"Antithesis and Completion": Zabolockij Responds to Tjutčev

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

"Antithesis and Completion": Zabolockij Responds to TjutčevAuthor(s): Sarah PrattSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 1983), pp. 211-227Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307316 .

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"ANTITHESIS AND COMPLETION": ZABOLOCKIJ RESPONDS TO TJUTCEV

Sarah Pratt, University of Southern California

Tjutcev and Zabolockij make an unlikely pair of correspondents. Tjutcev lived from 1803 to 1873, wrote some the finest Russian poetry of the Romantic period, and spent much of his creative life in Germany as a minor diplomat, refusing to play the role of a poet.' Zabolockij, on the other hand, was born a hundred years later, lived until 1958, and shared the experience of many intellectuals of his generation-from participation in the literary experiments of the 1920's (in Zabolockij's case, those of OBERIU), to a term in a Soviet labor camp and gradual rehabilitation after the death of Stalin.2 Yet the two shared more than an unusual ability to mold the Russian language into flowing lines of verse. As poety mysli, "poets of thought" or "metaphysical poets," both were influenced by German romanticism, both regarded nature as a living organism with its own independent metaphysical existence, and both devoted many lines of verse to exploration of the essential qualities of nature and man's place within nature's metaphysical realm.' Perhaps because of this philosophical bond, Zabolockij consistently named Tjut'ev and Boratynskij, the other major author of metaphysical verse in nineteenth century Russia, as his favorite poets, and is said to have kept volumes of their poetry with him even in camp in exile.4 It is most likely not simply a coincidence that critics again and again find Zabolockij's work after Stolbcy strikingly similar to Tjut'ev's poetry in both clarity of style and depth of philosophical concern." And it is no doubt the same set of factors that caused Zabolockij on at least one occasion to feel the "anxiety of influence," and, in a pattern of literary reaction identified by such various critics as Jurij Tynjanov and Harold Bloom, to recognize his debt to Tjutcev while simultaneously asserting his independence from him.6

Perceiving nature with the sensibility of a nineteenth century romantic prone to mysticism, Tjutcev asserts in the opening line of one of his best

SEEJ, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1983) 211



212 Slavic and East European Journal

known poems, Pevucest' est' v morskix volnax ("There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea"); Zabolockij, inclined to certain kinds of mysticism yet taken with the idea of technological progress, counters with the poetic statement, Ja ne i&du garmonii v prirode ("I do not seek harmony in nature"). Images and concepts echo between the two poems almost point for point, and an argumentative tone pervades each one, as if each author somehow knew what the response of the other would be. This "correspondence," to my knowledge, has been noted only once in previous scholarship, and this as a part of a larger argument in which the author cites half of Tjut'ev's poem, less than a quarter of Zabolockij's, and drops the matter without substantive analysis.7

Although Zabolockij's view very likely reflects the force of political pressures in addition to the poet's own "original" concept of nature, the essence of the poem lies in Zabolockij's response to the poetic statement made by Tjutcev some eighty years earlier. And because of this, Bloom's theory of influence is particularly applicable here. Bloom maintains that poems are, for the most part, about other poems," and in isolating various patterns of influence, he delineates a pattern called "Tessera" which provides the frame for our argument. According to this model, a poet responds to his precursor with a poem that is at once antithetical to the precursor's, yet seeks to complete the same basic notion. As Bloom explains it:

I take the word [Tessera] from the ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of rec- ognition, the fragment say of a small pot with which other fragments would reconstitute the vessel. A poet antithetically "completes" his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.9

Before discussing Zabolockij's "completion" of Tjut'ev's work and his transformation of the earlier poet's terms into their antithesis, we must first examine the poem that forms the catalyst for this anxiety of influence, Tjut'ev's "There Is Melodiousness in the Waves of the Sea":

Est in erundineis modulatio musica ripis

HeBylecTb eCTb B MOPCKIX BOJIHaX, FapMOHHR B CTHXH'HbIX cnopax, 14 CTpOHHblH MycHKHHCKHHi mopox CTpyHITC3I B 3bI6KIX KaMblmaX.

HeBO3MyTHMbII CTpOH BO BCeM,

Co3Bsybe HOJHoe B anppoge, -

JIUmb B HaUeA npuH3panHOH cBo6o0Ae Pa3JnaA Mbl C Hefo CO3HaeM.



"Antithesis and Completion": Zabolockij Responds to Tjutciev 213

OTKyla, KaK pa3naJ Bo3H1HK?

4 oTqero ~)ce B o6HteM xope Jiytua He TO noeT, WTO Mope, H ponmeT MblCJARIlAi TpOCTHHK?10

(There is musical harmony in the reeds along the shore

There is melodiousness in the waves of the sea, harmony in the elemental quarrels, and a harmonious musical rustle streams in the rippling rushes.

There is an imperturbable harmony in everything, full consonance in nature-only in our illusory freedom are we conscious of discord with her.

From where, how, did this discord arise? And why in the general chorus does the soul not sing what the sea sings? And why does the thinking reed grumble?)

The completeness of the opening one-line statement, its firm and definite rhythm, and the existential assertion indicated by the verb est' all contribute to the impression that the poem will be presenting a particular line of argument. And indeed, the whole first half of the poem consists of short declarative clauses (all but one complete in a single line), each hammering out a claim for one of the harmonious qualities to be found in nature: melodiousness, harmony, a harmonious musical rustle, imperturbable harmony, and full consonance.

