Iurii Tynianov
Translated by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Originally published in the short-lived monthly journal of literary criticism and bibliography, The Book and Revolution<\/em> [Kniga i revoliutsiia], no. 4, 1923, 15-19. The version translated here, edited by the eminent scholar Marietta Chudakova, is considered authoritative: Iurii Nikolaevich Tynianov, \u201cIllustrations\u201d [Illiustratsiia], in Poetics. History of Literature. Film<\/em> [Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino], ed. Marietta Chudakova (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 310-18. Chudakova\u2019s notes are taken from the same volume, 545-48.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some notes contain references to other articles by Tynianov, such as \u201cOn the Composition of Eugene Onegin,<\/em>\u201d \u201cDostoevsky and Gogol’,\u201d \u201cOn Khlebnikov,\u201d \u201cInterlude,\u201d \u201cThe Ode as Oratorical Genre,\u201d etc. These articles are available in English translation in Yuri Tynianov, Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film<\/em>, trans. Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are three levels of notes to this article: author\u2019s notes, editor\u2019s notes, and translators\u2019 notes. Tynianov\u2019s own notes appear with no additional identification. Notes made by Marietta Chudakova, editor of the authoritative 1977 version of the text being translated, are followed by (Chudakova\u2019s note). Notes made by the translators, Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko, are followed by (translators\u2019 note). In author\u2019s and editor\u2019s notes, abbreviations for cities have been expanded and translated (for example, M is expanded and translated to Moscow). Titles are given in translation, followed by the transliterated Russian title at first occurrence. Italics and bold print used for emphasis in the original are preserved in the translation. Square brackets are used for the translators\u2019 brief in-text clarifications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years we have seen a proliferation of Prachtausgaben<\/em>.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The illustrations here are often front and center, yet at the same time they play a subordinate role to the text. It is as if they were called on to elucidate the work, to illuminate the text in some way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one can deny that illustrations have a right to exist as independent works of art. Artists are justified in using any subject as a prompt<\/em> for their drawings. But do illustrations really illustrate anything? What exactly is their connection to the text? How do they relate to the work they illustrate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What concerns me here is not judging drawings on the basis of their artistic merit; I am interested solely in their illustrative<\/em> value. I am justified in making this distinction because when artists publish a book of poetry by Fet or Nekrasov, with the illustrations printed alongside the text, and with titles like The Poems of Fet Illustrated by Konashevich<\/em>,2<\/sup><\/a> or The Poems of Nekrasov Illustrated by Kustodiev<\/em>,3<\/sup><\/a> these artists actually emphasize the pictures\u2019 relationship to the text, their illustrative function. The picture should be viewed not for its own sake, but as somehow supplementing the written work, enriching it, making it in some way concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus, alongside Fet\u2019s poem \u201cThe Bathing Girl\u201d [Kupal’shchitsa] we are faced with Konashevich\u2019s \u201cBathing Girl.\u201d It is all too obvious that Fet\u2019s poem did not prompt<\/em> the drawing by Konashevich (taken on its own merits, it is of interest only to students of the artist\u2019s work); that the artist has, rather, interpreted<\/em> Fet\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, it is this very interpretation that is of questionable value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The concreteness of a work of verbal art does not correspond to its concreteness when transposed into a visual medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More precisely, the specific concreteness of poetry is diametrically opposed to the concreteness of pictorial art. The more vivid and palpable the poetic language, the less successfully it translates into a pictorial medium. The concreteness of poetic language does not come from some underlying visual image; indeed, this property of language is highly disjointed and vague (T. Meier).4<\/sup><\/a> Rather, it comes from a unique process by which the meaning of language is transformed<\/em>, making it vivid and new. The most important devices for making words concrete \u2014 simile and metaphor \u2014 are meaningless in pictorial art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most concrete \u2014 to the point of illusion \u2014 writer of them all, [Nikolai] Gogol’, is also the most resistant to being translated into pictorial art. The idea of the enshrined \u201cGogolian type\u201d imposed on readers of his work (beginning in childhood, for Russian readers) is sheer banality, since all the power of these characters comes from the fact that Gogol’ never circumscribes the dynamism of their words, gestures and actions into a single solid form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We see this even in such \u201cpicturesque\u201d scenes as the one where Chichikov pays a visit to Betrishchev:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bowing with head held respectfully on one side and hands extended like those of a waiter carrying a trayful of teacups, the visitor inclined his whole body forward, and said: \u201cI have deemed it my duty to present myself to your Excellency. I have deemed it my duty because in my heart I cherish a most profound respect for the valiant men who, on the field of battle, have proved the saviors of their country.