, on a purely human level, the response seems natural enough;
the ingenuity it takes to fool the state comes at a price. The poems them-
selves may be safe, but the private life that gave them birth has been placed
on public display. This answer is only partial at best, though. I have said
that the little shopping list is not poetic—but that is not entirely true. It
may be composed in the pragmatic shorthand of daily life rather than the
abbreviated lines of free verse, but the shopping list not only looks like a
lyric in miniature. It is the lyric heart of Barańczak’s poem. In her memoirs
Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls hiding her husband’s manuscripts in pots and
pans, places where the secret police would never think to search. Pots, pans,
and poetry: the very incongruity of this recipe apparently served to keep the
state at bay. But is this mix really so inconsistent? “If only you knew what
sort of trash / Verse grows from, knowing no shame,” Akhmatova declares
in “I’ve got no use for odic hosts.”38 The detritus of daily life is precisely the
kind of mulch that poetry requires, Barańczak’s lines suggest.
One of Mandelstam’s late lyrics begins with a snippet of intimate dia-
logue seemingly taken straight from daily life: “No, not a migraine, but
hand me the menthol pencil.” Williams’s famous poem likewise grows from
the private communication between intimates on a conspicuously home-
spun subject. A recent poem by Zagajewski parenthetically exposes the lyric
genre concealed behind such seemingly banal documents and dialogues:
“Carrots, onions, celery, prunes, almonds, bread crumbs, caster-sugar, four
large / apples, green are best (your love letter).” One study of the “Genera-
tion of ’68” focuses on the cat-and-mouse “game with the censorship” that
informs its representatives’ writing. In “And nobody warned me,” the lyrics
concealed in the poet’s winter underwear are part of this game; the shop-
ping list is not. What has been violated is the poet’s right to a private life
beyond the long reach of the state. And the essence of this existence lies in
the scribbled fragment that embodies the lyric impulse in daily life. 39
For Harold Bloom, Mark Edmundson remarks, “one of the main reasons
poetry matters is that it teaches you how to talk to yourself.” Such inner
dialogues rank among the threats that the lyric poses in a totalitarian state.
Barańczak’s poem “Fill Out Legibly” suggests how Eastern Europe’s pur-
veyors of Orwellian newspeak might have read Dickinson’s “letter to the
World / That never wrote to Me.” “Does he write letters to himself? (yes,
no),” the unnamed framers of an ominous questionnaire demand—and it’s
all too clear what the correct response should be. “Poetry is not heard,
but overheard,” John Stuart Mill remarks in one well-known definition of
the lyric’s audience. Lyric eavesdropping takes on new meaning in cultures
where the walls have not just ears, but microphones: in “Moscow’s evil liv-
ing space” “the walls are damn thin,” Mandelstam complains, just in case
state-monitored poets should take a notion to deviate from their assigned
task of “teaching the hangmen to warble.” In the lyric, T. S. Eliot insists, the
poet speaks “to himself—or to nobody.” Just such soliloquies come under
scrutiny in Wisława Szymborska’s “Writing a Resumé”: “Write as if you’d
never talked to yourself / and always kept yourself at arm’s length,” the
solicitous speaker cautions.40
“And Nobody Warned Me” goes to the heart of a dilemma faced by
Barańczak‘s poetic generation. The poem itself was written in 1980, more
than a decade after that generation had fi rst emerged on the political and
poetic scene. It indicates how successfully that generation’s poetry had
engaged the attention of a state that routinely sought to confiscate it and
punish its distributors and creators. It also demonstrates, though, the dan-
gers of the game that consists of being a political poet, a bard who must both
speak for his oppressed nation and outwit the state that keeps his poems
from reaching the citizens whose concerns they are intended to address.
Such obligations may endanger the private impulse that lies at the heart of
lyric creation, and that is the poet’s best defense against the impredations
of a programmatically collective state. Poetry is best equipped to engage
in “permanent rebellion, criticism, demystification” precisely because of its
“individual point of view, its unrepeatable vision of the world,” Barańczak
insists in an early essay.41 Revolt, unmasking, demystification: all are catch-
words of avant-gardes past and present. But avant-garde art has histori-
cally been a collective phenomenon; it thrives on groups, factions, credos,
causes. Hence the abundance of isms—Futurism, Surrealism, dadaism,
simultaneism, expressionism, formism, imagism, vorticism, cubism, and so
on—that proliferate in histories of modern art, both in Poland and abroad.
How can the individual, irrepeatable viewpoint that Barańczak defends be
reconciled with this avant-garde predilection for plurals?
Only with great difficulty—or so the writings of his poetic contempo-
raries, the Krakow-based “straight speakers” Adam Zagajewski and Julian
Kornhauser, suggest. “I’d give a lot / for this poem to be a box / of matches,
an unshaded lamp / on the desktop, a dry-cleaner’s slip,” Kornhauser
insists. For the straight-shooting poets of “NOW,” the poem should be
as ordinary and “as necessary as bread and air,” Nyczek comments: the
illumination and purification it provides should be no more esoteric than
what is yielded by matchbooks, light bulbs, and dry-cleaners. Kornhauser
provides a less sanitized image elsewhere. In his programmatic “Poetry,”
the lyric becomes “that dirty hotel towel, / that passes from hand to hand
and always / smells like the same gray soap.” In “And nobody warned me,”
poetry consists of a little scrap of writing that is both banal and profoundly
personal. In Kornhauser’s “Poetry,” the scribblings on a white page become
instead the traces left by the countless anonymous hands among which the
poem cum hand towel circulates. Poetry’s public functions efface the very
notion of privacy. “I am others” (ja to inni), Kornhauser asserts elsewhere,
revising Rimbaud’s famous pronouncement in favor of a more program-
matically appropriate plural.42
Zagajewski and Kornhauser both claimed to speak not for themselves
alone, but for an entire generation. Zagajewski’s early poems frequently
operate “In the First Person Plural,” as the title of one early poem reads.
The titles of his fi rst two volumes likewise speak to his notion of a public
poetry that is, like Kornhauser’s hand towel, not for the squeamish. The first
was called Communiqué (Kommunikat, 1972), that is, as Webster’s has it,
“any communication or piece of information spoken, written or printed, as
an official utterance”; while the second was entitled Butcher Shops (Sklepy
mięsne, 1975). Its title poem runs as follows:
An African not a Black
one doesn’t hear these days about the Blacks
killed in coal mines
those are African workers with smashed
skulls asleep beneath a heap of brains
one doesn’t hear these days about the butcher
the former knight of blood
butcher shops are museums for a new squeamishness
bureaucrats not executioners
one doesn’t hear these days about the dogcatcher
whom children hate
In the twentieth century under the regimes of reason’s new rule
certain things no longer happen
blood on the streets on the hoods of cars
and on unhooded cars
a man white with terror
a European eye to eye with death
One doesn’t hear about death any more
deceased not dead
that is the proper word
I say it and suddenly perceive
that my mouth’s been packed with cardboard
of the kind once known as silence.43
Like the “linguistic poets,” Zagajewski seeks to teach his readers to read
“between the lines of newspapers and communiqués.”44 “Butcher Shops”
apparently emerged from just such an experiment in revisionary reading.
It is a response to some sanitized newspaper account of “African work-
ers” killed in a mining accident or perhaps murdered in a strike, and the
poet urges his own readers to retrieve both the victims’ racial identity (“one
doesn’t hear these days about the Blacks”) and brutal fate (“smashed skulls
asleep beneath a heap of brains”). This leads him to address other forms of
butchery that lie concealed beneath the modern age’s veils of euphemisms,
from the mundane squeamishness that keeps us from acknowledging the
consequences of our own carnivorous appetites (“one doesn’t hear these
days about the butcher”) up to the screen of strategically opaque official-
ese that permits “bureaucrats not executioners” to commit their large-scale
crimes with impunity.
The poem ends, though, not with language triumphantly restored, but
with language lost once more: “I say [‘deceased’] and suddenly perceive /
that my mouth’s been packed with cardboard / of the kind once known as
silence.” The speaker is denied even the dignity of lapsing into true silence.
His mouth is stuffed instead with an ersatz alternative; he is gagged by
his own euphemistic pseudo-speech. Why is this? The answer lies in the
paradoxical circumlocutions that the poet must employ to achieve his
approximation of straight talk in “Butcher Shops.” I have mentioned this
generation’s ongoing tug of war with the censor, and Zagajewski himself
comments in a recent interview that this game made fully realizing their
dream of plain speech impossible. “Each house conceals a second / hidden
house your every move / might be a different one everything you say / could
be said differently”: these lines from his early poem “New World” speak to
the difficulties of speaking straight in People’s Poland.45
Zagajewski and Kornhauser railed against the Aesopian language of their
precursors in The Unrepresented World. But poets’ theories often fail to
match their practice. “In one’s prose reflexions one may be legitimately
occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing of verse one can only deal
with actuality,” Eliot remarks. The actuality faced by Zagajewski and his
generation was one that made talking straight to a larger public possible,
paradoxically, only by means of carefully chosen circumlocutions. The col-
lection Butcher Shops, unlike its predecessor, passed through the censorship
unscathed, and one reason must certainly be the brand of Aesopian speech
Zagajewski himself employs in the title poem.46
The Unrepresented World called for the linguistic resurrection of the con-
crete realia that shaped daily life in the People’s Republic. “Butcher Shops,”
however, apparently confi nes itself to attacking the modern age generally
for its euphemistic refusal of reality: “In the twentieth century under the
regimes of reason’s new rule / certain things no longer happen,” the poet
charges. It’s hard to argue with this level of generality—the regimes and
their various raisons d’état remain strategically unnamed. Specific keywords
would have alerted savvy readers to a more local interpretation. The poem’s
black victims have been converted into “workers” (robotnicy), a transfor-
mation well suited to a regime whose ideology placed class above race, with
the working class taking pride of place in the Marxist caste structure. The
“bureaucrats” who have supplanted “executioners” evoke the elaborate gov-
ernment systems that facilitated mass murder in the Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany alike. And the phrase “the regimes of reason’s new rule” uses its
deceptive plural to mask what is surely a reference to the quasi-scientific
basis of Marxist-Leninist thought, which was intended to replace the false
theological underpinnings of earlier states.
But initiating readers into a new kind of reading between the lines was
hardly the dream of the Young Turks who had challenged precursors and
contemporaries alike in The Unrepresented World. Perhaps the gap between
intention and reality is precisely what dumbfounds the speaker in the poem’s
closing lines. More than this—for a poem that claims to “look truth in
the eye,” as the title of one of Barańczak’s poems runs, the actual text is
conspicuously short on particulars.47 The People’s Poland of the early sev-
enties—with its own typically understocked butcher shops, its own bureau-
crats and dog catchers—is nowhere to be seen.
The difficulties of articulating a particularized, personal reality in a
world that promotes generic vision and public being are precisely the point
in Zagajewski’s powerful early lyric “Philosophers” (1974):
Stop deceiving us philosophers
work is not a joy man is not the highest goal
work is deadly sweat Lord when I get home
I’d like to sleep but sleep’s just a driving belt
transporting me to the next day and the sun’s a fake
coin morning rips my eyelids sealed as before
birth my hands are two Gastarbeiter and even my tears
don’t belong to me they participate in public life
like speakers with chapped lips and a heart that’s
grown into the brain
Work is not a joy but incurable pain
like a disease of the open conscience like new housing projects
through which the citizen wind passes
in his high leather boots48
Zagajewski uses a single citizen’s voice to articulate an attack on the

unnamed, but readily guessable philosophers of work whose ideals are
contradicted by his daily being: “work is not a joy man is not the high-
est goal.” The slogans this speaker attacks run parallel, moreover, to the
mottoes mangled in Krynicki’s “The World Still Exists”—further proof, if

we needed it, as to the particular world, and worldview, mirrored in both
poems. And it contains precisely the kind of realia that “Butcher Shops”
lacks; one wonders what the censors were thinking when they let this lyric
slip through the cracks. The slogans, the Gastarbeiter, and especially the
“citizen” in the penultimate line root the speaker’s diction in a very specific
cultural climate. The “new housing projects” (osiedla) immediately sum-
mon up the vast cement blocks (bloki) scattered across the urban landscapes
of People’s Poland. And the “public life” that consists of an endless series
of “speakers with chapped lips” clearly derives from the “delineated era”
ventriloquized in Barańczak’s poem.
These particulars are used, paradoxically, to express the resistance of
the world they evoke to true individuation. French philosophers of the six-
ties embraced the “philosophical anti-humanism” of Marx that had, they
complained, too often been “contaminated” in practice by the residues of
a “bourgeois ideology” that persisted in addressing “problems of law and
the person,” in Althusser’s phrase. The task of the new French thinkers was,
as Jean-François Lyotard explained, to make “philosophy inhuman.” The
People’s Republic that emerges in Zagajewski’s lyric has beaten them to the
punch. The speaker defies the defi nitions of man thrust on him from above.
But a state built upon the glorification of labor has stripped him of the
capacity to identify a self that lies beyond its reach; and its public language
sabotages his efforts to articulate private experience.49
“Man is not the user of language,” Lyotard proclaims. 50 Certainly that
is true for Zagajewski’s tormented speaker, whose diction and imagery are
dictated by the very state he attempts to escape. His sleep cannot provide
dreams or even physical rest. It serves instead as an assembly line, a mecha-
nized conduit transporting him to his next day’s labors in the service of the
state: sleep is required for work, and work is in turn the foundation upon
which the state rests. The very hands that perform this labor are, more-
over, not his own; they are resident aliens, described by a term imported
from government economics, Gastarbeiter. The state’s appropriation of
private property extends even to his tears, which become a mere exten-
sion of official rhetoric: “they participate in public life / like speakers with
chapped lips.”
Even the ethical functions of the individual conscience have been invaded
by the state’s public space. The phrase “open conscience” (otwarte sumi-
enie) might initially seem of a piece with Polish expressions such as “pure”
or “peaceful conscience” (czyste, spokojne sumienie). This conscience
is an “illness,” though, and its openness is linked with the “new housing
projects,” vast and badly built, in which enforced collective existence takes
precedence over the seeming privacy afforded by four walls, a floor, and a
ceiling of your own. “If you must scream, then do it quietly (the walls have
ears),” Barańczak warns in one of his “housing” poems. In another he sar-
donically celebrates the joys of project life in multiplicate:
We each have our refuge in cement,
Plus the prescribed single balcony . . .
The clocks strike simultaneously

We fight and make up identically,
Our period of rest is, as they say, adequate;
At the gray hour we view from our window

the hundred-watt bulbs in the other windows . . . 51
A conscience, like a living space, should be private, opaque; the ease with
which the “citizen wind” penetrates the projects he patrols in “Philoso-
phers” is suspicious, to say the least. “The Soul selects her own Society— /
Then—shuts the Door”: easier said than done in such impersonal and per-
meable places.
Precisely the right to privacy is at stake in the most complex and engaging
poems of the “Generation of ’68.” Zagajewski’s “Philosophers,” Barańczak’s
“And nobody warned me,” Krynicki’s “Act of Birth”: all mark efforts to
reclaim through language the private self and space that are the traditional
domain of lyric poetry. The truly radical project of these poets is not finally
their collective, generational embrace of a programmatically public poetry
intended to challenge a programmatically collective state. It is the undercur-
rent of stubborn singularity that underlies many of their most important early
writings. “In forty years or so,” Barańczak concludes in “The Real Thing”:
when we’re all
dead,
it will turn out (to general surprise), that
this generation did not live
in a period of thriving diaries:
although our solitude en masse
would seemingly have spawned just such
phenomena, diaries
somehow went unborn, those secret
embryos conceived in a mind fertilized by reality
(or the reverse)
were stifled before birth, in the cramped
wombs of our collective flats. . . . 52
Zagajewski (to whom this poem is dedicated), Krynicki, and Barańczak

may initially have viewed their chief poetic task as giving public voice to
collective dissatisfactions. All three achieved this goal with striking suc-
cess—and at considerable personal risk. Finally, though, the most subver-
sive weapon each poet possessed was a distinctive lyrical gift that persisted
in its efforts to articulate private experience in a state recognizing only col-
lective existence.
Lyrical Resistance
[There is] a more real, literal, visible program in this literature. More
practical, more prosaic, but perhaps no less important than its great
heroic project. I have in mind the defense of individual words. Indi-
vidual phrases, formulations. All those petty, seemingly inessential
elements of which literature is made . . . Writers, defend those little
words. They are literature’s substance, its foundation, its wealth, its
liberty. Not every word can be replaced by another one.
—Tadeusz Nyczek, Speak but the Word (1985)
The adjective . . . is the indispensable guarantor of the individuality

of people and things.
—Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities (1991)
Perhaps Derrida was right: a faith in language’s capacity for represen-

tation does presuppose outmoded notions like the existence of truth, a belief
in some sort of fundamental human nature, and faith in an individual imag-
ination that may at moments access these transcendent values. The Marxist
thought that marked the death of metaphysics for the French poststructur-
alists inadvertently kept metaphysics alive among their Polish contempo-
raries: metaphysics marks their revolt against programmatic materialism.
Such might be the message one takes from the later careers of Zagajewski,
Krynicki, and Barańczak. The trajectories of these careers are strikingly
different in ways that I will not explore here. For all their biographical and
artistic differences, though, all three poets have devoted much of their more
recent writing to a quest for the transcendent sense that informs—so they
hope—our daily being. And this shared quest cannot simply be dismissed
as a rejection of the more radical poetic politics of their youth. “Metaphys-
ics, and mysticism in particular, were considered alien to the rationalism”
of this generation’s thought, Nyczek notes. But the “metaphysical relations
of the poet as an individual human being and the universe, the cosmos”
inform even their most apparently “diagnostic,” “documentary” early writ-

ing. “Mysticism for Beginners”—one might easily compile an anthology of
poems, early and late, by Barańczak, Krynicki, and Zagajewski under the
title of Zagajewski’s well-known poem.53
The poets of ’68 were as acutely aware of the socially constructed nature
of what we take for reality at a given time and place as any of their French
contemporaries. Just such an awareness had influenced their precursors, the
poets of earlier generations—Miłosz, Szymborska, Woroszylski, Borowski,
and others—whose wartime experiences led them to embrace, however
briefly, Marxist thought in its postwar Soviet variant. This awareness sur-
vived their disillusionment with Marxist ideology: “All concepts men live
by are a product of the historic formation in which men find themselves,”
Miłosz comments in The Captive Mind.54 The reality we perceive has been
created by the language through which we perceive it: this notion permeates
the poetry of the Polish sixty-eighters. But the conclusions they drew from
this concept were radically different from those that inform the writings of
their Parisian counterparts. “Reality Demands”: the title of Szymborska’s
poem might serve as a post factum summation of the generation’s program.
“Reality,” “objective truth,” “an unfalsified image of the world”: their mani-
festoes are peppered with such unpopular terms. They coexist, I should add,
with references to Gramsci, Wittgenstein, and Barthes: their vision of truth
and the language that strives for it was anything but naive. Poetry’s task, as
they saw it, was to wrench language away from its prescribed social func-
tions in hopes of revealing glimpses of a human reality that had survived the
various ideologies and social constructs designed to distort or disguise it.
“like everyone i’ve lost faith / in poetry / and prefer concrete facts / to their
mythologization,” Lothar Herbst confesses in “Transcription VIII” (1971).
His generation’s antilyrical tendencies were counterbalanced from the start,
though, by a sense that lyric singularity was their best defense against the
collective mythologies foisted on them by a hostile state. I’ve already quoted
Barańczak’s quintessentially avant-garde prescription for the poetry of his
generation: “Permanent rebellion, criticism, demystification.” He proceeds,
though, to ask an unsettling question: “Why poetry?” His answer seems
calculated to enrage the collectivist sensibilities of his avant-garde precur-
sors and contemporaries: “Because in the modern world it preserves an
individual viewpoint, a particular, irrepeatable perspective on the world.”
By virtue of its singular viewpoint, moreover, the lyric poem becomes the
unlikely guarantor of those bourgeois pipe dreams, individual human rights:
“By defending the right of the individual to freedom in every sphere of life,
it must also defend the right to independent judgment—a crucial right in
an era of dogmas imposed from above and universalized through the tuba
of mass transmission. Poetry is thus a natural counterweight to any dogma
accepted en masse—and the natural opponent of all that strives to become
an impersonal system and thus threatens individual freedom.” The book
from which these quotes are taken could not be published in Poland; it fi rst
appeared in the Paris-based publishing house “Kultura” in the late seventies.
Barańczak’s comments, though, would have been no more welcome in post-
’68 Paris than they were in People’s Poland. Among Parisian intellectuals,
what Engels called “the old metaphysical bric-à-brac” of humanist values
and personal rights had been thoroughly debunked by the poststructuralists
and their followers: “The humanism of the last three or four centuries is
secretly totalitarian,” one Foucauldian proclaims.55
Still for the Polish sixty-eighters, this variety of totalitarianism apparently
seemed preferable to the kind they had come to know at home. In a poem
of the mid-eighties, Barańczak celebrates, only half-ironically, his panoply
of distinctly unpoetic “petit-bourgeois virtues.” Zagajewski makes an even
more shameful confession in a lyric written a few years earlier:
Probably I am an ordinary middle-class

believer in individual rights, the word
“freedom” is simple to me, it doesn’t mean
the freedom of any class in particular.
Zagajewski’s poetic career makes especially clear the perils and paradoxes
inherent in the artistic programs of the sixty-eighters—how can the lyric
voice be harnessed to collective action?—as he explores the potentials of
this singular gift in the face of collective pressures from both state and, more
surprisingly, opposition alike.56
In “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Theodor Adorno argues for the lyric as
a socially critical genre because it insists on keeping its distance from its
dreary neighbors in reality. “Released from the heaviness of things,” the
lyric “should evoke images of a life free from the impositions of the every-
day world, of usefulness, of the dumb drive for self-preservation.” And it
effects its utopian “dream of a world in which things would be different”
by way of this divorce from dailiness. Adorno’s otherworldly lyric was
the sort of poetry against which Poland’s sixty-eighters had declared war.
Such abstract, impractical poetry was, however, eminently acceptable to a
regime determined to obliterate all traces of daily life from public language,
poetic and otherwise. For all their differences, the “straight speakers” and
the “poet-linguists” were dedicated to resurrecting the particulars of life as
lived in the People’s Republic through maximally specific language. And
poetry was ideal for such purposes due to what Barańczak calls its “pro-
pensity for particularity.”57 The search for a private self and speech shapes
the richest and most engaging of Barańczak’s, Krynicki’s, and Zagajewski’s
early poems. But how can this search coexist with the need to speak “in
the fi rst person plural”? Is one collective voice necessarily the best weapon
against another? Isn’t a system bent on the eradication of individual person-
ality and vision better combated by a voice that embodies those qualities
most in danger of liquidation? Doesn’t the accidental, personal voice of lyric
poetry acquire singular power under such circumstances?
These questions are present in the programs and poetry of both “linguists”
and “straight speakers” from the start. But it was Zagajewski who chose to
depart most radically from the collective obligations of both his generation’s
and his tradition’s poet-bards in the mid-eighties. Zagajewski has exchanged
his “collective subject” for a mere “lyric speaker,” his erstwhile comrade-in-
arms Julian Kornhauser charged in a review of Zagajewski’s controversial
third volume of essays, Solidarity, Solitude (Solidarność i samotność, 1986).
The collection was published in Paris in 1986, and followed in the wake of
two equally provocative volumes of poetry, Letter: Ode to Plurality (List:
Oda do wielości, 1983), and To Go to Lvov (Jechać do Lwowa, 1985). “I
have the urge to become a dissident from dissidents,” Zagajewski writes in
Solidarity, Solitude, as he declares his newfound allegiance to “unusual, sin-
gular, exceptional things, such as a giraffe’s neck.” Fighting words indeed,
especially when uttered at yet another time of national crisis, the period of
martial law declared after General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s brutal suppression
of the Solidarity movement at the end of 1981. Poland’s writers were being
called upon once more to take the people’s part against the state, and poetry
“headed for the barricades” yet again, as Nyczek comments.58
Zagajewski’s reputation for irresponsible lyricism—among some Polish
critics and readers at any rate—dates from this time. “Birds, trees, wind,”
Kornhauser laments in a review of To Go To Lvov, “now carry him beyond
space and time. . . . He has brought himself to a halt in order to forget about
confl icts.” Kornhauser misreads Zagajewski in ways I will not attempt to
address here. But he has also apparently forgotten key elements of their
own earlier manifesto. “The aesthetic value of an apt description becomes
in some imperceptible way an ethical value as well, “ Zagajewski insists in
The Unrepresented World: his remark is of a piece with the calls for specific-
ity and concreteness that punctuate the volume. Such particularity extends,
Zagajewski’s later work suggests, to the poet’s need to cultivate not just
solidarity, but solitude, his singular self and viewpoint—not least in hopes
of pointing others to their own irrepeatable individuality. 59
In one early lyric Zagajewski describes an encounter with a group of stu-

dents: “What should we do they asked me / nineteen of my lyric I’s”: the
poet gives no reply. A later poem from Letter: Ode to Plurality suggests that
the best response might be to rephrase the question entirely:
I lived in the plural, we lived
in the plural, among friends
strange to us and friendly enemies,
so rarely on my own, our own, so little
loneliness in such a lonely
land. Even poems said
we, we poems, we lines, we
metaphors, we points. The I
slept like a child beneath the cloth
of a distracted gaze
The task of the poet, Zagajewski’s later work suggests, is to keep this “I”
awake at any cost, both for his own sake and for the sake of society at large.
The “ordinary middle-class believer in individual rights” explains:
I remember
the blazing appeal of that fi re which parches
the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns
books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing
those songs and I know how great it is
to run with others; later, by myself,
with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard
the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming . . .
The crowd’s voice not only threatens to efface the individual identities of
those who comprise it. It runs the risk of becoming what it hates, the burner
of cities and books. And the poet who runs with the crowd, whose songs
help to set it aflame, is at least partly to blame. Engagement has its dangers,
Zagajewski reminds us.60
Thus far I have been speaking of lyric singularity in the context of pro-
grammatic collectivism and the collective opposition it provoked. Zagajews-
ki’s more recent poetry invites us to take such considerations much further,
though. I have in mind specifically the fate of his most famous lyric, which
appeared on the fi nal page of the fi rst New Yorker issue to be published
after September 11, 2001:
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.

The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music fl ared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.61
It is perhaps not so surprising that a Polish poem should have been cho-
sen to commemorate this national tragedy. A sense of overwhelming loss
and hard-earned wisdom made poems like Miłosz’s “Song on the End of
the World” or “Dedication,” Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,”
“Could Have,” or “Hatred,” or Herbert’s “Marcus Aurelius” compelling
choices for journalists, artists, educators, and individual readers looking
for ways to come to grips with the disaster. All three poets are masters at
converting the horrors of modern Polish history into meditations, at once
personal and universal, on the nature of our shared human experience.
Zagajewski’s poem seems at fi rst a misfit in this company. The lyric “I”
is virtually invisible in many of the poems I’ve just listed, and this is no
accident. “The true home of the Polish poet,” Miłosz insists, “is history,”
and he or she is thus preoccupied “less with the ego” than with history’s
dramas.62 But Zagajewski’s poem, though used to commemorate a histori-
cal cataclysm, might serve equally well as a textbook illustration of Eliot’s
and Mill’s famous dictums. We eavesdrop upon a poet urging himself to
create (“try to praise”) as he recalls lyric moments (“remember June’s long
days”) and awaits the muse’s return, the resurgence of “the gentle light that
strays and vanishes.” The New Yorker’s former poetry editor, Alice Quinn,
remarked that this poem, written long before the terrorist attacks in Man-
hattan and Washington, was pinned to bulletin boards and refrigerators
throughout New York in its aftermath. As its translator, I received emails
from across the country after it appeared. In the lyric, the poet speaks to
himself or to nobody, Eliot claims. How could Zagajewski, in speaking to
himself, end by speaking to so many? How could a seemingly private poem
possibly fulfi ll a public function?
“Try to praise the mutilated world,” the poet bids himself as the poem
begins; and forms of this exhortation recur four times in the space of the
poem’s twenty-one lines. This is the poet’s difficulty, then; he suffers not from
solipsistic self-absorption, but from a nagging need, an ethical compulsion
even, to praise a world that is, and has always been, defaced by history’s cru-
elties. Lyricism (praise) confronts history (the mutilated world); and its frag-
ile, qualified victory (the straying light’s evanescent return) is achieved only
through persistence, particularity (the gray feather), and a stubborn refusal
to let either lyricism or history vanish entirely from view. I have mentioned
the poem’s traditional lyric topoi. Indeed, taken in isolation, the poem’s June,
its wild strawberries and wine, its music, thrush, and fluttering curtains all
teeter on the brink of poetic cliché. But they are not isolated here. “Remem-
ber the moments when we were together / in a white room and the curtains
fluttered,” the poet writes. Even in his remembered moment of solitude with
a wife or lover, his windows are open to the winds of the world beyond. This
poet is, if anything, too aware of history’s nightmares, and he struggles to
keep the lyric self alive in the face of history’s inexorable opposition. The lyric
recollections with which he begins—“wild strawberries, drops of wine”—are
quickly overtaken by the nettles that in turn “methodically overgrow / the
abandoned homesteads of exiles.” Here as throughout Zagajewski’s writ-
ing, the natural world is steeped in human history, and though he makes no
explicit mention of it, this history is clearly informed by modern Polish expe-
rience. Human habitations—be they modest homesteads or stylish yachts—
are in constant danger, and the dangers they face come from other human
beings as well as nature. “You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, / you’ve
heard the executioners sing joyfully.” This world is difficult to praise.
But praise it he must, and so must we. Why? “History rounds off skeletons
to zero,” Szymborska comments in “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo.” “For
120 dead,” Zbigniew Herbert observes, “you search on a map in vain”:
they do not speak to the imagination

there are too many of them
the numeral zero at the end
changes them into an abstraction
Herbert’s lament was inspired by an experience we all know far too well;
it comes from a little poem called “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper.” We
live in an age of “large numbers,” as Szymborska writes elsewhere, and we

are bombarded by them daily. Their dehumanizing abstraction hit home in
the months following September 11.63 The number of victims reported in the
media may have dropped from five thousand or more down to somewhere
around three thousand as the data grew more precise, but the multiple
zeroes and the lives they erased seemed painfully inadequate, as the New
York Times recognized through the moving profiles of individual victims it
ran week after week in the wake of the disaster.
Zagajewski’s poem addresses history’s victims only obliquely, through its
refugees and abandoned homesteads. The poet struggles instead to keep the
lyric “I” awake in the face of history’s overwhelming depredations. But this
“I” is not confi ned to the poet alone, in spite of the poem’s seemingly self-
enclosed dialogue of self and soul. Neither is it the inflated “I” of the many
would-be poet-prophets and poet-Christs who have sought since Romanti-
cism to take upon themselves the torments of the world en masse. This poet
invites us instead to join in his struggle to face the world’s large-scale suf-
ferings and—more difficult still—to praise its ephemeral joys. The self that
writes exhorts the self that reads to stay awake, despite awareness almost
past bearing, and to sustain itself in its labors through the private store of
lyric recollections that each of us carries within. The poet’s indirect invi-
tation is the more persuasive since he himself recognizes the difficulty of
the task he undertakes: “Try to praise,” “you must praise,” “you should
praise,” he urges. This poet is no teacher from on high; he struggles, as we
do, to see both the scars and the beauties, and to keep the seeing self alive.
His urging is the more compelling precisely because it is not heard, but
overheard. We follow his example not because he demands it, but because
his own struggle so fully engages our sympathies. In spurring himself, and
us with him, to recollect and revive our own inner lives, he also reminds us
obliquely of the rich inner worlds that are lost each time the homesteads are
abandoned as the executioners sing. Each vanished self had his or her own
Junes and acorns, his or her own hidden wounds.
Lyric privacy is not a matter for poets alone. “Once one divides the world
into history and poetry, then one obliterates the difference between a his-
tory which favors man, which is habitable and human, and the kind which
produces concentration camps,” Zagajewski asserts in Two Cities.64 This
may seem initially like uncharacteristic poetic grandstanding on Zagajews-
ki’s part. What he seems to mean, though, is far closer to the sense that so
many readers apparently derived from “Try to Praise.” The lyric poet sum-
mons us to remain stubbornly singular ourselves, whatever the cost, and
thus to see all history, whether past or passing, as composed of similarly
irrepeatable beings, and not as mere data, the vast, unfathomable numbers
that obliterate, willy-nilly, all traces of the individual existences that serve
as their raw material. Lyric history, as Zagajewski envisions it, retains its
humanity through its specificity and thus remains habitable and human in
spite of the endless exiles and executioners.
This is why Zagajewski and his contemporaries fi nally part company so
completely with the “antihumanist” philosophy of their French contempo-
raries. Miłosz hints at a secret bond, as I’ve noted, between écriture—that
poststructuralist echo chamber of texts speaking to texts without human
intervention—and the totalitarian state. It would be silly to push his anal-
ogy too far—but it would be equally misguided to ignore it. Each phenome-
non is born of the fascination with grand theory that marks the century just
past. Each leads to the erasure of individual beings in theory alone, in the
fi rst case, and in practice—quite spectacularly—in the second. The French
poststructuralists proudly proclaimed the “death of the subject,” while their
Polish contemporaries were busily orchestrating its resurrection. In their
rebellion against a state based on grand theory, Zagajewski, Krynicki, and
Barańczak chose as their weapon an instrument dedicated, as they saw it, to
the preservation of the specific experience of human beings in the singular.
This, not their early collective manifestoes and battle cries, proved to be
their lasting legacy to postwar poetry, both in Poland and beyond.
Chapter Title: The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream: Czesław Miłosz and Anglo-
American Poetry

8
The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream:

Czesław Miłosz and Anglo-American Poetry
Archimedes thought he could move the world if he could

find the right place to position his lever. Billy Hunter
said Tarzan shook the world when he jumped down out of
a tree.
I sink my crowbar in a chink I know under the masonry

of state and statute, I swing on a creeper of secrets
into the Bastille.
My wronged people cheer from their cages. The guard-
dogs are unmuzzled, a soldier pivots a muzzle at
the butt of my ear, I am stood blindfolded with my hands
above my head until I seem to be swinging from a
strappado.
The commandant motions me to be seated.

