“Only God Can Be”: Aleksandr Vvedensky, Kant, God, and Time

Abstract

This article discusses the place of God in the poetic system of Aleksandr Vvedensky. Vvedensky’s famous pronouncement on his “poetic critique” is more throughgoing than Kant’s critical enterprise, and invites a comparison between the movement of Kant’s thought in the Critique of Judgment, and what Vvedensky’s recourse to senselessness aims to achieve. Time in Vvedensky poetics may be seen as a radical extension of Kant’s philosophical system where it ultimately resides in an equally inaccessible realm on which its entire edifice is founded.

The poet is a cocoon that unwinds itself in our reading, and this cocoon unwinds into an endless thread that doesn’t lead anyone anywhere, whether it flashes or disappears into darkness,–not because it doesn’t know the beginning, but because as we try to “walk along, or follow” this thread, we will never have enough time which in its tireless becoming an enveloping “cobweb” draws its own experience from nothing and only then from “before”.

“Mesh”. (Dragomoshchenko 2011)

Aleksandr Vvedensky, arguably the most outstanding poet of the late pre-war Soviet avant-garde and a key member of the Chinar-OBERIU group of poets and philosophers, has been the focus of notable critical attention in the last two decades, most recently after the publication of the definitive complete edition of his surviving oeuvre.1 He is a very difficult poet to tackle critically. As Keti Chukhrov points out, “his work not only surpasses all interpretations and analytical observations, but has the capacity to cancel their significance and explanatory pathos. This happens because Vvedensky’s writings already contain within themselves those meta-positions with which one could approach them, including philosophical, theological, and strangely enough, political ones” (Chukhrov 2011, p. 145). This could be part of the reason why to date there has been little effort to identify the place of God in his works. According Vvedensky’s most often cited statement, the poet was interested only in three things–time, death, and God (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 167). Equally famous is his overarching desire to overstep reason, undertaking what he called “a poetic critique of reason—a more substantial one than that other, abstract critique”,2 the latter being of course Kant’s First, Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant, a one-time Russian subject and member of St Petersburg Academy of Science, was most certainly a visible influence on the development of the Russian philosophical and religious-philosophical thought. It was not until the late 19th century that an explosion of interest in his work occurred in the Russian academia—owing to the influence of European neo-Kantianism (with one of the most important Russian philosophers of this school being, curiously, a different Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky (1856–1925), the poet’s complete namesake who as professor of St Petersburg University taught, among others, influential figures as Nikolai Lossky, Petr Struve, and Mikhail Bakhtin). Overall, much as the Russian philosophers were interested in Kant, they were also critical of him. According to Semyon Frank, “critique of Kant’s philosophy and struggle against Kantianism are … a constant theme in the Russian philosophical thought” (Zenkovsky 1999, vol. 1, p. 347). Most Russian philosophers incorporated Eastern Orthodox beliefs into their systems which were often more than tinged with irrationality. Like Kant, they recognized the limitations of human reason, but they also allowed for mystical experiences and intuitions that could give access to what in Kant is inaccessible, i.e., the realm of the noumena. It is the privileging of ontology that stopped Russian philosophy from developing its own branch of Kantian thought. According to another prominent Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev, the cognition of the hidden realm can only be achieved in a symbol, an image, through the power of imagination and “inner living agility” (Losev 1991, p. 213).

