Metamorphoses in Russian Modernism by Peter I. s> Barta (review)

Abstract

520 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 Barta, Peter I. (ed.). Metamorphoses in RussianModernism. Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2000. i86 pp. Notes. Bibliographies .Index. [26.95; [I3.95. 'KAK merzla bystriai reka, / I zimin vikhri bushevali -/ Pushistoi kozhei pokryvali/ Oni sviatogostarika. . .'. So Pushkin'sold gypsyrecallsthe legend of Ovid in the narrativepoem Tsygane. To trace the exiled poet's continuing subliminal presence in Russian modernist poetry, prose, and cinema has proved a happy notion. Peter Barta'sbook gives us an in-depth insight into the abiding vitality of the Greek and Latin classic heritage in twentiethcentury Russian culture and, by concentrating on a well-chosen selection of examples of the poetic exploitation of metamorphosis as subject, device and philosophical tenet, achieves a sharpness of focus which might have been missingfrom a more general symposiumon Greco-Roman mythical subtext. The reader is not only presented with a hyperboreanmodernist slant on the sunny world of ancient Mediterranean metamorphoses, but is brought to consider the deeper meaning of the concept; its relationshipto metaphor, the underlying charge of revolutionary or erotic violence, the connotations of panpsychism as a substitutereligion and the way in which the 'shapeshifter retainsfeaturesof previousidentitiesand is sometimescapable of returningto previous forms' (Introduction,p. i i). The attempt made in the introduction to envisage the Russian people and state as a kind of gigantic, collective metamorphis apleasingconceit but isnot consistentlyborne out by individual articles,in which the internationalbackgroundto Russianmodernistmythical thinking -from German Romanticism through Wagner and Nietszche to Fraserand Freud -is implicitlyto be felt, if not alwaysexplicitlystated. The symposium proper opens with an elegant piece by the editor, which shows how 'the self-consciousartistsof the fin de siecle tended to identifywith figures,such as Narcissusand Echo, whose lives were definedby yearningfor the unattainable' (p. I7). The author traces permutations of this particular tale of metamorphosis through Russian Symbolist poetry, touching also on the European,and differentiatesnicelybetween Briusov'shomages to Pushkin and neo-classicism, Viacheslav Ivanov's search for the Nietszchean ApolloDionysus dichotomy in the figureof Narcissus,Hippius'sremarkableembodiment of the Echo-theme in a poem that contains no directreferenceto Ovid's protagonists,and Blok'smasterlysubsumingof both images into the weave of lyricaldramaand seeminglyspontaneouslove lyric. Next, in 'The transformationmythin RussianModernism:Ivan Konevskoi and Nikolai Zabolotsky' (pp. 4'-6o), Joan Delaney Grossman makes good use of unpublished material to probe these two poets' exploration of the concept of metamorphosis as part of their search for a holistic world view admitting of immortality albeit of a sort not necessarilyacceptable to the strivingindividual spirit. In spite of the difference of perspective natural for poets 'separated by forty years and several layers of cultural and historical change' (p. 42), she perceives 'strikingaffinities'in a shared perception of 'a universe constantly in flux and perhaps on the brink of dramatic change' (p. 43). A concept which interested both poets was panpsychism, which is traced back to the wisdom of Pythagorasas expounded by Ovid, but also to REVIEWS 521 Romantic pantheism and to Tiutchev's poetry, especially as expounded by Vladimir Solov'ev. The chief differencebetween Konevskoi and Zabolotsky, Grossmanmaintains,isthatthe formerseeks,throughthe idea of metamorphosis as empathy, to understand and interpret the harmony of an evolving naturalworldof which man ispart,albeitpotentiallythe highestpart,whereas the latter sees mother Nature as chaos, who 'stands to be perfected' by her progeny man, 'by the impositionof human reason'(p. 5 ). It could be argued that Konevskoi proceeds from the diurnal Tiutchev, Zabolotsky from the nocturnal; either way, it is curious that, in Orthodox Russia, thinkers and poets should have sought escape from a dualistic view of matter and spirit from what Grossman calls 'the time-space trap' (p. 46) in the classicalrather than the Byzantine concept of 'metamorphosis',the Greekword for 'transfiguration ' (in Russian, 'preobrazhenie'), a locution which, in this collection, appears to have fallen out of use. Even when Christianity is considered in relation to Ovidian metamorphosis(such as in Norman Brown'sfootnote i 7 to Stephen Hutchings's article), it is not this obvious word but the not altogether apt 'transubstantiation'and the totally inept 'incarnation' which are suggested as equivalents (p. i o). It is no adverse criticismto add in this wider context that, wherever the concept of...