诺贝尔文学奖获奖演说
约瑟夫·布罗茨基
一
对于一个个性的人、对于一个终生视这种个性高于任何社会角色的人来说，对于一个在这种偏好中走得过远的人来说——其中包括远离祖国，因为做一个民主制度中最后的失败者，也胜似做专制制度中的殉道者或者大文豪——突然出现在这个讲坛上，让他感到很窘迫，犹如一场考验。
这一感觉的加重，与其说是因为想到了先我之前在这里站立过的那些人，不如说是由于忆起了那些为这一荣誉所忽略的人，他们不能在这个讲坛上畅所欲言，他们共同的沉默似乎一直在寻求着、并且终于没有替自己找到通向你们的出口
唯一可以使你们与那些决定相互谅解的，是那样一个平常的设想：首先由于修辞上的原因，作家不能代表作家说话，诗人尤其不能代表诗人说话；若是让奥西普·曼德里施塔姆、玛丽娜·茨维塔耶娃、罗伯特·弗罗斯特、安娜·阿赫马托娃、魏斯坦·奥登出现在这个讲坛上，他们也会不由自主地只代表自己说话，很可能，他们也会体验到某些窘迫。
这些身影常使我不安，今天他们也让我不安。无论如何，他们不鼓励我妙语连珠。在最好的时辰里，我觉得自己仿佛是他们的总和——但总是小于他们中的任何一个个体。因为在纸上胜过他们是不可能的，也不可能在生活中胜过他们，正是他们的生活，无论其多么悲惨多么痛苦，总是时常——似乎比应该有的更经常——迫使我去惋惜时间的流动。如果来世存在，——我更愿意其存在，而无法否定其永恒生命的可能性，——如果来世存在，我希望他们原谅我和我试图作出的解释：终究不能用讲坛上的举止来衡量我们这一职业的价值。
我只提出了五位——他们的创作、他们的命运我十分珍重，这是因为，若没有他们，作为一个人、作为一个作家我都无足轻重：至少我今天不会站在这里。当然，他们，这些身影——更确切地说，这些光的源泉——灯？星星？——远不止五个，但他们中的每一个都注定只能绝对地沉默。在任何一个有意识的文学家的生活中，他们的数量都是巨大的；在我这里，这一数量仰仗两种文化而增加了一倍，是我命运的支配力使我从属于这两种文化。同样不能让人感到轻松，当我想到这两种文化中的同辈人和笔友们，想到那些我认为其天赋高过于我的诗人和小说家们，他们若是出现在这个讲坛上，早就谈到了实质之处，因为他们有比我更多的话要说给全世界听。
因此我才敢于在这里发表一系列意见——它们也许是不严密的，自相矛盾的，因其不连贯而足以让你们为难的。然而，我希望，交付给我用以集中思想的这段时间和我的这种职业能保护我，至少能部分地使我的混乱免受指责。我这一行的人很少自认为具有思维的体系性；在最坏的情况下，他才自认为有一个体系。但是，像通常那样，他的这点东西也是借来的：借自环境，借自社会机构，借自幼年时在哲学上的用功。艺术家用来达到这一或那一目的、甚至是最寻常目的的那些手段，都具有偶然性，没有什么能比写作过程、比创作过程本身更能让一个艺术家确信这一点。诗句，按阿赫马托娃的说法，的确是从垃圾中生长出来的：散文之根——也并不更高贵些。
二
如果艺术能教授些什么（首先是教给艺术家），那便是人之存在的个性。作为一种最古老的——也最简单的——个人投机方式，它会自主或不自主地在人身上激起他的独特性、单一性、独处性等感觉，使他由一个社会化的动物转变为一个个体。许多东西都可以分享：面包，床铺，信念，恋人——，但诗，比方说，勒内·马里亚·里尔克的一首诗，却不能被分享。艺术作品，尤其是文学作品，其中包括一首诗，是单独地面向一个人的，与他发生直接的、没有中间人的联系。正由于此，那些公共利益的捍卫者、大众的统治者、历史需要的代言人们大都不太喜欢一般的艺术，尤其是文学，其中包括诗歌。因为，在艺术走过的地方，在诗被阅读过的地方，他们便会在所期待的赞同与一致之处发现冷漠和异议，会在果敢行动之处发现怠慢和厌恶。换句话说，在那些公共利益捍卫者和大众统治者们试图利用的许多个零上，艺术却添加了“句号，句号，逗号和减号”，使每一个零都变成了一张人的小脸蛋，尽管他们并不总是招人喜爱的。
