Coming to Terms with the American Long Poem: Introduction
This book illuminates the role phenomenological philosophy has played in the composition of long poems in America. Since the mid-twentieth century, poetic experimentation has often articulated phenomenological themes of perception, being-in-the-world and intersubjectivity. The diverse group of poets explored in the book—George Oppen, Robin Blaser, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Nathaniel Mackey and Rachel Blau DuPlessis—have all created extended poetic projects which are motivated by or in places touch upon ideas expressed in the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In establishing the groundwork of this argument, this introduction will (1) address the problems of defning ‘the long poem’; (2) discuss recent critical approaches to long poems; (3) articulate the role of phenomenology in American poetics; and (4) explore the example offered by Charles Olson’s phenomenological poetry; before (5) detailing the poets and long poems being explored in this book.
defining the AmericAn long Poem
In his 2010 essay ‘The Longing of the Long Poem’, Peter Middleton writes that the long poem ‘does not lend itself to defnition, and frequently takes advantage of this absence of expectation of any defning characteristic’ (Middleton 2010). This ‘absence of expectation’ attests to the vastly differing ways in which contemporary American poets have
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M. Carbery, Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05002-3_1
arrived at their models of poetic extension. George Oppen, for example, built his 40-part serial poem ‘Of Being Numerous’ (1968) from the initial experiment of ‘A Language of New York’ (1965), expanding the themes of this earlier poem with further sections probing questions of being-among-others in post-war America. In another instance, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian wrote their collaborative long poem Sight (1999) in a series of email and letter exchanges between 1992 and 1997, engaging in a call-and-response on themes of intersubjectivity and visual perception. In still another, Nathaniel Mackey’s two ongoing intertwined long poems ‘Mu’ and Song of the Andoumboulou (1985–present), have been progressing alongside one another for three decades, exploring the ways in which subjectivity is a fuid and ongoing exchange between self and world. Indeed, the wide variety of long poems which have been written since the 1950s in the work of The New York School, The San Francisco Renaissance, The Deep Image Poets, The Objectivists, The Black Mountain Poets, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets and many others speaks not only to the prevalence of the long poem as a literary activity but also to the diversity of approaches and procedures on display in late twentieth-century poetics. The ways in which poets arrive at their long poem forms is always an idiosyncratic process— and, for many writers of long poems, the ultimate ‘form’ their work takes is only realised once the labour has been completed.
As the well-populated critical discourse surrounding the long poem suggests,1 this heterogeneity of forms makes seeking clear defnition a diffcult task. In a 2004 encyclopaedia entry, Burton Hatlen attempts to defne it historically:
The long poem arrived in North America carrying a heavy weight of associations. The august lineage that passes from Homer through Virgil and Dante to Milton and Wordsworth has meant that whenever an American poet has chosen the long poem form, that choice has had cultural and even political implications. (2004, 489)
Hatlen describes the long poem as ‘arriving’ from a European lineage of writers, before undergoing a transformation into a specifcally American form in the work of writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Joel Barlow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville in the nineteenth century. This account is largely corroborated by earlier works of criticism which trace a lineage from Whitman through to the
twentieth century, such as Stephen Fender’s The American Long Poem: An Annotated Selection (1977), Thomas Gardner’s Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem (1989), M. L. Rosenthal and Sally Gall’s The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry (1983). In these defnitions of the long poem, continuity between writers is emphasised over diversity of form. In this regard, Stephen Fender writes:
Even ‘open-ended’ gives too restricted a sense of the long poem in the Whitman tradition. […] T.S Eliot, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams all belong to this tradition, whatever their differences. (1977, vii)
This argument is compelling in the sense that Whitman’s iconoclastic Leaves of Grass (written and expanded on between 1855 and 1891) does have resonance with subsequent American long poems in its sheer size and scope. In particular, Whitman’s model of a long poem which occupies several decades of composition is refected in many subsequent works.
In contrast to this positioning of Whitman as the inaugural fgure of the long poem in America, however, some critics have sought to defne the American long poem in relation to historical periods of intense literary experimentation. During the Modernist period, the long poem became rife with mythic anchoring, intertextuality and an emphasis on fragmentation and scale.2 For example, Brian McHale’s The Obligation Toward the Diffcult Whole: Postmodern Long Poems argues that ‘the long poem is a “modernist invention”’ (2004, 3). In a similar line of argument, Margaret Dickie’s On the Modernist Long Poem (1986) suggests that this distinct Modernist variant of the long poem is inaugurated in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. Dickie describes Modernism’s relation to the long poem as ‘a new experiment not only with form but also with poetry as a public language. […] Openly didactic, the poets set out to teach not necessarily diffcult lessons, but simple precepts that required new and complex forms of expression responsive to the conditions of the modern world’ (1986, 8). Defning the long poem as a modernist invention, however, risks overlooking the infuence of earlier writers whilst delimiting the work of subsequent fgures in making the form their own. What is at stake here is not fxing the long poem as a form to the notion of
high modernist stylistic decisions. Indeed, many writers of long poems have far more humble ambitions than open didacticism—for example, throughout George Oppen’s career, he displayed suspicion towards Ezra Pound’s egoistic and didactic use of poetry, which he felt should not be used to ‘prescribe an opinion or idea, but to record the process of thinking it’ (Oppen 2007, 20). Many subsequent examples have centred on an ambition to record the process of thinking—and still others seem to fnd their ‘centre’ in the process of composition itself. Again, this is not to dismiss Dickie’s important work in coming to terms with Modernist long poems, but rather to suggest that arresting the ‘long poem’ form as belonging to any single historical period is an unnecessary restriction to place on the diversity of forms and procedures on display in American poetics.
In response to such accounts, more recent criticism of the American long poem has stated the need for less intense focus on the act of defnition itself. Figures such as Joseph Conte, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Peter Middleton, Peter Baker, Lynn Keller and Paul Jaussen have emphasised the overwhelming heterogeneity of the contemporary long poem form in favour of seeking to defne it or locate it within an historical moment. Joseph Conte, for example, argues in his 1992 article ‘Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem’ that the problem of defnition lies in the misdirection intrinsic in the term ‘Long Poem’ itself. He suggests that the diffculty is located ‘in the apprehension that the term “long poem” refers only to volume, and says nothing about the form or the content of the work’ (1992, 35). Conte gestures at the fact that the quantities involved in long poems differ so vastly from work to work that the measure of length itself is only a small part of what constitutes a ‘long poem’. In a similar fashion, Peter Middleton, in his essay ‘The Longing of the Long Poem’, displays suspicion towards what the phrase ‘long poem’ might signify:
What signifcance does the adjective ‘long’ carry when we talk about the long poem? Is it literal or metaphorical, or a more or less implicit proper name (a disavowed categorisation that really means ‘Modernist’ or ‘world-encompassing’)?; and whichever of these best describes the work of this measure, is it then a value […] or a category […] or a metonym for some extended poetic theory? (Middleton 2010)
Middleton’s range of associations here gestures at both the indeterminacy of the term and some possible ways of entry into the meaning of poetic ‘length’. In contemporary long poems, length is a measure not only of page or line number but of scope, capacity, space, range and duration. These varieties of extension are conditions of the long poem by virtue of the sustained attention involved in both writing and reading them. Middleton emphasises the fact that the long poem always involves a process of coming to terms with the specifc work in question, attending to its minute details and its wider structural organisation.
