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Taking Monologism Seriously: Bakhtin and Tsvetaeva's “The Pied Piper”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Catherine Ciepiela
Catherine Ciepiela*
Affiliation:
Department of Russian, Amherst College
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Extract

“Lyric dialogism” is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, “Slovo v romane” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently “monologic,” as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel. He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century. On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Winter 1994 , pp. 1010 - 1024
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

1. There are two noteworthy exceptions to this view. Paul de Man and Mikhail Gasparov, from very different cultural and theoretical perspectives, perceive Bakhtin's attack on poetry as related to problematic aspects of his thinking about language and culture. Paul de Man finds that Bakhtin's hostility to poetry manifests a fundamental resistance to figural language (“Dialogue and Dialogism,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, eds. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989], 105–14). Mikhail Gasparov contextualizes the attack in the cultural politics of the 1920s, painting a questionable portrait of Bakhtin as an avantgarde “culture-builder” eager to challenge all forms of literary authority (“M. M. Bakhtin v russkoi kul'ture XX veka,” Vtorichnye modeliruiushchie sistemy [Tartu: Tartu University, 1979], 111–14).

2. M. M., Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 4th ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 232 Google Scholar.

3. Some of these lecture notes have been published in Den'poezii (Moscow) 1983: 80–81, and 1985: 113–15.

4. Bakhtin, , “K filosofii postupka,” Filosofiia i solsiologiia nauki i tekhniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 80–160 Google Scholar. This text is now available in Vadim Liapunov's translation, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). When quoting the Bakhtin school's texts in English, I will use the major published translations, to which I have made slight alterations. Translations of all other texts are entirely my own.

5. On the question of whether Bakhtin actually authored works attributed to Medvedev and Voloshinov, see Katerina, Clark and Michael, Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984 Google Scholar; Titunik, I. R., “The Bakhtin Problem,” Slavic and East European Journal 30, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 91–95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 Google Scholar; and Bocharov, S. G., “Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2 (1993): 70–89 Google Scholar. Since there is still no conclusive evidence to support the case for Bakhtin's authorship, I have chosen to retain the initial attributions.

6. V. N., Voloshinov, Marksizm i jilosofiia iazyka: Osnovnye problemy sotsiologickeskogo metoda v nauke o iazyke, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Priboi, 1930 Google Scholar; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 24. See also Bakhtin's later essay, “Problema rechevykh zhanrov” (1952–1953), in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 237–80.

7. Bakhtin, , “Slovo v roinane,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 149 Google Scholar.

8. Ken, Hirschkop, “Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory,” in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds. Hirschkop, Ken and Shepherd, David (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 23 Google Scholar.

9. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane,” 110–11. The text is italicized according to the original.

10. Iurii, Tynianov, Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka, poetiki, Voprosy, no. 5 (Leningrad: Academia, 1924; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1963)Google Scholar.

11. Bakhtin, “K filosofii postupka,” 141–42.

12. Ibid., 144.

13. Bakhtin also addressed the topic of rhythm in “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti” ( “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” 1920–1923) which develops the concerns of “Philosophy of the Act” in the realm of aesthetics (Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 7–180). A fragment of what is believed to be the essay's first section includes a similar reading of Pushkin's “Parting” (Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki, 138–57). But there is also a later section on rhythm entitled “Vremennoe tseloe geroia” ( “The Temporal Unity of the Hero “). Here Bakhtin was concerned with the role of rhythm in “giving form to a soul,” or what a contemporary critic might term “a self.” Rhythm effects a kind of closure that is impossible with regard to oneself, since it is always experienced as open-ended, as “yet-to-be.” But one may and always does bestow such closure upon the other by “rhythmicizing” or “embodying” him. In so doing, one renders the other dangerously passive but also, as Emerson and Morson put it, “rescue[s] the other from pure potential.” This is essentially the same idea Bakhtin expressed in “Philosophy of the Act” with respect to poetic rhythm: the closure of rhythm is a necessary condition for the creation of a text (and/or self). It is worth noting that Bakhtin also spoke offabula as a rhythmicizing impulse.

14. See David Danow's discussion of the broad and, as he argues, unproductive ways in which Bakhtin's notion of dialogism has been employed in contemporary criticism (“Dialogic Poetics” in his The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: From Word to Culture [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991]).

15. Iurii Levin et al., “Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma,” Russian Literature 7/8 (1974): 47–82. In her article “Intertextuality: The Soviet Approach to Subtext,” Elaine Rusinko emphasized the productive symbiosis between acmeist poetics and structuralist methodology (Dispositio 4, no. 11/12 [1979]: 213–35).

16. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 232.

