Russian Modernism: The Transfiguration of the Everyday (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature)

This book explores the unique way in which Russian culture constructs the notion of everyday life, or byt, and offers the first unified reading of Silver-age narrative which it repositions at the center of Russian modernism. Drawing on semiotics and theology, Stephen C. Hutchings argues that byt emerged from a dialogue between two traditions, one reflected in western representational aesthetics for which daily existence figures as neutral and normative, the other encapsulated in the Orthodox emphasis on iconic embodiment. Hutchings identifies early "Decadent" formulations of byt as a milestone after which writers from Chekhov to Rozanov sought to affirm the iconic potential hidden in Russian realism's critique of representationalism. Provocative, yet careful, textual analyses reveal a consistent urge to redefine art's function as one not of representing life, but of transfiguring the everyday.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

RUSSIAN MODERNISM

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE General editor GATRIONA KELLY Editorial board: ANTHONY GROSS, GARYL EMERSON, HENRY GIFFORD, BARBARA HELDT, MALCOLM JONES, DONALD RAYFIELD, G. S. SMITH, VICTOR TERRAS

Recent titles in this series include Nikolai ^jabolatsky DARRA GOLDSTEIN

Nietzsche and Soviet Culture edited by BERNIGE GLATZER ROSENTHAL Wagner and Russia ROSAMUND BARTLETT

Russian literature and empire Conquest of the Caucasusfrom Pushkin to Tolstoy SUSAN LAYTON

Jews in Russian literature after the October Revolution Writers and artists between hope and apostasy EFRAIM SIGHER

Contemporary Russian satire: a genre study KAREN L. RYAN-HAYES

Gender and Russian literature: new perspectives edited by ROSALIND MARSH The last Soviet avant-garde: OBERIU -fact, fiction, metafiction GRAHAM ROBERTS

Literary journals in imperial Russia edited by DEBORAH A. MARTINSEN A complete list of books is this series is given at the end of the volume.

RUSSIAN MODERNISM The transfiguration of the everyday

STEPHEN C. HUTCHINGS University of Surrey

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 IRP, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Stephen C. Hutchings 1997 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 Typeset in Baskerville no. 2 11/12 V2 A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Hutchings, Stephen C. Russian modernism: the transfiguration of the everyday / Stephen C. Hutchings. p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in Russian literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o 521 58009 9 (hardback) 1. Russian fiction - 19th century - History and criticism. 2. Russian fiction - 20th century - History and criticism. 3. Manners and customs in literature. 4. Modernism (Literature) - Russia. 5. Modernism (Literature) - Soviet Union. 1. Title. 11. Series. PG3096.M35H88 1997 - dc2i 97-7025 CIP ISBN o 521 58009 9 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2004

For Marian

[T]he world is wide and yet . . . like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars. (Georg Lukacs)

Contents

Acknowledgments

page xi

Note on transliteration, citation and translation Introduction

xiii i

PART ONE

1 2

Narrative and the everyday: myth, image, sign, icon, life

13

The development of byt in nineteenth-century Russian literature

44

PART TWO

3

Enacting the present: Chekhov, art and the everyday

83

4

Fedor Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess

no

PART THREE

5 6

The struggle with byt in Belyi's Kotik Letaev and The Christened Chinaman Breaking the circle of the self: Vasilii Rozanov's discourse of pure intimacy

IX

141 168

x 7

Contents At the " I " of the storm: the iconic self in Remizov's Whirlwind Russia Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

194 220 235 278 289

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book arose from the discovery of what I now see to be a vital connection between three fields of interest that I had previously assumed to be quite discrete: the somewhat technical matter of peculiarities in the way that Russian symbolist novels deal with "temporal framing" (put simply, the relationship between past-time events and the present-time perspective from which they are narrated), broad reflections on the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary theories of signs, and a fascination with the theme of routine life in modern Russian fiction. In tracing the sometimes tortuous paths of confluence linking these areas, I have benefitted from the work of numerous scholars, all of whom are acknowledged in the notes. My own work owes much to contact of a more personal nature with a number of people to whom I am immensely grateful. Avril Pyman (whose scintillating lectures on Blok at Durham University first sparked my interest in the Silver Age) commented upon an early draft of the book, allowing me to gain from her deep understanding of Russian modernist culture and challenging me to rethink some of my most cherished precepts. Amy Mandelker's meticulous critique of a second draft, penetrating insights into the foundations of semiotic theory and willingness to split important theological hairs with me, were stimulating beyond measure. Brenda Meehan demonstrated an inimitable capacity for administering firm (but constructive) criticism and uplifting (yet sincere) praise in a single dose; the afternoons I spent at her house, exploring the richness of Russian Orthodox thought over endless glasses of XI

xii

Acknowledgments

iced tea are among the most pleasurable memories of the period during which this project seemed, for better and for worse, to fill my entire life. I am very grateful to Caryl Emerson who read several chapters, offered consistent (and much needed) encouragement and shared with me some of her own profound thinking about the writings of Chekhov and Rozanov. I would also like to thank Bernice Rosenthal, David Gillespie, Andrew Barratt, Peter Barta and Liudmila Iezuitova for their useful comments on portions of the book, and Olga MuUer-Cooke for initiating me into the arcane rituals of the Andrei Belyi Society - a development which culminated in the writing of chapter 5. Without the research leave granted me in Spring 1994 by the University of Rochester, this project would undoubtedly still be languishing on the drawing-board. A faculty seminar, sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the same university and at which I presented my initial conclusions, was extremely beneficial. Travel grants from the British Academy, the University of Rochester and the University of Surrey enabled me to attend conferences and give papers based on the drafts to various chapters. There is not room to thank the many (and, sadly, anonymous) individuals whose spontaneous responses to these papers often clarified points over which I had labored for months. The research that now forms the basis of chapter 6 was first published in Slavic Review, 52, 1 (Spring 1993), 67-86. A substantially amended variant on chapter 4 appeared in Modern Languages Review, 91, 3 (July 1996), 655-76. An early version of chapter 5 can be found in the Andrei Belyi Society Newsletter 12

(1994-95), 29-84. I thank these journals for permission to reproduce this material. I am grateful, too, to my editors at Cambridge University Press, in particular to Katharina Brett who went to considerable trouble to advocate the book in its current form, and to Linda Bree for her patient and reassuring responses to a barrage of queries that often betrayed a mix of the paranoid and the pointless. By far my largest debt of gratitude is owed to my wife, whose grasp of the luminous significance of the everyday is, on every level, unsurpassed. I dedicate the book to her.

Note on transliteration, citation and translation

In transliterating from Russian into English, I have adhered to the Library of Congress Transliteration System, except where custom has persistently favoured an alternative spelling. In such cases, I have opted for the more familiar English-language version (for example, ccDostoyevsky" instead of "Dostoevskii," "Tolstoy" instead of "Tolstoi," "Gogol" instead of "Gogol'"). Because this book is intended for specialist Russian-speakers and nonspecialists alike, quotations are given in English, with transliterated Russian supplied in brackets only where absolutely necessary, and to specify a particular intent not adequately conveyed by the English. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Russianlanguage texts are my own.

xni

Introduction

The trivia and atoms of life past have been studied to exhaustion and their final poet has been given to us . . . If not Chekhov, that last bard of decomposing trivia, then surely someone will show us a way out other than Moscow and old galoshes? . . . Surely Chekhov is not art's end-point? (Zinaida Gippius, 1904) What is there left to express? Cobwebs, sighs, the last elusive thing . . . From that point of view I am finishing literature and have finished it. (Vasilii Rozanov, 1915)1

In this book I treat what I identify as an epistemological conflict at the core of Russian literary conceptions of the everyday. I will introduce my theme through two brief examples from the Russian literary canon. I begin, however, with a scene from a French classic. In an episode from Flaubert's Madame Bovary the unhappy heroine is taken to the Rouen opera by an unsuspecting husband in an effort to hasten her recovery from a nervous illness suffered in the wake of her cynical abandonment by Rodolphe, her seducer. Flaubert juxtaposes the mundane, petit bourgeois prattle of the subscribers with the undulating emotions of Emma Bovary. Struggling to persuade herself of the mismatch between the dramatic peripetiae of the romantic novels she reads and the dreariness of the provincial reality imprisoning her, Emma sees in the operatic scene played out in front of her a depiction of her own life as it should have been: "All her attempts at denigration evaporated before the poetry of the

2

Russian modernism

singer's role which envelopped her and, drawn towards the real man by the illusion of the character. . . she longed to rush into his arms and seek refuge in his strength." 2 Flaubert's emphasis on the contrast between fictional illusion and the mundane realities of the provincial quagmire is temporarily undermined when Emma's musical fantasy is displaced by the ccreal-life" reappearance after a long absence of Monsieur Leon, her first admirer. With Leon's help, Madame Bovary rejoins the adulterous path to ruin which provides the novel with its linear trajectory. The operatic sequence highlights a contradiction in which literary plot plays the dual role of the false background against which the (realistic) action of the novel is perceived, and the model which each twist in that action follows. On one hand, it provides a foil to the sense of sameness which makes Emma's life seem all too real. On the other hand, precisely as a consequence of the "real life=stasis, fiction=eventfulness" equation, it offers the only standard against which to measure the change necessary to ensure that this life constitutes a story. The contradiction is resolved in two ways. First, Flaubert's knowing irony safely removes him from his heroine's cliched behaviour, facilitating the reassertion of reality over art. Secondly, by weaving together the rhythms of Emma's everyday routine with those of her adulterous affairs, the author reveals that the essence of provincial reality is to be discerned not in complete stasis, but in the patterned integration of (plotless) repetition and (plot-like) change. The pattern is that of the "moeurs deprovince" which provide the novel's subtitle, inscribing it within the realist canon. In Emma's operatic outing, then, we find images of the aesthetic deployed against the background of everyday reality in the interests of furthering the ability of representational narrative to integrate stasis with change, verisimilitude with readability. I will suggest that this three-way convergence is endemic in western narrative art from Cervantes to Joyce. What of our Russian examples? In Chekhov's story "The Kiss" ("Potselui"), all three components are present. There is a story to be told, an everyday reality to be depicted, and a set of

Introduction

3

cliched images with which to contrast it. An outline of the narrative seems to confirm its adherence to the model. A soldier on duty in the provinces attempts to create from a kiss mistakenly planted on his lips at a military soiree an amorous liaison. His efforts to imagine the identity of his mysterious "admirer" and the future development of the "affair" are based on images gleaned from literary romance. Not surprisingly, the affair does not materialize. The soldier is left gloomily contemplating the dull realities of his existence. There is, however, a subtle difference. In Madame Bovary, the encounter between art and the everyday is managed such that the terms emerge mutually enriched. In its narrative guise, we conclude, art embraces repetition as well as change. In its essential rhythms, meanwhile, everyday reality transpires to be as engaging as any other kind of reality. "The Kiss," by contrast, ensures mutual contamination. Because of a curious case of collusion between "narration" and "narrated," provincial life acquires the features of a pointless anecdote, while art adopts the humdrum inconsequentiality of provincial life. The notion of reality as a mediocre story permeates "The Kiss" and is brought out in a Chekhovian version of mise en abime. Shortly after the incident that is the focus of Chekhov's off-center tale, the hero attempts to relate the details to his comrades. The resulting story is a miniature of its containing narrative — an off-center piece of trivia which, in Cathy Popkin's words, strikes its audience as barely "worth telling": "A strange thing happened to me at the von Rabbeks5," he began, imparting to his words an indifferent, mocking tone. "I went off to the pool room, see" . . . He began describing very minutely the story of the kiss, and a moment later fell silent . . . Listening to him, Lobytko, who was a great liar and so never believed anyone, looked at him doubtfully and laughed.3 A routine consisting of dull rituals and inconsequential marginalia such as the kiss generates a mockery of the plotting necessary for good narrative. The hero soon discovers that the only way that even he might make sense of things is to embellish the occurrence with romantic images: "[H]e would close his eyes and see himself with another, entirely unfamiliar girl . . .

4

Russian modernism

In his imagination he talked, caressed her, leaned over her shoulder, pictured war, separation, then meeting again, supper with his wife, children." 4 To further underline the difference between the reality of poorly plotted truth and the falsity of good plot, Riabovich's abortive attempt to relate his adventure is juxtaposed with the fulsome account of the liar, Lobytko: "I was going to Kovno last year. . . the carriage was crammed . . . I lay down and covered myself with a blanket . . . It was dark you see. Suddenly I felt someone touch me on the shoulder... I opened my eyes and just imagine — a woman. Black eyes, lips red as fresh salmon, nostrils breathing passionately - a bosom like a buffer."5 Throughout, Chekhov maintains the distinction between a world of romantic images and fabricated anecdotes, and one of insignificant trivia and unchanging ordinariness. Rather than being cleanly delineated from the inauthenticity of art, this "real world" is instead incestuously assimilated to it as its mirror image. Chekhov's own account of Riabovich's life consists of a monotonous catalogue of insignificant trivia and dreary routines: And before him on the road were nothing but long, familiar, uninteresting scenes . . . To right and left, fields of young rye and buckwheat with rooks hopping about in them . . . The vanguard and the singers, like torch-bearers in a funeral parade, often forgot to keep the correct distance . . . To Riabovich it was all perfectly comprehensible and therefore uninteresting . . . Riabovich knew that, of the horses on which they rode, those on the left were called one thing, while those on the right were called another - it was all very uninteresting6 [Italics added] By underscoring the tedium of these trivia, Chekhov induces reality to equate itself with the subversion of its own narration. One important difference between Chekhov's "The Kiss" and Riabovich's account is that while the latter peters out, the former rambles on before dissipating. This is because Chekhov's narrative must convey both aspects of Riabovich's life - the boringly repetitious and the inconsequentially transient, while Riabovich focusses purely on the latter. The difference between Chekhov and Flaubert follows from this. Flaubert integrates incident and routine into a pattern that

Introduction

5

simultaneously renews the claims of everyday life to narrativity and reinforces art's claims to representational authenticity. (The "trick" is to assimilate one's plots to a rhythm which seems new and significant, yet instantly recognizable.) Chekhov combines incident and routine in an unintegrated medley which leaves both life and art looking like a lousy anecdote the very image with which Riabovich leaves us: "The water was running, he did not know where or why, just as in May. . . And the whole world, the whole of life struck Riabovich as an unintelligible, aimless joke." 7 It is also the frustrating note on which Chekhov ends when, taunting his readers one last time with the deflating rhythms of anti-narrative, he presents Riabovskii with the chance to renew his amorous quest, only to remove it and stop where he started - with a non-adventure: "The orderly informed them that they had all gone to 'General Fontriabkin who had sent a messenger on horseback to invite them . . . ' For a moment there was a flash ofjoy in Riabovich's heart, but he extinguished it at once, got into bed, and, in spite at his fate, as though to annoy it, did not go to the General's."8 The way in which reality becomes ingrained with the attributes of "bad" art characterizes Chekhov's variant on the encounter within narrative of daily life and the aesthetic. But the symbiotic intertwining of anti-narrative and reality is not exclusive to Chekhov. My final example takes us into the lurid world of Russian Decadence and reveals the extent to which, in less than a generation, the phenomenon had taken hold, developing a momentum of its own. Close to the denouement of Fedor Sologub's novel, The Petty Demon, the author depicts a riotous town masquerade. What we find in this scene is tantamount to a meta-textual enstaging of the process which had, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, bound the antithetical categories of everyday life and artistic cliche ever more disconcertingly together. The enstaging occurs on two levels, causing the process to acquire personified form, then to be reenacted as metadrama. First, the characters whose petty actions Sologub chooses in order to typify the unremitting provincial torpor pervading the novel, appear at the masquerade dressed up as grotesque misrepresentations of artistic conceits and mytholo-

6

Russian modernism

gical figures: Night, a she-bear, the classical deities, an AncientGerman warrior. The licentious dress and behaviour of the vulgar gossip, Grushina not only fails to generate an artistic rendition of the goddess Diana, it produces a ribald caricature: Grushina had the idea to dress up as Diana. Varvara laughed and asked: - So are you going to put on a collar? - Why do I need a collar? - What do you mean? You've managed to get yourself up as the Dog Dianka . . . It's a little bare, isn't it? Grushina replied, winking insolently: - Yes, but that way I'll get all the men following me.9 Also present is an embodiment of everyday life's antithetical twin: bonafide, artful plot. This takes the form of an androgynous boy who, in an exquisite subterfuge, has been disguised as a geisha by a hedonistic aesthete named Liudmila. Sologub thus engineers a full-scale physical battle between the everyday and the aesthetic. On winning the prize for best female costume, the geisha is set upon by the unruly crowd of masqueraders who unceremoniously tear his costume from him: "[S]he threw herself on the geisha with a penetrating screech and clenching her dry fists. Others followed . . . A wild assault began. They broke her fan, tore it up and trampled it on the floor . . . Some vicious young man or other bit into the geisha\ sleeve and ripped it in half."10 Presenting itself as a wicked caricature of its nemesis, post-Chekhovian provincial routine attains its final victory — a literal unmasking of the mendacious aesthetics of good plot. This, in a Decadent novel wherein art supposedly reigns supreme! There is a final twist. The frenzied anger of the provincial crowd generates a wave of destructive energy which leads, paradoxically, to one of the novel's few "plot-like" events — the burning to the ground of the masquerade hall (site of art, the everyday, and "the everyday as artistic parody"). Moreover, the source of this incendiary catharsis is none other than Ardal'on Peredonov, the demon of provincial pettiness himself. Thus, for a brief moment, narrative is reinstated on a new footing, freed of both its aesthetic and its anti-aesthetic burdens - of the need

Introduction

7

to integrate art with everyday life (Flaubert), and the subversive impulse mutually to contaminate them (Chekhov). This reversal points fleetingly towards a reconfigurement of the triadic relationship pitting art against the everyday within narrative. The reconfigurement will provide my study with its focus. In order to characterize the nature of the realignment there is an intricate web to be disentangled. One thing will already be plain to those familiar with the examples adduced. Just as the economy we have been "plotting" plays itself out in unusual fashion in Russian fiction, so it will appear that its most important category is, here, misnamed. For we are dealing in both Russian examples with the articulation not of "everyday life" but of the virtually untranslatable phenomenon of byt ("routine existence," "way of life," "the humdrum"). I will argue that byt's array of negative connotations can be traced to the role I began to assign to it in Chekhov: that of referential "shadow" to a complex of anti-narrative strategies developed through nineteenth-century Russian prose. I set myself three tasks. The first is to account for the cultural formation and literary evolution of byt in the framework of the three-way model (art — the everyday — representational narrative) with which I began. One argument I make is that byfs inception as a culturally significant category can be traced to the Silver Age. My second goal is therefore to identify, through my analysis of byt, the specificity of Russia's contribution to European modernism. The very choice of Chekhov as a starting point suggests that byfs genesis has its roots deep in the nineteenth century. A third aim is thus to link the particular qualities of Silver-age prose to those of nineteenth-century Russian realism. Alexander Blok's rejection of "the poison of modernism" with its autonomous and therefore "dead" aesthetic objects in favour of an art that "irradiates" what is truly alive, amounts to much more than a call for the idiosyncratic dose of civic concern frequently cited as an ingredient in Russia's literary diet : "Art is a kind of radium. It is able to radioactivate anything, the heaviest, the crudest, the most ordinary things: thoughts, tendencies, 'experiences,' feelings, everyday life. It is only what is alive that may be irradiated,

8

Russian modernism

hence that which is crude; it is impossible to radioactivate that which is dead." 11 Blok appeals to a distinctive sensibility shared by all the practitioners of Russian modernist narrative and reflected in a long-standing Russian concern to integrate the aesthetic and the ethical in one category. The desire to define this sensibility unites all three goals. In accomplishing my aims, it is not my wish to deny western modernism's undoubtedly profound influence on its Russian counterpart - an influence comprehensively described in a volume edited by Peter Barta and Ulrich Goebel.12 The view underpinning this and other accounts is that an assessment of Russia's contribution to modernism should, in George Gibian's words, eschew the search for "priority or uniqueness."13 Such studies assume that, since Russian modernism's most celebrated achievements were in painting, poetry and architecture, any comparison with European trends should proceed by comparing qualities within and between these forms and the historical movements they generated. Implicit in my approach is the counter-assumption that cultures develop as organic wholes, that external influences are, when absorbed, subject to structural transformation, not merely cobbled together with native traditions, and that Russian modernism's salient qualities have therefore to be sought in the monumentalism of its nineteenthcentury civic culture which was prose-oriented and to which the "everyday" theme was crucial. I thus make no apologies for implying through the title of my book that, rather than playing second fiddle to poetry and the visual arts, prose narrative was at the cutting edge of Russian modernist culture.14 The method of analysis I employ draws on semiotics and narratology. It is, above all, informed by the conviction that Russian literature's anti-narrative impulse, its provocative and contradictory attitudes to the production of artistic meaning, arise from its problematic assimilation of western ways of knowing. Many of the distinguishing features of Russia's epistemological traditions find their clearest formulation in its religious thought. I should stress that I do not wish to present the Orthodox faith as the hermeneutic key to the "mystique" of some exoticized Slavic soul. Many of the writers I treat are far

Introduction

9

removed from Orthodoxy. Moreover, the fact that Russia has always been a willing receptacle for western influences of all kinds is central to my argument throughout. It is, however, from Orthodox theology that I derive an important component in my interpretative master-code as it is applied to the task of determining how these influences were transformed by the unquestionably foreign soil into which they were transplanted. It will be my contention that the tensions engendered by the conflict that Russian fiction expresses converge in a nexus located at the heart of byt. Though the phenomenon is hardly limited to the Silver Age, the twenty or so years of intense cultural activity that this period produced contains the defining cycle in its development. There is symbolic significance in the fact that Chekhov, dubbed the last realist, began his career writing the briefest of anecdotes from the realm of humdrum life, while Vasilii Rozanov and Aleksei Remizov, the endmarkers of Russian modernism's pre-revolutionary phase (and, if Rozanov is to be believed, of literature itself), attained their artistic peaks with the publication of fragmentary episodes from their daily routines. My argument will be conducted through close readings of works written at, and between, the two boundaries of this crucial segment in byt's history: Chekhov's stories, Sologub's The Petty Demon (part 11), and the autobiographical writings of Belyi, Rozanov and Remizov (part 111). Since my selection cuts across the boundaries dividing the familiar literary schools (realists, symbolists, neo-realists etc.), the appearance of the anti-narrative assault that is the hallmark of these works varies considerably, encompassing the deflationary rhythms of Belyi's prose, Rozanov's domestic fragments and Remizov's meandering collage documenting the grim exigencies of day-to-day survival in revolutionary Russia. With each writer, the drama of plot-subversion is accompanied by a sustained focus on the decidedly undramatic world of routine existence; hence Belyi's disorienting flitting between the mindbending cosmos of the Eternal and the banal comedy of the everyday, and Rozanov's agressive championing of the ordinary minutiae of life at home. As suggested by the example of Rozanov, these writers are

io

Russian modernism

interested not in the representation of byt, but in harnessing its anti-aesthetic force so as to exorcize its negative associations. Chekhov progressed from condemnation of provincial stagnation to celebration of the provincial beauty of the lady with the little dog. Sologub countered the grey monotony of byt with the vitality of myth. Belyi chose to invest byt with the cosmic (the apocalypse in a sardine can in Petersburg). Rozanov turns the tables on the nineteenth-century social critics by adopting the trivia of domestic existence as the badge of true authenticity. In order to construct a framework within which to broach these hypotheses more fully, and to lay the ground for the textual analyses in which they are to be tested, I begin with an introductory section consisting of two chapters. In chapter one, I propose in broad terms one way of understanding the central role of the concept of everyday life in the European cultural tradition. I then pinpoint a complex of factors integral to Russian culture which, in assimilating that role, simultaneously act to undercut it, and posit a set of critical tools appropriate for studying the resulting conflict. Chapter two provides an account of the early "fruits" of that conflict in nineteenthcentury Russian literature which doubles as a pre-history of byt. The study thus adopts a progressively narrowing focus - from general theory, through literary history to textual analysis before opening out in the conclusion to consider the unique convergence of aesthetics and politics that characterized the Russian revolutionary era, that time when, in the words of Remizov, u the whole of life was turned on its head and was with each day being uprooted . . . and . . . ordinary people . . . found themselves in the hardest situations and lived out their days at a pace that set the head spinning." 15

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Narrative and the everyday: myth, image, sign, icon, life

We who are set apart and different do not conceive life as like us; it is the normal, respectable and admirable that is the kingdom of our longing: life in all its seductive banality. __ w x (Thomas Mann) The Truth is the contemplation of the Self through the Other in a Third: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. (Pavel Florenskii)1

What is it about narrative which enables Flaubert to integrate artistic plot and provincial routine by drawing attention to the contrast between them? How do we explain the tendency of Russian narratives to subvert such integration? What is the new configuration of art, narrative and daily life that emerged in Russia's Silver Age? In discussing these questions, I rely on modifications of work by Iurii Lotman in two areas: his theory of plot, and his research in the semiotics of cultural history. The link is provided by a synthesis of notions taken from theories of the artistic sign, and from Orthodox theology. The first section of this chapter addresses the first question by examining how narrative logic accommodates itself to the logic of representation. I begin by highlighting the connection between representation and the example — the exemplary event distinct enough to appear to capture reality's essence, but sufficiently normative to be reintegrated with it. The connection will be explored via Lotman's theory of the two basic plot mechanisms — one called upon to record anomalies and singular occurrences, the other grounded in cyclical time 13

14

Russian modernism

and designed to reinforce norms. Lotman's theory presupposes the derivation of these mechanisms from a "primordial mythic nucleus . . . with one plot and one meaning" - a hypothetical moment when life and essence, anomaly and norm were united and, in Didier Coste's words there was no "rift of representation," no need for the proliferation of aesthetic signs associated with the modern era.2 Representational narrative can be shown to reserve a privileged status for notions of the everyday owing to its capacity for healing this rift between anomaly and norm, for providing the representative example, mediating between transient (signifier) and eternal (signified). The corollary of mediation is dualism - the artistic sign's need to establish both presence (identity with the reality whose meaning it reveals) and absence (difference from it). I will maintain that the "stretching out" of the everyday between two terminals — repetitious daily routine and patent fictionality — reflects such dualism. This section ends with an illustration of how fiction bolsters its representational work through a carefully manipulated oscillation between these poles. In the second section I take up Lotman's suggestion that eschatology marks the transition from myth to modern narrative. I draw on the explanatory force of the Christian eschatological concept of Christ as image, with its ability to enter into representational art's "rhetoric of absence."3 This ability accords with the privileging in European verbal art of static, visual constructs such as point of view, and in western thought of the disjunction of subject and object, self and other, particular and universal. I then point out differences in the Orthodox interpretation of the Christ story which posits Christ as icon. These differences derive from a system privileging mutual predication over dualism's mutual exclusion, participation and embodiment over mediation and abstraction, process over stasis, and the integration of, rather than disjunction between self and other, particular and universal. I suggest parallels linking this system to features of Russian cultural history that act to undercut everyday life's mediatory capacities. I end by describing a set of tools with which to explore the

Narrative and the everyday

15

dialogue between the two systems as enacted in modern Russian literature. FICTIONAL DAILY LIFE AND THE NARRATIVE SIGN

The links between art and representation can be traced to Plato's discussion of mimesis in The Republic. Though scholars have argued about the precise nature and implications of representation, few have questioned the role of imitation as a prime motivating force behind a long line of aesthetic movements.4 In narrative, the mimetic urge is actualized in the depiction of events that purport to be representative of "life in general." However, like all art, narrative must be selective. Incapable of transcribing history in every aspect, it chooses actions that stand out from the "run of events" as different and anomalous. It must then ensure that these actions are reintegrated into the undifferentiated background in a new synthesis which constitutes the story's reference point and meaning. (Narrative thus obeys an axiom which applies to all art: that representation deals in representative example rather than wholescale transcription. This is true even of the portrait of a specific individual which, to acquire aesthetic status, must stake some claim to universality.)5 Every narrative representation consists of happenings singular enough to justify the initial "once upon a time," yet repeatable enough to allow the reader to concur with the final "and so it is . . . " Lotman's account of literary plot proves helpful here. The two originary text-mechanisms from which, he suggests, early narratives evolved, equate to the "and so it is" and "once upon a time" requirements to which all fiction pays homage. Lotman identifies a central, mythic mechanism dealing with events which were "endlessly reproduced and . . . inherent to a certain position in a cycle" and a historic mechanism for dealing with "linear-temporal motion . . . and chance occurrences."6 The first was responsible for "statutory and normative texts" which fixed timeless laws and principles, while the second gave rise to chronicles and annals. The history of plot is "the fruit of the interaction . . . of these two typologically age-

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old kinds of text." 7 It is not a question of the gradual transition from mythic texts to linear-temporal texts. Even in the nineteenth-century novel, where the linear mechanism dominates, the mythic mechanism continues to exert an influence which manifests itself in the ' 'principle of typification" that nineteenth-century realism embodies. As Michel Zeraffa has written: "Ruled by a historical-chronological principle the novel . . . refuses repetitiveness, but it must accept it because of its mythic antecedents and references." 8 Lotman's theory also has an epistemological aspect. The two mechanisms are equivalent to timeless (and therefore intranscribable) truth and those false (but unique and therefore transcribable) incidents which illustrate how our lives accommodate themselves to it. A good novel is "false" on the level of the empirical verifiability of the incidents depicted, but "true" on that of the universal applicability of the principles which the incidents embody. In both aspects, fictional narrative bridges the chasm that is the consequence of a decline away from Lotman's "primordial nucleus."9 In myth, there is neither a temporal distinction between occurrence and cycle, nor a difference of truth-status between incident narrated and universal principle embodied. To ask "when" Persephone descended to Hades and "whether" she actually did so is to view myth through post-mythic eyes. Lotman's text mechanisms reflect the fragmentation which occurred after the decline (itself, of course, a mythic construct). Modern narrative recombines the two mechanisms, simultaneously embracing the normative and the anomalous, truth and fiction, thus mediating between the chronological realities of our post-mythic lives and the mythic principles from which they deviate. Didier Coste writes: "We can wonder whether a society where myth and life are one . . . could be aware of the rift of representation and whether it could cover it with the sealant . . . of fictionality, or . . . whether it would need narrative to weld together an unbroken time." 10 "Narrative" and "representation" meet in the notion of the narrative sign. Coste's rift is the rift of semiosis. It is, in a narrative context, the split that opens up between events and

Narrative and the everyday

17

their meanings which, instead of inhering in those events (Persephone's descent is the arrival of winter), is mediated by a sign denoting them (Persephone's descent means the arrival of winter). Elsewhere, Lotman argues that "there is an identification of word and referent . . . characteristic of mythological ideas." 11 In mythic plot, the hero is simultaneously an individual and the generality of mankind: "Ivan is Man." In postmythic, literary plot the hero is an individual character whose actions signify (represent) the generality of mankind at another level of abstraction: "Ivan is a man" referring to Man in general.12 The linking of signifier to signified which constitutes the narrative sign can thus be seen in a separation out and subsequent reintegration of anomaly and norm, false and true — the generation of significance by the combination of singular with repeatable, the merger of "significant" and "habitual." The variations on the mix are undoubtedly infinite, the manner in which the mix is achieved, a complex matter. A day at the office culminating in the murder of fifteen company executives may make the newspapers as an anomalous occurrence, but it will not make a narrative representation unless the "anomaly" can be reassimilated to a "norm" so as to invoke the exclamation "that's just how it is!" A day at the office culminating in the loss of a pen will barely make a personal diary, let alone a narrative representation, unless the loss can be rendered as an anomalous deviation whose reintegration invokes the same triumphant exclamation. Neither task is beyond the skilled storyteller. In each case s/he must strive to create significant difference - anomalies different enough to rupture the norm such a way that we see it anew, but not so different as to defy normativity altogether. If narrative per se relies on a dialectic of routine recurrences and anomalous incident, then, as my examples indicate, the area of daily routine provides the ideal territory on which that dialectic might be set in play. The periods of sameness making up French provincial life in general cannot be transcribed in toto. The rhythms that define its essence can, however, be illustrated by transcribing the pattern traced by the norms (routines, rituals) of one particular provincial life and the deviations from

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those norms - some small (Emma stays in bed, rather than go about her daily chores), some large (Emma embarks on an affair rather than go about the business of her marriage). The manner in which Flaubert weaves together norm and deviation is instructive. The painful details of Emma's daily tedium are amassed in a sequence whose mounting tension serves as the backdrop for the inevitable deviations to follow. At the same time, the rapidity with which each liaison acquires its own predictable rituals draws the deviations inexorably back to the static norms from which they emerged (in a spiralic rather than a circular pattern). We see this in the account of Emma's illicit liaisons with Leon: "Emma knew the road from one end to the other: she knew that after a certain meadow came a road sign, then an elm, a barn, or a road-mender's cabin . . . She would plunge into a maze of dark sidestreets . . . She would recognize him from a distance by the way his curly hair hung down beneath his hat." 13 Deviation recombines with norm in a new synthesis which reveals a hitherto unseen essence - the "true" nature of French provincial life. The pattern is reflected in the shifts between the imperfect and perfect tenses that characterize literary narration. From the point of view of the story told, it is the perfect-tense actions that are most important - those telling examples which deviate from their imperfect-tense norms marginally enough to appear reintegrable with them (to appear empirically truthful), yet significantly enough to convey something essential and narratable about them (to be truthful in a "mythic" sense). Marc Blanchard has noted that: "[D]aily life is the area of the familiar and the customary. What is exemplary is common and . . . can be identified and imitated." 14 He points to a related feature of daily life's mediating capacity binding it to the narrative function in modern literature: its "nodal" position at the threshold of the public (the anonymous and general) and the private (the anomolous and unique). 15 The path to be negotiated between examples so ephemeral or private that they are not recognizable as common, and examples so commonplace that they fail to mesh with the web of anomalies that are the experience of the individual is a path through the spaces of

Narrative and the everyday daily life: for example, from work, with its anonymous schedules, yet its opportunities for illicit romances, to home, with its marriage rituals, yet its quirky, domestic intimacies. The perspective from which to "plot" such a path, to expect reliable knowledge of both the anomalies of an individual life, and about which anomalies to select as significant, is that of the authorial viewpoint. Blanchard writes that: "[ljiterature clings to a description of individual actions observed from a particular point of view, that of an author who knows the whole story and who continues to tell it as though it were both exemplary (repeatable) and unique (non-repeatable)."16 Nineteenth-century realism's obsession with detail amounts to an apotheosis of the force binding the exemplary nature of literary daily life to that of narrative representation. Realism's project was the pursuit to the limits of the search for detail so specific as to appear irreducibly singular, yet so representative as to seem infinitely repeatable in the most ordinary parts of life. To discover that detail is to recombine particular and general in mythic unity. The equation of everyday life and realist typicality was made by Walter Scott who praises Jane Austen's Emma for epitomizing: "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him." 17 But realism's cult of the typical can also be seen as a milestone in European civilization's love affair with rational abstraction. Michel de Certeau has argued that the enthroning of Everyman in the sixteenth century marks the inception of this culture's obsession with abstract norms and general laws to which every single instance or individual can be made "subject" (in the dual sense of the word). The downside of this way of thinking is that, deprived of individual quirks, the representative man in his ideal variant dissolves into pure abstraction and nothingness.18 This downside is the danger which the realist skirts in deploying perfecttense narrative's exemplary function. A perfect-tense action that deviates insufficiently from its norm is liable, not to reveal an essence, but to dissolve into that norm to become no more

19

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than one illustrative instance of an abstract principle, proving too "true" in the positivistic sense of correspondence to a known law, and thus insufficiently "true" in the essential sense. The imperfect-tense norms harbor a complementary danger. For fictional daily life specifically it is that of the periods of repetition seeming too prone to break out into sequences of one-time, dramatic occurrences, too close to being engulfed by perfect-tense drama, too unroutine-like to convey the sense of life lived over the long term. This is the mistake made by Emma Bovary who, like a poor novelist, sees "the mediocrity of everyday existence" as an anomolous stain on the broad canvas of romantic adventure: "She had been caught up in it all by some accident, whereas out beyond, there stretched as far as the eye could see the immense territory of rapture and passions."19 For narrative in the broader sense, the danger courted is that of telling an entire story that lacks a footing in "real life," one consisting of events too artistic, too "false" in the sense of failure to correspond to a familiar law, and thus insufficiently equipped to reunite with the normative in the new synthesis of particular and general that gives access to "truth" as essence. I now turn to the second way in which I believe the logic governing the generation of fictional daily life to recapitulate that of narrative itself. The twin precipices which threaten both narrative and daily life are, as we see, those of "life" and "art" in the hypertrophied forms of repetitious normality and patent fictionality. We are led back to the relationship between narrative and semiosis. Jan Mukarovsky suggested that all aesthetic signs must be perceived to be both (unintentionally) equivalent to the reality for which they are substituted, and (intentionally) different from it.20 In order to circumvent the potential loss of authenticity that might ensue from the stark delineation of sign from reality, representational aesthetics developed a method of forestalling the moment of delineation: the generation of internal images of art. This is achieved through a repeated restatement of the boundaries between "the aesthetic" (from which, precisely by articulating it, the narrative is able to distinguish itself) and "everyday reality"

Narrative and the everyday

21

(with which it equates itself). The strategy is termed "secondary coding" by Lotman and is one of two metatextual functions fulfilled by such images.21 For instance, in much of the first part of Madame Bovary the line drawn between Emma's falsely artistic aspirations and the dreary provincial reality surrounding her impels the reader to identify Flaubert's objective narration as the voice of reality (through the mere fact of the distinction between it and the novels that are the source of Emma's illusions). However, as Lotman's related theory of "the text in the text" acknowledges, to counter the equally undesirable loss in aestheticism ensuing from its overidentification with everyday reality, modern narrative embraces a compensatory strategy in which it reidentifies itself as art. (This, then, is the second metatextual function of the internal images of art.)22 Emma Bovary's love for Leon degenerates into an indulgence in the very bourgeois enslavement to materialist desire against which it originally served as a weapon. Both "love" and bourgeois materialism become permeated by an aesthetic whose banality exceeds that even of Emma's romantic illusion: "The arrow-tipped curtain rods, the brass furniture ornaments and the big knobs on the andirons - all gleamed at once . . . They said 'our room,' 'our carpet,' . . . she even said 'our slippers' in reference to a pair that Leon had given her to fulfil a fantasy."23 Provincial routine is exposed as having a foundation still more cliched than the romantic fictions from which it was distinguished. Consequently, Flaubert's narration asserts itself as the language of a true, elegant art, uncontaminated by provincial bad taste. Taken together, the two gestures (alignment with provinciality against the falsity of art; alignment with art against the banality of provincial routine) reinstall Flaubert's voice as that of the essence of reality, purified both of "tacky" provincial mediocrity and Emma's illusions. Art and reality, deviation and norm attain new, mythic synthesis. Literary daily life provides a metatext for narrative representation not only in its mediation of stasis and change, but also in its doubling of the reality/art dualism which such mediation entails. Representational narrative as a whole simultaneously

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marks itself as art, and aligns itself with reality. Within a given story the narrative voice may first identify with daily life in contradistinction to images of art, then distance itself from daily life and reassert its allegiance with the aesthetic. The two aspects of narrative representation which converge in the function of daily life are two aspects of the same phenomenon. In order to perform its mediatory function, narrative (like daily life) must be separated out from life in its entirety (as deviation) and reintegrated with it (as norm). It must therefore demarcate itself from life (by identifying itself as fiction) and establish its equivalence to it (by aligning itself with repetitious routine). Together these gestures perform the splitting-rebinding that is modern fiction's attempt to recreate mythic wholeness. The internal oscillation between "daily life" and "art" set in play to bolster the authority of narrative representation is most closely associated with the realist novel, where the "separation of styles" relegating daily reality to the lower, comic genres was overcome, and where art's representational capacities are manifested in supreme form.24 An early example is Don Quixote whose effect resides in a multi-layered contrast between Quixote's conception of himself as a knight errant (derived from readings of chivalric romances) and the mundane realities encountered during his quest. The antinomy is emblematized in Quixote's insistence on mistaking a common peasant girl (Aldonsa) for a beautiful damsel (Dulcinea). Don Quixote represents the novel in its infancy, and it is the "daily reality" side of the antinomy with which the identification is most forcefully made. However, evidence of a compensatory urge towards a counter-identification is also to be found. The sophisticated game that Cervantes plays with the "novel within a novel" in the second half of Don Quixote suggests that its metatextual function is that of a self-conscious, embedded image of the artistic status of its embedding text, as well as false, counterimage to it.25 Later, in Romanticism, the balance tilts, via the "artistic hero/vulgar crowd" opposition, back towards aestheticism. There occurs a reversal in art which is connected to authenticity, while the everyday is denigrated as mediocre, soulless and

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less than real. However, the romantic hero is not the sole repository of authenticity and value. For the naturalness that is part of romantic ideology the hero looks precisely towards the spontaneity of the ordinary person (Constant's Adolphe). Moreover, Lidiia Ginzburg points out that it was Romanticism which first liberated prose from the straitjacket of classical style by turning to everyday language for the vitality of expression it valorized. Here, too, the oscillation effect is evident.26 By the time the novel reached maturity, the antinomy could be embraced without the need patently to favor either element. In Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, the realist attains such confidence in the authority of the daily life/art sleight of hand that he can afford to underscore with equal panache both the artistic status and diagetic function of his narration, and its extradiagetic role in providing unrestricted access to the trifles of everyday, provincial reality (this time, of the English variety). Written in the same year as Madame Bovary, and set amid the backbiting atmosphere of clerical scandal, Barchester Towers gives an intricate picture of day-to-day existence in a sleepy English parish. The ordinariness (and thus, authenticity) of much of the conflict and intrigue stands out in relief against the narrator's deliberately elevated tone: "We know what was the wrath of Juno when her beauty was despised. We know too what storms of passion even celestial minds can yield. As Juno may have looked at Paris on Mount Ida, so did Mrs. Proudie look on Ethelbert Stanhope when he pushed the leg of the sofa into her lace train." 27 But Trollope's playful distance from his own, hyperbolous imagery confirms the "artistry" of his narration, its representational capacity for manipulating the code of artistic convention, then transcending it to adopt the voice of the true aesthetic sophisticate. (Flaubert's impersonal objectivity and Trollope's self-conscious banter are closer than we suppose.) With the decline of realism, writers began to lose confidence in their ability to hit the right note. Rather than an antithesis to be smoothly managed, "art" and "the everyday" became twin abysses to be avoided. In Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kriiger," the dilemma is sensed as a perilous path that art must steer

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between the Scylla of Isolation and the Charybdis of Capitulation - between the artist's dual urge to set himself above the commonplaces of everyday life the better to represent them, and to submit to those commonplaces, the more to appreciate their seductive allure: To take you, Ingeborg Holm, to wife, and have a son like you, Hans Hansen - to live free from the curse of knowledge and the torment of creation, live and praise God in blessed mediocrity... To long to be allowed to live the life of simple feeling. . . without compulsion to act and achieve - and yet to be forced to dance . . . the cruel and perilous sword-dance of a r t . . . I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon me to weave spells to redeem them . . . and to these I am drawn. But my deepest and secretest love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace.28 As demonstrated by works such as Ulysses (with its juxtaposing of the earthy, quotidian cares of Bloom and the soaring artistic speculations of Daedalus), modernist fiction by no means rejected its century-old legacy and continued to rely on the game of identification and counter-identification that had served writers from Cervantes to Flaubert. The persistence of the duality and the hierarchy that it reinstates is confirmed by recent enterprises such as that of Herman Parret's search for 'He sublime du quotidien" aimed at overturning daily life's subordination to art. However, when Parret suggests that everyday sublimation is to be found in those moments in daily life which mirror the aesthetics of great painting, one realizes that the hierarchy has once again emerged intact, as it must if art is to maintain its mimetic capabilities.29 IMAGE, ICON, NARRATIVE

In order to approach the specificities of the relationship between art and daily life obtaining in Russian fiction, we must return to Lotman. In his account of the two text-mechanisms, Lotman suggests that eschatological narratives provide a bridge between myth (when the eternal and the transitory are one) and post-myth (in which there is a split between the normative and the deviational).30 Eschatological time is neither unified

Narrative and the everyday

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nor completely fragmented, but stretched out between Beginning and End. The distance between the poles provides for chronological linearity, while the implied disappearance of that linearity at time's end suggests the retention of temporal unity as mythic residue. In western culture, the most important eschatological narrative is the story of man's expulsion from Eden and his redemption through Christ's two comings, the second of which will signal the end of time and the triumph of the Kingdom of God. At Christ's second coming, earth is united with the Kingdom of Heaven and man actualizes the divine essence that he rejected when he embraced Sin. Thus, the story of Jesus mediates not only between times, but between our transient lives and our eternal souls. It is Christ's life, death and resurrection which, in redeeming us, enables us to realize our identity as beings created "in the likeness of God." Thus, Christ's filial status fulfils the role of an image of God and, reunifying man's temporal existence with his divine soul, furnishes the prototype of the artistic sign. While the early centuries of the unified Christian church were marked by complex disputes about the two natures in Christ, post-schismatic Catholic and Protestant theology tends to emphasize Christ's mortal attributes - His ability to feel pain and His human qualities.31 Indeed, for His life to serve its mediatory function, Christ must be separated from (figured) God and assimilated to (figuring) man. Of course, Christian dogma never allows Christ's Godhood to be effaced. Jesus, though man, remains the Son of God. Nonetheless, the slow and necessarily incomplete process by which Christ is assimilated to man was spurred on by the fact that the New Testament narrative is set at the heart of human existence in its quintessential form - ordinary day-to-day life. Eric Auerbach points to: "the birth of a spiritual movement . . . from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature." 32 In Christ's story we thus discern the fledgling economy of narrative semiosis. Immersed in the everyday, Christ's works

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can be identified as deviations from the norms by which they are ultimately reassumed. (Western theology came progressively to stress the crucifixion over the resurrection, Christ's death (and thus manhood) rather than His immortality (and Godhood).)33 However, the norms are not merely reestablished. Christ's is no ordinary death. The pattern traced by His story reconstitutes the normative to reveal the truth at its heart — the divine essence underlying our everyday lives. In the life and death of Christ, we find man as the complete image (likeness) of God - the sign so perfect that it establishes divine presence (parousia). Here is not the place to pursue the path by which the mythic perfection of the patristic Christ (Christ is simultaneously God and Man) degenerates into the more familiar image-as-artisticsign (Christ, as man,figuresGod). Such a path would necessitate a long detour via Manichean dualism and other early heresies. It is, however, not difficult to see how the biblical narrative harbors the seeds of Jesus' future transformation into a separate figure of our likeness to God, and thus into an index of our alienation from God, of surface from depth, individual body from common, divine essence, man from Man, how it spawns the series of rifts which modern artistic signs are called upon to bridge: those between signifier (temporal existence) and signified (eternal soul), sign (Jesus) and denotate (God), and that dividing one user of the sign from another.34 All signs are of a different status to the materiality of which they "make sense." Abstracted from (though influenced by) the specificities of the interpersonal relations they mediate, the form and meaning of signs tend, once the battle for them is won, to gravitate towards the secure realm of impersonal abstraction. Estranged from one another and from our common essence, "you" and " I " communicate according to "their" anonymous code. A sign abstracted is a sign framed and finished - one perceived atemporally - absentedfromthe flux to which it brings order. The artistic sign's triumphal claims to presence, rest on its ability to master what W. J. T Mitchell calls "the rhetoric of absence" — the paradoxical "ability to see something as 'there' and 'not there' at the same time." 35 The

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27

image of a tree in a painting is an effective representation to the extent that it engages in this paradox. The Christ story ceases to embody mythic truth and becomes an artistic representation when it is removed from the turmoil of the here and now (and the inconvenience of having to respond to it ethically, through our actions), framed from the present and projected back into the past from which it can be said to re-present man's path to God. It is no accident that the chain linking artistic "presence" to semiotic absence, absence to framing, and framing to completion is best illustrated by painting. The artistic sign is often portrayed as essentially visual, since it is better able to be perceived as whole, framed, outside the temporal flux, and thus more conducive to the rhetoric of absence that is its mode of functioning. The association of the artistic sign with visuality is, as Mitchell suggests, evident from the dominance in modern aesthetics of the very word "image." 36 Indeed, the attention which western literature gives to painterly notions like imagery, point of view, the scene, and so on, indicates a certain tyranny of the visual.37 Nor is it a coincidence that the Renaissance which marked the beginning of the secular age also saw the development (by Alberti in 1435) °f linear perspective - the framing of a visual sign from an external viewpoint so as to confer the illusion of presence on the reality for which it is substituted. The same era heralded the coming to prominence of printed fiction - the framing of a set of events whose absence in the past is the precondition of their being able to be meaningful to an infinite number of anonymous readers in the present. It is thus a further index of man's estrangement from the common essence he shares with others. In Stanley Cavell's words: "[WJriting as telling allegorizes our apparent fate of projecting ourselves as fictions, of appealing to others by theatricalizing ourselves, so that I can never be satisfied that their response is to me . . . [T]he dissatisfaction may be a function, or price, of the satisfaction of projecting imaginary characters as real." 38 Reuniting personal and universal by mediating between them, art cannot help but simultaneously foreground their disjunc-

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tion. In performing that mediating function "in one fell swoop," abstracted from the temporal flux, it orients itself towards the static, visual image, or metaphor — a tendency which even the dynamic linearity of the novel cannot entirely repress. Within such concepts as ut pictura poesis, this interpretation of "image" slowly permeated European aesthetics. Since it often assumed a surface/depth manifestation, it helped to cement the Body/Soul split that is one of the two central dualisms of western metaphysics. Ideas of art as mediator between the phenomenal and the noumenal and its conception as "representation" are, for example, found throughout German idealism. The mediation of universal (depth, soul) through personal (surface, body) also presupposes an external site from which the mediation may be accomplished. In order for it to mean something (to acquire depth), the particular must, as object of representation, be externally framed by representing subject(s). Boris Uspensky writes: "In order to perceive the world of the work of art as a sign system, it is necessary to designate the borders: it is precisely these borders which create the representation."39 Thus, the development of the image assists in the maturation of the second central dualism in European thought - the Subject/Object dichotomy. There is, however, more than one interpretation of "image," just as there is more than one version of Christian eschatology. The following discussion highlights those points confirming that meaning-production in Russian culture has been influenced (though not ruled) by an epistemology different from that underpinning the familiar logic of the image. I rely on the interpretations of four theologians: Pavel Florenskii, Vladimir Lossky, Leonid Ouspensky and John Meyendorff. The system they embrace retains at its center the notion (originally common to both eastern and western Christology, but progressively deemphasized in the latter) of Christ as icon of God. The features of this system which I will identify (and which will inform my textual readings) are: (i) its antipathy to mediation, dualism and the logic of identity

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(ii) its emphasis on participation and embodiment (iii) the "mutual predication" of its constitutive elements (iv) its integration of particular (self) and universal (other) in a relationship preserving the irreducibility and freedom of the former (v) its dynamic concept of "vision" (vi) its gravitation towards merger with "life," rather than abstract "sign" (the outer limit of the "image") In developing its position on the controversy over the two natures of Christ that raged throughout early Christian thought, eastern Christianity came firmly to reject any exclusive focus on Christ's manhood (and thus everydayness), placing an equal if not greater emphasis on His divinity. Vladimir Lossky notes: "The Adoration of Christ's humanity is almost alien to Orthodox piety . . . It is the risen Christ . . . who is adored." 40 In his description of this doctrine, John Meyendorff stresses: "In Jesus Christ, God and Man are one." 41 Thus, Christ is effectively disbarred from playing the mediatory function that leads to the equation of image and sign; if Christ is at all times Divine and Human, He cannot assimilate himself to human everydayness in order to figure man's likeness to God. The Orthodox emphasis on Resurrection over Passion follows as a corollary: less significant than Jesus' death as man is His Resurrection as man-become-God (the unity of divinity and humanity). What, then, of "likeness"? The answer is found in the preschismatic notion of image as icon (in Russian both terms are conveyed by the single word obraz) which can, unlike the western "image," be imbued with a powerful sense of linearity. Meyendorff points out that "in Greek, the term homoiosis which corresponds to 'likeness' in Genesis . . . suggests the idea of dynamic progress . . . and implies human freedom."42 Leonid Ouspensky explains: "[LJikeness . . . is given to man as a task, to be fulfilled by the action of the grace of the Holy Spirit, with the free participation of man himself."43 In his formulation of likeness, Pavel Florenskii insists that seeing (recognition) is inseparable from action (becoming): "Only in God the Son does man recognize the Father as Father, and, for that reason,

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himself becomes a son." 44 Man does not see his likeness to God in the life of Christ, he enacts that likeness by resurrecting himself as man-become-God. This version of likeness and its concept of vision thus hinges on a dynamic interpretation of the phrase "in Christ," preparing the way for the full integration of aesthetics (vision, likeness, image) and ethics (participation, deification). The concept of grace as active force mentioned by Ouspensky reinforces the dynamism characteristic of Orthodox theology, its emphasis on God as motion - an energy to participate in, rather than a static entity to be figured: "The true purpose of creation is . . . not contemplation of divine essence . . . but communion in divine energy, transfiguration and transparency to divine action in the world."45 "The Son has become like us by the incarnation; we become like Him by deification, by partaking of the divinity in the Holy Spirit who communicates the divinity to each person in a particular way."46 We should note that such dynamism allows of no logical rupture of personal (man) from universal (God) to be healed through a mediatory Christ-figure, and no subordination of particular instance to general principle. Godhood (universal) is realized within every one of us (particular) through grace — a motion of infinite self-transcendence stimulating "an unchecked passage towards union in which created being seeks to pass beyond itself, opening itself infinitely to deifying participation without ever being satiated."47 Deification — man becomes God — facilitated by grace, and heralding the conquest of time, is the necessary complement to the incarnation accomplished through the Holy Spirit - God becomes man. Florenskii refers to this complementarity as "reverse flow" (obratnoe techenie).^ The two acts are contained in the life of Christ who, as Florenskii clarifies, emptied himself of divinity (the Greek notion of kenosis) so that man might deify himself in Christ, achieve homoiosis or likeness to God.49 (Hence scriptural references to the Church as Christ's Body) By deifying ourselves, bringing about Christ's second coming in human time, we reattain our true form, for " [T] heocentricity is a natural character of humanity."50 Conversely, in becoming

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man, God provides the precondition for the action of his own energies. According to Meyendorff, "created beings" are different from God only "in that they change and move towards Him . . . there is no 'nature5 without 'energy' or movement. . . The true purpose of creation is transfiguration and transparency to divine action in the world."51 Man is, however, not merely the instrument by which deification is set in motion. Nor, since it is an infinite movement, must deification eliminate the category of the human — a point stressed by Ouspensky: cc [S]anctification by grace does not eliminate any faculties of nature, just as fire does not eliminate the properties of iron." 52 In order to generate the fire that is the source of divine light, there has to be a material to be burned, a humanity whose properties are the very precondition for the process of transfiguration. For Vladimir Solov'ev, the complementarity extends to the relationship between good and evil. As the expression of man's apartness from God, evil provides the precondition for the process of self-transcendence in which he reattains God: "In order to possess the divine essence as springing from himself . . . man asserts his separation from God . . . The principle of evil, i.e. the exclusive self-assertion which had thrown all that exists into primordial chaos . . . now emerges in a new form, as the free conscious act of an individual man." 53 Solov'ev's assertion points up the Orthodox emphasis on both embodiment and freedom. Good and evil are not abstract principles, but living forces whose meaning is realized only when embodied in man's freely chosen actions - the assertion of separation and the achievement of likeness. For Meyendorff, reciprocity of God and man explains why Christ must possess two natures without assimilating one to the other as its figure: "Divine nature and human nature could never merge, or be confused . . . but, in Christ, they were united in the single divine hypostasis of the Logos."54 Christ is an icon of God in the sense of hypostasis - a fulfilment of the Logos, the Word of God which, in Orthodoxy is always linear and bi-aspectual, suggesting a descent (God to earth) and an ascent (man to Heaven). Christ as icon of God thus embraces a two-way process of becoming. According to St. Irenaeus'

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formula: "God made himself man that man might become God." This emphasis on Christ as incarnation of the Logos reveals an antipathy to static, visual conflation (to the rhetoric of absence and abstraction) and an openness to dynamic expansion (to narrativity in the pure sense, and to participation).55 The importance of complementarity is reflected in Byzantium's treatment of the issue most associated with its split from Rome: the dispute over the Jilioque in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Here we see clearly the refusal to establish a hierarchy subordinating individual to universal. As Lossky explains, to assert that the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son {jilioque), rather than from Father alone, allows an abstract "essence of God" to be separated from the process by which he is revealed, and posited as a universal principle ("God in general") subordinating to itself its own individual instances. In Orthodox belief: "the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, and this ineffable procession enables us to confess the absolute diversity of the Three Persons, i.e. our faith in the TriUnity. In the order of natural manifestation, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son . . . after the Word." 56 Through the apophatic method (contemplation of God through the negation of everything that He is not), theologians like Lossky claim simultaneously absolute diversity and absolute commonality for the hypostases of the Holy Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are neither one and the same (they are not individual expressions of God's essence which remains an inexpressible darkness), nor separate and distinct (each, nonetheless, partakes of the divine): "They are One distinctly and distinct conjointly . . . absolutely different in their absolute identity."57 In order to grasp this idea we need to move beyond familiar logic in which an element is identical to itself and only two (mutually exclusive) elements can be completely opposed. In apophatic dialectics, we must conceive of an identity that, to be enacted, must be founded on difference, of the absolute opposition of three terms each of which includes the tri-unity in the act of asserting its distinctness from the other two. As Lossky puts it, the contradiction between transcendence and immanence is

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overcome since, in the apophatic movement, "[T]he transcendent God of theologia becomes more and more i m m a n e n t . . . in his economy by which 'the energies descend to us.5 " 5 8 In his apophatic philosophy, Florenskii explains: "In order to avoid the tautology A=A, so that there might be real identity [in which] A is A, for A is not-A [i.e. B], it is necessary that B also be real, that B be not-B [i.e. C]. With C the circle can be closed, for in its other, i.e. not-C, A finds itself as A." 59 In dualistic logic (the logic of the sign) man is identical to himself, and so opposed to God - a relationship mediated by Christ. According to apophatic logic, man is neither self-identical nor, therefore, opposed to God. An individual finds himself as man, in God, by grace, just as God is realized as God through man in the Holy Spirit. This action of flow and reverse flow is accomplished as the incarnation and resurrection of Christ — the Godman, or icon of God. More than a methodological device, apophasis is itself party to divine revelation. Meyendorff considers "[t]he very notion of God's being both Unity and Trinity... a revelation illustrating this incomprehensibility."60 Also significant is Lossky's extension of God's economy to the energies (from Father, through Son, in Spirit, to man). It indicates that the notion of absolute distinction and absolute conjunction affects the relationship between man and God, confirming that the subordination of singular to general through the image of the God-like man is founded on the impermissible alienation of specific from essential. For Lossky, "in the measure in which he is a person in the true theological sense of the word [i.e. inasmuch as he has, in achieving self-deification, achieved likeness to the hypostatic Christ], a human being is not limited by his individual nature." 61 True singularity (diversity) is realized not in the prison of the isolated human self, but in the freedom to realize our "common nature" which partakes of God: "[The religious person] is not only part of the whole, but potentially includes the whole, having in himself the whole of the earthly cosmos, of which he is the hypostasis . . . Thus each person is an absolutely original and unique aspect of the nature common to all." 62 The relationship between particular and general resulting

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from Byzantium's view of the Holy Trinity is reflected in its system of sacraments. A second controversy centered on the Eucharist. In Meyendorff 5s account of Byzantine doctrine: [T]he Eucharist is . . . Jesus Christ Himself, the risen Lord, made known through the breaking of the bread. The rejection of the concept of the Eucharist as 'image5 is . . . very significant . . . the Eucharist always remained . . . a mystery to be received as food and drink, and not to be seen through physical eyes . . . The Eucharist cannot reveal anything to the sense of vision . . . it is the moment and the place in which Christ's deified humanity becomes ours.63 In what Meyendorff sees as Rome's "corruption" of the Eucharist's significance, "sacramental participation was . . . replaced with intellectual vision."64" The idea of the Eucharist as "the moment in which Christ's deified humanity becomes ours" explains what Meyendorff refers to as "the eschatological character of the Eucharistic mystery," which "recalls the second coming of Christ as an event which has already occurred" (emphasis Meyendorff's).65 The deemphasizing of the visual accompanying this notion recapitulates the connection between the Christ image and Christian eschatology as transition between mythic wholeness and chronological fragmentation. In the west, Christ tends towards the form of a God-like man whose second coming at the end of time will redeem all men; in the east, man becomes God in Christ whose second coming is in the here and now. The sacramental role of icons is, naturally, realized in a visual mode. However, even here, the stress on participation is evident. The Orthodox church's rebuttal of the iconoclasts (who destroyed icons because they were "graven images" of the ineffable) made recourse to notions of dynamism; to claim that Christ is ineffable, and thus indescribable is to deny the twoway process of incarnation and deification within which each individual realizes Godhood.66 In this context, Meyendorff reminds us that "the icon of Christ is the icon par excellence."61 And Ouspensky finds it essential to understand that the prototype of all icons was not a visual artwork, but Christ Himself: "[T]he very fact of the existence of the icon is based on the Divine Incarnation . . . this recreation was more in God's

