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Poetry is a special mode of thinking—to be precise, a mode of thinking in images. This mode entails a certain economy of mental effort that makes us "feel the relative ease of the process." The aesthetic sense is a consequence of this economy. This is how academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky understands it, and his recapitulation of this theory, based as it was on his teacher, whose works he had studied with great care, was in all likelihood quite accurate. Potebnya and the numerous members of his movement consider poetry to be a special form of thinking (i.e., of thinking with the aid of images). The raison d'être of the image consists, in their opinion, in helping to organize heterogeneous objects and actions into groups. And the unknown is explained through the known. Or, in Potebnya's words:

The relationship of the image to that which is explained by means of it may take one of two forms: (a) either the image serves as a constant predicate to a succession of ever-changing subjects—a permanent means of attracting changeable percepts, or else (b) the image is much simpler and clearer than that which is to be explained.

Thus, "since the purpose of imagery is to bring the significance of the image closer to our understanding, and since, without this, an image has no meaning, then, the image ought to be better known to us than that which is explained by it."

It would be interesting to apply this law to Tyutchev's comparison of summer lightning with deaf-and-dumb demons or to Gogol's simile of the sky as the raiments of the Lord.

"There is no art without images." "Art is thinking in images." Enormous energy has been put into interpreting music, architecture, and song along the lines of literature. After a quarter of a century of effort, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky has finally recognized the need for a special category of non-imagistic art encompassing song, architecture, and music. Separating them from literature, he defines this category as that of the lyrical arts, whose essence lies in a spontaneous play of the emotions. And so it has turned out that at least one huge chunk of art is not subject to the imagistic mode of thinking. And one of these (i.e., the song) resembles, nonetheless, "imagistic" art: it too deals with words. What is even more important, imagistic art passes imperceptibly into non-imagistic art. And yet our perceptions of them are similar.

Still, the assertion that "Art is thinking in images," and therefore (leaving out the intervening steps known to everyone) the proposition that art is the creator, above all, of symbols, has persisted to this day, having survived the collapse of the theory on which it is based. It is particularly very much alive in the Symbolist movement, especially among its theoreticians.

Consequently, many people still believe that thinking in images (i.e., in "paths and shades," "'furrows and boundaries") is the distinguishing feature of poetry. Therefore, these people must have expected the history of this "imagistic" art, to use their own words, to consist of the changes in the history of the image. It turns out, however, that images endure and last. From century to century, from country to country, from poet to poet, these images march on without change. They belong to "no one," except perhaps to "God." The more you try to explain an epoch, the more you are convinced that the images you thought were created by a given poet were, in reality, passed on to him by others with hardly a change. The work of successive schools of poetry has consisted essentially in accumulating and making known new devices of verbal arrangement and organization. In particular, these schools of poetry are far more concerned with the disposition than with the creation of imagery. In poetry, where imagery is a given, the artist does not so much "think" in images as "recollect" them. In any case, it is not imagistic thinking that unites the different arts or even the different forms of verbal art. And it is not the changes in imagery that constitute the essential dynamics of poetry.

We know of cases where we stumble onto a poetic something that was never meant, originally, to serve as an object of aesthetic contemplation. For example, we may point to Annensky's opinion concerning the special poetic character of Church Slavonic or to Andrei Bely's rapture over the practice by eighteenth-century Russian poets of placing the adjective after the noun. Bely raves about this as if there were something intrinsically artistic about it. Or, more precisely, Bely goes beyond this in assuming that this artistic quality is also intentional. In fact, though, this is nothing but a general peculiarity of the given language (the influence of Church Slavonic). In this way a work may be either created as prose and experienced as poetry, or else created as poetry and experienced as prose. This points out the fact that the artistic quality of something, its relationship to poetry, is a result of our mode of perception. In a narrow sense we shall call a work artistic if it has been created by special devices whose purpose is to see to it that these artifacts are interpreted artistically as much as possible.

On the basis of Potebnya's conclusion, which asserts that poetry equals imagery, a whole theory has arisen declaring further that imagery equals symbolism. This presupposes that an image is capable of serving as a constant predicate to a succession of changeable subjects. This conclusion, lying at the heart of the Symbolist movement, has seduced, by virtue of its kinship of ideas, such writers as Andrei Bely and Merezhkovsky with his "eternal companions." This conclusion flows partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish the language of poetry from the language of Prose. Thanks to this he has failed to notice that there exist two types of imagery: imagery as a practical way of thinking, that is, as a means of uniting objects in groups, and, secondly, imagery as a way of intensifying the impressions of the senses. Let me illustrate. I'm walking along the street and I see a man walking ahead of me wearing a hat. Suddenly, he drops a package, I call out to him: "Hey, you with the hat, you dropped a package!" This is an example of a purely prosaic use of an image. A second example. Several men are standing at attention. The platoon leader notices that one of the men is standing awkwardly, against army regulations. So he yells at him: "Hey, clean up your act, you crumpled hat!" This image is a poetic trope. (In one case the word hat serves as a metonymy, while in the other example we're dealing with a metaphor. And yet I'm really concerned here with something else.)

