À PROPOS D’UNE RENCONTRE ENTRE TOLSTOÏ ET UN PHONOGRAPHE
Conférence de Pavel Arseniev, poète et théoricien accueilli au sein de l’UMR Litt&Arts grâce au programme PAUSE du Collège de France.
Le texte politique le plus célèbre et sans doute le plus important de Tolstoï est intitulé « Je ne peux pas me taire ». Un peu moins connu est le fait que Tolstoï l’a écrit après avoir tenté d’enregistrer son appel oralement, bouleversé par la nouvelle de paysans pendus. Il voulait l’enregistrer sur un phonographe, l’un des premiers prototypes, envoyé personnellement au célèbre écrivain russe par son célèbre inventeur américain : Edison. Le lendemain de l’échec de la tentative avec le phonographe, l’article « Je ne peux pas me taire » sera écrit. Les premières rencontres des histoires littéraires et de la technique se font à l’aveugle, la littérature – même sensible aux problématiques politiques – reste insensible à la technique d’enregistrement et à sa surface sensible au son, avec laquelle elle est déjà en contact de facto en 1908. Sous l’emprise trop forte du désir d’une déclaration politique, elle ne peut pas non seulement se taire, mais même constater qu’elle est confrontée à de nouvelles conditions de parole.
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LE 26 AVRIL 202312h30 — 14h00
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Université de Grenoble Alpes Saint-Martin-d’Hères — Domaine universitaire
Maison des Langues et des Cultures
Salle Jacques Cartier
Création & Poésie, en partenariat avec Sciriolus, reçoit Pavel ARSENIEV, poète et théoricien accueilli au sein de l’UMR Lits&Arts en tant que chercheur post-doctorant grâce au programme PAUSE du Collège de France.
La rencontre, qui fera l’objet d’un échange autour de la poésie, a lieu mercredi 26 avrild, au Tonneau de Diogène.
15th March 2023, 2:15 pm, Sala Riunioni, Palazzo Venera
Pavel Arsenev (Università di Grenoble)
The Tactic of Linguistic Exile between Political Emergency and Poetological Programme
The most current concept of relocation seemingly points to a purely geographical shift and thus deproblematicises political relations within the “homeland” (with which «emigration», in turn, was still very much concerned). However, what is relocated outside the door returns to the window (of our browsers) and questions about speech geoposition arise: today, it might even be more important from where you speak than what you say and where you are (although this is most often connected). This new sense of a geo-position should now be clarified by the metadata of any public/private speech: “Ah, you just (not) speak from Russia now? And what is it that you seem to be expressing not in Russia? In order not to sound too much from Russia”, etc).
The crack runs already through the very history of the language, before only non-we spoke a foreign language, now we ourselves have become half non-we, since the speech of one half of the Russian-speaking population has lost its meaning for the other half. This linguitistic division can also be seen as the appearance of a fourth East-Slavic language). So far, it might still only be a phraseological and intonational misunderstanding between Russian speakers from “here” and “there”, sometimes getting lost in this uprooted deixis. But there seemingly appear two Russian languages now, like passports — internal and external. One cannot get the second one, and someone else on the contrary has long lost the first one.
En partenariat avec L’atelier des artistes en exil et Montévidéo & La Cômerie
À l’occasion du 5ème festival Visions d’exil
À Montévidéo, 3 imp. Montévidéo, 13006 Marseille
« Depuis que j’assiste ou même participe aux événements du Cipm et de l’Atelier des artistes en exil, j’ai inévitablement ressenti une condensation phraséologique autour de notion d’exil, qui, il s’est avéré, peut avoir sa propre poétique. Bien que cela ne rende pas politiquement la position de l’exilé plus optimiste, elle peut être comprise et habituée linguistiquement.
J’ai été attiré par la notion d’exil linguistique qui a émergé ici : nous nous retrouvons tous jetés dans telle ou telle langue, y agissant d’abord par le ressenti et doutant de nos expressions (et de ce fait, dans ce qui s’y exprime aussi), mais peu à peu on s’habitue à compter cette langue native, on l’utilise presque sans réfléchir, peut-être même en perdant l’intérêt ou l’attention envers lui. La prochaine fois, nous ressentons à nouveau une anxiété langagière dans trois cas — 1) si nous avons des enfants qui l’apprennent par tâtonnement et que nous sommes assez attentifs à ce processus; 2) si nous écrivons de la poésie dans lesquels l’action des expressions courants est suspendue, le sens est redéfini, et l’adressage est dispersé ; et enfin 3) si nous nous trouvons dans un exil politique ou économique et cherchons à nous installer dans un nouveau pays, une nouvelle culture et une nouvelle langue. Pourtant, chacun de ces cas tout à fait extraordinaires nous renvoie au sens du langage, rendant son usage à nouveau incertain, attentif et intéressé.
