Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/34

26 Osip Mandel'stam observed that in Bal'mont's poetry there is no balance between speaker and listener:

"On Bal'mont's poetic weighing-scales, the "I" pan decisively and impermissibly out-weighs the "not-I" pan, which appears to be too light."

Pomorska points out that this observation can be generalized for the Symbolists as a whole. In each case, the poet

"seems to ignore whether anyone is listening to him or not, because he knows that he is surrounded by emptiness."

This emptiness finds perhaps its most extreme expression in the work of Zinaida Hippius. Maslenikov writes of her:

"Her domain is one of isolation (absence of beings); of silence (absence of sound); of immobility (absence of motion); of darkness (absence of light); of death (absence of life); of indifference and apathy (absence of emotion); of chill and cold (absence of life-giving warmth)."

It is easy to see how Khlebnikov interpreted Symbolism as at bottom an expression of death. In terms of language, the relevant "absence" is the absence of sound. The theme of silence pervaded almost all the poetry of the Symbolists. Blok's lines convey its meaning of cosmic isolation: "I await a call, I seek an answer,

The sky grows dumb, the earth is silent..."

The "music" of words could be heard—but it was an inner music, a sound from "other worlds", which could only be heard once the absolute solitude and silence of the listener's inner world had been assured. In Zinaida Hippius' case, as Pomorska writes in relation to one poem, the desperately sought-for sounds were only echoes of the poet's own cries in an empty universe. For all the Symbolists, the fundamental fact was the muteness and deafness of the universe, within which the "inner voices" and "magic sounds" of poetic inspiration were but attempts at consolation.