“I am honoured to add a poet to our list.” He is
amused and genuine. “You’ll be safer here, anyhow.”
In the cell, I wedge myself with outstretched arms

in the corner and heave, I jump on the concrete fl ags to
test them. Were those your eyes just now at the hatch?
—Seamus Heaney, “The Unacknowledged
Legislator’s Dream” (1975)
234
The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream 235
The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream

In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot famously called April “the cruellest
month.” It has also been more recently christened—coincidentally, one
hopes—as American National Poetry Month. What does this mean in prac-
tice? Not much, I’m afraid. Editors push forward the publication dates of
whatever poetry volumes they happen to have on hand in hopes of a few
extra sales. Bookstores and libraries reserve a display case for Billy Collins,
Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, or Maya Angelou. And one or two prominent
poets make appearances on Public Broadcasting or National Public Radio
to try and explain what they do and why it matters before returning to their
usual spot offstage.
In one well-known poem, Yeats gently mocks his own standing as a
national icon, a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” standing awkwardly
on display “among school children.”1 Few anglophone poets in modern
times have been privileged to share in his public embarrassment: Eliot cer-
tainly, Frost, perhaps Carl Sandburg, and more recently Seamus Heaney,
whose translation of Beowulf became an unexpected bestseller a few years
back. If poets writing in English rarely fi nd readers outside the ranks of
critics, professors, and fellow poets, what can the occasional foreigner who
stumbles onto the scene possibly expect, burdened as he or she is with an
impenetrable accent and unpronounceable last name? One recent American
poet laureate, Joseph Brodsky, did his best to convince American readers to
pick up at least their own classic authors from time to time. Emily Dickin-
son alongside the Gideon Bible in every Holiday Inn, Walt Whitman next to
People magazine at the grocery checkout stand—so ran a few of his modest
proposals. Brodsky himself enjoyed great esteem among American intellec-
tuals and writers, but his impact was by and large restricted to their ranks—
and even here his influence rarely extended, I suspect, to the actual practice
of American poets writing today. In any case, his poetry never reached the
larger public he craved.
“If you have not read the Slavic poets, / so much the better,” Czesław
Miłosz wrote over forty years ago in his poem “To Robinson Jeffers” (1963).
He could not have begun a poem that way today—and for this he was him-
self largely to blame. For many years now, American poets and critics have
been reading Miłosz, along with his compatriots (many of whom they fi rst
encountered in the anthology of postwar Polish poetry he edited in the
mid-sixties), with an intensity and attentiveness seldom accorded to a living
poet whose words reach them only in translation. Miłosz’s impact reaches
far beyond American poetry—English-speaking poets from various parts
of the globe have acknowledged their debt to Miłosz and his fellow Poles
236 The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream
in recent decades. For the purposes of this chapter, though, I’ll be looking
most closely at his influence on American writing, with a few incursions
into English and Irish terrain. Robert Pinsky, Edward Hirsch, Rosanna
Warren, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Mary Karr, Carolyn Forché, Yusef
Komunyakaa, Mark Strand, W. S. Merwin—so might run a partial, pre-
liminary list of contemporary American poets who’ve felt the impact of
Miłosz and his compatriots over the last few decades. And this is not to
mention the other recent Nobel laureates, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott,
and Brodsky himself, who’ve testified, in both prose and verse, to what
Heaney calls the “altogether thrilling” experience of encountering Miłosz
and other Polish poets in translation. Brodsky even learned Polish in order
to read what he called “the most extraordinary poetry” of the twentieth
century in the original. 2
But Miłosz’s impact extends beyond literary circles. If you had been brows-
ing through the Chicago Tribune book review on October 5, 2003, you
might have noticed a photograph of Miłosz at the top of page 3, just above
the English version of a poem written some sixty years ago in Nazi-occupied
Warsaw. Miłosz’s “Song on the End of the World” was the third in a series
of poems chosen annually by the Great Books Foundation and printed in the
Tribune in a tradition begun shortly after September 11, 2001, when scores
of people turned up at designated libraries and bookstores around the Chi-
cago area to discuss Auden’s “September 1, 1939” as a way of considering
our more recent tragedy. (I should perhaps mention that the second poem
in this series was also Polish, Wisława Szymborska’s “Reality Demands.”)
Less locally speaking, a recent search on Amazon.com turned up close to a
thousand references to Miłosz in American books in print. There were the
expected mentions in anthologies and handbooks on unleashing your inner
artist, as well as numerous scholarly references in works on poetry, politics,
Eastern Europe, and so on. Miłosz also makes guest appearances, though,
in books on yoga, childrearing, self-help, basketball, civil liberties, world
mythology, Silicon Valley, Kissinger, modern Christianity, and ancient Zen.
His name even figures in a guide to celebrities and their signs: he apparently
shares a birthday with Mike Tyson. Tony Kushner quotes him in his plays;
Bill Moyers cites him on Public Broadcasting; he turns up in Lewis Hyde’s
classic The Gift (1983), John Grisham’s recent thriller The Broker (2005),
and Frances Mayes’s bestselling Under the Tuscan Sun (1997).
Miłosz sardonically travesties Horace in a poem from the early seventies:
“Oh yes, not all of me shall die, there will remain / An item in the fourteenth
volume of an encyclopedia / Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse”
(320). The unexpected fame he achieved since receiving the Nobel Prize in
1980 propelled him into even stranger company some years back when an
excerpt from his Treatise on Poetry ended up sandwiched between blurbs
for an illustrated history of baseball and Gourmet Paris 2001 in Borders
Bookstore’s monthly guide to new arrivals. He keeps more distinguished
company in Jill Vongrubin’s College Countdown: The Parent’s and Stu-
dent’s Survival Kit for the College Admissions Process, in which a list of
student must-reads includes “Miller, Arthur, Milton, John, Miłosz, Czesław,
Molière, Montale, Eugenio, Moore, Marianne, Morrison, Toni.”
Such a fate seemed unlikely, to say the least, when Miłosz chose exile—
fi rst in France and then the United States, where he taught Slavic literatures at
Berkeley for thirty years—over continued cooperation with the Communist
regime that came to power at the war’s conclusion. He continued to write
in Polish throughout his long exile, though this choice seemed to doom him
to obscurity. His work could neither be published in his homeland, where it
was officially banned, nor comprehended in his adopted country where his
native tongue seemed as remote, he complains, as “one of the lesser-known
African dialects” (3:146). He seemed in danger of becoming not even, as he
laments elsewhere, “the greatest poet of the kingdom of Albania” (3:115),
but a poet who was equally invisible, for different reasons, in both the land
of his origins and his adoptive country.
How did it come to pass that Miłosz—along with several other unpro-
nounceable poets whose names include ‘z,’ such as Zbigniew Herbert,
Wisława Szymborska, or Adam Zagajewski—has moved so far beyond
the circles to which poetry is ordinarily confi ned in the United States? I
raised this question fi rst in my introduction, but I’m afraid that I will not
explore its ramifications and their significance—sociological? cultural?
metaphysical?—in exhaustive detail here. Instead, I want to turn to the
more limited, if no less illuminating, topic of Miłosz’s reception in the States
particularly and the various paradoxes of cross-cultural poetry and politics
it reveals. Miłosz fi rst became known among American poets not as a poet,
but as a translator. In 1965, he edited the collection that put Polish poetry on
the map for American writers, his Postwar Polish Poetry—which is still in
print today. Time after time, I’ve heard poets speak of this book as a turning
point in their own artistic development.
But the year that marked his next major venture into the Americanization
of Polish poetry is more satisfyingly symbolic. Miłosz’s edition of Zbig-
niew Herbert’s Selected Poems (co-translated with Peter Dale Scott) fi rst
appeared in 1968. The causes and effects of the student revolts that erupted
from Warsaw to Berkeley varied greatly, depending on which side of the
Iron Curtain you happened to occupy, as I’ve noted in my discussion of
Poland’s “New Wave.” “The personal is the political,” ran the slogan in the
States—but the poetic was the political, as we’ve seen, for the students who
swarmed Warsaw streets in 1968 when Mickiewicz’s “Forefathers’ Eve” was
shut down by the Soviet-backed authorities. Shelley’s “unacknowledged leg-
islators” would have given their eyeteeth for such a reception. Small won-
der, then, that his American descendants should be drawn at that moment
to lyrics coming from a part of the world where poets were capable, even
posthumously, of disturbing the peace, inflaming the young, and outrag-
ing the authorities. In the States, the 1960’s witnessed, not surprisingly, the
growing restlessness of American poets, chroniclers of the personal unjustly
confi ned, or so they felt, to the margins of a society that had little use for the
selves they lamented or extolled in their poems.3
The complaint is an old one. American poetry “cannot embody political
vision,” Sven Birkerts remarks in The Electric Life (1989). “Poetry is now
largely a face-saving operation, with poets pulling their bitterness inside
out and preening themselves on their own uselessness.” Birkerts’s reproach
has a distinguished pedigree. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed some 150
years earlier that the American people were inclined to “look at the world
with reference to themselves and not, as the Frenchmen, at themselves with
reference to the world.” And the results, as he saw it, were far from promis-
ing: “Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry
interests, in one word so anti-poetic, as American life.” The would-be poet
of the fledgling democracy had recourse to himself alone: “Among a demo-
cratic people poetry will not be fed with legendary lays or memorials of old
traditions. . . . All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and the poet
needs no more.” One has only to reach for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to
feel the force of Tocqueville’s prophecy. American poetry arguably became,
and in many ways remains, as Roy Harvey Pearce has claimed, “a poetry of
the self,” “a private poetry aspiring to be universal,” an egocentric poetry
insisting that “in its egocentricism lay its universality.”4
Egocentric universalism: the phenomenon is hardly confi ned to the Amer-
icans, as any reader of Mayakovsky can attest. From Virgil to Dante, from
Blake to Blok or Mayakovsky and beyond, Western writers have shared the
experience that Lawrence Lipking sees as pivotal to the poetic vocation:
“[T]he poet realizes that his own personal history, reflected in his poems,
coincides with the universal spiritual history of mankind.” The key differ-
ence lies perhaps not so much in the claims themselves as in how seriously
they are taken by the poets’ compatriots—or their audiences in translation.
In any case, it was not simply the Americans who looked eastward in the
late sixties in hopes of reconciling the schism between the private lyrist and
the public life. “In Western Europe,” the British poet A. Alvarez comments
in his introduction to Herbert’s Selected Poems, “we take for granted that
there is a fundamental split between poetry and politics. The problem is not
that the twain can never meet but that they can do so only at a great cost.
The complexity, tension and precision of modern poetry simply doesn’t go
with the language of politics, with its vague rhetoric and dependence on
clichés.” “To all this,” he concludes, “Zbigniew Herbert is an exception.”
So it may have seemed in the late sixties, when Herbert was fi rst introduced
to an Anglo-American audience. But Herbert as exemplary political poet
would be joined over subsequent decades by other Eastern Europeans—
with Miłosz at their helm—who might, so anglophone poets hoped, help
them bridge the gap that Alvarez deplores. 5
Until the Nobel Prize, Miłosz was known in Anglo-American literary
circles chiefly for his translations of Herbert and other Polish poets, in spite
of the publication of his own Selected Poems in 1973, followed by Bells in
Winter in 1978. “No single writer of our time has with such profound effect
brought another literature across the distances of language and history to
the readers and writers of our own,” the poet Jonathan Aaron remarked in
1981. “His contribution to our literary self-awareness has been and contin-
ues to be crucial.” Aaron has in mind Miłosz’s translations of Aleksander
Wat, the volume of Postwar Polish Poetry, and especially Herbert’s poems,
which “stung,” Aaron notes, English and American writers “into a new,
unfamiliar awareness”: “translated by Miłosz, the poems seemed even in
English to be products of a sort of preternatural knowing,” a knowledge for
which Anglo-American poets apparently had no counterpart.6 As aware-
ness of Miłosz’s own poetic opus has grown over the last few decades, he
has come to seem the exemplar of the otherworldly knowledge that Aaron
and his fellow poets found so compelling in Herbert. But all this begs the
question—what is this uncanny consciousness to which Polish poets are
ostensibly privy? And why should American poets be so drawn to it?
Herbert himself suggests an answer in “Prayer of Mr. Cogito—Traveler”:
“forgive me that I didn’t fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive
peoples / that I watched only risings of the moon and museums.” The Brit-
ish Romantics, whose island empire spared them the horrors of revolt and
invasion at home, were forced to seek their captive nations elsewhere: the
revolutionary France of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the insurgent Greece
for which Shelley wrote his lyrics and Byron gave his life. In his “Hebrew
Melodies” (1815), Byron works to stir sympathy not just for the nationless
Jews alone, but for all peoples “whose shrines are desolate, whose land a
dream”: the Greeks, the Irish, the Italians, and the natives of South America,
as well as the hapless Poles. The Polish poet, though, is forced to play out
this scenario in reverse. He must fi rst flee his own captive nation if he is
to savor the seemingly innocent pleasures of moonbeams and museums—
although he must do penance for tasting the forbidden fruit of beauty for
its own sake: “forgive me,” Herbert’s alter ego Mr. Cogito begs. Politics
versus poetry, ethics versus aesthetics, uprisings versus moon risings and
museums: the manifold ironies unleashed by Mr. Cogito’s little plea take us
straight to the heart of the paradoxical Polish conquest of Anglo-American
poetic territory.7
In this sense, Miłosz’s remarkable career in English-speaking lands has
been exemplary. I began my book with Maureen McLane’s words on the
Slavic writers who have become the emblem of poetic gravitas for their
reluctantly sheltered Anglo-American confreres. As translator, prosely-
tizer, and éminence grise, Miłosz presided over this phenomenon in recent
decades. The last twenty-five years have seen his name take pride of place in
an obligatory litany, a mantra that prefaces almost every recent discussion
of poetry’s function in the modern world. It runs, with variations, roughly
as follows: Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vasko Popa, Miroslav
Holub, Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert. Other Polish
surnames—Szymborska, Różewicz, Zagajewski, Barańczak—sometimes
surface on such lists. “The collective heart of the Swedish Academy still
beats strongly for central Europe,” one journalist observed when Wisława
Szymborska’s Nobel Prize in literature was announced in 1996. A glance
at recent laureates seems to confi rm the preeminence of Eastern Europe in
modern poetry, with Miłosz (1980), Jaroslav Seifert (1984), Brodsky (1987),
and Szymborska (1996) all receiving the prize in the last three decades.8
An expanded list of recent laureates in poetry further testifies to the influ-
ence that these poets and their Eastern European colleagues have exerted
on writing in English generally. The two most recent recipients in English-
language poetry, Derek Walcott (1992) and Seamus Heaney (1995), have
been quick to acknowledge their debt to Eastern Europe. In “Polonaise,”
a poem later incorporated into his epic Omeros (1990), Walcott pays hom-
age to a Poland besieged by its own rulers by invoking its poetry; the poem
closes with three single, apparently self-explanatory names: “Zagajewski.
Herbert. Miłosz.” In his poetry and prose of the mid-eighties particularly,
Seamus Heaney pays grateful tribute to the “heroic names” of Eastern Euro-
pean poetry: Mandelstam, Miłosz, Holub, Herbert. And Brodsky was typi-
cally hyperbolic—although not necessarily wrong—when he announced in
1988 that “if you know Polish (which would be to your great advantage,
because the most extraordinary poetry of this century is written in that
language)—I’d like to mention to you the names of Leopold Staff, Czesław

Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska.” Recent American
poet laureates include, moreover, both actual Eastern Europeans (Joseph
Brodsky) and honorary ones (Miłosz’s co-translators Robert Hass and
Robert Pinsky). Yet another recent poet laureate, Billy Collins, has been
known to begin his own readings by reciting the poems of Wisława Szym-
borska in English translation. Ted Hughes, who served as the British poet
laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998, translated the Hungarian poet
János Pilinszky and wrote admiringly of Miłosz, Herbert, Popa, and Holub.
Through their poets, the countries of the former Soviet bloc fi nally appear
to have avenged their betrayal at Yalta by way of this unexpected Eastern
European invasion of Anglo-American poetry.9
Both British and American poets have fallen prey in recent decades to a
surprising Polish complex, with Poland as a peculiarly inverted promised
land: it serves as a kind of Slavic shorthand for “The Oppressed Nation
Where Poetry Still Matters.” Poland is not alone in this honor. The poets
of Latin America and Eastern Europe alike are “in vogue for suspicious
reasons,” Helene J. F. de Aguilar complains in a singularly blinkered review
of Miłosz’s poetry in translation. But Polish poets, she continues, have a
particularly unfair advantage due to the dazzling range of “demeaning pos-
sibilities,” the spectacularly “variegated” “dire straits” that history has
bestowed upon any poet fortunate enough to be born in twentieth-century
Poland: “The national life against which they seem to contend is the after-
math of every sort of war and oppression.”10 The strength of De Guilar’s res-
sentiment both demonstrates the power of the Polish influence on modern
poetry and tells us something about its sources.
I have mentioned the troubles American poets have traditionally encoun-
tered in struggling to conflate their nation’s life and destiny with their own.
The geography that has largely shielded the United States from Europe’s con-
flagrations plays a part in this, as does the programmatically antihistorical
bent of a young nation committed to the possibility of new beginnings and
endless self-reinvention. In this we are the antithesis of the country Miłosz
describes in the preface to his Postwar Polish Poetry, a country plagued by
history and geography alike. Polish poetry, he insists, is preoccupied “less
with the ego than with the dramas of history.” He gives a compelling rea-
son for this peculiarity: “A historical steam-roller has gone several times
through [this] country, whose geographical location, between Germany and
Russia, is not particularly enviable.”11
And yet some poets do envy it—and not Americans alone. For all its
proximity to the continent, England’s long history as an island-empire
has left it relatively unscathed by Europe’s greatest upheavals. “Contem-

porary English poetry,” Seamus Heaney remarks, “has become aware of
the insular and eccentric nature of English experience in all the literal and
extended meanings of those adjectives”: “England’s island status, its off-
centre European positioning, its history of non-defeat and non-invasion
since 1066, these enviable and (as far as the English are concerned) norma-
tive conditions have ensured a protracted life within the English psyche for
the assumption that a possible and desirable congruence exists between
domestic and imagined reality.”12
Heaney omits the high price paid at times to achieve this enviable history,
a price to which any survivor of the Nazi blitz will testify. Still, England’s
centuries-long career as island-empire has not prevented the occasional Eng-
lish poet from claiming honorary status as a Polish-style victim of history.
In an essay on Herbert, Donald Davie compares the plight of the modern
Briton to the predicament of the Poles: “Whereas the chronically helpless
or luckless Poles have found themselves in a situation of impotence through
most of their history, the post-1945 British, living through a post-imperial
twilight suddenly found their situation not very different. The USSR, the
USA—there are great differences of course, but one or the other Big Brother
limits the power of Poles and Britons alike.”13 Like their Romantic precur-
sors, the poets of England apparently still must travel abroad, at least imagi-
natively, to seek out a more challenging relationship between poetry and
society. And one of the more popular routes in recent years, Heaney notes,
has been by way of Warsaw and Prague.
Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, and Petersburg: these are the chief cities of what
many anglophone poets have come to see as “the republic of conscience,”
in Heaney’s phrase. (This is, incidentally, the title of a poem from the mid-
eighties that most strongly betrays the influence on Heaney’s own work of
what he calls Poland’s “parable poetry.”) And citizenship in this republic
represents the apogee of “the unacknowledged legislator’s dream.” For such
would-be martyrs, Poland must seem to represent a—somewhat perverse—
poetic dream come true. Shelley and his fellow Romantics could not even
get their dramas staged, let alone suppressed by the powers-that-be. Their
plays were private affairs, closet dramas largely confi ned to the stage of their
own creators’ minds. Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve or Juliusz Słowacki’s
“Kordian” (1834) are no less unstageable than Byron’s “Manfred” or Shel-
ley’s “Cenci”; indeed, Byron’s play particularly was a major influence on the
Poles. For all that, though, both Polish dramas have long, distinguished his-
tories on Polish stages and in the Polish popular imagination alike. Indeed,
even non-Poles could be granted de facto dissident status when it came to
the banning of almost-unplayable verse dramas. Eliot’s Murder in the

Cathedral, with its priest slain by a criminal state, was apparently consid-
ered too volatile to be staged in a Poland under martial law, and authorities
accordingly closed down a Polish production in 1982. It is not surprising
that Shelley’s twentieth-century descendants should fi nd themselves drawn
to Miłosz and other heirs of Eastern Europe’s poet-bards as they searched
for a way to engage with the politics and society of their own day.14
Miłosz among the Americans

I have felt that the problem of my time should be defined as Poetry
and History.
—Czesław Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West” (1977)
“The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz could hardly present a greater or

more instructive contrast to . . . the great majority of contemporary Ameri-
can poets,” Jonathan Galassi writes in a 1979 review of Bells in Winter.
“Miłosz’s work,” he continues, challenges “American poetry to exit from
the labyrinth of the self and begin to grapple again with the larger problems
of being in the world.” Such comments recur time and again in reviews of
Miłosz’s work. “The assumption that private life is embraced and controlled
by history is rare among American poets,” Marisha Chamberlain complains
in an essay on Miłosz’s collection Rescue (1945), written largely in wartime
Warsaw. In another review, Terence des Pres explicitly contrasts “Miłosz’s
example with the Emersonian tradition in American poetry”: “From Emer-
son and Dickinson onward, American poetry celebrates perception for per-
ception’s sake, it focuses on the interior drama of wholly isolated selfhood,
it posits destiny in solely individual terms. For a poet like Miłosz, who saw
Warsaw leveled and was among the handful to survive his generation’s mur-
der, such attitudes must not only sound out of place, but out of the world
altogether.” “People, places, things,” he concludes, “everything for Miłosz
is densely historical.”15
Miłosz himself apparently concurs. In the recently translated A Treatise
on Poetry (Traktat poetycki, 1957), America, predictably enough, plays
Nature to Europe’s History and Culture:
America for me has the pelt of a raccoon,
A chipmunk fl ickers in a litter of dry bark . . .
America’s wings are the color of a cardinal,
Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills
From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air. (146)
In America, the works of “our gray-haired father Herodotus,” the fore-

bear of Western historiography, remain unread: “Herodotus will repose on
his shelf, uncut” (144–147). In the Treatise’s conclusion, Miłosz’s speaker
exchanges comfortable exile in American “Natura” for Europe and history,
just as Miłosz himself had done following his postwar years in the Polish
diplomatic corps in New York and Washington.
In his influential Witness of Poetry (1983), Miłosz stresses the singular
engagement with history that distinguishes modern Polish writing from its
Western counterparts. In Polish poetry, he comments, “a peculiar fusion
of the individual and the historical took place, which means that events
burdening a whole community are perceived by a poet as touching him in a
most personal manner.” “The true home of the Polish poet,” he insists, “is
history.”16 The rootless, self-absorbed American and the Polish witness to
history: these two poets would seem to be worlds apart in the quotes, both
Polish and American, that I’ve assembled here. But the very works I’ve just
cited—A Treatise on Poetry and The Witness of Poetry—hint at the com-
plexities of Miłosz’s engagement with Anglo-American writing, and with
American poetry particularly, complexities to which his American audi-
ence, alert to his distinctive “Polishness,” has remained surprisingly oblivi-
ous. And this in turn points to a far more complex relationship between
private self and public history than Miłosz himself is sometimes willing to
admit in his own writing—as well as his occasional complicity in the clichés
of American rootlessness and Polish history that punctuate discussions of
Polish poetry stateside.
Certainly Miłosz himself has made no effort to hide his indebtedness to
American writing, and to one American author in particular. “I am a habi-
tan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin,” Walt Whitman boasts in “Salut au
Monde!”: “I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw.” The prophet may go
unnoticed in his own country. But Whitman proved prophetic at least in his
hopes for a conquest of Europe’s capitals, as I’ve noted elsewhere. Indeed,
Whitman’s name appears repeatedly not only in the Treatise and The Wit-
ness of Poetry, but throughout Miłosz’s vast opus. The English translation of
Miłosz’s “Throughout Our Lands” (1961) begins by quoting his American
master: “When I pass’d through a populous city / (as Walt Whitman says,
in the Polish version)” (182). Polish has no defi nite or indefi nite articles, and
the translators’ interpolation (the poem was translated by Miłosz with Peter
Dale Scott) is misleading: the Polish Whitman was far too popular in the
fi rst part of the twentieth century to be served by one version alone. The
Polish text is more specific: “When I pass’d through a populous city / (as
Walt Whitman says in Alfred Tom’s translation).” The scrupulous editor of
Miłosz’s Polish Collected Poems (Wiersze) informs us, though, that Miłosz
must have encountered this particular poem not in Tom’s, but in Stefan
Napierski’s translation (2:316, 389). Miłosz himself refers to three separate
translators, Tom, Napierski, and Stanisław Vincenz, in describing his fi rst
encounter with Whitman: “Immediately, revelation: to be able to write as
he did.”17
He was not alone in his enthusiasm: “What they really wanted was a
new Whitman,” Miłosz writes of Poland’s interwar poets in A Treatise on
Poetry (121). Whitman’s song of himself was no stranger, then, to the young
Miłosz. The biblical cadences and voracious, outsized speakers that mark
Miłosz’s own poetry clearly betray his debt, from his early lyrics on, to this
particular exemplar of the “Emersonian tradition” that Des Pres and others
oppose to his poetry and that of his fellow Poles. To read Miłosz, even in
English translation, is to be reminded just how much Whitman’s particular
brand of egotistical sublimity has in common not only with Miłosz him-
self, but with the Eastern European bards whose impact on society Miłosz
describes in The Captive Mind and elsewhere. Whitman’s example also
demonstrates, incidentally, that self-celebration and witness to history are
not mutually exclusive categories. He served, we recall, as a nurse in Union
hospitals during the Civil War: “From the stump of the arm, the amputated
hand, / I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and
blood,” he notes in “The Wound-Dresser.”18
Miłosz’s catalyzing encounters with Whitman took place before he began
to read English-language poetry in the original. But the Anglo-American
influence on Miłosz’s writing was not confi ned to Whitman alone. Many
key works from the postwar years—“The Treatise on Morals” (1947),
“Toast,” “To Jonathan Swift,” and others—defy translation, as Miłosz him-
self admits, due to the intricate verse forms that he found himself employ-
ing, to his own surprise, in his poetry of this period.19 The titles of two
untranslated poems remind us where Miłosz was and what he was doing
when they were written: one is called “On a Bird’s Song above the Banks of
the Potomac,” while the other is entitled “Central Park.” In 1946, Miłosz
was assigned to the Polish consulate in New York; and the following year
he became the cultural attaché to the Polish embassy in Washington. (Still
another poem of the period, “To Albert Einstein,” commemorates Miłosz’s
visit to Einstein’s Princeton home when he was seeking advice on whether or
not to remain in the States.)20
I’m less concerned at this point with Miłosz’s brief affi liation with the
People’s Republic and its aftermath than with the unofficial function Miłosz
performed during these years, his work as a cultural attaché in a larger and
more lasting sense. During his tour of duty stateside, Miłosz continued and
intensified a campaign begun in wartime Warsaw to open Polish literature
up to the riches of the English-language tradition. If in the States he is per-
ceived as fi rst bringing Polish poetry to the attention of an English-speak-
ing audience, the inverse is true in Poland. Polish poets and critics alike
credit him with singlehandedly shifting the cultural axis away from France,
which had previously dominated Polish literary culture, and towards poetry
written in English. The very verse forms that make the poems of Daylight
(Swiatło dzienne, 1953) so resistant to translation are indebted to his volu-
minous readings in anglophone poetry. John Donne, W. H. Auden, Karl
Shapiro, Robert Lowell, and Hart Crane all make appearances, inter alia, in
the pages of his influential essay “An Introduction to the Americans,” which
appeared in Poland in 1947. 21 Miłosz himself cites Karl Shapiro’s Essay on
Rime (1945) as a prime inspiration for his own A Treatise on Poetry. 22
“There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Miłosz,”
Helen Vendler declares in a controversial 1984 review. “Those who have
never seen modern war on their own soil cannot adopt his tone; the sights
that scarred his eyes cannot be seen by the children of a young provincial
empire.” Other critics point to Miłosz’s wartime poetry as the marker of his
distinctive, inimitable Polishness: Miłosz “found his voice and his subject
during his years in Nazi-occupied Warsaw,” Marisha Chamberlain com-
ments.23 These were also the years, though, when Miłosz fi rst learned Eng-
lish and began his English-language translating career, modestly enough,
with T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare. There are limits to what Americans can
learn from a poet whose history, both personal and national, is so distant
from their own, Vendler warns. Fair enough. Yet Miłosz himself drew poetic
lessons in wartime Warsaw from a young American who had himself never
witnessed war fi rsthand when he shaped his nightmare vision of a war-
shattered Europe in The Waste Land (1921).
Miłosz’s fi rst version of “The Waste Land” dates from the war years—he
revised it later—and Polish critics have been quick to see Eliot’s influence
in the poems most closely linked to the horrors Vendler evokes. I have in
mind the poems of Rescue (Ocalenie, 1945), and particularly the “Voices
of Poor People” and “Songs of Adrian Zielinski,” in which Miłosz adapts
Eliot’s techniques, his impersonality (pozaosobistość) and personae, to
horrific landscapes that far outstrip the parched plains and unreal cities of
Eliot’s famous poem-cum-apocalypse. The impact of Miłosz’s translation,
though, was such that his Polish critics routinely borrow the Polish title of
The Waste Land, “jałowa ziemia,” to describe not just Eliot’s poem, but
wartime Warsaw itself.24
Miłosz himself apparently concurs at times both with Vendler’s warning

and with the notion shared by poets like Forché and Des Pres that poetry
written in extremis, poetry rooted in fi rsthand, horrific experience, is
intrinsically more valid and valuable than any merely private poetic night-
mares could ever hope to be. “A real ‘wasteland’ is much more terrible than
any imaginary one,” he insists in The Captive Mind. In the same book,
Miłosz describes the rigorous standard for poetry he derived from his war-
time experience: “A man is lying under machine-gun fi re on a street in an
embattled city. He looks up at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight:
the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The
bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in
the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers.” “The vision
of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally
naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgement day of man’s
illusions,” he concludes. But one book that apparently passed his test does
not meet the criterion he himself sets forth here.
I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by fl ies, fought.
So Eliot confesses by way of his aged speaker in “Gerontion.” In Native

Realm, Miłosz recalls clutching the Faber and Faber edition of Eliot’s Col-
lected Poems while crossing a potato field under Nazi fi re: “Heavy fi re broke
loose at our every leap, nailing us to the potato fields. In spite of this I never
let go of my book.”25
What could an inhabitant of “imaginary waste lands” who had never wit-
nessed war fi rsthand possibly have to offer a survivor of calamities unimagi-
nable to his Anglo-American counterparts? Yet Eliot’s famous lilacs bred
from the dead land have clearly helped to pollinate the “spring flowers” that
Adrian Zielinski watches being “pushed up by a subterranean hand” on the
outskirts of war-ravaged Warsaw (67). And Polish critics have long since
noticed Eliot’s influence on the shattered landscapes—“A broken shadow
of a chimney. Thin grass. / Farther on, the city torn into red brick. / Brown
heaps, barbed wire tangled at stations. / Dry rib of a rusty automobile”—
and mangled song fragments—“Heigh-ho. Fingers, strings. / So nice a song. /
A barren field (jałowe pole)”—that make up a poem like “Outskirts” (65–
66; 1:216–217). But Eliot’s influence on Miłosz was not confi ned to the
war years, and Miłosz did not restrict his reading in English to Eliot alone.
I’ve already mentioned the voracious reading, writing, and translating that
helped to transform the poetic landscape of postwar Poland. And it is his

remarkable performance as a double agent infi ltrating and altering two sep-
arate poetic cultures—both Polish and Anglo-American—that takes us to
the heart of his paradoxical English-language reception.
“The English language is the language of poetry par excellence and every
poet should be familiar with it,” Miłosz insists in an essay of 1956. Else-
where he suggests one reason for this dictum as he pits both American and
Polish culture against a common enemy, France: “The fear of ‘impurity’”
that plagues French poetry, he comments, “is foreign” to Polish and Ameri-
can writers alike. The specific kind of impurity he has in mind here is poetic
language expanded to include both prosaic, everyday speech and the discur-
sive diction employed in other disciplines: philosophy, theology, history, and
so on. But the implications of his linguistic cross-fertilization reach much
farther. Miłosz’s commitment to the creation of a “more spacious form”
(240) is well-known: certainly poets writing in English have benefited from
his poetic expansiveness. The poet Peter Filkins observes that Miłosz has
“expanded poetry’s reach to include philosophy, religion and even prose.”
In “The Impact of Translation,” Seamus Heaney describes the “altogether
thrilling” effect of hearing Miłosz’s “Incantation” read for the fi rst time:
“We were enjoying a poem which did things forbidden within an old dispen-
sation to which . . . I was subject,” he recalls. “The poem was, for example,
full of abstractions . . . [its] unabashed abstract nouns and conceptually
aerated adjectives should have been altogether out of the question . . . and
indeed the poem aspired to deliver what we had once long ago been assured
it was not any poem’s business to deliver: a message.”26
These poets fail to realize that such gifts come to them in mediated form
by way of their own precursors and contemporaries: Miłosz’s expanded
poetic diction was set in motion in key ways by his intensive postwar read-
ing of American and English poetry. His essays of the period are peppered
with comments on the brands of discursiveness he fi nds at work in Eliot,
Auden, Shapiro, Merwin, Lowell, and others. Recent anglophone poetry,
he remarks, does not shy away from “direct discourse, even using a mul-
titude of words that have to be looked up in a philosophical dictionary.”
More than this—this same discursiveness is perceived by Polish critics to be
Miłosz’s distinctive contribution to his native Polish tradition by way of his
English-language reading. The scholar Jerzy Kwiatkowski calls Miłosz an
“amplifier” (poszerzyciel) of modern Polish culture. “He accomplished one
of the most significant revolutions in Polish poetry of the twentieth century,”
Kwiatkowski writes, by “drawing upon the means of expression character-
istic of all literature” and not just of poetry proper. And this “rehabilitation
of discourse,” he concludes, is due in large part to Miłosz’s reading and

translating of Anglo-American poetry. 27
But this prompts still other questions. Why did Polish poetic discourse
require rehabilitating? Why should the poets of postwar Poland, so rich
in the historical experience that their Anglo-American counterparts envy,
require this literary equivalent of the Marshall Plan? Why should Miłosz
feel compelled to splice his native tradition with Anglo-American borrow-
ings and why have these grafts proved so successful? “The unhistorical and
the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people
and a culture,” Nietzsche insists in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life. Miłosz is no Nietzschean. His Polish experience has taught
him, though, that too much history can be as great a burden as too little—
though he is sometimes loathe to admit as much to American readers par-
ticularly. Unacknowledged legislators may be prophets with an audience of
one. But poets forced by their unhappy nation’s past to assume the mantle of
poet-bard are faced by difficulties that their brethren in less embattled coun-
tries would fi nd difficult to imagine. In “An Introduction to the Americans,”
Miłosz notes that Karl Shapiro was himself no stranger to war; the Essay on
Rime that so influenced Miłosz was written while Shapiro was stationed in
the Dutch Indies in 1944. “Instead of writing nostalgic patriotic poems as a
Polish poet would certainly have done,” Miłosz comments approvingly, “he
wrote a verse treatise on contemporary poetics.” Why should he approve of
Shapiro’s refusal to bear witness? And why should Miłosz himself be inspired
by Shapiro’s example in undertaking his own Treatise on Poetry?28
The Treatise itself, along with the commentary Miłosz provides in his
English translation, suggests possible answers to such questions. The Polish
poet’s home is in history, Miłosz asserts in The Witness of Poetry; but this
home in history can easily become a prison without constant rebuilding
and renovation, or so he hints in the Treatise on Poetry. Modern Poland, he
notes elsewhere, is rich “in defeats and lost illusions,” in “the mythologies
of the unlucky conquered nations.” Such nations, comprised as they are of
“the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the underprivileged,” provide
fertile ground for the Romantic myth of the poet-prophet: martyrology is,
of course, the Romantic poet’s stock-in-trade. Hence the immense appeal
of the Poles for their Anglo-American counterparts, as I’ve suggested here
and elsewhere. 29
But imported prophets and martyrs are a tricky business. In their eager-
ness to appropriate a vicarious “poetry of witness” for their own trauma-
deprived homelands, English and American writers have too often reduced
Miłosz‘s work to a single function and tonality—or so he himself insists
in a famously furious response to a review of his Collected Poems (1987)

in the New York Review of Books. A. Alvarez’s essay, laudatory though
it was, had the misfortune of being entitled “Witness,” and in his let-
ter, Miłosz attacked this reduction of his long and complex career to a
single term: “Perhaps some Western writers are longing for subjects pro-
vided by spasms of historical violent change, but I can assure Mr. Alvarez
that we, i.e. natives of hazy Eastern regions, perceive History as a curse
and prefer to restore to literature its autonomy, dignity and independence
from social pressures.”30 This response may seem disingenuous, to say the
least, coming from the author of The Witness of Poetry: what’s become of
the much-touted home in history? We have only to return, though, to the
English version of the Treatise on Poetry to sense the historically charged
complexities that inform Miłosz’s brand of poetic witness, complexities
largely invisible to his American audience that are, for all that, key to his
Polish reception.
In the Treatise, Miłosz takes to task some of the Romantic mythologies
that have proven so attractive to the West. “A poet should not be a prisoner
of national myths,” Miłosz insists in his commentary—and the poets he has
in mind here are “the twenty-year-old poets of Warsaw” who perished en
masse on the battlefields and barricades of the doomed Uprising of 1944,
a catastrophic enterprise that led to casualties counted in the hundreds of
thousands, and that had been instigated, at least in part, by their own clan-
destine “propaganda poetry.” Their writing, Miłosz remarks in his notes,
“was a revival of Polish Romanticism, with its messianic overtones which
stressed the redeeming value of selflessly sacrificing one’s life for one’s coun-
try.” They “did not want to know that something in this century / Submits
to thought, not to Davids with their slings,” he charges in the poem prop-
er—and the phrase is key in understanding his own turn to Anglo-American
poetry in search of a creative counterpoise to a poetry determined to “feel
too much” at the expense of the kind of considered discursiveness he fi nds
at work in the Anglo-American tradition.31
Miłosz’s commentary to the Treatise sheds light, in turn, on one of his
best-known poems, “Dedication,” which appears either at the beginning or
the end of Miłosz’s wartime collection Rescue, depending on which edition
you consult.
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.

You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.
Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge

going into white fog. Here is a broken city.
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,

That I discovered late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I fi nd salvation.
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
Warsaw, 1945 (77; 1:139–140)
Alvarez cites several stanzas of “Dedication” in his controversial review.

