ART-ZINE REFLECT
REFLECT... КУАДУСЕШЩТ # 22 ::: ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ
Sergei LEVCHIN, Rafael LEVCHIN, Irina DZIUBA. THE ORIGIN OF STATUES
aвтор визуальной работы - Elvina Zeltsman
Video: sea foam in the wake of a traveling boat, statues.
Music: La Entrée, from Nyman’s La Traversee de Paris
Voice off-screen: Birthplace of giants, cradle of civilizations. These shores gave rest to the divine Aeneus as he fled from ravaged Troy, and the mysterious Assu, crossing from Asia into Scadinavia. Here wandered Cimmerian bands, Macedonian phalanxes, Roman cohorts and the Hunish hordes, Tatar tumens, Cossack kureni… Here too the Giants tore the flesh of Dionysus Zagreus; here stood the Temple of Peace. When it is restored all wars will end…
Video: the commentator appears – a venerable professor of a major university.
Today the biography of the renowned poet Rudolf Doliver, whose name is sometimes spelled de Oliveira, is thoroughly intelligible to us. Numerous articles and monographs devoted to his life and works have appeared in print.
Birthplace of giants, cradle of civilizations…
Who can doubt now that these thundering epithets refer to the legendary shores of the Crimean peninsula, the poet’s birthplace? It is well known to us that in late May of 1913 Rudolf Doliver set out on a major reading tour of Crimea. Today very few scholars still oppose us – Beatta Dreisen, John Bollard… But we may be certain that already in early June of the same year, in one of Evpatoria’s lush gardens, the poet was discussing with the young Maximillian Voloshin the publication of his seventh volume, Theatre for Manuela. As we know, the collection came out some thirty years later, delayed by the events of the Giant Insurrection.
Video: two young men talking on a bench
Video: the commentator appears on the screen.
We consider more than unfounded the assertions that Doliver is buried in the Karaim cemetery near Chufut-kale. No one can know where the poet is buried, or whether he is buried.
Video: the cemetery in the Veneto: mausoleum, graves
There is some evidence suggesting that the poet’s admirers had set up for him here a cenotaph, a void grave; this is confirmed by the poet’s own lines, taken from the cycle “Pilots,” and missing from the collection:
Video: above ground tombs; the camera slowly zooms in on a blurred photo on one of the tombs.
Voice off-screen:
because we are not assigned to an element
or to a precinct where a temple
will be built from our fragments
we circle above the rows of stones
and see that all are merely cenotaphs
Video: the commentator appears:
The poet’s first stop in Crimea – Simferopol. He visits the memorial to gods, victims of the Giant Insurrection. Here Doliver also receives the first in a series of letters from his beloved, whom he intends to meet at the end of the journey.
Video: view of Prague from the Zizka monument. Feet crossing the monument’s square. A man stands on the barrier looking out at the city. The camera zooms in on one of the houses below.
These letters were discovered in the archive of the poet’s friend, known only by the initials M.A. Today we still know very little about this individual; and the sobriquet M.A. is a rather fanciful invention of the indomitbl eccentric Akemitsu Tanaka, the poet’s chief biographer. In the letters Doliver occasionally refers to his addressee as Marcus Aurelius, and in jest calls him his “Roman friend.”
Video: the same two young men appear on the bench
Sound: a muffled conversation or recitation
Voice off-screen (commentator’s): These shots are most certainly not of Voloshin, who would have been much older at the time. Most likely it is no other than the mysterious M.A., the poet’s roman friend. (pause) At the same time, Salome Enzel insists that M.A. is a woman, in fact the poet’s fiancee…
Video: the statue of the Virgin (the Empress?) in Vienna, followed by another, holding an olive branch
…and that the letters – documents numbered 717, 319, 823 and 23 respectively – are written specifically in her hand. Consequently we are asked to accept that the letters were never sent and never received by the poet.
Video: the commentator returns to the screen
Most likely, this is an exercise in outmoded feminism. The majority of serious scholars agree that, one way or another, the first letter reached the poet in Simferopol, on March the 25th by the Old Calendar, i.e. the Tauromachia. While the indomitbl eccentric Akemitsu Tanaka had even put together a film crew and travelled to Crimea, carefully following the poet’s itinerary.
Video: a Japanese film crew surveys Prague from the Castle walls. The camera once more zooms in on one of the houses below.
Voice off-screen: She writes to me: “All of a sudden I wanted the world to be gigantic again, a child’s world, filled with light and stratagem… Despite the promised storm I began washing the windows, enormous, twice my height, three arm’s lengths wide; I opened the doors onto the balcony and let the air and clouds invade the various corners, vacant closets, photographs and jars…
Video: angelic babies over the Castle gates; the windows of the St. Vitus Cathedral
Music
…I filled the space of the blank walls with scraps of fog and the diligent calm of the water; I wondered once again at the old-fashioned drapery of the skies, fading in the summer and regaining its color and pattern toward the winter. We must air our worlds regularly with outside air.
Echoes of thunder, the sand storm (more in the next letter), break through the torpor, uplift the spirits and enjoin us to move forward, not to stand still…”
Video: the commentator returns to the screen
Naturally, we cannot know the actual place or the date of the poet’s birth; the purpose of his art was at all times to distort and mythologize his own origins. In one of the letters (known to us only through a reference in a friend’s letter, number 334) the poet apparently traces his origins to the Jews of Portugal, who fled the Inquisition in the 15th c. (hence the family name de Oliveira).
According to another source he is a descendant of the Karaim. This version, apparently more realistic, is in fact the most fanciful of the lot. Karaim, or Karai, who derive themselves from the lost tribes of Israel (though in actuality they split off from Jews in the 8th c. AD) appear in Criema in the 13th century, after the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders. Later, together with the Crimean Tatars they are partly led out of the land by the Lithuanian prince Mindovgas and make up his private guard… Decidedly, legend pervades history at every turn.
