Writers No One Reads

From the notes to Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Victor Shklovsky:

Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov (1877–1957), a brilliant and influential writer who attempted in his prose to strip the Russian literary language of its foreign derivatives and restore to it the natural raciness of the vernacular. He emigrated from Russia at the end of 1921 and settled in Berlin until 1923, when he moved to Paris, where he remained until his death. Remizov founded his monkey society as a lampoon on the official organizations and committees that proliferated after the revolution. Charter memberships were conferred by elegantly designed scrolls, signed by Asyka, tsar of the monkeys.

My favorite bit from his wikipedia entry:

Another striking work of this period is ‘The Sacrifice,’ a Gothic horror story in which “a ghostly double of a father comes to kill his innocent daughter in the mistaken belief that she is a chicken”.

I hope to explore his work more in the book Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art.

The great modernist eccentric Alexei Remizov was a “writers’ writer” whose innovative poetic prose has long since entered the Russian literary canon. Gradually expanding his working methods to make drawing an integral part of the writing process, during the 1930s and 1940s, Remizov created hundreds of albums that combined texts with collages and india ink and watercolor illustrations. In Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism, Julia Friedman provides the first extensive examination of the dynamic interplay between text and image in Remizov’s albums, revealing their coequal roles in his oneiric and synaesthetic brand of storytelling.

From another note in the ‪Shklovsky‬ book:

“Kukkha” is a word defined by Remizov as meaning “moisture” in monkey language.

From the 1947 edition of the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature (purchased yesterday for $3 and opened at random):

Nikolai Maksimovich Minski [often Minsky] (pseud. of  Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin, 1855-1937, Russian poet and philosopher), was born of poor Jewish parents at Glubokoye in the former Government of Vilna and took his degree in law at St. Petersburg. Minski began his literary career as a follower of Nekrasov [no one reads Nekrasov], but soon abandoned “civic” themes for an “art for art’s sake” attitude; he became the first of the Russian decadents, among whom he shared leadership with [Akim] Volynski and Merezhkovski, particularly as a philosopher. He was one of the organizers of the Religious-Philosophical Society (1902), which attracted the intellectuals among the believers. His ideas are set forth in the Nietzschean Pri svete sovesti (1890; By the Light of Conscience) and in Religiya budushchevo (1905; The Religion of the Future), which develops his concept of “meonism,” the religion of nonbeing, based on a mystic faith in conscience, sacrifice, and love, compounded with elements borrowed from Nietzsche and oriental mystics. His poetry is often a vehicle for his ideas, though in his later work he occasionally achieved a true synthesis of form and content. Minski was unfortunate in becoming a poet during a period of transition, and his chief importance lies in his preparing the ground for the later symbolists. Curiously enough, 1905 found Minski among the revolutionaries; he became the nominal head of Novaya zhizn (The New Life), Russia’s first legal Social Democratic newspaper, for which he wrote “A Hymn of the Workers.” His arrest terminated that period, and he left Russia for Paris. In exile, he wrote, among other things, a dramatic trilogy and a volume of criticism (1922, From Dante to Blok) and then lapsed into silence.

(Read more about Minsky. He also shows up in an article about the great Sologub.)

From the flaps to the 1975 Neville Spearman edition of The Fiery Angel (a reprint of a 1930 edition, now in print from Dedalus):

Valery Briussov’s historical novel, written in 1907, is a dramatic re-creation of a sixteenth-century world in which forces of demonology and witchcraft are real and powerful.

The story of the soldier, Rupprecht, captivated by a lady called Renata, who is tormented by demons, and their subsequent struggles, is an archetypal tale of horror and possession. The set piece of the witches’ sabbath—an authentic description—is particularly powerful, and should be read by anyone who  wants to understand what witches were supposed to do on these occasions. 

For a writer of the pre-Freudian era, The Fiery Angel is a remarkably convincing tour de force of abnormal psychology. Being a poet Briussov had an inkling of the strange truth about witches: that the powers of the human mind are far greater than we understand, and that they can be released by symbols.

Prokoviev’s opera, The Fiery Angels, was based on Briussov’s novel.

The back flap of the dustjacket reveals that Neville Spearman were doing a lot of Arkham House reprints in the 70s.

Colin Wilson called Fiery Angel ”one of the most remarkable novels ever written on the subject of magic and witchcraft.” From his intro:

By the age of twenty, Briussov had totally absorbed the gospel of decadence, as encapsulated in Huysmans’ A Rebours and Villiers de Lisle Adam’s Axel , with its famous line: “Live? Our servants can do that for us.” In 1894, when he was 21, he was part-author of a book called Russian Symbolists, which achieved a success de scandale. In the following year came his Chefs D’Oevres, which was greeted by the press with sneers and derision. In fact, Briussov was fighting in Russian the battle that Swinburne, Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelites had fought in the 1860s; and, as in England, there were plenty of conservative critics to denounce the “fleshly school of poetry.”

Jacket designed by Laurence Cutting

10/30/2011 update: I realized Briussov is featured prominently in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse.

Found tonight on Porridge Legs, the blog of artist Mick Peter:

‘Sasha Chorny’ (‘Sasha the Black’ / Са́ша Чёрный) was the deliberately suggestive pseudonym of the early 20th century poet Aleksandr Glikberg (Александр Михайлович Гликберг). His mordant and biting poems, mercilessly satirizing literary and emotional pretension appealed to Shostakovich, who loved laughter and caricature. The composer chose five of Chorny’s verses to make a short cycle for his friend, the distinguished soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. She herself suggested a subtitle to the cycle, ‘Pictures of the Past’, which the composer approved as it ironically underlined that, of course, these songs were all about the present. The set begins with the mocking address ‘To a critic’, and continues with ‘Spring awakening’ in which Chorny pokes fun at writers who wax sentimental about the coming of spring and Shostakovich has boyish musical fun at the expense of Rachmaninov’s famous romance ‘Spring Waters’. Two cynical little numbers about human motivation are finally rounded out with a poem referring to Tolstoy’s famous murder-story ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. The reference to Beethoven gives Shostakovich the chance for some more musical jokes.

I don’t see anything in English, though he surely shows up in anthologies, and there’s a nice wikipedia page for him.

No one reads Gorky’s close friend, Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919), who wrote plays, novels, and short stories. His writing is melancholic, psychological, satirical, and illuminatingly unorthodox in its treatment of religion.

Borges included one of Andreyev’s short stories, “Lazarus”, in the Russian stories section of The Library of Babel. In addition, I recommend, for starters, A Dilemma (a.k.a. A Thought), The Red Laugh, and The Seven Who Were Hanged; the latter two were in Lovecraft’s personal library.

Nel mezzo del cammin asks, “Does anyone read Daniil Kharms?” To which we reply that one certainly should, a good place to start being The Blue Notebook, available in its entirety at Ugly Duckling Presse.