And the poem has since become a staple in English-language anthologies
of what Carolyn Forché has dubbed, partly under Miłosz’s influence, “the
poetry of witness.” Forché quotes the poem’s opening lines in her introduc-
tion to her anthology Against Forgetting (1993) as she speaks of Miłosz’s
efforts to “call up the departed only to banish them again” (my italics).
Miłosz’s long-time collaborator Robert Hass describes the poem more
precisely as addressing “the dead of the Warsaw Uprising, which came
in August 1944” (my italics). And he’s right—up to a point. Certainly the
time and place inscribed so carefully beneath the poem invite just such a
contextualization.32
But another kind of specificity is inevitably lost in the English transla-
tion. Forché and Hass are not alone in reading the poem as the voice of a
single poet speaking to the multitudes. In my experience, American readers
invariably see the poem this way, following the lead perhaps of the fourth
stanza’s “people” and “nations” and the fi nal stanza’s “dead.” The fi rst line
of the Polish text tells us immediately and unambiguously, though, that
the addressee is a single person, a man whom the poet failed to save: “Ty,
którego nie mogłem ocalić.” Both the singular, familiar “you” (ty) and the
masculine pronoun “whom” (którego) vanish in the English text, and the
poem’s sense shifts as a result. The Polish lyric is clearly addressed to a
single person who perished in the Uprising, a person with whom the speaker
is on familiar terms.
Who is the friend to whom the poet speaks? The stanzas that follow
suggest several possibilities. The speaker, the survivor, appears to be con-
tinuing a conversation or argument begun before his friend’s untimely
death. And this conversation returns relentlessly to art, or more precisely,
to confl icting visions of poetry. “What is poetry?” the speaker asks, and
his own self-proclaimed “simple speech” appears to oppose the “wiz-
ardry of words” that confuses the “inspiration of hate” with “lyrical
beauty” and mistakes “blind force” for “accomplished shape.” The dead
man with whom the survivor speaks is, in other words, a poet; the poem
is thus both a deeply ambivalent elegy and a debate with one poet whom
another has outlived.
Miłosz gives us nothing more; but we do not have to look far to fi nd
plausible candidates for the part drawn from Miłosz’s own wartime expe-
rience. Two brief biographical sketches in Miłosz’s commentary to the
Treatise on Poetry suggest possibilities: both Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński
(1921–44) and Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–44) were gifted poets who died during
the Uprising. We have met Baczyński before, in Szymborska’s character-
istically oblique critique of the Polish cult of martyred poets, “In Broad
Daylight.” The nationalistic “inspiration of hate” that Miłosz describes
is more typical, though, of the group of talented young poets surround-
ing the underground publication Art and Nation (Sztuka i naród), whose
writings helped to foment the Uprising. In Yeats’s “Second Coming,” the
best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
In wartime Warsaw, the best combined conviction with intensity, at least
as Miłosz sees it, and the results were fatal not only for them, but also
for the fellow citizens whom they spurred to action through their words.
“Their verses and their deaths made them mythical figures, yet they built
no bridge between past and future,” Miłosz charges. 33
“What strengthened me for you was lethal,” the speaker mourns. And
what he has in mind is poetry. The “good poetry” whose “salutary aim”
he discovers late has been his salvation—I will return in a moment to
what this “good poetry” might be—while the poetry of his dead friend,
driven by social passions and national mythologies alone, proved to be
his, and not only his, ruin. Both Forché and Des Pres celebrate a “poetry
of extremity” “rooted in direct response to political pressure, which is to
say in despair and resistance, in ruin and recovery”34; it sounds perilously

close, at least potentially, to the “lethal” poetry that Miłosz describes in
“Dedication.”
Miłosz was no stranger to such longings—but he also knew their dan-
gers. He fell prey at various points in his career to the temptations that
the Polish tradition offers in abundance to the would-be poet-bard or poet-
martyr. Indeed, his life’s work might be seen as an oscillation between the
demands and seductions of engagement, on the one hand, and the necessity
for distance—be it aesthetic, ethical, or some combination of the two—on
the other. Like his near-contemporary W. H. Auden, he began his inter-
war career as a left-leaning political activist in verse. One of his fi rst major
publications, he recalls, was an anthology of “the so-called poetry of social
protest” co-produced with a group of like-minded young writers, though he
soon condemned this early work as “journalism . . . [that] had no connec-
tion with the living springs of art.” He returned to such poetry once again
during World War II, when he published an underground anthology of resis-
tance poetry entitled The Sovereign Song (Pieśń niepodległa) in 1942. Yet
he repudiated such patriotic poetic activism shortly afterwards. He not only
refused to participate in the Warsaw Uprising himself; in “Dedication” and
elsewhere, he rejects those poets who helped to foment the rebellion through
their words and deeds.35
“I am Miłosz, I don’t want to be Miłosz, being Miłosz, I must be Miłosz,
I kill the Miłosz in myself in order, being Miłosz, to be more Miłosz”: the
perpetual self-contradiction Witold Gombrowicz captures in his aphoristic
tongue-twister is nowhere more apparent than in Miłosz’s attitude towards
his inherited role as poet-prophet. “It makes me extremely uneasy to be
turned into a patriot-poet, a bard,” he insists in an interview with Aleksander
Fiut. But he was hardly immune to the seductions of his national tradition.
“Perhaps I was born so that the ‘Eternal Slaves’ might speak through my
lips,” the self-proclaimed “Promethean romantic” speculates in The Captive
Mind: the comment would not be out of place in the writings of any of his
great Romantic precursors, homegrown or foreign. His words would seem
to have been borne out when his poem “You Who Wronged” was selected
by workers for the Gdańsk monument to fallen strikers in 1981: “Do not
feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born,” the
prophet thunders (103). At the same time, though, The Captive Mind also
bears witness to Miłosz’s recognition that this bardic tradition led in part
to communism’s early success in recruiting Polish writers, including Miłosz
himself, to its cause. What would-be prophet would not feel tempted to
become a priest of the “New Faith” that heralded the fi nal coming of “the
Being which has taken the place of God in [the twentieth] century, i.e. his-
tory” in its fullest, Soviet Marxist incarnation?36
“A poet should not be a prisoner of national myths,” Miłosz insists; and
he took his own injunction quite seriously. He continued to enrage his Pol-
ish compatriots up to his death in 2004 and even beyond by challenging
their continued allegiance to Polish Romantic messianism in its nationalist
variant—in part by way of reminding them of Mickiewicz’s and his own
Lithuanian origins. “Send him back to Lithuania,” outraged right-wingers
cried as his family tried to make burial plans in the late summer of 2004.
The sentiments are still alive today. “Why did he have to go on and on
about Lithuania?” a teacher at a Krakow conference asked me recently. This
points, incidentally, to yet another paradox in Miłosz’s intercultural reputa-
tion: the self-proclaimed spokesman for what he dubbed the “Polish school
of poetry” stateside stubbornly resisted the cult of Polishness at home that
he himself had helped to export overseas, albeit in altered form.37
Mickiewicz has become a mere “patriotic prop (rekwizyt patriotyzmu)
for educating youth,” Miłosz charges in an untranslated line from the
“Treatise on Theology” (Traktat teologiczny, 2002). “Dedication”’s fi nal
lines suggest another possibility derived from Poland’s Romantic legacy.
The “millet” or “poppy seed” scattered for the dead comes from Mickie-
wicz’s poem “Forefathers’ Eve, Part II.” It thus takes us back to the Lithu-
anian folk rituals that Miłosz, like his great precursor, cherishes as part of
his own childhood legacy. Time and again in his writing, Miłosz evokes a
vanished multilingual, multiethnic Lithuania with its agrarian roots and
pagan superstitions as a counterweight to Polish messianic nationalism.
Mickiewicz’s homely image serves just such a purpose here. Miłosz tacitly
calls attention to a powerful counter-strain of the Polish Romantic tradi-
tion as a way of putting paid to the seductive myth of the poet-martyr that
has taken the life not just of the unnamed poet he addresses, but of count-
less other victims who fell beneath his spell. 38
This, at any rate, would explain the lines that have baffled some Ameri-
can readers; why should Miłosz, whose poems so lovingly resurrect the van-
ished dead of his and his country’s past, seek to keep them from returning
in “Dedication”’s closing?39 In the Polish, it is clearly one single spirit whom
he hopes to banish from his homeland, from the “us” that emerges in the
poem’s fi nal line. I take this to mean that he seeks to bar the unnamed poet
who embodies nationalist Romantic messianism from returning to haunt
the inheritors of Poland’s tragic legacy by way of the revised poetic tradition
he himself hopes to create: “That I wanted good poetry without know-
ing it, / That I discovered late, its salutary aim, / In this and only this I
fi nd salvation.” The poem invites, in other words, not emulation of Poland’s

poet-martyrs, but critical distance from them.
Witness and Distance

This is not to say that Miłosz abandons his Romantic roots in repu-
diating the martyr’s calling. Far from it. In an essay of the early seventies,
Barańczak observes that Herbert’s characteristic “intellectual skepticism,
irony, and critical perspective on tradition” mark him as a “dialectical
Romantic.” For all their differences, poetic and otherwise, Miłosz and
Herbert share what Miłosz calls a “rebellious fidelity,” made up in equal
parts of attraction and resistance, to their nation’s Romantic heritage. In
this both differ from Szymborska, who keeps a consistently bemused dis-
tance throughout her work from any vision, native or foreign, that aims to
transform mere poems into Poetry. Miłosz’s insistence on his Lithuanian-
ness serves not only to reproach his blinkered countrymen. It also becomes
a way to establish his credentials as the true descendant of the master, who
never set foot, after all, in Poland proper, and who conspicuously begins
his epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), with a hymn to the wrong homeland:
“Oh Lithuania! My fatherland! You are like health!” But this is not the
only function of Miłosz’s revisionary Romanticism. It also stems from a life
story that conspicuously fails to fit the Polish model in one key respect. Like
the autobiographical speaker in “Dedication,” Miłosz was not a martyr,
but a survivor, and a notably successful one at that: few martyrs end their
careers tenured at major American universities with parking spaces marked
“Nobel Laureate.” How does the survivor lay claim to the mantle reserved
for prophets slain in battle? The shape that survival takes in “Dedication”
helps to illuminate both the nature of Miłosz’s revised Romantic vocation
and his complex relation to poetic engagement.40
Poetry both redeems and damns, the speaker tells us: “What strength-
ened me for you was lethal.” His “salvation,” as the English translation has
it, has come by way of wanting “good poetry,” just as surely as his com-
patriot’s fate was sealed by his confusion of “hatred with lyrical beauty.”
And indeed, the goal of good poetry is precisely this, salvation. The English
translation of the Polish wybawczy, “salutary,” misleadingly points us in
the direction of wholesomeness or health—though such associations are not
out of place in a poem that relies so heavily on emblematic natural imag-
ery, be it clouds, trees, gulls, or poppy seeds, to counteract the destruction
unleashed by hatred’s inspiration. But the Polish adjective has higher ambi-
tions. It is linked to the root that generates Christ the Savior, “Zbawiciel,”
and its noun form, wybawienie, gives us an exact synonym not just for the
poem’s “salvation,” but for the entire volume’s title, Rescue, both of which
are ocalenie in Polish. Ocalenie serves as the verbal noun, moreover, for two
closely related verbs that are crucial to the poem’s sense: ocalić, to save or
rescue, and ocaleć, to survive. Forms of ocalić appear twice in the poem:
fi rst, in its opening line, “You, whom I could not save (ocalić)”; and once
again in the fourth stanza’s climactic question: “What is poetry which does
not save (ocala) / Nations or people?”
“To survive,” “ocaleć,” on the other hand, surfaces only obliquely,
through the verbal noun that does tacit double duty in the poem’s penulti-
mate stanza: “In this and only this I fi nd salvation (ocalenie),” the English
translation runs. The Polish original is more ambiguous, though, and not
just because of the fi nal word’s double meaning. It is an impersonal con-
struction whose subject is left unexpressed, and a more literal rendering
would force a choice between two options: “This and only this is survival,”
or “This and only this is salvation.” Which is it? And who will survive or
be saved? The English version, translated by Miłosz himself, suggests that
the poet alone has been redeemed. But the Polish requires no such decision,
and the personalized meaning serves as a guarantor of the phrase’s more
general sense. The individual poet’s survival, not his martyrdom, becomes
the mark of his chosenness, of the bardic calling that will lead him in turn
to rescue others.
The speaker survives, moreover, through a poetics derived, like Miłosz
himself, from rural Lithuanian roots, as mediated in this case by Poland’s
great Romantic. The “you” to be banished in the poem’s closing lines is
singular, the same ty to whom he speaks from the poem’s opening. For
the fi rst time, though, the poet-survivor speaks not for himself alone, but
for “us,” for the people to be saved by his “simple speech” from the evil
spirit who preys on his unhappy nation’s passions. And the book he uses
to banish this spirit is presented as the life-giving equivalent of the seeds
scattered to attract the beneficent dead disguised as birds whom Miłosz
borrows from Mickiewicz. “There is in me no wizardry of words,” the
speaker vows. But the exorcism he performs by way of his book—presum-
ably Rescue itself—rivals any of the magic spells cast in Mickiewicz’s pro-
grammatically folkloric Ballads and Romances (1822), or for that matter,
in “Forefathers’ Eve, Part II,” which takes its name from the Belorusian
folk rituals it ostensibly reenacts.
The speaker would be ashamed, he insists, of anything but “simple
speech.” And the poem’s unrhymed, end-stopped lines, its parallel construc-
tions and declarative sentences—“Here is a valley . . . Here is a broken
city”—seem to lend credence to his claim. For all its apparent directness,
though, his speech is anything but straightforward: how does one speak
in silence like a tree? We have seen “straight speaking” invoked as a social
obligation among the poets of the Polish “Generation of ’68.” Miłosz’s self-
consciously “simple” language has, if anything, still broader ambitions,
as the mute speech of his—deeply Romantic—clouds and trees suggests.
English poets “beginning with Wordsworth seized so consciously on [plain
English],” David Rosen remarks, “as an expression of their desires for both
vatic authority and social participation.”41 Certainly that is the function
of plain speaking in the powerful, programmatically straightforward “You
Who Wronged.” But the Mickiewiczean roots of “Dedication” suggest yet
another dimension of Miłosz’s poetic project.
He uses his Lithuanian past time and again, as I’ve mentioned, both to
reproach his countrymen for their nationalist myopia and to establish his
own link with Poland’s greatest Romantic. For Miłosz, though, the two
poets’ Lithuanian origins become the mark not just of a common provin-
ciality or even a shared variety of Polishness; they point to an even greater
calling. “In the moment before his [prophetic] transformation,” Lawrence
Lipking observes, the “poet has seemed to be living in a backwater, a
province or enclave that time has forgotten.” At the moment of initiation,
though, his obscure origins are transformed, Lipking continues, into “the
focal point of all civilization.” And this erstwhile provincial, the poet-initi-
ate, shares Miłosz’s larger ambition, which is not simply to restore an ideal,
rural past, or to redeem a single people or nation, but to transform human
nature as such, to turn mere “breadeaters into angels.”42
“What if one were to study the antagonisms, the collaborations, the rival-
ries of the two chief callings of the modern era—the social prophet-revolu-
tionary and the artist?” Miłosz’s question illuminates the distinctive brand
of rivalry at work in “Dedication.” The false prophets of “Art and Nation,”
as Miłosz sees them, inflamed nationalist passions and spurred their people
to a doomed revolt, for which they were rewarded with posthumous mar-
tyrdom, though “they built no bridge between past and future,” he charges
decades later. His phrase takes us back to “Dedication,” with its “immense
bridge” leading only into mist before a “broken city.” This shattered city
is, of course, Warsaw itself. But it is also akin to the composite collapsing
city—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London”—that marks the fall
of civilization itself in The Waste Land.43
“Even the warfare that threatens [the initiate’s] city becomes an emblem
of the great eternal war—a confl ict between secular and spiritual forces,”
Lipking remarks. The Uprising’s poet-martyrs were not secular, in Miłosz’s
view. They were idolators, high priests celebrating the cult of the nation at the
expense of its inhabitants, and of their own true mission. The genuine artist,
though, builds bridges between pasts—his own, his nation’s, and that of the
human race as such—and a future in which not simply one poet or people
alone will be redeemed. He seeks to change breadeaters into angels, to save
the species itself and restore its true homeland, the fallen earth. Hence the
blending in “Dedication” of rural Lithuania, in its Mickiewiczean redac-
tion, and ruined Warsaw: these two loci represent not simply Miłosz’s own
past, or Poland’s. They shape all of Rescue, with its bifurcated structure
divided between the idealized, pastoral Lithuania of the cycle “The World,”
and the embattled capital in which the sequence “Voices of Poor People”
and other key poems are set. In this larger context, their meanings extend
far beyond modern Poland. They symbolize the earthly variants of the true
Garden and the true City which are, Northrop Frye remarks, to be “brought
into complete metaphorical identification in the book explicitly called the
Apocalypse or Revelation”—or Rescue, or Redemption, or Salvation. 44
Miłosz, Mickiewicz, and Eliot—cross-cultural influences make for
strange bedfellows. The linkage points, of course, to the Romantic heritage
that Eliot himself worked so hard to resist by way of his pointedly “imper-
sonal” poetics. But it does more than this. The speaker of “Dedication”
views his shattered city only from a distance: “Here is a valley of shallow
Polish rivers . . . Here is a broken city.” Miłosz himself likewise knew the
disaster only from afar. He escaped from the city’s outskirts as the hostilities
began, and thus was not an “eyewitness to the Uprising,” he explains in an
interview with Renata Gorczyńska. His lack of “fi rst-hand experience,” he
confesses, necessitated the “distance” that colors his description of the event
in his novel The Seizure of Power (1952).45
This distanced description has a familiar ring to the reader of “Dedica-
tion”: “Below, at the heart of the fi re, the great river on which the city
stood was a pink metallic ribbon. Ruined bridges lay in it like shipwrecked
hulks.” Other passages from the novel also apparently derive from Miłosz’s
own experience. “To the southwest, the city ended abruptly,” the narrator
records. “There, large modern apartment buildings bordered on fields of
oats and potatoes. . . . A few tanks rolled slowly forward, churning up the
dry soil of the potato fields. Taacoo—taccoo—taccoo—the echo answered
their fi re.” These are surely the same bullet-riddled potato fields through
which Miłosz himself fled the Uprising, fields located in Warsaw’s outskirts,
and thus already removed, as he recalls, from the heart of the action.46
In Native Realm, this fl ight begins accidentally. Miłosz is strolling with
his wife and a friend as they discuss “something terribly important . . .
namely my new translation of an English poem.” I suspect he has in mind

The Waste Land, which, as he remarks a few pages earlier, “made some-
what weird reading as the glow from the burning ghetto illuminated the
city skyline.” Miłosz reads The Waste Land as the doomed Jewish Ghetto
Uprising of 1943 goes up in flames; and he turns to Eliot once more at the
outset of yet another ill-fated revolt. I have already cited Miłosz on the out-
come of the seemingly innocent walk that leaves him clutching Eliot under
gunfi re. But it is worth noting the precise moment at which this incident
occurs. It coincides with eruption of hostilities in the city’s outskirts, and
Miłosz’s split-second decision to take fl ight. “In spite of this,” he continues,
“I never let go of my book—fi rst of all out of respect for social owner-
ship, since the book bore a call number of the University Library; secondly
I needed it (although I could stop needing it). Its title: The Collected Poems
of T. S. Eliot, in the Faber & Faber edition.”47
Miłosz clings to Eliot’s poems while escaping the devastation that claimed
a quarter-million lives and left his nation’s capital in rubble as it capitulated
fi rst to the Nazis and then to the Soviet forces. I have mentioned his desire
for poetic distance from Polish Romantic nationalism in its virulent war-
time variant. But clearly a more literal, far more urgent kind of distance is
at stake in this passage. So why does he call our attention so pointedly to
the book “[he] needed” just at a time when all reading would seem to be
beside the point? This need extends, I suspect, beyond a corrective “imper-
sonal poetics” and encompasses the life behind the scenes, both Miłosz’s
and Eliot’s. The fleeing poet requires a counterbalance to the myth of the
poet-martyr, the myth on which he has literally turned his back in leaving
stricken Warsaw. Like Eliot before him, Miłosz chooses to keep his dis-
tance from the conflagration that would claim the lives of so many of his
contemporaries in the hopes of living to give voice to a generation’s and a
culture’s devastation.
Of course this comparison can only be taken so far. Miłosz’s reputation
in the West as exemplary poet-witness was hard-earned: the Polish poet
experienced loss and destruction on a scale that Eliot could scarcely have
imagined. But Miłosz is also an escape artist. And Native Realm, like so
much of his work, is the story of one close call, one miraculous near-miss
after another. It is also the story of the many choices, made often at great
cost, that enabled him to keep writing what he saw not just as his own
history, but the history of the modern age as embodied in one survivor’s
extraordinary life.
Miłosz may have needed the Anglo-American Eliot to help him gain dis-
tance on the Uprising in more ways than one. But an acknowledged bard
closer to home had faced a similar dilemma over a century earlier. The poet
Miłosz evokes in “Dedication”’s fi nal lines also chose to sit out the trau-
matic event that had scarred a previous generation of Polish rebels. Mick-
iewicz was convinced that the Poles’ 1830–31 insurrection against their
Russian overlords could bear only “calamitous consequences.” Still, as the
“national poet he considered it his duty to join the movement,” his friend S.
Sobolevsky recalled.48 Torn between these confl icting emotions, Mickiewicz
traveled from his self-chosen exile in Rome not to Warsaw, but fi rst to Paris
and then to Dresden. From Dresden he made it as far as the Prussian-ruled
province of Poznań—but he apparently never crossed the Prussian-Russian
border to reach the embattled capital itself. It would be reading too much
into Miłosz’s Mickiewiczean millet to see this complex history at work in
“Dedication” proper. Through this allusion, though, Miłosz summons up
not just a single poem, but an entire Romantic tradition whose key works—
Pan Tadeusz, Forefathers’ Eve, Part IV, The Books of the Polish Nation
and Polish Pilgrimage—were written far from the center of action in the
years following a disastrous uprising in which their creator had notably
failed to take part.
In a recent essay, the poet Geoffrey Hill takes Miłosz to task for the per-
verse snobbery he sees in Captive Mind’s call for a poetry based on the kind
of “naked experience” Miłosz himself underwent in wartime Poland as he
watched enemy bullets setting cobblestones on edge. Miłosz, Hill charges,
espouses an “elitism of the man-of-the-moment,” which “excludes from aes-
thetic regeneration those works unbaptised by an arbitrary experience of
‘brutal, naked reality.’” There’s some truth to this. Miłosz did not hesitate
upon occasion to flaunt his hard-won credentials as poetic witness to history
before his daunted Anglo-American admirers. But this image does not sit
easily with the more complex notions of witness that underlie Miłosz’s self-
presentation elsewhere. I have mentioned the anthology of protest poetry
Miłosz published in the early thirties, to his later chagrin. He gives a telling
explanation in Native Realm for the anthology’s emergence: he compiled
it, he writes, “to redeem (okupić) my abstention from a violent workers’
struggle with the police” (my italics). Revolt, abstention, salvation by way
of poetry: the psychological dynamic at work here is familiar from “Dedi-
cation.” And the Polish okupić adds yet another synonym to the verbs of
rescue and redemption that shape both “Dedication” and the volume it pref-
aces or concludes in its various redactions.49
How do we reconcile the artist of the bullet-ridden streets with the poet
who resists his nation’s tradition of failed revolts by sitting out his own gen-
eration’s moment of crisis? How does the poet-witness make peace with his
refusal, on at least this occasion, to base his testimony upon the kind of fi rst-
hand experience he stresses in The Captive Mind and elsewhere? And what
is the relation between this witness and the writer who claims, just a few
years after the episode he describes in Captive Mind, that “poetry is ‘recol-
lection in tranquillity’ (przypominanie sobie w stanie spokoju) and there’s
an end to it”?50 In this chapter, I have emphasized Miłosz’s attachment to
Whitman and Eliot—though other anglophone poets, notably Blake, belong
in any fuller discussion of his Anglo-American affi nities and tastes. But it is
peculiarly fitting to return here to an influence I mentioned in my introduc-
tion, one that is virtually invisible to those who know Miłosz only in Eng-
lish. This is of course William Wordsworth, whom he quotes in the passage
above in a 1949 letter to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, at the time, that is, when he
was serving as the cultural attaché at the Washington embassy of the newly
formed People’s Poland. Through the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” the Pol-
ish poet working for a self-proclaimed revolutionary state seeks to disengage
himself from the cause he had earlier embraced by way of a fellow renegade,
an English poet in retreat from another radical upheaval some 150 years
earlier. “And there’s an end to it,” Miłosz insists.
But the matter is rather less straightforward. “Without that detachment,
that disinterestedness, you’ve got, and will get, nothing.” Miłosz tells Iwasz-
kiewicz. What he derives, though, from his quasi-Wordsworthian detach-
ment are not the introspective lyric musings one might expect. Not long
after this letter was written, Miłosz’s psychic retreat yielded one of the most
potent and influential oppositional poems in the Polish tradition, “You Who
Wronged,” which bears the time and place of its composition in both its
Polish and English versions, “Washington, D. C., 1950” (103; 2:128). The
peculiar mixture of complicity, distance, and witness that produces this
poem takes us to the heart of the paradoxes that shape his distinctive brand
of poetic testimony.
The Washington-based Miłosz writes at a great physical remove from the
“simple man” he defends in the poem—if we take that person to be a Pole in
Poland, as Poles have often done (the poem itself does not specify). He fi nds
himself, however, in close physical proximity to his foes, to the emissaries of
the tyrant whom the poet addressed in the familiar, singular “ty” through-
out the poem—if we see this poem, reasonably enough, as being inspired by
the newly installed People’s State in its postwar Stalinist incarnation. “Your
deeds and words will be recorded” (Spisane będą czyny i rozmowy), the
prophet warns. The disaffected insider at the Polish People’s Embassy would
have been privy to just such ominous conversations and acts. Indeed, Miłosz
himself might easily be counted among those who “bowed down before you
. . . Glad to have survived (przeżyli) another day”—since the government

employee who penned these lines surely kept his subversive sentiments to
himself while on the job whose privileges he enjoyed.
Among these privileges was the intensive study of Anglo-American poetry
that Miłosz used to distance himself psychically both from an increasingly
repugnant state and from the Polish Romantic nationalism he mistrusted.
His translations from the period include, among many other things, excerpts
from “Song of Myself” and Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans,” as well
as a number of African-American spirituals and laments. Clearly he was
drawn to forms of poetic witness far removed from his own tradition. His
translation of Eliot’s “Gerontion,” which dates from about the same time,
likewise hints at a continued interest in forms of poetic distance derived
from foreign sources. (He had, we recall, translated “Tintern Abbey” just a
few years earlier.)51
This ambiguous combination of distance and proximity ended up serv-
ing his fellow Poles very well. Not only was “You Who Wronged” chosen
to commemorate Gdańsk’s fallen workers in 1981. It also helped to shape a
powerful postwar tradition, as Stanisław Barańczak notes in his preface to
The Poet Remembers: An Anthology of the Poetry of Witness and Opposi-
tion 1944–1984 (1984), a collection of Polish poems that appeared in Lon-
don at the height of martial law. (It could not be published in Poland for
obvious reasons.) Its very title derives from “You Who Wronged,” a poem
written, as Barańczak notes, “in the darkest moment of the Stalinist night
and recalled at the height of Solidarity’s hopes.” “It has been on all our lips
in recent years,” he remarks. “‘Your deeds and words will be recorded.’
How often we’ve repeated that sentence, how often it has sustained poets’
faith in the purpose of writing.” The unacknowledged legislator’s dream
indeed. The poet as long-distance witness would seem to have amply ful-
filled the demands that Eastern European history places upon its would-be
bards, whose songs should “linger on many lips,” and speak “of subjects of
interest to all the citizens.” Wordsworthian retreat—undertaken in admit-
tedly singular circumstances—would seem to have produced its opposite
here, truly effective poetic engagement. 52
But are these really such opposites? Barańczak’s introduction suggests
otherwise. He rejects the “poetics of extremity” that American poets have
often seen at work in his compatriots’ writing, and dismisses the terms
“political poetry,” “engaged poetry,” or “poetry of intervention” that pep-
per so many Anglo-American discussions of the Eastern Europeans. “’To
record the deeds and words,’ to bear witness to one’s times—this would
seem straightforward enough,” Barańczak comments. His introduction,
though, is meant to demonstrate otherwise. “I’ll doubtless be criticized,”

he notes, “for seeing antitotalitarian protest at work in poets who appear
to be more interested in their own imagination than in the objective social
world.” But “pure poetry,” he concludes, “has never really existed,” since
lyric poetry generally consists of an ongoing negotiation between two muta-
ble, mutually defi ning terms, “public” and “private.” The argument with
oneself is poetry, Yeats famously remarked, while the argument with others
is mere rhetoric. For Barańczak, these two arguments cannot be kept apart.
The poet’s public voice is strengthened by the intensity of the individual
viewpoint that informs it, while the privacy that fosters this viewpoint is
challenged by the need to reach an audience, however large or small it might
be. “To bear witness, to register protest at the age’s lunacy or injustice,”
the lyric poet need only follow his or her chosen genre’s own productively
fraught proclivities, as Barańczak sees it.53
The tensions between private and public voices seems to be kept strictly
behind the scenes in the case of “You Who Wronged.” Miłosz the public
servant performs his bureaucratic duties for a totalitarian state by day while
insisting in personal letters on the retreat and tranquility he needs in order
to sustain the private Miłosz, the writer. This second Miłosz produces a
remarkably effective piece of public rhetoric in which the individual poet
working for a particular state is replaced by the Poet-Prophet, the Poet-
Martyr—“You can kill one [poet], but another will be born”—who defies
the nameless Tyrant who wronged the Simple Man. But are these divisions
really so airtight? “The words are written down, the deeds, the date,” the
poet warns in the English version. Its translator, Richard Lourie, has chosen
to retain as much of the original’s rhyme scheme as possible, and the last
phrase is included exclusively for the sake of its rhyme-word, “weight”—
there is no equivalent in Polish. There is a date to be found, though, in
virtually every edition of the poem I have consulted, including the version in
Barańczak’s anthology. This is the date I mentioned earlier, the year which
Miłosz himself scrupulously records alongside the place of the poem’s com-
position beneath its fi nal line.
This is Miłosz both keeping himself honest and alerting the reader to the
compromising, “impure” situation that gave birth to his stirring poetic pro-
test. The phrase “Washington, D.C., 1950” beneath a Polish poem of witness
reads very differently, even to American eyes, than the “Warsaw, 1945” he
inscribes beneath “Dedication.” “The poet remembers,” Miłosz announces
in “You Who Wronged,” and the dictator’s words and actions are not the
only thing he keeps before his reader’s eyes, and his own. Does he produce
this testament to poetic witness in spite of its complex autobiographical
origins or because of them? My guess would be the latter. I have mentioned

in my introduction Miłosz’s remark, in The Captive Mind, on the subversive
potentials “Tintern Abbey” presents to the totalitarian state. The call for
lyric privacy Miłosz articulates by way of Wordsworth is no less subversive
in the face of the enforced collectivization Socialist Realism imposes on its
poet-subordinates. Yet it was precisely the temptation to lend his voice to
the collective hymn of history in the making that drew him to state service
to begin with, he suggests in The Captive Mind. This nexus of irreconcilable
tensions seems to have provided Miłosz with the fuel he required to produce
his poetic challenge to tyranny in “You Who Wronged.”
Effective poetic witness grows in this instance from an unstable mixture of
mediation and immediacy, distance and proximity, complicity and outrage.
Another confl icted poet-witness, Seamus Heaney, locates a similar mixture
in the poet from whom Miłosz himself drew unexpected inspiration in the
early postwar years. The “essential” Wordsworth, Heaney writes, is torn
between a “double necessity,” “the double requirement of surrender and
vigilance”: “I am thinking of contradictory allegiances which his work dis-
plays to the numinous and to the matter-of-fact, his conflicting awareness of
a necessity to attend to ‘the calm that nature breathes’ and a responsibility
to confront the grievous facts of ‘what man has made of man,’ his double
bind between politics and transcendence, morality and mysticism, suffering
and song.”54 Is this the lesson Miłosz drew from Wordsworth? Or did Word-
worth simply reinforce an understanding that both Miłosz’s own history
and that of his nation had thrust upon him long since?
One passage in Native Realm lends credence to this second possibility.
“I was stretched . . . between two poles,” Miłosz writes of his life in inter-
war Poland, “[between] the contemplation of a motionless point and the
command to participate actively in history.” “I did not manage to bring
these extremes into a unity,” he confesses, “but I did not want to give either
of them up.”55 The passage’s opening will sound familiar to admirers of
Heaney. It appears, unattributed, in “Away from It All,” from Station Island
(1985), whose central stanzas read as follows:
. . . It was twilight, twilight, twilight
as the questions hopped and rotted.
It was oarsmen’s backs and oars
hauled against and lifting.
And more power to us, my friend,
hard at it over the dregs,

laying in in earnest
as the sea darkens
and whitens and darkens

and quotations start to rise
like rehearsed alibis:

I was stretched between contemplation
of a motionless point
and the command to participate
actively in history.
‘Actively? What do you mean?’

The light at the rim of the sea
is rendered down to a fi ne
graduation, somewhere between
balance and inanition. . . . 56
Participation versus contemplation, politics versus transcendence, suffer-

ing versus song: it is a dilemma that Heaney himself knows all too well,
coming as he does from a troubled land with its own rich tradition of poet-
rebels and martyred bards. Even Poland’s long history of partitions and
poets-in-exile would be familiar territory to a Northern Irish poet long since
resident in the less turbulent southern Republic. In The Government of the
Tongue (1989), Heaney speaks modestly of the attraction that “poets from
Eastern bloc countries” hold for “a reader whose formative experience has
been largely Irish.” And like many other anglophone poets I’ve cited, he
reveres the great Eastern Europeans whose “tragic destiny” was to feel the
“‘call to witness’ more extremely than most others.”57 Yet the Miłosz who
appears in his own poem is not the poet in extremis, the witness to his-
tory. Heaney evokes instead a typically Miłoszian moment of self-doubt and
self-division, and then subjects this moment to further scrutiny. Does the
speaker use Miłosz’s words merely as a “rehearsed alibi,” an excuse for his
own inaction? And what shape should action take anyway? “Actively? What
do you mean?” his friend inquires.
The quoted phrase does not conclude the poem or end the debate. It enters
into the multiple vacillations—the hopping questions, the hauling oars,
the waves shifting from light to darkness—that give the poem its shape.
American poets can take no direct lessons from their Polish master, Vendler
warns. But perhaps they can learn from a master of indirection, who learned
to bear witness only by fi nding the proper distance, a distance he found
partly through his immersion in the Americans.
Chapter Title: Afterword: Martyrs, Survivors, and Success Stories, or the Postcommunist
Prophet

Afterword: Martyrs, Survivors, and Success
Stories, or the Postcommunist Prophet
I am ready for death.

—Osip Mandelstam, quoted by Anna Akhmatova,
“Osip Mandelstam” (1964)
Do not want to die for us,

do not want to live for us:
live with us.