But the poem's message begins to emerge even before the reader unwittingly intrudes upon Tjut'ev's monologic argument, for the epigraph from the fourth century poet Ausonius furnishes more than simple literary adornment. It introduces all the major elements of the poem in abbreviated form. Its reference to the shore suggests the water imagery of the poem's setting; its mention of reeds contributes to both the imagery of the "rippling rushes" in the first stanza and the closing reference to man as the "thinking reed," an epithet that will be discussed further below. On a different level, in a variant of Taranovsky's zaimstvovanie po ... zvu- caniju (borrowing of sound)," the first word of the Latin epigraph, "est," may well have brought out Tjut'ev's own tendency to use the Russian existential assertion est', thus allowing the epigraph to contribute to the strident tone of the poem's opening in addition to various aspects of its imagery. 12

And finally, the epigraph's statement of musical harmony begins the musical motif that runs through the opening lines of the poem to the image of the chorus in its conclusion. Emphasized by the use of the archaic form musikijskij rather than the standard form muzykal'nyj, and by the presence of words with musical connotations in all but three of the poem's twelve lines, the musical metaphor serves as a vehicle for the expression of a major aspect of Tjutev's world view. It both confirms the place of seem-




ingly dissonant, chaotic elements within the harmony of nature, and at the same time, underscores the true dissonance caused by human illusions of freedom. Thus the first line of the poem introduces the image of waves, which in Tjutciev's poetry most often functions as a symbol for chaos," but unequivocally establishes their melodiousness, or implicitly orderly structure. The elemental quarrels (stixijnye spory) likewise contain harmony, even though Tjutcev more commonly uses the word stixija (element, elemental force) in connection with the notion of chaos, and even though the word spor (argument) would seem to preclude the concept of harmony. Cosmic order exists even within individual chaotic forces.

On a broader level, the two symbols for chaos, the sea waves and the elemental quarrels themselves form a part of the all-encompassing natural harmony described in the first two lines of the second stanza: Nlevozmutimrj stroj vo vsem, / Sozviu'e polnoe v1 prirode (There is imperturbable harmony in everything, full consonance in nature). Here the word stroj carries not only its usual definition of "order" or "structure," but takes on specifically musical connotations, and the idea of musical order-harmony or in-tuneness-becomes dominant as the root form stroj relates back to the adjectival form strojnvj (harmonious) in line 3. By playing on the concept of musical order, Tjutcev has created two micro- cosms which form mirror images of the macrocosm. In the case of the sea waves and elemental quarrels, order exists within essentially chaotic forces; in the case of nature as a whole-which holds these phenomena within its realm-chaos exists as a legitimate force within the cosmos. The complex relationship between cosmos and chaos explains the strength of both the positive and negative feelings that accompany man's discovery of nature's metaphysical essence in other of Tjutcev's poems, such as Den' i noc', Svjataja noc' na nebosklon vzo0la, 0 cem ty voesv', vetr nocnoj?, Teni sizye smesilis', and Kak sladko dremlet sad temnozelenvj. While the poet's personae typically fear chaos and its revelation in the image of the abyss, they also sense its function as a part of a greater and more valid reality that is, in fact, cosmos.

This is one of many instances in which one can see a striking parallel between Tjut'ev's thought and that of Friedrich Schelling, the German romantic philosopher with whom Tjutcev was acquainted during his years in Germany.'~ In Pevucest' est' v morskix volnax, specifically in the line Sozvu('e polnoe v prirode (There is full consonance in nature), one senses Tjut'ev's agreement with Schelling's constant assertion of the existence of a harmonious, organic and purposeful system unifying all of nature. Schelling writes: ... there can be neither accidents in nature nor accidental natural phenomena . . . nature is a system, [and] for everything that happens or comes into existence there must be a connection with one of the principles that join all aspects of nature.'



"Antithesis and Completion": Zabolockij Responds to Tjutcev 215

Given this basis, Tjut'ev's statement on the role of seemingly chaotic forces within the cosmic order of the whole can be related to the following statement of belief by Schelling:

Nature is sublime not only in her humanly unfathomable immensity and unassailable might, but also in the chaos, or, as Schiller expressed it, in the confusion of her manifestations in general. Chaos is our principle intuition of the sublime because we perceive masses too great for our sensory perceptions only as chaos.'6

Schelling's philosophy likewise provides a parallel to the second half of the poem, which contrasts the seeming chaos of genuinely harmonious nature to the discord introduced by the illusory concept of human freedom. In his tract Untersuchungen iiber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Inquiries on the Essence of Human Freedom), Schelling asserts that nature is the embodiment of freedom, and that the way for man to become free is to give up his self-will and become part of the universal- will of nature.17 Tjutcev focuses on the same kind of separation from the wholeness of nature and consequent loss of true freedom through human consciousness, specifically, through human thought, as conveyed by the verb soznaem (we are conscious) and in the metaphor for man mysljaidii trostnik (thinking reed).