It is important to recognise, however, that Conte and Middleton are not claiming that the contemporary American long poem isn’t indebted in various ways to, for example, Walt Whitman or the Modernist writers. Their accounts, however, suggest that neither of these narratives can fully explain the sheer diversity and variation involved in the writing of long poems in the late twentieth century. For these critics, the long poem is frst and foremost an activity. In her 2004 lecture ‘Considering the Long Poem: Genre Problems’, poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that any such attempt to rigidly classify the long poem is ‘doomed’. She writes:
to use a genre— The Long Poem— or a historical entity— ‘the 20th or 21st century long poem’—with any hopes of achieving a genre defnition is a doomed undertaking, doomed to be undermined by plethora. (2006)
DuPlessis voices a recurring thread in recent criticism of American long poems; namely that genre defnitions or historical models are not only diffcult to arrive at but are ultimately insuffcient in coming to terms with the specifc acts of extension which characterise individual long poems. The desire for a critical vision which emphasises the difference rather than the similitude of acts of poetic extension fnds its justifcation in, to use DuPlessis’ term, the ‘plethora’ which undermines previous attempts to subject the American long poem to generic classifcation. This can be demonstrated with reference to the fact that American poets in the last ffty years have utilised a vast array of nouns to refer to their long poems, few of which can be understood simply in terms of their length or historical precedents. The American long poem is an ‘infnite archive’ (Susan Howe), a ‘grand collage’ and an
‘open feld’ (Robert Duncan), ‘a long wonder’ (Berryman), ‘undone business’ (Charles Olson), ‘a restless surface’ (James Schuyler), an articulation ‘of being numerous’ (George Oppen), an ‘Alphabet’ (Ron Silliman), a series of ‘Drafts’ and ‘Folds’ (Rachel Blau DuPlessis), a ‘loom’ (Robert Kelly), a network of ‘rivers’ and ‘fows’ (John Ashbery), a diary (John Cage; Bernadette Mayer; William Carlos Williams), a ‘Practice of Outside’ (Robin Blaser; Jack Spicer), and a series of letters (Thomas McGrath; Lyn Hejinian; Olson) or songs (Amiri Baraka; Olson; Berryman). Further to this, many poets prefer to refer to their extended works with verbs, emphasising the active and ongoing process involved in the generation of further sections, lines, sequences or books in their long poems. For Langston Hughes it is ‘a fuid far-off going’; for Leslie Scalapino an ‘occurring’; for John Taggart a ‘compulsion to repeat’; for Alice Notley a ‘descending’; for Charles Bernstein an ‘absorption’. The phrase ‘The Long Poem’ struggles to hold together these disparate activities—or rather, does not readily suggest the sheer variety of ways poets extend their poetic works. DuPlessis’ sense of the ‘plethora’ which constitutes the American long poem begs the question—if ‘doom’ characterises previous efforts to make these works cohere into a genre or classifcation, how then might we come to terms with the American long poem without oversimplifying or undermining its particular instances of poetic extension?
A more developed, site-specifc means of reading is necessary in order to understand how acts of extension function in the terms that their composers develop for the purpose. This book intends to respond to this necessity. Discussing the long poem through its practices of extension allows each long poem to be framed using the terms individual poets employ during the process of composition. Each chapter of this book will disclose the means by which these acts of extension are achieved and maintained, and will explore the ways in which these methods are infuenced or informed by phenomenological thinking. As indicated, in recent years, signifcant work has been performed by a number of critics to reframe the long poem in light of its myriad compositional practices. It is therefore important at the outset to engage with the reading strategies proposed by these critics in order to more fully explain the practical and theoretical obstacles the reader is confronted with in late twentieth-century American long poems.
reAding the AmericAn long Poem
Reading long poems can be a slow, engrossing, frustrating, ecstatic and diffcult task. There is often a nagging desire to constantly negotiate between the individual word, line or section and the wider encompassing structure of the work’s whole. There are also practical concerns involved in the production and reading of extended works. Long poems are:
expensive to print; tricky to handle digitally; too long to be read in their entirety at poetry readings; too big for anthologies; much too big for little magazines […]; almost always too long to teach within the constraints of a timetable; exorbitantly demanding of a reader’s time; and sometimes barely readable until extended scholarly labours have provided guides and critical readings. (Middleton 2010)
Further to this, we as readers discover how a poem ‘becomes’ long only through reading it and attending methodically to its development, continuation or narrative. It is an abundant form, and its meaning and purpose is revealed cumulatively, as a palimpsest, over a sustained period. DuPlessis articulates the challenges presented in her article ‘After the Long Poem’ (2017):
Reading any long poem is an event, an experience in which you shift scales repeatedly, from structure to detail, from line to sentence, from statement to sound, from visual text to semantic. A reader is called in a lot of directions, and attention is diffcult to organize and to prioritize. The scale shifts and local bumpiness of a long poem are challenges, for you have almost no idea how any one bit, any detail, is going to ‘ft’ into the ‘whole’—if those ideas matter. (2017)
This question of trying to ‘ft’ the parts of long poems into an overarching whole is further complicated, as DuPlessis indicates, by the fact that this ‘whole’ is sometimes impossible to arrive at. As Peter Middleton writes, ‘some long poems don’t even have a “whole” in any obvious sense, since they were added to, had sections removed and there is no defnitive edition’ (Middleton 2010). This play between the micro and the macro frustrates reading—but also makes writing about long poems a problematic task. For example, in ‘The Forest for the Trees: Preliminary Thoughts on Evaluating the Long Poem’, Dick Allen writes
that ‘critics have for too long been unchallenged when they dismiss long poems by quoting from their lesser parts— offering these, unfairly, as characteristic of the poem as a whole’ (1983, 79). This is a genuine concern—but how do we as readers or critics encapsulate the workings of these sprawling texts? Where do we begin our readings? Where do we end them? If individual long poems display such a plenum of features which direct and misdirect the reader, how then is it possible to arrive at a critical model which explores long poems without oversimplifying or undermining their workings?
Brian McHale argues that the wide range of idiosyncratic procedures employed by poets necessitates a variety of reading strategies. This is a central aspect of his 2004 book The Obligation Towards the Diffcult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems. He writes: ‘[E]ach alternative [reading] implies a different hypothesis of what constitutes the “whole”, how its parts are articulated, what lies inside that presumed whole and what outside it’ (McHale 2004, 17). McHale’s strategy for reading the contemporary long poem is to form pairs of poets according to loose thematic unities. For example, Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery (1965) and Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968–1975) are paired thematically in their interest in pastiche, whilst Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) and Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets (1974–1999) are brought together in the context of modernist inheritance. McHale admits in his conclusion that his book’s ‘repertoire of recurrences and tendencies is not exhaustive in any sense’ (2004, 261)—it still, however, offers an example of how it is possible to address a heterogeneity of long poem forms without at the same time undermining individually distinct compositional methods.
Following a similar reading method, Lynn Keller in Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women (1997) argues that ‘critical models [of the long poem] tend to recognise as long poems only works which ft a single pattern based on a particular generic precedent’ (1997, 1). At stake in Keller’s book is making space for a wide range of female writers— including Rita Dove, Sharon Doubiago, Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Howe—whose works are not beholden to any overarching patriarchal poetic tradition. Keller’s notion of ‘expansion’ suggests not only the size of the texts she is dealing with but also the wide thematic scope and generic interplay involved in these examples of the long poem as a ‘hybrid form’ (1997, 3). By underscoring the sense in which long poems ‘expand’ to become long, Keller emphasises compositional method as the focal point in reading the long poem.
We see a further attempt to approach the long poem as a distinct compositional act in the work of Paul Jaussen. Jaussen suggests that American long poems display unity in their shared ambition to develop spaces for disclosing and inquiring into their real-world contexts. In his 2017 book Writing in Real Time, he writes of long poems ‘functioning as complex adaptive systems’ (2). Drawing on contemporary systems theory, and in particular the notion of ‘emergence’, he presents Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Nathaniel Mackey as poets whose long poem forms ‘emerge’ in the writing process and respond to real-world events. He writes:
Poetic form, far from being determined in advance, arises as a dynamic second-order pattern out of frst-order activities, prompting the poem to further evolution. (2017, 2)
In Jaussen’s confguration, identifying the form a long poem ultimately takes is always a question of bearing witness to the ‘frst-order activities’ which establish it. Furthermore, the poem emerges in response to the environment it is written in. It is, he writes, a ‘framework through which the environmental event is experienced as an event’ (2017, 4). Jaussen’s vision of the long poem is instructive in that it acknowledges the radical contingency of the act of reading and writing works of poetic extension. He titles his chapters based on the processes at work in each poet’s writing— Olson, for example, is concerned with ‘emergent histories’, whilst Mackey’s work investigates ‘emergent sounds’. There is signifcant and fruitful overlap between Jaussen’s model and phenomenological notions of perception and temporality. His sense of the long poem as an event speaks to my own notion of extended poetics as an activity which develops modes of extension to respond to phenomenological questions of being-in-the-world.