—Ryszard Krynicki, “Do Not Want to Die for Us”
My life story [is] the triumph of foolish Jan over his wiser brothers.
—Czesław Miłosz, The Year of the Hunter
(Rok myśliwego, 1990)
In the summer of 2002, I conducted a series of interviews with Miłosz

in preparation for a biography I was just then beginning. Miłosz’s attitude
towards the project was, perhaps inevitably, mixed. He had given me his
blessing, but was concerned nonetheless with the shape his life would take
in another’s hands. Sometimes this concern was expressed comically. “I have
to convince you not to write the biography!” he exclaimed in one phone
266
Afterword 267
conversation. “But it’s too late!” I said. “I’ve already spent the advance.”
(This was not entirely true, but I was not about to remove that particular
line from my vita.) “Then you must make it a comedy,” he responded. “It’s
the life of Forrest Gump.” I’d handed him just the set-up he’d been looking
for, and he roared at his own joke.1
At other times his worries took a darker turn. He knew I had written a
book on Mandelstam, and he returned obsessively to the Russian poet in
our conversations. “There’s not enough about Stalin in your book,” he com-
plained. He meant, as it turned out, that I hadn’t emphasized Mandelstam’s
confl icted loyalties, his waverings and vacillations. I’d overlooked, he felt,
the poet’s profoundly mixed feelings towards the leader who would give him
the martyr’s death he both courted and feared, the dictator whom he reviled
in the “Stalin Epigram” (1933) and glorified in the “Stalin Ode” (1937). I
pointed out the parts of my book that dealt with precisely these issues, and
he ceded the point—for the moment. But my connection with Mandelstam
led him back to the topic time and time again in our talks. 2
Why should Miłosz have been so preoccupied with Mandelstam’s post-
humous reception as he neared the end of his own long, successful career?
“Who is a poet?” Thomas Mann asks, and he answers his own question:
“He whose life is symbolic.” I have spoken of the prestige with which anglo-
phone writers and readers have endowed Eastern Europe’s poet-bards in
recent decades. This points to yet another way in which the willfully con-
text-free lyric poem castigated by modern critics shifts its meanings accord-
ing to its setting: en route to its anglophone audience any lyric from Russia,
Poland, Slovakia, or Slovenia becomes willy-nilly a “Poem from Eastern
Europe,” imbued with all the “world-historical seriousness” that poets in
less tumultuous regions crave. This is not entirely a matter of misreading.
The New Critics famously sought to erase all “biographical heresies” from
considerations of the poet’s art. They would have found few allies among
the poets I’ve discussed in these pages, most of whom were avid “biographi-
cal heretics” of one stripe or another who labored to weave self and work
together into the satisfyingly symbolic whole that Lawrence Lipking calls
“the life of the poet.” This symbolic life becomes in turn an analogue for
the life of the people, the nation, even the species as such. One distinction
between the poets of modern Russia and Poland and their Western counter-
parts, I’ve argued, is the seriousness with which their compatriots, be they
friends or foes, take these far-reaching ambitions. Miłosz’s concern with the
martyred Mandelstam is a case in point.3
Miłosz’s interest in Mandelstam and Stalin predated our conversations.
In 1996, he published a essay entitled “Commentary on Osip Mandelstam’s
268 Afterword
‘Stalin Ode’” in the journal Na Głos. The piece had been inspired, he notes,
by the American Slavist Gregory Freidin’s revisionary interpretation of the
“Stalin Ode” as a sincere, sophisticated panegyric, and not as the last-ditch,
failed lifesaving operation Nadezhda Mandelstam describes in her memoirs.
An abridged version of Miłosz’s essay appeared shortly afterwards in the
weekend edition of one of Poland’s two chief newspapers, Gazeta wyborcza,
with a new title chosen by the editors, not by Miłosz himself, as he later
protested. “Knowing Neither Shame Nor Measure” ran the controversial
headline: both the title and the piece it prefaced sparked a fi restorm in the
Polish press.4
I do not exagerrate. It is difficult enough for Western readers to imagine
one famous poet’s account of another, long dead, writer’s poetic politics
occupying a full page in the front section of a major paper. That this essay
would continue to stir controversy not just in the pages of Gazeta wyborcza,
but in Poland’s other major daily, Rzeczpospolita, for months to come defies
comprehension. Miłosz‘s own interest in a great Eastern European precur-
sor is not so surprising. Why, though, should the rest of his countrymen
care? And care they did. Journalists and politicians, specialists and common
readers alike entered into what Rzeczpospolita called the “Polemic with
Miłosz.” The implications of this debate extended far beyond its ostensible
subject to encompass two identities, the poet’s and his nation’s. How was a
newly freed Poland to see itself? Had it been tainted by long contact with its
communist overlords? Or had the “Christ of Nations” survived unscathed?
As usual this conflict involved the country’s bards: “Milosz versus Herbert”
ran the headline splashed in bold letters across the cover of a 1995 issue
of the weekly Polityka. I cannot enter into all the details of this ongoing
battle, in which Herbert plays the long-suffering patriot to Milosz’s more
dubious success story with the politically checkered past. The polemic about
Mandelstam was a subplot in this far larger argument, though; hence the
intensity of the reactions it provoked.5
Two pieces in this particular debate took their titles directly from Miłosz’s
own “You Who Wronged.” “The Poet Doesn’t Remember,” the scholar
Adam Pomorski charged in Rzeczpospolita’s weekend edition for December
28–29; “The Poet Remembers and Understands More than the Russianist,”
the critic Ryszard Matuszewski retorted in the same venue two weeks later.6
Which is it? And what does the poet recall or forget? I won’t enter into the
questions of Russian and Polish history and cultural politics that Miłosz
addresses in his essay, though these provoked many of the arguments that
followed. Miłosz himself claims, in a response entitled “Why I wrote ‘The
Commentary on Mandelstam’s ‘Stalin Ode,’” that he took this particular
Afterword 269
example merely to indicate “what the state had meant to Russian poets”
in modern history. But I suspect that his motivations are fi nally both more
general and more personal. Miłosz applauds Freidin’s efforts to replace the
myth of Mandelstam the quasi-Christian martyr “who suffers for the sins of
others” with a more complex understanding both of the poet’s own political
sympathies and of a Stalinist Russia in which “terror and ideological fervor
went hand-in-hand” even for outcasts like Mandelstam. The editors took
the title for the offending piece, though, from a paragraph in which Miłosz
registers his differences with Freidin. Polish readers will not share Freidin’s
“high opinion of the ‘Ode,’” Miłosz claims, since for them it can only be
“a byzantine monstrosity, knowing neither shame nor measure in its flat-
tery.” Miłosz is careful to qualify his remark by describing the harrowing
circumstances in which the poem was written: Mandelstam’s sin, such as it
was, lay simply in wanting to survive, he reminds us. Nevertheless, he cut
the offending sentence from the version of the essay that appeared in book
form a few years later.7
The piece’s inflammatory opening, however, remains intact in all ver-
sions. “The Polish (and not just Polish) legend of Mandelstam as a martyr
for spiritual freedom does not entirely answer the facts,” Miłosz writes. Fair
enough. Scholars such as Freidin and Mikhail Gasparov have labored in
recent years to recuperate the complexities and contradictions of the life as
lived, the work as written, from the obscuring myth of heroic martyrdom.
“It’s rather like fi nding a pagan among the Christian martyrs in ancient
Rome, an unbeliever accused of disloyalty to Caesar by malicious rivals,”
Miłosz continues. Here he surely overshoots the mark, just as he does in
dismissing the fatal “Epigram” as mere “satiric rhymes.” Miłosz’s imag-
ery, though, with its intertwining of loyalty, politics, empire, and faith, will
sound familiar to any reader of The Captive Mind. Indeed Miłosz himself
makes the connection explicit in speaking of the “special social chemistry”
created by the twentieth century’s dictatorships: “One can [also] fi nd exam-
ples of yielding to the communist hypnosis on a smaller scale in Poland,
despite the argument that there were no Polish ‘captive minds.’” Whose
argument is this? And what does it have to do with Mandelstam?8
Adam Pomorski takes up these questions in “The Poet Doesn’t Remem-
ber.” He dismisses much of Miłosz’s discussion as a mere “continuation of
his ongoing quarrel with Gustaw Herling-Grudziński,” and concludes that
“attaching Mandelstam’s tragedy to the argument about The Captive Mind
is unseemly.” Pomorski refers to the earlier, far more ferocious battle that
followed the initial publication of The Captive Mind in Paris in 1953. The
book outraged both supporters of People’s Poland and its opponents, most
270 Afterword
notably the writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who had gone into Western
European exile following the war. All Miłosz’s elaborate metaphors and
subtle explanations served only to justify his own capitulation to Poland’s
communist rulers, Herling-Grudziński claimed. The true motivations for
such behavior were far simpler, he argued, and consisted only of “fear and
opportunism.” It was clear which of the two had been the deciding factor
for Miłosz himself in Herling-Grudziński’s view. Similar charges followed
Miłosz throughout his long life. He was merely “Moscow’s dancing bear,”
a younger poet charged in one particularly vicious attack published shortly
before Miłosz’s death.9
It would be too easy to read Miłosz’s “Commentary” as an unfortu-
nate bit of schadenfreude, an uncharacteristically heavy-handed attempt
to cut a poet-hero down to size. It was not simply Miłosz—or Szymborska,
or Woroszylski, or Kołakowski, or Borowski, or so many other postwar
artists and intellectuals—who fell under Soviet communism’s spell at one
point or another, Miłosz tacitly reminds his Polish audience. Even Man-
delstam, the poet-martyr par excellence, turns out to have feet of clay. He
too had been seduced not just by Marxism’s utopian visions, but by their
self-proclaimed inheritor and embodiment, Joseph Stalin. He too had been
something of a captive mind, Miłosz insinuates. “In truth, [Mandelstam]
always wanted to be a Bolshevik, it just didn’t work out” (my italics), he
claims in one of the essay’s most contested sentences, and he takes his evi-
dence from Mandelstam’s late “Stanzas” (1935): “A damned seam, a silly
whim / Has split us. Understand, / I must live on, breathing and bolsheviz-
ing / Growing better before death / So as to stay and play with the people
once again” (my italics).10
Miłosz far overstates his case. As he himself knew full well, a single line
taken from a single poem, however striking, does not a lifetime make. Indeed,
much of his essay is directed against the canonical posthumous reduction of
Mandelstam’s life to just such a static, unilateral affair. “A man who dies at
the age of thirty-five,” Walter Benjamin remarks, “is at every point of his life
a man who dies at the age of thirty-five”—or at least so he will “appear to
remembrance,” since, as Benjamin adds, “the statement that makes no sense
for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life.” And yet Mandel-
stam’s “remembered life”—the life of the poet-martyr who dies at the age of
forty-six in the gulag—is exactly what Miłosz sought to redress.11
Mandelstam may have been ready for death—but he also wanted to live,
and the months before his fi nal arrest demonstrate “that human greatness
and folly are close neighbors,” Miłosz comments. The Russian poet did not
know that his return to Moscow from exile was only a brief reprieve: “For
Afterword 271
a few months, it looked as though he’d be allowed to exist and publish.”

He also found time for a fi nal romance, a love affair with a fervent young
stalinistka named Liliia Popova. “And what of it?” Miłosz remarks. “We all
know he was not the fi rst master (mistrz) to be amorously inclined.” More-
over, Mandelstam wrote several more poems in praise of the Great Leader,
perhaps under Popova’s influence, before being sent to the transit camp that
would mark the human being’s end and the beginning of the legend.12
In the last of the “polemics with Miłosz,” a piece entitled “Poet and
Genius,” the Russian poet Anatoly Naiman inadvertently demonstrates the
tenacity of the myth that Miłosz seeks to debunk. “Mandelstam did not
‘seek salvation’ (nie ‘szukał ocalenia’)” in writing the “Stalin Ode,” he insists,
since his path had been chosen for him long since. Mandelstam experienced
“that fate and that death,” Naiman concludes, “not because he wrote poems
for or against, and not because it was a period of mass murders, but because
as a seventeen-year-old boy, he began to write poetry”: “You may write your
poems in a café in Petersburg, Warsaw, or Paris, but sooner or later poetry
guides its favorites to the stony road leading from kind Rome, gentle Flor-
ence, vernal Moscow to wild Sarmatia, harsh Ravenna, to Kolyma.” There
is that pesky word again, ocalenie, “salvation” (or “rescue,” or “survival”).
True poets, like Mandelstam—and unlike Miłosz?—do not dream of it,
since true poets know that all roads lead to Golgotha in the end.13
“Regardless of the length of life, a résumé is best kept short,” Szymborska
notes in “Writing a Résumé.” Miłosz and Mandelstam come from tradi-
tions in which the exemplary poet’s life is “best kept short,” kept in inverse
proportion, that is, to the posthumous shadow it casts. The poet’s quest
for freedom—his own, his nation’s, or that of oppressed peoples every-
where—is invariably lopped off, ideally by one vengeful state or another.
When Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) had the misfortune to die in a singu-
larly un-bardlike duel provoked by his foolish wife’s high society fl irtations,
his self-designated successor Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) taught his com-
patriots to read his precursor’s unseemly fate as a tacit form of christological
martyrdom at the hands of a brutal state. “The executioners of Freedom,
Genius, and Glory” who “stand around the throne” have replaced the poet’s
laurels with a “crown of thorns,” he thunders in “The Poet’s Death” (1837).
The unpublished lyric not only reached a wide, receptive audience in hand-
circulated form. It also helped to secure its young author’s reputation as a
worthy heir to the martyrological tradition that he himself had helped to
identify—or initiate. Through his poem, moreover, he also—inadvertently,
one assumes—provided future readers with a template for understanding
his own dueling death four years later in the Caucasian resort of Piatigorsk.
272 Afterword
This death was not simply the self-provoked outcome of a small-town soci-
ety scandal: it was also the inevitable fate awaiting any “slave to honor” in
a despotic state.14
Adam Mickiewicz lived far longer than his Russian coevals—he died at
the relatively advanced age of fi fty-seven. Still he overcame the misfortune
of having missed the Uprising of 1830–31 by dedicating himself full-time in
his fi nal decades to freedom fighting in his various capacities as “a teacher,
a prophet, a publicist, and an organizer.” He abandoned poetry for action,
and bequeathed his biography as “pilgrim, leader, and fighter” to genera-
tions yet to come, Miłosz notes. His quixotic death was no less exemplary.
Mickiewicz died, like his beloved Byron, in the cause to which he had dedi-
cated his life. He contracted typhus in Istanbul while forming a Jewish legion
to fight against the Russian enemy in the Crimean War. His fellow poet and
rival Juliusz Słowacki (1809–49) perished only slightly less gloriously. He
died of tuberculosis not long after rushing to the Prussian-occupied part of
Poland upon hearing of what proved to be an abortive revolution. In 1927,
both he and Mickiewicz were disinterred from their resting places in Paris
and brought back to Poland, where, as Tadeusz Komendant comments, “the
necrophiliac Poles placed their earthly remains in a single crypt at Wawel
Castle, where their spirits will squabble throughout eternity.”15
What becomes in such traditions of the poet who is not only remark-
ably long-lived—Miłosz died at the age of ninety-three in 2004—but fi nds
his fi nal decades crowned with prizes and world renown? Modern poetry,
Jean-Paul Sartre writes, “is the case of the loser winning. And the genuine
poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win.”
Old legends die hard—or at least much harder than the short-lived poets
they glorify. They are still more tenacious in cultures that respect poets
enough to kill them, as Mandelstam remarks, or at least to send them to
their deaths on one doomed barricade or another. In his famous essay,
Jakobson condemns the postrevolutionary “generation that squandered its
poets.” Yet he himself recognizes—how could he miss it?—the role that
Russia’s sui generis Romantic tradition played in the creation and com-
memoration of these premature poetic casualties: “Ryleev was executed
when he was thirty-one, Batjushkov went mad when he was thirty. Ven-
evitinov died at the age of twenty-two, Delvig at thirty-two. Griboedev
was killed when he was thirty-four, Pushkin when he was thirty-seven,
Lermontov when he was twenty-six.” One cannot escape, Jakobson con-
cludes, “an oppressive sense of an evil destiny” affl icting Russia’s poets.
But this destiny was at least partly self-perpetuating. Mayakovsky, Jako-
bson notes, saw the battle with daily life that helped to precipitate his
Afterword 273
suicide as the metaphorical equivalent of Pushkin’s and Lermontov’s more

literal, and no less deadly, duels.16
“Every time that he was accepted somewhere, I was cast out,” Akhma-
tova remarks of her meeting with Frost in 1963. “When he was rewarded,
I was disgraced. But the outcome is the same: we’re both candidates for the
Nobel Prize. Now that’s food for philosophical reflections,” she concludes.
It is indeed. Even oppressed poets dream of success. Still, those who—by
fate, or chance, or a dictator’s whim—are granted long lives may still sus-
tain their nation’s martyrological traditions by exchanging, willy-nilly, the
road to Golgotha for the more protracted Via Dolorosa of the poet-witness.
Even success can turn to disaster under the right—that is to say, wrong—
circumstances. Pasternak’s personal life and poetic career were very nearly
shattered by his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1958, which he chose to decline
for political reasons. Even so, the award was declared “an act of anti-Soviet
political provocation” in the Soviet press, and he was expelled from the
Soviet Writers’ Union shortly thereafter.17
“No, without the hangman and the scaffold / The poet can’t exist on earth,”
Akhmatova writes in one version of her poem “Dante” (1936). Her comment
is only half-ironic at best—or so a later observation on her protégé Joseph
Brodsky’s fate suggests. When the future Nobel Laureate was exiled to the
Soviet Far East in 1964 for the crime of “parasitism,” she exclaimed, “What a
biography they’re making for our Ginger. As if he’d gone out and hired some-
one to do it.” A strange form of PR indeed—the Soviet State as inadvertent
poetic press agent—and a very successful one, to judge by the furor surround-
ing Brodsky’s de facto expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972.18
This is not to diminish the very real suffering and persecution experienced
by Akhmatova, Brodsky, Pasternak, and so many of their fellow writers.
Akhmatova’s lines point, though, to the perversely symbiotic relationship I
have explored in various forms throughout this book, the bond that exists
between the oppressive state and the persecuted poet: “But he is a mas-
ter?” Stalin asks the flabbergasted Pasternak in the famous phone call about
Mandelstam. This bond is complicated, as Miłosz notes repeatedly, by the
messianic Romanticism that gave birth to Marxist philosophy and modern
poetry alike: “After all, Marx’s philosophy took shape in the Age of Rap-
tures,” he remarks in The Witness of Poetry. The dream of the poet-prophet
to overstep the limits of her or his small self and speak for the nation en
masse may be realized, at least potentially, not just through resistance to
one oppressive regime or another. It may also be achieved, again poten-
tially, through collaboration with a state that has supplanted the messianic
poet and his function, that claims, in other words, to have overthrown all
274 Afterword
past oppressors in the name of the people and their imminent liberation.
Miłosz himself was drawn at different points to Romantic messianism in
both its Marxist and its nationalist poetic modes. And true poetry remains
in essence prophetic for Miłosz throughout his long career: it could scarcely
be otherwise for a writer who claims Mickiewicz, Blake, and Whitman as
his poetic ancestors. But it is the ways in which his life fails to fit either
model completely that enables him to identify so astutely the dangers and
the seductions of both. 19
Brodsky died at the relatively young age of fi fty-five after a life that
seemed in many ways tailor-made for the prophetic model, as Akhmatova
had foreseen. Still it was Brodsky who came up with a compelling template
for the far longer and more controversial life of his friend and fellow exile.
At the 1978 presentation of the Neustadt Prize, Brodsky spoke, in a much-
quoted phrase, of the Polish author’s “severe and relentless mind” for which
the only parallel to be found “is that of the biblical characters—most likely
Job.” Miłosz was in fact translating the Book of Job from Hebrew to Pol-
ish at the time, and his activities may have suggested Brodsky’s analogy.
Certainly he felt affi nities with Job’s plight. “Poring over the Book of Job, I
couldn’t help but see the faces of those who entreated heaven in vain, the col-
ors of the earth, nature’s incomprehensible beauty with which my imagina-
tion still cannot make peace, just as it cannot make peace with Job’s lament
within myself,” he explains in his translator’s preface. 20
But Miłosz would hardly have held himself up as Job’s latter-day equiva-
lent, the just and perfect man tormented through no fault of his own. “Why
not concede,” he admits in the “Treatise on Theology” (2002), “that I have
not progressed, in my religion, past the Book of Job? / With the one dif-
ference that Job thought of himself as innocent . . . / I was not innocent; I
wanted to be innocent, but I couldn’t be.” Shortly after the Polish transla-
tion of Job was published, moreover, his fate took a decidedly un-Jobian
twist—or perhaps it came to resemble that of the aging patriarch whose
ends are more blessed than his beginnings. After three decades of exile and
isolation in the West, Miłosz received the news of his Nobel Prize. This is
when the alternate life story emerges, a story not of undeserved torments,
but unmerited rewards. Job’s torments are unearned, while his fi nal bless-
ings are meant to compensate him for his long-suffering virtue. For “foolish
Jan” and Forrest Gump, on the other hand, all triumphs are due to their
blunders, not their virtues. This is the story of “fortune’s favorite” and his
“entanglement in the history / of the twentieth century, the absurdity of his
actions, / the series of miraculous escapes” that are crowned in the end by
fame and “honors.”21
Afterword 275
This last citation also derives from the “Treatise on Theology,” in Miłosz’s
fi nal collection, Second Space (Druga przestrzeń, 2002). Even in this last
volume, he does not choose between Job and Forrest Gump. These two
apparently contradictory tales coexist uncomfortably throughout his later
work: human greatness and foolishness do indeed go hand in hand, the
late writing suggests. Miłosz resisted what he saw as the temptations of
nationalist mythologies by fleeing the Warsaw Uprising that produced poet-
martyrs like Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński only to fall prey, however briefly,
to the internationalist mythologies of the regime that had so recently added
the latest chapters to the Russian Romantic tradition of bardic victims. Not
only had he failed to fulfi ll the Polish poet-martyr’s destiny during the war;
he had joined forces afterwards with a state that had made a speciality of
creating new martyrs on its home turf. This notably uncanonical life had
led to both great anguish and fi nally, great fame. But perhaps it takes a poet
who has experienced and rejected the two great competing ideologies of
mid-twentieth-century Europe—the apotheosis of nation and the apotheo-
sis of class—to perceive the limits of each as a means of healing the breach
between the poet and the people for whom he longs to speak.
In “The Poet and the State,” Miłosz speaks of “the myth of the poet’s
highest freedom, alongside which the might and glory of dictators is as noth-
ing.” This is the myth, he argues, to which Mandelstam has posthumously
become a prime contributor. The truth, he insists, is more complex. His
own emotional investment in debunking notions of unsullied martyrdom
is evident in the essay’s excesses. Still he is right to point out the confl icting
impulses and tendencies that mark the modern poet’s life and art alike. Dis-
sidents’ fates may become perversely intertwined with those of their oppres-
sors, not least because both poetic dissenters and dictators may share the
same Romantic dream of embodying the nation in their words. More than
this—dissidents sometimes sit apart by necessity, not choice: “I offer the
Revolution gifts for which it has no need,” Mandelstam mourns in a 1928
questionnaire. Miłosz describes with great sympathy Mandelstam’s grief at
losing the “right to participate in the glorious, as he saw it, collective under-
taking. [He bears] the mark of the pariah ‘I’ who is wracked with guilt,
since the ‘they,’ the ‘we’ he wishes to join, all point at him accusingly.”22
“The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of
the work,” Yeats famously proclaims. Miłosz rejects Yeats’s ultimatum:
his programmatically impure poetry is the product of a long, turbulent,
and notably impure life, as he never allows us to forget. But readers prefer
their prophet-heroes to be impeccably valiant, and not only in the lands of
acknowledged legislation. The flap copy for Miłosz’s New and Collected
276 Afterword
Poems fi nds him heroically joining forces with the Polish resistance during
the Second World War. Shortly before his death, though, Miłosz himself
insisted on a correction for the English version of Second Space, which has
him simply “surviv[ing] World War II in German-occupied Poland . . . [and]
publishing his poetry in the underground press.”23
Surviving and publishing: it should be enough. But resistance is the stuff
of legends, and martyrdom is far more photogenic than mere endurance.
What would have become of the martyred Baczyński had he survived? This
is the question Szymborska asks in “In Broad Daylight”:
Goateed, balding,
gray-haired, in glasses,
with coarsened, weary features,
with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,
as if clay had covered up the angelic marble—he wouldn’t
know himself when it all happened.
“The price, after all, for not having died already / goes up not in leaps
but step by step,” Szymborska reminds us, “and he would / pay that price,
too.” What would that price have included? Might the “mountain board-
inghouse” where he spends his vacations in the poem have been a state-run
sanatorium for compliant writers? We’ll never know.24
“Cast a cold eye on life, on death”: Yeats remains imperiously bard-like to
the end and beyond in his self-composed epitaph “Under Ben Bulben.” But I
will give the fi nal word to one of modern poetry’s most unprophetic success
stories, Wisława Szymborska.
Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses,
the authoress of verse. Eternal rest
was granted her by earth, although the corpse
had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.
The plain grave? There’s poetic justice in it,
this ditty-dirge, the owl, the burdock. Passerby,
take out your compact Compu-Brain and try
to weigh Szymborska’s fate for half a minute. 25
Now that’s food for philosophical reflections.
Chapter Title: Notes

Notes
Introduction
1. Maureen McLane, “A Dirty Job” (review of William Logan, The Undiscovered
Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin), Chicago Tribune (Dec. 11, 2005), Section 14:5. I
am grateful to Michael Lopez for calling this essay to my attention. Nadezhda Man-
delstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 3rd ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 167.
2. Adam Zagajewski, “Kolce,” List: Oda do wielości (Paris: Instytut literacki,
1983), 56; Zagajewski, “Gdyby Rosja,” Jechać do Lwowa (London: Aneks, 1985), 50.
All translations from Russian and Polish here and throughout the book are my own,
unless otherwise noted. Seamus Heaney, “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream,”
Poems 1965–1975 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 211. Percy Bysshe
Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and
Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 478–510.
3. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, tr. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage,
1955), 175. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage,
1968), 27. For a pathbreaking comparative study of poetry and responsibility on Rus-
sian and Polish soil, see Victor Erlich, The Double Image: Concepts of the Poet in
Slavic Literatures (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964). As my subtitle
shows, I am also indebted to the work of another pioneering Slavist-comparatist,
Wacław Lednicki, whose Russia, Poland and the West (London: Hutchinson, 1954)
explores the relationship between Polish and Russian Romanticism and politics in its
opening chapters.
4. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 107. Adam Zagajewski, “W dwadzieścia
277
278 Notes to Pages 4–7
lat później: Przedmowa 2002,” Solidarność i samotność (Warsaw: Zeszyty Literackie,

2002), 7.
5. Zagajewski, “W dwadzieścia lat później,” 7.
6. Piotr Chaadaev, “Letters on the Philosophy of History,” Russian Intellectual
History, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), 164. Słowacki
is quoted in Skrzydłate słowa, ed. Henryk Markiewicz and Andrzej Romanowski
(Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1990), 621.
7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 26, 108,
226, 162, xxi.
8. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995), 21. Fredric Jame-
son, “Modernism and Imperialism, ““ Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed.
Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, intro. Seamus Deane (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 47–48. For a more detailed discussion, see
Clare Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter,
2004), 82–92.
9. Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 20.
Czesław Miłosz, Beginning with My Streets, tr. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 157. Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, tr. Rachel Phil-
lips (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), v.
10. M. H. Abrams quotes Coleridge in “Structure and Style in the Greater Roman-
tic Lyric,” Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton,
1970), 206. Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1983), 137. McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion
to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211.
Nicholas Roe, The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contempo-
raries (London: Palgrave, 2002), 7. Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period
Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37–38. Sarah Zimmerman
quotes Liu in Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1999), 27.
For recent accounts of the lyric under siege, see inter alia: Paul Breslin,
“Shabine among the Fishmongers: Derek Walcott and the Suspicion of Essences”
(unpublished talk, Northwestern University, 1997); Mark Edmundson, Literature
against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995); Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classical Lines (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 129–139; Mark Jeffreys, “Ideologies
of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics,” PMLA, vol.
110, no. 2 (March, 1995), 196–205; Susan J. Wolfson, “‘‘Romantic Ideology’ and the
Values of Aesthetic Form,” Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Bruns-
wick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 188–218; Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges:
The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), esp.1–30; Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism and History, esp. ix-38.
Levinson, McGann, Cameron, and others I cite here may strike the Slavist
as being as unexpected or even extraneous in this context as Tynianov, Gasparov,
or Ginzburg might seem in a American discussion of the British Romantics. This is
not to place an equal sign between the American critics and their Eastern European
counterparts. I want merely to emphasize the ubiquity and influence of these critics
in contemporary Anglo-American discussions of lyric poetry. And this in turn is my
Notes to Pages 8–12 279
reason for examining these theories against a radically different cultural backdrop:
Do they hold for modern poetry generally? Or can they be applied only to lyric poems
produced in specific times and places? If so, then don’t they leave key elements and
possibilities of lyric poetry unexplained, even unrecognized?
11. Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Envi-
ronment, and the Future of the Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004), 91. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 10.
12. Donald Davie, Czesław Miłosz and the Insuffi ciency of Lyric (Knoxville: Uni-
versity of Tennessee Press, 1986), 28. Aleksander Wat, Poezje (Warsaw: Czytelnik,
1997), 10. Max Eastman quotes Trotsky in Artists in Uniform: A Study in Literature
and Bureaucraticism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), 52.
13. “Dedication,” tr. Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems (1931–2001) (New
York: Ecco, 2001), 77. Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957–1997,
tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 227.
Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 368. Fletcher, A New Theory,
105. 127, 164, 83. Aleksander Wat, “Kilka uwag o związkach między literaturą a
rzeczywistością sowiecką,” Świat na haku i pod kluczem (London: Polonia, 1985), 114.
14. Fletcher, A New Theory, 176–177. MacLeish, “Ars Poetica,” in The Imagist
Poem, ed. William Pratt (New York: Dutton, 1963), 125. W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal
Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 231.
15. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism, tr. and
intro. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1965), 12. Shklovsky, “Voskreshenie slova,” Texte der russischen Formalisten, vol.
2, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stempel and Inge Paulmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972),
3–4. Roman Jakobson, “Modern Russian Poetry: Velimir Khlebnikov,” Major Soviet
Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (London: Oxford University Press,
1973), 62. Jakobson, Language in Literature, 193, 215, 127.
16. Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 88, 197, 71, 119.
17. Ibid., 23. Wolfson, Formal Charges, 12. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social
Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 94. Terry Eagleton, Literary The-
ory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 21.
Edmundson also comments on the New Historical resistance to form: “The pro-
ponent of historical criticism is likely to see the purveyors of close reading, whether
they quest for organic form or the breaking of forms, as decadents, self-indulgently
removed from real people and events” (Literature against Philosophy, 16).
18. David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992), 112. Roe, Politics of Nature, 8. Vincent B. Leitch, “Cultural Criticism,” The
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and
Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 181.
19. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 3,
93–94. McGann, Romantic Ideology, 158.
20. Cameron, Lyric Time, 118–119.
21. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981), 296–298, 216. “An Interview with Jerome McGann,” McGann,
Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 257. Wolfson, Formal Charges, 19, 238. Charles Altieri bears witness
to the centrality of Bakhtin’s thought in recent theories of the lyric in his entry on
“lyric autonomy” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex
Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 113–114.
“Claims for aesthetic autonomy may be little more than a defensive mechanism for
idealizing artistic impotence,” Altieri remarks, and he calls upon a familiar figure
by way of explanation: “To Mikhail Bakhtin, the ideal of artistic purity becomes a
‘monological’ evasion of the dialogic play of languages that characterizes social life.”
22. Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. Struve and B. A. Filipoff, 4 vols.
(vols. 1–3, Washington, D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971; vol. 4,
Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 2:334. Jurij Tynianov, “Promezhutok,” Arkhaisty i nova-
tory (Priboi, 1929; rpt. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 541–542.
This is not to say that either Mandelstam or Tynianov was entirely correct in his
prognosis for poetry’s downfall—lyric poetry continued and sometimes thrived long
after the Bolshevik takeover. Their sense that a great age of poetry was past or pass-
ing, though, was shared by many of their contemporaries, including important party
members and policy shapers.
23. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Interna-
tional Publishers, 1963), 18. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 98, 170. Nikolai Bukharin, “Poetry,
Poetics and the Problems of Poetry in the U.S.S.R,” Problems of Soviet Literature:
Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, ed. H. G. Scott (West-
port: Hyperion Press, 1980), 244–245, 254–255. Bukharin’s speech was not based on
his personal views, but was in fact a collectively composed “document submitted to
the Politburo (Stalin) for approval and corrections prior to its public delivery—and
then was subjected to extraordinarily fierce attacks at the Congress in what appears
to be a carefully orchestrated campaign” (personal communication from Professor
Lazar Fleishman, June 21, 2008). The views Bukharin articulated remained dominant
during the relatively “liberal” period from 1934 to 1936. The very fact of these heated
debates and fierce campaigns at the highest level of Soviet power indicates the remark-
able significance the state attached to literature generally and poetry in particular.
24. Bukharin, “Poetry,” 254. Mark D. Steinberg quotes Papernyi, René Fülöp-
Miller, and Bogdanov in his illuminating discussion of “The Proletarian ‘I’” in Pro-
letarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2002), 102–146. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Konspekt rechi o
Mandel’shtame,” O literature: Raboty raznykh let (Moscow: Sovietskii pisatel’,
1987), 447.
25. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 286–259, 331, 298. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great
Period Poems, 37–38.
Levinson’s book has become a touchstone for critical responses to New Historical
readings of the Romantic lyric: see, inter alia, M. H. Abrams, “On Political Readings
of Lyrical Ballads,” Doing Things with Texts, ed. Michael Fisher (New York: Norton,
1989), 364–392; David Bromwich, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of
the ’1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 75–76; Edmundson, Litera-
ture against Philosophy, esp. 120–147; Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth:
Intensity and Achievement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), esp. 1–35; and McFar-
land, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
passim; Wolfson. Formal Charges, 14; Zimmerman, Romanticism, Lyricism, and
History, passim.
26. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 296–298.
27. Ibid., 287, 273.
28. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:202. On Bakhtin’s more nuanced discus-
sions of the lyric, see Caryl Emerson, “Prosaics and the Problem of Form,” Slavic and
East European Journal, vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1997), 16–39.
29. Bromwich, Disowned by Memory, 110. Karl Radek, “Contemporary World
Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art,” Problems of Soviet Literature, 152.
McGann, Romantic Ideology, 88.
30. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 130, 103, 10. Frank Lentricchia,
Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1985), 76. Said, Culture
and Imperialism, 283.
31. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, 11, 135. Nicholas Roe quotes Liu in The
Politics of Nature, 5.
32. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vin-
tage, 1998), 51, 376. Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” 29. Eagleton, “Intro-
duction,” Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 1.
33. Roe, Politics of Nature, 5. McFarland, Romanticism, 267, 87. See also ibid.,
133–34 for a brief, brilliant discussion of the persistence of Jacobinism of one stripe or
another in twentieth-century Marxist practice. Edmundson, Literature against Phi-
losophy, 119.
34. Eagleton, “Introduction,” Marxist Literary Theory, 6. Miłosz, Captive Mind,
200–201. Aristotle, “Poetics,” Classic Writings on Poetry, ed. William Harmon (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 41.
35. “Lecture IV,” tr. Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Miłosz, New and Collected
Poems (1931–2001) (New York: Ecco, 2001), 497. The Oxford Authors: William
Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 133.
36. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 74. On the projected anthology, see Miłosz, Zaraz
po wojnie: Korespondencja z pisarzami (Krakow: Znak, 1998), 38. His translation
appeared only several decades later in an anthology entitled Mowa wiązana (A Fet-
tered Speech), ed. and tr. Czesław Miłosz (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy,
1986), 65–68. I’m grateful to Aleksander Fiut for making his copy of Mowa wiązana
available to me. See also Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie, ed. Magda Heydel (Krakow:
Znak, 2005), 82–85.
37. Miłosz commented on his lack of sympathy for Wordsworth in a personal con-
versation of July, 2003: he had no interest, he said, in “excavating” at that late date
the reasons that had led him to “Tintern Abbey” in the fi rst place.
38. Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie, 201. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Gill,
William Wordsworth, 611. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 56. “Mind-forged manacles” is
Blake’s phrase: The Oxford Authors: William Blake, ed. Michael Mason (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 276.
39. Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, ed. and tr.
Richard Lourie (New York: Norton, 1990), 92. I have adapted the translation slightly;
see Aleksander Wat, Mój wiek, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1998), 1:254. Levinson,
Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 34.
40. Tom Paulin, “Introduction,” The Faber Book of Political Verse (London: Faber
and Faber, 1986), 17, 52. Paulin clearly has in mind here not lyrics themselves, but
misguided modes of reading; his anthology is dedicated to reclaiming the anglophone
lyrical tradition from the hands of the “ahistoricists.” His vision of the lyric is less
nuanced elsewhere. “Social history and the lyric poem appear to be poles apart,” he
writes in an essay on Philip Larkin. “Politics and culture are always melting into dif-
ferent shapes, but the lyric speaks for unchanging human nature, that timeless essence
beyond fashion and economics” (Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State [Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], p. 233).
41. Paulin, “Introduction,” 17, 51, 52. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 175. “Imperium” is
Miłosz’s term for the Soviet bloc throughout The Captive Mind.
42. Paulin, “Introduction,” 48. Reginald Gibbons, “Political Poetry and the
Example of Ernesto Cardinal,” Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hall-
berg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 293. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 56.
Stanisław Barańczak, Zaufać nieufności: Osiem rozmów o sensie poezii (Krakow:
Wydawnictwo M, 1993), 17.
43. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Poetry in Theory: An Anthol-
ogy 1900–2000, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 344–345.
44. Kornei Chukovsky, “Akhmatova and Mayakovsky,” tr. John Pearson, Major
Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, ed. Edward J. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 51–52. Wiktor Woroszylski quotes Pravda in The Life of Mayakovsky, tr.
Boleslaw Taborski (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 280. Lydia Chukovskaia quotes
Akhmatova’s critics in Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi 1952–1962 (Moscow: Soglasie,
1997), 77.
45. Amanda Haight quotes Mayakovsky and other Soviet critics on Akhmatova in
Anna Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),
71–73. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 148–153. Woroszylski cites Mayakovsky
in The Life of Mayakovsky, 347.
46. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry,” 346–347.
47. Bukharin, “Poetry,” 233.
48. All references to Akhmatova’s work derive from the following edition, unless
otherwise noted: Sochineniia, 3 vols. (vols. 1 and 2, ed. Boris Filipoff and G. P. Struve,
Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3, ed. G. Struve, N. A.
Struve, and B. A. Filippov, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983). Requiem appears in 1:359–370.
For its troubled publication history, see the same volume, 422–423, and Susan Amert,
In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 205. From Six Books was withdrawn from distribution shortly
after its publication; see Roberta Reeder, Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 229–230, 250–251.
49. V. Pertsov, “Chitaia Akhmatovu,” Akhmatova, Requiem, ed. P.D. Timenchik
(Moscow: Izd. MPI, 1989), 159–162.
50. “This box has a triple bottom,” Akhmatova notes in the Poem (Sochineniia,
2:126).
51. Wat, My Century, 92; Mój wiek, 1:254.
52. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 1:361, 369.
53. Bukharin, “Poetry,” 223. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 2:179.