伟大的巴拉丁斯基在谈到自己的缪斯时，说她具有“独特的面部表情”。在这一独特表情的获得中，也许就包含有个性存在的意思，因为对这一独特性我们已有了似乎是遗传的准备。一个人成为作家或是做了读者，这无关紧要，他的任务首先在于：他怎样过完自己的一生，而不是外力强加或指定的、看上去甚至是最高尚的一生。因为我们每个人的生命都只有一次，我们清楚地知道这一切将以什么结束。在对别人的外貌、别人的经验的重复上，在同义反复中耗尽这唯一的良机，是令人遗憾的，更令人难受的是，那些历史需要的代言人们——人们遵循其教导已准备赞同这种同义反复——却不会和人们一起躺进棺材，也不会说声谢谢。
语言，我想还有文学，较之于任何一种社会组织形式是一些更古老、更必要、更恒久的东西。文学在对国家的态度上时常表现出的愤怒、嘲讽或冷漠，实质上是永恒、更确切地说是无限对暂时、对有限的反动。至少，文学有权干涉国家事务，直到国家停止干涉文学事业。政治体系、社会构造形式，和任何一般的体系一样，确切地说都是逝去时代的形式，这逝去的时代总企图把自己与当代（时常也与未来）硬捆在一起，而以语言为职业的人，却能够让自己最先忘记这一点。对于一个作家来说，真正的危险，与其说是来自国家方面的可能的（时常是实在的）迫害，不如说是他可能被硕大畸形的，或似乎渐趋于好转——却总是短暂的——国家面貌所催眠。
国家的哲学，国家的伦理学，更不用说国家的美学了——永远是“昨天”；语言、文学则永远是“今天”，而且时常——尤其在这一或那一政治体系地位正统的场合下——甚至是“明天”。文学的功绩之一就在于，它能帮助一个人确定其存在的时间，帮助他在民众中识别出无论是作为先驱还是作为常人的自我，使他避免同义反复，也就是说，避免那冠有“历史之牺牲”这可敬名称的命运。一般的艺术，其中包括文学，愈是出色，它和总是充满重复的生活的区别就愈大。在日常生活中，您可以把同样一个笑话说上三遍，再说三遍，引起笑声，从而成为交际场合的主角。在艺术中，这一行为方式却被称为“复制”。
艺术是一门无后坐力炮，决定其发展的不是艺术家的个性，而是素材本身的推动力和逻辑，是材料发展的命运，这些材料每一次都需要找到（或提示出）本质上全新的美学解答。拥有自身的演变、动力、逻辑和未来，艺术便不是同义的，但在最好的情形下，与历史同步，其存在方式就是一次次新的美学现实的创造。因此，艺术常常走在“进程的前面”，走在历史的前面，而历史的基本工具——我们要不要点出马克思的话？——正是复制。
如今有这么一个主张流传甚广，似乎作家尤其是诗人，应当在自己的作品中采用街头的语言、大众的语言。这个带有虚幻的民主性和显见的实际利益的主张，对于作家来说是荒谬的，这是一个使艺术（这里是指文学）依附于历史的企图。如果我们认定，该停止“智慧”的发展了，那文学便应该用人民的语言说话。否则，人民则应该用文学的语言说话。
每一新的美学现实都为一个人明确着他的伦理现实。因为，美学是伦理学之母；“好”与“坏”的概念——首先是美学的概念，它们先于“善”与“恶”的范畴。在伦理学中之所以不是“一切均可能”，正是由于在美学中也不是“一切均可能”，因为光谱中颜色的数量是有限的。一个不懂事的婴儿，哭着拒绝一位陌生人，或是相反，要他抱，拒绝他还是要他抱，这婴儿下意识地完成着一个美学的而非道德的选择。
美学的选择总是高度个性化的，美学的感受也总是独特的感受。每一新的美学现实，都会使作为其感受者的那个人的面孔越发地独特，这一独特性有时能定型为文学的（或其他类型的）趣味，这时它就已自然而然地，即便不能成为一种保障，也会成为免遭奴役的一种保护方式。因为一个带有趣味、其中包括文学趣味的人，就较少受到重复的各种政治煽动形式和节律咒语的感染。问题不仅在于，美德并不是创作出杰出的保证，而且更在于，恶尤其是政治之恶，永远是一个坏的修辞家。个人的美学经验愈丰富，他的趣味愈坚定，他的道德选择就愈准确，他也就愈自由——尽管他有可能愈不幸。
正需要在这一更实用而较少玄虚的意义上去理解陀思妥耶夫斯基的“美拯救世界”的看法，或是马修·阿诺德的“诗歌拯救我们”的观点。世界，大约是不堪拯救了，但单个的人总是能被拯救的。美学鉴赏力在每个人的身上都发展得相当迅速，这是因为，一个人，即便他不能完全弄清他是什么以及他究竟该做什么，那么他也能下意识地知道他不喜欢什么以及什么东西不合他的意。就人类学的意义而言，我再重复一遍，人首先是一种美学的生物，其次才是伦理的生物。因此，艺术，特别是文学，并非人类发展的副产品，而恰恰相反。如果说有什么东西使我们有别于动物王国的其他代表，那便是语言，也就是文学，其中包括诗歌，诗歌作为语言的最高形式，说句唐突一点的话，它就是我们这一种类的目标。
