PERSONAL COLUMN

Flowers for-Mr Kruchonykh

CLARENCE BROWN

Clarence Brown is Professor of Russian Literature at Princeton University.

In his review of Vladimir Markov's book Russian Futurism (SPECTATOR, 8 November) Mr Ronald Hingley, the distinguisped specialist in Russian affairs, appears to have buried, prematurely a poet who was until recently still alive. Aleksey Kruchonykh, the Futurist poet and theoretician, did not in fact perish during the Stalin era 'in com- parative obscurity,' as the review has it, but he survived it in such total obscurity that anyone might have supposed him to be gone along with the rest.

But Kruchonykh was certainly alive in 1966 when I saw him with my own eyes. The occasion was his eightieth birthday, or rather the celebration of it in the Writers' Union in Moscow. I was astonished to come across the notice, obscurely posted on an an- nouncement board in the House of Writers, for, like Mr Hingley and most other students of Russian letters in the west, I had long assumed that Kruchonykh was dead. He was never of great prominence. His fellow Futurists Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov totally eclipsed him as a poet.

But that was scarcely the only reason for my surprise that he should be honoured by a reading of his works in the citadel of Soviet literary orthodoxy. Futurism as a movement was marked by the kind of verbal and visual gusto with which drab literary policemen have never been entirely comfortable. The oafish incomprehension of imaginative play had amply declared itself only a few months earlier that same year in the trial of Sinyaysky and Daniel. I thought it a fascinating evidence of some residual 'give' in the system that an anniversary celebration of Kruchonykh, whose name is synonymous with the purest nonsense, or `trans-sense' as it was called, should be permitted at that mo- ment. But I was hardly prepared for how fascinating the actual ritual was to be.

Things began in the usual unkempt man- ner of Russian literary gatherings with a great deal of bustling about on the tiny plat- form and in the hall. The announced hour of beginning passed. Another hour passe& A telegram arrived from the writer who was to have chaired the meeting saying that he had been taken ill, and this set off the usual susurrus of ideological interpretations of his absence. It was then announced that Lev Nikulin, of all people, an old novelist of the most conservative and 'loyal' sort, would preside. The prospect of a delicious contrast behind the speaker's table began to be seen.

Meanwhile Kruchonykh himself arrived amid an entourage of elderly ladies and young supporters.

The expected contrast emerged. Everything in Nikulin that was pudgy, sedate, inert and respectable was in Kruchinykh wiry, nervous, alive and outrageous. A small man in the embroidered skull-cap occasionally affected by writers in the capital, he appeared to have an electric motor inside his jittery person, and his voice, heard above the hubbub the moment he entered, had the effect of a rat's nail being drawn across tinfoil. More waiting, with Kruchonykh hugely enjoying the chance of chatting with his many old friends in the aisle. Next to me was sitting the amazingly well-preserved Lily Brik, wife of a well- known literary theorist but better known as one of Mayakovsky's strongest loves. Audrey Voznesensky came in. The guest of honour made his way to the platform and the general dialogue continued from there. With delightful Russian sloppiness, the evening had more or less begun without anyone's really knowing it to. But then Nikulin arose, managed with some show of firmness to dislodge Kruchonykh from the central place, and began to utter what he took to be the necessary introduction. There was a faintly sodden quiet as everyone waited for the re- quisite benediction of officialdom to be pro- nounced. Then Nikulin sat down.

Kruchonykh resumed. But now his verbal performance, which continued as the same relaxed mingling of colloquy and salutation, was accompanied by the stage business. He began to remove objects from his pockets and distribute them about the table. I wish that I could recall them all, but I shall not forget the first two : a small posy of lily-of- the-valley, which he took from his lapel, and a vase to contain it, which he took from his coat pocket. This he placed on a table until then conspicuously bare of the bouquet that is normally de rigueur at such gatherings—a wonderfully pixyish reproof. Then came a bottle of fruit juice. No Soviet conference table is complete without its bottles of Georgian mineral water. The laughter in- creased. Kruchonykh was catering for his own party! And in a style sufficiently close to the official to be noticeable and sufficiently far from it to be Futurist.

Nikulin, meanwhile, had pursed his lips so firmly that one wondered whether he would be able to part them again, but the answer came at once: Kruchonykh took from another pocket a bottle-opener and handed both that and the fruit juice to the astonished chairman. More things, most of which I have forgotten. Fruit, I think, various books and papers, a clock. A Futurist happening was being resurrected in 1966. Finally, the table suitably littered and all decorum shattered, Kruchonykh read a poem or two, not, as I remember, from among his more extreme works. The latter could consist of the gib- berish mentioned above, the zaum or `trans- sense,' perfectly unintelligible combinations of random letters. He then said he wanted a rest and sat down. Nikulin called upon a series of people to deliver short tributes.

I remember only one, by Voznesensky. He had just returned from Tashkent, the site of a recent and horrible earthquake. Plying back from the disaster, he said, he had recalled the gul zemli, the terrifying, rasping hum that seems to come from everywhere before a quake, and had asked himself who among the Russian poets could have reproduced that noise in verse. Only Kruchonykh! There was general satisfaction at this adroit and kindly compliment.

This mingling of poetry and tribute con- tinued. Kruchonykh would recite a bit, others would say his poems from memory. At one point some young archivists of the Mayakovsky collections, to whom Kruchonykh had evidently been a great help and by whom he was obviously loved, presented him with an actual bochka medul, a barrel of honey, but without the proverbial fly that is supposed to spoil it. Then the au-

dience began to call for a long poem, famous for its phonetic yawps and fizzes, Kruchonykh held back, the audie pleaded, and the enjoyment was unive Suddenly he stood, struck an oratoric pose, and . . . from a small balcony at the back of the hall Kruchonykh's voic boomed and scratched the requested poe from an ancient tape recorder.

All heads turned. W' • they looked a

Kruchonykh again he moving his h silently and gesturing. Whether on accoun of the acoustics or on account of h' deliberately lagging • a word or so behind -don't know, but the effect was that of a ye bad job of dubbing. Finally it didn't matte anyway, since the hall was a pandemoni of laughter, applause and shout Kruchonykh drank his fruit juice, whic -,:someone else had finally had to open Nikulin just sat there, looking black.

Nikulin, poor man, has gone to hi reward. And according to several report Kruchonykh has also died—in June 1968 But on one spring evening in 1966, h was not only alive: he seemed to m the only one who was alive. He transmit ted his vitality for a moment to those caugh in the rigor mortis of Socialist Realism an reminded them of a recent past when I Russian language had been gay and Russian spirit unshackled.