Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина
ISSN 0136-0132
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. → 1998 → 4
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Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1998, 4
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Stanley Mitchell
Chagall talks to Bakhtin
A fantasy with slides in four scenes
Dramatis personae: Chagall, Bakhtin and Stanley Mitchell
In the spring of 1985 Marc Chagall entered Heaven. He found
the dazzling radiance familiar, but too orderly. Looking for some
distraction, he chanced upon the Heavenly library, where he discovered all
his paintings, graphics, stained glass windows — everything he had
produced — on display, along with every book that had been written
about him. He was impressed. On the shelf next to his own he noticed the
name Bakhtin. (Of course, this was only possible using the Western
alphabet. In Russian the names would be far apart. But Chagall was by now
more accustomed to French and the library simply adapted itself to the
language of the reader, which it could instantly recognize). «Bakhtin,
Bakhtin,» mused Chagall, «didn't I know a Bakhtin in Vitebsk, just after the
Revolution?» He took down the latter's book on
Franois Rabelais. A few days later, strolling along the
Heavenly boulevard, which reminded him of his first visit to Paris, Chagall watched a wheelchair approaching with
a cadaverous figure in it. As it drew level with him, he saw a saintly,
almost medieval-looking man. They eyed each other and, in the light of
Heaven, which erases time, they exclaimed: Chagall! Bakhtin!
And they betook themselves to a Heavenly cafe to drink and reminisce.
(I am avoiding the
ological niceties and claiming poetic licence to enable Chagall the
Jew and Bakhtin the Orthodox Christian to inhabit the same
Heaven).
SCENE 1
CHAGALL: Mikhail Mikhailovich, I've just been reading your book on Rabelais. I'm not an intellectual, but I know a thing or two about carnival and the grotesque. What I don't understand is why, in 1919 or 1920, when our world was so full of carnival, when we were painting the streets with my flying Jews and green goats and Malevich's triangles and squares — you remember Mayakovsky's phrase about the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes (Eisenstein used it when he passed through the town), — when Altman was organising street theatre in Petrograd and Esenin was writing his wonderful images about the sky and the stars (the sky an udder and the stars the teats), why was it then that you paid no attention to us, to me? Did I show you my paintings at the time? I was Commissar of Art for Vitebsk, appointed by Lunacharsky.
BAKHTIN (interrupting): Lunacharsky? He's here somewhere — one of the few good Bolsheviks. He wrote a piece on laughter and carnival in the thirties, which set me going, though I didn't agree with his Marxist view that carnival is no more than a safety-valve, a ruling-class ruse to keep down the masses. He actually set up a Commission for the Study of Satiric Genres and their role in the class struggle. I don't think it got very far.
CHAGALL: Lunacharsky wrote some sensible things about me — my art was a mixture of reality and fantasy, he said, real-fantastika. But let's go back to 1920. You have so many good ideas in your book, but I must admit, it wasn't easy. What I find so strange is that you didn't write it then, with so much first-hand material around you, which later disappeared.
BAKHTIN: Perhaps it was the later period, which needed to
be reminded of laughter and festivity, and of the popular, the truly
popular,
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which by then had become a state-organised thing. I told those apparatchiks later on, when they examined the book for a doctorate, that laughter liberates us from fear and that in order to look at the world soberly I must cease to be afraid. Laughter has always played a serious role in this. At least, Lunacharsky wrote a reasonable review of my Dostoevsky book, which saved me from the Lubianka.
CHAGALL: Yes, and fortunately I was no longer there, but what about 1920?
BAKHTIN: Then I was in a different phase, interested in theological and philosophical problems — what weren't we interested in during the Civil War, hiding out in provincial towns, like Vitebsk? But there were some ideas then, expressed, I admit, in a very abstruse way, which bore fruit subsequently in my work on Rabelais and carnival. For instance, Hermann Cohen…
CHAGALL: Hermann Cohen? I never knew a Hermann Cohen in Vitebsk. To be sure, there were plenty of Cohens, but Hermann, sounds like a German.
