In the Footsteps of Baudelaire's Poetics of Shock

Contemporary readers pinpointed the origin of Khodasevich's modernist poetics in Charles Baudelaire. Thus, for instance, in his review of Khodasevich's Collection of Poems, Gleb Struve wrote about the émigré cycle “European Night”: “Khodasevich combines creepy, cynical realism with some terrible phantasmagoria, both of which recall Baudelaire (‘Windows to the Yard,’ ‘Under the Ground,’ ‘An Mariechen,’ ‘Berlin,’ ‘Country,’ ‘Ballad,’ ‘By the Sea,’ ‘Stars’).”Footnote ²¹ Struve's words echo Baudelaire's description in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” of “modernist art” as a combination of “the transitory” and “the eternal” and anticipate T. S. Eliot's definition of Baudelaire's modernist poetry as “the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact and the fantastic.”Footnote ²² Khodasevich's orientation toward Baudelaire in his émigré poetry was self-conscious. In 1928, having published his final book, Collected Poems (1927), Khodasevich translates a number of Baudelaire's prose poems from Paris Spleen (1869). One of the implicit purposes of this venture was, apparently, to provide an interpretive framework for his own émigré poems published under the separate rubric, “European Night,” in Collected Poems.Footnote ²³ Indeed, for the recent Russian émigré who had traveled all over Europe prior to settling down in Paris in 1925, Baudelaire's oeuvre offered a blueprint for the poetic mapping of postwar Europe—predominantly its metropolises—and for fashioning his new modernist émigré poetic self.

Khodasevich's deliberate orientation toward Baudelaire in “European Night” parallels the major contemporaneous reevaluation of Baudelaire's heritage currently associated predominantly with Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, and Erich Auerbach.Footnote ²⁴ These figures, in contrast to the symbolist interpreters of Baudelaire, who highlighted his notions of synesthesia, a “forest of symbols,” and his Swedenborgian mysticism of the “correspondences” between metaphysical and earthly worlds from his eponymous sonnet, foregrounded Baudelaire's modernist urban sensibility.Footnote ²⁵ In “Under the Ground,” Khodasevich's particular contribution to this modernist re-appropriation of Baudelaire lies in his ambiguous, while unwitting, dramatization of two interrelated aspects of Benjamin's conceptualization of modernist poetry: first, Benjamin's theorization of the poetics of shock as Baudelaire's mode of coming to terms with modernity; and, second, Benjamin's nuancing Baudelaire's vision of a modernist artist as flâneur by defining the latter vis-à-vis a particular urban locus of mercantile capitalism—an arcade—as a prime space of his self-realization.Footnote ²⁶ In his lyric self's encounter with his masturbating alter ego in the public “underground” restroom, Khodasevich provides a thematic, spatial, and psychosomatic foil to Baudelaire's and Benjamin's problematization of the preferable visual mode of interpreting the urban environment, personified in the flâneur. Khodasevich supplements the visual representation with olfactory images: “There where it smells of black carbolic acid / and reeking earth.” As Mark Smith has pointed out, in literature smell often functions as “authenticator” of implicit “truths” and genuineness in contrast to subverted rationality.Footnote ²⁷ Accordingly, in “Under the Ground,” the contrast between the uncertainty of visual signification and the “telling” smell, with its “radical interiority, its boundary-transgressing propensities and its emotional potency,”Footnote ²⁸ metonymizes Khodasevich's poetics of shock with its subversive potential to penetrate beyond established aesthetic and epistemological surfaces.

