Oblaka v kontse veka.
Terras, Victor
The poems of Oblaka v kontse veka (Clouds at the End of the Century),
Anatoly Naiman's second collection of verse, are diverse in many
respects, partly because they cover a period of thirty years and their
persona also finds himself in Russia as well as in England and in
Connecticut or Vermont. Naiman's verses are formally sophisticated:
depending on the content, rhyme and meter are impeccably accurate, as in
the cycle "Diune Rhythms," or pointedly ragged, as in the poem
"Wait, I Stand in Line Here." Naiman's language is the
colloquial idiom of the Russian intellectual, often laced with slang and
macaronisms. It is rich and colorful, but rarely foregrounded.
Naiman's themes range far and wide: the Bible ("Saul on the
Eve of his Death"), world literature (as echoes from Ovid,
Shakespeare, Leopardi, Apollinaire, as translations from Nerval,
Baudelaire, Roethke, Dylan Thomas, as an ode "On the Death of W. H.
Auden"), nature, vignettes of city life in Russia ("A
Veteran"), synesthetic conceits ("After
Postimpressionism," featuring a marvelous image of white on white),
poems on the poet's craft, gnomic and confessional poems, and,
first and foremost, poems on the times, in Russia and in the world. The
times are more often than not autumnal or wintery. The poet is painfully
aware of changes that have happened or are imminent--they may be for the
worse. His mood is one of care, uneasiness, and rather diffident hope.
With such a variety of themes and images, it is difficult to abstract
from it all a distinctive style or voice. On the one hand, Naiman often
resembles Pasternak in his liberal use of nature imagery as metaphor of
the human condition and of a pathetic fallacy skillfully realized. His
poetic world, however, is modernist rather than romantic; it is a world
of random associations, confused experience ranging from the banality of
daily life to metaphysical musings, a vaguely identified persona, an
"I" that vacillates between past, present, and future:
"ia eshche tam, gde menia eshche net" (I am still there, where
I'm not as yet). The result is a reality that is certainly of this
world yet also alien to it, at times concrete and palpable, at times
estranged and opaque. It always arouses the reader's curiosity and
is often fascinating.
Victor Terras Brown University
