Forest and glade (Liès, da palianeu), without anyone around (bizlioudiyé krougom), snowstorm and
cries and groans (Viyouga i plâtchètt i stôniètt). Mussorgsky, Songs and Dances of Death for voice and
piano.
6A. THE LANGUAGE
In the
previous cases, the environment certainly had a large role to play. But it was
still manageable, it could be made sufficiently dialectic that we could think
that languages were largely independent from it, hence conceivable for
themselves, even if they then had to mark their consonances with the landscape
and the other aspects of the culture.
There are
different situations. It seems impossible to situate Dutch correctly without
evoking the extraordinary social and bodily integration, the ‘gezelligheid’ that
supposed the secular battle against a sea that was higher than the lands. We
could not understand Arab if we did not consider the deathly threat exerted on
the bodies by the torrid heat and the naked immensity of the desert of sand.
Similarly, how can we describe the structures and fundamental fantasy of the
Russian language, which settled around Moscow somewhere between the 14th
and the 17th century, and is hence northern before being southern,
without starting from the environment where it developed?
First there is
the cold; the river where one fishes with the eyes fixed on the hole made in
the ice; the permafrost that twists the rails. Then, it is the immensity of the
steppe, which is not marked by oasis like a sand desert, but that is
continuously formless, except for the hillocks (kurgan), in an expanse that,
except for the Ural, is crossed from the South to the Great North, but also
from Lvov to Vladivostok without major punctuation. These physical provocations
led to other social and political provocations. The invasions of the Mongol by
the East, the conquering fantasies of Swedish, Danish, French, and German
monarchs by the West. While the power tended to remain both blurred and
discretionary because of the distances.
So, the
Russian language built itself up like a heating machine against the cold, the
anchorage against the expanse, permanently under invasion, both of privacy and
conviviality seeing the aberrations of public like. While in French, English,
German, Italian, Spanish, in a largely meditating milieu, the body is at the
service of the language, this time it is language that is at the service of
bodies. Not by individually gloving them, as befits the combat of the Arab
speaker against the drying heat, nor by enjoying a close but exterior community
elbow-to-elbow, as requires the fight of the Dutch speaker against the sea
coming in from all sides. But by getting participation
(laterally) the organisms one to the other like from the inside, thermally and
physiologically, more than gesturally. We shall speak of the endosomy of
Russian, like we speak of endopathy.
However, we
shall note that the Russian speaker does not protect himself against the cold
and emptiness like an Eskimo or Ural-Altaic. He is an Indo-European. He fits in
an area of language that has, from the very start, privileged a great lateral
cohesion of the syntagm, which it has done syntactically, morphologically,
phonetically. We probably know quite a lot on the structure and fundamental
fantasy of Russian if we say that it is an endosomic
specialisation of an Indo-European fund that is already very lateralising from the start; in other
words, that it lateralises strongly. Amongst the other languages with a great
somatic influence, this sets it apart from Arab, which is not Indo-European,
and that does not lateralise at all. And from Dutch, which, while being
Indo-European, hence lateralising, has preserved the frontalness in regards to
things within the elbow-to-elbow, and is hence not endosomic in the sense we
understand here.
6A1. Phonosemics
Since we are
so close to the body, it is essential that we should start off from phonetics.
A usual manner of protecting oneself against a hostile environment consists in
multiplying consonants, and Russian accumulates them, just like Arab and Dutch:
'zdrav-stv-oui(tié)!', ‘hello!’, from the root 'zdrav', healthy
and reasonable, in good order (moreover, the first ‘v’ is not pronounced, and
the complete form is very often reduced to 'zdrastié'). But, since it is endosomic, it palatizes them and makes them
sonorous, for in this way they overlap, forming a continuous fabric that is
both impenetrable and thick. The palatal-alveolar fricatives are privileged and
insistent: 'jè', 'tchè', 'cha', 'chtcha'. Where German
creates a succession of implosion and explosion, in the affricative, here is a
succession of the explosion and the implosion in the ‘vp’ (opposite of the
German ‘Pferd’), ‘dn’ (‘Dniepr’), 'zn', 'sd', 'stv', 'chk', 'kv', sorts of countdown affricatives. Especially, in addition to their
hard version, almost all consonants have a palatized version, which is ignored
in French. The other choices confirm the sonorous fleece: the ‘r’ is rolled in
a roar, and the doubles (‘ss’, ‘nn’, ‘ll’, ‘tt’) are lengthened without the
Italian extraversion. No real aspiration, and the guttural sound only produces
a Greek khi, which is transliterated ‘kh’, relatively soft, at the opposite to
the Spanish jota, and also of the very scraping aspirations and gutturals of
Arab and Dutch.