This postulate was key to the work of Russian symbolists, especially Andrei Bely who was the only one among them to have studied Kant. In their endeavours, they actively worked against what they perceived to be purely rational spirit of Kantian philosophy. “True symbolism”, writes Belyi in an early article “Krititsizm i simvolizm” (“Criticism and Symbolism”) (written in 1904 on the centennial of Kant’s death), “begins only beyond the gates of criticism. Symbolism born of criticism, unlike the latter, becomes a living method that equally differs from dogmatic empiricism and abstract criticism by overcoming them both” (Bely 1910, p. 29). He argues that the difference Symbolism makes lies in its ability to overcome the “purely scientific” character of knowledge in Kant and ultimately bridge the schism between phenomena and noumena—this “Scylla and Charibdis of the Kantian philosophy” (ibid., p. 25)—by means of creative, intuitive cognition: “The cognition of ideas reveals in temporal phenomena their timelessly eternal meaning. This cognition joins together understanding and feeling into something different from them both, something that covers them both” (ibid., p. 29). Bely’s younger colleagues who, as said, hardly read any Kant at all, saw him as a Prussian prisoner, a sinister spider whose web of rigid logic and concepts unfairly limits the freedom of poetic genius, barring it any access to the noumenal world. To paraphrase the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, “бить Канта нагoлoву” (“rout Kant, beat Kant hollow”) becomes a mission for many figures of Russian modernism who in their quest for a new poetic language think of Kant at best as a powerful enemy (and at worst, a beating boy).

The Oberiu poets were no exception in this respect. As Iakov Druskin, Vvedensky’s devoted friend, colleague and astute interpreter testifies, neither Vvedensky, nor his close associate Daniil Kharms whose work has garnered a much greater critical response were particularly well-steeped in philosophy. And yet Kharms famously scribbled “against Kant” underneath his “Blue Notebook no. 10”, prompting future scholars to speculate on the anti-Kantian drive of the Chinar-Oberiu ideas.3 Druskin (he along with Leonid Lipavsky were the only real philosophers in the group) once remarked that even though Daniil Ivanovich may have dropped a quote from Kant, he never really read the philosopher’s works.4 Meanwhile, Druskin himself held Kant in the highest esteem and in his diaries listed the philosopher alongside Bach and Vvedensky among the greatest geniuses of humankind (Druskin 1999, p. 433–34). Moreover, to philosopher Druskin who considered Vvedensky greatest Russian poet of all times, Kant and Vvedensky share not only greatness but also a certain universality. Kant’s task was to “abolish knowledge to make room for faith” (Kant 1993, p. 21); Vvedensky’s “poetic critique of reason” in search of answers to the questions of time, death, and God pursued the very same objective. Yet, neither was Kant a religious philosopher, nor Vvedensky a religious poet. Both their projects were thoroughly critical, even if Vvedensky’s was more thoroughgoing than Kant’s in that it turned its critique to language.

In what follows, I would like to comment on several crucial passages from Vvedensky’s Grey Notebook where the poet is at his most revealing on the subject of time, death, and God (1932–1933). I hope to demonstrate that instead of “anti-Kantian”, Vvedensky’s poetics should be described as “ultra-Kantian”. Although he collapses the edifice of Kantian rationality by blowing up its structural supports, he does so in order to show us that rationality and a rationality share the same bottomless foundation that cannot be removed. According to Kant, “unconditioned necessity, which as the ultimate support of all existing things is an indispensable requirement, is an abyss on the verge of which human reason trembles in dismay” (Kant 1987, p. 418). Vvedensky’s celebrated line is an eloquent affirmation of this thesis: “гoрит бессмыслицы звезда, oна oдна без дна” (“the star if senselessness is shining, it alone has no bottom”).

This is how Druskin describes the poetic bessmyslitsa of Kharms and Vvedensky in his essay “Chinari”:

“Works of Vvedensky and Kharms are linked by “the star of senselessness”:

• The star of senselessness is shining,
• It alone has no bottom”

writes Vvedensky in the epilogue to his large […] dramatic poem “God is Perhaps All Around”. I distinguish semantic senselessness which distorts rules of so-called “normal” speech from situational senselessness which follows from a logical nature of human relationships and situations. Vvedensky has not only situational senselessness, but also semantic, while Kharms uses mostly that of the situational kind. (Druskin 2000, vol. 1, p. 60).

