Pussy Riot: art on trial, the bad rhyme, and negative capability

So. The pop stars have made their statements of solidarity. The theological case in favour of Pussy Riot’s protest in the cathedral has been made. (And refuted below the line in a thousand online columns.) The Mayor of Reykjavik has worn his pink dress and his balaclava on top of a van blaring a Pussy Riot song in Reykjavik’s first-ever Gay Pride march.

 Jon Gnarr, the mayor of Reykjavik

David Cameron has publicly questioned Putin about the case, and all the people of the world now know what a brightly coloured balaclava means. Major cities of the world have united in a global day of protest; yesterday public statues in Moscow – and some in other countries, like this Soviet memorial in Bulgaria – wore balaclavas.

 Soviet memorial in Sofia

A few days ago, when Amnesty International tried to deliver its petition to the Russian Embassy in Washington, the embassy heavies threw it to the ground. Pussy Riot are now important. Garry Kasparov is beaten and arrested, along with many others. Russia has banned Gay Pride marches (‘for a hundred years’). The crackdown on the intelligentsia creaks back into motion, and apparently Putin wants us to see it.

 Pyotr Pavlensky, an artist, protesting

This last point appears critical, and the world’s artists have responded. (Though, as with the last week’s Olympic joy in the UK, let’s see how long that lasts, or if it translates into anything more than some balaclava-wearing; some of them are a bit luvvie….) Thanks to Pussy Riot, politics is back. We – in particular the pampered poets of the English-speaking world – can stop our bleating about ‘whither political poetry?’ It’s here. The world is rushing past us. It’s agitprop.

 ‘We searched for real beauty and sincerity, and found it in our punk performances’. 

Pussy Riot have  used an artistic medium  to create a clash of two things, which results in a third, incontrovertible, thing – in this case, making visible the church-state nexus in Putin’s Russia. It is this that Putin can’t stand. And he’s cracking down on the ‘creative class’ because he knows he can’t win over anyone who can think with a moral aesthetic, make connections, and make their ideas easily understood by others.

 in Ireland

Oleg Kashin writes in yesterday’s Guardian:

The reconstruction of the political space in Russia began almost right after the mass protests in December of last year demanding honest elections. Putin didn’t start flirting with the “creative class”, where most of the protesters came from, but instead devoted his whole pre-electoral campaign on creating the maximum amount of mutual hatred between the “creative class” and the “simple people”, who, if you believe the propaganda, support Putin. The Pussy Riot case takes this hatred to a new level, adding to it a religious component. If you’re against Putin that means you’re against the Orthodox church. You can sneer at this formulation all you want, but it makes Putin’s power more stable. The hatred being cultivated in Russian society will become a source of legitimacy for Putin.

Nadya, Katya and Masha’s closing speeches from the trial, translated into English by Sasha Dugdale (a poet) and read out at the Royal Court yesterday, are the statements – among other things – of artists. A host of Russian writers and artists are cited, including (in Masha’s testimonial) Joseph Brodsky, in his famous trial in 1963:

I am extremely angered by the phrase ‘so-called’ which the State Prosecutor uses to refer to contemporary art. I would like to draw attention to the fact that during the trial of Brodsky exactly the same phrase was used. His poems were referred to as ‘so-called poetry’, and the witnesses hadn’t even read them. Just as a number of our witnesses had not actually seen what had happened.

in Berlin

Nadya, the beautiful firebrand revolutionary, is a writer of reach and power – and a thinker like Emma Goldman, the small, powerful woman who told Lenin where to get off. Emma Goldman who was invited back from America by the leader to witness the great Soviet experiment, fearlessly told him it wasn’t good enough because there was no contraception, and went back to America. Nadya references Solzhenitsyn and other dissident writers, including an absurdist poet called Vvedensky:

Just as the oberiu (absurdist) poets remained artists to the very end, although they were purged in 1937. One of them, Aleksandr Vvedensky, wrote ‘The incomprehensible gives us pleasure, the inexplicable is our friend’. The official version is that he died on 20 December 1941, the cause unknown, perhaps dysentery in a cattle truck, or a guard’s bullet. The place: somewhere on a railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. PUSSY RIOT are students and disciples of Vvedensky, his ‘bad rhyme’ principle seems natural to us. He wrote ‘it sometimes happens that two rhymes come to mind, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one, because that’s the exactly right one.’ The oberiu poets proved with the loss of their own lives, that a sense of meaninglessness suited the ‘nerve’ of that time. The price of this proof, of participating in the creation of history, is always out of proportion, always too great. But in it, and in this participating is all the salt of our existence. To be a pauper and yet to make others rich, to have nothing, and yet possess it all.

Alexander Vvedevsky: dead at 36

I’m pretty sure that in previous statements she mentioned Mandelstam, too.

Strangely, this ties in tangentially with a mini-online-workshop I’m quickly putting together this weekend, on the ability to work through questions rather than answers. (See here for more details, but hurry; it starts on Monday.) I’ve been thinking a lot about Keats’ principle, mentioned only once in a letter to his brother Tom, of Negative Capability. The idea that – well, but no, I don’t want to start talking in generalist ideas. Here’s what he said:

…it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.

Sometimes you just have to work with what you’ve got, and that, in abundance, is what Nadya, Masha and Katya did, and what the other equally heroic Pussy Riot members are doing now. (One of the most powerful statements this week was their interview: ‘We are anonymous and there are many of us’.) (And no, it doesn’t matter if you don’t like their music or if you’re shocked by their antics in a church. You were meant to be shocked.

I can’t really add much. There is lots of awful, horrible stuff going on in the world. this week. But this is big news from Russia, andto know more about it, read:

Padraig Reidy in the New Statesman

Interview and background, from Miriam Elder, whose tweets from the trial have been amazing throughout

Index on Censorship on the ‘country of women’

And of course, the Free Pussy Riot website: tons of info and material