Modernist studies appropriated the notion of shock, starting with Benjamin's generalizing Sigmund Freud's hypothesis from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) about dream characteristics of accident victims of WWI. Benjamin contends that modernity—“the inhospitable, blinding age of large-scale industrialism”—is structured like a historical “accident” that befalls and disrupts the homogeneous structure of “traditional” experience.Footnote ²⁹ The traditional poetic point of view lies in the poet's ability to distill the essence of reality for his/her readership; while “shock as poetic principle in Baudelaire”—like the dream characteristics of accident victims—pertains in his susceptibility of absorbing and reflecting the extreme, sometimes worst, forms of modernity in order both to disrupt the empty repetitiveness of commodified history and, retrospectively, to gain some control over them.Footnote ³⁰ Benjamin's insights correspond to views of other philosophers of modernity who have considered its disruptive effect on the phenomenological character of experience. Following the destabilization of the social and philosophical structures associated with earlier forms of political and economic organization, it has become harder to assign a stable meaning or value to individual objects and practices. Yet as older forms of organizing experience have weakened, new forms of producing experience, associated with modern industrial technology, have developed. The perpetually renewing spectacle of commodities and images demanded a new form of representation.Footnote ³¹ According to Benjamin, interpretation of the urban phenomena was provided by feuilletons, “physiologies,” and similar modes of writing that claimed to possess interpretative powers to accommodate and compartmentalize a potentially chaotic urban population into superficial stereotypes.Footnote ³² As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, in this mode of writing and its personification, the flâneur, we “recognize our own consumerist mode of being in the world.”Footnote ³³ Benjamin pointed to Poe's story “The Man of the Crowd” and Baudelaire's urban poetry as literary precedents for critiquing the flâneur's pretension to master a modern city through his interpretive techniques.Footnote ³⁴ Poe's narrator-flâneur easily “reads” the representatives of the London crowd, using his superb interpretive abilities. Encountering the “mysterious” old man, however, he acknowledges a failure of his interpretive mastery.Footnote ³⁵ As such, the story calls for an upgraded version of the city interpreter, subsequently introduced by Poe's detective stories. Like Poe's “The Man of the Crowd,” Baudelaire's urban poetry problematizes the interpretive self-assurance of urban spectatorship. The fantastic resemblance of “seven old men” from his eponymous poem attacks the poet-flâneur's sense of identity and brings him to the verge of mental breakdown.Footnote ³⁶ “Under the Ground” reiterates the lyric dynamics of Baudelaire's “Seven Old Men,” bringing the poet-flâneur to the peak of “rage and grief” after meeting his own “old man.”

Two factors played a role in Khodasevich's re-appropriation of Baudelaire's poetics of shock. First, it reflected the crisis in his symbolist assumptions about the exalted status of poetry as a medium for transcending the mundane condition and distilling its supernatural essence for his readership. Second, it signaled his groping for a new post-symbolist modernist poetics at a vulnerable time in his life: his situation was precarious both financially and existentially after his departure from Russia in 1922. His status as an expatriate gradually changed to that of émigré when, under several pen-names, he started publishing articles criticizing various aspects of Soviet cultural politics in the émigré press. He obtained the Nansen passport, and in 1925 Soviet authorities in Rome rejected his request to extend his Soviet passport.Footnote ³⁷ His 1922–27 cycle “European Night,” the last section of his ultimate Collected Poems (1927), precisely punctuates the moment when the disintegration of the vertical, transcendental axis of his Symbolist poetics leads him to the painful embrace of the diverse postwar European experience, without providing, however, the secure position of its detached interpreter and connoisseur, associated with the flâneur. While “Under the Ground” was written in 1923, Khodasevich's poetics of shock straddles his poems from “European Night,” which were written before and after 1925. My reading goes against the grain of Pavel Uspenskii's division of Khodasevich's poems from this cycle in terms of their poetics and pragmatics into “half-émigré” (1922–25) and émigré (1925–27). The first, Uspenskii contends, manifest a “satirical” mood, aiming at “denouncing the social squalor of émigré and partially European life,” whereas only the latter fully express “total existential despair.”Footnote ³⁸ The self-referential character of “Under the Ground,” discussed below, attests that this poem reflects Khodasevich's major aesthetic and existential crisis, triggered by a complex of ideological and existential factors, and cannot be reduced to a tendentious satirical mood. Khodasevich's employment of Weimar “underground” life for thematization of his poetics of shock cardinally differs from social criticism of the depraved Weimar bourgeois society, on which some of his contemporaries tried to capitalize politically.Footnote ³⁹

In his letter of January 12, 1925, to Khodasevich, Viacheslav Ivanov discusses the Baudelairean tinge in Khodasevich's 1922 book Heavy Lyre, inscribing it in the “vertical” dichotomy of “the spleen and the ideal.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Khodasevich's response of January 21, 1925 to Ivanov indicates, however, a conscious attempt to break with his former Symbolist poetics, with its inherent hierarchical dichotomies: “I clearly feel that my previous form has to be changed somehow, broken somewhere. I keep failing, however, in either calculating the angle and point of fracture, or in coming across them in the process of writing.”Footnote ⁴¹ Despite the expressed dissatisfaction with his current attempts to find the right “angle” “to break” his old “form,” his contemporaneous poems precisely realize this intention, variously problematizing his and his peers’ Symbolist assumptions, including their Symbolist appropriation of Baudelaire. In this regard, Baudelaire's and Khodasevich's poetics of shock were analogous expressions of their respective negation of prevalent poetic schools of their time—romanticism and symbolism in post-revolutionary France and postwar and post-revolutionary Russia and Europe.Footnote ⁴²