BAKHTIN: Yes, indeed, a professor of philosophy in Marburg. My friend Kagan studied with him. A neo-Kantian, if that means anything to you, Mark Zakharovich. He argued that the world is not given, but proposed, something to be made, constructed, that everything is a possibility, a gap or a loophole, as he called it. The idea excited us in our little circle in Vitebsk, when despite the privations and horrors of the Civil War — which is why we took refuge there — everything still did seem possible. There were the germs there of my later concepts of carnival and grotesque. But our eyes were on the infinite. That's why Lenin didn't like him, although he did call him an honest idealist.
CHAGALL: I painted a picture of Lenin upside down as a clown. It was long after I left Russia. In my autobiography I wrote: «Lenin turned Russia upside down the way I paint pictures».
BAKHTIN: I remember now, Mark Zakharovich, that you
had already left Vitebsk when I arrived and I got to know you very
briefly, though I think I did see your flying Jews and green goats on a
visit from Nevel. But Malevich was the leading figure in your Art School
then and my wife and I saw a lot of him. He liked to study the stars.
We'd take part in his experiments. Such a hunger for the infinite, for the
cosmos. Did you know that Khlebnikov made him a President of his
Earthly Sphere. That was at the time of the February Revolution. In fact,
he'd given up painting and was writing treatises on Suprematism as the
way to pure knowledge. I don't recollect seeing any paintings of yours
in the Museum, which I know you also founded. By then every room
was crowded with squares, circles, crosses, polyhedrons and so on.
Most of the students came from working-class, artisan or peasant
backgrounds, but I don't know whether what they did can be called popular
art. They all adored Malevich. My artistic tastes, of course, differed from
all this. I liked the symbolists and Vrubel'. You must explain to me
what you think we have in common.
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CHAGALL: Isn't it obvious? You, yourself doubt that Suprematism was popular. That's putting it mildly. Actually, I remember your friend Medvedev attacking Malevich for this very reason. I was the popular one. As you know, my art was rooted in the lives of ordinary Vitebsk people, Jewish workers and Russian peasants. True, my first pictures were pretty gloomy, but when I came back from Paris, having taken a lesson or two from the Cubists and the poets there — Apollinaire, Cendrars — my pictures started to laugh, maybe not with Rabelaisian laughter though I was sometimes near it. I was, of course a Jew, and inherited all our self-irony. But I also rose above it, I flew. My family was Hassidic and the Hassidism brought laughter and play and acrobatics into prayer. You talk of Malevich's cosmos. Where are his angels? And you can hardly accuse him of jollity. But the futurists knew how to laugh, especially Larionov and Mayakovsky, although he shouted too much. Do you know the lines he wrote about me:
If only I knew how to stride
Like Chagall I'd be satisfied.
BAKHTIN (laughing): Oh, yes, I remember your long legs. Mind you, Mayakovsky's legs were long enough. Now he was a carnival personality.
CHAGALL: You mention that eccentric Khlebnikov — you must know his crazy poem about laughter, . How does it go? It is untranslatable:
«O, , !
O, , !»
BAKHTIN (taking it up): « , …».
CHAGALL: Oh, and I especially like «», «».
It was a carnivalesque time, Mikhail Mikhailovich, and we Jews were celebrating our liberation. Of course, I have not suffered like you, but, as a poor Jew, I did have to live illegally in St. Petersburg to pursue my career. With the October Revolution the Pale was abolished and Jews could go anywhere and take up whatever job they liked. Who would have dreamt before the Revolution that I should become Commissar for the arts in Vitebsk?