Important work has already been carried out by Peter Baker on the theme of intersubjectivity in American poetics. His 2004 book Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority in the Modern Long Poem explicitly portrays long poems as being intersubjectively motivated, concerned foremost with responding to that which is exterior to subjectivity. Baker offers the frst example of a critical model in which the American long poem is read in phenomenological terms. Baker’s rubric of ‘Exteriority’ is developed from the work of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), in particular his early work Totality and Infnity (1961), in which Levinas argues that ethics is grounded on our encounter with Others. Baker writes:
The philosophy of Levinas claims that an ethical stance, open to the address of the truly other, will keep faith with the need to resist violence. […] This openness to the other he terms exteriority. (1991, 6)
His range of poets includes Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, though his thesis, carried out at the Saint-John Perse Foundation, begins with fve chapters on Perse’s poetics in order to establish a more general association between the late French intersubjective phenomenologies of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida. In particular, Baker characterises the modern long poem as being written ‘against interiority […] in an attempt to reorient the analysis of modern long poems away from the idea of the individual self as the centre of interest and organization’ (1991, 2). In this sense, Baker’s intention is to not only disclose the intersubjective stances prevalent throughout American long poems but also to perform critique on these works in a manner which does not do ‘violence’ to ‘the truly other’. His book highlights the idiosyncrasies of works by virtue of an ethical necessity, focusing on the extent to which these poets avoid a poetics of introspection and interiority—what Charles Olson in ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) calls poetry as ‘private-soul-at-any-public-wall’ (1997a, 3). Furthermore, Baker argues that this ecstatic movement is crucial to the forms long poems take—which is to say, exteriority provokes extension. He writes:
[The] long poem turns deliberately outward in order to address the experience of others, at the same time inviting the reader into the process of making sense out of the text. The exteriority of the modern long poem is one form of ethical practice in our time. (1991, 3)
Baker underscores the sense in which the long poem involves a prolonged engagement with the text for both the writer and reader, and, as a result, constitutes a sustained intersubjective activity for both. Moreover, for Baker, the task of writing a long poem is analogous with the ambitions of phenomenological philosophy:
This view of the ethical subject of poetry based on an outward orientation runs parallel to the view of the subject in the philosophy and critical theory of the twentieth century. (1991, 3)
As indicated, Baker gravitates towards phenomenological theorists for their discussions of the ethical dimensions of subjectivity. Baker’s work establishes a generative meeting of two ethical practices— phenomenology and extended poetics—which confront the contradictions and aporias of articulating the intersubjective. His overarching argument concerns the ‘exteriority’ with which American long poems are occupied, functioning as acts of ekstasis beyond the poet themselves. Baker focuses on the individual ways in which poets explore their exteriorities, establishing a collective sense of the long poem as a form which needs to be understood as acts of extension from one subjectivity to the intersubjective world.
As these accounts attest, Conte, Blau DuPlessis, Middleton, Baker, Keller and Jaussen have performed crucial work in emphasising the sheer variety and diversity of long poem forms. Baker’s Obdurate Brilliance has been instrumental in the development of my own stance towards the long poem. His suggestion that the American long poem is occupied with ideas similar to the radical intersubjectivity articulated by Levinas led me to question what other strands of European phenomenology could be identifed in American Poetics. My account extends Baker’s study of Levinas to consider the ways in which the ideas and writings of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida appear in the long poems of late twentieth-century America. I argue more fundamentally that since Charles Olson’s experimentation with phenomenological ideas in the writing of The Maximus Poems (1953–1970), phenomenology has been one of the many and diverse infuences bearing on contemporary long poem forms. How and why this is the case will be explored next, with particular focus on Olson’s reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred North Whitehead during the composition of the Maximus Poems. Before moving to this account, however, it is necessary to detail the complex history of phenomenology as a body of thought, and to indicate the diversity of practices signifed by the term ‘phenomenology’ itself.
Phenomenology And AmericAn Poetics
In the preface to his major work Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes in broad terms the ambitions of phenomenology:
Phenomenology calls us to return, as Husserl put it, ‘to the things themselves’. By ‘things’ Husserl meant not real (concrete) objects, but the ideal (abstract) forms and contents of experience as we live them, not as we have learned to conceive and describe them according to the categories of science and received opinion. Phenomenology is thus a descriptive, not an explanatory or deductive enterprise, for it aims to reveal experience as such, rather than frame hypotheses or speculate beyond its bounds. (Merleau-Ponty, viii)
This desire to ‘reveal experience’ without restricting it with presuppositions is at the heart of phenomenology’s ambitions. Edmund Husserl is traditionally understood to be the frst philosopher to develop a cohesive model of phenomenological investigation. The phenomenologists featured in this book—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida—all began their philosophical careers working on Husserl’s texts and ideas. It is necessary to begin with Husserl because his foundational texts articulate the ambitions of the phenomenological method. This will allow me to frame phenomenology as a mode of inquiry frst, before attending to the specifc methods and variations found in the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida as they appear in the work of late twentieth-century American poets. Infuenced by diverse fgures such as Rene Descartes, Franz Bretano, Henri Bergson and William James, Husserl established phenomenology as a method for exploring lived perception from within its complex fux.3 In ‘Outside the Subject’ (1993), Emmanuel Levinas refects on Husserl’s foundational work on the phenomenological method:
For a whole generation of students and readers of [Husserl’s frst major work] Logical Investigations (1900), phenomenology, heralding a new atmosphere in European philosophy, meant mainly thought’s access to being, a thought stripped of subjectivist encumbrances. […] ‘The return to the things themselves’, the rallying cry of phenomenology, is most often understood as that priority of being over the consciousness in which it shows itself. (Levinas 1993, 153)
Levinas envisions Husserl’s work as allowing a ‘stripp[ing] of subjectivist encumbrances’, clearly establishing the grounding of his own inquiry into the radical meeting between self and other. In developing this reading of Husserl’s phenomenology, Levinas develops Husserl’s notion of intentionality, a term which denotes the way in which human perception is always directed towards something. He writes:
All consciousness is conscious of that consciousness itself, but also and especially of something other than itself, of its intentional correlate, of its thought-of. […] Husserl stressed the irreducibility of intentionality: a being-open-to that is neither a principle of contiguity, resemblance or causality, nor one of deducible consequence, nor yet again the relation of sign to signifed or of the whole to the part. (Levinas 1993, 152)
Levinas underscores the importance of subjectivity always being directed towards ‘something other than itself’, phrasing this as ‘being-open-to’, which he sees as the basis of consciousness. This is very much at the heart of Levinas’ phenomenology, which he develops from Husserl as well as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger after the Second World War. Husserl’s interest in that which is outside the subject is explored in the lectures on phenomenology collected in Cartesian Meditations (1931):
More than anything else the being of the world is obvious. It is so very obvious that no one would think of asserting it expressly in a proposition. After all, we have our continuous experience in which this world incessantly stands before our eyes, as existing without question. (1960 [1931], 17)
It is Husserl’s desire to put back into question that which exists, and to seek to understand it anew through the immediacy of perception. This extends also to the perceiver himself. Husserl continues:
Moreover, this life is continually there for me. Continually, in respect of a feld of the present, it is given to consciousness perceptually, with the most originary originality, as it itself; memorially, now these and now those pasts thereof are ‘again’ given to consciousness, and that implies: as the ‘pasts themselves’. Refecting, I can at any time look at this original living and note particulars; I can grasp what is present as present, what is past as past, each as itself. (1960 [1931], 19)
A large part of Husserl’s efforts lie in coming to terms with the sheer ongoingness of our perception—and, further, to seek a method of describing this process from within. What this requires, for Husserl, is a way to strip our perception of its contextual trappings and to see the contents of experience in all their radical strangeness. Husserl’s response to this is his development of what he calls the phenomenological reduction or epoché. In The Idea of Phenomenology, a work which collects Husserl’s 1907 lectures, Husserl speaks of a desire to ‘accomplish a phenomenological reduction’:
We make a new beginning, each for himself and in himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically: that at frst we shall put out of action all the convictions we have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences. (1999 [1907], 7)
This ‘putting out of action’ is, as Dan Zahavi writes, a ‘methodological tool permitting us to overcome the naivety of the naturalistic attitude, which simply presupposes the world as a pre-given source of validities. One encounters objects as given, but does not refect upon what givenness means, nor how it is possible’ (2010, 676). At stake for Husserl, then, is a necessity to understand ‘givenness’—not just the objects of our perception, but the process by which they become objects for us. Husserl further refnes what this means in The Idea of Phenomenology:
What I want is clarity. I want to understand the possibility of that reaching. […] I want to come face to face with the essence of the possibility of that reaching. I want to make it given to me in an act of “seeing.” A “seeing” cannot be demonstrated. The blind man who wishes to see cannot be made to see by means of scientifc proofs. (1999 [1907], 4)
It is important to note that, from the beginning of his development of a phenomenological method, Husserl was keenly aware of the endlessness of the task before him. As a descriptive rather than analytical practice, phenomenology aims to reach for a way to articulate experience whilst remaining aware of the diffculty of transcribing perceptive experience. In this sense, the epoché is a self-conscious ‘act of seeing’, in which the immediate impressions a physical or psychic object offer us are given our sole focus. As Dan Zahavi writes, the epoché is intended ‘to liberate us from a natural dogmatism and to make us aware of our own constitutive (i.e. cognitive, meaning-disclosing) contribution’ (2010, 669). He continues:
The aim is to suspend or neutralise a certain dogmatic attitude towards reality, thereby allowing us to focus more narrowly and directly on reality just as it is given. In short, the epoché entails a change of attitude towards reality, and not an exclusion of reality. (2010, 670)
Husserl’s desire is to capture objects in their mode of appearing to us, to fnd a way of perceiving perception, of observing how the contents of reality become meaningful to us.
