“The Russian Trace”: Connecting Paris: A Poem to Russian Modernism

Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison’s interest and affection for the Russian language, literature, and Russian émigré authors is well documented—though hardly unusual for Britons during the First World War and the Russian Revolution.[1] Following 1917 and the turmoil of the civil war, Europe welcomed “an influx of artists and intellectuals” fleeing from these “seemingly apocalyptic events” (Schwinn-Smith, “Bears in Bloomsbury,” 121). These people were seen as an entry point into the tumultuous and complicated culture that was emerging in the unstable new regime in Russia.

However, Harrison and Mirrlees were not just ordinary “consumers” of the Russian mythos and culture. Harrison studied and later taught Russian at Cambridge, and hosted, corresponded, and collaborated with Russian writers, poets, and philosophers (most notably with Prince Mirsky and Aleksey Remizov). In 1915 Harrison and Mirrlees embarked on the study of the Russian language at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris and around the time Paris: A Poem was written, Mirrlees was due to receive her Diploma in Russian. The most prominent examples of the two women interacting with the Russian culture are their joint translations of The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself (1924) and the collection of folk tales The Book of the Bear (1926). In 1925, Harrison famously professed her love of the Russian language in her Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. Therefore, it is not coincidental that the scholarship around Harrison’s and Mirrlees’s engagement with Russian language and literature focuses primarily on the mid-1920s.

While Harrison’s role as a significant figure within the Russian émigré and Russophile networks in Paris and the UK has been well established, the link between Mirrlees’s oeuvre and Russian culture has not been as carefully documented. Even in the context of their joint translations into Russian, Mirrlees’s name appears only on the margins, as Harrison’s student and protégée.[2] This article seeks to redress this gap in Mirrlees scholarship by looking at Paris: A Poem and the “Russian trace,” which was essential—biographically, culturally, and historically—to Mirrlees at the time of writing. While the poem turns to Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and other cultural and historical links to Russia in the text itself (which indeed can be conceptualised as a “Russian trace” in its own right), this article is primarily interested in tracing an intertextual connection between Paris and the Russian avant-garde through elements of form. I establish this connection by comparing Paris to two key works of Russian modernism, The War and the World (Vojna I Mir, 1917) by Vladimir Mayakovsky and The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’, 1918) by Aleksandr Blok.[3] In the works of these three poets, written around the same time, violent historical change and a sense of a destabilised (urban) space appear as recurring motifs, encouraging the poets to re-invent poetic form and language. The emergence of these similarities across national borders not only opens up additional political dimensions to Paris’s aesthetics; it also situates the political poetry of Mayakovsky and Blok within the broader aesthetic framework of avant-garde modernism(s).

II.

Aleksandr Blok wrote his poem The Twelve as a response to the October Revolution of 1917, an event he initially welcomed and embraced, thus garnering harsh criticism within (if not ostracism from) his literary circles upon the poem’s publication.[4] Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem The War and the World, written around 1915 and first published in full in 1917, was ultimately read as an anti-war text (although initially Mayakovsky, like many futurists, welcomed the First World War). Mirrlees started working on Paris: A Poem in 1919 during the Paris Peace Conference, contemplating the effects of the First World War on the “capital of the world.”[5] Beyond the war itself, Mirrlees’s poem also comments on class divisions, and the effects of colonialism, capitalism, and religion.[6] All three texts are long modernist poems, which in the Russian literary tradition would be referred to as “poema.”[7] In order to link these texts—written across national and literary backgrounds, representing differences in class, gender, and political worldviews, as well as different strands of modernism—I employ Susan Stanford Friedman’s definition of modernism as “the expressive dimension of modernity.”[8] Friedman proposes a “new geography of modernism” which would encourage scholars “to focus on the cultural traffic linking [centers of modernity across the globe], and to interpret the circuits of reciprocal influence and transformation that take place within highly unequal state relations”  (Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism”, 429).[9] The search for these links was the conceptual starting point of this intervention.