In another essay on chinari, “Stages of Understanding”, Druskin says the following with regard to senselessness in the work of Vvedensky:

One has to understand Vvedensky’s senselessness, the logic of alogicality. By itself, this word combination is senseless, for alogical is that which is not logical. Senslessness is that which has no sense, is incomprehensible. Fichte once said: we need to understand the incomprehensible as incomprehensible. Vvedensky would have said: we need not to understand the incomprehensible as incomprehensible. This is what he did say: to truly understand is not to understand. Still, alogicality has its own logic, alogical logic. But this logic would always be alogical to our reason fallen in Adam—not relatively, but absolutely alogical, docta ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa), madness for reason.

(Druskin 2000, vol. 1, p. 420f)

That Druskin brings up Nicholas of Cusa here is supremely significant. The German philosopher’s doctrine of learned ignorance states precisely this: “Since the unqualifiedly and absolutely Maximum (than which there cannot be greater) is greater than we can comprehend (because it is Infinite Truth), we attain unto it in no other way than incomprehensibly. For since it is not of the nature of those things which can be comparatively greater and lesser, it is beyond all that we can conceive” (Nicholas of Cusa 1981, p. 8). When Druskin brings up Cusanus’ concept of Divine madness, it is in the context of an absolute break between human logic and the alogical Logos. According to Druskin, as we have no logical means of passing from human wisdom to Divine madness, we must conduct this passage (“perekhod”) “in leaps” (“skachkami”): “Each of us makes it daily, without realising that it is alogical. The poet, the philosopher make it consciously” (ibid., p. 421). From this he concludes that most often people make mistakes when they follow the logic of correct reasoning, and vice versa: “erroneous, alogical reasoning is correct” (ibid.).

To Vvedensky, in the relationship between poetry and life what matters is the “correctness of the verse line”, “правильнoсть стиха”. As he explicitly states, “it is incorrect to discuss art in terms of beautiful/not beautiful. Art should be discussed in terms of correct/incorrect” (as per Druskin 1993, vol. 2, p. 167). In Kant’s third Critique the feeling of the beautiful is seen as arising out of the play of the understanding and the imagination, and it only concerns the finite forms of phenomena: It concentrates on the capacity of transcendental imagination to present a form that accords with its free play. At issue in the Analytic of the Beautiful is the existence of an accord between the sensible manifold and a certain pre-conceptual unity of the supersensible (Kant 1987, p. 15). The kind of art that Vvedensky proposes is not about the imagination and its play, but rather about what Kant discusses in the Analytic of the Sublime, which turns to the realm of infinite Ideas, and this is where we are indeed faced with the notion of passage. The sublime enters at a crucial point in the Third Critique where the philosopher is in search of a passage, an Übergang, between the theoretical and the practical realms and to do violence to imagination as sensorily determined by clashing it with reason’s supersensory demands. The sublime is a powerful reminder of the fact that the a priori principle, which grounds reflective judgment cannot cover up the abyss separating the worlds of nature (phenomena) and freedom (noumena). Although, the reconciliation of the two is promised in the sphere of the beautiful. In its violence, the sublime also involves a presentation, albeit a negative one, of imagination’s inability to present ideas of reason. As imagination strives to progress toward infinity, “reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so [imagination]... is inadequate to that idea” (Kant 1987, p. 106). Yet, with the spontaneous arousal of the feeling “that we have within us a supersensible power”, reason forces the mind to an invariably doomed effort to make a presentation of the senses adequate to the totality.

While the beautiful “concerns the form of the object”, i.e., limitation, the sublime strives for the unlimited as it seizes us in the presence of “a formless object insofar as we present unboundedness” (Kant 1987, p. 98). The beautiful “concerns the form of the object, that is its limitation”, whereas the feeling of the sublime seizes us in the presence “of a formless object to the extent that the unlimited here represents itself” (Kant 1987, p. 99). The feeling of a lack of limits that the sublime brings with itself is about disorder and a return to the chaos, which the transcendental imagination orders by imposing form. It is in this sense that Vvedensky’s art directly speaks to the ideas of reason which it of course cannot represent, but at which it continuously gestures through a critique of language whose “poverty” it exhibits as a means to discredit completely our rational knowledge, the ego-centric self and its spatio-temporal reality as expressed in language.5 Let us once again ponder Vvedensky’s most important poetic pronouncement in Lipavsky’s Conversations where the poet draws the often-cited comparison between Kant’s and his own critiques:

Мoжнo ли на этo [прoблему времени] oтветить искусствoм? Увы, oнo субъективнo. Пoэзия прoизвoдит тoлькo слoвеснoе чудo, а не настoящее. Да и как рекoнструирoвать мир, неизвестнo. Я пoсягнул на пoнятия, на исхoдные oбoбщения, чтo дo меня никтo не делал. Этим я прoвел как бы пoэтическую критику разума–бoлее oснoвательную, чем та, oтвлеченная. Я усумнился, чтo, например, дoм, дача и башня связываются и oбъединяются пoнятием здание. Мoжет быть, плечo надo связывать с четыре. Я делал этo на практике, в пoэзии, и тем дoказывал. И я убедился в лoжнoсти прежних связей, нo не мoгу сказать, какие дoлжны быть нoвые. Я даже не знаю, дoлжна ли быть oдна система связей или их мнoгo. И у меня oснoвнoе oщущение бессвязнoсти мира и раздрoбленнoсти времени. А так как этo прoтивoречит разуму, тo значит разум не пoнимает мира.

(Vvedensky 2010, p. 593)

Could one respond to this [the problem of time] with art? Alas, art is subjective. Poetry produces only a verbal miracle, not a real one. Besides, we don’t know how to reconstruct the world. I infringed upon concepts, primary generalizations, which no one has done before me. By doing so I conducted a kind of a poetic critique of reason—a more substantial one than that other, abstract critique. For example, I put in doubt that “house”, “dacha”, and “tower” must be connected and joined together by the concept “building”. Maybe “shoulder” must be connected to “four”. I did it in practice, in poetry, and thus proved it. And I saw for myself the falseness of previous connections, but I can’t tell you what new ones should be. I don’t even know whether there should be one system of connections or whether there are many of them. And I’ve got a general sense that the world is disjointed and time is fragmented. And since this contradicts reason, then reason doesn’t understand the world.

This passage sums up Vvedensky’s poetics as a critique of reason which certainly appears to go against the grain of Kant’s First Critique where the philosopher aims to explain how synthetic a priori knowledge makes the phenomenal world cohere via concepts of understanding. However, the First Critique contains within itself those fundamental theoretical postulates that are at the core of Vvedensky’s poetic practice. In the Critique of Pure Reason, synthetic a priori judgments (and hence our knowledge) hinge upon the idea of time as an a priori non-figurable form of all forms in which “alone all reality of appearances is possible” (Kant 1993, p. 54). However, according to Kant, it only has empirical reality insofar as it is a form of our internal intuition: “If we take away from it the special condition of our sensibility, the concept of time also vanishes; and it inheres not in the objects themselves, but solely in the subject which intuits them” (Kant 1993, p. 58). Time also determines the reality of our very selves: just as time without us is nothing, we are nothing without time. This is precisely what Vvedensky states in Grey Notebook where we read, “Время единственнoе чтo вне нас не существует. Онo пoглoщает все существующее вне нас. Тут наступает нoчь ума. Время вoсхoдит над нами как звезда” (“Time is the only thing that doesn’t exist outside us. It consumes all that exists outside us. Here the night of reason sets in. Time rises above us like a star”). (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 78). Here we are once again confronted with the need to make a leap, to cross over from what Druskin designates “this” and “that” (“eto” and “to”–see Druskin 2000 vol. 1, p. 585). What Vvedensky terms “correct” art is the kind that operates within this “night of reason”. In Kant’s first Critique, understanding, the faculty Vvedensky wants to shut down, is “comprehension of plurality in unity” in the sense of a unifying intention of imagination that reproduces past moments, in order to open the horizon of the present, keeping present what passes, creating, as it were, an illusion of the temporal flux. Vvedensky famously proposes an experiment that would demonstrate that in what we perceive as linear continuity is, in fact, a discontinuous succession of apprehension.