But it is not only Schelling's influence that is here absorbed and transformed by Tjut'ev's poetic vision. The thought of Schiller, whose work Ober das Erhabene (On the Sublime) Schelling cites in the passage above, also makes itself felt. Tjut'ev translated a number of Schiller's poems and no doubt knew many of his other works, possibly including Ober das Erhabene as well as the play Die Rauber (The Robbers), which contains the following line sometimes suggested as a source of inspiration for Tjut'ev's poem: "Es ist doch so eine g6ttliche Harmonie in der see- lenlosen Natur, warum sollte dieser Missklang in der verniinftigen sein?" (There is such divine harmony in soulless nature; why should there be this discord in its rational aspect [i.e., man]?"' But if Tjut'ev did, in fact, borrow the notion of nature's seeming "confusion" directly from Schiller's Uber das Erhabene, the borrowing was limited to that single idea, for Schiller posits the sublime as the key instrument in proving man's freedom of will, while Tjutcev asserts that it is precisely the illusion of freedom that leads man away from harmony with nature. Likewise, the seemingly Tjutcevian contrast between nature's harmony and man's dissonance in Die Riiuber carries a not quite hidden flaw. Schiller explicitly characterizes nature as "soulless" (seelenlos), whereas Tjut'ev's metaphysical nature lyrics, including the poem under discussion, are based on the assumption that nature is a full metaphysical being complete with a vaguely defined soul. As he states in another poem:




He TO, TO MHHTe Bbl, npupoga: He cJenoK, He

6e3ymnHbIii JnHK - B Hef erCTb Ayma, B He eCTb cBo6o0a, B Hel eCTb JlO6OBb, B He~I eCTb MI3blK .. 19

(Nature is not what you think: not a copy, not a soulless countenance-there is a soul within her, there is freedom within her, there is love within her, there is speech within her . . . )

While the existence of nature's soul is implicit rather than explicit in Pevu'est' est' v morskix volnax, the assumption is there nonetheless. Tjut'ev's borrowings from Schiller are, at most, incomplete.

Another reference in this part of the poem is to the thought of the seventeenth century philosopher Pascal, whose Pensees provide the epithet "thinking reed" (in the original French, "roseau pensant") as a metaphor for man.20 Here again the manner in which TjutCev changes the sense of the original material is telling. Pascal writes as follows:

Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but a thinking reed. It does not need the universe to take up arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But, though the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer, because he knows that he is dying, knows that the universe has got the better of him; the universe knows naught of that.

All our dignity then consists in thought."'

Here we find a "thinking reed," water imagery and a troubled relationship between man and the universe, just as in Tjut'ev's poem. But the sense derived from the combination of these elements is a vastly different one, for Pascal posits man's consciousness, his ability to think, as the basis of his superiority to nature rather than as a source of undesirable discord. In another section of the Pensdes, Pascal seems to approach Tjutcev's position and Schelling's as well, in a long statement on the limitations of man's perceptions and rational abilities,= but these limitations exist only in relation to God: man, the "thinking reed," must ultimately turn to God to escape the given dimensions of his human state, but he still reigns morally triumphant over unconscious nature. Tjutcev, while expounding man's limitations in similar fashion and appropriating the term "thinking reed" in such a way that it has become the hallmark of this poem, nonetheless disagrees with Pascal on the crucial issue of consciousness: Pascal maintains that thought, or rational consciousness is man's highest achieve- ment; Tjut'ev here portrays it as the root of man's gravest metaphysical problem. In addition, Pascal denigrates nature and seeks to promote an active and self-conscious faith in God within his reader; Tjutiev, for his part, ignores the issue of religious faith altogether and implicitly posits the abolition of consciousness through merging with nature as the greatest good.23




In spite of his adoption of certain images and concepts from Schiller and Pascal, Tjut'ev is ultimately closer to Schelling than to either of the others, and his poem implies his own poetic reworking of Schelling's philosophy:

Man is unconscious and thinks that he is free. Because man is conscious, he is not truly free. If man were not conscious, he would be free.

But in style quite opposed to Schelling's lengthy arguments, Tjutcev offers no conclusions outright. Using a pattern that occurs in a number of his works, the poet gradually drifts away from the assertive tone es- tablished in the first line, goes through a series of non-emphatic affirmative statements, and concludes with a series of questions that pose a problem the bewildered persona is wholly unable to answer: "From where, how, did this discord arise? And why in the general chorus does the soul not sing what the sea sings? And why does the thinking reed grumble?" As the persona recognizes the illusory quality of human freedom and man's unenviable role as the source of dissonance within the harmonious choir of nature, he loses faith in his own ability to think and draw conclusions. And while the epithet "thinking reed" might sometimes suggest the creativity of poetic reflection, the reed here "grumbles" rather than func- tioning as a poet-singer in this naturally harmonious realm. The persona, himself a representative specimen of the "thinking reed," has neither the intellectual power to understand the workings of the universe nor the humility that would allow him to join the general chorus of nature. He has no other choice but to abandon the role of the poet and let the poem come to a close. In the face of his failure and in the face of the poignant and apparently unanswerable questions of the last stanza, all that is clear is that human consciousness has no place in nature's harmonious universe.

Let us now turn to Zabolockij's response, Ja ne iu garmonii v prirode ("I Do Not Seek Harmony in Nature"):

31 HE HllY FAPMOHHH B HPHPOJE 31 He Huty rapMOHHH B inppoge. Pa3yMHOfi copa3MepHOCTH Haqal HH B HeApax cKaJ,. HH B MCHOM He6OCBOAe 31 go cHx nop, yBb., He pa3nusan.

KaK CBOeHpaBeH MHp ee gpeMyqHi! B O>KeCTOqeHHOM CeHHH BeTpOB He CJnblmT cepgAe npaBHJbHblX CO3ByqHH, Jiyma He qyeT CTpOHHbIX FOROCOB.

Ho B THXHH qac oceHHerO 3aKaTa,

Koraa yMOJKHeT BeTep BnaaeKe,

Korea, cHMHbeM HeMOHLHbIM o6bTra,

CnenaM HOqb onyCTHTCM K peKe,




KorAa, ycTaB OT 6yliHOrO ABH>eHbI, OT 6e3none3HO TIMKKOFO Tpyga, B TpeBO)KHOM nonyCHe H3HeMO)KeHbM 3aTHXHeT noTeMHeBarM Boga,

Korga OFpOMHbAi MHp npOTHBOpeqnHH HacbITHTcM 6ecnnOAHOIO HrpoHi, - KaK 6b1 npoo6pa3 6oJnI qenoBeqbeiH 143 6e3AHbI BOA BCTaeT nepeAO MHOH.

