# Taking Monologism Seriously: Bakhtin and Tsvetaeva's "The Pied Piper"

            The International Research and Exchange Board and the
            Fulbright Program provided support for my research.  I
            am grateful to Dale Peterson, Susanne Fusso and Stephanie
            Sandler for their excellent comments on several versions
            of this essay.

"Lyric dialogism" is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, "Slovo v romane" ("Discourse in the Novel," 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently "monologic," as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel.1 He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century.2 On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry. As I will argue in the first part of this essay, although Bakhtin did have something to say about poetry, it is not what he is often understood to say by these critics. At issue is the force of Bakhtin's distinction between monologism and dialogism, which is fundamentally an ethical and political distinction. Because for Bakhtin all language carries the ideological accents of its use in previous contexts, the choice to ignore or engage that fact has more than stylistic implications. The reading of Tsvetaeva's "Krysolov" ("The Pied Piper," 1925) offered here is intended to suggest the potential for a bakhtinian approach to poetry that, by taking monologism seriously, makes the most of Bakhtin's contribution to the study of textual politics.

All of Bakhtin's central ideas find fruition in or emerge from his writings about the novel, though his literary interests were not always so exclusive. His lectures on literature from the early 1920s include discussions of Ivanov, Mayakovsky, Esenin and Kliuev;3 and an important philosophical essay from the same period, "K filosofii postupka" ("Toward a Philosophy of the Act," 1920-1924), centrally features a reading of one of Pushkin's lyrics.4 Bakhtin did not focus on the novel until the book on Dostoevsky (1929), where he began to develop an argument about the novel's generic distinctiveness. The major writings of the 1930s, the essays later published under the title Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Questions of Literature and Aesthetics) and his dissertation on Rabelais are devoted to this project. As he made his claims for the novel, Bakhtin developed a general theory of genre from several related but distinct perspectives. He criticized genres that he perceived as driven by a unifying impulse, whether formal or ideological, and his main targets were poetry and epic. In "Epos i roman" ("Epic and Novel," 1941), where genre is defined in terms of governing "chrono- topes," the epic's valorization of an hermetic "absolute past" is contrasted to the novel's commitment to an unfolding present. The attack on poetry appears in "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-1935) and is conducted on rather different grounds. Here Bakhtin defined genre in terms of language use, and it is around this issue that he made his famous distinction between poetry and the novel.

The particular understanding of language that grounds Bakhtin's theory of genre in "Discourse" was articulated during the 1920s by what is now referred to as the "Bakhtin School," including Bakhtin himself, P. N. Medvedev and V. N. Voloshinov.5 The most sophisticated and complete statement of their theory of language is found in Voloshinov's Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1929). In a critique of Saussurean linguistics, Voloshinov argued that language exists for speakers not as a closed and abstract system, but as "utterance," that is, as it is employed by speakers within concrete and particular circumstances in response to other speakers (hence the term "dialogism"). This focus on the unique and unrepeatable speech event does not imply a radical subjectivism. Rather, the members of the Bakhtin School always insisted on the social character of the utterance, on its saturation with ideological meaning. Thus, one of the central tasks that Voloshinov set for his new sociological linguistics was a typology of "speech genres," or "forms of adjusting an utterance to the hierarchical organizations of society."6 These "speech genres" are much like the "social languages" that Bakhtin spoke of in "Discourse," each of which describes a particular ideological purview. Like Voloshinov, Bakhtin painted a picture of linguistic reality as a hierarchically ordered multiplicity of social languages, to which he gave the name "social heteroglossia" (sotsial'noe raznorechie).

In "Discourse" Bakhtin argued that the novelist and the poet respond to this linguistic environment in wholly contrary ways. The novelist, he argued, revels in speech diversity and puts it to artistic use. Specifically, the task of the novelist is to create the "image of a language" (obraz iazyka): ". . . the central problem for a stylistics of the novel may be formulated as the problem of artistically representing language, the problem of representing the image of a language." 7 The novelist, then, does not simply mimic different speech styles. He works on a more profound level, revealing the ideological physiognomy of "languages." As Ken Hirschkop has put it, in the 1930s the novel became for Bakhtin "a kind of surrogate sociology."8 The poet, by contrast, seeks to write in a "directly intentional language," cleansed of the evaluations of other speakers. Poetic language, that is, is "monologic" or single-voiced. But how is it that poetry is able to deny the reality of social heteroglossia? The answer Bakhtin gave is that the formal patterns of verse, which establish correspondences between different textual elements, erase speech diversity:

              Rhythm, by creating an unmediated involvement between
              every aspect of the accentual system of the whole (via
              the most immediate rhythmic unities), destroys in embryo
              those social worlds of speech and of persons that are
              potentially embedded in the word: in any case, rhythm puts
              definite limits on them, does not let them unfold or
              materialize. Rhythm serves to strengthen and concentrate
              even further the unity and hermetic quality of the surface
              of poetic style, and the unitary language that this style
              posits.9

Bakhtin perceived a necessary antagonism between verse form and the natural dialogism of language. In a curious way this notion echoes the formalist theory of verse as shaped through the antinomy of "form" and "material." 10 While for the formalists this tension is aesthetically productive, in this passage Bakhtin decries form's "deformation" of language.