What a book someone could have written about Jewish
carnival, Mikhail Mikhailovich? I am no scholar, my friend, I paint pictures, I
don't talk about them, I don't theorize, like Malevich. But someone I know is
interested in the subject. He is the writer of these lines. Unfortunately, he
is still on earth, but he can tell us something about Jewish carnival and
the
peculiar Jewish Renaissance of those far-off days in
Vitebsk and the rest of Russia. It may not have been like
the real Renaissance which produced Rabelais and his
unblemished laughter, but it is a Renaissance nonetheless, and
it may interest you, for in its way it exemplifies the sociological methodology you use in your
book — phew! that was difficult. How can we get hold of him?
BAKHTIN: Simple, you just desire to hear him and the voice will come up.
SCENE 2
AUTHOR OF THE PLAY: The Jewish Renaissance to which Chagall refers lasted from 1912 to 1928, although it had already begun in the nineteenth century, when the critic Stasov encouraged the wealthy Jews of St. Petersburg to resurrect their national culture. From 1912 to 1914 the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society conducted a major anthropological expedition through the Pale of Settlement. It was led by the writer Solomon An-Sky, who came from the Vitebsk area and is famed for his play The Dibbuk, which treats of the possession of the soul by an alien force, a theme which went deep into Jewish tradition and is close to the uncanny representations in some of Chagall's early paintings and, in a different way, to the golem in Prague. Behind these paintings is the impending break-up of the shtetl, the Jewish village, and the terrors and uncertainties following the failed 1905 Revolution. Pogroms spread throughout the Empire, though not in Byelorussia where Chagall lived. An-Sky also became secretary to the Narodnik or Populist Russian leader, Lavrov, who lived in Switzerland. There was another important Jewish political thinker in Vitebsk, Chaim Zhitlovsky, who was first a Populist and then formed his own revolutionary Party. Many young Jews joined the Narodniks, so linking Jewish and Russian revolutionary politics. Jews took a significant part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
Pogroms followed this attempt, too, leading both to mass
emigrati
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on of Jews to the West and to political resistance at home. The Bund or Union of Jewish Socialist Workers of Lithuania, Poland and Byelorussia was formed, rapidly becoming the largest Socialist organisation in Eastern Europe before the rise of Lenin's Social Democrats. It was Yiddish speaking, communicating to Jewish workers in Yiddish, publishing all its texts in the vernacular and regarding Hebrew as the language of the bourgeoisie and the Zionists. With Sholom Aleikhem and Leib Peretz Yiddish literature stepped on to the world stage and its affiliations were almost entirely with the Socialist movement. Jewish artists like Altman, Lissitzky, Chagall and Ryback explored the old synagogues and cemeteries, copying the ornamentation and incorporating the plant and animal decorations into their work, creating a Jewish primitivism in parallel with early Malevich and Goncharova. Yiddish writers like Der Nister and Bergelson, Yiddish poets like Markish and Kvitko became either Communists or Communist sympathizers. All of them perished under Stalin. These lines from Markish demonstrate the affinity of Jewish poets at the time with the inventions of Chagall:
A couple of top hats on the feet
And on the head a boot with a red star
And so the heavens will announce the news
From the Central Committee of the Comintern.
Tatlin's projected tower for the Third International comes to mind: it was to be topped by some kind of television station, which would broadcast political decisions. Jews of the shtetl had been forbidden by their religion to make graven images of the human figure. Opening up the shtetl, the Bolshevik Revolution released a torrent of artistic energies. The canvases of Chagall, dark at first, dazzle with this new light, which he discovered first of all in his visit to Paris before the Revolution. The Jewish artist from the Pale of Settlement who went to Paris, and there were many, experienced a dizzying transition not only from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society, but from an age-old prohibition of artistic expression to avant-garde modernism. It was a unique phenomenon.