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Here, all the comic power and vividness of Chichikov\u2019s gesture lies, firstly, in the reference to the tea tray, as well as in the relationship between the gesture and Chichikov\u2019s speech, with that rounded oratorical period which subordinates language to rhythm, and itself acts as a sort of verbal gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reference to the tea tray is not concrete in a pictorial sense; rather, it shifts the action to an entirely different series6<\/sup><\/a> (with its \u201cwhiff of obsequiousness\u201d). The fusion of Chichikov\u2019s gesture and speech is what makes the scene concrete. Subtract the tea tray from the picture, subtract Chichikov\u2019s oratorical devices (as you inevitably will if you translate this into a pictorial medium), and you\u2019re left with a substitution: [Gogol’\u2019s] elusive verbal concreteness has been swapped out for the accommodating, foolproof \u201cconcretization\u201d of a drawing.7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why, when Rozanov considers \u201cwhy the monument to Gogol’ is a failure,\u201d he speaks of the impossibility of embodying his characters (in sculpture):<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is nothing easier than giving a lecture on Gogol’ and illustrating it marvelously with passages from his works. As language, it comes out gorgeous, magnificent. But what about sculpture? Just you try to sculpt a Pliushkin or a Sobakevich. On the page, it\u2019s wonderful, but in bronze, it\u2019s hideous, because sculpture is body, sculpture is form; it obeys all the laws of the perceptible and tangible (Among Artists<\/em> [Sredi khudozhnikov], Saint Petersburg, 1914, p. 279).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Now consider that we have had pictorial \u201cGogolian types\u201d forced on us since childhood. Just think how badly they have obscured and distorted Gogol’\u2019s actual characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, half of Russian readers are familiar not with Gogol’ himself, but with Boklevskii, or, at best, Agin.8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cNevsky Prospect\u201d [Nevskii Prospekt] Gogol’ depicts a crowd using purely verbal devices: \u201cHere you meet unique whiskers, drooping with extraordinary and amazing elegance below the necktie […] marvelous mustaches [\u2026] waists of a slim delicacy beyond dreams of elegance.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a> \u201cOne displays a smart overcoat with the best beaver on it, the second \u2014 a lovely Greek nose, the third \u2014 superb whiskers, the fourth \u2014 a pair of pretty eyes and a marvelous hat, the fifth \u2014 a signet ring on a jaunty forefinger, the sixth \u2014 a foot in a bewitching shoe, the seventh \u2014 a necktie that excites wonder, and the eighth \u2014 a moustache that reduces one to stupefaction\u201d (ibid., 211). These verbal focal points<\/em> \u2014 whiskers, mustaches \u2014 which are so vivid in language would, if they were translated into a pictorial medium, merely give us body parts severed from their owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dandified frock coat, Greek nose, little foot and hat, jumbled together and made equivalent through the use of the same syntactical construction (sound correspondences emphasize this further), are concrete only in a verbal sense. Enumerated one after another, building in intensity, the details lose their thing-like concreteness, and replace it with a new kind of concreteness, one that is cumulative, verbal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are all sorts of ways one could illustrate \u201cNevsky Prospect,\u201d but if the artist follows Gogol’ closely, he will produce a caricature of the text; and if he takes a different approach altogether, he will produce a different kind of concreteness, one that will push aside and obscure Gogol’\u2019s verbal concreteness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prospect of illustrating \u201cThe Nose\u201d [Nos] is tantalizing, but impossible \u2014 but not because of the difficulty of fusing the grotesque and the everyday in pictorial art. It is impossible because everything in \u201cThe Nose\u201d hinges purely on language: Major Kovalev\u2019s nose<\/em>, which gets baked into a loaf of bread, is identified with, and substituted by, the elusive Nose<\/em>, who gets into a coach and attempts to flee to Riga.10<\/sup><\/a> This Nose<\/em> is apprehended by a police officer and returned to the nose\u2019s<\/em> owner wrapped in a piece of cloth. Any illustration is doomed to spoil this play; any pictorial concretization of the Nose<\/em> will make its effortless substitution with a nose<\/em> entirely nonsensical.11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The same can be said of Leskov\u2019s concreteness. Leskov is one of the most vivid writers in Russian.12<\/sup><\/a> In his hands, Russian speech<\/em>, with its enormous diversity of intonations and sly folk etymology, becomes a kind of illusory protagonist. We sense the gestures behind the speech, and behind the gestures we sense a kind of face, almost tangible. But this tangibility is elusive. It is concentrated in the articulation of speech, in the curve of the lips; and when we try to catch this character, the character slips away. And it stands to reason: Leskov\u2019s comically palpable language, in the process of turning into an acoustic gesture and thus hinting at a flesh-and-blood speaker, seems to turns into this speaker, to take his place. Language alone is entirely sufficient for concretizing the character, and the \u201cvisible\u201d character dissolves. (This accounts for the enormous significance of characters\u2019 first and last names<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here the crucial factor is the indeterminacy, the wide borders of this concreteness. In translating a face<\/em> into the medium of sound<\/em>, Khlebnikov achieved remarkable concreteness:13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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