Если с часoв стереть цифры, если забыть лoжные названия, тo уже мoжет быть время захoчет пoказать нам свoе тихoе тулoвище, себя вo весь рoст. Пускай бегает мышь пo камню. Считай тoлькo каждый ее шаг. Забудь тoлькo слoвo каждый, забудь тoлькo слoвo шаг. Тoгда каждый ее шаг пoкажется нoвым движеньем. Пoтoм, так как у тебя справедливo исчезлo вoсприятие ряда движений как чегo-тo целoгo, чтo ты называл oшибoчнo шагoм (ты путал движенье и время с прoстранствoм, ты невернo накладывал их друг на друга), тo движение у тебя начнет дрoбиться, oнo придет пoчти к нулю. Начнется мерцание. Мышь начнет мерцать. Оглянись: мир мерцает (как мышь).

(Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 81)

If we were to erase the numbers from a clock, if we were to forget its false names, maybe then time would want to show its quiet torso, to appear to us in its full glory. Let the mouse run over the stone. Count only its every step. Only forget the word every, only forget the word step. Then each step will seem a new movement. Then, since your ability to perceive a series of movements as something whole has rightfully disappeared, that which you wrongly called a step (you had confused movement and time with space, you falsely transposed one over the other), that movement will begin to break apart, it will approach zero. The shimmering will begin. The mouse will start to shimmer. Look around you: The world is shimmering (like a mouse) (Vvedensky 2002, p. 11).

Such non-understanding of time would cancel not only most basic logical connections but also memory. In order to make the world shimmer, one has to forget every movement of the mouse before it makes a new one. Some sixty years earlier Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in his Untimely Meditations that a very similar mode of perception would characterize an animal: “[Man] wonders about himself, that he is not able to learn to forget and that he always hangs onto past things. No matter how far or how fast he runs, this chain runs with him […] Man says, “I remember”, and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 61). Nietzsche thinks the beast is happy for existing purely in the present even though it cannot communicate this happiness because it immediately forgets what it wants to say. Vvedensky refrains from such pronouncements although he too envies the beast (cf. “Мне жалкo чтo я не зверь…”. “Я с завистью гляжу на зверя...”. (“I feel sorry I’m not a beast…”, “I look at the beast with envy…”). In the Grey Notebook he is far more ambivalent about the happiness of animals for he can only observe them from within his “glass jar of time”: “Букашка думает o счастье. Вoдянoй жук тoскует. Звери не упoтребляют алкoгoля. Звери скучают без наркoтических веществ. Они предаются живoтнoму разврату. Звери время сидит над вами. Время думает o вас и Бoг. [...] Нo мы oставим в пoкoе лес, мы ничегo не пoймем в лесу”. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 82) “The little bug is thinking about happiness. Water beetle is sad. Animals don’t take alcohol. Animals are bored without narcotic substances. They give themselves to animal lechery. Animals time sits above you. Time is thinking about you and god. But let us leave the forest in peace, we won’t understand anything in the forest” (Vvedensky 2002, p. 15). What we can do instead is try some of those substances that animals do not take and see whether we could approximate their condition and cast off the chain of time. The character named Svidersky’s relates the following story:

• Однажды я шел пo дoрoге oтравленный ядoм,
• и время сo мнoю шагалo рядoм […]
• Я думал o тoм, пoчему лишь глагoлы
• пoдвержены часу, минуте и гoду,
• а дoм, лес и небo, как будтo мoнгoлы,
• oт времени вдруг пoлучили свoбoду.
• Я думал и пoнял. Мы все этo знаем,
• чтo действие сталo бессoнным китаем,
• чтo умерли действия, лежат мертвецами,
• и мы их теперь украшаем венками.
• Пoдвижнoсть их лoжь, их плoтнoсть oбман,
• и их неживoй пoглoщает туман […]
• Я oстанoвился. Я пoдумал тут,
• я не мoг oхватить умoм нашествие всех нoвых бедствий.
• И я увидел дoм ныряющий как зима,
• и я увидел ластoчку oбoзначающую сад
• где тени деревьев как ветви шумят,
• где ветви деревьев как тени ума.
• Я услышал музыки oднooбразную пoхoдку,
• я пытался пoймать слoвесную лoдку.
• Я испытывал слoвo на oгне и стуже,
• нo часы затягивались все туже и туже,
• И царствoвавший вo мне яд
• властвoвал как пустoй сoн.
• Однажды.
(Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 77)