De plus, le sens de la matérialité linguistique est aggravé dans le cas de traductions poétiques mutuelles de deux exilés linguistiques — de régions aussi différentes que l’Afghanistan post-séculaire et la Russie post-soviétique, apparemment retrouvés en exil politique pour des raisons comparables, mais traitant le problème de l’exil linguistique dans des manières différentes (parmi les modes de le traiter, on peut mentionner l’essai de maintenir un lien avec la langues native en exil, de négocier avec diaspora, ou un métissage radical avec l’autre langue). Bref, ces tactiques d’exil linguistique, en partie abstraites comme programmes linguo-philosophiques, et d’autre part assez politiquement urgentes, je les proposerais comme cadre de travail sur les traductions ou y consacreraient notre éventuel dialogue avec Mustafa. »
Pavel Arsenev
L’atelier des artistes en exil, structure unique en France, a pour mission d’identifier des artistes en exil de toutes origines, toutes disciplines confondues, de les accompagner au regard de leur situation et de leurs besoins administratifs et artistiques, de leur offrir des espaces de travail et de les mettre en relation avec des professionnels afin de leur donner les moyens d’éprouver leur pratique et de se restructurer.
This is the first bi-lingual English-Russian edition of Pavel Arseniev’s poetry. Arseniev is a St. Petersburg writer, editor, political activist, theoretician, and recipient of the Andrei Bely prize, Russia’s most prestigious literary award. The book contains an introduction by Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania) and is edited by Anastasiya Osipova.
Arseniev’s poetry provides a living link between the legacy of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde art and theory, on the one hand, and the modern Western materialist thought on the other. It traces how these diverse influences become weaponized in the language of contemporary Russian protest culture. Arseniev readily politicizes all, even the most mundane facts of the poet’s life, while at the same time, approaching reified bits of found speech and propaganda with lithe, at times corrosive irony and lyricism.
“One hundred years after the October revolution, LEF (Left Front of the Arts), and Russian Formalism, Pavel Arseniev brings into Russian poetry the militant excitement of subversive materialist exploration and canny activist protest. The unique results of this poetic event will, without a doubt, be exceptionally interesting and useful to an American reader.”
Kirill Medvedev, the author of It’s No Good
“Pavel Arseniev charts the ‘emergence of unexpected forms of collective life…’ These vivid translations show contemporary Russian poetry at one of its high points, where language laughs at its own seriousness but opens the way for astute cultural insights and a bracing evocation of life lived out loud.”
Stephanie Sandler, Harvard University
The truths of Russian administered reality were long ago stripped bare, so that now the poet’s work is to invent a new line of camouflage. Warning: Pavel Arseniev is a defector with only his disguises to divulge. Perhaps this as close as we can come, in this moment, to alchemy. Or is it allegory? Warning: this is poetry that makes Russia great again. Arseniev is taking a bullet for poetry but, at the same time, he is asking – will poetry take a bullet for you? Warning: any complete picture – lies. Then one day dyr bul schyl. Reported Speech turns the stink of the real into a stinging aesthetic coup de grace. I’m defecting to that.
In a bilingual Russian-English format, Arseniev’s work articulates intimate, defiant, and at times desperate responses to a world in which culture seems to be increasingly prefabricated, predetermined, and designed to numb the mind and soul.
Exposing the absurd vagaries of the present moment is where the volume shines as a tremendous piece of internationalist literature.
Through art like Arseniev’s poetry, we gain a toehold, however momentary, from which we are better able to grasp the present and prepare a future.
As a keyhole into contemporary Russian experimental poetry, the volume should find a broad readership in the English speaking world. In essence, the book represents poetic strategies for resistance and survival under fierce oppression, underscoring that literature matters, as well as how it does things.
Pavel Arseniev’s poems of solidarity and alienation illuminate the phantasmagoria of capitalist Russia.
«By concentrating as much on the act as on the content of speech, Arseniev seems also to have come closer to documenting aspects of the very tenor of life and reality in the present epoch. Through using the genre of police reports or of legalese in ‘An Incident’ and ‘Forensic Examination’, or the language of adverts in ‘Mayakovsky for Sale’ and ‘Mass Median’, a series of brief news items in ‘Reports from the Field’, or the long parodic poem-diatribe in nationalist hate-speech In response to a ‘Provocative Exhibition of Contemporary Critical Art’, we discover not the poet’s perspective, but a concrete, material trace taken from excessive speech which illuminates the strange capitalist phantasmagoric world that is contemporary Russia.»