Bakhtin addressed the question of verse form rather differently, however, in the above mentioned "Toward a Philosophy of the Act," from the early 1920s. This essay analyzes Pushkin's lyric poem "Razluka" ("Parting") in terms of the relation between speaker and addressee, each embedded within a particular, concrete "value-context" (tsennostnyi kontekst). It describes how the lyric hero's value-laden perspective (or "intonation") is overlaid with the beloved's in such a way that each remains activated. This interpenetration of perspectives is achieved through the agency of an "author-reader" who stands outside the characters' purview (Bakhtin calls this aspect of aesthetic activity "outsidedness" [vnenakhodimost']).11 As in his comments on poetry in "Discourse," Bakhtin described a tension between the "accent" or "intonation" belonging to the figures represented, and "rhythm," rather oddly understood as the carrier of authorial intent: "the emotional- volitional reaction of the author finds its expression in rhythm, and the reaction of the hero, in intonation." 12 But in this early formulation, authorial rhythm does not extinguish the hero's intonation. In fact, it is rhythm that makes it possible for the hero's intonation to sound, for the adoption of a perspective beyond the hero's is precisely what con- stitutes the aesthetic act. There is no necessary conflict between formal repetition and ideological intonation, as Bakhtin later claimed in "Discourse."13

Why then did Bakhtin, in the later essay, resort to the simplistic argument that the formal patterns of verse serve only to restrict the natural dialogism of language? What shift occurred in his thinking about poetic form since "Philosophy of the Act"? In his discussions of both Pushkin's poem and the novel Bakhtin maintained his distinctive focus on how value laden perspectives are artistically represented. But by the time of "Discourse" Bakhtin had moved beyond the idea of the hero's "value context," which is radically individual and unrepeatable, to that of "social languages," which are shared by whole groups of speakers and ordered in a linguistic hierarchy. This sociological turn in Bakhtin's thinking about language and literature surely explains his rejection of poetry. In a lyric poem, which Bakhtin considered to be the representative poetic genre, we do not often hear differentiated voices, much less those speaking the kinds of social languages Bakhtin found in the novel. This is to say that one reason Bakhtin's attack on poetry is largely ignored may be that, while it seems unjust, it also seems quite right. To justify calling a poem "dialogical" in the bakhtinian sense, one would first have to demonstrate the presence of ideological languages and then analyze the manner of their orchestration: are they monologically suppressed or dialogically allowed to speak their plural truths?

This is not a facile point, because "lyric dialogism" is generally conceived and applied in a rather different fashion in the study of Russian poetry, even by those who see themselves as working within a bakhtinian framework.14 I have in mind the Tartu school of structuralist semiotics, which has developed a notion of dialogism as "quotation" or "intertext." A good example is a landmark essay on acmeism by Iurii Levin and several distinguished Tartu colleagues in which they have described a rapprochement between poetry and prose in the work of Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam.15 In making their argument, they have cited Bakhtin's cryptic remark about the twentieth century "prosification" of poetry 16 and have appealed to his notion of "multivoicedness" (mnogogolosie). They have used the term in a variety of senses, some of them distinctly un-bakhtinian. For example, they have noted Akhmatova's use of dialogue in her Iyrics and argued that these other voices enhance the poet's psychological portrait: ". . . she bound together this multi-voicedness with the monody of the lyric genre, in which the 'I' not only does not weaken, but since it is variously refracted through other voices, becomes still fuller and clearer in its psychological associations." 17 For Bakhtin, such a preoccupation with the poet's subjectivity was a primary symptom of monologism. When Levin et al. have said that "lyric monody" and "multi-voicedness" enhance one another, they ignore the fact that for Bakhtin these were eternally warring principles.

