channel is its qualitative transformation, which leads to the reformation of the “I” itself.ii In the first instance, the addresser transmits a message to someone else, the addressee, and remains unchanged in the course of the act. In the second, in broadcasting to himself, he reforms his own essence internally, insofar as one can regard one’s personal essence as one’s individual store of socially meaningful codes, and here this store of codes changes in the process of the communicative act.
A message’s transmission through the “I—I” channel has no immanent character, insofar as it is conditioned by the encroachment of certain additional codes from outside and by the presence of external shocks that shift the contextual situation.
A typical example would be the effect of metered sounds (the beat of wheels turning; rhythmic music) on a person’s interior monologue. One could name a whole range of artistic texts in which rich and unbridled fantasy is conditioned by the metered rhythms of riding on horseback (Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” a number of poems from Heine’s Lyrical Intermezzo), the rocking of a ship (Fyodor Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” [Son na more]), the rhythms of the railroad (Mikhail Glinka’s “Travelling Song” [Poputnaia pesnia], with words by Nestor Kukolnik).
Let us consider Tyutchev’s “Dream upon the Sea” from this perspective:
Dream upon the Sea
Both sea and the storm held our bark in its sway;
And, sleepy, I felt at the whim of each wave.
Infinitudes two I possessed deep within,
And they made of me a most trifling thing.
So like cymbals, around me, the rock cliffs did crash,
The swells singing their part, the winds answering back.
And I in the chaos of sound lay there stunned,
But then over the chaos of sound came my dream.
A shock to behold, and yet magically mute,
O’er fulminous mist it plotted its route.
In feverish rays it unfolded its world,
The green earth grew greener as the ether glowed,
Circuitous gardens, rich halls, colonnades,
Assemblages seething in unspeaking crowds.
And many a stranger’s new face I observed,
Saw sorcerous creatures, mysterious birds,
On the heights of creation, like God, I did tread,
And the world underneath me still shone, as if dead.
But like sorcerers’ howling, in these reveries,
I hearkened the rumbling of unfathomed seas,
And visions and dreams, all my quiet domain
Was breached by the swells and the blasting of foam.3
И море, и буря качали наш челн;
Я, сонный, был предан всей прихоти волн.
Две беспредельности были во мне,
И мной своевольно играли оне.
Вкруг меня, как кимвалы, звучали скалы́,
Окликалися ветры и пели валы.
Я в хаосе звуков лежал оглушен,
Но над хаосом звуков носился мой сон.
Болезненно-яркий, волшебно-немой,
Он веял легко над гремящею тьмой.
В лучах огневицы развил он свой мир –
Земля зеленела, светился эфир,
Сады-лавиринфы, чертоги, столпы,
И сонмы кипели безмолвной толпы.
Я много узнал мне неведомых лиц,
Зрел тварей волшебных, таинственных птиц,
По высям творенья, как бог, я шагал,
И мир подо мною недвижный сиял.
Но все грезы насквозь, как волшебника вой,
Мне слышался грохот пучины морской,
И в тихую область видений и снов
Врывалася пена ревущих валов.
We are not interested here in that aspect of the poem that is connected with what is for Tyutchev an essential juxtaposition (“Thought upon thought, wave upon wave” [Duma za dumoi, volna za volnoi]) or the opposition (“A melody found in the waves of the sea” [Pevuchest′ est′ v morskikh volnakh]) between the life of the soul, on the one hand, and the sea, on the other.
Insofar as the text is evidently rooted in a real experience—the recollection of a four-day storm in September 1833, as he was voyaging around the Adriatic—it interests us as a monument to the author’s psychological self-observation (one can hardly deny the legitimacy of such an approach to the text, among others).
The poem lays out two components of the author’s spiritual state: the soundless dream and the storm’s metrical roar. The latter is marked in the original by the unexpected insertion of an anapestic line into an amphibrachic text:
So like cymbals, around me, the rock cliffs did crash,
The swells singing their part, the winds answering back …
But then over the chaos of sound came my dream …
But like sorcerers’ howling, in these reveries …
The anapestic lines are devoted to the rumbling of the storm, and the two symmetrical verses beginning with “but” portray the dream erupting through the storm’s noise, or else the noise of the storm erupting through the dream. The verse dedicated to the philosophical
