Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Time of Gratitude
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/21/1934-2/21/2006
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Russian
son Aleksey Aygi is a composer.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 83228293
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n83228293
HEADING: Aĭgi, Gennadiĭ, 1934-2006
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046 __ |f 1934-08-21 |g 2006-02-21 |2 edtf
053 _0 |a PL384.A4 |c Chuvash
053 _0 |a PG3478.I35 |c Russian
100 1_ |a Aĭgi, Gennadiĭ, |d 1934-2006
370 __ |a Chuvashia (Russia) |b Moscow (Russia) |2 naf
374 __ |a Poets |a Translators |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a chv |a rus
400 1_ |a Aigi, Gennadi, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aïgui, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aïgui, Guennadi, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aygi, Gennady, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aigj, G. |q (Gennadij), |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aigj, Gennadij, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aĭkhi, Gennadiĭ, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aĭkhi, G. N. |q (Gennadiĭ N.), |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aĭgi, G. |q (Gennadiĭ), |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Ajgi, Gennadij, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Lisin, Gennadiĭ Nikolaevich, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Aygi, Gennadiy, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Айги, Геннадий, |d 1934-2006
400 1_ |a Айхи, Геннадий, |d 1934-2006
667 __ |a Machine-derived non-Latin script reference project.
667 __ |a Non-Latin script references not evaluated.
670 __ |a Ein Leben nach dem Todesurteil, 1982 (a.e.) |b t.p. (Gennadi Aigi)
670 __ |a LC data base, 8-5-83 |b (hdg.: Aĭgi, Gennadiĭ, 1934- )
670 __ |a His Sommeil, poésie, poèmes, c1984: |b t.p. (Aïgui) cover p. 4 (Guennadi Aïgui; b. 1934)
670 __ |a His Veronica’s book, 1989: |b t.p. (Gennady Aygi)
670 __ |a Studi miscellanei uralici e altaici, 1984: |b t.p. (G. Aigj) p. 353 (Gennadij Aigj)
670 __ |a His Śurkhi ĭĕpkhu̇, 1990: |b t.p. (Gennadiĭ Aĭkhi) verso t.p. (Aĭkhi G.N.) colophon (Gennadiĭ Nikolaevich Aĭgi)
670 __ |a Tetradʹ Veroniki, 1997: |b t.p. (Gennadiĭ Aĭgi) verso t.p. (G. Aĭgi)
670 __ |a Ode auf den Besuch der Landzunge von Belosaraj, 2002: |b t.p. (Gennadij Ajgi)
670 __ |a Chuprinin, S. Russkai︠a︡ literatura segodni︠a︡, 2003: |b p. 58 (Gennadiĭ Aĭgi, Lisin Gennadiĭ Nikolaevich, b. Aug. 21, 1934)
670 __ |a Wikipedia WWW site, Feb. 24, 2006 |b (Gennadiy Aygi [in rom.]; Aĭkhi Gennadiĭ Nikolaevich [in Chuvash]; Gennadiĭ Nikolaevich Aĭgi [in Russian]; b. Aug. 21, 1934, Shaimurzino, Chuvashia; d. Feb. 21, 2006, Moscow; Chuvash poet and translator; wrote in both Chuvash and Russian)
953 __ |a ec39 |b vl09
PERSONAL
Born August 21, 1934, in the Chuvash Republic (now Chuvashia); died February 21, 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and poet.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Gennady Aygi was a poet and writer from Chuvashia, or the Chuvash Republic, a federal subject of Russia. He was born in 1934 and earned a reputation as one of the most noted Chuvash poets. During his student days in Moscow, he was a friend of Russian literary giant Boris Pasternak, a writer, poet, and novelist perhaps best known for the novel Doctor Zhivago, noted Ryan K. Strader, writing on the Cleaver website.
In Strader’s Cleaver interview with Peter France, a major translator of Aygi’s work, France described his meeting with Aygi in 1974. The poet “talked very eloquently (and I mainly listened and learnt). You couldn’t help being struck by the intensity of his devotion to poetry, culture, and spiritual values. But there was also his simplicity, his humor—he had a great gift for friendship (which shines through his poems too),” France stated.
Much of Aygi’s creative work demonstrated his affable personality and a deep interest in the natural world. Child-and-Rose, for example, includes a collection of his works selected by Aygi himself. Field-Russia contains two short collections of poetry, and his poems “poems offer glimpses of village life and the natural world,” observed Miriam Tuliao, writing in Library Journal. The first, the titular Field-Russia, was written between 1979 and 1982, noted a Publishers Weekly writer. The second, Time of the Ravines, was composed between 1982 and 1984. The Publishers Weekly contributor called these two chapbook-length collections “magisterial in their haunted longing to connect with the past, and with nature.” The book also includes a lengthy interview with Aygi.
Time of Gratitude contains a collection of essay and poems by Aygi. The opening essay is a tribute to Boris Pasternak. Another piece honors Pasternak and other Russian, European, and Chuvash writers, such as Franz Kafka, some of whom were mentors and inspirations to Aygi. Other prose pieces and poems in the book were written for specific events or to commemorate particular individuals. Some, Strader wrote in a Cleaver review, are “written as personal reflection.” Strader concluded, “I did find Time of Gratitude to be a personal and intimate way to enter the world of Aygi’s poetry for the first time.” A Publishers Weekly contributor observed that Aygi’s “own included poems are both simple and striking . . . showing that he belongs in the company of the authors about whom he writes.” In Kirkus Reviews, a writer called Time of Gratitude a “well-chosen introduction to the artistic and spiritual forces that shaped a poet.”
Aygi died in 2006.
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Valentine, Sarah, Witness and Transformation: The Poetics of Gennady Aygi, Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA), 2015.
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, summer, 2008, John Taylor, “The Russian Poets Are Coming,” review of Field-Russia and Salute—To Singing, p. 582.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of Time of Gratitude.
Library Journal, November 1, 2007, Miriam Tuliao, review of Field-Russia, p. 72.
Publishers Weekly, April 1, 2003, review of Child-and-Rose; October 1, 2007, review of Field-Russia; September 4, 2017, review of Time of Gratitude. p. 78.
ONLINE
Cleaver, https://www.cleavermagazine.com/ (May 14, 2018), Ryan K. Strader, “A Conversation with Peter France;” (May 14, 2018), Ryan K. Strader, review of Time of Gratitude.
A Conversation with Peter France
translator of Gennady Aygi’s TIME OF GRATITUDE
Interview by Ryan K. Strader
In 1974, Peter France visited Russia to do research for a new translation of Boris Pasternak. He was invited to meet Gennady Aygi, a Chuvash poet who, as a student in Moscow, had been friends with the much-older Pasternak. France describes that meeting with Aygi as having altered the trajectory of his life, both professionally and personally. For the next forty years, France would translate Aygi’s work, bringing him to a Western audience, a task that has been criticized by those who argue that Aygi’s poetics do not conform to Russian tradition.
France’s most recent publication of Aygi’s work is Time of Gratitude, published by New Directions in December 2017. Based in Edinburgh where he was a professor of French until 2000, France has written widely on French and Russian literature and has published an Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, and translations of Blok, Mayakovsky, and Mandelstam, among others.