But as the bulk of their argument demonstrates, the main function of quotation in Akhmatova and in Mandel'shtam is cultural rather than psychological. The openly intertextual character of their poetry can be understood as part of their humanist project of preserving culture through remembrance (Mandel'shtam's "yearning for world culture" [toska po mirovoi kul'ture]). This is the most important sense in which Levin and his colleagues have characterized this poetry as "multivoiced." Renate Lachmann, in a later article on the same topic, has drawn an explicit parallel between Bakhtin's theory of language and acmeist poetics.18 Bakhtin's notion of the word that carries the trace of its previous intonations, she has argued, echoes the acmeist conviction that quotations continue to "speak" in their new poetic context (Mandel'shtam: "A quotation is a cicada" [Tsitata est' tsikada]). Lachmann thus has interpreted "dialogism" in the broadest possible sense as "quotation," without regard to the kinds of utterances in play and how they are textually orchestrated; she simply has done away with Bakhtin's critical distinction between monologism and dialogism. She can now distinguish "lyric dialogism" from dialogism in the novel only by reverting to a traditional conception of poetic language as maximally concentrated: "Heterogeneous text-voices brought into close contact constitutes lyric 'polyphony.'" 19

But Bakhtin already answered Lachmann's argument about acmeism in "Discourse." While casting Bakhtin's theory of language in terms of remembrance, Lachmann has passed over his own use of this rhetoric in his comments on poetry: "Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts: language may remember only its life in poetic contexts (in such contexts, however, even concrete reminiscences are possible)." 20 Bakhtin argued that poetic language, if it remembers at all, does so selectively; it remembers only its literary past. Bakhtin's qualification reads like a thinly veiled commentary on acmeism's self-conscious appeal to literary antecedents. In essence he repeated Medvedev's earlier remarks about acmeism in Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii (The Formal Method in Literary Studies, 1928): "The acmeist wordÑnot in the manifestoes but in poetic practiceÑis taken not from emerging ideological life, but directly and exclusively from a literary context."21 Whether this is a fair evaluation of acmeism is a question I do not consider here, though I would note that the distinction that both Medvedev and Bakhtin made between "ideological" and "literary" languages is a dubious one, particularly in light of their own critique of the formalist distinction between practical and poetic language. But these comments have the virtue of clarifying that when the bakhtinian critic reads he is interested in the interaction of ideological languages, in contrast to the structuralist focus on semantics (how the "quotation" enters the creation of the text's meaning).22

This differing emphasis can be seen in Lotman's discussion of "The Other's Word" (chuzhoe slovo) in his canonic work on poetics, Analiz poeticheskogo teksta (Analysis of the Poetic Text, 1972). He cited Bakhtin as his authority and discussed Annenskii's "Eshche lilii" ("More Lilies") as an example of lyric dialogism, which he characterized in the following way:

          . . . the principle of monologism enters into contradiction
          with the constant displacement of semantic units in the
          general field of meaning construction. There is a continuous
          polylogue of different systems; different means of explanation
          and systematization of the world, different pictures of the
          world, confront one another. The poetic (artistic) text is in
          principle polyphonic.23

Lotman's "polylogue of systems" seems rather like Bakhtin's interpenetrating social languages, particularly since he expressed an interest in value ("different pictures of the world"). But in his comments on structuralism in his late writings, Bakhtin was careful to distinguish his conception of ideologically accented language from the structuralist notion of "system" or "code." Bakhtin criticized Lotman's famous analysis of Eugene Onegin for transforming "a dialogue of styles into a simple coexistence of various versions of one and the same style," that is, for describing the same content translated into different codes rather than uncovering distinct ideological perspectives.24

In this regard, it is symptomatic that Lotman, as has Lachmann, rendered Bakhtin's monologic/dialogic distinction meaningless by claiming that the poetic text is both. (Not surprisingly, he, too, reached the neutral conclusion that the lyric is basically condensed dialogue: "Outside poetry such a structure would occupy many pages."25) Bakhtin's distinction should be taken seriously, however, for it offers a way out of descriptive poetics by providing a means of evaluating how different languages are set into relation. Bakhtin created a vocabulary with which to discuss the politics of the text, that is, how it acknowledges or exiles other linguistic worlds, whether it is essentially utopian or anti-utopian. The following reading of Tsvetaeva's "The Pied Piper" attempts to demonstrate how productive this vocabulary can be when one avoids making an easy claim about "lyric dialogism." Tsvetaeva's poem is instructive to read in this context because, although it would seem to be an obvious example of lyric dialogism, it actually plays out in compelling ways the inherent paradox of this notion.

The title page of "The Pied Piper" identifies this long poem as a Lyrical satire" (liricheskaia satira), one of the few instances in which Tsvetaeva gave a generic label to one of her compositions.26 Immediate attention is thus drawn to the poem's discursive aspect, which is its most distinctive feature. All of the poem's central conflictsÑ-between narrator and characters, and among different charactersÑ-are enacted as discursive conflicts, as so many "wars of words"; in a dramatic and explicit fashion, Tsvetaeva made social heteroglossia a structuring element of this poem. What is most interesting about the novelistic appeal to social languages in "The Pied Piper" is that this poem powerfully expresses Tsvetaeva's romantic Weltanschauung, a utopian and monologic vision that is wholly antagonistic to the form-shaping ideology of the novel. The poem concludes with an escape, orchestrated by the poet, from the world of social languages. This hybrid "lyrical satire" stages an irreconcilable conflict between monologism and dialogism, between poetic language and social heteroglossia.

