Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry

Chapter Four. “A Poet Is Less Than a Poet”: Timur Kibirov’s Merry Logophobia

163 Chapter Four “A Poet Is Less Than a Poet”: Timur Kibirov’s Merry Logophobia WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the hawk of poetry turns bird non grata in the stratosphere, however icy? Monuments not made by hand may not exactly stand on Alexandrine pillars, but they do crumble fast in a mass-consumer Elysium. As the former Soviet Union joined the family of market economies, Russian Logos, tempered and pampered by an extended autocratic tradition, left the era of worship for one of recreation. The poet, once “more than a poet,” as in Evgeny Evtushenko’s “Prayer Before a Poem” (“Molitva pered poemoi,” 1964), becomes an equivalent of self, and, frequently , less than that. This chapter focuses on Timur Kibirov’s antiverbal parry as representative of a larger trend of verbal skepticism occupying center stage in conceptualism and postmodernism. With the lofty stature of Russian letters problematized as never before, verbal skepticism emerges full force in postSoviet poetry. Kibirov, one of the most popular post-Soviet poets, conveys his skepticism more light-heartedly than his predecessors, but his critique is no less expansive. Taking the lengthy poem-epistle “To Igor Pomerantsev” as my base text, I would like to consider the heteroglossia that is its hallmark. The polyphony of languages in the poem—Golden Age diction, modern slang, loan words, parodic quotation—creates a back-and-forth of mockery. Kibirov moves beyond play with multiple tongues to a scathing ridicule of language, an exercise that communicates his resentment of verbal masks. If verbal skepticism reaches its emotional apogee in Brodsky’s portrayal of parallel verbal and existential catastrophe, in Kibirov tragedy subsides into slapstick. Yet this slapstick also powerfully dramatizes the language crisis. Kibirov uses verbal masks for comic purposes and ridicules multiple languages to question verbal clichés and, more widely, language as such. Words, ossified into banalities, do not express thought and emotion but inhibit them; they are vulgarized under the new order; and they are impotent against evil. As I extend my analysis to other Kibirov poems, I consider whether Chapter Four 164 his work suffers from the disappearance of the lyrical center (the “death of the author”) as a result of the numerous languages employed, which seem to take over and make the poet their will-less instrument. But Kibirov is in fact determined to establish a lyrical center amidst the heteroglossic bacchanalia—for example, by interspersing details from his private life in his poems. For this poet there is a genuine poetic interiority, just as there remain genuine sentiments in this world, and moral values. An unwilling conceptualist and postmodernist, Kibirov, like his poetic predecessors, resists verbal self-effacement. L(AUGHING) O(UT) L(OUD): THE CONCEPTUALIST LINEAGE OF VERBAL SKEPTICISM The point of the concluding lines of Brodsky’s “Funeral of Bobo” is that death is inexpressible: “Now Thursday. I believe in emptiness. / There, it’s like hell, but shittier, I’ve heard. / And the new Dante, pregnant with his message, / bends to the blank space and writes a word” (Idet chetverg. Ia veriu v pustotu. / V nei kak v adu, no bolee kherovo. / I novyi Dant skloniaetsia k listu / i na pustoe mesto stavit slovo) (Brodsky, Collected Poems in English 57; Brodskii 3:35). What if a postmodern poet were to write these words? The reader, Pierre Menard-like, would likely fasten on the double import of “blank space,” with its interplay of the somber and the jocular, a posthumous emptiness and a colloquial idiomatic “having nothing in it” (pustoe mesto). Such wordplay would not cancel the gravity altogether, yet some of the emotional charge would be diverted toward an ironic jarring of remote semantic spheres and, consequently, would promote a less angstridden perception of the utterance. The jovial metaliterary facet of postmodern verbal inadequacy softens its negativity. At the same time postmodern verbal skepticism itself is anything but flippant and all-pervasive. A form of verbal skepticism based on the grotesque, irony, and play, which comes to the fore in the postmodern antiverbal project, has among its antecedents the poetry of OBERIU. In a way akin to the apocalyptic vision of “The Horseshoe Finder,” Oberiuty see verbal structures as incommensurate with the arbitrary brutality of being: Verbs are living out their age right before our eyes . . . Plot and action are disappearing . What actions there are in my poetry are illogical and pointless . . . Events do not coincide with time. Time has swallowed up events. Not a single bone of them is left.1 The...