those old Russian poets

I suppose there's no simple explanation, other than: it is what it is because sensibility.

Reading their poems -- lines becoming stanzas becoming a whole thing -- one is never left scratching his head, gnashing his teeth, and muttering furiously: "What the hell was that?"

Their poems are spiritually and actually comprehensible (not to mention disarmingly beautiful and the opposite of boring). One doesn't need to consult a hallucinating Egyptian oracle to translate Rorschach into English. They were generous and gracious toward their readers, even as they moved into the depths of their inspirations.

Therefore, those old Russian poets were masters of the art of language as poetry.

I've been listening...

...to a CD I bought a number of years ago. It's Scriabin pieces played by Halida Dinova:

amazon.com

I get the unusual impression that I'm on a sofa in Scriabin's flat and that Dinova is also there, at the piano and channeling his spirit. So it's a kind of imaginary musical séance, I guess.

Bernstein, the RDO, and Nielsen

another excerpt from The Italics Are Mine

From page 314, by Nina Berberova:

So, in the summer of 1927 I read Envy, which made the strongest literary impression on me in many years. It was and remained for me a great event in Soviet literature, very likely even greater than Pasternak's Waves. Before me was a story by a young, original, talented writer, very much alive to his own time, a man who knew how to write and in a completely modern way as no one in Russia had before him, with a sense of measure and taste, knowing how to interweave drama and irony, pain and joy, and in whom literary techniques combined with the inner devices of his personal inversions in an oblique presentation of reality. He depicted people without embracing the rigid law of 'realism', on his own plane, against the background of his own personal vision of the world, with all the freshness of a unique and original perception. I realized that Olesha was one of the few now in Russia who understood undercurrent in a text and its role in a prose work, who had a mastery of prose rhythm, grotesque fantasy, hyperbole, musical effects, and unexpected turns of the imagination. Olesha's consciousness of his goals, control over achieving them, and the exquisite balance of the novel were striking. Something had been built or created, linked not to Gladkov's Cement, to Gorky's Mother or even to Chernyshevsky's What Can Be Done? -- but directly to Bely's Petersburg, The Overcoat, Notes from the Underground, the greatest works of our time. 

If you find yourself...

...speaking, writing incessantly about yourself, don't.

Consider scaling back your egoism and desperation for celebrity to almost negligible quantities. Consider how many who were truly interesting are dead and silent. Consider how many of them, even when alive, kept rather quiet about themselves.

And consider someone like Nina Berberova, who wrote an autobiography. She did it cool. So much in that book about her life flows toward the reader with a kind of ostensible pulse. Her written presence appears mostly as an implicit form around which and through which others are brought to written presence. Decisively and in good taste, her thoughts about herself are subdued with a genuine and diffuse irony.

Yes, that's the ticket: if you must speak, write about yourself, do so quietly, humbly, ironically.

a problem of substance

Let the monumental go dim!
I'm not infatuated with Paris.
Let that city be an afterthought,
retreating into mist and gestures.
Paint me instead one black lamp
standing glassy and almost real.
Paint me what's beneath umbrellas,
the wet thoughts of eternal people
gathering for the sake of enigma,
who breathe in equivocal autumn
and turn their backs on structure.

Autumn in Paris
copyright © the artist Dusan Djukaric

~ TB, 2013

Antonin Ladinsky

1896 - 1961

Reading about him in Nina Berberova's The Italics Are Mine, I had a hunch about this Russian émigré poet and novelist. A friend translated several of his poems for me. My hunch was confirmed that his poems would mean something special to me.

From Handbook of Russian Literature:

His splendid lyric poetry is still awaiting critical recognition.