"The Pied Piper" is acknowledged by many poetry specialists to be Tsvetaeva's masterpiece, but it has yet to find the larger readership it deserves. The poem appeared serially in the emigre journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926 as it was being written. It was ignored by the Russian emigre community but much admired by the Moscow intelligentsia, who were unofficially acquainted with the work by Pasternak (the poem was not published in the Soviet Union until the 1965 Biblioteka Poeta edition of her selected works, and then with major cuts).27 Tsvetaeva employed the German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin to develop several interrelated allegories, one of which is a political allegory concerning the betrayal of revolutionary ideals that took place during the era of the New Economic Policy (Cantos III and IV). An army of revolutionary rats invades and conquers Hamelin, where they quickly adopt the mores of its bourgeois inhabitants. They are recalled to their revolutionary vocation by the Pied Piper, who leads them to death in what I have interpreted as a politically astute restaging of the march of Blok's "The Twelve" ("Dvenadtsat'," 1918).28 Tsvetaeva thus cast the ideological conflict between bourgeois and revolutionary values as a conflict between German and Russian cultures, each rendered as "the image of a language." These are the social languages of "The Pied Piper" against which the poet set her own language.

In "Discourse" Bakhtin illustrated various "compositional forms" for orchestrating social languages in the novel. The example that seems most relevant to "The Pied Piper," oddly enough, is Dickens's comic novel:

         But the primary source of language usage in the comic novel
         is a highly specific treatment of "common language." This
         "common language"Ñusually the average norm of spoken and
         written language for a given social groupÑis taken by the
         author precisely as the common view, as the verbal approach
         to people and things normal for a given sphere of society,
         as the going point of view and the going value. To one
         degree or another, the author distances himself from this common
         language, he steps back and objectifies it, forcing his own
         intentions to refract and diffuse themselves through the
         medium of this common view that has become embodied in
         language (a view that is always superficial and frequently
         hypocritical).29

In this type of double-voiced discourse there is maximal distance between the author's view and the social view being represented, a distance that is very much a critical one. It lends itself in particular to social criticism, which is an important feature of Tsvetaeva's late verse. Like Dickens, Tsvetaeva often targeted the bourgeois Philistine, though with a darker humor that was perhaps conditioned by her own experience of poverty in the Russian emigration. By the 1920s Tsvetaeva spoke in solidarity with the insulted and the injured, most explicitly in "The Pied Piper."30

There is a distinction to be made, however, between Tsvetaeva's use of social languages in her poem and that which Bakhtin described. The novelist never speaks a language of his own; he speaks exclusively through other languages: "The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it were, through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquizes."31 Bakhtin's own formulation suggests, however, that in an important sense the novelist does speak in his own "voice." He possesses a "semantic intention" that is "refracted at different angles" depending on the degree of distance between his own intention and the social language represented. What is different about Tsvetaeva's practice is that her semantic intention finds direct expression in the poem. The poet both speaks through other languages and speaks a language of her own, making the poem both "lyric" and "satire." The story proper of "The Pied Piper" does not begin until the end of Canto III with the revolutionaries' invasion of Hamelin. The first two cantos are devoted to the poet-narrator's description of the town's bourgeois populace. Her linguistic versatility, the constant shifts in register and rhythm, supply the drama and movement of this early part of the poem. She speaks in two modes: as the lyric poet in periodic digressions on metaphysical themes, and as the spirited and cunning storyteller who announces herself in the opening stanzas:

               Star i daven gorod Gammel'n,
               Slovom skromen, delom strog,
               Veren v malom, veren v glavnom:
               Gammel'n, -- slavnyi gorodok.

               V noch', kak byt' dolzhno komete,
               Spal bez prosypu i splosh'.
               Prochno stroen, chisto meten,
               Do umil'nosti pokhozh

               --Ne podoidu i na vystrel!--
               Na svoego burgomistra.

(Hamelin's an old, an ancient town, / Strict of word, and quick to frown, / True in matters large and small, / It's the best hamlet of all! // On the night a comet should appear / They deeply, soundly slept. / Solidly built and carefully swept / It bears a charming likeness to //-ÑI won't be caught within gunshotÑ- / His honor, the mayor.) The line "Ne podoidu i na vystrel!" is the first of many moments in which the narrator evaluates her subject in an openly hostile fashion. Gunther Wytrzens has pointed out that this line refers to the conversation between Famusov and Chatskii in Act II, Scene 1 of Griboedov's Gore ot umaWoe from Wit, 1823-1824).32 When Chatskii openly criticizes the sycophantic behavior of the aristocracy, Famusov responds with horror to his "revolutionary" sentiments: "Strozhaishe b zapretil ia etim gospodam / Na vystrel pod"ezzhat' k stolitsam" ("I would strictly forbid these gentlemen / From coming within gunshot of the capitals"). This reference to the most famous satire in Russian literature signals the mode in which Tsvetaeva's narrator speaks.