Khodasevich proclaimed his new post-symbolist modernist poetics in his March 24–27, 1923, poem “Vesennii lepet ne raznezhit” (The spring babble will not soften), which Wladimir Weidle has defined as a sort of ars poetica of the later Khodasevich:Footnote ⁴³

Khodasevich redefines the axiological premises of his poetry, prioritizing the psychosomatic experience of shock over “all harmonious beauties.” “[T]he shiver running over my skin / or the cold sweat of horror” designate the very moment when the defense mechanism fails and the shock penetrates the body, whether shock of fear, shock of poetic inspiration, or both.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the poem, Khodasevich dramatizes this agonizing experience by oxymoronically embracing traditionally “unharmonious,” “extreme” occurrences, either natural or technological—the stroke of lightning from “a tin cloud” or the noise of an “electric” saw which is, nevertheless, characterized as “melodious.” This undermining of the traditional aesthetic hierarchy is epitomized in the image of “the iron gnashing of cacophonous worlds” with its striking combination of the subverted audial harmony and scatological connotations.

Khodasevich further redefines his poetic subjectivity: no longer a discrete entity, observing reality from some secured viewpoint, it is an entity at the moment of its psychosomatic disintegration. Nevertheless, in the last lines, Khodasevich, in a Baudelairean way combines the “low,” technological imagery of this physical “exploding” experience with the celestial imagery “the alien spheres of being,” thus still attempting to provide the overall symbolist framework for his poetics of shock. “The alien spheres of being,” however, do not function as a transcendental signifier reunifying the distorted earthly self but rather enhance the non-individual, if not anti-individual, character of this experience.Footnote ⁴⁶ Publishing it as one of the first programmatic poems in “European Night,” Khodasevich, nevertheless, writes in his 1927 comments to Collected Poems that he is not satisfied with this poem.Footnote ⁴⁷ Apparently, Khodasevich's reservations extended beyond the issue of its rhythmic and phonetic design over-determining its semantic message.Footnote ⁴⁸ He may have been also dissatisfied with its overly declarative and abstract proclamation of the principles of his new modernist poetics. In his other poems from “European Night,” perceptively assessed by Struve, Khodasevich succeeded in thematizing the “cacophonous worlds” and “the shiver running over [his] skin” in the concrete imagery of postwar European metropolises and the predicaments of his poetic subjectivity.

The need to concretize his newly adopted poetics of shock was correlated with his refiguring of his lyric persona. The pre-émigré Symbolist model of the poet Orpheus with his transformative power of poetry is superseded in “European Night” by a new model analogous to that of a poet-flâneur bereft of a larger-than-life aura and inspired by the urban experience rather than by otherworldly sublime stimuli typical of Symbolist poetry.Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly to Poe's narrator in “The Man of the Crowd” and Baudelaire's lyric “I” in his cycle “Parisian Pictures,” the poet-flâneur of Khodasevich's “European Night” implicitly manifests characteristics of a voyeur or an “amateur detective” who finds themes for his writing in wandering along streets of the metropolis and tracking down various urban phenomena.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, in Khodasevich's case, flânerie was not just a poetic trope; it exemplified his self-fashioning as a modernist émigré poet, which took place predominantly in the circumstances of his writing “Under the Ground.”Footnote ⁵¹ Witness his comment on the poem, which he wrote on a copy of the Collected Poems belonging to Nina Berberova: “I saw him on Viktoria-Luise Platz. I trailed [prosledil] the old man (incidentally, some 50 years-old plus) to Kurfürstendamm.”Footnote ⁵² Khodasevich, thus, incarnates the behavior of the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” who obsessively traces the “mysterious” old man on streets of London. In his poem, Khodasevich probably calls the fifty plus man, whom he followed from Viktoria-Luise Platz to Kurfürstendamm, “an old man” not without setting up the thematic parallelism with Poe's and Baudelaire's similar characters, who function as implicit alter-egos of the respective speakers.Footnote ⁵³

It seems that, just as in Poe's story, Khodasevich's poet-flâneur's fascination with his “man of the crowd” stems from his semiconscious recognition of their similarity—now the similarity between his own predicament as an alienated modernist émigré poet and the act of (public) masturbation. In Poe's and Baudelaire's works the similarity between the flâneur and his men of the crowd derives from their common inscription in the consuming mode of urban spectatorship, where the flâneur presents only its more sophisticated form.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Poe's and Baudelaire's works, this recognition leads flâneurs to its suppression in the form of the criminalization and demonization of their respective men of the crowd. Historically appearing near the end of the period that Poe and Baudelaire inaugurated, “Under the Ground” revises the tradition of urban spectatorship in a nutshell form, providing a poetic equivalent to its subsequent philosophical explications. First, Khodasevich ironically exposes “the secret” of “the man of the crowd,” thus depriving him of his larger-than-life aura. Second, while the poet-flâneur ostensibly stigmatizes him as a “madman,” their similarity, nevertheless, emerges in the poem both spatially, thematically, and intertextually, destabilizing the poet-flâneur's detached reading of the urban experience. Simultaneously, transferring the gap of the interpretation from the thematic to the hermeneutic level, the poem makes its very reading equivalent to the poet-flâneur's encounter with the limits of the self-secured urban spectatorship.

