Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva

The painter Leonid Pasternak was not sure how to react when his son wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke in April 1926, asking the elder poet to send an inscribed copy of one of his books, “perhaps the Duino Elegies”, to his “greatest and probably only friend”. “Her name is Marina Tsvetaeva”, Boris Pasternak explained, “and she lives in Paris, 19th arrondissement, 8 rue Rouvet”. He told Rilke that Tsvetaeva was “a born poet, a great talent . . . . who writes in a way that none of us in the USSR now writes”.

Leonid Pasternak, who had met Rilke in Moscow twenty-five years earlier, when his son and Tsvetaeva were just schoolchildren, persuaded himself that his anxieties about the propriety of the request were due to the excessive decorum of his generation and his own insufficient understanding of the ways of poets. “Perhaps among you poets it’s accepted to exchange books without being personally acquainted”, he concluded with paternal deference. For Rilke, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, separated by geography, politics and domestic circumstances, the exchange of books was itself the source of the immediate and ecstatic sense of kinship – far over-running the bounds of conventional “personal acquaintanceship” – recorded in their correspondence of summer 1926.
Indeed, Pasternak’s request to Rilke was prompted by his reading of Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” (1924) for the first time on the very day that he received word from his father that Rilke had read and admired his own poems. “My whole disposition has been blown to pieces by Rilke’s letter and Marina’s poem”, he wrote to his sister Josephine, “it’s as though my heart has ripped open my shirt. I’ve gone crazy, splinters are flying: something akin to me exists in the world, and what kin!” Although Pasternak fantasized about travelling to Switzerland with Tsvetaeva to visit the dying Rilke, and there were intermittent urges and unrealized plans to meet over the years, actual encounters played no part in the “love” that their letters mutually proclaim. As Tsvetaeva later wrote to Pasternak, “we have nothing except words”. Her shrewd sense of how meeting in person might jeopardize the communion available to them in letters (and dreams) was part of a longstanding philosophy of “non-meeting” (razminovenie) with other great poets, which, in its turn, contributed to what Joseph Brodsky calls her retreat into an ever-expanding “sphere of isolation”. “I know Boris very little”, she wrote to Rilke, “and love him as one only loves the never-seen.” The few meetings between them in Moscow before Tsvetaeva’s emigration in 1922 were inconsequential; their eventual reunion in 1935 at an anti-Fascist Writers’ Congress in Paris, which Pasternak (by now deep in compromise with Stalinism) had been forced to attend, was a disappointment, which soon declined into misunderstanding and recrimination. Nonetheless, Tsvetaeva became a main prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, the novel which Pasternak completed almost fifteen years after her suicide. more…

Generals always prepare for the previous war

In the course of discussions and polemics about the writing of Czech literary history and the literary canon, two things have begun to interest me more and more: the mechanisms that explain why discussions about writing history are so impassioned these days, and the relationship between these discussions and the field of thinking in which they are taking place and which they are trying to help form.

Noteworthy – and, in the context of Czech literary scholarship, quite unusual – is the sheer number of discussions about history-writing; their frequency alone strengthens the suspicion that we are in a breakthrough moment when a new paradigm of literary history is being established. For anyone who has experienced these discussions on literary and non-literary history, the suspicion becomes a certainty: the majority of participants distance themselves from “normal history”, proclaiming that the way it has been written until now can no longer meet the demands of the age, and hence there must be a change in historical thinking and practice that aims at the very foundations, somewhere in the depths of the nineteenth century and the national awakening.

These discussions share a common starting point, the thesis that literary history and literary canons are not given to us by God or Nature, but are the product of free human activity. In other words, they are a construct, and always have a creator. The past of literature, that is, does not constitute an essence that we are getting ever closer to; the history we write about literature is just a stylized narrative, motivated purely subjectively, a constructed story that always blends together with the moment of its origin as well as the social position and views of the person formulating it. From this starting point, such meditations tend to cast doubt on several certainties of literary history that had seemed undoubtable, but that now reveal themselves as artificial constructs maintained by power relations:

- The assumption of continuity and causality – which until now justified the historian in searching for connections between past and present – is problematized.

- The meaning of the national language, as well as the meaning of the national literature that grows out of it, were once the key subject of a nation’s literary history; now they are being relativized.

- The very idea of literature as art, and of literary value as the constitutive feature of the literary work and the principal subject of literary history, is blurred.

In practice, this also means casting the literary canon into doubt; it stops being perceived as something natural and becomes an instrument of power in the formation of social consciousness, helping to impose on its recipients a vision of what should be considered valuable in works of the past. Indeed, realizing the relativity of literary-historical efforts is a very good thing – not only because it allows us to see that the achievements of earlier scholars in our field are created constructs, but also because it leads to a deeper reflection on, and correction of, our own work. more…

Ingmar Bergman: the sense of the world

You can read a great novel – Nostromo, for example – and immediately, on finishing, want to read it again. You can listen to a great symphony – Bruckner’s 7th, for example – and have the same experience. Ditto for great works of painting, sculpture and architecture. But very few films have this effect on their intended audience, and even if you occasionally want to see a film twice or thrice, it is rare that a film proves inexhaustible, in the way that Conrad and Bruckner are inexhaustible.