I came into contact with France while researching Aygi for Cleaver’s review of Time of Gratitude, and was taken with his warmth and willingness to discuss all things connected with Russian literature, share his photos from his travels to Shaymurzino, Aygi’s native village, and answer questions about the work of translation.
Here I follow up with him regarding Time of Gratitude, his approach to translation, and his decades-long friendship with Aygi, who died in 2006. Images by courtesy of Peter France. —RKS
RKS: You first met Aygi in 1974, when visiting Russia to do some work on a translation of Pasternak. I’m intrigued with the way you describe that meeting as having “changed your life.” Could you expand a little bit on your first meeting with Aygi, and what your first impressions were of each other?
PF: So, it sounds a bit over-dramatic to say that my meeting with Aygi changed my life, but it certainly opened up new worlds for me. For a start, I began to translate his poems, a great challenge, confronting me with a tragic and exciting life experience and a corresponding spiritual vision. This, in turn, led me to translate several other Russian poets, some of them Gennady’s favorites (Lermontov, Annenkov)—I was already translating Pasternak (with Jon Stallworthy) and this was why I went to see Aygi in the first place. Then there was the plunging into Chuvash culture, ancient and modern, translating the Chuvash anthology, and later other poems from folklore and 20th-century literature, and getting to visit and love Chuvashia and to understand something of the many problems of a quite distinct ‘autonomous region’ within the Russian Federation. From our first meeting, he became a point of reference for me, distant but present—as he still is.
When we first met, in September 1974, in a flat on the southwestern edge of Moscow, we seemed to hit it off immediately, talking all day as we wandered in the woods. He talked very eloquently (and I mainly listened and learnt). You couldn’t help being struck by the intensity of his devotion to poetry, culture, and spiritual values. But there was also his simplicity, his humour—he had a great gift for friendship (which shines through his poems too). For him, I must have been a visitor from another world (not the first such visitor by any means), but by the end of a day, we were on familiar terms (Ty, not Vy). We shared a love of poetry of course (though he lived for poetry, and had far more to tell me than I had to tell him). But there was also our love and awareness of the natural world. Trees were a constant theme—and the tree is a sacred being in Chuvash culture.
RKS: In 2013, you did a wonderful interview with Alex Cigale. At the time you stated that, while there was much of Aygi’s work still untranslated, you particularly wanted to gather together his tributes to other writers for publication. The new book, Time of Gratitude, is a collection of these tributes. Out of the material you had, why did you choose to translate these tributes instead of more poetry, or his letters? How do you think Time of Gratitude fits in with Aygi’s other translated work?
PF: I’d already translated some of Aygi’s notes on poetry (see Child-and-Rose and Field-Russia, both with New Directions), but I was keen to publish a volume of his tributes to other writers and artists—and he himself was keen that such a book should appear in English. They belong to a genre characteristic of this poet, called elsewhere “Conversations at a Distance.” It is indeed conversation rather than criticism; as Gennady’s friend, the Chuvash scholar Atner Khuzangay, recently wrote to me in a letter: “In the book/conversation everything flows together in a single stream, poems, essays, memories, impressions… In these conversations there are specific interlocutors, his spiritual companions, he speaks to them, asks them questions, receives from them moral support, advice, an answering word.” That’s what I wanted to present, allowing new readers to enter a conversation that includes prose as well as poems.
Gennady Aygi, 1975. Photo by Igor Makarevich
Thinking of other possible publications, there are many poems by Aygi that have not yet appeared in English. Indeed I have quite a lot of translations that have not been published, or only published in obscure journals. But this seemed to me less urgent than the book/conversation. In the future I think the best way of publishing more translations would be to translate particular books—he grouped his poems like this, though often they haven’t been published this way. Maybe some of the early books, such as Fields-Doubles (1961-3) or Consolation 3/24 (1965-7).
There’s also a great body of Chuvash poetry, virtually unknown outside Chuvashia. It would probably have to be translated via Russian, with help from Chuvash speakers, as was done recently when Aygi’s sister Eva worked with Mikael Nydahl (Sweden), Gunnar Wærness (Norway), and myself.
Then there are the letters. It’s quite true that there is a vast treasure of letters written by Aygi to friends scattered all over the world—so far I don’t think they’ve been gathered up. I included some translated excerpts from letters to me in Field-Russia, but generally, I’d rather wait until there’s been a proper publication of the correspondence in Russian. Will this happen? I don’t know.
RKS: You’ve translated poets like Mandelstam and Pasternak, poets who are “household” names and recognized as “famous Russian writers” even by people who don’t read non-Western literature. How does your commitment to translating Aygi over the years fit into your oeuvre? Was that greatly influenced by your personal relationship with him, or did something else encourage you to keep coming back to his poems?
PF: I began translating Aygi as a result of meeting him. When I first met him it was to talk about Pasternak—I knew nothing of his own poetry and found it pretty hard at first, but discovered it mainly by translating, which I did as a way of continuing our “conversation at a distance.” For much of the time, this was very different from other things I was doing—mostly academic writing about French and comparative literature. But I had begun (in the 1960s) by translating Blok and Pasternak, working together with my great friend, the poet Jon Stallworthy. It was no doubt the experiencing of translating Aygi that give me the impetus, when I retired in 2000, to try translating many other Russian poets. Some were close to Aygi (Mayakovsky, Annensky, Lermontov, perhaps Batyushkov), others less so. And, of course, I’ve gone on translating Aygi, though less intensively than in the early days. I’ve also gone on from the Chuvash Anthology to translate the great poem by Kenstenttin Ivanov, “Narspi,” due to appear (in Chuvashia) later this year (as with the Anthology, I’ve worked from a Russian literal).
Peter France in Chuvashia, in front of a school named for Gennady Aygi
RKS: When I first read Time of Gratitude, I had to “catch on” to how Aygi writes. It certainly is its own genre, and not just stylistically. In an interview with him that is included in Field-Russia, he mentions how he addresses other writers: that he is not addressing their work necessarily, as one would in a critical response, but instead he is attempting “conversation” with the writers themselves “as genuinely living images,” as he put it. It seems to me that part of what makes his work distinct is the spiritual orientation of the writer toward the addressee, where he (the writer) has adopted the addressee as a “spiritual companion” as you described it. To me, this is a profound value of Aygi ’s work—a more mystical connection to writers and poetry. You mention that Aygi wanted to see some of these book/conversations translated into English. What did he want English readers to understand from this genre that was unique to him?
PF: Yes, there’s something special about Aygi’s attitude to many other writers and artists—a kind of mix of friendship/love and reverence. In relation to, say, Pasternak, the two are fairly evenly balanced, but for others whom he didn’t know personally (e.g. Kafka or Malevich) it’s reverence that predominates. His feeling of closeness led him to seek out the places of these figures, notably burial places. I shared this with him for Malevich, the Chuvash poet Mitta, Baudelaire, Nerval, and Robert Burns. When we went, with three Scottish poet-friends, to Burns’ mausoleum, we performed a ceremony—pouring of whisky, laying of roses and Chuvash earth, song and a speech addressed to his ‘brother’ Robert—which reminded me a bit of our visit to the grave of his grandfather, a pagan priest. And I guess it’s this sort of bonding he wanted readers of his tributes to feel, including now the English speakers.