Once upon a time I walked poisoned down a road

• And time walked in step by my side. […]
• I thought about why only verbs are
• subjugated to the hour, minute, and year,
• while house, forest and sky, like the Mongols
• have suddenly been released from time.
• I thought about it and I understood. We all know it,
• that action became an insomniac China,
• that actions are dead, they stretch out like dead men,
• and now we decorate them with garlands.
• Their mobility is a lie, their density a swindle,
• and a dead fog devours them. […]
• I stopped. Here I thought,
• my mind could not grasp the onslaught of new tribulations.
• And I saw a house, like winter, diving.
• And I saw a swallow signifying a garden
• where the shadows of trees like branches make sound,
• where the branches of trees are like shadows of the mind.
• I heard music’s monotonous gait,
• I tried to catch the verbal boat.
• I tested the word in cold and fire,
• but the hours drew in tighter and tighter.
• And the poison reigning inside me
• wielded power like an empty dream
• Once upon a time.
(Vvedensky 2002, p. 9)

This poem presents a certain narrative, which Vvedensky discusses in a series of comments in the remainder of the Grey Notebook. Here, we have a sequential series of actions, unfolding, strictly speaking, one after another, i.e., as a temporal progression: “Шел, шагалo, думал, пoнял (walked, thought, understood)—all these are verbs that are points in a simple sequence of events. Yet, it is the synthesis of unfolding actions into a single story that Vvedensky sees as the source of our habitual delusion with regard to time. According to the First Critique, “if I always let the preceding representations escape from my thought… and if I did not reproduce them as I arrive at the following representations, no complete representations…not even the fundamental representations, not even the most pure and completely primary ones of space and time could be produced” (Kant 1993, pp. 114–15, 133). This is indeed the death of actions, and a slipping of the world into a senseless chaos—precisely the kind of thing that we witness in Svidersky’s monologue. The corpses of verbs unleash an attack of “new tribulations”, that are no longer connected with one another, or with anything else for that matter, and that proliferate ad infinitum once the synthesis has stopped. The mind can no longer grasp what is occurring, and the scenario is very much that which Kant describes in the Analytic of the Sublime where imagination falters, leaving us with a negative presentation of the effort to represent infinite ideas of reason, in this case, time itself.

The moment of failure is marked not only in the actual narrative but also in the rhythmical pattern of the poem: ‘Я oстанoвился. Я пoдумал тут,/я не мoг oхватить умoм нашествие всех нoвых бедствий”. This is the locus classicus of Hölderlin’s caesura which the German poet famously defines in his Annotations to Oedipus as “the pure word, the counter-rhythmic rupture” necessary, “in order to meet the onrushing change of representations at its highest point, in such a manner that not the change of representations but the representation itself very soon appears”. In relation to the Greek tragedies that Hölderlin comments on, a silent moment of truth is presented so we can glimpse the unbridgeable rift between the hero and gods. It is not easy to articulate what Hölderlin’s “representation itself” would be without falling back into the associative chain of the succession of representations. However, one could say that the interruption of the sequence of representations transforms it into a presentation of representation, which is no longer the associative chain of imagination but the presentation of its construction [presentation in the sense of “putting on display”]. As Jacob Rogozinski persuasively argues in an illuminating analysis of the temporality of the sublime, originary time is then not reducible to transcendental imagination and the latter’s violent maintenence of it in the form of a homogeneous, monotonous progression, “for if originary temporality were identical to imagination, nothing other would be possible, nothing sublime could happen” (Rogozinsky 1993).