The Jewish Renaissance was riven by an inner paradox, which
was characteristic of Jews in every sphere — on the one hand, a desire
to cultivate ethnic roots, to regenerate the national culture; on the other,
to shed these origins and embrace internationalism at its most advanced
level. Ever since Marx internationalism had been an option for the
emancipated Jew, and for Marx it was the only one. The quarrel with his friend
Lissitzky, which Chagall refers to in a veiled way in his autobiography, turned
on this contradiction. At the Vitebsk Art School, to which Chagall had
invited
him, Lissitzky joined forces with Malevich, turning his back on
Jewish themes forever. Moving from Suprematism to Constructivism, he
became Russia's leading international modernist. And Chagall himself, while
he adhered to Jewish subject-matter, nevertheless refused to
acknowledge himself as a Jewish artist. He belonged to no particular movement,
but the Cubists welcomed him and he found even more favour with
the Surrealists. In this sense he also belonged to the international
avant-garde. By the end of the twenties Stalinist policies cut short the Jewish
Renaissance, as it did the modernist movements which were in any case
running out of puff. In 1930 the Jewish section of the Communist Party
was disbanded and its members liquidated. Yiddish writers and poets
continued to publish. And a handful of artists continued to work with
specifically Jewish themes. There were still Yiddish newspapers and a Yiddish
theatre. There was even an out-of-the-way Jewish territory in the Far East.
But Jews were essentially metropolitans and townspeople and there was
no longer that autonomous culture epitomized by the Bund, which aimed
to be both nationalist and internationalist and to which the Bolsheviks
were fiercely opposed because of its separatism. Artists like Chagall or
Lissitzky had no connection with the Bund and they both chose
internationalism early on in their different ways, as we have seen. Chagall unlike
Lissitzky left Russia altogether. The Jewish Renaissance, therefore, certainly as
an artistic manifestation, thwarted itself before Stalinism policed it
into conformity. It would be silly to suggest that the Jewish Renaissance
in Russian and Eastern Europe bears any comparison with the Italian or
the French. Yet it does form a clearly defined historical moment with a
precise social, economic and political basis in the break-up of the shtetl and
the rise and decline of the October Revolution.
Bakhtin comments perceptively on the decay and privatisation of carnival; on the transfiguration of popular laughter into the more negative genres of satire, irony and sarcasm; on the degeneration of the grotesque into the uncanny. All that is healthy and robust in carnival loses its potency and we become victims of our alienated selves, which we project into images of horror and fear. One thinks again of The Dybbuk. Bakhtin lists two kinds of twentieth century grotesque: modernist and realist. As examples of modernist, he mentions Alfred Jarry, the Surrealists and Expressionists, all of whom he links with Romanticism, which he sees as the watermark of the grotesque after the Renaissance and the first period in which the concept was seriously theorized. (He also includes Existentialism as a philosophical influence on contemporary grotesque). To the realistic grotesque he gives three names — Thomas
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Mann, Brecht and Neruda. (I assume Bakhtin means the Chilean Pablo rather than the Czech surrealist poet, Jan).
Clearly, Bakhtin would place Chagall somewhere among the Expressionists and the Surrealists; and would argue that Chagall has privatised and interiorised the grotesque in the tracks of the Romantics. At a first glance, this is obviously true. Which other artist of the twentieth century has turned art into a dreamworld as consistently as Chagall? Compared with him, the Expressionists are propagandists of emotion and the Surrealists manipulators of fantasy. Andre Breton declared that Chagall was the only true Surrealist.
But the briefest acquaintance with Chagall's art also shows a rich and vivid world of carnival, entirely free of Romantic irony and eeriness, if we leave aside his early work. It is an array of processions, music, masks, interchanging humans and animals, lavish colours, acrobatics, clowns, equestrian riders, dismembered and reconstituted bodies, parodistic mimicry, dislocated space and suspended time — a world turned upside down.
