A Verbal Exhibition: Lev Loseff's ‘Captions to Pictures Seen in Childhood’

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 4, 2018 A Verbal Exhibition: Lev Loseff’s ‘Captions to Pictures Seen in Childhood’ G. S. SMITH The five-part composition, ‘Podpisi k vidennym v detstve kartinkam’ (‘Captions to Pictures Seen in Childhood’, hereafter, CPC) was included in Lev Loseff’s first book of poetry, and subsequently reprinted in collected editions.1 In these publications it is placed in a position that may suggest that the poet attached particular importance to it, as the concluding item in the second of the four sections into which the collection is subdivided. However, it has been little mentioned in the now substantial body of discussion concerning Loseff’s legacy.2 One reason for this situation is likely to have been the problem of identifying the pictures concerned. Critics and scholars have perhaps felt that without such identification, it is not possible to achieve sufficient precision and reliability in analysis. This possibility has been taken seriously and borne in mind in what follows here. But the resulting caution and sense of unavoidable provisionality G. S. Smith is Professor Emeritus of Russian in the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of New College. 1 Lev Losev, Chudesnyi desant. Stikhotovoreniia, Tenafly, NY, 1985, pp. 58–60; CPC was collected first in Lev Losev, Sobrannoe, Ekaterinburg, 2000, pp. 56–58; then in Viktor Kulle and Vladimir Ufliand (ed.), ‘Filologicheskaia shkola’. Teksty. Vospominaniia. Bibliografiia, Moscow, 2005, pp. 530–32, and most recently in Lev Losev, Stikhi, St Petersburg, 2012, pp. 74–76. References to Loseff’s poetry will be made hereafter to the latter edition, abbreviated as Stikhi, with page reference. A translation of the poem may be found in Selected Early Poems of Lev Loseff, translated with annotations and scholarly introduction by Henry W. Pickford, Brooklyn, NY, 2014, pp. 62–67 [ accessed 13 May 2018]. 2 See, most recently, Mikhail Gronas and Barry Scherr (eds), Лифшиц/Лосев/Loseff. Sbornik pamiati L´va Vladimirovicha Loseva, Moscow, 2017, and the ongoing website ‘Lev Losev ne poet, ne kifared’ [accessed 13 May 2018]. A particularly insightful and well-balanced general survey of Loseff’s life and work is Igor´ Efimov, ‘Bol´she chem edinitsa: chetyre litsa L´va Loseva’, reprinted in Лифшиц/Лосев/ Loseff, pp. 83–97. G. S. SMITH 732 have been overcome by the conviction that to prioritise identifying the original referents may actually inhibit analysis. In other words, the visual stimuli may legitimately function not so much as the principal matter concerned in the poem, without a grasp of which it cannot be adequately comprehended, but rather as a point of departure for the poet and the reader. This position accords with a prominent tendency found across a broad spectrum of recent theorizing, and a large body of critical practice, relating to the creative procedure conventionally referred to as ekphrasis, which has been the subject of continuous discussion since antiquity.3 More broadly, this issue opens out into the domain of referentiality or allusiveness, part of the domain of intertextuality.4 Since the beginning of his activity as a poet in the late 1970s, allusiveness has been recognized as a leading characteristic of Loseff’s work. But discussion of it has as a rule been limited to literary sources rather than those involving the graphic or other arts.5 3 Among publications concerned with literatures other than Russian, a useful general introduction to this subject remains Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Baltimore, MD, 1992. A valuable tour d’horizon is John Hollander’s introduction to his anthology The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, Chicago, IL, 1995. For poetry concerned specifically with painting, see Robert D. Denham, Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography, Jefferson, NC, 2010. 4 The clearest concise introduction to this body of theory and practice I have encountered is Margarete Landwehr, ‘Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality’, College Literature, 29, Summer 2002, 3, Literature and the Visual Arts, pp. 1–16. Specifically on Russian literature, I have found useful guidance in the following publication: D. V. Tokarev (ed.), ‘Nevyrazimo vyrazimoe’: Ekfrasis i problemy representatsii vizual´nogo v khudozhestvennom tekste: Sbornik statei, Moscow, 2013. It was preceded by Leonid Geller (ed...