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likeness and better than the first creation . . . the heavenly man bearing the Holy Spirit within him." 68 Thus, an icon is equivalent not to a static, atemporal^wr^, but to the unfolding of a life - a life which we must rejoin in order to participate in God's kingdom. Florenskii insists that identity (of man to God) "can only live in its capacity as act . . . Blind in its givenness, the law of identity can be rational in its eternal being-createdness." 69 The participatory residue of the first iconic life remains in the aura created around the icon as sacrament. Eastern Christendom made much of the icon's transfigurative qualities, frequently conferred sainthood on its icon-painters, and insisted that the production and perception of an icon involves not distanced vision, but experience of the transforming powers of grace, and thus knowledge of God: The role of the icon . . . is not conservative but dynamically creative. The icon is regarded as one of the means by which it is possible . . . to achieve the task set before mankind, to achieve likeness to the prototype, to embody in life what was manifested and transmitted by God-man.70 The fact that God made man in His image and likeness shows that iconography is a divine action.71 [T]hrough the icon . . . we not only learn about God, but we also know God . . . In order to receive and pass on the testimony, the iconographer must not only believe that it is genuine, but must also share in the life, by which the witness of the revelation lived.72 Lossky's definition of the Orthodox tradition of which icons form part speaks of a mode of reception outside of which truth cannot be known: "It [Tradition] is not the content of revelation, but the light that reveals it; it is not the word, but the living breath that makes the word heard . . . it is the life of the Holy Spirit in the church." 73 And Ouspensky's comments on revelation and the religious art that serves it confirm its participatory, processual nature: "Only those who know from personal experience the state it portrays can create images corresponding to it which are truly a 'revelation . . . of things

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hidden,5 in other words evidence of man's participation in the life of the transfigured world he contemplates."74 The problem of the static, visual mode of the icon is brought into focus by these remarks, and by Theodore's definition of icono-graphy as divine action. It can be resolved by reference to what Meyendorff terms the "communication of idioms": "In the hypostasis, the two natures of Christ accomplish a union without confusion. They retain their natural characteristics, but because they share a common hypostatic life, there is a 'communication of idioms,' or perichoresis."75 If the supreme icon establishes communication between the divine and human idioms, then the liturgical icon accomplishes a secondary perichoresis between the dynamic idiom of Christian eschatology and the static, "fallen" idiom of vision, of the image - a communication in which the former takes precedence over the latter (the vital process of deification is always the goal served). Christ's life — the perfect icon — is the hypostasis of the Logos, the point where the divine meets the human (without merging with it). Subsequent icons represent the point at which human life in its fallen state accommodates itself, through grace's deifying action, to the iconic life of Christ. Liturgic art is, according to Ouspensky, "God's descent into our midst, one of the forms in which is accomplished the meeting of God with man, grace with nature, eternity with time." 76 Eastern theologians customarily associate grace with light, suggesting that it is in this way that humans experience grace's infinite energy, thus confirming the connection between the fallen world and vision, and again explaining why icons take visual form. Here too, though, we are not dealing with secular light (the light that allows us to see visual images), but with an idea corresponding neither to the laws of sense nor those of the intellect, one in which light is the tension generated when the processual linearity of divine energy (grace) asserts itself from within the static and visual (fallen nature). The tension contextualizes the stylized nature of icons in which, argues Ouspensky, "the action taking place before our eyes is outside the laws of human logic, outside the laws of earthly existence."77 It likewise explains the participatory aura surrounding their creation and

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perception since, in Lossky's interpretation, "[i]n order to see the divine light with corporeal eyes . . . one must participate in this light, one must be transformed by it . . . He who participates in the divine energy . . . becomes himself, in a sense, Light." 78 With its emphasis on participation as the unity of ethics and aesthetics, the iconic system opens to assimilation with life itself, just as, in adopting a rhetoric of mediation, the artistic image is liable to degenerate into the alienated abstractions of the arbitrary sign. The sense in which I subsequently use the term "icon" is by analogy neither with the visual sacrament ("Russian literature produces icon-like texts") nor with the icon supreme ("Russian literature deals in Christ-like figures"), but with the process by which liturgical form accommodates the iconic Christ. Thus, Russian literature is seen as generating a perichoresis parallel to that of the religious icon, but only one of whose "idioms" (eastern Christology) features in liturgical art. The other idiom — that of modern narrative — is not primarily visual. The result of this new systemic dialogue is a kind of "narrative icon." 79 Nor should the distinctive features of modern Russian art be viewed as "caused by" eastern Christology, though one might point out that the well-documented delay in Russia's secularization shielded it from the developments of the Renaissance period which did so much to ensure the predominance of the image. My focus, however, is to be provided by narrative fiction — a phenomenon with non-Russian origins and a non-visual mode of being. The evolution of the art/daily life relationship and the birth of byt is the result, not of some victory of icon over image, but of a complex interaction between two systems whose critical differences reveal themselves in divergent versions of Christian eschatology. Moreover, Eastern Christianity's rejection of Christ as image can be seen as part of a general resistance to hegemonic semiosis identified by Lotman and Uspenskii as a feature of Russia's history and expressed in terms of what they call Russian cultural binarism - the division of the world into two realms (higher and lower) and the absence of a neutral term capable of serving as a sign of one or the other: "[W]e find that the Russian system divides life

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beyond the grave into heaven and hell. There is no provision for an intermediate zone. And, correspondingly, behaviour in this life is either holy or sinful . . . The secular authorities might be regarded as divine or demonic, but never as neutral in relation to these concepts." 80 In Russia, "life" is a marked term likely to be assimilated to an irreducible essence (the divine, the demonic). The neutral concept of c'everyday life" whose semiotic potential enables it to mediate between positive and negative values is alien to Russian culture. Cultural binarism with its two unmediated poles in a single system is, we should note, quite the opposite of philosophical dualism with its two discrete realms mediated by signs. Lotman reinforces his insight by pointing to institutional differences between Russia and the west. Developments in Europe, he argues, have, from the emergence of medieval conceptions of honor, led to the proliferation of contractualism (government by constitution; business by negotiation; law by contract; the contractualism of semiosis itself). The persistence in Russia of "symbolic consciousness," by contrast, has favoured models of "self-giving" (also active in the west, but gradually suppressed).81 One of Lotman's examples of symbolic consciousness is the understanding of power, not as an abstract, relational entity to be negotiated, but as something inherent in the figures that embody it, and to which one voluntarily "gives oneself." Characterizing the role of the tsar', Lotman writes that "power from the point of view of the symbolic consciousness . . . is endowed with the traits of holiness and truth. Its value is an absolute one for it is the image of heavenly power and embodies eternal truth . . . In face of it the individual is not a party to a contract, but a drop of water flowing to the sea."82 Lotman's analysis suggests that medieval Russia, along with other medieval cultures, excluded the everyday lives of ordinary people from semiosis. In Russia, however, this downplaying of daily life's mediatory function continued beyond the medieval era, as confirmed in the sixteenth-century Domostroi, or "Householder's Handbook." In their homilies on the conduct of domestic affairs, the anonymous authors portray the

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surroundings of the Russian home as individualized objects, incapable of functioning as "signifiers" of an abstract "signified." The practical, asemiotic world of domestic life remains incapable of being connected with the privileged realms of meaning. In the Domostroi, phenomenal existence cannot mediate between noumenal worlds in a sign system whereby individualized objects are contracted to stand for generalized concepts. Daily life could, indeed, be "made to mean," but by conceiving of it iconically (rather than semiotically) - as a microcosm of life in the tsar"s family — a secondary reembodiment of divine law via which each household naturally reenacts the relationship of God to man, tsar' to servant. Householder, like tsar', like God is the loving head of a family whose members repeat the self-giving attitude of those in the sphere above them: family to householder, householder to tsar', tsar' to God. Thus, two chapters are respectively entitled: "How to respect a tsar' or a prince" and "How children should love and care for their mother and father and obey them in all matters." 83 And the editor of the modern edition writes that in the Domostroi "the [domestic] world of objects comes to life when everything is blessed . . . and becomes through divine mercy a symbol of the righteous life."84 There is no semiotic replacement by individual household of households in general as part for whole, rather an orientation towards iconic reenactment. In his work on self-giving as cultural model, Lotman confirms that iconic meaning is bestowed by "the holy" and that, should daily life aspire to semiosis, it runs the risk of capitulation to the devil who is, in Russian thought, associated with the capacity to imitate and lie, and the deception of signs. The continuing status in Russia of an everyday life deprived of semiotic potential can be traced into the eighteenth century, where it takes the form of an association with eventlessness. (The meaningful essence of a norm, we recall, is established through the reassimilation of deviations from it, i.e. the depiction of events.) In his study of the poetics of everyday behavior, Lotman shows how post-Petrine noble circles turned to art, particularly theater, as a model with which to accord their everyday behaviour sense:

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Everyday life compared with theatrical life seemed to be immobile; events and happenings in it either did not take place at all, or were rare exceptions . . . Viewing real life as a performance not only offered a person the possibility of choosing his type of individual behaviour, but also filled it with the expectation that things were going to happen.85 Lotman's examples demonstrate the lengths to which the Euro-centric Russian aristocracy went to appropriate the plots of contemporary theater in order to achieve rapid semiosis for their lives.86 The end of the eighteenth century marked Russia's entry onto the European literary stage. The starting point for my account of byt constitutes a confluence of para-literary factors (the eighteenth-century aestheticization of Russian everyday life) and intra-literary factors (the birth of nineteenth-century realism in a reaction against romanticism's over-aestheticized tendencies). This confluence marks the beginning of the most important stage in the conflict of systems whose general contours I have been outlining. I conclude by positing a framework within which this moment can be explored. I will be looking at a clash between the participatory tradition of the icon and the mediatory rhetoric of the artistic sign within which that tradition (re)asserts itself. The main area of conflict is that of the frame, since it is as essential to the image's capacity to represent, as it is antithetical to the icon's urge to participate. The notion of narrativeframeconstitutes my primary analytical tool. In narrative, the position of exteriority essential to art's framing activity takes the form of a present-time instance of narration (analogous to Emile Benveniste's linguistic "instance of enunciation") from which the events in the plot happen^/ . 87 The narrating presence's position ahead of the events facilitates the maneuvers associated with a well-constructed plot. It is also indissociable from aspects of meaning. In addition to being of time (past framed by present), narrative is articulated through time. The categories of beginning and ending constituting the internal dramatization of the narrative frame and tracing a path from the furthest position in the narrative past to that closest to the

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present are vital to narrative semiosis.88 In order that this path be construed as a sequence capable of functioning semiotically, there must be a structural relationship between beginning and ending marking its framing boundaries — that elusive combination of similarity with difference which Todorov understands as narrative transformation?9 Moreover, the point from which the plot is told is, owing to art's universalizing function, always an eternal present ("always is") rather than a contemporaneous present ("is now"). The relationship between "once upon a time" and "so it is" is one not only between past and present, but also between singularity and generality (the past-tense events must, however unique, submit to an authenticating generality). The singularity required for narrativity must thus be balanced against the need for the repetition essential to meaning. A good story surprises, but also cries out to be infinitely retold. Peter Brooks goes so far as to suggest that "the result aimed at by plotting is ever the same . . . the restoration of the possibility of transmission."90 It is the narrative frame, the invisible seam separating and joining the "was" of the past to the "is" of the present which harnesses this paradox to narrative's semiotic function. The forces which came to a head in Silver-age fiction are, I contend, spearheaded by a rebellion against framing. Thus, the principles of good plot are abandoned in favor of antiplot; narrative transformation is undermined; singular events resist repetition. The subversion of framing is accompanied by an attrition of the ties connecting narrative representation to daily life's mediatory role, and the corresponding evolution of a uniquely Russian form of literary everyday life. Narrative framing is not without a spatial aspect, just as painting cannot be free of time. Indeed the position of "outsidedness" (vnenakhodimost') which is Bakhtin's version of framing is a spatio-temporal outsidedness; in order to represent human life the author must remain exterior to the space of the human body as well as the time in which the life unfolded: "If I relate . . . an event that has just happened to me, then I as teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event occurred . . . The represented world

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. . . can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents, where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found.5591 In the texts we are to analyse, Bakhtin5s axiom regarding the incompatability of the chronotopes (his term for the unity of space and time) of representing and represented worlds is subjected to continual pressure. An assault on narrative framing is an assault on the principle of chronotopic separation. The tension unleashed by this assault is reflected in a series of motifs running through our texts — the journey, the provincial town, the home — and sharing a certain ambivalence attributable to the contradictions entailed in an artistic subversion of artistic framing; the journeys embrace both motion and the striving for eventual stasis; the provincial town and the home are at once enclosed places of intimacy, and sites of alienation. In the last two instances, the chronotopic motif incorporates a particular model for the narrative act - that of gossip. Another term for the artistic image — a sign which reproduces the reality that it represents while remaining distinct from it — is, of course, metaphor. Roman Jakobson drew attention both to the primacy of metaphor in art and to the partnership it enjoys with metonymy — the trope which figures its object by presenting itself as conjoined to, displaced from, or, in the case of synecdochic metonymy, part of it.92 Jakobson expanded his theory to account for equivalence and displacement as principles of textual syntax, noting that prose's relative freedom lends it to the operations of metonymic displacement (progression by contiguity), while the tighter control exercised by poetry favors development through relations of similarity. Jakobson recognized that even prose must submit to metaphor, while poetry's need for coherence forces it to pay deference to metonymy. This insight has been modified by psychoanalytically-oriented critics like Brooks who treat narrative in terms of a desire to be maintained by metonymic displacement, but finally sated through metaphoric equivalence.93 In our texts, ridden as they are by acute epistemological conflict, the undermining of the framing which guarantees the artistic image as metaphor leads logi-

Narrative and the everyday cally to a privileged role for the displacements of metonymy. My next chapter analyses the factors in nineteenth-century Russian literature which paved the way for this conflict's apotheosis in the Silver Age.

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CHAPTER 2

The development of byt in nineteenth-century Russian literature

Onegin, following Ghilde Harolde's vice Fell languidly to pensive ways Begins his mornings with baths of ice Then all day at home he stays (Aleksandr Pushkin) If at Anna Ivanovna's they serve cheese sandwiches, then at Ivan Ivanovich's you get ham, and at Matvei Ionych's every other sandwich will be cheese . . . And so on for thirty years with no change . . . Anna Pavlovna putting a sandwich on the table - is that not the limits of fantasy? (Andrei Belyi) In Russian Literature . . . reality is constantly provoking moral dissatisfaction with the past and a desire for something better in the future . . . Russian literature squeezes the present between the past and the future. (Dmitrii Likhachev)*

In this chapter I trace the epistemological conflict in Russian culture by examining key moments in what has been called its "counter aesthetic" - the second, reactive stage in a three-stage process by which Russia accommodated itself to western aesthetics.2 Together these factors account for the negativity with which byt is associated and the positive, self-transformative potential that is the other side of its anti-aesthetic coin. Some of these moments have been analysed in different contexts by other critics (Gary Saul Morson, Irina Paperno, William Mills Todd III) and I draw upon their insights. The first section begins with a characterization of byt in its modern interpretation, highlighting its associations with trivi44

The development of byt ality, petty intrigue and automatism. To explain the origins of these connotations I return first to a key point in byt's prehistory: the dual assault of early Russian realism on (i) the western artistic models Russia had absorbed uncritically in the eighteenth century, and (ii) the aestheticization of daily life itself. I link the resulting conflation of anti-aesthetic and real with the rapid circulation of properties between "reality" and "art" in nineteenth-century Russian aesthetics, and the tendency to identify life with art in its negative form — a contradiction central to Russia's "representational-didactic mode." 3 I treat the implications of the confusion for the realist concept of type, noting the influence of the sketch and the importance of its semi-aesthetic status, but indicating that the difficulties Russian writers experience in framing the particular produced a distortion of the genre that accounts for the association of daily life with stagnation and triviality (Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedryn). Russian literature's problem with framing is then traced through Gogol, where the effect is that of an abandonment of the norm/ deviation plot model for a conception of norm as abstraction (St. Petersburg, the governmental machine) that, when embodied, can be nothing but deviation (Gogol's itinerant swindlers). While accounting for the provincial setting associated with byt, Gogol's adoption of non-integrative plot also paves the way to the mutual predication of antithetical terms (man and God, Christ and Antichrist) characteristic of the iconic system and revealed more clearly by Dostoyevsky. The ambiguity engendered by such reciprocity lends Gogolian narration to appropriation by "gossip" - an everyday discourse which, like the sketch, situates itself on the boundaries of the aesthetic. This, too, connects Gogol to Dostoyevsky whose narration centers on scandal as the propulsion of the intimate into the public arena. I end by suggesting that in Tolstoy, the equation of reality and anti-aesthetic, representation and participation, forces the fragmentation of daily existence into (i) the deathly automatism of anonymous codes, and (ii) pure, unmediated life. The second section highlights Chekhov's status as the "end-

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point" and his importance as the focus of the trend towards the congealment of the negative properties of daily life as byt, and the depositing of their "positive" corollaries in the category of zhizri (life). The establishment of byt in terms of the antithesis of stagnation and motion reflects Vladimir Solov'ev's renewal of Orthodox thought. However, Solov'ev's formulations open the door to the reestablishment of art as a separate category and a return to the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic impasse. A way out is contained in two Symbolist theories which sketch out an alternative cultural form neither "aesthetic" nor "anti-aesthetic." This reaffirmative stage in Russia's assimilation of western art points toward a reconfigurement of the art-daily lifenarrative relationship.

Roman Jakobson pointed out that Russian is the only European language able to designate with a single word the compound concept (everyday life, Alltagsleben, la vie quotidienne, etc.). He

reminds us of the difficulties of translating the word byt with its connotations ("hardened mold," "stagnating slime," "static norm"), explaining how it grew into an obsession for Maiakovskii whose last despairing reference to his "love-boat crashing up against the rock of byt" provides an emblem of the lyricist's disenchantment with the realities of bureaucratic stagnation afflicting the revolution he had served with such zeal.4 Jakobson suggests that Maiakovskii's own antithesis to the density of byt is a certain suppleness, the sense that "everything has become a little fluid [tekuchee], a little slippery [polzuchee], a little bit thinned and watered down \razzhiz~ hennoe]."5 The experiencing of Russian life as both immobility and movement can be traced back to Chaadaev's references on one hand to "our dead and stagnant life," and, on the other, to his feeling that "everything is slipping away, everything is passing."6 But, as Maiakovskii's agonized formulations indicate, literature had always been tied to the negotiation of this paradoxical synthesis of stasis and instability. In his cycle Pro eto (About that), Maiakovskii opposes byt to the poet's dynamic " I "

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whose verse serves to confound its coagulating force: "I hammer my forehead with the resistance of words into byt. . . But strangely, my words pass through it."7 The poet's links with the Formalist Jakobson is significant. One of Formalism's central tenets was the claim that art's ability to "defamiliarize" provides a weapon against automatization in daily life. (This axiom dovetails with the Formalists' contrast between everyday and poetic language.) The connection linking daily life to stasis and bureacratic impersonalism is crucial to the evolution of byt. So, too, is the idea of art as a weapon against automatization - a notion that betrays Formalism's German Romantic heritage.8 We should note, though, that Maiakovskii poses the art/byt dichotomy as a struggle between two authentic forces within life, rather than a difference between the authenticity of the poetical self, and the banal inauthenticity of "the crowd." He thus takes us beyond both Romanticism's art/everyday opposition and the related contrast of the philosophical idealist pitting byt (empirical, earthly existence) against by tie (spiritual Being). It is the byt/zhizri (everyday routine/life) distinction deriving from Russian Symbolism which will prove of greater significance. Appropriately, Maiakovskii's Pro eto concludes with the image of the poet's crucifixion by the legions of byt — a. sacrifice offered to Love, the ultimate Savior. For this sacrifice he requests of Love nothing short of resurrection "even if only because I was a poet and awaited you, and cast off the rubbish of the everyday. Resurrect me - Just for that! I want to live it through to the end." 9 Maiakovskii's tragic death in 1929 becomes, ironically, the supreme act of Symbolist zhiznetvorchestvo (/z/e-creation.) To Maiakovskii's name we should add that of Marina Tsvetaeva for whom byt also assumed cosmic significance, and whose expressions of the everyday likewise amount to reverse images of the artistic. (In an early poem she wishes that "yesterday would be legend," and that "everyday would be madness.")10 Mikhail Zoshchenko, too, focussed his satirical eye (and provocatively unorthodox approach to storytelling) on another aspect of the norm-alization of Soviet Russia - the heightened sense of triviality that arises when the grand slogans

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of Bolshevik ideology are juxtaposed with the concrete realia they intended, but failed to revolutionize. (Hence the topics of Zoshchenko's most celebrated tales - bus tickets, a trip to the bathhouse, and so on.) For these writers, as for Jakobson, byt's litany of negative attributes (automatism, eventlessness, petty intrigue, ugly uniformity) has no historical dimension other than the unusually harsh nature of everyday existence that has been the lot of Russians under a variety of regimes, and which the term reflects. Byt is easily dismissed as a peculiarly Russian word denoting one of those enduring (and long endured) Russian misfortunes. However, aside from the sense of instability with which byt as stasis is confoundingly fated to coexist, the coherence of its network of synonyms is undermined by the equally puzzling fact that for much of the nineteenth century, the word possessed the neutral meaning of "way of life," "local customs" or "national rituals," featuring regularly in the titles of scholarly works of geography in this sense. Hugh McClean makes this point after enumerating the familiar connotations and stating with tantalizing imprecision that they evolved in Russian literature "in twentieth-century literary usage."11 Moreover, these associations have long since broken free of their literary origins and form part of what most Russians mean when they refer in conversation to byt. Questions about how the shift occurred, and why it proved so pervasive, lead one to conclude that the term must be subjected to a second, literaryhistorical defamiliarization. Following Peter the Great's reforms, Russia became highly receptive to European influence. Alongside the infiltration of art into daily life, the eighteenth century saw the absorption of western aesthetic forms and the beginnings of a secular Russian literature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russian culture began the second stage of its accommodation to the European aesthetic tradition - the subjection of western artistic models to critique and translation into its own modes of meaning production.12 The fact that the beginning of this process coincided with the rise of western realism (itself a reaction against overaestheticism) explains why Russian realism

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retained its anti-aesthetic orientation for so long. This orientation is reinforced by a secondary coincidence - that between realism's focus on the ordinary and the by now palpably "aesthetic" nature of Russia's version of the everyday. Iurii Tynianov points to the importance of parody as a spur to the evolution of representational form, linking it to the reactions of new schools against the worn-out cliches of the previous movement which, having ceased to represent reality authentically, becomes false and insincere.13 In the case of Russia's initiation into realism, the parodying of romanticized modes of representation (a feature characteristic of early European realism) coincides with the "participatory" critique of art as distanced representation, and of overcoded, inauthentic behavior in the daily life to be represented. The needs of semiosis (to replace an outmoded form of representation) and the participatory urge to restore to daily life an unmediated, asemiotic status converge in a single point. The congruence is acutely evident in Russia's first important contribution to realism. Presented as a novel in verse, Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin is littered with metaliterary subversions of poetic convention.14 Central to the plot is the heroine's discovery that her lover is a cynical dandy who conducts his relationships in imitation of the conventions of Byronic ennui: "A Muscovite in Childe Harolde's clothes / A parody, a wretched ghost."15 As this chapter's first epigraph suggests, even Onegin's daily routine is accorded eventfulness through its concordance with the Byronic model. Saul Morson refers to the coincidence which Pushkin's parodic anti-hero highlights when explaining why Russian realism continually opted for anti-aesthetic forms in its depiction of reality, rather than adopt the stable version of the nineteenth-century novel.16 Pushkin's choice of an antinovel - a novel in verse - foregrounds Russia's rejection of the paradigm: narrative=novel; novel=prose; prose=life. For Pushkin, "life" is best revealed (and participated in) through a parodic form of poetry. In more conventional novels such as Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, the affectations of Russian Byronism are ridiculed from within (Pechorin's mockery of the pretentious Grushnitskii).

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Though still a force, the anti-aesthetic urge has given way to the impulse to write good novels. However, the sense that portions of society were living according to false aesthetic models, and that both depiction and transformation of such life demand anti-narrative forms persisted as far as Tolstoy where, in Morson's analysis, the equation between verisimilitude and anti-narrative is accompanied by the implied injunction to live in the least plot-like way possible.17 The confusion of artistic representation with participatory involvement and the resulting equation of reality and antinarrative is at the roots of Russia's nineteenth-century civic tradition. It is reflected in the rapidity with which "art" and "reality" change places in Belinskii's attempt to describe without contradiction a representational aesthetic which, qua aesthetic, distinguishes itself from the reality it represents, but whose defining quality is its antagonistic attitude towards aesthetic distance. Art and reality are, in dizzying succession, each accorded the value of authenticity. Lidiia Ginzburg's account of Belinskii's struggle to overcome Hegel is apt: [T]he initial opposition was between "idealism" and "base reality." During his Hegelian period, that formulation was turned upside down, producing a new opposition between "reality" and "vulgar idealism." During his crisis of faith in Hegelian ideas, yet another opposition emerged, one between the "illusory dream" and "vile reality."18 The anti-aesthetic impulse defines the life of the man who epitomizes Russia's civic tradition - Nikolai Chernyshevskii. Irina Paperno reveals the extent to which the merging of the iconic and the semiotic came to characterize Russian aesthetics when she writes that, for Chernyshevskii, reality is that which can be transformed: "According to Chernyshevsky's argument, reality is those phenomena of life that can, when motionactivity is applied to them, be transformed into different, opposite phenomena (rotting, black soil that can become living, white wheat)." 19 Paperno notes the influence of eastern theological concepts of transfiguration, suggesting that, in his influential novel What is to be Done, Chernyshevskii adapts Orthodoxy to utilitarian ends, applying the patterns of religious

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transformation to his heros.20 She also underscores the importance of Chernyshevskii's anti-aesthetic to his revolutionary mission, arguing that the much maligned What is to be Done is a deliberately bad novel: "The idea of a writer who is aesthetically inept and whose role is that of a practical man . . . becomes an integral part of the epochal model. Chernyshevsky's novel fulfilled its role not in spite of its artistic faults, but rather because of them." 21 Chernyshevskii's adoption of "bad art" as a model for life compounds the paradox besetting Belinskii. To equate life with the negation of art is to remain a prisoner of semiosis, of the need for art (albeit in negative form) as mediator between life and essence, and of the dualistic thinking which, translating between two opposed terms (art/life) with a third (beauty), paves the way for their conflation. To paraphrase Paperno, the path from Art (not life) is Beauty, to Beauty (not art) is Life, to Art (not life) is Life is a slippery one.22 The predominance of aesthetics - beauty is an aesthetic category - is preserved. Not surprisingly, Chernyshevskii and his followers developed a poetics of everyday behaviour of their own, valorizing all things practical and anti-artistic as a means of beautifying their lives. The civic tradition in Russian aesthetics is less a reflection of Orthodox "participation," than its refraction through a deeply semiotic form. Thus, Paperno's statement that Chernyshevskii is aligned with "the . . . Russian tradition of substituting literature for religion" requires qualification.23 The icon proper (Christ) does not mediate between opposed terms - man and God, Life and Essence. Nor, therefore, can it, like art, instigate an oscillation between "life" and "icon" ("life" and "not life," "icon" and "not icon"). The icon is both man and God, life and essence, but assimilable to neither - an absolutely distinct term through which God is realized by man in the Holy Spirit. Later, we will find the instability of the art/life dichotomy confirmed in the writings of the arch-conservative, Vasilii Rozanov. Rozanov also identified life with anti-art. But for him "art" meant precisely the canonized civic tradition which Chernyshevskii had fostered. Revealingly, Rozanov turns to the very strategy of enumerating in diary form the chores of

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daily existence with which Chernyshevskii's own career had begun! For Chernyshevskii, this strategy is useful therefore nonartistic, therefore life-like, therefore "beautiful." For Rozanov it is useless, therefore non-artistic, therefore life-like, therefore "beautiful." The civic tradition which Chernyshevskii spearheaded required art objectively to "represent" reality, while simultaneously subjecting it to critique. Rozanov points to the confusion resulting from the attempt to reconcile these demands when he (somewhat improbably) blames the catastrophic 1917 revolution on a nineteenth-century misreading of Gogol! For Rozanov, the illusion fostered by the literary establishment was "the acceptance [of Gogol] as a naturalist. . . the fact that in "The Inspector General" and Dead Souls it considered everything as a copy from reality."24 The confusion is further reflected in the difficulties experienced by Russian realists over the concept of "type," where the relationship between deviation and norm, narrative and "the representative example" comes to the fore. The theory of the type as a character whose actions, while corresponding to those of no individual, reveal the essence of a norm through their deviations from it was undoubtedly assimilated, as Dostoyevsky's formulation confirms: "Writers mostly attempt in their stories and novels to take social types and represent them imaginatively and artistically; these types are extremely rarely met with in actual life in their entirety, but they are nevertheless almost more real than real life itself."25 And Belinskii's theory of realism is grounded in references to the type. It was he who stressed the everyday imperative in realism's urge for objectivity by raising the famous "pennies" issue.26 However, his attempt to define the concept of type to which this imperative is tied is tinged with the Hegelian idealism he found conducive to the negotiation of his dilemma: "The crux of the matter lies in types, and here the ideal arises . . . as the relationship the author establishes between the types he has created in accordance with the thought which he sets out to develop in his work" (italics a d d e d ) . 2 7

The difficulty of reconciling critical "participation" with the revealing of "objective essences" is tied to the problems of representation. A participatory position at the heart of things is

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ill suited to the task of framing from without, selecting the particular detail (or deviation) which best represents the universal whole (eternity, the norm). The problematization of the relation of particular to universal is the chief aspect of Russia's difficulties with typicality. The narration in Goncharov's Oblomov offers a bizarre illustration in its manifest unwillingness to break out of the imperfective aspect (matched only by the eponymous hero's reluctance to get out of bed). The variety of nineteenth-century superfluity known as Oblomovshchina is generated from pages of intricate detail conveying Oblomov's daily (even yearly) (in)action sustained with strings of imperfective verbs ("He would . . . he would"): As soon as he got up in the morning he would lie down again on his divan immediately after tea, would lean his head on his hand and begin to think . . . until his head would begin to tire from the hard work and his conscience would tell him: that's enough done for today for the common good. Only then would he decide to rest from his labors and change his engaged pose for another, less business-like one.28 Goncharov is unwilling to make the leap of faith that would allow him to substitute a few well-chosen perfective actions to represent the totality of Oblomov's way of life at a given point. Even dreams - traditionally the locus of fantasy, adventure, events — take the form of thirty-five page, present-tense "flashbacks" relating the soporific rhythms of a childhood existence established over generations.The result is a daily routine that, far from corresponding to some exemplary typicality, acquires a palpable air of stagnation.29 When accounting for Goncharov's approach, we should consider the ocherk (physiological sketch) which has played a crucial role in the development of Russian realism. The genre's position on the boundaries between journalism and art equips it to reflect the competing claims of critical participation and distanced representation that Russian literature addresses. Of western origin, the sketch is tied to the concept of typicality that influenced realism in its early stages. The principle it adopts (well demonstrated by Balzac) is that of conveying the sense of a sociological class by relating (usually in the present

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tense) salient features in the behaviour of a composite figure - a representative, but imaginary example.30 Aside from its persistence in Russian letters, the ocherk deviated from its (western) norm in significant ways.31 Thus, Saltykov-Shchedryn's collection of sketches The Trifles of Life [Melochi zhizni) consists of portraits of figures drawn from provincial life in mid nineteenth-century Russia. But, rather than selecting a cross-section of details from their routine existence in order to convey a sense of the whole, Saltykov narrates entire lives as single, present-tense states. The techniques of the ocherk are applied to material associated with artistic narrative (which customarily relates whole lives). Indeed, some of the sketches are narrated in the past tense and approach fictional status. The profoundly anti-narrative strategy (these are stories containing nothing but present-tense states) is easily commuted into a referential effect - they deal with documentary reality - producing the Chekhovian everyday lifeanti-narrative equation. Also striking is the triviality of the details associated with these provincial lives: Bracing himself and having decided the question of the trousers and the tie etc., Serezha begins to get dressed. Again there is a whistling, again smiles and again, not a single thought. Timefliesimperceptibly amid all the hesitations and exchanges with Charles; a comforting "Enjin me void en regie" resounds - and the great process of dressing is finished.32 Because of the context in which they are cited (the diachronic account of an entire life, rather than a synchronic cross-section) these details break free from the particularuniversal relationship tying representative example to represented whole, acquiring a pseudo-objective existence. The author's introduction explains this pure singularity as a concrete, physical presence: "In this way the provincial town is gradually being brought to that wearying uniformity which allows neither the exchange of thought, nor vital activity . . . The sum total of trivia is not diminishing but growing into a glacier. And this glacier will roll on and on and eventually will block the road ahead and make it impassible."33 Significant also is the fact that many of the sketches begin or end with phrases

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like: "such is the byt of the merchant (the priest, the schoolteacher)." Byt is still neutral and pseudo-scientific, lacking the twentieth-century connotations, which, though present in the life of the subjects, cannot yet be paired to it as its definition. Saltykov-Shchedryn is known better for his fiction, in particular for subjecting to his acerbic vision the world of the provincial Russian landowner. In The Golov'ev Family (Gospoda Golov'evy), daily existence becomes synonymous with the drunken haze of idle chatter in which the grotesque characters slowly suffocate. Everyday reality is decoupled from notions of rhythmic repetition through time, severed from its position on the boundary between private and public (necessary so that private example can typify public whole), featuring instead as a never-changing present made up of an infinite accumulation of petty minutiae lacking any generalizable pattern, or tracemark: Before him was merely the present in the form of a tightly closed prison in which any idea of time or space had disappeared without trace . . . It was a completely. . . independent style of life capable of existing completely independently of any pattern . . . This was an infinite void . . . In general . . . Porfirii Ivanovich was a man who . . . was buried up to his ears in a mire of trivia and whose existence as a result left behind it no trace. There are quite a few people like this and they all live estranged.34 The last sentence betrays the lingering influence of the ocherk ("There are quite a few such people . . . "), just as the sketch leaves its mark on the European novel. But while the latter develops the illustrative instances of the sketch into specially selected artistic deviations capable of revealing essences, Saltykov-Shchedryn grafts present-tense, illustrative ocherk onto past-tense, "deviational" narrative in unsynthesized fashion, so that narrative patterning (and the totality of life that provides its ultimate referent) degenerates into the haphazard accretion of static, singular detail: [W]ith feverish impatience he watched the carts being unloaded . . . and thenfinallydisappear into the yawning abyss of cellars. Much of the time he remained happy. "Two cartloads of brown mushrooms were brought today from Dubrovino . . . " Or: "Today mother gave

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the order to catch carp in the pond . . . More than a foot long some of them were." However, sometimes he wasfilledwith sadness. "The pickles, brother, they didn't turn out right today."35 Instead of Flaubert's seamless pattern of (non-aesthetic) norm and (aesthetic) deviation, provincial Russian life becomes a single, universal norm enmired in a choking overgrowth of its own distinctly unaesthetic instances. The alternative to Likhachev's "squeezing" of present between past and future is to expand it to engulf both. Each strategy reflects an awkwardness with the ordering of narrative time - with the manipulation of the temporal frame upon which narrative relies, and the semiotic frame which is its corollary; in order to make past seem like present, to represent, one must be willing to select and frame. Chaadaev's sense of life's "static instability" is, perhaps, not the paradox that it seems. Much of the humor in Gogol's Dead Souls derives from potshots that the narrator takes at typification. The novel is riddled with phrases such as "one of those wool-covered cushions," "the usual standard of our provincial capitals," phrases which, in Roland Barthes's account of realism, mark the activity of a referential code - "an anonymous, collective voice whose origin is human wisdom."36 But, rather than reinforcing the text's claim to referential truth - the claim that it deals in particulars with a source in universal human wisdom - Gogol's generalizations highlight the inappropriateness of the link asserted, either by universalizing an absurdly off-beat item, or by following the universalizing gesture with an example whose improbability cuts the ground from beneath it: She belonged to that class of female landowners who . . . complaining and drooping their heads to one side are meanwhile stuffing money into striped purses, which they keep hoarded in cupboard drawers. Into one they will stuff rouble pieces, into another half roubles, and into a third chetvertaki, although from their appearance you would think that the cupboard contained just linen.37 Gogol's assault on typification extends to the level of plot. It is initiated in the foreword where we are told that the hero (Chichikov) is a type taken "to display the vices and weaknesses . . . of the commonplace Russian individual," only to be

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informed lines later that much of what is described "is unlikely and does not happen as things usually happen in Russia."38 The conception of the plot of Dead Souls reflects a mistrust of the particular/universal relationship in its bureaucratic form. The notorious table of ranks with its abstract "slots" and "positions" instituted by Peter the Great epitomizes Russia's inveterate inability to assimilate western models of government. The quintessential locus of the particular/universal model in its political context is the provincial town - outpost of the governmental machine and the chinovniki (functionaries) - those tiny instances of the colossal norm regulated in the diabolic abstraction that is St. Petersburg. Madame Bovary and Barchester Towers take the European novel's quest for the essence of reality to the French and English provinces. The Russian novel takes its mission to its own "common-place" — life in the guberniia. But in Dead Souls there is no integrated pattern of (mundane) norm and (dramatic) deviation, only an open-ended, picaresque sequence of deviations - roguery, corruption - a drawnout scheme to defraud the governmental machine of which Chichikov only appeared to be the perfect representative: "Even his superiors admitted that he was a devil at the job and not a human being; he would conduct searches inside wheels . . . in horses' ears . . . in places where only a Customs official is allowed to pry."39 For Gogol - and for Dostoyevsky - the devil is associated with western rationalism and negation. To perform that negation, to become an active force, however, the devil must progress from being Dostoyevsky's ghostly "x in an indeterminate equation" — evil as a pure, unreal state opposed to and disjoined from the state of good — to becoming materially embodied: as Ivan Karamazov's scruffy provincial gentleman in checked trousers, or as Gogol's Chichikov.40 For these writers, a norm instantiated is a norm subverted, since every event instantiating (substantiating) the devil is a deviation towards his opposite. It is only through the material life of man in fallen condition, through linear events and active transcendence of the devil that God can be realized on earth. As Ivan Karamazov's devil explains:

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Hosannah alone is not enough for life, we need this Hosannah to pass through the crucible of doubt . . . So they. . . made me write for the criticism section and life happened . . . they say, live, because without you there would be nothing . . . Without you there would be no events, and there have to be events . . . I am some sort of phantom of life who has lost all ends and beginnings . . . I would give all of that life beyond the stars . . . only to be embodied in the soul of a twohundred-and-fifty-pound merchant's wife.41 Christ and Antichrist, God and man are not separate realms mediated through the neutrality of (everyday) life. They are mutually predicated forces, transmutable one into the other, provided that this being without ends and beginnings can be incarnated in the material surfaces of life. In making flesh of the diabolic abstraction that he is, the devil is made to serve God for, without him there would be only static norms - no anomalies, no events, no trajectory of self-transcendence that is the Orthodox path to Truth. Chichikov arrives from St. Petersburg, sufficiently insubstantial and mediocre to retain his normativity, but having at every point deviated, used the system against itself. Had he remained the "eternal median of Being," nothing would have happened, and Dead Souls would be without a plot.42 However, Chichikov's subterfuge (the purchase and resale of dead serfs still on the official register) is not of the conventionally literary kind that, once suspensefully unravelled, can be reabsorbed into the everydayness from which it emanated. The meandering anomaly with its endless succession of co-conspirators that is Chichikov's scandalous journey through the provinces makes for good gossip, but poor artistic plot. It is in fact an anti-plot, plot with a minus sign. Or, plot with a soft sign — plot' (the Russian for "flesh"). Temporarily derailed at the end of part 1 when confused with another spurious conspiracy to abduct the Governor's daughter, it is resumed at the beginning of part 11, where it becomes woven into the fabric of provincial scandal. Moreover, Chichikov's scheme hardly furnishes an artistic deviation or "figure," since the "ground" (the provincial reality in which the conspiracy unfolds) is itself a maze of petty, gossipy subterfuge, rendering impossible the narrator's task of

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separating figure from ground, deviation from norm: "[H]e began closing his eyes . . . Let the author take advantage of this, in order to talk at length about his hero, since hitherto he (the author) has been prevented from doing so by those thousand trifles which seem trifles only when included in a book, but which in reality appear as matters of importance." 43 Gossip is a form of story-telling grounded in everyday ephemera and superficial intrigue. Rather than framing and selecting those details for lasting significance, the gossiper is self-indulgently indiscriminate. Addressing a group of intimates, gossipers need not restrict themselves to details of public relevance. Nor should their stories be situated in some hallowed past, for one gossips about what happened "the other day," assuming that the intrigue in question will soon evaporate into the atemporal continuum from which it emerged, to be replaced by a succession of more "newsworthy" topics. When gossiping, we are compelled to be neither concise nor purposive and are at liberty to go off at tangents ("and, by the way, did you know . . . "). 4 4 Gossip is the mainstay of the plot, setting and narration in Dead Souls. It is the (non)substance of the hero, as we learn at the novel's centerpiece - the Governor's ball which generates pages of rambling speculation, before degenerating into fantasy: "One of the many ideas propounded was a theory that Chichikov was Napoleon Bonaparte, released from St. Helena and travelling about the world in disguise . . . " 4 5 The narrator, too, rambles, and is likewise prone to idle speculation and digression. And, like the townsfolk of N. he holds up as "event-like" the kind of murky, inconclusive scandals with whose echoes gossip resonates. Thus, the dead souls scheme is hyperbolized within a few lines as "an essential cause" and "a matter of great seriousness" with a "crowning denouement," while the gossiping Nozdrev with his propensity for farcical outrage is described as "a man of incident" (istoricheskii chelovek).4"6 We have long been aware of the ability of the realist novel to transform the non-aesthetic discourses on whose boundaries it situates itself (journalism, the personal diary and so on.) Ross Chambers, who has studied gossip in this context, notes the influence on the novel of eighteenth-

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century "salon talk," highlighting gossip's capacity for circulating the values of particular social groups and scapegoating non-conformers.47 In a canonical gesture of western criticism, Chambers traces the gossip function in realist narration whose claim to objectivity is thereby ''unmasked." But, as the example of Saltykov indicates, Russian writers foreground rather than mask their sub-aesthetic intertexts. Instead of the assimilation of non-artistic form to novelistic art, we encounter the reordering of artistic form along non-artistic lines that characterizes the reactive stage of Russia's dialogue with European aesthetics. When Russian writers gossip, they do so openly; why expose the gossip in Gogol's rambling speculations or Dostoyevsky's scandalmongering when he makes every effort to announce himself? Gogolian gossip as narrative model is acutely anti-aesthetic in intonation. Gogol's stylistic bombast highjacks high literary form to indulge in the kind of rambling reminiscent of gossip. William Mills Todd suggests that, like Pushkin, Gogol construes his fiction as a parodic subversion of the overaestheticized lives of Russian high society. Whereas Pushkin directed his controlled irony at effete poses and behaviour, the more manic Gogol exposes through comic hyperbole the ridiculous conventions of "polite talk."?8 Thus, for Gogol, as for Pushkin, the conflict generated in the interstices of Russian literature's nonaesthetic aesthetic, its "representational-didactic mode," is managed by suggesting that Russian reality is revealed for what it is through a satirical parody of the art that it is not (but which it presents itself as).49 Gogol's own commentary on the gossip theme support this interpretation: "The idea of the town . . . Idle talk. Gossip surpassing all limits. How all this has arisen from idleness . . . How private gossip mixes into the general gossip . . . How the emptiness and impotent idleness of life gives way to dull and unspeaking death." 50 The death at the heart of the life depicted is duplicated in the emptiness of the depiction. Again, provincial Russian reality equates itself with the subversion of its own narration. While retaining gossip's non-aesthetic provenance (and antiaesthetic force), Russian literary gossipers exploit some proper-

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ties of the form that Chambers chooses to ignore. Like the ocherk, gossip situates itself between reality and fiction, grounding itself in speculative rumors — "half-false and halftrue" — worthless unless they have some foundation in reality, yet relying for their piquant ambiguity on a liberal spicing of make-believe. Accordingly, amidst all the innuendo surrounding Chichikov's identity, the truth about his swindle is spoken by none other than the lying gossip, Nozdrev.51 As in real gossip, truth emerges, by accident, from falsehood. By adopting (though without absorbing) this low genre as the model for his "high" art, Gogol simultaneously exploit's gossip's anti-aesthetic orientation, and immerses himself in the non-aesthetic, everyday reality in which it is based. Gossip is therefore, allied with the participatory activity that works against typification. Nozdrev is a liar whose fictions happen upon the truth. The artist, Gogol, has perforce to work with figures alienated from the realities which they replace - fictions whose only claim to truth is as its distanced representation. Yet, his "lies," too, happen upon the truth - not the empirical truth of fact, nor the abstract truth of the typical, but the truth which emerges from the everyday reality that is its materialized negation, from out of the tide of gossip which we owe to the devil.52 If representational fiction is a lie masquerading as truth, then gossip is a truth entangled with lies. And if Gogol's devil is that of Dostoyevsky, then he, too, is ultimately an agent of Truth. The false rumors feeding the notion that Khlestakov is a Government Inspector (and furnishing the plot of Gogol's play) are eclipsed at the end by the announcement that the "real Inspector" has arrived, at which the entire cast is struck dumb. The truth embodied in this apocalyptic finale cannot be spoken (as the redemptive end of Dead Souls cannot be plotted). It is arrived at through an em-jfr/of-ment of its negation (the saunters of Chichikov and Khlestakov through the provinces). The mode of being of those diabolic mediocrities is as the object of gossip - the everyday discourse whose truths come to light solely by penetrating a crust of deceit.53 Dostoyevsky developed both the provincial setting and the

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gossip narration bequeathed to him by Gogol. Many of Dostoyevsky's novels are narrated in gossipy fashion by personas caught up in the atmosphere of provincial intrigue that Dostoyevsky found so congenial to his brand of mystery tale. If the privileged object of much Gogolian narration is the petty machinations of Russian provincial life, then Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, too, abounds in intrigues which are "the talk of the town" - hilarious depictions of the bumbling plots of the revolutionary movement. And The Idiot makes much of the painfully public wrangling over Prince Myshkin's inheritance. As Bakhtin established, it is the drawing room scandal which lends Dostoyevskian plot its distinctive stamp, confirming Dostoyevsky's allegiance with the European carnival tradition and his ability to exploit that tradition in order to "lay bare the human soul." 54 Scandal, however, is also object and method in Dostoyevsky's distinctly Russian appropriation of gossip. In one scene from The Possessed the private secret of Stavrogin's marriage to the crippled Maria Lebiadkina emerges from a stream of small talk and is revealed to his unknowing mother and her scandalized associates. The narrator relates how the news that he has just made public to his intimate fellow-gossips — his readers — immediately makes its way into the public arena of the town to become the latest source of scandal: "Needless to say, all kinds of rumors spread throughout the town that night . . . But what we couldn't tell, was who was responsible for divulging all that had happened so quickly and so accurately."55 By constructing his plots from scandal and siting it in the quintessential provincial town, Dostoyevsky contradicts the conception of literary everydayness as mediator between singular (private), and universal (public). Rather than selecting private events typical (i.e. public) enough to "represent," Dostoyevsky chooses events in which the private is expelled unceremoniously into the realm of the public (i.e. scandalized). No longer marking the intersection of private and public, the everyday expands to become an intimate space within which the drawing room irrupts into the town square. Gossip comes to serve as both thematic content and narrative model. Dostoyevsky remarked that, hidden away in the faits divers

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columns of local newspapers, are facts more fantastic than anything conceivable to a writer. More than a reassertion of the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction," Dostoyevsky's attention to these stories reveals an interest in the circulation of intrigue around a small, intimate readership. The journalistic connection deepens the parallel between gossip and the ocherk. Both are forms that, while retaining an affiliation with the aesthetic, announce their affiliation with earthy, extra-literary reality. Dostoyevsky's insistence on the inherent fantasy of the fait divers (he defines his method as fantastic realism) indicates a continuing inclination not merely to straddle the boundary separating aesthetic from non-aesthetic, but to reorder the aesthetic along non-aesthetic lines. Fiction becomes the discourse of the affected and the predictable, newspaper gossip that of the truly intriguing, the earthy and the narratable. The most outrageous scene in The Possessed is Iuliia Mikhailovna's disastrous literary soiree. The writer Karmazinov and his literary confreres suffer a debacle in which their lofty allegories are laughed off stage, providing fulsome fodder for the town's voracious rumor-mill which had eagerly anticipated the scandal. The entire occasion, which occupies over fifty pages, is narrated in the newsy tone of a second-rate gossip columnist: "For the greater writer to tell us about his first kiss seemed to my mind a little incongruous with his short and fat little figure . . . Perhaps I am not reporting it quite right and don't know how to report it, but the drift of the babble was something of that sort." 56 Anticipating Sologub's decadent masquerade, Iuliia Mikhailovna's fete ends in a pseudo-apocalyptical inferno (likewise the work of diabolically petty arsonists) in which, from within the gossipy world of the everyday, the devils reveal themselves for who they truly are. The fact that they, like Sologub's Peredonov, do so by destroying the false world of art, points up Dostoyevsky's ambiguity regarding the devil who, as instantiation of evil, is the road to salvation - an ambiguity encapsulated in the fascinating figure of Stavrogin.57 Rejecting everyday life as metaphor - the synthesis of ordinary and anomalous whose capacity for revealing the universal in the particular invokes the exclamation: "our lives

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are like that!" - Dostoyevsky5s scandalous plots are alien to the everyday as every-day. This is why the sequence of scandals from which the plot of The Brothers Karamazov is compiled (the putrefaction of the elder's corpse; the murder of father by son; Ivan's outburst at the trial) all reiterate the same symbolic truth — that of the suffering—death—rebirth sequence contained in the novel's biblical epigraph. In an everyday life of unremitting scandal, the singular is propelled eschatologically into the eternal — whether the blissful eternity of the instant preceding Dostoyevsky's epileptic fits, or the eternal bathouse with spiders imagined by Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment.,58 This eschatological impulse is peculiarly congenial to the gossip for whom there must be no plotting of time (past to present; present to future), but instead everything is revealed at once, in the breathless intimacy of standard Dostoyevskian narration. In the nineteenth century, Russian culture was still accommodating western artistic form to its own structures. The antiaesthetic orientation of its relatively new literature reflects that struggle. The crucial role accorded to gossip with its combination of positive and negative features indicates the ambiguity with which the struggle was joined. Gossip is negative since it thwarts the urge to generate good art, positive since, as antiaesthetic, it expresses the distance that Russians tend to place between themselves and good art. At the turn of the century, Russia gestured towards an art freed of both western aestheticism and its own anti-aestheticism. We will see that gossip narration is central to the working out of this new aesthetic and that, as it took shape, gossip began to shed its negative connotations and thus its very identity as gossip. Dostoyevsky reasserts Russia's cultural binarism by showing (through his exploitation of the eschatological possibilities of scandal) that the appropriation of anti-aesthetic models can lead to a positive (divine) version of everyday life as well as a negative (diabolic) version. But it is Tolstoy - the standardbearer of Russian realism - who expresses the bifurcation most clearly. Saul Morson has indicated that Tolstoy epitomizes Russian literature's hostility to the principle of aesthetic distance, suggesting that Tolstoy's anti-aesthetic acquires an

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epistemological dimension. Tolstoy's conception of how we might know reality calls for plots that, since they are not governed by a narratorial position outside of contingency, take decidedly unplot-like courses, pursuing what turn out to be blind alleys for the narrative potential they could, with hindsight, have held. The concomitant moral philosophy embedded in Tolstoy's novels calls for an approach rejecting grand, universally applicable belief-systems in favor of careful, responsive attention to the irreducibility of individual contexts.59 The tension arising from Tolstoy's attempt to convey in novelistic form a sense of an everyday reality whose most enduring feature is its hostility to art, is brought out in the opening line of Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Morson interprets these lines to mean that everyday life in its true state is life that will not submit to the engaging differences of artistic plot. Adapting this insight, we can say that the plot that is Anna's road to death is "untrue" in two senses; it is modelled on an artistic fiction (like Emma Bovary, Anna is carried away by novels) and it strays from "the true way."60 It is an artistic (false) deviation away from a truth which, indivisible into norm and deviation, cannot be plotted and thus gives the mirror image to Chichikov's journey which, as anti-aesthetic em-plotment of (deviation from) falsehood, is the path towards that same Truth. The contradiction is mitigated through the parallel life-journey travelled by Konstantin Levin which, with its unfounded suspicions of adultery, qualified, unspectacular joys and jagged, stop-and-go authenticity stands in vivid contrast to Anna's dramatic, "untrue" life with its adultery, tragic rifts and suicide. Significantly, what were initially artistic deviations pursued by Anna in order to ameliorate the oppressive condition of her marriage begin to intrude inside that norm. Her marital difficulties are explained away with the help of a dramatic artistic figure: " cHe is not a man, but a machine,' she added, picturing Karenin to herself with every detail of his figure and his manner of speech, holding against him everything she could find."61 As her liaison with Vronskii careers towards its thor-

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oughly artistic end, Anna distances herself from the dynamic process of life, increasingly framing her own part and that of others in her predicament as roles to be played, deferring to her "fate." When Dolly visits Anna at home with Vronskii, she is disappointed to find a household built on false airs and the assumption of roles - a daily existence resembling a "bad performance" at the theater.62 Tolstoy spotlights the path leading directly from representational art, through type-casting, to alienation and a life mediated through the impersonal abstractions of the arbitrary sign.63 These roles are impersonal codes of conduct elaborated in the alienating context of the anonymous svet — codes which produce ciphers, not living people — abstract paradigms to be repeated without regard to context. Artistic representation is bound up with typification (a type is an artistic role infinitely repeatable in life) and is thus forever on the verge of semiosis which for Gogol means negation and the devil, for Tolstoy, the negation of life itself; Anna Karenina's path ends where Chichikov's begins. Unable to sustain the paradoxical status of both distanced representation and participatory action, daily life collapses into one of its two outer limits — the abstract sign — which, in turn, equates itself to the negative pole in Lotman's binaristic system. If the everyday existence implicit in Anna's artistic plot degenerates into the lifeless abstractions of the sign, and thus death, then Levin's distinctly unartistic plot fosters participation in iconic life (what Richard Gustafson terms moments of "residency"). In instants such as one that follows Kitty's traumatic experience of childbirth, Levin's ordinary, day-today routine is, through his capacity for unconditional sacrifice, suffused with a divine presence transforming the disjunction between singularity and repetition implicit in the notion "dayto-day" into a moment in which earthly transience and heavenly eternity become one: "[O]ut of the mysterious, terrible and unearthly world in which he had been living for the last twenty-four hours, Levin felt himself momentarily transported back to the old, everyday world, but now radiant with the light of such new joy that it was unbearable." 64 Russian realism's

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equation of daily life with anti-plot leads in Anna Karenina to the bifurcation of the everyday into death (Anna) and divine life (Levin). The general hostility towards artistic framing and the propensity for binaristic thought prove to be two sides of the same anti-semiotic coin that is the currency of Russian culture.