The English-speaking world was more foreign to him than France (he knew French quite well, but no English). But he did visit Britain four times, liked London, felt great affection for Scotland (I remember travelling through the Scottish borders with him, and he dreamed of coming to live here), and loved (in translation) the writing of Burns, Hopkins, and above all Dickens (at the age of six he had read Great Expectations under the title Pip, but only discovered later who wrote it). And for his lovely collection, Veronica’s Book, he wrote a “Foreword to the English-speaking Reader,” which you may have seen. Towards the end of his life we visited America (the land of Emily Dickinson), and again he felt at home, especially traveling through the country between Chicago and Wisconsin. So, yes, he wanted English speakers, too, to be part of this world-wide circle of friends.
RKS: I’m intrigued with your trip to Chuvashia. The pictures that you’ve shared of the countryside there are beautiful. I can see that you went to great pains to become better acquainted with Aygi’s village and his native countryside. You’ve also mentioned other travels to Russia when working on other translations. I’m curious about how critical geographic familiarity is to you in your work. How important was that trip to understanding Aygi, and how important is geographic familiarity to you in general, in a translation project?
PF: It’s good to be able to visit the places of the texts you’re translating, but not essential. I’ve recently been translating some 16th-century French poetry, and while I know France well, I can’t visit the 16th century. Similarly, when I did most of my translation of Aygi and other Chuvash writers, I was able to visit Russia but Chuvashia was still closed to foreigners. I went there for the first time in 1989, by which time my English version of the Anthology of Chuvash Poetry was pretty well complete. Of course, when I went there I understood certain things better. A good example is an ancient text entitled “Parents’ Valediction to the Bride and Bridegroom”; I had translated this and admired it, but during a visit to Chuvashia I participated in a village wedding, and was amazed to see the young couple, having driven round the nearby villages hooting motor horns, returning to the wife’s house, passing through the courtyard where a disco was in full swing, and going in to kneel in front of the elders while the traditional ‘valediction’ I had translated was spoken. Obviously it meant more to me when I’d seen this, but I don’t think the translation was affected.
I guess the essential thing, if you don’t have direct access to the place and the culture, is to have a good source of knowledge. This can be books or pictures, but for me, it was ideal to work with Gennady who helped me understand so much about his own poems and about his native culture (of which I knew nothing before meeting him). While he was alive my translations of Chuvash texts were done from his beautiful literals with comments, reading aloud, etc. Later I got help from other Chuvash friends.
All in all, it was a great piece of luck for me that this great Russian poet was also a Chuvash village boy.
RKS: It seems that for some time Aygi was rejected by Chuvashians for having “switched” to Russian, but then later he was embraced by them. Can you talk a little bit about what the Chuvashian perception of Aygi might have been, and how Aygi felt about being “disowned” by Chuvashia?
PF: I don’t think it’s quite right to think of him as being disowned by the Chuvash for writing in Russian—his Russian poetry, together with his work on the Chuvash Anthology, helped to put Chuvashia on the international literary map. And in any case, he continued to write and translate in Chuvash.
In the Soviet period, he was harassed in Chuvashia for a variety of reasons, all to do with literature rather than politics. At first, he was regarded as a ‘hostile element’ mainly because of his friendship with Boris Pasternak, though his expulsion from the Moscow Literary Institute was also a factor. Together with his poetic credo, it was totally at odds with Socialist Realism. He was arrested in Cheboksary in 1960, accused of ‘vagrancy,’ but managed to escape to Moscow and didn’t return to Chuvashia for fifteen years or so. And then in 1976, he was attacked by the Chuvash authorities for having poems published in the emigre journal Kontinent (in Paris, associated with Sinyavsky). All this was very painful for him. Even when I first went to Chuvashia in 1989, in the dying years of the old regime, there were voices accusing him of “cosmopolitanism.” It took a few years for him to be fully accepted and proclaimed the national poet.
RKS: It’s interesting that you separate literature from politics here, a separation which works a little differently in the American imagination than in the Russian imagination. Can you clarify the distinction as it relates to Aygi?
PF: Clearly the two are not easily distinguished, especially in a Soviet context, when a certain style of writing could be construed as a hostile act. In particular, openness to foreign influences such as Kafka or Kierkegaard could be seen as a kind of treason. What I meant was that Aygi was not a dissident in the normal sense of the word—he didn’t take public stances on such questions as the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn. Of course, his poems were often, a response, direct or indirect, to the evils of the regime (from the invasion of Czechoslovakia to the misuse of psychiatric hospitals), but they weren’t public statements.
RKS: When I was trying to track down critics who had some experience with Aygi, one writer explained to me that Aygi was sometimes seen as a “fraudulent” presence in the Russian canon. Could you comment a little bit on this critical perception of Aygi and his work?
PF: Aygi was not ‘fraudulent’ in the sense of deliberately setting out to pull the wool over people’s eyes; it is quite wrong to see him as trying to bamboozle readers so as to achieve fame. He was totally committed to his poetic work. Undoubtedly some readers and critics and fellow poets didn’t (and don’t) accept what he was doing (not just free verse, but his use of language and his poetic aims). For some readers, his writing was not truly Russian and not poetry as they understood it. At one point, a critic in a London-based Russian-language newspaper stirred up a storm in a tea-cup by arguing that his reputation had been manufactured by foreign Slavists (for their own ends, no doubt). Against this, you could quote many Russians, from Roman Jakobsen to the major contemporary poet Olga Sedakova, for whom he had become “the first Russian-language poet to become a world poet in his lifetime.”
RKS: One of the pictures you shared with us is of Aygi’s funeral in 2006. Can you share how you came to have this picture, and what thoughts it brings to mind?
PF: This is one of a group of black-and-white photos sent me by a Chuvash friend and showing Gennady’s funeral in the wintry spaces of Shaymurzino—extremely moving for someone who knew the poet and his village. He had a state funeral in the Cheboksary, attended by the President of the Republic, then the body was taken to be interred in the village graveyard. One or two of the color photos I sent you show the place in summer. Gennady is much remembered. The village school bears his name, as does a street in Cheboksary, and every year there are gatherings, large and small (often with associated publications), to celebrate his memory.
Funeral of Gennady Aygi, Shaymurzino, in the Chuvash Republic, 2006
RKS: You have commented elsewhere that, because of Kierkegaard, Aygi “came back to his own form of Christianity.” The idea that he had his “own form” of belief is intriguing to me. You mention that he felt a bond with the old pagan beliefs of Chuvashia, but also kinship with more contemporary Christian theologians. Could you comment further on this blended spiritual identity that Aygi seems to have, and how that might help readers to understand Aygi’s poetry?
PF: It’s difficult to speak in a few words of Aygi’s religious views. He was certainly a religious poet, seeing poetry as a kind of “sacred action” which could create communication between people, and also communication of people with the natural world. The old Chuvash ‘pagan’ religion with its rituals and ethical values meant a lot to him (for a description see the Anthology of Chuvash Poetry, now available online via Duration Press), but he didn’t agree with those who want to revive this religion today. Chuvashia had been Christianized over the centuries, and this was often oppressive, but he also saw it as a great enrichment. His own return to Christianity (from an earlier Nietzschean phase) he attributed largely to Kierkegaard, discovered in 1969. Before this he had read Pascal, later he read a lot of the early Orthodox Church Fathers, and of modern theology (when in Daghestan, which he loved, he had a sympathetic interest in Islam too). All of this came together in a religious synthesis. I don’t think he went to church much, but he regarded himself as Orthodox and was buried as such. Let me quote a letter he wrote me which gives an idea of his spiritual vision, sent from a Russian village in 1980: “I write—and with my shoulders I feel-and-know that the hawthorn is flowering now in the mist (the human soul cannot know such tranquil solitude: I am reading here the writings of Russian holy men; behind their sayings there stands their silence…).”