There are three features that enable connections between the texts: the reduction of the poetic “I” to encourage the moment to speak for itself, the search for a new language, and the audial (musical) dimension of the poems. Beyond the poetic texts themselves, some of these features emerge prominently in the essays that Mayakovsky and Blok wrote around that time, highlighting the similarities in the poets’ visions of how poetry has the capacity to interact with historical change. All three texts respond to a tumultuous moment in time punctuated by the First World War, the Russian revolution, and the Russian Civil War, and each experiments with how it incorporates these historical ruptures into the work.

1. The Screaming Time

In The War and the World, Mayakovsky writes:

Слушайте!

Изъ меня,

слѣпымъ Вiемъ,

время оретъ[10]

These lines can be interpreted as the speaker reducing their poetic “I” to let the historical moment of the First World War speak through them as a medium. As Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine argues, this is unusual for Mayakovsky: in the poem “Mayakovsky’s larger-than-life narrator is diminished in comparison to what the reader expects of him from his previous works” (Lavine, “From Lyric Indulgence to Epic Utopia,” 319). In the poems by Blok and Mirrlees, this feature manifests itself in two ways: as the blurring of the “I” and as bricolage as the mode of writing. Both function as a poetic means to capture a complex and polyphonic “voice” of the moment: the “screaming time” according to Mayakovsky’s lines quoted above. While the last line of the excerpt has been translated as “Time’s shout,” I prefer the more dynamic and violent translation of “screaming time,” which seems to better encapsulate the turbulent moment of writing (Mayakovsky, Selected Works, 45).

The “screaming time” emerges perhaps most prominently in Blok’s poem. As Russian poet and critic Maria Stepanova observes, “[Every] speech or noise fragment . . . [is] presented . . . as something that does not belong to the author at all—but was left to him by someone to preserve.”[11] In other words, there is a sense that in the poem the “centre of speech” is absent; instead, the moment is narrating itself. Some sections of the poem change “voice” in the most dramatic way:

Ты лети, буржуй, воробушкомъ!

Выпью кровушку

За зазнобушку

Чернобровушку. . .

 

Упокой, Господи, душу рабы твоея. . .

 

Скучно![12]

The change that occurs within these few lines takes the reader from a class affront to a violent expression of love and from prayer to an exclamation of boredom. These excerpts overpower the reader all at once, in a distorted, kaleidoscopic vision that for Blok defines Petrograd post-revolution. If one needs to “listen to the Revolution” as Blok proposes, it seems that in the poem this was his intention—it explains the removal of an identifiable speaker who would have usurped and brought order to the space of writing.[13]

The same “technique,” which can be conceptualised as palimpsest or bricolage, is central to Mirrlees’s Paris. In these terms, the first page of Paris is representative, as the barrage of words seen, said, overheard, and written rapidly replace each other, overpowering the speaker:

As the “I” of the speaker finally emerges at the end of the fragment, the line “I can’t” can be read as the inability of the speaker to catch up with the speed of the urban setting around her. This line also stands for the inability to control (even discursively) the speaker’s surroundings, as if the city writes itself and the speaker serves merely as a recording device.

In The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, Peter Howarth refers to Mirrlees as he conceptualises this phenomenon of writing between the individual and collective: “[E]ach fragment connects to many others across great distances of the poem, and becomes a nodal point between the transient moment and the grandest stories of war or religion.”[15] As all three poets look for means of expression for a new, destabilised world, they turn their speakers into one of many “nodal points” through which the moment (the “screaming time”) is mediated.

2. The New Language

In his essay The War and the Language (1914), Mayakovsky, who was then welcoming the First World War as a force of renewal and progress, wrote:

[We] must sharpen our words. We must demand speech that sparingly and accurately represents every movement. We want the word in speech to burst like a landmine, to whine like the pain of a wound.[16]

Even if Mayakovsky appears more sceptical about the war later in The War and The World, his attitude towards its representation remained. In fact, as all three poets turn to tumultuous events in their works, the need for new language becomes apparent. In the case of Mayakovsky, The War is rich in neologisms and play on words: “Это масомясая, / быкомордая орава,” “смаслились глазки щелясь” (Mayakovsky, The War and the World, 9–10).[17] These are the words that sound strange and heavily alliterated, which allow Mayakovsky to destabilize the language as the symbol of the new world. And yet, in Part IV the speaker of the poem questions the possibilities opened up by poetic language against the realities of the new war:

Этого

стихами сказать нельзя.

