Susan R. Garrett - Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West

Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics

RUSSIA, POLAND, AND THE WEST

CLARE CAVANAGH

Copyright 2009 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Sabon type by Integrated Book Technology.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cavanagh, Clare.

Lyric poetry and modern politics : Russia, Poland, and the West / Clare Cavanagh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-15296-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Lyric poetryHistory and criticism. 2. Russian poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism. 3. Polish poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism. 4. Politics and literatureHistory20th century. 5. Politics in literature. I. Title.

PN1356.C38 2010

809.104dc22 2009023902

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Mike, always

The debts I have incurred while writing this book are many. Vladimir Gippius gave his young students a house, a home in Russian literature, Osip Mandelstam recalls. My dear friends and teachers Anna and Stanisaw Baraczak gave me a home in Polish culture many years ago in Boston, and in my heart Ive never left. Their generosityintellectual, literary, culinary, and otherwisehas left its mark throughout this book, and to say I am grateful is small repayment. My friend and colleague Gary Saul Morson supported this project from its earliest inception through the long journey through to its final publication. His enthusiasm kept it afloat and his criticism set me straight at crucial moments. Saul and Jonathan Brent at Yale University Press proved stalwart champions of a polemical Slavists defense of poetry, and I owe them more thanks than word limits permit. Lawrence Lipking read an early version of the book in its entirety: his erudition and imagination pointed me in new directions. Adam Zagajewski not only provided the poetry and criticism that inspired much of my argument. He also read through more versions of this book than I care to recall; great poets who are also great critics and friends are few and far between, and Im lucky to have begun translating a writer thirteen years ago who proved to be all of these and then some. Lazar Fleishman brought both his critical acuity and his unparalleled command of Soviet literary politics to bear on the manuscript, and it is much the better for his kindness. Irena Grudziska Gross has lent her erudition, her passion, and her enthusiasm to this project in multiple ways. An unnamed reader for Yale was immensely helpful. Rosanna Warren generously took time to read the penultimate version of my introduction, while the final chapter is very much the better for Christopher Ricks astute, scrupulous editing of an earlier incarnation. The faults that remain are of course all my own doing.

Other friends and colleaguesCaryl Emerson, Madeline Levine, Victor Erlichgenerously supplied me with support, conversation, and yes, the occasional, dreaded letter of recommendation over the many years of this books gestation. My wonderful colleagues Susan McReynolds, Elisabeth Elliott, and Nina Gourianova have helped in more ways than I can say. I want to thank Jenny Holzer and Kerin Sulock of the Jenny Holzer Studio for extraordinary kindness. As if being inspired by a great poet I happen to translate werent enough, Ive also been privileged to follow the work of a great artist who takes inspiration from the same source in her meditations on the public functions of private art. Nice work if you can get it. Jonathan Galassi, Drenka Willen, Sal Robinson, Krystyna and Ryszard Krynicki, Anna and Stanisaw Baraczak, Natalia Woroszylska, and Adam Zagajewski generously assisted with the permissions process. Yale Presss editorial staffSarah Miller, Ann-Marie Imbornoni, and Gavin Lewis, copy editor extraordinairehave been models of patience and persistence. Ive been lucky in my graduate help over the years: Jenifer Presto, at the projects early stages, and Katherine Bowers and Kolter Campbell later in the game were both exemplary research assistants and terrific interlocutors.

was published in Literary Imagination, vol. 6, no. 3 (2004), 33255. I am grateful for permission to reprint them here.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council generously provided the fellowship support that made research for the project possible. The University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Northwestern University supported the project with research and travel assistance, and the International Research and Exchanges Board funded a research trip to Poland in the summer of 2002. The Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern provided a years senior fellowship in 20034 to pursue my research on Miosz, some of which found its way into the books last chapter.

Parents should always use words their children dont understand, Marina Tsvetaeva warns. They should also read their children poetry. Ogden Nash, Robert Frost, The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Cremation of Sam McGeeof these only Frost made his way directly into the book that follows. (I should also mention Shakespeare, particularly with Mickey Rooney as Puck.) But what my father and mother, John and Adele Cavanagh, gave me way back then informs this project in ways they themselves could never have anticipated. I wish I could tell them so today.

Last, but never least, are my nearest relations and best friends, Mike and Martin Lopez. Martin has lived with this project virtually his entire life; and he is what made living with it possible. Mike has been my friend, teacher, editor, advisor, and best support throughout this long, long process. Daily conversations with a superb critic who is also a scholar of British and American Romanticism would be good luck enough. When he also leaves you exactly the right books and bibliographies after those talks; gives you exactly the advice you need, even when you dont know you need it; reads your work; sets you straight; and makes your home the place you do your best thinking and writing, and your best resting after the thinking and writing: then you have more than you could ever ask for. And thats Mike.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821)

The unacknowledged legislators of the world describes the secret police, not the poets.

W. H. Auden, Writing (1962)

Do not be elected to the senate of your country.

W. B. Yeats, To Ezra Pound (1937)

The Lyric under Siege, and the Mystery of the Missing Second World

Poetry is power.

Osip Mandelstam, quoted in Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (1970)

What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?

Czesaw Miosz, Dedication (1945)

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.

Thomas Hardy, from