By the time of his treatise What is Art, Tolstoy had come to reject high art as so much useless self-indulgence. His belief that a piece of peasant craftsmanship is worth more than all of Shakespeare is reminiscent of Chernyshevskii's anti-aesthetic utilitarianism. Chernyshevskii's prominence in Russian aesthetics indicated that the tensions inherent in the representational-didactic mode could be held in check. His utilitarianism is, nonetheless, an aesthetic which inspired novels purporting to represent reality. Tolstoy's decision to jettison art altogether confirms that those same tensions lead eventually to a tilt into didacticism of a purer kind. The alternatives are to suppress the didacticism in favor of a supposedly objective representationalism, or to opt for a renewed utilitarianism reestablishing art's primacy. The rising star of the radically non-partisan Chekhov assigned the task of filling the vacuum caused by the demise of the Russian novel guaranteed the viability of the first alternative. The second finds an outlet in Merezhkovskii's decadent manifesto, where Chernyshevskii's movement is condemned for representing all that was bad about nineteenthcentury rationalism, while, in the same breath, genuine aesthetes are summoned to initiate a vast project whose goal is to achieve an artistic synthesis of Christian spirituality and the corporeal mysticism of the pagans. 65 The drift away from civic-populism was marked by the poet Nadson's turn towards an inward-looking poetry of the self, and by the closing of the populist journal, Notes of the Fatherland. Nonetheless, it is a mark of the progressives' continuing dominance that Chekhov's decision to place his work with the conservative Novoe Vremia created a scandal which, in turn,

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provoked from the independent-minded Chekhov the indignant response that he was nobody's servant. But, despite the gesturing towards a more distanced objectivism that we find in Chekhov, he is as much Tolstoy's successor as his nemesis, the torchbearer to Tolstoy's critique of aestheticism in life and his anti-artistic methods. The next chapter will suggest that Chekhov carried these traits to the brink of a new aesthetic in which the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic dilemma could be resolved. Our first task will be to show how Chekhov's apparently distanced objectivity in fact projects the participatory function onto the very reality represented. In the story "An Attack of Nerves" ("Pripadok") a well-intentioned student expresses dismay at the distasteful vulgarity that he finds among some prostitutes who had hitherto attracted his sympathy. The women and their surroundings are fixed as integral and real, and allowed polemically to posit themselves as mocking parodies of the artistic delusions from which, through the deliberateness of their bad taste, they are distinguished: "There was something characteristic and peculiar in the bad taste . . . Vasil'ev recognized that this was not lack of taste, but something that might be called the taste, even the style of S-street, which could not be found elsewhere, something integral in its ugliness, not accidental, but elaborated in the course of years." 66 However, this congealment of anti-aesthetic as reality was seized upon as evidence that Chekhov was interested only in the deathly version of daily life (conveniently ignoring its Tolstoyan association with art). Chekhov's stories provided a defining moment in the establishment of byt, as evidenced by Zinaida Gippius's seminal article "Everyday Life and Events" ("Byt i sobytiia") in which a tendentious distinction is drawn between byt (life as congealed mediocrity and eventless stagnation, life as it approaches the condition of death) and zhizri (life as pure motion and constant striving for self-transcendence). Gippius takes characteristic features of two writers' approach to plot, interpreting them according to her dichotomy. Chekhov's depiction of routine provincial life becomes associated with the eternal repetition of byt, while Dostoyevsky's immersion in the dynamic motion of the soul is identified with the eventfulness

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n is events, whereas byt is only eternal repetition, the preservation of these events in . . . motionless form. Byt is the crystallization of zhizri . . . Chekhov was inside byt - and hated it, . . . while loving and knowing it . . . Dostoevsky is zhizri itself . . . Any human relations . . . die away in byt] they're depersonalized, crushed by two or three stylized forms.67 Gippius equates to the neutral, scholarly understanding of byt a literary phenomenon - Chekhov's supposedly eventless anti-plots and the day-to-day repetition of trivia in Oblomov (which she also analyses). The diabolic stasis in Chekhov's plotless rendition of provincial life converges with the fixity and crystallization in byt as ritual and custom to produce one of the earliest articulations of byt in its modern variant. Gippius is supported by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, for whom "Chekhovian byt is the bare present, merely a frozen, motionless moment, a blind alley [tupik] in contemporary Russian life, without any link to world history or world culture." 68 Though a byproduct of Chekhov's apparent turn towards objective representation, the formulation of byt in terms of an irreconcilably dichotomous opposition to zhizn provides new impulse to Russian cultural binarism: "Byt begins at the point when zhizn is interrupted . . . and . . . when zhizn begins, byt disappears." 69 It points also to a distinguishing characteristic of Russian modernism's reaction against realism. Rather than rejecting realism as a worn-out mode of representation whose increasingly elusive object finally evaporates into the crevices of language, Gippius rejects a concrete entity for being too real. This makes interesting comparison with Paul Valery's critique of nineteenth-century European realism for its arbitrary insistence on a carriage's being grey (why not some other color?). Here it is realism's mode of representation that has become automatized, in need of replacement by a more vital mode with a new, more authentic reality as its object - the recesses of inner consciousness (Lautreamont, Proust), the essences behind illusory appearances (Baudelaire, Verlaine), the collective unconscious (Conrad) and so on. In Huysmans's Au rebours there is an illustration of European culture's insatiable thirst for ever newer forms of authenticity. In response to a culture that has

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exhausted its own meanings, Huysmans imagines a realm of artificial representations of nature more authentic than nature itself, and foreshadowing by a century the postmodernist "simulacrum."70 Instead of emptying realism of its authenticity, Chekhov's crime is to have overauthenticized it by so immersing it in minutiae that it grinds to a halt. The view of Chekhov as the last in a line was expressed by Gippius who anoints him "the last bard of decomposing trivia."71 Even Gor'kii saw Chekhov as the endpiece of Russian realism, the writer who, in taking the movement into every provincial corner, had perfected and thus killed it: "Do you know what you are doing? You are killing realism, and you will soon finish it off — finally and for a long time." 72 But Gippius's conflation only ensured that incipient modernism's reaction against realism would reaffirm Russian art's civic vocation. First, the formulation of byt with its negative attributes furnishes the perfect pretext for a renewed transformational impulse. Secondly, if the "real" object of Chekhov's pseudo-objectivism is merely a congealed anti-aesthetic, then the aestheticism characterizing fin de siecle modernism by definition involves a provocative incursion into the space of the real. From early on, Russian modernism experienced little difficulty in harnessing aestheticism to utilitarian goals.73 Thus, Merezhkovskii's programmatic defence of beauty could easily have come from the pen of Chernyshevskii: "[PJoetry is not an additional storey added on, not an external embellishment, but the very breath and heart of life . . . One without the other is impossible. Take beauty . . . from life; what then remains? Take life from art, and . . . 'salt ceases to be salt.' " 7 4 That Merezhkovskii entered into the paradox which embroiled Chernyshevskii is proven by none other than Gor'kii whose own brand of romantic aestheticism is justified in terms of a conscious embellishment of reality, within the framework of an intention to "tear up the past by its roots" and point the way to a brighter future. In the autobiographical Childhood (Detstvo) that past is characterized as a monotonous sequence of hardships. To "alleviate the monotony" through aesthetic color, to counter anti-narrative with narrative proper, thus

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revealing the potential for betterment, is to serve the cause of extirpation.75 The establishment of byt through a contrast with zhizn reflects Vladimir Solov'ev's renewal of Orthodox philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century. Among Solov'ev's achievements was his Orthodox-influenced recasting of the difference between nature and God as a difference in permutation of the same elements: [Njature . . . can only be a different positing or permutation of given essential elements which have their substantial being in the divine world. Thus these two worlds differ from one another not in essence, but only in their mode of positing. One of them represents the unity of all that is, a positing in which eachfindsitself in all, and all in each. The other . . . represents a positing of all that is, in which each, in itself or through its own will asserts itself apart from the others.76 Solov'ev's understanding of evil as the apartness from God required for deification is related to this definition and reflects Dostoyevsky's influence. Also significant are the qualities that Solov'ev attributes to evil — ''separation and discordance," c 'inertia and impenetrability," "mutual exclusion" — all reminiscent of byt in its new guise.77 Gippius's thinking allows for the mutuality which would enable byt to serve as the precondition of zhizn. {Byt is merely zhizri waiting to be freed and set in motion. Both are byproducts of a single anti-aesthetic urge.) However, the two poles of her axis are embodied in two very different writers, suggesting that an element of dualism has found its way into her system. This prepares the way for an art conceived separately from reality, called upon to mediate between its two variants {byt and zhizn) and transform one into the other (transformation being the cornerstone of Russian Symbolism's theurgist phase). This slippage is explained by the fact that the theorists of byt were artists bound by the truth that postRenaissance European art cannot be anything other than a discrete form, and by the nature of Solov'ev's project which, as Pamela Davidson points out, was an attempt to reconcile Orthodoxy with Catholicism.78 The "differences" of early Orthodoxy are thus attenuated in Solov'ev's own system. It was Solov'ev,

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himself a poet, who assigned symbolist art its theurgical function, as evidenced by his "Lectures on Godmanhood" where he compares man's task of bringing Sophia down to earth through love with the poet's role of bringing beauty to man through art. 79 This function is highlighted in the essay "Beauty in Nature" in which Solov'ev posits art as the religious transformation of reality, turning to Chernyshevskii to support his belief that beauty is objective potential inherent in reality and that the function of art is to actualize this potential.80 From different perspectives (one glorifying materialism, the other celebrating transcendence of matter through beauty), Solov'ev and Chernyshevskii both resort to an anti-aesthetic the terms of whose dichotomous construction (art/reality) assure the continued existence of the aesthetic as a superior category. The differing permutations of the art/reality relationship determined the nature of the allegiances Russian Symbolism forged. Despite attempts to distance themselves from the decadence of the French Symbolists (for whom the contrast between the inner world of the poet and the banality of the everyday was paramount), the Russians rarely succeeded in overcoming this Romantically inspired dichotomy. Baudelaire's insistence that "la vraie realite n'est que dans les reves" is echoed in Valerii Briusov's own programmatic rejection of realism: "While the realists sought life outside themselves, we sought it only within ourselves . . . So, realizing that the subject of art is the depiction of feelings, in spirit, it became necessary to change our methods of creation. This is the way which brought us to the symbol."81 Later, Briusov went beyond the simple opposition of supreme self to inferior world. But his assertions that the everyday masks the deeper mysteries of an alternate realm to which it points do nothing to undermine art's supremacy. Moreover, the path to that realm, Briusov contends, must be carved out within the creative soul of the priest-like artist (cf. Baudelaire's l'ame du poete). Other Symbolists ameliorated the downgrading of reality by positing the world as a text of symbols pointing to an authentic essence to which they are cemented in an essential bond. (In fact, the idea of world as text recalls the ancient theatrum mundi

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image and betrays a heightened aestheticism.) The artist's function becomes that of correctly reading the text, of releasing this essence through a synthesis of Apolline form and Dionysiac chaos. Viacheslav Ivanov was thus able to claim that he was the true realist, not Gorkii's J^nanie writers who, in their slavish attachment to the brittle encrustations of life, are dismissed as mere bytoviki. Rather than depict byt, the theurgist creates life. The identification of the bytoviki established byt as an independent realm with its own, lowly species of bard. But this division of experience into the merely real (the bytovoi world of realid) and the more than real (the essences or realiora allotted to true artists) calibrates authenticity with an aesthetic gauge. As the aestheticization of Silver-age culture suggests, zhiznetvorchestvo was about the assimilation of life to art, not art to life (see the effacement of Boris Bugaev by Andrei Belyi). The division contains the seeds of its own reversal. In a new twist in the oscillating movement that the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic dichotomy generates, Alexander Blok, himself associated with theurgy, moved to rehabilitate the bytoviki (along with popular art-forms such as the recently invented kinematograf).82 In response to Symbolism's decline around 191 o, Blok expressed disdain for the elitist aestheticism of the realiora and identified true art with the sub-aesthetic vibrancy of the realia, talking in highly approving terms of the ccphilistinism and banality" of folk-theater plots, and extolling writers like Leonid Andreev for the crude vitality of their art. 83 The fact that the fruits of this shift are represented by Blok's own innovations in high art (his poem "The Twelve") confirms the rapidity with which the categories of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic exchange properties in Russian culture, and the constantly assured victory of the first term. The shocking anti-aesthetic antics of Maiakovskii's Futurists mark the next stage in the counterswing that Blok initiated. Maiakovskii, as we know, owed much to the Symbolist movement he so derided. It is, however, two Symbolists who signal a way out of the impasse. In his typology of the various forms of byt, Fedor Sologub follows the Merezhkovskiis in associating the bytovoi with crystalline stasis. But, rather than merely attaching this

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attribute to the neutral, scholarly version of byt, he retains the pre-twentieth-century conception as the first stage in a circular development in which modern byt marks a decline away from a norm. Applied to culture in its broadest sense, Sologub's theory allows for two stages of development, each characterized by a particular byt deriving from the one preceding it, each passing through a single point into its opposite: There are two types of byt directly opposed to one another, although one is born of the other as its consequence; there is established, cultural byt and there is stagnating reactionary byt the byt of the cornfield and the byt of the marsh. When established, cultural byt exhausts all its living content... it begins to turn into its opposite, its acute negation.84 Neutral, "cultural" byt features as an abstract point marking the end (in both senses) of a period of motion. No sooner is that point reached ("when established byt exhausts all its living content"), than the decline begins. The period preceding the stage of exhaustion is culture as dynamic motion. For Sologub, as for Gippius, life as a neutral abstraction is virtually assimilated to the negative pole of an axis whose positive pole is provided by zhizn'.85 However, unlike Gippius who, by equating "way of life" to anti-plot and zhizn to art proper, splits byt apart from zhizn, Sologub's formulation outlines a self-contained system in which they are two links in one unbreakable chain. Focussing on stage 2, Sologub indicates that byt in its decaying mode acquires the features of a nightmare: "In the periods of the decline of bytovoi life . . . all becomes stupid, unnecessary . . . Byt in these epochs becomes nightmarish and turns into its polar opposite - a wild fantasty similar to the nightmares of Goiia." 86 Sologub's principle of stasis finds expression not as norm and ritual, but as wild, nightmarish deviations. From the self-transcendent creativity of zhizn, through the abstract point of everyday life in its neutral state, culture passes to artistic creativity in its obverse form (formless nightmare) and then (because this is a self-perpetuating system), back to zhizn. Art as a discrete category facilitating the transmutation of one state into another is eradicated. We are left with a non-artistic aesthetic and a non-artistic anti-aesthetic, each having its mode

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of existence in opposed variations on "life." Daily life is unable to survive as neutral "way of life," for the impersonal objectivity that this entails is a negative principle rooted in alienation. Rather than stabilizing in the form of norms, it seeks embodiment in arbitrary deviations, or "dumb coincidence"

[nelepaiia sluchainost').87 For Sologub, what the bytoviki claim as

objective analysis is, because it is the portrayal of an alien world, a rendition of arbitrary byt in which the latter triumphs at the expense of zhizn (the transformation of daily life through the creative act of a participatory "I"). 88 Thus, when daily life is not infused with the transforming presence of the creative self it consists solely of the repetition of pointless routines that make a mockery of ritual in the conventional sense.89 But Sologub's typology leaves out of account the closing of the circle: how we get from byt in its degenerative mode to the living content of zhizn. Art as a distinct category is ruled out, since this is a self-contained theory of daily life. Nor, for the same reason, is art as participation the answer. Just as mocking, anti-aesthetic qualities are inherent in the state to be transformed, so participatory creativity is implicit in the state aspired to. What is required is an art integral to the reality to be acted upon, yet transformative of it, a force assuring the distance between, and mutual attraction of the positive and negative poles of Russian literature's anti-aesthetic. Rather than (as is often maintained) initiating a swing towards the "art" pole of an art/reality pendulum, the metatextual images of art with which Silver-age narrative prose abounds can, I believe, be identified as the marker of the new aesthetic. The differences between narrative and byt (as congealed anti-narrative) are putatively overcome in a discourse which, in transcending semiotic dualism, generates not metaphoric representations of daily life, but iconic transfigurations of the everyday, thus accomplishing the reconfigurement of the artdaily life—narrative triad outlined earlier. Bound by his artistic identity, Sologub was unable to describe, let alone practice such an aesthetic. His efforts failed to evade the trap of oscillating identifications and counter-identifications that thwarted his symbolist counterparts. His theoreti-

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cal writings do, nonetheless, indicate an awareness of the scale of the task. Sologub recognized that the new aesthetic must incorporate a new kind of beauty — one which cannot exist on its own, but conies into being in the act of transforming what is ugly. In Sologub's rereading of Don Quixote, there can be no Dulcinea without Aldonsa, whose everyday usualness he repeatedly stresses.90 Beauty is neither quality nor state of being, least of all a set of norms, but rather an act aimed at shaking life out of bytovoi stasis. Without beauty there would be only fixity and repetition. Without byt, however, there can be no beauty. Sologub mentions Isodora Duncan's dancing, underscoring her lack of conventional beauty, the ordinariness without which the motion of her dance would be unable to generate genuine beauty.91 Andrei Belyi followed Sologub in his obsessive return to the two conflicting inclinations in cultural development - creative motion and rational normativity, arguing that "culture is . . . the unification of creativity and knowledge . . . a special tie linking . . . philosophy and aesthetics, religion and science."92 Like Gippius, Belyi posits art as the principle at the heart of the "positive," dynamic pole: "[CJulture amounts, in its early periods, precisely to the creation of value . . . [SJymbolism underscores the primacy of creation over cognition, the possibility of transfiguring the images of reality in artistic creativity."93 Art (especially Symbolist art) is thus culture in quintessential form. For Belyi, the normative pole is identified with the stagnation of byt - an umbrella term signifying not merely (neutrally) "way of life," but all the arid formalism, ritualism and automatism associated with the way of life into which Belyi was born: Half-destroyed b y . . . our fathers, the children of the border between the centuries destroyed that byt to the finish, that byt which had seemed as hard as stone and so strong . . . Stasis, prejudice, routine, vulgarity, limited horizons, - that's what I carried away at the border of the two centuries from the byt of an average Moscow professor; and in the average of averages, something far from average was dissolving.94 Belyi's objection is to byt\ gravitation towards "the average

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of averages," yet, when characterizing this metaphysical mediocrity, he reveals that byt is less the pure abstraction of the median with its perfect matching of instance to norm, than the forced normalization of singularities so trivial as to belong to no norm. The paradoxical effect is, as for Sologub (and as this chapter's second epigraph confirms), one of the fantastic rather than the average: Anna Ivanovna's cheese sandwich. Belyi's principle of normativity longs for the embodiment that, by definition, amounts to its own subversion (a norm is perfectly actualized only in an abstract instance); the average bytovoi person decomposes into an abstraction only to resolidify as: "something weighty, hard, material — i.e. byt . . . The average man of byt is . . . decomposed into an abstraction, wafting over a person's head in the form of smoke from a cheap cigarette and afterwards hardening into the shape of a bug-infested armchair." 95 In its embodied form, Dostoyevsky's diabolic principle facilitates the deviations, the events and the suffering through which man incarnates the divine image in which he was created. Plot (norm plus deviation) as anti-plot (pure deviation) produces plot'. Belyi's own path from byt to zhizn takes him through the deviational chudachestvo that marred his childhood the bizarre scenes played out between his parents - a chudachestvo which is both part of the byt against which Belyi sets his sights and the key to his own struggle against it. The turn of the century marked the point at which Russian literature entered the next stage of its accommodation to European art, breaking free from both the straitjacket of western artistic conventions, and the need to negate those conventions from within. The purgative naming of byt indicates that it had reached the threshold of a new discourse, neither aesthetic, nor anti-aesthetic, but iconic. In the following chapters, I trace the emergence of this iconic aesthetic of the twentieth century from the counter aesthetic of the nineteenth - a path that leads from the peculiarities of Russian realism to the specificities of Russian modernism. The five chapters are divided into two parts arranged in a progression whose chronology reflects the course of the rebellion against narrative framing, the corresponding development of the art/everyday

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life relationship and that of the new aesthetic. Part 11 includes chapters on Chekhov and Sologub's The Petty Demon. For both writers I demonstrate a correlation between the varieties of anti-plot to which they resort in their battle with narrative framing and their fictional conceptions of byt. Chekhov and Sologub shared an awareness of byt\ ambiguous nature - the presence within its innermost recesses of unexpectedly potent forces capable of sweeping away the negativity. This ambiguity reflects a hesitation between the desire to brandish art as a foil to the drudgery of everyday life and the opposing urge to privilege everyday life's authenticity over artistic falsity. The paradox is left intact, but both writers are conscious of the need for a new discourse resolving the differences between the aesthetic and the everyday and finding its metatextual markers as theater (Chekhov) and myth (Sologub). The chronotopic motifs reflecting these conflicts are the journey and the provincial town (accompanied in Sologub's case by the reappropriation of gossip as narrative model). In part in, I maintain that Belyi, Rozanov and Remizov intuited that a discourse in which the daily life/art dichotomy might be overcome must (i) eradicate the barriers separating the transformative qualities of the aesthetic from the nonaesthetic authenticity of ordinary life and (ii) transcend the process by which the creating self is alienated from an objective world to be represented. These writers were striving to turn metatext into text proper, to initiate an autobiographical discourse whose source and reference point is not the discrete self of conventional autobiography but a self integrated with, yet unassimilated to others. This trans-artistic mode rehabilitates narrative by refashioning its function from that of an alienated mimesis of life (with its oscillation between the aesthetic and the everyday) to that of marking the shifting point at which the everyday is transfigured from within - the process by which the artist offers himself in sacrifice to the "bad infinity" of byt, overcoming the division of aesthetics from ethics. All three adopt variants on the domestic chronotope of the home which, in the cases of Rozanov and Remizov, is enhanced by further adaptations of gossip narration.

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We should not express surprise at the earlier mentioned helping hand given by revolutionary reality to the aesthetic project of Russia's Silver Age. As Chaadaev (and later, Likhachev) intimated, the urge to throw off the burden of the past and reach for the end of time, abolishing both daily life and the present time that is its habitual home underlies not only the apocalyptic spirit of revolution, but the entire Russian cultural mindset.96 Noting this quality, and locating it in the depths of the national psyche, a prominent Russian writer commented: "[A] 11 down to the last man . . . referred to the present with contempt. Your Russian loves to remember, but he doesn't enjoy the business of living."97 It is to the author of these remarks that I now turn.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 3

Enacting the present: Chekhov, art and the everyday

The world's unity is a moment in its concrete uniqueness. (Mikhail Bakhtin)1

This chapter will treat Zinaida Gippius's critique of Chekhov as a productive misreading. While recognizing the fertility of her distinction between byt and zhizn\ I hope to show that, rather than leading to an exitless endpoint, Chekhov's immersion in byt marks the first moment in a journey towards a new, dynamic version of zhizn • I do so by reexamining the symbiosis binding Chekhov's everyday to the forces of anti-narrative brought to light in the introduction in the context of the analysis in chapters i and 2. Chekhov's anti-narrative strategies are part of the broader resistance to aesthetics in which Russian culture habitually engages. There is no writer who better epitomizes Russia's perennial doubts about the value of art. It is no coincidence that the Sakhalin Project — a monumental exercise in sociological documentation - was undertaken when Chekhov was at his artistic peak, as if to appease a conscience still troubled by uncertainties as to whether literary talent, too, can serve a moral purpose.2 Accordingly, Chekhov's own art is littered with images of the aesthetic linking the category to inhuman objectification, and pure mauvaise foi. In the early story, "The Privy Councillor" ("Tainyi sovetnik"), a. high-ranking official's visit to his relations turns out, to their dismay, to have been motivated by condescending illusions about the "simple beauty" of country life: " 'Upon my soul, how charming!,' he

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said, scrutinizing us as though we were clay figures. cThis is really life. This is what reality has to be like.5 " 3 But, like that of his predecessors, Chekhov's hostility to aesthetic distancing lived in uneasy coexistence with a positive valorization of art's capacity for envisioning perfection, for enabling reality to transcend identity with its own brute "objectness" and engender meaning. Chekhov was never slow to empathize with those able to appreciate the beautiful in life. Right up to the affection with which Ranevskaia's nostalgic longing for the translucent whiteness of her tree blossoms in "The Cherry Orchard" is treated, art consistently (and paradoxically) finds its way to the fore of the Chekhovian value system. (Nostalgia for the past and "dreams of a brighter future" are themselves double-edged, connoting simultaneously the debilitating desire to evade reality, and the exhilarating potential to give expression to the ideal.) It is in keeping with the paradoxes in this approach that an everyday life conceived in anti-aesthetic terms should give rise to a corresponding ambivalence. Gippius herself maintained that: Chekhov was inside byt and hated it, while loving it . . . and knowing it. That is the way we sometimes hate our own arm - and yet, of course, it is our arm, closer to us than anyone else's, and you are not going to cut off your own arm! . . . His hatred for byt was so unconscious, so affectionate that many mistook it for pure love.4 The everyday is on one hand, the negation of beauty, the meaningful and the ideal — senseless repetition, mindless triviality and ugly, gray oppression. On the other hand, as the antidote to false consciousness, it is the ground on which a person might, through forbearance, realize his or her humanity. Chekhov offers this revealing eulogy to the long-suffering heroine of "In the Cart" ("Na podvode"): "It is a hard, uninteresting existence, and only stolid cart horses like Maria Vasil'evna can tolerate it for long; lively, alert, impressionable people who talk about their vocation and about serving the ideal soon tire of it and give up the work."5 As we shall find, the ambivalence is, perhaps, best expressed by the writer's curious

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double take on "bad art" as poshlost' which, for Chekhov, connotes at once vulgar banality and earthy authenticity. My purpose here is to demonstrate that these contradictions mark the first stirrings of an urge to reconceive the aesthetic so that, precisely by underscoring its foundation in the ordinary, it should act as a force for the attainment of the ideal. Thus Chekhov is shown to be gesturing beyond the fruitless dichotomy pitting art against the everyday, and beyond Tolstoy (for whom art remained the antithesis of both reality and virtue), towards a reconciliation of real and artistic, good and beauty, ethics and aesthetics. My analysis proceeds by focussing upon Chekhov's conception of reality as a subversion of aesthetic framing, first in a general sense, then in terms of the way his stories confound the universalizing function of narrative's temporal frame (the implied repetition of singular-past as eternal-present). I will demonstrate that Chekhov's anti-stories both defy such repetition (thus deconstructing the notion of a reality coincident with its own meaning) and hyperbolize it (resulting in a Chekhovian variant on byt as "bad infinity"), ultimately transforming it so that each singularity enacts (rather than merely instantiates) the eternal. In each aspect the journey chronotope, with its sense of present time as incessant motion, proves suggestive. Himself an artist, Chekhov is, however, restricted to presenting his unity of real and ideal metatextually, for which he turns to theater - reconceived as the performance not of preconceived roles, but of unique acts of embodiment. My approach is, for the most part, synchronic. I assume that the features to which I attend are present in seminal form throughout Chekhov's oeuvre. The points I make are illustrated by stories belonging to his middle and late periods.6 The strands of my argument are unified in a brief reading of Chekhov's first major play, "The Seagull." The best-known Chekhovian image of art is Treplev's ridiculed theater within a theater at the beginning of "The Seagull," to which I shall return. Throughout Chekhov's narratives, too, one finds artistic representations aggressively intruded upon by a surrounding reality. "The Grasshopper" ("Poprygun'ia") tells of a pretentious woman who marries a

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doctor for his "bearish simplicity," only to be unfaithful to him, then lose him to disease. At one point, the heroine is standing on a ship next to her seducer (a painter), who is describing in mellifluous tones the "magical" water below. Ol'ga's complicity in the cliche enables her to generate a false aestheticization of her entire life: "Ol ga listened to Riabovskii's words . . . The purple color of the water. . . the sky. . . the black shadows . . . filled her soul, telling her that she would one day make a great artist."7 Her rural idyll is, however, rudely shattered by the intrusion of some singularly unaesthetic detail: At that moment a woman was carefully carrying a bowl of cabbage soup in both hands, and Ol'ga Ivanovna noticed that both her thumbs were wet from the cabbage soup. And the dirty woman with her skirt drawn tightly over her stomach, the cabbage soup . . . the hut, this life which had at first seemed so delightful in its simplicity and aesthetic disorder, now struck her as appalling.8 Ol'ga's subsequent (and temporary) realization of the falsity of her life is precipitated by the news that her despised husband has fallen sick after sucking pus from the throat of a boy with diptheria. The sticky pus becomes the objective correlative to the ugly reality that has seeped into her poetic delusions: "She forgot the moonlit night, the poetic life in the peasant hut, and remembered only that she had plunged head and shoulders into something foul and sticky, from which she would never be able to wash herself clean."9 Elsewhere, the frame is provided by a literary stereotype whose presence is sensed throughout. In Chekhov's povest' "The Duel" ("ZW"), the central event of the plot with its anticlimactic outcome figures as a conscious parody of the Lermontov-style duel: It turned out that of everyone present not one had been at a duel and noone knew exactly how the participants had to stand and what they were to say... - Gentlemen! Who remembers how it's all described in Lermontov? - asked von Koren laughing . . . At that moment a shot rang out. Seeing that Laevskii was still standing and hadn't fallen, everyone looked over in the direction from which they had heard a cry and saw the deacon . . . all wet and dirty on the other

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bank . . . smiling somehow strangely and waving his soaking-wet hat.10 The ridiculous deacon trespasses inconveniently across the borders of the aesthetic scene. Here, too, the deflationary effect of the incursion suggests that for Chekhov, as for his predecessors, art is bound up with masks and falsity. An ^/z-aesthetic stance becomes essential to conveying a true conception of what reality is. In "The Bishop" ("Arkhierei"), one of Chekhov's last stories, Tolstoy is the thinly disguised target. The first paragraph describes how a dying bishop suddenly thinks he has seen his mother at a church service. He begins to weep, and, inexplicably, the whole congregation follows suit. Still more puzzling for the reader anxious to seize a recognizable plot thread, is the fact that the weeping suddenly subsides and the service continues as before, as though nothing had happened: "[WJithin five minutes, the nun's choir was singing; no one was weeping and everything was as before."11 This abortive opening frame prefigures the sabotaging of our search for a "plotted" end in which the bishop reaches some final understanding of what his life has been about. In fact, he dies neither wholly satisfied, nor in a trough of gloom, and swiftly forgotten by all but his mother. This, however, is no mark of callous indifference, as in Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Yet, nor is there any epiphanic realization of the bishop's significance. Instead, life simply continues, neither good nor bad, and one is left puzzling over the reasons why the biography has been related at all.12 Elsewhere, the clash is between dream and reality. It is here that Chekhov's desire to have it both ways asserts itself most obviously, and that "reality" achieves its most subversive contamination of "picture." In "Sleepy" ("Spa? khochetsia"), a cruelly overworked babysitter begins to hallucinate, imagining the source of the tyranny to be her tiny protege, whom she then strangles. The story ends with the girl waking up to a world in which the aesthetically satisfying alleviation of a burden has been reconstituted as a shockingly anti-aesthetic infanticide. Since it is brute reality (rather than, as in Tolstoy, an ethical

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lapse) that sanctions the parodic warping of the frame, it is difficult either to condemn or forgive the girl's delusionary fantasy. However, rather than a lurch towards distanced objectivity, Chekhov's hesitant neutrality indicates a renewed rejection of artistic framing, a participatory expose of how Tolstoy's anti-aestheticism cannot help but accomplish an idealized objectification of its own (the glorification of the guileless muzhik), and perhaps even a gentle corrective avant la lettre to Saul Morson's triumphal celebration of the superiority of prosaic living over the moral bankruptcy of all-embracing semiosis.13 (By attributing the parodic force to reality itself, Chekhov reveals the reifying effects of Tolstoy's didacticism to be no less reprehensible than those of the aesthetic models against which it is directed.) Equally, and in another departure from the Tolstoyan (and, indeed, Morsonian) model, the far from reprehensible nature of the dreams themselves suggests that aesthetic urges are not irredeemably shameful (the babysitter's fantasies do at least spur her to confront her predicament). Chekhov's ambivalence towards art coexists with a contradictory attitude towards "bad art," and particularly towards poshlost' - that other untranslatable Russian phenomenon of the everyday whose anti-aesthetic core was immortalized by Vladimir Nabokov: "Poshlust [sic] is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive . . . Poshlust is especially vigorous . . . when . . . the values it mimics are considered . . . to belong to the very highest level of art." 14 Though the frequent target of satire, Chekhovian jfrarA/art' also plays a liberating role.15 In its travesty of taste, the poshlost' of the prostitutes in "An Attack of Nerves" ("Pripadok") gives the lie to the aesthetic objectifications of the womens' predicament perpetrated by the student and his Bohemian associates. This is true not only of the brothels (with their "integral bad taste"), but of the prostitutes' illusionshattering vulgarity. Even after the shock of realizing that these women are not the pretty martyrs he had taken them for, the student cannot resist subjecting them to a second, more sophisticated aestheticization which, while accounting for their

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refusal to conform to bookish models, still belittles them as "insulted sufferers": It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but beings belonging to a different world, quite apart, alien to him and incomprehensible; if he had seen this world before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed that it could exist; And he realized that there were real people living here who . . . felt insulted, suffered, wept.16

Picturing to himself the "real suffering55 of one victim, he leaps to defend her from her agressor, only to see the "heroic55 scene sullied by the realization that the woman's theatrical tears are a result of alcohol rather than physical abuse.17 Poshlostns grounding in the harsh world of the everyday, along with its capacity for exposing and subjecting to ridicule the beautiful illusions of the genuine aesthete were exploited by Chekhov in his portrayal of Natasha in "The Three Sisters55 ("Tri Sestry"). With her vulgar affectations and brash materialism, Natasha counterposes the delicate refinement of the three sisters. But the condescending manner in which she is treated, and the solid pragmatism she exhibits in contrast to the sisters5 impractical visions of a brighter tomorrow suggest that Chekhov envisioned Russia's future as belonging to her class rather than that of the effete landowner. Like gossip, poshlost' is a sub-aesthetic form with both negative and positive qualities. Situated at the heart of the ordinary, it is antithetical to the framed illusoriness of art. But, by the same token, it is closed to the realm of beauty and perfection. To resolve the contradiction ("good55 art as bad; "bad55 art as good) would require the impossible — an aesthetic freed from the need to separate itself from the world, yet able to embrace a vision of that world in ideal form. In both positive and negative forms, the frame-shattering effects of Chekhov's counter-aesthetic are realized most characteristically as anti-narrative. Earlier, we drew attention to the strategy by which an instance of aborted narrative transfers itself from narrated "story55 to narrating "discourse,55 leading to a conception of the everyday as the subversion of good plot. Most emblematic of the contamination effect is "A Boring

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Story" (£CSkuchnaia istoriia") — Chekhov's account of the last months of an old professor's life. Embittered by the realization that he has wasted his time in idle pursuits, in the company of a family whom he despises, the professor's only companion is a romantic actress named Katia. To her he relates a different account of his past, increasing her misplaced admiration for him: To my amazement, I relate details which I never suspected my memory had retained. She listens with . . . pride and bated breath . . . And, as you see, my dreams have come true. I have gained more than I dared dream of... I fell in love, married for passionate love and had children. In a word, looking back now, my life appears to me as a beautiful, talented painting. It remains to me now not to ruin the finale.18 To this evidently fabricated but "interesting" story, the authentic account of how the professor really sees his life, past and present, stands in marked contrast as the skuchnaia istoriia of the title (which correlates perfectly the byt that Chekhov's stories have as their referent and the narrative subversion they accomplish). Much of the professor's narrative consists of the retelling of details quite unfit to be told - dreary domestic rituals and marital tiffs, inconsequential encounters, summaries of uninspiring lectures given a thousand times, scenes overtly acknowledged as unworthy of repetition, yet related in their entirety. Throughout, the narrator recounts recurring routines as if they are single events, lending the degree of specificity to his descriptions that should only have been possible had the scenes occurred once only. Unstory-like routine is forced into the mold of story: "After my lecture, I work at home . . . I hear the bell. It is a colleague, come to discuss business. We begin by trying to show how extraordinarily polite and pleased we are to see each o t h e r . . . I try to sit him in the armchair, but he insists that I have it . . . " 1 9 Appropriately, the professor suffers from insomnia. For it is during sleepless nights that one notices all the most irritating trivia of one's domestic life — details that one would normally not dream of including in a narrative intended for general consumption: "I pace up and down . . . studying the familiar paintings and photographs . . . if there is a book on

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the table I draw it towards me unthinkingly and read it indifferently. Thus, not long ago, in the course of a single night I read through a complete novel with a strange title: What the Swallow Sang Of."20 But if the "actual55 details of the narrator's routine existence contrast with the aestheticized version of his life that he presents in cynical half-jest to Katia, then the dreary story that is his diary is a mirror-image of Chekhov's "Boring Story." For the latter, too, fails to self-ignite into meaningful action. There is no third-person viewpoint able elegantly to frame and provide a perspective for the professor's life. Nor does Chekhov rescue the account from the margins of narrativity by providing a final twist. Although a hint of this comes (as in "The Kiss") in the last pages when a desperate Katia visits the professor to ask his advice about a failing romance, any expectation that the professor might salvage some sense from his hitherto meaningless existence by passing on his cumulative wisdom is rebuffed with silence and a few farewell banalities: " 'Say something. Just one word!' she sobs, reaching out to me . . . A silence descends upon the room . . . 'I don't like Kharkov,' I say. 'Everything is so grey' . . . I want to say 'Then you won't be at my funeral?' But she does not look at me . . . Her black dress flashes for the last time . . . Farewell, my treasure." 21 The hint at plot-worthy resolution is, again, stifled. In the earlier story, "The Steppe" ("Step'"), the contamination is given symbolic expression. The steppe furnishes a metaphor for the monotonous vastness of Russian life that, through the eyes of the travelling youngster (Egor), Chekhov conveys as a bewildering accumulation of detail. At one point Egor speculates that in order to generate true narrative action, the immense space of the steppe would have to have been peopled by the epic heros of times past: The steppe's spaciousness confused Egor and generated fantastic thoughts. Who drove along it? Who needed so much room? It was incomprehensible and strange. It was certainly possible to believe that long-striding people like Il'ia Muromets were not extinct and that their gigantic horses had not yet died out . . . And how those people would have suited the steppe!22 The narrative that Chekhov relates, however, is one peopled by

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little characters who make fleeting appearances, never to be mentioned again - one filled by inconsequential incidents that occur during the many stop-offs. Characterized by weird sounds repeated continually but never explained, the steppe forever shifts in appearance, never changing in its overbearing effect on all that it contains. The correlation between formless expanse and incessant repetition through a time that as a result seems unchanging fosters the impression of a continual present, a set of experiences that never recede into the past to become narratable, but continue to overwhelm with their sheer variety and oppress with their meaningless recurrence or mysterious disappearance: The brichka . . . seemed to be going backwards instead of forwards, and the journeyers saw what they had been seeing since noon . . . Suddenly something snapped in the still air and a strong gust of wind whirled roaring and whistling over the steppe . . . A bustard fluttered up by the road . . . it veered to one side and could be seen fluttering for a long time . . . But the invisible and oppressive force gradually calmed the dust and, once more, as if nothing had happened, silence descended.23 The anti-aesthetic impact of the journey chronotope is evident here. A journey is characteristically experienced as a myriad of first-time impressions which the continual motion prevents from being sorted into any hierarchy of value. When the journey is one across a seething expanse, the potential for antiplot becomes still greater. The traveller's stories told one evening are, significantly, located in an indeterminate, distant past. Unlike the journey narrative, they are full of suspenseful action (murders, robbery etc.) and thus reinforce the contrast between present-tense, authentic byt, and past-tense, false narrative: "[A]ll [Egor's] acquaintances had one thing in common . . . they were all people with a beautiful past and a very unbeautiful present: all down to the last man talked about their past with rapture, but they referred to the present almost with contempt."24 That the stories told are exaggerations is revealed when one character begins to repeat the same motifs from tale to tale. But there follows a passage in which it transpires that the difference

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between these "repeatable" stories and the "unrepeatable" reality from which they emerge is not in the latter's lack of drama, but rather in its chaotic excess; the world now resists narrative because it is too fantastic, too chaotic to be plotted: [W]hat was strange was that . . . whenever he had to tell stories, he gave obvious preference to fantasy and never mentioned what he had actually experienced. Egor. . . found it strange that a man who had seen and known many things, a man whose wife and children had been burned to death, should, while sitting at the campfire, either say nothing, or talk about what had never occurred . . . The cross by the roadside, the dark bales, the open space and the destinies of the people gathered round the campfire - all these were themselves so miraculous and frightening that the fantastic nature of the fable or fairy-tale paled by comparison and merged with life.25

Life offers less a dichotomous contrast with campfire stories than a parodic hyperbolization of their drama. The open steppe is as conducive to association with the excessive and chaotic as it is with the repetitive and monotonous since both are equally resistant to narrative framing. Significantly, the story-telling is succeeded by an example of excessive malice from the bully Dymov who, when challenged by Egor, responds in an astonishing way: " 'Egor,5 he said quietly. 'Come on then, hit me!5 . . . And without waiting for Egor to strike him or say anything, he jumped down and said T m bored! . . . It's useless, this life of ours, hopeless!5 " 2 6 Cosmic monotony is merely the inverse of fantastic tragedy. The full title of this povest' is "The Steppe - The Story of a Journey.55 The text delivers the opposite of what we expect from a story. And its anti-narrative features are encapsulated in the figure of the steppe itself which, instead of providing a backdrop to the story, supplants with its plot-resisting idiosyncracies the very possibility of "story55 in its conventional sense — a point understood implicitly by Chekhov's contemporaries.27 The steppe is the story, or rather its own out-of-step version of what story is. The dual challenge that "The Steppe55 offers to plotting (the excess of its arbitrary singularities, the monotony of its senseless routines) confirms the importance of repetition to the way in

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which, through the narrative frame, fiction generates meaning. When a plot threatens to coagulate into a clot of identical occurrences, or to dissolve into a normless chaos, there is little impulse to repeat or retell it. If, however, it effects the meaningful violation of a norm, the transformation of an initial state into one similar to, yet different from itself, it lends itself to being framed as a sign of another such sequence ("life," "human destiny" etc.) — to being repeated.28 Many of Chekhov's shorter stories exhibit a propensity for the aborted sequence, the half-event, the frustrated narrative transformation. Often, entire stories strike the reader as halfevents, sequences of actions containing the germs of a plot which is then abandoned at the crucial moment. Such stories go a step beyond the in medias res device requiring the reader to project an outcome. Chekhov requires his reader to project a middle too, as in "The Lady with the Little Dog"("D
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what had the cap to do with it all?"31 It is the arbitrary nature of the outcome that is most striking, its contamination by trivial details, its abandoned conflicts. In stressing the excess in the sequence, the narrator draws attention to its unsuitability for retelling, and thus to its lack of meaning — both characteristics shared by obydenshchina.

When Chekhov's stories do contain fully fledged events, they are absorbed into the stream of detail constituting the larger part of life.32 Of the hero's death in "The Bishop," Chekhov writes: "[T]he bishop had just passed away. Next day was Easter Sunday. There were forty-two churches and six monasteries in the town . . . the birds were singing, the sun was shining brightly . . . A month later a new bishop was appointed." 33 Moreover, the last few days of life preceding this non-occurrence have been filled with little more than a sequence of shifting moods (regrets at an unfulfilled career, periods of calm tranquillity, nostalgic musings), interspersed with inconsequential interludes (the infectious tears in the church; a little girl accidentally breaking a vase). Little wonder that readers have experienced difficulties in seeing a "point." Their doubts are anticipated in the story's last words by the mother's failure to recount anything compelling about her son's life: "[She] says that she had a son who was a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she might not be believed . . . And indeed, there are some who do not believe her."34 The event-sequence is too lacking in the generalizing traits of plot-transformation to fall into the pattern necessary for the conferral of universality that is fiction's prerogative. For Chekhov, ease of repetition distinguishes the facile illusions of narrative from the unframeable meanderings of the everyday. In "The Grasshopper," Ol'ga remains attached to her aestheticization of her husband as an extraordinary man, able to rephrase her eulogizing narrative with minimum effort, even if occasionally she slips up and re-uses the same phrases about other men: "[TJhere is something about him, isn't there?" she said . . . apparently keen to explain how it was that she had agreed to marry a commonplace, in no way remarkable man . . . "There is something

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strong, something powerful, bearish about him, isn't there? . . . The telegraph-operator at the station is going to be married, Chikeldeev his name is. Good-looking boy, and no fool, there's something strong, bearish about his face."35 Even at the end, when real life has wreaked its arbitrary havoc, Ol'ga's realization of Dymov's true worth is too easy in coming to be anything more than a modified retelling of her familiar narrative: "She wanted to explain to him that it had all been a mistake, that everything was not yet lost, that life might yet be beautiful and happy, that he was an unusual, a remarkable, a great man." 36 Chekhov's rebellion against realism, like that of Gogol and Tolstoy, lies in his rebellion against repetition's role in the construction of typicality. A typical detail is, as we saw earlier, one that summons forth images of infinite repetition. The student in "An Attack of Nerves" is led to insanity through a realization that authentic reality rejects repetition. Whenever he thinks he has penetrated to a tangible core, the world stubbornly refuses to oblige by reproducing the images of which that core consists (images drawn from narrative art). Chekhov's byt does not defy repetition altogether. Another component in his anti-plots is his tendency to parody the implied iteration driving narrative precisely by repeating the ephemeral and non-repeatable. In Chekhov's development of a practice we examined in Saltykov-Shchedryn, this takes the form of a "tic," the reiteration of an arbitrary detail inviting a response straddling the boundary between manic laughter and despair. In "The Grasshopper," the banality in the relationship between Ol'ga and her artistic lover is first revealed in the latter's habit of coining inane meaningless rhymes for her amusement: "Nature-morte, port, resort." Later, with Dymov at the point of death, Olga mechanically articulates her own set of rhymes based around the name of the eminent German doctor who has been summoned: "Sport, short . . . and who's Schreck? Schreck, treck . . . " 3 7 The rhymes become the perfect figure for Chekhovian byt - a maliciously distorted mirror image of the repetition of singular but significant details required by realist typicality. The end of "The Kiss" frustrates

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and mocks its reader because, instead of correcting the story's own self-abortive pattern (the failed narration of an inconsequential non-affair), it recapitulates it - Riabovich thought about going to the new party, but did not. In his plays, Chekhov formalized his use of the tic as a theatrical device. "The Cherry Orchard," ("Vishnevyi sad"), for example, abounds in singular quirks of character (Gaev's billiards jargon), of action (Epikhodov's curious amblings across stage), and of sound (the breaking string). A projection of such repetition into infinity leads to the Nietzschean nightmare of durnaia beskonechnost' — the diabolic anti-eternity best symbolized by Svidrigailov's bath-house in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. But Chekhov offers an alternative perspective on such unmotivated repetition, accompanied by a different (yet related) version of byt. "The Kiss" established in a negative sense that life will not submit to plotting (Riabovich's illusory romance is eclipsed by the reality of a maliciously reiterated non-event). The same axiom is reaffirmed in a positive sense in "The Lady With the Little Dog" - the story of a philanderer's growing love for a diminutive woman with whom he commits adultery in Yalta. Because it is true love that Anna and Gurov will now enjoy, it too must lie outside the narrator's scope. Significantly, the first half of the story ends with a seemingly final departure portrayed as though it were the conclusion of a well-rounded holiday romance: "The train moved away quickly. . . and a minute later it was no longer to be heard, as though everything had conspired to end as quickly as possible that delicious trance, that insanity . . . And he reflected thoughtfully that there had now been another episode or adventure in his life."38 The end of the second half, when Gurov is prepared to bear the consequences of his new love is contrastingly unplot-like: "the most complicated part was only just beginning." Like Riabovich's projected military fate, the long years of unliterary love that await Anna will be subject to the burden of repetition: "They talked of how to avoid the necessity... of not seeing each other for long stretches of time, how to free themselves from these unbearable hardships."39 This however will be neither a regression into the durnaia

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beskonechchnost' of byt, nor the reproduction of some neat, artistic model, but instead, an authentic (and so unnarratable) routine whose pattern of recurrences might be said to correspond to the unknowable flux of nature sensed earlier by Gurov in Yalta: The dull, monotonous sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal rest awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta . . . so it rumbles now. . . And in this permanency, in this complete indifference to the life and death of all of us, there lies, perhaps a promise of our eternal salvation, of the ceaseless progress of life, of ceaseless movement towards perfection.40

The journey ahead is to be one of ephemeral incidents and conflicts, repeated in a rhythm matching the ceaseless motion of the sea.41 How is it though that, by confounding narrative iteration, Chekhov's singularities accommodate themselves to eternity of another kind? The answer, I believe, lies in an extension of the frame-breaking responsible for these singularities, from the level of narrative's "of-timeness" (past framed by present), to that of its "through-timeness" (the linear process in which the frames are gradually consolidated). At one point in "An Attack of Nerves," Vasil'ev suddenly notices in his vodka a small piece of cork which, no sooner mentioned, is abandoned without consequence for the coherence of the scene or the issues broached. The effect it produces on the level of scene is equivalent to that evoked on the level of plot by Riabovich's inconsequential kiss: a puzzled "why?" To this day, such details present a radical challenge to our urge to detect meaning at every point. Like the kiss, they are unframeable, excessive pieces of byt. As in the earlier story, there is a shuttling to and fro between discourse (narration) and story (narrated), causing the referent of Chekhov's story to merge with the challenges it poses to its own telling. Vasil'ev's own puzzlement that some snowflakes should pollute the model according to which he is assigning typicality to a street of brothels, mirrors that of the reader on encountering the piece of cork: a frustrated bemusement at reality's refusal to be pinned down: cc And how can the snow fall in this street!' thought Vasil'ev. 'Damnation take these houses!' " 4 2

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Others have viewed such passages as evidence of Chekhov's interest in the phenomenological "being there55 of objects, reappropriating him for a modernized version of representational realism.43 But these readings blunt Chekhov5s anti-aestheticism, abstracting him from the cultural tradition to which he belonged. It is important to note that the frame-breaking effects of Chekhov's plots as complete units are inseparable from the frame-breaking affecting their individual components (episode, setting, detail), resulting in the sense that nothing ever remains equal to itself, cocooned in an impenetrable shell of objectivity. In "An Attack of Nerves,55 the prostitutes pass through a series of shattered conceptualizations. First they are the "fallen women with their guilty smiles.55 Then they are transformed into "real people, suffering, insulted, weeping.55 When this conception is subverted by the realization that they are weeping because they are drunk, they become "like sheep . . . stupid, indifferent.55 Yet these indifferent women who refuse to submit to any objectifying conceptualization of how they should be, are infinitely more authentic than their aesthetically-derived types: "My God,55 Vasil'ev exclaims in disbelief, "these women are actually alive!5544 The narrator characterizes Vasirev5s ability to confront reality in its semiosis-resisting ugliness, together with his understanding of our responsibility for that ugliness, as his "talent for humanity.5545 For Chekhov (as for Florenskii), the pure "beingthere55 of self-equivalent objects is a diabolical illusion. To make A identical to A is to condemn it to death, which is why Chekhov's Belikov - the "man in a case" who loved the past for its certainties and hated the present for its failure to conform to his preconceptions — attains his ideal when laid to rest in a coffin.46 Often the breaking, reforming and rebreaking of interpretative frames ensures that "character" (a word implying fixity), is substituted by a succession of mood changes. In "The NameDay Party" ("Imeniny") - the account of a woman's shifting moods prior to a miscarriage - the oscillation in her attitudes to her unfaithful husband - from dull alienation, to jealous indignation, to compassion - continues to the end, so that even the "final55 reconciliation reached as the chloroform wears off is contradicted in the last lines: "There was a mistiness in her

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brain from the chloroform, an emptiness in her soul . . . The dull indifference to life which possessed her when the doctors were performing the operation was still with her."47 "Character" is the signified that we assign to the succession of signifying actions and traits associated with a hero's role in the plot. It is the frame that, in time, we place around the hero, enabling us to decode further actions accordingly. The way that Chekhov's characters undermine their own interpretative frames accounts for what Boris Eikhenbaum called Chekhov's sense of character as "flux."48 Eikhenbaum's term leads us to the temporal aspect of this rejection of self-identity. For Chekhov subverted conceptions of narrative time as a framed past which merely pretends to presence, but which, like the personalities whose attributes appear to evolve through it, is really known in advance. In the marital quarrel preceding the denouement to "The Name-Day Party," the heroine's repeated attempts at interpreting the course of the argument as though it were a piece of high tragedy from the past are impeded by the persistant intrusion from the present of semi-comic items of trivia, by her husband's refusal to play his allotted role, and by her own inexplicable changes of mood. The words in bold type below indicate Ol'ga's attempts at framing and thus detemporalizing her present, the italics - all that conspires to frustrate her: [S]he felt anxious all over, and she turned on the other side. A big fly was buzzing about the bedroom and thumped against the ceiling in distress . . .

"You're so full of lies . . . You are a deceitful man! I see through

you and understand every step you take!" "Ol'ga I wish you

would please warn me when you are depressed . . . " Saying this, Petr Dmitrich picked up his pillow and walked out of the bedroom. Ol ga Mikhailovna had not foreseen this . . . Was this one of the

devices which deceitful people resort to when they are in the

w r o n g . . . ? . . . To her mind there was only one thing left to do now; to . . . leave the house forever . . . and to say something hurtful and sarcastic . . . Petr Dmitrich was lying on the sofa, pretending to read a newspaper. . . expecting her to say something else that was terrible . . .

She thought everything was lost . . . "It's over, it's over!" she

cried, not noticing that the pillow had slipped to thefloor.. . "I m u s t be dying in childbirth," she thought. Petr Dmitrich came cautiously into the bedroom . . . "What rain!" he said.*9

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The disorientation that the reader observes in Ol'ga's incomprehending attitude to her depicted present is, elsewhere in Chekhov, experienced directly during the present of the reader's time of reading. This accounts for the Chekhovian half-event, the minor deviations and twists in plots whose line of development then peters out, obscuring the hindsight that the reader expects of temporally-framed narrative. There is a scene in "Peasants" (^Muzhiki") in which a home catches fire. The scene is depicted with the degree of detail that would suggest that it is crucial to the story's outcome: a stallion breaks free and suddenly stops to kick a cart; a frantic village headman begins inexplicably to axe out the windows of the cabin; a student turns his hose on the peasants and is gently reproached by two pretty girls. It is only with hindsight that we recognize the marginality of these incidents; the initial impression is that, despite the past-tense narration, we are in a sequenceless world full of random incidents each of which may produce a plot line that we will recognize only when it is framed as past. It is in this aspect that Chekhov can be seen to be the successor to Tolstoyan "prosaics" as the idea has been developed by Caryl Emerson and Saul Morson.50 Chekhov correlates lack of knowledge about outcome with an incertitude about inner unity. The clock which strikes at odd hours, the cook's perspiring bald spot, the network of veins on the doctor's face in "Peasants" are all details whose redundancy corrodes the tragic atmosphere of poverty and ignorance that the plot seemed intended to generate.51 Both features conspire to ensure that Chekhov's stories challenge our assumption that we are dealing with a narrative past framed from a narrating present in which the outcome and unity of the events is pre-established. The same effect is guaranteed by the unmotivated actions of Chekhov's characters. Such examples as the drunken tears of the prostitutes in "An Attack of Nerves" and the pleasant cup of tea enjoyed by Maria Vasil'evna against the grain of her dismal experiences ("In the Cart") confirm that an author who underexploits the privilege of hindsight will forego the chance to impose purpose on the events he relates.The impression produced is that of a time whose outcome we do

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not know, and upon which we are unable to impose coherence - a time in which each event contains what Morson terms "narrative potential" (a possible narrative trajectory which may or may not be fulfilled).52 Without hindsight we are obliged to treat each event, each detail as unrepeatable, unyielding to the imposition of significance from a point in the future, and thus to semiosis. (Semiosis in narrative, we recall, requires a split between past and present corresponding to that between singular and general.) Chekhov foregrounds Tolstoy's critique of framed time by deepening its ethical dimensions, showing that, merely to capitulate to the chaos of unfulfilled potential of the present, thereby removing oneself from active struggle within it, accomplishes no less of an aesthetic framing than to bury oneself in a beautified past, or to defer to a distant, idyllic future in which we will have no part. This is what is behind the "dull indifference" that Ol'ga Mikhailovna feels after her miscarriage at the end of "The Name-Day Party," and the naive yearnings for a conveniently far-off, Utopian future which afflicts so many Chekhov characters.53 To live in time is to embody time in the minute-by-minute, irreducible singularity of a unique life. A present becomes real when a person ceases to escape from it into an idealized (and thus generalized) past or future, or to surrender to the certainty of its chaotic uncertainties (thus rendering it an unembodied, self-identical abstraction), choosing instead to participate at the heart of its processual movement, constituting that linearity as his own embodied journey. integrating past into present, transfiguring present into future. Chekhov's present does not imply an exit from time, either into the nether-realm of Saltykov-Shchedrin's Golov'evs, or into a hazy, unchanging daydream of other times. Chekhov's present is of this time (a "this" which, in Bakhtinian terms can only be "undersigned" by the one who lives it).54 It is one in which, as R. L.Jackson argues, the past matters and should be accommodated. 55 The future, meanwhile, ever unframeable, should be worked at in the here and now. In his first major play, "The Seagull," Chekhov clarifies the implications of his approach to temporality for his hostility to

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artistic semiosis, for the connections he makes between aesthetics and ethics, and for his growing sense of the possibilities of both a new, participatory art and a non-bytovoi version of the everyday. Exploiting the play's linear axis to great effect, Chekhov initially highlights art's links with objectification, selfidentity and bad faith. The work begins with the failure of Treplev's play, whose framing by Chekhov's larger text establishes it as a sign, standing in marked opposition to the authenticity of the secondary coding. Nina, the aspiring actress who plays the leading part, characterizes herself as drawn to this false world of semiosis by comparing her role to that of a "seagull attracted to a lake." 56 Chekhov marks his allegiance with the civic tradition by ridiculing the theatricalization of life. But, in a gesture ultimately less paradoxical than it seems, he does so from within theater. The seagull, itself an artistic figure, allows Nina to frame her identity in terms of the already framed (and therefore inauthentic) world of theater. Bound up with art and selfobjectification, the seagull is linked also with Treplev who, after presenting a real bird to Nina, confirms that he too prefers to convert reality into signs rather than live reality in its asemiotic flux: "I was wretched enough to kill this seagull today. I'm laying it at your feet . . . soon I shall kill myself in the same way."57 When Treplev shoots himself at the end of act 4 he merely closes the circle of self-identity within which he has been slowly entrapping himself throughout. Trigorin - the ' Villain" of the play - is (like Treplev) an artist who spends his life, notebook in hand, transforming people around him into aesthetic objects (converting reality into signs of itself). At the end of act 2 he too co-opts the seagull, framing it as material for a plot: "An idea suddenly came into my head. A subject for a short story: a young girl, like you . . . loves the lake as a seagull does . . . But a man chances to come along, sees her, and for want of anything better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull."58 And, like Treplev, Trigorin remains imprisoned within his artistic self-identity, equal to his sign. In the course of Chekhov's play (the secondary coding) he repeats the role described in his own story (the primary coding),

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virtually destroying Nina in cynical fashion. Framing deprives a person of the right to freedom, manipulates that person as though he/she were an actor, responsive to the dramatist's whims - all the more so when the actor is the dramatist's own self. Nina is herself a passive victim, eager to strive for identity with her sign and carry out the theatrical role assigned to her in life. She indicates this by expressing readiness to live up to a line from one of Trigorin's stories which she has surreptitiously underlined: "If ever you need my life, come and take it." 59 This is precisely what Trigorin does, enticing Nina to Moscow with promises of theatrical stardom, then abandoning her to the dual fate of a miscarried pregnancy and an abortive career. But Chekhov uses the linearity of theatrical narrative to point the way to the transcendence of theater in life, and thus of imprisoning self-identity. Unlike the other characters, Nina changes and learns. By the end she has abandoned her fantasies of metropolitan stardom, taking instead to the unglamorous task of improving her present performances on the provincial stage. Equally, instead of unthinkingly abandoning her past with Treplev for whose suicide attempt she bears considerable responsibility, she returns to make her peace with him. Nina, like Chekhov, comes to realize that true art is not a sign of a separate, framed reality with which one must identify, but that art and reality converge in endurance, hard work and a knowing (rather than a blind) faith - qualities that cannot be semioticized and acted, but must be lived and enacted: "[WJhether you act on the stage or write stories - what really matters is not fame, or glamour. . . but knowing how to endure things . . . I have faith now and I'm not suffering quite so much, and when I think of my vocation I'm not afraid of life."60 Acting rediscovers its own etymology. Decoupled from the abstraction of theatrical signs, it is reassociated with the living performance of conscious acts of self-transformation. As a metatextual marker (yet no more: Chekhov's play must itself submit to the world of theater), acting points to an aesthetic which is neither "art" nor "reality," but the point when reality ceases blindly to repeat the cycles of its own drudgery, and art

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no longer separates itself from reality in order forcibly to impose meaning upon it - the point when art provides the means by which the everyday might become the living. Thus Chekhov succeeds in conceptualizing (if not act-ualizing) the inconceivable — a non-semiotic art, one participatory in the very reality it frames and fixes. After considerable anguish, Nina breaks free of the need to repeat the identity of the seagull imposed on her by Trigorin and asserts her claim to Chekhov's Seagull - a symbol of singularity, freedom from objectification and imprisonment within concepts, of continual movement towards a higher goal which, once conceptualized, is forever lost — a sign of nonsemiosis: "Someone ought to kill me . . . Pm a seagull . . . No, that's not it. Fm an actress . . . Now I am a real actress, I act with

intense enjoyment, with enthusiasm . . . keep walking and thinking . . . and feeling that I am growing stronger in spirit with every day that passes" (italics added). 61 Nina now lives not in the senseless haze of byt, but in the real present. She refuses, likewise, to follow Treplev's mother in looking for refuge in the nostalgically distorted past of a faded acting career, or, like the circle of card-players on whom the curtain closes at the play's end, to surrender her singularity to notions of a predetermined future. She is thus to be distinguished from those whom Bakhtin imagines claiming: "I can ignore my self-activity and live by my passivity alone. I can try to prove my alibi in Being, I can pretend to be someone I am not. I can abdicate from my obligative [ought-to-be] uniqueness." Nina is one who, on the contrary, "affirms [her] non-alibi in Being." 62 For Chekhov, the singular must resist semiosis and repetition. (The very point of a sign is that it can be repeated in different contexts while retaining a similar meaning.) Failure to maintain singularity is condemned as contrary to freedom. In the story "About Love" ("0 liubvi"), the failure of a couple to act on their feelings derives from the facility with which they find reasons not to pursue their affair on the grounds that it defies rational and ethical norms. The failure is thus due to their refusal to treat their own love as irreducible to laws or typical models. Only when they are about to part forever do they realize that,

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with love, usual meanings have no validity: "[W]hen you love you must . . . start from what is higher . . . than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all." 63 Chekhov allies himself with Tolstoy and Dostoevskii when he distinguishes life from the rational and the semiotic (that which can be assigned meaning according to an immutable model). By "life" Chekhov, like Dostoevskii, has in mind zhivaia zhizn - a phrase whose tautology is a means of emphasizing that true life has no predicate, no meaning, since it is all act(-ing). "Gooseberries" (^Kryzhovnik") - a story in the same trilogy of which "About Love" is also part - tells of a character whose dreams of retirement to a cosy farm with a gooseberry patch are expressed as images from paintings. The man's life turns out to be nothing more than the predictable fulfilment of his dream in accordance with the artistic meaning imposed upon it. What this amounts to is worse, even, than the tic-like anti-eternity of Chekhovian byt whose diabolic mockery of semiosis, like that of Gogol (and as Gippius failed to see), at least prepares the grounds for embodied life. The perfect correspondence of life to artistic sign in the gooseberry dream is nothing short of death: "[T]o r u n away and hide on your farm - that's not life, it's . . . a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. What man needs is not six feet of soil, not a farm, but the whole world, all of Nature, where he can show unhindered all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit."64 As the narrator implies, life is not to be made meaningful, but to be lived: "|T|s there order in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand beside a ditch and wait for it to close itself up orfillwith silt, when I could jump over it or build a bridge across it? And again, why must we wait? Wait until we have no strength to live, and yet we must live and are eager to live?"65 By the time he came to write "The Seagull," however, Chekhov had realized the futility of conceiving of life in dualistic opposition to art. The acts that Nina performs must be distinguished both from art and reality since the theatrical metatext to which they belong introduces a third term facil-

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itating an escape from the perpetual oscillation between art and the everyday that we saw in chapter 2. Chekhov's espousal of the insignificant half-occurrences of the everyday suggests a reality that is not ordered for the purposes of narrativity but anchored in the present with all its redundancy. The unframeable plot-sequences of Chekhov's prose lead directly to his experiments with drama which is, as Likhachev has remarked, the form in which the real time of the text's unfolding comes closest to coinciding with the represented time of the action.66 There is noone who has surpassed Chekhov in his exploitation of the potentials of narrative time and of temporal devices specific to the theater such as the pause.67 What, though, of the connection between theatrical temporality and theater as metatext? The answer lies in a return to the notion of deification, the journey of self-transcendence by which each person remakes him- or herself as icon of God in a never-to-be-repeated union of singular and eternal. In their refusal to submit to narrative repetition, Chekhov's anti-plots can be seen as reenactments of a higher meaning to which they are not subordinate as singular is to general (and so cannot "figure"), but which, since it emerges from them, is contained iconically within them. When the images of transitoriness in "The Lady With the Little Dog" are placed alongside the rhythms of the sea with its infinite progress towards unknowable perfection, we sense that their lives might serve not as metaphors of that movement, but as its icons, its in-imitable incarnation. The daily struggle of their lives to follow, we surmise, will reenact the mysteries of a higher movement (rather than be reduced to it as its repeatable instance). Significantly, Gurov associates his recognition that he and Anna will grow old with the fulfilment of this true love, rather than its demise: And it seemed strange to him that he had become so much older in the last few years and lost his looks. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and heaving. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably about to fade and wither like his own . . . And now only when his hair was gray had he fallen in love, really, truly, for thefirsttime in his life.68

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Each ordinary, unique life is an irreducible (and so unframeable) reenactment of the journey towards perfection, each tiny detail of those lives contains the beautiful whole within it. Anna Sergeevna is beautiful to Gaev not despite her ordinariness but in it: "This little, insignificant woman, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now . . . and to the sounds of the terrible orchestra, of the wretched local violins, he thought how lovely she was." 69 In Bakhtin's words: u [T]he truth [pravda] of Being as event contains within it totally the whole extra-temporal absoluteness of theoretical truth [istina]"70 The ordinariness of everyday things is, for Chekhov, rarely an aspect of neutral typicality (a representative, extra-ordinary figure for how things ordinarily are).71 Nor is it, as Gippius suggests, identical with objectified byt, nor even with the messy, unfinalizable prosaics of Morson, whose unrelenting antagonism to final meanings ultimately draws him into the familiar (finalizing) art/(unfinalizable) everyday life paradigm.72 It is either the parodic, meaningless singularity of daily life as durnaia beskonechnost', or the singularity of daily life as self-transfiguration. In their exhortations to work, Chekhovian heroines like Sonia in "Uncle Vania" are summoning the strength to begin this arduous task of transfiguring everyday existence into an icon of the ordinary: We shall live through a long succession of days and dreary evenings. We shall suffer patiently the trials which fate imposes on us; we shall work for others, now and in old age, and we shall have no rest. When our time comes we shall die submissively. . . and God will have pity upon us. And then, dear Uncle, we shall both begin to know a life that is bright and beautiful and lovely.73 Like the acts of faith required in Nina's theater, Sonia's minuteby-minute struggle to gain control of a future that constantly eludes her is neither everyday life (though it comes close to sinking into the drudgery of byt) nor art (though it bears comparison with Trofimov's aestheticized images of work in "The Cherry Orchard"). It is rather a form of creativity distinct from everyday life, yet participatory in its transfiguration, equivalent to the ceaseless motion of zhizn'74r The four steps of the process by which Chekhov came to

