Nobel lecture upon recieving the Nobel prize for litterature
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.
IlI
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. |