14 B 3TOT qac neiqanbHaa npupopa

JleCKHT BOKpyr, B3AbIXaM TM>eeno,

H He MHJa eC AHKar CBO6Oga, Fje OT o6pa He OTeJeMMO 3AJo.

SCHHCHHTCMI ef 6JACCT5MI1iH Baln Typ6HHbl, 14 MepHblHi 3ByK pa3yMHOrO Tpypa, HI neHbe Tpy6, H 3apeBo FJIOTHHbl, 14 HaJIHTble TOKOM npoBoga.

TaK, 3acbUmaA Ha CBoeCi KpOBaTH, be3yMHaM, HO JIo6M4IIaM MaTb TaHT B ce6e BbICOKHHI1 MHp AHTMTH, HTo6 BMeCTe c CblHOM COlHtue yBHgaTb.24

(I do not seek harmony in nature. Neither at the base of the cliffs nor in the clear arc of the heavens, alas, have I discerned the rational harmony of first principles.

How willful is her nature's dark universe! In the fierce singing of the winds the heart does not hear true consonance, the soul does not sense harmonious voices.

But at the quiet hour of an autumn sunset when the wind falls silent in the distance, when, surrounded by a weak glow, blind night goes down to the river,

When the darkened water, tired by turbulent motion and uselessly heavy labor, becomes quiet in the troubled half-sleep of exhaustion,

When the vast world of contradictions sates itself with fruitless play-it is as if the archetype of human pain rises up from the abyss of the waters before me.

And at this hour mournful nature lies around sighing heavily, and the untamed freedom in which evil is inseparable from good is not dear to her.

And she dreams of the sparkling shaft of the turbine, the measured sound of rational labor, and the singing of smoke stacks and the glow of dams, and wires filled with current.

Thus, falling asleep on her bed, the irrational but loving mother harbors the lofty universe of the child within her in order to catch sight of the sun together with her son.)

It is not difficult to perceive this as a response to Tjut'ev's poem. In both cases, a first line that is rhythmically strong and syntactically complete provides a statement of the poem's main line of argument. In each case,




the argument concerns a structured musical quality-pevumest' (melodiousness) or garmonija (harmony). Zabolockij, like Tjut'ev, develops the musical metaphor as his argument progresses: he seeks harmony or proportion (sorazmernost') in the first principles of the universe, hears the singing (penie) of the winds, and expects to hear true consonance (pravil'nye sozvuo'ta)

and harmonious voices (strojnye golosa) in nature. Thus, as suggested by Bloom, the terms of the original work are retained. But while Tjut'ev affirms the presence of musical structure (stroj) and full consonance (sozvu('e polnoe) in nature, Zabolockij laments that he has looked everywhere from the bowels of the earth to the arc of the heavens and has been able to discern none of these qualities, except perhaps the singing of the winds, which he characterizes as fierce or violent (oz`e- sto'ennoe) rather than harmonious-the terms are retained, but another, antithetical meaning is derived from them.

Zabolockij's poem does not end with this antithetical reworking of Tjutiev's view of nature, however. With the word no (but), which opens the third stanza, the poem turns away from the noisy, willful and disorderly aspect of nature and turns toward a quiet, almost pathetic portrayal of an autumn sunset, thus softening the effect of the opening polemical barrage. The section comprised of stanzas 3-5 is structured around three major elements: first, a movement away from the tone and material of the preceding part of the poem as indicated by the word no and the introduction of the tixii fas (quiet hour); then a series of four kogda-clauses describing the "quiet hour"; and finally, the conclusion for all the foregoing kogda- clauses, which appears after the dash in the fifth stanza. Through this process, the poem develops from a seemingly simply rebuttal of Tjutiev's view of nature into a positive statement of Zabolockij's own curiously heterogeneous concept. In Bloom's terms this is the "completion" of the initial impulse of influence.

Each of the kogda-clauses moves the poem one step closer to expression of Zabolockij's view, yet remains tightly bound to the preceding text by an echo effect of words and ideas. The first subordinate clause, kogda umolknet veter vdaleke (when the wind falls silent in the distance), completes the transition from the opening stanzas marked by the "fierce singing of the winds" into the more peaceful mood of the second major portion of the poem. The second kogda-clause-Kogda, sijan'em ne- moScnym ob'jata, / Slepaja noc' opustitsja k reke (When, surrounded by weak glow, blind night goes down to the river)-continues the description of the sunset. Simultaneously, however, it moves the poem into the realm of the sentimental night poetry of the eighteenth century England and early nineteenth century Russia, represented, for example, by Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Zukovskij's translation of it, Sel'skoe kladbiKde. The use of personification and oblique reference,




here an allusion to night's darkness by means of the epithet "blind," represent typical aspects of the poetry of the earlier period. In addition, as night goes down to the river, she is "surrounded by a weak glow," which not only suggests the waning sunset, but also contributes to the general sense of weakness and exhaustion that characterizes nature in this part of the poem. Here again, the use of oblique reference and the pathetic fallacy recall the works of Zabolockij's sentimental predecessors.