RKS: In Aygi’s obituary that you wrote for The Guardian, you make a comment about Aygi that is very moving, that he “wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century.” Sometimes it seems that we are dangerously removed from understanding men like Aygi and their historical context. What do you hope that readers today learn from Aygi, either from his poetry or from the story of his lived experience? What is the most important takeaway for us, as English readers in 2018?
PF: Although Aygi writes a great deal about flowers, snow, fields—nature, as we say—his poems are full of the awareness of the often terrible things that happened in his lifetime, both personally (hardship, political harassment, the sufferings of friends) and more publicly (the Holocaust and war, the oppressions of the Soviet regime). He’s a tragic poet for the tragic 20th century. But at the same time, he insists on the positive nature of poetry, bringing warmth to a cold world, as he puts it somewhere. He said in an interview (printed in the volume Field-Russia, published by New Directions) that his impression of much contemporary poetry was that it was written as if its vocation was to “curse the world.” He wanted to do the opposite, to search out and celebrate life in the face of death. I think this was what he so loved in Pasternak. In the same interview, he remembers a starling in a Moscow suburb on a dank spring day with wet snow falling. “The world was like a curse,” he says, but the starling was whistling and bubbling, “it must be bursting with gratitude—even for a day like this.”
Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.
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Print Marked Items
The Russian Poets Are Coming
John Taylor
The Antioch Review.
66.3 (Summer 2008): p582+.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Antioch Review, Inc.
Full Text:
Field-Russia by Gennady Aygi, translated by Peter France. New Directions, 172 pp., $15.95 (paper).
Salute--To Singing by Gennady Aygi, translated by Peter France. Zephyr, 93 pp., $13.95 (paper).
Contemporary Russian Poetry: An Anthology , edited by Evgeny Bunimovich and J. Kates. Dalkey
Archive, 489 pp., $14.95 (paper).
A Kindred Orphanhood by Sergey Gandlevsky, translated by Philip Metres. Zephyr, 105 pp., $12.95
(paper).
Say Thank You by Mikhail Aizenberg, translated by J. Kates. Zephyr, 109 pp., $14.95 (paper).
Cicada: Selected Poetry and Prose by Tatiana Voltskaia, translated by Emily Lygo. Bloodaxe (distributed
in the United States by Dufour Editions), 141 pp., $23.95 (paper).
The Diving Bell by Elena Ignatova, translated by Sibelan Forrester. Zephyr, 131 pp., $14.95 (paper).
A Million Premonitions by Viktor Sosnora, translated by Dinara Georgeoliani and Mark Halperin. Zephyr,
135 pp., $12.95 (paper).
Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms , translated and edited by Matvei
Yankelevich. Overlook, 287 pp., $29.95.
The Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems , translated by Paul Schmidt, edited by Catherine
Ciepiela and Honor Moore. New York Review of Books, 140 pp., $14.95 (paper).
The Selected Poems--Osip Mandelstam , translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. New York
Review of Books, 167 pp., $14.95 (paper).
Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky , edited by Michael Almereyda. Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 270 pp., $27.00.
The Russian poets are coming. Many are young and all of them, with the possible exception of Gennady
Aygi (1934-2006), are unknown in the United States. The inquisitive and enterprising Zephyr Press has
spearheaded this effort to get beyond two prestigious generations. First, that of Osip Mandelstam (1891-
1938), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), and the newly and enthusiastically
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discovered Daniil Kharms (1905-1942)--who are still much in the news. Note the recent reprinting of W. S.
Merwin and Clarence Brown's classic versions of Mandelstam; an anthology, Night Wraps the Sky , of rare
writings by and about Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930); The Stray Dog Cabaret , a selection of verse
associated with the notorious Saint Petersburg haunt; and especially the odd "poetic prose" of Kharms's
Today I Wrote Nothing , which dizzily blurs conventional boundaries between poetry, narrative, drama,
diary jottings, and newspaper reporting. And this brings me to the subsequent generation, dominated by
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), but also including the subtly moving Anatoly Naiman (b. 1936) and the
robust, melancholy, Evgeny Rein (b. 1935).
Aygi belongs to this latter age group, but his poetics stand at such antipodes from Brodsky's that he is better
placed among a handful of philosophically inclined language skeptics and radical sense seekers ranging
from the pre-Socratic thinkers concerned with ontology to Mallarmé and especially Paul Celan. In a prose
text, Aygi notably calls Celan his "rebbe," the Yiddish term for rabbi or mentor: "But reb-be, made of all
things--of this and that --you were so much one,--dirt, a torn book, and blood,--oh, almost Transparency."
As Peter France's mesmerizing versions in Field-Russia amply show, Aygi boldly departs from the classic
metric and rhyme schemes that continue to dominate Russian verse, not only among practitioners in
Brodsky's generation, but indeed among most younger poets as well. His poetry gropes into what he calls
"the wordless comprehensibility," and this intense, paradoxical mission enables him to raise deep questions
about the self, the physical world, metaphysical intuitions, and language as he contemplates natural
phenomena that take place on, or remain associated with, a "field" upon which he seems to gaze from a
window.
As the hyphenated title suggests, this at once real and metaphorical field is linked to a country. The hyphen
is significant, not only because it implies the presence of a community on or perhaps as a "field." Born
Chuvash (a people who live near the Volga river near Kazan and whose language belongs to the Turkic
family), Aygi eventually chose to write in Russian, with the encouragement of Boris Pasternak (1890-1960).
Readers should thus also consult his graceful, enigmatic "variations" on Chuvash, Tatar, Mari, and Udmurt
folksongs that are gathered in Salute--To Singing , which complements Field-Russia . Aygi's Chuvash
background remains a fundamental source for him even in his most audacious displays of "linguistic
incandescence" whereby "the new in poetry comes into being organically," as he phrases it in a prefatory
"Conversation at a Distance."
Aygi's poetry can seem abrupt and abstract, even off-putting with its ubiquitous dashes, parentheses, and
quotation marks:
field--like "something" like Appearance?
and if it was simply--for us?
as if "we were not"--only wandering in vision or deed
as if we were like advances:
strange--as sleep: in illumination!
we sleep we wake (as if we were fleeting):
we are for no morning!
the fiery light without meaning is empty ...
Yet one gets accustomed to the heavy punctuation and fragmented syntax, which creates puzzling cognitive
leaps, to be sure, but above all unexpected connections. In fact, frequent similes suggest that Aygi is
searching for an overarching unity among profound dichotomies: Chuvash and Russian, his rural childhood
village and the underground culture of Moscow during the 1960s and 1970s, and most of all his pagan
intimations ("in pale dawnlight / as if--before orthodoxy!") as opposed to the Christianity that has also
influenced him. In this regard, "Field-Russia: A Farewell" is almost "transparent" (to recall his tribute to
Celan) in its grappling with a Chuvash heritage, the origins of poetic inspiration, Johannine theology,
nature, and a most unusual and deep sense of freedom:
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but to love the motherland
--is not to see Me
came the sudden words
and the country's
damp--in hollows--
heartfelt weeping: gathered life--
in the breast mistily grew--as once before--the space
where proofs
of the Trinity swirled
(...)
words came in the night (and there is not word--without the Word):
only so much orphanhood: a mist--like a handful!--
to be eyelight swarming-oakwood-song
and to weep as a sun (because--without soul)--
and to be--a field--who is or is not--free.