Following this, the Husserlian epoché undergoes signifcant revision in the work of his inheritors, perhaps to the extent that it can be better described as a statement of ambition as opposed to a cohesive system. For example, Merleau-Ponty in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception (1945) argues that the reduction offers ‘clarity’ in the form of a renewal of the strangeness of the world:
Refection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fy up like sparks from a fre; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. (2012 [1945], xv)
This observation is related to the more general fact that Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida—all of whom establish their philosophies in response to Husserlian phenomenology in their early works—develop their own vocabularies for dealing with phenomenological themes. Heidegger becomes committed to analysing ‘Being’ and ‘disclosure’; Merleau-Ponty interrogates intersubjectivity through the notions of the ‘chiasm’ and ‘the fesh’; Levinas is concerned with ‘ethics as frst philosophy’ in the interaction between ‘Same’ and ‘Other’; and Derrida develops a linguistic phenomenology, attuned to ‘deconstructing’ structures and articulating the workings of ‘the trace’.4
Furthermore, it is these differing interpretations and developments of major Husserlian themes which distinguish the phenomenologists from each other. The early works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida all deal with Husserlian phenomenology in idiosyncratic ways— and, as Heidegger articulates in his 1920 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, this dispersal results in the fact that ‘there is no such thing as the one phenomenology.’ (2000 [1920], 2) As Dan Zahavi argues, phenomenology is a ‘tradition by name only’ (661). He continues:
Virtually all post-Husserlian phenomenologists ended up distancing themselves from most aspects of his original program […] It has no common method and research program. It has even been suggested that Husserl was not only the founder of phenomenology, but also its sole true practitioner. (661)
Indeed, Husserl’s foundational role in the development of phenomenology has itself been reduced in favour of emphasising a combination of his and Heidegger’s work together. As Dermot Moran writes: ‘After the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), phenomenology came to be understood almost exclusively in terms of the combined contribution of both Husserl and Heidegger, and so it appeared to Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida.’ (2010, 3) In a certain sense, this intermingling of bodies of work is typical of phenomenological method. If phenomenology holds that our encounter with the world is always constitutively intersubjective, it follows that no single phenomenologist could once and for all defne a method of describing perception. In this regard, Moran comments:
Intersubjectivity is a relation between embodied creatures. And our bodies are present in every project and in every perception. They are our point de vue and point de depart. There is no pure point of view and there is no view from nowhere, there is only an embodied (and contextually embedded) point of view. (2010, 678)
We are embodied subjects, and in our encounters with other selves, our own sense of self is reifed by our awareness that these Others are also embodied subjects. There can be no understanding of subjectivity without the acknowledgement that all the myriad complexities of our being are also experienced by Others as Selves. In short, to conceive of ourselves as individuals is to acknowledge the absolute individuality of the other people who occupy our life-world.
Moran’s statement here speaks to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, both phenomenologists for whom intersubjectivity is foundational to our understanding of lived experience. As Zahavi writes:
Phenomenological analyses reveal that I do not simply exist for myself, but also for an other, and that the other does not simply exist for him- or herself, but also for me. The subject does not have a monopoly, either on its self-understanding or on its understanding of the world. On the contrary, there are aspects of myself and aspects of the world that only become available and accessible through the other. In short, my existence is not simply a question of how I apprehend myself, it is also a question of how others apprehend me. (2010, 665)
This notion of phenomenology as starting out from an intersubjective basis is, for Merleau-Ponty, essential in coming to an understanding of the relationship between self, world and Others. In The Phenomenology of Perception, he articulates this in a series of questions:
How can the word ‘I’ be put into the plural, how can a general idea of the I be formed, how can I speak of an I other than my own, how can I know that there are other I’s, how can consciousness which, by its nature, and as self-knowledge, is in the mode of the I, be grasped in the mode of Thou, and through this, in the world of the ‘One’? (2012 [1945], 406)
By foregrounding his phenomenology on the concept of a seemingly-impossible ‘plural I’, Merleau-Ponty reiterates the limitlessness of the task Husserl and phenomenology in general sets itself. Seeking to enumerate our collective being from this double-bind of I-ness and We-ness, his work extends Husserl’s initial investigations towards a further embrace of ambiguity and all-encompassing intersubjectivity.
In his later work in The Visible and Invisible, he begins to articulate this intersubjectivity through the concepts of ‘the chiasm’ and ‘the fesh’. He writes:
What there is then are not things frst identical with themselves, that would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is frst empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them—but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing ‘all naked’ because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own fesh. (1968, 131)
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘fesh’ in which both self and world are embedded establishes an indeterminate situation in which it is diffcult to decide where one ends and the other begins. Intersubjectivity demands this sense of inextricable proximity, and indeed Emmanuel Levinas goes on to develop Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology into an irrevocably open ethical relation with the absolutely Other. As we have seen, Peter Baker’s study of poetry in Obdurate Brilliance uses Levinas’ work to establish a sense of the long poem as an inherently intersubjective and ethical practice. He articulates this in terms of the relationship between the writer of the long poem and its readers:
The modern long poem, often through experimental strategies, works to break down the identifcation of the poetic speaker and the poet/author. […] As readers, our ethical response is thus engaged, as we are confronted with works in which the very structure of intersubjectivity is worked out in the disposition of their textual strategies. (1991, 177)
The ‘ethical response’ here requires an understanding of the specifc ways in which intersubjectivity is ‘worked out’. In stressing this intertwining of terms, it is essential to underscore the extent to which intersubjectivity, concerned as it is with the Other, cannot become generalised. ‘Otherness’ is not a vague exoticism encountered in the not-I; it is the very recognition of I-ness in the lives of Others. This is a primary tenet of Levinas’ phenomenology, which seeks to articulate the primacy of ethics in our intersubjective life. In his major 1961 work Totality and Infnity, he writes:
A calling into question of the same […] is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics. (1999a, 43)
In this sense, Levinas’ work seeks to allow the other to remain absolutely other. This task requires the polarities of ‘same’ and ‘other’ in that the latter cannot ethically be comprehended in the terms of the former. Levinas’ development of phenomenology into a play of impossible difference and similitude is taken up subsequently in the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida. As Moran comments: ‘Derrida’s path beyond philosophy is essentially a route which went through phenomenology’ (2000, 436). Derrida’s early analyses of Husserl in his Master’s thesis ‘The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology’ (1954) and his translation and commentary of The Origin of Geometry (1962) lay the groundwork for his later wide-ranging critiques of the history of ideas. In works such as Of Grammatology (1976) and Writing and Difference (1978), Derrida’s project develops into an expansive critique and expansion of the ambitions of phenomenology. As Moran writes:
Derrida sought to expose the hidden metaphysical presuppositions of traditional Husserlian phenomenology, which, in his view, far from being a presuppositionless science, actually belonged to the history of metaphysics. (2000, 436)
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The power of Ivan Kalita being once raised by the Tatars’ aid, and by the re-establishment of the direct line of succession, and thoroughly developed by his son and grandson, Simeon the Proud and Dmitri Donskoi, it followed, as a natural consequence, that he who was most able to reward and to punish drew around him, and retained, the whole of the nobles. These constituted the sole strength of the appanaged princes; their defection, therefore, completed the subjugation of the princes. Dmitri Donskoi was, therefore, in reality sovereign, as is proved by his treaties with the princes who held appanages, all of whom he reduced to be his vassals. And, accordingly, notwithstanding the appanages which he gave to his sons, and the dissensions which arose out of that error—an error as yet, perhaps, unavoidable—the attachment of the nobles, for which we have just assigned a reason, always replaced the legitimate heir on the throne.
