Probstein , Ian The River of Time: Time-Space, History, and Language in Avant-Garde, Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 355 Ready’s analysis shows the fool in late Soviet and post-Soviet culture as a highly complex figure. On the one hand, his behaviour — and Ready’s subjects are exclusively male — echoes a tradition in which the Other had the function of unmasking the hypocrisy of the establishment. Yet the fool emerging from the ‘befuddled subcultures’ (p. 243) is damaged in many ways; he is stupefied and emasculated. His infantilism (Sokolov’s Nymphae is literally a child) and passivity (unlike a iurodivyi, Erofeev’s Venichka desires peace rather than truth; Aleshkovskii’s Nikolai Nikolaevich is ‘harmless’ because he refuses to engage with Soviet society, unlike the heroes of Platonov) recast his folly as a refusal of responsibility. Compulsive irony (‘panironizm’, p. 226) is the disease of the intellectual whose agency has been undermined by decades of stagnation. The discussions in the final section that deals with post-Soviet literature are markedly shorter, perhaps marking the increasing fragmentation and contingency of the fool motif in contemporary writing. While the parts on individual writers can be read in isolation, the chapters are tightly interwoven, meaning that the book as a whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the most valuable and hopeful message we receive from Ready’s fools is that the world’s essence remains ultimately beyond the grasp of formal reason. Richly referenced, Persisting in Folly presents demanding but accessible scholarship — scholarship as it should be — on much-loved texts as well as writers who are barely researched in English. Slavonic Studies Section Josephine von Zitzewitz Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages University of Cambridge Probstein, Ian. The River of Time: Time-Space, History, and Language in AvantGarde , Modernist, and Contemporary Russian and Anglo-American Poetry. Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2017. xix + 278 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Ian Probstein’s The River of Time is an ambitious study of modernist poetry in two major ways. First, it is ambitious in the sheer number and variety of the poetsdiscussedinthebook.Probstein’svolumeexploresunderonecoveravantgarde and futurist authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Maiakovskii, along with the ‘high modernists’ Thomas Stearns Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Osip Mandel´shtam, as well as such modern authors as Joseph Brodsky, John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 356 Secondly, the ambition of the book lies in the parameters that Probstein sets for his study. The methodological lynchpin of the book is Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’, which the author applies, contra Bakhtin, to poetry. Probstein defines the purpose of his book in the following terms: ‘I seek to characterize the works of modern Russian, French, and AngloAmerican poets based on the attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics’ (p. xviii). While such a scope might seem too ample, it is not without a sound motivation. No doubt, the scale of these concerns to a large extent reflects the grand ambition of modernist poetry itself, for, as T. S. Eliot succinctly puts it in his Four Quartets, ‘Only through time time is conquered’. Probstein’s frame of reference, broad as it is, holds refreshing potential: it allows the author to move, with varying ease, between numerous voices of Russian and Anglo-American literary contexts. All too often, in the discussion of modernist literature, scholars downsize modernism to a rigid and geographically limited canon, which does not incorporate modernist authors from a broader map of national contexts, including Russia. While Probstein focuses on the works of some of the central modernist figures, he also seeks to embrace the complexity and diversity of modernisms (we can appreciate here the creative mind of an experienced translator and editor of numerous anthologies). Probstein furnishes a ‘common language’ to let the connections between various modernist texts shine through. Part Two of the book is particularly rich in revealing such connections. Through a comparative reading of the works of Pound, Mandel´shtam and Yeats, Probstein’s study juxtaposes the poets’ aesthetic visions of paradise, as well as of ‘nature, reality, and eternity...