我远不是想进行作诗法和结构方面的普及教育，然而，把知识阶层和所有其余的人区别开来的社会划分却是我所不能接受的。在道德关系中，这一划分近似于社会的贫富划分；但如果说，某些纯人身的、物质的划分依据对于社会不平等的存在而言尚有意义，那么这些依据对于精神的不平等而言则毫无意义。无论如何，这一意义上的平等我们天生就有。这里谈的不是教育，而是语言的教育，语言中最细微的变化也能招致荒谬选择对人的生活的入侵。文学的存在就意味着文学关怀的存在——不仅在道德方面，同时也在词汇方面。如果说，一部音乐作品还能给一个人在听众的被动角色和积极的演奏者之间进行选择的可能，那么文学——按蒙塔莱的说法，就是无望的语义学艺术——作品，却使这个人注定只能充任演奏者的角色。
我以为，较之于其他任何角色，人应该更多地扮演演奏者的角色。而且，我还以为，由于种群的爆炸，由于与此相连的日益加剧的社会的分裂，也就是说，由于日益加剧的个体的隔绝化，这样的角色愈来愈不可回避。关于生活，我不认为我比任何一位我的同龄人知道得更多，但我觉得，作为一个交谈者，一本书比一个朋友或一位恋人更可靠。一部长篇小说或一首诗——并非独白，而是作者与读者的交谈——是交谈，我重申一遍，是最真诚的、剔除任何杂念的交谈，如果愿意——那又是两个厌世者的交谈。在进行这样的交谈时，作者与读者是平等的，反过来也一样，这与他是不是一位伟大的作家并不相干。这一平等是意识的平等，它能以记忆的形式伴随一个人的终生，朦胧或清晰，早或晚，恰当或不恰当，它都决定着个体的行为。在谈到演奏者的角色时，我指的正是这一点，更自然地说就是：一部长篇小说或一首诗是作者和读者双边孤独的产物。
在我们种群的历史上，在“智慧”的历史上，书籍是一种人类学意义上的发展，其重要性类似于车轮的发明。书籍的出现，是为了让我们不仅知道我们的来源，而且也清楚“智慧”的用处，书籍是一种以书页翻动的速度越过经验空间的手段。这一移动和任何一次移动一样，也会转变成一种逃遁，逃离公分母，逃离用这一分母上高不过腰的线条来束缚我们的心灵、我们的意识、我们的想象这一企图。这一逃遁，也就是向独特的面部表情、向分子、向个性、向独特性的逃遁。我们已有五十亿，无论我们是按照谁的形象和类型被塑造出来的，除了艺术所勾勒出的未来，一个人没有另一种未来。否则，等待我们的将是过去——首先是充满大众警察娱乐的政治的过去。
一般的艺术，其中包括文学，成了社会上少数人的财产（特权），无论如何，我觉得这一状况是不健康的，危险的。我并不号召用图书馆去取代国家——虽然我不止一次地有过这种想法——但我仍不怀疑，如果我们依据其读者经验去选举我们的统治者，而不是依据其政治纲领，大地上也许会少一些痛苦。我觉得，对我们命运未来的统治者，应该先不去问他的外交政策方针是什么，而去问他对司汤达、狄更斯、陀思妥耶夫斯基持什么态度。尽管说，文学最必需的食粮是人的多样和人的丑陋，文学仍是全面广泛地解决人类生存问题这一方向已知或未来的所有企图的解毒剂。作为一个至少是道德上的保险体系，比起各式各样的信仰体系或哲学学说，它在任何地方都更为有效。
由于不可能有保护我们不受我们自己侵犯的法律，所以每一部刑法典都没有对反文学罪的惩罚条例。在这些罪过中，最深重的不是对作者的迫害，不是书刊检查组织等等，不是书籍的葬身火堆。有着更为深重的罪过——这就是鄙视书，不读书。由于这一罪过，一个人将终生受到惩罚；如果这一罪过是由整个民族犯下的话——这一民族就要因此受到自己历史的惩罚。我在我目前居住的那个国家里生活，我也许是第一个准备相信这一现实：在那个国家，一个人的物质财富与他的文学无知几乎相等；然而，使我不再深究这一点的，是我诞生并长大成人的那个国家的历史。因为，被驱向因果关系的最低极限、被驱向愚蠢公式的俄罗斯悲剧——正是社会的悲剧，文学在这一社会中成了少数人、即知名的俄罗斯知识分子的特权。