Already, so early as about 1366, the Russian princes could no longer venture to contend against their lord paramount by any other means than by denunciations to the horde; but to what khan could they be addressed? Discord had created several: what result was to be hoped from them? Divided among themselves, the Tatar armies had ceased to be an available force. The journeys to the Golden Horde, which had originally contributed to keep the Russian princes in awe, now served to afford them an insight into the weakness of their enemies. The grand princes returned from the horde with the confidence that they might usurp with impunity; and their competitors
[1366 ]
with envoys and letters, which even they themselves well knew would be of no avail. It was, then, obvious in Russia, that the only protecting power was at Moscow: to have recourse to its support was a matter of necessity. The petty princes could obtain it only by the sacrifice of their independence; and thus all of them became vassals to the grand prince Dmitri.
Never did a great man arise more opportunely than this Dmitri. It was a propitious circumstance, that the dissensions of the Tatars gave them full occupation during the eighteen years subsequent to the first three of his reign:[20] this, in the first place, allowed him time to extinguish the devastating fury of Olgerd the Lithuanian, son of Gedimin, father of Iagello, and conqueror of all Lithuania, Volhinia, Smolensk, Kiev, and even of Taurida; secondly, to unite several principalities with his throne; and lastly, to compel the other princes, and even the prince of Tver, to acknowledge his paramount authority
The contest with the latter was terrible: four times did Dmitri overcome Michael, and four times did the prince of Tver, aided by his son-in-law, the great Olgerd, prince of Lithuania, rise again victorious. In this obstinate conflict, Moscow itself was twice besieged, and must have fallen, had it not been for its stone walls, the recent work of the first regency of the Muscovite boyars. But, at length, Olgerd died; and Dmitri, who, but three years before, could appear only on his knees at the horde, now dared to refuse the khan his tribute, and to put to death the insolent ambassador who had been sent to claim it.
We have seen that, fifty years earlier, a similar instance of temerity caused the branch of Tver to fall beneath that of Moscow; but times were changed. The triple alliance of the primate, the boyars, and the grand prince, had now restored to the Russians a confidence in their own strength: they had acquired boldness from a conviction of the power of their grand prince, and from the dissensions of the Tatars. Some bands of the latter, wandering in Muscovy in search of plunder, were defeated; at last the Tatars have fled before the Russians! they are become their slaves, the delusion of their invincibility is no more!
The burst of fury which the khan exhibited on learning the murder of his representative, accordingly served as a signal for the confederation of all the Russian princes against the prince of Tver. He was compelled to submit to the grand prince, and to join with him against the horde.
The Battle of the Don or Kulikovo (1380 . .
)
Russia now began to feel that there were three things which were indispensably necessary to her; the establishment of the direct succession, the concentration of the supreme power, and the union of all parties against the Tatars. The movement in this direction was taken very opportunely; for it happened simultaneously that the Mongolian chief, Mamai, was also disembarrassed of his civil wars (1380), and he hastened with all his forces into Russia to reestablish his slighted authority; but he found the grand prince Dmitri confronting him on the Don, at the head of the combined Russian princes and an army of two hundred thousand[21] men. Dmitri put it to the choice of his troops whether they would go to encounter the foe, who were encamped at no great distance on the opposite shore of the river, or remain on this side and wait the attack? With one voice they declared for going over to the assault. The grand prince immediately transported his battalions across the river, and then turned the vessels adrift, in order to cut off all hopes of escaping by retreat, and inspire his men with a more desperate valour against an enemy who was three times stronger in numbers. The fight began. The Russians defended themselves valiantly against the furious attacks of the Tatars; the hosts of combatants pressed in such numbers to the field of battle, that multitudes of them were trampled under foot by the tumult of men and horses. The Tatars, continually relieved by fresh bodies of soldiers as any part was fatigued by the conflict, seemed at length to have victory on their side. Nothing but the impossibility of getting over the river, and the firm persuasion that death would directly transport them from the hands of the infidel enemy into the mansions of bliss, restrained the Russians from a general flight. But all at once, at the very moment when everything
[1380 ]
seemed to be lost, a detachment of the grand prince’s army, which he had stationed as a reserve, and which till now had remained inactive and unobserved, came up in full force, fell upon the rear of the Tatars, and threw them into such amazement and terror that they fled, and left the Russians masters of the field. This momentous victory, however, cost them dear; thousands lay dead upon the ground, and the whole army was occupied eight days in burying the bodies of the dead Russians: those of the Tatars were left uninterred upon the ground. It was in harmony of this achievement that Dmitri received his honourable surname of Donskoi.g
Significance of Battle of Kulikovo
The chronicles say that such a battle as that of Kulikovo had never before been known in Russia; even Europe had not seen the like of it for a long time. Such bloody conflicts had taken place in the western half of Europe at the beginning of the so-called Middle Ages, at the time of the great migration of nations, in those terrible collisions between European and Asiatic armies; such was the battle of Châlons-sur-Marne, when the Roman general saved western Europe from the Huns; such too was the battle of Tours, where the Frankish leader saved western Europe from the Arabs (Saracens). Western Europe was saved from the Asiatics, but her eastern half remained long open to their attacks. Here, about the middle of the ninth century, was formed an empire which should have served Europe as a bulwark against Asia; in the thirteenth century this bulwark was seemingly destroyed, but the foundations of the European empire were saved in the distant northwest; thanks to the preservation of these foundations, in a hundred and fifty years the empire succeeded in becoming unified, consolidated—and the victory of Kulikovo served as a proof of its strength. It was an omen of the triumph of Europe over Asia, and has exactly the same signification in the history of eastern Europe as the victories of Châlons and Tours have in that of western Europe. It also bears a like character with them—that of a terrible, bloody slaughter, a desperate struggle between Europe and Asia, which was to decide the great question in
the history of humanity: which of these two parts of the world was to triumph over the other.
But the victory of Kulikovo was one of those victories which closely border upon grievous defeats. When, says the tradition, the grand prince ordered a count to be made of those who were left alive after the battle, the boyar Michael Aleksandrovitch reported to him that there remained in all forty thousand men, while more than four hundred thousand had been in action. And although the historian is not obliged to accept the latter statement literally, yet the ratio here given between the living and the dead is of great importance to him. Four princes, thirteen boyars, and a monk of the monastery of Troitsa, were among the slain. It is for this reason that in the embellished narratives of the defeat of Mamai we see the event represented on one hand as a great triumph and on the other as a woeful and lamentable event. There was great joy in Russia, says the chronicler, but there was also great grief over those slain by Mamai at the Don; the land of Russia was bereft of all voyevods (captains) and men and all kinds of warriors, and therefore there was a great fear throughout all the land of Russia. It was this depopulation through loss of men that gave the Tatars a short-lived triumph over the victors of Kulikovo.e
THE DESTRUCTION OF MOSCOW (1382 A.D.)
The immediate and inevitable consequence of the battle was a sensible reduction of the Russian army. The numbers that fell before the Tatars could not be easily or speedily supplied: nor were the means of a fresh levy accessible. Those districts from which the grand army was ordinarily recruited had already exhausted their population; all the remote principalities had contributed in nearly equal proportion, and the majority of the rest of the empire was composed of persons who were unaccustomed to the use of arms, having been exclusively occupied in tillage or commerce. These circumstances, which did not damp the joy of the victory, or diminish its real importance, presented to the implacable foe a new temptation for crossing the border. But it
[1382 ]
was not until two of the wandering hordes had formed a junction that the Tatars were able to undertake the enterprise. The preparations for it occupied them two years. In 1382, the hordes of the Don and the Volga united, and making a descent upon the frontier provinces with success, penetrated as far as Moscow. The city had been previously fortified by the boyars with strong ramparts and iron gates; and Dmitri, trusting with confidence to the invincibility of the fortifications, left the capital in the charge of one of his generals, while he imprudently went into the interior to recruit his army. His absence in the hour of danger spread consternation amongst the peaceable part of the inhabitants, particularly the clergy, who relied upon his energies on the most trying occasions. The metropolitan, accompanied by a great number of the citizens, left the city upon the approach of the Tatars. The small garrison that remained made an ineffectual show on the ramparts, and the Tatars, who might not otherwise have gained their object, prevailed upon the timidity of the Russians, who consented to capitulate upon a promise of pardon. The Tatars observed their pledge in this instance as they had done in every similar case—by availing themselves of the first opportunity to violate it. They no sooner entered Moscow than they gave it to the flames, and massacred every living person they met in the streets. Having glutted their revenge with a terrible scene of slaughter and conflagration, they returned home, satisfied with having reduced the grand princedom once more, after their own fashion, to subjection. They did not perceive that in this exercise of brutal rage they strengthened the moral power of Russia, by giving an increased motive to co-operation, and by rendering the abhorrence of their yoke still more bitter than before. All they desired was the physical and visible evidence of superiority; either not heeding, or not comprehending, the silent and unseen progress of that strength which combined opinion acquires under the pressure of blind tyranny.
