Russian Poetry

It's strange how during the semesters I seem to forget my natural tendencies when unoccupied. I imagine I can be just as productive as I am during school, though able to take time to relax. This never seems to work out exactly as I expect because my melancholy is given plenty of space to move in. This feels like a burden at first, until I realize that it's only when I have let the blues sink in a bit that my brain and my heart really come alive again. I won't describe this further, only as an explanation for the rest of this post. It takes a lot of time before I can get in the mood to write things that I've been thinking about fragmentedly for months. So below is a poem analysis I have been working on of a poem by the Russian Areseniy Tarkovsky, father of the filmmaker. I have no delusions that it will be interesting to anyone at all, but of course I figure it doesn't hurt to 'publish' it, rather than keep it all to myself. Besides, I should like to prove that I haven't spent the last few weeks solely eating pancakes and indulging in irreverant pop music.

Вот и лето прошло,
Словно и не бывало.
На пригреве тепло.
Только этого мало.

Всё, что сбыться могло,
Мне, как лист пятипалый,
Прямо в руки легло.
Только этого мало.

Понапрасну ни зло,
Ни добро не пропало,
Всё горело светло.
Только этого мало.

Жизнь брала под крыло,
Берегла и спасала.
Мне и вправду везло.
Только этого мало.

Листьев не обожгло,
Веток не обломало...
День промыт, как стекло.
Только этого мало.


Summer came and went,
Like it never happened.
It was warm in its nourishment.
Only that’s not enough.

Everything that could come to fruition,
Like a five-fingered leaf,
Was laid straight into my hand.
Only that’s not enough.

Not in vain did evil,
Nor good disappear,
Light burned everything away.
Only that’s not enough.

Life took me under wing,
Guarded me and redeemed me.
It was so lucky for me.
Only that’s not enough.

The foliage was not scourged,
The branch was unharmed…
The day was sluiced clean, like glass.
Only that’s not enough.

-Arseniy Tarkvosky

Before diving into an interpretation of this poem, as with other Russian poems we must first consider the surface matters of its form. It is comprised of five four-line stanzas, following the rhyme pattern ABAB consistently throughout (not in my translation, unfortunately, but in the Russian). The first and third lines of each stanza end in masculine rhymes, while the second and fourth in feminine.
Keeping this in mind we can delve into the paradox which the poem reveals to us, the unifying tension between form and content. For without the last line of each stanza, the rhyme scheme would be stilted and the repetitive “Only that’s not enough” (Только этого мало) would not be there to tie all five stanzas together, thus leaving us with a more fragmented set of verses. But let us for the moment read the poem once again without the final line of each stanza. What we have is, I think, a thematically mirrored poem. Stanzas one and two work together, stanza three takes a turn, and stanzas three and four echo the first two, though effected by the cathartic third stanza.
In the first stanza, we have a light, pastoral sentiment: summer was here, it nourished me, but it passed too quickly. Nature gives and takes away. So far Keats and Wordsworth would nod approvingly. The next stanza moves us into fall: everything that grew during summer now is harvested, is reaped for our benefit. The inclusion of «five fingered leaf» is very important, since this poem itself is five-fingered (five stanzas long), written on leaves of paper. We now are not simply talking about nature, but also the art of poetry. The first stanza is thus not only about nature's summer, but the summertime of the soul, of warmth and happiness. Autumn brings its melancholy, and by the loss of summer we are given fodder by the muse of poetry, words of longing and remembered bliss.
The third stanza is our peripeteia, our turn or reversal: something ineffably catastrophic has happened. We can suppose it is winter, but Tarkovsky avoids terms to make this association. Instead, good and evil have disappeared and everything has been burned away. Cataclism, or merely a personal catharsis, who knows? But everything in the first two stanzas has disappeared. We start afresh after this stanza, unsure of the line between the pastoral and the spiritual from this point on. The fourth stanza answers our question, at least for now. The author has been saved by «life». But does he mean the green, lush life of stanzas one and two, or living, breathing human life? Has he found some solace in a human spiritual awakening, or simply shelter from nature's tumult? I think that he implies the former, since the verb used here, from the Russian спасать, meaning to save or redeem, has specifically relgious connotations. But this connotation merely introduces a tension in meaning. It comes from the Old Church Slavonic noun спасение, meaning «salvation». You still hear it in their church music. This connotation, however, I think the author evokes on purpose, only to give it a more earthly meaning. Life has redeemed him. But in the next line, he is merely the recipient of luck, of good fortune «везло». Life has picked him out haphazardly, and he feels gratitude for its nourishment. This reminds us, of course, of what summer did for him in the first stanza.
In the final stanza we are returned solely to the natural world. The trees are still standing, untorched and unbroken, the day is clear «like glass». Evidently the author has gone through some transformation, only to end up where he was in the first stanza. However, something has changed: he has become awakened, subconsciously to a different reality, the reality of redemption: if he meant спасать in the earthly sense, he now also understands its heavenly connotation.
I believe this awareness of the spiritual life is what gives us the cadence of «only that's not enough» at the end of each stanza. They are added because the author has realized the vanity of everything natural, the vanity of fortune and of the seasons and human emotion. Without the repetitive line, we would have, in a sense, a complete poem, replete with movement and imagery: it would be exactly a «five fingered leaf» that falls into our hands. With the cadence, however, the entire poem is reversed. It forces us to look not at what is in the poem, but rather what is absent from the poem. This realization becomes integral to the poem, inseparable from the ABAB rhyme scheme. To neglect the fourth line is to miss the whole point. The poem's entire meaning now hangs on whatever is missing from it. Luck, summer, warmth, light, nature and even poetry cannot satiate this void which the poet feels. So what would be enough?
My answer is this: the human will. In this poem the author is merely a passive recipient. There are no verbs which he is the agent of. In the Russian he is relegated to a recipient of action in the dative of the personal pronoun «мне», never the Я or 'I' of action, agency and control. What the repeating line deprives is the poem's natural vivacity, and replaces it with veracity. The poet builds the poem, lines 1-3 throughout, only to destroy it with line 4: the poem's form itself is a catharsis.
The poem is beautiful, as is nature: it has movement, beginnings and conclusions. But evidently it is not the answer to life's problems. «Only that's not enough» turns us away from the poem and its content towards a different philosophy, a different perspective on earthly matters: fortune cannot save you, and happiness fixed to this world is ultimately a lack of something else. Fulness in one sense is emptiness in another. One must act with one's will for true salvation. It will not be placed into our hands like good memories, friends, summer, food and shelter. The genius of th epoem is that this act of the will heralds into one's life a mirroring of nature's cycle of life, death and rebirth, the cycle of the poem. When one can choose, freely, to give up the life of this world, there then awaits a salvation that can satiate us, a redemption that is enough.