The third and fourth kogda-clauses accomplish the transition from the first half of the poem to the second. While the first four stanzas relate to the poetry and world view of early nineteenth century Russia, the four concluding stanzas introduce a more contemporary aspect of Zabolockij's world view. The poet gradually develops a statement of faith in human reason, brings in modern industrial terminology, and even sets a tone that could be called Marxist. While it goes without saying that Zabolockij might have created the Marxist (or pseudo-Marxist) subtext with an eye to the political realities of the day, he nonetheless seems to have had a genuine interest in the "socialist" concept of social and technological progress. This is indicated most convincingly in personal letters, letters not for publication still held in the family archive, in which he writes with notable respect about the works of Engels and of Ciolkovskij, the "father" of the Soviet rocket, with whom he corresponded for some time.25 It is true that the poet seems never to mention Marx and actually prefers the hypothetical, almost mystic aspects of Engels' and Ciolkovskij's thought to the less imaginative and more dogmatic aspects propagated by the Soviet authorities, but the underlying concern for "progressive" ideology remains.

In returning to the kogda clauses, we find that the turbulent motion (bujnoe dviien'e) of the fourth stanza refers back to the wild and dishar- monious nature depicted at the beginning of the poem; the mention of exhaustion (iznemozen'e) and water refer back to the images of weakness and the river in the preceding stanza; and the appearance of the word trud (labor)-note the choice of the elevated trud over the more ordinary rabota (work)-begins the movement towards Soviet terminology. Trud at this point, still in the part of the poem tied to the earlier epoch, is described as "uselessly heavy" (bespolezno tjaikij), whereas later it will be bound to the ideal of human progress.

In the fifth stanza, and the final kogda-clause, one comes upon that key word in Marxist terminology, protivorecie (contradiction). For Za- bolockij, though, the "vast world of contradictions" (ogromnyj mir pro- tivore'ij) means not capitalism, but nature as yet untamed by the force of human reason. He not only mentions the contradictions, but provides an example as well. While nature suffers in the fourth stanza from "uselessly heavy labor," here she sates herself with "fruitless play" (bes-




plodnaja igra). Does nature play or does she labor? Ultimately even the contradiction is irrelevant because nature's activities have no meaning in either case: they are "useless" or "fruitless."

The conclusion of the four kogda-clauses is not the expression of sympathy for suffering nature that might be expected. Rather, nature's weakness, exhaustion, and suffering lead to a vision of human pain: Kak by proobraz boli 'elovec'ej / Iz bezdny vod vstaet peredo mnoi (it is as if the archetype of human pain rises up from the abyss of the waters before me). The rhyme words emphasize the specifically human element. And while the adjective 'elovefij carries the same denotation as the more common C'elove'eskij, the ending -ecij suggests the delineation of an animal species like sobacij (dog-) or ovecij (sheep-). The unusual form draws the reader's eye to the word, and the word then by implication juxtaposes and distinguishes human beings, the species of rational man, from all other animal species on earth.

In the same vein, the rhyme word mnoj (me) refers to the only rep- resentatives of the human species in this part of the poem, the author or persona himself. Thus mnoj closes the circle begun with the first word of the poem ja (I), and in a way, completes the poem's major statement. This statement, like the paraphrase reduction of Tjut'ev's poem, can be expressed in syllogistic form. Zabolockij's argument reads as follows:

Nature is full of contradictions. Contradictions preclude harmony. Therefore, one cannot find harmony in nature. If one cannot find harmony in nature, One must inevitably turn back to the human perspective.

With the introduction of the abyss of the waters, the poem shifts into a triumphal, mythical, and paradoxically, Biblical mode of expression. The word "archetype" (proobraz) immediately suggests a particular kind of metaphysical reality, and the notion of something rising up from the abyss recalls the myth of creation, both as it appears in the Greek and Roman classics and as it appears in the Bible. The use of anaphora and parataxis in the sixth and seventh stanzas with the repetition of the con- junction i (and) further strengthens the Biblical tone by mimicking a typical Biblical narrative style.

The three final stanzas are essentially a coda providing one last bit of material to round off the major statement-and they provide an op- portunity for Zabolockij to offer one more refutation of Tjutciev's position. First, he states that "untamed freedom, in which evil is inseparable from good" is not dear to nature. This implies that the human moral distinction between good and evil is essential to any positive kind of freedom. Tjutiev, on the other hand, views the freedom cherished by human beings as an




illusion and as the source of discord in a basically harmonious universe: Li's" v nasej prizracnoj svobode / Razlad my s neju soznaem (Only in our illusory freedom are we conscious of discord with her).

The seventh stanza portrays nature's dream, a dream of human technological progress that includes "the sparkling shaft of the turbine, the measured sound of rational labor, and the singing of smoke stacks and the glow of dams, and wires filled with current." While the stanza seems to turn completely away from the preceding portrayal of nature both in its content and in its triumphal tone, it actually repeats a number of elements, but now gives them positive connotations, rather than the negative or simply pathetic ones previously used. The assertion that nature dreams of the "sparkling shaft of the turbine" seems to draw away from the foregoing material, yet the potential pun in the word val, which can mean both "shaft" and, more commonly, "billow, wave, breaker," implicitly picks up the strand of water imagery begun in the fourth stanza. A turbine has rows of turning parts that look like waves, and certainly rows of churning turbines might look like a rolling sea. Furthermore, the turbines that Zabolockij would have in mind are driven by the force of "billows" of water flowing through a dam, so that the watery element lies within the image itself, not only in the double denotation of the word val. And while the water imagery associated with nature in the first part of the poem is linked to darkness, weakness, and pain,'the shaft or billow of the turbine is sparkling (blestjas`ij) and forms part of a triumphal proclamation on human technology.

