Chapter 1

Art as Device

"ART IS THINKING IN IMAGES." This phrase may even be heard from the
mouth ofa lycee student. It serves as the point ofdeparture for the academic
philologist who is making his first stab at formulating a theory of literature.
This idea, first propounded, among others, by Potebnya, has permeated the
consciousness of many. In Notes on the Theory of Literature he says:
"There is no art without imagery, especially in poetry." "Like prose, poetry
is, first and foremost, a mode of thinking and knowing."
Poetry is a special mode ofthinking-to be precise, a mode ofthinking in
images. This mode entails a certain economy ofmental effort that makes us
"feel the relative ease ofthe process." The aesthetic sense is a consequence
of this economy. This is how academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky under­
stands it, and his recapitulation ofthis theory, based as it was on his teacher,
whose works he had studied with great care, was in all likelihood quite
accurate. Potebnya and the numerous members of his movement consider
poetry to be a special form of thinking (i.e., of thinking with the aid of
images). The raison d'etre of the image consists, in their opinion, in helping
to organize heterogeneous objects and actions into groups. And the
unknown is explained through the known. Or, in Potebyna's words:
The relationship of the image to that which is explained by means of it may take
one of two forms: (a) either the image serves as a constant predicate to a succession
of ever-changing subjects-a permanent means of attracting changeable percepts,
or else (b) the image is m'Jch simpler and clearer than that which is to be explained.

Thus, "since the purpose of imagery is to bring the significance ofthe image
closer to our understanding, and since, without this, an image has no mean­
ing, then, the image ought to be better known to us than that which is
explained by it."
It would be interesting to apply this law to Tyutchev's comparison of
summer lightning with deaf-and-dumb demons or to Gogol's simile of the
sky as the raiments of the Lord.
"There is no art without images." "Art is thinking in images." Enormous
energy has been put into interpreting music, architecture, and song along
the lines of literature. After a quarter of a century of effort, Ovsyaniko­
Kulikovsky has finally recognized the need for a special category of non­
imagistic art encompassing song, architecture, and music. Separating them

