The Older Generation

Igor Chinnov

Poet and essayist (b. 1909). Chinnov was born in Riga, Latvia, where he was trained as a lawyer. In 1944 he fled to Germany. He moved to Paris in 1947, returned in 1953 to Germany, and eventually moved to the United States in 1962. There he was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Kansas and Vanderbilt University. In 1989 a selection of his verse was published in the chief Soviet literary journal Novy mir (The New World), no. 9.

Verse collections: Monolog (Monologue) (Paris, 1950); Linii (lines) (Paris, 1960); Metafory (Metaphors) (New York, 1968); Partitura (New York, 1970); Kompozitsia (Compositions) (Paris, 1972); Pastorali (Pastorales) (Paris, 1976); Antiteza (Antithesis) (College Park, Md., 1979); and Autograf (Autograph) (Holyoke, Mass., 1984).

English translations: Three poems, trans. Theodore Weiss and L. P. Izborsky, TriQuarterly, no. 28 (1973): 433-434; R. H. Morrison, ed. and trans., America's Russian Poets (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975); five poems in Russian Poetry: The Modern Period, ed. John Glad and Daniel Weissbort (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1978).

College Park, Maryland, 1978

JG Igor Vladimirovich, when did you begin writing poetry?

IC I began writing poetry while still a law student. After I graduated I took up Slavic literatures and languages in Paris. But my first collection wasn't published until 1950, by Rifma Publishers, which was run by Sergei Makovsky. In former days Makovsky had edited the famous St. Petersburg literary review Apollon. When my first collection came out—it was called Monologue —the Paris Federation of Russian Writers and Poets set up a discussion panel on the book. There were numerous speakers, including Georgy Adamovich, a friend and follower of Gumilyov and a member of the Poets' Guild, as well as Georgy Ivanov. Sergei Konstantinovich Makovsky himself was there, and after the conference he published a report on it in the premiere issue of his New York review Opyty (Experiments). The journal no longer exists. But I do remember a Pushkin anniversary dinner one evening in Paris, where I read a poem on Pushkin composed just for the occasion. The speakers there were Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov, and Boris Konstantinovich Zaitsev, who would later host another dinner, this one in my honor upon my arrival in Paris eighteen years later.

My dinner was in 1970. Gregory Adamovich and Vladimir Veidle came and gave talks on my poetry. Veidle was another Silver Age man, and I imagine that there are still people around in Leningrad who remember him. Irina Odoevtseva, Gumilyov's disciple and a member of the Poets' Guild, and Yury Konstantinovich Terapiano, who always reviewed my books in Russkaya mysl' in Paris, were also there. Those are the two evenings I remember. A year later, in 1971, after my return to Paris, I learned, to my sadness, that both Adamovich and Zaitsev had passed on. I lived in Paris for about ten years. I also lived in Germany. But Paris is still like a hometown to me.

JG Then you would say you're a postwar poet.

IC Yes, my prewar poetry is of hardly any significance. I published a few things in a Paris-based avant-garde review called Chisla (Numbers). What happened was this. While I was living in Riga, I was discovered by Georgy Ivanov, who took a liking to my poetry and to an article I had written. He had it all published in Chisla. But it was only with the publication of my first book Monologue that the real Chinnov appeared. At that time I wrote in the style of the Parisian Note, a movement headed by Adamovich himself. Its hallmark was simplicity—a limited vocabulary, pared down to only the most essential words. We were so eager to replace the specific with the generalized that sea gulls, larks, and nightingales were all reduced to "birds," while birches, oaks, and weeping willows became "trees." We all believed that we should write as if there would be no more poetry after us, that what we wrote in exile would be the last Russian poetry, and that we should add no ornamentation, nothing superfluous. We strove for the most Spartan word stock, without ornamentation and without frills. Our vocabulary included only what was rudimentary and indispensable.

JG You say that you are a representative of the Parisian Note, and yet you began writing poetry only after World War II. One usually thinks of the Parisian Note as a prewar phenomenon.

IC Absolutely. I am something of a hanger-on.

The Parisian Note took acmeism and developed it further. As Vladimir Veidle once wrote, I probably went farther than anyone else. He was convinced that I had reached the limits of that style, that the simplest of the simple poetry had now been written, and that nothing was left but repetition. He claimed that I'd come to a dead end and that I was heading off in a new direction.

The poetry in my first book Monologue as well as in Lines is unembellished. There is no ornamentation. But in my seventh book, Antithesis, I began writing free verse. Some of the poems, while neither iambic nor trochaic, are quite rhythmical. I have always striven for musicality and wanted my poetry to be pleasant to the ear. Not everybody agreed with this. The poetry of Anatoly Steiger—also of the Parisian Note and a fine poet—has a drier sound to it than mine. He used musical orchestration and ornamentation, but his poems are more bitter than mine, with the exception of one of my later books, Partitura, which includes some very sad pieces as well as poems in the grotesque.

In my first three books, I do not use elements of the grotesque. These books contain some free verse and a certain amount of vocabulary enrichment. In other words, I have strayed from the notion that we must limit ourselves to the most basic, indispensable language, and I have begun to write more freely, if you will. It's something I had to do. I could no longer restrict myself; I could not remain static. Metaphors, my third book, contains some enrichment of language. However, I am not that fond of those first three books of mine. I like the others better, Partitura in particular. That book has a great deal of the grotesque in it.

JG Do you consider yourself a cosmopolitan writer?

IC I most certainly do. The Russian titles of all my books are single words with Latin or Greek roots—Monologue, Partitura, Kompozistia. My intention here was to emphasize the importance of cultural tradition, particularly the Greco-Roman European tradition. I attach a great deal of meaning to that. I am a Russian poet, and I love Russia, but I also love our European civilization and culture as a whole.

JG Much of what you're saying reminds me of Mandelstam's manifesto, The Dawn of Acmeism,...