In languages
of defence against the environment, vowels, which are too uncovered, are
generally reduced. This is the case of Arab, which only counts three (a, ou,
i), and Dutch, which, although it has more, at times diphthongizes them
(moeite), or grinds them in the milestone of consonants (‘graag’, ‘slurpen’’).
Russian has six main vowels, although the only opened is the ‘a’; already the
‘è’ and the ‘o’ are semi-opened, and the ‘i’ (anterior), the ‘eu’ (central and
written ‘bI’) and the ‘ou’ (posterior) are firmly closed. The system is
dominated by the ‘a’ sounds (the most compact and primordial of
vowels) and the ‘i’ (which here, at the opposite of French, makes soluble more
than it points). Therefore, ‘o’ becomes an ‘a’ supported before the accent, and
a mute ‘a’ after: 'avtabiagrafia'; ‘è’ becomes
‘i’ before the accent: 'nigatif'. The ‘i’ is still
omnipresent under the form of the yod ('y'), 'ya', 'yè', 'yo', 'you',
'yi': 'Briejniev', particularly that there are countless
endings in ‘iet’, ‘iyou’, and the abstract ending is 'tsiyé': 'dimocratsiye',
'likvidatsiye' ('liquidation'). However, Russian
ignores diphthongs, which are too confounding: the ‘y’
and ‘i’ that we have just written do not make one with the vowel that follows
them, but belongs to the palatization, to the softening of the consonant
preceding them (it is as difficult for a Russian speaker to hear our diphthongs than it is for us to hear his soft consonants). Nasal vowels and
the ü, so characteristic of French, are excluded, the former because they
resound towards the inside in a narcissist manner (therefore not endosomic in
the defined sense); the second because it creates too much distance.
Here were some
details amongst many others of a diction that is both masticating and
savouring, where interactions that are both lateralising and sonorising are
attentive not only to the dissimilation necessary to every language, but also
to the tone (relative intensities of the harmonics) that can come between the
dissimilated elements. There is no better way of maintaining oneself in the
physiology of a sonorous body than the tone, with its rhomb effects. English
phonetics also exploits this, but by leaving its realisation to individual
fantasy. The endosomic Russian phonosemics produces a fabric that is more
continuous and thick that the position of every thread is delicately defined,
point by point. It is reminiscent of the sadhi of Sanskrit.
Still, we
would understand nothing of this thermic and physiological diction if we were
to neglect the vital breath that supports it. Russian is spoken rather loudly
and not too quickly, say the manuals, which befits its environment. The
accentuation does not pursue the decision of French, or the effusion of
English, or the digging of German, or the quantification and the thrust of Italian,
or the frontal pressure of Spanish; but nor does it pursue the slackening of
Walloon, whose hindered vowels (‘eu’ for ‘i’, ‘mon p’teu’) would resemble that
of Russian, minus the breathing. It is a fundamental support, a constant
reprise by the back, an almost abdominal swelling, called upon by the effect of
the rhomb, which manifests itself right to the general posture of the speaker
and in the sphericity of his mouth (more than a simple roundness) that concords
with the babyish face that has already been selected by the climatic and
dietary needs. Hence, the meter, sensitive in the verse but also in the prose,
does not have the aggressive ‘vis’ that it claims in Latin and ancient Greek.
In the thermic turbine of Russian diction, it too strongly lateralises and
thickens the syntagm.