I
 Art as Device 3
2 Theory of Prose
On the basis of Potebnya's conclusion, which asserts that poetry equals
from literature, he defines this category as that of the lyrical arts, whose imagery, a whole theory has arisen declaring further that imagery equals
essence lies in a spontaneous play of the emotions. And so it has turned out symbolism. This presupposes that an image is capable of serving as a
that at least one huge chunk of art is not subject to the imagistic mode of constant predicate to a succession of changeable subjects. This conclusion,
thinking. And one of these (i.e., the song) resembles, nonetheless, lying at the heart of the Symbolist movement, has seduced, by virtue of its
"imagistic" art: it too deals with words. What is even more important, kinship of ideas, such writers as Andrei Bely and Merezhkovsky with his
imagistic art passes imperceptibly into non-imagistic art. And yet our "eternal companions." This conclusion flows partly from the fact that
perceptions of them are similar. Potebyna did not distinguish the language of poetry from the language of
Still, the assertion that" Art is thinking in images," and therefore (leaving prose. Thanks to this he has failed to notice that there exist two types of
out the intervening steps known to everyone) the proposition that art is the imagery: imagery as a practical way of thinking, that is, as a means of
creator, above all, of symbols, has persisted to this day, having survived the uniting objects in groups, and, secondly, imagery as a way of intensifying
collapse ofthe theory on which it is based. It is particularly very much alive the impressions ofthe senses. Let me illustrate. I'm walking along the street
in the Symbolist movement, especially among its theoreticians. and I see a man walking ahead of me wearing a hat. Suddenly, he drops a
Consequently, many people still believe that thinking in images (Le., in package. I call out to him: "Hey, you with the hat, you dropped a package!"
"paths and shades," "furrows and boundaries") is the dis).inguishing This is an example of a purely prosaic use of an image. A second example.
feature of poetry. Therefore, these people must have expected the history of Several men are standing at attention. The platoon leader notices that one
this" imagistic" art, to use their own words, to consist of the changes in the of the men is standing awkwardly, against army regulations. So he yells at
history of the image. It turns out, however, that images endure and last. him: "Hey you, stop looking like a crumpled hat!" This image is a poetic
From century to century, from country to country, from poet to poet, these trope. (In one case the word hat serves as a metonymy, while in the other
images march on without change. They belong to "no one," except perhaps example we're dealing with a metaphor. And yet I'm really concerned here
to "God." The more you try to explain an epoch, the more you are con­ with something else.)
vinced that the images you thought were created by a given poet were, in A poetic image is one ofthe means by which a poet delivers his greatest
reality, passed on to him by others with hardly a change. The work of impact. Its role is equal to other poetic devices, equal to parallelism, both
successive schools of poetry has consisted essentially in accumulating and simple and negative, equal to the simile, to repetition, to symmetry, to
making known new devices of verbal arrangement and organization. In hyperbole, equal, generally speaking, to any other figure of speech, equal to
particular, these schools of poetry are far more concerned with the disposi­ all these means of intensifying the sensation of things (this "thing" may well
tion than with the creation of imagery. In poetry, where imagery is a given, be nothing more than the words or even just the sounds of the literary work
the artist does not so much "think" in images as "recollect" them. In any itself). Still, the poetic image bears only a superficial resemblance to the
case, it is not imagistic thinking that unites the different arts or even the fairy-tale image or to the thought image (see Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky in
different forms of verbal art. And it is not the changes in imagery that Language and Art, where a young girl calls a round sphere a "water­
constitute the essential dynamics of poetry. melon"). The poetic image is an instrument ofthe poetic language, while the
We know of cases where we stumble onto a poetic something that was prose image is a tool of abstraction: the watermelon instead of the round
never meant, originally, to serve as an object of aesthetic contemplation. lampshade or the watermelon instead of the head is nothing more than an
For example, we may point to Annensky's opinion concerning the special act of abstracting from an object and is in no way to be distinguished from
poetic character of Church Slavonic or to Andrei Bely's rapture over the head = sphere or watermelon = sphere. This is indeed a form of thinking,
practice by eighteenth-century Russian poets of placing the adjective after but it has nothing to do with poetry.
the noun. Bely raves about this as if there were something intrinsically
artistic about it. Or, more precisely, Bely goes beyond this in assuming that The law governing the economy of creative effort also belongs to a group of
this artistic quality is also intentional. In fact, though, this is nothing but a laws taken for granted by everyone. Here is what Herbert Spencer says:
general peculiarity of the given language (the influence of Church Slavonic).
On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see
In this way a work may be either created as prose and experienced as poetry, shadowed forth in many of them, the importance ofeconomizing the reader's or the
or else created as poetry and experienced as prose. This points out the fact hearer's attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least
that the artis tic quality of something, its relationship to poetry, is a result of possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above
our mode of perception. In a narrow sense we shall call a work artistic if it quoted point. ... Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of
has been created by special devices whose purpose is to see to it that these thought. there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the
artifacts are interpreted artistically as much as possible.
4 Theory of Prose Art as Device S

vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and
thing to be done, is to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. experiences function unconsciously-automatically. If someone were to
(The Philosophy of Style) compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand or speaking a foreign
tongue for the very first time with the sensation of performing this same
And Richard A venarius writes: operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us.
If the soul possessed inexhaustible resources, then it wou ld be of no moment to it, It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose
of course, how many of these inexhaustible resources had actuaIly been spent. The speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words.
only thing that would matter would be, perhaps, the time expended. However, since The ideal expression of this process may be said to take place in algebra,
our resources are limited, we should not be surprised to find that the soul seeks to where objects are replaced by symbols. In the rapid-fire flow of conversa­
carry out its perceptual activity as purposefully as possible, i.e., with, relatively tional speech, words are not fully articulated. The first sounds of names
speaking, the least expenditure of energy possible or, which is the same, with, hardly enter our consciousness. In Language as Art, Pogodin tells of a boy
relatively speaking, the greatest result possible. who represented the sentence"Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles" in
By a mere allusion to the general law governing the economy of mental the following sequence of initial letters: L, m. d, I, S, s, b.
effort, Petrazhitsky dismisses James's theory, in which the latter presents This abstractive character of thought suggests not only the method of
the case for the corporeal basis of the affect. The principle of the economy of algebra but also the choice of symbols (letters and, more precisely, initial
creative effort, so seductive especially in the domain of rhythm, was letters). By means of this algebraic method of thinking, objects are grasped
affirmed by Aleksandr Veselovsky. Taking Spencer's ideas to their conclu­ spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize
sion, he said: "The merit of a style consists precisely in this: that it delivers them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it
the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words." Even Andrei were prepackaged. We know that it exists because of its position in space,
Bely, who, at his best, gave us so many fine examples of his own"laborious," but we see only its surface. Gradually, under the influence of this generaliz­
impeding rhythm and who, citing examples from Baratynsky, pointed out ing perception, the object fades away. This is as true ofour perception ofthe
the "laboriousness" of poetic epithets, found it, nonetheless, necessary to object in action as of mere perception itself. It is precisely this perceptual
speak of the law of economy in his book. This work, representing a heroic character of the prose word that explains why it often reaches our ears in
attempt to create a theory of art, demonstrates Bely's enormous command fragmentary form (see the article by L. P. Yakubinsky). This fact also
of the devices of poetry. Unfortunately, it also rests on a body of unverified accounts for much discord in mankind (and for all manner of slips of the
facts gathered from out-of-date books, including Krayevich's physics text­ tongue). In the process of algebrizing, of automatizing the object, the
book, in fashion when he was a student at the lycee. greatest economy of perceptual effort takes place. Objects are represented
The idea that an economy of effort lies at the basis of and governs the either by one single characteristic (for example, by number), or else by a
creative process may well hold true in the "practical" domain of language. formula that never even rises to the level of consciousness. Consider the
However, these ideas, flourishing in the prevailing climate of ignorance following entry in Tolstoi's diary:
concerning the nature of poetic creation, were transplanted from their As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the
native soil in prose to poetry. life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it otT or not. Since these
The discovery that there are sounds in the Japanese poetic language that movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to
have no parallels in everyday Japanese was perhaps the first factual indica­ remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if
tion that these two languages, that is, the poetic and the practical, do not I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If
coincide. L. P. Yakubinsky's article concerning the absence of the law of someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to
restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or
dissimilation of liquid sounds in the language of poetry, and, on the other
observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place
hand, the admission into the language of poetry, as pointed out by the entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been. (29
author, of a confluence of similar sounds that are difficult to pronounce February [i.e., I March] 1897)
(corroborated by scientific research), clearly point, at least in this case, to
the fundamental opposition of the laws governing the practical and poetic And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness.
Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives,
uses of language.
For that reason we have to consider the question of energy expenditure and at our fear of war.
and economy in poetry, not by analogy with prose, but on its own terms. If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the
If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been.
 Art as Device 7
6 Theory of Prose
In "Kholstomer," where the story is told from the point ofview of a horse
And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel the objects are enstranged not by our perception but by that of the horse:
objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The Here is how the horse views the institution of property:
purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ
of sight instead of recognition. By "enstranging" objects and complicating What they were saying about flogging and about Christianity I understood very
form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The per­ well. But I was completely mystified by the meaning ofthe phrase" my colt" or" his
ceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to colt." I could see that humans presupposed a special relationship between me and
the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process ofcreativity. The the stable. What the nature of that relationship was I could not fathom at the time.
Only much later, when I was separated from the other horses, did I understand what
artifact itself is quite unimportant. all this meant. At that time, however, I couldn't possibly understand what it meant
The life ofa poem (and of an artifact) proceeds from vision to recognition,
when I heard myself called by people as the property of a human being. The words
from poetry to prose, from the concrete to the general, from Don Quixote, "my horse" referred to me, a living horse, and this seemed to me just as strange as
the scholarly and poor aristocrat enduring half-consciously his humiliation the words "my land," "my air" or "my water."
at court, to Turgenev's broad and hollow Don Quixote, from Charlemagne And yet, these words had an enormous impact on me. I thought about this night
to Charles the Fat. As the work of art dies, it becomes broader: the fable is and day, and it was only after many diverse contacts with humans that I leamed at
more symbolic than a poem and a proverb is more symbolic than a fable. last the significance of these strange words. The gist is this: People are guided in
For that reason, Potebnya's theory is least self-contradictory in its analysis their life not by deeds but by words. They love not so much the opportunity of doing
of the fable, which, he believed, he had investigated thoroughly. Alas, his (or not doing) something as the chance to talk about a host of things in the possessive
theory never dealt with the" eternal" works of imaginative literature. That language so customary among them: my book, my house, my land, etc. I saw that
accounts for the fact that Potebnya never did complete his book. As is well they applied this "my" to a whole gamut of things, creatures and objects, in fact,
even to people, to horses, to the earth itself. They have made a compact among them­
known, Notes on the Theory ofLiterature was published in 1905, thirteen
selves that only one person shall say "my" to anyone thing. And, in accordance
years after the author's death. Potebnya himself had managed to work out with the rules of this game, he who could say" my" about the greatest number of
fully only the section on the fable. things would be considered to be the happiest of men. Why this is so I don't know,
After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of"recoj!­ but it is so. For a long time I tried to see in this some direct benefit to me, but in the
nition." An object appears before us. We know it's there but we do not see final analysis, it all seemed so unjust.
it, and, for that reason, we can say nothing about it. The removal of this Many of the people, for example, who call me their horse did not ride on me.
object from the sphere of automatized perception is accomplished in art by a Others did. These same people never fed me. Others did. Once again, I was shown
variety of means. I wish to point out in this chapter one of the devices used many kindnesses, but not by those who called me their horse. No, by coachmen,
almost constantly by Tolstoi. It is Merezhkovsky's belief that Tolstoi veterinarians and strangers of all sorts. As my observations grew, though, I became
presents things as he sees them with his eyes without ever changing them. increasingly convinced that this concept of mine was invalid not only for us horses
The devices by which Tolstoi enstranges his material may be boiled but also for human folk, i.e., that it represents nothing more than man's base and
beastly instinct to claim property for himself. A landlord, for instance, says "my
down to the following: he does not call a thing by its name, that is, he
house" but never lives in it, concerning himself only with the structure and main­
describes it as if it were perceived for the first time, while an incident is tenance of the house. A merchant says "my shop," "my clothing shop," yet he
described as if it were happening for the first time. In addition, he foregoes himself does not wear any clothes made from the fine material displayed in it.
the conventional names ofthe various parts ofa thing, replacing them instead There are people who call a piece of land theirs but have never laid eyes on it nor
with the names of corresponding parts in other things. Let me demonstrate walked it. There are people who call other people theirs, but who have never seen
this with an example. [n "Shame" Tolstoi enstranges the idea offlogging by them. And their entire contact with these people consists of doing them evil.
describing people who, as punishment for violating the law, had been There are people who call women "theirs" or "their" wives, yet these'women live
stripped, thrown down on the floor, and beaten with switches. A few lines with other men. And people do not aspire to do good. No, they dream of naming as
later he refers to the practice of whipping their behinds. In a note on this many objects as possible as their own.
passage, Tolstoi asks: "J ust why this stupid, savage method of inflicting pain Leaving aside other good reasons for our superiority, I am now convinced that
what distinguishes us from humans and gives us the right to claim a higher place on
and no other: such as pricking the shoulder or some such other part of the
the ladder of living creatures is simply this: that the human species is guided, above
body with needles, squeezing somebody's hands or feet in a vise, etc."
all, by words. while ours is guided by deeds.
I apologize for the harshness of this example but it is typical of the way
Tolstoi reaches our conscience. The usual method offlogging is enstranged The horse is killed off long before the end of the story, but the mode of
by a description that changes its form without changing its essence. Toistoi telling the story, its device, does not change:
constantly makes use of this method of enstrangement.
'~~"
i
8 Theory of Prose
Art as Device 9
