Context
Interview with Arkadii Dragomoschenko
by Shushan Avagyan
Shushan Avagyan: Dust is a collection of essays, quite different from your previous works. How would you describe it? Arkadii
Dragomoschenko: To a certain degree, yes, it is kind of different from
my former writings, i.e., poetry, and perhaps, prose works, too (I’m
referring to Phosphor, Chinese Sun, and probably
forgetting something). As we speak, I’m tempted to put the words
“genre” and “type” in quote marks, because genuinely speaking I don’t
have the sufficient grounds to articulate their differences—well, with
the exception of “poetry,” the definition of which is so grossly
oversimplified. I think that the categorization of the latter has
acquired such a habitual factor that it’s too late to change anything. So then, what is Dust?
Perhaps, for a start, I will say that it represents “structure.” It
consists of a certain conditional unity of fractions, which are
dispersed and networked through either magnetic fields, movements in
the air, or the voracity of our eyes. Interestingly, before even
starting “Indifference” (the last essay in Dust), I had no
intention of having cut-out fragments juxtaposed to finished pieces,
which then would determine their relationship to the last part. Looking
back, now I have all the grounds to claim that their . . . let’s say
their architecture (associations, relativity, construction of
intonations) began to shape only in the process of writing
“Indifference.” SA: As I understand, some of the pieces were
written in train stations, hotels, during writer’s symposiums in
Berlin, New York, Helsinki and other cities. How much did these
transitional circumstances in which you wrote influence the plot of the
book? AD: Before the conception of “Indifference” each essay
represented a sort of self-contained fragment, written in connection to
various singular circumstances (I didn’t bother in structuring any of
the writings or confining them to a certain finished plot). At
different occasions I wrote some of the essays for literary journals,
or they appeared in other publications, like the essay “Sand to Sand”
was originally written as a preface to a book. At other occasions I
would start writing a letter to someone and then I would quickly lose
interest in finishing it—instead I’d send a short note to the person I
was writing the letter . . . as an excuse. Sometimes I wrote out of
sheer pleasure—I’m talking about the simple physical pleasure I get out
of typing or feeling my fingertips on the keyboard. At those instances
I imagine seeing the body of a concrete reader, hovering in a slant of
the obfuscated horizon; by which I mean the anticipation of his
reaction to what he’d just read and tried to change the expanse and
proportions with my “forthcoming sentence.” Well, and at other times
all of these would happen simultaneously. Then I would put everything
aside for the big thick vision of a book, which would encompass all. AD: The question is rather complicated. I guess it makes sense to
talk a little bit about certain sources of writing—sort of supplemental
writing. Universal mores have lost their excitement. Perpetuality and
everlasting values have unfortunately become the subjects of academic
analysis. To a certain extent, I suppose human experience replicates
fundamental narratives typical of this or that era. And sometimes, only
the extent and vastness of such an experience vouch for the fact that
comprehension, in general, is possible. But speaking of dialoguing,
it’s important to remember that a dialogue is not a system of
“exchange,” but rather a discontinuous liaison based on anticipation in
the form of questions/answers. It sounds ridiculous, but
really, will any reader understand anything about the present-day, or
even the old Petersburg, or about Russia in general, by reading my
book? Of course the reader has various motivations for reading, and
that’s what keeps me writing. SA: In one of your essays from Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States you write about New York: “As soon as you get used to hearing several
languages spoken at once, the surroundings suddenly lose their fifth
dimension and the world returns to the realm of normal things, such as
the heel of my shoe, ground down from too much walking, the reflection
of the setting sun cast with seeming indifference by a passing subway
train on the Manhattan Bridge, the ring of a telephone, a receipt from
a liquor store, or a tearful meeting with Avital Ronell in a labyrinth
of offices at NYU.” At first estranged, America becomes very familiar .
. . Could you talk a little bit about your visit? AD: I have a
very complex, subtle and rather amenable relationship with this
country. In a few words—I love America, because in my
sub-consciousness, memory and even imagination it’s never
self-contained or concluded. “America, to me” is an ever-pulsating,
multi-faceted construction of high dynamic voltage—in cultural,
ethnographical, geographical, anthropological, political and finally
personal aspects. I wrote the first part of my book Chinese Sun in Encinitas, where I lived and taught at the University of California,
San Diego, as a visiting professor. My seminar was called “Different
Logics for Writing,” which I was planning to use as the title for my
book, but then something else occurred to me one evening, when I was
standing at the shore, completely entránced by the sunset—I realized
that China had dislocated itself to the West . . . But then, of course,
I forgot all about it until months later, in Petersburg, I came across
one of Konstantin Vaginov’s lines: “Look how shimmers the dead Chinese
sun . . .” Of course, you’ll point out my use of “foreign” (to
the Russian reader) names of local streets, downtown areas, cities—all
that is a simple device for estranging one from the textual material.