6A2. The writing
Cyrillic
characters, adapted from Greek in the 9th century by Saints Cyril
and Methodius to write down the languages of the Slavs that they were aiming at
evangelising, remarkably visualise this phonosemics party, and we understand
that independently from the link that they ensure between the various peoples
of Russia, they are not about to disappear in an international graphic like
their Chinese counterpart Pinyin. They too lateralise and thicken the text by
the mimetic length of 'jê',
'cha', 'you', by the spread out down strokes of ‘d’ and ‘l’;
by the appendixes of ‘tsê’, ‘chtcha’ and by the harshening sign 'tviordeuï
znak'; many are squarer than they are high; there are more
full signs than there are fine signs; lowercases have capitalised forms, which
has the double effect of magnifying the whole and of equalising it by drowning
the real capitals. But especially, these thick characters make visible every
little savouring interaction of the Russian ‘sandhi’. To the extent that many
are not essential phonetically. Of the thirty-three signs of the alphabet, ten
or so could easily be removed without the reading being affected. But
everything occurs as if, at the opposite of the Arab reader, who valorises the
reduction of signs to ambiguity, and of the English reader, who digs the
graphic gap between reading and etymology, the Russian script and reader would
want that the text writes everything that can link them together in the
phonemes, creating a continuous and thick fabric. The punctuation is strong,
and the subordinate clause is always separated from the clause from which it
depends with a comma.
In turn, the
morphology lateralises by powerfully underlining the articulation
root/theme/flexional ending, characteristic to Indo-European. This gave way to
the so-called morphologic spelling: the ‘house’ is ‘dom’ at the singular
nominative form and 'dama' in the plural nominative form, but is written 'doma' even in the plural so that the external and internal flexions remain
patent. The word can therefore take on a huge weight. One currently tells off a
child: '(êta) bièzabrazna'. We translate: ‘it is bad’. In fact, it was uttered, written and
read: ‘this <is> without image’; èta (this) bièz
(without) obrass (icon)-na'. Served by the morphological
unveiling, the semantic is as dense as the phonic fabric.
6A3. Semantics
The internal
sexualisation of vocables still comforts the vividness, hence the endosomy. The
three genders of the Indo-European cosmic trinity, masculine, feminine,
neutral, are this time not only simple characters of the declension, but belong
to the theme of the noun using several rules. Moreover, these rules have an
analogical scope. In the canonical form of the noun, meaning its singular
nominative, the masculine theme leaves its hard or palatized consonant
uncovered (first declension). The feminine theme covers it vocally with the
‘-a’ or ‘-ia’ if it is hard (second declension), and leaves it uncovered if it
is palatized or palato-alveolar, as it is then vocalised in advance (third
declension). Neutral themes are recognised with the ‘-o’ and are categorised in
the first declension. Dictionaries do not characterise a word using ‘masculine’
or ‘feminine’ like they do in French, but using: ‘masculine root (rod)’,
‘feminine root (rod)’. The morphological sexualisation can be found even in
verbal forms: in the past tenses, the genders, not the persons, form the
conjugation. As for the plurals of nouns, it is asexual, but maintains the
other intense Indo-European distinction, which is sometimes active at the
singular: animated/inanimate. A corpse is inanimate, but a dead is animated; a
crowd and an army, being collectives, are inanimate. What implicit sociology!
But it is the
declension that syntacticaly contributes the most to the organic
lateralisation. Nothing makes a more coalescent fabric than marking the
functions using declined cases, and not by solely using prepositions or the
position of the word like in French, the distance-inducing language. Russian
therefore declines, just like German. And it does this using a wide variety of
consonantal: ‘m’, ‘n’, ‘v’, ‘kha’, and vocalic endings: ‘a’, ‘ou’, ‘o’, ‘è’,
‘i’, ‘ia’. While the German cases, which are most discreet, never weaken the
monematic character of words and only tighten their deflagration, the very
visible cases of Russian proclaim the functions as such, intimately tying the
verbal fabric from afar and from up close.
Simultaneously,
there are many cases. They evidently include the four cases of German: subject
(nominative), determiner (genitive), frontal object (accusative), and
tangential or beneficiary object (dative). But we find two others cases of the
proto-Indo-European: the locative and the instrumental, the latter being
frequently and markedly used. In this way, almost all the functions can do
without the distance-inducing preposition, and belong interiorly to the word.
There is however, one remarkable absence, but one that concords with the
endosomic will: The ablative, the case of ablation, so very operating in Latin,
the legal language, and whose function is here insured by other cases, like in
Greek.
Otherwise,
when the preposition is required, it makes one with the name it precices,
seeing that it governs a case: 'ia v komnatié maièï pichou' is thereby tighter
than ‘I write in my room’ and can fill a verse by Pushkin. And sometimes, the
preposition can also contribute to the heat; where the French dryly says: ‘un
champion d’échecs’, ‘un compagnon d’armes’, Russian says and things 'tchèmpiyon po
chakhmatam'
and 'tavarichtch po aroujiyou', thereby
creating the multiple links of the ‘po + dative’. Evidently, in contrast with
English prepositions that are themselves very directional, the preposition here
is often content with marking a simple type of adherence, which is then
specified by the case. Therefore, depending on the case, ‘Na’ covers such
varied directions as ‘on’, ‘in’, ‘against’, ‘while’, ‘for’ (for two rubles),
‘by’ (being late by fifteen minutes), ‘in’ (in the manner of), (in the next
year), (in the New Year).
