Chih-Chung Tsai
LTWR113 – Rivera-Garza
1-10-11
WE: 2 Place of Birth - b
“Silliman, Hejinian, and other writers even traveled to the Soviet Union in the
1980s for exchanges with experimental writers there. Soviet experimental poets and
critics were always more radical and less programmatic than the Soviet government; as
such, the two groups sustained tense relations from 1917 onward.”
-Carl J Boon, 2007, PARATAXIS AND POSSIBILITY: RON SILLIMAN’S ALPHABET
The Soviet Union is a place of shadows. A constant reminder of what once was. It brings about memories of snowy nights, of hotel bars and strangers with accents.
“I once met Ron Silliman. We were in the Soviet Union. On the last day, in the bar of the Baltiskaya Hotel, if that’s how you spell it, he said, you know, Kent, something tells me we are going to meet up again. Well, we haven’t yet, though I suppose in a way we have. Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian inexplicably floated above us, circling the room, like lovers in a Chagall.”
It is impossible to write about a place without first examining your own perspective, to see where you are standing.
On the American poets travelling to the Soviet Union and their interactions, “While each group found inspiration in the other's avant-garde tradition, they had different definitions of what avant-garde was. American writers were testing their ideals of Western Marxism; the Marxists they had admired idealized American bourgeois democracy.”
The enemy is always the strangest one, the most alien. But as alien as they are to us, we are to them.
The Soviet Union was one of the main characters in the Cold War. It was striving to be known for its power and influence, with the effects of communist philosophy seen in the satellite states and countries that surrounded the Soviet Union. As Gorbachev came to power, things changed. The communist ideal wilted, and these communist powers were overthrown. This was around the time that Ron Siliman visited the Soviet Union. When the wall fell, and people's voices rose to a tumultuous roar.
"The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's 70-year existence. During the first eleven years following the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. On the other hand, hundreds of intellectuals, writers, and artists were exiled or executed, and their work banned, for example Nikolai Gumilev (shot, conspired against the Bolshevik regime) andYevgeny Zamyatin (banned)
If something is not permitted to be said, does it then have even more merit? If it is even more audacious to speak a word, is it even more important then for this word to be said?
“Following the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation in art forms became permissible once again, with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work began to be produced. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of authorYury Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture the Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to the highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch.
In the second half of the 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press.”
What was once known collectively as the Soviet Union is now a place of shadows. It is built with the residual memories of what it once was. It's a place that has something to say, and in a sense, where things need to be said the most. It is interesting to see what the Soviet Union used to be compared to what it is now, but even more interesting, is to see how it compares to the United States, where every word is permitted, and no thought restrained. Do we say anything worth saying, compared to fellow artists and poets in the now called “USSR”?
Ron Siliman once went to a place that was the direct opposite of what our nation is. It was as foreign as we are foreign. They were as ideal as we were ideal. For in the end, man wants what he does not have.
