Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

The river of time: time-space, history, and

language in avant-garde, modernist, and
contemporary Russian and Anglo-American poetry

Peter Nicholls

To cite this article: Peter Nicholls (2018): The river of time: time-space, history, and language in
avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary Russian and Anglo-American poetry, Textual Practice,
DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1447425

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1447425

Published online: 12 Mar 2018.

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE, 2018

BOOK REVIEW

The river of time: time-space, history, and language in avant-garde,

modernist, and contemporary Russian and Anglo-American poetry, by
Ian Probstein, Boston, MA, Academic Studies Press, 2017, xix + 277 pp.,
$55.00, ISBN: 978-1-61811-626-0

Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope – ‘the idea of the unity of time and
space’, as Ian Probstein defines it (p. xii) – has had its success in the world, though
for the most part in regard to studies of fiction rather than to the literary arts more
generally. Bakhtin was himself responsible for setting limits to the use of his
concept, ruling that poetry was essentially monologic and lacking in chronotopic
potentiality. Bahktin critics such as Michael Eskin and Ken Hirschkop have
regretted this limited and limiting conception of the poetic.1 In The River of
Time, Ian Probstein joins them to read Russian and recent Anglo-American
poetry through the lens of the chronotope: ‘it is my contention’, he says, ‘that
time and space play a more crucial role in poetry, even in lyric poetry, since
poetry can be defined as time and space condensed in images’ (p. x). That tem-
poral and polyphonic structures are significantly at work in poetry seems, pace
Bakhtin, pretty much self-evident. Probstein quotes Roman Jakobson making
just this point (‘the most effective experience of verbal time occurs in verse’, he
argues [p. xiii]) and we might add to this the admirably precise account of
Anna Akhmatova’s work by Joseph Brodsky who receives an insightful chapter
in Probstein’s book: ‘What is called the music of a poem is essentially time
restructured in such a way that it brings this poem’s content into a linguistically
inevitable, memorable focus’.2
Probstein begins his discussion on familiar ground, considering ways in which
avant-garde preoccupations with simultaneity produced a strikingly new time-
space relation in the work of Apollinaire, Cendrars, and the Delaunays. The
Futurists, of course, deployed an even more explosive chronotope, and while,
as Probstein demonstrates, their Russian counterparts eschewed the Italians’ cel-
ebration of violence, they certainly shared their fascination with an aesthetic of
simultaneity and presence. Probstein’s second chapter refines these terms, explor-
ing the complex writings of Velimir Khlebnikov where futural projection does not
require the destruction of the past, paradoxically drawing much of its energy from
the archaic. For Probstein, Khlebnikov’s ‘restructuring’ of time and his way of
exploiting anachronism produce an effect that is strongly suggestive of Bahktin’s
chronotope: ‘Not only does Khlebnikov reverse time, but he also merges time and
space, transforming time into space’ (p. 22). The resulting ‘poly-dimensional
space’ structurally informs Khlebnikov’s sverkhpovesti or ‘supernovels’, bizarre
texts that weave together historical and mythological time. The tendency in
this late work to what Probstein calls ‘hyperbolization’ is shared by Vladimir
Mayakovsky, and while his poetry tends increasingly to focus on the present
rather than on the future he too establishes a kind of grotesque ‘irreality’ where
2 BOOK REVIEW