During his stay in Berlin in 1923, Khodasevich lived in a boarding house located on Viktoria-Luise Platz.Footnote ⁵⁵ Along with Kurfürstendamm, this area was considered part of “Russian Berlin.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Viktoria-Luise Platz was likewise not far from various homosexual and transvestite venues of the rich sex nightlife of Weimar Berlin.Footnote ⁵⁷ This meta-poetic spatial overlapping of Russian émigré Berlin and nightlife Berlin, which in itself blurred the identity contours of two marginalized yet distinct socio-cultural groups, corresponds to the poet-flâneur's problematic (self-)positioning vis-à-vis his “man of the crowd.” His trailing the latter in real life and voyeuristically viewing his autoerotic manipulations, while replicating the flâneur's penetrating gaze on the diverse urban phenomena, put him in a position of the “watchqueen” or “look-out” in the homosexual “tea room trade,” examined by Laud Humphreys. While the watchqueen's role in the public restroom homosexual practice is to signal when someone approaches, he “gets his kicks” by watching the action of others without participating in it.Footnote ⁵⁸ The poet-flâneur's sexual integrity is thus deeply destabilized by the very act of voyeuristically observing masturbation, which involuntarily entails self-gratifying or homosexual connotations.Footnote ⁵⁹ The thematic blurring of the line between the poet-flâneur and his man of the crowd has likewise its intertextual counterpart, where the old masturbator turns out eventually to be the visual projection of Khodasevich's own poetic self.

The Shock of the Autoerotic Intertextuality

Among other things, Khodasevich expressed his new post-symbolist poetics in a drastic reconsideration of his earlier approach to referentiality. Previously, his rich employment of intertextual allusions, primarily to the Russian Golden Age and symbolist poetry, was aimed at inscribing himself into the Russian literary tradition, envisioned as a coherent continuum of everlasting aesthetic values, both reincarnated in and endowing its auratic power to its attentive poetic successors.Footnote ⁶⁰ Reconfigured by his modernist poetics of shock, in “European Night,” intertextuality often performatively punctuates the “point of fracture,” as he had intimated in his letter to Ivanov, in the continuity of literary and existential experience. Two main techniques accomplish this in “European Night.” In “Khranilishche” (Repository) or in “Pered zerkalom” (In front of the mirror), literary and visual-art allusions underscore the inadequacy of traditional fields of reference to provide meaning for the modern experience.Footnote ⁶¹ In other poems, allusions deprive elements of the literary, mostly symbolist tradition of their aura by re-situating them in bleak surroundings of postwar European metropolises, for that matter, in the public subterranean restroom.

The “creator” of “voluptuous worlds” in front of “a tile wall” probably refers to Valerii Briusov's programmatic poem “Tvorchestvo” (Creativity) (1895). This meta-poetic poem reiterates the process of its own creation, engendered by contemplating blurred reflections of the moon on tiles of the stove in Briusov's flat. Briusov's poem epitomizes the triumph of the symbolist poet's creative power to transform mundane reality into an imaginary one. The suggestive imagery of the poem with its Mallarmé-like idiosyncrasy was considered incomprehensible. In his 1914 article “Briusov's Juvenilia,” Khodasevich provides a detailed analysis, suggesting a mundane—now widely accepted—interpretation of the poem's imagery: the poet just indulges in daydreaming about the shadows of palms on the stove's tiles in front of him.Footnote ⁶² Khodasevich's half-ironic comments on Briusov's enigmatic daydreaming foreshadows his radically relocating it into the “underworld” of masturbatory phantasy. This relocating may have been anticipated by Briusov's own endowing the creative process with (self-)erotic tinges. Thus, at the end of “Creativity,” the poet's daydream receives an eroticized self-gratifying tone: “Secrets of created creatures / cuddle me with a caress, / And the shadow of latania palms trembles / On the enamel wall.”Footnote ⁶³ Travestying his literary father figure's arbitrary omnipotence over his fantasies, their antithetical description (“Here he creates and destroys / his voluptuous worlds”) is likewise self-referential, harking back to Khodasevich's 1921 poem “Gorit zvezda, drozhit efir…” (A blazing star, the quivering ether…) included in The Heavy Lyre: “And out of nothing I create / Your seas, Your deserts, and Your hills, …And suddenly at merest whim / I destroy this splendid nonsense…”Footnote ⁶⁴ With a tinge of self-irony, Khodasevich reiterates the romantic view of the creative consciousness as a dialectic of authorial self-creation and destruction, which celebrates its supremacy over the constraints of empirical phenomena.Footnote ⁶⁵ In “Under the Ground,” this neo-romantic, demiurgical creativity, encapsulated epigrammatically in the phrase “Here he creates and destroys… ,” conjures up “voluptuous worlds” that traditionally were forbidden entrance into the domain of pure art. The further description of the old man bolsters his self-referential origin. Trance movements of his body (“just rocks [kachaetsia] all over slightly”) echo the semi-conscious trance in which the speaker of the 1921 “Ballad” falls under the spell of his own incantations: “And I begin to rock [kachat΄sia], / embracing my knees.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Such creative self-stimulation on the verge of self-eroticizing is present likewise in other poems of The Heavy Lyre. In the poem “K Psikhee” (To Psyche) (1920), for instance, the poet addresses his own soul as his beloved, reciprocally eroticizing himself:

By overlapping with the theme of the self-stimulating solipsism, the self-referentiality of “Under the Ground” blurs the line between the masturbatory and creative imagination. Khodasevich, thus, taps into modernist literary engagements with masturbation as a trope for the trauma (and certainly delight) of autonomous imaginative rêverie, self-cultivation, and auto-representation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Uneasily exposing the work of the masturbatory (and creative) imagination in a semi-public setting of the “underground” restroom, Khodasevich, at the same time relives the poetics of shock by the dramatized subversion of artistic, often self-complacent, autonomy as the premise of modernist art.

In his book Khodasevich: His Life and Art, David Bethea has likewise noted that the poem's biblical theme of Onan reconsiders the image of a poet as a happy sower from Khodasevich's Grain's Way, instead symbolizing the miserable state of the émigré poet alienated from his homeland.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, in his programmatic eponymous poem from this book, Khodasevich's quilted imaginative comparison of poetry and a peasant's plowing aimed at naturalizing himself and his own poetry, inscribing it into the symbolic domain of Russian history, peoplehood, and literature. While contrastively nodding toward his former poetic program, the very writing abroad of “Under the Ground,” the “forceful” poem (in Harold Bloom's terms), however, challenges the essentialist correlation of the creative process with physical proximity to native soil, especially as Khodasevich's poetic self-perception was hardly rooted in a (neo-)romantic vision of a homeland as the “natural” wellspring of poetic creativity. His own non-Russian, Polish-Jewish origin and his strong opposition to both Polish and Russian ethnonationalisms, expressed on various occasions, primed him for distancing himself from the nostalgic conviction, widespread in the Russian emigration, of the émigré plight as bare of creative capacities. In his 1933 article “Literatura v izgnanii” (Literature in Exile), Khodasevich criticizes the “biological” denunciation of émigré literature on the basis of its “separation from the national soil and way of life” and argues for the creation of extra-territorial Russian émigré literature, drawing on the examples of Jewish diasporic literature and Polish literature of the so-called Great emigration in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ This possibility of extra-territorial émigré literature was confirmed by Khodasevich's own “European Night”: a nostalgic mood was not mandatory for émigré creativity. His fluid national-cultural identity and his uprooted, expatriate situation arguably correlated with his contemporaneous proclivity toward the modernist poetics of shock, announced in “The spring babble will not soften,” which develops from precisely the willful, if painful, disavowal from cultural allegiances and aesthetic norms taken as “natural.”Footnote ⁷¹

A Flâneur in the Public “Underground” Restroom

Khodasevich's destabilization of the poet-flâneur's sexual and creative integrity through merging him with his masturbatory reflection is intensified by the similarly destabilizing foil to the flâneur's paradigmatic locus of self-realization, namely, the arcades. Indeed, the public “underground” restroom and the arcades are intrinsically, but inversely, correlated in their urban localization and functioning. Originating in a single span of time as two prototypical urban representations of modernity, they are designed to domesticate the public space as both street and interior, where their visitor simultaneously is alone and exposed to others.Footnote ⁷² Arcades and public restrooms present two subordinate and interdependent loci intended to regulate the urban space and to serve the bodily needs of urban dwellers. While the arcades display their mercantile façade, the restroom is designed to conceal the arcades’ waste.Footnote ⁷³ Taken as Baudelaire's key definition of the “Modern,” Benjamin theorizes “a phantasmagoria” of the arcades in Marxist terms as the powerfully illusory quality of this environment, determined by commodity production.Footnote ⁷⁴ Mentioned in Struve's review as one of the main features of Khodasevich's Baudelairean poems, “Under the Ground” locates the need and origin for the “phantasmagoria” in the old man's and the viewers’ imaginations. Such introjection seems in tune with deconstructive and psychoanalytic re-readings of Baudelaire and Benjamin, which argue that the shift in experience and consciousness conveyed by Baudelaire resists Benjamin's sometimes “brutal inscription of Baudelaire's poetry in its sociohistorical contexts” and are rather inherent in the human psyche or “endemic to the iterable nature of language itself.”Footnote ⁷⁵