54. James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), 5.
55. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:165–166. Osip Mandelstam, The Com-
plete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and
Constance Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 478. On Mandelstam’s lyrical “chamber
music,” see Roman Jakobson, “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia. Nabrosok pervyi: Viktor
Khlebnikov, “Texte der russischen Formalisten, 140; Tynianov makes similar obser-
vations in “Promezhutok,” 572–573. For a discussion of this poem in the context of
Mandelstam’s later work, see Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist
Creation of Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 247–250.
56. The editors quote Ilya Selvinsky on the infamous “mandelstamp” in Sobranie
sochinenii, 1:489. Max Eastman quotes John Reed in Artists in Uniform: A Study of
Literature and Bureaucratism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), 9. Aleksandr Zholk-
ovsky cites A. Tarasenkov’s entry “Mandel’shtam” (Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol.
6 (1932), 756–759) in his pithy analysis of Mandelstam’s lyric, “Invarianty i struktura
teksta. II. Mandel’shtam: ‘Ia p’iu za voennye astry . . . ’,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, ed.
L. Fleishman, O. Ronen, and D. Segal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), 4:171.
57. The editors quote both Selivansky and Kovalenkov in Sobranie sochinenii,
1:494–495.
58. An excerpt from S. Malakhov, “Lirika kak orudie klassovoi bor’by” (Zvezda,
1931, no. 9) is reprinted in Timenchik’s edition of Requiem, 91. Zholkovsky, “Invari-
anty,” 176. The editors quote Chinnov in Sobranie sochinenii, 1:495.
59. Zagajewski’s poem could not be published officially; Zagajewski himself had
left Poland for exile in France the previous year. The poem made its way back to his
compatriots by the two unofficial routes known in Russian as tamizdat and samiz-
dat: Zagajewski, List: Oda do wielości, 12; and Zagajewski, List: Oda do Wielości
(Krakow: Polka poetów, 1982), 9. I am grateful to Anna and Stanisław Barańczak for
making the underground Polish edition available to me. For a slightly different Eng-
lish version of the poem, see Renata Gorczyński’s translation in Adam Zagajewski,
Without End: New and Selected Poems, tr. Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczyński,
Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 101.
I will discuss the trajectory of Zagajewski’s career in more detail in Chapter 7.
60. Zbigniew Herbert, Report from the Besieged City, tr. John and Bogdana Car-
penter (New York: Ecco, 1985), 69–70.
61. Herbert, “To Ryszard Krynicki—A Letter,” ibid., 21–22.
62. King Lear, 2.4.264–265. Mandelstam, “Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate,” Sobranie
sochinenii, 1:244–249.
See M. L. Gasparov, “Stikhi o neizvestnom soldate: apokalipsis i/ili agitka” (The verses
on the unknown soldier: apocalypse and/or agitational poem”), O. Mandel’shtam:
Grazhdanskaia lirika 1937 (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1996),
6–77, for a compelling rebuttal to earlier readings that followed Nadezhda Mandel-
stam’s lead in interpreting the poem as an anti-Stalinist apocalypse. On Mandelstam’s
purported “attachment to parasitical ideology and culture,” see Zholkovsky, “Invari-
anty,” 171.
63. Nadezhda Mandelstam records her husband’s remarks in Kniga tret’ia (Paris:
YMCA Press, 1987), 154. Heaney, Government of the Tongue, xviii-xix.
64. Heaney, Government of the Tongue, xvi, xix.

65. Ibid., 39, 99, 135. Eastman, Artists in Uniform, 45. Richard Poirier, Poetry and
Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37, 54.
66. Poirier quotes Emerson in Poetry and Pragmatism, 156. Heaney, Government
of the Tongue, 128.
67. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:23, 202. The “prophet’s staff and ribbons”
comes from Szymborska’s “Soliloquy for Cassandra,” Poems New and Collected, 83.
68. Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov: Letters and Theoretical Writings, tr.
Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1987), 333. James Longenback quotes Pound in Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and
Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 74.
69. Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the
Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 68. Benedikt Sarnov, Zalo-
zhnik vechnosti: Sluchai Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Izd. “Knizhnaia palata,” 1990),
10, 24. On Marx’s and Engel’s early poetic proclivities, see Marxism and Art: Essays
Classic and Contemporary, ed. with commentary by Maynard Solomon (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1979), 3–5; and Horst Höhne, “Shelley’s ‘Socialism’
Revisited,” Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stu-
art Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 201–212. “According
to his biographer, Gustav Mayer,” Solomon reports, Engels dreamed of “‘preaching
through poetry the new ideas which were revolutionizing his inner world.’ He wrote
poetic cycles devoted to humanity in the style of Shelley, and he began a translation of
Queen Mab” (4–5). On Stalin as Romantic writer-prophet, see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank
You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 54–82.
70. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24, 5. Karl
Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene
Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), 203. Adam Mickiewicz, Dzieła (Warsaw:
Czytelnik, 1999), 5:15, 19–20; I have taken my translation from Norman Davies,
God’s Playground: A History of Poland, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 2:9.
71. Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” Selected
Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 132.
72. Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1974), 168. Aleksandr Blok,
Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955), 1:453.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1978), 3:91. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 1:369. Zagajewski, “W liczbie mno-
giej,” List: Oda do wielości, 49. I have borrowed the term “lyric strategies” from
Edward Balcerzan, Poezja polska w latach 1939–1965, pt. 1: Strategie liryczne (War-
saw: Wydawnictwo Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1982).
73. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:334, 217.
74. McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry,” 210–211. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great
Period Poems, 43. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 81–82. Zbigniew Herbert, Bar-
barian in the Garden, tr. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 101. For a more detailed discussion of Miłosz’s poem, see
Clare Cavanagh, “Poetry and History: Poland’s Acknowledged Legislators,” Com-
mon Knowledge, vol. 11, no. 2 (Spring, 2005): 185–197.
75. Miłosz, “You Who Wronged,” tr. Richard Lourie, New and Collected Poems,
103. Miłosz, “Prywatne obowiązki wobec polskiej literatury,” Prywatne obowiązki
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 95–135. Bromwich, Disowned by Mem-
ory, 156, 139. Andrzej Zawada, Miłosz (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo dolnoślaskie, 1997),
147. For Miłosz on mass culture and “high art,” see “Pytania do dyskusji,” in Kultura
masowa, ed. and tr. Czesław Miłosz (Paris: Instytut literacki, 1959; rpt. Krakow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), 150–169.
76. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:253. Wisława Szymborska, Nonrequired
Reading, tr. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 2002), 104.
77. Miłosz, “Bobo’s Metamorphoses,” tr. Czesław Miłosz and Richard Lourie,
New and Collected Poems, 193–197. Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems,
32. “Tintern Abbey,” in Gill, William Wordsworth, 131–135. Heaney discusses the
derivation of “verse” in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (New York: Far-
rar Straus Giroux, 1980), 65.
78. Edmundson, Literature Against Philosophy, 134. See Roe for a similar argu-
ment (Politics of Nature, 169). Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 148. Fletcher,
A New Theory, 105.
79. Davie, Czesław Miłosz and the Insuffi ciency of Lyric, 71. Christopher Ricks,
Reviewery (New York: Handsel Books, 2002), 284–285. Helen Vendler, Seamus
Heaney (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5–7.
80. Cameron, Lyric Time, 71. Szymborska, Poems New and Collected, 245.
81. Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in
Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982), 44.
82. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 200.
83. Miłosz, The Year of the Hunter, tr. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1994), 119. Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 497–498. Mason, Wil-
liam Blake, 395.
84. Fletcher, A New Theory, 29, 14. Robert Pinsky, “The Idiom of a Self: Elizabeth
Bishop and Wordsworth,” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and
Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 49. Szymborska,
Poems New and Collected, 122, 135, 196, 265. Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog, tr.
Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak (New York: Harcourt, 2006), 69.
85. Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog, 69.
86. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage,
1991), 141. Szymborska, Monologue of a Dog, 69. Szymborska, Poems New and Col-
lected, 67, 232, 263, 42.
Chapter 1. Courting Disaster

1. Thomas Kilroy, “The Seagull: An Adaptation,” The Cambridge Companion to
Chekhov, ed. Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 80–82.
2. Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in
Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 96–97. R. F. Foster, W.
B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 254.
3. Aleksandr Blok, “Vozmezdie,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khu-

dozhestvennaia literatura, 1955), 1:476–522, esp. 492–497. Further references to this
edition will appear in the text with volume and page. Kornei Chukovsky, Aleksander
Blok as Man and Poet, tr. and ed. Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1982), 5. Avril Pyman quotes Blok on his fears and Kluyev’s dismissive assess-
ment in The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Release of Harmony 1908–1921 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1980), 139, 21.
4. Pyman quotes Blok in Alexander Blok: Selected Poems, ed. and intro. Avril
Pyman (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972), 282. Chukovsky, Blok, 4.
5. For an overview on Symbolist “life-creation” in its cultural context see Creat-
ing Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan
Delaney Grossman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Olga Matich’s Erotic
Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005) provides a richly detailed portrait of Symbolist philosophy
and practice. For an innovative discussion of life-creation and gender in Blok specifi-
cally, see Jenifer Presto, Beyond the Flesh: Russian Symbolism and the Sublimation
of Sex (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), esp. 19–133.
6. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 119. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 40. Yeats, “Modern Poetry,” Essays and Introductions
(New York: Collier Books, 1986), 506–510.
7. Marjorie Howes quotes Yeats in Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161, 164. “To try to understand
what has come upon us,” Auden proclaims in 1940, may be “the most heroic of the
tasks required to save civilization” (quoted in Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization:
Yeats, Eliot, and Auden between the Wars [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984], 9).
8. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1961), 57. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson (New York:
Meridian Books, 1961), vii. Howes quotes Yeats in Yeats’s Nations, 110.
9. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997),
27. Further references to this edition will be given in the text.
10. Osip Mandelstam, “On the Nature of the Word,” Complete Critical Prose and
Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ann Arbor:
Ardis, 1979), 128. I am drawing upon James Pethica’s annotation in Yeats’s Poetry,
Drama, and Prose, ed. James Pethica (New York: Norton, 2000), 12. On Yeats’s
involvement in the Golden Dawn, see Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: Brit-
ish Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004), esp. 51–84.
11. Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr Blok: The Distant Thunder 1880–1908 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 67. The literature on Soloviev’s Divine Sophia and her
followers is vast; see, inter alia, Z. G. Mints, “K genezisy kosmicheskogo u Bloka (Vl.
Soloviev i A. Blok),” Aleksandr Blok i russkie pisateli (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB,
2000), 389–442; D. Maksimov, “O mifopoeticheskom nachale v lirike Bloka,” Mak-
simov, Russkie poety nachala veka (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1986), 199–239;
Avril Pyman, A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 226–242; Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and
Practice,” Creating Life, 24–50.
12. Fyodor Tiutchev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhevstvennaia lit-
eratura, 1984), 1:212. My interpretation of “Predchustvuiu Tebia” is indebted both to
Presto’s astute reading of the poem (Beyond the Flesh, 91–94), and to the splendid work
done by participants in a 2005 seminar I taught on Blok and Yeats at Northwestern
University: Katia Bowers, Jan Peters, Nina Tyurina, and Lisa Yountchi. Their energetic,
imaginative discussions of both poets make themselves felt throughout this chapter.
13. Presto, Beyond the Flesh, 91–94.
14. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 99. On Yeats and the late nineteenth-century
attempts to revive Irish Gaelic, see ibid., 133–154.
15. Pyman, The Distant Thunder, 68.
16. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 72. Pethica, Yeats’s Poetry, 21. For Mangan, Fergu-
son, and Davis in the development of modern Irish writing and identity, see Seamus
Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1986), 60–89.
17. On the ancient folkloric traditions of Russia as what G. Fedotov calls a “great
divine female power,” see Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Rus-
sian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 3. Marjorie Howes dis-
cusses the colonial vision of Ireland as woman in Yeats’s Nations, esp. 1–43.
18. D. Maksimov quotes Blok in “O mifopoeticheskom nachale,” 211. His com-
ment on Blok’s metahistoricism derives from the same essay (205). Yeats, “Ireland and
the Arts,” Essays and Introductions, 203–210. Yeats’s Slavic peasants appear in “The
Message of the Folklorist,” Pethica, Yeats’s Poetry, 262–263.
19. F. S. L. Lyons quotes Joyce in Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890–1939:
From the Fall of Parnell to the Death of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 65. Seamus Deane, “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” Celtic Revivals
(Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1985), 40. Yeats, Essays and Intro-
ductions, 210–249.
20. Deane, “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” 46. Pyman quotes Blok on Europe
in The Release of Harmony, 245. The notion of Russia’s barbaric boundlessness as the
shape of the future has a distinguished nineteenth-century Russian pedigree, as Blok
himself well knew; see his essays “Narod i intelligentsia” and “Ditia Gogolia” for his
eccentric celebration of Gogol’s “unborn” Russia (2:85–91, 107–110).
21. Edward Said paraphrases Spencer in “Yeats and Decolonization,” Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 222. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist,
The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin,
1982), 652. Yeats records Lady Gregory’s remark in Autobiographies: Memories and
Refl ections (London: Macmillan, 1955), 400. Foster comments on the Anglo-Irish
fascination with the occult in The Apprentice Mage, 50.
22. On the early twentieth-century Russian fascination with the occult, see Maria
Carlson, “Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Her-
meticism in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,” The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed.
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 135–152. Alex
Owen notes the affi nities between the English (and Anglo-Irish) and Russian esoteric
fascinations, which were linked by the figure of Madame Blavatsky, in The Place of
Enchantment, 45. Pyman, The Distant Thunder, 198.
23. The rose upon the cross in Yeats’s poem is of course the emblem of Rosicrucian-
ism; Blok draws upon the same imagery in his play “The Rose and the Cross” (Roza i
krest, 1912). Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 246.
24. The photographs can be found in Pyman, The Distant Thunder, 176–177 and
112–113. Mendeleeva-Blok, “Facts and Myths about Blok and Myself,” Blok: An
Anthology of Essays and Memoirs, ed. and tr. Lucy Vogel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982),
54. Pyman quotes Blok on his wife in The Distant Thunder, 149. Konstantin Mochul-
sky cites his letter in Aleksandr Blok, tr. Doris V. Johnson (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1983), 64.
25. Pyman quotes Blok’s letter in The Distant Thunder, 127. On the popularity of
such “white marriages” in Symbolist circles, see Presto, Beyond the Flesh, Matich,
“The Symbolist Meaning of Love,” and Matich, Erotic Utopia, esp. 212–235.
26. Mendeleeva-Blok, “Facts and Myths,” 38–39. Pyman quotes Blok’s journal in
The Release of Harmony, 232.
27. On Aphrodite’s dual nature, see Sir William Smith, Smaller Classical Diction-
ary (New York: Dutton, 1958), 307, and I. Aghion, C. Barbillon, and F. Lissarrague,
Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 294–299. Pyman
quotes Blok on his love for the motherland in The Release of Harmony, 25.
28. Deane, “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” 44. Blok, “Avtobiografi ia,” Pol-
noe sobranie stikhotvorenii v dvukh tomakh, ed. Vl. Orlov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisa-
tel’, 1946), 11. On the wedding’s consummation, see Matich, Erotic Utopia, p. 107;
Pyman also discusses the consummation and Mendeleeva-Blok’s symbolic fall from
grace in The Distant Thunder, 175–176.
29. See Presto, Beyond the Flesh, for a discussion of mythic femininity in Blok’s
work generally, esp. 41–70. Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 301. Kristi Groberg
describes the 1905 representations of Mother Russia as sexual victim in “‘‘The Shade
of Lucifer’s Dark Wing’: Satanism in Silver Age Russia,” The Occult in Russian and
Soviet Culture, 104. Pyman mentions the poetic postcards in The Release of Har-
mony, 22. She records Blok’s comments from his notebooks and mentions Peters-
burg’s Blokian streetwalkers in Alexander Blok: Selected Poems, 240, 218.
30. See Presto, “Poetry against Progeny: Blok and the Problem of Poetic Repro-
duction,” Beyond the Flesh, 19–133: Presto quotes Blok’s notebooks ibid., 29, 125.
Matich quotes Soloviev and Gippius in “The Symbolist Meaning of Love,” 31.
31. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1983), 16–17. Foster describes the “ex-debutante” turned seductress in The
Apprentice Mage, 87.
32. Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 87. Yeats, Autobiographies, 364. Said mentions
Yeats’s “super-terrestrial idea of revolution” in Culture and Imperialism, 227.
33. On Yeats’s courtship of both mother and daughter, see Foster, The Apprentice
Mage, esp. 116–123, 391–396, and Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2: The Arch-Poet
Life: II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 55–56, 90–92. Brenda Maddox dis-
cusses this literal family romance in Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats
(New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 41–54.
34. “Eros and mystical love”: the phrase is Pyman’s (The Distant Thunder, 105).
Yeats contrasts himself with Gonne in Autobiographies, 363. Foster, The Apprentice
Mage, 114, 122–123.
35. Kilroy, “The Seagull,” 31. Pyman mentions the casting of “Neznakomka” in
The Release of Harmony, 198.
36. Yeats, “Cathleen Ni Hoolihan,” Eleven Plays of William Butler Yeats, ed. A.
Norman Jeffares (New York: Collier, 1964), 221–232.
37. Foster quotes Stephen Gwynne on “Cathleen” in The Apprentice Mage, 262.
38. Presto quotes Blok in her discussion of Retribution and disrupted lines of
descent in Beyond the Flesh, 242–243. Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, 23.
39. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1. Sheila Fitzpatrick discusses the
various ways of dating Russia’s revolution in The Russian Revolution 1917–1932
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–10.
40. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Collier Books, 1966), 26.
41. James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 131. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 315. Pound and Eliot
likewise made use of what Pound called the “bolcheviki” and their “rheffolution”
in their poetry: Eliot refers the reader to the “present decay in Eastern Europe” as a
key to the imagery in The Waste Land (The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950
[New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971], 53–54; Pound, The Cantos [New York:
New Directions, 1975], 74). All three poets see the revolution as the most egregious
example of the cultural mayhem that their poetry is intended to combat.
42. Longenbach quotes the early version of Yeats’s poem in Stone Cottage, 131.
Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, 234; this is also the source for Yeats’s comment on history’s
cycles. Foster quotes Yeats’s letter in The Apprentice Mage, 282.
43. Yeats, Autobiographies, 164; A Vision, 268.
44. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 318. Yeats, A Vision, 9. Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, 9.
45. See Pethica’s commentary on the probable meaning of the poem’s “bays,”
Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, 95.
46. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 449. Yeats, “Irish Language and Irish Literature,”
Pethica, Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose, 271.
47. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 105. I’m indebted to Howes’s splendid book through-
out my discussion of Yeats, and I’ve drawn here particularly upon her fourth chapter,
“In the Bedroom of the Big House: Kindred, Crisis, and Anglo-Irish nationality,”
102–130. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, 231.
48. On Blok and Nietzsche, see Evelyn Bristol, “Blok between Nietzsche and
Soloviev,” Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 149–160. On affi nities between Yeats’s and Khlebnikov’s
elaborate geometries of history, see Marjorie Perloff, “The Pursuit of Number: Yeats,
Khlebnikov, and the Mathematics of Modernism,” Poetic License: Essays on Mod-
ernist and Post-Modernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990),
71–97.
49. For a discussion of Blok’s “Polish poem” and his unexpected debt to Polish
Romantic messianism, see Wacław Lednicki, Russia, Poland and the West: Essays in
Literary and Cultural History (London: Hutchinson, 1954), 349–399.
50. Chukovsky, Aleksander Blok, 15, 18. Presto, Beyond the Flesh, 197.
51. See Pyman, Alexander Blok: Selected Poems, 271–275, for an excellent syn-
thesis of both contemporary responses to “The Twelve” and Blok’s own notes and
comments on the poem and its reception. “Anathema or hosanna” is Chukovsky’s
phrase (Alexander Blok, 140). For a sampling of confl icting contemporary reactions,
see ibid., 25, 34, 132–140, and Leon Trotsky, “Alexander Blok,” Literature and Revo-
lution, tr. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 116–125.
52. Chukovsky, Alexander Blok, 132.
53. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 122.

54. For more on the parallelism between Katka and Mother Russia and the effemi-
nacy of the Old World’s representatives in the poem generally, see Irene Masing-Delic,
Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 198–209. Boris Gasparov also notes the paral-
lel between Katka and Russia in “Poema A. Bloka ‘Dvenadtsat’’ i nekotorye problemy
karnavalizatsii v iskusstve nachala XX veka,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 1 (1977),
125. Eliot Borenstein, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Rus-
sian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 17. I’m indebted to
Borenstein’s discussion of masculine collectivity in the early years of the revolution
throughout this portion of my discussion.
55. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), 64.
56. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 82.
57. Pyman quotes Blok on the “feminine phantom” in Selected Poems, 273. The
second quote is taken from Chukovsky, Alexander Blok, 25.
58. Engelstein quotes Rozanov in The Keys to Happiness, 327. For more on
Rozanov’s anti-Christian vision of Christ, see Anna Lisa Crone, “Nietzschean, All
Too Nietzschean? Rozanov’s Anti-Christian Critique,” Nietzsche in Russia, 95–112.
Pyman quotes Blok in The Release of Harmony, 152.
59. On Yeats’s death, burial, and reburial, see Foster, The Arch-Poet, 651–659.
60. Pyman quotes Blok on his attempted suicide in The Distant Thunder, 118.
Chukovsky, Aleksander Blok as Man and Poet, 20.
61. Osip Mandelstam, “Barsuch’ia nora,” Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. Struve and
B. A. Filipoff (vols. 1–3, Washington, D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–
1971; vol. 4, Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 2:270–275. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Blok’s Fate,”
Blok: An Anthology of Essays and Memoirs, 134. Trotsky, “Alexander Blok,” Litera-
ture and Revolution, 116–125,
62. Anatoly Lunacharsky, “Aleksander Blok,” On Literature and Art, ed. A. Leb-
edev (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 159–213.
63. Trotsky, “Alexander Blok,” Lunacharsky, “Aleksander Blok,” passim.
64. Eikhenbaum, “Blok’s Fate,” 132.
65. Lunacharsky, “Aleksander Blok,” 212, 160.
66. Ibid., 239.
Chapter 2. Whitman, Mayakovsky, and the Body Politic

1. Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters (1913) quoted in Betsy Erkilla,
Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
l980), 199; and Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-garde
in France 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 284–285, 322. Walt
Whitman, “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals,” Complete Poetry and Collected
Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 264. All subsequent citations of Whit-
man’s work in the text will refer to this edition, unless otherwise noted. For accounts
of Whitman’s influence on European and American avant-garde writing, see Walt
Whitman Abroad, ed. Gay Wilson Allen (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1955);
and James E. Miller, Jr., The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s
Legacy in the Personal Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
2. Czesław Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC’s, tr. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001), 299.
3. For Whitman’s fate on Russian and Soviet soil, see Kornei Chukovsky, “Uit-
men v russkoi literature,” Chukovsky, ed. and tr., Uolt Uitmen: Poeziia griadushchei
demokratii, 6th ed. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 143–165; Chuk-
ovsky, “Uolt Uitmen v Rossii,” Chukovsky, ed. and tr., Moi Uitman (Moscow: Prog-
ress, 1966), 241–268; Stepan Stepanchev, “Whitman in Russia,” Whitman Abroad,
144–155; Yassen Zassourskii, “Whitman’s Reception and Influence in the Soviet
Union,” in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial Collection, ed. Geoffrey M.
Sill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 283–290; Thomas Eekman, “Walt
Whitman’s Role in Slavic Poetry,” American Contributions to the Eighth International
Congress of Slavists, ed. Victor Terras, 2 vols., (Columbus: Slavica, 1978), 2:166–190.
On Balmont and Whitman see Martin Bidney, “Leviathan, Yggdrasil, Earth-Titan,
Eagle: Bal’mont’s Reimagining of Walt Whitman,” Slavic and East European Journal,
vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 176–191. For a summary of Chukovsky’s work on Whit-
man, see Gay Wilson Allen, “Kornei Chukovsky, Whitman’s Russian Translator,” Walt
Whitman of Mickle Street, 276–282. Chukovsky, Moi Uitman, 251.
4. On Whitman’s careful structuring of his image, see Betsy Erkilla, Whitman:
The Political Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. 3–6; Donald Pease,
“Walt Whitman’s Revisionary Democracy,” The Columbia History of American
Poetry, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 148–171; Ed
Folsom, “Whitman and the ‘Visual Democracy of Photography,’” Walt Whitman of
Mickle Street, 80–93.
5. Erkilla, Whitman, 3–5. On Mayakovsky’s yellow blouse, see Svetlana Boym,
Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), 137–147. On Symbolist “life-creation,” see Creating
Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Dela-
ney Grossman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
6. Chukovsky, “Maiakovskii,” 349–352.
7. Chukovsky, Ego-futuristy i kubo-futuristy (Petersburg, 1914; rpt. London:
Prideaux Press, 1976), 42–43; Chukovsky, “Uitmen v russkoi literature,” 161; Chuk-
ovsky, “Maiakovskii,” 349.
8. Mayakovsky, “150,000,000,” Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3 vols.
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 3:108–9. All references in the text to
Mayakovsky’s work will be taken from this edition, unless otherwise noted.
9. Chukovsky, Dnevnik 1901–1929, ed. E. Ts. Chukovskaia (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1991), 195. On Whitman and the Proletkult, see also Victor Erlich, Modern-
ism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
10. Chukovsky gave his 1923 edition of Whitman’s poetry the subtitle “The Poetry
of the Coming Democracy.” Chukovsky’s “democracy” had a distinctly radical fl avor
in tsarist and revolutionary Russia alike. The Social Democrats, or SD’s, comprised
one of the largest Marxist parties of prerevolutionary Russia; they were tolerated for
a time following the revolution as well. The Bolsheviks also preempted the use of the
term “democratic” for their own experiments in constructing a socialist society.
11. Chukovsky, “Maiakovskii,” 162. See also Edward Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet
in the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 89, 115, 171, 177,
182–183; Victor Terras, Vladimir Mayakovsky (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 47–48, 79,
129.
12. Whitman continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass throughout his life;
editions of the book appeared in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871–72, 1876, 1881, 1889,
1891–92 (Miller, Supreme Fiction, 40). On the significance of this ceaseless revision,
see Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 114–129; and Michael Moon, Dissemi-
nating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991).
13. Miller, Jr., Supreme Fiction, 44. Louis Simpson quotes Lawrence in “Strategies
of Sex in Whitman’s Poetry,” Walt Whitman of Mickle Street, 33). Erkilla, Whitman,
282.
14. Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets,” tr. Edward
J. Brown, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 139.
15. Anatoly Lunacharsky, On Art and Literature (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1965), 233.
16. Erlich, Modernism and Revolution, 263. Leon Trotsky, “Futurism,” Literature
and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960),
146–149.
17. Chukovsky, Ego-futuristy, 43.
18. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Piatyi International,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13
vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955–61), 4:127.
19. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 31, 12.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957),
141–142.
20. On Mayakovsky’s “sado-masochistic” poetics, see Yuri Karabchievsky,
Voskresenie Maiakovskogo (Munich: Strana i mir, 1985), esp. 51–78; and Aleksandr
Zholkovsky, “O genii i zlodeistve, o babe i vserossiiskom masshtabe (Progulki po
Maiakovskomu),” A. K. Zholkovsky and Iu. K. Shcheglov, Mir avtora i struktura
teksta (Tenafly: Hermitage, 1986), 255–278.
21. Chukovsky, “Maiakovskii,” 349. On this incident of “misreading,” see Karab-
chievsky, Voskresenie, 76–78.
22. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Infl uence (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973).
23. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 143–147.
24. Ibid., 148. “Meat,” Karabchievsky notes, with all its “anatomo-gastronomical
associations,” is Mayakovsky’s “favorite poetic dish” (Voskresenie, 77–78).
25. Viktor Shklovsky, “Voskreshenie slova” (leaflet, 1914); reprinted in Texte der
russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969–72), 2:2–17.
26. Galina Patterson quotes Lenin in “Reimaging Majakovskij: Another Viewpoint
on ‘150,000,000’” (unpublished essay). Patterson is excellent on the ambivalence that
permeates Mayakovsky’s text and the critical reaction it provoked.
27. On Mandelstam’s poetic body, see Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the
Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp.
66–102.
28. Trotsky, “Futurism,” 148; Karabchievsky, Voskresenie, 48.
29. Quoted in Erkilla, Whitman, 198. I am drawing upon Erkilla’s fi ne analysis of

Whitman’s Civil War poetry in my discussion here (ibid., 190–225).
30. Karabchievsky, Voskresenie, 20–23.
31. “In Majakovskij’s spiritual world,” Jakobson notes, “an abstract faith in the
coming transformation of the world is joined . . . with hatred for the evil continuum
of specific tomorrows that only prolong today . . . and with undying hostility to that
‘broody-hen’ love that serves only to reproduce the present way of life” (“Generation,”
153–54).
32. Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:127–134.
33. For a critique of Mayakovskian misogyny, see Zholkovsky, “O genii i zlodeistvii.”
34. Like many of his revolutionary brethren, Mayakovsky was strongly under the
influence of Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903), whose ideas on physical resurrection of
the dead apparently presented Mayakovsky with what he saw as a plausible alterna-
tive to outmoded bourgeois procreation. On Mayakovsky and Fedorov, see Jakobson,
“Generation,” 151; Svetlana Semenova, Preodolenie tragedii: “Vechnye voprosy” v
literature (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), esp. 262–284; and Irene Masing-Delic,
Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
35. Terras, Mayakovsky, 47–48; Brown, Mayakovsky, 115.
36. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 155. N. Aseev, B. Arvatov, et al., “Za chto
boretsia Lef?” Lef, vol. 1 (1923), 1; I. Zdanevich, A Kruchenykh, et al., “Manifest
‘41º,” 41º (Tifl is, 1919). Both translations are taken from Russian Futurism through
Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. and tr. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 194, 177.
37. Erkilla, Whitman, 146. M. Mendel’son both summarizes and continues the
Soviet tradition of reading Whitman as spurned socialist in his Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo
Uitmena (Moscow: Nauka, l965), passim. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What Is Literature?”
and Other Essays, tr. Bernard Frechtman et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 334.
38. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 150.
39. Ibid., 254–257.
40. Richard Stites quotes Alexei Gastev in his discussion of “Man the Machine,” in
Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145–164. Trotsky, Literature
and Revolution, 170–171.
41. Ritualistic commemoration of Lenin’s “sacred” corpse began almost immedi-
ately after his death. Indeed, one Soviet elegist chose to model his dirge on Whitman’s
commemoration of Lincoln’s death in “O Captain! My Captain!”—yet another testa-
ment to Whitman’s pervasive presence in early Soviet poetry (Nina Tumarkin, Lenin
Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983], 99).
42. Boris Pasternak, “Okhrannaia gramota,” Vozdushnye puti (Moscow: Sovetskii
pisatel’, 1982), 282.
43. Jakobson, “Generation,” 161, 163.
44. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. Struve and B. A. Filipoff, 4 vols. (vols.
1–3, Washington, D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971; vol. 4, Paris:
YMCA Press, 1981), 2:334.
45. Wiktor Woroszylski quotes Lunacharsky’s attack in The Life of Mayakovsky,

tr. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1972), 250. Lunacharsky, On
Art and Literature, 239, 234, 245, 240.
46. Lunacharsky, On Art and Literature, 250.
47. Ibid., 252–253.
Chapter 3. The Death of the Book à la russe

1. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 8, 18; Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, tr. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977), 113–139, esp. 117; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image—Mu-
sic—Text, ed. and tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–143.
2. Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” tr. Edward
J. Brown, Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 164. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 143.
For a provocative discussion of the notion of the “death of the author” in modern
French and Russian poetry, see Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural
Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 15. Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietz-
sche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985),
340, 347, 351. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. G. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 396.
4. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983), 66.
5. “What Is an Author?” 124. For a succinct discussion of the limits of Foucaul-
dian theory on Stalinist soil, see Beth Holmgren, Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time:
On Lidiia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 7–9. Vitaly Shentalinsky quotes Mandelstam’s guard in Arrested
Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime (New York: The
Free Press, 1996), 182. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 3rd
ed. (Paris: YMCA Press, 1982), 178. On martyrological readings of Mandelstam’s
own life and work, see Clare Cavanagh, “Rereading the Poet’s Ending: Mandelstam,
Chaplin and Stalin,” PMLA, vol. 109, no. 1 (January, 1994), 71–86.
6. Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 200. “Believe me, I’ve had it
up to here/ With the triumphs of a civic death,” Akhmatova complains in one late
lyric (“Torzhestvami grazhdanskoi smerti,” Sochineniia, 3 vols. [vols. 1 and 2, ed.
Boris Filipoff and G. P. Struve, Washington, D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates,
1967–1968; vol. 3, ed. G. Struve, N. A. Struve, and B. A. Filippov, Paris: YMCA
Press, 1983], 3:502). She explains the nature of her premature burial and “posthumous
existence” in her essay on Georgii Ivanov’s Peterburgskie zimy (1961): “They stopped
publishing me altogether from 1925 to 1939. . . . I was witness to my civic death for
the fi rst time then. I was thirty-five years old . . .” (“On Petersburg Winters,” in Anna
Akhmatova, My Half Century: Selected Prose, ed. Ronald Meyer [Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1992], 57). Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1960), 171.
Mandelstam refers to “Stalin’s book” in his last lyrics, written in Moscow before his
fi nal arrest. The phrase itself is taken from his chilling “Stanzas” (Stansy), written
in July 1937, as printed in Osip Mandelstam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. P.
M. Nerler (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 1:316–317. On Stalin as
the master artist who fulfi lls avant-garde dreams of fusing life and art, see Andrei
Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, tr. Joanne Turnbull (New York:
Little, Brown, 1990), 93–113; and Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-
Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, tr. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992).
7. Anna Akhmatova, “Mandelstam (Listki iz dnevnika),” Sochineniia, 2:181.
Anatoly Naiman quotes the Soviet critics on Acmeist “chamber music” in Remem-
bering Anna Akhmatova, tr. Wendy Rosslyn (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 128.
Osip Mandelstam, “Literary Moscow: The Birth of Plot,” The Complete Critical
Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris, and Constance Link
(Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 152. All further translations of Mandelstam’s prose will be
taken, with slight modifications, from this edition. Akhmatova, “Poema bez geroia,”
Sochineniia, 2:125.
8. Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G.P. Struve and B.A. Filipoff, 4
vols. (vols. 1–3, Washington, D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971; vol.
4, Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 1:202.
9. Quoted in Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (Cam-
bridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 176. Shetalinsky records the tran-
scripts of Mandelstam’s interrogation in Arrested Voices, 172–181. Polianovsky and
Nadezhda Mandelstam also report the interrogator’s reactions in E. Polianovsky,
“Smert’ Osipa Mandelstama I,” Izvestiia (May 23–28, 1992); and Mandelstam,
Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, esp. 88, 96–98, 165–170.
10. A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. D. Blagoi, vol. 2 (Moscow, Khudozhest-
vennaia literatura, 1970), 84. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 3:147.
11. On Mandelstam’s recitations of the epigram, see Polianovsky, “Smert’ Osipa
Mandelstama I,” 23–28; and Mandelstam, Vospominaniia: Kniga pervaia, 88, 96–98,
165–170.
12. Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, 184.
13. Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 438, 317.
14. Ibid., 316–317, 314; Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:157–158.
15. Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 1:361; translation taken from Susan Amert, In a Shat-
tered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1992), 32.
16. Boris Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova (Izd. Lev, 1923; rpt. Paris: Lev, 1980),
86–87. “Journey to Armenia” (1933), Mandelstam, Complete Critical Prose, 372.
Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:170, 214, 169. On the role of articulation in
Akhmatova’s late poetry, see Amert, Shattered Mirror, 32–34.
17. Andrei Sinyavsky quotes Voloshin in Soviet Civilization, 233.
18. “Poema bez geroia,” Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 2:101.
19. Bulgakov’s famous phrase derives from The Master and Margarita (Master i
Margarita).
20. “And now I’m writing, just as before, without corrections/ My verses in a burnt
notebook,” Akhmatova notes in a poem of 1956 (“Son,” Sochineniia, 1:291). I am
indebted to Amert’s discussions of Akhmatova’s “burnt notebooks” and “poems writ-

ten for the ashtray,” Shattered Mirror, 143–151.
21. Akhmatova quotes Mandelstam in her recollections of the poet (Sochineniia,
2:185).
Chapter 4. Akhmatova and the Forms of Responsibility