Further along in the seventh stanza, the measured sound (mernyj zvuk) of human activity contrasts with the absence of true consonance (pravil'nye sozvucija) in nature, just as the notion of rational labor (ra- zumnyj trud) contrasts with nature's fruitlessly heavy labor (bespolezno tjaikij trud). The singing smoke stacks (pen'e trub), which also suggests the triumphal blowing of trumpets because of the double meaning of the word truba, contrasts with the fierce singing of the winds (oiestocennoe penie vetrov) in the second stanza. Likewise, the glow (zarevo) of the dam contrasts with the weak glow (sijan'e nemosYnoe) of the autumn sunset, and the wires filled with electrical energy (nalitye tokom provoda) counterbalance the general images of weakness and exhaustion that per- vade the opening portrayal of nature.

Given another context, one without the intertextual relationships between the two parts of the poem and between Zabolockij's poem and Tjutciev's, this stanza might be perceived as existing fully within the canons of Socialist Realism. In fact, the imagery of the sparkling turbines, singing smoke stacks and glowing dams, crowned with the concept of rational labor, could serve as a fine source of inspiration for a Soviet poster touting the glories of the latest five-year plan, perhaps with the slogan Slava




trudu! (Glory to Labor!). But no matter what Zabolockij's motivation or intention in connection with the industrial imagery, the imagery both suggests a Marxist outlook and, simultaneously, hints at the inadequacy of such an outlook, for the romantic mystical element, the search for harmony in nature, the view of nature as an organic, personified whole- in short, the complex response to Tjutciev-remains at the heart of the poem.

Still not content with his arguments, however, Zabolockij sets up one final analogy to be sure that his point has been made: "Thus, falling asleep on her bed, the irrational but loving mother harbors the lofty universe of the child within her in order to catch sight of the sun together with her son." In the description of the loving but irrational mother, he uses the word bezumnyj in its root sense, bez uma-without mind or reasoning faculties. Although the mother-mother nature-is presumably an "adult" and should be more rational than a child, it is her child-rational man- who sees "the sun," the light of reason; and she must harbor the lofty world of this child within her so that she too may be enlightened.

Continuing the interpretation based on Soviet ideology, one might view this as an analogy with the revolutionary situation in which the younger members of society, specimens of the new Soviet rational man, took it upon themselves to "enlighten" the older generation still lost in the "irrational" ideology of the previous era. But more important, one finds yet another response to Tjut'ev's Naturphilosophie, in this instance to its expression in the poem Ne to, cto mnite vy, priroda ("Nature is Not What You Think"), the first stanza of which is cited above. The poem's middle section offers an ironic portrayal of those men of extreme reason who cannot or will not believe that nature "is not a soulless countenance," and the conclusion juxtaposes "rational" man with the following image of mother nature, the image to which Zabolockij seems to be reacting in the conclusion of his own poem:

He iHX BHHa: HO iMH, KOJb MO)KeT, OpraHa KH3Hb FnyXOHeMOHi! YBbI, gAYUII B HeM He BCTpeBO)KuIT 1H ronoc MaTepCI caMogi!

(It is not their fault: let a deaf-mute understand the life of the organ if he can! Alas, even the voice of the mother herself will not arouse the soul within him!)

The statement, "It is not their fault" may be taken either seriously or ironically. But in either case, Tjut'ev relegates those who do not perceive nature's organic and animate grandeur to the category of "deaf-mutes" who cannot even hear the voice of "the mother herself." Mother nature, in Tjutiev's portrayal, is clearly superior; and rational-overly rational- man is something less than a whole being. Once again true to Bloom's




description of the "Tessera" category of influence, Zabolockij provides both antithesis and completion of Tjut'ev's idea. In his poem rational man, the "son," is superior to mother nature, thus establishing the point of view opposite Tjut'ev's; but the antithesis is softened by the poetic act of completion, for nature is declared capable of learning: she "harbors the lofty universe of the child within her in order to catch sight of the sun together with her son.'''

Another example of "Tessera" can be seen in the poem's treatment of the theme of creativity. While the first two stanzas ofJa ne ic'u garmonii v prirode provide a direct rebuttal to Tjutiev's Pevui(est' est' v morskix volnax, the remaining verses provide both the Bloomian completion of Tjutiev's idea and, simultaneously, a somewhat less direct response to another of Tjutiev's metaphysical poems, Videnie ("A Vision"). Both Videnie and the section of Zabolockij's poem beginning with the third stanza posit the existence of a special quiet hour: Tjuttev writes, Est' nekij cfas v roci, vsemirnogo moldan'ja; and Zabolockij writes, No v tixij cas osennego zakata. . ... And in both cases the hour involves water imagery, the portrayal of the coming of night, and a mythical situation suggesting creation-the thickening of chaos on the waters for Tjutcev, and the formation of an image from the abyss of the waters for Zabolockij. Furthermore, the experience is linked with a non-rational state of being (bespamjatstvo, or the state of being bezumnyj), which then combines with the myth of creation to give rise to another kind of creative activity. In Videnie the Muse's soul is touched by the gods in prophetic dreams. This whole experience, in turn, creates the vision that is the poem itself. Tjut'ev's nature has no use for human existence as a distinct element. Inspiration, in the form of the Muse's prophetic dreams, simply appears in nature by itself, visions occur and poems "happen" without the apparent intervention of a human poet. In Zabolockij's poem the situation is reversed: nature finds her inspiration precisely in the consciousness of self and organizing control of human reason, and so she dreams in explicit terms of technological progress achieved through human labor.