But the longer Chagall lives in exile his carnival exuberance
becomes more fantastic and dreamlike, and his Vitebsk iconography is
sustained purely by memory. He would fit Bakhtin's category of modernist
grotesque. And yet, Chagall's memories do still record a reality and indeed
a continuing experience, that of the shtetl in crisis and the problems of
ensuing emigration. (Vitebsk, by the way, was too large a town to be
called
a shtetl, but the area in which Chagall grew up was like a village and
typical of habitation in the Pale. Interestingly, the word Pale originally
referred to English jurisdiction in Ireland in 1547). In the day-to-day
accounts of Chagall's autobiography we witness how, to the sensitive boy and
adolescent, reality turns into fantasy as shtetl life reels before
uncomprehended forces. All the early paintings tremble on the edge of an
apocalypse. Invisibly, the historical marker of Chagall's early work is the 1905
Revolution. He began painting in 1907. All that he records in his
autobiography — the grandfather, who climbs up to the roof in a moment of distress
or to watch a fire, of which there are many; the people who seem to
lose their heads, whether in madness or in the literalness of the
youngster's imagining; the births, deaths and weddings — all reassemble in
Chagall's paintings without a change. Either the autobiographer has already
transmuted them into fantasy or reality itself — the
crazy, stifling, doomed life of the shtetl — has become
fantastic, Chagall's art, particularly his early art, is situated
on the borderland dividing reality and fantasy. His
Byelorussian hometown, Vitebsk is as fantastic as
Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, though for different reasons.
Bakhtin locates the aesthetic in boundary regions, which
he describes as a field of force between self and other.
Chagall designates the Jewish inhabitants of Vitebsk as
people of the air, luftmenshen in Yiddish, who crave stability. In no
other Jewish artist has the wealth of Jewish humour been so completely
expressed — its sense of absurdity, self-irony, indulgent mockery of the
sacred, familiar intercourse with prophets and God, its shoulder-shrugging
acceptance of the world. This may not be laughter in the Rabelaisian sense,
as Chagall has said, but it is folk humour, a means for survival. Bakhtin
showed that Romanticism took the joy out of the grotesque, reduced
popular mirth to personal humours (rather than humour) and dallied with
darkness. Chagall's work, indeed gloomy, even demonic at first, takes on a
joyful,
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radiant character once he has left Vitebsk and found an international style in Paris — in Cubism and Orphism. While never espousing Cubism proper, he found in it a way of articulating the contradictory experiences of shtetl life and the transition to Paris, above all a way of creating a comic space, a sense of distance. His visit to Paris, from 1910 to 1914, was the first step towards a carnival style. Someone has referred to his dreams in this period as "waking dreams", shaken into consciousness by Cubist rationality, — "fantastic-real" in Lunacharsky's words.
There are two elements in Chagall's art, which relate specifically
to Jewish carnival. These are the Purim festival and the Hasidic
tradition. Both are present in Chagall's great 1921 mural for Granovsky's
Jewish theatre in Moscow, and examples of one or other or both can be found
in
most of Chagall's work. The mural forms a complex synthesis of
these elements and is also his last great painting before he leaves Russia
for good. Done in Moscow, after he has also left Vitebsk for good, it is
his most realistic version of carnival and a summing-up of his Russian
years. Purim is a carnival which celebrates the survival of the exiled
Israelites under King Ahasuerus of Persia after one of his ministers, Haman,
has attempted to annihilate them. It resembles Western carnival in all the
ways that Bakhtin enumerates. A rabbi was elected Lord of Misrule, sacred
texts were parodied, men and women exchanged costumes, and people
were exhorted to get so drunk that they wouldn't be able to tell the
difference between Haman and Mordecai, who defeated him. On this festival
delicious triangular cakes are consumed, called "Haman"s ears'. What
could be more carnivalesque than that?
Hasidic tradition was strong in Vitebsk and Chagall, as he said,
was born into a Hasidic family. Hasidism relates to Jewish humour as a
means of «looking on the bright side of things». But it brings in a quality
which Jewish humour lacks — ecstasy. It was an antinomian movement,
which began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and rapidly spread.