我不想展开这一话题，我不想因提及被另外成千上百万人毁坏的成千上百万人的生活而使这个晚会蒙上暗淡的色彩——因为，二十世纪上半叶在俄国发生的一切，都发生在自动武器出现之前——为了一种政治学说的胜利，这种政治学说的荒谬性早已表露无遗，因为它的实现需要人类的牺牲。我只想说——不是凭经验，唉，只是从理论上讲——我认为，与一个没读过狄更斯的人相比，一个读过狄更斯的人就更难为着任何一种思想学说而向自己的同类开枪。我谈的正是对狄更斯、司汤达、陀思妥耶夫斯基、福楼拜、巴尔扎克、麦尔维尔等等的阅读，也就是说是谈对文学的阅读，而不是谈识字，不是谈教育。识字的人也好，受过教育的人也好，完全可能一边宣读这样或那样的政治论文，一边杀害自己的同类，甚至还能因此体验到一种信仰的喜悦……
然而，在转入关于诗歌的话题前，我还想补充一点，俄罗斯的经验可以被合理地视为一个警告，这是因为，迄今为止的西方社会的一般构造，与1917年前俄国社会中存在过的一切很相近。（顺便说说，以此也正可以解释十九世纪俄国心理小说在西方的广泛传播和当代俄罗斯散文的相对失败。在二十世纪俄国形成的社会关系，对读者来说大约比文学主人公的名字更稀罕，这就妨碍了读者与文学主人公们的亲近）。比如，单说政治党派，1917年十月转折前夕的俄国所存在的政党，无论如何也不比今天美国或大不列颠的政党少。换句话说，一个冷静的人也许能看出，特定含义上的十九世纪目前正在西方继续着。在俄国它已结束；如果我要说它是以悲剧结束的，那么首要的依据就是人的牺牲的数量，已降临的社会和历史转变将他们掳掠而去。真正的悲剧中，死去的不是主角——死去的是合唱队。
三
虽然，对于一个母语是俄语的人来说，谈论政治之恶就像谈论食物消化一样自然，但现在我仍想换一个话题。谈论明了之事的缺点在于，这样的谈话会以其轻易、以其轻松获得的正确感觉使意识堕落。这种谈话的诱惑也正在于此，就其性质而言，这一诱惑近似于会孕育出恶来的社会改革家的诱惑。认清这一诱惑，抵制这一诱惑，在一定程度上是我们众多同时代人对命运所负的责任，更不用说那些笔友们对流自他们笔端的文学所负的责任了。文学，既不是脱离历史的逃遁，也不是记忆的余音，它不似旁观者所以为的那样。“奥斯维辛之后还能写出音乐吗？”——阿多尔诺问道，一个熟悉俄国历史的人也能重复提出同样的问题，只要更换一下集中营的名称——甚至，他有更大的权利重复这一问题，因为，死在斯大林集中营中的人数，远远超出死在德国集中营中的人数。“奥斯维辛之后还会有午餐吗？”——美国诗人马克·斯特雷德一次这样说。无论如何，我所属的这一代人是有能力写作这样的音乐的。
这一代人，这恰恰在奥斯维辛焚尸炉满负荷工作时、在斯大林处于其似乎自然合法的上帝般绝对权力之顶峰时出生的一代人，出现在世界上，审判一切，好让理应在这些焚尸炉中和斯大林的群岛上无名者合葬墓中中断的一切延续下去。并非一切都中断了——至少在俄国是这样——这一事实，就是我这一代不小的功绩，我更为自己牢靠地属于这一代而自豪，较之于我今天站在这里这件事。我今天站在这里这一事实，就是对这代人的文化所做出的功绩的肯定；想到曼德里施塔姆，我要补充一句——是为世界文化所做出的功绩。回首一望，我可以说，我们是在荒地上——更准确地说，是在荒凉得可怕的空地上开始的，我们有意识地，但更多则是直觉地致力于文化延续性效用的重建，致力于文化的形式和途径的重建，努力让文化那不多几个尚且完整的、也常常完全败坏了名声的形式充盈我们自身的、新的或我们固有的当代内容。
也许，存在着另一种途径——最大地变形的途径，残片和废墟诗文的途径，已停止呼吸的最低纲领主义的途径。如果说我们拒绝了这一途径，这完全不是因为它对我们来说是一条自我改编的途径，也不是因为我们曾因保护我们熟悉的文化形式传统的高尚这一思想而十分兴奋，在我们的意识中，这些文化形式与人的价值形式完全相同。我们之所以拒绝这一途径，是因为这一选择实际上不是我们的选择，而是文化的选择——这一选择仍然是美学的，而非道德的。当然，一个人不易把自己视作文化的武器，相反，他会更自然地将自己视为文化的创造者和保护者。如果我今天要肯定相反的一面，那也不是由于在二十世纪离去时去套用一下普罗提诺、夏夫兹伯里勋爵、谢林或诺瓦利斯的话就有什么特定的诱惑，而是由于，只有诗人才永远清楚，平常语言中被称之为缪斯的声音的东西，实质上是语言的操纵；他清楚，语言不是他的工具，而他倒是语言延续其存在的手段。语言——即便将它视为某种让人激奋的东西（这也许是正确的）——它也无助于伦理的选择。