Much later, they dumped Serpukhovsky's body into the ground. He had walked Or in the fourth act:
the earth. He had drunk and eaten of it. Neither his skin nor flesh nor bones were of
any use to anybody. There was a certain devil on the stage who sang, with arms outspread, Until
For twenty years, this dead body walking the earth was a great burden to every­ someone pulled the board from under him and he fell through.
one. Now, the dumping ofthis body seemed like another hardship to others. He was
no longer of any use to anyone and could no longer cause anyone any grief. N ever­ Tolstoi deScribes the city and court in Resurrection in the same way.
the less, the dying who buried the dead had found it necessary to dress up this bloated Similarly, he asks of the marriage in The Kreutzer Sonata: "Why should
body, which was about to rot, in a dress uniform and to lower him, with his good two people who are soul mates sleep together?"
boots on, into a fine coffin adorned with new tassels at the four corners. They then
But the device of enstrangement was not used by T olstoi to enstrange
put this new coffin into another coffin made of lead, took it to Moscow, where they only those things he scorned:
dug up ancient human bones and buried this body infested with worms in its new
uniform and polished boots. Then they poured earth all over his coffin. Pierre got up and walked away from his new friends and made his way among
We see by the end of this story that Tolstoi continues to make use of this camp fires to the other side of the road where, as he had been told, the captive
soldiers stayed. He wanted to have a little talk with them. On the way, a French
device even when no motivation for it exists.
sentinel stopped him and ordered him to return. Pierre returned, but not to the camp
In War and Peace Tolstoi describes battles using the same device. They fire, not to his friends. but to an unharnessed carriage that stood somewhat apart.
are all presented, above all, in their strangeness. Unfortunately, I cannot Cross-legged and with his head lowered, he sat on the cold earth by the wheels ofthe
offer any full examples, because this would require excerpting a large carriage and thought for a long time without moving. More than an hour passed.
portion of the monumental novel. However, a description of the salons and No one disturbed him. Suddenly, Pierre broke out with a robust, gOod-natured
the theater will suffice for the moment: laugh that was so loud that people looked back from all directions at this evidently
strange laugh.
Level boards were spread out in the center of the stage. Along the wings stood
HHa, ha, ha," Pierre laughed and he began talking to himself: "So the soldier
painted pictures depicting trees. Behind them, a canvas was stretched on boards. In
wouldn't let me through, ha, ha, ha! They seized me, blocked my way. Me. Me. My
the middle ofthe stage sat young girls in red bodices and white skirts. One young girl,
immortal soul. Ha, ha, ha," he continued laughing as tears rolled down his
very fat, and attired in white silk, was sitting separately on a low bench to which a cheeks....
green cardboard was attached from behind. They were all singing something. When
Pierre looked up at the sky, at the playful stars that were receding into the
they finished singing, the young girl in white walked over to the prompter's box and a
distance. "And all of this is mine and all of this is within me and all of this is me,"
man in tight-fitting silken hose on his fat legs approached her, sporting a plume,
Pierre thought to himself. "And they seized all of this and shut it off with boards."
spread his arms in despair and began singing. The man in tight-fitting hose sang He smiled, returned to his comrades and went to sleep.
alone, then she sang. Then they both fel! silent, the music roared, and the man began
fingering the hand ofthe young girl dressed in white, evidently waiting again for his Everyone who knows Tolstoi well can find several hundred examples of
tum to join her in song. After their duet, everyone in the theater applauded and this sort.. His way of seeing things out of their usual context is equally
shouted. Gesticulating, the lovers then smiled and bowed to the audience.
evident in his last works, where he applies the device of enstrangement to
The second act included scenes depicting monuments. The moon and stars
peeped in through holes in the canvas and lampshades were raised in frames. Then,
his description of the dogmas and rituals he had been investigating. He
to the sound of bass horns and double basses, hordes of men rushed onto the stage replaces the customary terms used by the Orthodox Church with ordinary,
sporting black mantles and brandishing what looked like daggers. Then still others down-ta-earth words. What results is something strange, something mon­
ran up and started pulling on the arm of a young girl. Dressed earlier in white, she strous which was taken by many-quite sincerely, I might add-as a form
was now dressed in a light blue dress. They did not drag her off right away. First, ofblasphemy, causing them great pain. And yet this is the same device that
they joined her in a song for what seemed like a very long time. At long last, after . Tolstoi applied to his perceptions and descriptions of the world around him.
whisking her off, they struck three times on some metallic object offstage. Then, Tolstoi's faith was shattered by his perceptions. He was confronting that
everyone fell on his knees and began singing a prayer. Several times the actions of which he had been trying to evade for a long time.
the protagonists were interrupted by the enthusiastic screams of the audience. The device ofenstrangement is not peculiar to Tolstoi. I illustrated it with
So also in the third act: examples from his work for purely practical considerations, that is, simply
because his work is known to everyone.
. . . But suddenly a storm broke out and in the orchestra you could hear the Having delineated this literary device, let us now determine the limits of
chromatic scales and diminished seventh chords and they all ran up and dragged its application more precisely. In my opinion, enstrangement can be found
another of the characters offstage and the curtain fell. almost anywhere (Le., wherever there is an image).
What distinguishes our point of view from that of Potebnya may be
10 Theory 0/ Prose
Art as Device 11