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recognize the value of such creativity are conveyed in the four stages of Gurov's love for Anna. First we find the (implicit) parody of his objectifying, aestheticized attitude to their encounter in Yalta. Back in Moscow (and like the hero of "The Kiss"), Gurov experiences the humiliation of seeing his narrative of this pretty memory collapse into untellable irrelevancy: "One evening he could not help saying: cIf you only knew what a fascinating woman I met in Yalta!' The official got into his sledge . . . and shouted . . . 'You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit off.' These words, so commonplace, for some reason incensed Gurov."75 Life's resistance to facile narrativization crystallizes as the absurd, humdrum prison of byt: "What stupid nights, what dull, humdrum days . . . Futile pursuits and conversations about the same old things . . . in the end all that remains is a life clipped and wingless, an absurd mess." 76 It is only through "working at" his love that, by the end, Gurov is able to make an icon of his humdrum existence, though the temptation to aestheticize remains always at hand: "And it seemed as though in a little while the answer would be found, and then a new and beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to them that the end was still far away, and that the most complicated part was only beginning." But the story is, in the final analysis, a mere aesthetic representation of an iconic process. Chekhov's long struggle to negotiate a path between art and life could not of itself generate icons. What was needed was an aesthetic of acts rather than representations: neither theater reduced to mimicking the banality of the everyday, nor the poses of role-playing actors, but what John Orr refers to as "a new theatricality of everyday life."77 Ironically, the completion of that task would have meant that the form which proved nascent Russian antiaestheticism's most pliant victim, might now be crowned its triumphant successor.78

CHAPTER 4

Fedor Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess

Moi aussi, j'etais de trop . . . et je me secouais pour me debarrasser de cette salete poisseuse, mais elle tenait bon et il y en avait tant. . . j'etouffais au fond de cet immense ennui. (Jean-Paul Sartre)1

If it were not for the insights contained in his theoretical writings, Fedor Sologub would not appear to be the ideal torchbearer to Chekhov in the struggle to renew art by revalorizing everyday life. Sologub has traditionally been seen as an ally of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii in his mission to forge a path out of the impasse to which Chekhov had led realism. Indeed, the incorrigibly decadent Sologub was considered to have done much to consolidate the notion of byt as a monotonous nightmare of poshlost1 from which art offers the only hope of salvation. His fiction tells unfailingly of characters striving through a combination of eroticism, art and/or suicide to escape routine drudgery and enter the realm of beauty beyond it. To cite one example, in "Shadows" ("7i«z"), a bored schoolboy follows instructions from a book on hand-shadow theater to create a magical world on the brink of insanity into which he finally entices his mother. The role of madness and death as escape-routes, together with the fact that the alternative world is so often an artificial one - in the novel A Legend in Creation (Tvorimaia legenda) the hero creates his fantasy realm from chemically revitalized corpses - suggest a profound pessimism about the possibility of reconciling the opposing worlds.2 Most critics perceive in Sologub's chef d'oeuvre the same no

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess

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duality.3 The novel's very title reflects Sologub's insistence that the mindless triviality displayed by the "hero" is the very essence of evil. Meanwhile, the haphazard scenes of sensuality involving the beautiful Liudmila and her pubescent protege, Sasha, provide the familiar flight from the provincial quagmire of which Peredonov is only the most degraded representative. Those readers who have noted the nagging parallels between Liudmila and Peredonov have done so with a view to demonstrating either Liudmila's eventual capitulation to Peredonovshchina or, conversely, the presence within the recesses of Peredonov's corrupted being of the divine spark of artistic vision which animates Liudmila's myth-making. Either way, the dichotomy is preserved.4 There is little question that Sologub's novel — which even includes an allusion to Chekhov's archetypal bytovoi villain, Belikov - is conceived in opposition to post-Chekhovian everyday life. My purpose, however, is to demonstrate that, in striving to cast off byt's burden, this uncompromising aesthete could not help but redouble his predecessor's paradoxical celebration of its hidden, self-transfigurative aspect and intensify his attempt to articulate a new form of activity in which that paradox might be overcome. I begin by establishing Sologub's affinity with the nineteenth-century tradition, suggesting that, rather than telling of post-Chekhovian byt, The Petty Demon engages in a form of second-order anti-telling. What results is an epidemic of unwanted narrative in which plotted purposefulness is supplanted by gossiping excess. Like Chekhov's anti-plot, Sologub's "surfeit plot" is shown to derive from a resistance to narrative framing, but with two quite un-Chekhovian corollaries: (i) the unintegrated activity of an intrusive authorial presence, and (ii) an inflated role for metonymic surface slippage as the means of ensuring narrative progression. My argument turns on the notion that Sologub shares with Chekhov a powerful anti-aestheticism which reveals itself as an expose of the link between metaphor and mendacity. Peredonov's anti-aesthetic byt will be shown to contain within it the seeds of its own transfiguration into a form in which the byt/'art

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dichotomy is rendered invalid, thus completing the imperfect circle of Sologub's earlier mentioned theoretical schema. This form (whose metatextual marker can be traced in the role of the novel's other petty demon - the mysterious nedotykomka that torments Peredonov) constitutes an advance on Chekhov's theater of everyday life in that, via myth, it foregrounds the components of self and body.5 Discarding Liudmila's alienating corruption of classical legend, Sologub reaches tentatively for a new, de-aestheticized version of myth in which self might be reintegrated with world. The hesitancy is reflected in a reprise of Dostoyevsky's fascination with the provincial demonism of gossip - at once intimate and vindictive, true and false, constitutive of the everyday, yet a diversion from it.6 Despite the assertions of the otherwise reliable Milton Ehre that the novel has but a "scanty plot," The Petty Demon is in a real sense characterized by a veritable proliferation of plots.7 It is often suggested that the use of one word to designate both the foundation of story-telling and the notion of subterfuge speaks of the essence of narrative. Sologub's novel overindulges in plot in both senses. All the characters are inveterate intriguers. The Petty Demon's story-line (such as it is) centers around Peredonov's plot to obtain a school inspectorship by marrying his cousin, Varvara, whose relative (a countess in St. Petersburg) can wield influence on his behalf. Varvara has her own plan to entice an overcautious Peredonov into marriage - a plot into which she drags a friend, Grushina, for help in forging a letter from the countess. Peredonov is the object of further marriage-procurement schemes: by his friend Rutilov on behalf of his daughters, and by the widow Vershinina on behalf of her niece. The climax to the novel, meanwhile, is precipitated by a conspiracy hatched by Liudmila Rutilov to pass a schoolboy off as a geisha at a masquerade. The effect of this surfeit of plot is reminiscent of that produced by Chekhov's plot deficit in that it renders problematic the task of identifying a coherent sequence of events framed from either end and posited as a model for reality. Onto Chekhov's world of the untellable is superimposed Sologub's world of the overtold.8 The confusion of plot in which the provincial town depicted

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess is submerged has three dimensions which reinforce a single anti-narrative function: (i) Phantom plots: The tenuous hold that Peredonov's ruse maintains over other contenders for the title of plot line becomes still more precarious when we recognize that it is based on unfounded supposition. Princess Volchanskaia, the character from whom the promise of an inspectorship is supposed to have emanated, is curiously elusive, while the letters that Peredonov received from her are, of course, forgeries concocted by Varvara and Grushina (Sologub is careful to point out that the only genuine letter did not state directly that the Princess would secure the inspector's post). The princess's function as helper in Peredonov's quest (to use the Proppian terminology) and the object of the quest (the inspectorship) are of equally dubious status!9 As the prospect of the position and the verity of its source recede, Peredonov begins inventing his own, transparently fictional plots about the princess: "From spite [Peredonov] made up ridiculous lies about the princess. He told Rutilov and Volodin that he had once been her lover and that she had paid him a lot of money."10 Peredonov compensates for the absence of real intrigue by substituting multiple false schemes which in turn furnish the basis for Sologub's own three-hundred-page minusplot. To continue the Proppian analogy, the phantom "helper" (the princess) is opposed by an array of still more insubstantial "obstacles" - the characters whom Peredonov imagines as schemers bent on preventing him from achieving his goal. This confusion of phantom plots motivates Peredonov's visits to local dignitaries to enlist their support against his detractors. To each official Peredonov repeats a monotonous litany of accusations not only superfluous, but counterproductive to his cause: "I was never a socialist and the fact that . . . someone might have said something out of place . . . But now I have none of those thoughts." 11 The bureaucratic platitudes received in baffled response to these complaints are misread as promises of still more phantom support. Phantom intrigues are not Peredonov's sole prerogative. Other characters orient their lives around vastly inflated

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subterfuges. From the most dubious of sources, Grushina manufactures an outrageous plot involving a woman dressing up her niece as a boy and enrolling her in the local gymnasium. It is in the nature of gossip - the life blood of the town - to generate tall tales. Such creativity is, however, Peredonov's special talent. Sologub's herofleshesout his master-plot (the story of the inspectorship) with an inexhaustible supply of subplots on which he extemporizes at every juncture and which attach themselves to the most unlikely objects; during a routine conversation with his associates Peredonov generates a picture of a dramatic slaying: "Varvara cut off a slice of bread and, enjoying Volodin's fanciful speeches, carried on holding the knife in her hand. Peredonov had a scary thought: what if she suddenly cut his throat?" 12 And a piece of gossip about a maid spawns two further conspiracies: "I've heard that our Natasha is living with you, but don't believe a word she says about me . . . Maybe she went to work for you specially to steal something secret." "Please, don't worry about that," the lieutenant colonel objected. "I don't keep the plans to fortresses in my house." The mention of fortresses troubled Peredonov. It seemed to him that Rubovsky was hinting that he could imprison Peredonov in a fortress . . . " 13 Plots in The Petty Demon are self-reproductive, all-embracing, able to give voice even to dumb animals: "Varvara greeted Peredonov with a concerned face. Ardalion Borisych!' she exclaimed, 'We've had a real adventure! The cat has run off.' Peredonov thought that perhaps the cat had gone off to the police station and was purring everything out that it knew about Peredonov. . . " 1 4 Psychological readings stress Peredonov's precipitous descent into insanity. There are, however, advantages to be gained from an approach that integrates his behaviour with the action of the novel as a whole. Moreover, problems emerge from the proposition that Peredonov's growing paranoia provides a substitute for narrative progression.15 For if he is in the grip of paranoia, then the descent into its delusionary world occurred well before the novel's beginning; the increase in its intensity that seems to occur towards the end is barely equivalent to

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess plotted sequence. Besides, if paranoia there is, then the whole gossiping town is deluded - a fact which further problematizes the focus on Peredonov. As the author commented: "Peredonov's madness is no freak occurrence, but rather a social disease; it is nothing other than the everyday life [byt] of modern Russia."16 So consumed, in fact, is Peredonov's life by his own fantastic intrigues that it takes on the characteristics of a monotonous anti-routine - a. byt whose roster of duties is based on an intrigue that never was: "The pursuit by potential wives, the jealousy of colleagues (more a product of his imagination than real), the suspected intrigues of others — all that made his life monotonous and mournful like the weather."17 Thus, Peredonov's solicitations of support from those he implicates in his subterfuge provide the structure of his daily round, marked, like most daily rounds, by sheer tedium: " And now,5 he thought, 'like it or not I've got to go and explain myself. What a burden! What a bind!5 " 1 8 (ii) Substandard Plots: What of the vestiges of real plot that remain when the delusions have been filtered out? Of course, Peredonov's conspiracy is, imaginary foundation notwithstanding, a concrete narrative fact. The scheme did, after all, result in acts with identifiable consequences. But, in terms of narrative worth, a plan to obtain a school inspectorship is hardly the stuff of which literary drama is made, particularly given the haphazard way in which Peredonov pursues it. The central quest is as narratologically substandard as it is ontologically insubstantial, generating innumerable conflicts with little connection to the inspectorship which thus further diminish the sense that we are dealing with the intricate interweaving associated with good plot. On a micro-level, the attributes of these secondary sequences (which, like their progenitor, bear the structure of conspiratorial schemes) mirror those of the central subterfuge - the inflated significance accorded them by their agents, the randomness with which they are carried out, and the undramatic character of the events which constitute them. The letter-forging farce, for example, is conducted in curiously drawn out fashion - an initial failure followed by a successful attempt which itself dissipates in failure; a falsely

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reluctant accomplice who has to be bribed into participating delays and obstacles which offer a mockery of the retardation devices analysed by the Formalists in their explications of fictional suspense.19 The conspiracy is enacted with the minimum of artifice: Grushina's handwriting bears little similarity to that of the Princess; Varvara's blushing lies are transparent to all but Peredonov, and Grushina's uncontrollable propensity to gossip soon ensures that the subterfuge is common knowledge to the entire town. In lacking art-ifice, this deception lacks the aesthetics of good narrative; it is subplot as anti-narrative. Much of the novel is taken up by ploys still less deserving of the attention lavished upon them: Peredonov's and Volodin's cowardly plan to have Vershina's gates daubed as punishment for her reluctance to give her niece in marriage to Volodin; Peredonov's pathetic attempt to have his theft of a packet of raisins attributed to a servant; the regressively infantile plan of Varvara and Peredonov to trash their apartment in order to spite their landlady. At times, Sologub's own narration colludes, through free indirect speech, in the attribution of value to patently valueless occurrences: "An important piece of news was awaiting Peredonov at home. While still on the threshold it was possible to realise that something extraordinary had occurred . . . Varvara ran out into the hall and cried: 'They've brought the cat back! . . . And the cat has rattles on its tail and it's making a racket' . . . Peredonov was petrified."20 We are struck by the random arbitrariness of the sequences, the self-indulgent nature of the whims in which they originate, their lack of plot-like purposefulness. Liudmila's elaborate plots to entice Sasha into her erotic fantasies share the same qualities. Her initial visit to the boy is carried out merely to satisfy her "burning curiosity" about him and there is never any suggestion that the scheme will end in plot-worthy seduction.21 The suggestive scenes that she enacts rely on the boy's remaining innocent and unspoiled. They cannot qualify as foreplay, for there is no dramatic deflowering intended or accomplished: "These stimulations . . . represented the main delight of their affair for Liudmila. They aroused her, yet were

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far removed from vulgar, repulsive consummation."22 This is sex in which the foreplay is the climax — the reason why Milton Ehre is, perhaps, correct in seeing the relationship as an attempt to escape the linearity of time into pure Being.23 The geisha scheme is equally superfluous, its purpose to revel in the sheer hell of deception - plot for the sake of plot: "Daria and Liudmila didn't care about the prize, neither before nor after . . . But both sisters were carried away by Liudmila's dream of sending Sasha to the masquerade in a female costume . . . it would be terribly funny to trick everyone."24 What Peredonov does out of sheer spite (so zlosti), Liudmila performs for the fun of it (dlia zabavy). The two are worlds apart, but the respective (sub)plots in which they are engaged reveal a shared purposelessness that raises questions for those who perceive significant linear development in Liudmila's supposed descent into Peredonovshchina.25 These gratuitous schemes propose objectives not worth the effort required to attain them and which, in extreme cases, amount to sheer indulgence. From surfeit of plot we arrive at plot as surfeit. In Chekhov we find an absence of plot where plot there should be ("The Kiss" leads us to expect the unfolding of a romantic adventure, only to frustrate us). This translates referentially into an impression of Russian provincial life as eventless stagnation. In The Petty Demon we have plot where there should be none — in the midst of the same provincial quagmire. Sologub's surfeit plot merely deposits onto it another layer. In both aspects, the novel's multiple plots incorporate features of gossip which, as we know, deals in half-truths which forego narrative's innate authority-conferring powers, substituting quality with quantity.26 Pettiness, intrigue, delusionary imaginings (like gossip) are all thematic concerns in The Petty Demon. By treating them in their narrative aspect, I hope eventually to uncover the celebratory potential they share with gossip in its Russian literary variant. (iii) Dissolving Plots: There is a third respect in which the plots of Peredonovshchina resemble those of gossip. Many are, unlike those in Chekhov's stories, far from abortive and are given climactic resolutions - not the plotted climax of a goal realized,

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but that of a public scandal precipitated. Peredonov's spur of the moment ruse to hide his theft of the raisins, for example, has its peripeteia in Klavdia's announcement that she had discovered the wrapper in Peredonov's pocket, followed by a mock-tragic denouement in which Klavdia is first disbelieved, then ridiculed before all.27 The plot to have Vershina's gates daubed in vulgar slogans likewise culminates in a scene of public gawping in front of the widow's house.28 Liudmila's exquisite practical joke at the masquerade reaches its unexpected climax when Sasha is driven from the hall by a jealous crowd, only to be rescued in the nick of time by a gallant actor. Finally, when Peredonov finally learns that he has been duped, his own master plot careers swiftly to its own violent conclusion: the murder of Volodin before Varvara and her scandalized servants. These denouements are, no matter how public, deprived of lasting consequence. Klavdia's humiliation is no sooner recorded than forgotten by both participants and narrator who subsequently depicts, without reference to the previous episode, a quite different Klavdia joining in the celebrations at the news of Peredonov's inspectorship.29 Other climaxes suffer a similar fate. The scandal over Sasha's costume is superseded immediately by the news of Peredonov's arson, while the geisha episode is absorbed into the nebulous mass of rumor that is the town's only sustenance.30 As well as providing the model for all narrative action, gossip is at once its source (it provides the agents and objectives for the plots), its culmination point (each plot has its climax in a scandal which generates a further round of tall tales replenishing the stock), and its dissolving point (every sequence is assimilated to gossip's indeterminate, atemporal realm).31 The last pages are taken up with a dizzying succession of such climaxes. Peredonov's arson, dramatic though it is, is cast aside in the debris thrown up as the narrative hurtles chaotically towards its arbitrarily chosen resting point. Volodin's murder, too, can hardly be said to have the merit of dramatic surprise; Peredonov has been obsessed with delusionary fears about him from the beginning and, besides, Sologub informs us in advance of Peredonov's intentions in inviting Volodin home.

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Nor does it impress as a vicious conspiracy executed in cold blood - the final flourish in a long, purposeful sequence. The act is instead performed as an excessive overreaction to a mild case of teasing: " cYou were tricked, Ardasha,' [Volodin] said with contemptuous sympathy. Til trick you!' Peredonov growled fiercely. Volodin seemed frightened and threatening to him. He had to defend himself. Peredonov quickly withdrew the knife, threw himself on Volodin and cut his throat." 32 Random and surplus, the slaying exacts few consequences for anyone. Even the victim bleats like a lamb to the last, as if the assault has left his fundamental state intact. Peredonov is abandoned in the same dull melancholy that beset him throughout. And, for the townspeople, the scandal seems destined to be no more than extra grist to their gossip mill perhaps the reason why Sologub informs us in the foreword to the fifth edition that Peredonov's subsequent release from a mental asylum is followed by his promotion to Vice-Governor in the novel's sequel. The gratuitousness of the plots extends to the individual acts within each of them. Peredonov's behaviour is consistently random. He is prone to sudden, unmotivated outbursts of spite or mirth which occur in endless sequence: Peredonov suddenly burst into loud and abrupt laughter, [zakhokhotal gromko i otryvisto]

Peredonov sullenly roared with laughter as he stared at his naked girlfriend, [ugriumo zakhokhotal]

Standing in front of the wallpaper all three of them were spitting at it, tearing the wallpaper and stomping on it with their shoes. Tired and satisfied after a while they turned away . . . Peredonov leaned over, picked up the cat . . . and . . . pestered it - he pulled at the ears and tail and shook it by the neck . . . Finally Peredonov became bored with this diversion and let it go.33 Eschewing the predictability of routine as patterned repetition, Sologub generates his (infinitely more oppressive) everyday tedium from a haphazard spewing forth of the unrepeatable into a single, undifferentiated mass.

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Peredonov's decisions, likewise, are so arbitrary as to undermine our efforts to grasp a method in his madness, a sense of purpose in his plots. His unmitigated stupidity amounts to an absence of artifice, an inability either to manipulate his own schemes, or to perceive them in others: Peredonov said: "Those eggs are nothing, on our estate my father had a hen that laid two huge eggs each day the whole year round." "That's nothing," Prepolovenskaia replied, "if you really want to boast about something! There was a hen in our village that laid two eggs and a spoonful of butter every day." "We had the same thing too," said Peredonov without noticing the mockery. If the people he met asked him where he was going, then he would lie quite inartfully [neiskusno], yet he himself would be pleased with his clumsy [nelovkimi] inventions.34 Varvara, Grushina and Volodin are little less gullible than Peredonov, confirming that petty demonry is far from unique to the Petty Demon himself. Peredonov and his associates deal in life's surfaces, believing what they are told, convinced that their transparent schemes will likewise be taken at face value, that a mere change in surface is tantamount to a change in essence (Peredonov's decision to paint "P" over his body to prevent Volodin from usurping his identity).35 The Petty Demon's behaviour points to a focus on the gratification of meaningless, fleshly desires, particularly those centering on the mouth. When he is not compulsively cramming his mouth with pies and vodka, he is giving forth from the same orifice in equally superfluous fashion: hence his uncontrolled fits of laughter, his spitting, and the monotonous flow of gossip that issues from his tongue. Where sexual desire is concerned, Peredonov's sadistic taste for whipping young boys likewise indicates a proclivity for the gratuitous — an appetite shared (along with the tendency towards fits of laughter) with Liudmila, whose paganistic motivation for her own commitment to the pleasures of bodily surfaces is only partially convincing: "It's sweet even when it hurts - as long as you can sense the body, as long as you can see the body's nakedness and beauty. I'm a heathen, a sinner . . .

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They say there is a soul . . . What do I need it for? . . . I love the body, strong, agile, naked, able to take its pleasures.5'36 For Liudmila, too, the oral and the sado-masochistic are indistinguishable in their shared gratuitousness: "She took one date at a time out of the box and put it into Sasha's mouth and after each one she forced him to kiss her hand." Her madness recalls Peredonov's own paranoia and when she exhorts Sasha to "[t]ry to understand [that] . . . happiness and wisdom can only be found in madness" she confirms the importance of the author's assertion that not all of Peredonov's insanity can be dismissed as delusionary and that "he, like all men, was merely seeking the truth." 37 Chekhov's prose breaks the frames of typicality that it invokes, compelling us continually to construct new models for the events depicted. Sologub's novel takes the assault further by articulating events superfluous to all frames, plotting not worthy of the name plot. This difference engenders a further distinction between an incipient byt still defined consciously (and optimistically) in contradistinction to narrative and a decaying byt which, on the point of tilting over into the diabolics of total indifference - the "decrepit chaos" {driakhlyi khaos) to which Sologub refers — can do no more than identify itself with a purposeless inversion of narrative.38 Byt as tic (the structured repetition of the unrepeatably singular) is on the point of effacement by byt as the unstructured accumulation of the excessive and indifferent. For this very reason Peredonov's behavior betrays a dull, melancholic detachment, a complete lack of plot-like malice: "Peredonov gazed with crazed eyes at the corpse and listened to the whisperings on the other side of the door . . . A dull melancholy oppressed him. He had no thoughts." 39 For the same reason his stupidity is defined less by lack of intelligence than by an indulgence in pointless gossip: "The talk in the town about Liudmila's love for a student at the gymnasium was exaggerated and filled with stupid and indelicate details. But few people believed it — Peredonov had overdone it." 40 The dreary margins of day-to-day provincial reality are here tinged with a manic streak of grotesque fantasy. Events in The Petty Demon resist translation from surface into

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depth. Meaning in narrative is relational and derives from the disposition of (at least) two viewpoints: that of the action narrated, and that of a narrating subject. If there is no framing viewpoint from which the events are presented and purposefully evaluated (given depth), those events lack sense.41 This is why we find it difficult to perceive the novel as a representation. The characters are, to be sure, immersed in the trivial minutiae of provincial existence, but because their behavior does not feature in any perspectival disposition, it cannot be interpreted as representative of that existence. (To "make representative" is to frame and accord meaning.) The paradoxical sense that Sologub writes simultaneously in the realistic and the fantastic modes is a function of this phenomenon. A truly typical petty malice would soon cease to be imbued with the semi-delirious atmosphere that, as Diana Greene points out, pervades the entire novel, drawing the reader into its zone of influence.42 Byt in The Petty Demon is no literary representation of an extraliterary world, but an internally generated daily life emerging haphazardly as a tumorous growth of minus-plot (an unwelcome excess of surface flesh) on an ever-shrinking body of real plot (the pursuit of the inspectorship): "Peredonov unwillingly provided the money for the wedding expenses, mocking Varvara. Sometimes he would bring his walking stick with the rude gesture on the knob and say to Varvara: cKiss my fig and I'll give you the money . . . ' Varvara would kiss the fig. 'So what, my lips won't split from it,' she would say."43 It is difficult to assign meaning to scenes such as these, easy to be lured into the crazed vision that produced them. These are daily events with minimal representational value; like the alien, excessive surfaces encountered by Sartre's Roquentin, they simply (but repellently) are.** Sologub displayed an awareness of the problem of framing and viewpoint that his text raises through the intriguing forewords he attached to various editions of the novel in an attempt simultaneously to enlighten and mystify his audience.45 His teasing manipulations of popular reactions to The Petty Demon thus perform a complex metatextual function. For the authorial inserts extend well beyond the forewords. Part of the work's

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hypnotic aura derives from multiple intrusions whose cumulative effect is to intensify the assiduously cultivated languidity of the narrative itself: A melancholy calm blew over the streets . . . Only the children, those eternal, untiring vessels of God's joy at the earth, were lively, running and playing. But even now sloth was settling over them . . . In the midst of this languor in the streets and houses, in the grip of this alienation from the heavens, through this soiled and impotent earth walked Peredonov, languishing from vague fears. And for him there was no solace in the divine and no joy in the earthly, because . . . he looked at the world through moribund eyes like some demon languishing in gloomy solitude. The mystery of the eternal transfiguration of impotent matter into a force which annihilated the chains of death was hidden forever from him . . . an absurd combination of nonbelief in the living God and Christ with a belief in sorcery!46

Unusual for any novel, such passages nonetheless provide the basis for standard interpretations of this work. Here are the commonplaces of Symbolist orthodoxy - Peredonov as embodiment of the diabolic disorder beneath the surfaces of provincial routine; the world as a mask of appearances hiding a truth which must be read in its arcane symbols, and so on. What is odd is that, via some of the most heavy-handed authorial intrusions known in literature, these readings are furnished by the author from within his own narrative. As Victor Erofeev implies, Sologub breaks the rules of narrative by mixing text with metatext — another aspect of anti-narrative in this most anti-narrative of novels.47 The intrusions are, however, no more than compensation for the absence of integrated viewpoints - the phenomenon which conventionally enables the events' meaning to appear to inhere within them. The strange, atmospheric effect of this heresy against narrative convention derives from the infiltration of metatext into the very fabric of the narrative. One example is to be found in the incongruous function of recurring epithets. The adjectives "sluggish" (viatyi), "gloomy" (ugriumyi), "dull" (skuchnyi) and "indifferent" {bezrazlichnyi) are used repeatedly:

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After the dancing Peredonov was overcome with generosity. A dim and sullen animation gleamed on his swollen face . . . "I want to spit on you," said Peredonov. . . He stood up and with a dull and indifferent expression he spat in her face. "Did you really write to her?" Peredonov asked. His face became excited with a glint of dreary anticipation.48 It is not usual for faces to become excited with dreary anticipation, nor for the faces of people overcome with generosity to be described as "dim and sullen." Peredonov's metatextual role as the embodiment of metaphysical ennui is superimposed disorientatingly onto the level of the actions designed to articulate that sense. A metatextual position is one located at a point from which the plot has always already been read. The action depicted in The Petty Demon is thus often superfluous to the interpretation with which it is intertwined. Peredonov's metaphysical significance is made available to the reader in advance of the sequence of actions whose final meaning we would expect to emerge only at its end. The interference produces a narrative short-circuiting illustrated by the portrayal of Volodin whose sheepish essence - the deep metatextual interpretation of his role in the narrative - is conflated with each detail of his outside demeanor: Volodin, symbolically, the sacrificial sheep, looks (and behaves) . . . like a sheepl His every appearance is accompanied by bleating and prancing. His herd instinct and stupidity are, likewise, "done to death" by the narrator. When Peredonov sees a sheep standing in the road and concludes that it is Volodin, the narrator colludes in stressing Volodin's sheeplike qualities, thus neutralizing the delusional status of Peredonov's vision and enticing the reader into his world-view: "The sheep stood at the crossroads and gazed dully at Peredonov. Suddenly a bleating laughter was heard around the corner — Volodin came into sight."49 Volodin's actions fail to elicit a meaning revealed at the end when framed past catches up to framing present (the natural site of that meaning). His significance is imposed, crystallized, from the beginning: he is a sheep, no more, no less. Even his dreams do no more than

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repeat that basic truth: " CI seemed to be sitting on a throne . . . In front of me was grass and there were little sheep on the grass, nothing but sheep and more sheep . . . ' 'Well, then what happened?' Grushina asked . . ., 'Nothing but sheep and more sheep, and then I woke up,' Volodin concluded." 50 To his last bleat, Volodin remains unaffected by the world, his sheep-like identity long established as the only interpretation for anything he does. The intrusive metatextual activity erases the (usually requisite) narratological distinction between Volodin's symbolic death as sacrificial lamb and his actual slaying: "Peredonov. . . threw himself on Volodin and cut his throat. The blood spurted out in a stream . . . Volodin kept bleating and trying to grab his throat with his hands . . . He let out a gasping whine . . . and then fell silent." 51 As Rosemary Jackson argues, the fantastic mode's espousal of ambiguity and contradiction is bound up with its foregrounding of problems in the construction of meaning. 52 The fantastic effect of what we have termed Sologub's narrative excess is supplemented through the confusion arising from an equally problematic compensatory strategy, nowhere more evident than following the appearance of the fantastic figure of the nedotykomka. Described as grey, sticky, gloomy and formless - in short, as the physical embodiment of byt - this ambiguous creature attaches itself to objects of everyday existence (tables, chairs etc.) and thus amounts to an inner authorial reading of certain aspects oi Peredonovshchina. Like Peredonov, it indulges in spiteful subterfuges. It is introduced, unexpectedly, half-way through the novel — as though Peredonov must be split metatextually from himself at the point when he begins to escape the purview of the framing narrator. 53 For when Peredonov sees the creature he temporarily evades the thirdperson narrator to occupy the position of the author for whom Peredonov himself is normally the petty demon. Significantly, the narrator's use of free indirect speech generates maximum ambiguity when the nedotykomka appears to incite Peredonov to set fire to the masquerade hall - one of the few acts of which Sologub himself might have approved: "[A]fierynedotykomka ceaselessly tried to hint to Peredonov that he should light a

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match and let loose this fiery, but captive nedotykomka upon these dim, grimy walls . . . The flaming nedotykomka crawled like a spritely little serpent along the curtain, squealing softly and cheerfully.5554 As a rule (from which the nedotykomka'^ departure proves crucial), Sologub5s intrusions serve to underscore the fixed, deathlike aspects of byt: [Peredonov] walked quickly in a regular fashion . . . there seemed to be no expression on his face — it was motionless like the face of a wound-up doll. Only some hungry fire was reflected in the deathly glint of his eyes. Tishkov . . . couldn't help pouncing upon other people's words for the sake of rhyme and he behaved with the steadiness of a cleverly thought-up mechanical bore. After staring for a long while at his jerky, distinct movements, one could have thought that this was no living person, that he had already died.55 The detached rhythms of Peredonov5s gait and Tishkov5s speech suggest byt as ritual, or fixed customs. Viewed through the prism of its antecedents, the novel's misgrafting of metatext (Peredonovshchina's internal status as the principle of deathly inaction) and text (the grotesque chicanery of the antiplots called upon to instantiate that principle) further confirms that the em- plot'-ment of diabolic abstraction leads not to instantiation but to a senseless chaos of deviations - an axiom to which the sludge of irreducible (i.e. norm-resistant) minutiae churned up in the anti-plots of first Russian realism, and now Russian modernism, bears (in)eloquent testimony. Sologub5s own theory of byt, we recall, stipulates an inversion of plot rather than a negation: the dumb coincidences and burdensome nightmare of the everyday in its mature stage, of the world of petty demonry. It is in the notion of Peredonovshchina's incarnation of evil that we find the key to byt's inner transcendence, and to the closing of Sologub5s circle.56 For there are times when the novel's manic action expresses an exuberance that bursts forth in maximally energized (and so potentially regenerative) outbursts of vulgarity that are presaged in Sologub's longstanding and

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess self-consciously contradictory fascination with the phenomenon of the provincial crowd.57 The chaotic, unpredictable events of the masquerade - Grushina defiantly blowing her nose on the folds of her masquerade dress; the crowd's frenzied pursuit of the geisha, and so on - are the epitome of this aspect of byt and constitute the underside of Liudmila's displays of Dionysiac frenzy. Thus, the passage in which an uncontrollable Volodin tears the sleeve from the geisha costume is reminiscent of the earlier scene in which the incomparably deliberate Liudmila rips off Sasha's blouse to delight in the surfaces of his torso, suggesting that, in its propensity for sudden releases of pent-up energy, byt is capable of surpassing the aesthetic. At this point, the Dostoevskii connection reasserts itself. If, as Robert Jackson avers, Fedor Karamazov is Peredonov's spiritual father, then he is also the biological father of Dmitrii Karamazov, whose experiences of divine ecstasy presage Liudmila's paganism, for as Dmitrii discovers, a plunge into the abyss leads as easily to the Madonna as to Sodom.58 The Peredonov—Liudmila relationship reconfirms and deepens Dmitrii's discovery that the two realms are separated by a hairsbreadth and, when embodied, are capable of mutating between one another. When Ivan Karamazov is visited by his devil (a precursor to both Peredonov and the nedotykomka) he is, we recall, astonished by its banality — by the fact that he appears not as the symbol of abstract metropolitan evil, but incarnated in the vulgar surfaces of the provincial meshchanin. This original petty demon mocks Ivan's rebellion in the name of a grand Mangod figure, telling him that evil is a delusion (the devil is not the awe-inspiring figure of romantic legend), that real evil assumes the embodied form of a thousand petty vices. Fittingly, Sologub's Peredonov concedes nothing to Liudmila in his obsession with the way in which sensuous shifts in bodily presentation produce changes in identity/gender: the woman's corset he dons to distinguish himself from an old man; his dream in which the boy tempts him into a dark street with a lurid glint in his eyes. To be sure, Peredonov's corrupt bytovoi environment represents a distortion of the ecstasies of Liudmila's pagan rituals. Nonetheless, the perverted sensuality of

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Peredonovshchina itself acquires a celebratory edge, particularly in the playful mockery of the nedotykomka with its gentle jabs and "soft, cheerful squeals."59 There is another way in which Peredonov parallels (and surpasses) Liudmila's legend-making having to do with the mechanism by which the forward movement of the novel is propelled. Roman Jakobson elaborated the principle of metonymic displacement to describe how narrative logic unfolds action in novels through the overlapping of juxtaposed terms into one another. He pointed out that the resulting slippage is held in check by the balancing principle of metaphoric equivalence (the favored principle of poetic syntax).60 In The Petty Demon, however, metaphor is overshadowed by metonymy to a degree unusual even in the novel. This imbalance is a powerful component in the strange atmosphere pervading the narrative and is most obvious in the outbursts of sensuality in which Liudmila lingers over Sasha's body in languorous sequences of objective-less caresses: Liudmila pinched at Sasha's cheek . . . It was beautiful. Liudmila pinched the other cheek too . . . She grabbed his arm and dragged his sleeve above his elbow . . . But Liudmila was admiring his arm, turning it this way and that. "You have such beautiful arms!" she said loudly and joyfully and suddenly kissed him near the elbow. . .They parted. Sasha accompanied Liudmila to the gate.61 The logic of Peredonovshchina is similarly motivated. The petty demon's actions are little more than spontaneous, bodily responses to the surfaces with which he happens to find himself in contiguity. Wallpaper is there to be shredded; a cat - to have its fur rubbed the wrong way; a fiancee - to be spat at; a pack of cards - to be mutilated; a friend - to have his throat slit. Narrative movement remains virtually unchecked by any deep, metaphorizing structure and amounts to little more than an accumulation of neurotic displacements onto the surfaces of the provincial setting. Narrative excess and burgeoning metonymy turn out to be one and the same. Peredonov's paranoia is governed by the same purposeless slippage from association to association. He begins tormenting a cat, only to be distracted by Volodin's mention of a tasty dish, prompting a jest from

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess Peredonov that "they eat dead cats where [he comes] from." At this Volodin recalls that his dish is a funeral meal, which in turn causes Peredonov to assume that Volodin wishes to assassinate him.62 Peredonov's puns, too, amount to barely motivated slippages across the accoustic surfaces of language. And the sensuality engendered by Liudmila's manipulation of erotic surfaces is paralleled in the raucous humor produced by Peredonov's unwitting manipulation of metonymic displacement within the vulgar arena of byt. Untrammelled metonymic displacement is, of course, the plot-advancement technique of gossip. As a corollary to the model gossip provides for ontological and narratological dilemmas posed by the novel, its spatio-temporal dimensions may likewise be treated as a gossip chronotope. Metatext/text conflation is a strategy designed to compensate for a malfunctioning narrative frame. The gossip chronotope is, in a sense, the reverse — a strategy working in consort with the absence of frame (hence its affinity with the everyday in positive mode). In gossip there is no clear distinction between narrating and narrated, no position in the present from which the past is kept separate until the last moment when all knowledge is released, and past and present are brought together in metaphoric unison. Gossip time is one of indistinction, where the sources and destinations of the superfluous trivia in which the narrator indulges converge: a piece of gossip emerges from nowhere and, once told, slides, via aimless metonymic displacement, into the succeeding topics, before disappearing into the atemporal abyss of the collective consciousness. There can be no subterfuge here, no building and release of narrative tension manipulated from a distant viewpoint, no all-important epistemological goal pursued to completion. Gossip deals in the gratuitous and forgettable, its secrets corroded by the attrition of constant rumor-mongering: "The rumors about the forged letters circulated around the town. Conversation about the topic occupied and pleased the townspeople. Almost everyone praised Varvara and was happy that Peredonov had been tricked. And all those who had seen the letters expressed their assurances that they had guessed straight away."63 The tern-

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poral aspect of the gossip chronotope has a spatial correlative that of the claustrophobic space of the provincial town where nothing is far and everyone knows everyone: Another guest had been sitting there before Peredonov. Peredonov knew him. Indeed, who doesn't know whom in our town? Everyone knows everyone else. Varvara . . . often rode in cabs, although the distances were not great in our town. Recently she had begun visiting Grushina's. The cabbies had noted that. 64

In the space-time of gossip there is no holding one's audience at arm's length, no suspenseful retention of knowledge to maintain plot's linear trajectory. In gossip one tells all (and more!) in rapid-fire metonymic sequence. Unlike Peredonov, Liudmila participates in the hilarity that her metonymic play evokes. This is because Liudmila ultimately asserts control over the process. Her puns are not the purposeless manipulations of coincidental sound displacements that we see in Peredonov's clumsy witticisms. Their shift of surfaces produces a corresponding shift in sense. Liudmila tricks Sasha into admitting that he likes little roses (rozochki), reminding him of the homonym meaning c'whipping"(rozochki) and demonstrating the equivalence of the beautiful and the painful in her magical world.65 Liudmila tempers her metonymies with a strong dose of metaphoric equivalence. Her ability to impose metaphoric control over metonymic slippage, to make the shift of surfaces equivalent to something (and thus, to mean) is in keeping with her aesthetic creativity. Her sensual delight in Sasha's body is thus assimilated to her attempt to recreate a mythic realm out of reach of the grim everyday world - her gratuitous eroticism held in repressive metaphoric check by her overarching aesthetic project. While Liudmila controls the town's endless flow of gossip, Peredonov is its unwitting victim. Such is his inability to manipulate gossip's shifting tides that he ends up as object of suspicion of the very rumors he initiates. Liudmila, by contrast, is known for the skill with which she crafts the rumours she sets in motion. When exposed, she uses her metaphorizing deceitfulness to

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deflect suspicion: "At first Liudmila was embarrassed . . . but she quickly composed herself. With a cheerful laugh . . . she told . . . a story that she had just made up." 6 6 The novel displays an acute awareness of the connection between aesthetics and mendacity: "The sisters lied so confidently and calmly that it was impossible not to believe them. Indeed, a lie often seems more like the truth than the truth itself. . . Whereas the truth, of course, is untruthlike . . . You only had to compare: the insane, vulgar, dirty Peredonov - and the cheerful, sweet-smelling, welldressed Liudmilochka."67 Sologub is struggling here with the dilemma of how to reconcile truth and beauty. Everything in Liudmila is pleasing. Yet her art is, in its metaphoric essence, all about lying: presenting as equivalent things which are not. When adorning Sasha, Liudmila remains aware of the impossible nature of her project, her delight in her creations mingled with the same despondent melancholy that accompanies Peredonov's vulgar excesses: "Liudmila would dress him up and admire him. At the same time she would become pale and sad." 68 In aestheticizing legend, Liudmila succumbs to the (real) life/(fictitious) art dichotomy, destroying the authenticity of true myth which knows no difference between truth and fiction. The climax to her enterprise comes at the masquerade - in the midst of the very vulgarity from which her earlier fantasies had been presented as an escape. Here her mendacious talents are shown to their full: "Liudmila herself created the costume . . . from the label on a bottle of coryolopsis: a dress of yellow silk on red satin, long and flowing; a colorful pattern sewn onto the dress and big flowers of exotic design . . . The talented Liudmila painted the mask for the geisha : a yellowish, but sweet, somewhat thin face with a slight, motionless smile."69 The fiction's success is but temporary. It is left to the frenzied forces of provincial byt to uncover the artifice behind the representation, the gendered body (Sasha as boy) behind the neutral androgyny (Sasha as aestheticized counter-abstraction to Peredonovshchind). The masquerade is, in effect, byt's scurrilous debunking of the metaphor or artistic sign. It is no accident that the only character without a costume is Peredonov — pure, unmasked, authentic byL70 The masquerade acquires many characteristics associated

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with Bakhtin's carnival: the scabrous humor, the emphasis on bodily function, the breakdown of social hierarchies, the removal of distinctions between artist and audience (carnival is "lived rather than performed"), and the discrowning of the carnival king (Sasha).71 Bakhtinian carnival serves a liberating function - a function that Sologub's byt appropriates as it approaches the elusive point of self-transcendence. The king discrowned in Sologub's carnival is none other than art conceived as an autonomous domain (the geisha's costume being Liudmila's supreme artistic creation). And, as Bakhtin insists, from within every carnivalesque discrowning shines forth a recrowning. Thus, in its jubilation, the mob can be seen to reach unknowingly towards a new non-aesthetic discourse in which daily existence breaks free from its demonic cycle of tedium and pettiness. Liudmila's art is not transformative in this sense. Her legends are creations designed, like those of Sologub, to extract one from byt rather than transform it from within. In the absence of an authentic, participatory art, Liudmila (Sologub) must fall back on the metaphorism of an aesthetics accommodated to myth. This, rather than a capitulation to Peredonovshchina, is the reason for the collapse of Liudmila's enterprise. 72 The failure is reflected in the final demise of Sasha's hermaphroditism, for the play of surfaces allowing Sasha to oscillate between masculinity and femininity is fatally undermined when he senses the onset of a male sexual drive, and again when his costume is torn from him. 73 Sologub describes the impossibilty of achieving his transformation as liable to plunge the aspiring aesthete into "deathly gloom." 74 This is the very mood which overcomes Liudmila and dominates the writer's own oeuvre, recapitulated as it is in A Legend in Creation where Sologub's declared intention to take a piece of raw, ugly byt and, by subjecting it to his transforming vision, turn it into a beautiful legend is sabotaged through a piece of deflating self-mockery.75 The novel ends with Trirodov (the creative hero who plies provincial byt with both the artificial substances of chemistry and the beautiful artifice of poetry) leaving the earth in a spacecraft disguised as a greenhouse for a distant planet where his legend might be truly realized.

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The point from which to plot reality is that from which to create artistic mimeses, or lies. Following his realist predecessors, Sologub rejects equally the notion of a neutral, stable, and so normative reality to be mimicked, and that of a distanced, and so false aesthetic form with which to mimic. (Russian thought associates the devil both with the abstraction of pure reason — man setting himself over, and apart from God — and with mimicry — man setting himself apart, to mock and mimic God. Florenskii, for example, characterizes the devil as "God's pitiful ape.") 76 But, in highlighting the close ties linking these two assaults on representational logic through the deliberate overplotting of Peredonovshchina, he exposes the contradiction inherent in Russian realism's attempt to "have it both ways": to attack normativity and aesthetic distance, yet still claim to fix reality in its reifying vision. Neither plotting reality nor antiplotting it, Sologub's aesthetic of narrative excess plots against both abstraction and plot itself. Far from furnishing a metaphoric escape route from the real-life hell of Peredonovshchina, Liudmila's fragile pseudo-myth and its ignominious fate reveals Sologub's urge to go beyond nineteenth-century's incomplete assault on distanced, aesthetic likeness by ejecting metaphor from art altogether. Recognizing that, reduced to metaphor, myth cannot reconcile art with the everyday, Sologub abandons Liudmila's escapism, turning instead to Peredonov's antiaesthetic whose destructive minus-creativity might generate a force capable of sweeping aside the artifice of masks and cleansing itself of its own grimy encrustations: "[AJfter devouring the building where such terrible and incomprehensible things were taking place, [the nedotykomka] would leave Peredonov in peace." 77 The nedotykomka reveals itself to be the embodiment (and thus transcendence) of Peredonovshchina as abstract principle; hence the need to separate the two. It partakes of both the diabolic negativity of the everyday and the mocking force of subversion waiting to emerge from it, engulfing all in redemptive flames. The closed circle of Sologub's theory is broken by the incipient eschatology of his fictional practice. The novel's second half marks the petty demon's fragmentation into two hypostases - Volodin (byt as the dumb, herdlike

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repetition of prescribed norms) and the nedotykomka {byt as the regenerative force which, in order to renew, must first destroy).78 After harnessing the force to rid the provincial town of the evils of artistic mendacity through the burning of the hall (itself a restaging of the diabolic conflagration unleashed on Iuliia Mikhailovna's soiree in Besy), Peredonov reexploits it to purge himself of the demon of provincial normativity (the murder of Volodin). The two (dis)crowning moments at the end of the work thus deepen Russian literary provinciality's links with Russian realism's dual assault on abstraction and artistic deceit. But they also point hesitantly to the path by which negation might become affirmation, realism's anti-aesthetic transformed into modernism's new aesthetic. In this context, the slaying (whose similarity to a ritual sacrifice has often been noted) can be interpreted as a form of j^sacrifice. 79 Byt (Peredonov as Volodin) is gratuitously done to death by a force emanating from within byt (Peredonov as nedotykomka), so that, rather than suggesting a descent into insanity, the petty demon's progress from superfluous arsonist to gratuitous murderer becomes the last representable stage in an ultimately unrepresentable journey from alienation and objectification, through cathartic destruction to the creative (life-giving) self-sacrifice of zhizn. Indeed, Sologub follows Vladimir Solov'ev in associating the creative transformation of zhizn with the suffering Christ's assumption of universal responsibility: "[AJnyone who voluntarily draws unto himself the great destroyer of all intolerable woes . . . hurls into our souls a powerful rebuff to the disorder and evil in our lives . . . The world is transformed through . . . sacrificial death and art . . . because art with its elevating and cleansing influence is indeed similar to death." 80 This awareness of the need to incorporate the self in his art casts new light on Sologub's perplexing inclusion of autobiographical data in his depiction of Peredonov. Both writer and character were provincial teachers; those who knew the writer note the same moody sullenness that we see in Peredonov; author and hero shared a vision of the nedotykomka. And, as we know, Sologub insists that

Sologub's aesthetics of narrative excess Peredonov is, like his creator, merely seeking the truth. For his part, Peredonov's worries that Volodin might steal the inspectorship from him degenerate by the end into fantasies about how this pitiful duplicate of an inspector is about to enter his skin. Thus, his assault is akin to the killing of an alter ego, one which (like that of the nedotykomka) is traceable to Sologub. Again, it is Peredonov not Liudmila who stumbles closest to the threshold of the elusive new cultural form in which aesthetics and the self-sacrificial transfiguration of byt become one. Like many of his peers, Sologub was under the spell of Schopenhauer. In articles betraying the German philosopher's influence, the " I " of Sologub's first-person narration is identified with Schopenhauer's Universal Subject (or Will).81 To this all-encompassing Subject Sologub opposes a counter-force, a "You" who is this Subject's negation, a demonic power with whom he must unite in order to overcome it and articulate the truly transcendental Subject: All demons are grey and flat, all people are devils, grey and flat because they are Not-I. My secret, You are My negation, formless, dark . . ., My Bride . . . You are the reason for Sin . . . I will combine with My Bride . . . In this combination is the destruction of the world and the resurrection of another Being - My Being.82 Yet it is clear that Sologub adapts Schopenhauer to his Symbolist vision. His portrayal of Peredonov is certainly an attempt to combine authorial " I " with the grey devil of the "not-I." But it is also an effort to accomplish the sacrificial participation of the "I" in the alienated "not-I" of byt so as to transform it by reintegrating creating self with created other. Sologub was careful to distinguish between the subjectivity of the selfserving ego and the all-responsible "I" of the Universal Will: "The correct path to self-denial is the path to denial of one's contingency, of material things and their lure. It is a path of active love, a path on which I give up all that is mine because all is Mine"; "Ethics and aesthetics are sisters. If you offend one then the other is offended too." 83 On one level, Sologub's striving artistically to embody the

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deathly alienation of Peredonovshchina and irradiate it with is doomed to flounder in an unresolved oscillation between subject and object, art(ist) and artwork, Peredonov as biographical self (Sologub = Peredonov = nedotykomkd) and Peredonov as object of depiction (Peredonov = byt = Volodin). The author's intrusions into his narration thus feature as the most obvious manifestation of an " I " that has failed to integrate with its "not-I." In another sense, and as Edith Clowes implies, the incongruously vibrant bursts of energy point metatextually, ambivalently (the elusive nedotykomka is, perhaps, after all, a figment of imagination — but whose?) to an alternative aesthetic able eventually to achieve transcendence of the familiar dichotomous paradigms.84 Taking its cue from Ivan Karamazov's prescient devil, Sologub's modernistic reprise of the provincial theme converts the minus sign of Gogolian anti-plot into the soft excesses of plot] anticipating the conversion of counter aesthetic into iconic aesthetic. Apart from its proliferation of superfluous subterfuges, the novel is informed by a contradictory sense that petty demonry harbors the seeds of creative renewal, and by the intuition that Russian literature is poised to dispense with the alienating self-identity of, and so opposition between art (the essential, the eternal) and life (the particular, the chronological). From Chekhov onwards, Russian writers begin to think the dichotomies away altogether by envisaging everyday provinciality as the ground for a force enabling each individual to realize his essence from within, transfiguring the everyday into the living, byt into zhizn, embodying the path of self-transfiguration that begins with the devil and ends in Christ. However, like Chekhov, Sologub must remain a prisoner of western form and the epistemology underlying it. "The Seagull," is, after all, a play, The Petty Demon a novel. Claiming aesthetic status, literature must remain an abstraction, all the more so in its mass-produced form, since, in representing the world, a modern published fiction addresses all in general, and so none in particular - a fact that, as we shall see, was to trouble Vasilii Rozanov. Yet at certain instants, Sologub seems to break loose from the constrictions of his alienating fictions.

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Rejecting the false lure of Liudmila's aestheticized version of classical legend, he stumbles upon the possibility of a form that, were it to appropriate the vitalism of the provincial mob and, in particular, the intimacy of gossip, would emerge, sphinx-like, from the ashes of Peredonovshchina. For gossip has two faces. While sharing in the alienating mendacity of metaphor and art, its authentic grit, the intimacy of its space-time, the togetherness of its participants, its eschewal of semantic hierarchies and goal-determined structures, the rambling superfluity of its surface slippages all point to a breakdown of the relationships of alienation defining narrative fiction.85 Ultimately, however, these fleeting instants are but imprecise indices, the new voice whose word they aspire to speak, muffled and repressed. In the closing lines, the mythic (self-?) sacrifice is followed by one of the novel's hypnotic refrains which, when repeated for the last time, confirms that the meaning of this supremely gratuitous act is to remain hidden, its secrets unspoken: "Peredonov was sitting downcast, mumbling something incoherent and senseless" (bormotal chto-to nesviaznoe i bessmyslennoe)

(italics added).86 Garbled excess is, for the time being, fated to be no more than the mirror image to silence.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 5

The struggle with byt in Belyi's Kotik Letaev and The Christened Chinaman

We must recreate everything and in order to do this we must create ourselves. And the only slope on which we may still clamber is ourselves. At the summit our " I " awaits us. Here is the answer for the artist if he wishes to remain an artist but not cease to be a man; he must become his own artistic form. (Andrei Belyi)1

It is no coincidence that the texts in my final section all fall under the rubric of autobiography. The analysis in each chapter so far has culminated in considerations of the category of self. Chekhov and Sologub each understood that the transcendence of byt as the reifying effects of the anonymous other called for a shift from the territory on which that other is written - from literature (which, in its modern variant, remains in thrall to an anonymous, alienated readership), and from fiction (which deals in the abstractions of plotted roles). By its nature, autobiography highlights the private things of life, that myriad of everyday occurrences which come incrementally to determine the subject's intimate sense of self. The very point of such writing is to reveal to an unknowing public the secret dramas (beneath an ocean of mundaneness) to which only the self has access. Thus, autobiography represents the quintessence of the project which has daily life as its internal model: that of bridging the rift disjoining particular (private) from universal (public). By the same token, it becomes the faultline along which that project splinters apart as artists begin to doubt its validity. Thus, the autobiographical novel has proved popular within contemporary postmodernist metafic141

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tion in which the artistic "game" of life is to cast the self into an infinite regress with no outlet to the world of others. The argument I shall make here is that the version of metaliterature espoused in early twentieth-century Russian (pseudo-)autobiography celebrates neither the primacy of the self in literature, nor the literariness of the self in life, but rather attempts to fashion a form in which the distinctions between literature and life, art and the everyday, self and other are rendered invalid. In a sense, it eschews the metaliterary altogether, and could be described as converting the metatextual probings discussed in part 1 into text proper, actualizing metatext as zhizn'. I begin with Andrei Belyi whose early aesthetic formulations often reveal a readiness to transcend the dichotomy between utilitarian and purist views of art and come close to meeting the requirements of the new form of creativity: cc[A]rt ceases to be a self-sufficient form. But it cannot on the other hand be made to serve utilitarian ends. Instead, it is becoming the pathway to a more essential type of cognition, namely religious cognition." 2 Belyi conceived art as integral to religious meaning, for without artistic creation, the ultimate religious truth — the incarnation of heaven on earth - becomes unattainable. Art itself is responsible for the continual creation of religious truth: "To use the language of religion, creation leads us to an epiphany, or actual manifestation of the deity. The World Logos takes on the Image of Man." 3 Belyi recognized that an art which creates a hitherto unmanifested truth (rather than one transcribing an existing one) tolerates no disjunction between artist and artwork since true aesthetic activity cannot be anything other than a discourse of the self. Others have pointed out that all Belyi's narratives are perpetual reworkings of the father—son relationship that defined his childhood.4 But, despite the innovations they display, the fact that these are fictions, and that the subject around which they revolve is the autocentric, autobiographical self is symptomatic of Belyi's failure to accomplish the radical break with previous models required by theurgy. As Roger Keys intimates, Petersburg represents the biggest step in this direction with its self-ironizing narrative voice and its attempt

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to present itself as the monstrous "brain-game" [mozgovaia igra) of an unidentifiable super-consciousness.5 But the novel's unambiguous fictionality confirms that, even at the height of his powers, Belyi has yet to match rhetoric with achievement - the most intractable problem deriving from the theorist's insistence on artistic creation as a form of activity with the potential to constitute rather than reflect the world in which it situates itself. Belyi's theory delineates several levels of creativity - each with an aesthetic component, roots in reality, and the power to harness the aesthetic element to the task of transforming that reality. The initial levels coincide with stages in the development of human consciousness — the acquisition of language and the formation of the self: Creation has certain definite forms through which it passes . . . Primitive creation is . . . the unity of rhythmic movements in the primordial chaos of feelings. And the first act performed by creation is the naming of contents. In naming contents we turn them into things. In naming things, we transform the formlessness of the chaos of contents into a series of images. We unify these images in a single whole. The wholeness of images is none other than an "I." 6 For Belyi, the process by which we cognize the world and our selves partakes of the aesthetic. The later stages of his theory project the aesthetic function further beyond its traditional sphere, bringing art close to the status of a universal theory of human experience which looks towards attainment of the state of Godmanhood: The symbolic image of experience, extracted from the soul . . . gives us . . . the artistic symbol. The attempt to give life to this complex unity. . . leads to a yet more complex unity, namely the unity of the religious symbol. This is accomplished in such a way that the artist himself and those surrounding him become artistic forms . . . Moreover, the religious symbol, that is the beautiful life of man, which is taken as the norm of all behavior, takes the unity of human nature and turns it into the dualistic image of the God-Man.7 As Belyi understood, fiction (distinct from, and free of responsibility for the real) is ill-equipped to achieve such grandiose aims. It is for this reason that, inspired by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, he devoted the latter portion of his

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career to a vast pseudo-autobiographical project (or epopee as he called it) of which Kotik Letaev and The Christened Chinaman are

part. 8 Commentaries dealing with Belyi's autobiographical art tend to focus on its relationship to anthroposophy. The periods of Kotik's life described — each culminating in images of the boy as Christ — are seen as artistic transcriptions of Belyi's own spiralic progress towards spiritual perfection. The plots, though based on events from Belyi's childhood, are artistic renditions of those happenings, memories reconstructed according to the ideal anthroposophical life-model: Andrei Belyi reimagining himself as Kotik Letaev. It is this framing of a more or less fictionalized (anthroposophized) child by a more or less autobiographical narrator which is at the root of the paradox (and, for most, failure) of Belyi's enterprise. On one hand, he claims autobiographical authenticity for his recollections; the narrator is a contemporary writer remembering incidents from his childhood.9 On the other hand, the need to express those memories anthroposophically leads to absurd situations such as a description of the moment of a birth from the baby's viewpoint. It is the contradiction involved in the self-conscious subject's attempt to represent his pre-linguistic infancy which causes most difficulty.10 This portrayal of the novels as artistic idealizations of anthroposophical teaching (or factual accounts of anthroposophical experience) sidelines the theurgical reconception of aesthetics proposed in the theoretical writings. What, we might wonder, happened to the reformulation of the relationship between art and reality of the Symbolist tracts? What if we take Belyi at his (earlier) word and view them as works in which the artistic symbol "speaks the language of human acts," and, conversely, "forms of conduct appear as artistic creations of life"? What, then, of the relationship between (autobiographical) reality and (artistic) creation, adult narrator and child hero, Andrei Belyi and Kotik Letaev? These are the questions which will guide my analysis. Kotik Letaev and The Christened Chinaman are set in the

archetypal locus for modern Russian everyday life: the urban

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apartment. The theme of the connection of everyday life with the apartment which can be traced throughout Belyi's novels also features in his memoiristic writings as a key element in his world view. Since I shall treat the texts in the context of (i) the writer's creative theurgy, and (ii) the role accorded to routine existence in the new autobiographical discourse that such creativity brings with it, it seems appropriate to use this link as a point of entry. I first examine the apartment as object of depiction, showing how its topology is associated in turn with (i) intimacy, creative interaction and the incarnation by self of other, (ii) the capitulation of self to anonymous other, and (iii) the construction of a shell of idiosyncratic selfhood (or chudachestvo) with which to combat that other's invasive influence. Next, I turn to the relationship between subject and object and thus to the disposition of levels delineating child-hero from adult-narrator, empirical child and authorial persona. I argue that Belyi's narrator adopts the buffoonery of his father (the adult-as-child) and the musical sensibility of his mother (the child-as-adult) as creative strategies of his own, inducing a dialectical spindling together of object and subject, childhood and adulthood, depicted byt and depicting artist. The result is Kotik Letaev as Christ - Belyi's Childman - a metatextual figure who, by analogy with the Dostoyevskian Godman, reattains innocence by assuming and overcoming the burdens of reason and consciousness. In the final section, and drawing on the writer's imagery, I express the two-way, iconic movement of Belyi's narratives in terms of energy released from within a shell essential to the meaning to which that energy gives embodied form. This formula is applied to the question of plot in Kotik Letaev and in The Christened Chinaman, where I

suggest that Belyi overcomes contradictions left unresolved in the earlier novel by exploiting iconic logic to engage in a dynamic process that rewrites byt as myth and ccrefamiliarizes" the alienating abstractions of the routine, enabling the space of the apartment to become again a site of creative intimacy between son and father, self and other. Although I remain attentive to such differences, for much of the chapter, and for reasons that will be apparent, I treat the works as a unity.11

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Illustrations of a number of points are therefore drawn with minimal distinction from either novel, or from both. My analysis is supported by references to Belyi's non-fictional memoir On the Border of Two Centuries which is essential to a meaningful treatment of my theme. One must bear in mind that Belyi's memoirs were written under the conditions of an emerging totalitarian state, forcing the writer to recast his reflections along lines acceptable for publication in the conditions of the time.12 Even allowing for any resulting distortions, there is little doubt as to the role played by byt in the evolution of his philosophy. The word and its derivatives - bytovoi, bytik, bytovik etc. - recur so frequently that we must conclude either that the manuscript was prepared in haste, or that the phenomenon itself developed into a gigantic obsession.13 Without refuting the first conclusion, the prominence of the bytovoi theme in Belyi's fiction lends weight to the second. It is easy to understand why Belyi should link byt with his father's generation, and to the place with which it was inextricably linked - the professorial apartment: Mathematicians . . . turned out to be the most thickly-set bytoviki imaginable, which in my language meant: boring people, deprived of imagination in practical life; byt in life is taken by a mathematician fully "on hire," like a piece of furniture . . . It is felt by that part of the body which is opposite to the head; byt is like the sense one has of the "behind" regions of the torso. [T]he theme of the end is immanent to my development; it is imbued with the theme of another end: the end of one of the professorial apartments, a typical one however, for in it is the end of byt, the end of the century.14 The association made between byt and "life's musty trivia" allows Belyi to establish the apartment as the phenomenon's primary locus: "[I]n the apartment was the ash of words; beyond the windows was the storm . . . my pessimism was the pessimism of an experiencing of the apartmental odor."15 He subdivides the apartment along ideological lines, referring to an inner haven characterized as a child's world of fantasy and

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imagination: "[I]n my imagination the nursery was the inner world, and the living room was the outer world - almost the Arbat . . . Crawling across into the living room, I stepped into the apartmental byt . . . and, frightened by it, I flee from it . . . back into the nursery."16 But, when referring to his father's generation, Belyi stresses that he is blaming not individuals but an environment (sreda): "And so, it is not they who are guilty, but the apartment, interwoven with all other apartments: it is the professorial environment and the professorial apartment, not ours in particular, but the arithmetically average apartment of a professor."17 We need only look at two of his definitions of byt to confirm that we are dealing with the complex of qualities encountered in previous chapters: Stagnancy, prejudice, routine, vulgarity, limited horizons, - that's what I carried away at the border of the two centuries from the byt of an average Moscow professor. Caryatid-likeness, stoniness, unchanging stagnation spoiled our life; everything that changed had changed a long time ago, in Alexander the Second's time.18 However, to the familiar mix Belyi adds his own, philosophical ingredient by equating byt in life with analytical positivism in thought: "[T]he epoch which gave birth to us was static; we were in those years the striking force of dynamism; our fathers being analysts, turned analysis into a dogma; we, who gave ourselves up to fluid process were dialectics."19 This enabled him to develop the theme into a point of reference against which he defined his life, thought and art: In front of me stood nothing more and nothing less than a program to carry out a revolution against byt . . . an ambush against a thousand-year-old culture, which had been puffed up into a thousand-year-old sclerosis. [SJpiders, sneezes, dust and rot cannot be washed away with the light cloth of the rejuvenation of byt, but only by the burning of that byt to ashes.20 Keeping in mind this notion of byt as the core of a belief

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system, we now turn to how it functions in the works where the concept is most clearly tied to the apartment.21 If one is to attach credence to the experiences depicted in Kotik Letaev, the importance of the apartment predates Belyi's interest in philosophy, its associations with the negativity of byt and even the acquisition of consciousness.22 Belyi uses the aparment's topography to concretize the images of his preconscious life. The surrounding rooms and corridors provide the infant with his sole means of perceiving the experiences preceding and succeeding his birth - the filter through which they pass in order to be made available to his developing consciousness: [EJverything is in me, I am in everything . . . These are my first moments . . . Then - . . . gloom . . . began to crawl from me; sensations divided from my skin . . . the skin became for me like a vault: that is how we perceive space; my first impression of it is that it is - a corridor . . . Rooms are - parts of the body; they have been thrown off by me; and - they hang over me, in order to come apart on me afterwards.23 The apartment furnishes a primitive system of differentiation: a way of experiencing difference from the world. Rooms have doors; corridors lead from one place to another. They designate the border between self and other. The same features enable Kotik to conceptualize the state of transition between the temporal world into which he was born, and the timeless cosmos from which he emerged: "Passages, rooms, corridors remind us of our body, prototypify it for us . . . they are the body's organs . . . organs of the universe whose corpse is the world that we see." 24 The apartment's compartmentalizing capacity also furnishes an apparatus for expressing the subdivision of meaning within the mythic world of pre-consciousness and enhances its role as facilitator of passage between the realms, and of progress into the world outside: Passages, rooms, corridors, rising up toward me in the first instant of consciousness, transport me into life's most ancient era: into the cave period: I experience the life of black voids.