Aygi's contemplation of "fields" is pensive, interrogative, and he develops a unique vantage point on major
issues of European poetry. In "Field-Conclusion (Land without People)," he notably asks: "But 'heaven'-
from-a-thing?--with a streambed of emptiness: like absence--of wordlikeness." He thus participates in the
archetypal European quest for the thing-in-itself as a way of transcending the turmoil of the self, all the
while wondering whether this search really leads to salvation; and he must admit to the emptiness and
absence with which everything seems permeated, including the very words that he must use. At the same
time, because of this devastating acknowledgement, this poet who above all seeks an "ever-quieter
unquietness" ultimately charts his hopes for "presence" and being: "(the incredible / last word / 'is')," as he
puts it in characteristically discreet parentheses.
* * *
Aygi's poetics are so personal that they are probably not very useful to younger poets. This, at least, is the
impression that I am given by the otherwise engaging anthology, Contemporary Russian Poetry . The
editors, Evgeny Bunimovich and J. Kates, have cast their net wide: forty-four poets ranging in year of birth
from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. In his introduction, Bunimovich delineates Metarealism,
Conceptualism, and Polystylistics, the three important poetic currents of the 1980s, and also presents NeoClassical
poets (such as the stunning Sergey Gandlevsky) and a few unclassifiable mavericks, like the
equally remarkable Mikhail Aizenberg. My only regret, a minor one, is that no biographical information is
provided about Marianna Geide, whose toned-down descriptive verse quietly haunts:
I imagine the day when I'll vanish from the world,
and I mix black bread with milk.
the cold wind shapes the water
into a prickly crust on the pale sidewalk,
amber and lead are mixed in the gleaming
water, and above it all are hanging gardens
of stone flowers and the windows' blackness ...
These lines remind me why I keep coming back to Russian poetry: imagery. Russian poets have an uncanny
ability to produce a sort of natural surrealism that blends unexpected objects and sensations into a thoughtprovoking
borscht often stirred with traditional meters. If Geide's verse is relatively sedate, much Russian
imagery is extravagant. A "Portrait of the Artist" by Mark Shatunovsky (b. 1954) is exemplary:
my throat is isomorphic to the structure of the sewer.
my arm is dug out like a giant tunnel
through a Caucasian mountain range, my index finger presses the
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button
for south.
inside my self-portrait, you will reach the floor that you need
by an elevator plugged into a hydraulic heart.
enter the hemisphere of dreams, where there's demolition all the
time,
softly open the vinyl-upholstered door ...
And in her intellectually intricate verse, Inga Kuznetsova (b. 1974) ties heterogeneous images together,
soliciting different sense impressions in turn:
Teach me to swim, embracing the elastic water.
A freedom that reminds me of a rowboat's oar
rendered into a wooden bell's clapper,
dried up and bitter as black chokecherries,
as the crack of fallen limbs, an evening stroll's melancholy ...
The challenge of these concatenations of disparate word pictures, which are typical of Russian poems, is
summed up by Yuri Kublanovsky (b. 1947), who opens Contemporary Russian Poetry by quipping that "to
seize the meaning of a line just happens to be harder / than extracting herring from a barrel. / Every syllable
somehow salty, sour, dreadful / yet beyond all this--there's a self-assertion of sense." In this anthology that
displays much self-assertion and all sorts of essential topics, I was particularly touched by Svetlana Kekova
(b. 1951), whose lines "we already know / that an object is no match for its own shadow" question the
significance of material things once again, that is, ask whether the world and its appearances can truly
provoke intimations of transcendence. Are we condemned to physical materialism, to the literally selfenclosed
vicious circles of perception and memory and anticipation? She brings a Judeo-Christian religious
heritage to bear on this dilemma, which is likewise developed by Viktor Kulle (b. 1962): "It's worth looking
more intently-- / the world becomes clear, festive and wicked, / a carbon copy from childhood: / remove the
paper layer, // and an ear, accustomed to irregular rhythms, / suddenly senses, as it knocked around in me /
no more sermons--and still / no prayer."
* * *
The aforementioned Gandlevsky (b. 1952) and Aizenberg (b. 1948) are vibrantly present, not only in the
anthology, but also and especially in A Kindred Orphanhood and Say Thank You. These two selections
remind me of the second reason I admire Russian poets: their emotional engagement. Philip Metres'
versions in the former volume reveal a "virtuoso of the unbearable," as Gandlevsky defines himself in a
prose text. Evoking the harshest daily detail, Gandlevsky conjures up subject matter ranging from
alcoholism and dereliction to communal living, Chernobyl, and the "dangerous conversations ... / forbidden
books, cigarette butts in an empty tin" that characterized the Soviet period. In "Stanzas," a masterly
sequence written in memory of his mother, he pinpoints the irrepressible inner necessity that he manages to
canalize into regular meters and rhyme schemes, creating in the process both great tension and poetic grace.
The first poem asks a question ("Speak. But what do you want to say?") that is answered only at the very
end: "Speak. There's nothing else you can do with this affliction." This is gripping confessional poetry at its
most artistic.
Gandlevsky's friend Aizenberg, whose poems are translated by Kates, is equally absorbing and, perhaps,
linguistically more complex. The opening poem of Say Thank You announces the same concern with the
compulsion to speak when "life is barely, / barely endurable." I mean "speak" here, and not "speak up" or
"speak out," for Aizenberg's is no simplistic poetry of protest or complaint: he, too, is interested in those
moments when language just emerges from feeling, suffering, and perception, not merely in its quality as a
vehicle of already cogitated meaning. It is, moreover, at this point that he advises us to "say thank you," and
the reader, here as elsewhere, will gauge the irony. Joking darkly, inverting clichés, and working on several
levels of diction, Aizenberg thus describes a grim quotidian as much from outside as from inside. There are
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unexpected leaps between realistic detail, emotional outcry, and symbolism, as these opening strophes of a
key poem reveal:
What have we been given?
How can I say what we've been given.
An angle of rain, waterproof cloth, the warmth of a room.
Somebody said: a wall is a door.
But my wall is a window.
And the cracked glass is poorly shuttered.
Even the very last ray strikes it,
someone's spasmodic guffaw and a mechanical foxtrot.
Just don't cry, don't cry, I beg you, don't torture me.
Don't talk of a life crammed between the lines.
* * *
If Aizenberg often first situates his multifaceted theme of yearning and impossibility on the level of
everyday experience, Elena Ignatova (b. 1947) and Tatiana Voltskaia (b. 1960) sometimes specifically
evoke impossible love in The Diving Bell and Cicada, respectively rendered by Sibelan Forrester and Emily
Lugo. In a broken-off, thirteen-line, sonnet, Ignatova compares an unhappy relationship to how "the whole
world" becomes "like the cavity / of a shell--the sea's noise, but there's no sea." She has lived in Israel
during the past two decades and thereby also meditates on her experiences there and elsewhere. One longish
piece called "The House in Crimea" conspicuously departs from formal strictures and gradually constructs
the emotion of longing by means of sharp images:
A scab of salt. A crust over fresh pain.