In cinema, too much is built upon effects, which do not bear repetititon once they have lost the element of surprise; too much in the image is accidental, intrusive or irrelevant to the story; too much is dependent on the arbitrary appearance of the actors, rather than the depths of the characters they portray – in short, too much is focused on that first and startling impression, and little or nothing on the meaning that can only reveal itself in time. The cinema is an art in which redundancies proliferate, flooding and diluting the dramatic image. And it has all got worse since the introduction of colour, and the subsequent loss of control over light, shade and contrast.

There are exceptions, of course: Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Welles, and many more. But few if any have equalled Ingmar Bergman in the ability to subdue the redundancies of the moving image, and to make it into a unique vehicle of dramatic expression. Even now, after ten viewings, I want to see Wild Strawberries again, not for the story only, but for specific snatches of dialogue, specific images and the specific atmosphere which makes this film enter the soul with the evocative force of a play by Ibsen or Strindberg.

The comparison with those dramatists is, I think, important. For Bergman was a man of the theatre, who understood that, if the cinema is to justify its claims as an independent art-form, it must show how its techniques contribute something of their own to the drama. Bergman’s approach to the screen was like Henry James’s approach to the novel: a constant obedience to the supreme command – “Dramatise!” Not only is the dialogue in his films masterly, flowing smoothly between the characters in exactly the manner of a well-made play; the camera filters out all that distracts from the action, with images carefully composed so as to frame the word, the gesture, the facial expression which tells us all. In Persona, in which the central character does not speak, the camera speaks for her, dramatising her silence as intensely as her garrulous nurse is dramatised by her flood of trivial narrative.  more…

The temptations of the dinosaur theory

During the IT boom of the 1990s, I used to travel the convention circuit, sometimes as speaker, sometimes as listener. At almost every lecture, I encountered the very same person. The propeller head, so called because he seemed to be floating a few decimetres above the floor.The message of the propeller head was always the same: beware, everything is going to change so fast you’ll never know what hit you!

One of the recurring prophecies of the propeller heads concerned the future of the book and/or the newspaper. I remember one instance, when a consultant from a highly prestigious firm showed us a slide of a lady in a recliner, reading a newspaper. As the lecturer said: Imagine that this picture is taken five years into the future. Now, what is wrong with it? And he answered his own question: Five years from now, there will be ladies, there will be recliners – but there will be no newspapers!

That was in 1997.

My friend the propeller head was, in my opinion, a victim of the dinosaur theory. Many people are. We will return to that later, but first I will try to say a few words about another friend of ours, Marshal McLuhan, a man whose theories are very present in the debate on digital media – and, in some cases, very misunderstood.

is interesting to see to what degree it is possible to apply the ideas of McLuhan to the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. McLuhan died in 1980, well before the Internet was a common instrument, and published his two major works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

The central idea in The Gutenberg Galaxy is that the technology we use to communicate determines the way we think and what we can think. McLuhan traces the source of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in ca 1440. It was not the new ability to reproduce text in high quantities, and therefore the possibility to access the classics and new philosophical writings, that brought about the changes in society, McLuhan argues, but the new ability to think with your eyes instead of your ears. McLuhan’s observation is in many ways correct. The distribution of print media in wider and wider circles brought about a slowly accelerating revolution in how we perceived and used literature. From something that was brought to you by sound, from word of mouth, often in groups, and more often than not in a dimly lit room, the peasants kitchen, or by the bonfire, literature mutated into something that you viewed with your eyes, as an individual, alone and in a lit room. McLuhan argues that the way we used the new print media is an important aspect of the birth of the modern individual (ideas that have been expanded in interesting ways by his pupil Walter Ong.)

So far I follow him. I think he is exaggerating, but I find his thinking interesting and not so far off the mark.

But in Understanding Media, and in his later works, his style is more blurred, and his love for wordplay and puns make it easy to misinterpret him. His argument seems to be: the turn towards “electronic media” weakens the position of visual media such as print (e.g. books, magazines, and newspapers). The rise of electronic media – and even the computer, as McLuhan understands it, around 1965 – is a shift away from the technology that created the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. To cut it short: television makes us stupid. McLuhan never stoops to such easy remarks, but this is in many ways his legacy, misinterpreted or not.

McLuhan tended towards pessimistic and somewhat apocalyptic ideas, more so in his later books. I might be doing him an injustice, and many of the more cynical remarks on the development of modern media and modern culture that are usually attributed to him should perhaps be put down to some of his disciples and to a general misunderstanding of his ideas. But he does say, in Understanding Media, that the effect of television on society does not come from the content. The actual programmes people are watching – documentaries about African animals, stupid soap operas, or ultra-violent action movies – don’t matter, he says. What matters is the technology by which we access the world. The technology shapes our models of thinking. That’s how we should understand his famous sentence, “The medium is the message”. more…

Charles Simic named US poet laureate

Charles Simic, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who emigrated to the US from Yugoslavia aged 16, has been named as his adopted country’s new poet laureate.Simic will be the 15th poet to hold the title of US poet laureate. The annual post of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress has existed since 1937, but the occupant was not officially designated poet laureate until 1985, following an act of Congress. With his appointment, Simic joins a venerable rollcall that includes such luminaries as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost.  more…