6A4. The verb
However, how
can the endosomy be extended to the verb? Are verbal tenses not the irreducible
experience of exteriority? We may be able to cross the distances of space,
however great they may be, but we cannot return to the past, nor can we go
forth in the future!
Well, all
Russian verbs present, and primordially so, before any other determination of
mode and time, what we call an aspect,
which marks whether the action is undetermined in relation to its completion,
and is hence eventually repeated (read), it is the imperfective; or to the
contrary if it includes its completion (reading one page from front to back),
it is the perfective. The perfective usually comes first, even when it can be
reformed from a perfective. This system belongs to the proto-Indo-European, and
we find traces of it in the Greek conjugation, for instance in its perfect
tense (perfective). In this way, actions are immediately situated in the pure
passage, Heraclitean, or in the definitive completion, as with Parmenides,
these two registers being the two faces of the state. In post-Socratic Greek,
these aspects of the verb progressively gave way to the tenses of the verb, or
more exactly they have become a simple characteristic of some tenses (like the
perfect and pluperfect tenses); they have even disappeared in the other
languages in this study. This is a sign that the state did not blur as first
transcendental to the profit of another transcendental: the progressive action,
progress (pro-gredi), with its present, imperfect, aorist, the future, the
future perfect, pluperfect, opening a dialectic.
In Russian,
the aspect, hence the status, remains foremost. Keeping the proto-Indo-European
practice, verbal themes comprise their aspect by prefixation, suffixation,
infixation, before even being conjugated, just like, as we have seen, the noun
themes have a gender before being declined. And so-called tenses preserve this
prevalence of status over the dialectic of progress. Perfective or imperfective,
the verb only has a past, without distinction of imperfect, aorist, perfect,
pluperfect, and the past is not conjugated after the persons, but whether the
subject is plural or singular, and in the singular whether it is masculine,
feminine or neutral; the past is therefore used as an adjective, and is more
qualifying than it is active. And there is only one future, where the status is
generally privileged, since, when there is an original form, it is perfective,
and otherwise is conjugated depending on the being + infinitive (the French
future tense consists of the infinitive + having: aimer-ai). As for the present
tense, it is only applied to imperfectives, hence designating actions whose
completion is not known, and that are hence constant or iterative, one of the
two sides of the status.
In summary,
this endosomic system confirms in stasis what the modern philosophers, used to
the progressive times of their verbs, sometimes called the ex-stasis of the
moments of time. The verbal modes are then limited. The indicative and the
conditional suffice, without the subjective or the optative. On the other hand,
the infinitives, participles, gerundives, and all other forms that have the
status of nouns, adjectives and adverbs, therefore marking states, are largely
represented.
There are two
essential verbs to envisage: to be and to have. The being and the having, this
is where the fundamental topology of the living, and particularly the mammal,
lies: being encompassed, or being;
being encompassing, or having; the
former does not create exteriority, the second creates one. We guessed this. In
the Russian endosemy, the being is so naïve, so native, it so rarely makes a
splash in the states that links the
subject and the complement, that it does not have to be expressed in the
present tense: ‘I am at home’ = 'ia' (‘I’) 'dom-a' (‘house’ in the locative tense);
'my house is convenient' = 'moï dom oudobneuï' ; ‘to be’ in
the present tense is indicated by a pause in the diction or a dash in the text.
‘To be’ only ever really intervenes to mark another tense than the present, or
else the negation: 'niètt' (ne ièstt) with the
genitive.
On the other
hand, having, since it is exteriorising, is an issue. Russian turns its active
encompassing into a passive encompassing through the resource of ‘at’: ‘someone
having something’ = ‘something at someone’. ‘I have a pencil’ = 'Ou minia (at me) karanndach
(pencil)'. 'You have a pencil' = 'Ou tibia karanndach'. 'He has a pencil' = 'Ou nivo
karanndach'. 'She has a pencil' = 'Ou niyo karanndach'. In the event of
an insistence or an interrogation, the ‘ièstt’ is added. Then, the plural
possessed does not change ‘ièstt’: ‘Yes, he truly has a wife and a son’ =
'Ou nivo ièsst jeuna i seun'. The
topology of a language is an unwavering coherence.