From its very first pages, Pavel Arseniev’s Reported Speechshows itself to be true to its title; the opening poem’s epigraph comes to us, we are told, from an “Instruction in the platzkart train car”. This is only the beginning of a journey through a trail of words found, mixed and transmitted from various source texts. The poems represent “reported speech” in the sense that they are inspired by found texts, by language encountered on the streets, in police stations, rail cars, courtrooms, newspapers, books, personal correspondence, nationalist political screeds, and writing on social media and the internet. The poet appropriates, organizes, shuffles and shapes the material of the political world, which is everywhere, for everything is political.Pavel Arseniev is part of a group of contemporary Leftist poets developing new modes of resistance and protest through literary production. Arseniev’s unabashedly political project rejects any view of art and art institutions as motivated by a search for the next singular voice of creative genius. Rather, his creative practice seeks to dismantle the idea of poetry as narcissistic, individualistic self-expression and instead aims to capture and convey aspects of human social experience in the world through the multifaceted voices of the collective.
His larger creative project is to facilitate the dissemination of socially engaged and marginalized speech and, in some ways, to continue the legacy of the Russian avant garde and factographic movements of the 1920s. Arseniev also sees his mission in part as working to fill a void left in the wake of the collapse of samizdatculture of the 1970s.
If Amelin mounts a defense of poetry against the threat of modernity by digging
into the roots of tradition, Pavel Arseniev, in contrast, questions why it needs defending in the first place. In Arseniev’s view, the formal and institutional constraints of Russian verse have rendered it useless in articulating the present moment. His is an engagé poetry that articulates a leftist critique of the myriad forms of social and political alienation in contemporary Russia. The translations found in Reported Speech, executed by a collective of translators overseen by editor Anastasiya Osipova, effectively recreate the urgency and relevance of his project.
In both his poetry and his political activism, Arseniev attempts to overcome the
futility of traditional methods of resistance. Civic verse and revolutionary discourse are no longer as meaningful as they once were, having been co-opted and commodified by state and commercial interests. Arseniev’s answer is to subvert the role of the poet by acting as a field reporter, providing snapshots and snippets of speech from everyday life. In “Mayakovsky for Sale” (24–25), a list of hyperlinks from an online advertisement for a used volume of the poet’s collected works becomes a statement on the market’s power to subsume everything into its domain. Another poem, “Translator’s Note” (38–43), consists of lines excerpted from a Russian translation of a philosophical tract by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In their transformed context, these disconnected scraps take on new meanings, challenging the reader to reconsider traditional notions of authorship and originality.
Arseniev’s innovations are informed by his concerns about the viability of political poetry. Perhaps a poet in Russia should be less than a poet after all. At times he anticipates critiques of his approach by assuming the voices of his detractors, as in “Forensic Examination,” which reads like a report by a state prosecutor indicting the poet with inciting political extremism:
We shall see the writer
Has attempted
To voice his political
Views and convictions,
Clumsily camouflaging them
In aesthetic window dressing.
Its objective qualities,
According to many experts,
Are surely
Much poorer
Than if he had minded his own business
And simply written poems,
Looking for his own style
And his own place on the literary scene (45).
A similar satirical wit appears in “Poema Americanum,” in which a visit to a
west coast university prompts the poet to reflect on his own marginality: “in time you will stop being a person / whose acquaintance is sought out by the slavic studies professors / wishing to appear more radical” (133). In this poem, as throughout the entire volume, the translation deftly captures the contrasts between a multitude of voices and perspectives, allowing Arseniev’s multifaceted authorial presence to appear starkly on the page.
Дискуссия по выставке Павла Арсеньева «Орфография сохранена» (14 мая 2012 года).
Модератор дискуссии Елена Яичникова. Участники дискуссии: Глеб Напреенко, искусствовед, арт-критик Олег Аронсон, философ, теоретик кино и телевидения Павел Арсеньев, поэт, художник. Иван Ахметьев, поэт, критик, редактор. Данила Давыдов, поэт, прозаик, литературный критик.
Доклад «Прагматическое измерение поэтического высказывания» (теоретический блок «Самообращенность высказывания в актуальной поэзии и современном искусстве», 2014)