In the final analysis, Zabolockij's completion of his predecessor's work consists primarily in this addition of a positive image of human rational activity, for it is such "rationalization" of nature that will create the order necessary for harmonious existence. Tjutiev denies the possi- bility of human participation in nature's harmonious process to the point that the metaphysical nature poems discussed here have invisible personae whose presence is never felt except through the fact of the poems' existence. When human presence is mentioned, it is described as discordant, disruptive, and not part of the natural order. Zabolockij, in opposite fashion, starts his poem with the pronoun ja (I), closes the main exposition of the poem's statement with mnoj (me), and from the outset equates




natural harmony with the principles of human reason. He seeks not simple garmonija (harmony), but specifically razumnaja sorazmernost' natal (the rational harmony or proportion of first principles). Furthermore, he implies that his human inability to discern harmony means that there is no harmony, thus directly contradicting the idea espoused by Schelling and Tjut'ev that human beings may perceive nature as chaos simply because they lack the faculty to grasp the whole picture at once. Tjuttev, the romantic mystic, sees nature filled with its own irrational harmony and man at his best when his presence and consciousness have no impact on his surroundings; Zabolockij, the child of the industrial age, seems to view nature as a wild mass of contradictions waiting to achieve harmony through the productive control of human reason and labor.

All the components of Bloom's "Tessera" pattern of influence fall into place: the adoption of the precursor's terms, the turn to antithesis, and the attempt to go beyond the precursor's art to "complete" his work. And precisely because of the complexity of this literary relationship, we feel the real strength of the bond between the two poets. The "archetype of human pain" that inhabits Zabolockij's consciousness, be it the pain of human mortality, of political repression or literary anxiety, requires a vision of natural harmony as its antidote. Zabolockij may throw down the gauntlet before Tjut'ev with the defiant assertion, "I do not seek harmony in nature," but the major part of his poem is nothing less than the story of his poignant search for such harmony.

NOTES

1 See K. V. Pigarev, Zizn' i tvoreestvo Tjuteeva (M.: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962) and F. I. Tjuteev i ego vremja (M. Sovremennik, 1978); I. S. Aksakov, Biografija F. I. Tjutc'eva (M. 1886); Richard A. Gregg, Fedor Tiutchev: The Evolution of a Poet (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965).

2 See A. M. Turkov, Nikolaj Zabolockij (M.: Xudoiestvennaja literatura, 1966) and "Ni- kolaj Zabolockij" in N. A. Zabolockij, Stixotvorenija ipoemy (M.-L.: Sovetskij pisatel', 1965); A. V. Makedonov, Nikolaj Zabolockij: izn', tvorcestvo i metamorfozy (L.: So-

vetskij pisatel', 1968); Boris Filipoff, "Put' poeta" in Nikolaj Zabolockij, Stixotvorenija, ed. Filipoff and Struve (Washington: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1965), xxxi- lviii; Nikolaj Zabolockij, "Avtobiografija" and "Rannie gody," ibid., 1-20.

3 See Lidija Ginzburg, 0 lirike (L.: Sovetskij pisatel', 1964, expanded edition 1974), Chapter II, "Poezija mysli"; N. Stepanov, "N. A. Zabolockij" in N. A. Zabolockij, Izbrannye proizvedenija (M.: Xudotestvennaja literatura, 1972), I, 5, 21. Tjut'ev's connection with German romanticism is readily apparent both in his connection with Schelling, which will be discussed briefly below, and in his numerous translations of the works of German romantic poets, especially Goethe. See F. I. Tjut'ev, Lirika, ed. K. V. Pigarev (M. Nauka, 1965)-Volume II contains most of the translations; see also William A. Coates, Tiutchev and Germany: The Relationship of His Poetry to German Literature and Culture, unpublished dissertation (Harvard Univ., 1950). Zabolockij, for




his part, no doubt absorbed traces of German romanticism through the poetry of Tjuteev and Boratynskij, and possibly, as suggested by Professor Lauren Leighton, through the poetry of Mandel'stam. While I have yet to uncover any references to a connection between Zabolockij and Mandel'?tam, the question of influence certainly merits further investigation. Moreover, Zabolockij also had a direct interest in German literature, especially the works of Goethe. See Nikita Zabolockij, "K tvorceskoj biografii N. Zabolockogo" in Voprosy literatury, No. 11 (1979), 225; Turkov, "Nikolaj Zabolockij," 207-8; and Zabolockij's own letter to Kas'janov, in which he speaks of "the divine Goethe" (bofestivennxj Gete) in Zabolockij, Izbrannye

proivedenija, II, 231.

4 Nikita Zabolockij, 225; Stepanov, 1, 19. 5 Filipoff, xxx; Makedonov, 202-3, 226, 306, 332-33; D. Maksimov, "O starom i o novom

v poezii Nikolaja Zabolockogo," Zviezda, No. 2 (1958), 230; A. Pavlovskij, "Nikolaj Zabolockij (Filosofskij mir, poetika, tradicii)," Russkaja literatura, No. 2 (1965), 36; Emmanuel Rais, "Poezija Nikolaja Zabolockogo" in Zabolockij, Stixotvorenija, ed. Filipoff and Struve, lxv; Marc Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature (N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 263; N. Stepanov, 21, 28-29; Turkov, "Nikolaj Zabolockij," 33, 58.

6 Jurij N. Tynjanov, Arxaistv i noi'atorv (L., 1929; reprint, Munich: Fink, 1967); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).