一个人之所以写诗，意图各不相同：或为了赢得所爱女子的心，或为了表达他对一片风景或一个国家等周围现实的态度，或为了塑造他当时所处的精神状态，或为了在大地上留下痕迹——如他此刻所想的那样。他诉诸这一形式——诉诸一首诗——首先是出于无意识的、拟态的意图：白色纸张上垂直的黑色单词淤块，仿佛能使一个人想到他在世界上的个人处境，想到空间与他身体的比例。但是，与促使他拿起笔的各种意图无关，与流出其笔端的一切所起的效果无关，对于他的读者，无论其读者是多还是少——这一事业迅即的结果，就是一种与语言产生了直接联系的感觉，更确切地说，就是一种对语言中所说、所写、所实现的一切迅即产生依赖的感觉。
这种依赖性是绝对的，专断的，但它也会释放自由。因为，作为一种永远比作者更为古老的东西，语言还具有其时间潜力——即在前面的一切时间——赋予它的巨大的离心力。这一潜力，虽说也取决于操这一语言的民族的人数，但更取决于用这一语言所写的诗的数量。只要想想古希腊罗马文学的作者们就够了，只要想想但丁就够了。比如，今天用俄语或英语创作的作品，就能为这两种语言在下一个世纪中的存在提供保证。诗人，我重复一遍，是语言存在的手段。或者，如伟大的奥登所言，诗人就是语言赖以生存的人。写这些诗句的我不在了，读这些诗句的你们不在了，但写出那些诗句的语言和你们用它阅读那些诗句的语言却将留存下来，这不仅是由于语言比人更为长寿，而且还因为它更适应于突变。
然而，写诗的人写诗，并不是因为他指望死后的荣光，虽然他也时常希冀一首诗能比他活得更长，哪怕是稍长一些。写诗的人写诗，是因为语言对他作出暗示或者干脆口授接下来的诗句。一首诗开了头，诗人通常并不知道这首诗怎样结束，有时，写出的东西很叫人吃惊，因为写出的往往比他预期的更好，他的思想往往比他希求的走得更远。只有在语言的未来参与进诗人的现实的时刻，才有这样的情形。我们知道，存在着三种认识方式：分析的方式、直觉的方式和《圣经》中先知们所采用的领悟的方式。诗歌与其他文学形式的区别就在于，它能同时利用这所有三种方式（首先倾向于第二和第三种方式），因为这三种方式在语言中均已被提供出来；有时，借助一个词，一个韵脚，写诗的人就能出现在他之前谁也没到过的地方——也许，他会走得比他本人所希求的更远。写诗的人写诗，首先是因为，诗的写作是意识、思维和对世界的感受的巨大加速器。一个人若有一次体验到这种加速，他就不再会拒绝重复这种体验，他就会落入对这一过程的依赖，就像落进对麻醉剂或烈酒的依赖一样。一个处在对语言的这种依赖状态的人，我认为，就称之为诗人。
一九八七年
译 / 刘文飞
Nobel Lecture December 8, 1987
I
For someone rather private, for someone who all his life has preferred his private condition to any role of social significance, and who went in this preference rather far – far from his motherland to say the least, for it is better to be a total failure in democracy than a martyr or the crème de la crème in tyranny – for such a person to find himself all of a sudden on this rostrum is a somewhat uncomfortable and trying experience.