Dmitri, thus reduced to submission, was compelled once more to perform the humiliating penance of begging his dignity at the hands of the khan. Empire had just been within his grasp; he had bound up the shattered parts of the great mass; he had effected a union of sentiment, and a bond of co-operation; but in the effort to establish
this desirable end, he had exhausted the means by which alone it could be perpetuated. Had the Tatars suffered a short period more to have elapsed before they resumed the work of spoliation, it is not improbable but that a sufficient force could have been raised to repel them: but they appeared in considerable numbers, animated by the wildest passions, at a time when Dmitri was unable to make head against their approach. The result was unavoidable; and the grand prince, in suing to be reinstated on the throne from which he was virtually expelled, merely acquiesced in a necessity which he could not avert.
But the destruction of Moscow had no effect upon the great principle that was now in course of development all over the empire. The grand princedom was still the centre of all the Russian operations: the grand prince was still the acknowledged authority to which all the subordinate rulers deferred. While this paramount virtue of cohesion remained unimpaired, the incursions of the Tatars, however calamitous in their passing visitations, had no other influence upon the ultimate destiny of the country than that of stimulating the latent patriotism of the population, and of convincing the petty princes, if indeed any further evidence were wanted, of the disastrous impolicy of wasting their resources in private feuds.
THE DEATH OF DMITRI DONSKOI; HIS PLACE IN HISTORY
The example of Dmitri Donskoi had clearly pointed out the course which it was the policy of the grand prince to follow; but, in order to place his own views beyond the reach of speculation, and to enforce them in as solemn a manner as he could upon his successors, that prince placed a last injunction upon his son, which he also addressed in his will to all future grand princes, to persevere in the lofty object of regeneration by maintaining and strengthening the domestic alliances of the sovereignty, and resisting the Tatars until they should be finally driven out of Russia. His reign of twenty-seven years, crowned with eventful circumstances, and subjected to many fluctuations, established two objects which were of the highest consequence to the ultimate completion of the great design. Amidst
all the impediments that lay in his way, or that sprang up as he advanced, Dmitri continued his efforts to create an order of nobility— the boyars, who, scattered through every part of the empire, and surrounding his court on all occasions of political importance, held the keys of communication and control in their hands, by which the means of concentration were at all times facilitated. That was one object, involving in its fulfilment the gradual reduction of the power of the petty princes, and contributing mainly to the security of the second object, which was the chief agent of his designs against the Tatars. In proportion as he won over the boyars to his side, and gave them an interest in his prosperity, he increased the power of the grand princedom. These were the elements of his plan: the progressive concentration of the empire, and the elevation of the grand princedom to the supreme authority. The checks that he met in the prosecution of these purposes, of which the descent of the Tatar army upon Moscow was the principal, slightly retarded, but never obscured, his progress. The advances that he had made were evident. It did not require the attestation of his dying instructions to explain the aim of his life: it was visibly exemplified in the institutions he bequeathed to his country; in the altered state of society; and in the general submission of the appanages to a throne which, at the period of his accession, was shaken to its centre by rebellion.d
In 1389 Dmitri died at the early age of thirtynine. His grandfather, his uncle, and his father had quietly prepared ample means for an open decisive struggle. Dmitri’s merit consisted in the fact that he understood how to take advantage of these means, understood how to develop the forces at his disposal and to impart to them the proper direction at the proper time. We do not intend to weigh the merits of Dmitri in comparison with those of his predecessors; we will only remark that the application of forces is usually more evident and more resounding than their preparation, and that the reign of Dmitri, crowded as it was from beginning to end with the events of a persistent and momentous struggle, easily eclipsed the reigns of his predecessors with their sparse incidents. Events like the battle of Kulikovo make a powerful impression upon the imagination of
[1389 . .]
contemporaries and endure long in the remembrance of their descendants. It is therefore not surprising that the victor of Mamai should have been given beside Alexander Nevski so conspicuous a place amongst the princes of the new northeastern Russia. The best proof of the great importance attributed to Dmitri’s deeds by contemporaries is to be found in the existence of a separate narrative of the exploits of this prince, a separate embellished biography. Dmitri’s appearance is thus described: “He was strong and valiant, and great and broad in body, broad shouldered and very heavy, his beard and hair were black, and very wonderful was his gaze.” In his biography the severity of his life is extolled, his aversion to pleasure, his piety, gentleness, his chastity both before and after marriage; among other things it is said: “Although he was not learned in books, yet he had spiritual books in his heart.” The end of Dmitri is thus described: “He fell ill and was in great pain, then it abated, but he again fell into a great sickness and his groaning came to his heart, for it touched his inner parts and his soul already drew near to death.”
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The important consequences of Dmitri’s activity are manifested in his will and testament, in which we meet with hitherto unheard-of dispositions. The Moscow prince blesses his eldest son Vasili and endows him with the grand principality of Vladimir, which he calls his
paternal inheritance. Donskoi no longer fears any rivals to his son, either from Tver or Suzdal. Besides Vasili, Dmitri had five sons: Iuri, Andrew, Peter, John, and Constantine; but the two latter were under age, Constantine having been born only four days before his father’s death, and the grand prince confides his paternal domain of Moscow to his four elder sons. In this domain, that is in the town of Moscow and the districts appertaining to it, Donskoi had ruled over two parts or shares, the share of his father Ivan and of his uncle Simeon, while the third share was under the rule of Vladimir Andreevitch, to whom it now remained. Of his two shares the grand prince left one half to his eldest son Vasili; the other half was divided in three parts among the remaining sons, and the other towns of the principality of Moscow were divided among the four sons; Kolomna went to Vasili, the eldest, Zvenigorod to Iuri, Mozhaisk to Andrew, Dmitrov to Peter.
THE REIGN OF VASILI-DMITRIEVITCH (1389-1425 A.D.)
From the very commencement of his reign the young son of Donskoi showed that he would remain true to the traditions of his father and grandfather. A year after the khan’s ambassador had placed him on the grand prince’s throne at Vladimir, Vasili set out for the horde and there purchased a iarlik (letter-patent of the khans) for the principality of Nijni-Novgorod, which not long before, after many entreaties had been obtained from the horde by Boris Constantinovitch. When the letter heard of Vasili’s designs, Boris called together his boyars and said to them with tears in his eyes: “My lords and brothers, my boyars and friends! remember your oath on the cross, remember what you swore to me!” The senior among his boyars was Vasili Rumianietz, who replied to the prince: “Do not grieve, my lord prince! we are all faithful to thee and ready to lay down our heads and to shed our blood for thee.” Thus he spoke to his prince, but meanwhile he sent to Vasili Dmitrievitch, promising to give up Boris Constantinovitch to him. On his way back from the horde, when he had reached Kolomna, Vasili sent from there to Nijni the ambassador of Toktamish and his own boyars. At first Boris would not let them enter the town, but Rumianietz said to him: “My lord prince, the khan’s ambassador and the Muscovite boyars come
here in order to confirm peace and establish everlasting love, but thou wishest to raise dissensions and war; let them come into the town; what can they do to thee? we are all with thee.” But as soon as the ambassador and boyars had entered the town, they ordered the bells to be rung, assembled the people, and announced to them that Nijni already belonged to the prince of Moscow. When Boris heard this he sent for his boyars and said to them: “My lords and brothers, my beloved drujina! remember your oath on the cross, do not give me up to my enemies.” But this same Rumianietz replied: “Lord prince! do not hope in us, we are no longer thine, we are not with thee, but against thee!” Boris was seized, and when somewhat later Vasili Dmitrievitch came to Nijni, he placed there his lieutenants; and Prince Boris, with his wife, children, and partisans, he ordered to be carried away in chains to various towns and kept in strict imprisonment.e
The princes of Suzdal, Boris’ nephews, were banished, and Vasili also acquired Suzdal. Later on the princes of Suzdal made peace with the grand prince and received back from him their patrimonial estates, but from generation to generation they remained dependants of Moscow and not independent rulers. In 1395 took place an event which raised the moral importance of Moscow: on account of an expected invasion of Timur (Tamerlane), which, however, never took place, Vasili Dmitrievitch ordered to be transported from Vladimir to Moscow that famous ikon which Andrew had formerly taken from Kiev to his beloved town of Vladimir; this ikon now served to consecrate the pre-eminence of Moscow over all other Russian towns.
