The Making of the Moscow Nightingale
More vibrant than myth. Louder than legend. It's a car alarm in the tree. The whirring of trolley-bus cables. It starts as an underground stream, utters cosmic sounds. And then it shows.
It happened one May, with the poplar trees releasing the pungent smell of early green through Moscow's courtyards. I was out walking with A. We were caught up in a mood when it seems there's no more to know, when the city itself is caught up in a state of stasis like the desert in the Soviet-era film, Kin-Dza-Dza. Drier than the desert of Kin-Dza-Dza. We could have walked those streets to dust, and still found nothing that we were looking for. Then, suddenly, A stopped, and told me to listen. There, open-throated before us, was the nightingale. If he hadn't drawn my attention to it, I wouldn't have known what it was. It didn't seem possible that this strange, loud sound was the nightingale: that bird which seemed to belong elsewhere, alongside the dodo and Alice's flamingo.
But here it was, a modern misfit in the centre of Moscow: a tiny, brown, mouse-like creature, singing despite it all, shaking every fibre to produce its call for another, summoning as much power as is needed to out-shout the background noise. On Pushkin Square, alongside an atomic-neon flashing flower and four lanes of Land Rovers, it was belting out its song.
From that moment on, the nightingale became my sweet obsession. I would seek it out in the early green underleaf canopy of the German cemetery where its song rang out with a clear resonance, or in the Sculpture Garden of fallen Soviet statues alongside Stalin with no nose, Lenin missing his middle.
They'd never heard anything like it back home. When I played them my recordings of the nightingale's song, they were as astonished as if I'd brought back proof of the last unicorn. A tiny brown miracle of sound: that very creature that sung in Berkeley Square, that lulled Keats in his dreams of sweet death…
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Poets have been drawn to nightingales throughout the ages, the resultant tradition cumulating in what is now a classic image of sorrow and longing: Keats' nightingale. His is seemingly such a constant bird, standing remarkably steady in the ever-changing gaze and surroundings of the onlooker,
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown…
It seems to be true of all birds in poetry - whatever the reaction they evoke - that they must stand, timeless, in that most inspiring of elements: temporality. The passage of the year, remembrances, the ages of humankind - Romanticism, Modernism - wherever they happen to find themselves. Or perhaps, rather than standing timeless, they work to concentrate time around them, setting up pockets of heightened temporality like Edward Thomas's thrush, causing 'All that's ahead and behind' to flare the brighter, yet always remaining separate from it. Even when a particular bird's mortality is all too clear, such as Hardy's 'frail, gaunt, and small' thrush singing at the century's close, this flaring of time, a hint of eternity, is present in its 'joy illimited'.
And they often seem to be saying 'look ahead'. Even though we may no longer look to them for signs of the future, present-day birds still augur. They augur through the watcher, the poet, and together they tell us of what's to come, maybe just a second, a few lines, later. As in a recent poem by Jennie Feldman where the bulbul that 'doubts its song today' pre-empts the poet's doubt of her own song some moments later.[1] Such birds become points of light, crystals, refracting moments of the onlooker's world. Through poems about them we see the person who's looking; and we may even see beyond into poems that came before. The closer the poet looks, the clearer that crystal becomes. This is the alchemy of the moment, mixing observation, recollection, and the imagination.
Another important ingredient is knowledge. Birds in poetry are often measured for their knowledge against that of the onlooker. It might be something the bird knows: the thrush's 'cause for carolings' that remains hidden from Hardy, Shelley's desire to share 'half the gladness' of the skylark. Or something that the poet knows, but of which the bird is blissfully unaware, such as with Keats in his longing to join the nightingale where he can forget suffering and death: 'What thou amongst the leaves hast never known'.