In relocating the phantasmagoric effect inside or under the ground, Khodasevich metonymized the human psyche by subverting the visual representation, privileged by the flâneur, and prioritizing the olfactory effect, with its disturbing potential to penetrate visible surfaces.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, the arcades’ phantasmagoria is expressed predominantly in visual effects of display and consumption and achieves its foremost embodiment in surfaces of showcases and mannequins.Footnote ⁷⁷ In “Under the Ground,” however, while the poet-narrator behaves as a voyeuristic flâneur, the visualization of the “underground” setting is constantly hindered. In fact, the reader understands who is depicted in the poem only when the protagonists have left the restroom. In the restroom itself, as if literalizing its “deep half-darkness” and the poet-flâneur's embarrassment, the very syntactic patterning blurs the clear visualization: the first two stanzas lack the noun definition of the actor (“[he] stands”; “[He] does not step back, nor turn around”); whereas in the subsequent two stanzas, only the cryptic pronoun “he” designates the old man.Footnote ⁷⁸ Creating a gap in the poet-flâneur's and readers’ interpretive control of the actual and textual reality, the subversion of the visual and semantic clarity deprives the old man's act of masturbation of its locus. The act of masturbation becomes a dislocated process conjured up in the observers’ (including readers’) imagination, preconditioning their participation in the shock experience, as in order to interpret correctly the old man's body language, they should be cognizant of its autoerotic semantics. The disturbing comprehension of this shared language results in the old woman's burst of violence, in the poet's outburst of rage and grief, and in the euphemistic and embarrassed interpretations of the poem by its readers. One may correlate Khodasevich's giving readers the vicarious experience of shock with the general modernist and avant-garde anticipation of the current widespread attempts to undermine the opposition between the critical-aesthetic and the autoerotic. Thus, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's suggestion concerning the unstable division between art and masturbation, critics have argued that this instability works likewise to break out of academic protocols that maintain secure critical distance from variously disturbing texts.Footnote ⁷⁹

In contrast to the consciously thwarted voyeuristic characterization of the old man, the main clues for deciphering the poem's locus are primarily olfactory. Indeed, the olfactory imagery of the first two lines of the poem literally ushers the reader into the interiors of “Under the Ground”: “through smell . . . one interacts with interiors, rather than with surfaces, as one did through sight.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Just as the shock strips consciousness of its self-defense mechanism under the effect of urban stimuli, the “underground” smell functions as the sensorial metonymy of the shocking effect of the poem, compelling the reader vicariously to participate in its inhaling.Footnote ⁸¹

The “smell” likewise exacerbates the ultimate victimization and castigation of the old man, which takes the form of direct physical violence: “a smelly broom / chases the madman from his corner.” In an interconnected process of the dehumanization, the agent of this moral and social castigation is metonymized into a depersonalized “smelly broom” (in Russian the feminine voniuchaia metla), while the old man is ultimately depersonalized and diagnosed as a “madman.” His behavior, which so far has had no clear denotation, has finally been converted into an identity, assigning the old man a special place in the modern disciplinary society.Footnote ⁸² Thus the poet-flâneur's cognitive act of labeling the old man replicates the physical violence inflicted on him. At the same time, the discursive regime that the poet has interiorized has, in turn, similarly pathologized his own modernist creativity: notoriously, various contemporary anti-modernist spokesmen, from Max Nordau to Lev Tolstoi and from Russian Marxists to Italian Fascists and German Nazis, disparaged new art through the lens of degeneration theory.Footnote ⁸³ This inner clash in the poet's subjectivity psychologically parallels the old man's instantaneous psychosomatic agony. Their parallel shock experience, analogous to its somewhat abstract description in “The spring babble will not soften,” embodies the poignant birth of Khodasevich's modernist self via the subversive appropriation of the anti-masturbatory “tongues of repression” and the predominant mode of urban spectatorship. At the end of “Under the Ground,” the traditional socio-moral and metaphysical domains whose norms were crucial for castigation of the old man as “a madman” themselves evince the feeling of “madness” or are eviscerated (“the Berlin day, the shining delirium . . . and up above is a blue desert…”). Consequently, the post-symbolist escape from the dehumanized and de-spiritualized world finds its niche (or “oasis” as a contrasting comparison to the celestial “blue desert”) in a marginalized, “smelly” urban space of a public “subterranean” restroom.

