Alexander Zholkovsky

ISSUES IN RUSSIAN INFINITIVE POETRY:
Anna Akhmatova's "Prosypat'sia na rassvete..."

Infinitive poetry. Recently I have been concentrating on the study of what I dubbed infinitive poetry, i.e. poetry written exclusively or mostly in sequences of infinitive constructions, either absolute or dependent but long enough to create a quasi-absolute impression: imagine a poem that would go like: To be or not to be...To sleep perchance to dream... all the way to the end.

I stumbled on the idea some five years ago. Impressed by Sergei Gandlevskii's poem "Устроиться на автобазу..." ("To Get a Job At a Garage...", 1985), I shared my enthusiasm with Andrei Zorin, who mentioned Mikhail Bezrodny's essay relating it to Blok's "Грешить бесстыдно, непробудно..." ("To Sin Shamelessly, Obstinately...", 1914). Later, Oleg Lekmanov sent me his own article, linking it also to Brodsky's "Родиться бы сто лет назад..." ("To Be Born a Hundred Years Ago...", 1971). They had thus beaten me to the two major subtexts, but their approach was characteristically "Russian," as they were looking for, precisely, subtexts, whereas a theoretically more mature "Western" approach (beginning probably with Michael Riffaterre) has been to focus on intertexts: hypograms, generic formats, discursive patterns. That's what I then set out to do.

For several years now I have been compiling and annotating an anthology of Russian infinitive poetry that spans three centuries - about 500 poems by some 200 poets from Vasilii Trediakovskii to Boris Ryzhii. As a Golden Age example, here is a sequence from "Onegin's Letter to Tatiana" (1831; transl. by Johnston):

Infinitive poetry got a powerful boost at the turn of the 20th century and the advent of modernism, with Fet, Annenskii, and Blok playing a major role. (In English, interestingly, Emily Dickinson was a leader in developing infinitive writing.)

I formulated the overall semantic halo (semanticheskii oreol, a Taranovsky-Gasparov term) of infinitive poetry as a meditation on - often a virtual journey to, or even a metamorphosis into - another place, realm, time, mode of being. Infinitive writing boasts a variety of structural, rhetorical and motivic patterns that form a stable repertoire of invariants. Every poem is to be shown as exemplifying both the general patterns of such writing and the original variations and innovations introduced by the period, the trend, the poet, the themes, and so on.

The poem. Akhmatova's "Просыпаться на рассвете..." ("To Wake Up At Dawn...")

was written in 1917, published in 1918 г. and then included in the book of poems Подорожник ("Plantain", 1921), and was among those addressed to Boris Anrep, who emigrated to England. It is remarkable for the way early Akmatova's lyrical invariants - given here a rare positive spin -- are expressed through a comibation of a special kind of blank verse, the so-alled Spanish trochees, аnd a special syntactic pattern: the absolute infinitive structure.

Plot. The plot of this exceptionally optimistic piece, as Akhmatova's lyrics go, hinges on combining the increasingly intimate contact with the increasingly expanding world: as the seascape widens (from inside the cabin all the way to the faraway lover/star), the senses involved become more and more immediate: general awakening - vision - hearing - touch - taste (соленых, "salty"). This counterpoint of simultaneous "widening/narrowing" culminates in the punchword молодеть, which endows the momentary, skin-deep tactile sensation with a profoundly existential experiencing of time.

Much about the poem is oxymoronic, including the poignantly virtual status of the anticipated voyage and eventual meeting with the beloved. This aura of indefiniteness and understatement is seconded by a pointedly impressionistic fragmented narrative: the boat is presented through a mosaic of its parts: cabin, one synecdochal wave, sound of the engine, splashes of water, including the seductive glimpse of a lady on the deck wrapped in an expensive fur (synecdochal again), probably courtesy of a fashionable cruise ad.

Syntax. The poem's syntax confirms Eikhenbaum's observation about the role of Akhmatova's favorite conjunctions. But what stands out above all, is that the entire poem is just one sentence. Delivered as it were "in one breath," its complex sprawling structure coveys both the immediacy of the speaker's emotional urge and her whimsical sophistication. Last but not least all five of the poem's main verbs (comprising half of all its verb forms) are infinitives, so the whole is not just one sentence but one infinitive sequence.