This sensation is aggravated not so much by the thought of those who stood here before me as by the memory of those who have been bypassed by this honor, who were not given this chance to address ‘urbi et orbi’, as they say, from this rostrum and whose cumulative silence is sort of searching, to no avail, for release through this speaker.
The only thing that can reconcile one to this sort of situation is the simple realization that – for stylistic reasons, in the first place – one writer cannot speak for another writer, one poet for another poet especially; that had Osip Mandelstam, or Marina Tsvetaeva, or Robert Frost, or Anna Akhmatova, or Wystan Auden stood here, they couldn’t have helped but speak precisely for themselves, and that they, too, might have felt somewhat uncomfortable.
These shades disturb me constantly; they are disturbing me today as well. In any case, they do not spur one to eloquence. In my better moments, I deem myself their sum total, though invariably inferior to any one of them individually. For it is not possible to better them on the page; nor is it possible to better them in actual life. And it is precisely their lives, no matter how tragic or bitter they were, that often move me – more often perhaps than the case should be – to regret the passage of time. If the next life exists – and I can no more deny them the possibility of eternal life than I can forget their existence in this one – if the next world does exist, they will, I hope, forgive me and the quality of what I am about to utter: after all, it is not one’s conduct on the podium which dignity in our profession is measured by.
I have mentioned only five of them, those whose deeds and whose lot matter so much to me, if only because if it were not for them, I, both as a man and a writer, would amount to much less; in any case, I wouldn’t be standing here today. There were more of them, those shades – better still, sources of light: lamps? stars? – more, of course, than just five. And each one of them is capable of rendering me absolutely mute. The number of those is substantial in the life of any conscious man of letters; in my case, it doubles, thanks to the two cultures to which fate has willed me to belong. Matters are not made easier by thoughts about contemporaries and fellow writers in both cultures, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts I rank above my own, and who, had they found themselves on this rostrum, would have come to the point long ago, for surely they have more to tell the world than I do.
I will allow myself, therefore, to make a number of remarks here – disjointed, perhaps stumbling, and perhaps even perplexing in their randomness. However, the amount of time allotted to me to collect my thoughts, as well as my very occupation, will, or may, I hope, shield me, at least partially, against charges of being chaotic. A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system – but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal – however permanent it may be – than the creative process itself, the process of composition. Verse really does, in Akhmatova’s words, grow from rubbish; the roots of prose are no more honorable.
II
If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness – thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous “I”. Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct – free of any go-betweens – relations.
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a “period, period, comma, and a minus”, transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.
The great Baratynsky, speaking of his Muse, characterized her as possessing an “uncommon visage”. It’s in acquiring this “uncommon visage” that the meaning of human existence seems to lie, since for this uncommonness we are, as it were, prepared genetically. Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one’s task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one’s own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience, on a tautology – regrettable all the more because the heralds of historical necessity, at whose urging a man may be prepared to agree to this tautology, will not go to the grave with him or give him so much as a thank-you.
Language and, presumably, literature are things that are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent – better yet, the infinite – against the temporary, against the finite. To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself mesmerized by the state’s features, which, whether monstrous or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics – not to mention its aesthetics – are always “yesterday”. Language and literature are always “today”, and often – particularly in the case where a political system is orthodox – they may even constitute “tomorrow”. One of literature’s merits is precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to avoid tautology – that is, the fate otherwise known by the honorific term, “victim of history”. What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called “cliché”.
Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found “ahead of progress”, ahead of history, whose main instrument is – should we not, once more, improve upon Marx – precisely the cliché.
Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature.
