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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Some poets are astonishingly precocious: Arthur Rimbaud, for example, wrote everything he had to write by the time he was nineteen. Nikolai Morshen’s development as a poet offers an opposite example. Gradually maturing in a leisurely and deliberate manner over almost four decades, this poet’s work, when viewed in its totality, is a study in ever deepening philosophical thought and ever more finely honed verbal mastery. The stages of Morshen’s development and their chronology are obvious enough: the verse of 1936 to 1946 (written prior to Morshen’s first published collection and, for the most part, not included in it); the three published books of verse, Tiulen' (The Seal, 1959), Dvoetochie (Punctuation: Colon, 1967), and Ekho i zerkalo (The Echo and the Mirror, 1979); and a few poems that have appeared in émigré journals from his fourth, unpublished collection, “Umolkshii zhavoronok” (“The Now-Silent Lark”).
1. See Nikolai, Morshen, Tiulen’ (Frankfurt/Main, 1959)Google Scholar; idem, Dvoetochie (Washington, D. C, 1967); and idem, Ekho i zerkalo (Berkeley, Calif., 1979). The poems intended for “Umolkshii zhavoronok” appeared in Russkii al'manakh (Paris, 1981), pp. 103-106 and Perekrestiki (Crossroads), 2 (1978): 10-13, 3 (1979): 17-18, and 4 (1980): 27.
2. Mnimnye velichiny (New York, 1952). The book is available in English as Chains of Fear, trans. Christopher Bird (Chicago, 1958), in French as Grandeurs imaginaires (Paris, 1959), and in German as Wenn das Saltz schall wird, trans. Siegfried von Vegesack (Graz, n.d.). Mogu was published in Buenos Aires in 1965.
3. Personal communication. A study should one day be written about the phenomenon of the persistent and parallel cults of the three officially disapproved poets in the pre-1960s USSR — the romantic and escapist cult of Gumilev, the sentimental cult of Esenin, and the intellectual cult of Khlebnikov.
4. See, for example, “Zakaty” ( “Sunsets” ), Tiulen', pp. 27-28. See also the untitled poem in ibid., p. 16.
5. This was in a mimeographed edition, of which no copy has been preserved. See “Iskhod,” ibid., p. 41.
6. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
7. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
8. The cited lines from Gumilev's “Fra Beato Angelico” appear as an epigraph to the untitled poem in ibid., p. 18, and fragments from these same lines are scattered in the fourth stanza of this poem. Morshen remembers that the Gumilev lines he actually overheard in the situation described in the poem were from that poet's “Indiuk” ( “The Tomturkey” ).
9. Ibid., pp. 15, 23, and 17, respectively.
10. Ibid., p. 12.
11. Ibid., p. 40.
12. Ibid., p. 19.
13. “Latch your door! But you won't exorcise your fright/With this cubbyhole as depressing as a burrow: /Your magic circle is a vicious circle/Because its squaring is unreal.” (Ibid.)
14. “And far away, where the darkness lasts half the year or longer/There are words as shaggy as bears: /Vorkuta, Magadan, Kolyma, Ukhtpechlag …/Like the crown of thorns or the mark of Cain —/The polar circle, the ultimate, the ninth one.” (Ibid.)
15. Ibid., p. 26 and Aleksandr, Solzhenitsyn, V krugepervom (New York, 1968), pp. 112–18 Google Scholar.
16. Tiulen', pp. 3-4.
17. Mandel'shtam's interest in Linnaeus, Lamarck, Buffon, and other eighteenth-century predecessors of Darwin's ideas on evolution runs like a constant thread through his Journey to Armenia and also finds expression in his poems “Lamarck” and “A nebo budushchim beremenno” ( “And the sky is pregnant with the future” ). See Mandel'shtam, Osip, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1967-71), 2: 137–76; 1: 177-78 and 145–47Google Scholar.
18. “Klubilis’ nochi u reki,” Dvoetochie, pp. 18-19. The poem has been translated into English with miraculous precision by Richard Wilbur as “Nights rolled upon the river's face” (Triquarterly [Evanston], 28 [Fall 1973]: 426-27; reprinted in The Bitter Air of Exile, Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr., eds. [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976], pp. 334-35).