metaphor is pushed to its illogical end and temporal and spatial structures are
exploded as unwelcome constraints. As Probstein pithily notes, ‘Not only space
and the present, but even his own bodily form, his ego, is too small for Maya-
kovsky’ (p. 33).
Futurism is, however, but one of the tendencies of international modernism,
and Probstein goes on to consider three poets who offer powerful alternatives.
Of these, Yeats is arguably differentiated by his investment in ‘the artifice of eter-
nity’, while the other two, Ezra Pound and Osip Mandelstam, are more attached
to a concept of the natural order and the possibility of a paradiso terrestre. Prob-
stein adduces some unexpected and fascinating parallels between these two poets,
showing that while they were quite unaware of each other’s work, they nonethe-
less shared a high regard for ‘Hellenism, high antiquity, medievalism, Dante, and
Villon’ (p. 77). They are both, one might also say, poets of the human scale, at
least in comparison to the deliberately excessive experiments of the Futurists,
Italian and Russian. Probstein’s expertise as a translator of Russian makes this
alignment of Pound and Mandelstam a major axis of his book – at least his com-
parative readings of the two writers give non-Russian readers an appreciation of
this fine poet whose work translations often only thinly represent.
‘I don’t see why Mandelstam is considered a great poet’, remarked Auden, ‘The
translations that I’ve seen don’t convince me of it’ – ‘Small wonder’, is Brodsky’s
tart rejoinder, ‘In the available versions, one encounters an absolutely imperso-
nal product, a sort of common denominator of modern verbal art’.3
Reading Pound and Mandelstam in tandem hardly solves the many local pro-
blems of translation, but it does give an impressive sense of the expansiveness and
epic ambition of their respective poetics. As Probstein puts it, ‘Sailing far beyond
the Gates of Hercules, the protagonists of Pound and Mandelstam, unlike the
lyrical hero of Yeats, are bound to return “filled with time and space”, to quote
Mandelstam, thus unifying time and civilization’ (p. 106).
Probstein’s way of ‘apply[ing] Bakhtin’s ideas against Bahktin to lyric poetry’
prompts him to consider next the dialogistic aspects of T. S. Eliot’s work. As we
might expect, Bahktin’s concept of polyphony speaks immediately to Eliot’s mul-
tilayered practice of allusion and quotation. Indeed, ‘[i]t is music and dialogism,
not only themes … that unify Eliot’s longer poems’ (p. 130). Probstein’s close
reading of The Waste Land arguably brings few surprises, though side references
to Borges, Mandelstam, and Briusov once again set the poet’s allusive practice in
an illuminating international context. The relevance of Bakhtin’s terms to this
discussion is more provocatively demonstrated in Probstein’s extended account
of Eliot’s Four Quartets where the slightly abstract notion of the chronotope is
persuasively grounded in the affective movements of rhythm and image, in ‘the
rose, the garden, “a faded song”, “a lavender spray”, the river and the ocean,
the ground swell and the bell, and many more’ (pp. 158–159). Yet not all lyric
poets weigh time and space in the same scale: Joseph Brodsky, for example,
‘values time much more than space’, though in contrast to Eliot’s transcendental
impulse, ‘absolute time for Brodsky is death, not eternity’ (p. 214). Two other
writers of the present century make such clear formulations a little harder to
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3

reach. John Ashbery, for example, is concerned not only with time’s endless and
unpredictable movement, but also with art and its way of ‘creating another reality
that nevertheless reflects reality in this paradoxical way’ (p. 225), while Charles
Bernstein, with his edgier irreverence, forces a humorous polyphony to recast
yet again the Bakhtinian chronotope; or, as Probstein nicely puts it, in Bernstein’s
work ‘[t]he present [is] stretched to the future in the form of a poetic line uniting
time with space’ (p. 241). I am reminded once again of Brodsky’s fine account of
Anna Akhmatova’s ability to see the tragic events of her time ‘first through the
prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history’. What
remains so striking about such a vision, continues Brodsky, is that ‘These two per-
spectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repo-
sitory of time within language’.4 Simply? Ian Probstein’s The River of Time offers
the help we need to gauge the real complexity of that word ‘simply’.

Notes
1. See, for example, Michael Eskin, ‘Bakhtin on Poetry,’ Poetics Today, 21. 2
(Summer 2000), 379–91; Ken Hirschkop and David Shepard, eds., Bakhtin
and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
2. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Keening Muse’, in Less than One: Selected Essays
(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986).
3. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Child of Civilization’, in Less than One, 142.
4. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Keening Muse’, in Less than One, 52.

Peter Nicholls
New York University, New York, NY, USA
pn18@nyu.edu
© 2018 Peter Nicholls
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1447425