Unlike Keats' or Hardy's birds, the Moscow nightingale did not fill me with Romantic longing to escape and join it, or with a post-Romantic sense of never being able to know its reason for hope - Hardy's 'ache of modernism'. It fired my imagination with the reality against which it was singing. It was a call to arms - a far cry from the nightingale-poet that Shelley describes in his 'Defence of Poetry': 'A Poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.' For a start, my nightingale was a bird of the daytime. Rather than sorrow and sleep, the Moscow nightingale brought boldness and wakefulness.
A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, wrote Keats in a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse, but most delightfully redirected to Fanny Brawne in the 2009 film Bright Star.
I might re-work this to say that the Moscow nightingale is the most un-nightingale-like of birds. It is the most unpastoral, non-languor-inducing, unsorrowful of birds, bearing little resemblance to those qualities that legend and hearsay might cast its way. When I first saw it, half shrouded in scraps of myth and symbolism, it seemed very much out of place, out of time. But like Keats' unpoetical poet, it didn't seem to have much reverence for itself - unconcerned with protecting that privacy that nature books would ascribe to it. And it didn't seem to require the sound recordist's hushed longing for a glimpse, just a glimpse. There, in the middle of noisy daytime Moscow, blasting its presence heroically through the traffic, it had a startling effect on me. It was no more just a bird of legend and metaphor, but one of reality, and its effect was to bring me to myself. I was more in life.
What was this bird doing waking me up rather than lulling me to sleep? Perhaps this was something to do with ornithological classification: a few years after my first encounter, I discovered that it was not quite the same bird that had inspired Keats, but a very close relative. His was luscinia megarhynchos, or the Common Nightingale; while the Moscow nightingale is luscinia luscinia (itself seemingly twice over), or the Thrush Nightingale, as we call it. But in Russian it is called the Common Nightingale, while they call the one to be found in England the Southern or Western Nightingale. So they are both 'common' nightingales in the eyes of their respective summertime homes. (To Russians, though, the bird is much more common a sound to hear in the countryside - there it is at the opening of the pagan festivities in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, or go mid-May to Tolstoy's estate, Yasnaya Polyana, to be kept awake all night by them…) But perhaps the English name for this bird, the Thrush Nightingale, can lead us to the wake-up call that I heard there, for it is Keats' thrush, not his nightingale, that trills: 'He's awake who thinks himself asleep' (in the sonnet 'O thou whose face hath felt the Winter's wind'). Thrush nightingale so be it.
Does it matter that all this time I had been in thrall to something that was not quite what I thought it was, not quite a nightingale after all? To Russians, it is just the solovei, the 'nightingale', and so it was to me. I was of course very much looking at the bird through English eyes, with faint strains of English poetry and legend echoing there. But this is a Russian bird. I needed to seek out the nightingale in Russian poetry.
When my searches brought me repeatedly to Pasternak and his nightingales, I was delighted in the way that one is when a private obsession, the merest spark of an idea, suddenly arrive at the party a little late - but are glad to be there all the same. On first reading Pasternak's poem 'Definition of Poetry' (1922), I knew I had found my Moscow nightingale. This was not just because of the bold metaphor equating once and for all the nightingale's song and poetry (he describes poetry as the duelling of two nightingales), but I was also captured by the irrepressible artillery fire of sound, the bubbling rise of language, that runs throughout. And then Mandelstam's essay 'Notes on Poetry', in which he praises Pasternak, made the connection complete for me: here he says that the true Russian language and poetry (freed from its Byzantine, monastic restraints) is like the nightingale's song. It's all in the consonants: Russian poetry is full of consonants, which whir, jug and whistle through it. And in Pasternak's poetry he finds: a whistling (svist), jugging (shchelkanye), rustling (shelesteniye), crackling (sverkaniye), plashing (plesk), fullness of sound, fullness of life, images and feelings that overflow with unparalleled force… I include the Russian words for the sounds of the nightingale here so the consonants can be heard. This was not only where I found described to my satisfaction the energy and boldness of the Moscow nightingale, but where a new connection was made: between the nightingale and Russian language itself.
