Snapshots of the Soul

Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture

Molly Thomasy Blasing

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501753701
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria rusa

Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image.

Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.

CHAPTER 1

Illuminating Consciousness

Pasternak’s Poetics of Photography

Единственные дни	Singular Days
На протяженье многих зим	Across the span of many winters
Я помню дни солнцеворота,	I recall the solstice days,
И каждый был неповторим	Each one was unique and unrepeatable
И повторялся вновь без счета.	And each recurred anew without limit.
И целая их череда	And their entire sequence
Составилась мало-помалу—	Was built slowly, piece by piece—
Тех дней единственных, когда	Of unique days, when
Нам кажется, что время стало.	It seems to us that time stood still.
Я помню их наперечет:	I recall each and every one:
Зима подходит к середине,	Winter approaches its midpoint
Дороги мокнут, с крыш течет	Roads are wet and rooftops drip
И солнце греется на льдине.	And the sun warms itself on the ice-floe.
И любящие, как во сне,	And lovers, as if in a dream,
Друг к другу тянутся поспешней,	Hurry quickly toward the other
И на деревьях в вышине	And high up in the trees
Потеют от тепла скворешни.	Nesting boxes grow sweaty from the heat.
И полусонным стрелкам лень	And half-sleepy clock hands are too lazy
Ворочаться на циферблате,	To turn around on the clock face,
И дольше века длится день,	And a day lasts more than a century,
И не кончается объятье.1	And never-ending is the embrace.

Boris Pasternak’s final completed poem, the 1959 lyric “Singular Days” (Edinstvennye dni), initially does not appear to be connected with the theme of photographs or photographic technology. Photography is not the subject of the poem, nor is the language of photography present in this poem on any discernable level. Yet it is photography—the technology of fixing momentary experiences in a form that can be continually revisited—that serves as the conceptual framework for this poem’s temporality. The photo-poetic elements that underpin this poem’s relationship with time and memory are those that are rooted in Pasternak’s early poetry and philosophical orientation to time, image, and technology. This chapter traces the way that links between photography and creativity are established, developed, and sustained in Pasternak’s poetry and other writings over several decades of his writerly life.

One of the more challenging aspects of scholarship that tells how photographic technology has shaped literary and artistic creation in the twentieth century is the problem of how to explain the effect of the medium on artistic texts that are not explicitly about photography. To read a poem like “Singular Days” in terms of photo-poetics, we must ask how the proliferation of camera technology and photographic representation have shifted our conceptions of time and the way we record and remember our lives and our days. What I test here is the claim that Pasternak’s “Singular Days” is a poem that could not have been written before the advent of photography. This is a text that could have come into being only in an environment firmly rooted in twentieth-century technology and the philosophical inquiries that accompanied, through direct or indirect influence, developments in instantaneous photography.

This chapter’s exploration of Pasternak’s use of the lexicon and metaphor of photography in his poetry and prose will elucidate the way that the depiction of time in “Singular Days” is consistent with the writer’s broader conception of the problem of time as it relates to the photographic. Motifs built around the technological mechanisms of the camera offer Pasternak a means to convey a tension between motion and stasis, between static and dynamic aspects of human experience and the natural world. This tension between fixity and flow is a key artistic concern of Pasternak’s as he strives to capture and preserve phenomenological experiences, human emotions, and historical events in lyric form. Photographic motifs are a key vehicle for developing these ideas in his early lyrics, and his use of such imagery sets the stage for later developments in his work; we find them present in the historical epics of the 1920s and in passages of the novel Doctor Zhivago. Key conceptual elements remain even in this late lyric poem, “Singular Days.” This chapter traces the development of Pasternak’s interest in photography and the way photographic motifs in his poetry allow him to develop means of depicting divergent philosophical conceptions of time, the power of light as a creative force, and the exquisite potential for poetry to capture and preserve ephemeral moments of lived experience.

Visual Poetics in Pasternak

The role of visual perception and the influence of the visual arts in Boris Pasternak’s creative world is a topic that has been examined thoroughly by scholars of the poet’s life and work, and it is well established that the experience of visual perception is of major importance in Pasternak’s artistic philosophy. Yuri Lotman, for example, characterizes the role of the visual in Pasternak’s poetics in the following way: “The true world is not only empirical but, for Pasternak, it is the only authentically empirical thing; it is a world, seen and felt, as opposed to the world of words and phrases. . . . Therefore those authentic connections that organize Pasternak’s world—a world of desecrated routine linguistic connections—are almost always seen connections [uvidennye]. . . . In the same way, Pasternak’s central idea is a seen idea.”2 Pasternak demonstrates a particular skill in expressing with great precision the experience of apprehending the beauty of the natural world visually. Such keen powers of observation serve as a catalyst to merge the natural world with the world of human emotion. For example, in his short lyric, “Hops” (Khmelʹ), from the Doctor Zhivago poems, it is a sharpening of visual perception that reveals the lyric persona’s initial error in “reading” or comprehending visually the scene he describes.