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For me the road of life has been extended out: through the stovepipe, the corridor, through the form of our rooms - into the TrinityArbat Church . . P The question as to whether these images amount to anything more than an adult's metaphor for infantile experiences is answered when Belyi points out that the experiences are themselves memories (of another plane of being), and that all memories are transformations: "The transfiguration of the previous by means of memory is the genuine reading: of the universe which is not ours, standing behind the previous; the impressions of childhood years are — flights into the never-having-been."26 From whichever temporal viewpoint we observe them, the rooms and corridors are always already transfigurations of something preceding them.27 The apartment is integrated into the theory of language implicit in Kotik Letaev. Rooms and corridors are bounded spaces which delimit the flow of chaotic meaning in which Kotik is immersed. The apartment simultaneously halts the flow and enables it to be experienced, thus preserving elements of both the flux that it bounds and the act of creativity accomplished in expressing the concept. The process by which the words of one's family are made one's own, filled with cosmic meaning and transformed, is depicted repeatedly. One example is found in Kotik's account of how he accommodates the word "professor" to a mythic recollection from the other universe: "[T]he old delirium would arise: a 'professor' is himself a sounding into another universe where everything is still molten and where he has taken his own deliria . . . he rushes along . . . just as the old woman used to rush; the old woman is his wife - . . . a professor's wife. Very often a professor is - an old man" (italics Belyi's.)28 The last sentence reveals how the repeatable concept "professor" belonging to Kotik's parents (concepts must, by definition be repeatable in different contexts) is assimilated to an individualized mythic recollection belonging exclusively to Kotik. Kotik's initiation into language takes place in an idealized time when he is accorded access to the world of others through the words and concepts they use, yet is able to inject into them that which derives from his experience in the pre-conscious

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universe: "The content is mine; I filled everything with it." 29 The meaning of concepts is not the cliches associated with their habitual usage, but the creative synthesis which occurs when this mutual interillumination is accomplished and myth (cosmos) pulsates within word (room). When this transitional stage is about to end Kotik complains: "concepts are not growing over with meaning . . . and my cosmos — the kingdom I inhabited before my birth — stands before me as a grey, stone building with columns and empty-eyed windows."30 The apartment serves to bring inside the outside world of professors so that Kotik can inflect it with his own meaning. Like language, whose action it mirrors, it occupies a liminal status on the boundary between self and other. The apartment belongs, like Kotik, half to the inner self, half to the world of others in which the concept " I " originates: "This 'it5 was not me; but to me it was as if. . . inside me, even though 'outside': Why 'this5? Where? Is not this 'it5 really Kotik Letaev?" 31 It is thus linked with art in the sense that Belyi gives the term in his theories. If entry into language is itself the essence of creativity ("others555 concepts swelling with "my55 meaning), then verbal art likewise consists of creative acts which transfigure the experiences they recall. Rather than failure, the use of phrases such as "if I had been able at that time55 indicate the notion of memory as creation anew: "If I had been able at that time to unite my conceptions of the world into one, a cosmogony would have come about. Here it is: — the Kosyakov house, my Papa and all the Lev Tolstoys in the world.5532 The perpetual separation of "I55 from itself, the experiencing of consciousness on the border between self and outside world and the need to reexpress self-experience on a higher plane provides the impulse behind the novel5s spiralic model: "[T]he spiral pattern . . . sums up in me impressions of an expanding thought . . . It seemed to me that there was nothing inside: everything in me is outside me . . . T is 'not-I5 . . . I am - with the spirit.5533 Entry into the routine life of the apartment (like entry into language) need not bring surrender to external abstractions and loss of human contact. It may instead mean iconic interaction. 34 More than signs containing the image of

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their own meanings (the conventional, semiotician's sense of the term), icons must also be grounded in intimate exchange between self and other ("I" to "Thou"), allowing for the incarnation of self (God) in other (man) and the corresponding reenactment by self (now man) of other (now God) in a bidirectional movement in which both elements are at all times preserved (the iconic Christ). When Kotik perceives his father's algebraic "x"s as dachshunds he is merely assimilating his father's "word" to his own childish visions, without establishing any common, identifiable meaning.35 Though the linking of the word taks (dachshund) to the exclamation "tak-s" uttered by his father while performing equations produces vaguely motivated associations generating a modicum of shared meaning, Kotik remains isolated in his nursery. When, however, he inflects the paternal concept "Moscow" with a meaning that is intimately his, yet conveys an impression which his father (and all fathers) might share, he performs an act of embodiment, incarnating the infantile meanings of the cosmic flux in the fallen world to produce . . . poetryl He is also moving from the enclosed world of the nursery into the liminal space of the apartment walls: "Pavements, asphalts, parquet floors, firewalls, dead ends — form a gigantic pile; this pile is the world; and it is called Moscow . . . The edge of our apartment is a blank wall; if one were to knock a hole in it, then a flood would gush out . . . and 'Moscow' would fill up . . . like a water barrel." 36 Without concrete "I"-"Thou" exchange (and the apartment's facilitating space), iconic meaning will be swallowed up by the outside world's anonymous abstractions, or else degenerate into the infantile self-indulgence of the nursery.37 In his memoirs, Belyi refers to symbolism as the creative reorientation by the nursery (self) of the words of the living room (others): "[I]n my attempts to unite the nursery with the rooms beyond it . . . I was already a Symbolist; I hear the phrase 'he fell into a faint.' And immediately I have a dream: the nursery floors have split open and I have fallen into the unfamiliar rooms below which are called £a faint.' " 3 8 This idealized image of the apartment as haven of creativity did not recede after Belyi had passed though the trauma of estrangement from his parents

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and into the hostile realm of byt. His memoirs describe the sense of joy felt on discovering in Mikhail Solov'ev's apartment (situated beneath his own, now despised dwelling) a second home, an apartment as apartments should be - intimate, welcoming, conducive to human contact and collective mythmaking: I received the impression of a cosy "underwater kingdom" when I went down to the floor below our apartment: in our place it was mundane, and the furniture stands just like it does in everyone else's place, and the professors sit just like they do everywhere else; whereas here everything was . . . fairy tale-like, nice and unusual . . . I had got myself a second home. In my relationship with Olga Mikhailovna [Solov'eva] I had begun to acquire my own language which was "our language", the language of conversation with Serezha and Olga Mikhailovna . . . And I began to speak in the special jargon of the apartment: I formed and made witticisms with this jargon . . . that was just the way that myths used to come about in ancient times: our conversations and games were myth-creations.39 The reader of Kotik Letaev keenly senses the transition between the time of "I"-"Thou" relationships and the period of Kotik's capitulation to an anonymous "They" - characterized by the demise of creative intimacy. The point corresponds to Man's ejection from Eden into the corrupted world of temporality. Late in the novel, the narrator mentions how, after the disappearance of a favorite nanny, his father would come to explain the significance of the Tree of Knowledge and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. This Fall coincides with Kotik's final assimilation into language. Part of the price of knowledge, and of subordinating oneself to the language of fathers, is the loss of intimacy with one's real father - a tragedy dramatized when the boy bemoans the disjunction between his dual identities: " 'He's not like me: he's like his father!' This seems abnormal to me: and a strange world arises in me . . . Who here is T? I is not I: I is not Kotik Letaev! - what it is is a prematurely developing mathematician."40 His identity forcibly integrated into the alien world of mathematicians, Kotik is no longer himself, but rather a miniature Professor Letaev.

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The laws of mathematics, its arbitrary symbols, are now his. Byt is nothing less than capitulation to the word of the other. In his memoirs Belyi uses mathematical images when characterizing the corrupting influence of abstract societal norms: "[I] saw and heard nothing except . . . cold, stony generalities . . . You could talk of the arithmetically average apartment, the arithmetically average word, the arithmetically average spirituality."41 However, his attitude to mathematics is not exclusively negative. Some have seen in his intellectual project an attempt to synthesize art and science (the respective discipines of his mother and father); his role in initiating the science of metrics, and his use of mathematics to formulate his symbolist theories are two examples of the fruits of these efforts. Elsewhere, Kotik expresses respect for the potential of true mathematical creativity, and profound affection for the father whose place has been usurped by Professor Letaev — by the sreda which has infiltrated the apartment, installing the false ambiance of mathematics as formalistic dogma: "[M]y Papa is — the mathematician Letaev; and Papa is — my Papa: mine only, noone else's; the mathematician Letaev cannot be the Papa of anyone else in the world; he is - Papa to me; so why is it that my Papa is - the mathematician Letaev?"42 Taken to an extreme, such abstraction turns both the mathematicians' world and the byt whose principles it embodies into a fantastic monstrosity: "[MJathematicians are generalizers; and be sure that the slogan of the professor's apartment 'like everyone else' is taken by them to an extreme . . . the fact of the matter is that the fantasy of mathematical thought has long since surpassed all fantasies."43 The fantastic element results, as the epigraph to chapter 2 suggested, not from generalization itself, but from the resistance offered by the phenomena generalized: the private and intimate, the transient and domestic: Anna Ivanovna's cheese sandwich. The victory of the mathematicians heralds the capitulation of life in the apartment to the law of "just like everyone else" (kak u vsekh) - the mechanistic derivation of every detail of daily existence from an impersonal societal norm. This law is associated with the older generation generally, not with any particular father. In the memoirs, Belyi emphasizes that his

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musically gifted mother played an equal role in consolidating the mathematicians5 dead dogmas. She is characterized impersonally as "the professor's wife": "I have never seen such a terrible, dull, uninteresting byt as the one introduced by the 'professor's wife' of the eighteen eighties . . . noone punished deviations from 'like everyone else's' with such refined cruelty."44 In The Christened Chinaman, the most extreme representative of kak u vsekh is an outsider named Malinovskaia who poisons the apartment's atmosphere with her pernicious influence. She is so much in the thrall of kak u vsekh — or tak i vse ("that's the way it is with everything") — that she adds the phrase to every piece of small talk, ensuring the inappropriate subordination of the tiniest trivia to the most bloated generalities, sowing disunity and discord, destroying all intimacy: "She added 'that's how it is with everything' to each word . . . all her comments led to discord . . . she managed to wedge just such a fountain-head of dispute between mama and papa . . . 'Yes, that's how it is with everything, dear . . . Everywhere there's always dust. . . that's how it is with everything.' " 4 5 Abstraction is bound up with depersonalization. When, in The Christened Chinaman, Kotik senses the growing rift between his parents, he is struck by the withering manner in which his mother dismisses his father through oblique references to "those who . . ." (te kotorye . . . ), by the forcing of what should be relationships of intimate singularity ("I"—"Thou"; WifeHusband) into the straitjacket of impersonal, third-person abstractions. Belyi bemoans the loss of creativity that is the price to be paid for initiation into the arbitrary symbols and depersonalized concepts of language. The link between language and submission to "The Law of the Father" is made clear in Kotik Letaev when the narrator describes his introduction to the written alphabet: I remember being a second mathematician, refuting my early meanings but not yet able to construct for myself outside of these refuted meanings - a single meaning by which the mathematicians - my Papa - live. He promises to teach me: he presents me with an alphabet book; . . . you would open it - there silently purples a letter: a science . . . - without sound!46

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The language of adults expunges iconic meaning, subordinating individual meanings to abstract generalities according to an arbitrary system of correspondences detached from the intimacies of human exchange. 47 The onset of abstraction leads both to linguistic competency and to the infusion of the outside world's dry impersonalism into the intimacy of the apartment. This process is coincident with the birth of byt, described as the congealment of mathematical concepts: the average bytovoi person decomposed into an abstraction and resolidifying in the shape of a bug-ridden armchair. 48 The crystallization of the arithmetically average (elsewhere Belyi refers to byt as life's "sclerotic deposit") coincides also with Kotik's discovery of chronological time and repetition. The early, ccmythic" part of Kotik Letaev is narrated in a pseudo-iterative tense in which singular events are presented as imperfective and into which the word "once" is slowly and insidiously infiltrated. Later, in The Christened Chinaman, Belyi links the arrival of linearity with the appearance of routine. When myth (the unity of singular and eternal) fragments, perpetual recurrence - which should be immanent - must be achieved chronologically, resulting in "the humdrum" which is associated with Belyi's father, a "timemaster" who "leads in the weeks." 49 The establishment of "once" in Kotik's consciousness is swiftly succeeded by circularity and the everyday, which literally attaches itself to the fabric of the apartment: "[T]he days flowed by in ranked order into the shadows which hung from the ceilings, out of the corners, joining themselves together into a huge multi-hornedness which no longer exists: a mysterious emptiness which makes it dark for me; and makes it sad!"50 Routine - the pointlessly infinite (i.e. humdrum) repetition of the discretely singular (i.e. trivial) - subjugates eternal time as experienced in Kotik's earliest moments: "[W]e sit: there are no events; and there is nothing at all; the same humdrum; time is vanquished in the babble of little drops." 51 Rather than merely submit to byfs influence, each Letaev, however, constructs his or her own, impenetrable shelter (or home within a home), a svoe to counter kak u vsekh. In Kotik Letaev this is reflected in the hero's growing sense of loneliness.

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When this time arrives, Kotik rapidly loses the ability to interact creatively with the world, which comes instead to resemble an alien being pursuing him between rooms. Deprived of true meaning, the familiar space of the apartment become a terrifying maze of dark, empty corridors: "The meanings of words were deceitful; and the mysterious rooms of the Cosmos revealed themselves as dark passages - of rooms, rooms and rooms - from which, if you enter, you will not return, and you will be grabbed by things, it's still not clear by what kind of thing, but it would seem by armchairs in severe, greyish slipcovers."52 In The Christened Chinaman, the formation of the impenetrable self is associated with the obverse of kak u vsekh: "one's own thing" {edakoe takoe svoe) in which Olga Muller-Cooke has justifiably perceived hidden references to the hidden sexual organs of adults.53 But careful scrutiny of the phenomenon reveals that it has a more general application relating to Kotik's struggle with the alienating language of byt. For the singularity of "one's own" is a deformed singularity, cocooned within the discrete self, detached from creative exchange, erecting barriers rather than facilitating interactive response: "From everything 'one's own' matures and grows, something that I cannot understand: 'ten' - means raising the fingers of both hands; and I did not reply; 'one's own' is not 'mine'; and 'one's own' is a hidden object that someone, anyone else has." 54 The two meanings can be reconciled in Kotik's father who is both the mathematicians' symbolic figurehead, and the first and most important adult male in Kotik's life. Indeed, the fact that Papa is the person in whom Kotik most senses the presence of "one's own" suggests another Lacanian link between the Oedipal struggle and entry into the impersonalized abstractions of language: Looking me up and down with a vacant look from under his brow, as if he had been asked a scholarly question, Papa leaned out of the room into the hall so as to whisper something into the pages of his books: there everything is "one's own." Papa has more of this "one's own" than anyone. Because of it I was made to shake with fear more than once.55

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The father's ability to mark out a space in which he might "be himself" causes Belyi to perceive in him a half-hearted rebel against byt. This rebellion consisted in his chudachestvo — a quality he cultivated through his capacity for puns and the quirks in his everyday behavior: "A revolt against byt in the form of a joke, - that's how I would characterize the vague influence of my father on me." 56 Punning (a technique familiar to Belyi scholars) was seized upon by the young boy as a form of half-hearted warfare against the rule-bound world of the professor's apartment. The attraction of puns is their ability to shatter the tired slogans of byt into hitherto unheard sounds which subvert the canons, without ever threatening their continued existence: It only needed father to open his mouth, than mother would interrupt him with "There you go again with your own thing!" . . . This need for monstrosities was an organic buzzing which grew from the eternal juxtaposition of new, original thoughts about the world with "little byt" . . . And in his puns he lived out his urge to do "what one is not supposed to do," while still following the canons of byt.57 Chudaki are people whose quirks are sanctioned by the society they (unwittingly) mock. Accordingly, the hilarious nature of the older Bugaev's buffoonery lies precisely in the manner in which its inabilty to overcome byt leads to an uneasy integration: "With father, this cto be like everyone else' was integrated only after the greatest of effort; with a clumsiness which provoked laughter in 'everyone else,' he pierced all the bytovye canons." 58 During the course of The Christened Chinaman, the older Letaev enacts a litany of irritatingly quirky, yet harmless rituals: pulling the heads off flies, banging a rusty nail against a handbasin in frustration at his wife's obduracy, spewing out pun after pun to welcome guests at a family gathering, making forays into the kitchen - the bowels of the bytovoi hell - in order to demonstrate an idiosyncratic new method for peeling potatoes.59 In a manner analogous to the layering effect that we saw in Sologub, Letaev's buffoonery is thus subject to assimilation. The list of odd, dust-laden paraphernalia tumbling from the professor's desk with which The Christened Chinaman opens is

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already part and parcel of the byt against which that oddness is directed as counter-strategy throughout.60 Although the professor's singularity loses any subversive force through its infinite recurrence in unchanging form, the rhythm which that repetition obeys is at least entirely his. He peels potatoes by his own method — enacting a sequence of time-honored procedures that has nothing to do with the patterns of domestic routine (and is for that reason ridiculed). Letaev's inscrutable eccentricity — his repetition of singular quirks in a pattern chuzhoi to others - is indeed that of a Chinaman. 61 In another aesthetic appropriation of his father's chudachestvo, Belyi himself breaks down the archetypally bytovoi slogan "those who . . . " into staccato (Chinese-like?) sounds and typographical anomalies, repeating them at measured distances in a coded pattern whose key he alone holds: ne — ko — to — ry — e — ko — to — ry - e!! . . . nekoto — rrr — rrr — rrr — rrr — rrr.. , 6 2

Rhythm is the domain of Belyi's musical mother. If Mathematician Letaev is at once the epitome of byt and a tireless (if ineffectual) warrior against it, the Professor's Wife, too, serves as chief enforcer of the bytovye canons and (albeit temporary) refuge from their horrors, her music even affording the possibility of achieving the transfiguration of the everyday to which Belyi was later to aspire: "[SJounds fly in, reform everything, and then tune (nastroif) something new . . . the walls are stretched out and appear to have broadened themsleves out into the summits of the ceilings; they have deepened and become impossibly transparent." 63 Music (mother) and mathematics (father) are not purely antithetical, since each contributes to byfs alienating effects, yet both, in different ways, struggle against that alienation in attempting to remake the chuzhoi as svoi.

The examples just cited indicate that, in struggling with the bytovoi past of which his parents were part, Belyi the artist borrowed their counter strategies - eccentric buffoonery and musical rhythm - effecting a mutual imbrication of "narrated" and "narration." On one hand, Belyi adopts facets of the personas at the center of his account. On the other hand, the

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past reality recounted is itself a product of strategies of resistance against it; what we have is not childhood in fictional form, but a fictional attempt to overcome childhood. Moreover, the childhood which provided the basis for the texts was not Belyi's, but that of Boris Bugaev junior. The empirical act of transformation is carried out by Bugaev senior, while the transforming force is that of art, the result - Kotik Letaev: Boris Bugaev made anew as Kotik Letaev through the divine energy of Andrei Belyi.64 Thus, Belyi cannot be held to account for rationalizing in language experiences that precede reason and language, for this is not his life to be rationalized. Rather, by applying his theurgy to the byt that blighted the life of Bugaev, Belyi facilitates a release of potential expressed in the zhizn of Letaev. Christ, the (future) apotheosis of the (present) theurgist, Andrei Belyi, is projected back into the Bugaev childhood (past) to produce a synthetic image combining past, present and future in one — Kotik as Jesus. The ending of Kotik Letaev has often been dismissed for its clumsy thrusting of a piece of cumbersome anthroposophical baggage onto the shoulders of a child. In fact, something of a more dialectical nature is at work. The memoirs confirm that, following his introduction to the bible, little Boren'ka Bugaev did indeed begin to see himself as a tormented Christ. 65 Recalled by Bugaev, reworked by Belyi, the image is projected onto childhood, to be transfigured into Kotik Letaev (the crucified savior).66 Carol Anscheutz has characterized this back and forth movement between narration and narrated as a failed srategy: "[Belyi] merely transfers to the ridiculous child the attributes of the sublime. But the ridiculous is not sublimated in Kotik Letaev, rather the sublime is ridiculed. The adult narrator sinks to the child's level. . . There is in fact no child in Kotik Letaev."67 In my view, she misses the point, however. For the novel does not set out to reproduce a. conventional child, but rather, by spindling the byt of Boris Bugaev between the narrative terminals of past and present, dialectically to create a new being — a childman. Perhaps, in deliberately overpoeticizing an infant's everyday experiences and so ridiculing his adult world of anthroposophy, Belyi indeed "sinks to the level

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of a child." Equally, the attribution of poetic sensibility to a sixyear-old can be seen as the elevation of a child to premature adulthood. However, both models (child as adult; adult as child) are themselves spindled reworkings of memories attributed referentially to the childhood past. Thus, in both novel and memoir, Belyi's mother taunts her son about his protruding forehead and unhealthily developed mind, while images of buffoonery (the boy on all fours before his family in infantile regression) are also common to fictional and non-fictional texts.68 The spindling strategy is evident in Belyi's attitude to poetry. On one hand, the child in The Christened Chinaman who delights in a ccpreternaturally overdeveloped" way in word associations is a poet before his time, an adult in child's clothing. On the other hand, the adult writer is, through his poetry, returning language to its pristine condition - a time when meaning and form were one. The adult poeticizes (and makes ridiculous) the child. But the child is the true poet. Extending a Dostoyevskian insight, Belyi seeks to resolve the paradoxes of man-as-child and child-as-man and the question of where his narration is located (past, present, future?) through the Godman — a being whose childlike innocence is combined with freedom and reason in an adult, human embodiment. Rather than a static (and paradoxical) synthesis of child and adult, God and Man, however, the Christ figure participates through his human attributes (reason, freely-chosen self-sacrifice) in the true divinity which in Orthodoxy implies dynamic transcendence. God made Himself Man, that man might become as God. Christ-like innocence is reachievable only by passing, via linear time, through the crucible of suffering: through reason, language and adult selfhood. Belyi's Christ-image provides the "reverse flow" (man becomes God) in the iconic process for which the corresponding movement (God becomes man) was the infant Kotik's myth-making, thereby casting aside the alienated buffoonery of the adult as child (the repetition of unintegrated selfhood) and the unnatural superimposition of artistic reasoning onto a fledgling consciousness (child as adult).69 The crucified Letaev prefigures a conscious enactment of childlike

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through a sacrifice freely offered by the adult self at the heart of byt: "I will be taken apart in myself, with my nailed-on, torn-apart body and soul . . . My self-consciousness will be a bridegroom, then, my self-consciousness as a little baby still: I will be born anew; the ice of concepts, words, meanings — is shattering: it will sprout multiple meanings."70 Outside the narrative time separating past from present, present from future, Kotik finds his true identity - in the transfiguration performed on the life of Boris Bugaev that accommodates it to Christ's life. Thus, the metatextual Kotik - the true "I" in the discourse (the level at which the art/reality distinction evaporates) — is at all times the Godman. 71 Despite its aspirations, however, Kotik Letaev remains a secular work of narrative art which fragments reality into narrating present, narrated past, and projected future. The transfiguration must therefore be deferred beyond the end of a plot sequence proceeding from pre-past, through past and present, and into a future beyond the narration. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ lie in the future, not because the events themselves will come to pass in subsequent years, but because the iconic Childman cannot be accommodated in metaphoric art. Only the last sentence (quoted from the Christian funeral service) is uttered in an eternal (and, for the secular artist, impossible) present tense, spoken from the position at which this iconic metadiscourse might be located: "In Christ we die in order to rise again in the Spirit."72 It is at this level that Belyi's project falters, if at all, and not, as is usually thought, at that of the contradictions broached in attempting to give linguistic expression to pre-linguistic experience. Notwithstanding the tensions undermining Kotik Letaev, iconic logic pervades Belyi's novels. Icons belong to the fallen world of the discrete, rational self. In the perichoresis that they accomplish, they deal in reason in order to articulate the meaning whose dynamism derives from the energy generated in the attempt to overcome reason's constraining influence. Iconic logic is at the root of Belyi's conception of the relationship between outer, Apollonian form (ergos) and inner, Dionysian

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meaning (energeia). Far from rejecting form as the subjugation of myth by abstract reason (or conceiving of the two as an irreconcilable antinomy), Belyi posits form as the sole means by which myth can be actualized - the shell from whose confines the cosmic must break free to be constituted at all. Images of a bursting forth from enclosed space are prevalent in Belyi's treatment of the pre-linguistic impressions of myth, and in his projection of the arrival of the super "I" (the "He" that is at once Vladimir Solov'ev and Jesus Christ) which will crown his spiritual development: "[M]y brain hemispheres fused together headlong: and like the feathers of sparkling wings, smashing the brain-plates, they began to shake: to blossom forth . . . the bird . . . rushed . . . toward me and inside me: to remove my T and to fly away through the skylight with it into eternity . . ." 73 Meaning is, for Belyi, always explosive process. Thus, space is sensed as such if its outer limits are marked by walls against which it presses with unbearable weight. In Petersburg, an everyday item (a sardine can) is torn to shreds by an apocalyptic explosion and, in the same novel, Apollon Apollonovich's head splits apart to release his mindgames. The walls of the apartment in The Christened Chinaman burst open under pressure from the internal energy of the cosmic, while, as we know, zhizn must emerge from the heart of byt. The playing out of the mutual predication of singular and general, concept and meaning, consciousness and cosmos, child and adult, man and God in The Christened Chinaman goes a long way towards explaining the narrator's attitude to his father. For the son's attempt to break free of pernicious paternal influence (and overcome mathematical abstraction), but from the inside, is ultimately aimed at a creative rapprochement in which there can be no self without other, no art without science, no cosmos without consciousness, no son without father. Here Belyi echoes Dostoyevsky's attack on Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in The Brothers Karamazov by reaffirming the need for an accommodation of son and father (man and God), rather than a rebellion of son against father. Appropriately, therefore, the liminal space of the professorial apartment providing the plot's stage has as its chief player Kotik's father - a threshold figure who mediates

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between the worlds of self and world. Within that liminal space Belyi is able to focus on the homely scenes of an everyday life quite unsuited to literary emplotment by "singularizing" the scenes as if everything is happening for the first time, so as to achieve the de-autonomization of bytovoi ritual and the reappropriation of the paternal for the son. This broad aim is accomplished through three strategies deployed earlier in Kotik Letaev, but integrated more fully in The Christened Chinaman: (1)

the perfective-aspect narration of scenes which have occurred repeatedly, (2) the narration of events unworthy of inclusion in a plot, and (3) the presentation of domestic regularities as sequences of mythological drama. An example of strategy 1 is the quarrel between mother and father which culminates in the image of Professor Letaev banging his rusty nail against a handbasin. For although the episode is reported as a one-time occurrence, the narrator later refers to the echo of the nail "sounding down the long chain of days." 74 The singularization represented here derives from the idiosyncracies of Professor Letaev himself and is of a referential nature: Belyi singularizes the routine life of his past by reproducing the quirky patterns of everyday existence already present in his father. The Christened Chinaman is also littered with marginal episodes lacking even the limited narrative interest of the nail episode, yet introduced as if of great importance (strategy 2): "I remember two important events in the life of objects; the satin furniture became worn through . . . it had been sat in too often and the dirty stuffing was protruding; at this point the upholsterer from Kuznetskii Bridge appeared . . . they chose the olive color — the red fairy tale of objects had faded into green prose." 75 Quirky details such as these wrench the Letaev's domestic life from the anonymous collective to which we and the narrator belong, but in being rendered marginal and "other" to us, they are simultaneously made "svoi" to Kotik. Everyday life produces repetition according to a pattern "applied across the board" and is, for that very reason, routine. In relating episodes for which that pattern has no place, Belyi repudiates its very essence.

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However, the writer is himself bound by the adult world of others, and by its post-mythic notion of time in which individual occurrences and recurring patterns are separate. Many of the episodes narrated from the child's point of view, as if they were happening once and for all time, are concluded with narratorial interventions reminding us that they were doomed to endless repetition: "[T]he food has been consumed; a large quantity of dirty plates has been taken to the kitchen . . . everything will flow again as if there had been no Mikhailov day, but . . . all this will be repeated as it has been repeated since Adam's time." 76 The sudden intrusion of a perspective distinguishing "once" from "many times" converts a magical sequence of interchanges between larger-than-life creatures back into nothing more than a routine mealtime sequence. The adult narrator of The Christened Chinaman is as conscious of his alienation from his young alter ego, as he is of Kotik's alienation from his father. What is svoi to Kotik Letaev is chuzhoi to Andrei Belyi. Here too, though, the spindling phenomenon comes into play, for the means by which Belyi renders Kotik's experience different from those of his chronological, adult realm are precisely those of poetry — a child's province. Many of the category 2 episodes are framed with indices of poeticity: pointed interspersions of the narrative with "I remember," the use of unprosaic punctuation and graphics, mythic allusions, and devices explicitly foregrounding the adult artist's active role in changing the material he describes in order to communicate it. In category 3, phenomena that are routine in value and temporality are assimilated to the drama of "once and for all" classical myth. Thus, in Kotik Letaev, the boy's daily meetings with a large, St. Bernard dog are transformed into a single encounter with an awe-inspiring Lion: "[B]efore me looms a maned lion's muzzle . . . everything is some kind of yellow sand; out of them matted knots of hair regard me calmly; and the muzzle: there is a shout: 'The Lion is Coming. . . ' " When Kotik is disavowed of his illusion, he is made simultaneously aware of the pastness of the encounters, their plurality (numerous sightings instead of one encounter), and their banality (this was an ordinary dog, not a mythical Lion): " 'Your lion

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muzzle is a fantasy: it belongs to a St. Bernard by the name of Lion . . . I too lived near Dog square for a time when I was a child . . . there I too saw Lion . . . He was a good dog; sometimes he ran out into the circle.5 " 7 7 But in The Christened Chinaman, Belyi readapts the mythreappropriation strategy to serve a more ambitious aim: that of re-familiarizing the routine so as to bridge the rift separating self and generalized other and eliminate the distinction between "edakoe takoe svoe" and "kak u vsekh." If the mathematicians

autonomize iconic creativity, and the dfe-autonomizing strategies of Letaev father build on the resistance offered by the everyday to kak u vsekh in order to reassert the rights of edakoe takoe svoe, then The Christened Chinaman looks towards a reconci-

liation of the two, the recreation anew of the intimacy which allowed for son creatively to reaccent ("my Moscow") the words of a familiar other ("Moscow the city of my fathers"), for singular to re-embody universal. When adopting myth here, Belyi is not, as in Kotik Letaev, regressing to his pre-conscious infancy but consciously replenishing the language of educated adults. It is, note, Letaev senior — the mediator between plots of the self and plots of the other - who introduces the biblical stories of Abraham and Christ to Kotik who, in turn, internalizes them and reissues them with his own singular stamp, while keeping the original in place as the shell from which they emerge. At one point, for example, he confesses to the misdemeanor of eating a herring bone without permission — a mundane lapse which, nonetheless, becomes the lapse of all lapses — a Fall into eternal solitude: "The herring bone is the beginning of the end . . . I've been thrown out! And paradise appears between Mama and Papa: they'll go to a correction house to have the 'svoe* beaten out of me." 78 Kotik appropriates the plots of the fathers (from Abraham to the present), infusing them with his unique meanings - meanings articulated by shattering the rigidity of the very concepts containing them, thus reasserting the unity of particular with universal, and the possibility of the inner transcendence of byt (the episode is nothing if not an archetypal piece of everyday trivia). An image from the plot thus comes to emblematize the principle behind

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the novel itself. For the reconciliation between father and son which the episode foreshadows can also be seen as a transcendence of the dichotomy between writer's adult self and child's identity from which that self is estranged by the past tense that it must adopt. The iconic emergence of the Childman (and of the life of Kotik from Bugaev's routine existence) is an energy transcending the terms of its articulation ("child" and "man"). The Kotik Letaev of The Christened Chinaman is neither the figure of a real child, nor the figurative projection of a real adult onto a childhood, nor even the pre-figuration of the Godman. He is not a figure at all, but the product of a creative force released by the sacrificial acknowledgment that immanent Godmanhood cannot after all be textualized, but that "if that were possible, it would be expressed thus . . . " The energy is located neither in the (adult) " I " expressing, nor in the (child-like) concepts expressed, but in the doubly negating (and ultimately affirmative) "If I had been able . . . " - the transfigurative art of Andrei Belyi which operates on a principle analogous to that of theological apophasis - itself party to revelation.79 Like Kotik Letaev, The Christened Chinaman ends with visions of a crucified

Christ — Kotik offered up in sacrifice to the inhabitants of byt\ "[T]hen the rhinoceros-horned [Madam] Gornung, black, enormous in a dress from hell (behind her the white necks) appears stretching out her arms and cawing loudly, like black ravens: 'Crucify him! Crucify him!' " 8 0 Here, however, the crucifixion is succeeded by a vision of the resurrection, of the "reverse flow" - man becomes God in Christ - and of the Gospel fire "hovering in a little flame above Papa, Mama, Uncle and Aunt," breathing the Word into them, enabling each to exhibit simultaneously absolute singularity and absolute commonality. This is the transforming energy of art (and of grace) in the Russian sense.81 The notion of the aesthetic as inner sanctification of objectified matter accords with the idea of Belyi's art as the transcendence of the everyday, and of self/other alienation. The plot of Kotik Letaev is no plot, since its action takes place outside of time. If the final lines of Kotik Letaev are spoken from an eternal

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present, then the finale to The Christened Chinaman reaccommodates the human category of time, expanding that present and projecting it onto a number of intersecting temporal planes: backwards to childhood, forward to the time of writing (the moment of trancendence), backwards to the Old Testament era, forward to Time's end (Kotik becomes Christ), backward to infancy when time's end coincided with its beginning. The last pages of The Christened Chinaman indicate the final aspect of the father-son reconciliation: that of the immanent transfiguration of byt in both guises. The revelatory energy of Belyi's aesthetic enables the horrors of "nekotorye kotorye" to be assimilated by the Old Testament patriarchal tradition which merges with Kotik's own papochka who, in his turn, emerges anew from it: "Those who . . . ! They are in Papa and they are only he: . . . the patriarchy, 'those who . . .' Papa is also Enoch . . . He 'enochized' with his nose and lifted his sleeve over the china cup on the wash basin." 82 The same energy transfigures the edakoe takoe svoe - the inscrutable, buffooning Chinaman with Belyi's divinely inspired theurgy: "I wake up and I see in the window . . . nature, like an old Chinaman becoming ancient with overgrowth . . . Papa is the Christened Chinaman." 83 It thus reestablishes in the Bugaev apartment (hitherto the heart of apart-ness) - the creative togetherness of an eternal Letaev Home.

CHAPTER 6

Breaking the circle of the self: Vasilii Rozanov's discourse of pure intimacy

Hellenism is the warmth of the hearth experienced as sacred . . . [it] is a system in the Bergsonian sense of the word, one which a person unfolds around him, like a fan of phenomena liberated from temporal dependence. (Osip Mandelshtam)l

Belyi understood that homes possess a time and a space all of their own. The capacity of their confined spaces to accommodate self/other relations founded on intimacy, and of their correspondingly homely temporality to liberate anonymously scheduled lives from society's plotted boundaries allows us to speak generally of a domestic chronotope which all three writers treated in part in adopt particular versions. In Vasilii Rozanov's case, the retreat inside the walls of home is associated with an assault on literature's inflated pretensions to universality in favor of the "honest spontaneity" of a fragmentary form of autobiographic writing situated on the margins of the aesthetic. An attempt to shed light upon the ensuing fog of conflicting opinions as to how precisely to categorize Rozanov's work will underlie my analysis in this chapter. I proceed first by demonstrating how Rozanov's positing of a self-oriented domestic time-space to counter the other-oriented time-space of literature generates a paradigm cutting across the disorderly variety of Rozanovian discourse-types and consisting of paired oppositions: home to outside world, self to other, life to literature, concrete to abstract. In a gesture grounded in the anti-aesthetic from which he emerged, Rozanov manipulates the value system implicit in the paradigm to accomplish a series 168

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of reversals, revalorizing the trivia of daily life at home as the truly literary, the transient as the lasting, and so on. Unlike his predecessors, Rozanov reveals an awareness of the contradictory circularity inherent in the reversal: of the paradox that, in order to be written, the (unliterary) self must inhabit the ground of its (literary) other. I pinpoint a strategy by which he attempts to "break the circle," and, at the same time, transcend the paradoxes of the nineteenth-century anti-aesthetic. This involves the mutual translation of the languages of self and other. One of several consequences I explore is Rozanov's success in reconstituting literature on the territory of the self and enriching it with the spicy tones of hearthside gossip (thus shepherding that sub-literary form to the next stage in its own journey to rehabilitation). Ultimately, however, I maintain that mutual translation collapses again into mutual dependency. In a final tragic twist, it is left to the once despised public arena to engineer a situation in which, briefly, Rozanov is able to articulate a discourse of pure intimacy between self and other in which the ethical and the aesthetic resolve their differences and the ordinary, rather than merely countering the universal, recontains it. Many great literary works present difficulties in the area of genre. Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, Tolstoy's War and Peace and, indeed, Belyi's Kotik Letaev serve as instructive examples. To this list one could add the late writings of Vasilii Rozanov. The genre of Rozanov's trilogy Solitaria, Fallen Leaves and Apocalypse

of Our Time is notoriously resistant to definition and generates a host of competing alternatives. Should they be treated as collections of anecdotes, autobiographies, confessions, fictions, or as something that combines elements from all of these genres? Each answer has validity. But this list of options suggests that Rozanov does more than pose questions of literary genre. He also raises problems in the broader arena of discourse type. The possibility of regarding these works as autobiographies already leads us to place them on the boundary between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic. Much of both Solitaria and Fallen Leaves is given over to a highly subjective form of literary criticism — another marginal discourse type.

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Yet, given the virulent ideologizing to which Rozanov is prone throughout, there are grounds for contending that it would be better to consider the trilogy under the rubric of journalistic polemic. On the other hand, Rozanov's often lengthy philosophical digressions might encourage us to treat the late writings in the context of his earlier religio-philosophical essays. The further we extend our list, the more we wonder whether we are correct in viewing the artistic element in Rozanov as anything more than decorative surface. The history of scholarship dedicated to Rozanov's later writings reflects the dilemma. Commentators divide into two camps: those who have assimilated the trilogy into Rozanov's non-aesthetic writings, and those who, while acknowledging the departure these works represent from literary convention, interpret such innovation as evidence that the trilogy is in the vanguard of aesthetic evolution. Heinrich Stammler's cogent assessment of the place that the late works occupy in Rozanov's philosophical development is a good example of the first kind of scholarship. Richard Hare's account of Rozanov's role in pre-revolutionary political polemics is another. So too is Vladimir Sukhach and Sergei Lominadze's characterization of the literary-critical achievements of the trilogy.2 In the second category, Viktor Shklovskii's pioneering interpretation of the formal peculiarities of Fallen Leaves remains one of the most important pieces of Rozanov scholarship.3 More recently, Anna Lisa Crone's sophisticated discussion of Rozanov's polyphony touches upon the problem of discourse status, though ultimately assimilates Rozanov to the realm of the aesthetic, characterizing his trilogy as "an alternative literature . . . the last book." 4 Dmitrii M. Segal makes the same choice when, after focussing on the point at which Rozanov's late writing intersects with literary criticism, he argues that Rozanov is a kind of metaliterary postmodernist avant la lettre and that Solitaria and Fallen Leaves are "the final stage in the coming-to-be of literature about literature." 5 There can be no doubting that Rozanov extended the bounds of literature in the way suggested. However, there is a problem in presenting this as what Jakobson would term "the

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dominant" of the trilogy, vast portions of which are taken up with straightforward polemic and philosophical speculations on matters ranging from sex and Judaism to the meaning of love. I do not expect to resolve the problem of genre nor to assign a definitive discourse type to Rozanov's trilogy. Indeed, my argument focuses on the way in which Rozanov's synthesis of varying discourse types calls into question the very status of all forms of public discourse. Based on a reading of self/other relations in Rozanov, and taking into account his position in the Russian literary tradition, my analysis will work towards bridging the gap between the "aesthetic" and "non-aesthetic" branches of Rozanov criticism. The notions of literature and literary autocritique remain central to my reading, but in such a way that they do not overshadow the other themes, genre traits and discourse types, serving instead as a symbolic key to their joint interpretation in terms of a single, catalytic element at work in the heart of Rozanov's creative laboratory. There is not necessarily a contradiction in following these disclaimers with an analysis beginning with a concept of decidedly literary associations - that of plot. Historians are among those to have realized that plot is not an exclusively literary phenomenon. Autobiographies, too, require the linear patterning provided by plot. Even philosophical and journalistic discourse seeks an inner coherence akin to plot. It is the ramifications of the problem that we encounter when this axiom is applied to Rozanov which make it a useful point of entry into his writings. Solitaria, Fallen Leaves (and to a lesser extent Apocalypse of Our

Time) possess neither linear sequence nor inner coherence and take the form of a haphazard collection of aphorisms, anecdotes and ruminations, private correspondence and polemical essays. Only occasionally is there motivation for the sequence in which these disparate discourses are assembled. Nonetheless, and however we decide to categorize Rozanov's work, it is clear that his method parallels that of other writers of the time. As we know, a striking feature of Silver-age fiction as a whole is its reaction against plot's "temporal framing" aspect. Artist or philosopher, journalist or autobiographer, Rozanov went

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further than anyone in this direction, fragmenting his discourse into a myriad of shorter reflections which, rather than being subordinate to an organizing consciousness in the present, are tied exclusively to the transient moments at which they occurred. These Rozanov describes as the momentary half-emotions of life which are c 'without processing, aim or premeditation" and whose only significance is that they have "fallen directly from [his] soul like leaves from a tree." 6 Rozanov takes this principle to an extreme, so that many of his thoughts (normally presented in the form of diary entries) are no more than trivial ephemera drawn from odd moments: games played with his children, scandalous gossip about his contemporaries, even purely practical notes about his favourite pastime - coincollecting. Transience is of the essence: "You're afraid of losing something unique which will never be repeated. Something better may be repeated but it's not the same thing. And you want the same thing."7 What interests Rozanov is not his life as a coherent whole, framed from the end, but the process of life as it moves imperceptibly from one moment to the next. He not only contradicts himself between entries but even corrects himself within single entries in order to convey experiences in raw form, as they take shape: "If ever I were to see a man with cancer and a happy mother I would make straight for the sick person. No, that's not right: an old man, or worse still, an old woman with cancer."8 Rozanov anathematizes the very idea of fixing life's elusive movement: "Any definition is a judgment . . . Let the world be undefined."9 These private ephemera are interspersed with provocative pronouncements of a more general nature on various themes. Unity is subverted here too, since the pronouncements are often contradicted later, and in such brazen fashion that it is difficult to fix a Rozanovian position on any issue. If the literary Rozanov is an autobiographer with no framing identity to bestow meaning on his autobiography, then the discursive Rozanov is a traveller on a journey with no end: "I walk, walk, walk. And where my journey will end, I don't know. And I'm not interested. Or rather, I'm not walking, but being carried. And I'm torn away from every place where I once stood."10

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Despite the lack of coherent plot, one can speak of a unified setting - that of Rozanov's home. Home is the source of all the anecdotes. Moreover, the intimate and spontaneous homeliness that one associates with a person expatiating without fear of reprisal from within his own home infects Rozanov's tone on a range of topics. It is this that lends some pronouncements their air of mischief-making scandal, others their graphic earthiness: Everyone finds things difficult. Only for Boborykin is everything always easy . . . and I think that he finds it easy to digest even the most indigestible substances. Why do we need the universal volo? There's no volo here; it's more like sliding legs and quivering stomachs. This isn't life, it's a skating rink!11 At home a person is at his least self-conscious; here time is rarely gathered up as a unified whole but rather experienced as discrete, transient moments of little consequence but great and intimate pleasure. As Rozanov explained to his friend Hollerbach, his writings are "exclusively fallen leaves: things that were and are no longer, that once lived and have now outlived themselves."12 Every fragment is followed by an indication of the activity in which the writer was engaged when the thought occurred. The most exaggeratedly profound formulations are arrived at "over a cup of tea" or "in the lavatory." At home one is so unselfconsciously absorbed that one has neither time nor need to reflect on the inner coherence of one's thoughts. Rozanov's domestic time, like the phenomenon that Paul Ricoeur terms "care-time," is task-oriented, rooted in the spurof-the-moment, geared to the meeting of specific deadlines or to the haphazard enjoyment of homely pleasures rather than to contemplation of the mysteries of eternity or the high drama of literary romance: "My household accounts notebook is worth more than the letters of Turgenev and Viardot. What effort, what thrift, and what satisfaction when at the end of the month I find that everything adds up correctly!"13 If life must be contemplated then it can only be equated with the hustle-bustle of domestic routine: "My day is my life" as Rozanov put it. He literally has "no time" for Nietszche's reevaluation of values,

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he tells us, when he, Rozanov, has bills to pay and debts owing to him, and when he has to deal with more precisely locatable problems of morality. The expression "to have no time for" is a temporal figure for a value judgment. It neatly encapsulates an additional feature of the Rozanovian chronotope. For Rozanov's attachment to domestic temporality carries through into a value system which (even by Rozanov's low standards of consistency) repeatedly gives precedence to the private and intimate, the practical and homely. Literally and figuratively, Rozanov "has no time" for the universal or the significant, the cold or the impractical. "Trivia are my Gods," he intones at one point.14 "Private life is higher than all else," he declares elsewhere. The qualities that Rozanov values in people are precisely those of home life, such as intimacy, warmth and patience. The qualities that he rejects are those of the cold outside world like satirical laughter which he sees as an agressive force more appropriate to the public square: "Laughter can't kill anything. Laughter can only suffocate. And patience will overcome laughter any time." 15 Like the Domostroi to which he refers, Rozanov not only lays down the rules for running a home, but offers the values of home life as a model for society; the Tsar's role, for example, is that of a loving but authoritative head of household in the Russian home-land.16 Home is the place where each person belongs, not beholden unto others. Everything outside home is alien; when one ventures outside, one immediately loses something of one's selfhood: "Outside what is yours is the world of other people [Vne svoego - chuzhoe]. Everything is decided by this one word. Just try and live with others. It's better to eat a crust of bread at home than pies from the hands of others." 17 Time at home does not need to be sequenced or made accessible for others. It can remain in the raw, fragmentary form in which it is experienced by the self who is blissfully unconcerned for the cold world of others, warmed, as he is, by Mandelshtam's "hearth of Hellenism."18 Rozanov's life paints a portrait of the self for itself and not, as in conventional autobiography, the self turned towards others, bringing his prose closer than that of any writer to the status of self-

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addressed discourse. He reinforces this impression by incorporating many of what Lotman describes as the hallmarks of autocommunication - notes in such abbreviated form that they are only comprehensible to the self, the use of intimate nicknames, and so on. 19 In the sense that I am outlining, Rozanov is surely mounting an assault on the essence of narrative literature, for he is implicitly rejecting the otheroriented time of plot. As I shall acknowledge, the critique becomes explicit, but we should remember that it is grounded in a version of the svoil chuzhoi distinction which in Rozanov cuts across the distinctions between various themes and categories of discourse.20 Despite the contradictory positions adopted (which anyway are motivated by Rozanov's preference for processual transience over fixed definition), a clear system emerges in which home is consistently opposed to outside world. If a home is the place where the self "comes into its own," then the public square is the place where other people lose their sense of intimate selfhood and give themselves up to jeering, laughter and all the other un-homelike activities that Rozanov finds alien. When in an open space, a person feels the need to huddle together with others in order artificially to recreate the impression of domestic warmth. This is even true of the open space that is Russia in Rozanov's interpretation of Russia's tendency to bow down before western influences: "A longing for the foreign, isn't that just a product of the excessive sense of suffocation we feel as a result of the immensity of our land relative to the tiny soul of each of us: T m drowning. Find me a German!'" 21 And if the cold space of public squares is where others congregate, then it is also where literature, especially Russian literature, is written. The public square is as conducive to ugly cursing as it is to the social satire which Rozanov sees as the most pernicious influence in Russian literature. Indeed, Russian literature's ingrained civic-mindedness is no more than an extension of the animal-like orientation towards screeching flocks of others that is found in public space:

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Why do I feel like choking whenever people talk about civicmindedness? Well, it's as if they're talking about the migration of crows . . . — Fly, my dears wherever you like: what's it got to do with me? . . . And that's why those little crows are so boring. And anyway - I can't stand the noise they make. And wherever there are crows there is always screeching.22

Russian literature is, however, no different from all modern literature in that, being made for public consumption, it is flawed at its foundation. The downfall of literature began, he argues, with printing technology (Gutenberg's discoveries are repeatedly savaged), as a result of which the journalistic press became the epitome of writing, since it is open to instant access by anonymous others. Soon, moreover, the press corrupted literature's soul, reshaping it in its own distorted image. If one's private home is the site of true writing, then the public space of the drinking-house or kabak is the site of the press and of literature in its modern, corrupted form: "The whole of nineteenth-century civilization is characterized by the slow . . . infiltration everywhere of the kabak. The kabak has seeped into publishing too, for before the nineteenth century there were no newspapers, only literature." 23 Furthermore, the knowledge that literature will be disseminated alters the relation between a writer and his work and between writer and reader. Rather than introspective reflection intended only for the self or for an intimate other, writing becomes an act of vanity (samoliubie): vanity as the puffing up of the self in order to impress the anonymous other. Literature, in Rozanov's eyes, is the epitome of vanity. The puffed-up self oriented towards the outside world of others is, then, an inauthentic or even prostituted self; literature is the place of inauthenticity and bad faith. Far from reflecting life as nineteenth century critics would have it, literature is in fact the antithesis of life. By introducing into literature the human soul's most trivial and transient moments, the fragile "cobwebs of everyday life" as he calls them, Rozanov comes close to expelling the literary from literature and merging it with life itself: "Meaning," he insists, "is not in the eternal, meaning is in the moments." 24 In order to have universal

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value, literature must stop being literature. In Rozanov's topsyturvy world nothing is more truthful and universal than the individualized trivia of the family man at home (equated with Rozanov's anti-literature of the self), nothing more petty than the impersonal conceptualizing of the world of others (equated with the inflated abstractions of modern literature and the herd instincts of the press): Literature and the personal had come together to such an extent that for me there was no literature, just "my affair," and even literature completely disappeared outside its relation to my affair. The personal has merged with the universal. We really know only ourselves . . . And if the only self-revealing reality is "I," then you must obviously tell about "I" (if you have the knowledge and the ability).25 In typically paradoxical fashion, and as if to confirm the link between selfhood and the everyday trivia of the family man, Rozanov sees the defining and unique feature of his literary identity as its very ordinariness. Rejecting comparisons with Nietzsche or Leont'ev, he retorts: "I am the most ordinary of people; allow me to give you my full title: College assessor, Vasilii Vasilievich Rozanov who writes essays."26 Rozanov, note, is most ordinary; he takes common-or-garden "everydayness" to the point at which it turns into its opposite — the unique property of a triumphantly assertive self. The process by which everydayness is attributed positive value is a hallmark of Rozanov's technique. It rests on the principle that the soul in all its individuality is more true and universal than the outside world of generalities which is the site of the petty and false: "I don't think about kingdoms. Because my soul is bigger than a kingdom. It's eternal and divine. Whereas a kingdom is 'nothing special.' (A kingdom is a bazaar.) (On the way to the clinic after turning into Kirochnaia street.)"27 Conventional meanings are reversed. The everyday minutiae making up the private life of an individual become the bearers of lasting significance (which is why Rozanov includes so many of them in his anti-literature), while the

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generalities of the objective world of others degenerate into pettiness (which is why they are always ridiculed). In what Rozanov terms true literatura ("literature," the discourse of the unique self and the antidote to what he calls the false literatorstvo ["literaturizing"] of the world of others), the tiny details of everyday life can be presented without need for justification, or for the derivation of general principles. Such details are naturally universalized by virtue of their inclusion in the framing context of the self's spontaneous account of his everyday activities: "I was hurrying home. It was getting dark. And I see a figure standing under an umbrella . . . looking out at the sea. 'What's he looking at?' 'Who's he waiting for?' I tell the batiushka over tea. He laughs. 'That's my father. He's arrived from Viatka.' " 2 8 The superficial moments of domestic life do not represent eternity, they carry that depth within them and are thus identical to it: "The moments are eternal." 29 The sense of Rozanov's own private life is to be rendered not through philosophical abstraction but in the person of his domestic companion - his wife (or "friend"). It is a sense which, in being concrete and "everyday," is by that very fact divine: "The essence of my life was revealed through my 'friend.' Everything became human. I received speech, wings, strength. Everything was filled with 'the earthly' and at the same time with what divinity!"30 In rejecting modern literature Rozanov simultaneously rejects both everyday life as a vehicle for rendering the typical, and its degradation into a negativized dull, routine existence. But, as we learned in chapter 2, Rozanov's own antiaesthetic paradoxically replenishes the powers of literature. Anti-literature is, after all, literature - a fact that Rozanov cannot ignore. To render daily existence as an icon within a form which is by its nature non-iconic is an impossible dream. Self is to other, then, as life is to literature. Literature, however, represents only one form of cold generalized discourse. Anything that inclines towards impersonalized abstractions becomes an object of Rozanov's ire. Political parties, for example, are seen as an impersonal other acting as a grotesque, egotistical self, while the bureaucrat is portrayed as the anti-

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thesis of the family man. Christian ideas of immortality, too, are "dry and abstract." When remembering a deceased friend, Rozanov insists: "It's not that Shperk's soul is immortal, rather his little red beard just couldn't die . . . whether his soul is immortal or not, I don't know, and I don't care." This gives rise to Rozanov's comic projection of his own afterlife: "I want to arrive in the afterworld with a handerkerchief. Nothing less."31 Rozanov's hostility towards Christianity's cold abstraction and his admiration for Judaism and the more physical pagan religions is founded on his preference for concrete, fleshly distinctions such as that between male and female.32 The celebration of fertility and sexual difference have in the Christian world been superseded by the neutral, undifferentiated abstraction that is man (the Russian word for man — chelovek — is gender-neutral): "[In Christianity] everything takes you away from masculine seed . . . There's no more male and female sexes, only 'man'." 33 Rather than being in contradiction with his powerful endorsement of the values of the family, Rozanov's notorious celebration of phallic cults is inextricably tied to the latter. Both phallic cult and family cult emphasize concrete, surface difference over abstract, profound unity. The family home, site of the self in its most intimate mode, is the very context in which authentic sex should be celebrated. In all that he treats, Rozanov overturns the hierarchy privileging "depth" (what really counts) over "surface" (the insubstantial and dispensible). In his formulation, surface is the true depth, depth a mere surface: "Without bodily pleasure there's no spiritual friendship. The body is the basis for the spirit . . . And the spirit is the odor of the body." 34 This principle permeates Rozanov's attitude to politics. Take, for example, his redefinition of the left-wing Octobrist movement active in the pre-revolutionary years: "A cigarette after my bath, raspberries with milk, a lightly-salted cucumber, with a little strand of dill attached (that should be left on). There's my 17th of October. In that sense I'm an Octobrist." 35 When he is not inverting the relationship between particular (surface) and universal (depth), he is subverting it. "The grand is apprehended through the trivial" is Rozanov's guiding

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motto, but it is one which he adheres to with tongue firmly in cheek.36 In one passage he recalls with affection a whimsical conversation in a theater with a pregnant woman on the topic of childbearing. From this one encounter Rozanov draws a sweeping conclusion: "This enormous, unifying, socializing role of the stomach is striking, touching, noble, elevated. The stomach produces as many ideas as the head." 37 Elsewhere, he generates one of his uncompromising formulations from what starts out as as a personal reflection on his desire that his children should not be childless: "I bequeath that my children — my son and my four daughters — should all have children. The fate of a girl without children is terrible . . . A girl without children is a sinner . . . That's 'Rozanov's canon' for all Russia."38 The comic effect lies not only in the outrageousness of the maxim, but also in the incompatibility between the singular instance on which it is based (Rozanov's wish that his daughters should not be childless) and the generality derived from it (that childless women are all sinners). It is not that for Rozanov particular cannot be subordinated to general, but rather that when this occurs the result must be rejected. Particularity in its pure form should, as in Chekhov, remain unrepeatable, irreducible to the role of instance of a general law. This distinction is sensed in Rozanov's contrastive comparison of the contemptible pettiness of the bureaucrat (singular as instance of the impersonal state machine) and the orientation towards trivia characteristic of the family man (singular as unique, irreducible self). And when defending the Orthodox church, a lengthy account of a mushroom-picking trip taken with a parish priest is accorded more significance than the theological arguments he adduces (which, anyway, are contradicted elsewhere). An unaccustomed reader might accuse Rozanov of making subjective judgments based on personal preferences. But the whole point is that the hierarchy placing general over specific is suspect. Rozanov articulates a paradigm opposing on one hand self, home, life, the specific, the superficial, the sexual and the politically inconsistent, to the alien, the outside, literature, the general, the profound, the spiritual and the politically consis-

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tent on the other, and undercutting the value system valuing the latter over the former. As we know from the special case of literature, the reversal is merely apparent. For if what has occurred is the assumption by self and home of the properties of the other and the world at large (universality, depth), then the fundamental distinctions remain intact and all that have changed are the names filling the slots. To put it another way, selfhood is fated to exist in parasitic co-dependency with the otherness that defines it, and which it defines. Or again, to extol the self as a universal value means to enter the territory inhabited by universal values: that of the anonymous other. How can one advocate a system privileging self and life over other and literature within a discourse which, though it may cross the threshold of the non-literary, is nevertheless, like literature, to be disseminated to the anonymous other? Rozanov may protest that he is not remotely interested in his readers: "I've written without a reader for a long time . . . and I won't be angry if a reader who has bought my book by mistake throws it in the trash bin . . . or better still, why not sell it to a second-hand bookstore with a fifty per cent discount?"39 But we are no more likely to give credence to these protestations than we are to similar claims made by Dostoevsky's Man from Underground, whose self-assertive discourse is, as Bakhtin has shown, acutely other-oriented.40 Another disarming strategy adopted to counter the effects of the contradiction is to profess guilt at having wasted time in such a worthless pursuit as writing, particularly in view of the severity of Rozanov's wife's chronic illness.41 A third ruse is to insist that his works are really only manuscripts not intended for publication (hence their fragmentary spontaneity). Indeed, argues Rozanov, what he is trying to convey is the soul's raw, unfinished, manuscriptlike state (rukopisnost'dushi). Finally, and most persuasively, Rozanov assuages his guilt by pointing out that money made from his publications has at least paid his wife's medical bills. Nevertheless, the fact remains: Rozanov is a writer whose work is made "other." An attempt to project a sublimated self on the alien territory of this other is a tall order. It is Rozanov's awareness of, and attempts to come to grips with this dilemma