1. I fi rst learned of the so-called Mystery House through childhood visits. The
quotes and factual data on Sarah Winchester’s mansion derive from “The Win-
chester Mystery House: The History of One of America’s Most Haunted Houses,”
by Troy Taylor (www.prairieghosts.com/ winchester.html), 1–7); and “Winchester
Mystery House: Amazing Facts” (no author) (www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
facts.html), 1–2.
2. Ibid.
3. I draw my chief version of the Poem from Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 3
vols. (vols. 1 and 2, ed. Boris Filipoff and G. P. Struve, Munich: Interlanguage Liter-
ary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3, ed. G. Struve, N. A. Struve, and B. A. Filippov, Paris:
YMCA Press, 1983). All further citations from these volumes will be indicated in the
text. I have also consulted D. Timenchik’s edition of the Poem in Anna Akhmatova,
Poema bez geroia (Moscow: MPU, 1989), 30–61. All translations from the poetry are
my own, unless otherwise noted. Akhmatova comments on the Poem in its introduc-
tory texts; Anna Akhmatova, My Half Century: Selected Prose, ed. Ronald Meyer
(Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1992), 130.
4. Quoted in Timenchik, Poema, 67.
5. I have taken my translation here, with slight modifications, from Akhmatova,
My Half Century, 136 (Sochineniia, 3:156).
6. Roberta Reeder quotes Solzhenitsyn in Anna Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 373. For Amert’s splendid discussion of Requi-
em’s “framing texts” and their function, see In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry
of Anna Akhmatova (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 30–59.
7. Lydia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 3 vols. (Moscow: Soglasie,
1997), 2:123. I follow Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova’s lead in my term for the
volumes collectively in the text: see Lydia Chukovskaya, The Akhmatova Journals,
vol. 1: 1938–1941, tr. Milena Michalski and Sylva Rubashova (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1994). Untranslated volumes will appear as Chukovskaya, Zapiski
in the notes.
8. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 53, 57.
9. Chukovskaya includes Akhmatova’s poem in Zapiski, 2:260. Akhmatova‘s
comments on Requiem’s auditors are quoted in Anna Akhmatova, The Word that
Causes Death’s Defeat: Poems of Memory, tr. and ed. Nancy K. Anderson (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 83. On Mandelstam’s reading of the Stalin epi-
gram, see E. Polianovsky, “Smert’ Osipa Mandel’shtama I,” Izvestiia (May 23–28,
1992); and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, tr. Max Hayward (New
York: Atheneum, 1976), 83.
10. Kees Verheul, “Public Themes in the Poetry of Anna Axmatova,” Tale Without
a Hero and Twenty-Two Poems by Anna Axmatova, ed. Jeanne van der Eng-Lied-
meier and Kees Verheul (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 21. Anderson, The Word, 185.
11. Stephany Gould, “Requiem as Revised Epic,” unpublished essay (Madison,

Wis., 1993). Chukovskaya mentions reading the novella to Akhmatova in The Akhma-
tova Journals, 58–60. Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofi a Petrovna, tr. Aline Werth (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press,1988), 60.
12. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Cen-
tury Russia (New York: Viking, 2000), 308. She mentions the Bolshevik resistance to
mourning in the same work, 129. “Muse of weeping” derives from Tsvetaeva’s cycle
on Akhmatova: Marina Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, 5 vols. (New York: Rus-
sica Publishers, 1980), 1:232.
13. His purported attachment to “formalism” in art and his popularity among his
university students were also contributing factors (private communication from Lazar
Fleishman).
14. On Stalin’s order to “isolate but preserve,” see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope
against Hope, 32. For the Poem’s omitted stanzas see Timenchik, Poema, 64. Amert,
Shattered Mirror, 124.
15. Timenchik, Poema, 23. Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:130.
16. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1978), 3:91. Anatoly Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova, tr. Wendy Ross-
lyn (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 127. Lev Loseff, “Who Is the Hero of the Poem
without One?” Essays in Poetics, vol. 2 (Spring, 1986), 91–105. Osip Mandelstam,
Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. Struve and B. A. Filipoff, 4 vols. (vols. 1–3, Washington,
D.C.: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971; vol. 4, Paris: YMCA Press, 1981),
1:106.
17. Kees Verheul, The Theme of Time in the Poetry of Anna Akhmatova (The
Hague: Mouton, 1971), 217.
18. The lines I attribute to each speaker are provisional; one voice frequently blurs
into the next.
19. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 128–133.
20. Amert, Shattered Mirror, 34–35. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 130, 132.
21. Amert, Shattered Mirror, 36–48.
22. This is also Akhmatova’s friend Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, as Akhmatova herself
indicates.
23. Emily Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H.
Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 55. Chukovskaya records that Akhmatova
claimed to have read Ulysses six times by 1940 (The Akhmatova Journals, 168), and
she read Eliot’s Quartets with great interest after the war; I will return to this later in
my discussion.
24. Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:325, 123. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 132.
25. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1957), 15. For the
dates of Akhmatova’s stay in the House on the Fontanka, see Akhmatova and Ronald
Meyer’s commentary in My Half-Century, 100, 354.
26. Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:185. Verheul, Theme of Time, 204.
27. Pavlovsky is quoted in Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 2:368. Naiman, Remember-
ing Anna Akhmatova, 120. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 14. Lawrence Lipking,
The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 65–137; his comment on Virgil can be found on 77. On Akhma-
tova and Eliot, see Reeder, Anna Akhmatova, 389, V. N. Toporov, “K otzvukam
zapadnoevropeiskoi poezii u Akhmatovoi (T. S. Eliot),” International Journal of

Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, vol.16 (1973), 157–176.
28. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 301. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays
1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 140.
29. Toporov, “K otzvukam,” passim. Lipking, Life, 65–66, 75. Eliot, Complete
Poems, 117, 144–145.
30. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 1. The phrase “counterrevolutionary poetess” is
quoted in Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:106.
31. “The accursed tsarist past” is Chukovskaya’s phrase (Zapiski, 2:285). Ander-
son quotes Akhmatova in The Word, 68.
32. Lipking, Life, 67. Akhmatova, My Half Century, 58, 15. Chukovskaya quotes
Tvardovsky in Zapiski, 2:370. The “Royal Court” appears in Chukovskaya, The
Akhmatova Journals, 107.
33. Akhmatova has in mind particularly the memoirs of the poet Georgii Ivanov
and the ostensibly scholarly study of Leonid Strakhovsky, Craftsmen of the Word:
Three Poets of Modern Russia (1949). The quotes and references to Strakhovsky and
Ivanov are taken from Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:623, 225, 348, 675.
34. Eliot, Collected Poems, 144. Nadezhda Mandelstam refers to the Stalinist
“pre-Gutenberg era” in Hope against Hope, 192.
35. Caryl Emerson, “The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin,” Rethinking Bakhtin:
Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1989), 163.
36. Akhmatova recalls Tsvetaeva’s reaction in Timenchik, Poema, 353. On Blok,
Akhmatova, and the Poem see, inter alia, V. M. Zhirmunsky, “Anna Akhmatova i
Aleksandr Blok,” Russkaia literatura, vol. 3 (1970), 57–82; Sam Driver, “Axmatova’s
Poema bez geroja and Blok’s Vozmezdie,” Aleksandr Blok Centennial Conference,
ed. Walter N. Vickery (Columbus: Slavica, 1984), 89–99; Michael Wachtel, “Poet-
icheskaia perepiska Bloka s Akhmatovoi; Vzgliad na pervuiu publikatsiiu,” Stikh,
iazyk, poeziia: Pamiati Mikhaila Leonovicha Gasparova (Moscow: RGGU, 2006),
154–166. On the Poem’s self-conscious theatricality, see Wendy Rosslyn, “Theatre,
theatricality and Akhmatova’s Poema bez geroya,” Essays in Poetics, vol. 13, no. 1
(1988), 89–108.
37. Driver quotes Akhmatova in “Axmatova’s Poema,” 89. Rosslyn quotes the
critic A. A. Mgebrov on the Silver Age’s ubiquitous Pierrots in “Theatre and Theat-
ricality,” 96.
38. V. F. Khodasevich, “Konets Renaty,” Nekropol’ (Brussels: Les Editions Petrop-
olis, 1939; rpt. Paris: YMCA Press, 1976), 7–60.
39. Ibid., 23.
40. Akhmatova’s comments on Glebova-Sudeikina are quoted in Timenchik,
Poema, 212. Khodasevich quotes Blok in “Konets Renaty,” 22; the other citations
from “Konets Renaty” may be found on 8, 12, 14–15.
41. For Akhmatova on Glebova-Sudeikina, see Timenchik, Poema, 212. Ronald
Meyer quotes Ginzburg in My Half Century, xx. Mandelstam, Sobranie sochineniia,
1:37.
42. See for example Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:238.
43. Khodasevich, “Konets Renaty,” 14. On Mandelstam in the Poem’s opening
texts, see Rory Childers and Anna Lisa Crone, “The Mandel’shtam Presence in the
Dedications of Poema bez geroja,” Russian Literature, vol. 15, no. 1 (1984), 51–84.
Akhmatova quotes Mandelstam in My Half Century, 99.
44. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2002), 32.
45. Isaiah Berlin, “Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956,” Personal
Impressions, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Penguin, 1982), 190, 199. The phrase
“genius for self-dramatization” comes from Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 156. For accounts of Berlin’s encounters with Akhma-
tova and their aftermath, see: Gyorgy Dalos, The Guest from the Future: Anna
Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin, tr. Antony Wood (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir-
oux, 1996); Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, esp. 150–172, 232–233; Reeder, Anna Akhma-
tova, esp. 286–288, 324–326, 458–460.
46. Berlin, Personal Impressions, 192.
47. Ibid., 202, 190. Eliot, Collected Poems, 48. Akhmatova speaks of the Poem’s
doppelgänger in My Half Century, 136.
48. Carl Woodring quotes Auden in Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 47. For Stalin’s phone call to Pas-
ternak, see Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, 145–149. I have altered the
translation to reflect the Russian original, master, as opposed to Hayward’s “genius.”
Reeder quotes Stalin on Akhmatova in Anna Akhmatova, 229. Michael Ignatieff cites
the informer’s report on Akhmatova on the basis of a lecture on the “Akhmatova fi le”
given by a KGB operative in Berlin in 1993 (Isaiah Berlin, 165, 168). Berlin quotes
Akhmatova on Stalin’s alleged response to their meeting in Personal Impressions,
201–202.
49. Berlin, Personal Impressions, 202.
50. Timenchik, Poema, 61; it also appears in a footnote to the Struve/ Filipoff text
(2:132).
51. Balfour, Rhetoric, 70–71. Berlin, Personal Impressions, 205, 203.
52. For Akhmatova’s response to Frost, see Naiman, Remembering Anna Akhma-
tova, 111. Her comment to Chukovskaya is quoted in Zapiski, 2:509.
53. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 77. Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of
America, 1995), 739–740. F. D. Reeve quotes Frost in Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), 105, 132, 112, 126–127. Tom Paulin, Minotaur: Poetry
and the Nation State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 185.
54. Chukovskaya, Zapiski, 2:509. Berlin, Personal Impressions, 181, 184–186.
55. Berlin, Personal Impressions, 195. Ryszard Krynicki, “Do Not Want to Die for
Us,” Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun: Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist
Rule, ed. and tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1991), 142. Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957–1997, tr.
Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 83.
Chapter 5. Avant-garde Again

1. I’m grateful to friends who made the research for this chapter possible by gener-
ously providing me with key texts concerning the Mayakovsky cult and its aftermath
in postwar Poland: Anna and Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and especially
Michał Rusinek, who, as always, exceeded the call of Socialist Realist duty by track-
ing down and xeroxing virtually all of Wiktor Woroszylski’s early poetry for me.
My quotes are taken from Jacek Łukasiewicz, “Wiersz wewnątrz gazety,” Teksty dru-
gie, vol. 4, no. 10 (1991), 25–26. See also Tadeusz Nyczek, 22 × Szymborska (Poznań:
Wydawnictwo a5, 1997), 19–20.
2. Quoted in Łukasiewicz, “Wiersz,” 26. Wisława Szymborska, Dlatego żyjemy
(Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1954).
3. Wiktor Woroszylski quotes Mayakovsky and his critics in Życie Majakowskiego
(Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965). Woroszylski’s biography appeared
in English, in (unacknowledged) abridged form, as The Life of Mayakovsky, tr. Bole-
slaw Taborski (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 510, 427, 483. Trotsky attacks Maya-
kovsky’s “Bohemianism” in Literature and Revolution, tr. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1960). 131.
4. Edward Brown quotes Stalin in Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 370. I quote Lazar Fleishman from a private
communication. He continues: “A few years before that, on January 21, 1931 Lily
Brik sent a letter to Stalin asking him to write an introduction for the Collected Works
of Mayakovsky and to give his political and artistic evaluation of Mayakovsky’s epic
‘Lenin.’ Stalin left this letter unanswered.” Boris Pasternak, “Liudi i polozheniia,”
Vozdushnye puti: Proza raznykh let (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1982), 458.
5. On Mayakovsky’s visits to Poland, see Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odys-
sey of a Polish Intellectual, tr. Richard Lourie (New York: Norton, 1988), esp. 25,
43–48; Tomas Venclova, Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1996); Marcy Shore, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s
Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),
52–69; and Wiktor Woroszylski, “W Polsce,” Życie Majakowskiego, 605–624. This
chapter was omitted from the English translation, which also contains a number of
less substantive omissions, none of which are identified in the English text. On Wat’s
political beliefs and activities in the twenties, see Venclova, Aleksander Wat, 69–83;
and Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 10–78.
6. Wat, My Century, 44, 24. Woroszylski quotes Tuwim in Życie Majakowskiego,
608–609. Edward Balcerzan, Poezja polska w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1996), 32, 138. Tuwim passed through a brief
infatuation with Futurism himself—“I’ll be the fi rst Polish Futurist,” he crowed in
1918—but his love for Mayakovsky survived his short-lived fascination with Futurist
aesthetics (ibid., 32).
7. Woroszylski records the responses of Polish witnesses to the visit in Życie Maja-
kowskiego, 610–621. Mayakovsky himself wrote the introduction to his selected poems
in Polish translation that appeared in 1927. See Leonid Katsis, “Vladimir Maiakovskii
v Varshave v 1927 (russkii literaturnyi kontekst),” Włodzimierz Majakowski i jego
czasy, ed. Wiesława Olbrzych and Jerzy Szokalski (Warsaw: SOW, 1995), 29–42.
8. See Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 119–190, for an account
of the often contradictory interpretations of Mayakovsky’s death generated by his
French and Russian contemporaries. Trotsky quotes the official report on Mayak-
ovsky’s suicide in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel (New York:
Pathfi nder Press, 1970), 175.
9. On the issue of Miesięcznik literacki devoted to Mayakovsky, see Wat, My Cen-

tury, 56; and Krystyna Sierocka, “Miesięcznik literacki (1929–1931),” Słownik litera-
tury polskiej XX wieku, ed. Alina Brodzka, Mirosława Puchalska, et al. (Wrocław:
Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1992), 619–622. Balcerzan comments on
Broniewski’s poem in Poezja polska, 143–144, and gives the poem in its entirety in
Włodzimierz Majakowski (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1984), 159.
10. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1978), 2:31. For a more detailed discussion of the poet’s death and its Polish repercus-
sions, see Shore, Caviar and Ashes, 79–81.
11. On the “Batalia o Majakowskiego” and the postwar Polish “majakowszc-
zyzna,” see Edward Balcerzan, Poezja polska w latach 1939–1965, 2 vols. (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1988), 2:43–46; Stanisław Stabro, Poezja i his-
toria: Od Żagarów do Nowej Fali (Krakow: Universitas, 2001), 181; Leszek Szaruga,
Walka o godność: Polska poezja w latach 1939–1988 (Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze,
1993), 43–49. For Trotsky’s critique of Mayakovsky, see Literature and Revolution,
126–161. On “Mayakovshchina” in Soviet Russia of the twenties, see my introduc-
tion, and Woroszylski, Life of Mayakovsky, 274, 280–281, 419. Woroszylski’s remark
is taken from his Powrót do kraju (London: Polonia, 1979), 47.
12. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3:178. On the origins of the group’s derogatory
nickname, see Jacek Bocheński, “Moje przygody z Wiktorem, jak je pamiętam,”
Woroszylski, ed. Iwona Smolka (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyński, 1997),
5–12. Balcerzan quotes from “The Battle for Mayakovsky” in Poezja polska w latach
1939–1965, 2:45. Woroszylski, Poezje wybrane (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia
Wydawnicza, 1982), 6.
13. Alicja Lisiecka, Pokolenie ‘pryszczatych’ (Warsaw, 1964), 4. Quoted in Stabro,
Poezja i historia, 181.
14. Woroszylski, “Od autora,” Poezje wybrane, 6. Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju,
38. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 1:146–147.
15. Even a change of style was not enough to save Jasieński, who wrote a proto-
typical Socialist Realist novel—appropriately entitled Man Changes His Skin (Che-
lovek meniaet kozhu, 1932)—but perished just the same in a transit camp en route
to Kolyma in 1939. Broniewski’s poetics had always been more conservative than his
politics, making him a far more likely candidate for successful Sovietization. He not
only survived his stint in the dreaded Lubianka prison, but went on to become the
official “national poet” of postwar Poland. Wandurski died in a Soviet prison some-
time after 1934 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. On these poets’ fates see
Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983), 398–400. For Wat’s far more complex biography, see Venclova, Alek-
sander Wat, and Wat, My Century.
16. Max Eastman quotes Trotsky on the lyric in Artists in Uniform: A Study in
Literature and Bureaucratism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), 52. Literature
and Revolution, 150. Woroszylski quotes Mayakovsky’s Soviet critics and the poet
himself on his deplorable lyric tendencies in The Life of Mayakovsky, 250, 340, 346,
431. Mayakovsky, “Vo ves’ golos,” Sochineniia, 3:334.
17. Literature and Revolution, 170–171. Szaruga quotes Ważyk in Walka o
godność, 64–65. Wojciech Ligeza quotes the Socialist Realist critic L. Flaszen in
O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej: Świat w stanie korekty (Krakow: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 2001), 45. See Jacek Łukasiewicz, “Poezja,” for a more detailed description
of the antilyrical bent of Polish Socialist Realism: “The individual ‘I,’ whether agitator
or cult functionary, was irrelevant,” he explains (Słownik realizmu socjalistycznego,
ed. Zdzisław Łapinski, Wojciech Tomasik [Krakow: Universitas, 2005], 206–210).
18. Szaruga quotes Ważyk in Walka o godność, 64–65. Woroszylski, “O milości—
gawęda chaotyczna,” Śmierci nie ma! Poezje 1945–1948 (Warsaw: Ksiązka i wiedza,
1949), 41–44.
19. Woroszylski, “Rosa Lee,” Śmierci nie ma! 45–50.
20. Szaruga quotes from Woroszylski’s essay in Walka o godność, 47; Woroszylski
himself began his writing career as a state journalist, and continued his journalistic work
for many years both within Poland and in other eastern bloc countries. I have tried to
make my translation as infelicitous as Woroszylski’s clunky parody, which labors to
reproduce even Poe’s well-known rhyme scheme; see Poe, “Annabel Lee,” American
Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. John Hollander, vol. 1 (New York: Library of
America, 1993), 550–551. Mayakovsky, “Bruklinskii most,” Sochineniia, 1:519–523.
21. Woroszylski describes the master key that was to be his generation’s point of
entry into universal history in Powrót do kraju, 37.
22. Mayakovsky, “Domoi,” Sochineniia, 1:528–532, “Pro eto,” ibid., 3:142–185.
23. On Soviet schoolchildren’s mandatory Mayakovsky, see Boym, Death in Quo-
tation Marks, 183. Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju, 11. Balcerzan, Poezja polska w
latach 1939–1965: Część II (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, 1988),
43. Woroszylski, “O miłości—gawęda chaotyczna,” Śmierci nie ma! 43.
24. Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju, 10, 60–61. I have drawn additional information
on Woroszylski’s life and later work on Mayakovsky from Boleslaw Taborski’s “About
the Author” in The Life of Mayakovsky, 561–562. For a more detailed discussion of
Woroszylski’s engagement with, and disengagement from, People’s Poland, see Anna
Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Ławina i kamienie: Pisarze wobec komunizmu (War-
saw: Proszyński i S-ka, 2006), esp. 56–67, 284–295.
25. Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twenti-
eth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 5. Mayakovsky,
Sochineniia, 3:337, 1:66.
26. Woroszylski, Śmierci nie ma! 8–9, 54.
27. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3:7–36.
28. Woroszylski, Śmierci nie ma! 2–8. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 1:16–35. Roman
Jakobson, “On the Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” tr. Edward J Brown,
Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1975), 138–168.
29. Woroszylski, “Niech się męcza,” W dżungli wolności (Warsaw: Biblioteka
‘Więzi,’ 1996), 246.
30. On this production, see Balcerzan, “Włodzimierz Majakowski i nasze czasy,”
Włodzimerz Majakowski i jego czasy, 10; Stabro, Poezja i historia, 344.
31. “Od autora,” Poezje wybrane (Warsaw: Ludów Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza,
1982), 5–6.
32. Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju, 45. The Life of Mayakovsky, 530. I have amended
Taborski’s translation slightly to bring it closer to Pasternak’s original Russian. For
a discussion of Mayakovsky’s and Esenin’s suicides, see Boym, Death in Quotation
Marks, 119–190, 222–224.
33. Woroszylski, Śmierci nie ma! 6–7, 55.

34. Ibid., 11, 39–40.
35. Ibid., 40–44. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3:11–17.
36. Ibid. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 2:13.
37. Śmierci nie ma! 41–44.
38. Ibid., 54. Jan Kott, “Introduction,” Borowski, This Way to the Gas, Ladies and
Gentlemen, tr. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1976), 12 .
39. Balcerzan quotes Borowski on Mayakovsky in Poezja polska w latach 1939–
1965, 2:44. Milosz, The Captive Mind, tr. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1955),
134. Wat, My Age, 47. Woroszylski, “Nowotko,” Ojczyzna (Warsaw: Państwowy
Instytut Wydawniczy, 1953), 8.
40. Poezja Polski Ludowej, ed. Ryszard Matuszewski and Seweryn Pollack (War-
saw: Czytelnik, 1955), 567–575. Woroszylski, Ojczyzna, 5–6, 46. 71–74. Woroszyl-
ski, Z podróży, ze snu, z umierania: Wiersze 1951–1990 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo a5,
1992), 11.
41. Woroszylski, “O sobie i o wierszach,” Z podróży, 243–246. Szaruga, Poezja
polska, 84.
42. Woroszylski, Poezje wybrane, 9.
43. Woroszylski, Życie Majakowskiego, 5–6.
44. Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of
America, 1982), 87. Mayakovsky, Sochineniia, 3:91. Balcerzan describes the fate of
Broniewski’s translations, Poezja polska w latach 1939–1965, 2:38. Jacek Bocheński,
“Moje przygody z Wiktorem, jak je pamiętam,” Woroszylski, ed. Iwona Smolka (Kra-
kow: Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyński, 1997), 8. Woroszylski, “Od autora,” 11.
Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju, 29.
45. Woroszylski, Powrót do kraju, 28. Łukasiewicz mentions Woroszylski’s Histo-
rie in “Wspomnienia,” Smolka, Woroszylski, 33–36.
46. The censorship was never as strict in People’s Poland as it was in the Soviet
Union proper. Joseph Brodsky was only the most visible of the many Russian intel-
lectuals who learned to read Polish so as to gain access to literary texts, including
contemporary Western works in translation, that could not be printed in Poland’s
neighbor to the east.
47. Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History (New York: Little,
Brown, 1990), 232. Two recent volumes bear tribute to Mayakovsky’s continuing
popularity among Polish and anglophone artists. A 1996 issue of the prominent Pol-
ish journal Literatura na świecie dedicated some sixty pages to Mayakovsky’s work,
including translations by Tuwim, Jastun, and others alongside comments by recent
poets on Mayakovsky’s continued influence (Literatura na świecie, no. 7 [1996],
195–260). Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky, ed. Michael
Almereyda (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008) incorporates the comments
of American fi lmmakers, poets, and critics among Mayakovsky’s own writings and
Russian reactions to the poet.
Chapter 6. Bringing Up the Rear

1. Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęszna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie, przyjaciele i sny
Wisławy Szymborskiej (Warsaw: Proszyński i S-ka, 1997), 143. Wojciech Ligęza,
“Przepustowość owiec: Rozmowa z Wisławą Szymborską,” Teksty drugie, vol. 10,

no. 4 (1991), 153. Edward Balcerzan, “Laudatio,” Wokół Szymborskiej: Poznańskie
studia polonistyczne, Seria literacka 2.22 (Poznań, 1995), 26. Wisława Szymborska,
Poems New and Collected: 1957–1997, tr. Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 205. Further references to this volume will appear
in the text.
2. Bikont, Szczęszna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie, 73,103.
3. Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Con-
dition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xiv. “Grand narratives” is Lyotard’s
term (Postmodern Condition, 15).
4. Tomashevsky, “Literature and Biography,” Readings in Russian Poetics: For-
malist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann
Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), 47–55. Jacek Łukasiewicz, ““Poezja,”
Słownik realizmu socjalistycznego, ed. Zdzisław Lapiński and Wojciech Tomasik
(Warsaw: Universitas, 2004), 206–210. Wisława Szymborska, Dlatego żyjemy (War-
saw: Czytelnik, 1954), 4, 9, 13.
5. Bikont, Szczęszna, 112.
6. Wojciech Ligęza quotes L. Flaszen in O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej: Świat w
stanie korekty (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 45.
7. Tadeusz Nyczek comments on its popularity in 22 × Szymborska (Poznań:
Wydawnictwo a5), 133.
8. Bikont and Szczęszna quote both Nyczek and Szymborska in Pamiątkowe
rupiecie, 106, 137, 162, 172, 161. Wisława Szymborska, “Bringing Up the Rear,”
Nonrequired Reading, tr. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 2002), 104.
9. Jerzy Smulski, “Konwencje i gatunki literackie,” Słownik realizmu socjalisty-
cznego, 108–112. Bikont and Szczęszna quote Szymborska in Pamiątkowe rupiecie,
107.
10. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 100. Julia Hartwig, “In Your Eyes,”
Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun: Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule,
ed. and tr. Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 48.
11. Tadeusz Nyczek, “Bach na dachu Lubianki (Aleksander Wat),” Emigranci
(London: Aneks, 1988), 28.
12. Szymborska, “Nicość przenicowała się także i dla mnie,” Wiersze wybrane
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo a5, 2000), 194.
13. The term is Katherine Verdery’s, from What Was Socialism and What Comes
Next (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), passim.
14. Czesław Miłosz, “On Pasternak Soberly,” Emperor of the Earth: Modes of
Eccentric Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 73.
15. “Linguistics and Poetics,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and
Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 71.
16. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic His-
tory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), passim. Frank Kermode, The
Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 164.
17. Zbigniew Herbert, Mr. Cogito, tr. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter
(New York: Ecco Press, 1993), 30.
18. Quoted in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experi-
mental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 42.
19. Szymborska, “Z elementarza,” Dlatego żyjemy, 38.
20. Quoted in Bikont and Szczęszna, Pamiątkowe rupiecie, 177.
21. Szymborska, “Close Calls,” Nonrequired Reading, 121. Bernstein Foregone
Conclusions, 19.
22. I’m indebted in this portion of my discussion particularly not just to Bernstein’s
book, but to years of wonderfully productive arguments with my friend and colleague,
Gary Saul Morson, whose ideas on what he calls “prosaic” history may be found,
inter alia, in Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995).
23. Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History, vol. 11, no. 1
(Autumn, 1979), 41–74.
24. Leszek Szaruga, Walka o godność: Poezja polska w latach 1939–1988
(Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze, 1993), 67.
25. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917–1932 (New York: Oxford
26. Zbigniew Herbert, Still Life with a Bridle: Essays and Apocrypha, tr. Michael
March (New York: Ecco Press, 1991), 60.
27. Anna Akhmatova, “Lotova zhena,” Sochineniia, 3 vols. (vols. 1 and 2, ed. Boris
Filipoff and G. P. Struve, Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68); vol.
3, ed. G. Struve, N. A. Struve, and B. A. Filippov, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 1:222.
Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading, 104.
28. Jacek Łukasiewicz, “Wiersz wewnątrz gazety,” Teksty drugie, v. 4/ 10 (1991),
29, 27.
29. Zagajewski, List: Oda do wielości (Paris: Instytut literacki, 1983), 49.
30. Zagajewski, “Poezja swobody,” Barańczak, “Posążek z soli,” Kornhauser,
“Czarodziejstwo,” Radość czytania Szymborskiej, ed. Jerzy Illg (Krakow: Znak,
1996), 255–276.
Chapter 7. Counterrevolution in Poetic Language

1. Adam Michnik, “Anti-authoritarian Revolt: A Conversation with Daniel Cohn-
Bendit,” Letters from Freedom: Post–Cold War Realities and Perspectives, ed. Irena
Grudzinska Gross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 37. “The unrepre-
sented world” is Julian Kornhauser’s and Adam Zagajewski’s phrase, from their book
by that name (Świat nie przedstawiony [Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974]).
2. Denis Hollier, “May, 1968: Actions, No! Words, Yes!” A New History of
French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1989), 1037. Yve-Alain Bois, “1973: French Lib,” ibid., 1041. On the legacy of 1968
in modern French thought, see Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the
Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, tr. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1990) and Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel
Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (University Park: Pennsyl-
vania State University Press, 1996).
3. Hollier, “May, 1968,” 1034. Michnik, “Anti-authoritarian Revolt,” 37.

4. Neal Ascherson, The Polish August (New York: Penguin Books), 93. Michnik,
“Anti-authoritarian Revolt,” 42–45. Tony Judt quotes polemicists of the Parti Social-
iste Unifié in Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 281.
5. Michnik, “Anti-authoritarian Revolt,” 36, 47. Michnik comments on the Polish
press coverage of May, 1968 ibid., 46.
6. Jacques Derrida was at the same time, incidentally, busily forging the begin-
nings of what would prove to be a spectacular international career by lecturing
American academics on the significance, inter alia, of Vietnam and Martin Luther
King’s assassination. He reminded them, too, that his own talk had been written
under duress: “The universities of Paris were being invaded by the forces of order” at
the very moment that he was preparing his lecture, he informed his audience (Hollier,
“May, 1968,” 1039).
7. On the omission of Poland from postcolonial criticism generally, see Clare
Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter,
2004), 82–92.
8. Michnik, “Anti-authoritarian Revolt,” 42. Ascherson, Polish August, 91–92.
Tadeusz Nyczek, “The Poetry of the ‘68 Generation,” Humps & Wings: Polish Poetry
Since ‘68, ed. Tadeusz Nyczek, tr. Bogusław Rostworowski (San Francisco: Invisible
City, 1982), 7. On the Romantics and Solidarity, see Timothy Garton-Ash, The Polish
Revolution: Solidarity (New York: Vintage, 1985), 44–45; and Norman Davies, Heart
of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 382.
9. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1974). Kristeva, “How Does One Speak to Literature?”,
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1980), 123.
10. Tel Quel, “Division of the Assembly,” The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick ffrench
and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–24.
11. Suleiman paraphrases Pleynet and quotes Sollers in “1960: As Is,” 1011–1018.
Matei Calinescu describes Tel Quel’s members as “monomaniacs of the idea of Revo-
lution” in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 144–145.
12. Kristeva, “The Ethics of Linguistics,” Desire in Language, 27, 31. On Tel Quel’s
fascination with Futurism and Formalism, see Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics
of Tel Quel, 115–134. On Kristeva and the Russian avant-garde, see Clare Cavanagh,
“Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language: Julia Kristeva and the Russian Avant-garde,”
Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 2 (Summer, 1993), 283–297.
13. Tadeusz Nyczek quotes Karasek in his introduction to Określona epoka: Nowa
Fala 1968–1993, ed. with commentary by Tadeusz Nyczek (Krakow: Oficyna Liter-
acka, 1994), 7. Ryszard Krynicki, “Obywatele Fantasmagorii,” Magnetyczny punkt:
Wybrane wierszy i przekłady (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo CiS, 1996), 90. Nyczek,
Określona epoka, 3, 7.
14. Wit Jaworski, “Maj 68 (Image),” Nyczek, Określona epoka, 67.
15. Zagajewski, “Rzeczywistość nie przedstawiona w powojennej literaturze,”
Świat nie przedstawiony, 36. Miłosz, Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1980), 13.
16. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Marx and the Inscription of Labour,” Marx-Scouras, The
Tel Quel Reader, 53. Ibid., 78. This is also the source of Foucault’s remark.
17. Hollier, “1968, May,” 1037.
18. Leszek Szaruga discusses Socialist Realist “hermetic poetics” in Walka o
godność: Poezja polska w latach 1939–1988 (Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze, 1993), 67.
François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century, tr. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 139.
19. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, ed. Charlotte Douglas and Ronald
Vroon, tr. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987–89),
I: 321. Lenin comments on art in “Partiinaia organizatsiia i partiinaia literatura,”
Sochineniia, vol. 10 (Moscow: Ogiz, 1947), 27.
20. Aileen Kelly quotes Malia in “The Secret Sharer,” New York Review of Books,
vol. 47, no. 4 (March 9, 2000), 33.
21. “The unrepresented world” is the title of Kornhauser and Zagajewski’s pro-
grammatic study, as cited above. “The unfalsified world” comes from Barańczak’s
essay “Parę przypuszczeń na temat poezji współczesnej” (1970), Etyka i poetyka
(Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1979), 263. Jacek Kuron, and Jacek Zakowski, PRL dla
początkujących (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo dolnośląskie, 1998), 230.
22. Michnik, Letters from Freedom, 287. Michnik, “Biały gołąb szeptu,” Wyz-
nania nawróconego dysydenta (Warsaw: Zeszyty literackie, 2003), 62. Nyczek,
Określona epoka, 9.
23. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, tr. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1981),
75. Zagajewski, “New World,” Without End: New and Selected Poems, tr. Clare
Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 67. Nyczek, Powiedz tylko słowo (London: Polonia,
1985), 20. Romanticism figures even in the subtitle of Barańczak’s influential Nieufni
i zadufani: Romantyzm i klasycyzm w młodej poezji lat sześćdziesiątych (Wrocław:
Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1971), in which he describes the recent devel-
opment of what he calls “dialectical Romanticism” among younger poets (passim).
Zagajewski discusses the “plain speaking” of the poetic group “NOW” (TERAZ) as
a form of “populist Romanticism” in Świat nie przedstawiony (150).
24. Nadeau quotes Breton in Five Faces of Modernity, 117, 248; his own comments
can be found ibid., 223. Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, tr. Joanne
Turnbull (New York: Arcade, 1988), 210.
25. Kristeva, “From One Identity to An Other,” Desire in Language, 132.
26. Kornhauser and Zagajewski, Świat nie przedstawiony, 43–44. Barańczak,
Neufni i zadufani, 31.
27. Nyczek, Powiedz tylko słowo, 16. Barańczak, “Parę przypuszczeń,” Etyka i
poetyka, 264. Krynicki, “Podróż pośmiertna II,” Magnetyczny punkt, 56.
28. Krynicki, “Akt urodzenia,” Magnetyczny punkt, 28.
29. Krynicki, “Podróż pośmiertna (III),” Magnetyczny punkt, 88.
30. Ibid., 87. Krynicki, “Świat nie istnieje,” Magnetyczny punkt, 92.
31. Kornhauser and Zagajewski, Świat nie przedstawiony, 43; Krynicki, “Świat nie
istnieje,” 92.
32. Krynicki, Organizm zbiorowy (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1975), 89.
33. Barańczak, “Określona epoka,” Wybór wierszy i przekładów (Warsaw:
Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1997), 140. For a more extensive discussion of
Barańczak’s poetics, see Clare Cavanagh, “Setting the Handbrake: Barańczak’s Poet-
ics of Displacement,” Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, ed. Halina
Stephan (New York: Rodopi Press, 2003), 77–96.
34. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978–1987
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). On the complex relationship to the
censor that shaped the generation’s work, see Joanna Hobot, Gra z cenzurą w poezji
nowej fali (1968–1976) (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000).
35. Quoted in Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, 98.
36. Barańczak, “8.2.80: I nikt mnie nieuprzedził,” Wybór wierszy, 212.
37. William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say,” Selected Poems (New York:
New Directions, 1969), 55.
38. Akhmatova, “Mne ni k chemu odicheskie rati,” Sochineniia, 3 vols. (vols. 1
and 2, ed. Boris Filipoff and G. P. Struve, Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates,
1967–68); vol. 3, ed. G. Struve, N. A. Struve, and B. A. Filippov (Paris: YMCA Press,
1983), 1:251.
39. Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. G. Struve and B. A. Filipoff (vols.
1–3, Washington, D.C,: Interlanguage Library Associates, 1967–1971; vol. 4; Paris:
YMCA Press, 1981), I:221. Zagajewski, “Antennas in the Rain,” Eternal Enemies, tr.
Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 111. On the “game
with the censorship,” see Hobot, Gra z cenzurą, passim.
40. Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 220. Dickinson, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s
Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 55. Barańczak, Wybór
wierszy i przekładów, 69. Christopher Benfey quotes Mill in Emily Dickinson and the
Problem of Others (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 53. Mandel-
stam, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:196–197. Eliot, “The Three Voices of Poetry,” On Poetry
and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961), 96. Szymborska, Poems New
and Collected, 1957–1997), tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1998), 205.
41. Barańczak, “Pokolenie 68,” Etyka i poetyka, 195.
42. All quotes are taken from Nyczek, Określona epoka, 224, 204, 43.
43. Zagajewski, “W pierwszej osobie liczby mnogiej,” Komunikat (Krakow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972), 14. Zagajewski, “Sklepy mięsne,” Sklepy mięsne
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1975), 25. I’m drawing here on Nyczek’s com-
ments in “Komunikaty, listy, wyznania,” in Powiedz tylko słowo, 47–56.
44. Zagajewski, Sklepy mięsne, 13.
45. Hobot, “Rozmowa z Adamem Zagajewskim,” Gra z cenzurą, esp. 335, 337.
Zagajewski, “New World,” Without End, 70.
46. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 30. Hobot,
“Rozmowa z Adamem Zagajewskim,” 336.
47. Barańczak, “Spójrzmy prawdzie w oczy,” Wybór wierszy, 70.
48. Zagajewski, “Filosofowie,” Sklepy mięsne, 46. The translation is mine (With-
out End, 74).
49. All quotations come from Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties,
24–25.
50. Ibid., 26.
51. Barańczak, Wybór wierszy, 183–184.

