Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes.

Terras, Victor

Darra Goldstein's study of Nikolai Zabolotsky (1903-58) accomplishes many things. It offers an updated biography of Russia's "last modernist," along with ample background information on the poet's political, intellectual, and poetic ambience. It establishes connections between his poetry and its literary antecedents, such as Khlebnikov, and traces aspects of its modernism to other art forms, such as the "analytic art" of Pavel Filonov. It presents a synthesis of Zabolotsky's philosophical searchings and their reflection in his poetry. The impact of the thought of Skovoroda, Fyodorov, Tsiolkovsky, and Bakhtin is discussed in some detail. A fairly detailed picture of the literary scene and its politics in the 1920s and 1930s also emerges, as we hear a great deal as well about Zabolotsky's associates of OBERIU.

The image of Zabolotsky the man and the poet that emerges is a complex but nevertheless convincing one: a man who was right in never doubting his talent or his calling yet misunderstood the political situation, who was quite willing to be a Soviet poet yet misjudged what was asked of him, who was no hero and a reluctant martyr yet through all adversity remained a poet, even when glorifying Stalin. Goldstein is able to establish a theme that accompanies Zabolotsky through his entire career: the theme of universal harmony, which appears in a variety of transformations that unite the spiritual and the material, biological and social structures, freedom and determinism, death and immortality. In particular, Goldstein shrewdly observes how Zabolotsky uses the grotesque as a vehicle of transformation.

Goldstein's study is less effective in describing and explaining Zabolotsky's art in terms of poetic technique--that is, versification, tropes, and figures of speech--either in an esthetic or in a semiotic framework. Like all great artists, Zabolotsky developed a distinctive style of his own. A detailed analysis of his poetic devices will help us understand and appreciate this better. Goldstein's many translations of Zabolotsky's poetry are philologically accurate but fall short of conveying the delightful strangeness of his poetic world, not to mention his driving rhythms and sonorous instrumentation. Still, all in all, Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes is a major step in introducing to the Western reader a poet who is second to none in the twentieth century, in Russia or elsewhere.

Victor Terras Brown University