7 Turkov, Nikolaj Zabolockij, 109-10. 8 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 18; also The Anxiety of Influence, 70. 9 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14. Bloom's theory is to some degree paralleled by

the third and fourth categories of subtext presented in Taranovsky's Essays on Man- del'9tam, Harvard Slavic Studies Volume VI (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), 18. Taranovsky, however, takes a semiotic approach to literature and its evolution, while Bloom's approach tends more towards the Freudian. The categories of subtext listed by Taranovsky run as follows: (1) that which serves as a simple impulse for the creation of an image; (2) Zaimtstvovanie po ritmt i zvIICaniju (Borrowing of a rhythmic figure and the sounds contained therein); (3) the text which supports or reveals the poetic message of a later text: (4) the text which is treated polemically by the poet. Bloom's theory rather than Taranovsky's is used as the primary vehicle for analysis here because Bloom's sense of the organic connection between antithesis and completion and, above all, his sense of a personal bond between the poet and his precursor seem to be better suited for discussion of the relationship between Tjutiev and Za- bolockij in this particular case.

10 Tjutiev, I, 199. All translations in this article are my own except the translation of Pascal (see note 21).

11 Taranovsky, 18. 12 See, for example, Tjutiev's poems (Est' v oseni peronac'al'noj; Est' V moem stra-

dal'Yeskom zastoe; lines 3 and 4 of Ne to, eto Inite vy, priroda-V nej est' dula, v nej est' svoboda,/ V nej est' ljubov', v nej est' jazyk ... ; and in a slightly different vein, line 10 of "Silentium"' '-Msl' izre(ennaja est' lo,'; and two lesser poems, Est' rnnogo melkix bezymnjannyx . . . and Est' telegraf za neiren'em nog.

13 See R. F. Gustafson, "Tjuttev's Imagery and What It Tells Us," in Slavic and East European Journal 4, No. 1 (Spring 1960), 1-16.

14 Aksakov, 42, 64; Wsewolod Setschkareff, Schellings Einfluss in der russischen Literatur der 20er und 30er Jahre des XIX Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Schulze, 1939), 99-106.

15 F. W. J. Schelling, Saimmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta'scher Verlag, 1856) Part I, Vol- ume III, 278-79. All subsequent references are to volumes in Part I.

16 Schelling, V, 465. 17 Schelling, VII, 363.




18 Gregg, 234; Coates; Friedrich Schiller. Die Rauber, Act IV, Scene 5. in Schiller's Sammtlich Werke in Einem Bande (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1934). 138.

19 Tjutdev, 81. See also Tjutdev's poems Vesna; 0 ('em ty' voef', %retr noenoj?; Ofr izni toj, cro buievala zdes'; and even the terrifying Priroda sjinks, i tem ona vernej.

20 Pascal, Pensees, dual text, trans. H. F. Stewart (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 83. For further discussion of Tjutdev's relation to Pascal, see Gregg, 76-77, 97-99, 109, 198. Taranovsky, incidentally, discusses this epithet as it was passed along from Tjutdev to Mandel'gtam, 52-53.

21 Pascal, 83. 22 Pascal, 21-29. 23 For an explicit statement of this desire to merge with nature, see Tjutdev's poem Teni

sizye smesilis' and Lidija Ginzburg's perceptive comments on it in Chapter II of her book O lirike.

24 Nikolaj Zabolockij, Stixotvorenija, ed. Filipoff and Struve, 110-11. It is worth noting that several of Zabolockij's other poems also portray nature as a system in need of human "rationalization," for example Citajte, dere~ ja. stixi Gesioda and Veera, o smerti razmysljaja; still others, notably Zasuxa, Priroda 'ernaja, kak kuznica, Tuorcy dorog and Lodejnikov, seem to waver between a sense of human superiority and a sense of nature's superiority. The complexity of Zabolockij's view of nature is, in any case, an area worthy of further study.

25 Nikita Zabolockij, 221, 223-25. See also Nikita Zabolockij, "Kratkie vospominanija ob otce i o nagej zizni," Vospominanija o Zabolockom, ed. E. A. Zabolockaja and A. V. Makedonov (M.: Sovetskij pisatel', 1977), 204-5: A. Pavlovskij, "Perepiska N. Zabo- lockogo s Ciolkovskim," Russkaja literatura. No. 3 (1964), 219-26; A. Pavlovskij, "Nikolaj Zabolockij (Filosofskij mir, poetika, tradicii): and the various documents ap- pended to Volume II of Zabolockij's Izbrannye proizvedenija.

26 I am indebted to Professor Lauren Leighton for noting that the mother image might also be linked to the Mother of God portrayed in Russian icons. I would be more sanguine about developing this hypothesis if Zabolockij were an overtly religious poet, say, in the manner of Pasternak. Still, one might claim that the whole theology associated with the Mother of God, especially its manifestation in the Annunciation and Nativity, and its portrayal in icons offer possible models for Zabolockij's image. In icons like the 12th or 13th century Panagaia Virgin (also called the Virgin of the Annunciation) in the Tretjakov Gallery, an image of the Christ Child is superimposed in a circular clipeus on the upper portion of the Virgin's torso, thus providing a graphic demon- stration of the notion that the mother "harbors the lofty universe of the child [Christ child] within her in order to catch sight of the sun [the light of God] together with her son [also the Son of God.]" This hypothesis is, as I have noted, extremely tentative, but perhaps it deserves investigation. For a reproduction of the Panagaia Virgin, see M. S. Alpatov, Art Treasures of Russia (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.), plate 23.



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"Antithesis and Completion": Zabolockij Responds to Tjutčev

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