The line also introduces "distancing" as a figure for the function of satire. It is the same figure that Bakhtin employed in "Discourse" to describe how authorial intention is refracted through the social languages of the novel. The ideological distance between voices inhabiting the same word creates the tension and the polemical force of satiric discourse. This tension is sustained through the first two cantos of "The Pied Piper" as the narrator ventriloquates the Hameliners' social language, most brilliantly in the odes to bourgeois values. The narrator dominates the scene until Canto III, where the characters begin to speak directly; this discursive shift foregrounds the "distance" between narrator and characters and reveals the dynamics of satire.

The narrator is an extraordinarily active presence in these early cantos. She does not simply narrate, but playfully tests the power of her own performance by directly addressing those about whom and to whom she speaks. She questions and cautions the Hameliners about the veracity of her representation, gestures that locate her within the fictional world of Hamelin. She also highlights important information for the reader and counters anticipated protests, implying immediate access to the reader as well. The narrator moves between these two worlds, which are brought together in Canto II by means of a Shklovskian narrative device. Canto I closes as the narrator "interrupts" her description of Hamelin to report that the townspeople are retiring to bed, as though Hamelin's temporality coincides with the temporality of reading. She takes this opportunity to invite the reader on a secret tour of the Burgermeister's house in Canto II, entitled "Sny" ("Dreams"): "Proidem, poka spit . . ." ("Let's go in while he's sleeping . . .").33 She thus violates her own self declared prohibition ("I won't be caught within gunshot!"), bringing narrator, reader and characters into immediate proximity within the imaginary space of Hamelin.

The narrator's presence in Hamelin conditions a new discursive pattern in Canto III. The canto's siuzhet follows this sequence: a short scene in Hamelin's marketplace; another of the narrator's double-voiced odes to Hamelin values (the "Ode to Moderation"); and finally the story proper, which moves speedily through the invasion of the rats (the event announced by the canto's title, "Napast'" ["The Attack"]), the Hameliners' resolution to reward the savior of the city and the Piper's unremarked arrival. In Canto III, that is, we finally meet all of the characters "face to face." For the first time they speak for themselves, through direct rather than reported speech. And by virtue of the narrative device employed in Canto II, the narrator is located at the scene of the action, so that she now seems to speak alongside the characters. She is involved in what looks like a dramatic dialogue, in which eachÑthe narrator and the HamelinersÑspeaks in turn. The effect is not unlike that of an operatic duet, in which the characters sing lyrics independent of each other in the context of the same musical composition.34 The "deaf dialogue" in which they engage dramatizes the ideological tension previously conveyed solely through the narrator's double-voiced discourse.

The central characters of the market scene are the torgovki (hawkers), whom we observe first selling their wares and then gossiping about their neighbors. Rather, we hear them, since they are represented primarily through their speech, which receives the immediate focus:

         Tetki-treshchotki,
         Kukharki-taratorki,
         --Cheptsy, koshelki--
         Babki-balabolki.

(Old-maid-jabberers, / Cook-chatterboxes, /ÑBonnets, pursesÑ/ Gossip-wenches.) Three words for "talker" crowd this first stanza, simultaneously describing and mimicking their language. They speak loudly and incessantly, in a manner conditioned by their social function: "torgovki-gorloderki" ("hawker-yellers"). As creatures of language (and such strident language), the torgovki beg comparison to the narrator, whose voice interweaves with theirs: their respective utterances are directly juxtaposed, often within the bounds of a single four-line stanza.35 In the third stanza, for example, the torgovki's cries are "interrupted" by the narrator's caricaturing epithets:

         --Po--slednei doiki!
         Devki-masloboiki.
         --Iadrenoi krupki!
         Striapki-miasorubki.

("The laaÑtest milking!" / Maiden-butterchurns. / "Whole grains!" / Butcher-cooks.) The extremely short verse lines, with their swift rhythm and extended rhymes (the first couplet approximates a line-rhyme: poÑslEdnei = dEvki, dOIki = maslobOIki), compress these hostile utterances into a tight pattern. But the binding action of the text's prosodic features is countered by its graphic presentation. Speech boundaries are clearly marked. The torgovki's utterances are always introduced by a customary dash indicating quotation and closed by an exclamation mark; the integrity of each line is maintained so that different discourses never inhabit the same one; and enjambment only occurs between lines belonging to the same voice. All of these markers, as well as the narrator's unrelenting sardonic tone, insist upon the differences among speakers. In these stanzas, two wholly antagonistic languages are tied together by the formal structures of verse, creating a palpable ideological tension.