Под ракитой, обвитой плющом,

От ненастья мы ищем защиты.

Наши плечи покрыты плащом.

Вкруг тебя мои руки обвиты.

Я ошибся . . . Кусты этих чащ

Не плющом перевиты, а хмелем.

Ну, так лучше давай этот плащ

В ширину под собою расстелем.3

Beneath these willows, ivy-choked,

The rain has chased us off to hide,

Our shoulders wrapped inside a cloak,

My arms around your figure twined.

But look—I’m wrong. This willow grove

Is not with ivy choked, but hops!

So come . . . we’ll take this heavy cloak

To spread beneath us as a drop.4

As Susanna Witt notes, the lyric speaker of this poem takes a second look (“Not with ivy choked, but hops!”), and his newly clarified vision leads to an emotional transformation in the posture and mood of the lovers: from huddled, chilly, and sober to open, warm, and intoxicated.5 In the second and third stanzas of another poem from 1941, “Pine Trees” (Sosny), the lyric speaker becomes similarly immersed in the natural world through an intense visual experience that is then linked to emotional and metaphysical transformations:

Трава на просеке сосновой

Непроходима и густа.

Мы переглянемся—и снова

Меняем позы и места.

И вот, бессмертные на время,

Мы к лику сосен причтены

И от болезней, эпидемий

И смерти освобождены.6

The grass in the clearing among the pines

Stands impenetrable and thick.

We’ll exchange glances, and once again

Shift sides and change positions.

And now, immortal for a moment,

We are numbered among the trees

And from illness, epidemics

And death we are set free.

This moment of visual intensity shared between the speaker and his beloved is precipitated by the action “my pereglianemsia” (“we’ll exchange glances”). The speaker’s momentary suspension in an indeterminate space outside of natural time transpires at this moment of human visual connection. Described in the colloquial perfective future, the language of the poem further emphasizes both the momentariness and the habit of the action. The poem’s central figures become “immortal for a moment”; they are transferred to a temporal plane that, for just an instant, protects them from death and disease (“And from illness, epidemics / And death we are set free”). In a sense, this poem’s stilling of time as a means to open a space for immortality employs an unspoken poetics of photography; that is, the photo-camera’s ability to capture and preserve a moment outside the natural wear of time is at work here, despite no mention of photographs or cameras. Just as important here is the historical context; the poem was written in 1941, the year Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Death and destruction were happening all around Pasternak, while he used poetry about the natural world to hold human interactions in a space free of violence.

This poem is emblematic of Pasternak’s broader skill in transforming an intense visual experience into a catalyst for connections between the natural world and the realm of human emotion. Pasternak’s manipulations of time and visual imagery are what distinguishes him as one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Marina Tsvetaeva famously characterizes his reliance on visual acuity as a key element distinguishing Pasternak’s poetry from her own: “In poetry Pasternak SEES, but I HEAR.”7 Pasternak credited fellow poet Rainer Maria Rilke with teaching him “the skill of seeing and loving” (umeni[e] videtʹ i liubitʹ).8 Pasternak repeatedly invokes the power of vision as a key element in his creative life. In 1914, as a young man just beginning to formulate a philosophy of art and creativity, Pasternak describes the artist’s role as mediator of human experience in highly visual terms: “It seems to me that artistic talent consists of this: one must see—fatefully, instinctively and without artifice—in the same way that others think and, vice versa, think the way others see.”9

Several scholars have approached the complexities of Pasternak’s visual poetics by studying the influence of painting and painters on Pasternak’s approach to writing.10 The poet’s father was the renowned painter Leonid Osipovich Pasternak (figure 1.1), and Boris’s childhood interest in sketching led some to believe for a time that he might follow in his father’s footsteps.11 Although the young Pasternak’s professional aspirations shifted from painter to musician to philosopher before finally resting on poet, the world of visual art continued to shape his poetic practice in important ways.12

More revealing for my purpose are Pasternak’s letters and essays that address the limits of the snapshot’s representational potential. In his personal correspondence in the years leading up to the public...