There is no
reason, in such a system of existence, to specify, as we do with French
articles ‘un’, ‘des’, ‘les’, ‘le-la’, that a noun represents a singular
individual, or individuals, or a universal in extension, or a universal in
comprehension. Therefore, there are no articles. On the other hand, why should
we deprive from the convivial warmth of the pronoun in front of the personal
forms of the verb, as with Latin and Italian? And how can the names, first
names and patronymics of persons not be declined (what German does not do),
substantively in the last two cases, and adjectively in the former, which is
probably more peripheral, more simply legal? In the endosomy, instead of the
individual being an unmovable phonic and graphic, it is itself made syntax.
6A5. Syntax
In summary,
here is a tight linguistic fabric, overlapping, strongly lateralised, thick
around its speaker, which preserves warmth and life, and at the same time
shines warmth and life. Thought subtle and defined tones. Through the ostentation
of functions thanks to the declension and prepositions governing the cases.
Through the evidence of the themes and even of the archaic roots, which are
very few and protected by a so-called morphological spelling. Through the
absence of articles, another exposing of the roots and themes. Through the
impact and the swarming of Cyrillic graphic. And particularly, we must now add,
through the freedom that the declension gives, not only of playing with the
places of the determiner and the determinatum, but also of placing the semantic
blocks and functions in the most efficient shaking order for the fantastical
and logical warmth of the sentence. There, the verses of Mayakovsky will often
consist of an isolated word: ‘the word is therefore heavier, juicier, more
bloody, as tight as a firmly pulled nail, just tried and immediately expulsed,
making us more responsible of it, inverting the meter endlessly.’
Many of these
characteristics mean that Russian is, with Sanskrit, one of the most insistent
presence of the old proto-Indo-European fund, and particularly of its syntactic
lateralising resources brought forward by compared grammar: the distinction
animated/inanimate, the couple perfective/imperfective, the declension and the
agreeing conjugation, the masculine-feminine-neutral trinity, the trinity of
the three degrees of one same radical: strong vowel/inflected vowel/absent
vowel, or the vocalic ablaut. All this on a background of sociological trinity:
fecundity/war/law, mirroring the peasant/warrior/king.
The
archaeological analyses of Marija Gimbutas (1963) attribute the
proto-Indo-European revolution to the ‘civilisation of hillocks (kurgan)’ born
in the 4th and 3rd millenniums in the plain that goes
from the Dnieper River to the high Yenisei River, meaning from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, along the 50th
parallel, in places that were already favoured of Neolithic civilisations that
we learn to know better each day. Then, not only is the Russian language an
endosemic specialisation of the Indo-European syntactic revolution,
lateralising, but the Russian milieu, with its particular geography, has
probably had a decisive part to play in the birth of this syntactic revolution
itself.
Plain +
hillock + continental climate, meaning easy circulation + military defence and
top-bottom social stratification + immediate physical defences, but also
stretched transitions of night and light (*deiv, god)! This environment and
this topology, creating a situation that is not yet dialectic (we shall have to
wait for the post-Socratic to go from the aspect of the state to time), but
proto-Socratic, deserves to be meditated when we think of the anthropogeny.
Just like the absence of major punctuation in this landscape is, to beleive
some current Russian speakers, the image (the induction?) of the phonic,
morphologic, syntactic lateral compenetrations (of the non-punctuation) of
their language.
6B. CULTURAL CONSONANCES
The main
institution consonant with such an endosomic language is obviously the meal. A
meal of substantial food, where burning liquids, borscht, vodka and tea
alongside the constant reserve of boiling water in the samovar, are as vital as
the meats, are more important that vegetables are rare, apart from the cabbage
(quintessence of phonetics, cabbage soup is said ‘chtichi’). But this meal is
also a recharging of the ‘psyche’ in the Greek sense (corporal animator
principle), then of the ‘pneuma’, still in the Greek sense (evasive spiritual
principle, pneumatic), in a savouring of dishes that counts less than that of
words. There are two moments in the liturgy of meals: the expression of the
common affection, then soon the loss of each and everyone into space, in time,
among the divagation of men and the rigors of the laws, as the evening passes
and the drunkenness increases. Indeed, the deepening of the nocturnal immensity
is a part of the deepening of the community. We do not say: of society, which
is always suspect.
