The Estranging Mirror: Effects of Reflection and Superimposition in Vladislav Xodasevi&chachek;'s Evropejskaja no&chachek;&soft;
Alexandra
Kirilcuk
The paper investigates the metapoetic significance of the recurrent
images of reflection and superimposition in Vladislav
Xodasevi&chachek;'s last collection of verse, Evropejskaja
no&chachek; (1927). Superimposition and reflection figure most
notably in one of the best-known works in the collection,
Sorrentinskie fotografii, with its central image of the
double-exposed photograph as a metaphor for the way in which memory
functions. But similar images of reflection and superimposition (they
often appear together) also play a key role in other poems in
European Night. These images are not only a figure for
the capriciousness of memory,
as in Sorrentinskie
fotografii, but also reflect the lyric subject's simultaneous
sense of self-reflexivity and alienation from the self that he
experiences in exile. Furthermore, the play of reflections that
appears in several of the poems of European Night is
indicative of a deeper problem, that of the poet's increasing
inability to integrate art and life, spiritual and earthly
reality.
The cycle opens with Peterburg, a recollection of the
harmonious relationship that existed between the poet, his poetry and
the world around him while he still lived in Russia. In the succeeding
poems of European Night, this image of a world in which
it is still possible to graft the classical rose onto the
Soviet wilding
is replaced by an exilic universe in which the
spiritual and the earthly are tragically separated: the poet can
superimpose them, but can no longer integrate them. The reflections
that he sees around him trap him in the realm of earthly reality,
throwing it back at him in even more horrifying forms and denying him
access to the world of the spiritual that his poetry once provided in
earlier poems such as Muzyka and Ballada
(both from Tja&zhachek;elaja lira). The various ways in
which reflections debase and disfigure reality and entrap the poet in
a self-reflexive yet alienating maze of gazes are discussed through
readings of the poems Slepoj, Berlinskoe,
Pered zerkalom, and Zvezdy.
I conclude my analysis with a reading of Sorrentinskie
fotografii that focuses on the metapoetic implications of the
reflected images in the poem and their relationship to other poems in
the cycle. For example, the angel on the Peter and Paul fortress that
the lyric subject sees reflected, upside down, in the Bay of Naples
is, as several scholars (David Bethea, Frank Goebler) have noted, a
symbol of imperial Russia cast down and destroyed by the
revolution. However, the angel is metonymically related to many other
images in European Night. Firstly, it cannot but remind
us of the other angels
that populate both
Tja&zhachek;elaja lira and European Night:
the angels that the lyric subject sees and hears in moments of poetic
transcendence. The inverted position of the Peter and Paul angel also
relates it to the image of the suicide in Bylo na ulice
potemnelo, who plunges headfirst onto the pavement below:
S&chachek;astliv, kto padaet vniz golovoj: / Mir dlja nego
xot&soft; na mig—a inoj.
And the reflection of a
heavenly entity in a body of water corresponds to the debased
reflection
of Zvezdy, in which the
Biblical fourth day of creation is reenacted by half-naked dance-hall
girls in a vaudeville act: Tak vot v kakoj postyloj
lu&zhachek;e / Tvoj Den&soft; &Chachek;etvertyj
otra&zhachek;en!
Thus the play of reflections within various poems of European
Night is replicated on a larger scale by the way in which
reflected images play off one another across
individual poems. This intricate play of mirrorings and
correspondences attests to the unity and aesthetic sophistication of
European Night as a cycle, yet paradoxically, it also
represents yet another figure for the poet's sense of entrapment in a
debased and estranging world in which poetry itself becomes
increasingly less possible.