The Professor & the Mad-Dead Poet Society

[Terrance]

Nabokov's novels are full of madness. Mad poets. Mad Professors. 

He comes to America. 
To write fairy tales.  

Cherrycoke, like mad Ishmael returning from the sea, like Slothrop's
reversed vomiting of the deep, boards Faucault's prison ship of fools. 

To escape the madness of Europe? 

To find a voice in America? 

A free voice? 


What is Pynchon's Vineland about? Madness? 1984? What? 

Bunch of poets,  painters, musicians, actors, artists taking refuge,
taking jobs as waiters and landscapers in Vineland the Good? 

In Russia, denouncements, purges, mass deportations, mass arrests, or
unexplained disappearances--a poet's noninvolvement, his or her
apolitical lyrical incursion into a wholly private world, metaphysical
speculation, or spiritual exploration, became the most political of
statements and was so understood by the poet, the public, and the state
organs of repression. 

Perhaps poets were listened to because of the unique potential for oral
literature to avoid censorship. The prodigious Russian memory for verse
can perpetuate what can never exist in printed form. Perhaps poets were
listened to out of sheer respect because being a poet involved enormous
risk. 

Russian poets were not shipped off to America. They died in prison. In
Russian prisons and in German prisons too. Nikolai Gumilyov never even
made it to prison, he was executed for his crimes. Leonid Lavrov and
Daniil Andreyev, both died shortly after being released from long
imprisonment. The families of both Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva were
imprisoned and murdered. Yesenin, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, and Aleksandr
Bashlacov, overwhelmed by despair, committed suicide. Maksim Gorky died,
reportedly  from a mysterious poisoning. Dmitry Kedrin was assassinated,
thrown off a  train. Olga Bergholts, who literally had her unborn child
beaten out of her during police interrogations wrote, 

No, destiny has not offended me, 
It generously gave me its rewards:
Both sent me to Yezhov's prisons, 
And dragged me into psycho wards. 

It led me through the blockade, 
Passing dead loved ones each day, 
And took my ultimate delight--
The joy of motherhood away. 



Yury Galanskov died in prison in 1972. Natalya Gorbanevskya was held in
a psychiatric prison. Irina Ratushinskaya and Joseph Brodsky were
imprisoned and exiled. The poets fled. Where? To Vineland the Good? It
wasn't only the poets, the artists, everyone suffered. But poets
suffered no less than bankers and cops. But poets, if their suffering is
not more or less is unique because they suffer in unique ways by being
poets. In America, the poet can take refuge in the University. Not in
Russia.