Around the
meal, there is the room, 'komnata',
the agricultural-nomad shelter against the smooth fleeing of
the outside environment, the room that privileges the viscosity of forms and
colours, which are stabilising and warming, like the words and the dishes. The
architectural cell is not the house, unless the latter, like the isba and today
the datcha, does not exceed the dimensions of the room too much. A fortiori
there is no urbanism, like the Napoleonic troops already noted as they moved
from Paris to Moscow. The perspectives of Leningrad are the ‘windows through
which Russia looks at Europe’. Elsewhere, in the torsion of their globes and
the insistence of their colours (of transparent nightfall, ‘prazratch(i)neuï
soumrak’), the palaces and churches create on a large scale the
agricultural-nomad viscosity that the bedroom ensures in small scale.
For the rest,
everything leads to the icon, which shines like the Russian word. Through the
monotony of its themes, through its centring on the face, through the
interlacing of its backgrounds and its figures, through the colour-light that
is both thick and diffuse, the icon and the iconostas transform space and time
into states, trapping the transcendence itself in the endosemy. In the West,
images are distinct from what they represent: ‘imago alicuius rei est ad quandam significationem, non
est ipsa res’ Thomas of Aquinas insisted, cutting all idolatry
short. Continuing Byzantium, the Russian image participates ontologically, and
not only in a semiotic manner, to what it figures. Stasis in the iconostases,
state amongst the stasis, declared perfective/imperfective, it truly is the Blessed Virgin Mary and the
Saviour, or in any event it is their light. Whence the seriousness of
iconoclast quarrels, perpetuated before the portraits of Lenin and Stalin. The
genius of Rublev was to broaden the interlacing of the icon, to filtrate the
viscosity of its colour, without loosing its epiphany. It is remarkable that he
should have worked in Moscow at the time of the constitution of the current
Russian in around 1400. Malevich in the Heraclites and Parmenides speed of
forms, and Rothko in the light suffusion of colour all demonstrate that this
epiphany continues through the 20th century.
As was to be
expected, there is no shattering philosopher. Nothing in the physiological and
thermic turbine of endosemy calls for the faraway meditation that makes a great
philosophy. Lenin’s materialism un-dialectises Marx: ‘Every mysterious,
ingenious and subtle difference between the phenomenon and the thing in itself
is only a fabric of philosophic absurdities’. The 'sophiology' of Soloviev (perhaps
a poet before all else) and Bulgakov is an erudite gnosis obsessed by communion
and immediate contact, where real and reality, and particularly memory and
present want to coincide. The orthodox religion pushed as far as possible the
conjugal symbolic of the body of Church united to the Saviour. It also firmly
rejected the legal definitions that defined the evil that one confesses and the
good that one does not confess, in the Roman manner, to cultivate a free
confession that leaves the repentant with an almost physical intimacy of the
sin and repentance.
The
philosophical laziness had to go hand in hand with a powerful prose literature,
only means of the gnosis in act. The Russian novel is comparable to the wind of
the outside immensity, sometimes attempting to domesticate it through the
orchestrated path with Tolstoy, sometimes abandoning oneself to its madness
with Gogol, sometimes tolling its charitable or diabolical illuminations,
‘idiot’ in any event, right to the drafts of Dostoyevsky’s interiors. All these
novelists share the same process: tackling head on tiny, very precise details
with general designs that are devoid of reference axis. This has sometimes been
called realism and metaphysics, but is neither, only the experience of a time
and a space that cannot be dialectised and where every full is empty, every
living is dead or never born, in endless Dead
souls, incompatible, not coordinable and the impossible to finish Karamazov Brothers. From 1849, in Oblomov’s Dream, Gontcharov described
the attempt of conversion of the quietist Russian Oblomov ('Ablomov', ablameuvatye', being broken) by the semi-westernised Russian Shtoltz, and the failure of this
perestroika. Lenin knew the writing and measured its scope.