The axiological rehabilitation of the “underground” as the place of modern creativity is supported likewise by its mythological projections. “Under the Ground” intrinsically combines the features of two prototypical plot-lines of catabasis narratives, which Raymond J. Clark conveniently distinguishes as descents in a “fertility tradition” and those in a “wisdom tradition.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In the fertility tradition, the descent restores a lost vitality to the earth, which was romanticized in a plot of resurrection of lost love (Orpheus and Eurydice). In the wisdom tradition, catabasis provides the hero with knowledge about the future and the afterlife (Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante). The old man's masturbation in the “underground” with his subsequently being chased away by the old woman travesties Orpheus's descent into Hades in quest of his beloved wife Eurydice. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Orpheus was eventually torn apart by Maenads because of his avoiding women and his homosexual preferences.Footnote ⁸⁵ The vision of the old man as a degraded Orpheus (with a nod to his own various self-mythologizations as Orpheus in his pre-expatriate poetry) is juxtaposed with the speaker's own catabasis leading to his meeting with his purported father figure whose modern “madness” or “perversity” punctuates “the point of fracture” with the classical paternal wisdom from Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy.Footnote ⁸⁶ Both fertility and wisdom subplots variously support the intrinsic correspondence between two protagonists, making the poet's descent into the subterranean restroom indeed an inaugural experience in his transformation into a modernist poet.

Khodasevich's poetics of shock that reified the dynamics of his disillusionment in and the reclaiming of his modernist poetic self was inscribed in a particular historical-biographical context whose modification, it seems, entailed renunciating his disturbing poetics. Khodasevich himself was aware of the precarious stature of his shock poetics in the contemporaneous political cum literary circumstances. Sending “Under the Ground” to Maksim Gor΄kii on September 24, 1923, Khodasevich acknowledges that its nonconventional character may create problems with its publication, in other words, problems in situating it within the “respectable” space of Russian literature: “Unfortunately, there is no journal that would dare to publish such ‘poetry.’”Footnote ⁸⁷ Putting “poetry” in quotation marks, Khodasevich self-ironically preempts the possible questioning of its aesthetic status, indeed subsequently voiced in Nabokov's review.Footnote ⁸⁸ While correlating his poem's undermining of literary propriety with its own possible problematic positioning within the precincts of contemporary Russian literature, Khodasevich's remark, in effect, aligns “Under the Ground” with similar modernist attempts to redefine the interrelated aesthetic and sexual norms, attempts that in turn were deemed “improper” and censored. One can recall the epitome of such modernist endeavors, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, and—contemporaneous to Khodasevich's “Under the Ground”—Joyce's Ulysses, both accused of obscenity.Footnote ⁸⁹

In his September 27, 1923, response, Gor΄kii pinpoints the roots of Khodasevich's provocative poetics: “it is a devastating poem; I hear something of Baudelaire in it; but, if I may say so, the last three lines seem superfluous to me.”Footnote ⁹⁰ One can discern a clash of realist and modernist perspectives on art in Gor΄kii's skepticism about the last three lines. Without them, the poem might read as an exemplar of the bitter socio-moral criticism of postwar Weimar Germany from the objectified point of view of some universal humanistic ideal.Footnote ⁹¹ The three last lines, however, where the personal pronoun “my” appears for the first time in the poem, bolster the personal presence and bewildered self-identification of the lyric persona, enraged and grieved with the old man, thus undermining secure detachment from the observed act of masturbation. While Gor΄kii appreciates the Baudelairean subject matter of the poem, he, as well as some other readers of the poem, would prefer to eschew this traumatic self-identification, which is largely predetermined for the reader by the last lines of the poem. Gor΄kii might also have recognized the formal “impropriety” of these lines that break from the rest of the poem both syntactically and formally: the ellipsis at the end of the line preceding these three creates the sense of a break; this is the only time in the poem that Khodasevich rhymes three consecutive lines, which strengthens their link to each other and helps the reader to single them out. Similarly to “The spring babble will not soften,” “Under the Ground” seems to set up an implicit correspondence between its subject-matter and formal patterning. Approximately from the poem's middle, when the old woman dislodges the old man from his “voluptuous worlds,” it moves from regular quatrains increasingly to longer and irregular stanzas with unpredictable rhyming. In the final 12-line stanza, this rhyming can both imitate the old man's somber ascent from the underworld and, reinforced by internal rhymes (zlost΄/trost΄), the relentless tapping of the walking stick.Footnote ⁹² For such a formal-conscious poet as Khodasevich, even these relatively moderate formal incoherencies might imply an “exploding” effect similar to the one described at the end of “The spring babble will not soften.”

