A Hunt for Optimism. Viktor Shklovsky

‘The Trumpet of the Martians’,” opening with Khlebnikov’s 1916 Futurist manifesto, includes memoirs on Mayakovsky, which were later inserted in Mayakovsky and His Circle (1941). It traces the vibrant history of the Russian avant-garde, the literary and artistic happenings at the Stray Dog Café, the gatherings of the Futurists, and it incorporates parallel columns of quotes from Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Fet, Blok, and other poets. The final part, “The End of A Hunt for Optimism,” switches to journalistic and quasi-parodic observations on the first Five-Year Plan, collectivization, Red Army maneuvers, and war games.

      This little polemical book is about art and revolution — “the revolt of things against a reified universe.” By way of both direct and indirect parodies, anecdotes, and stories within stories Shklovsky criticizes Soviet censorship and the ineptitude of Soviet leaders. In it, he carries the vulnerability of the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik intelligentsia, who had unwittingly become the “enemies of the people.” Stylistically, he never tires from digressing from one theme to another. His prose moves in short, staccato sentences, single-sentence paragraphs that are montaged in seemingly disconnected and contradictory ways — they materialize contradiction as both a style of writing and a state of being.

       ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The present translation is based on the first edition published in 1931 in Moscow by Federatsia Press. I have used existing translations, when possible, for quotations from texts originally in other languages, while I have compared texts originally in Russian with existing translations and revised some of them (all revisions are indicated in the footnotes) or translated anew. I would like particularly to thank Margo Rosen for her translation of several excerpts of poems in the fourth part of the book, some of which appear in English for the first time.

      S. Avagyan

       March 2012

      1. In the notes to “Incident at the Factory,” Gamburgsky Schyot: Statyi, vospominaniya, esse, 1914–1933 (Hamburg Account: Articles, Memoirs, and Essays, 1914–1933), Sovetsky pisatel, 1990.

      2. Introduction, Gamburgsky Schyot.

      3. In the notes to “Incident at the Factory,” Gamburgsky Schyot.

      4. Ibid.

      5. Literaturnaya Rossiya (Literary Russia) 39 (1986).

       ON ARCHITECTURE

      Khlebnikov thought about it and wrote in the journal Vzyal (Took). I am quoting from the end:

      XI. To separate mankind into inventors and others. A platoon of visionary eyes.

      XII. To study the art of crossbreeding and creation of new tribes for Earth’s needs.

      XIII. To reform housing rights; the right to own a room in any city and the right to constantly move, change location (the right to housing free from spatial determination). A flying mankind does not limit its ownership rights to a private place.

      XIV. To build steel gridshell buildings that could fit small portable glass houses.¹

      We know that life is good for nothing.

      We don’t know how to build buildings.

      I was in Green City yesterday. The forest there stretches for seventy-five square versts.² It is a spruce and pine forest.

      Models of new houses stand in the forest.

      We don’t know how to rebuild our ships. Should we build small houses on legs, a separate room, a studio for one person, so that he can be either with everyone else or completely alone?

      Or should we build huge buildings with elevators and maybe tram cars in the hallways?

      We don’t know.

      The Milky Way stretches over the roof as a wide steppe road in the autumn, all strewn with straw.

      The Milky Way streams like a wide road.

      People in our small wooden house are like those on a steamship. They sleep on beds, couches. They sleep on the floor.

      Our house floats like a small steamship, exhaling heat through the funnels.

      It floats under the sky.

      That’s probably called “drifting” in nautical language. The house drifts on the ground.

      Nothing has been decided yet. The way hasn’t been found.

      My keys don’t open all the doors of my era.

      It’s time to wake up, time to change.

      My stories have been played on an eight-by-eight checkerboard. White, black, love, betrayal, death.

      The ending of my book isn’t resolved yet, reader, and it’s written without complete skill. Yes, it’s easier for me to describe the funny town of Beryozovka and its marketplace than the Third Congress of Women Collective Farmers. I don’t know how to write about the things that I have seen.

      I’ll write in sketch form. No, that’s not a solution. Sketches perish quickly. They don’t survive their own day. They have already expired, while the question still persists.

      The sketch is not suitable then.

      Silence. Unfit for sailing, my small ship sails across dry land, moving in relation to the stars.

      Apartment life.

      Reader, it’s so difficult to sail away from your own immovable home. It’s so hard to forget bitterness and confusion. To move from an apartment floor plan to the map of the world.

      Silence befalls when you finish the book.

       May 14, 1930

      1. Velimir Khlebnikov, from “Proposals,” Vzyal (December 1915).

      2. A verst is about two-thirds of a mile.

       PART ONE

Titled “Everything as it Should Be,” with an Epigraph

       I haven’t thought of you for so long, my dear, that I don’t even miss you.

      — From a personal letter

       THE REGISTRY OFFICE

      Are you here for a funeral?

      To register your marriage? And he never showed up? Could he be late? Does he work?

      It’s funny how marriages and funerals are registered at the same desk.

      Look, even the signs are identical.

      You aren’t very talkative.

      I’m not here for a funeral either — I’m here for a divorce.

      Life has become unbearable.

      You are a complete stranger to me and you won’t even answer, but I will tell you.

      Look, another couple is getting registered.

      I had a husband, I called him Serenky. He was short, with gray hair on his temples. Such a gentle, caring man. See my lilac stockings? He’s the one who picked them for me to match the color of my shoes.

      And these are aquamarines — they are my grandmother’s. They match the color of my eyes. Even my blouse matches. Isn’t it pretty?

      Listen, your man might never show up. Aren’t the aquamarines pretty?

      There, now you are smiling.

      My Serenky is plain. We have a nice room in a large building. With a stone hallway that’s noisy. But the room is nice. We have a few neighbors whom