The blood of grapes beneath the rude bark
of the vine. Each spring
Crimea would open like that ...
As for Voltskaia, her learned, brilliantly crafted ruminations on loneliness, dreaming, nature, contemporary
society, and Saint Petersburg epitomize the "neo-classical" category defined by Bunimovich in
Contemporary Russian Poetry --in which she is not included: an oversight? Cicada is distinguished by its
high style, intellectual distinction, and psychological refinement. Voltskaia is certainly a worthy heir of
Brodsky, whose return to Russia she imagines in a poem setting forth, as she does elsewhere, his tone and
method:
Orpheus, don't come here. We don't exist.
You cannot call us like Eurydice,
We are only the shadows of your lines.
Snow is falling. And our looks are wild.
There's no more winter here, it's always March,
The manna melts on ground it's barely touched ...
Going on to see her mentor as the exiled Ovid, then as Odysseus, she concludes: "We've waited so long on
our streets -- / You'll find nothing there, not even tears."
* * *
A heavy meal of melancholy Russian verse should be topped off with A Million Premonitions, by Viktor
Sosnora (b. 1936). An experimenter with rhythm and diction (including past stages of the language, like Old
Russian), Sosnora apparently composes his poems while "the lunar rider" is galloping behind him, as
"Epilogue" suggests. He is indeed moonstruck, that is, wacky if precise, and full of emotional steam. He has
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translated Catullus, among others (including Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Allen Ginsberg), and
relishes placing classical props in contemporary settings, or vice versa. Also like Catullus, he is the author
of lively erotic poems, some of them strange and imaginative ("A Night about You"), others downright
hilarious ("Day of Hopes").
Like most poets evoked here, Sosnora must try to grasp what might be the poet's role in contemporary
Russia. This is no easy matter, all the more so in that three outstanding generations have had to grapple
constantly with all the material aspects of getting by, surviving, often hiding, let alone writing and getting
published, that is, distributing their verse in one way or another. (In several of these books under review, the
number of poems translated from samizdat manuscripts is shocking.) Sosnora's "The Soldiers Are Leaving"
opens in ancient Rome, the symbolic focal point of many of his colleagues as well. Let's give him the last
word, which can only be a question:
The twentieth century rolled off like sweat;
people are multilingual already--and
there are so many capitals, but no one sings;
the trumpets were stolen!
An electron and a nuclear megaphone--like
a ghost--hang over roofs of the country.
That's the wrong voice! Why do I, Triton,
howl on Trumpets?
John Taylor
Taylor, John
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taylor, John. "The Russian Poets Are Coming." The Antioch Review, Summer 2008, p. 582+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A184179033/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd87c104. Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A184179033
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Aygi, Gennady: TIME OF GRATITUDE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Aygi, Gennady TIME OF GRATITUDE New Directions (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 12, 12 ISBN: 978-0-
8112-2719-3
Warmth and passion infuse a collection of poetry and prose.The national poet of Chuvashia, "a remote nonRussian
republic nearly 500 miles to the east of Moscow," Aygi (1934-2006) left the region to study at the
Gorky Literary Institute and, encouraged by his mentor Boris Pasternak, began to write in Russian rather
than his native Turkic. "Only writing in Russian will allow you to articulate fully everything that is
happening within you," Pasternak told him. That decision changed the course of Aygi's career, making him
accessible to a vastly larger--and international--readership. France, Aygi's longtime translator and friend,
has collected 23 brief memoirs, interviews, poems, and sketches to reveal the poet's aesthetic inspirations
and affinities. A helpful introduction contextualizes the pieces and identifies poets--e.g., Velimir
Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh--likely to be unfamiliar to most readers. The volume opens with an
homage to Pasternak, written after the writer's death and more than three decades after his meeting with
Aygi. The younger poet was awestruck by a man he worshipped as "the older Friend, the Teacher, the
unparalleled Interlocutor." They discussed creativity, craft, literature, and the nature of existence. Pasternak,
Aygi said, was capable of being enchanted "by all kinds of things and at any moment: a falling leaf, a child
he met when out walking." The miracle of creation, he told Aygi, surrounds us: "When you read a text, you
are communicating not with letters but with the spirit of the author." Just as the writer Vladimir
Mayakovsky had led him to Pasternak, through Pasternak, Aygi discovered Baudelaire, Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Kafka (a name "sacred to me"), and Max Jacob. Aygi pays homage to several of these writers
and others, including the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer and French poet Rene Char. Among avant-garde
artists whose work Aygi knew well, Kazimir Malevich receives great adoration. A well-chosen introduction
to the artistic and spiritual forces that shaped a poet.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Aygi, Gennady: TIME OF GRATITUDE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=327106f3.
Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217636
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Time of Gratitude
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p78.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Time of Gratitude
Gennady Aygi, trans, from the Russian by Peter France. New Directions, $16.95 trade paper
(144p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2719-3
A collection of essays and poems inspired by a life in art, Aygi's work is impressive in its international
scope and deep devotion to the ideal of a poetry that translator France describes as "essentially
communication, creating ... communities of people who could share a vision." Born in the small Soviet
republic of Chuvashia, the young poet was educated in Moscow, where he had to make the difficult choice
between writing in Russian or in his native Chuvashian. There he befriended the writer Boris Pasternak,
"the Poet ... the older Friend, the Teacher, the unparalleled Interlocutor," whose positions Aygi records
respectfully: "My 'individuality' causes me to diverge somewhat from Pasternak, but at the same time I
marvel at his incredible daring, courage and responsibility towards the Word." Likewise admiring without
obsequiousness are the shorter, commemorative pieces on the Russian poets Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei
Kruchoeykh, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And although literature in the U.S.S.R. was largely cut off from
world developments, Aygi writes with passion and insight about European writers including Franz Kafka,
Paul Celan, and Tomas Transtromer, whose poetry is "a kind of 'discipline' for the spirit ... communicative
without condescension." His own included poems are both simple and striking, a "god-pyre--this open field
/ letting all things pass through," showing that he belongs in the company of the authors about whom he
writes. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Time of Gratitude." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 78. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468111/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd60b2e5.
Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468111
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Aygi, Gennady. Field-Russia
Miriam Tuliao
Library Journal.
132.18 (Nov. 1, 2007): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Aygi, Gennady. Field-Russia. New Directions, dist. by Norton. 2007. c.144p, tr. from Russian by Peter
France. ISBN 978-0-8112-1721-7. pap. $15.95. POETRY
The work of internationally acclaimed, avant-garde Chuvash poet Aygi (1934-2006) did not appear in print
in the former Soviet Union until the late 1980s. France's refulgent translation contains more than 100 central
pieces from Aygi's Field-Russia, Time of the Ravines, and Final Departure and includes the innovative
poems "Island of Daisies in a Clearing," "Field-Conclusion (Land Without People)," and "Peacefully: Fires
of Sunflowers." He highlights Aygi's "silvery-shining" voice and his predilection for free-verse
construction, clustered nouns (e.g., "snowflake-beings"; "little-girl-butterfly"), fragments, Dickinsonian
dashes, and negative space. While Aygi's poems offer glimpses of village life and the natural world (e.g.,
views of ruined churches, glistening birches, sunflowers, and snowdrifts), his painterly representations
signal layers of meaning, point to moral and spiritual quests, and speak of loss. In one such exemplary
poem, titled "After Midnight--Snow Outside the Window," he writes of how "grief/like orphanly scatteredwhite
clothing" spreads "through a silent land/ just--everywhere--breathing desolation." Recommended for
academic and larger public libraries.--Miriam Tuliao, NYPL
Tuliao, Miriam
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Tuliao, Miriam. "Aygi, Gennady. Field-Russia." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2007, p. 72. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A171622706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=65b0148a.