“Under the Ground” was initially published in the journal Beseda, edited by the sympathetic Gor΄kii and Khodasevich himself, which positioned itself as an ideologically neutral bridge between expatriate-Soviet and European-Russian literatures.Footnote ⁹³ Ironically, Beseda's distinctive place in the ideological “no man's land” both allowed the unproblematic publication of such “poetry” and rapidly led to its own extinction in the intensifying, polarized Soviet-émigré battle-field of contemporary Russian literature.Footnote ⁹⁴ The looming closure of Beseda, apparently Khodasevich's main venue of literary activity and source of income in emigration, along with other circumstances mentioned above, triggered his decision with regard to his future ideological allegiances, which, it seems, could not but have its effect on the destiny of his evolving modernist poetics. His spatial move away from peripheral Sorrento, where he stayed in Gor΄kii's villa from October 1924 until April 1925, to Paris (where, as it turned out, he settled for good), the cultural center of the émigré life of the period, unequivocally indicated his allegiance with émigré, anti-Soviet circles.

After several years, in 1927, this spatial and ideological move culminated in Khodasevich's accepting, after a period of bitter vacillations, the offer to work as a key literary critic in the right-wing émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie (Renaissance).Footnote ⁹⁵ This marked the end of his peregrinations, one could say flânerie, throughout Europe, providing him with a stable, if meager, income for exhausting work. Working in Vozrozhdenie, Khodasevich could not help but subscribe to its ideological agenda, characterized by political conservatism and literary traditionalism. Aligning with the conservative line both in politics and in literature was especially vital for Khodasevich, as he wished to whitewash himself from his cooperation with Soviet cultural organizations after the revolution and his cooperation with Gor΄kii prior to his moving to Paris.Footnote ⁹⁶ An aesthetic reflection of his dealing with his deep existential and ideological crisis, his shock poetics was incompatible with his current settling down as an adamant adherent of traditional ideological and literary values. Contrary to popular views that Khodasevich abruptly stopped writing poetry after 1927, Nikolai Bogomolov has convincingly demonstrated that Khodasevich did not stop writing poetry till the end of the 1920s and occasionally wrote it afterwards.Footnote ⁹⁷ Khodasevich, however, certainly stopped writing in a style defined in this essay as poetics of shock, while retreating to the neoclassical or occasional comic exercises, often reminiscent of his pre-émigré poetry.Footnote ⁹⁸ His deliberate ideological and literary alignment with Vozrozhdenie's conservative line, sometimes respectful to a fault, was, in a way, his defense mechanism against his former “suspicious” (as it teleologically turned out) left-wing allegiances; similarly, his renunciation of the poetics of shock is negatively correlated with his former experiments in the new grounds (and “undergrounds,” one might say) of modernist poetry.Footnote ⁹⁹ My interpretation of the dynamics of Khodasevich's émigré poetic creativity takes issue with the version that it was primarily “the trauma of emigration” that “silenced Khodasevich as a poet.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The latter view perpetuates the essentialist devaluation of émigré literature, widespread in Soviet Russia for ideological reasons and expressed likewise in attempts, during the Thaw period, to “rehabilitate” Khodasevich ideologically on the basis that his émigré poetry expresses “his dissatisfaction with life in an alien land.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ As I have shown in this essay, Khodasevich's “trauma of emigration” precipitated his more general reliving of “the trauma of modernity,” which engendered his creative response in the form of his poetics of shock. In essence, his attempts to alleviate his trauma of modernity by normalizing his émigré status societally and ideologically led to the renunciation of his problematic poetics of shock; he did not, however, derive satisfaction from resorting to neo-classicist poetics, which is reflected in the gradual decline of his poetic creativity and his reluctance to publish his more traditional émigré poems.Footnote ¹⁰² Khodasevich's literary politics was likewise indicative of a conservative turn in the context of transnational modernism. Symptomatically, a year after Khodasevich started working in Renaissance, T. S. Eliot declared his orientation as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” surprising some of his modernist comrades-in-arms.Footnote ¹⁰³ After their “Sturm und Drang” years, high modernists started giving up faith in artistic autonomy for the sake of extra-artistic activism, in which writing often became subservient to sociopolitical causes.Footnote ¹⁰⁴