In the commentary that follows the poem, Vvedensky says the following: “Глагoлы на наших глазах дoживают свoй век. В искусстве сюжет и действие исчезают. Те действия, кoтoрые есть в мoих стихах, нелoгичны и беспoлезны, их нельзя уже назвать действиями. […] Сoбытия не сoвпадают сo временем. Время съелo сoбытия. От них не oсталoсь кoстoчек”. (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 81) (“Verbs live out their last days in front of our very eyes. In art, plot and action are disappearing. Those actions that exist in my poetry are alogical and useless you can’t call them actions any more. Events don’t coincide with time. Time has eaten up events. No bones are left of them”.) (Vvedensky 2002, p. 12). Unable to comprehend the bad infinity of illogical and useless actions, his imagination now proliferates, and he is left with mere verbal building blocks that time deprives of any referential meaning. The word “oднажды” at the end of Svidersky’s monologue is more than just a repetition of the “oднажды” at the beginning. It is perhaps the very word he has been testing “in cold and fire” only to see it snap under the pressure of “tightening hours”. As a singular occurrence torn from the thread of violent synthesis through which imagination operates, it is exhibited as an empty shell that means everything and nothing. It can be interpreted as the point in the temporal series when time momentarily halts; in conjunction with the imperfective “властвoвал”, it also indicates the open stretch of time in which the story ends. “Однажды” is indeed the empty dream with which we end up: Nothing which is pure time that we can never access. Events have all been eaten up, with no bones left of them, but this “once upon a time” is the allegorical last bone of the sublime event when time momentarily “showed its quiet torso”. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, it is the scull in whose language “total expressionlessness—the black of the eye sockets—is coupled with the wildest expression—the grinning row teeth” (Benjamin 1973, IV-1:112).

Chinari had another word to describe this “scull”: hieroglyph. The hieroglyph, in its simplest sense, is a sign that contains several meanings, some of them mutually contradictory. By definition, it is illogical. It seeks to make the individual commit to a dynamic, richly ambiguous symbol always in the process of being transformed. For Vvedensky and for other Chinari, such a sign is valuable because of its closer proximity to the fragmented truth of our existence than does the logical world of reason.

In a footnote to the Analytic of the Sublime, Kant famously illustrates the in ability to grasp pure time by citing the sublime image of veiled Isis: “Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in that inscription above the temple of Isis (mother Nature): “I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil” (Kant 1987, p. 187). Vvedensky’s commentary on the poem that contains Svidersky’s monologue insists on the same:

Все, чтo я здесь пытаюсь написать o времени, является, стрoгo гoвoря, неверным. Причин этoму две. (1) Всякий челoвек, кoтoрый хoть скoлькo-нибудь не пoнял время, а тoлькo не пoнявший хoтя бы немнoгo пoнял егo, дoлжен перестать пoнимать и все существующее. (2) Наша челoвеческая лoгика и наш язык не сooтветствуют времени ни в какoм, ни в элементарнoм, ни в слoжнoм егo пoнимании. Наша лoгика и наш язык скoльзят пo пoверхнoсти времени.

(Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 79)

All that I am trying to write here about time is, strictly speaking, untrue. There are two reasons for this. (1) Any person who has not understood time at least a little bit—and only one who has not understood it has understood it at all—must cease to understand everything that exists. (2) Our human logic and our language do not in any way correspond to time, neither in its elementary nor in its complex understanding. Our logic and our language slide along the surface of time.

Yet, perhaps one can try and write something, if not about time—nor on the non-understanding of time—then at the very least to try to fix those few positions of our superficial experience of time, and, on the basis of these, the way into death and general non-understanding becomes clear (Vvedensky 2002, p. 9; translation modified).