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that distinguishes him from his anti-aestheticizing predecessors and provides the key to his creative technique. Rozanov's sensitivity to the problematic expresses itself in his struggle with the instabilities and contingencies of language and meaning. A striking feature of his style is the overabundance of quotation marks. On one hand they contribute to the rough-edged, manuscript-like quality Rozanov is keen to cultivate, but on the other hand they bespeak an attempt to separate his authentic self from all the utterances that self makes on the territory of the other. For every "I" whose appearance on the ground of the other reduces the selfhood of that "I," there is always another more authentic Rozanov able to frame and distance himself from it: "I am alien to my own soul. Who am I? It's clear only that there are many Ts in CI,' and many more Ts within those Ts." 4 2 The quotation marks give material expression to the frame of otherness in which literary utterances made by the self are inevitably enclosed.43 A similar explanation accounts for Rozanov's aphoristic manner of expression, for an aphorism is a thought packaged in a neatly condensed form made suitable for endless repetition by countless others, even if it is a thought proclaiming the sanctity of private life: "How I used to sit at home, picking my nose . . . that's what I call eternal." 44 The packaging and ordering of linear time as plot, for the benefit of the anonymous other, is replaced by the packaging of fragmentary thought as aphorism.45 Whenever Rozanov attempts to express his inner self on the open square of published discourse his thoughts are dis-owned, made "other." The sense that the real Rozanov remains separate from the public Rozanov is reinforced by the frequency with which the writer refers to himself in the third person as "Rozanov," or "little Rozanov." The "true" Rozanov, we sense, despite his risky incursion onto hostile surroundings, never becomes ossified and objectified by others but, in his words, remains "all subject." This privileging of rampant subjectivity means, among other things, that only other people die.46 The Rozanovian self cannot envision the self-objectification implicit in imagining oneself dead. The

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same all-conquering subjectivity makes lying to others on their own territory (i.e. published literature) a virtue rather than a vice and allows Rozanov to escape behind its protective screen: "It's remarkable how I made out with lying. It never bothered me . . . What business is it of yours what I really think? Why am I obliged to tell you my real thoughts? . . . My innermost subjectivity has made me live my life behind an untearable curtain. Nobody is able to touch that curtain."47 At other times, far from hiding, the assertive Rozanovian self expands to assimilate the world to itself, as in the comic picture of a gigantic baby Rozanov nursing at the breast of mother earth, or in his inflated claim that in the beginning God created Rozanov and that he is therefore related to everyone. Yet the throw-away tone characterizing these declarations indicates that Rozanov knows only too well that he remains impaled on the horns of the dilemma that is the essential other-orientedness of the discourse through which his rampant subjectivity is generated. The same doubts about the possibilities for stable, uncontaminated meaning are at the roots of Rozanov's deep unease at the refusal of objects to correspond unwaveringly to their assigned definitions: "[T]he deviation of all things from their definition, the deviation of all planets from the straight path. What is this? !!! Horrors, horrors . . . " 4 8 Rozanov's critique of language accords with his attack on all systems devised to convert self into other. When one speaks one uses a system belonging to an anonymous commonality of people. To speak one's innermost secrets is to remove them from the intimate realm of the self. It is significant that literature (that other great system for "making other") is linked directly with language when Rozanov asserts : "Surely kissing a sick man is a deed . . . The kiss replaces the word, and is richer than the word because . . . it is . . . less defined than a word . . . Let writers do all the speaking"*9 Here he follows the canons of the Russian philosophical tradition in which participation is consistently preferred to verbal abstraction and the integration of subject and object takes precedence over the subordination of one to the other.50

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When dealing with language Rozanov exposes the paradox besetting him elsewhere: that in order to be articulated the self must be filtered through an otherness which is also the ground on which it stands. This is as true for the self-identity of phenomena as it is for that of autobiographical subject. Whenever self meaningfully coincides with its definition, it is in fact simultaneously made other since, in order for anything to have meaning, that which is other to it must be set against it so as to fix it. We identified this axiom in Rozanov's conception of literature, but it is also realized across a range of other Rozanovian phenomena. Beauty, for example, cannot exist in pure form but must consist in the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly: "There is no such thing as a good face if at the same time there's not something ugly in it . . . a freckle, a pimple . . . Perfection is for the heavens and for marble and even in marble it begins to arouse my suspicions."51 He applies the strategy to comic effect when attacking the progressive wing of pre-revolutionary Russian politics: "You see, it's perfectly clear that Social Democracy is worthless to anyone except the Department of State Police. Without it the Department has no work, like there's no tackle and catch without a bait." 52 If the identities of self and other are mutually predicated and thus relational, then it takes little for their respective statuses to be reversed, and for the conventional meanings of, say, "absentmindedness" and "attentiveness," or, even more ingeniously, "undying love" and "persistent infidelity," to be stood on their heads: An absentminded person is an attentive person. Attentive, however, not to the expected or the desired, but to something difficult and personal. Love is always an exchange of body and soul. So when there is nothing to exchange love fades. And it always fades for one reason . . . the similarity/identity of people who once loved and were different . . . The cogs (differences) are blunted and worn away, stop connecting with one another . . . because the machine as a . . . harmony of opposites has disappeared. This love . . . will never be reborn. So before its total expiration, infidelities flare up, as the last

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hope of love: nothing separates (and thus creates difference between) lovers like infidelity. The last not quite worn away cog regains its teeth. Motion is again possible. In this way infidelity is love's self-cure . . . without infidelity lovers or the family would fall away in indifference.53 Yet should we necessarily conclude that Rozanov's experimental probings are condemned perpetually to run up against the stone wall of contradiction? A more insightful understanding of how Rozanov negotiates the treacherous waters dividing self from other can, I believe, be gained by viewing the confrontation as one between two languages (a language of the self and a language of the other) - a confrontation, moreover, which does not have to end in a victory for either side or in a breakdown in communication. For, as Lotman has shown, linguistic confrontation can be resolved through mutual translation.5* According to this model, the "content-plane" of Rozanov's language of home and self can be seen to be conveyed via the "expression-plane" of his language of public discourse and the other. Fragmentary moments from family life are presented in the succinct form of the aphorism, acquiring its generalizing function and inherently universal accessibility: "From a distance: 'Mama! Mama!' - 'Idiot! - You'd do better to go to your sick mother than call her to you.'" 55 On the other hand, the lofty concerns of literature and the outside world are treated in the wickedly scandalous terms of the self, encrusted with a rich overlay of homely values. Witness Rozanov's depiction ofJudgment Day: "They'll say: Off you go to the Last Judgment. And I'll say: I'm not going. I want to smoke. Find me a piece of hell's coal to light my cigarette. I see you have Stamboli. We tend to smoke Asmolov here. It's the national brand." 56 In the language of the Rozanovian self, public discourse acquires an altogether unexpected flavor. Literary criticism, for example, comes to resemble hearthside gossip, incorporating hyperbolical insults of the sort that one would only make in the most intimate company. Thus, of the exotic Bal'mont we read: "He's a clothes-hanger hung with dresses — Indian, Mexican, Egyptian . . . Spanish. It would be better if there were some gypsy dresses, but there aren't." 57 At

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the same time, the elevation of gossip's raw spontaneity to the literary high ground infuses the lowly, sub-aesthetic discourse with serious value. What results here is neither the triumph of self over other, nor the assimilation by other of self, but through their mutual translation, a renewal and redefinition of both. In its provocative translation into the foreign dialects of the other - literature, literary criticism, philosophy, religion - Rozanov's own language of the self is enriched and intensified. Yet through their inflection with the homely accents of the self these alien discourses themselves penetrate taboo areas. Religion incorporates sex. Philosophy is regrounded in the spontaneous and inconsistent thoughts which occur as one goes about one's daily chores. Literary criticism is spiced with the informal, gossipy banter of the hearth. Literature celebrates the unliterary trivia and non-events of day-to-day existence. The renewed languages of self and other need not bear the jarring traces of translation, for Rozanov is just as apt to present discourse of the self in "pure" form. In Fallen Leaves he includes pages of clumsy, rambling letters from a schoolboy friend that are of obvious value only to Rozanov who thus deliberately sidelines his unfamiliar and anonymous readers. There are snippets of trivial conversation with his daughters, even monetary calculations jotted down as private, selfaddressed memos whose inclusion in a published work is, however, the implicit indicator that we are dealing with self translated into the generalizing language of the other; the literary framing of these trifles automatically confers on them a generalizing function, even if that function is no more than the assertion of domesticity as universal value. Literary art, of course, is all about deriving universality from the singular and concrete. But Rozanov stretches this principle to breaking point, developing singularity into the extreme form of trivial ephemera and leaving the generalizing literary frame to be inferred by the reader. His awareness of what he is doing is demonstrated by his declaration that he has succeeded in "overcoming literature," bringing it to its end and thus turning it on its head: the essence of literature now consists in all that is

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not literary, while its function resides in the conferral of anonymous universality upon all that which is most nonuniversal and belonging to the intimate self. In one sense literature and the other are fated to disappear, to dissolve without trace in the vast ocean of the self: "The dissolution of literature is taking place within me." 58 But simultaneously and here is where Rozanov's strategy of translation attenuates the absurd contradition in the very term "anti-aesthetic" literature's new-found capacity to capture for the anonymous other the most intimate moments of the self produces the ultimate literary achievement. Rozanov's works represent the apotheosis of literature's universalizing function: "Within me there is a kind of bringing to completion of literature."59 Pure domestic ephemera are universalized solely because they are framed in a literary context. Likewise, pure generalizations are assimilated into the domestic chronotope by their framing context - indications in parentheses of the precise domestic activity associated with each generalization. The language of the other, no matter how uncompromisingly universalizing, is no less susceptible to translation into its opposite than is that of the self. For Rozanov, self and other depend on one another for physical survival.60 No matter how high he builds his monument to the self, the other is always at hand as the foundation on which that monument must stand. Even such an uncompromisingly self-centered book as Solitaria is at root "an attempt . . . to break through to people, whom I love sincerely."61 Earlier rejections of literature as an act of vanity and assertions that the only true literature is that of the self appear to have been reversed. But Rozanov finds no contradiction here, for in Solitaria he considers himself to be reaching out to other people in an act of real communication, of literatura ("literature") rather than literatorstvo ("literaturizing"). (The line just quoted is preceded by the suggestion that the "reaching out" is modelled on Rozanov's intimate relationship with his wife.) The many versions of self/other interaction and the differing value placed upon them generate many of the notorious Rozanovian inconsistencies. But consistent factors in all the

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variants are Rozanov's attempt to maintain a distinction between self and other and a pendulum-like oscillation between the mutually translatable languages which that division generates. The line separating a world dominated by self from a world oriented towards the other is so thin that Rozanov's persona is fated always to hover between them. The image he uses is that of a paper-thin table top dividing space above (the "normal" world of others) from space below (the world in which nothing exists but the self). Rozanov's eye is aligned with the table surface, so that his gaze is drawn now upwards, now downwards: "Something quivered and underneath the table there opened up a world quite different from that on top. My line of vision shifted by a millimetre. Above the table I see 'our life' - 'I'm being read,' 'I'm fussing around' . . . under the table there's nothing at all, or a quite different view."62 To describe the table top as "paper-thin" is an apt and subtle choice of image, since paper is the surface on which the literary self (or self as other) is written. Equally subtle is the way in which Rozanov effects a translation within a translation by redrawing the self/other distinction that had mediated between home and outside world inside the territory of the self and family, of the self for the familiar other. Far from solipsistic, Rozanov's writings about home are filled with the other members of his family, especially by the figure of his wife. He takes genuine contact with this different being as what gives his life purpose and distinguishes his interpersonal relations from the impersonal parading before others that characterizes the discourse of the intelligentsia: "If it weren't for the love of my 'friend,' how my life and my personality would have been impoverished! Everything would have been just the empty ideology of an intellectual . . . what would there have been to write about?" 63 Translated into the intimate idiom of home the relationship between self and other becomes one of reciprocal surrender: "Love is the complete surrender of the self to another." 64 The defining act of love is to be able to feel the same pain that the intimate other is experiencing - hence Rozanov's obsession with his wife's illness: "I am sad . . . when things are in pain. That has been a

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constant hurt in my own life. Through this hurting passes tenderness." 65 Ultimately, declares Rozanov, the self can only be defined through the other: "My whole life has been a search to find what is 'mine.5 Only in my 'friend' have I caught a glimpse of this 'mine.3 " 6 6 From the oscillation between a privileged domestic self and an alien other we have proceeded to the redrawing of the distinction in a positive light from within the space of the self, and then to the surrender of self to other in that space.67 However, lest we become lulled into believing that the pendulum is stilled through a cosy compromise by which self surrenders to other on its own territory, Rozanov produces another sleight of hand to reestablish its oscillatory motion. Just as he used the difference between self and other to enrich the self and assimilated the languages of the other (while distancing them by framing them in quotation marks or as aphorisms), he now repeats the gesture from within the world of the self. For in surrendering to his wife, Rozanov aspires to acquire her different qualities as his own, to overcome himself in the same way that he claims to have overcome literature: "And her soul entered me, soft, tender, responsive. And my soul began to enter her, severe and wrathful . . . She got ever more severe . . . and I began to forgive everyone everything. But I forgave through the happiness which she brought me." 68 In another entry he explains his dependence on his wife as a function of her ethical otherness which he later transforms into the voice of his conscience and thus assimilates to himself: "My dependence on mamochka is like the dependence of a person weak in morals on a moral person . . . I never used to care about [conscience], thinking that it did not exist . . . Then it was affixed to me . . . in the form of my 'friend5 . . . and I admired it, but didn't act according to it." 69 Even at home, self and other are read through, and so colored by one another. Mutual translation is also mutual contamination. Thus, Rozanov5s domestic interactions with the other fall far short of his sought-after ideal — spontaneous communication in a language that remains uncontaminated, untranslated. The progressive, but necessarily partial domestication

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process is a self-repeating, circular structure that cuts across the distinctions between the themes Rozanov pursues and the contradictions within each theme. Literature, for example, is not always a cold, alien discourse. When translated into the domestic language of the self, it is rather like an intimate part of Rozanov's own apparel: "I feel no constraints in literature, because literature is just the pants that I wear. That there are also literators and that it [literature] has an objective existence does not bother me in the slightest."70 Literature's objective existence may be in the form of "literaturizing" (literatorstvo) but, when domesticated, it is assimilated to the self in the purer form of "literature" (literatura). Here again is Rozanov's earlier strategy. When domesticated, literature allows self to assimilate and even efface it, yet its generalizing function is preserved, so that even the most subjective trivia acquire universality. Rozanov continues: "That's where my careless familiarity [neriashlivost'] within literature comes from. How can I not be familiar in my own home? I feel literature like I feel my home. I have no sense that I'm obliged to do anything in it, that anything is expected from me." 71 When dealing with one's family members one is apt, depending on mood, to be badtempered and spiteful, then affectionate and loving in turn which is exactly how Rozanov treats other writers: "Literature is like my trousers, so why should I stand on ceremony with it?" 72 One finds the same procedure at work across the gamut of Rozanovian themes and discourse-types. Thus, the Christian God of the eternal afterlife exists in an impersonal, alienated version. But there is also the God of "little Rozanov," an intimate " 7 ^ " with whom the writer interacts in his domestic surroundings, to whom he can give himself and through whom he defines his identity precisely because this will be an act of surrender to another on the safe and hallowed territory of the self.73 The contradictions in Rozanov's attitudes to Jews are explicable according to the same system. In Solitaria the figure of the Jew is the epitome of the alien outsider who has seized the Russian soul and is corrupting it: "The whole of literature has been seized by the Jews. Our wallets weren't enough for

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them, now they've come after the Russian s o u l . . . A pogrom is just a convulsion in response to torture.5'74 In his last major work, Apocalypse of Our Time, Rozanov's views seem to have turned full circle with the Jew now portrayed as Russia's only hope of salvation. Yet this transformation is in keeping with literary domestication - a co-optive act which, in assimilating the other, preserves its alterity intact. The Jew to whom Rozanov now dedicates an affectionate paean is still an other, a non-Russian. But he is an other all but assimilated to the home environment, one whose difference, like that of Rozanov's wife, consists in his superiority. Just as mamochka's moral otherness becomes the voice of Rozanov's conscience and in a confident, "colonizing" manner is moved to the center of a renewed literary self, so the newly-domesticated Jew's otherness establishes itself at the heart of a newly-defined Russian self. The Jew is, it transpires, a more perfect incarnation of ccRussianness" than Russians themselves: "Amidst all the swinishness of the Russians there is one very valuable quality - intimacy, sincerity [zadushevnost'] . . . It's just that a Russian is a drunken sincere person, while a Jew is a sober sincere person." 75 Thus, the confrontation of languages, the circular process of self's alienation from, domestication of, surrender to and realienation from the other provides the key to Rozanov's writing. Though the process transcends the difference between the genres and discourse types to which his works may be assigned, and between the themes that those works treat, it is nonetheless literature which furnishes the system's most complex model since literature it is whose simultaneous renewal and destruction causes Rozanov the most anguish. Yet in a final ironic twist, it is likewise literature that brings him closest to breaking the circle, to articulating an uncontaminated self who reaches out in an attempt at u true communication" with an intimate other in a language that bears no trace of "translatedness," converting literatura from metatextual hypothesis into iconic reality. In Rozanov's view, private correspondence between two friends had always represented literature's ever unrealizable ideal for, despite his elaborate strategies, the fact remains that modern literature is disseminated to a potential

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infinity of others, making mutual translation ultimately no more than mutual contamination. Rozanov's literary self therefore always remains at root a contaminated self, a self translated into the language of the other. Until, that is, the terrible days succeeding the 1917 revolution — the last of his life — which he lived out confined within a religious sanctuary, in a state of extreme impoverishment, declining health and virtual starvation, his writing, whether published or not, serving as his only means of communication with the world outside.76 The anonymous, impersonal readership to which all modern writing has perforce to be addressed, now comes to coincide precisely with the intimate, familiar other who previously existed only at home and contaminated by the self. And so the emphasis on the practical concerns of day-to-day living becomes transformed before our eyes from a literary device into what is simultaneously a terrifyingly real strategy for human survival and a spontaneous outburst of human warmth. In the final pages of Apocalypse of our Time, which, as Andrei Siniavskii wrote, cause "a shiver to run across one's body,"77 a desperate Rozanov deploys his literary gifts both to appeal to, and counsel us readers as intimate but undomesticated others: In this terrible, earth-shattering year, and through the goodness of the human heart, I've received help from many people known and unknown to me - help both financial and in the form of food. And I can't hide the fact that, without this help, I would not have been able to survive last year. . . Naturally, everyone's soul is open to them, and I know of my own soul that it caresses and cares for, and wants to make tender and intimate the soul of my reader. Take care of the intimate, only the intimate; of all the world's treasures the intimacy of your soul is the most precious to me . . . But now, look, the intimacy of the reader's soul has taken inside itself the intimate soul of a writer . . . I'm tired. I can't carry on. 2 or 3 handfuls offlour,2 or 3 handfuls of oatmeal and five hard-boiled eggs can save my day. Reader, preserve your writer. . . and I imagine that I can discern something finalizing [zavershaiushchee] in the last days of my life.78 The only self able to break free from the circle of contamination is the self at the point of extinction. The horrors of the revolution ("something finalizing") bring Rozanov to do what has hitherto eluded him: to contemplate

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his own death, to see himself from the position of others as "finalized" - to perform an act of real self-authorship (in Bakhtin's formulation of "completing a person from the outside"), one which simultaneously tears down the barriers that had kept him apart from others. That this instance of spontaneous, "unliterary" intimacy should be achieved within literature is explicable neither by Rozanov's literature assimilating his life, nor by the capitulation of literature to life. It is rather a case of literature (the aesthetic) and life (the nonaesthetic) being subsumed within a no longer hypothetical literatura - the new realm in which the goals of life and literature coincide in intimate sincerity (zadushevnost'). Earlier Rozanov had contrasted the warmth of the act to the cold abstractions of the word, complaining that "[t]he word cools experience." Now, however, act and word glow with the same inner warmth, for the act is the Word. Like Maiakovskii (though from a different angle), Rozanov realizes that the revolutionary era demands a new discourse one that, following his interpretation of literature, is grounded in the concrete trivia of the self ("2 or 3 handfuls of flour"), but also one which, like religious philosophy or polemical journalism, deals with the ethical obligations of the anonymous other ("reader, preserve your writer"). It should be a discourse of both the aesthetic and the ethical, of self and of other - one in which the unique, everyday acts of the self embody the universal values of the other, so that "the meaning" truly is "in the moments." The final contradiction that Rozanov must face here, however, is that this is no more than a transformational reworking of the very state of affairs in nineteenth-century civic culture to which he had earlier objected so vehemently.

CHAPTER 7

At the "I" of the storm: the iconic self in Remizov's Whirlwind Russia

The Poet must remember that his poetry is guilty of the banal prose that is life, and the human being of life should know that . . . the frivolity of his everyday questions are to blame for the barrenness of a r t . . . It is easier to create without answering for life, as it is easier to live and not reckon with art. Art and Life are not one, but they must become united in me, in the unity of my responsibility. (Mikhail Bakhtin)1

Rozanov understood that the new mode of living-as-creating (literatura) had to be a discourse of the self in which the trivia of private, everyday existence would no longer be compelled to repeat a pattern external to it in order to acquire meaning, since the act of living such moments would actualize their essence. He failed to appreciate, however, that this self would have to be a transcendent entity at one with others, and so remained trapped in the game of alienations and appropriations played out between a private individual and an other who, notwithstanding the sleights of hand, remain at odds. It was through a quite unwanted turn in the course of history that Rozanov was able momentarily to evade the trap and approach his ideal. My last chapter will contend that, by turning a quirk of fate into a creative principle, Aleksei Remizov advanced Rozanov's mission to completion (though not to victory). I will argue that, in Remizov's neglected chronicle of the revolutionary years, the upheavals brought upon the lives of ordinary Russians are exploited to attain the penultimate stage in the transformation of Russia's anti-aesthetic.2 Thus, Remizov succeeds in reinstating the everyday as the proper site of (rather than the

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antithesis to) plot, and reconceiving narrative art as the activity of a writerly self integrated with (rather than aloof from) the routine world of others. This, I argue, identifies Remizov's art as being akin to the force that eliminates the distinction between the aesthetic and the real, assimilating text to metatext, (literary) word to (iconic) Word. Via the chronicle's own trajectory, Remizov attempts to free his own slovo from the static, imagic status of shadow to a passive "bearing of witness," and to restore to it its sense of participatory dynamism. To accomplish the reintegration of self and other upon which this process is predicated, Remizov elaborates his own domestic chronotope, adopting a corresponding form of gossip narration purified of negativity. It is significant that Remizov maintained a close relationship with, and deep respect for Rozanov. Profoundly influenced by the radical experimentation in his peer's writings, he dedicated to him a short piece entitled "Kukkha" and intended as a kind of celebratory Rozanovian pastiche.3 But the text that, in her outstanding book on Remizov, Greta Slobin sees as his supreme achievement owes still more to the innovatary methods of Fallen Leaves? Whirlwind Russia (Vzvikhrennaia rus) is

ostensibly a diary of a writer's day-to-day experiences recorded between 1917 and 1921, of which portions were published with the double-edged hindsight of an irrevocably final emigration.5 However, it substitutes for the nostalgic past-orientedness of the quintessential emigre text an overwhelming sense of the all-toopresent moment. Taking its cue from Rozanov's trilogy, it is compiled from a collation of brief anecdotes transcribed from one individual's increasingly difficult daily routine, philosophical aphorisms, rhetorical addresses to the Russian people, spontaneously recorded dreams and revolutionary slogans and documents inserted without comment. There are, however, differences. Remizov was an accomplished writer in his own right by the time he began work on Whirlwind Russia. His fiction had already exerted influence on Belyi, and was later cited as the inspiration for much literature of the nineteen twenties.6 Unlike Rozanov, whose discourse of the self originated in the writer's earlier non-fictional writings,

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Remizov passed through an apprenticeship in the craft of storytelling before arriving at his brand of autobiography. As a result he established a distinctive narrative voice whose tones are keenly sensed in the chronicle. Two of the hallmarks of Remizov's prose were (i) the systematic appropriation of the substance and language of dream and folk-tale and (ii) the development of a version of skaz narration that has constantly confounded critics.7 These, like other features of Remizov's prose, were conceived in the overall context of the author's lifeproject — the renewal of the Russian "Word." 8 Such differences will help to explain my reasons for positioning Whirlwind Russia at the summit of the process it has been this book's task to describe. The foundation supporting Remizov's project is his discovery that the havoc wreaked by the revolution conferred on every detail of life a sense of drama that in one stroke evacuated the word "everyday" of its meaning. Describing on the first page how an old woman is kept from sleep in a train compartment by an unruly passenger, Remizov plunges his reader into the midst of a scene that would, even now, strike any Russian as archetypally routine. The writer, who is henceforth ever at hand to bear witness to his compatriots' daily tribulations, furnishes the symbolic key within which this most ordinary of happenings and those to follow are rendered ^ra-ordinary: "Old woman of ours from Kostroma, Russia of ours, why did they disturb you? For you had settled down, and you were ready to rest until sunrise, but no, they had to shove you around. And why did that stupid stallholder have to climb in with her blanket to wake you up?" 9 Since the brutal events of the Civil War released Russian byt from its cocoon of complacent familiarity, Remizov is without contradiction able to center his narrative concerns on something as mundane as the daily loaf of bread: "Prishvin's flour had all been used for pancakes. There was no bread and Prishvin had disappeared. There was no bread and the oatmeal was right down to the bottom of the jar. If we could at least get some oatmeal. I thought I'd go to Nadezhdinskaia street on Monday to the literary cooperative: perhaps they'll have some

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to give away there." 10 The chronicler can incorporate as many quotidian fragments as he chooses, for in the midst of revolution each such fragment becomes worthy of narration. To live in revolutionary everyday life is, by definition, to live in extremis. In a reversal of logic, the normal (that which conforms to a predictable daily norm) is made to change places with the momentous (that which justifies the attribution of narrativity): "And so the most important matters are now £a return ticket' and chow to have a bath' (in a time of war and revolution that's not so simple), whereas all those 'events' — the State Convention, Kornilov - disappeared."11 Remizov is adamant that the real revolution takes place not in the peripetiae of the newspaper headlines, but in the tumultuous, whirlwind of little sticks (palochki) - his equivalent to Rozanov's fallen leaves. Each palochka embodies the motion of the revolution itself: "[A] 11 these twisted little sticks, revolving in the whirlwind are the dance of the storm, the dance of the battles . . . the dance of the r e v o l u t i o n . " (emphasis Remizov's)12 When relating an ocurrence from the realm of the everyday, Remizov, like no writer before, can be confident that he is not subordinating that occurrence to something more abstract. He can dispense, too, with the need defiantly to brandish the sword of an anti-aesthetic in explanation for the switch in focus. Remizov takes delight in pointing out that fantastic drama is now the exclusive property of the real-life daily grind: " 'Hunting for water!' Noone will believe it. And we are busy with that each day: water doesn't make it up to the sixth floor! . . . In the morning the water was turned on. I was overjoyed as I am overjoyed at warmth and light. What bliss when there's water flowing from the tap." 13 Remizov sporadically intersperses his chronicle with unprocessed, image-by-image transcriptions of dreams consisting of haphazard concatenations of bric-a-brac from the previous day. The transpositions and displacements to which, in keeping with the Freudian "dreamwork," these trivia are subjected, produce an effect that, though off-center and hallucinatory, is barely more bizarre than the transfigurations worked on daily routine by waking life. One of the points made through such

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sequences (distinguishable from "real" events by the fact that they are reported in inset paragraphs) is that dream and everyday routine have become one and the same: Some red guardsmen came to search us. — "You have no weapons?" — "Nothing except scissors," I say. They looked at my silver wall covered with various scarecrows. - in Moscow. . . there is a pond . . . full of pancakes like lily leaves. That's on our way: we're going to Moscow. I. Gessen asks "And how are things with the fortification?" ("Fortification" is the handing in of bread and grocery ration cards at the grocery counter: it's a very tough affair, you've got to be in time and there's a big line!) "N. A. Kotlaiarevskaia," I say, "has had them printed on an iron bar!" . . . "And what about the pancakes?" It's a pity to leave them. I looked out of the window: there were boats on the pond netting pancakes like butterflies.14 In revolution, the everyday and the routine (normally synonyms) are rent apart as repetition from day to day is replaced by a daily "making anew" in which every little event is "for the first time": "With the revolution the whole of life was turned on its head and was with each new day being uprooted. Need crawled out of every chink . . . ordinary people . . . found themselves in the hardest situation and lived out their days at a pace that set the head spinning."15 There is no possibility here of an authoritative position from which each palochka is assigned a meaning. This motivates Remizov's choice of the chronicle format for his narrative, the whole of which bespeaks a precipitous lurching forward from one crisis-ridden day to the next. The patterning of plot is eschewed. There is, for example, no logic to the chronological ordering of the dream sequences which cease as suddenly as they commence; moreover, the chronicle is, like the author's earlier fictions, littered with incidents that, receiving no further mention, are lost forever in the whirlwind's wake.16 Liberated from a controlling narrating presence, each fragment acquires a supreme singularity conferred by reality itself. Everyday life comes to consist not of the mindless performance of anonymous routines but from instants - absolute in the

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unspeakable crisis that they entail or the unrepeatable joys that they bring: It's impossible to go on living like this. Let them at least give us an apartment: however bad it is for everyone else they're at least living like humans, while even a healthy person wouldn't survive at our home . . . I'll wait a bit, be late home so that I miss the time when they turn the water on in the laundry and noone will bring any up and we'll be left without water. [W]hen the decree forbidding private enterprise was issued, the grocery store was temporarily turned into a used goods store . . . they were also temporarily left one rear room . . . in this one rear room you could find everything that was earlier for sale, only at a much higher price. But on the other hand there was something that they had never had before — little, unusually delicious black bread rusks with just vinegar added . . . And in the darkness I could make out two shop assistants sitting. . . "They'll never find us here," they said in unison, "we're quite hidden." "If you were any lower," I thought, "you'd fall through the earth to paradise beyond."17

Remizov shares Rozanov's hostility to the portrayal of quotidian minutiae as "trivial" (lacking in the significance required by the anonymity of the printed word). The public is denigrated as predictable and normative, the ordinary extolled as a million engaging anomalies whose deviation from the ghostly standard is a mark of their emplotment of the essentially real. Many anecdotes feature the irrepressible chudiki of Russia's whirlwind days: the woman who, exploiting a new decree, renames herself Anna Karenina, the merchant who broadcasts a bureaucratic agreement he has drawn up with his common-law wife detailing complex financial conditions, the Pushkin-reading Finnish house maid who speaks using only masculine agreements.18 Like Rozanov, Remizov contrasts the concreteness of daily life with the anonymity of public discourse, frequently reproducing impersonal newspaper headlines, street signs or revolutionary decrees alongside the subjective intimacies of the everyday. Thus a segment in which the writer is recalling a close friend is followed by a list of unattributed quotations from the press: "From the papers: 'I repeat, that the internal

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enemies are precisely the capitalists, big and small and all traders.' 'I propose to the convention a lottery and everyone who pulls a straw should go and kill one bourgeois. 3"19 Remizov thus establishes a Rozanovian contrast in values made specific when he reports the death of an acquaintance: "[TJhey'll tell you all about [Shchekoldin's] work for the revolution, whereas I will mention only his great honesty and his love for birch trees and . . . bluebells." 20 The force of the comparison is still more keenly felt when he notes the passing of a less celebrated (and, thus, more narrative-worthy) individual: "The old woman Ol'ga Ivanovna, Maria Konstantinovna's mother, has died. I will remember Ol'ga Ivanovna for her tea: nobody knew how to make tea quite like her, and that's why it was so especially cosy in her home." 21 The world of revolutionary politics is one of unthinking slogans detached from the realities of the lives they are designed to influence. It is a world deprived of narratability, one whose events amount to a mechanical acting out of abstract formulae. Remizov refuses to expend his creative energy on them, disdainfully presenting them in their prepackaged forms: Two worlds are in struggle: a new world and an old world And a red wave is washing over the boat And above the look-out post of all proletarian masts Thunders concrete, iron and granite. (Verses on a child's grocery ration card).22 The public realm of revolution acquires the attributes of byt ritualism, predictability and non-narrativity. Key political events are passed over in less than a sentence, while whole paragraphs are given over to fragments of "ordinary" conversations overheard in the street: "The New Year of 1921 has arrived - the fourth of the revolution . . . The Kronshdadt rebellion. Lenin's speech about NEP . . . I'm walking slowly along . . . people pass by saying - 'tomorrow the crisis is expected: she's got typhoid. Of course she must have got sick on the way: they took 45 days to get here from the Crimea . . .' " 2 3 The subjective domain of daily life becomes the exclusive site

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of the engaging and narratable. Of far greater import than the inept verses just cited are Remizov's efforts amid the privations of revolution to organize a name-day party for a neighbour (Taras Kliuchkov) with the curious nickname of "never-despondent-beard." The chronicler details the guests' names and clothing and the dishes prepared, ending with a scene whose synthesis of the bizarre, the frenetic and the utterly mundane defines the tone sustained throughout: I saw how the teacher Valentina Aleksandrovna, frozen stiff in her shoes made of rope, pitifully looked at the empty plate: perhaps they'll find her a bite? She couldn't get here any earlier: she had a long way to travel . . . I saw how S. L. Rafalovich . . . the author of inimitable aphorisms . . . still conserving the appearance of a welldressed (if dishevelled) man arrived in a tie . . . to press flesh with the name-day man and congratulated Shaposhnikov who . . . having eaten his share was explaining the wonders of electrification . . . "-Mother of God, Mother of God!" said [Kliuchkov] clutching at his beard. 24 The tale-teller's aesthetic function merges with the documentary role of the chronicler-as-witness. Unlike public affairs, daily life now consists of nothing but narrative-worthy material: " 'Debates' and 'politics' I don't read, whereas the chronicles of happenings and events . . . no, that's not right . . . for in our time everything is a happening and everything is an event!" 25 As the chronicle proceeds, Remizov becomes ever more cognizant of a liberating sense of privilege. For, at the center of the whirlwind, he has discovered a way of life that is not byt, a routine that refuses to embrace "the routine." What he rejects are the stagnating rituals and eternal recurrences of byt which, following Chekhov, he associates with the rural provinces. To these he opposes the new urban way of life, the transformative motion of a byt- become-zhizn: I cannot live for long in the country. That life of sequence: eating, growing, marrying - green, mud, quiet . . . No I can't live according to "natural laws" . . . It's time to go home to fireplaces and hunger. I know that the most ominous of all storms - revolution - will change nothing, but I also know that we are lost without that storm . . . I want it to hit hard, so that for at least once we are made to . . . clutch

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at our heads, otherwise our petty dog's existence [zhit'e] will poison any real life [zhizn'].26 Remizov insists that it is only in Russia that this life can be lived, and thus that Russia is the rightful home of the artist. The rest of the world becomes the home of a now exiled byt\ "You know . . . abroad . . . it's even harder for the Russian writer, for it's only in Russia that something is happening . . . whereas here [abroad] it's like a desert for the Russian."27 A full circle has been turned. If daily life had earlier defined itself as grim, eventless anti-narrative in opposition to the falsity of fictional plot, then in revolutionary Russia, it becomes the exclusive locus of narrative. In Whirlwind Russia Remizov spins tale after tale yet remains rooted in authentic, everyday reality.28 However, the nature and number of anecdotes ensure that they too retain an affinity with anti-narrative. The eventsequences that form their basis jettison literary plot's temporal framing and controlled release of knowledge. Remizov's miniature narratives are ephemerally brief because there is no temporal vantage point from which the revolution's trajectory might be traced, while their off-center content is owed to the fact that the whirlwind to whose tune they dance has no semantic reference point from which to construct hierarchies of significance. One tale, which, unusually, meanders on for pages, describes the hardships resulting from a heap of dog excrement deposited on an apartment stairways, the laborious bureaucratic procedures required for it to be removed, and the wondrous ending in which the dog returns to eat its own waste! To question the story's relevance is to misunderstand Remizov's enterprise. Worse still, would be to dismiss the tale as some scabrous jest: "If it had happened in the summer [the pile] would have dried up after a week - you could have cleared it with your bare hands. And in winter it would have frozen over . . . But now it was autumn . . . cif only the frost would come soon!' Don't you laugh, this was no laughing matter and needed to be seen to at once." 29 Nor, given the dissipation of the very notion of a norm from which deviations might be marked "fantastic," should we

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marvel at the conflation of the unlikely with the ordinary. A fantastic narrative anchored in everyday routine is now no contradiction, since the everyday hardships that ordinary people face are far more anomalous than the facile sloganizing of the revolutionaries: "I have no time to read the paper. I looked once by accident: 'Democratic Convention,5 and I remembered the words 'Long Live the Eternal Revolution!' But I've got to get money - 150 roubles!"30 The rhetorical refrain punctuating Whirlwind Russia — "Revolution or a cup of tea?" (revoliutsiia, Hi chai pit'?) — seems to propose a choice between the contemplative passivity of life in an intellectual's home and the rigors of revolution. Remizov frequently follows Rozanov in selecting the domestic option. But, in a post-Rozanovian twist, he points out that it is now the "cup of tea" which offers the best prospect of epic action, that the vortex of the whirlwind is located in the midst of the traumas involved in obtaining tea: Shestov. . . put the kettle on. "Revolution or a cup of tea?" And he laughs with his eyes, not allowing me to reply. . . Revolution or a cup of tea? In other words, the Elemental Flying Sticks or stubborn refusal? Those who are in the element - in "action" - are the happy ones . . . But a cup of tea is in no way as easy as it seems. For, you see, in order to make a cup of tea you've first got to have tea. And in order to get tea . . .31 Consequently, it is the "cup of tea" which best lends itself to narrativity, furnishing its own equivalent to the scheming subterfuges of literary plot: "The day has finished - a day of disorder and senselessness! A day full of hunger pangs and the most cunning of plans devised to obtain some kind of provisions. A day circling between work, standing in lines, expectation and a pitiful lunch." 32 And the little joys and fears of routine existence are promoted to the status of miraculous wonder or brute terror, freeing the chronicler of the need to indulge in the polemical strategies of Rozanov to justify their inclusion: "Having eaten the lot, the dog licked the floor and . . . turned away . . . And only when its steps had died away did Skvortsov come and make straight for the pile: but it was as

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if there had never been any pile, it had gone without trace. An authentically miraculous occurrence!"33 Remizov's conviction that the revolution's exhilarating pace had conferred gianthood on Russia's smallest people, transforming the routine movements of their lives into epic struggles for survival is reflected in the designation of one section of the chronicle "Contemporary legends." Much of Remizov's earlier career had consisted of ornate retellings of folktales.34 This, along with his association with elitist journals like Vesy and Zolotoe runo had earned him the reputation of being the "artist's artist."35 But the self-styled intelligent now realizes that, in order to intensify his aesthetic revival, he need look no further than the daily lives of the ordinary people around him.36 The singularization of daily routine in Bolshevik Russia profoundly affected the way that Remizov conceived his artistic selfhood which now has its central axis in the refrain "revolution or a cup of tea?" At face value, the formula encapsulates a dichotomy that had long beset Russian culture: that between the elemental forces of the narod and the sympathetic but estranged rationalizers of the intelligentsia. At times, Remizov adopts an extreme position and (as many an embattled Russian intellectual was to do in the years to follow) portrays his side of the divide as representing the freedom of the self against the herd instincts of a brutish mob. The alienation asserts itself through the first part of the chronicle where the narrator emphasizes his detached role as a witness of the storm around him, an observer whose refined intellect allows him to rationalize and frame images of what he sees, but at an agonizing arm's length.37 Fragments are held together with the unifying phrase "I saw" or "I witnessed." Indeed, the symbolic opening scene has Remizov "watching the old woman" (the rudely awakened mother Russia), "following her with his eyes" - a phrase which is repeated twice.38 The discrete blocks of dialogue in which common, anonymous prejudices are presented as if overheard by a horrified intelligent only serve to reinforce the estrangement, as does the intrusion of the chilling slogans of the revolution. The dichotomy takes on a different aspect when viewed from the eye of the storm. For Russia's whirlwind years not only

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sweep away the ground on which the tea-sipping intelligent stood ("in order to make a cup of tea you've first got to have tea"), they hurl him to the center of the maelstrom, ensuring that it is now he who must act to survive, thrust up against the painful surfaces of daily existence and forcibly liberated from obsession with rational abstractions (now the prerogative of "the people"). In short, it establishes the intelligent as more narod-likt than the narod itself.39 This, as Remizov the chronicler points out, was true historically, since the Bolsheviks assigned intellectuals to the penultimate category of social privilege. But Remizov the artist raises the truth to a higher level when he transforms the detached intelligent^ own insignia - his spectacles with their special, myopic vision — into the very instrument by which he attains at-oneness with the everyday sufferings around him: On the corner of Bolshoi Prospekt and the fourteenth line stands a woman . . . and she always gets donations . . . A week passed, then another — and there was no sign of the old woman . . . And today I look and there she is! . . . I saw and understood . . . that she had been very ill these last weeks, but that now it was a little better. And I also saw in her eyes a gentle preparedness to bear out these terrible days. And the woman, I saw that too, she burst into tears, for her own reasons — everyone is brimming over with their own reasons — And I quietly walked on with sharpened eyes — blind, making out only unnoticeable trivia. And I don't know what to do and where to go when I see these things, and I don't know how to put them right.40 The transition from "I saw" to "I experienced" is the more remarkable since, according to his carefully crafted literary identity and, as befits the bespectacled intellectual, Remizov is an introverted loner, ill at ease in the world of people and things: "When I go out onto the street, things run away from me . . . And the first disaster in my life occurred precisely because I went outside . . . When I walk along the street and in front of me, twisting in the wind, things are blown away from me . . . In the world of people I would surely come to no good." 41 Remizov's social ineptness forms a natural unity with his cerebral nature and his impractical fascination with the distortions produced by his "shorn eyesight."42 It comes as a

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revelation when we discover, that, far from disjoining Remizov from the world, the cursed gift of artistic vision with its myopic focus on life's scattered trivia conjoins him in co-suffering with it in a dynamic way that empowers him to penetrate through that world's dead surface layers to its pulsating essence: It's the third month of the revolution. And from the tension produced by the welling-up of all my emotions I am as if made naked. My conscience aches . . . And I pity everyone . . . the entire world, all things seem to have merged with me, I pass through heaps of them, tear myself away, force myself through and behind me there stretches an entire tail . . . and my heart beats like the thousand hearts of all that is living from man to "soulless" object . . . Against the force of the tornado of crowding objects with which I am now overgrown like a corpse I am penetrating through to the living source of life [zhizn] which beats with a living heart.43 Thus, the immutable paradox in which the Russian writer rails against alienation and rationalism from within a discourse which is itself the highest achievement of an alienated rationalist culture is overcome. Remizov's growing conviction that he and other artists have been propelled from life's ethereal outer reaches to its earthy core is responsible for the dispersal throughout the text of a rollcall of the Silver-age cultural elite. Hardly a page goes by without the mention of a Shestov, a Blok, a Belyi, a Berdiaev, a Zamiatin, a Shklovskii or a Petrov-Vodkin. But Remizov turns name-dropping on its head, citing famous people in order to draw attention to the shared ordinariness of citer and cited (with the twist, of course, that this is no ordinary ordinariness). Many of the associated anecdotes are of a markedly mundane nature: Shestov putting on the kettle, Zamiatin arriving at the nameday celebration, Petrov-Vodkin looking for somewhere to have a bite to eat. Furthermore, the famous names take their place alongside the "little people" with whom Remizov also shared these terrible days and whom he invariably names in full. Writers, in other words, are as immersed in the concrete exigencies of the daily round as are storekeepers and street beggars. Whirlwind Russia is written in contrary celebration of

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this unexpected casting-off of the burden of nineteenth-century superfluity. In sections entitled "Windows" ("Oknishcha") and "On free bread" ("JViz darovykh khlebakh") where Remizov adopts the gossip narration which he had employed in his earlier fiction, he approaches Rozanov's elusive discourse of mutual intimacy.44 The voice here is collective and skaz-\ike (it speaks in an earthy, oral register). However, the collective in question is no anonymous abstraction ("Russian folk consciousness," "the people"), but rather that of the Petersburg apartment block where Remizov lived in enforced intimacy with a group of neighbors. When he writes, "we," "in our block," the first person plural pronoun is no literary affectation, but rather an indication that he can now integrate his own voice with that of the real Russians with whom he shares these unique circumstances, la videl ("I saw") has been substituted by u nas . . . ("at our place . . . "). 4 5 What is important to a group is synonymous with what is intimate to it. Those happenings that are of general value (events relating to the revolutionary arena) are accorded summary attention. The closing of a neighbourhood market, by contrast, is described as the most momentous of events: The last days of frost were crowned by the most momentous of events in our neighbourhood; people are talking about nothing else. Not the police searches - that's such nonsense it's not even worth talking about: noone has or has ever had any weapons. But when there are no groceries, even a small supply! That's much more serious and much more disheartening: They've closed our only market!46 There is nothing more disorienting than to have to listen to other people's gossip. The stories that Remizov tells towards the end of Whirlwind Russia appear pointlessly offbeat to a late twentieth century western reader, but to the people with whom he shares the experiences, they are eminently tellable precisely because they are unique to that group. The "dog excrement" narrative is one example. Another centers around a second unusual dog called "Nakhodka." Narrating within the lexicon of a collective but far from abstract narrative persona, Remizov relates how the dog's owner - a bread merchant - departs on a

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business trip. When the neighbourhood bread supply dwindles and people are woken by barking, they assume that a thief is to blame, only to discover a forlorn, but well-sated Nakhodka. On his return, the embarrassed owner refuses to believe his mistake until a pair of scales verify his overcalculation.47 Unlike Rozanov's plotless "fallen leaves," the "Nakhodka" tale possesses the linearity, twists and denouement of conventional plot. Like the gossip stories of Sologub's Petty Demon, what it lacks is the sense that these stratagems might interest an anonymous readership. But, trapped within narrative fiction (with its requirements of universal "readability"), Sologub cannot but retain the negativity associated with gossip's antiaesthetic. Remizov, for whom reality has shifted the margins of the artistic, is without contradiction, able to celebrate gossip's integration of collectivity and intimacy, self and other, while savoring anew the value it places on story-telling. Barely hampered by the literary value system, Remizov tells stories whose rules are very different from those of "framed" narrative. A certain Gusev uses the passports and ration cards of a husband, wife and baby to obtain extra provisions, until the authorities ask to see in person the (non-existent) baby, and, moreover, the couple decide to divorce. At this point he has to arrange for a baby's sudden "death" and his own fake divorce to annul the false marriage he had registered.48 With the much attenuated temporal frame, every juncture in the story asserts itself as a kind of "present," a singular instance in its own right, necessitating, like the junctures of the classic gossip tale, digressions, subnarratives and tangential speculation. Even the husband, Sergeev, who features only briefly at the beginning and end, suddenly acquires presence when the matter of his divorce is introduced and he furnishes an explanation that is truly singular in its own right: "As a result of the worldwide earthquake - wrote Sergeev - I thought of getting married again, and I am obliged to get divorced from Maria Petrovna: I therefore need her passport immediately."49 The weakened narrating frame is responsible for the constant appearance and disappearance of new characters who, once their tale is told, are abandoned forever. Sofia Petrovna —

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a husbandless woman mockingly nicknamed "Vorob'ev's fiancee" - attracts eight full pages of narrative attention only to be swiftly "forgotten."50 The same property explains the metonymic mechanism by which the action is advanced: gossip tales wander from person to person, topic to topic on the basis of temporo-spatial juxtaposition: as soon as a new element is introduced, the focus switches accordingly. The "Vorob'ev's fiancee" episode starts out as the tale of a woman's efforts to secure a partner. Half-way through, a similarly blighted girlfriend, Nadia, is mentioned. From there on the narrative turns to the relationship between the two women, ending with an incident having little to do with the main drama - the theft by Sofia of some food from Nadia which she sells to buy herself some new shoes. One mini-narrative dissolves imperceptibly into the next in self-perpetuating succession. The stories are related by a narratorial persona who integrates into a seamless unity the distinctive voice of the writer Remizov and that of collective wisdom of ordinary people, confirming that daily life now provides the only source and motivation for story-telling. One of the bold conclusions that Remizov draws from his conversion from writer as observer into writer as participant is that self and everyday life form an organic unity. Everything belonging to everyday life belongs ipso facto to self, and vice versa, so that, when chronicling his experiences, Remizov feels no need to justify the introduction of characters from his earlier fiction. At one point, alongside authentic facts, he describes how Akumovna, one of the characters in Sisters of the Cross (Krestovye sestry), mingles comments about her fictional apartment block and the suicide of the main protagonist with complaints about conditions in revolutionary Russia: On the Day of Atonement Akumovna arrived . . . Twelve years ago, on the ninth ofJanuary, "when the workmen on the Nevskii Prospekt washed human brains and blood from the sidewalk," the trouble subsided and Akumovna remained unharmed to live out the rest of her life, but what's going to happen the day after tomorrow? . . . She was terrified to say. And she was afraid not for herself — what's it to her? — but for her nephews . . . God knows whether they'll come back . . . And all because there's nothing to eat, no bread, the bakers

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shops have all shut down . . . Formerly I dressed Akumovna in firtree silver, and she would sit in silver drinking tea, but now she's not up to tea, or silver.51 Put another way, to live in daily life is to tell of it: art becomes the internal force transfiguring the everyday into the living. Since self and daily reality are one, the status of the dream transcripts becomes that of authentic document of the revolution (or rather of the unity formed by the self and daily life in revolution). Indeed, the function of dreams seems to be to provide a place where everyday trivia are extracted from the unnarratable monotony of routine and accorded — via the self— the singularity that is truly theirs: "[T]he great events of these days turned out to be closed to the eyes and there remained one thing - the afterglow, the refracted light which is reflected in dreams, and the accidentally overheard word . . . and fragments of an event glimpsed out of the corner of the eye for which nothing even flickered."52 Situated neither in the alien realm of history, nor in a sphere of daily life separate from the self who lives it, nor again in the individual consciousness, the real revolution is inaccessible to normal perception for it is not a fixed entity but a swirling vortex, the vanishing point where history, daily life and the self cancel one another out, where the eye that sees the storm becomes the eye of the storm, or rather its (telling) C T \ The storm cannot, therefore, be cognized through a recording of objective happenings, of the self in revolution, or, for that matter, of daily life in revolution (all of which presuppose fixed objects and a discrete analysing subject). All that can be traced is the refracted light emanating from this shifting point of intersection: in the dream fragment, the overheard conversation and so on. The prominence Remizov gives to dreams does not privilege a subjective, visionary self. The same otsvet is just as liable to be captured in one of the bytovye fragments which, to balance the equation, are no more "documentary" and no less "selforiented" than dreams. The categories of self and outside reality are rendered defunct. Indeed, in one lucid segment, the afterglow from the everyday scene around Remizov suddenly penetrates his soul, bursting forth to illuminate the entire

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street, bathing self, revolution and daily life in a single, blinding light: At the pharmacy I found a line . . . My eyes were particularly struck by a red-haired man, taller than all the others, with a stretched out neck: his turn was coming soon . . . "Baldin, teacher" — he said — "cod-liver oil" . . . I myself can't stand this oil. I feel nauseous at the very name . . . But for this teacher Baldin, for his poverty, his state of abandonment and the pretaste of happiness he felt I too took in with my soul that substance which I had found so disgusting. . . and when he stretched out his hands to the capsule and made some silent motion of the lips . . . everything was overturned inside me. And I felt a light strike me. And this light, filling my soul, lit up the whole street.53 It would be incorrect to speak of the submerging of the self in some amorphous collectivity. This is, after all, autobiography, but autobiography in which the discrete, spatiotemporally restricted individual subject designated by the prefix "auto-" is replaced by a self who is at once the writer Remizov and the ordinary people in their daily toil. Meanwhile, the documentary account of an objective life-history suggested by the term "biography" is superseded by a discourse that is authentic because creative and therefore transformative of the empirical reality in which it is grounded.54 The tension resulting from the articulation of this transcendent entity from within a discourse of the empirical individual reaches a climax when Remizov's self is split apart by the whirlwind which is now both outside and inside him: I didn't always understand what was being spoken inside me, and often there were no words, but some kind of spiralling here and there . . . the whirlwind had taken hold of my soul. I give voice to all my thoughts: I'm afraid I'll be split asunder. I speak and speak and speak and I don't know what I'm saying, I speak my thoughts: they're like a whirlwind.55 This new self is depicting source and object of depiction.56 Peter Alberg Jensen negotiates what he sees as the problem of locating a Remizovian speaking subject with reference to the "new objectivism" of European modernism in which the

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creating author is "life itself." Significantly, Jensen's rereading of Remizov (which rather than transcending the subject/object dichotomy, resolves it in favor of the second term) makes no reference to Remizov's autobiographical writings. 57 The Remizovian self enters this iconic existence-as-transformation through the Word which he, shaman-like, contains within him - a Word that speaks with the voice of long-suffering Russia: " O , fated motherland: punished by God and by God visited! They'll erase your name, and who will remember whether you once stood or not? I will preserve my Russian soul with a belief in your difficult truth, I will treasure your memory in my heart, while my Word - Your Speech - lives on in this cross-burdened world." 5 8 As custodian of, and jewelsmith to Russia's most precious stone - the Word - the writer simultaneously constitutes its soul and transfigures it with a light that burns forever: And can I abandon you, I, a Russian, the son of a Russian, I, from the very bowels of your earth? . . . I have brought you valuable gifts so that you might become brighter and more joyful. From your selfilluminating jewels, from your pearls, from your words I have woven a white necklace to lay on your white breast; With a fevered, neverdying memory, with the outpouring of a heart, with a feat, with a cross-like torment before the cross borne by the whole world - that's how a man should live and love. Dostoyevsky is Russia. The sonorous Russia whose praise was sung by my grieving Word, and the new Russia which has yet to speak, the Russia that is rising stormily from the dust — And there is no Russia without Dostoyevsky. Russia, impoverished, cold, hungry, is burning with the fiery Word.59 Remizov's literary word thus finally coincides with the iconic Word as metatext - a Word that, in speaking both the transcendent self and Russia's identity, is above all an act of self-sacrificial involvement in the everyday reality from whose center it emerges: Two women came up behind me — ordinary women. One is telling the other about some man or other . . . who has absolutely nothing and is in the depths of poverty . . . and this man says "Well . . . if you've got nothing then you can at least share a kind word!" . . . I also have nothing and there is nothing for me to share with people — I'm a man of the street, a beggar! But I do have something that is

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bigger than any riches or food supplies, I have the word. And I want to share that word.60 Remizov's word is no different from the thousands of other acts to be found throughout Russian life - acts that are ordinary and yet, in their revolutionary context, far from routine - acts which shine with the "heroism of the everyday," with the light that defines the human as a daily reenactment of the divine, enabling us to see in the participatory, iconic sense: Every living thing . . . shines with its own light, so do the thoughts and projects of human beings. The word too shines with its own light . . . And the light is from "the human" in man and the human in man is that yearning of the soul, that rock on which the impoverished, torn-apart world rests . . . Amidst the worst in bestiality . . . in this darkness, it will suddenly flare up with a warm spark and light up all around.61 To live a moment iconically is to live it with, and for an intimate, embodied other, and thus to incarnate its essence — to realize something internal to it, thereby overcoming its momentariness (its status as single instance of an external pattern). The word may be an act of goodness, or of mourning, an anthem of praise, or an atonement for sins. It is never a passive shadow of the alienated visual image. This is why the chronicle exhibits so many shifts in modality and is liable to plunge into an effusive emotionalism more appropriate to a medieval song of lament: "O my grief-stricken motherland, my mother, humiliated! I am bowing down to your wounds . . . I will not leave you even in your sins."62 Remizov's synthesis of chronicling and creating underlies passages based on the project on which he was working during the period covered by Whirlwind Russia — Russia in Letters (Rossiia

v pis'menakh), in which he aims to recreate Petrine Russia through the manuscripts of the period. Such passages are fully integrated with the grim material that surrounds it, since, no less than the latter, the historical sections unite (albeit in a different mix) everyday life, creativity and reflections on Russia's destiny. When commenting on his historical project, Remizov states that he is "recreating Old Russia from nothing, out of the fragments of documents" — an activity which

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complements the simultaneous forging of a New Russia from the shards of revolutionary contemporaneity63 In Whirlwind Russia, art is reconceived as the creation of life (zhizn) out of the everyday — life as participation and unceasing transformation. This shift is reinforced throughout the chronicle by a circular chain of identifications linking the artist and suffering, suffering and grief, grief and Russia, Russia and destruction, destruction and rebirth, rebirth and life, life and action, action and redemptive self-sacrifice, and, finally, selfsacrifice and the artistic Word. As the chain unfolds, the whirlwind comes to be overshadowed by an image of fire - derived partly from Heraclitus - and forming a vitally important figure whose symbolic meaning resolves the chain of associations, turning circle into spiral.64 It is the fire of destruction ("a fiery whirlwind is sweeping Russia"), of pain and Christ-like suffering ("a fiery crown burns my brain"), of creativity and the Word (" . . . to set fire to the earth with the word"), of life and renewal ("A fiery whirlwind . . . carries the seeds of spring"), and of divine light.65 From his childhood when he dreamed of being an Old Believer (and even Awakum himself), Remizov had associated fire with the self-immolating schismatics. It had thus always been capable of uniting destruction, sacrifice, Russia, dreaming, creative renewal and the self. The key link in this chain is that between the Word and self-immolation. Never an alienated reflection, the Word has instead been the driving force behind every excruciating effort in Russia's endless struggle to transform itself by assuming the oppressive burden of its history — a struggle which it embodies in its inner essence. The Russian Word is epitomized by Dostoyevsky, from whom Remizov quotes entire passages without compromising his own authenticity as a writer (Dostoyevsky=Russia=The Word=Remizov). Dostoyevsky is the heart beating painfully at the center of existence, the zhizn pumping its own life-blood into the outer reaches of byt [EJverything that I see and everything that I hear is penetrated by pain. The street, the people I meet . . . painfully beat me across my heart. And I can't take my eyes away - they don't see me.

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[M]y heart, growing faint, beat together with the whole earth - with the heart of the forests, the fields and the hills . . . a strange feeling, most acute, penetrated all of my being. And this feeling sliced through the days.66 The blood of suffering, meanwhile, is the blood of the Word and of the self as writer: "I cried to the whole world from ocean to ocean. And my words were like blood, like fire, like stone. And with my words I spat out my blood, and fire and stone into the cruel valley where the soulless knife and the indifferent bullet were deciding fate."67 Remizov invokes Gogol's conviction that every Russian writer is a spark (ogonek) burning at that country's core: "Gogol: 'Poets. . . are fires flying forth from the people, advance messengers heralding its strength'." 68 And when one, such as Blok, dies, Remizov writes of a "fire being extinguished." The fire of the literary word equates, as for Belyi, to the fiery gospel tongues bringing God's Word to all men. Thus, Russian literature transfigures everything with its searing light. On the penultimate page of the final section — entitled, appropriately, "The Light of the Word" - the writer reflects on how his narrative memory enables the words through which it is expressed, icon-like, to transfigure reality, making it more lifelike than life itself: "What happiness to carry away into life shining memories: an event unrepeatable, but alive, more alive than it was in life, because, as a memory, it has been pondered over and given expression, and also because in its depths an unsung feeling burns with light."69 Since the fire generating the light - the fire of the Word - is kindled at the heart of the everyday, it is able to make every tiny facet of that reality glow in its presence: Into the Department of Justice . . . some woman or other entered to plead for her husband . . . who'd been put away for drinking . . . to ask for him to be released, and she's asking not with words but with her whole being . . . And I see . . . how the administrator in charge writes: "Release." And I feel my light spilling out. . . I love everything that's alive in the world — and everything that's alive shines, and everything shines from the biggest star to the tiniest grain

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of sand, and from the grand word to the fleetmg thought: I love the sun, the stars, the wind, the earth.70 The stars mentioned here complete the associative journey whose trajectory traverses Whirlwind Russia. They are Remizov's own stars, high in the Russian sky, "beckoning to him like sisters," shining with the light of the heavens. They are also the myriad sparks emitted from the eternally radiant fire burning deep within Russia herself.71 Significantly, the only contrast drawn between the stars and the earth below is couched in an opposition contrived to be shattered: "And I do not know why there is this sticky, foul mess, these crowded, stale living conditions, when there are pure stars wandering so broadly in the pure sky above . . . I'll tell you, man is perhaps even more alive amidst all this filth and this fairy-tale catastrophe."72 Heaven is no Haven, no final refuge at the end of time. It is instead forged in the here and now, through an immersion in, and transfiguration of earth — a Dostoyevskian assumption of responsibility for earth's sins. When Remizov writes "I'm ready to accept everything . . . I've realized that all this disaster that is our life must be born," he cleanses the words "accept" and "bear" of any stoic fatalism, infusing them with a sense of dynamic action, of suffering as Christ-like passion.73 It is this passion that ignites the fire of the heavens, which is also that of the iconic aesthetic — art not as passive reflection of the prose of earth, nor as the poetic ideal of a distant heaven, but as the act which unceasingly transfigures one into the other. The Orthodox tradition of "man become God" is evoked in the sequences towards the end of the book when Remizov offers eulogies to Dostoyevskii and Blok, and earlier, when he relates his hallucinatory visions. Here, the scorching fire of fever conflates Remizov's suffering with that of Christ lying parched on the cross. That these images derive from dreams and artistic citations in no way diminishes their value, since Remizovian reality dissolves the distinctions between fact and creation, self and other, individual voice and voice of Russia. In the vision of writer (man of everyday life) as Christ that Remizov imagines (lives) during his illness and returns to in the

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Dostoyevsky sections the crucifixion acts to restore the repressed semantic link between Christ's passion and passion as sensuality. It is a crucifixion culminating in a resurrection in reverse in which Christ sinks deep into the bowels of the earth to emerge in a fiery blaze on the other side. Here the writer describes a route to salvation through intimacy with the moist, fertile body of Mother Earth, thus reemphasizing the fusion of flesh and spirit - the transubstantiation of matter so important in the Eastern tradition — simultaneously reconfirming that daily life in its true state can never equate to an abstract norm ("the average person on an average day") and that its sensual surfaces, when infused with its spirit of the divine, must reenact its very essence: Moist, Mother Earth! I'm flying head down . . . I am cutting through the earth's crust to the core . . . I've dived into fire. And I'm walking under the fire as if under water, walking to the very center . . . And suddenly I see: above my head the blue sky and through the heavenly blue the stars are shining! . . . My sister-stars! I'm flying above the earth, the stars are burning and my memory is aflame! Like the stars - burning for those who are sad, who cannot find a place on earth . . . In a whirlwind I am carried to the stars . . . and on my head are three rays like nails, in the form of a crown . . . The day is hard, the night terrible for me . . . On Sunday I rose . . . What was he weeping for? Oh, he was weeping even in his grief about these stars which were shining to him from the abyss. As if the threads from these countless divine worlds had come together in his soul . . . He wanted to forgive everyone for everything and to ask forgiveness not for himself but for all and for everything . . . and somebody was whispering "Mother of God, greatest of mothers . . . you are the mother of the moist earth. And there is great joy in that for mankind . . . And any earthly sadness and any earthly tear is a joy for us. And you will soak the earth with your tears" . . . I will climb the hill and turn to the East, to see fire. I'll turn to the West - fire! I'll look to the North - it's aflame! And to the South - it's aflame! I'll fall upon the earth. It will burn me! . . . And above spacious Russia, exhausted from thirst, above the burned-out steppe, and the threatening forest, true, bright stars will ignite.74 The circle that is completed by the stars is more a Belyi-esque spiral in which each return to the beginning progressively

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raises the point of departure to a higher level. Thus, the whirlwind of destruction becomes, via fire as redemptive selfsacrifice, the eternally burning light of the heavens. And the everyday, through art and revolution, attains the higher status of life.