52. Ibid., 149.
53. Nyczek, Określona epoka, 279–280. Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners”
gave its name to one collection in English; Zagajewski, Mysticism for Beginners, tr.
Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 7.
54. Miłosz, Captive Mind, 29.
55. Herbst, “Zapis VIII,” Nyczek, Określona epoka, 253. Barańczak, “Pokolenie
‘68,” Etyka i poetyka, 195–196. Ferry and Renaut quote Engels and Foucault’s stu-
dent, M. Clavel, in French Philosophy of the Sixties, 8, 106.
56. Barańczak, “Drobnomieszczańskie snoty,” Wybór wierszy, 295–296. Zaga-
jewski, “Fire,” tr. Renata Gorczynski, Without End, 101. For a more detailed dis-
cussion of Zagajewski’s poetic trajectory, see Clare Cavanagh, “Lyrical Ethics: The
Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring, 2000), 2–15.
57. Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos, vol. 20 (1974), 52–71. Barańczak,
“Parę przypuszczeń,” Etyka i poetyka, 264.
58. Kornhauser, “Życie wewnętrzne,” Międzyepoka (Krakow: Wydawnictwo
Baran i Suszczyński, 1995), 147. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, tr. Lillian Vallee
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 114, 71. Nyczek, “Bach na dachu Lubi-
anki (Aleksander Wat),” Emigranci (London: Anyks, 1988), 28.
59. Kornhauser, “Lwów jest wszędzie,” Międzyepoka, 100. Zagajewski, “Rzeczywistość
nie przedstawiona w powojennej literaturze polskiej,” Świat nie przedstawiony, 36.
60. Zagajewski, “O tym jak 27 marca 1972 roku 19 studentów pod kierunkiem
doktora Prokopa analizowało mój wiersz Miasto,” Sklepy mięsne, 33. “W licz-
bie mnogiej,” List: Oda do wielości (Paris: Instytut literackie, 1983), 49. “Fire,” tr.
Renata Gorczynski, Without End, 101.
61. Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. Clare Cavanagh,
New Yorker (September 24, 2001), 96. The poem appears in a slightly different ver-
sion in Without End, 60.
62. Czesław Miłosz, Postwar Polish Poetry (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983), xi–xii. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1983), 111.
63. Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957–1997, tr. Stanisław
Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 42, 145. Zbig-
niew Herbert, “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper,” Mr. Cogito, tr. John Carpenter
and Bogdana Carpenter (Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1993), 16.
64. Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, tr.
Lillian Vallee (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 260.
Chapter 8. The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream

1. “Among School Children,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York:
Macmillan, 1974), 212–214.
2. Miłosz, “To Robinson Jeffers,” New and Collected Poems (1931–2001) (New
York; Ecco/Harper Collins, 2001), 252. Future references to this edition will appear
in the text; references to the Polish texts are taken from Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze, ed.
Aleksandr Fiut, 4 vols. (Krakow: Znak, 2001–2004), unless otherwise noted. Seamus
310 Notes to Pages 238– 241
Heaney, “The Impact of Translation,” The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose
1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 36–44. Joseph Brodsky,
“How to Read a Book,” On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Noonday/Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995), 96–103.
3. Postwar Polish Poetry, ed. Czesław Miłosz (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983). Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter
Dale Scott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).
Shelley did have a political afterlife, abroad and at home, that would have gratified
at least some of his legislative ambitions. Not only did he inspire Marx and Engels,
who relished his revolutionary sentiments. He posthumously influenced the politics of
the future prime minister William Gladstone, and his “Song to the Men of England”
inspired the Chartist poets, and became in time a “classic working-class song,” as
Lawrence Lipking has informed me (unpublished correspondence). See also Bouthaina
Shaaban, “Shelley and the Chartists,” and Andrew Bennett, “Shelley in Posterity,”
Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 114–128, 215–223.
On American poetry and radical politics in the sixties, see Paul Breslin, The Psycho-
Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987); and Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture 1945–1980
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp. 111–147.
4. Sven Birkerts, The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (New York: William
Morrow, 1989), 84, 29. Pearce quotes and discusses Tocqueville in The Continuity of
American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 137–141.
5. Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 18. A. Alvarez, “Introduction to the
Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert,” Selected Poems, 9.
6. Jonathan Aaron, “Without Boundaries” (review of recent Polish poetry in
translation), Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Spring/Summer, 1981), 124, 128.
7. Zbigniew Herbert, “Prayer of Mr. Cogito-Traveler,” Report from the Besieged
City and Other Poems, tr. John and Bogdana Carpenter (New York: Ecco Press,
1985), 12–13. Carl Woodring quotes Byron in Politics in English Romantic Poetry
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 173–174.
8. Robert Boyes, “Irony of a Poetic Soul Wins Nobel for Pole,” The Times (Lon-
don, Oct. 4, 1996), 1.
9. Derek Walcott, “Polonaise,” New Yorker (Oct. 9, 1989), 52; Omeros (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 210–212. Seamus Heaney, “The Impact of Transla-
tion,” 39. Brodsky, “How to Read a Book,” 102. A number of younger Irish poets have
been so strongly influenced by “European [and] Eastern European poets,” Dillon John-
ston notes, “that they are undervalued by Irish readers . . . looking for ‘Irish poetry’”
(Irish Poetry after Joyce [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997], xvii).
On Hughes and Eastern European writing, see Michael Parker, “Hughes and
the Poets of Eastern Europe,” The Achievement of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 37–51; and Hughes’s introduction to
Vasko Popa, Collected Poems, tr. Anne Pennington and Francis R. Jones, ed. Francis
R. Jones (London: Anvil Press, 1997), xxi–xxx.
10. Helene J. F. de Aguilar, “‘A Prince Out of Thy Star’: The Place of Czesław
Miłosz,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Fall/Winter, 1983; Spring/Summer, 1984),
138, 142.
11. Miłosz, Postwar Polish Poetry, xi–xii.

12. Heaney, “The Impact of Translation,” 41.
13. Donald Davie, Slavic Excursions: Essays on Russian and Polish Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 290.
14. Heaney, “From the Republic of Conscience,” The Haw Lantern (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 211; “Sounding Auden,” Government of the
Tongue, 127; “The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream,” Poems: 1965–1975 (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 211.
By the early 1840’s, “Manfredism” had already become a dramatic cliché in Pol-
ish writing: “You stand like Manfred, with your face paler than the moon,” one char-
acter tells the Romantic poseur-hero of Słowacki’s play “Fantazy” (Juliusz Słowacki,
Dramaty [Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972], 2:58).
On the fate of Eliot’s play in Poland, see Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: The Past
in Poland’s Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 394.
15. Jonathan Galassi, “The Horses of Fantasy and Reality,” New York Times Book
Review (March 11, 1979), 14, 25; Marisha Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan:
Czesław Miłosz’s Warsaw Poems,” Ironwood, vol. 18 (1981), 28–35; Terence Des Pres,
“Czesław Miłosz: The Poetry of Aftermath,” The Nation (Dec. 30, 1978), 741–743.
For an English-language overview of Miłosz’s influence on American poetry, see Bog-
dana Carpenter, “The Gift Returned: Czesław Miłosz and American Poetry,” Living
in Translation: Polish Writers in America, ed. Halina Stephan (Amsterdam: Rodopi
Press, 2003), 45–76.
16. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983), 94–95, 111.
17. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of Amer-
ica, 1982), 264. Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC’s, tr. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2001), 299–300.
18. Whitman, Complete Poetry, 444–445.
19. Quoted in Czesław Miłosz and Renata Gorczyńska, Rozmowy: “Podróżny
świata” (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002), 101–102.
20. Miłosz, “Na śpiew ptaka nad brzegami Potomaku,” “Central Park,” “Do
Alberta Einsteina,” Wiersze, 2:32, 48, 147.
21. Miłosz, “Wprowadzenie w Amerykanów,” Kontinenty (Krakow: Znak, 1999),
91–137.
22. Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC’s, 30.
23. Helen Vendler, “Czesław Miłosz,” The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets,
Critics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 223. Chamberlain,
“Voice of the Orphan,” 28.
24. Miłosz, “Wprowadzenie w Amerykanów,” 91. See, for example, Marian Stala’s
afterword to Miłosz, Poezje (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1999), in which he
refers more than once to the wartime Miłosz as “an inhabitant of the waste land”
(mieszkaniec jałowej ziemi), 460–462.
25. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, tr. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1981), 216,
41. Miłosz, Native Realm, tr. Catherine S. Leach (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 249.
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1971), 21.
26. Miłosz, “Próba porozumienia” (1956), “Poezja amerykańska” (1956), Konty-
nenty, 432, 414. Filkins, “The Poetry and Anti-Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” Iowa
Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer, 1989), 190. Heaney, “The Impact of Transla-
tion,” 37.
27. Miłosz, “Proba porózumienia,” 442. Jerzy Kwiatkowski, “Miejsce Miłosza w
poezji polskiej,” Magia poezji: O poetach polskich XX wieku (Krakow: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 1995), 21–22.
28. On Eliot’s influence in Poland, see Jean Ward, T. S. Eliot w oczach trzech
polskich pisarzy (Krakow: Universitas, 2001); and Magdalena Heydl, Obecność T. S.
Eliota w literaturze polskiej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego,
2002). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,
tr. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, 1980), 10. “Wprowadzenie w Amerykanów,” 121.
29. Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 112–113; Miłosz, Unattainable Earth, tr. Miłosz
and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), 69; Heaney, “The Interesting Case of
Nero, Chekhov’s Cognac and a Knocker,” Government of the Tongue, xx.
30. A. Alvarez, “Witness,” New York Review of Books (June 2, 1988), 21–22.
Czesław Miłosz, letter to the editor, New York Review of Books (July 21, 1988), 46.
31. Czesław Miłosz, A Treatise on Poetry, tr. Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York:
Ecco Press, 2001), 33, 100, 103–104.
32. Carolyn Forché, “Introduction,” Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century
Poetry of Witness, ed. Carolyn Forché (New York: Norton, 1993), 40. Robert Hass,
“Reading Miłosz,” Ironwood, vol. 18 (1981), 49.
33. Miłosz, Treatise, 103–106. Miłosz himself mentions the poets associated with
Art and Nation in his commentary (104). I’m indebted to Michał Markowski for his
comments on this section of this chapter particularly.
34. Forché, “Introduction,” 36; Des Pres, “Czesław Miłosz,” 743.
35. Miłosz, Native Realm, 121. On Auden’s early political poetry, see Samuel
Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930’s
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Pieśń niepodległa, ed. Czesław Miłosz
(Warsaw, 1942; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981).
36. Miłosz quotes Gombrowicz in Rozmowy, 152–153. Miłosz, The Year of the
Hunter, tr. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 119. Ewa
Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, tr. Richard
Lourie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 321. Miłosz, Captive Mind,
175, 250, 31.
37. Miłosz, Treatise, p. 100. On the controversies surrounding Miłosz’s funeral, see
Clare Cavanagh, “Chaplain of Shades: The Ending of Czesław Miłosz,” Poetry, vol.
185, no. 5 (February, 2005), 378–386.
38. Czesław Miłosz, Druga przestrzeń (Krakow: Znak, 2002), 67. An English
translation of the poem, minus this line, may be found in Miłosz, Second Space, tr.
Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco, 2004), 47–66.
39. “In contradistinction to Miłosz’s later work, however, these dead are not
desired. They are a burden,” Forché comments (“Introduction,” 40).
40. Barańczak, Neufni i zadufani: Romantyzm i klasycyzm w młodej poezji lat
sześćdziesiątych (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1971), 12. Lidia Banowska quotes Miłosz in
Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji (Poznań: Wyd. Naukowe UAM, 2005),
9. Miłosz stands proudly before his parking space in a Polish documentary on his life
in the States, Czarodziejska góra (A Magic Mountain; Telewizja Polska, 2000). I’m
grateful to Jerzy Illg, one of the fi lm’s producers, and his wife Joanna for showing me
the fi lm in their home.
41. David Rosen, Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 3.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 19. Miłosz, Year of the Hunter, 119.
43. Miłosz, Year of the Hunter, 208. Eliot, Collected Poems, 48.
44. Lipking, Life, 19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton
45. Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Rozmowy, 113–114.
46. Miłosz, The Seizure of Power, tr. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1982), 34–35.
47. Miłosz, Native Realm, 238, 249.
48. Wiktor Weintraub quotes Sobolevsky in The Poetry of Adam Mickiewicz (The
Hague: Mouton, 1954), 148–149.
49. Geoffrey Hill, “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” Literary Imagination, vol.
1, no. 2 (Fall, 1999), 251. Miłosz, Native Realm, 121. I have adapted the English
translation here; see Miłosz, Rodzinna Europa (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
2001), 139.
50. Miłosz quotes Wordsworth in Zaraz po wojnie: Korespondencja z pisarzami
(Krakow: Znak, 1998), 221.
51. See Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie (Krakow: Znak, 2005), 88–91, 122–128,
277–279.
52. Poeta pamięta: Antologia poezji świadectwa i sprzeciwu 1944–1984, ed.
Stanisław Barańczak (London: Puls Publications, 1984), 5. Miłosz, Captive Mind,
175.
53. Barańczak, Poeta pamięta, 5–9.
54. Heaney, “Introduction,” The Essential Wordsworth (New York: Ecco, 1988), 9.
55. Miłosz, Native Realm, 125.
56. Heaney, Station Island (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 16–17.
57. Heaney, Government of the Tongue, xx, xvi.
Afterword
1. Conversation with Czesław Miłosz, 2002. Miłosz was not above using the
same joke more than once; see Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna, Lawina i kamienie:
Pisarze wobec komunizmu (Warsaw: Proszyński i S-ka, 2006), 189.
2. Conversations with Miłosz, 2003. Miłosz apparently didn’t engage other
interlocutors on this topic with such frequency, to judge by what two of his long-
time friends and colleagues, Adam Michnik and Irena Grudzińska-Gross, told me in
another private conversation (Boston, 2005).
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), passim. Lipking quotes Mann, 113.
“World-historical seriousness” is Maureen McLane’s phrase, from “A Dirty Job”
(review of William Logan, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin),
Chicago Tribune [Dec. 11, 2005), Section 14:5. See the introduction, 1).
4. Czesław Miłosz, “Komentarz do Ody do Stalina Osipa Mandelsztama,” Na
Głos, no. 22 (1996). The abridged, retitled text appeared as “Nie znając wstydu ni
miary,” Gazeta wyborcza (Nov. 23–24, 1996), 12. Yet another version, abridged
this time by the author himself, was published in Miłosz, Eseje, ed. Marek Zaleski
(Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2000), 278–285. Miłosz was so concerned that I understand
his position that he personally made sure that I obtained a copy of this version. For
Freidin’s interpretation of the ode, see A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and
His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987),
222–272.
5. To judge by the state-sponsored “Year of Zbigniew Herbert,” commemorating
ten years since the poet’s death in 1998, Herbert seems to have won a posthumous vic-
tory in this particular wrestling match: see Barbara Zukowski, “Battling Bard: The
Politics of Zbigniew Herbert” (honors thesis, Northwestern University, 2008).
6. The responses to Miłosz’s article run as follows: Fazil Iskander, “W nadziei
na zmiłowanie,” Gazeta wyborcza (Nov. 23–24, 1996), 13; Jerzy Pomianowski,
“Tematy nie do odstąpienia,” ibid., (Nov. 30–Dec. 1, 1996), 16–17; Zbigniew
Dmitroca, “Kiedy w miescie panuje dżuma,” ibid., (Dec. 7–8, 1996), 22; Miłosz,
“Poeta i państwo,” Rzeczpospolita, Plus-Minus (magazine section, Dec. 7–8, 1996),
1; Adam Pomorski, “Poeta nie pamięta,” ibid., (Dec. 28–29, 1996), 4; Ryszard
Matuszewski, “Poeta pamięta i rozumie więcej niż rusycista,” ibid., (Jan. 11–12,
1997), 6; Anatolii Naiman, “Geniusz i poeta,” Gazeta wyborcza (March 22–23,
1997), 18. I am grateful to Piotr Sommer for passing on the entire sequence to me
shortly after it appeared.
7. Miłosz, “Nie znając wstydu,” 12. Miłosz, Eseje, 278.
8. See Freidin, Coat of Many Colors; Mikhail Gasparov, O. Mandel’shtam: Gra-
zhdanskaia lirika 1937 goda (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1996);
and my own “Rereading the Poet’s Ending: Mandelstam, Chaplin and Stalin,” PMLA,
vol. 109, no. 1 (Jan. 1994), 71–86, and Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation
of Tradition, esp. 279–304. Miłosz, “Nie znając wstydu,” 12.
9. Pomorski, “Poeta nie pamięta,” 4. Jerzy Giedroyc paraphrases Herling-
Grudziński in Andrzej Zawada, Miłosz (Wrocław: Wyd. Dolnośląskie, 1997), 132. I
am grateful to Anna Barańczak for illuminating this debate for me.
Miłosz himself was very upset by the young poet’s charges and mentioned them to
me repeatedly in our talks of summer, 2002. I no longer recall which poet made the
accusations, but they were the subject of much discussion among Miłosz’s friends that
summer.
10. Miłosz, “Nie znając wstydu,” 12. Osip Mandelstam, Sobranie sochinenii, ed.
G. P. Struve and B. A. Filipoff (vols. 1–3, Washington, D.C,: Interlanguage Library
Associates, 1967–1971; vol. 4; Paris: YMCA Press, 1981), 1:217.
11. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken,
1978), 100.
12. Miłosz, “Nie znając wstydu,” 12. On Liliia Popova and the late poems, see
Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 357; and S. S. Averintsev, “Sud’ba i vest’ Osipa
Mandel’shtama,” Mandelstam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhest-
vennaia literatura, 1990), 1:62.
13. Anatolii Naiman, “Geniusz,” 18.
14. Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected 1957–1997, tr. Stanislaw
Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 205. M. Iu. Ler-
montov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., ed. G. Makogonenko (Moscow: Pravda, 1986),
1:41–42.
15. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1983), 231–232. Tadeusz Komendant, “Między wieszczami,” Polityka,
no. 3 (Feb. 25, 1995), 4.
16. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, tr. Bernard Frecht-
man et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 334. Roman Jakobson,
“On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets,” tr. Edward J. Brown, Twentieth-
Century Russian Literary Criticism, ed. Victor Erlich (New Haven: Yale University
Press, l975), 163.
17. Lydia Chukovskaia quotes Akhmatova in Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2
(Moscow: Soglasie, 1997), 509. Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His
Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 289–290.
18. Brodsky was directed by Soviet authorities to accept an invitation to Israel—as
a Jew he was eligible for “repatriation” under Soviet law—that he had not sought. He
complied only to avoid yet another extended stay in prison or exile. See Lev Losev,
Iosif Brodskii: Opyt literaturnoi biografi i (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2006), 146–
148. Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 3 vols. (vols. 1 and 2, ed. Boris Filipoff and G.
P. Struve, Munich: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1967–68; vol. 3, ed. G. Struve,
N. A. Struve, and B. A. Filippov, Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), 1:236. Anatoly Naiman
quotes Akhmatova in Remembering Anna Akhmatova, tr. Wendy Rosslyn (New
York: Henry Holt, 1991), 5.
19. Benedikt Sarnov describes Stalin’s phone call to Pasternak in Zalozhnik
vechnosti: Sluchai Mandel’shtama (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1990), 30. Czesław
Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983),
36.
20. For Brodsky’s comment, see Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, ed. Cynthia
Haven (Jackson: University Press of Missouri, 2006), 188. His remarks also appear
in abbreviated form on the jackets of many of Miłosz’s English-language translation.
Czesław Miłosz, Księgi biblijne (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 286.
21. Czesław Miłosz, Second Space, tr. Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco,
2004), 59, 62. I have adapted the translation somewhat; see Druga przestrzeń (Kra-
kow: Znak, 2002), 80, 84.
22. Miłosz, “Poeta i państwo,” 1, “Nie znając wstydu,” 11. Mandelstam, Sobranie
sochinenii, 2:217.
23. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997),
251.
I discussed the changes to Second Space’s flap copy in phone conversations with
his son Antoni Miłosz, who was assisting his ailing father with the volume’s prepara-
tion at the time (July, 2004).
24. Szymborska, Poems, 192–193.
25. Yeats, Poems, 336; Szymborska, Poems, 52.
Chapter Title: Credits

Credits
“Określona epokha,” “I nikt mnie nie uprzedził,” “Autentik,” from Wybór wierszy i
przekładów by Stanisław Barańczak. Copyright © 1997 by Stanisław Barańczak.
Reprinted by permission of Stanisław Barańczak.
“Remorse is memory” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson,
Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright ©
1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted
by permission of Harvard University Press.
“The Unacknowledged Legislator’s Dream” from Poems 1965–1975 by Seamus
Heaney. Copyright © 1980 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber Ltd.
“Away from It All” from Station Island by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1984 by
Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and
Faber and Faber Ltd.
“To Ryszard Krynicki—A Letter” from Report from the Besieged City by Zbig-
niew Herbert, tr. John and Bogdana Carpenter. Copyright © 1985 by Ecco Press.
Reprinted by permission of Ecco/Harper Collins.
“Akt urodzenia,” “Świat jeszcze istnieje,” “Nie chciej za nas umierać,” from Mag-
netyczny punkt by Ryszard Krynicki. Copyright © 1996 by Ryszard Krynicki.
Reprinted by permission of Ryszard Krynicki.
“Dedication,” “Six Lectures in Verse,” “Song on Porcelain” from New and Collected
Poems (1931–2001) by Czesław Miłosz. Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by
Czesław Miłosz Royalties. Reprinted by permission of Ecco/Harper Collins Press.
317
318 Credits
“Children of Our Age,” “In Broad Daylight,” “Could Have,” “Séance,” “The Let-
ters of the Dead,” “Hitler’s First Photograph,” “Lot’s Wife” from Poems New and
Collected 1957–1997 by Wisława Szymborska, tr. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare
Cavanagh. Translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Reprinted
by permission of Houghton Miffl in Harcourt and Faber and Faber Ltd.
“Photograph from September 11” from Monologue of a Dog by Wisława Szymbor-
ska, tr. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak. Translation copyright © 2006 by
Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Miffl in Harcourt and Faber
and Faber Ltd.
“Jeszcze o nieśmertelności” from Śmierci nie ma! Poezje 1945–1948 by Wiktor Woro-
szylski. Copyright © 2009 by Natalia Woroszylska. Reprinted by permission of
Natalia Woroszylska.
“To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time” from Editing Yeats’ Poems by W. B. Yeats.
Copyright © 1990 by St. Martin’s Press. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s
Press and AP Watt Ltd. on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.
“Philosophers,” “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” from Without End: New and
Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczyński,
Benjamin Ivry, C. K. Williams. Translation copyright © 2002 by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and
Faber Ltd.
“Gdyby Rosja” from Jechać do Lwowa by Adam Zagajewski. Copyright © 1985 by
Adam Zagajewski. Reprinted by permission of Adam Zagajewski.
“W liczbie mnogiej” from List: Oda do wielości by Adam Zagajewski. Copyright ©
1983 by Adam Zagajewski. Reprinted by permission of Adam Zagajewski.
Chapter Title: Index

Index
Titles of works follow other subentries under authors’ names.
Aaron, Jonathan, 239 29; White Flock, 124; “A Word

Acmeism, 28, 109–19 about Pushkin,” 120
Adorno, Theodor, 22–24, 26, 33, 227 Algerian War, 200
Aeneid, 189–90 Althusser, Louis, 223
aestheticism, 10–11, 16, 29, 30 Altieri, Charles, 280n21
African-American spirituals, 262 Alvarez, A., 239, 250, 251
Akhmatova, Anna, 28, 109, 131, 136, Amert, Susan, 119, 123, 124, 127, 131
177, 218, 274; as poet-bard, 2, 5, Anderson, Nancy, 125
41, 120–48, 240; state persecution Antichrist, 57, 189
of, 23, 25, 26, 111, 112–13, 116–18, Apollinaire, Guillaume, 83–84, 86
126–28, 135–37, 144, 273; “Cruci- Aragon, Louis, 155, 209
fi xion,” 26; “Dante,” 124, 273; Eve- Art and Nation, 252
ning, 124; “In Place of a Preface,” Auden, W. H., 1, 3, 43, 144, 146, 236,
130; “Letter to N.”, 130, 131; “Lot’s 246, 248, 253, 286n7
Wife,” 194–95; “Osip Mandelstam,” Auschwitz concentration camp, 168
266; “Pages of a Diary,” 135, 136;
Plantain, 124; The Poem without Baczyński, Krzysztof Kamil, 179–81,
a Hero, 24, 25, 117, 118, 120–48; 252, 275, 276
Requiem, 24, 26, 34, 113, 116–17, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 11–15, 33, 137–38,
119, 122–32, 134, 142, 145, 146; 203, 214
Rosary, 124; “The Sentence,” 24–27, Balcerzan, Edward, 152, 160
319
320 Index
Balfour, Ian, 143, 146 (poem), 60; “To the Maiden-Revolu-

Balmont, Konstantin, 84, 152 tion,” 62; “The Twelve,” 65, 72–74,
Barańczak, Anna, 299n1, 314n9 76–77, 80
Barańczak, Stanisław, 5, 183, 196, 205, Bloom, Harold, 218
207–10, 213, 222, 226, 233, 240, body: and body politic, 83–108; and
299n1; on individuality in a repres- poetry’s orality, 117. See also flesh
sive regime, 22, 224, 225, 228; on Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 13
romanticism, 255; “A Delineated Bois, Yve-Alain, 198
Era,” 214–16, 223; “And Nobody Borenstein, Eliot, 290n54
Warned Me,” 216–19, 224; “Fill Out Borowski, Tadeusz, 168, 169, 226, 270
Legibly,” 218–19; The Mistrustful Boym, Svetlana, 152
and the Arrogant, 209, 213–14; The Breton, André, 155, 156, 208
Poet Remembers, 262; “The Real Briusov, Valerii, 136, 139, 152
Thing,” 224–25; “Why Poetry?”, Brodsky, Joseph, 2, 235, 236, 240–41,
226–27 273, 274, 303n46
Barthes, Roland, 110, 111, 114, 198, Bromwich, David, 10, 15, 37
201, 226 Broniewski, Władysław, 152, 153, 156,
Baudelaire, Charles, 155, 159, 209 170, 301n15
Belyi, Andrei, 58, 59, 69, 73, 139 Brooks, Jeffrey, 138
Benjamin, Walter, 109, 179–80, 270 Bukharin, Nikolai, 13, 19, 24, 27, 151
Berlin, Isaiah, 33, 132, 133, 143–48 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 118
Bernstein, Michael André, 185, 189 Byron, Lord, 58, 177, 201, 239–40,
Bible, 185–87, 190–95, 274–75 242, 272
Bikont, Anna, 175
Birkerts, Sven, 238 Cameron, Sharon, 10–12, 39–40,
Blake, William, 20, 42, 66, 261, 274 278n10
Blavatsky, Madame, 48, 287n22 censorship. See poetry: state control
Blok, Aleksandr, 5, 111, 136, 152, 177; over, in Poland; poetry: state control
and Akhmatova, 138–41; lyricism over, in Russia
and nation in work of, 41, 45–82, Chaadaev, Piotr, 5
146, 238; and Mayakovsky, 91, 94, Chamberlain, Marisha, 243, 246
101, 106; “Art and Revolution,” Chaplin, Charlie, 135, 179
49; “The Divine Cannot Be Mea- Chekhov, Anton, 45–46, 148
sured by the Mind,” 52–53, 55, 72; Chenier, André, 109
“The Guardian Angel,” 61, 62; “I Chicago Tribune, 2, 236
Foreknow You,” 50, 52–54; “On Chinnov, Igor, 29
the Current Condition of Russian Christianity, 54–55, 57, 67, 78, 162. See
Symbolism,” 57–58; “On the Field also Jesus Christ
of Kulikovo,” 60, 69; The Poet, the Chukovskaya, Lydia, 124–26, 128, 131,
Light Blue Man, and the Stranger, 132, 136, 141, 147
73; “The Puppet Show,” 73, 138–39; Chukovsky, Kornei, 23; and Blok, 46,
“Retribution,” 46, 48, 52, 64, 47, 64, 71, 73, 79; and Whitman,
69–71, 75, 76, 81; “The Scythians,” 84–89, 92–93, 95–96
34, 56, 65, 75–76; The Stranger Churchill, Randolph, 144
(play), 63, 72; “The Stranger” Churchill, Winston, 144, 174
Index 321
class: Akhmatova’s, 135–36; Blok’s, crucifi xion, 25, 26, 95, 162, 164. See
47–49, 64, 65, 70, 71, 76, 80–81; also Rosicrucianism
lyric’s associations with, 11, 14, cultural criticism, 6, 10–11, 15–16
25, 27–30, 36, 47, 112, 123, 157, cycles. See repetition
159, 167, 195, 226–27, 229; Mayak- Czechoslovakia, 198–99
ovsky’s, 92, 104, 108, 151; of poetry
readers, 56, 150; of Surrealists, 202; Dachau concentration camp, 168
in Western capitalist civilization, Darwin, Charles, 187
110–11, 174, 199, 203, 208, 223; Davie, Donald, 8, 39, 242
Whitman’s, 85–86; Yeats’, 45–49, 64, de Aguilar, Helene J. F., 241
66, 68–71, 76 Deane, Seamus, 56, 60
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 198, 199 death(s): alleged, of lyric poetry, 47, 80,
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 7, 239 81, 107, 156, 157; associated with
Collins, Billy, 235, 241 communism, 17, 25, 26, 115, 118–19,
colonialism, 200 123, 126–28, 142, 233, 270–71;
communism: American academics’ “beautiful,” 164–65, 168–69; of the
ignoring of, 16–17; barbarities asso- book and the subject, 109–18, 233;
ciated with, 17, 25, 26, 115, 118–19, Borowski’s, 168, 169; civic, of Akhma-
123, 126–28, 142, 233, 270–71; col- tova and Mandelstam, 112, 115,
lective voice associated with, 12–15, 118–19, 124–28, 135, 136, 144; as not
20–22, 25, 26, 29, 32, 34, 37, 41, 85, existing, 133, 140, 157–58, 165–66;
137, 153, 160, 169, 170–71, 195–96, Krynicki on, 210–12; from love,
264; in Eastern Europe, 4, 19–20, 66, 166–68; Mandelstam as ready for,
151–52, 237; and Herbert, 174–75; 115, 142, 266, 270–71; of metaphys-
and Jesus Christ, 76–77, 162–63; ics, 225–26; poets as would-be martyrs
Mayakovsky on, 100, 160; and in, 2, 4, 57, 112, 124–25, 142, 148,
metanarrative, 40, 41, 82, 177–79, 161–63, 177, 232, 242–43, 249–59,
187; and Miłosz, 19–20, 174, 237, 263, 269–76; Pushkin’s, 271–72; by
244, 245–46, 253–54, 260, 263–64, suicide, 28, 79, 80, 82, 92, 106–8,
269–70; as resistant to reform, 199; 139–42, 151–53, 156, 161, 162, 164,
and Szymborska, 174–75, 177, 270; 165, 167–69, 272–73; as ultimate
Western and Eastern differences aesthetic act, 137; Zagajewski on,
in views of, 203; and Woroszyl- 220–21. See also guilt; immortality;
ski, 160–63, 270. See also Marxist resurrection; women: bereaved
theory; “newspeak”; names of com- deconstructionism, 4, 10
munist leaders and states Delvig, Anton, 272
Congresses of Soviet Writers. See Soviet democracy: Mayakovsky on, 88; Whit-
Writers’ Congresses man on, 84, 85, 88, 89–90, 92, 97,
Conrad, Joseph, 6 100; Yeats’ view of, 66
courtship: in Blok’s and Yeats’ lives and Derrida, Jacques, 17, 100, 109–11,
works, 49–64, 78, 79, 146; in Maya- 114–16, 198, 202, 204, 215, 225,
kovsky’s works, 101; in Whitman’s 306n6
works, 100, 103. See also marriage des Pres, Terence, 243, 245, 247, 252
Crane, Hart, 246 Dickinson, Emily, 120, 131, 218, 224,
Crimean War, 272 243
322 Index
Donne, John, 246 fascism, 19, 65, 168, 174, 202

Dostoevsky, Fedor, 191 Fedorov, Nikolai, 293n34
Dubček, Alexander, 198–99 Filkins, Peter, 248
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 194
Eagleton, Terry, 11, 17 Fiut, Aleksander, 253, 281n36
Eastern Europe: clandestine means of Fleishman, Lazar, 151
distributing poetry in, 21, 27, 39–40, flesh (meat), 94–99, 101
112–13, 115–18, 124, 127, 137, 215, Fletcher, Angus, 7, 8–9, 38, 42
227, 271, 276, 283n59; grand nar- Forché, Carolyn, 236, 247, 251, 252
ratives of history in, 7–8, 40; West’s Formalism, 9–12, 201–3, 219
current interest in poets from, 31, 41, Foster, R. F., 57, 61, 63
235–41, 245–55, 262–65, 267; West’s Foucault, Michel, 8, 110, 111, 198,
neglect of culture of, 5–6. See also 204–5, 215
Poland; Russia France: as bourgeois capitalist empire,
Eastman, Max, 31 6; language of, 46, 248; literary
écriture: and totalitarianism, 109, 112, theories from 1968 rebellion in, 4,
200, 203–5, 214–15, 233. See also 197–201, 203, 204, 208, 209, 226,
“newspeak” 233; Miłosz’s exile in, 20, 174, 237;
Edison, Thomas, 86, 87 Polish works published in, 227, 228,
Edmundson, Mark, 17, 38–39, 218 246; revolution in, 15, 16, 239; Yeats’
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 13, 80, 81, 113, 117 death in, 78–79. See also poetry:
Einstein, Albert, 87, 245 linguistic
Eliot, T. S., 48, 218–19, 221, 230, 231, Freidin, Gregory, 268, 269
258; as influence on East European Freud, Sigmund, 16, 49–50, 201
poets, 131, 246–48, 257, 259, 261; Frost, Robert, 147–48, 235, 273
Collected Poems, 247, 259; Four Frye, Northrop, 95–96, 258
Quartets, 134–37; “Gerontion,” 247, Furet, François, 205
262; Murder in the Cathedral, 243; Futurism, 83–88, 91–93, 97, 99, 103,
“Preludes,” 213; The Waste Land, 104, 202, 203, 205–7, 209, 219; in
49, 134, 144, 235, 246, 257, 259, Poland, 151, 152, 155
289n41
Emerson, Caryl, 137–38 Gaelic language, 49
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 32, 89, 90, Gajcy, Tadeusz, 252
103, 120, 243, 245 Galassi, Jonathan, 243
Engels, Friedrich, 33, 227, 310n3 Gałczyński, Konstanty, 168
Engelstein, Laura, 46, 60 Galileo, 2
Enlightenment, 186 Gasparov, Mikhail, 269, 278n10,
epic poetry, 48, 189; Akhmatova’s, 283n62
121–48; Blok’s, 46, 69–70, 76; Maya- Gazeta wyborcza, 268
kovsky’s, 86, 88, 91, 104, 105, 156, Gdańsk (Poland), 37, 201, 253, 262–63
160, 167; Whitman’s, 90 Generation of ’68 (New Wave poets), 5,
Erkilla, Betsy, 90 41, 196, 197–233, 237–38, 257
Erlich, Victor, 92, 277n3 Germany, 66
Esenin, Sergei, 28, 164, 165, 167, 171 Gibbons, Reginald, 22
“existential historicism,” 192–93 Ginzburg, Lydia, 141, 278n10
Index 323
Gippius, Zinaida, 61 history: Akhmatova as ghost of her