formulated as follows: The image is not a constant subject for changing How we learned our alphabet together:

predicates. The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding Mine was the silver inkwell, and your pen was golden'!

closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive I moistened your pen then and there,

the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a "vision" of this object Yes, I moistened it, all right, then and there."

rather than mere" recognition."

There is another version of this bylina where a riddle is answered:
The purpose of imagery may be most clearly followed in erotic art. The
erotic object is here commonly presented as something seen for the very At this pointthe fearsome ambassador Vasilyushka
first time. Consider, for example, Gogol's "Christmas Eve": Raised her dress all the way up to her navel.
And behold, young Stavyor, the son of Godinovich
Then he moved closer to her, coughed, let out a laugh, touched her exposed, full Recognized the gilt-edged ring ...
arm and said in a voice that expressed both cunning and self-satisfaction:
H And what's that you have there, my splendid Solokha?" Saying this, he took But enstrangement is not a device limited to the erotic riddle-a euphe­
several steps back. mism of sorts. It is also the foundation of all riddles. Every riddle either
"What do you mean? My arm, Osip Nikiforovich!" Solokha answered. defines and illustrates its subject in words which seem inappropriate during
"Hm! Your arm! Heh, heh, heh!" the secretary, satisfied with his opening gambit, the telling ofit (for instance: "What has two rings with a nail in the middle of
said warmly and paced about the room. it?") or else it represents a peculiar audio form ofenstrangement( i.e., a kind
"And what's that you have there, Solokha? Why are you trembling?" he said with of mimicry: "slon da kondrik" instead of "zaslon i konnik").
that same look in his eyes as he started for her again and touched her neck lightly Similarly, erotic images that are not riddles may also be a form of
with his hand. He then pulled back as before.
enstrangement. I mean, of course, the whole range of colorful obscenities
" As if you didn't see, Osip Nikiforovich!" Solokha answered... It's my neck and
on my neck there is a necklace," associated with the burlesque. The device of enstrangement is perfectly
"Hm! So there is a necklace on your neck! Heh, heh, heh!" and the secretary clear in the widely disseminated image-a kind of erotic pose-in which
again paced up and down the room, wringing his hands. "And what's that you have bears and other animals ( or the devil, prompted by a different moti vation for
there, my peerless Solokha?" non-recognition) do not recognize man. Very typical is this tale of non­
Who knows how far the secretary would dare go with those long fingers of his? recognition, one of the Great Russian Tales o/the Perm Province collected
by D. S. Zelenin:
Or in Hamsun's Hunger: "Two white miracles showed through her
blouse. " A peasant was cultivating a field with a piebald mare. A bear approaches him and
Orelse erotic objects are depicted allegorically, where the author's intent asks: "Hey, brother. Who made this mare piebald for you?"
"I myself, of course," the peasant replied.
is clearly something quite other than a conceptual understanding.
"Really, and how?" the bear fired back.
Here belongs the description ofprivate parts in the form of a lock and key "Come on, let me make you piebald too."
(e,g., in Savodnikov's Riddles o/the Russian People), or in the correspond­ The bear agreed.
ing parts ofa 100m, or in the form ofa bow and arrow, or in the game of rings The peasant tied the bear's legs with a rope, removed the ploughshare from the
and marlinespikes. We find the latter in the traditional bylina (folk epic) plough, heated it in the fire, and otT he went to apply it to the bear's flanks. This
about Stavyor, where the husband fails to recognize his wife, who has put on scorched his coat to the very bone, making him piebald. After the peasant untied
the armor of a bogatyr (folk) heroine. She poses the following riddle: him, the bear moved away and lay under a tree.
A magpie swooped down on the peasant to peck at his flesh. The peasant seized it
"Do you remember, Stavyor, remember, dear?
and broke one of its legs. The magpie then flew otT and sat down on the same tree
How we strolled along the street when young,
against which the bear was resting.
How we played rings and 'spikes together:
Finally, a horsefly came along and sat on the mare and began biting it. The
Your marlinespike was made of silver,
peasant seized the horsefly, shoved a stick up its behind, and let it go. The horsefly
While my ring was made of gold.
flew otT and sat in the same tree where the magpie and bear were reposing.
I would hit the target now and then
All three were resting together when the peasant's wife arrived on the scene with
But you struck bull's-eye every time ..."
her husband's dinner. After eating his dinner in the open air, the peasant beat his
Stavyor, son of Godinovich, says in tum:
wife, throwing her repeatedly to the ground.
"I have never played marlinespikes with you!"
Seeing this, the bear said to the magpie and the horsefly: "My God! Looks like
Vasilisa Mikulichna fires back, quote:
this peasant is out to make someone piebald again."
"Don't you remember, Stavyor, don't you recall
"No, no," the magpie answered, "no, he wants to break someone's leg."
12 Theory of Prose Art as Device 13