On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man’s ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of “good” and “bad” are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of “good” and “evil”. If in ethics not “all is permitted”, it is precisely because not “all is permitted” in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one.
Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one’s experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer – though not necessarily the happier – he is.
It is precisely in this applied, rather than Platonic, sense that we should understand Dostoevsky’s remark that beauty will save the world, or Matthew Arnold’s belief that we shall be saved by poetry. It is probably too late for the world, but for the individual man there always remains a chance. An aesthetic instinct develops in man rather rapidly, for, even without fully realizing who he is and what he actually requires, a person instinctively knows what he doesn’t like and what doesn’t suit him. In an anthropological respect, let me reiterate, a human being is an aesthetic creature before he is an ethical one. Therefore, it is not that art, particularly literature, is a by-product of our species’ development, but just the reverse. If what distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom is speech, then literature – and poetry in particular, being the highest form of locution – is, to put it bluntly, the goal of our species.
I am far from suggesting the idea of compulsory training in verse composition; nevertheless, the subdivision of society into intelligentsia and “all the rest” seems to me unacceptable. In moral terms, this situation is comparable to the subdivision of society into the poor and the rich; but if it is still possible to find some purely physical or material grounds for the existence of social inequality, for intellectual inequality these are inconceivable. Equality in this respect, unlike in anything else, has been guaranteed to us by nature. I am speaking not of education, but of the education in speech, the slightest imprecision in which may trigger the intrusion of false choice into one’s life. The existence of literature prefigures existence on literature’s plane of regard – and not only in the moral sense, but lexically as well. If a piece of music still allows a person the possibility of choosing between the passive role of listener and the active one of performer, a work of literature – of the art which is, to use Montale’s phrase, hopelessly semantic – dooms him to the role of performer only.
In this role, it would seem to me, a person should appear more often than in any other. Moreover, it seems to me that, as a result of the population explosion and the attendant, ever-increasing atomization of society (i.e., the ever-increasing isolation of the individual), this role becomes more and more inevitable for a person. I don’t suppose that I know more about life than anyone of my age, but it seems to me that, in the capacity of an interlocutor, a book is more reliable than a friend or a beloved. A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. It’s precisely this that I have in mind in speaking of the role of the performer, all the more natural for one because a novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader.
In the history of our species, in the history of Homo sapiens, the book is anthropological development, similar essentially to the invention of the wheel. Having emerged in order to give us some idea not so much of our origins as of what that sapiens is capable of, a book constitutes a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page. This movement, like every movement, becomes a flight from the common denominator, from an attempt to elevate this denominator’s line, previously never reaching higher than the groin, to our heart, to our consciousness, to our imagination. This flight is the flight in the direction of “uncommon visage”, in the direction of the numerator, in the direction of autonomy, in the direction of privacy. Regardless of whose image we are created in, there are already five billion of us, and for a human being there is no other future save that outlined by art. Otherwise, what lies ahead is the past – the political one, first of all, with all its mass police entertainments.
In any event, the condition of society in which art in general, and literature in particular, are the property or prerogative of a minority appears to me unhealthy and dangerous. I am not appealing for the replacement of the state with a library, although this thought has visited me frequently; but there is no doubt in my mind that, had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. It seems to me that a potential master of our fates should be asked, first of all, not about how he imagines the course of his foreign policy, but about his attitude toward Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky. If only because the lock and stock of literature is indeed human diversity and perversity, it turns out to be a reliable antidote for any attempt – whether familiar or yet to be invented – toward a total mass solution to the problems of human existence. As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine.
Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature – the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books – we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. Living in the country I live in, I would be the first prepared to believe that there is a set dependency between a person’s material well-being and his literary ignorance. What keeps me from doing so is the history of that country in which I was born and grew up. For, reduced to a cause-and-effect minimum, to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority: of the celebrated Russian intelligentsia.
I have no wish to enlarge upon the subject, no wish to darken this evening with thoughts of the tens of millions of human lives destroyed by other millions, since what occurred in Russia in the first half of the Twentieth Century occurred before the introduction of automatic weapons – in the name of the triumph of a political doctrine whose unsoundness is already manifested in the fact that it requires human sacrifice for its realization. I’ll just say that I believe – not empirically, alas, but only theoretically – that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.