A similar confrontation occurs at the end of the canto between the Hameliners and the invading revolutionary army, who speak in Soviet-style political and military rhetoric. But we hear them only as quoted by the Hameliners, who exclaim to each other over the destruction being wrought upon the town. Like the narrator, they now intone their enemy's language. But they make explicit the politics of this kind of double-voicing by openly contrasting this alien language to their own in a series of lines, e.g.:

         Predikovinnyi sort!
         Ty im: Bog, oni: chert!

         Skok -- na bashennyi shpits!
         Ty im: Herz, oni: tsyts!

("They're the strangest sort! / You say: God, they say: Devil! // They've jumped on the steeple! / You say: heart, they say: enough!") The first couplet targets the revolutionaries' atheism, the second their rejection of bourgeois sentimentality. Each group's ideology is concentrated in a single, monosyllabic word and the battle is compressed into the space of a single line. Again, though they are forced into immediate relation within the verse line, the two kinds of speakers are clearly demarcated, not only by means of punctuation but by direct attribution ("You say . . . they say"). The languages themselves are sharply differentiated: the townspeople's commercial speech is rendered in German and the rats' political rhetoric in Russian. The greatest mark of their alienation is that the Hameliners simply cannot pronounce the revolutionaries' words: "U nas: Brot, u nikh: prod / I iazyk ne beret!" ("We say: bread, they say: product / Your tongue can't do it!").

But "The Pied Piper" is ultimately about the conflict between the poet's language and these warring social languages. Throughout the poem, Hamelin represents the world of social and ideological conflict that the poet seeks to escape, as she announces in the opening stanzas ("ÑNe podoidu i na vystrel!"; "I won't be caught within gunshot"). The final canto stages such escape, as the Pied Piper lures away Hamelin's children with a vision of pure freedom and self-realization not achievable within the confines of Hamelin. The poet's paradise offers an alternative linguistic vision:

         Zdes' -- puty,
         Zdes' -- chisla. . .

         Razrukha. . .
         Razluka. . .

         Rai -- suti,
         Rai -- smysla,
         Rai -- slukha,
         Rai -- zvuka.

(Here there are fetters / Here there are numbers . . . / Destruction . . . / Separation . . . // A paradise of essence, / A paradise of meaning, / A paradise of hearing, / A paradise of sound.) The Piper celebrates the power of poetic language to create correspondences and to recover meaning from a divided, post-Babel linguistic world. As if to demonstrate that power, the poet reveals a set of morphemes that distinguish the realm of loss from the realm of perfection: "raz-" / "rai" ("dis-" / "paradise"). In the Piper's song, poetic language is represented as a liberatory straining against the social languages that structure all experience, thus exemplifying the utopian philosopheme that Bakhtin detected at the heart of the poetic enterprise.

"The Pied Piper" narrates the triumph of monologism over dialogism, of the poet's truth over the truths of the "market square." It is an allegory of the finalizing action of the poet's language. Because the central conflicts of "The Pied Piper" are played out among languages, languages that are manifestly ideological, we can meaningfully compare Tsvetaeva's discourse in this poem to that of Bakhtin's novelist. In this example she is most like Bakhtin's monologic novelist, Tolstoy, with regard to both orchestration of voices and authorial stance. In the later edition of the Dostoevsky book, where Bakhtin expanded upon Tolstoy's monologism using the example of "Tri smerti" ("Three Deaths"), he described a lack of "connection between consciousnesses" among the characters that well characterizes the "deaf dialogues" of "The Pied Piper" ("They are self-enclosed and deaf; they do not hear one another").36 Furthermore, her characters are not dialogically engaged but judged and condemned from the same authorial "surplus field of vision," a metaphor that is textually actualized in the poem's lyric digressions. Like Tolstoy, the poet speaks not to the characters, but about themÑin effect, "drowning" them out. That said, it must be emphasized that Tsvetaeva's voice is too urgent, too embattled and, finally, too vulnerable to be likened to Tolstoy's. The victory staged through the poem's allegory is all too clearly fantasized, possible for the poet's mythological double (the Piper) but not for the historically situated poet herself. The poem displays not Olympian indifference but an urgent desire to win over the audience, a feature that characterizes all of Tsvetaeva's writing.