By the middle of the 1910s, Russian infinitive poetry already had a long history, but absolute infinitive writing was still relatively new. Akhmatova started using infinitive sequences from the start, as early as 1911, but our lyric is her first absolutely infinitive (if we ignore moei in the last quatrain). Her recourse to this format is in accord with the virtualizes of a 'journey into another realm,' and, what's more, one by boat, as well as the one-sentence structure, both characteristic of infinitive writing. A more specific stimulus might have been Fedor Sologub's 1913 (pub. 1914) triplet "Просыпаться утром рано..." ("To Wake Up Early In The Morning"):

The similarities are obvious, as are the differences: Akhmatova's lyric is in blank verse and pictures the flow of time not as cyclical but as unfolding into a promisingly open future. Infinitive life cycles can be peaceful day's routines of waking up, acting and falling asleep (symbolically dying), vicious dead-end circles, or optimistic spirals, offering a new beginning, resurrection or even transmigration of souls in the end. But there is also the tradition of open-ended sequences, with the symbolic 'day of life' lasting indefinitely, evaluated either negatively or positively, as in this case.

Infinitive writing is well attuned to subtleties of time flow thanks to its fixation on the topos of "day/life cycle", and its usual syntactic format - that of parallel infinitive constructions punctuating a regular temporal rhythm. Indeed, our poem uses just such a sequence (просыпаться - глядеть - слушать - (не) думать...). This pulsation is also supported by the consistently imperfective aspect of the infinitives, implying repeated, iterative actions, and by direct references to units of time (на рассвете, с каждым часом) as well as the pounding of the ship's engine and, subliminally, the speaker's her heart.

Focus on both the movement of time and its stoppage forms a counterpoint, is characteristic of poems about freezing the beautiful moment. One way this is achieved compositionally is by extending gradually the intervals between the infinitives: the first and second ones begin their lines and clauses; the third and the fourth are almost at the end of their clauses but still at the beginning of their lines, whereas the fifth is the only one in its quatrain, at the end of the clause, line and the entire poem. This parallels, on the temporal and rhytmical plane the counterpoint of the spatial widening/closing.

Both counterpoints culminate on the same infinitive молодеть, remarkable in many ways, of which I will dwell on the one that is most remarkable. First of all, it is a hyperbole, a time lens effect, in fact, one quite in the spirit of Akhmatova's poetry. What's more important, it is a reversal of normal time flow, albeit metaphorical - an unexpected finale to a poem about life's cycle and eternalizing a moment.

The repertoire of infinitive poerty includes several versions of time warping. There are the nostalgic prohections into the past, into childhood, clinging to one's mother etc. Probably the most bizarre is an Oedipal romance with one's still virginal mother dreamed of in Sergei Gorodetskii's "Пытая жизнь. 4" ("Testing Life", 1912).

But even in these poems, the personas, having migrated into the past, find themselves subject to the linear progress of time, to again living forward. In Akhmatova's lyric, however, time flows, as it were, back, hour after hour, like - avant la letter -- in Dizzy Vertex's reverse montage. This is completely unique in my entire collection of infinitive poetry.

Versification. The poem is written in blank trochaic tetrameter, in its version known in Russian poetic tradition as Spanich trochees. Speaking about it would be opening a whole can of worms. Very briefly, it made its way into Russion poetry via translations from German, where it was used in translations, beginning with Herder and later Heine, from Spanish, in particular, of "romances", i. e. mostly narrative, ballad-like poems about El Cid and other legendary heroes and on similar exotic, sometimes also lyrical topics.

According to Innokentii Annenskii, Heine, so popular in Russia, infused this conventional epic form with his lyrical meditations on love, sickness and approaching death, as for instance, in "Azra" ("Der Asra", 1846; Russ. tr. by P. Veinberg, 1904. Engl. tr. by Joseph Massaad).

This, especially the Pointe, saved until the very end, sounds much like Akhmatova, especially if transposed into first-person mode, see, for instance two of her poems about a young boy's love for the speaker: "Мальчик сказал мне: "Как это больно!"…" ("The Boy Said to me: 'How Painful...," 1913), and "Высокие своды костела…" ("The High Vaults of the Cathedral..."; 1913). Incidfentally, Heine does have first-person lyrical poems in this meter and form too.

Akhmatova's use of the format begins with her 1914 "Я пришла к поэту в гости…" ("I Visited the Poet...") - her response to Alexander Blok's "Анне Ахматовой" (1913, publ. 1914), which was written in the same Spanish mode and pointedly Hispanisized. She wrote seven poems in this form, three of them love lyrics, one to Gumilev, two to Anrep.

Formally she in part follows Blok, but thematically she abandons the exotic flavoring to focus on her favorite themes of love and destiny. What she does retain from the usual semantic halo of the Spanish trokhee is the general aura of narrativity, event-ness, in particular that of journey, pilgrimage, quest, following the star etc. (Incidentally this narrative halo presents yet another contrapuntal foil to the time reversal in the poem's finale.). This "trip" dimension of the Spanish trokhee's halo, of course, accords well with a similar component of the halo infinitive writing. One further reason for the felicitous combination of the two formats is the way the absence of rhyme in Spanish trokhee is compensated for by the organizing role played by the repetitive infinitive pattern.

And so on, as Khlebnikov used to say...

© A. Zholkovsky

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