17. Levin et al., 71.

18. Renate, Lachmann, “Bachtins Dialogizität und die akmeistische Mythopoetik als Paradigma dialogisierter Lyrik,” in Das Cespräch, eds. Stierle, Karlheinz and Warnung, Reiner, Poetik, und Hermeneutik, , no. 11 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 489–515 Google Scholar.

19. Ibid., 510.

20. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane,” 100.

21. Bakhtin, , Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii (New York: Serebrianyi vek, 1982), 83 Google Scholar.

22. For a valuable discussion of the difference between the bakhtinian and structuralist conceptions of language, and its impact on their interpretive methods, see Titunik, I. R., “M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and Soviet Semiotics,” Dispositio 1, no. 3 (1976): 327–38.Google Scholar

23. Iurii, Lotman, Analiz poeticheskogo teksta: Struktura stikha (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1972), 110 Google Scholar.

24. Bakhtin, “Iz zapisei 1970–71 godov,” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorcheslva, 339. Bakhtin provided his own commentary on Pushkin's novel in “Discourse. “

25. Lotman, 12.

26. I refer throughout to the version of'The Pied Piper” published in the fourth volume of Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, eds. Viktoriia Shveitser and Aleksandr Sumerkin (New York: Russica, 1980).

27. Pasternak was a great admirer of “The Pied Piper,” and his extended remarks in his letters to Tsvetaeva are an important commentary on the poem. See his letters of 5.VI, 7.VI, 10.VI, 13.VI, 14.VI, 18.VI, and 2.VII.1926 in Rainer Mariia Ril'ke, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva: Pis'ma 1926 goda, eds. K. Azadovskii, E. B. Pasternak, E. V. Pasternak (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 132: 58.

28. See my article “Leading the Revolution: Tsvetaeva's ‘The Pied Piper’ and Blok's ‘The Twelve, “’ to be published in the proceedings of the International Tsvetaeva Symposium at Amherst, 1992 (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1994).

29. Bakhtin, “Slovo v roniane,” 114–15.

30. Tsvetaeva identified herself with Dostoevsky's Kalerina Ivanovna (of Crime and Punishment) in a letter to George Ivask (5.X.1934):

Somehow I've never really had any use for Dostoevsky, but 1 recognize myself in “White Nights” … and, most of all, remember this, —in Katerina Ivanovna with her shawl and her naked children, in her French dialect. That's me—at home, in the everyday world, with children, in Soviet Russia and in the emigration; me, in that real soup and dish-water puddle that is my life since 1917, and from which—I judge and threaten.

(“Pis'ma M. I. Tsvetaevoi Iu. P. Ivasku [1933–1937],” Russkii literaturnyi arkhiv, eds. Michael Karpovich and Dmitry Čiževsky [New York, 1956], 216.)

31. Bakhtin, “Slovo v roniane,” 112.

32. See Marie-Luise Bott's commentary to her translation of “The Pied Piper,” Krysolov. Der Rattenfanger, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 7 (Vienna: Gesel Ischaft zur Forderung Slawistischer Studien, 1982), 197.

33. Tsvetaeva used the same gesture of invitation in her lyric poem, “Cherdachnyi dvorets moi …” (“My attic palace … ,” 1919), to similar effect:

(My attic palace, my palatial attic! / Come on up. There's a heap of manuscripts … / This way.—Your hand!—Stay to the right, — / Here's a puddle from the leaking roof. “) We find it in another narrative context as well, in her long poem “Tsar'-devitsa” ( “Tsarmaiden,” 1920). The narrator coyly addresses the reader, mimicking the stepmother's salacious behavior with the prince: “Tak.—Zasim, druzhok, dai ruku” ( “This way.— And then, my dear friend, give me your hand “). They become so involved that she actually threatens to abandon the narrative: “Vsekh Tsarits s toboi upustim, / Vsekh Tsarevichei na svete!” ( “Let's leave behind all the tsarinas / All the tsareviches in the world! “). See G. S. Smith's discussion in “Characters and Narrative Modes in Marina Tsvetaeva's ‘Tsar'-Devitsa, '” Oxford Slavonic Papers 12 (1979): 117–34.

34. A good example of such a deaf “duet” is found in Verdi's Otello, where lago swears his vengeance upon Othello, while Othello rages against Desdemona. Pasternak, among others, noted the operatic quality of “The Pied Piper. “

35. It is possible to scan these lines for discursive patterns, as one would for rhyme and meter.

36. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 82.

37. Morson, Gary Saul, “Tolstoy's Absolute Language,” in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Morson, Gary Saul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123–43Google Scholar, and Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). On the topic of Bakhtin's interpretation of Tolstoy, see also Caryl Emerson, “The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, 149–70.