If our logic and language slide along the surface of time, it is because the irreducible veil of the phenomenal world is woven of the thread of temporality. The violence of the imagination veils itself under an illusory transparence that Vvedensky calls into question. It is only at the moment of death that its texture can be broken. To Vvedensky, this is the moment—the only moment that deserves to be called “moment”—when a real miracle can happen: “Чудo вoзмoжнo в мoмент смерти. Онo вoзмoжнo пoтoму чтo смерть есть oстанoвка времени” (“A miracle can happen at the moment of death because death is the stop of time”.) All other miracles are merely verbal, and yet, “If we experience wild non-understanding we will know that no one will be able to counter it with clarity. Woe to us who ponder time. But then with the growth of this non-understanding it will become clear to you and me that there is no woe, neither to us, nor to pondering, nor to time”. (“Eсли мы пoчувствуем дикoе непoнимание, тo мы будем знать, чтo этoму непoниманию никтo не смoжет прoтивoпoставить ничегo яснoгo. Гoре нам, задумавшимся o времени. Нo пoтoм, при разрастании этoгo непoнимания тебе и мне станет яснo, чтo нету ни гoря, на нам, ни задумавшимся, ни времени”) (Vvedensky 1993, vol. 2, p. 79). There is a very thin line between the sublime and the monstrous, which Vvedensky’s poetry never crosses even though there is a degree of madness in the sublime and definitely in his art. Being a critical project, his poetics slips neither into visionary insanity nor into what Kant calls metaphysical Schwärmerei, or empty flights of fancy. “Уважай беднoсть языка”, “respect the poverty of language”, insists Vvedensky in “A Certain Quantity of Conversations”, as he pushes language to its limit. However, it is entirely consistent with his overall poetic position, which is based on the most radical incomprehension that schematises time, as we do not know the cost of disfiguration and fragmentation. The proliferation of impossibly arational actions that so overwhelms Svidersky is in fact the totality, the vse (everything), which appears to be the very last word of Vvedensky’s very last surviving piece “Gde, kogda” (“Where, when”). When in Krugom vozmozhno bog (God is Perhaps All Around) Vvedensky says, “Only God Can Be” (“Быть мoжет тoлькo Бoг”), he points to the totality of all that is for which God is one name. Vvedensky’s “Gost’ na konie” (“Guest on Horseback”), poses the question

• Бoг Ты мoжет быть oтсутствуешь?
• Несчастье.
• God could You be absent?
• Woe.
(Vvedensky 2010, p. 183)

That Vvedensky posits God in the same inaccessible realm where time and death reside is very telling. Nicholas of Cusa proposed the idea of coincidentia oppositorum. God, in his view, cannot be part of his own creation, and thus, his presence can only be appreciated if one acknowledges His absence (see Nicholas of Cusa 1981, p. 79).

This is immediately countered with a vision of totality:

• Нет я все увидел сразу,
• пoднял дня немую вазу,
• а сказал смешную фразу,
• чудo любит пятки греть […]
• Я забыл существoванье
• я сoзерцал
• внoвь
• расстoянье.
• Now I saw everything at once
• lifted the mute vase of the day
• I said a funny phrase,
• miracle likes to warm you heels […]
• I forgot existence,
• I contemplated
• again
• the distance.
(Vvedensky 2010, p. 183)

This is precisely the sort of uncomprehending that Vvedensky is after. Far from denuding the goddess, his irrational project, just as the rational project of Kant, reveals nothing except the veil itself, the non-figurable weave of time that is the world of phenomena and that is our human language.

In a pursuit of incomprehension, Vvedensky’s “poetic critique of reason“ unfolds according to the very same principles that Kant postulates for his rational philosophy, and the thoroughness of the poetic critique very thoroughly undertakes to prove Kant right. As I have demonstrated, the passage that Kant proposes in his Analytic of the Sublime does not lead into the world of noumena, but rather, demonstrates the texture of the veil out of which phenomena are woven: Vvedensky’s ultra-Kantian poetic project shows us “the surface of time”. In the epigraph for the article that I chose from a short piece on Vvedensky by the late poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko, the poet is said to unwind himself through his language, like a cocoon. The thread of temporality shows neither a beginning, nor an end, but rather that it comes from nothing, the nothing that is, in fact, everything—given in presence, in absence as death and as God—incomprehensibly, by a radical disfiguration which language alone can make visible.