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c?fO The Problem of Poetic Biography "A11 happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." These words belong to one of the greatest of all prose writers and - one has to imagine the connection is not fortuitous - one of the most demanding ethical thinkers in any tradition. Prose, ethics, verisimilitude , a stripping away of illusion, "telling it like it is" - these qualities have never existed in a vacuum. In fact, they are implicit responses to codes and conventions that came to be seen as no longer adequate to their particular time and place: poetry, aesthetics, the oneiric shape of desire, "leaving the hero his heart" (as Pushkin said), telling it like it could/should be. But neither set of expectations is, one hastens to add, right or wrong. Calling something by its right name, telling the reader that the fish Stiva Oblonskyorders is turbot and not salmon, is "correct" only if the goal is the recreation of "lifelike" threedimensionality , or what Jakobson would term the metonymic plane in all its abutting contours and clearly glimpsed surfaces. For the eerie precision of the hologram and the reality that seems ever more virtual come at their own price. Ifthe goal in writing and thinking is something else, say to establish a connection between one's person and certain incompatible orders of being (God, the devil, one's immortal soul, one's people as "chosen" or "punished"), then a shift to the metaphoric plane, to that linguistic perch where meaning is generated by asserting the likeness/identity between two different things separated by time and space, and to the genres associated with it cannot be far behind. Tolstoi was not a poet not simply because his pictorial intelligence did not feel at ease rhyming one word with another. Also at work here is the fact that the convention stipulating such poetic rules for discourse formation (the "returning" sound of the rhyme partner) seemed to him artificial, and thus false- that is, not true to life.48 Why join two words merely because, if uttered 48. As the autobiographical hero of Childhood remarks of his attempts to write verse following the model of his tutor Karl Ivanych, "This [poem in honor of his grandmother's name day] ought to have sounded really quite fine yet in a strange way the last line offended my ear. "'And to lo-ve thee li-ke our own dear mo-ther' [1 liu-birn, kak rodnu-iu rna!'], I kept 34 Copyrighted Material The Problem of Poetic Biography 35 in close proximity, they create an acoustic frisson of unnecessary (i.e., not arrived at "honestly") meaning? Ifwe were to rewrite the great opening to Anna Karenina from the point of view of a poet, and not just any poet but a poet who lived before Tolstoi and the clenched-fist quality ofthe latter's antiromantic precepts, then the words would go something like this: all normal (translate : nonpoetic) lives resemble one another in their internal consistency, but everyextraordinary (translate: poetic) life is uniquely unpredictable. And these terms would be meaningful in their own right. Happiness or unhappiness, the domestic sphere versus the social twirl, language that gets more authentic the more private and elliptical it becomes,49 would not be, one suspects, defining repeating to myself. 'What other rhyme could I use instead of mother? [Kakuiu by rifmu vmesto mat'? igrat'? krovat'?] ... Oh, it will do! It's better than Karl Ivanych's anyhow.' "Accordingly I added the last line to the rest. Then in our bedroom I read the whole composition aloud with expression and gestures. There were some lines that did not scan at all but I did not dwell on them: the last line, however, struck me even more forcibly and disagreeably than before. I sat on my bed and pondered: " 'Whydid I write like ourown dear mother? She is not here so there was no need ever to bring her in; it is true, I do love and respect grandmamma, still she is not the same as ... Why did I put that? Why did I write a lie [zachem ia solgal]? Of course it's only poetry but I needn't have done that'" (L. N. Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, trans. Rosemary Edmonds [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964], 56; original in Sobranie sochninenii v dvenadtsati tomakh [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972-75], 1:51). Pushkin, as I argue below, would never have imagined (and written about) the interior space...

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