Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "absurdism"
What distinguishes an artist from the other people?
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future (trans. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull)
This book written in the 1920s in Russia by a man who couldn’t publish because what he wrote couldn’t satisfy the “realist” taste of the Communist authorities is not an easy read, but it has some extraordinary pages. Some American reviewers call him “surrealist” because the reality he describes doesn’t correspond to their definition of reality. What would people do if the word “surrealist” didn’t exist? This has nothing to do with surrealism. Maybe the Soviet reality of the time was surreal, but poor Sigizmund had no intention of being “surrealist”! Let’s remember that the surrealists were either being playful or were trying to subvert the “rational” way of looking at things. But Russian and East European writers don’t need to “subvert” this rational way of perceiving the real because they don’t perceive it in this rational way to being with. They are naturally “irrational” (that is, according to the Western definition of “reason”)—ie, they do not necessarily use a cause-effect logic.
SK was a kin soul to Felipe Alfau. His characters not only become independent of their creator, but turn into critics, denying their author’s existence—“they are the book’s atheists.”
In one of the book’s dialogues, one of the characters asks, “What distinguishes a creator of culture from its consumers?”
The answer is the best definition of the artist I have ever read:
“Honesty”—and this is why:
What distinguishes them is the fact that, unlike other people, the creator gives back what he receives on credit from nature. Every day the sun “lends its rays to every one of us.” To give something back is a duty of anyone who “doesn’t wish to be a thief of his own existence. Talent is just that, a basic honesty on the part of ‘I’ toward ‘not I’, a partial payment of the bill presented by the sun: the painter pays for the colors of things with the paints on his palette […:] the philosopher pays for the world with his worldview.”
In other words: Honesty toward a higher order of things (not toward your next-door neighbor)
This book written in the 1920s in Russia by a man who couldn’t publish because what he wrote couldn’t satisfy the “realist” taste of the Communist authorities is not an easy read, but it has some extraordinary pages. Some American reviewers call him “surrealist” because the reality he describes doesn’t correspond to their definition of reality. What would people do if the word “surrealist” didn’t exist? This has nothing to do with surrealism. Maybe the Soviet reality of the time was surreal, but poor Sigizmund had no intention of being “surrealist”! Let’s remember that the surrealists were either being playful or were trying to subvert the “rational” way of looking at things. But Russian and East European writers don’t need to “subvert” this rational way of perceiving the real because they don’t perceive it in this rational way to being with. They are naturally “irrational” (that is, according to the Western definition of “reason”)—ie, they do not necessarily use a cause-effect logic.
SK was a kin soul to Felipe Alfau. His characters not only become independent of their creator, but turn into critics, denying their author’s existence—“they are the book’s atheists.”
In one of the book’s dialogues, one of the characters asks, “What distinguishes a creator of culture from its consumers?”
The answer is the best definition of the artist I have ever read:
“Honesty”—and this is why:
What distinguishes them is the fact that, unlike other people, the creator gives back what he receives on credit from nature. Every day the sun “lends its rays to every one of us.” To give something back is a duty of anyone who “doesn’t wish to be a thief of his own existence. Talent is just that, a basic honesty on the part of ‘I’ toward ‘not I’, a partial payment of the bill presented by the sun: the painter pays for the colors of things with the paints on his palette […:] the philosopher pays for the world with his worldview.”
In other words: Honesty toward a higher order of things (not toward your next-door neighbor)
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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