On such a
plain, poetry may only be horizontal in a first while, meaning that it is epic:
Na biériégou
pousteunneukh voln (on the bank <of> desert waves) / Stayal On
(<he> stood) , doum vilikikh poln (<of> great thoughts
filled) , i vdal gliédièl (and in distance looked)’. This is how Pushkin’s canonical Bronze
horseman begins. And, for the same reasons as those of the novelists, the
poets conjoin vastness and detail. A 1922 poem by Maïakowsky starts with a
simple and large light effect: a boy (‘Maltchik’) goes toward
an incomparable yellow sunset (‘niéprivzaïdima jolt’), where
even the snow became yellow (‘snièg jeultièl’). And suddenly:
Chol (moved forward) /
vdrouk (suddenly) / vstal (stopped) / F cholk (in silk) / rouk (of hands)
/ stal(i)
(steel).
Suicide is
consumed in six monosyllables, six verses, with all the circular causalities of
‘Chol/cholk,
vdrouk/rouk, vstal/stal, without mentioning "jolt/jeultièl/Chol/cholk’. Since ‘cholk’ is accusative, we even feel the knife slide in the
silk of the hands. Thanks to the extraordinary iconic strength of Russian
words, the landscape (‘jolt’) and the walk (‘chol’) are enough to determine
death. Camus’ entire The Stranger in
fifteen lines or so.
As was to be
expected, the musical art fed from the ‘sandhi’ of the language, meaning the
tones rather than the melody or the rhythm. It was first the tone of liturgical
songs, archaic like the roots and themes of the words. Then, when it became
instrumental, it placed itself not in true operas or symphonies, but in suites
of instrumental paintings (Pictures at an
exhibition), veritable sonorous icons, from Mussorgsky to Shostakovich.
Current Russian rock music is a poem that is as long as the meals and the
orthodox services, where the band participates from the inside (in an endosemic
manner) to the voice and the body of the poet and of everyone. In the native
dances, the individual bodies are the organs or the replicas of the convivial
body. In this area, classical dance is in Russia as much as museum as
Leningrad, where Marseilles-born Petipa originally introduced it.
As for the intelligentsia, whilst its name has gone
around the world, it only finds its native force there, communicating,
sometimes believer sometimes atheist, but always millenarian, exalting to
paroxysm the repast of food and words. The words of Jesus and of Pilates in
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and
Margarita sufficiently illustrate the gnostic essence of his logicism,
particularly if we are to compare them to Borges on the same theme.
The Russian
community is probably the only one where the notion of ‘class’ in the Marxist
sense could be something completely different to a militant abstraction.
Participating to the weeping crowds at Lenin’s death, Mayakovsky closely
marries endosomy and class: ‘joy that even the tears out of the eyes should be
common (…). More strongly / and more purely / impossible to share / with the
noble sentiment / that has the name - / class! Sil(i)niéié / i tchiichchié
/ nil(i)zia pritchiastitsa / po imeni - /
klass! For the use of ‘pritchiastitsa', the official comment does not fear to remind its first sense:
receiving the Eucharist. Political programmes, like religions, need some
linguistic soils to blossom.
The powerful
Russian contribution to linguistics does not refute the endosomy and the
iconicity. Jakobson systematised the phonemes of all known languages by
bringing them back to the various fillings of a matrix in twelve traits, twelve
couples of sonorous, physical and existential opposites: compact/diffuse,
strong energy/weak energy, voiced/not voiced, strident/not strident,
sharpened/not sharpened, toned down/not toned down, etc. He frankly marked the
restrictions that needed to be brought to the arbitrary of the sign that
Saussure too massively borrowed from American Whitney, in the relation of
significant/signified, but also in the phonic sense of words, which coincide or
not with their lexical sense. And he quotes Mallarmé when the latter remarks
that ‘nuit’ is phonetically clear, while ‘jour’ is phonetically dark, whereas
in the Czech couple den/noc (as with the Latin diem/noctem), this discordance
does not occur. He endlessly signalled that we could not adequately understand
a language if we could not situate the paths according to which it is learned
in a child and it is lost with the senile or the aphasic, and in particular, he
offered a genetic psychology of phonemes from the opposition a/p, a/ou, ou/i, p/t, d/t, and so on. He was constantly preoccupied with situating the phonetic
function, considering that language refers as much to it than at exterior designated.
We have spoken a lot of the Russian
soul. This type of cliché is never false. If ‘soul’ is understood in its
etymological sense of powerful, hot, interior and still subtly laterally
modulated breadth, this is indeed a rigorous description.
Henri Van Lier
Translated by Paula Cook