[1395-1412 ]
Following in the steps of his predecessors, Vasili Dmitrievitch oppressed Novgorod, but did not however entirely attain to the goal of his designs. Twice he endeavoured to wrest her Dvinsk colonies from her, taking advantage of the fact that in the Dvinsk territories a party had been formed which preferred the rule of the Moscow grand prince to that of Grand Novgorod. The people of Novgorod were fortunate in defending their colonies, but they paid dearly for it: the grand prince laid waste the territory of Novgorod, and ordered some
of the inhabitants who had killed a partisan of his at Torzhok to be strangled; but worse than all, Novgorod itself could not get on without the grand prince and was obliged to turn to him for help when another grand prince, namely the Lithuanian, attempted its conquest.
At that period the horde was so torn up with inward dissensions that Vasili had not for some years paid tribute to the khan and regarded himself as independent; but in 1408 an unexpected attack was made on Moscow by the Tatar prince Edigei, who like Mamai, without being khan himself, made those who bore the name of khan obey him. Vasili Dmitrievitch being off his guard and thinking that the horde had become weakened, did not take early measures against his wily adversary, who deceived him by his hypocrisy and pretended good-will. Like his father he escaped to Kostroma, but provided better than his father for the defence of Moscow by confiding it to his brave uncle, Prince Vladimir Andreevitch. The inhabitants themselves burned their faubourg, and Edigei could not take the Kremlin, but the horde laid waste many Russian towns and villages. Moscow now learned that although the horde had no longer the power to hold Russia in servitude, yet it might still make itself terrible by its sudden incursions, devastations, and capture of the inhabitants. Shortly thereafter, in 1412, Vasili went to the horde to do homage to the new khan Djelalledin, brought him tribute, and made presents to the Tatar grandees, so that the khan confirmed the grand principality to the prince of Moscow, although he had previously intended to bestow it upon the exiled prince of Nijni-Novgorod. The power of the khans over Russia was now only held by a thread; but for some time yet the Moscow princes could take advantage of it in order to strengthen their own authority over Russia and to shelter their inclinations under the shadow of its ancient might. Meanwhile they took measures of defence against the Tatar invasions, which might be all the more annoying because they were directed from various sides and from various fragments of the crumbling horde. In the west the Lithuanian power, which had sprung up under Gedimin, and grown great under Olgerd, had attained to its utmost limits under Vitovt.
Strictly speaking, the supreme authority over Lithuania and the part of Russia in subjection to it belonged to Iagello, king of Poland; but Lithuania was governed independently in the quality of viceroy by his cousin Vitovt, the son of that Keistut who had been strangled by Iagello. Vitovt, following the example of his predecessors, aimed at extending the frontiers of Lithuania at the expense of the Russian territories, and gradually subjugated one after another of them. Vasili Dmitrievitch was married to the daughter of Vitovt, Sophia; throughout his reign, he had to keep up friendly relations with his kinsman, and yet be on his guard against the ambitious designs of his father-in-law. The Muscovite prince acted with great caution and prudence, giving way to his father-in-law as far as possible, but safeguarded himself and Russia from him. He did not hinder Vitovt from taking Smolensk, chiefly because the last prince of Smolensk, Iuri, was a villain in the full sense of the word, and the inhabitants themselves preferred to submit to Vitovt, rather than to their own prince. When however Vitovt showed too plainly his intentions of capturing Pskov and Novgorod, the grand prince of Moscow openly took up arms against his father-in-law and a war seemed imminent; but in 1407 the matter was settled between them, and a peace was concluded by which the river Ougra was made a boundary between the Muscovite and the Lithuanian possessions.
VASILI VASILIEVITCH (AFTERWARDS CALLED “THE BLIND” OR “THE DARK”)
Vasili Dmitrievitch died in 1425. His successor, Vasili Vasilievitch, was a man of limited gifts and of weak mind and will, but capable of every villainy and treachery. The members of the princely house had been held in utter subjection under Vasili Dmitrievitch, but at his death they raised their heads, and Iuri, the uncle of Vasili Vasilievitch, endeavoured to obtain the grand principality from the horde. But the artful and wily boyar, Ivan Dmitrievitch Vsevolozhsky, succeeded in 1432 in setting aside Iuri and assuring the grand principality to Vasili Vasilievitch. When Iuri pleaded his right of seniority as uncle, and in support of his claim cited precedents by
[1425-1435 ]
which uncles had been preferred, as seniors in years and birth, to their nephews, Vsevolozhsky represented to the khan that Vasili had already received the principality by will of the khan and that this will should be held above all laws and customs. This appeal to the absolute will of the khan pleased the latter and Vasili Vasilievitch remained grand prince. Some years later this same boyar, angered at Vasili because the latter had first promised to marry his daughter and then married Marie Iaroslavna, the granddaughter of Vladimir Andreevitch Serpukhovski, himself incited Iuri to wrest the principality from his nephew Thus Russia again became the prey of civil wars, which were signalised by hideous crimes. Iuri, who had taken possession of Moscow, was again expelled and soon after died. The son of Iuri, Vasili Kossoi (the Squinting) concluded peace with Vasili, and then, having treacherously violated the treaty, attacked Vasili, but he was vanquished, captured, and blinded (1435). After a few years the following events took place at the Golden Horde: the khan Ulu Makhmet was deprived of his throne and sought the aid of the grand prince of Moscow. The grand prince not only refused him his aid, but also drove him out of the boundaries of the territory of Moscow. Ulu Makhmet and his partisans then established themselves on the banks of the Volga at Kazan, and there laid the foundations of a Tatar empire that during a whole century brought desolation on Russia. Ulu Makhmet, as ruler of Kazan, avenged himself on the Muscovite prince for the past, was victorious over him in battle, and took him prisoner. Vasili Vasilievitch only recovered his liberty by paying an enormous ransom. When he returned to his native land, he was against his will obliged to lay upon the people heavy taxes and to receive Tatars into his principality and give them estates. All this awakened dissatisfaction against him, of which the Galician prince Dmitri Shemiaka, the brother of Kossoi, hastened to take advantage, and joining himself to the princes of Tver and Mozhaisk, in 1446 he ordered Vasili to be treacherously seized at the monastery of Troitsa and blinded. Shemiaka took possession of the grand principality and kept the blind Vasili in confinement, but observing an agitation among the people, he yielded to the request of Jonas, bishop of Riazan, and gave Vasili his liberty, at the same time making him swear that he
would not seek to regain the grand principality Vasili did not keep his oath, and in 1447 the partisans of the blind prince again raised him to the throne.
It is remarkable that from this period the reign of Vasili Vasilievitch entirely changed in character. While he had his eyesight, Vasili was a most insignificant sovereign, but from the time that he lost his eyes, his reign becomes distinguished for its firmness, intelligence, and decision. It is evident that clever and active men must have ruled in the name of the blind prince. Such were the boyars: the princes Patrikeev, Riapolovski, Koshkin, Plesktcheev, Morozov, and the famous voyevods, Striga-Obolenski and Theodore Bassenok, but above all the metropolitan Jonas.
[1447-1448 ]
Jonas Becomes Metropolitan
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Jonas was a native of Kostroma. When he was made bishop of Riazan he did not in any wise become a partisan of the local views, his sympathies inclined to Moscow because, in conformity with the conditions of that epoch, Jonas saw in Moscow alone the centre of Russian unification. In 1431, at the death of the metropolitan Photius, Jonas was elected metropolitan, but the patriarch of Constantinople had already named the Greek Isidore to that office. This Isidore had participated in the capacity of Russian metropolitan, in the Florentine council which had proclaimed the union of the Greek church with the Roman, the pope of Rome to be the head of the Universal church. Isidore, together with the patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine emperor had submitted to the pope; for Isidore was at heart a Greek: all his aims
were directed to the salvation of his perishing country, and like many other Greeks he hoped through the pope to arouse Europe against the Turks. It was these hopes that had caused the Greeks of that time to sacrifice the independence of their church. In the eyes of Isidore Russia too was to serve as an instrument for Greek patriotic designs; but the union was rejected at Moscow, Isidore was driven out, and for some years the office of metropolitan of Moscow remained unoccupied. Kiev had its own metropolitans since the days of Vitovt, but Moscow did not wish to have anything to do with them. The bishop of Riazan, Jonas, having been already named metropolitan by the Russian clergy, enjoyed at Moscow a pre-eminent importance and influence, and finally, in 1448, this archbishop was raised to the rank of metropolitan by an assembly of the Russian bishops, without regard to the patriarch. This event was a decisive breach with the past, and from that time the eastern-Russian church ceased to depend upon the patriarch of Constantinople and acquired full independence. The centre of her supreme power was Moscow, and this circumstance definitively established that moral importance of Moscow, which had been aimed for by the metropolitan Peter, which had been held up by Alexis, and which had received greater brilliancy from the transfer of the ikon of the Blessed Virgin from Vladimir. From that time the Russian territories not yet subject to Moscow and aiming to preserve their independence from her—Tver, Riazan, Novgorod—were bound to her more closely by spiritual bonds.