I have been shifting here between the metaphorical and the real. Let's suppose they are one and the same thing. Isn't this what poets do? Create a world and speak as if these things were real? Isn't the nightingale just there for the taking? Or is it there for the making? But before I could make it into meaning, that is, metaphor, it captured me - right at the time when I was finally becoming more fluent in Russian, more open to its consonants, and when I was hearing more clearly my own, often doubted, song above the background roar.
Once, in Moscow, I heard the nightingale. It was pointed out to me. And then I always looked for it. Moscow was a desert, and the nightingale sang a bubbling stream of creativity up from the dust. Sometimes it is enough to speak literally (no venn diagrams needed). Directly then. Or: there are moments when things equate. The nightingale erupted out of Moscow, and it equated to something in me. There it was: apart from the crowd, dashing under the lilac bushes through the dust of the streets. It even gave me the answer to those half-formed questions I had: be bold. Do birds always give us what we need? An exit strategy or a way back into life? Spots of such dense being in the world, they attract the poet's eye, accumulating meaning as the gaze passes over them. But they remain light and free, no matter what burdensome things poets project their way. The bird as gift to the poet. Make of it what you will.
Does it matter that all this time I had been in thrall to something that was not quite what I thought it was, not quite a nightingale after all? To Russians, it is just the solovei, the 'nightingale', and so it was to me. I was of course very much looking at the bird through English eyes, with faint strains of English poetry and legend echoing there. But this is a Russian bird. I needed to seek out the nightingale in Russian poetry.
When my searches brought me repeatedly to Pasternak and his nightingales, I was delighted in the way that one is when a private obsession, the merest spark of an idea, suddenly arrive at the party a little late - but are glad to be there all the same. On first reading Pasternak's poem 'Definition of Poetry' (1922), I knew I had found my Moscow nightingale. This was not just because of the bold metaphor equating once and for all the nightingale's song and poetry (he describes poetry as the duelling of two nightingales), but I was also captured by the irrepressible artillery fire of sound, the bubbling rise of language, that runs throughout. And then Mandelstam's essay 'Notes on Poetry', in which he praises Pasternak, made the connection complete for me: here he says that the true Russian language and poetry (freed from its Byzantine, monastic restraints) is like the nightingale's song. It's all in the consonants: Russian poetry is full of consonants, which whir, jug and whistle through it. And in Pasternak's poetry he finds: a whistling (svist), jugging (shchelkanye), rustling (shelesteniye), crackling (sverkaniye), plashing (plesk), fullness of sound, fullness of life, images and feelings that overflow with unparalleled force… I include the Russian words for the sounds of the nightingale here so the consonants can be heard. This was not only where I found described to my satisfaction the energy and boldness of the Moscow nightingale, but where a new connection was made: between the nightingale and Russian language itself.
I have been shifting here between the metaphorical and the real. Let's suppose they are one and the same thing. Isn't this what poets do? Create a world and speak as if these things were real? Isn't the nightingale just there for the taking? Or is it there for the making? But before I could make it into meaning, that is, metaphor, it captured me - right at the time when I was finally becoming more fluent in Russian, more open to its consonants, and when I was hearing more clearly my own, often doubted, song above the background roar.
Once, in Moscow, I heard the nightingale. It was pointed out to me. And then I always looked for it. Moscow was a desert, and the nightingale sang a bubbling stream of creativity up from the dust. Sometimes it is enough to speak literally (no venn diagrams needed). Directly then. Or: there are moments when things equate. The nightingale erupted out of Moscow, and it equated to something in me. There it was: apart from the crowd, dashing under the lilac bushes through the dust of the streets. It even gave me the answer to those half-formed questions I had: be bold. Do birds always give us what we need? An exit strategy or a way back into life? Spots of such dense being in the world, they attract the poet's eye, accumulating meaning as the gaze passes over them. But they remain light and free, no matter what burdensome things poets project their way. The bird as gift to the poet. Make of it what you will.