However, even Remizov must find a way of mediating his victory over the impediments dividing word from Word, text from metatext. Like Belyi, he implicitly acknowledges that he is trapped within an aesthetic defined in terms alien to his project and, like Belyi, it is to the rituals of Orthodoxy that he returns to give (inadequate) expression to his new discourse of the everyday self. The chronicle appears to end with a section entitled "In the end" in which Remizov acknowledges that the idea of "the cup of tea" has now become an irrelevancy, subsumed, along with the tea-drinker, by the primal forces of revolution.75 But as a last gesture of defiance towards closure, and in an attempt to suggest that the iconic mode must lie outside narrative, Remizov follows this entry by one final sequence entitled "Inextinguishable Stars." Here he leaves his account of revolutionary trauma to recount in detail a memory of an Easter service. The description, though presented as a recollection, shifts in and out between the past tense and that of an eternal present whose synthesis of singular and permanent is the familiar one of Christian liturgy: The old memory rises into life . . . Night time — the long service in Uspenskii cathedral . . . It was like that in Tsar Ivan's time, in Godunov's time . . . the bonfire from the dark, the bluish dawn . . . The autumn night is scattered with stars. Like stars, the arches come alight. And on the starry crosses are the last flowers of autumn . . . For the last time the apostles go to pay their repects to the Mother of God . . . And I saw the familiar faces of the saints worshipped by our Russian land: in great simplicity they walk with just staff in hand . . . They whispered and from their whispering the mist thickened. And through the mist: the architects and builders, blinded by light, touch the walls with their hands. Inextinguishable fires burn over Russia!76 The emergence from routine into mystic rite would have, perforce, to be an emergence from the disjunctions of the past tense and thus from narrative itself. Remizov cannot defer

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closure indefinitely, any more than he can deny artistic status to what, boundary-shattering innovations notwithstanding, stubbornly insists on being read in aesthetic mode. Life collapses back into art. A staggered ending is, nonetheless, an ending.

Conclusion

A real life saturated to overflowing point with art will reject art as unnecessary. (Boris Groys)1

The tacit admission of failure contained in the final pages of the attempt by Remizov (the artist) to harness the destructive force of the revolution to creative effect is compounded if we recall that they were written after Remizov (the man of everyday life) had sought refuge in the west. In order to conclude my account of byt I must consider the further consequences of the revolution for my theme. Beforehand, however, I should recapitulate the (anti-)plot so far, and so assess progress made towards completing the tasks I set myself: (i) to depict the defining cycle in the development of byt in order to account for its resonance in twentieth-century Russian culture; (ii) to determine in this light the special nature of Russian modernist narrative; (iii) to trace its cultural roots. I have focussed throughout on byt as a literary-cultural construct. I began by stressing that, rather than being the product of an indigenous Russian tradition, the phenomenon's complex of negative connotations reflect a vigorous dialogue between two different epistemological systems, both of which exert influence in East and West (though in differing degrees). One - predominant in, but by no means exclusive to the Catholic and Protestant cultures of western Europe — is reflected in the economy of the sign with its dualistic hierarchies of matter and essence, particular and universal, its espousal of the logic of self-identities and oppositions and its 220

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emphasis on absence and mediation. The other — progressively repressed, though far from inactive in the west since Rome's split with Byzantium — is best encapsulated in Orthodox trinitarian thought with its urge to resist the hierarchies of particular and universal, flesh and spirit, its rejection of the deathly effects of self-identity and its orientation towards participation. Rather than mounting an assault on the Word (to which thinkers like Derrida have customarily linked signs), eastern Christology claims to accord to it its rightful meaning. It thus immerses itself in dynamism: the flow and reverse flow of the image-as-icon (God-become-man-become-God in the here and now). It resists the subordination of Logos to the alienated image-as-sign (the God-like man whose imitation of Christ - the mediator between a non-identical and so opposed earth and heaven - may, at the end of time, bring heaven to earth). As I suggested in chapter 1, the attachment of secular art to the image-as-sign entailed a privileged role for the everyday. The concept's mediatory capacity for grounding the "telling example" (for marrying norm to anomaly in essence-revealing synthesis) equipped it to serve representational semiosis and to bridge the set of rifts that are the consequence of the ascendancy of semiotic logic: private/public, self/other, body/spirit, singular/general, present/absent. I demonstrated how in narrative this mediatory work is accomplished through the negotiation of a path between two polarities: engaging, but inauthentic fictionality and authentic, but repetitious routine. This accounts for the three-way convergence with which my investigation began: narrative's need to integrate change and stasis, the internalized images of art it perpetually generates, its goal of representing a neutral everyday. My thesis in chapter 2 was that Russian cultural history reveals a tortuous but inexorable movement towards assimilation of the modern aesthetic, and of art as a discrete entity. It is characterized by a communication of idioms or perichoresis establishing the mutual accommodation of the semiotic and the iconic. The first stage can be seen as eighteenth-century Russia's basically uncritical absorption of western aesthetic

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forms. The second (critical) stage began in the nineteenth century in the form of Russia's paradoxical anti-aesthetic - its redefinition of art as the negation of art, its reordering of the framed representation of the other along the frame-breaking, participatory lines of one's self. Within prose, this conflation led to (i) a problematization of the neutral concept of type and the smooth management of the particular/general relationship, (ii) a reconception of the everyday as the mirror image of good narrative (the equation of byt with anti-plot), and (iii) the postTolstoyan splintering of reality into positive and negative hypostases - byt and zhizn . Nineteenth-century Russian writers are caught between two requirements: the need to produce good art, and the need to subject to critical scrutiny the aesthetic distancing on which good art is based. This explained the highly equivocal manner in which they adopted gossip narration (gossip as bad art; bad art as "good"). By the turn of the century, Russian artists began to sense the contradiction at the heart of the anti-aesthetic, the urge to move beyond the art/life antinomy by which it remains bound and towards the third stage of the perichoresis — the reissuing of the category of the aesthetic in positive mode. Accordingly, Silver-age writers sought, by developing to their conclusion the counter-aesthetic (and so counter-semiotic) tendencies of the nineteenth-century Russian novel, to bring to fruition their iconic potential. The writers I treated each aspired to overcome the frame which in delineating art from life provides the precondition for the trompe Voeil by which art claims to represent life. The categories of the everyday and the aesthetic were retained (this was, after all, a cultural dialogue rather than a battle for supremacy). But the disposition in which they figured was altered. Writers from Chekhov to Remizov rejected the self-identity of, and opposition between art and life and, by analogy with the function of grace in Orthodoxy's reading of the relationship between man and God, reconstituted the aesthetic as a force within the everyday (byt) enabling it to realize its identity as life (zhizn). Narrative, meanwhile, shifts from being the mechanism by which art is seamlessly integrated with the everyday, to the site in which art transforms the

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everyday into the living. This, then, is the reconfiguration whose description was the key to achieving my goals. From chapter 2 onwards, I tied the reconfiguration to the notion of byt as the embodiment, and so subversion of abstraction and evil. In a further reflection of the mutual predication of God and man, good and evil characteristic of the iconic system, Abstraction Incarnate doubles as the path to True Life. In this way, byt as anti-plot (referential shadow to the participatory force parodying artistic distancing and its corollary — rationalistic abstraction) becomes the ground for art as alternate aesthetic (the participatory force facilitating inner transcendence). The negativity of byt is revealed to be the obverse of its hidden, transformative potential - the precondition for, rather than the antithesis to zhizn . Part 11 looked at how Silver-age developments in the history of anti-plot began, building on potential already inherent within established renditions of byt, hesitantly to sketch the contours of the new aesthetic. Thus, Chekhov rejects conventional narrative time (singular-past framed from eternalpresent) in favor of an iconic temporality in which singular moments from the (everyday) present enact the (living) whole. Constrained within an art form defined in representational terms, Chekhov is, however, compelled to deploy a metatextual notion of theater in order to signal this aesthetic of acts. Sologub, meanwhile, strove for the iconic through narrative surfeit. I argued that the gratuitous excesses of plot in The Petty Demon's version of provincial byt accomplished a critique of metaphor as alienation (the disjunction of corporeal surface from abstract essence). Hidden within the gossipy world of petty demonry is an attempt to grasp at a deaestheticized form of creativity in which body is no longer subordinate to spirit, nor self to anonymous other. For Sologub it is myth which fulfils the metatextual function. In part m I detailed three attempts to pursue to its conclusion the conversion of metatext into text proper. The writers I treated recognized that, in transcending the division between art and daily life, the new discourse would have also to invalidate the self/other dichotomy on which artistic represen-

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tations of the everyday are founded. Each turned for inspiration to a domestic chronotope. Andrei Belyi discovered a model for the new kind of self—other relations in the intimacy of the family apartment. He explores the mechanisms by which such intimacy capitulates to societal norms, the abstractions of adult language, chronological time and an art divorced from life. Belyi associates these mechanisms with byt, but in such a way that the phenomenon is made to bear within its embodied form the seeds of its own transcendence. In a process that I traced to the final pages of The Christened Chinaman, Belyi learns, through the Kotik Letaev persona, to reconstrue the byt of his father's world as the Fall necessary to the incessant motion of self-transcendence that is zhizri — the humanity (adulthood) which must be assumed in order that divinity (childhood) might be reattained and familial intimacy reestablished. In the contrast between homely, spontaneous literatura and vain, anonymous literatorstvo, Vasilii Rozanov gave expression to the task that an iconic aesthetic must accomplish. Rozanov went further than his contemporaries in seeking a form appropriate to this task, in freeing his everyday existence from the burden of art, revalorizing its surfaces as values in themselves. But Rozanov was also uniquely attentive to the paradox of attempting this mission on the territory of the other (that of published discourse). He responded by engaging in a game of domestications and alienations — an exitless (and vicious) circle broken only by the intervention of History and death. Finally, I showed how Aleksei Remizov exploited the revolutionary situation to creative effect. His Civil War diary established ordinary life as the exclusive locus of adventure and the rightful home of the artist. Remizov's claim to integration with others enhanced his ability to purify gossip narration and to exploit to the full its intimacy and groundedness in the everyday. Remizov it was who came closest to completing the transformation of the nineteenth-century anti-aesthetic when, equating his word to the iconic Word and his persona to the iconic Christ, he identifies his writing as a transfigurative act which causes the ordinary to glow with divine light. However, the refusal of art as discrete form to give way to art as

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transcendent force is reflected in the writer's slide into mystical, past-tense recollection - a slide corresponding to the everyday man's escape from the horrors of revolution. The importance of "the word" is a thread running through Russian modernist culture.2 Despite the uncontroversial nature of that assertion, it nonetheless cues in a necessarily cursory elaboration upon what is likely to be a contentious aspect of my thesis: the emphasis placed throughout on the distinctive features of Russian modernism over its numerous parallels and similarities with other European modernisms. The terms of my investigation require me, in outlining the results, to broach the thorny issue of the place of the Silver Age in the larger arena of European culture. This in turn warrants a digression for the purpose of making explicit and whole the picture of western modernism with which I have hitherto worked implicitly, and whose diverse elements are scattered throughout the study. We might begin by citing the example of Virginia Woolf as evidence that the obsession of Russian modernism with everyday experience is far from unique. That realm was, of course, equally important to western modernists. Moreover, the rejection of linear chronology and plot action in Woolf's novels suggest that they, too, embraced anti-plot. However, these parallels ultimately prove to be deceptive. In his analysis of the novels of Woolf and Joyce, Eric Auerbach comments on the prevalence therein of ordinary, random experience: "[T]he author submits, much more than was done in earlier realistic works, to the random contingency of real phenomena; and even though he winnows and stylizes the material of the real world . . . he does not proceed rationalistically, nor with a view to bringing a continuity of exterior events to a planned conclusion." 3 Virginia Woolf herself offers clarification: "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel . . . Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance." 4 As these passages indicate, the significance to writers like Woolf of the world of everyday contingency lies not in any

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inherent negativity, but in the "pattern" that it scores upon the inner consciousness. The negation of conventional plot, meanwhile, is motivated through the substitution of "external action" by the achronological shapes traceable in these subjective patterns. Far from emitting the dank stench of byt (let alone the fragrance of Rozanov's domestic idyll), the external world of western modernist everyday existence amounts to so much "random contingency," a chaotic, alien mass whose "order," if it exists at all is "hidden behind the arbitrariness." The "winnowing and stylizing" mentioned by Auerbach points to one of the commonplaces of modernist criticism that language has, in the modern world, lost its mediating function as a transparent mirror onto reality. What Richard Sheppard calls modernism's "crisis of language" can be traced to nineteenth-century French Symbolism - to Baudelaire's cult of silence, and Verlaine's insistence on the impossibility of real communication.5 Allied to linguistic opacity is Nietzche's Death of God - the demise not just of religious faith, but of belief in all fixed truths. As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane argue "[T]he great works of Modernism live amidst the tools of modern relativism, scepticism and hope for secular change." 6 A second corollary of language's newly acquired density is the most widely accepted of all the defining characteristics of modernist art: its supposed autonomy from the real world. It is again to Nietzsche that we must turn for a formulation: "No artist tolerates reality. . . What strikes me as beautiful . . . is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold itself together through the internal force of its style."7 Oscar Wilde's early insistence on the supremacy of style, Picasso's non-representational painting and the claim of self-sufficiency made for atonal music are just a few manifestations of modernism's inward turn. We must, it seems, reconcile two opposing characteristics on one hand, epistemological breakdown and a retreat into auto-reflexivity, on the other hand, the bold exploration of new subjective realms of experience. A way of grouping these features under a single umbrella is to be found in Mojmir Grygar's semiotic formulation referring to a "split in the artistic

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sign," a detachment of signifiers (meaning-bearing features) from their signifieds (the mental concepts or meanings with which the signifiers are paired), and a tendency towards the "free combination" of the former.8 The inability to assign the old, familiar signifieds (the real world, the human soul) to the artistic forms designating them corresponds to the perception of outer reality as disorder and the abandonment of authoritative meaning, while the free combination of signifiers expresses both the newly discovered linguistic opacity and the emphasis on the autonomy of form. But how to explain the substitution in the works of Woolf and Joyce of an "inner realm" for outer reality? Jonathan Culler suggests an answer by acknowledging the phenomenon of semiotic split, yet insisting on the immutable need in art for "two orders" (signifier and signified): "[I]n the absence of a correspondence between two orders one must always find a way to guarantee the naturalness of signs." 9 One solution to Grygar's semiotic disjunction, argues Culler, is to be found in "internalizing the connection between signifier and signified."10 The process Culler describes precisely echoes Richard Sheppard's account of the Dadaists (who, in this context, serve as a paradigm for much of European Modernism): "They . . . first ventured the daring conclusions that the experiences of nothingness and linguistic aridity can be dealt with not by retreat, resignation or withdrawal but by accepting them and that from this acceptance, new if transient patterns can be drawn . . . they invented the shock tactics by which the mind, conscious of its imprisonment, might free itself.11 Culler's supplement to Grygar's theory helps us to understand that the loss of faith in language's communicative powers did not impede European culture's commitment to semiosis — its tendency to respond to semiotic crisis with the elaboration of still more signs, the layering of increasingly complex signsystems one on top of the other. 12 Some have argued that modernism did little to dislodge western art's commitment to mimesis and representation; it was just that the reality to be imitated had altered. In Virginia Woolf's immortal words: "In

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or about December 1910 human character changed." Semiosis may indeed have come under stress when realist reality ceased to persuade its audience of its "presence" (Valery's arbitrary gray carriage; Huysmans's provocative claim that the authenticity of the artistic simulacrum surpasses that of nature). The response of early twentieth-century modernism was to set out along the path of resemiosis — the discovery of new sets of signs and new objective/subjective realities to which they might refer: the disturbing depths of Conrad's collective unconscious, the nightmare of Kafka's existential void, the independent reality of Proust's self-reflexive text. We would do well to note the complicity of texts like Ulysses in the process recounted in chapter 1. With its elaborate structure interlacing, via Homeric myth, Stephen Daedalus's soaring artistic speculations and Arthur Bloom's earthy, quotidian concerns, Joyce's novel is a willing participant in the eternal game of identification and counter-identification played out between art and the everyday in the interests of generating ever newer forms of representation. Russian literature's inconvenient failure to conform precisely to this axiom has been the subject of chapters 2 to 7. My project has been carried out against the background of western culture's preferred reading of the Logos in which the linear and participatory Word of God is subordinated to the static, absent image (the God-like man) and the linguistic word is construed as the image's shadow (a move precipitating language's journey into abstraction). The profound consequences of such an identification include the continuing domination of rationalism in thought, the consistent gravitation of the image towards merger with the abstract sign, the pursuant need to find more subtle ways of masking semiosis, and in conclusion — the profusion of ever more signs. Modernism counts among the last-ditch attempts to shore up representationalism and stave off the abyss: a world torn loose from its moorings, hopelessly stranded on an ocean of pure signification. What has followed might be considered art's first attempt to come to terms with the hegemony of the sign, to work with the grain of semiosis, rather than against it. Here is hardly the place to venture into the minefield of postmodernist

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studies, but it is safe to assert that references to "free-floating signifiers" and the "textualization" of reality are recurring themes in discussions of postmodernism in both art and culture at large. 13 With computer technology's recent gift of virtual realities more complete and vivid than the experiences for which they are substituted, the convergence threatens to become complete. Aesthetic illusion of presence is to be superseded in art and everyday life by a wallowing in the absence of presence: the triumphal declaration that the absence is the presence. It is no coincidence that these same technologies promise a future in which, liberated from the inconvenience of intimacy with others, we will spend our lives before screens awash with disembodied words and images transmitted via vast information highways — a challenge to which artists have been swift to respond. 14 While remaining deeply embedded in Russian culture, the Orthodox counter-interpretation of the Logos linking the image to the dynamic flow and reverse flow of the iconic Christ (God-become-man-become-God) has had increasingly to absorb (and even cede place to) the rich legacy of representational semiosis as Russia becomes ever more receptive to western influence. I have tried to show that the resulting "communication of idioms" effected within its relatively new literary tradition is driven by a desire to weaken the bonds subjugating the word to the image (and thus the sign), to reaccommodate the image-as-sign with the image-as-icon, thus restoring the word to the Word and countering linguistic opacity by rendering language translucent with iconic light. That the Silver Age was the climax to the perichoresis is, therefore, consistent with the contention that Russia's brand of modernist literature reflects the influence of forces much attenuated in other European modernisms. What I believe to be the subtle but significant divergences in form and outlook follow from this. For example, Russian modernism prefers not to resolve its tensions by reference to an all-encompassing subject (consciousness) or object (alien world). Emerging from a tradition in which categories of subject and object are less rigidly separated,

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less capable of integrating into themselves their own individualized instances, Russian modernist prose effects that tradition's most powerful realization. It is for this reason that it can feel different to its European neighbours, sometimes appearing to forego the label of modernity altogether (Chekhov, Sologub's The Petty Demon - which continues to be seen by some as a late example of nineteenth-century social satire). This is perhaps also the reason why, for some, Silver-age prose is overshadowed by the more obviously radical innovations in poetry (Blok, Maiakovskii) and the visual arts (Tatlin, Malevich). The texts I have analysed surely impel us to reject the conclusion that Silver-age narrative art therefore made no contribution to the dynamics of artistic evolution. It is true that it is less willing to break free from the nineteenth-century models from which it emerged than its western counterpart. But nineteenth-century Russian realism was, from the beginning, itself involved in a groundbreaking assault on the tenets of the European mimetic tradition with its insistence on aesthetic frames and its commitment to Cartesian rationalism and representational semiosis. The defining achievement of turn-of-the-century Russian narrative is not to be sought in an overthrow of the stylistic canons of its predecessors, nor in the discovery of exotic new contents. It is rather to be looked for in the apotheosis of a deep-rooted structural phenomenon which had gathered force throughout the course of Russian realism, namely an assault on the spatiotemporal frame defining past-tense narration. This brings in its wake the jagged (or meandering) contours of anti-plot, the semiosis-defying subversion of the link between singular and general and the disorienting erosion of the divide separating self from other upon which modern, mass-produced literature relies for its meanings. It disrupts the game of identification and counter-identification between "the aesthetic" and ''daily life" which allows art to represent, yet retain its difference from its object of representation. Consequently, Russian turn-of-thecentury fiction aims to supplant the west's alienated representations of the everyday with its individualized icons of the ordinary (in Solov'ev's sense of the term c'individual" and Rozanov's reconception of "the ordinary"). 15

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Gor'kii saw Chekhov as the writer who took realism so far it could go no further. Later, Rozanov saw himself as the apex of the Russian realist pyramid, its final and highest point. Each of these writers was a bona fide realist, each a ground-breaking modernist - a state of affairs whose paradox is lessened only when one remembers the Russian context in which it must be seen and the associated need to reconceive our understanding of both modernism and realism. The intimate, daily routines of Rozanov and Remizov presented in a discourse at the point of overcoming literature close the circle which began with Chekhov's everyday anecdotes modestly presented from within a discourse that barely merited the name literature. The circle begins in the breeding ground of Russian realism (the journalistic feuilleton) and ends by opening out into the art of the futurist avant-garde whose radical aesthetics of self-sufficient, everyday objects makes the ultimate (if misguided) claim of a discourse that creates its own meaning - that of revolution. The avant-garde now figures as a deep structural transformation of Russia's civic tradition, the bringing to fruition of its hidden iconic potential, rather than its mere adaptation or total uprooting. The examples of Rozanov and Remizov teach us, however, that even modernism's apotheosis of the iconic impulse is unable to jettison inner contradiction. Russian modernism's rejection of resemiosis as a response to Grygar's "semiotic crisis," its struggle to move in the opposite direction is limited by the fact that art can only ever be a semiotic medium. The modern icon, too, is an artistic sign - albeit one that claims not to signify its content but to reenact it naturally within itself, and so come close to escaping the status of sign (without ever actually doing so). Since, for Chekhov, Sologub and even Belyi, art remains the privileged term while byt retains its negativity, it is to the revalorized domestic minutiae of Remizov and Rozanov that we should turn for the closest approximation to a discourse transcending both art and daily life, to pure iconic discourse. Presented as if spontaneously, in a raw state (like "leaves from a tree" or "sticks thrown up by a storm"), they are temporal

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fragments without meaning but purporting to contain the whole of eternity (the entire force of the whirlwind) within them. These de-narrativized fragments do not represent daily life, but amount to daily life in its raw, unliterary state — moments whose intimacy reenacts the intimate relation of God to each individual, byt on the path to zhizn. The end of that path is, though, kept tantalizingly out of reach. The capsules of everydayness are as if in raw state, merely pretending to contain eternity. Remizov and Rozanov must, like Sologub and Belyi, submit to metaphor and thus to art. They brush up against the limits of the aesthetic without truly embracing the iconic. In making the final leap into zhizri we must abandon narrative art altogether for the world of Russian revolutionary culture. The most telling evidence of a "carry-through" of the iconic enterprise of the Silver Age into the Bolshevik period emerges, as earlier suggested, in the work of the revolutionary avant-garde. After two centuries of assimilation (classicism, sentimentalism), reactive critique (the realist anti-novel) and reprocessing (the Silver Age), Russian culture exploded in an outpouring of startlingly innovatory art (Malevich, Tatlin, El Lissitsky and others) which propelled Russia briefly to the forefront of European culture. The understanding reached by the writers I have analysed was that a truly trans-aesthetic discourse of daily life cannot be accomplished within fiction. This in part is responsible for the prominence acquired in the early nineteen twenties by aesthetically marginal forms such as photography, architecture, poster art and what is now known as "design." Whereas for other cultures, the arrival of such tendencies (in the work of the Bauhaus group, for example) spelled a confidently pioneering expansion of art into life which simply redrew the boundaries separating the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic in favour of the former, the unique socio-political situation obtaining in revolutionary Russia facilitated a form of activity in which, at least in principle, creation and living had truly converged. As Tatlin put it: A new everyday life requires new objects . . . Our everyday life is built on . . . natural principles and an object from the west cannot satisfy us . . . It is for this reason that I show such interest in organic

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form as a point of departure for the creation of the new object . . . Such are our principle tasks in working on the organization of new objects in the new collective way of life.16 The notion of a supreme artist turning to work on the materiality of everyday things in order to fashion objects which embody in their organic integrity the new revolutionary reality implies the effacement of artistic semiosis by a practice akin to iconic creativity. Our search for the final twist in the agonizing, conflictridden spiral characterizing this particular episode in Russia's ongoing dialogue with western culture would seem, however, to take us beyond even Tatlin's reformulations of the aesthetic. We recall that, just as the danger courted by the image is capitulation to the disembodied abstractions of the sign, so the risk inherent in the icon is that of merger with life itself. In trinitarian thought, Father, Son and Holy Spirit remain absolutely distinct in their absolute commonality. Likewise, man, the iconic Christ and God participate in a tri-unity founded on non self-identity. So, too, we might surmise, the everyday, iconic art and true Life. But, what if everyday life submits so much to the inner force of transcendence that there is no longer anything to transcend, and so no longer any sense in retaining a transcending force, since what is left is a self-sufficient True Life? What, then, if we substitute for "transcendent force" and "True Life" the terms "avant-garde" and "Perfect Society"? Suggesting that Russia's communist leadership was "merely an artist whose material was the whole world," Boris Groys has advanced the provocative argument that the name to be invoked when that hypothetical moment is made actual is Stalinism.17 For Groys, the socio-political nature of the Stalinist project (itself the product of a misgrafting of western rationalism onto an alien intellectual tradition) derives entirely from the inner logic of the avant-garde, from the notion that "the cognitive function of art had ended" and that art must now be required to work towards the transformation of reality which, when attained, leaves a situation in which everyday life has been overcome since "the everyday and ideology coincide in the endless Text." 18 However, the Silver-age culture which, as

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Groys acknowledges, gave birth to the avant-garde was motivated by the urge not to supplant the everyday, but to make it the precondition for Life. For this reason, his dramatic assertion that Stalinism simply completed the avant-garde's project is, I think, highly questionable. The problem besetting the Silver Age was how to hypothesize an art that perpetually transfigures, yet remains internal to the everyday, from within an aesthetic whose very identity and ability to represent is founded on the establishment of semiotic difference from that realm. The Stalinist solution that Groys mistakes for the apotheosis of the transfigurative impulse is to abandon both the dualistic opposition of art to everyday life, and the iconic commitment to trinitarianism (an everyday realizing itself as Life through art), conflating three terms into one: the self-identical Communist Paradise in which transformative art is, notwithstanding the brave resistance of Silver-age avatars like Zamiatin and Bulgakov, rendered superfluous.19 In what I would therefore prefer to argue is a final, irrevocable travestying of the iconic enterprise (and so the completion of the defining cycle in the evolution of byt), Stalinism finds its own distorted way of tearing down the barrier that had kept everyday life and art at perpetual odds. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Blok's agonizing over the poison of modernism with its production of "dead objects" was matched by his endorsement of true art which irradiates that which is "alive." The remainder of that century has taught us, however, that radium, when misused, is, like untramelled ideology, a poison far more virulent than art - one liable to generate neither dead objects, nor deadened abstractions but rather a multitude of human corpses. When we represent the trajectory of the ghostly image as one culminating in death we are speaking in images - which is, perhaps, why, at the turn of a new century, we continue to be at liberty to represent at all.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 See Zinaida Gippius, Literaturnyi dnevnik, i8gg—igoj (Munich, 1970), p. 23, and Vasilii Rozanov, Izbrannoe, ed. Evgeniia Zhiglevich (Munich, 1970), pp. 220-21. 2 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Henry de Montherlant (Paris, 1983), p. 259. 3 Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 18 vols., ed. N. F. Bel'chikov, D. D. Blagoi, G. A. Bialyi, A. S. Miasnikov, L. D. Opul'skaia, A. I. Reviakin and M. B. Khrapchenko (Moscow, 1974), vol. vi, p. 352. Developed from the Chekhov chapter in her book The Pragmatics of Insignificance: Chekhov, ^oshchenko, Gogol'

(Stanford, 1993), pp. 17-53, Cathy Popkin's illuminating article on "The Kiss" treats Chekhov's testing of the limits of narrativity, his concern to determine what it is that makes something "tellable." See Cathy Popkin, "Kiss and Tell: Narrative Desire and Indiscretion," in Jane Costlow and Stephanie Sandier (eds.), Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (Stanford, 1993), pp. 139-55. Ellen Chances sees in Chekhov's convention-defying techniques a foreshadowing of the extreme brand of anti-plot espoused by Daniil Kharms. See "Cekhov and Xarms: Story/Anti-Story," Russian Language Journal, 36 (Winter-Spring 1982), 181-92. In taking narrativity to its extremes, Chekhov is said by both critics to reassert the importance of plot. My interest is less in techniques (whether Chekhov's anti-plot oversteps or confirms the bounds of a universal concept of narrativity), and more in semiotics (the bearing that the reader's perception of Chekhov's plot-defiance has on his/her construction of the reality to which the stories are made to refer). 4 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vi, p. 350. 5 ibid., pp. 352-53. 6 ibid., p. 349. 235

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Notes to pages 5—15

7 ibid., p. 355. 8 ibid., p. 355. 9 Fedor Sologub, Melkii bes, ed. N. P. Utekhina (Moscow, 1991), p. 241. 10 ibid., pp. 250-51. 11 Aleksandr Blok, Jfapisnye knizhki (Moscow, 1965), p. 214. 12 See Peter Barta and Ulrich Goebel (eds.), The European Foundations of Russian Modernism (New York, 1991). 13 See George Gibian, "Introduction," in G. Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma (eds.), Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, igoo-igjo (Ithaca and London, 1976), pp. 9-18 (p. 17). 14 For an anthology that takes a similar approach, see Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (eds.), Creating Life: the Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford, 1994). 15 Aleksei Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus (Moscow, 1991), p. 476. I NARRATIVE AND THE EVERYDAY! MYTH, IMAGE, SIGN, ICON, LIFE

1 The Thomas Mann quotation is taken from the story "Tonio Kriiger" in Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, trans. H. T. LowePorter (New York, 1989), pp. 75-133 (p. 102). Florenskii's remarks are to be found in Pavel Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny, ed. N. F. Utkina, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1990), vol. 1, p. 47. 2 See Iurii Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A. Shukman (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990), p. 162. Didier Coste's phrases are taken from his Narrative and Communication (Minneapolis, 1989), p. 133. 3 The phrase "rhetoric of absence" belongs to W. J. T. Mitchell. See his Iconology: Image, Icon, Text (Chicago and London, 1986). 4 For Mikhail Bakhtin, admittedly, artistic evolution is best studied as the history of a struggle for dominance between competing, context-specific discourses. See his essay "Discourse and the Novel," in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), pp. 259-423. However, what Bakhtin sees as the striving of one discourse to assert "monological" dominance over the "heteroglossia" of discourses can be seen as a drive to achieve acceptance for a particular version of what reality is, and so is not inconsistent with the notion of a mimetic urge. Moreover, Bakhtin's emphasis on concretized, participatory conflict is very much the product of the philosophical tradition from which he emerged. New insights often derive from the application of the theories of one culture to

Notes to pages 15—21

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the texts of another - hence Bakhtin's importance to western semioticians in their efforts to portray sign systems as systems of power relations. Hence also why Bakhtin is initially eclipsed by semiotics in my analysis; many of the salient features of the Russian texts I examine are revealed in terms of the resistance they offer to the rhetoric of the sign. A photograph capturing a likeness does not generally merit artistic status (unless the person is a famous figure whose claim to universality is already assured). More likely to achieve "arthood" is a snapshot portraying someone in an unusual pose which, precisely because it does not command unthinking recognition, leads one to discover some hidden "essence." Lotman, Universe ofthe Mind, pp. 152-53. ibid., p. 153. Michel Zeraffa, Personne et Personnage: Le Romanesque des Annees 1920 aux annees 1950 (Paris, 1971), p. 121. Lotman writes: "The law-forming center of culture, genetically deriving from the primordial mythological nucleus, reconstructs the world as something totally ordered, with a single plot and supreme meaning." Universe of the Mind, p. 162. See Coste, Narrative and Communication, p. 133. Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, "Myth — Name — Culture," in Daniel Lucid (trans, and ed.), Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology (Baltimore and London, 1988), pp. 233-53 (P- 23^)Lotman and Uspenskii, "Myth - Name - Culture," p. 235. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, pp. 299-300. Marc E. Blanchard, "Aesthetic and Illusion of Daily Life," in F. Burwick and W. Pape (eds.), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches (Berlin and New York, 1990), pp. 79—92 (pp. 80-81). ibid., p. 88. ibid. Quoted in Peter Faulkner, Modernism: The Critical Idiom (London, i977)>P- iMichel de Certeau, Arts de Faire: L3Invention du Quotidien (Paris, 1980), pp. 36-37. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, p. 92. Mukarovsky develops this idea throughout his book Structure, Sign and Function, trans, and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (Yale, 1977)See Iurii Lotman, "Concerning Khlestakov," in Alice and Alexander Nakhimovsky (eds.), The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (Ithaca, 1985), pp. 150-88 (p. 187). If one of representation's

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34

Notes to pages 21-26

functions is to confer the illusion of presence, and if the generation of these images reinforces that function, they can be said to play a metatextual role: that of a "contained" text which describes its "containing" text. See Lotman, "Tekst v tekste," Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 14 (1981), 3-19. In order to represent its object, an artistic text must distinguish itself from it. The second metatextual function of the internal artistic images is that of markers of the containing text's self-identity as art. For a survey of metatextual theory, see Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London and New York, 1984). Flaubert, Madame Bovary, p. 301. For a discussion of the "separation of styles," see Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1974), p. 489. Examples of metatextual self-consciousness in Don Quixote, such as the famous "Knight of the Mirrors" episode, confirm that, rather than the exclusive property of postmodernism, the phenomenon was integral to representational fiction from its beginnings. See Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans, and ed. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, 1991), p. 4. Anthony Trollope, "Barchester Towers" and "The Warden" (New York, 1950), pp. 296-97. Thomas Mann, "Tonio Kriiger," pp. 102, 126, 132. See Herman Parret, Le Sublime du Quotidien (Paris/Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1988). Lotman writes that "eschatological legend is the product of [a] rephrasing [of] a myth in linear terms that is typologically closest to myth (and probably historically the earliest)." See Universe of the Mind, p. 159. Catholic renditions of the crucifixion are, unlike the stylized images of eastern Christianity, often vividly gory; the Catholic saint is recognized by the stigmata — the mark of human suffering, whereas in Orthodoxy, the halo of divine light is more important. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 43. Though the resurrection is universally considered the climax to Easter, the Catholic and Protestant calendars separate off Good Friday - the day when Christ gave his human life to redeem us (and became a model for us to imitate). For the eastern churches, the crucifixion is inseparable from Christ's resurrection as God which we must reenact. As the early semiotician Charles Pierce stressed, a sign cannot

Notes to pages 26-31

35 36

37

38 39

40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

239

function in a vacuum; it must be used by someone to mean something for someone else. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 17. Mitchell notes that that the "progressive sublimation of the image reaches its logical culmination when the entire . . . text is regarded as an image . . . the modernist image as pure structure." See Mitchell, Iconology, p. 25. This argument is supported by Audrey Jaffe, who refers to "the role of visuality and its literary evocations in defining, reinforcing and disseminating some of western culture's dominant values." See "Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol," in PMLA 109, 2 (March 1994), 254-66. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London, 1988), p. 134. Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of Compositional Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), p. 140. Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John Erickson and Thomas Bird (Crestwood, New York, 1985), p. 65. J o h n Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York, 1983), p. 152. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 139. Meyendorff links the emphasis on likeness as dynamic action with the compatibility of grace and freedom in Orthodoxy: "[T]he presence in man . . . of a 'grace' which is part of his nature and makes him fully man, neither destroys his freedom, nor limits the necessity for him to become fully himself by his own efforts; rather it secures . . . that synergy between the divine will and human choice which makes possible . . . the assimilation of man to the divine dignity for which he was created" (ibid.). Leonid Ouspensky, "The Meaning and Language of Icons," in Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, TTie Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, New York, 1982), p. 34. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie, vol. 1, p. 95. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 133. Lossky, In the Image, p. 109. ibid., p. 38. Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie, vol. 1, p. 138. ibid., pp. 92-93. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 154. ibid., p. 133. Ouspensky, "The Meaning," p. 39. Vladimir Solov'ev, "Lectures on Godmanhood," in J. Scanlon,

240

Notes to pages 31—38

J. Edie and M. B. Zeldin (eds.), Russian Philosophy, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1965), vol. in, pp. 62-85 (p. 82). 54 Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 154. 55 We might hypothesize that Byzantine Christology is closer than its western counterpart to pure myth in that its concept of deification approaches the "single plot with single meaning55 where the (singular) event of man's life is identifiable with the (universal) Event that is the coming of God's kingdom. 56 Lossky, In the Image, p. 93. 57 ibid., pp. 24, 28. 58 ibid., p. 28. 59 Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie, vol. 1, p. 48. 60 Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 185. 61 Lossky, In the Image, p. 109. 62 ibid. 63 Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, pp. 204-05. 64 ibid., p. 202. 65 ibid., p. 207. 66 Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 48. 67 ibid, p. 51. 68 Ouspensky, "The Meaning,55 p. 34. 69 Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie, vol. 1, p. 47. 70 Ouspensky, "The Meaning,55 pp. 43-44. 71 Theodore the Sudite, quoted in Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, p. 48. 72 Ouspensky, "The Meaning,55 pp. 36, 42. 73 ibid., p. 15. 74 ibid., pp. 42-43. 75 Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, pp. 154—55. 76 Ouspensky, "The Meaning,55 p. 36. 77 ibid., p. 40. 78 Lossky, In the Image, pp. 59-61. 79 A narrative icon is thus, not a visual icon in narrative form, but an iconic system translated into imagic logic within narrative fiction. 80 Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii, "The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture,55 in Iu. Lotman and B. Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor, 1984), PP- 3-36 (p. 4)81 See Iurii Lotman, "Agreement and Self-Giving as Archetypal Models of Culture,55 in Lotman and Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, pp. 125-41. 82 Lotman, Universe of the Mind, p. 260.

Notes to pages 39-44

241

83 V V Kolesova (ed.), Domostroi (Moscow, 1990), pp. 33, 51. 84 Kolesova, Domostroi, p. 12. 85 Iu. Lotman, "The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture," in Lotman and Uspenskii, The Semiotics of Russian Culture, pp. 141-65 (p. 160). 86 Lotman discusses, amongst other things, the popularity of duelling, and the cult of dandyism in late eighteenth-century Russian culture as outgrowths of theatricalization. 87 For Benveniste's concept of "enunciation," see Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Cables, Miami, 1971). 88 See Iu. Lotman, "O modeliruiushchem znachenii poniatii 'kontsa' i 'nachala' v khudozhestvennykh tekstakh," in Lotman (ed.), Tezisy dokladov vo vtoroi letnei shkole po vtorichnym modeliruiushchim

89 90 91 92 93

sistemam

(Tartu, 1966), pp. 69-74. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1977), p. 233. Peter Brooks, Reading For the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York, 1984), p. 221. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 256. Seejakobson, "Two Aspects of Language Disturbance and Two Types of Aphasia," in Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, The Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), pp. 75-80. See, for example, Brooks, Reading For the Plot, p. 29.

2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF BYT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE

1 The Pushkin quote is from Evgenii Onegin. See A. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh, ed. D. Blagoi (Moscow, 1969), vol. 11, p. 83. Belyi's words are taken from Na rubezhe stoletii, ed. D. Fridliand (Moscow, 1989), p. 72. Likhachev's remark is taken from "Russian Culture and the Modern World," Russian Studies in Literature, 29, 1 (Winter 1992-93). 27-37 (34735)2 In his account of cultural dialogue mechanisms, Lotman isolates the stages by which one culture processes the texts of another. In the initial stages, the receiving culture absorbs and imitates the "received" texts. In the intermediate stages it "restructures" those texts according to its own codes, and in the final stages it becomes a text-transmitter, relaying texts produced according to a syncretic code enabling them to be perceived by other cultures as innovatory and worthy of absorption. The eighteenth century can be seen as Russia's text-absorbing stage, while the paradoxical, nineteenth-

242

Notes to pages 45-49

century "didactic aesthetic" is attributable to the restructuring phenomenon. The prominence achieved by the Russian avantgarde in the early twentieth century corresponds to the transmittingphase. See Lotman, Universe of the Mind, pp. 143-51. 3 For the phrase "representational-didactic mode," see David Shepherd, Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature

4 5 6 7 8

(Oxford, 1992), p. 7. See Roman Jakobson, "O pokolenii rastrativshem svoikh poetov," in R. Jakobson and D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Smert' Vladimira Maiakovskogo (The Hague and Paris, 1975), pp. 8-35. ibid., p. 15. Quoted in Jakobson, "O pokolenii," p. 15. Vladimir Maiakovskii, Pro eto, in V Maiakovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 13-i tomakh, ed. K. Malyshev (Moscow, 1957), vol. iv, PP- 135-85 (p. 165). The classic Formalist text on automatization is Shklovskii's "Iskusstvo kak priem," in B. Eikhenbaum, V Shklovskii and Iu. Tynianov (eds.), Poetika: Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka (Petro-

grad, 1919), pp. 101-14. 9 Maiakovskii, Pro eto, p. 184. 10 Quoted in Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), p. 39. 11 See his entry under "Byt" in Victor Terras (ed.), The Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven and London, 1985), p. 70. 12 It is thus the transcoding of western texts, produced according to the conventions of framing and aesthetic distance into the iconic system or "symbolic consciousness," which gave rise to Russia's participatory, anti-aesthetic aesthetic. 13 Iurii Tynianov, "On Literary Evolution," in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structur-

alist Views (Ann Arbor, 1978), pp. 66-77. 14 To give one example, Pushkin substitutes the word polei for the anticipated rozy to rhyme with morozy, following with an interjection to the reader to "take his rhyme anyway" (Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, p. 82). 15 ibid., p. 133. 16 "My feeling is that many of those 'accursed questions' of Russian aesthetics - the inclusion of sermons and essays in fiction, the cultivation of works which lie on the interstices between recognized genres . . . or between fiction and non-fiction altogether derive from a deep suspicion of the conventions of literature. Poised between metafiction and didactic fiction, Russian literature is the literature of frame-breaking. It is in fact not so much

Notes to pages 50—54.

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30

31

243

literature as counter-literature, governed by an anti-aesthetic." See Gary Saul Morson, "The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction," in Michael R. Katz (ed.), Tolstoy's Short Fiction (New York and London, 1991), pp. 379-94 (p. 394). Morson explains that "unhappy families, like unhappy lives, are dramatic; they have a story, and each story is different." See Gary Saul Morson, "Prosaics in Anna Karenina," The Tolstoy Studies Journal, 1 (1988), 1-13 (p. 5). Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, p. 86. Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford, 1988), p. 216. ibid., p. 221. ibid., p. 221. ibid., pp. 12, 164. ibid., pp. 217-18. Victor Erofeev explains that Rozanov saw the Russian misfortune as consisting in "the fact that [it] believed in a distorted image as an authentic and true one." Quoted in Victor Erofeev, "Rozanov protiv Gogolia," Voprosy literatury, 8 (1987), 147-75 (P- x^4)Quoted in Paperno, Chernyshevsky, p. 9. As Paperno explains, Belinskii reacted against the romantic taboo on the low aspects of life, insisting that "realism . . . meant an awareness of the details of concrete, material existence, even the petty, ugly or revolting ones . . . 'pennies,' 'groceries,5 and 'the animal side of nature' " (p. 44). See V G. Belinskii, Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu i84jg (Moscow, i960), p. 74. I. A. Goncharov, Oblomov, in Goncharov, Sobranie sochinenii v 8-i tomakh, ed. M. Blinchevskaia (Moscow, 1953), vol. rv, p. 68. "The norm of life was ready-made and bequeathed to [the Oblomovs] by their parents . . . Life flowed by them like a calm river; all they had to do was to sit on the banks of this river . . . Again the period of rites and feasts and weddings would arrive . . . Then the repetitions would begin: the birth of children, rites, feats . . . and so according to this program, life would stretch out as a monotonous, uninterrupted canvas, breaking off imperceptibly at the grave." (Goncharov, Oblomov, pp. 126—28). La Bruyere in France, Addison and Steele in England, and Novikov and Krylov in Russia also made important contributions to the development of the form. See Deming Brown, "The Ocerk: Suggestions Towards a Redefinition," in American Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, vol. 11, Literary Contributions (Ohio, 1968), pp. 29-41.

244

Notes to pages 54-60

32 M. Saltykov-Shchedryn, Melochi zhizni, in Sobranie sochinenii v 12-i tomakh, ed. D. I. Zaslavskii (Moscow, 1951), vol. xi, pp. 145-451 (p. 224). 33 ibid., pp. 160, 164. 34 M. Saltykov-Shchedryn, Gospoda Golov'evy, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. VII, pp. 46, 135. 35 ibid., p. 42. 36 Quoted in J o n a t h a n Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, New York, 1975), p. 203. 37 Nilolai Gogol, Mertvye dushi in Sobranie sochinenii v j-i tomakh, ed. S. I. Mashinskii, M. B. Khrapchenko and N. L. Stepanov (Moscow 1967), vol. v, p. 52. 38 ibid., p. 569. 39 ibid., p. 275. 40 The phrase "x in an indeterminate equation" is from F. Dostoyevsky, Brat'a Karamazovy, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh, ed. V. G. Bazanov, V V Vinogradov, F. la. Priima, G. M. Fridlender and M. B. Khrapchenko (Leningrad, 1976), vol. xv, P- 7741 ibid., p. 77. 42 The phrase "eternal median" is from D. Merezhkovskii, "Gogol' and the Devil," in Robert Maguire (ed.), Gogol' From the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1974), pp. 55-103 (p. 62). 43 Gogol, Mertvye dushi, p. 261. 44 For an account of the more positive features of gossip, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York, 1985). 45 Gogol, Mertvye dushi, p. 242. The Old Believers associated both Peter the Great and Napoleon with the Antichrist. Chichikov's diabolic credentials are thus enhanced by the fact that he is a servant of Peter's bureaucracy and the rumor that he is Bonaparte himself. 46 Gogol, Mertvye dushi, pp. 22, 82. 47 See Ross Chambers, "Gossip and the Novel: Knowing Narrative and Narrative Knowing in Balzac, Mme de Lafayette and Proust," Australian Journal of French Studies, 23(2) (May-August 1986), 212-33 (pp. 212-13). 48 See William Mills Todd III, Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions and Narrative (Cambridge, MA and London, 1986), pp. 64-200. 49 Mills Todd III writes: "The refined language of polite society, which had invaded the government offices and churches, had lost its empire . . . As the ideologically constructed world of N. collapses, so does the map of Russia drawn by the ideology of

Notes to pages 60—66

50 51 52

53

54

55 56 57

58 59 60

61

62

245

polite society . . . Dead Souls . . . played a double game with the ideology that had prevailed for decades among Russia's cultured elite, in one movement making a spectacular pseudo-event of its demise, then in a countermovement suggesting that this selfsatisfied and ultimately immutable world . . . had been dead all along" {Fiction and Society, pp. 198-200). Quoted in Merezhkovskii, "Gogol' and the Devil," p. 61. It is Nozdrev who accidentally stumbles upon the truth about Chichikov's dead souls scheme. "I am fully convinced that it is the Devil and not man who weaves the web of gossip." Quoted in Merezhkovskii, "Gogol' and the Devil," p. 61. In his book on Tolstoy, Richard Gustafson reminds us of the Orthodox vision of saintliness as divine light piercing through a brittle surface crust of bodily passions: "Sanctity is marked . . . by a transfiguring light which permeates and emanates from the body. 'When the identity of direction is established . . . the fleshly, personal life ends and I pass into the force which is passing through me.' " See R. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoi: Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton, 1986), pp. 450—51, 454. "People appear for a moment outside the normal situations of life, as on the carnival square or in a nether world, and a different, more genuine sense of themselves and their relationships to one another is revealed." See M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, 1973), p. 120. E Dostoyevsky, Besy, in Polnoe sobranie, vol. x, p. 167. ibid., p. 366. Stavrogin's moral ambivalence is refracted through the factual ambivalence surrounding his sexual abuse of a young girl. Dostoyevsky was acutely attuned to the paradox of embodied evil's strange affinity with good. In Russian folklore, the bathhouse (where there can, for obvious reasons, be no icons) is frequently linked with the Devil. See Morson's book Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potential in "War and Peace" (Stanford, 1987). Tolstoy's novel thus provides a decisive foil to Madame Bovary whose heroine, like Anna, commits adultery after reading too many novels, but which is, in the matter of its plot's integration (or otherwise) of norm and deviation, antithetical to it. Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, in Tolstoy, Sobranie sochinenii v 20-i tomakh, ed. N. Akopova, N. K. Gudzii, N. N. Gusev and M. B. Khrapchenko (Moscow, 1963), vol. vm (ed. S. Chulkov), p. 224. ibid., vol. ix, p. 236.

246

Notes to pages 66-yo

63 Krystyna Pomorska notes Tolstoy's hostility to semiosis in "Tolstoi: Contra semiosis," in Henryk Baran (ed.), Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative (Durham, NC and London, 1992), pp. 57—65. In a book which came to my attention after completion of my own project, Amy Mandelker gives a superb account of the path leading from Tolstoy's resistance to artistic framing to his embrace of a radically iconic aesthetic in Framing Anna Karenina, (Ohio, 1993). Mandelker is now at work on a book tracing the influence of iconicity in Russian critical theory and provisionally entitled: "Icons of Theory, Theories of Iconicity." 64 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 328. 65 See Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 24-kh tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1914), vol. xvn, pp. 175-275. An excellent account of Merezhkovskii's argument is to be found in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The Development of a Revolutionary

Mentality (The Hague, 1975), pp. 37-57. 66 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, p. 179. 67 See Zinaida Gippius, "Byt i sobytiia," in her Literaturnyi dnevnik, pp. 283-309 (pp. 288-92). 68 See D. S. Merezhkovskii, "Chekhov kak bytopisatel'," in V Pokrovskii (ed.), Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Ego zhizn i sochineniia: Sbornik kritiko-literaturnykh statei (Moscow, 1907), pp. 191-92. 69 Gippius, "Byt i sobytiia," p. 287. 70 "Nature has . . . finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes . . . the patience of refined temperaments . . . [TJhere is not one of her inventions . . . that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery. . . the time has come when her productions must be superseded by art." See J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, trans. Havelock Ellis (New York, 1931), p. 104. 71 Zinaida Gippius, "Chto i kak," in Literaturnyi dnevnik, pp. 225—59 (P- 237)72 Quoted by Dmitrii Chizhevsky. See "Chekhov in the Development of Russian Literature," in R. L. Jackson (ed.), Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays (Eaglewood Cliffs NJ, 1967), pp. 49-62 (PP- 50-5073 As Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal suggests, for example, the invocation of Nietzsche's Superman on behalf of the Bogostroitetstvo ("God-Building") movement led by Gor'kii and Lunacharskii was a distortion of the original concept {Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age, P- 152). 74 Merezhkovskii, "O prichinakh," p. 200.

Notes to pages 71-75

247

75 "[T]he leaden vileness of savage Russian life," writes Gor'kii, "must be known to its roots so that it can be ripped up by them from the memory. . . [I]nspite of everything, something shining, healthy and creative will grow triumphantly . . . awakening . . . hope . . . for our rebirth into a bright and human life." See M. Gor'kii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, ed. M. L. Leonov (Moscow, 1968-82), vol. xv, pp. 193-94. 76 Solov'ev, "Lectures on Godmanhood," p. 78. 77 ibid., pp. 77, 81, 97. 78 See Pamela Davidson, The Poetic Imagination of Vyacheslav Ivanov: A Russian Symbolist's Perception ofDante (Cambridge, 1989), p. 62. 79 Solov'ev, "Lectures on Godmanhood," p. 62. 80 As Davidson notes, Solov'ev advanced Chernyshevskii's dissertation, "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" as the first step towards establishing a valid new system of aesthetics (Davidson, The Poetic Imagination, p. 60). 81 Valerii Briusov, "Sviaschennaia zhertva," Vesy, 1 (1905), 26-27. 82 For an account of the growth of Russian cinema and the interest it held for artists like Blok, see N. M. Zor'kaia, JVa rubezhe stoletii: u istokov massovogo iskusstva v Rossii igoo—igio godov (Moscow, 1976). 83 For a discussion of Andreev's ambiguous reception by Blok and Belyi in the context of shifting attitudes to the nature of art, see my A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid Andreev igoo-igog (London, 1990), pp. 215-27. 84 Fedor Sologub, "Iskusstvo nashikh dnei," in Sologub, Tvorimaia legenda, ed. Iu. Rosenblum, and O. Larkina, with commentary by L. Soboleva, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991), vol. 11, pp. 177-209 (p. 194). 85 "If byt triumphs . . . that means that life (zhizn ).. . is languishing in captivity. . . Life can only be created by someone who dares to say T . " See Sologub, "Iskusstvo nashikh dnei," p. 205. 86 ibid., p. 195. 87 "Al'donsa is stupid coincidence, a momentary and momentarily dissipating caprice of the drunken Aisa." See F. Sologub, "The Demons of the Poets" ("Demony poetov"), in Tvorimaia legenda, vol. 11, p. 163. 88 The title of Sologub's trilogy indicates the novelist's insistence on the indissociability of creating " I " from the created world. Here the work of art is not conceived as the finished product of a discrete artist. Its aesthetic status is inherent in the act by which it was created. It is a legend in creation. 89 "In everyday life a man does not create, he only repeats. He does what others do. Moves together with the crowd . . . with the majorities." See Sologub, "Poets - The Sculptors of Life"

248

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Notes to pages y6-88

("Poety - vaiateli zhizni"), in Tvorimaia legenda, vol. 11, pp. 209-13 (p. 209). Sologub, "Iskusstvo nashikh dnei," pp. 195-200. ibid., pp. 198-200. Andrei Belyi, "The Problem of Culture," in Belyi, Simvolizm: kniga statei (Moscow, 1910), pp. 1-10 (p. 7). ibid., p. 8. Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe stoletii, pp. 37-41. ibid., p. 448. See the third epigraph to this chapter. The words are from the story "The Steppe" ("Step'") in Anton Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, p. 70.

3 ENACTING THE PRESENT! CHEKHOV, ART AND THE EVERYDAY

1 See M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Michael

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, 1993), P. 7i. For one analysis of Chekhov's account of his work on Sakhalin, see Cathy Pop kin, "Chekhov as Ethnographer: Epistemological Crisis on Sakhalin Island," Slavic Review, 51 (Spring 1992), 36—52. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. v, p. 51. Gippius, Literaturnyi dnevnik, pp. 290—91. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, p. 339. Chekhov's oeuvre divides into an early period (1880-1886) dominated by humorous satire, a middle period (1887-1890) when Chekhov began his experimentation with shorter narrative forms, and a mature period (1891—1904) containing his best stories and major plays. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vm, p. 59. ibid., p. 64. ibid., p. 72. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, pp. 421-22. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, p. 417. Nils Nilsson remarks on the difficulties this aspect of "The Bishop" caused its readers, but then goes on to extract symbolic meaning from the story's subtextual patterns. See Studies in Cehov3s

Narrative Technique: ceThe Steppe33 and CiThe Bishop33, Stockholm Slavic

Studies, no. 2 (Stockholm, 1968). 13 In similar vein, Caryl Emerson wisely cautions that while "Chekhov understood how virtuous, prosaic living often turned out - a muddle, a mess - for Tolstoy . . . prosaic values had to

Notes to pages 88-gj

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32

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work out." See her paper "Chekhov and the Annas" delivered at Yale University, 5-6 November, 1994, p. 13. See Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol' (New York, 1961), pp. 67-70. Chekhovian poshlost' draws sustenance from the falsely aesthetic. In "All Because of Apples" ( " ^ iablochki"), a landowner punishes two miscreants by forcing them to reenact a mockery of the fairytale encounter between tyrant and prince. The punishment is both a grim reality to be distinguished from its artistic model, and a vulgar parody of that model. The provincial ugliness which Nadia is striving to reliquish in "The Betrothed" ("Nevesta") is epitomized in the motif of a tasteless painting of a naked woman admired by her despised fiance. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, p. 181. ibid., pp. 184-85. ibid., pp. 256. ibid., pp. 236-37. ibid., p. 226. ibid., p. 287. ibid., p. 54. ibid., p. 34. ibid., p. 70. ibid., p. 79. ibid., p. 91. For example: "The scenes . . . would lose absolutely nothing if they were broken down into separate sketches. Instead of 'The Steppe/ we could have A Hot Day on the Steppe,' A Jewish Inn,' . . . etc." See K. Arsen'ev, "Sovremennye russkie belletristy," Vestnik Evropy, 7 (1888), 258-59. In an early study of Chekhov's prose, William Gerhardi attempted to motivate Chekhov's plot subversion in "The Kiss" by arguing that the story is about time's passage in a meaningless monotony. See W. Gerhardi, Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (London, 1923). Serge Persky felt that the story showed life as "an absurd mystification." See S. Persky, Contemporary Russian Novelists (Freeport, NY, 1913). Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. x, p. 143. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vm, pp. 165-66. ibid., p. 173. A. P. Chudakov writes: "Earlier literary tradition emphasized among the characteristics of its literary model a hierarchy of objects, signs and phenomenological qualities . . . There is no such hierarchy in Chekhov's model of the world." See A. P. Chudakov, Chekhov's Poetics (Ann Arbor, 1983), p. 220.

250

Notes to pages 95-102

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. rx, p. 430. ibid., p. 431. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vm, pp. 52—53, p. 58. ibid., p. 75. ^id., p. 73. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. x, p. 135. ibid., p. 143. ibid., p. 133. The impression of life as a path flowing ceaselessly from the past into a freely chosen future is reminiscent of the journey chronotope in "The Steppe," confirming Chekhov's allegiance to a cultural tradition in which the figure of the put' (path) is so important. See L. Sazonova, "Ideia puti v drevnerusskoi literature," in Russian Literature, 29 (1991), 471-88. 42 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vm, p. 185. 43 See, for example, Peter Stowell, "Chekhov and the Nouveau Roman: Subjective Objectivism," in P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman (eds.), Chekhov's Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical

Essays (Columbus OH, 1977), pp. 180-91. 44 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, pp. 185, 188. 45 ibid., p. 190. 46 In "The Man in a Case" ("Chelovek v futliare"), a. bureaucratic teacher is incensed by anything that breaches regulations, and cannot bring himself to contemplate marriage for fear of the unforeseeable trouble it might bring. 47 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, pp. 170, 172. 48 Boris Eikhenbaum, "Pushkin i Tolstoi," in Eikhenbaum 0 proze: sbornik statei (Leningrad, 1979), p. 176. 49 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. vn, pp. 163-69. 50 For one of the first formulations of prosaics, see Morson's Hidden in Plain View 51 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, pp. 205-19. 52 Morson develops the notion of sideshadowing (by analogy with the more familiar "foreshadowing") to describe the way in which novels such as Tolstoy's appear to invest equal narrative potential in a messy plurality of simultaneously unfolding lines of action. See "Bakhtin, Genres and Temporality," in New Literary History, 22 (1991), 1071-92. 53 Another example is "The Betrothed" ("Nevesta") which ends with the heroine's triumphant departure for Moscow from the stifling, vulgar provinces to begin a glorious future after recognizing that her life had been "turned upside down" (zhizn . . . perevernuta) - a phrase which, like Ol ga in "The Grasshopper," she repeats from

Notes to pages 102-08

251

another source with fake poetic connotations (Polnoe sobranie, vol. x,p. 219). 54 "[O]nly through the answerable participation effected by a unique act or deed can one get out of the realm of endless draft versions and rewrite one's life once and for all in the form of a fair copy" (Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, p. 44). 55 Jackson comments in reference to Treplev in "The Seagull": "Man's first step . . . must be to recognize his fate in himself, his past in his present, and so come to grips with the only real given in history: man. This step . . . Treplev is incapable of making." See "The Empty Well, the Dry Lake and the Cold Gave" in R. L. Jackson (ed.), Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays (Eaglewood Cliffs NJ, 1967), pp. 99-112 (p. 107). 56 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. xi, p. 148. 57 ibid., p. 148. 58 ibid., p. 168. 59 ibid., p. 175. 60 ibid., p. 192. 61 ibid. Jackson writes: "The triumph of Nina is her free choice of the journey, her willingness, finally, to endure." See "The Empty Well," p. i n . 62 Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy, pp. 40-42. 63 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, p. 281. Egil Steffenson has shown how Chekhov symbolizes withdrawal from active participation through the theme of departure, itself connected with the concept of futliarnost''. See "Tema ukhoda v proze Chekhova," in ScandoSlavica, 27 (1989), 121-40. 64 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, p. 269. L. Lieber examines the ethical coloring given to Chekhovian space and movement (including the notion of confinement and enclosure). See "Otsenochnyi cprostranstvennyi iazyk' v trilogii Chekhova," Studia Slavica Academiae Hungaricae, 28 (1982-83), 199-312. 65 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. ix, p. 274. 66 D. Likhachev, Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury (Leningrad, 1967), p. 300. 67 Martin Esslin writes of Chekhov's plays: "[T]he silences and hesitations in the characters' speech produced a new kind of poetry, a lyricism in which the rhythms and pauses coalesced into a new harmony." See "Chekhov and the Modern Drama," in Toby Clyman (ed.), A Chekhov Companion (Westport CT, 1985), PP- I 35-45 (p. 142). 68 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. x, p. 142. 69 ibid., p. 139.

