How did you get involved with Russian?
It was a matter of feminism. I was trying to find women poets who I could admire without reservation, I’d studied Latin in high school, and in college I was reading Virgil and Ovid, so I wasn’t likely to be impressed by Maya Angelou or Elizabeth Bishop. But in Russian I found a triumvirate of world-class modern women poets.
These were?
Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Zinaida Hippius.
I’ve heard of Akhmatova, but the rest are new to me. If one wanted to learn something about these and other modern Russian writers, where would one start?
Not a lot of choice there. What we have in English is almost all realist novels: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev. All indisputably great, but perhaps beside the point. We’ve just finished a second century of depressing realist novels, so isn’t it time for something else?
What about experimental novels, Joyce, Pynchon and Foster Wallace? You’re not suggesting they’re in the realist tradition?
Actually I am. Pynchon’s paranormalism, Joyce’s mythology, Foster Wallace’s perplexed reality, simply add a grotesque depth to their realism. They present hallucinations, not visions. Cervantes anticipated all of their antics when he wrote his epic of hopelessness saturated in madness. I’m not saying these modern titans aren’t great—I am however saying I’m quite tired of their antics.
So you think the great 19th century Russian novels are passé. What do you find that is more relevant now in Russian literature?
Russian literature’s greatest strength has always been poetry. It begins with Pushkin, as Greek literature did with Homer. I can’t think of another modern literature, that is so focused on poetry, or achieved so much so recently.
Which poets are the most important to read?
We’re not there yet. There are almost no adequate translations. English has an unusually impoverished tradition of translation. After the days of Pope and Dryden, first-rate anglophone poets just didn’t turn their hands to translation. The only good translations so far in English are those by Mark Pettus, whose Pushkin achieves the impossible feat of being accurate and elegant.
This lack would be your remit as a translator. Who are you working on now?
Zinaida Hippius She was the dark genius of Russian Symbolism and Decadence. Her poetry ventured so far in the direction of Lovecraftian horror that Trotsky wrote, in Literature and Revolution, “I don’t believe in witches, but I’m quite sure Hippius was one.”
She was also a gay trans-man, who lived in a menage-à-trois with her husband, the then world-famous novelist Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and the male lover she procured for him. She dressed as a male (eighteenth century male attire set off with a monocle and a long cigarette holder), and wrote her poetry with male pronouns.
Decadence and Symbolism: is that really more important than the dissident poetry of Anna Akhmatova?
Akhmatova is widely and justly admired in the anglophone world—but not because there’s any general appreciation of great poetry or interest in what women have to say—as the Cold War reached its end, she was a convenient stick to beat the Soviets with.
Also, she fit in with our obsession with politics, which has replaced all other criteria of aesthetic merit.
Huh?
In the 20th century, progressive politics came to set the agenda for what would be prized, praised and paid for in art and literature. Publishing schedules have become exercises in box-checking and quota-toting.
The landscape of western literature has taken on a weirdly Soviet cast: realism, political engagement, and official atheism became the touchstones of merit. That’s why the Decadent and Symbolist poets are now extremely relevant. They are the antidote to our faded, dreary, 2,000th generation Xerox of modernism.
How exactly do they act as an antidote? I’m pretty familiar with Baudelaire, Huysmans and the rest, and they discovered so little that was helpful that they fled terrified back to the Church.
It was different in Russia. The Russians were civilized late and badly, so they brought a barbaric energy to the western culture they adopted. What the French developed as artistic theories, the Russians adopted as articles of faith. They actually performed Rimbaud’s “alchemy of the word.” And the ones who best achieved this were all women.
Why only women, and just what did they achieve?
Hippius and Tsvetava, who were, unlike Akhmatova, Symbolists, brought about a new a positive revaluation of the “real” world. They were able to see existential meaning as radically immanent in material being.
A number of men have attempted this, especially Nietzsche and Walt Whitman, but what they created was just an overly thrilled and insistent materialism. Allen Ginsberg tried the same experiment, peering through the lens of Zen, but the results were oddly clinical. He arrived at a poetic photorealism that was somehow less warm than photography.
But women, since they experience themselves as present in the body, and identify the self with the body far more than men do, are able see the transcendent in the physical, not merely as a metaphysical assertion, but as an intimate and emotional fact.
Why only Russian women? Can’t we find the same insights in American women poets?
The Russians had the advantage of being highly privileged and educated members of an aristocratic society at a pinnacle of its cultural striving. It’s like when Lady Murasaki wrote The Tale of Genji in Heian Japan—the Japanese were then trying to outdo the Chinese in Chinese culture. So Murasaki invented the psychological novel. With their unique combination of sophistication, ambition and naivete, the Russians succeeded in achieving the dreams of Symbolism. Andrei Bely’s Petersburg is the ultimate Symbolist novel. It makes Huysmans’ Against the Grain look like a Hardy Boys adventure. Tsvetaeva and Hippius similarly outdid Rimbaud.
American women poets—with the exception of Julia Vinograd in her Book of Jerusalem, didn’t even try to rise to the occasion. An American poet like Adrienne Rich, brilliant as she was, had no wider culture than comes from a Radcliffe BA. On top of this, writing when Hippie America was racing to jettison “elitist” European culture, she wasn’t going to reach Olympian heights. In fact she did her best to level them.