Tsvetaeva's "lyrical satire" lends itself particularly well to a bakh- tinian reading that heeds the presence of finalizing, monologic impulses. But Bakhtin's vocabulary could also be helpful for describing the dynamics of other examples of poetic discourse, in ways that would become apparent only through the practice of interpretation. Much of the critical literature inspired by Bakhtin's writings has shown that his categories have a richer application than he demonstrates in his own practice. The most relevant example is Gary Saul Morson's response to Bakhtin's reading of Tolstoy, where he has conceded the charge of monologism while providing a more complicated analysis of its effects and limits.37 Why not take monologism seriously in the study of poetry as well? When structuralist readers of poetry collapse Bakhtin's dis- tinction between monologism and dialogism with the neutral concept of "quotation," they lose Bakhtin's distinctive concern for language as ethical and political activity. A serious assessment of the powers and limitations of a bakhtinian approach to poetry can be made only when that concern is directly acknowledged.

#### NOTES:

1. There are two noteworthy exceptions to this view. Paul de Man and Mikhail Gasparov, from very different cultural and theoretical perspectives, perceive Bakhtin's attack on poetry as related to problematic aspects of his thinking about language and culture. Paul de Man finds that Bakhtin's hostility to poetry manifests a fundamental resistance to figural language ("Dialogue and Dialogism," in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, eds. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989], 105-14). Mikhail Gasparov contextualizes the attack in the cultural politics of the 1920s, painting a questionable portrait of Bakhtin as an avant-garde "culture-builder" eager to challenge all forms of literary authority ("M. M. Bakhtin v russkoi kul'ture XX veka," Vtorichnye modeliruiushchie sistemy [Tartu: Tartu University, 1979], 111-14).

2. M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo,4th ed. (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 232.

3. Some of these lecture notes have been published in Den' poezii(Moscow) 1983: 80-81, and 1985: 113-15.

4. Bakhtin, "K filosofii postupka," Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 80-160. This text is now available in Vadim Liapunov's translation, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). When quoting the Bakhtin school's texts in English, I will use the major published translations, to which I have made slight alterations. Translations of all other texts are entirely my own.

5. On the question of whether Bakhtin actually authored works attributed to Medvedev and Voloshinov, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); I. R. Titunik, "The Bakhtin Problem," Slavic and East European Journal 30, no. l (Spring 1986): 91-95; Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and S. G. Bocharov, "Ob odnom razgovore i vokrug nego," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2 (1993): 70-89. Since there is still no conclusive evidence to support the case for Bakhtin's authorship, l have chosen to retain the initial attributions.

6. V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka: Osnovnye problemy sotsiologicheskogo metoda v nauke o iazyke, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Priboi, 1930; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 24. See also Bakhtin's later essay, "Problema rechevykh zhanrov" (1952-1953), in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 237-80.

7. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane," in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975), 149.

8. Ken Hirschkop, "Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory," in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 23.

9. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane," 110-11. The text is italicized according to the original.

10. Iurii Tynianov, Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka, Voprosy poetiki, no. 5 (Leningrad: Academia, 1924; reprint, The Hague: Mouton, 1963).

ll. Bakhtin, "K filosofii postupka," 141-42.

12. Ibid., 144.

13. Bakhtin also addressed the topic of rhythm in "Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti" ("Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," 1920-1923) which develops the concerns of "Philosophy of the Act" in the realm of aesthetics (Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 7-180). A fragment of what is believed to be the essay's first section includes a similar reading of Pushkin's "Parting" (Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekh- niki, 138-57). But there is also a later section on rhythm entitled "Vremennoe tseloe geroia" ("The Temporal Unity of the Hero"). Here Bakhtin was concerned with the role of rhythm in "giving form to a soul," or what a contemporary critic might term "a self." Rhythm effects a kind of closure that is impossible with regard to oneself, since it is always experienced as open-ended, as "yet to-be." But one may and always does bestow such closure upon the other by "rhythmicizing" or "embodying" him. In so doing, one renders the other dangerously passive hut also, as Emerson and Morson put it, "rescue[s] the other from pure potential." This is essentially the same idea Bakhtin expressed in "Philosophy of the Act" with respect to poetic rhythm: the closure of rhythm is a necessary condition for the creation of a text (and/or self). It is worth noting that Bakhtin also spoke of fabula as a rhythmicizing impulse.

14. See David Danow's discussion of the broad and, as he argues, unproductive ways in which Bakhtin's notion of dialogism has been employed in contemporary criticism ("Dialogic Poetics" in his The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: From Word to Culture [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991]).

15. Iurii Levin et al., "Russkaia semanticheskaia poetika kak potentsial'naia kul'turnaia paradigma," Russian Literature 718 (1974): 47-82. In her article "Intertextuality: The Soviet Approach to Subtext," Elaine Rusinko emphasized the productive symbiosis between acmeist poetics and structuralist methodology (Dispositio 4, no. 11/12 [1979]: 213-35).

16. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 232.