However, before I move on to poetry, I would like to add that it would make sense to regard the Russian experience as a warning, if for no other reason than that the social structure of the West up to now is, on the whole, analogous to what existed in Russia prior to 1917. (This, by the way, is what explains the popularity in the West of the Nineteenth-Century Russian psychological novel, and the relative lack of success of contemporary Russian prose. The social relations that emerged in Russia in the Twentieth Century presumably seem no less exotic to the reader than do the names of the characters, which prevent him from identifying with them.) For example, the number of political parties, on the eve of the October coup in 1917, was no fewer than what we find today in the United States or Britain. In other words, a dispassionate observer might remark that in a certain sense the Nineteenth Century is still going on in the West, while in Russia it came to an end; and if I say it ended in tragedy, this is, in the first place, because of the size of the human toll taken in course of that social – or chronological – change. For in a real tragedy, it is not the hero who perishes; it is the chorus.
III
Although for a man whose mother tongue is Russian to speak about political evil is as natural as digestion, I would here like to change the subject. What’s wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil. The realization, or rather the comprehension, of this temptation, and rejection of it, are perhaps responsible to a certain extent for the destinies of many of my contemporaries, responsible for the literature that emerged from under their pens. It, that literature, was neither a flight from history nor a muffling of memory, as it may seem from the outside. “How can one write music after Auschwitz?” inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp – and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin’s camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. “And how can you eat lunch?” the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.
That generation – the generation born precisely at the time when the Auschwitz crematoria were working full blast, when Stalin was at the zenith of his Godlike, absolute power, which seemed sponsored by Mother Nature herself – that generation came into the world, it appears, in order to continue what, theoretically, was supposed to be interrupted in those crematoria and in the anonymous common graves of Stalin’s archipelago. The fact that not everything got interrupted, at least not in Russia, can be credited in no small degree to my generation, and I am no less proud of belonging to it than I am of standing here today. And the fact that I am standing here is a recognition of the services that generation has rendered to culture; recalling a phrase from Mandelstam, I would add, to world culture. Looking back, I can say again that we were beginning in an empty – indeed, a terrifyingly wasted – place, and that, intuitively rather than consciously, we aspired precisely to the recreation of the effect of culture’s continuity, to the reconstruction of its forms and tropes, toward filling its few surviving, and often totally compromised, forms, with our own new, or appearing to us as new, contemporary content.
There existed, presumably, another path: the path of further deformation, the poetics of ruins and debris, of minimalism, of choked breath. If we rejected it, it was not at all because we thought that it was the path of self-dramatization, or because we were extremely animated by the idea of preserving the hereditary nobility of the forms of culture we knew, the forms that were equivalent, in our consciousness, to forms of human dignity. We rejected it because in reality the choice wasn’t ours, but, in fact, culture’s own – and this choice, again, was aesthetic rather than moral.
To be sure, it is natural for a person to perceive himself not as an instrument of culture, but, on the contrary, as its creator and custodian. But if today I assert the opposite, it’s not because toward the close of the Twentieth Century there is a certain charm in paraphrasing Plotinus, Lord Shaftesbury, Schelling, or Novalis, but because, unlike anyone else, a poet always knows that what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of the language; that it’s not that the language happens to be his instrument, but that he is language’s means toward the continuation of its existence. Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.
A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form – the poem – most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. But regardless of the reasons for which he takes up the pen, and regardless of the effect produced by what emerges from beneath that pen on his audience – however great or small it may be – the immediate consequence of this enterprise is the sensation of coming into direct contact with language or, more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, and accomplished in it.
This dependence is absolute, despotic; but it unshackles as well. For, while always older than the writer, language still possesses the colossal centrifugal energy imparted to it by its temporal potential – that is, by all time Iying ahead. And this potential is determined not so much by the quantitative body of the nation that speaks it (though it is determined by that, too), as by the quality of the poem written in it. It will suffice to recall the authors of Greek or Roman antiquity; it will suffice to recall Dante. And that which is being created today in Russian or English, for example, secures the existence of these languages over the course of the next millennium also. The poet, I wish to repeat, is language’s means for existence – or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.
One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn’t know the way it’s going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.
There are, as we know, three modes of cognition: analytical, intuitive, and the mode that was known to the Biblical prophets, revelation. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature is that it uses all three of them at once (gravitating primarily toward the second and the third). For all three of them are given in the language; and there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience; one falls into dependency on this process, the way others fall into dependency on drugs or on alcohol. One who finds himself in this sort of dependency on language is, I guess, what they call a poet.
Translated from the Russian by Barry Rubin.
诗歌poetryart 2022-05-04 0