Выхоленнымъ ли языкомъ поэта

горящiя жаровни лизать![18]

The poem simultaneously reflects the effort and the impossibility to represent war, which is a theme that often emerges in war writing.[19] At the same time, these lines reveal a paradox: Mayakovsky refers to this poetic impossibility inside of a completed (and published) poem, deepening a sense of struggle and instability within the text itself.

Mirrlees’s Paris attempts to navigate a similar issue, as the opening line of the poem signifies this search for language: “I want a holophrase” (3).[20] In this line, Mirrlees borrows from Harrison’s well-known work on the “holophrase,” defined as “utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got their heads above water, but are still submerged in a situation.”[21] Harrison’s word choice is significant here: it is hardly accidental that in Paris the speaker constantly returns to the water of the Seine as the source of dreams and as forging the metaphorical link between dreaming and the poetic act: “through his sluggish watery sleep come dreams” and “[t]he dreams have reached my waist” (Mirrlees, Paris, 14, 19).  At a particularly critical moment, right in the center of the poem, the water of the Seine again becomes the source of dreams:

It also becomes, however, the primordial waters where the new language is forged, finding its way, haltingly, onto the streets of post-war Paris. Observing the city where the space, in a state of flux, determines its own language, Paris simultaneously participates in this process: through puns, wordplay, and euphemism, the words seemingly fixed on the city walls in advertisement posters, memorial plaques, and monuments are constantly “unfixed” and destabilised by the speaker’s imagination.

In The Twelve, Blok’s search for the language of the revolution manifests itself as a refusal to resort to his “old” poetic ways of expression. Anatoly Yakobson comments on the “astonishing” language of the poem: “[As] a rule, Blok’s vocabulary is refined, but Twelve is an avalanche of naked words” (Yakobson, The End of a Tragedy, 10).[22] One of the main conflicts in the poem’s vocabulary emerges from many words with diminutive suffixes (“Ванюшка,” “пальтишко,” “на оглобелькахъ,”) and violent vocabulary and profanity (“Шоколадъ Миньонъ жрала,” “лежи ты, падаль, на снѣгу,” “Ну, Ванька, сукинъ сынъ, буржуй”) (Blok, The Twelve, 35–39).[23] In some cases, both modes appear side by side.[24] The result of this tension is macabre and strangely ironic: diminutive suffixes stand for softness or “smallness,” they decrease the sense of danger or aggression, thus the contrast to the scenes of violence (verbal and physical) described in the poem is even more striking.

The modes of representing historical change within and through language appear on different levels in the three poems: while Mayakovsky simultaneously creates new words and ponders their (im-)possibility, Mirrlees’s speaker thinks about language in ritualist terms and observes the new language being formed in the waters of the Seine and on the streets of Paris. Blok makes diminutive and violent vocabulary clash to increase the sense of chaos and disorientation. In all three texts, the new language, often appearing as “an avalanche of naked words,” carries the weight of momentous change (Yakobson, The End of a Tragedy, 10).

3. The Audial Dimension

Around the same time that Aleksandr Blok was working on The Twelve, he also wrote the essay The Intelligentsia and the Revolution (1918), which in criticism often appears en pendant to the poem. Throughout the essay, Blok turns to the metaphor of music and sound: “The . . . artist’s obligation, is . . . to listen to the music thundering in the 'wind-torn air.'”[25] The essay ends in a plea: “With your whole body . . . listen to the Revolution.”[26] As if to illustrate his position in the article, different modes of music and melody also appear throughout The Twelve. Yakobson and Oborin identify several of them: some lines are reminiscent of the genre of the Russian chanson (blatnaya pesnya), marching songs, short humorous folk songs (chastushka), and other types of folk songs and prayers.[27] The tension between these different modes of (criminal, folk, religious) “voice” destabilizes the poem by constantly changing its rhythm and intonation: if Blok writes Petrograd in a liminal moment of its transformation, it is significant that it is not defined by a single melody (or a single voice). This might also imply that the “sound” of Revolution is capacious and has not yet come to dominate other sounds and melodies.

