Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

Author: Jessica Laser

Publisher: Letter Machine Editions (2019)

There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly broken down in tears of joy in front of the state council, trying to read aloud a commendatory letter from the sovereign that began, “Sergei Kuzmich! From all sides rumors reach me…” Those not involved in falling in love at the party laugh, appearing involved in this gossip, but, as Tolstoy describes it, “no matter how indifferent or inattentive to them they seemed, the feeling for some reason was…that the anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich, and the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and all the power of attention of the entire company was directed only at this couple.”

Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides takes a poem to be a kind of pretense, an “anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich,” the thing we say when we can’t talk about being in love. And we can never talk about being in love, because, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says, “it is not the kind of thing that can be known (it isn’t information).” These poems aim to reach beyond information—to speak from where Sergei Kuzmich leaves off—in order to give voice to the kinds of experience that, to become knowable, require the pretense of art.