"Oh, no, fellows, you got it all wrong," the horsefly announced solemnly: "Not at stH nuovo," the language of Daniel, with its dark style and difficult forms,
all. He wants to shove his stick up her behind!" presupposing difficulties in pronunciation. Yakubinsky has demonstrated in
his article the law of difficulty for the phonetics of poetic language, particu­
The similarity of the enstrangement device here with its use by Tolstoi in
larly in the repetition ofidentical sounds. In this way, therefore, the language
"Kholstomer" is, I believe, quite obvious.
of poetry may be said to be a difficult, "laborious," impeding language.
The enstrangement of the sexual act in literature is quite frequent. For
In certain isolated cases, the language of poetry approaches the language
example, in the Decameron, Boccaccio refers to "the scraping of the
of prose, but this does not violate the principle of "difficulty." Pushkin
barrel," "the catching of the nightingale," "the merry woolbeating work"
writes:
(the last image is not deployed in the plot). Just as frequent is the enstrange­
ment of the sexual organs. Her sister was called Tatiana.

A whole series of plots is built on "non-recognition," for example, Willfully shall we shed light

Afanasiev's Indecent Tales. The whole tale ofthe "Bashful Lady" revolves On the tender pages of this novel,

around the fact that the object is never called by its proper name (Le., it is Naming her so for the first time.

based on a game of non-recognition). The same is true ofOnchukov's "A For the contemporaries of Pushkin, the elevated style of Derzhavin was
Woman's Blemish" (tale no. 525) and "The Bear and the Rabbit," also poetic language, while the style of Pushkin, due to its banality (as was
from Indecent Tales, in which a bear and a rabbit give each other a thought then) represented for them something unexpectedly difficult. Let's
"wound." not forget that Pushkin's contemporaries were horrified at his trite expres­
To this device of enstrangement belong also constructions such as "the sions. Pushkin employed folk speech as a special device of arresting the
pestle and the mortar" or "the devil and the infernal regions" (Decameron). reader's attention precisely in the same way that his contemporaries inter­
Concerning enstrangement in the form of psychological parallelism, see spersed Russian words in their everyday French speech (see the examples
my next chapter on plot formation. Here let me say only, what is important in Tolstoi's War and Peace).
in psychological parallelism is for each of the parallel structures to retain its At this point, an even more characteristic phenomenon takes place.
independence in spite of obvious affinities. Though alien to Russia by its nature and origin, the Russian literary language
The purpose of parallelism is the same as that of imagery in general, that has so deeply penetrated into the heart of our people that it has lifted
is, the transfer of an object from its customary sphere ofperception to a new much of popular speech to unheard-of heights. At the same time, literature
one; we are dealing here with a distinct semantic change. has become enamored of dialect (Remizov, Klyuev, Esenin, and others,
In our phonetic and lexical investigations into poetic speech, involving all of these so uneven in their talent and yet so near to a consciously
both the arrangement of words and the semantic structures based on them, provincial dialect) and of barbarisms (we might include here Severyanin's
we discover everywhere the very hallmark of the artistic: that is, an artifact school). Maksim Gorky, meanwhile, is making a transition at this very
that has been intentionally removed from the domain of automatized moment from the literary tongue of Pushkin to the conversational idiom of
perception. It is "artificially" created by an artist in such a way that the Leskov. And so folk speech and the literary tongue have changed their
perceiver, pausing in his reading, dwells on the text. This is when the places (Vyacheslav Ivanov and many others). Finally, a powerful new
literary work attains its greatest and most long-lasting impact. The object is movement is making its debut with the creation of a new, specialized poetic
perceived not spatially but, as it were, in its temporal continuity. That is, language. At the head of this school, as is well known, stands Velimir
because of this device, the object is brought into view. Khlebnikov.
These conditions are also met by "poetic language." According to All things considered, we've arrived at a definition of poetry as the
Aristotle, poetic language oUght to have the character ofsomething foreign, language of impeded, distorted speech. Poetic speech is structured speech.
something outlandish about it. In practice, such language is often quite Prose, on the other hand, is ordinary speech: economical, easy, correct
literally foreign: just as Sumerian might have been regarded as a "poetic speech (Dea Prosae, the queen of correct, easy childbirth, i.e., head first). I
language" by an Assyrian, so Latin was considered poetic by many in shall speak in more detail of the device ofimpeding, of holding back, when I
medieval Europe. Similarly, Arabic was thought poetic by a Persian and consider it as a general law of art in my chapter on plot construction.
Old Bulgarian was regarded likewise by a Russian. Or else it might indeed Still, those who favor the economy of artistic energy as the distinctive
be a lofty language, like the language of folk song, which is close to litera­ feature of poetic language seem to be quite persuasive when it comes to the
ture. To this category belong also the widespread archaisms of poetic question of rhythm. Spencer's interpretation ofthe role of rhythm seems on
language, the difficulties ofthe language ofthe twelfth century called "dolce the face of it quite unshakeable:
/4 Theory oj Prose