It opposed the supremacy of the Torah (the Law) in worship and
sought instead a direct communion with God. Borrowing from that other
anarchist doctrine. the Caballah, hasidism envisioned an originary
moment when God bestowed his overflowing love for humankind in a vessel
which proved too fragile for it and shattered into millions of fragments. The
task of humanity ever since, so the hasidim taught, was to gather up
these fragments and restore the intactness of God's vessel. From this
image came a pantheist view of the world according to which everything,
large and small, clean and unclean, good and evil, contained an element
of divinity. The very nature of hasidic prayer strove to lift terrestrial
matter towards God, addressing Him through all the physical acts of eating,
drinking and sexual gratification. The hasidim sought to erase the bowed,
melancholic figure of the traditional Jew and render him joyful and
exuberant. To this end they introduced music and dance into the liturgy,
blurring the distinction between sacred and profane. As Chagall remarks,
they prayed acrobatically, performing somersaults. The image of flight as a
metaphor for escape and love is paramount in Chagall's work, and
ecstasy is literal — bodies and things leap out of stasis. You remember his
flying Jews.
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SCENE 3
Heaven
CHAGALL: That's enough. Like you, Mikhail Mikhailovich, I find monologues wearing. And he kept on repeating what I'd already said. He also omitted to mention my illustrations of Dead Souls, which I did for Vollard in Paris. Now that's the funniest and most grotesque piece of writing in Russian literature, you must agree, Mikhail Mikhailovich. That was the demonic me. Didn't you quote Jean Paul's remark about the Devil being the best humorist. They wouldn't have let me in here, if I'd only done that.
BAKHTIN: No, this is not the place for carnivals and devils. I only got in because of the Orthodox Church.
CHAGALL: Well, what do you think? Does the author have a case?
BAKHTIN: It was very interesting and I can now see you in a new light and regret my formality and indifference in far-off Vitebsk. It's your belonging to the Jewish community at a crucial historical moment which made a carnival art possible, but once the physical links with that community are gone, even memory can degenerate into a formal device and I have heard that you did tend to repeat yourself in later life. The main difference between you and me is that you're forever flying upwards and indeed you've reached heaven. Your're like Malevich in this, though more picturesque. But I, certainly after Vitebsk, always strove downwards and earthwards, down to the body and all its monstrously wonderful orifices and appetites; to Gargantua and Pantagruel; though it appears, from what your scholarly interpreter says, you've got some of this in you, as well I'll tell you what, Marc, why don't we collaborate here on a book about Jewish carnival. Hermann Cohen didn't understand this side of Jewish life, he was too abstract. And, as you say, I didn't notice it in Vitebsk either, even though Jews made up half the population.
CHAGALL: A marvellous idea! How glad I am I met you and
the very first person, too. This sounds like destiny.
BAKHTIN: Yes, but careful, they don't favour this kind of subject up here. It's like being in the Soviet Union all over again.
Your scholarly chap mentioned Brecht and Neruda. They're carnival characters. Neruda is quite like you in some ways — the soaring imagery, cabbalistic in its sweep from small particulars to the vast cosmos, the same "ungivenness" that Cohen talked about. And all that Latin American «magic realism» is nothing other than carnival grotesque. Brecht, on the other hand, is a medieval character, sly, a peasant out of Brueghel. I have a great deal of sympathy for him. He depicted the Thirty Years War as a tragi-comic dance of death. And his early Expressionism comes straight out of Bosch and the Seven Deadly Sins. Marx said something illuminating about laughter, that it was history's way of saying good-bye to the past. But the only Marxist I ever came across with a real sense of humour was Brecht. Of course, it was a wicked sense of humour, so they wouldn't let him in here. You've just arrived, Mark Zakharovich. I tell you, there's not a lot of laughter in heaven.
The two men shook hands and agreed to meet the following day, when Chagall promised to show Bakhtin a series of slides relating to Vitebsk.
SCENE 4
Slides
BAKHTIN: Good morning, Marc.
CHAGALL: Good morning, Mikhail….
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THE END
London
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Stanley Mitchell
Chagall talks to Bakhtin