Accessed 25 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A171622706
Child-And-Rose
Gennady Aygi, Author, Gennadii Aigi, Author, Peter France, Translator New Directions Publishing Corporation $14.95 (168p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1536-7
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
With a preface by Bei Dao and translations from the Russian by Peter France, Child-and-Rose presents poet Gennady Aygi's own selection from his work. Now living in Moscow and nearly a septuagenarian, Aygi was born in the Chuvash Autonomous Republic, and writes with an imagistic compression and real time candor that recalls Robert Creeley, but is utterly unique.
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 04/01/2003
Release date: 04/01/2003
TIME OF GRATITUDE
by Gennady Aygi
translated by Peter France
New Directions, 135 pages
reviewed by Ryan K. Strader
When I was a twenty-one-year-old college student and had zero sense of self-preservation, I rode alone on the train in Russia several times between Petrozavodsk and St. Petersburg—unaccompanied, on an overnight train, sleeping in a bunk car with strangers. I was also very chatty because I was trying to learn Russian. Talking up Russians who wanted to sleep seemed like a way to endear myself to my bunkmates and perfect my language at the same time.
At first, it was hard to start conversations. Finally, at one point, one drunk Russian man was lamenting my lack of useful knowledge—I didn’t know card games or anything about professional swimmers. “What do you study?” he asked me.
When I mentioned that I knew Pasternak’s poetry, his face lit up. “Your schools aren’t complete shit after all!” he said joyously, as though his faith in American education had just been fully restored.
Suddenly we had something to talk about. Poetry. Russians know their writers. That lesson stayed with me. From then on, I advanced conversationally on my bunk-mates by mentioning Pushkin, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. If they didn’t care for poetry, I could switch to the novelists. The tactic rarely failed.
When I received Time of Gratitude to review, I was expecting to discover a new Russian poet. That is, a poet who fit in well with the other Russian poets I knew. A poet “like” Pasternak, or “like” Blok, even if it was in some intangible abstract way that we like to describe one poet as being like another. I had expectations about what a Russian poet would sound like, given my experience of the modernist Russian canon.
But Time of Gratitude is unexpected, in many ways. Its very first lines, which are an opening to an essay that pays tribute to Boris Pasternak, read:
I am writing of a Poet who possessed an Apollonian beauty at the age of seventy and of an ecstatic twenty-two-year-old…myself—‘and I cannot draw a line between us’: not between myself now and myself then, nor between them both and the divinity of the Poet whom the young man adored.
These lines took me by surprise—Aygi can’t, he says, “draw a line” between himself and Boris Pasternak, and, in truth, his poetry itself doesn’t sound “Pasternakian.” If I started conversations on the train by bringing up the work of Gennady Aygi, I am not sure how far I would have gotten.
In fact, I wouldn’t have gotten far at all: Aygi’s assertion of his place alongside Pasternak would likely have been contested, and perhaps even seen as subversive. Aygi is not easily granted a spot in the canon of Russian poetry, for a number of reasons.
While he has many admirers, among them the poet Alex Cigale, and his long-time friend and translator Peter France, and while many scholars of Russian literature have encountered his work, he is often described as “avant-garde” and as being outside of the Russian lyrical tradition, with very little apparent influence from Russian masters. Such detectable influence from the writers that Russians think of as “theirs” is important.
It is possible that Aygi’s Chuvash background and its influence on his work might have something to do with his outsider status as well. A rural region almost 500 miles east of Moscow, Chuvashia has its own Turkic language and rural culture. Aygi’s work is marked by rural images, values, and a spirituality rooted in nature. In his poetry, this background melds with European modernism in unexpected ways: Time of Gratitude also comments on Kafka, Nietschze, and Kierkegaard.
On top of all this, Aygi was writing in a singularly oppressive historical moment. In my search for interviews and information about Aygi, I found critics that see his work as genius, those that see his work as spiritual, and those that see him as “not Russian,” almost a fraudulent presence amongst Russian poets. The tributes in Time of Gratitude ended up striking me as Aygi’s own commentary on participating in multiple worlds—erasing the lines between Chuvash and Russian, between languages, between philosophies of writing—or re-framing those relationships to create a new sense of unity within himself and his own experience. Such moves are always threatening to someone, and it seems that Aygi has his detractors.
In his introduction to Time of Gratitude, translator Peter France claims that Aygi, who died in 2006, clearly did not suffer from Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” but was instead “a poet of gratitude, gratitude for the human and natural world, gratitude for the artistic creations of others.” “Gratitude” might be another way of describing “influence” for Aygi, but it struck me as a lovelier description because it encompasses the many ways that Aygi felt literary influence as both personal and communal, not simply a matter of poetics. One of Aygi’s most touching memories in Time of Gratitude is a conversation with Pasternak when Aygi was going over a draft of one of the older poet’s novels:
At our second meeting he asked me a question with some embarrassment, slowly and hesitatingly: “Tell me…you are a man…of the people…forgive me for talking like this!…Tell me, does my novel seem to you not to be ours?”
I was staggered—it was as if all the depth of the suffering of my incredible interlocutor was revealed to me. “Boris Leonidovich, what are you saying! It’s ours, it’s ours absolutely!” in the ardour of my reply I was almost choking. Pasternak threw his arms around me.
This conversation underscores Pasternak’s perspective on art, which seems to have been Pasternak’s primary influence on the young Aygi. He describes Pasternak as an artist who saw each human being as “a complete world” in themselves; this dignifying of the individual endowed them with what Aygi calls the “Pasternakian Freedom,” an individual spiritual significance which both dignified the individual’s voice and connected all people into a shared humanity. This perspective seems to have both validated Aygi’s unique voice as a Chuvash-Russian poet and connected Aygi to what was ours—a literary tradition of “the people,” one that values connectedness to the extant literary tradition but also cherished individual voice: “I simply abandoned myself to the power of his Freedom—this mattered more than ‘literary problems,’” writes Aygi. “And this Freedom discovered for itself where he could spread himself in the expanse of its flight and its magnificence.” Such recollections are important to what Aygi refers to as his “spiritual orientation,” by which he seems to mean both his spiritual beliefs and the “spiritual orientation” of much of his poetry. Peter France touches on this spiritual affinity between Pasternak and Aygi in the obituary he wrote in The Guardian: “like Pasternak’s, his poetry was a poetry of light, seeking to assert the values of human community and oneness with the rest of creation.”