Just as the body in receiving a series of varying concussions, must keep the
muscles ready to meet the most violent of them, as not knowing when such may
come: so, the mind in receiving unarranged articulations, must keep its perspectives
active enough to recognize the least easily caught sounds. And as, ifthe concussions
Chapter 2
recur in definite order, the body may husband its forces by adjusting the resistance
needful for each concussion; so, if the syllables be rhythmically arranged, the mind
may economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each syllable.
The Relationship between Devices of
This apparently convincing remark suffers from a common defect, that is,
Plot Construction and General Devices of Style
the turning upside-down of the laws that govern poetry and prose. In his
Philosophy ojStyle, Spencer completely failed to distinguish them. It may
well be that there exist two types of rhythm. The rhythm of prose or of a "Why walk on a tightrope? And, as if that were not enough, why squat every
work song like "Dubinushki" replaces the need for an order from a super­ four steps?" asked Saltykov-Shchedrin about poetry. Every person who has
visor by its rhythmic chant: "let's groan together." On the other hand, it also ever examined art closely, apart from those led astray by a defective theory
eases and automatizes the work. And indeed, it is easier to walk with music of rhythm as an organizational tool, understands this question. A crooked,
than without it. Of course, it is just as easy to walk while talking up a storm, laborious poetic speech, which makes the poet tongue-tied, or a strange,
when the act of walking disappears from our consciousness. In this sense, unusual vocabulary, an unusual arrangement of words-what's behind all
the rhythm of prose is important as a factor leading to automatization. But this?
such is not the rhythm of poetry. There is indeed such a thing as "order" in Why does King Lear fail to recognize Kent? Why do both Kent and Lear
art, but not a single column of a Greek temple fulfills its order perfectly, and fail to recognize Edward? So asked Tolstoi in utter astonishment about the
artistic rhythm may be said to exist in the rhythm of prose disrupted. underlying laws of Shakespearean drama. This comes from a man who
Attempts have been made by some to systematize these "disruptions." knew greatly how to see things and how to be surprised by them.
They represent today's task in the theory of rhythm. We have good reasons Why does the recognition scene in the plays of Menander, Plautus and
to suppose that this systemization will not succeed. This is so because we Terence take place in the last act, when the spectators have already had a
are dealing here not so much with a more complex rhythm as with a disru(r presentiment by then of the blood relationship binding the antagonists, and
tion of rhythm itself, a violation, we may add, that can never be predicted. If when the author himself often notifies us of it in advance in the prologue?
this violation enters the canon, then it loses its power as a complicating Why is it that in dance a partner requests "the pleasure ofthe next dance"
device. But enough of rhythm for the time being. I shall devote a separate even after the woman had already tacitly accepted it?
book to it in the future. What keeps Glahn and Edvarda apart in Hamsun's Pan, scattering them
all over the world in spite of their love for each other?
Why is it that, in fashioning an Art ojLove out of love, Ovid counsels us
not to rush into the arms of pleasure?
A crooked road, a road in which the foot feels acutely the stones beneath
it, a road that turns back on itself-this is the road of art.
One word fits another. One word feels another word, as one cheek feels
another cheek. Words are taken apart and, instead of one complex word
handed over like a chocolate bar at a candy store, we see before us a word­
sound, a word-movement. Dance is movement that can be felt. Or more
accurately, it is movement formed in order to be felt. And behold, we dance
as we plow. Still, we have no need of a field. We can dance even without it.
There's an old story in some Greek classic ... a certain royal prince was
so impassioned with the dance at his wedding that he threw off his clothes
and began dancing naked on his hands. This enraged the bride's father, who
shouted, "Prince, you have just danced yourself out of a wedding." To

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