This is an old device, by the way, something that has been around long
before Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists pointed it out. Remember
the riddles from your childhood. Instead of saying “scissors,” for
example, we ask what is it that has “two ends, two rings, and a screw
in the middle.” When taken out from its “normal” (habitual) context,
and inserted into a complex rhetorical structure or syntactic
construction, the expression gains a different semantic horizon as a
phenomenon free from its experiment (or experience), meaning, it’s not
so much a “rewriting” but a shifting of one’s optic angle. It’s not an
investment with an additive significance, but a radical shift of the
actual conscience. These were some of the ingredients that we
experimented with at the seminar in La-Jola. SA: Can you talk a little bit about your correspondence with Lyn Hejinian. How did it end up in Jacki Ochs’s Letters Not About Love? AD:
My collaboration with Lyn and Jacki began long time ago—I think it was
at the end of the 1980s. Jacki has one remarkable quality; she always
finds an intellectual intrigue in all her projects (perhaps I’m wrong
and it’s the other way around—an actual “intrigue” becomes material for
her films). In any case, the plot of the documentary that was based on
my correspondence with Lyn didn’t sound very convincing. But then
Jacki, rather unexpectedly, turned our attention to the Bakhtinian
notion that one can “understand” his own culture only through “another”
culture. Of course, this idea wasn’t anything new or exceptional, but
the time and place when it was brought to our attention, from the point
of social, let’s say, “meditation” or inquiry, it seemed quite
reasonable. And then, this was adequately touching upon the problems of
the Other and intersubjectivity. Jacki sent me and Lyn a list of
ordinary words (like “home,” “poverty,” violence,” etc) that were
supposed to drive the dialog of that particular letter. As far as I can
remember, the correspondence lasted over a year (have in mind that we
didn’t have e-mail back then, and the strategy of a paper letter in an
envelope is drastically different from the instantaneous gratification
that we get today with electronic mail. And since each letter traveled
for 17-20 days, with approximately the same duration of time for a
reply, the paper as if contained in itself a sense of preserved time). There
were twenty words in all, multiply that with the number of days of mail
delivery, and you can truly understand the physicality of this
correspondence. But the times have changed, we don’t see each other as
often. The film was developing slowly. I remember we had to make some
changes, add certain things. As a result, Jacki came to Leningrad with
her filming crew and after a month’s sleepless work she had all of her
material . . . Those were funny days, funny and terrifying at the same
time. The people’s consciousness of the already crumbling Soviet Union
was slowly heaving up, as if from a slumbering state . . . But the film
was finished eventually and if I’m not mistaken it even got some
critical attention. SA: How has Petersburg changed in the past fifteen years? AD:
Petersburg has been and is still undergoing a massive transformation,
although you can hardly tell when you’re living inside the parameters
of the city. Some changes are good, some simply frustrate me, yet
others generate the feeling of complete helplessness. To say that
Petersburg has developed a definite orientation toward the West more
than any other part of Russia would be a bit far stretched. I am saying
this because there are too many nuances, which don’t allow for such a
statement to be true. SA: Which authors have most influenced
you as a writer? And also, from foreign authors, whose works would you
translate for the Russian reader? AD: Well, there are so
many that I don’t even know where to begin from . . . Perhaps I should
reflect on which authors still compel me to open their books. I am
thankful for the existence of Paul Valery, Gaito Gazdanov, Ivan Bunin
and especially his The Life of Arsenyev, I am also fond of
Nabokov’s certain works, Herman Melville, the prose works by Osip
Mandelstam, Maurice Blanchot, Faulkner, and others. Without a doubt
each one of them has had some kind of influence on my writing at one
time or another. From the poets I would mention Tutchev, Aleksandr
Vvedensky, Celan, Rilke, Georg Trakl . . . I am also extremely grateful
to such important contemporary poets as Lyn Hejinian, Robert Creeley,
John Ashbery, and from the slightly older generation—Michael Davidson
and Michael Palmer, from whose works I have tried to translate. It’s
impossible to go over all the influences that I’ve had throughout the
course of my life, but I should mention this: I begin understanding my
own poetics much better and appreciating it more when I’m outside of my
native country, when I’m over there—in America.