It does not seem odd to me that “community” and “oneness” would have begun with an appreciation for the individual, particularly an individual who crossed ethnic and linguistic categories as Aygi did. Born in 1934 in Chuvashia, Aygi moved to Moscow in his early twenties to pursue his education. His first poems were written in his native Chuvash, earning him disapproval from the Russian community. Pasternak encouraged him to switch to Russian, assuring him that “only writing in Russian will allow you to articulate fully everything that is happening within you, in the way of an emerging poetry, as we talk.” The choice to switch seems to have been a difficult question of identity for Aygi, both because claiming a place amongst Russian poets was to claim a “greatness” and literary influence that would quickly be resented, and because it may be seen as rejection of his Chuvash heritage.
Peter France records in Aygi’s obituary from The Guardian that it was at this time, when deciding to write poetry in Russian, that Aygi changed his name: his original surname was Lisin, a Russified name, and Aygi was properly Chuvashian, meaning “that one.” It seems like a calculated choice, but it did not protect Aygi from being shut out of both Russian and literary circles for most of his life. In the same essay on Pasternak, Aygi notes that the writer Hikmet warned him, “There is no question you must go over to Russian, it will correspond to what you have in you. But remember: They will never forgive you for this move,—that you, the son of a small nation, will exist within a great literature.”
While Aygi does not clarify an exact “they” that Hikmet is referencing, such lack of forgiveness seems evident in the larger critical community. Since perestroika such silencing is probably not malicious; rather, it is the unfortunate historical aftermath of a political environment that sought to silence difference. It is startling to realize how limited our knowledge of Russian writers of the twentieth century might really be, given the extent of Soviet censorship, and it humbles the notion of a “canon” that is easily recognizable to American students and Russian traingoers alike, to think of what might have been missed. Aygi was still alive and living in Moscow when I was there, but no Russian literature instructor ever pointed me to him. Nor would they have known to do so.
Time of Gratitude is an unusual text: the collected pieces are both prose and poetry, some of them written for events and some written as personal reflection. Translator Peter France has organized the book into two sections. The first one is devoted to Russian and Chuvash writers and artists, including Boris Pasternak, Kazimir Malevich, Varlam Shalamov, and Chuvash poet Mikhail Sespel. The second section includes pieces in honor of non-Russian writers and artists, and includes Kafka, Baudelaire, Max Jacob, and the Swedish writer Tomas Tranströmer. The title, “Time of Gratitude,” was borrowed from a cycle of poems that Aygi wrote in 1976-7, marking a time of grieving over the politically inspired murder of his friend Konstantin Bogatyrev. In publishing this new collection of Aygi’s works that pay tribute and gratitude to other friends, France concluded that the same title was still appropriate.
In a sense, this collection is a complement to the earlier collection of poems, as expressions of thanks to writers who helped to sustain Aygi through the “difficult times,” which Aygi describes as beginning in 1958 “like a single immense dark avalanche.” While he is not always specific about the precise nature of the difficult times in Time of Gratitude, the reader understands why France says that Aygi “wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century.” In Time of Gratitude, Aygi touches on the imprisonment of Chuvash poets, the death of friends, the censorship of his own work and the censorship and death of Pasternak.
In an interview published in New Directions’ 2007 edition of Aygi’s poetry, Field-Russia (also translated by Peter France), Aygi describes how he understands “literary influence,” and his comments shed light on the structure of the pieces selected for Time of Gratitude. Aygi claims that his “literary education” can be traced to “something different,” which he describes as “addressing the writers themselves rather than their ideas, whether literary or otherwise.” During dark periods of his life, he insists that his mind would turn to the ideas of certain writers, and he would write to them as people with whom he was having an existential debate, rather than write as if he were trying to build images in accordance with the structure of their work. Because of this relationship with writers as partners in conversation rather than as masters to be imitated, “the continuingly influential and genuinely living images of certain teachers constituted for me their ‘legacy,’ their life-long support, and the strength of this kind of ‘contact’ was more powerful than any literary considerations.”
This existential “dialogue through poetry” is present in his poems in Time of Gratitude, such as “For a Conversation About K.” Dedicated to Olga Mashkova, “K.” refers to Kafka:
earth is just a thought—freely visiting:
changing:
sometimes known to me
in a thought that is Prague:
and then I see
a grave in the city—
it is like a grief-thought:
earth—of suffering!…his—as of that thought
which is now so constant!…
I shall say of that grave “a dream”:
and—as even wounds do not make us believe it is real—
he seems dreamed
in another sleep:
as if unending:
by me
Of all the poems in Time of Gratitude, this one struck me as most “like” Aygi’s work in other published volumes. Sleep is a theme in many of his works, and the ethereal sense of questioning reality seems to be a consistent quality of his writing, even in his prose in Time of Gratitude. While the poem is thematically “Kafkaesque” in that it deals with the nature of reality and the mystery of suffering, it also flouts expectations of “Russian” poetry with its use of free verse and its chant-like syntactical structure. Several critics have described his work as “shamanistic,” an adjective that recalls his rural background and emphasizes his avant-garde characteristics.
It was not uncommon for Soviet writers to be unpublished at home and have their works published—sometimes without them even knowing—in the West. With perestroika, Aygi developed a broad European audience, and his work has slowly become better known to American readers. Peter France points out in an interview in Beloit Poetry Journal that while Aygi is considered a “modern classic” to a few, he is still fairly unknown, despite being a pioneer of free verse in Russia and bringing recognition to Chuvashian writers. Time of Gratitude is one attempt to gather and publish more of Aygi’s work; France hopes that at some point Aygi’s extensive collection of letters to people all over the world will be gathered together and published.
I did find Time of Gratitude to be a personal and intimate way to enter the world of Aygi’s poetry for the first time. Since I began with Aygi by reading his memories of those who had been “fathers” and mentors to him, I felt invited to encounter the poet as a person first, aside from the poems, and thereafter it was difficult to separate the poet from the poems. France has commented that, as Aygi’s friend, he often experienced the same difficulty. Given Aygi’s approach to other writers though, as “genuinely living images” that sustained him in ways poems by themselves never could, it seems fitting that Aygi might be introduced to a wider American public this way.
Ryan Strader earned a B.A. in Russian Literature from George Mason University, and an M.A.T. from Clayton State University. She is currently an instructional designer and researcher. Her most recent instructional design project is the development of a class in writing and qualitative research methods at Georgia State University, where she is also a doctoral student. Her most recent publication is an upcoming book chapter on populism in young adult novels. She lives and works in the Atlanta area.
Field-Russia
Gennady Aygi, Author, Peter France, Translator New Directions Publishing Corporation $15.95 (171p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1721-7
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Aygi (1934-2006) was born in the Soviet Chuvash Repuplic, now Chuvashia, a part of the Russian federation. According to the warm and informative afterword by translator France, Aygi composed in chapbook-length series of poems; following Child-and-Rose, this fourth Aygi release in English collects two of those lyric series: the three-part title piece, ""Field-Russia,"" written between 1979-1982, and a shorter series titled ""Time of Ravines,"" written between 1982-1984. Those two pieces are magisterial in their haunted longing to connect with the past, and with nature: ""as if to breathe-and-pass-through/ in flight - with gratitude to earth."" Those poems are bookended by the extended interview with Aygi (conducted in writing in 1985) that opens the collection, and by a short poetic series and short prose piece that are dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg and Paul Celan, respectively. While readers wait for a collected edition of Aygi's work in English, this look at one of his major modes of the 1980s broadens our understanding of a major 20th century writer.
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 10/01/2007
Release date: 10/01/2007