19.
(Dvoetochie, p. 10).
20. See “Urok botaniki” ( “Botany Lesson” ) in ibid., pp. 61-62; “Tsvetok” ( “The Flower” ), ibid., pp. 63-64; and “Bylinka” ( “A Blade of Grass” ), ibid., p. 58.
21. “In the world of dim hopes and homeless dogs/Flowers blossom every morning./And Budapest rises. And Pasternak conducts/Informal conversations with immortality. Unfrozen water, alive as quicksilver, bursts through ice./Words gather into lines./Suns blaze forth. Nightingales thunder./And grass tears up asphalt.” (Ibid., p. 43)
22. Chekhov, A. P., Sobranie sochinenii, 12 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1960-64), 11: 281 Google Scholar.
23. “Thrice will the waters strike the shore, /And thrice will the cocks crow, /That new offspring is to be expected by winter, /That beasts, people and poems/Are all brothers, all of the same race, /Not nature's whim, but her law, /Her successes, not her sins.” ( “U slovarei” [ “At the Dictionaries” ], in Dvoetochie, p. 30)
23. 24. Ibid., pp. 43-44.
25. “Noch’ na vzmor'e” ( “Night at the Seaside” ), ibid., p. 52; “More, kholodnyi perpetuum mobile” ( “The sea, a cold perpetuum mobile” ), ibid., p. 48; and “Segodnia tikho na more” ( “The sea is quiet today” ), ibid., p. 54.
26. “Balerine” ( “To a Ballerina” ), ibid., p. 47.
27. Dvoetochie, pp. 31-32.
28. Ibid., p. 32.
29. Ibid., pp. 65-66.
30. Vladimir, Veidle, “Zhretsy edinykh muz: 7. Dvoe drugikh,” Novoe russkoe slovo (New York), October 28, 1973Google Scholar.
31. Leonid, Rzhevskii, “Strofy i ‘zvony’ v sovremennoi russkoi poezii,” Novyi zhumal, 1974, no. 115, p. 137 Google Scholar.
32. Ekho i zerkalo, p. 16.
33. Ibid., p. 35.
34. Arthur, Koestler, The Sleepwalkers; a history of man's changing visions of the universe (New York, 1959Google Scholar).
35. “howevertheattentiveglancewilldiscerninitthecharmofintelligenceandtheseverityoflove However, the attentive glance will discern in it the charm of intelligence and the severity of love. However, the attentive glance will discern in it the charm of intelligence and the severity of love.” ( “Sad i les,” in Ekho i zerkalo, p. 23)
36. Ibid., pp. 69-70.
37. Ibid., p. 12.
38. Ibid., p. 24.
39. Ibid., p. 65.
40. “'In our country there's happiness!'/—The people … and … misfortune!/'In our country there's freedom!'/— The people … and … captivity!/'But we need the commune! Build it!'/ — Who needs … [this] … hell? Let it be!” (Ibid., p. 14)
41. “And behind the stern of the spaceship/The land of Russia narrows down/Compresses itself into a landlet, a land-drop, / On it there flicker facelets, not faces, / Laudatory verselets in teensy journals, /Teensy psychoclinics, tiny sobering-up stations, diminutive obscenities —/Even the language itself strives to be petty.” (Ibid., pp. 79-80)
42. “Do I rejoice? No, rather I tremble./Am I becoming petty? Yes, I want to shrivel/And now, no longer with faith in constancy/But only with a birthmark on a memento [instead of Motherland in memory] I fly/Into the immense alien realm of free space.” (Ibid.)
43. Ibid., pp. 75-78.
44. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
45. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
46.
(Ibid., p. 27)
47. Ibid., p. 89.
48. “Rhythms hummed in a murky ocean, /The first river flowed and sang, /There flew [or] floated, in an Aristophanian manner/Frogs, birds, wasps, clouds.” ( “The Now-Silent Lark” )