A poetic image is one of the means by which a poet delivers his greatest impact. Its role is equal to other poetic devices, equal to parallelism, both simple and negative, equal to the simile, to repetition, to symmetry, to hyperbole, equal, generally speaking, to any other figure of speech, equal to all these means of intensifying the sensation of things (this "thing" may well be nothing more than the words or even just the sounds of the literary work itself). Still, the poetic image bears only a superficial resemblance to the fairy-tale image or to the thought image (see Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky in Language and Art, where a young girl calls a round sphere a "watermelon"), The poetic image is an instrument of the poetic language, while the prose image is a tool of abstraction: the watermelon instead of the round lampshade or the watermelon instead of the head is nothing more than an act of abstracting from an object and is in no way to be distinguished from head = sphere or watermelon = sphere. This is indeed a form of thinking, but it has nothing to do with poetry.


The law governing the economy of creative effort also belongs to a group of laws taken for granted by everyone. Here is what Herbert Spencer says:

On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader's or the hearer's attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point. . . . Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. (The Philosophy of Style)

And Richard Avenarius writes:

If the soul possessed inexhaustible resources, then it would be of no moment to it, of course, how many of these inexhaustible resources had actually been spent. The only thing that would matter would be, perhaps, the time expended. However, since our resources are limited, we should not be surprised to find that the soul seeks to carry out its perceptual activity as purposefully as possible, i.e., with, relatively speaking, the least expenditure of energy possible or, which is the same, with, relatively speaking, the greatest result possible.

By a mere allusion to the general law governing the economy of mental effort, Peirazhitsky dismisses James's theory, in which the latter presents the case for the corporeal basis of the effect. The principle of the economy of creative effort, so seductive especially in the domain of rhythm, was affirmed by Aleksandr Veselovsky. Taking Spencer's ideas to their conclusion, he said: "The merit of a style consists precisely in this: that it delivers the greatest number of ideas in the fewest number of words." Even Andrei Bely, who, at his best, gave us so many fine examples of his own "laborious,'' impeding rhythm and who, citing examples from Baratynsky, pointed out the "laboriousness" of poetic epithets, found it, nonetheless, necessary to speak of the law of economy in his book. This work, representing a heroic attempt to create a theory of art, demonstrates Bely's enormous command of the devices of poetry. Unfortunately, it also rests on a body of unverified facts gathered from out-of-date books, including Krayevich's physics textbook, in fashion when he was a student at the lycêe.

The idea that an economy of effort lies at the basis of and governs the creative process may well hold true in the "practical" domain of language. However, these ideas, flourishing in the prevailing climate of ignorance concerning the nature of poetic creation, were transplanted from their native soil in prose to poetry.

The discovery that there are sounds in the Japanese poetic language that have no parallels in everyday Japanese was perhaps the first factual indication that these two languages, that is, the poetic and the practical, do not coincide. L. P. Yakubinsky's article concerning the absence of the law of dissimilation of liquid sounds in the language of poetry, and, on the other hand, the admission into the language of poetry, as pointed out by the author, of a confluence of similar sounds that are difficult to pronounce (corroborated by scientific research), clearly point, at least in this case, to the fundamental opposition of the laws governing the practical and poetic uses of language.

For that reason we have to consider the question of energy expenditure and economy in poetry, not by analogy with prose, but on its own terms.

If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously—automatically. If someone were to compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand or speaking a foreign tongue for the very first time with the sensation of performing this same operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us. It is this process of automatization that explains the laws of our prose speech with its fragmentary phrases and half-articulated words.

The ideal expression of this process may be said to take place in algebra, where objects are replaced by symbols. In the rapid-fire flow of conversational speech, words are not fully articulated. The first sounds of names hardly enter our consciousness. In Language as Art, Pogodin tells of a boy who represented the sentence "Les montagnes de la Suisse sont belles" in the following sequence of initial letters: L, m, d, l, S, s, b.

This abstractive character of thought suggests not only the method of algebra but also the choice of symbols (letters and, more precisely, initial letters). By means of this algebraic method of thinking, objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged. We know that it exists because of its position in space, but we see only its surface. Gradually, under the influence of this generalizing perception, the object fades away. This is as true of our perception of the object in action as of mere perception itself. It is precisely this perceptual character of the prose word that explains why it often reaches our ears in fragmentary form (see the article by L. P. Yakubinsky). This fact also accounts for much discord in mankind (and for all manner of slips of the tongue). In the process of algebrizing, of automatizing the object, the greatest economy of perceptual effort takes place. Objects are represented either by one single characteristic (for example, by number), or else by a formula that never even rises to the level of consciousness. Consider the following entry in Tolstoi's diary:

As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been. (29 February [i.e., 1 March] 1897)

And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.