When he had for the third time ascended the throne of Moscow, the grand prince designated as co-regent with himself his eldest son Ivan, who was thenceforth called grand prince like his father, as is shown by the treaties of that period. It was from that time that the political activity of Ivan commenced and gradually widened; and there is no doubt that when he attained his majority it was he, and not his blind father that directed the accomplishment of the events which led to the strengthening of Moscow. Prince Dmitri Shemiaka, who had been obliged to promise on his oath to desist from any further attempts upon the grand principality, did not cease to show his enmity against Vasili the Dark. The clergy wrote to Shemiaka a
letter of admonishment, but he would not listen to their remonstrances, and the armies of Moscow marched with the blessing of Jonas and accompanied by the young prince, against Shemiaka in Galicia. Shemiaka was defeated and fled to Novgorod, where the inhabitants gave him a refuge, and Galicia with its dependencies was again joined to Moscow. Shemiaka continued to plot against Vasili, took Ustiug, and established himself there; but the young prince Ivan Vasilievitch drove him out, and Shemiaka again fled to Novgorod. The metropolitan Jonas issued an edict declaring Shemiaka excommunicated from the church, forbidding orthodox persons to eat and drink with him, and reproaching the people of Novgorod for having received him. It was then decided at Moscow to put an end to Shemiaka by secretly murdering him; the secretary Borodati, through Shemiaka’s boyar Ivan Kotov, induced Shemiaka’s cook to prepare and serve to him a poisoned fowl (1453).
Vasili the Dark died on the 5th of March, 1462, from an unsuccessful treatment of burns. He outlived his chief counsellor, the metropolitan Jonas, by a year, the latter having died on the 31st of March, 1461.h
[1462 . .]
A REVIEW OF THE INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT DURING THE TATAR PERIOD
The beginning of the fourteenth century was the commencement of a new epoch in the life of Russia; in its two halves two empires began to crystallize: that of Moscow in the east and that of Lithuania in the west, and the scattered elements began to gather around the new centres. Such a centre for eastern Russia was Moscow, until then an insignificant town, rarely mentioned in the chronicles, being the share of the younger and therefore less powerful princes. Under Daniel Aleksandrovitch[22] the town of Moscow constituted the whole principality. With the acquisition of Pereiaslavl (1302), Mozhaisk (1303), and Kolomna (1308) this region became somewhat more extended, but when it fell to the share of Ivan Danilovitch after the death of his brother Iuri, it was still very insignificant; and yet through
its resources the princes of Moscow managed to become the first in eastern Russia and little by little to gather round them the whole of eastern Russia. The rise of the principality of Moscow is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of Russia. It is therefore not surprising that particular attention should have been directed towards it by historians, and by the light of their united investigations the phenomenon becomes sufficiently clear.
In the thirteenth century, under the domination of the Tatars in eastern Russia, there was a continual struggle amongst the princes for the title of grand prince, to which they also strove to unite the possession of Vladimir. We also observe another distinctive feature of the time, which was that the princes did not remain to live in Vladimir, but only strove to unite it to their own possessions, and thus augment them, and, if possible, secure them for their families. The struggle was for the preponderance of one family over another through the extension of its territorial possessions. In the Kievan period, whoever became prince of Kiev, removed to Kiev, and named someone of his own family as ruler in his own principality, so that if Kiev were lost and it should pass into another family, he would not lose his own patrimony.
During the Tatar period we note a new phenomenon: the princes did not merely separate themselves from their patrimonial lands, but even from their capitals; for instance: Iaroslav lived in Tver, Basil in Kostroma, Andrew in Gorodeza, Dmitri in Pereiaslavl, and so on. The power of a grand prince at that time was only a hegemony, a preponderance over other princes; as a testimony of their independence the other princes, the elders of their families (such as Riazan, Tver, etc.) began also to call themselves grand princes, and the preponderance of the grand prince of Vladimir little by little lost its significance. To all this there must yet be added another special circumstance, that in order for anyone to unite Vladimir and its territory to his possessions and thus obtain the predominance, a iarlik or letter of the khan was required; no rights were necessary and a wide field was open for every guest. Thus there appeared a new basis for the right of succession: the favour of the khan. To obtain this favour was the aim of all the princes, to keep it—a
peculiar art. Whoever possessed this art would be the head over all eastern Russia, and whoever could maintain this position was bound to subordinate all the rest to himself. In consequence of this, the first condition for success at that time was a dexterous tactfulness, and whoever possessed this quality must come out victor. This dexterousness was a peculiar distinction of the Muscovite princes, and in it lay the chief cause of their success. They had neither power nor higher rights, and all their hopes were founded on their own skill and the favour of the khan. They had no riches, and their patrimonial lands, poor and secluded, away from the great rivers which were then the chief means of communication, did not yield them large means.
But to ensure success with the khan, his wife, and the princes of the horde, money was necessary; so they became saving and scraping, and all their capacities were directed to the acquisition of gain. Their qualities were neither brilliant nor attractive, but in their position it was only by these sober qualities that anything could be obtained. Alexander Iaroslavitch (Nevski) pointed out to his successors that their policy should be to give way when necessary and to wait when uncertain. He who followed this counsel was successful; whosoever hurried, like Alexander Mikhailovitch (of Tver), was a loser in the game.
But while taking advantage of every means of influence at the horde, the Muscovite princes did not lose sight of those means by which they could also act within Russia itself. Ivan Danilovitch managed to induce the metropolitan St. Peter to come to Moscow, and his successors continued to reside in that town. The alliance with the spiritual power, the only power that embraced the whole of Russia, was of extraordinary advantage to the Muscovite princes.
The metropolitan could exert his influence everywhere. Thus Theognost closed the churches at Pskov when that city offered an asylum to Alexander Mikhailovitch, and St. Sergius did likewise at Nijni-Novgorod when it accepted a prince to whom Moscow was opposed. This alliance was a most natural one: if the princes needed the authority of the church, the clergy—at that time the representatives of the most advanced ideas concerning the civil
order—sought to realise that order of which it stood in need even for its purely economic interests. There is not the slightest doubt that one of the chief causes of the devotion of the clergy to the views and policies of the Muscovite princes, lay in its conviction that it was bound to derive material advantages from the concentration of all power in the hands of one prince. In fact, while the system of appanages prevailed, it was, on the one hand, extremely difficult for the clergy to enjoy its possessions and privileges in security, because the maintenance of this security depended not on one, but on many; while on the other hand, the princes of appanages infringed on clerical privileges more frequently than the grand prince. The dispersion of the monastic estates over several principalities still further contributed to the desire of the clergy for the abolition of the appanage system, which increased the difficulties of managing those estates. Especially in the case of war among the princes of appanages, the clergy of one appanage might easily be deprived of its possessions in another appanage, because at such a time all means of injuring the enemy were considered permissible.
In the increase of power of the Muscovite princes a leading part also belongs to the Moscow boyars, whose activity was principally displayed during the youth or minority of the grand princes.[23]
Such were the principal causes of the strength of the Moscow princes; to them should be added (according to the historians N. V. Stankevitch and S. M. Soloviov) the central position of the principality of Moscow, both in the sense that Moscow is near the sources of the chief rivers, and that an attack from without must first fall on the surrounding principalities. But these causes are evidently secondary and would have no significance without the others: Moscow is not so far from the other principalities that these advantages would belong to her alone. It was much more important that a wise policy, by preserving Moscow from the attacks of the Tatars, attracted thither an increased population and thus enriched the principality. A final important cause was the weakening of the Tatar horde and its dismemberment at the end of this period, of which the princes of Moscow did not fail to take advantage for their own ends.b