The sense that hearing and listening are especially significant in times of radical change proves relevant to the works of Mayakovsky and Mirrlees as well. In Paris, the city Mirrlees describes is dominated by sound: from the onomatopoeic “Brekekekek coax coax” to a cock suddenly singing a melodic “Do do do miii”; from “little widows moaning / Le pauvre grand!” to endless taxis that “moan and yell and squeak / Like a thousand tom-cats in rut” (Mirrlees, Paris, 3, 6, 11, 21). These features create a rich soundscape of a city “awakening” after the First World War. Additionally, Mayakovsky and Mirrlees introduce music into the fabric of their texts: both poems feature several bars of sheet music. In Paris, a poem defined by the “screaming” sounds of the city, Mirrlees has to silence the streets before introducing the musical “quotation” with the line “Hu s s s h” (which is itself onomatopoeic) (Mirrlees, Paris, 18).[28]

In Mayakovsky’s The War and the World music plays a key role as he uses the metaphor of “the theatre of war” throughout the poem: as “эстрад[а] / колебим[ая] костромъ оркестра.”[29] Bars of music intercept the text on seven occasions: the poem opens with three bars of a tango popular at that time, which are then repeated in variations (Lavine, “From Lyric Indulgence to Epic Utopia,” 327). In these “musical quotes,” Mayakovsky relies on the sound of the verbal elements as well: the bars of tango contain the lyrics “Тра_ра_ра _ ра_ра_ра_ра_ра_ра_ра_ ра_ра_ра,” which can be read as onomatopoeic, reminiscent of the sound of shooting (“The War and the World”, 9)[30]. It could also be read as an allusion to Marinetti’s famous poem Zang Tumb Tumb.[31] Later in the poem, the tango is intercepted by another melody, an Orthodox prayer for the departed.[32] In Part III, the two melodies appear side by side, as if in dialogue (a more militant tango and a solemn prayer, a secular and a religious melody). At the end of Part III, the prayer supersedes the tango, thus signifying a change of tone: the parts of the poem that contemplate the war’s dead and wounded.

All three poets think about the audial dimension as they write their works: on the one hand, poetry is inevitably linked to sound, through rhythm and rhyme or simply by being read aloud. On the other hand, in the poems by Mayakovsky and Mirrlees, the audial “trespasses” the limits of sound by turning toward the visual: both poets feel compelled to incorporate musical scores into their texts. These tensions and limits—between the heard and the seen, noise and silence, violence and calm, festivity and mourning—create a complex and conflicted soundscape in all three texts experimenting with revolutionary poetics.

III.

In reading Mirrlees’s Paris within the context of a “Russian trace,” I do not conceptualize a linear “influence” but instead an occurrence of parallelism and synchronicity across national, political, and literary traditions. This framework allows us to go beyond the nineteenth-century Russian prose canon, which still dominated the British reception of Russian culture in the early twentieth century, and to turn our attention to the complexities of Russian modernist poetry and the ways in which it opens new scholarly pathways into the politics of Paris’s aesthetics. Allowing the Russian poets to speak on their own terms in dialogue with Paris subverts the marginalization and exoticisation of Russian modernism in relation to its Western European counterparts.

Read side-by-side, the post-war poems of Mirrlees, Blok, and Mayakovsky appear to embody “the expressive dimension of modernity” from different standpoints: political worldviews, literary traditions, and national as well as class backgrounds that distinguish the three poetic voices (Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 432). The points in which these very different texts and positions intersect appear to be the embracing of modernity itself: the momentous change, the urban landscape, and the technological progress they register signify a new age, a new crisis of the poetic (and, possibly, psychological) “I,” and a multiplicity of voices, languages, and visual stimuli that encompass a new political/poetical vision.