Gladstone, William, 310n3 nation’s, 136, 138, 146; Akhmatova as
Glebova-Sudeikina, Olga, 132, 138, responsible for shaping, 145, 146–48;
140, 141 early Soviet views of, 194; “little” vs.
Gogol, Nikolai, 130 “Great,” 176–77; lyric form as essen-
Gombrowicz, Witold, 253 tially resistant to grand narrative of,
Gonne, Iseult, 62, 65 7–18, 22–24, 35–44, 165–72, 176–96;
Gonne, Maude, 54, 61–63 Marx on, 202; personal, and univer-
Gorczyńska, Renata, 258 sal, 238–39; and poetry in Miłosz’s
Gould, Stephany, 125 eyes, 243–65; Szymborska’s view of,
Goux, Jean-Joseph, 204 176–96, 231–32; and unhistory, 249;
Great Britain, 6, 241–42, 262. See also Woroszylski’s view of, 170–72, 176.
Ireland; specifi c poets from See also New Historicism; poet-bards;
Griboedev, Aleksandr, 272 time; voice
Groberg, Kristi, 288n29 Hitler, Adolph, 42, 189, 211
Grudzińska-Gross, Irena, 313n2 Hollier, Dennis, 198
Gruszczyński, Krzysztof, 156 Holub, Miroslav, 240, 241
Guillen, Nicolas, 156 Holzer, Jenny, 182
guilt: Akhmatova’s, 121–22, 126–27, homelessness, 132–33
132–33, 140–43; Mandelstam’s, 275; Horace, 236
Szymborska’s, 175 Howes, Marjorie, 54, 69, 71, 287n17
Gumilev, Lev, 25, 26, 126–28, 136 Hughes, Ted, 241
Gumilev, Nikolai, 25, 26, 126, 136 Hugo, Victor, 201
Hyde-Lees, Georgie, 65, 68
Hardy, Thomas, 2
“harmonium,” 134, 137 immortality, 149, 161–62, 166, 167
Hartwig, Julia, 180 individualism, 93. See also voice: indi-
Hass, Robert, 236, 241, 251 vidual, in American poetry; voice:
Hatshepsut (Egyptian pharoah), 193–94 individual, of lyric poetry
Heaney, Seamus, 3–4, 31, 32, 35, 215, Ireland, 45–46, 48–49, 51–52, 54–56,
235, 236, 240, 242, 248; “Away from 60, 63–71. See also Northern Ireland
It All,” 264–65; “The Unacknowl- Isaiah (Biblical figure), 186
edged Legislator’s Dream,” 3, 234 Ivanov, Georgii, 298n33
Herbert, Zbigniew, 2, 21, 37, 174–76, Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław, 20, 261
237, 240, 241, 255, 268; “Marcus Izvestiia, 212
Aurelius,” 230; “Mr. Cogito and a
Poet of a Certain Age,” 186, 231; Jakobson, Roman, 34, 91, 107, 110,
“The Power of Taste,” 29–30; 163, 183; “The Generation that
“Prayer of Mr. Cogito—Traveler,” Squandered Its Poets,” 79, 272–73;
239–40; Selected Poems, 237, 239 “What is Poetry?”, 8, 9
Herbst, Lothar, 226 Jameson, Fredric, 6, 10, 16–17, 32, 176
Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw, 269–70 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 228
Herodotus, 244 Jasieński, Bruno, 152, 155, 156, 209,
Hill, Geoffrey, 260 301n15
Hirsch, Edward, 236 Jauss, Hans Robert, 40
324 Index
Jaworski, Wit, 203 Kundera, Milan, 163

Jesus Christ, 109, 125; in Blok’s “The Kuron, Jacek, 207
Twelve,” 76–78; communism and, Kuzmin, Mikhail, 140
76–77, 162–63, 186; femininity of, Kwiatkowski, Jerzy, 248–49
76–77; Lenin as, 78, 105; mother of,
26, 128; physical conception of, 67; language (and reality), 197–233
poets as martyrs like, 2, 57, 232, 271; Lautréamont, comte de, 201, 208
Romantic poets on, 93–96, 99. See Lawrence, D. H., 90
also crucifi xion; salvation Lednicki, Wacław, 277n3
Jews, 27–28, 239–40. See also Warsaw: Lee, Rosa, 157–58
Uprisings in Leitch, Vincent, 10–11
Job (Biblical figure), 274, 275 Lenin, V. I., 66, 87, 104, 208; as Christ,
John (Biblical figure), 185, 186 78, 105; and language, 201; as
Joyce, James, 56, 131 Marx’s disciple, 17; on Mayakovsky,
97, 150; Mayakovsky’s poem to,
Karabchievsky, Yuri, 98, 99 149, 150, 161; on role of art, 205–6;
Karasek, Krzysztof, 202 Szymborska on, 175, 186
Karr, Mary, 236 Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia),
Keats, John, 9–10 27, 29, 84, 116, 126–28, 130, 132,
Kermode, Frank, 185 138–39, 143, 147, 161, 242, 244, 271
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 33, 69, 155 Lentricchia, Frank, 16
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 139, 140, 142, Lermontov, Mikhail, 58, 271
143 Levinson, Marjorie, 7, 14, 15–16, 20,
Khrushchev, Nikita, 124, 147, 202, 211 35, 38, 278n10
Kiberd, Declan, 48, 54, 66, 68 Lewiński, S., 150, 151, 153, 156
Kilroy, Thomas, 45–46, 63 “life-creation,” 48, 58–82, 86, 139–41
Kluyev, Nikolai, 46–47 Lincoln, Abraham, 86, 87
Kniazev, Vsevolod, 139–40, 142 Lipking, Lawrence, 134–36, 238, 257,
Kołakowski, Leszek, 161, 175, 197, 267, 310n3
206, 270 Lisiecka, Alicja, 155
Komendant, Tadeusz, 272 Lithuania, 254–58
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 236 Liu, Alan, 7, 16
Kornhauser, Julian, 196, 206–9, Longenbach, James, 27, 66, 147
219–21, 228 Loseff, Lev, 129
Kotkin, Stephen, 7 Lourie, Richard, 263
Kott, Jan, 168 Lowell, Robert, 246, 248
Kovalenkov, Aleksandr, 28 Łukasiewicz, Jacek, 150, 177
Krakow (Poland), 19, 157, 174, 204, Łukasiewicz, Małgorzata, 170–71
209, 242, 244 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 77–78, 80, 81,
Kristeva, Julia, 156, 198, 201, 202, 209 91–92, 106, 150, 156
Krynicki, Ryszard, 5, 29–30, 148, 203, Lyons, F. S. L., 65
205, 207, 209, 223–26, 228, 233, Lyotard, Jean-François, 223
299n1; “Act of Birth,” 210–12, 224; lyric poetry: Blok’s, 47, 65, 80, 81–82;
“Do Not Want to Die for Us,” 266; bourgeois associations of, 11, 14, 25,
“The World Still Exists,” 212–14, 223 27–30, 36, 47, 112, 123, 157, 159,
Index 325
167, 195, 226–27, 229; “death” of, Mann, Thomas, 267

47, 80, 81, 107, 156, 157; defi nitions marriage, 50; Blok’s, 58–62; Yeats’, 64,
of, 9–11, 31, 39–40; elegaic, 169; 65, 78, 79. See also progeny
as essentially resistant to history Marx, Karl, 7, 16, 186, 201, 202, 204,
as grand narrative, 7–18, 22–24, 209, 223, 310n3; Das Kapital, 186,
35–44, 165–72, 176–96; as individual 204; on poetry, 12, 33–34. See also
voice privileging private experience, Marxist theory
11–15, 20–27, 29, 31, 35–44, 113, Marxist theory, 186, 200, 273; in
118, 122–23, 157, 159, 173, 194–96, Anglo-American critical discourse, 4,
217–33, 251–52, 264; Mayakovsky’s, 10–11, 15–17, 176, 198; Polish writ-
91, 149–72; vs. prose, 11–12, ers’ disillusionment with, 226. See
80; Soviet ideals in, 151, 168–69; also communism
strategies of, in Russian and Polish Marx-Scouras, Danielle, 200, 204
poetry, 34; Trotsky on, 8, 12–13, 23, masculinity, 54, 72, 74–77, 87, 146. See
104, 107, 112, 156–57; as virtually also Stalin, Joseph: as father of the
taboo in Eastern Europe, 13, 23, 28, nation
112–13, 179, 195. See also Romanti- Masing-Delic, Irene, 161
cism; voice; specifi c poets Matuszewski, Ryszard, 268
Mayakowsky, Vladimir, 5, 111, 177,
MacLeish, Archibald, 9 209; on body politic, 83–108, 205;
Maddox, Brenda, 64, 68 as influence on Woroszylski, 41,
Maksimov, D., 55 155–72; lyricism and nation in
Malia, Martin, 206 work of, 41, 45–82, 107, 156, 238;
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 201 oppression of, 23; suicide of, 79,
Mandalian, Andrzej, 156 92, 106–8, 151–53, 156, 161, 162,
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 2, 30, 41, 111, 164, 165, 167–69, 272–73; “About
112, 116, 218, 268, 283n62 That,” 94, 98, 106, 160; “At the
Mandelstam, Osip, 51, 97, 129, 141, Top of My Lungs,” 91, 105, 123–24,
267; on Blok, 80; defi nition of lyric 156, 160, 161; “The Backbone
by, 35, 107; as poet-bard, 2, 3, 5, Flute,” 162; Bathhouse, 164; “A
32–33, 37–38, 41, 111–19, 240, 275; Cloud in Trousers,” 86, 92, 94, 96,
on poetry’s importance, 1, 111–12, 101, 102, 152, 162; “A Conversa-
125, 272; state persecution of, 109, tion with the Tax Inspector about
111–19, 125, 127, 142, 144, 218, 269, Poetry,” 153; “Fifth International,”
270; “Conversation about Dante,” 93, 101, 104–5; “Good,” 150, 156,
116, 117; “Fourth Prose,” 116, 117; 160; “Homeward!”, 91, 100, 160; “I
“I Drink to the Military Asters,” Love,” 93, 97, 167; “I Protest,” 101,
27–28, 30; “Literary Moscow: Birth 102; “Kazan,” 88; “Left March,”
of the Plot,” 12, 35; “Moscow,” 117; 150, 152; “Listen,” 161–62; “Man,”
“Stalin Epigram,” 15, 26, 27–29, 88–89; “150,000,000,” 34, 81,
32–33, 113–15, 117, 125, 267, 269; 86–89, 91, 97, 101, 103, 106, 124,
“Stalin Ode,” 267–71; “Stanzas,” 125, 128, 170; “Order to the Army
270; “Verses on the Unknown Sol- of the Arts,” 155; “Revolution,” 102;
dier,” 30–31, 113, 119; “Voronezh “To His Beloved Self the Author Ded-
Notebooks,” 117 icates These Lines,” 93; “Vladimir
326 Index
Mayakowsky, Vladimir (continued) 186, 226, 245, 247, 253, 260, 261,
Ilyich Lenin,” 149, 150, 161; “Vladi- 264, 269–70; “Central Park,” 245;
mir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy,” 86, 97, Collected Poems, 245, 250; “Com-
98; “War and the World,” 94–96, 99; mentary on Osip Mandelstam’s
“War Is Declared,” 96 ‘Stalin Ode’“, 267–69; Daylight, 246;
Mazower, Mark, 16 “Dedication,” 8, 230, 250–55, 257,
McFarland, Thomas, 17 258, 260; “Incantation,” 248; “An
McGann, Jerome, 7, 11, 12, 15, 16, 35, Introduction to the Americas,” 246,
278n10 249; Native Realm, 247, 258–60,
McLane, Maureen, 2, 240 264; Nobel Lecture of, 200, 203–4;
meat. See flesh “On a Bird’s Song above the Banks
Megill, Arthur, 110 of the Potomac,” 245; “Outskirts,”
Mendeleeva-Blok, Liubov’, 58–61, 63, 73 247; “The Poet and the State,” 275;
Merridale, Catherine, 126 “A Poet Between East and West,” 7,
Merwin, W. S., 236, 248 243; Postwar Polish Poetry, 19, 20,
Michnik, Adam, 198–200, 313n2 235, 237, 239, 241, 260; Rescue, 243,
Mickiewicz, Adam, 177, 254, 256, 258, 246, 250–51, 256, 258; Second Space,
260, 274; censorship of works by, 275, 276; The Seizure of Power, 258;
200, 201, 204, 207, 238; death of, Selected Poems, 239; “Six Lectures in
272; Books of the Polish Nation and Verse,” 18, 42; “Song on Porcelain,”
the Polish Pilgrimage, 34, 260; Fore- 35–37, 41; “Song on the End of the
father’s Eve, 34, 200, 238, 242, 254, World,” 230, 236; “Songs of Adrian
256, 260; Pan Tadeusz, 255, 260 Zielinski,” 246; The Sovereign Song,
Mill, John Stuart, 218, 230 253; “Throughout Our Lands,” 244;
Miller, James, 90 “To Albert Einstein,” 245; “Toast,”
Miłosz, Antoni, 315n23 245; “To Jonathan Swift,” 245; “To
Miłosz, Czesław, 176, 177, 181–82, Robinson Jeffers,” 235; “The Treatise
272; and Anglo-American poets, 5, on Morals,” 245; Treatise on Poetry,
235–65; author’s interviews with, 237, 243–46, 249, 250, 252; “Treatise
266–67; communism and, 19–20, on Theology,” 254, 274–75; “Voices
174, 237, 244, 245–46, 253–54, 260, of Poor People,” 246, 258; The
263–64, 269–70; as cultural attaché Witness of Poetry, 244, 249, 250,
in US, 19–20, 174, 237, 244, 245–46, 273; “The World,” 258; “You Who
261–63; Lithuanian origins of, Wronged,” 37, 253, 257, 261–63, 268
254–58; as lyric poet, 41–42; Nobel Modernism, 47–49, 56, 61, 131–32,
Prize for, 200, 203–4, 236, 239, 255, 136, 152. See also specifi c Modernist
274; as poet-bard, 2, 21–22, 177, writers
235–66; on poetry’s importance, 1; Montaigne, Michel de, 188–89
as survivor, 243, 255–59, 272, 276; Moscow (Russia), 12, 35, 79, 84, 117,
on totalitarianism and écriture, 127, 132, 145, 161, 164, 171–72, 200,
200, 203–5, 214–15, 233; as transla- 218, 244, 270–71
tor, 19, 237, 239, 246–49, 262; on
Whitman, 5, 84; Bells in Winter, Nadeau, Maurice, 208
239, 243; “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” Napierski, Stefan, 245
38; The Captive Mind, 17–22, 177, Napoleon Bonaparte, 185
Index 327
narratives. See history Paul (Biblical figure), 35, 42

National Poetry Month (U.S.), 235 Paulin, Tom, 21, 22, 31, 147
nation-building (through poetry): Pavlovsky, A. I., 134
Blok’s and Yeats’, 48–57, 60, 66–68, Paz, Octavio, 7
70–72, 78; and gender, 33, 49–61, Pearce, Roy Harvey, 238
71–72, 74–77, 101, 125, 138, 145–46, the personal as political, 217, 238
181, 287n17, 288n29; Mayakovsky’s, Pertsov, Viktor, 25–27, 124
91–92, 97–98, 106; Miłosz on, Pethica, James, 51–52, 54
250–55, 257–61, 274, 275; Whit- Petrovskaya, Nina, 139–40
man’s, 85–86, 91–93, 98–101, 103. Pilinszky, János, 241
See also poet-bards “pimply ones” (Polish avant-garde),
Nayman, Anatoly, 128–29, 134, 271 154–56
New Criticism, 9, 12, 21, 267 Pinsky, Robert, 42, 236, 241
New Historicism, 4, 6, 7, 10–11, 16, 21, Plato, 8
37, 47, 176 Pleynet, Marcel, 202
“newspeak,” 193–233 Poe, Edgar Allen, 84, 158–59, 165
“New Wave poets” (Poland). See Gen- poet-bards: Akhmatova as, 2, 5, 41,
eration of ’68 120–48, 240; Blok as, 47–82; among
New Yorker, 182, 229, 230 Eastern European poets, 1–4, 32–34,
New York Review of Books, 250 207–8, 266–76; Mandelstam as,
New York Times, 232 2, 3, 5, 32–33, 37–38, 41, 111–19,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 57, 68, 69, 240, 275; Mayakovsky as, 83–108,
110–11, 249 150–51; Miłosz as, 2, 21–22, 177,
Nobel Prize: candidates for, 147, 273; 235–66; role of, 213, 218–19, 224–25,
for Eliot, 135–36; for Miłosz, 200, 250–62; Shelley on, 1, 3; status of, in
203–4, 236, 239, 255, 274; for Paster- Poland and Russia, 40, 112, 115, 119,
nak, 273; for Szymborska, 175, 177, 174, 177, 180, 203; West’s current
240; for Yeats, 65 interest in Eastern European, 31, 41,
Northern Ireland, 4, 265 235–41, 245–55, 262–65, 267; Whit-
NOW (TERAZ), 209, 219–23 man as, 245; as would-be martyrs, 2,
numbers. See history; voice: collective 4, 57, 112, 124–25, 142, 148, 161–63,
Nyczek, Tadeusz, 174, 178, 200, 208, 177, 232, 242–43, 249–59, 263,
219, 225, 228 269–76; Yeats as, 44–82. See also
“unacknowledged legislators”
occult, 52, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 68 “poet-linguists,” 227–28
O’Hara, Frank, 156 poetry: “civic,” 112–19; clandestine
orality. See poetry: clandestine means means of distributing, in Russia,
of distributing; voice 21, 27, 39–40, 112–13, 115–18, 124,
Owen, Alex, 287n22 127, 137, 215, 227, 271, 276, 283n59;
as collective resistance, 3–4, 18;
Papernyi, Zinovyi, 13 defi nitions of, 8–12; “good,” 251,
Pasternak, Boris, 23, 134, 273; and 252, 254–56; linguistic, 197–233;
Mandelstam, 114, 115, 144, 273; “messages” of, 248; “of witness,” 18,
on Mayakovsky, 106, 151, 165; Dr. 31, 245, 249–51, 259, 260–65, 273;
Zhivago, 148, 181–82 poet-bards’ view of role of, 226;
328 Index
poetry (continued) postcolonial studies, 6

political purposes of official, 12–15, postmodernism, 4, 109, 110, 112, 176
17–18, 21–22, 27, 112–13, 197, 204, poststructuralism, 4, 225, 227, 233
205–6, 227; power and popularity of, Pound, Ezra, 33, 65, 75, 132, 289n41
in Eastern Europe, 1, 40–41, 111–12, “Prague Spring,” 198–200
125, 174, 180, 201, 203, 207–8, Pravda, 23, 107, 212
242–43, 268, 271, 272, 280n23; state Praz, Mario, 50
control over, in Poland, 175, 198, Presto, Jenifer, 53, 71
205, 215, 218–19, 221, 223, 227, 237, Princip, Gavrilo, 84
238, 243, 262; state control over, in privacy. See voice: individual, in Ameri-
Russia, 15, 18, 27, 28, 39, 41, 52, can poetry; voice: individual, of lyric
91, 110–18, 124, 127, 135–37, 161, poetry
164, 171, 198, 271; in the United progeny: Blok and Yeats on, 50, 61, 64,
States, 238; West’s current interest in 67–68, 70, 78; Mayakovsky on, 96,
Eastern European, 31, 41, 235–41, 100–102; Whitman on, 90, 100
245–55, 262–65, 267. See also epic prose vs. lyric poetry, 11–12, 80
poetry; lyric poetry; poet-bards; Proust, Marcel, 29, 79
Social Realism; voice Przyboś, Julian, 188
Poirier, Richard, 31 Pstrowski, Wincenty, 155, 163, 165–66
Poland: authors’ oppression in, 3–4, Punin, Nikolai, 126
156, 169, 221, 240, 241; history of, Pushkin, Alexander, 15, 40, 46, 81,
176, 194, 230, 241, 249, 254; 1830- 120, 171, 177, 271–73; Onegin, 137;
1831 insurrection against Russia by, Prophet, 115, 148, 153
260, 272; martial law in, 169, 180, Pyman, Avril, 54, 288n29
228, 243, 262; Mayakovsky’s influ-
ence in, 151–72; Miłosz’s contribu- Quinn, Alice, 230
tion to literary tradition in, 248–49;
poetry’s power and popularity in, Radek, Karl, 15
40–41, 174, 180, 203, 242–43, 268; RAPP (Russian Association of Proletar-
as Polish People’s Republic, 108, ian Writers), 151, 156
149–72, 178, 181, 186, 193, 197–233, Reed, John, 28
240, 261, 269–70, 274; Romantics’ Reeve, F. D., 147
view of, 242–43; as Soviet colony, repetition (circles; cycles), 51, 69–70,
151, 174, 200, 207, 237, 238; state 101, 202
control over print and culture in, 175, resurrection, 166, 293n34
198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 215, Ricks, Christopher, 39
218–19, 221, 223, 227, 237–38, 243, Rimbaud, Arthur, 155, 177, 209, 220
262, 303n46; status of, relative to Roe, Nicholas, 7, 10, 17
Western culture, 5; and World War Romanticism, 2, 118; as bourgeois,
II, 19, 174, 211, 250–53, 257–59, ahistorical concept, 11, 15–16, 18,
275. See also “newspeak”; Solidarity 35; and cult of the Great Man, 185,
movement; specifi c Polish poets 186; as influence on Eastern Euro-
Pomorski, Adam, 268, 269–70 pean dictators, 275; as influence on
Popa, Vasko, 240, 241 Eastern European poets, 2, 85, 93,
Popova, Liliia, 271 124, 155–56, 160, 164–71, 201, 208,
Index 329
232, 250–60, 272–75; as influence on Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 164, 170,

Marx, 33–34, 310n3; as influence on 171
Whitman, 93; Miłosz’s criticism of, salvation (poetic), 252, 255–59, 271
250–62; and poet-Christ, 57, 232; and Sandauer, Artur, 160
poet-prophets, 143, 146, 249–50, 263, Sappho, 109, 125
273–76; and revolutions in captive Sarnov, Benedikt, 33
nations, 239–40, 242; and sexuality, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 103, 200, 202, 272
50. See also specific Romantic poets Scott, Peter Dale, 237, 244
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 144, 174 Seifert, Jaroslav, 241
Rosen, David, 257 self. See voice: individual, in American
Rosicrucianism, 48, 288n23 poetry; voice: individual, of lyric
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 185, 186 poetry
Rozanov, Vasilii, 77 Selivansky, A., 28
Rózewicż, Tadeusz, 21, 176, 240 September 11, 2001, 42, 182, 229–32,
Rus’ (nation-goddess), 55, 74, 76, 77, 236
125, 145–46 sexuality, 50, 60, 100–101. See also
Rushdie, Salman, 111 courtship; marriage; progeny
Rusinek, Michał, 300n1 Shakespeare, William, 246
Russia (Soviet Union), 56; Akhmatova Shapiro, Karl, 246, 248, 249
as ghost of history of, 136, 138, 146; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1, 3, 33, 48, 238,
bourgeoisie in, 46–47; collective 239, 242–43, 310n3
vision of, 12–13; Czechoslovakia’s Shklovsky, Viktor, 9, 91, 97, 117, 132,
occupation by, 199; Jews in, 27–28; 140
mourning forbidden in, 126, 162; Shtok, I., 132
oppression of poet-bards in, 3–4, Silver Age (in Russia), 75, 79, 84, 86,
23–27, 109, 111–19, 125–28, 135–37, 96, 127, 136, 139–41
142, 144, 218, 219, 269, 270, 273; Simic, Charles, 236
poetry’s power in, 40; Poland’s Sinyavsky, Andrei, 171, 208
occupation by, 19; 1830-1831 Polish Skamandrites, 152
insurrection against, 260, 272; post- Słobodnik, Włodzimierz, 152
revolutionary, 83–108; state control Słonimski, Antoni, 152
over print in, 15, 18, 27, 28, 39, 41, Słowacki, Juliusz, 5, 201, 242, 272
52, 91, 110–18, 124, 127, 135–37, Sobolevsky, S., 260
161, 164, 171, 198, 271, 303n46; Social Realism, 13, 20, 112, 151,
status of, relative to Western culture, 157–59, 168–69, 264; and linguis-
5; war and revolution in, 12, 17, 41, tic theories, 205; and Szymborska,
60, 65, 66, 71–74, 79–80, 99, 202, 177–79
205, 211, 275, 289n41. See also com- Solidarity movement (Poland), 37, 41,
munism; Silver Age; Stalin, Joseph; 148, 201, 207, 228, 262
specifi c Russian poets Sollers, Philippe, 202
Rzeczpospolita, 268 Soloviev, Vladimir, 50, 52, 57, 58, 61
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 122–23
Said, Edward, 5–6, 16, 61 Soviet Union. See Russia
Saint Petersburg (Russia). See Lenin- Soviet Writers’ Congresses, 13, 112,
grad (Russia) 151, 155
330 Index
Soviet Writers’ Union, 15, 135, 273. See “Hitler’s First Photograph,” 42,
also Social Realism 189; “In Broad Daylight,” 179–81,
speech and reality, 197–233 252, 276; “The Joy of Writing,” 43;
Spenser, Edmund, 56 “A Large Number,” 195, 196; “The
Staff, Leopold, 241 Letters of the Dead,” 185–86; “Lot’s
Stalin, Joseph, 19, 79, 104, 189, 267; Wife,” 190–95; “Love at First Sight,”
authors’ persecution by, 110–19, 40, 184; “May 16, 1973,” 192;
124–25, 142, 144, 147–48, 156, 164, “Maybe All This,” 187–88; “Nega-
168, 202, 261–62, 270–71, 273; tive,” 42; “No End of Fun,” 187;
collectivization policies of, 14–15; “Nothing Twice,” 196; “A Paleolithic
as father of the nation, 33, 138, 146, Fertility Fetish,” 181; The People on
181; Khrushchev’s denunciation of, the Bridge, 178, 180; “Photograph
211; Mandelstam’s epigram to, 15, from September 11,” 42, 43–44;
26, 27–29, 32–33, 113–15, 117, 125, “Pietà,” 177–79, 181; “Psalm,”
267, 269; people killed under, 25, 39; “Reality Demands,” 226, 236;
26, 115, 118–19, 123, 126–28, 142, “Saturday in School,” 150; “Seance,”
270–71; and poet-bards, 2, 33, 151, 183; “Snapshot of a Crowd,” 42;
153, 267, 268; and Poland, 151; “pre- “Soliloquy for Cassandra,” 148;
Gutenberg era” under, 41, 112, 137; “Some People,” 192; “Starvation
Szymborska’s elegy for, 175 Camp near Jaslo,” 188, 231; “A Tale
Stern, Anatol, 151, 152 Begun,” 184; Why We Live, 150, 165,
“straight speaking,” 209, 219–25, 177, 178, 187; “Writing a Resumé,”
227–28, 257 175, 219, 271
Strakhovsky, Leonid, 298n33
Strand, Mark, 236 Tashkent, 126, 128, 132, 133
structuralism, 9, 201, 203 Tel Quel literary group, 201–6, 208,
student rebellion (1968). See Generation 209
of ’68 time: lyric’s stopping of, 9–11, 39,
Surrealism, 155, 201–3, 207, 209, 219 42–44, 282n40; Mayakovsky on,
Symbolists, 51, 59, 61, 65, 66, 73, 80, 102–4. See also history
82, 84, 92, 96, 139–42 Timenchik, Roman, 128, 135
Szcęszna, Joanna, 175 Tiutchev, Fyodor, 52
Szymborska, Wisława, 2, 5, 8, 19, 38, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 238
149–51, 153, 226, 237, 240, 241, Tom, Alfred, 244–45
270; and communism, 174–75, 177, Tomashevsky, Boris, 177
270; as “little historian,” 176–77; Toporov, V. N., 134–35
lyric practice of, 41, 173–96, 255; Trotsky, Leon, 108, 202; on Blok, 74,
Nobel Prize for, 175, 177, 240; on 80–81; on lyric poetry, 8, 12–13, 23,
photography, 42–43; “Census,” 104, 107, 112, 156–57; on Mayak-
188–90; “The Century’s Decline,” ovsky, 92, 97, 98, 103, 104, 150, 153,
186; “Children of Our Age,” 178; 156
“Could Have,” 182–83, 230; “Elgiac Tsvetaeva, Marina, 138, 141
Calculation,” 184–85; “The End Tuwin, Julian, 152
and the Beginning,” 230; “Fro- Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 136
zen Motion,” 42; “Hatred,” 230; Tynianov, Jurij, 12, 278n10
Index 331
“unacknowledged legislators,” 1, 3–4, Wat, Aleksander, 8, 20, 149, 151–52,

40, 85, 146–47, 242–43. See also 155, 156, 168, 209, 239
poet-bards Ważyk, Adam, 157
United States, 235, 238, 243; antihis- Wells, H. G., 186
torical bent of, 241; as bourgeois West: capitalism and class in, 110–11,
capitalist empire, 6; Civil War in, 98, 174, 199, 203, 208, 223; current
121, 245; Marxist theory in universi- interest of, in Eastern European
ties in, 4, 10–11, 15–17, 176, 198; poet-bards, 31, 41, 235–41, 245–55,
Miłosz as cultural attaché in, 19–20, 262–65, 267; as discredited in
174, 237, 244, 245–46, 261–63; rac- Eastern Europe’s eyes after World
ism in, 157–58 War II, 19, 168, 174; Miłosz’s exile
Urgacz, Tadeusz, 156 in, 20, 21, 174, 237; 1968 protests
in, 198–99; teleological impulses in
Vendler, Helen, 39, 246–47, 265 history of, 185–90. See also postmod-
Venevitinov, Dmitry, 272 ernism; specifi c countries
Verheul, Kees, 125, 129 Whitman, Walt, 60, 83–108, 155, 170,
Vietnam War, 16, 198, 199 177; influence of, 5, 84–89, 244–45,
Vincenz, Stanisław, 245 261, 274, 293n41; “By Blue Ontar-
Virgil, 134, 238 io’s Shores,” 89, 94; “Democratic
voice: collective, in communist ideolo- Vistas,” 84, 97–98, 103; “Dirge for
gies, 12–15, 20–22, 25, 26, 29, 32, Two Veterans,” 262; “I Sing the
34, 37, 41, 85, 137, 153, 160, 169, Body Electric,” 94, 95; Leaves of
170–71, 195–96, 264; double, in Grass, 86, 89–91, 100, 103, 105,
Akhmatova’s poetry, 24–27, 123–29; 238; “Salut au Monde!”, 83, 84, 244;
individual, in American poetry, “So Long!”, 105; “Song of Myself,”
238; individual, of lyric poetry, 85, 86, 93, 98–100, 102, 103, 262;
11–15, 20–27, 29, 31, 35–44, 113, “Starting from Paumanok,” 87;
118, 122–23, 157, 159, 173, 194–96, “This Compost,” 95; “The Wound-
217–33, 251–52, 264; Maya- Dresser,” 98, 99, 245
kovsky’s, 88 Wilde, Oscar, 160
Voloshin, Maksimilian, 117 Williams, William Carlos, 217, 218
Vongrubin, Jill, 237 Wilson, Woodrow, 86, 97
Wimsatt, William, 9
Walcott, Derek, 236, 240 Winchester Mystery House, 121, 122
Wandurski, Witold, 152, 156, 301n15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 209, 226
Wapcorow, Nikola, 178 Wolfson, Susan, 10, 12
Warren, Rosanna, 236 women: bereaved, 25–26, 119, 123,
Warsaw (Poland), 19, 242, 244; 125–31, 177–79, 181; disobedient,
Miłosz’s writings in, 243, 246, 190–95; in matriarchal cultures, 181;
250–51, 263; 1968 protests in, nation depicted as, 49–61, 71–72,
198–200, 204, 238; Uprisings in, 74–77, 101, 125, 145–46, 287n17,
250–53, 257–59, 275; World War II 288n29; time depicted as, 102–4
in, 19, 243, 246–47, 257, 258 Wordsworth, William, 155, 239, 257; as
Washington, D.C. See Miłosz, Czesław: influence on Miłosz, 261, 262, 264;
as cultural attaché in US as lyric poet, 15–16, 18, 19–22,
332 Index
Wordsworth, William (continued) Autobiographies, 61, 62, 66; Cath-

35, 37, 40; “Tintern Abbey,” 14, 15, leen ni Houlihan, 63–64; “Ireland
19–22, 38, 262, 264 and the Arts,” 55; “J. M. Synge and
World War I, 66, 75, 84 the Ireland of His Time,” 69; “Leda
World War II, 148, 168, 242, 270, and the Swan,” 66, 67; “Meditations
274, 275–76; and Poland, 19, 174, in Time of Civil War,” 68, 69, 71;
211, 250–53, 257–59, 275; West as “Modern Poetry,” 48; “Nineteen
discredited in Eastern Europe’s eyes Hundred and Nineteen,” 71; “No
after, 19, 168, 174; Yeats’ death dur- Second Troy,” 54; “Poetry and the
ing, 78–79 Tradition,” 57; “A Prayer for my
Woroszylski, Wiktor, 5, 176, 226, 270, Daughter,” 67, 68; “A Prayer for my
300n1; and communism, 160–63, Son,” 67–68; Responsibilities, 64;
270; Mayakovsky’s influence on, The Rose, 51, 54; “The Second Com-
41, 155–72; state persecution of, ing,” 66–67, 70, 252; “To Ireland in
169; “About Love—A Chaotic the Coming Times,” 54, 62–63; “To
Tale,” 157, 160, 166, 167; “After the Rose Upon the Rood of Time,”
a Friend’s Death,” 169; “Brooklyn 50–55, 57, 61; “The Tower,” 68–69;
Bridge,” 158; The Death of Maya- “Under Ben Bulben,” 78–79, 276; A
kovsky, 161; Histories, 170; “An Vision, 50, 67–69, 78
Intimate Letter,” 166, 167; The
Life of Mayakovsky, 154, 161, 164, Zagajewski, Adam, 203, 205–9,
169–71; “Nowotko,” 168; “Once 218–20, 237; as poet-bard, 2–5, 225,
More on Immortality,” 149, 162, 228–33, 240; Another Beauty, 174;
166, 167; “On the Reverse Side of “Butcher Shops,” 220–23; “Fire,” 29;
Wincenty Pstrowski’s Obituary,” “If Only Russia,” 2, 3, 120; “In the
165–66; “Rosie Lee,” 157–59, 162, First Person Plural,” 220; “In the Plu-
165; There Is No Death!, 157–58, ral,” 32, 196; Letter: Ode to Plurality,
161–62; “The War for Literature in 228, 229; “Mysticism for Beginners,”
People’s Poland,” 158 226; “New World,” 221; “Philoso-
Writers’ Union. See Soviet Writers’ phers,” 223–24; Solidarity, Solitude,
Union 4, 228; “Thorns,” 2, 3; “Try to Praise
the Mutilated World,” 229–32; Two
Yeats, Ann Butler, 65, 67 Cities, 225, 232; The Unrepresented
Yeats, Michael, 65, 67–68 World, 206, 221, 222, 228
Yeats, W. B., 1, 289n41; lyricism Zhdanov Resolution, 135, 136, 144. See
and nation in work of, 41, 45–82, also death(s): civic
147, 263, 275; Miłosz as translator Zholkovsky, Aleksandr, 28–29
of, 5; as senator, 65, 68, 78, 235; Zielinski, Adrian, 246, 247
“Among School Children,” 235; Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 135

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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: Front Matter

Book Title: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Lyric Poetry and

Yale University Press

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,

Set in Sabon type by Integrated Book Technology.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence

Chapter Title: Table of Contents

Book Title: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Afterword: Martyrs, Survivors, and Success Stories,

Chapter Title: Acknowledgments

Book Title: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Chapter Title: Introduction: Acknowledged Legislation

Book Title: Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” describes the secret

Do not be elected to the senate of your country.

The Lyric under Siege, and the Mystery of the

What is poetry which does not save

“What would American poets and critics do without the Cen-

If only Russia had been founded

Taken together, Adam Zagajewski’s brief lyrics seem to embody what

I sink my crowbar in a chink I know under the masonry

compatriots’ preoccupation with poetry as a form of collective resistance.

I do not pretend to anything like exhaustiveness. Modern poetry and poli-

history as grand narrative might reveal its subversive potentials in a state

apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic lit-

(sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices

Levinson dubs her method “deconstructive materialism.” She calls upon

theoretical apparatus and not its historical applications. “Marxism is at

containing antihistory? The erasure or the defense of particularity? Let us

Tintern Abbey versus People’s Poland

Even apolitical poetry is political.

Under the Communist regime, Miłosz explains in The Captive Mind,

And the stony word descended

I’ve got a lot to do today:

If not . . . the hot rustling of summer,

To the music of Savoy pine trees, to benzine in the Champs-Elysées,

I drink to the waves of Biscay, to cream in Alpine jugs,

“I have strange taste,” Mandelstam admits in a 1909 letter to the Symbol-

comments. Suspect foreign place names (including a conspicuously anach-

we had a shred of necessary courage

in our poems Ryszard there is so little joy—daughter of the gods

what strength of spirit is needed to strike

so the dancing circle will last forever on the thick grass

mismatched weapons and unexpected comrades-in-arms of its fi fth segment

The Battle of the Bards

“I hate the builders of dungeons in the air,” Emerson protests in one

about cowed silence eventually carried, as he apparently intended, to the

A Tale of Two Pronouns

“All personality (lichnost’) aside. Make way for anonymous prose.”

Rose-colored cup and saucer,

Before the fi rst red tones

The blackened plain spreads out

Bourgeois bric-à-brac once more—but with a difference. Miłosz’s shattered

not humanity en masse, but humans in particular, the individual beings of

In every pocket he carried pencils, pads of paper