17. Levin et al., 71.

18. Renate Lachmann, "Bachtins Dialogizitat und die akmeistische Mythopoetik als Paradigma dialogisierter Lyrik," in Das Gesprach, eds. Karlheinz Stierle and Reiner Warnung, Poetik und Hermeneutik, no. 11 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984), 489-515.

19. Ibid., 510.

20. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane," 100.

21. Bakhtin, Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii (New York: Serebrianyi vek, 1982), 83.

22. For a valuable discussion of the difference between the bakhtinian and structuralist conceptions of language, and its impact on their interpretive methods, see I. R. Titunik, "M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and Soviet Semiotics," Dispositio 1, no. 3 (1976): 327-38.

23. Iurii Lotman, Analiz poeticheskogo teksta: Struktura stikha (Leningrad: Prosveshchenie, 1972), 110.

24. Bakhtins "Iz zapisei 1970-71 godov," in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 339. Bakhtin provided his own commentary on Pushkin's novel in "Discourse".

25. Lotman, 12.

26. I refer throughout to the version of "The Pied Piper" published in the fourth volume of Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, eds. Viktoriia Shveitser and Aleksandr Sumerkin (New York: Russica, 1980).

27. Pasternak was a great admirer of "The Pied Piper," and his extended remarks in his letters to Tsvetaeva are an important commentary on the poem. See his letters of 5.VI, 7.VI, 10.VI, 13.VI, 14.VI, 18.VI, and 2.V11.1926 in Rainer Mariia Ril'ke, Bores Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva: Pis'ma 1926 goda, eds. K. Azadovskii, E. B. Pasternak, E. V. Pasternak (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 132:58.

28. See my article "Leading the Revolution: Tsvetaeva's 'The Pied Piper' and Blok's 'The Twelve,'" to be published in the proceedings of the International Tsvetaeva Symposium at Amherst, 1992 (Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1994).

29. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane," 114-15.

30. Tsvetaeva identified herself with Dostoevskyss Katerina Ivanovna (of Crime and Punishment) in a letter to George Ivask (5.X.1934):

Somehow I've never really had any use for Dostoevsky, but I recognize myself in "White Nights" ...and, most of all, remember this,Ñin Katerina Ivanovna with her shawl and her naked children, in her French dialect. That's meÑat home, in the everyday world, with children, in soviet Russia and in the emigration; me, in that real soup and dish-water puddle that is my life since 1917, and from whichÑI judge and threaten.

("Pis'ma M. I. Tsvetaevoi Iu. P. Ivasku [1933-1937]," Russkii literaturnyi archive, eds. Michael Karpovich and Dmitry Cizevsky [New York, 1956], 216.)

31. Bakhtins, "Slovo v romane," 112.

32. See Marie-Luise Bott's commentary to her translation of "The Pied Piper," Krysolov. DerRattenfanger,Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 7 (Vienna: Gesellschaft zur Forderung Slawistischer Studien, 1982), 197.

33. Tsvetaeva used the same gesture of invitation in her lyric poem, "Cherdachnyi dvorets moi . . ." ("My attic palace . . . ," 1919), to similar effect:

Cherdachnyi dvorets moi, dvortsovyi cherdak! Vzoidite. Gora rukopisnykh bumag. . . Tak.--Ruku!--Derzhite napravo,-- Zdes' luzha ot kryshi dyriavoi.

(My attic palace, my palatial attic! / Come on up. There's a heap of manuscripts . . . / This way.ÑYour hand!ÑStay to the right,Ñ/ Here's a puddle from the leaking roof ) We find it in another narrative context as well, in her long poem "Tsar'-devitsa" ("Tsar-maiden," 1920). The narrator coyly addresses the reader, mimicking the stepmother's salacious behavior with the prince: "Tak.ÑZasim, druzhok, dai ruku" ("This way.Ñ And then, my dear friend, give me your hand"). They become so involved that she actually threatens to abandon the narrative: "Vsekh Tsarits s toboi upustim, / Vsekh Tsarevichei na svete!" ("let's leave behind all the tsarinas / all the tsareviches in the world!"). See G.S. Smith's discussion in "Characters and Narrative Modes in Marina Tsvetaeva's 'Tsar's- Devitsa,'"Oxford Slavonic Papers 12 (1979):117-34

34. A good example of such a deaf "duet" is found in Verdi's Otello, where Iago swears his vengeance upon Othello, while Othello rages against Desdemona. Pasternak, among others, noted the operatic quality of "The Pied Piper."

35. It is possible to scan these lines for discursive patterns, as one would for rhyme and meter.

36. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 82.

37. Gary Saul Morson, "Tolstoy's Absolute Language," in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 123-43, and Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and creative Potentials in "War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). On the topic of Bakhtin's interpretation of Tolstoy, see also Caryl Emerson, "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin," in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, 149-70.