It was to trace and to understand his roots, and for no other reason, that Doliver travels in Crimea from 1927 to 1929. This hypothesis was put forward by Alexis Pogorelskih, and as such contains not a shred of truth. Evidently, Doliver did not care what scrap of land to designate homeland, or how his last name was pronounced centuries ago. Even a cursory look at his poetry will readily convince us that the poet sought in Crimea roots of a wholly different kind. He envisioned the peninsula as a fragment of the lost Atlantis, and intended to discover there the birthplace of giants.
Video: the iron gates of a villa in the Veneto
Voice off-screen: In Kerch – ancient Pantikapey – the poet visits the famous statue of Homer at the Villa Bartini and recites to it his verses. Here he also receives the second letter.
Video: slowly advancing head of the statue of “Homer.”
Voice off-screen:
Night may never mar
the edge of the hero’s shield
upon it – the world and even more
and around it – nothing
old troy
She writes to me: “you are remarkably right: the world is terribly small, and may fit all on one shield, as in Homer. At night the world becomes even smaller, only islets of light remain to us; we move from one to another, from Krym to another Krym. I read on:
ceramic alley…
I long to sleep, to see marvelous dreams
Video: deserted sun-drenched streets in a Veneto town
These lines for me are the absolute all. Astonishing: how could you see, without ever seeing Krym, what is most essential: toward noon one grows inevitably sleepy; the day is hot, the shops along the narrow alley sell broken marble…”
Video: the commentator appears on the screen
Incidentally, certain scholars – Mykola Luhovik and Taras Prohas’ko – assert that these lines are merely Russian translations of Ukrainian originals. We do not reject this hypothesis, though we would not support it either. It is well known that Doliver, like the great Russian novelist Nabokov, was from his childhood trilingual – in Russian, Ukrainian and Hoch-Deutch – so that the original verses may have been written in any of the three languages. Nevertheless, our Ukrainian colleagues insist on the primacy of Ukrainian, and as proof adduce the names of two graduate students from University of Manitoba – Yaroslav Balan and John Sodomyj – who, allegedly performed the said translations in January of 1944.
Video: the same two young men on the bench.
Sound: a muffled conversation or recitation
Video: the monument in Vienna and the bicycle rider, windows of houses in Vienna
Voice off-screen:
Gallery in a tepid street
Shade
Lions’ manes and serpents’ bronze
Rings and copper green
Most peculiar exhibits
without torsos, without lips,
without pedestals or shoulders,
merely masks with empty eyes.
a striped plastic bumble-bee
buzzes by
pauses, says:
“All kindssss!... All kindssss!...”
and goes away.
And Marina:
“It was time, encrusted, golden,
speckled, latticed,
at our door…”
Marble browns by and by.
at the edges of the marsh,
golden brush rots
impervious to malaria
to life
It was time
It was time
Dzzzz
vzzzz
Video: the commentator appears on the screen
The history of Crimea comprises a multiplicity of partially overlapping layers, such as: the Scythian kingdom with its capital Scythian Neapolis (today Simferopol’), Greek colonies along the entire coast…
… Kerch-Pantikapey, Ol’via, Xersones (Sevastopol), Evpatoria, where Roman garrisons were stationed until the invasion of the Huns, the Gothic kingdom Feodoro, the Jewish fortress Chufut-kale in the highlands, the Khazar kingdom, the Crimean khanate, struggling against its eternal enemies the Moscow duchy and the Zaporozhian Host.
Video: rower in the boat
In search of his subject Doliver visits all the significant settlements of Crimea and notes with bitterness the decay that has befallen the legacy of the giants. He envisions a tremendously bold eneterprise – a museum encompassing the entire territory of the Crimean peninsula. He promptly leaves for Petersburg to begin work on the project, but en route he is overcome by another letter.
Video: view from the moving tram in Prague
“I beg you, stay a poet! Become no other. You are already barely perceptible, as it is… Suppose you become a sailor, that’s one sailor more. A poet is always one and alone, even in a crowd of poets.
Video: the crowd on the Charles Bridge in Prague
I read somewhere: the world and poets. Absurd. POET and the worlds! that I could see:
the monastery gardens in bloom – over, the sky, reflecting all waters – across, the clouds – beyond, the bloodied arenas – without, in all religions engendered by Word…
Video: Villa d’Este in Tuscany. The film runs out at some point during the reading, and the last lines are read over a blank screen.
Voice off-screen: Doliver returns to the family estate in Dzhankoj, apparently forever. (pause) At any rate, as far as we know he completes there his cycle “Pilots.”
beneath the airplane wings mountains and clouds
and the chessboard compartments of human life
remember we embraced on the shore among rocks and trees
don’t say that it never was that our skins were not
tossed aside into the sun’s debris
squabbling with darkness salamanders mountains to this day
our skins know the meaning of day better than us
which is the same as the meaning of must
we embraced and emitted light that went to the depths of trees and rocks
and the animals drew forth to the light, to the fragrant feast
though it would be better to paint this torrent a waterfall
light is smeared everywhere and the clouds boil internally
what comes next, one with a painted grin
seeking evil everywhere though never exhausting it
and the endless summer is nearly complete
with no one to mutter the usual travesty
the name of the flower is torn fast from the stalk
at any rate one can tell a river from the edge of a bayonet
which it seems was compared once to a quill
though it is shorter and not so sharp
and is good at exercising what you don’t even have
and again the demon pours out the barelled gun
and the lesser demons surround you like a host
in predicaments of this sort one must be on one’s guard
how many tropes you have already sent downstream
we shall speak of it later, if a later should come.
END
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