252

Notes to pages 108-og

70 Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy, p. 71. Bakhtin's conceptions overlap with the distinctions that Berdiaev draws between objectified time (time fragmented into a sequence of unrecapturable moments) and existential time (in which the subject experiences the fulness of time within each instant). See Berdiaev, "Time," in Edie, Scanlon and Zeldin (eds.), Russian Philosophy, vol. 111, pp. 213-21 (p. 216). 71 "The Man in the Case" (the text on which the association of Chekhovian everyday life with provincial stagnation is frequently based) is something of an anomaly. Belikov is, unusually for the mature Chekhov, a cut-and-dry figure lacking the ambiguity inherent in the portrayal of, say, Riabovich in "The Kiss." As for Dostoevskii, the literary incarnation of deathly normality is, for Chekhov, usually equivalent to its subversion) there are moments in "The Kiss" (and other such stories) in which the heroes approach a liberating accommodation with their routine existences. It is no accident that the story of Belikov is related in the first person by a character from whom Chekhov can thus establish an appropriate distance. For an analysis of Chekhov's framed narratives, see Charles Isenberg, Telling Silence: Russian Frame Narratives of Renuncia-

tion (Evanston, 1993), pp. 100-36. 72 Following Bakhtin, Morson has written: "Neither culture, language nor the self ever achieves . . . unity as the great philosophical systems have . . . described them. Quotidian randomness and other centrifugal forces interfere. Heteroglossia insures the partial asystemacity of language; the inevitably multiple 'chronotopes' of daily life insure the diversity of culture; and the often unpredictable dialogues that constitute the self and social interaction create the uniqueness of each utterance and each person." See G. S. Morson (ed.), Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work (Chicago

and London, 1986), p. xi. 73 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. xi, p. 241. 74 Many have, in interpreting this duality, talked in terms of a hesitation between everyday life as oppressive daily grind, and everyday life as the ground on which man can reveal his humanity. See, for example, V Kamianov, "Schet vremeni: v khudozhestvennom mire Chekhova," Oktiabr, 12 (1987), 188-94. Such approaches omit to account for the possibility of transformation (through true, iconic art) of one kind of life into the other - a possibility that Chekhov expresses persistently. 75 Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie, vol. x, p. 137. 76 ibid., p. 137. 77 "This was not drama as a mirror of everyday life, but drama as a

Notes to pages iog—u

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performance in which a new theatricality of everyday life was to be created." See John Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society

(London, 1981), p. 59. 78 Viacheslav Ivanov, Symbolism's leading theorist, singled out theater from other art forms for its unique capacity for synthesizing aesthetics, ethics and truth: "In theater the whole triad is openly manifested because theater . . . has as its artistic material man in his entirety and strives for the production of an entire event in its synthetic unity within the soul." See V Ivanov, Borozdy i mezhi: opyty esteticheskie i kriticheskie (Moscow, 1916), p. 276. 4 FEDOR SOLOGUB S AESTHETICS OF NARRATIVE EXCESS

1 The epigraph is from Sartre's novel, La Nausee, in J.-P. Sartre, Oeuvres Romanesques (Paris 1981), p. 159. 2 Unlike some other Symbolists, Sologub tended to insist on a radical difference in status between the two realities, writing of "a world analogous to the outside, objective world, but constructed independently by the artist," and declaring that art is an edifice "built not for life but for the purposes of art alone." Cited in James West, Russian Symbolism: A Study of Viacheslav Ivanov and the Russian Symbolist Aesthetic (London, 1970), p. 114. 3 See, for example, K. Chukovskii, "Nav'i chary Melkogo besa," in A. Chebotarevskaia (ed.), 0 Fedore Sologube: kritika (St. Petersburg, 1911), pp. 35-57; S. Rabinowitz, "Sologub's Literary Children: The Special Case of The Petty Demon," in F. Sologub, The Petty Demon, ed. Murl Barker, trans. S. D. Cioran (Ann Arbor, 1983), PP- 344-554 Sologub's early critics focussed on the jarring impression created by the Liudmila/Sasha scenes. Iurii Steklov argued that they were added merely for their "piquant aroma," while A. Gornfeld commented that the lack of integration makes the "perversion" that they demonstrate "all the more depraved." See Iu. Steklov, "O tvorchestve Fedora Sologuba," Literaturnyi raspad, 2 (St. Petersburg 1909), 176; A. Gornferd, "Nedotykomka," in Chebotarevskaia (ed.), 0 Fedore Sologube, p. 256. For two readings in which parallels between Liudmila and Peredonov are analysed, see Linda Ivanits, "The Grotesque in Sologub's Novel The Petty Demon," in Sologub, The Petty Demon, pp. 312-24 (Liudmila assimilated to Peredonovshchina), and Irene Masing-Delic, " Teredonov's Little Tear' — Why was it Shed?: The Sufferings of a Tormentor," in Sologub, The Petty Demon, pp. 333—44 (Peredonov as a distorted version of Liudmila).

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Notes to pages 112-16

5 The novel's title is ambiguous and may refer both to Peredonov and to the nedotykomka that appears to him as an index of his growing insanity. The significance of this ambiguity will be dealt with later. 6 Sologub's novel owes much to Dostoyevsky, including the very concept of petty demonry which invokes both the devil that torments Ivan Karamazov and the bumbling revolutionaries of The Possessed. Gogol's Chichikov is another antecedent to Peredonov (see chapter 2). 7 Milton Ehre, "Fedor Sologub's The Petty Demon: Eroticism, Decadence and Time," in J. Elsworth (ed.), The Silver Age in Russian Literature: Selected Papers From the Fourth World Congress for Slavic and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (New York, 1992), pp. 156—71

(P. 158). 8 It is no wonder, then, that Sologub's claim in his foreword to the novel's second edition that he simply observes everyday life as he finds it, has been treated with skepticism: "Everything that relates to . . . the everyday life and the psychology in my novel is based on very precise observations . . . Smooth is the surface of my mirror . . . it possesses no distortion. The deformed and the beautiful are reflected in it with equal precision." "Author's Foreword to the Second Edition (1908)", in Sologub, The Petty Demon, p. 27. The translation is S. D. Cioran's. 9 Propp's structural theory lists thirty-one functions or "slots" ("helper," "object," "obstacle" etc.) which account for all aspects of plot action in simple folk tales. See V. la. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, Texas, 1968). 10 Fedor Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 209, 213. 11 ibid., p. 97. 12 ibid., p. 62. 13 ibid., p. 72. 14 ibid., p. 174. 15 For example, Edith Clowes writes: "[T]he dreams, visions . . . which build in intensity . . . are intended to explore and evoke subliminal energy." See "Literary Decadence: Sologub, Schopenhauer and the Anxiety of Individuation," in V Terras (ed.), American Contributions To the Tenth International Congress of Slavists

(Columbus, 1988), pp. m - 2 3 ( p . 118). 16 Quoted in Lena Szilard, "Vklad simvolizma v razvitie russkogo romana," Stadia Slavica Hungaricae, 30 (1984), 185-207 (p. 193). 17 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 97. 18 ibid., p. 91. 19 For the principle of retardation see Viktor Shklovskii, "Art as

Notes to pages 116-21

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Technique," in L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), pp. 3-24. Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 189. ibid., p. 130. ibid., p. 157. Ehre, "Fedor Sologub's The Petty Demon," p. 167. Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 240. This is a view taken by Charlotte Rosenthal and Helene Foley: "Yet the increasing pressures of the outside world make the amorality of Liudmila's romance immoral, and turn her to violence and revenge." See their article "Symbolic Patterning in Sologub's The Petty Demon," in Sologub, The Petty Demon, pp. 324-33 (P. 329)For analyses of the nature of gossip see L. J. Morrissey, " cMending Wall': The Structure of Gossip," English Language Notes, 25, 3 (March 1989), 58-63; Gary Alan Fine, "Rumors and Gossiping," in Teun A. Dijk (ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (London, 1985), vol. 111, pp. 223-37. Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 112. ibid., p. 120. ibid., pp. 184-85. ibid., pp. 264, 254. This is the very reverse of the Bakhtinian scandal where scandals take place not in the non-time of gossip but in the collapsed, apocalyptical time of the Dostoyevskian threshold. ibid., p. 263. ibid., pp. 35, 74, 39. Stepan Il'ev writes: "Peredonov's laughter . . . is always a guffaw, and, moreover, an unusual, unexpected guffaw." See S. II'ev, Russkii simvolisticheskii roman: Aspekty poetiki

(Kiev, 1991), p. 38. 34 ibid., pp. 61, 225. 35 Stanley Rabinowitz connects these shifting surfaces with the preponderance of linguistic punning in the book, which he portrays as a questioning of the surface stability of language: "[N]umerous puns signal a breakdown in the integrity of language itself: words no longer communicate clear and unqualified meaning." See Rabinowitz,"Sologub's Literary Children," p. 352. 36 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 226. 37 ibid., pp. 154, 229, 220. 38 Victor Erofeev points out that, in contrast with nineteenthcentury depictions of Russian provincial life (including those of Chekhov), there is, in The Petty Demon, no concretely embodied ideal to counteract the unrelenting and timeless monotony of byt,

256

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41

42 43 44

45

46 47

48 49

50 51

Notes to pages 121-25

no alternative space for optimism and (in an allusion to "The Three Sisters") no ever-beckoning Moscow. Rather than distinguishing himself from the negativity that he portrays and thus retaining his wholeness (tselostnost'), Sologub's narrator "corresponds to the fragmentary chaos of the world he depicts." Viktor Erofeev, "Na grani razryva: Melkii bes F. Sologuba na fone russkoi realisticheskoi traditsii," Voprosy literatury, 5, ii (February 1988), 140-58 (143, 158). Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 264. ibid., p. 232. Bruce Holl who investigates the connections between Peredonov and Don Quixote reminds us that the name Peredonov connotes to Russian readers notions of something "overdone," and, by extension, of someone "over-Donned." See Bruce T. Holl, "Don Quixote in Sologub's Melkii bes," Slavic and East European Journal, 33 (Winter 1988), 539-55. Boris Uspenskii insists that perspective and meaning in art are inseparable, arguing that the adoption of a particular vantage point automatically implies an evaluation, and thus an intended meaning. The phrase "point of view" conveys this semantic complexity well. See Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition. See Diana Greene, Insidious Intent: An Interpretation of Fedor Sologub's "The Petty Demon" (Columbus, 1985). Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 198-99. Sartre's understanding of senseless existential excess, reflected in this chapter's epigraph, is encapsulated by the refrain-like phrase de trop. There are a total of seven such forewords, all containing cryptic and contradictory clues as to how the author intended his novel to be read, and to his own attitude to his hero. Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 90-91, 191. Erofeev claims that the constant intrusions into the narration "exceed the boundaries of the literary fact." See Erofeev, "Na grani razryva," p. 152. Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 48, 37, 81. ibid., p. 188. Greene argues that "Sologub gives his narrator realistic mannerisms . . . but the world the narrator shows us is disintegrating in a most unrealistic way . . . We are confused by this dissonance between the tone of the narration and the events of the novel, and thus we are more vulnerable to Sologub's insidious intention: slowly but inexorably to recreate in us Peredonov's spiritual dilemma." Greene, Insidious Intent, p. 107. Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 196. ibid., pp. 263-64.

Notes to pages 125-30

257

52 Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy - The Literature of Subversion (London and New York, 1981). 53 Further evidence confirming the complexity of the relationship between Peredonov and his creator comes in the form of earlier poems by Sologub entitled "Nedotykomka" and "Likho" in which the lyric subject is the author himself. For a useful account of the semantic connotations of the neologistic word nedotykomka, see S. D. Cioran's introduction to Murl Barker (ed.), The Petty Demon, pp. 20-21. 54 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 254. The fusion of discourse levels responsible for free indirect speech is also liable to engender the kind of ambiguity associated with the fantastic. For the connections between these two phenomena see the analysis in chapter 2 of my A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid Andreev, igoo—igog (London, 1990). 55 Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 185, 60. 56 The dilemma posed by Sologub's theory was, we recall, how it is that mature byt (byt as the counter-aesthetic nightmare of dumb coincidences) returns to the pristine state of byt as life and motion. 57 Sologub had explored this fascination in the earlier story "The Crowd" {"Tolpa"). 58 Jackson analyses the parallels linking Peredonov with Fedor Karamazov in a chapter on The Petty Demon in his book Dostoyevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature (The Hague, 1958). This is a connection made also by Viktor Erofeev in "Na grani razryva." 59 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 254. 60 For Jakobson's account of the metaphor/metonymy principles, see his "Two Aspects of Language Disturbances," in R. Jakobson and M. E. Halle, The Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), PP- 58-9761 Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 157-58. 62 ibid., p. 39. 63 ibid., p. 214. Gossip is, for Sologub, in part (negative) object of depiction, in part (positive) model of narration. The contradictory approach of nineteenth-century writers to gossip (having to do with its position on the margins of aesthetics and their ambivalence towards art) has yet to be resolved. See chapter 2. 64 Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 103, 49. I. Sukhikh has, in his interpretation of the provincial chronotope, traced the phenomenon back to Gogol's Mirgorod. See Sukhikh, Problemy poetiki A. P. Chekhova (Leningrad, 1987). 65 Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 156-57. II7ev interprets the difference

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66 67 68

69 70

Notes to pages 131-34

between Peredonov's punning and that of Liudmila as one between the "profanation" of the world and escape from it into an ideal, lyrical realm. See Russkii simvolisticheskii roman, p. 46. Sologub, Melkii bes, pp. 235-36. ibid., pp. 257-59. ibid., p. 229. Ivanov-Razumnik, an insightful commentator on Sologub's novel, notes that the author "becomes convinced that you can't simply ward off the grey nedotykomka with the word 'beauty'." See "Fedor Sologub," in Chebotarevskaia, 0 Fedore Sologube, pp. 7-33 (p. 23). Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 240. Fragments from the notebooks to the novel support the notion of a virulent anti-aesthetic at work. There is a whole section dealing in mocking fashion with two writers who do not appear in the published version. Their effete, aesthetic wordplay is one target. Another is their stated aim in visiting the town: to give a literary depiction of the "common type." Peredonov subverts their attempts to typecast his predicament in social terms by yawning in their faces; yawning is, of course, among the many oral excesses that characterize Peredonov's own anti-aesthetic. See Sologub,

The Petty Demon, pp. 291-305. 71 See M . Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (Ann Arbor, 1973),

pp. 102-03. 72 I would therefore question Diana Greene's assertion that "the two plots influence one another in a two-way osmosis" and that therefore the Sasha/Liudmila relationship merely "presents Peredonovism in another form," Insidious Intent, pp. 36, 64. 73 Lena Szilard notes that androgynous figures derived from Plato were important to Russian Symbolists attempting to make good Russia's lack of a renaissance and of the process of individuation of the personality that came with it. The example of Sasha suggests that Russian Symbolism indeed toyed with androgyny and its capacities for covering over the disjunctions and splits of semiosis through the accretion of more complex layers of signs. But it did so only to reject it. See "Andrei Belyi and His Beatrice," in J. Elsworth (ed.) The Silver Age, pp. 171-82. 74 Fedor Sologub, "Isksusstvo nashikh dnei," p. 198. 75 The introductory paragraph reads: "I take a piece of everyday life (byt), coarse and barren, and out of it I create an exquisite legend, for I am a poet." 76 See, for example, Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie, vol. 1, p. 168. 77 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 254. 78 The nedotykomka and Volodin thus become two alternative (and

Notes to pages 134-42

79

80 81 82 83 84

85

259

contrasting) inner metatextual readings of Peredonov's ultimate significance. The always astute Chukovskii senses something of the triumphal undercurrent in Peredonov's murder of Volodin when he suggests that the act was committed to enable Peredonov to acquire his own Dulcinea: the school inspectorship. See "Nav'i chary Melkogo besa," p. 37. Sologub, "Iskusstvo nashikh dnei," p. 205. See Sologub, "la. Kniga sovershennogo samoutverzhdeniia," in Sologub, Tvorimaia legenda, vol. 11, pp. 148-53 (p. 149), and "Chelovek cheloveku - d'iavol," ibid., pp. 153-59. Sologub, "Chelovek cheloveku - d'iavol," pp. 157-58. See Clowes, "Literary Decadence" for a perceptive account of Schopenhauer's influence on Sologub. Sologub, "Staryi chort Savelych," in Sologub, Tvorimaia legenda, pp. 164-71, and "Iskusstvo nashikh dnei," p. 182. Clowes writes "[T]he dreams, visions, dances and masquerades which build in intensity to the great anti-climactic slaughter at the end are intended to explore and evoke subliminal energy and to channel it toward cultural and spiritual rebirth." Clowes, "Literary Decadence," p. 118. Ross Chambers suggests that the "narrative seduction" involved in western fiction's tightly structured, suspenseful plots is "a consequence of the alienation undergone by literary discourse in the text, and a condition of its interpretability. . . [S]uch seduction, producing authority where there is no power. . . appears as a major weapon against alienation, an instrument of self-asser-

tion." See Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 212. 86 Sologub, Melkii bes, p. 264. 5 THE STRUGGLE WITH BYT IN BELYI S KOTIK LETAEV AND THE CHRISTENED CHINAMAN

1 Andrei Belyi, "The Art of the Future," in Stephen Cassedy (trans, and ed.), Selected Essays of Andrey Bely (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 199-205 (p. 202).

2 Andrei Belyi, "Symbolism as a World View," in Cassedy, Selected Essays, pp. 73-93 (p. 78). 3 Andrei Belyi, "The Emblematics of Meaning," in Cassedy, Selected Essays,??. 11-199 (p. 153). 4 Lazar Fleishman, for example, writes of the "intensified autobiographical orientation of Bely's work as a whole." See

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10

Notes to pages 143-44

L. Fleishman, "Bely's Memoirs," in John E. Malmstad (ed.), Audrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 216-42 (pp. 216-17). Roger Keys, "Metafiction in Andrei Belyi's Novel Petersburg," Forum For Modern Language Studies, 28, 2 (1992), 150-56 (p. 154). Belyi, "Emblematics of Meaning," p. 193, pp. 183-84. Belyi, "Emblematics of Meaning," p. 193. See J o h n Elsworth, Audrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge, 1983), p. 118. Critics differ in the degree to which they emphasize the "factual" basis for the works. Elsworth portrays Kotik Letaev as an artistic novel which takes the reader into the arcane and idealized unreal world of anthroposophy, "unless, that is, anthroposophy is actually true and the reader finds all the explanation pre-existing in his own mind" - a possibility treated with skepticism. See Audrey Bely, p. 137. Gerald Janecek steers a middle course, arguing that the novel is "a blend of fact and imagination." See Janecek's introduction to A. Belyi, Kotik Letaev, trans, by Gerald Janecek (Ann Arbor, 1971), p. v. Vladimir Alexandrov takes Belyi at his word, portraying Kotik Letaev as "a thinly veiled autobiography" in which (in Belyi's words) "it was not Andrei Bely who wrote . . . but Boris Bugaev who naturalistically captured what he remembered well all his life." See Vladimir Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fictions (Cambridge MA, 1985), p. 153. Despite these differences, the conventional notions of art (as the work of the imagination) and reality (as empirical fact) remain in place. It is merely the mix of the two which shifts from interpretation to interpretation. Alexandrov is among those to mention the line joining Belyi's Symbolism with his autobiographical venture, but is typical in downplaying the reformulation implicit in Belyi's Symbolism of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in favor of the more manageable ties posited between art and cognition which Alexandrov assimilates to anthroposophy: "[Ajutobiography can be seen as an outgrowth of the symbolistic epistemology that is the foundation of his art . . . Belyi's immersion in . . . Steiner's anthroposophy . . . could only reinforce his belief in the validity of his own theory of symbolism." See Vladimir Alexandrov, "Kotik Letaev, The Baptized Chinaman and Notes of an Eccentric," in J. Malmstad (ed.), Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 145-83 (p. 146). Alexandrov best expresses this view: "Bely wants nothing less than to describe an absence of self-awareness from the point of view of the . . . unformed infant. But this is clearly a paradoxical

Notes to pages 145—48

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desire in view of the nature of language and it leads to the striking inconsistency of referring to oneself even when that self does not exist." See Alexandrov, Andrei Bely, p. 180. 11 Alexandrov is quite correct in noting (among other differences) that in The Christened Chinaman "Belyi moves the visionary, anthroposophical imagery which dominated the early work into the background," and that (as compared with Kotik Letaev) "the teleological component that converts cycles into whorls of a spiral is muted in The Baptized Chinaman. The narrator's identification with the transcendence that Christ represented earlier has become significantly weaker." See Andrei Belyi, pp. 183, 190. I shall suggest that the abandonment of a transcendent (i. e. atemporal) Christ, as well as the more clearly defined distinction between viewpoints ("adult" and "child") in the later work can be seen as an advance on, rather than a retreat from the innovations of Kotik Letaev. For more on differences separating the two Kotik novels, see Thomas Beyer's introduction to Andrej Belyj, The Christened Chinaman, translated, annotated and introduced by Thomas Beyer Jr. (Tenafly, NJ, 1991). 12 N. V Valentinov expresses this view with considerable vitriol in his Dva goda s simvolistami (Stanford, 1969). Lazar Fleishman provides an effective riposte reasserting the basic authenticity of Belyi's account in "Belyi's Memoirs." 13 Charlene Castellano quotes Georgii Ivanov's complaint that Belyi's memoirs are "extremely unpleasant and difficult to read because of their annoying manner" in her own very helpful "Andrey Bely's Memories of Fiction," in Jane Gary Harris (ed.), Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature (Prin-

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

ceton, 1990), pp. 66-99 (p. 68). Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe stoletii (Moscow, 1989), pp. 37, 97. ibid., p. 379. ibid., p. 177. ibid., p. 445. ibid., pp. 41, 107-08. ibid., p. 200. ibid., pp. 436, 442. The theme of byt in Belyi's works is treated in somewhat lopsided fashion by A. Dolgopolov in Andrei Belyi i ego roman "Peterburg"

(Leningrad, 1988). Dolgopolov portrays byt as something to be escaped from into the realm of bytie (maintaining a dubious dichotomy opposing two fixed states) rather than transcended and made anew as zhizn (which would, more correctly, I believe, imply a contrast between a fixed state and a motion of transcendence).

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Notes to pages 148-51

22 In Na rubezhe, Belyi confirms that "the period described [in Kotik Letaev] . . . stands under the slogan of the nursery, the carpet and my nanny; our apartment has yet to be fully studied by me" (P. 181). 23 Andrei Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia v 2-kh tomakh, ed. V Piskunov (Moscow, 1990), vol. 11, pp. 293-444 (pp. 301-02). 24 ibid., p. 305. 25 ibid., pp. 305, 332. 26 ibid., p. 347. 27 Carol Anscheutz explores the links between metaphor as transformation and memory in Belyi in "Recollection as Metaphor in Kotik Letaev" Russian Literature, 4 (1976), 345-55. 28 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia v 2—kh tomakh, ed. V Piskunov, p. 362. 29 ibid., p. 418. 30 ibid., p. 419. 31 ibid., pp. 403-04. 32 ibid., p. 363. Most critics note this feature of Belyi's writing as the reflection of a technical problem only partially overcome. Andrew Wachtel, for example, writes: "How could the inchoate memories of a child who did not yet know how to speak be presented in words? . . . The adult's perspective . . . indicates that the adult narrator, although he can, with great effort, recall and verbalize the experiences he had as a young child, cannot return to that state." See Andrew Wachtel, The Battle For Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990), pp. 159-60. 33 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 431. 34 In an insightful article, Amy Mandelker points to links between Belyi's interpretation of language as, from its inception, an inherently social activity, and the linguistic theories of Vygotskii and Voloshinov. See Amy Mandelker, "Synaesthesia and Semiosis: Icon and Logos in Andrej Belyj's Glossalolija and Kotik Letaev," Slavic and East European Journal, 34, 2 (Summer 1990), 158-76 (p. 173). Mandelker, incidentally, follows Steven Cassedy in indicating Belyi's debt to Orthodoxy's concept of the icon. Both critics (and in Cassedy's case, as I shall argue, with some misleading consequences) focus on one aspect of iconic language (the icon as physical embodiment of Logos). My analysis extends the notion of icon to plot and narration. See Steven Cassedy, "Bely's Theory of Symbolism as a Formal Iconics of Meaning," in Malmstad (ed.), Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, pp. 285-313. 35 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 339. 36 ibid., p. 357.

Notes to pages 151-53

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37 Cassedy notes the affinity between Belyi's earlier Symbolist theories and Orthodox concepts of iconicity, stressing the shared emphasis on the coexistence of meanings — divine and human, transcendent and corporeal: "The important notion is the duality of Christ's nature, the coexistence in him of a transcendent (divine) and an immanent (corporeal) component . . . [I] cons have the same status . . . Thus when we experience an icon we experience divine grace . . . we are coming as close as the intrinsic limitations of our corporeal natures allow to the actual experience of the divine . . . Bely's system is iconic through and through. Replace Value with God the Father and the Symbol Embodied with divine grace and you have . . . a Russian Orthodox theology of icons." See Cassedy, "Bely's Theory," pp. 304-05. However, Cassedy leaves aside the interdependence of meanings - of divine grace and the corporeal - implicit in most Orthodox interpretations of our relationship to God. He suggests that Belyi's system is, however iconic, not truly religious because its components are self-sufficient and do not allow a transcendent God and/or divine grace to be posited as first principles external to that system (p. 310). This goes against Orthodox conceptions of the Triune God — precisely a self-contained system in which, because the Holy Spirit does not proceed from Father and Son, but from Father through Son, there is no external, abstract principle that can be removed from the divine economy in which God is immanent. The implication that icons accord humans (limited) access to a fixed essence from which they are separate also contradicts Orthodox ideas about the dynamic, energetic nature of the participation of created beings in God from which they are different only "in that they change and move towards him" (Meyendorff). Godhood is not merely embodied, whole and complete, in man, it is realized by man through the transfiguration of his corporeal existence. (Likewise, Belyi's iconic meaning is articulated through the fixed, linguistic concepts that, in reaccenting, it overcomes and is not merely statically embodied in those concepts.) 38 Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 182. Anscheutz's article "Recollection as Metaphor" gives many examples of Kotik's literal understanding of metaphors. 39 Belyi, Na rubezhe, pp. 344-45, 353~5640 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, pp. 380-81. 41 Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 447. 42 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 353. 43 Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 72.

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Notes to pages 154-58

44 Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 68. 45 Andrei Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets (Munich, 1969), pp. 52-53. The real prototype on whom Malinovskaia is based was a woman called Mariia Ivanovna Liaskovskaia to whom Belyi devoted an entire chapter in Na rubezhe (pp. 108-15). 46 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunoy, p. 425. 47 Amy Mandelker writes: "Rather than depicting a Lacanian loss of meaning with the acquisition of language, Belyi's narrative suggests that childhood is an age of union with language in its fullest significance" ("Synaesthesia and Semiosis," p. 171). She is presumably referring to the "iconic" stage of Kotik's linguistic socialization in which he was able creatively to interact with his father - the stage which precedes crystallization as "a second mathematician" and his entry into language as abstract symbols which does involve a kind of Lacanian loss wherein words no longer "sparkle" with inner meaning. It is Vladimir Solov'ev (or "He" as he is cryptically referred to in the novel) who is to return to rescue Kotik from the bytovoi grip of both parents and install a new era of mythic creativity based on interchange of the sort that Kotik enjoyed in the apartment of Mikhail Solov'ev (the younger brother of the philosopher and reputedly the person who suggested the theurgic identity of Andrei Belyi to Boris Bugaev). 48 Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 448. 49 Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, pp. 133-35. 50 Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 422. 51 ibid., p. 417. 52 ibid., p. 303. 53 Olga Muller-Cooke, "Pathological Patterns in Belyfs Novels: Ableukhovs-Letaevs-Korobkins' Revisited," in Daniel RancourLaferriere (ed.), Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam/

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 263-85. Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 44. ibid., p. 47. Belyi, Na rubezhe, p. 89. ibid., p. 67. ibid. Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, pp. 112, 153, 116-17, r99ibid., p. 5. The identification of Letaev senior as the Chinaman, and the role of the eastern elements in The Christened Chinaman has puzzled critics. Alexandrov writes: "The change to the final title of the work [it was to have been called The Crime of Nikolai Letaev] is difficult to understand, as is the function of the Asiatic imagery in

Notes to pages 158—61

62 63 64

65 66

67 68

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the novel as a whole" (Andrei Bely, p. 185). The association of "Chineseness" with edakoe takoe svoe accords with the focus of the novel as I understand it. Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 150. ibid., pp. 192-93. Critics make much of the complexity of viewpoints in the Letaev novels, disagreeing about the relationship between them. Wachtel notes "the rapidity with which [Belyi] cuts back and forth between the two points of view" [adult-narrator and child-hero] but claims that the narrator "is not supposed to be the author" {The Battle For Childhood, p. 158). Elsworth insists that the narrator's viewpoint is that of the author (Audrey Bely, p. 120). If, however, the novel is seen as an act of transfigurative theurgy, the problem of perspective (which, by definition, involves "viewpoints" on something outside the viewing subject) is circumvented. The narration in Kotik Letaev does not, then, express a perspective external to what it depicts, it enacts the transformation by which Boris Bugaev becomes Kotik Letaev — the Childman — who is constituted through the act of transfiguration and cannot be "viewed" outside it. In Na rubezhe, Belyi writes: "In Jesus I recognized the theme of my innocent suffering in our home" (p. 91). Cf. Lazar Fleishman's account of Belyi's notion of the individuum as a "collection of personalities" in potentia, and his assertion that the little Boren'ka of the memoirs is always simultaneously both Andrei Belyi and Kotik Letaev. See "Bely's Memoirs," p. 227. Anscheutz, "Recollection as Metaphor," p. 353. "And now: I will crawl up to Mummy like a little dog, straight towards her plush slipper - to sniff it; and, putting my hand to my back, I cunningly wag my little tail . . . Mummy would laugh and say: cBaby. . . ' " (KotikLetaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 162). The unnaturally childlike Aliosha Karamazov and the unnaturally adult-like Kolia Krasotkin (in the same novel) can be seen as Dostoyevskian prototypes of the Childman/Godman - explorations of the way in which childhood innocence and adult reason can be combined such that both categories are transcended in the resulting synthesis. Belyi, Kotik Letaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 443. This is perhaps why Belyi accords the infant Kotik the capacity for divine creativity. The problem here is that Belyi is attempting both to represent the bi-directional iconic process (God-becomesman-becomes-God) while enacting only the secondary, human element in the formula (man-becomes-God). The transcendent,

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80 81

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Notes to pages 161-70

atemporal nature of Kotik's self-identity (his fixed status as figure of Christ) conflicts with the temporal manner in which the iconic likeness of man to God is achieved in Christ. Belyi, KotikLetaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, p. 443. ibid., p. 432. Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 155. ibid., pp. 166-67. ibid., pp. 126-27. Belyi, KotikLetaev, in Sochineniia, ed. Piskunov, pp. 309-10, 312. Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 183. As we recall from chapter 1, to commit oneself to the multiple negations of apophatic logic (Kotik is neither Boren'ka Bugaev, nor Boris Bugaev, nor Andrei Belyi) equates to a dynamic act of faith (Florenskii) or a revelation (Meyendorff). Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 229. In conferring grace upon us, the Holy Spirit enables each of us to become as God: "The Son has become like us by the incarnation; we become like Him by deification, by partaking of the divinity in the Holy Spirit, who communicates the divinity to each human person in a particular way" (Lossky, In the Image, p. 109). This idea is implicit throughout Mandelker's discussion of Belyi's Glossaloliia - itself based around the image of the "tongues of fire" - and in Belyi's own work (the image is pivotal in his narrative poem Pervoe svidanie). Belyi, Kreshchenyi kitaets, p. 222. ibid., p. 235. 6 BREAKING THE CIRCLE OF THE SELF! VASILII ROZANOv's DISCOURSE OF PURE INTIMACY

1 See O. Mandelshtam, Slovo ikul'tura (Moscow, 1987), p. 64. 2 See Heinrich Stammler, "Vasily Rozanov as a Philosopher," Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, 28, 2-3 (1984), 143-51; Richard Hare, Portraits of Russian Personalities Between Reform and Revolution (New York, 1967); Vladimir Sukhach and Sergei Lominadze, "V Rozanov - literaturnyi kritik," Voprosy literatury, 4 (1988), 176-200. 3 Viktor Shklovskii, Rozanov. Siuzhet kak iavlenie stilia (Petrograd, 1921). 4 Anna Lisa Crone, Rozanov and the End of Literature (Wiirzburg, 1978), p. 126. 5 Dmitrii M. Segal, "Literatura kak okhrannaia gramota," Slavica Hierosolymitana, 5-6 (1981), 150-244 (p. 183).

Notes to pages 172-74.

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6 Vasilii Rozanov, Izbrannoe (Munich, 1970). The collection includes Solitaria {Uedinennoe), Fallen Leaves (Opavshie list'ia), vols. 1 and 11, The Fleeting {Mimoletnoe), Apocalypse of Our Time (Apokalipsis nashego vremeni) and Letters to E. Hollerbach {Pis'ma E. Gollerbakhu). Though some

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18

critics have (justifiably) seen fit to point out subtle differences in substance and style between these works, they will generally be treated as a unity for my purposes. The precise work from which individual quotations are taken will not generally be indicated. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 123. ibid., p. 235. ibid., p. 435. ibid., p. 84. ibid., pp. 122, 30. ibid., pp. 535-36. ibid., p. 129. For Ricoeur's concept of "care-time" see his Time and Narrative, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1984), vol. 1. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 211. ibid., p. 325. Rozanov's hostilty to such phenomena, of course, hardly squares with his own propensity for mischievous scandal. Rozanov's writing seems to suggest that both the private home and the carnival square are generative and subversive in the Bakhtinian sense. Writing of the unquestionable authority and goodness of the tsar, and of the fact that Russia has, to its detriment, deviated from that belief in recent years, Rozanov comments: "to love the tsar . . . is the first duty of every citizen . . . all our history has been a detour from this . . . 'we have taken a wrong turning' and 'haven't found our way home'" {Izbrannoe, pp. 112-13). In an earlier essay Rozanov illustrates Lotman's notion of Russian contractualism when he stresses "the principle of trust as the natural expression of unity. . . which, when it was removed, was replaced by suspicion and mutual looking over the shoulder,' by the system of contracts, guarantees and charters - by the constitutionalism of the west." See Rozanov, Literaturnye ocherki (St. Petersburg, 1902), p. 94. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 129. Hellenism is Mandelshtam's classically derived term for homecentered literature (see epigraph). It is perhaps no coincidence that the figure of home is so recurrent in Russian literature. Mandelshtam cites Annenskii as another example. Lotman has referred to the importance of home as symbol in Pushkin, and in Bulgakov {Universe of the Mind, p. 185). Tolstoy also comes to mind in this context.

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Notes to pages 175—82

19 Lotman, Universe ofthe Mind, pp. 20-35. 20 As T. V. Tsiv'ian writes, the svoi/chuzhoi opposition in Russian history is an important bearer of cultural meaning with significant differences from self/other structures in other cultures. See "K strukture inostrannoi rechi u Dostoevskogo," in Morris Halle, Krystyna Pomorska, Boris Uspenskii and Iurii Zdorov (eds.), Semiotics and the History of Culture (Columbus, 1988), pp. 427-37 (P- 427)21 Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 123. 22 ibid., pp. 79-80. 23 ibid., p. 227. 24 ibid., p. 424. 25 ibid., pp. 109, 178. 26 ibid., p. 258. 27 ibid., p. 406. 28 ibid., p. 115. 29 ibid., p. 424. 30 ibid., p. 178. 31 ibid., p. 89. 32 For a good exposition of the importance of sex in Rozanov's religious philosophy, see G. Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago, 1968), pp. 55-72. 33 Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 201. 34 ibid., p. 140. 35 ibid., p. 175. 36 ibid., p. 240. 37 ibid., p. 138. 38 ibid., p. 169. 39 ibid., p. 3. 40 See Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1972), pp. 265-76. 41 Rozanov's common-law wife, Varvara Rudneva, was chronically ill from an early age. Rozanov's confessional outpourings, expressions of affection and agonizing over the various erroneous diagnoses made, constitute one of the trilogy's recurrent themes. Moreover, many of his generalizing aphorisms are formulated "in the clinic," giving support for Shklovskii's claim that the story of his wife's sickness comes close to providing a skeletal plot for Rozanov's works. The writer himself, referring to his wife's suffering and its connections with his career, comments that "everything grew out of that one pain" {Izbrannoe, p. 389). 42 ibid., p. 432. 43 Dmitrii Maksimov points out that the excessive use of quotation

Notes to pages 182—87

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58 59 60

2

^9

marks was a fashion in Silver-age literary-critical discourse, linking this to a loss of faith in the authenticity of language. See D. Maksimov, Poeziia iproza Bloka (Leningrad, 1981). Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 435. For an analysis of the generalizing function of aphorisms, see Iu. A. Zdorov, "K voprosu o sviaznosti teksta," Trudy po znakovym sistemam, 6 (1973), 464-70. This accords with Bakhtin's early aesthetic theory in which the "self for itself" can contemplate death only for the completed other. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 54. ibid., p. 354. ibid., p. 305. For the world to be analysed objectively, it must be seen as separate from the analysing subject. As Nicholas Lossky points out, the tendency in western thought has been to overcome the division by subordinating subject to object (Locke, empiricism) or object to subject (Kant, idealism). Lossky is among those Russian thinkers to join Berdiaev in rejecting the division and insist upon the absence of subordination between subject and object. See N. Lossky, "Intuitivism," in Edie, Scanlon and Zeldin (eds.), Russian Philosophy, vol. 111, p. 324. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 250. ibid., p. 263. ibid., pp. 103, 136-37. Other Silver-age writers expressed similar sentiments about language. Zinaida Gippius wrote: "Everything everywhere has been turned upside down and confused. Noone understands anything. Words have completely lost their first meaning. You say a word and immediately it is necessary to ask: what do you mean by that?" See Literaturnyi dnevnik, p. 329. See Lotman, Universe of the Mind, pp. 11-19. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 177. ibid., p. 78. ibid., p. 125. Though in the first stages of his career Rozanov gravitated towards Symbolism (he was a frequent visitor at the Merezhkovskiis'), he began to adopt a stance quite independent of Symbolist thinking as early as 1896 - the year that he published his article "Dekadenty" in Russkii vestnik, 4 (1896), 271-82. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 220. ^d. It is largely for this reason that as Stammler notes, sex is so important to Rozanov's philosophy of cosmic vitalism: "It is . . . in the erotic encounter that man . . . experiences and conceives of

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himself as an organic part of a god-created, god-permeated cosmos" ("Vasily Rozanov," p. 150). Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 224. ibid. ibid., p. 85. ibid., p. 335. ibid., p. 361. ibid., p. 130. Rozanov's treatment of love and the self parallels and contrasts with that of Solov'ev for whom true individuality, as opposed to mere egoism, arises only from communion with another. The sacrificial act of love is the ultimate means of acquiring the wholeness that such individuality confers: "The meaning of human love . . . is the justification and salvation of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism." See "The Meaning of Love," in Edie, Scanlon and Zeldin (eds.), Russian Philosophy, vol. 111, pp. 85-98 (p. 87). For Rozanov there is no unifying concept of individuality transcending the circular process by which self surrenders to other, but only by first domesticating that other on its own home territory. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 337. ibid., pp. 356, 387. ibid., p. 336. ibid., p. 389. We might similarly view Rozanov's translation into the language of the self of the term rukopisnost' - an item borrowed from the literary vocabulary of the other. Though now "domesticated," it is the retention by the term of the generalized meaning it bore within literary language which enables it to act as a powerful reinforcement of the Rozanovian self. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, p. 182. Thus he is able both to revere and to despise Tolstoy. Even Dostoyevsky, to whom Rozanov owes so much, is at one point dismissed as a hysterical old lady for his alarmist warnings about the dangers of radicalism. ib^., p. 433ibid., pp. 176-77. ibid., p. 484. Renato Poggioli details the publication history of Apocalypse of Our Time, noting the fact that the only reason it could be published at all in Russia was the revolutionary abolition of ecclesiastical censorship. See R. Poggioli, Rozanov (New York, 1962), pp. 23-30. Andrei Siniavskii, {(Opavshie list'ia" V. V. Rozanova (Paris, 1982), p. 118. Rozanov, Izbrannoe, pp. 492-93.

Notes to pages 194-97

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7 AT THE " i " OF THE STORM! THE ICONIC SELF IN REMIZOv's WHIRLWIND RUSSIA

1 Mikhail Bakhtin, "Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiaternosti," in Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1986), pp. 7-8 2 In 1986 Fredric Levinson described Whirlwind Russia as "one of the most sadly neglected pieces in the writer's prodigious oeuvre." The situation has barely improved since then. The work has only recently been republished in Russia and as yet there exists no complete English translation. See Fredric Levinson, "Vzvikhrennaia rus': Remizov's Chronicle of Revolution," Russian Literary Triquarterly, 19 (1986), 211-27 (p. 211). 3 For an analysis of "Kukkha" see Anna Lisa Crone's article "Remizov's 'Kukkha': Rozanov's 'Trousers' Revisited," Russian Literary Triquarterly, 19 (1986), 197-211. 4 See Greta Slobin, Remizov's Fictions 1900-1921 (De Kalb IL, 1991), P- 1305 Remizov emigrated in 1921. Whirlwind Russia was published piecemeal in the period from 1917-1927 when a complete version appeared in the emigre press. Some of the chronicle was therefore recorded while Remizov was still in Russia; much of the latter part was added later. 6 Vladimir Markov refers to Remizov's "enormous influence on young prose during the early Soviet period." See V Markov, "Neizvestnyi pisatel' Remizov," in Greta Slobin (ed.), Aleksej Remizov: Approaches to a Protean Writer (Columbus, 1987), pp. 13-19 (P- 13)7 Difficulties in categorizing Remizovian skaz persist as far as recent times. See Markov, "Neizvestnyi pisatel'," pp. 14-16; also Peter Alberg Jensen, "Typological Remarks on Remizov's Prose," in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 277-85. 8 Slobin writes that "Remizov conceived his role to be that of the redeemer of the deeply buried and long-forgotten treasures of the Russian language." See Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 30. 9 Aleksei Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus1(Moscow, 1991), p. 217. 10 ibid., p. 234. 11 In her analysis of the chronicle Helene Sinany-Macleod points out the "primacy of byt." See "Strukturnaia kompozitsiia Vzvikhrennoi rusi," in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 237-45 (p. 238). As Slobin notes in a different context, Mandelshtam demonstrated awareness of the need in turbulent epochs to seek alternatives to conventional genres: "Apparently, by force of circumstance, the

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Notes to pages igy-202

contemporary prose writer will become a chronicler." Quoted in Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 130. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 256. ibid., p. 396. ibid., p. 306. Commentators who view the dreams in opposition to daily life, or as providing relief from it fail to take into account Remizov's insistence on the fantastic nature of revolutionary everyday life. Thus Antonella D'Amelia writes that in Whirlwind Russia "alongside historical events and everyday trivia fantastic events unfold - the 'reality' of nighttime visions." See "Neizdannaia kniga Merlog: Vremia i prostranstvo v izobraziternom i slovesnom tvorchestve A. M. Remizova" in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 141-67 (p. 151). Avril Pyman is closer to the mark when she argues that Remizov "allowed dream to overflow into a daytime reality which had become so arbitrary and topsy-turvy as to verge on and occasionally merge with the chaotic world of night." See "Petersburg Dreams," in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 51-113^.52). Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 476. Thus, Remizov's novella "The Irrepressible Tambourine" is full of characters who enter the life of the main character, Stratilatov, and then leave never to be seen again. And the Burkov apartment which is the locus of all the action in Sisters of the Cross is characterized by a constant coming and going of tenants. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', pp. 442-43,413-15. ibid., pp. 405-06, 328, 422-23. ibid., p. 327. ibid., p. 391. ibid., p. 439. ibid., p. 418. ibid., p. 500. ibid., pp. 421-22. ibid., p. 405. ibid., pp. 395, 306. ibid., p. 520. This passage comes from an eloquent eulogy to Blok who remained in Russia to the end of his life. Remizov finally succumbed to the lure of emigration and this is one of the few points where he openly adopts a position of hindsight. To be rooted in the everyday is, for Remizov, to be rooted in the self. Hence, Slobin is correct to describe the chronicle format as the vehicle "that allowed him to reconcile his primarily lyrical voice and his penchant for 'spinning fictions.'" See Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 138.

Notes to pages 202-05 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

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41 42

273

Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 461. ibid., p. 334. ibid., pp. 251-52. ibid., p. 374. ibid., p. 470. Remizov published several volumes of folk tales with minimal deviations from the extant variants, for which he incurred charges of plagiarism. Charlotte Rosenthal writes that Remizov "valued the vestiges of myth as cultural items reflecting prelogical human perception." See "Remizov's Sunwise and Leimonarium: Folklore in Modernist Prose," Russian Literary Triquarterly, 19 (1986), 95-113 (p. 9 6). As well as being acquainted with all the important avant-garde literary figures, Remizov was much admired by Futurist painters like Guro and Matiushkin. Remizov was himself an accomplished graphic artist. Alongside the accounts of everyday hardship Remizov will insert the occasional piece of folk wisdom or apocryphal tale reminiscent of his earlier work, as when he reports the sighting of a devil {Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 441). Slobin puts it well: "[T]he gnomic, eccentric Remizov claims the privileged, detached position of the artist and continues writing in the midst of violence" (Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 145). However, she appears to see no progression in Remizov's stance during the course of the chronicle. It seems to me that, by the end, the detachment is replaced by a most intense form of engagement. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', pp. 216-17, my emphasis. Remizov is adamant that the revolutionary whirlwind has little to do with Lenin and that, rather than standing in opposition to the everyday traumas of the people, is grounded in them. The polarization suggested by Slobin is perhaps, therefore, misleading: "The exhilaration of the storm that brings with it a renewal of creativity is sharply counterbalanced by references to the grinding, oppressive miseries of daily life" (Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 147, emphasis mine). Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 403. Commenting on his legendary shortsightedness in the memoiristic With Clipped Eyes (Podstrizhennymi glazamx), Remizov writes: "[F]rom birth my eyes made out trivia which merged together for the normal eye, and it was as if by nature that I had been designated for the calligraphy of tiny detail." See A. Remizov, Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1977), pp. 430-31. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 274. "[A]mong people with 'normal' vision, in the incomprehensible

274

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

Notes to pages 206-11 chaos of sober life I am like a scarecrow and have many enemies" (Remizov, Izbrannoe, p. 482). Andrei Siniavskii gives an astute analysis of Remizov's numerous literary identities in his "Literaturnaia maska Alekseia Remizova," in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 25-41. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', pp. 267-70. The best example of Remizov's fictional gossip narration is the novel The Fifth Pestilence (Piataia iazva) in which he depicts the fate of a government prosecutor who is attempting through the rule of law (and, by extension, the imposition of western reason) to save Russia from its primeval excesses. The action is restricted to a provincial town and the narrator (an anonymous inhabitant) reports the tales surrounding the prosecutor, as well as many incidents linked only indirectly to him, in the form of rumors that he is circulating. As Vladimir Markov argues, it is incorrect to categorize this mode of narration as skaz, since there is not the necessary discourse objectification that defines skaz. See Markov, "Neizvestnyi pisatel'," P- 15. Identical phrases occur in "Sisters in the Cross" which is narrated by a collective "gossip" persona. "In our block," "the whole block knew," "at our place" are all to be found here. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 473. ibid., pp. 444-49. ibid., pp. 449-60. ibid., p. 460. ibid., pp. 476-84. ibid., pp. 232-33. ibid., p. 275. ibid., p. 435. What we now have is more than the mere switching of positions between normative and deviational, humdrum and tellable that Cathy Popkin discusses in relation to Zoshchenko in The Pragmatics of Insignificance, pp. 98-100. For Remizov it is not so much that the ordinary changes places with the extraordinary, but rather that the extraordinary is made, through the introduction of a third term - narrative - to emerge out of the ordinary. Olga Raevsky-Hughes characterizes Remizov's autobiographical mode as follows: "This prose cannot be classified as either memoirs or reminiscences, nor is it autobiography in the narrow sense of the word. It is a 'story' of his life, but the narration is deliberately achronological; carefully chosen episodes attain special meaning, becoming symbols of his life and destiny." See "Alexei Remizov's Later Autobiographical Prose," in Jane G.

Notes to pages 211-14

275

Harris (ed.), Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian

55 56

57 58

59 60 61 62

Literature (Princeton, 1990), pp. 52-66 (p. 55). Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', pp. 250, 339. The iconic as conceived in this study differs from the semiotic in two respects. First, there can in the iconic be no representation of an object to a subject that is separate from both object and representation, no abstraction of life from life itself and from the self who lives it; since the icon is the living life, it is also the living self. Secondly, an icon does not, like a sign, reproduce from without, it transforms from within. See Jensen, "Typological Remarks," p. 280. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 321. Slobin gives an excellent account of Remizov's shamanism in Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, pp. 84-86, and in her article "The Ethos of Performance in Remizov," Canadian Slavonic Journal, 14, 4 (Winter 1985), 412—25. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rusf, p. 505. ibid., p. 491. ibid., p. 490. ibid., p. 320. The section from which this passage comes is styled in the manner of a medieval lament entitled "The Lay of the Ruin of the Russian L a n d " (ilSlovo 0 pogibeli russkoi zemli"). This is

another example of the way that Remizov unites his voice with that of old Rus' itself by speaking through its texts. 63 Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 348. Slobin skilfully analyses the dialogue that Remizov institutes between Petrine Russia and that of Lenin, pointing out that Remizov's experiences of the revolution inspired in him a "retrospective acceptance" of Peter whom he had formerly viewed as representing the destruction of Rus' (Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, pp. 140-44). If the Petersburg section is the "creation of a chronicle," then the section in which Remizov tells of the formation of a mock society of literary apes (Obezvelpopal, or The Great Free Order of the Apes) is the chronicling of a creation. Remizov wrote a hilarious "manifesto" for the society (whose members included Blok, Rozanov and Zamiatin) which he published in "Kukkha" and again in Whirlwind Russia, where he also details the arrest of the members by the Cheka. Slobin persuasively interprets this and other practical jokes to which Remizov was always prone as an example of his awareness of the connection between the ludic and the aesthetic, and his urge to influence life through artistic creativity. 64 The section of the chronicle entitled "About Fiery Destiny" ("0 sud'be ognennoi") begins with a page taken from the writings of Heraclitus. As Slobin points out (Slobin, Remizov's Fictions, p. 144),

276

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76

Notes to pages 214-26 Remizov adapts Heraclitus's cosmic view of history as cycle of destruction and renewal to his own ends, integrating it into the Christian view of history as divine retribution and redemptive suffering. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', pp. 337, 335, 501, 337. ibid., pp. 374, 492. ibid., p. 343. ibid., p. 374. ibid., p. 532. ibid., pp. 436, 273. ibid., pp. 354, 487. ibid., pp. 487-89. ibid., p. 399. ibid., pp. 340-46, 504-05. The first part of the second of these passages comes from the "Cana of Galilee" section of The Brothers Karamazov where Aliosha has an ecstatic experience of the unity of earth and heaven in which Zosima's doctrine of mutual responsibility is propounded. Dostoyevsky's words merge at the end into the peculiarly Remizovian association of bright stars burning above Russia with a vision of the entire earth aflame. Again, the question of plagiarism does not arise; Remizov is merely melding his word to the Russian Word. For discussion of the relationship between creation and tradition in Remizov, see Sarah Burke, "A Bearer of Tradition: Remizov and His Milieu," in Slobin (ed.), Approaches, pp. 167—75. Remizov, Vzvikhrennaia rus', p. 529. ibid., pp. 530-33. CONCLUSION

1 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, 1988), p. 28. 2 Symbolists Andrei Belyi and Valerii Briusov, post-Symbolists like Mandelshtam, Futurists such as Maiakovskii and Khlebnikov, not to mention Formalism and the Bakhtin school all place "the word" (slovo) at the center of their concerns, though with somewhat different emphases. 3 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 538. 4 Quoted in Peter Faulkner, Modernism: The Critical Idiom (London, 1977), P- 3i5 Richard Sheppard, "The Crisis of Language," in M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds.), Modernism i8go-igjo (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 323-37-

Notes to pages 226-34

277

6 See their editorial piece "The Name and Nature of Modernism," in M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane (eds.), Modernism, pp. 19—57 (P- 49)7 Quoted by Bradbury and McFarlane in "The Name and Nature of Modernism," p. 25. 8 See Grygar's important article "Kubizm i poeziia russkogo i cheshskogo avangarda," in Jan Van der Eng and Mojmir Grygar (eds.), Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture (The Hague and Paris, 1973), pp. 59-103. 9 Jonathan Culler, "Literary History, Allegory and Semiology," New Literary History, 7, 2 (Winter 1976), 259-71 (p. 266). 10 ibid., p. 266. 11 Sheppard, "The Crisis," p. 332. 12 Notions of the hegemony of the sign in western civilization have been taken up by theorists of postmodernism like Jean Baudrillard. See his Pour une Critique de VEconomie Politique du Signe (Paris, 1972). 13 Intelligent (if over-celebratory) discussions of the primacy of signifiers and text are given in Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (London, Melbourne and Henley, 1983), pp. 91-92, 188-92 and elsewhere in the book. For the convergence of art and capitalistic everyday life see Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture," in Hal Foster and Port Townsend (eds.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Washington, 1983), pp. 11-25. 14 A glance at the arts supplements to any "serious" Sunday newspaper in recent years will confirm the zeal with which contemporary artists have assimilated and exploited the new technologies. 15 For Solov'ev's understanding of individuality, see chapter 6, note 67. 16 Quoted in Larissa Zhadova, Tatlin (New York, 1988), pp. 267-68. 17 Groys, The Total Art, p. 3. 18 ibid., pp. 27, 87. 19 Arguably, Stalinism represents yet another perichoresis - the retranslation of iconic life back into the idiom of western dualism with its insistence on self-identity (Life as equivalent to Life; the self-identical Perfect Society).

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Index

aesthetic, the, 2, 5-6, 62, 73-74, 78 aesthetics, 24, 30, 37, 51 and the concept of beauty, 51 European aesthetics, 60 Russia's anti-aesthetic, 6, 10, 45-46, 50-51, 61, 64-65, 74-75, 77, 108, 194, 222, 230

see also, ethics, anti-narrative, the everyday and throughout Alberti (Italian painter), 27 Alexandrov, Vladimir, 26on.o, 264-65^61 Andreev, Leonid, 73 anti-narrative, anti-plot, 4—5, 7 and the civic tradition, 49-67 and everyday life, 58, 64 in Chekhov, 3-5 in Dostoyevsky, 63-64 in Gogol, 58 in Gor'kii, 70 in Goncharov, 53 in Saltykov-Shchedryn, 54-56 in Tolstoy, 6 see also, framing and throughout apophasis, the apophatic method, apophatic logic, 32-33, 166, 266n. 79 Auerbach, Eric, 25, 225-26 Austen, Jane,i 9 autobiography, autobiographical discourse, 78, 141-42, 145 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 41, 83, 102, 194 on Being, 105, 108 and Berdiaev, 252^70 concept of carnival in, 132 on chronotopes, 42 on "completion" {zavershenie), 193

on death, 193 on Dostoyevsky, 62, 181 on scandal, 62 and semiotics, 236-37^14 Balzac, Honore de, 53 Bal'mont, Konstantin, 185 Barthes, Roland, 56 Baudelaire, 69, 72, 226 Bauhaus group, the, 232 Belinskii, Vissarion, 50-52 Hegelian idealism in, 52 and the "pennies" issue, 52 and realist representation, 50 concept of "type" in, 52 Belyi, Andrei, 9-10, 44, 78, 218, 224, 232 and anthroposophy, 143-44, 159 autobiographical influences on, 77, 142, 144, 26on.9 byt in the world view of, 81-82, 164-66, 179 byt and the urban apartment in, 163-74, r72>73> 180-82 Dostoyevsky's influence on, 145, 160, 162, 265^69 on Godmanhood, 143, 160-61, 166 iconicity in, 145, 151, 155, 161-62, 165-66, 263^37, 265^71 Kotik Letaev as Christ in, 144-45, 159-61, 166-67 theory of language in, 149-52, 154-55 mathematics as theme in, 146, 152-56, 158,162 memory and myth in, 149, 152, 160, 162-65, 167, 173, 179, 181-82 narrative perspectives in, 145, 158-59, 161, 265^64 Old Testament references in, 152,165, 167

289

290

Index

Belyi, Andrei (cont) and the novel Petersburg, 142, 162 punning in, 157 Solov'ev's role in, 162 "spindling strategy" in, 159-60, 164 and symbolism, 73, 144, 151 as theurgist, 142-45, 159, 167 time, routine, eternal and linear in, 155, 164, 167 transfiguration/transcendence in, 178, 182-83 Berdiaev, N., 252^70 binarism, cultural, 37-38, 64, 67, 69 Blanchard, Marc, 18-19 Blok, Alexander, 7-8, 73, 230, 234 Briusov, Valerii, 72 Brooks, Peter, 41-42 byt (Russian for "everyday life"), 7 bytoviki, 73, 75

as anti-narrative, 7, 55,75, 223 and art, 47 Belyi's concept of, 76-77 characteristics and evolution of, 37, 40, 45-48, 68-69, 74-75, 234 as cultural construct, 55, 74, 220 and the normative, 77 and the ocherk, 55 and realism, 7 as "referential shadow," 7, 223 and representation, 10 Sologub's theory of, 73-76 transcendence of, 78 and zhizrt', 68-69, 71, 74-75, 136, 222-24, 2 3 2 see also, the everyday, anti-narrative and, passim, throughout Cassedy, Stephen, 262^34, 263^37 Catholicism, 25, 71, 220, 238^31 Cervantes, M. Don Quixote, 8, 22, 29, 81

Chaadaev, Petr, 46, 56, 79 Chambers, Ross, 59-60, 259^85 Chekhov, Anton, 1, 9-10, 67, 78, 117, 231 concepts of the aesthetic in, 83-84 aesthetic framing in, 83-86, 88-89, 94> 98-104 and the anti-aesthetic/anti-narrative, 97-98, 103-106, 109, 117, 120 role of byt in, 68, 74, 93-106, 109 and the civic tradition, 103 and Dostoyevsky, 106

as the end of the realist line, 9, 45-46, 70 and Gippius, 68 the iconic aesthetic of, 107-09 journey chronotope in, 85, 92, 102 metatextual elements in, 75, 104, 106-07 narrative transformation in, 94, 95 on poshlost', 84, 88-89 self-identity in, n o semiosis in, 103, 104, 106 theater in, 103-04, 106-09 time in, 98, 100-02 and Tolstoy, 68, 85, 87-88, 101, 106 notions of typicality in, 96, 99, 105, 108 concept of zhizri in, 106-08 WORKS: "About Love," 105-06; "All Because of Apples," 249^15; "An Attack of Nerves," 68, 88-89 96, 98-99, 101; "The Betrothed," 249n.i5, 250-51^53; "The Bishop," 87, 95; "A Boring Story," 89-91; "The Cherry Orchard," 95, 107, 119; "The Duel," 86-87; "Fear," 94; "Gooseberries," 106; "The Grasshopper," 85-86, 95-96; "In the Cart," 84, 101; "The Kiss," 2-5, 91, 96-98, 252n.7i; "The Lady With the Little Dog," 94, 97-98, 107-09; "The Man in a Case," 250^46, 252n.7i; "The Name-Day Party," 99-102; "Peasants," 101; "The Privy Councillor," 83 "The Seagull," 85, 102-105 "Sleepy," 87-88; "The Steppe," 91-93; "The Three Sisters," 89; "Uncle Vania," 108 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 50-52, 67, 70, 72 Christ, Jesus, Christianity, Christology, 25-37, 221, 223, 24on.55 as icon, 14, 28, 31, 34, 36, 51, 151, 229 see also image, icon, hypostasis, deification chronotopes, 42, 78 of the home, 78, 168, 224 chronotopic motifs, 42, 78 chronotopic separation, 42 see also, Bakhtin, Chekhov, Sologub, Belyi, Rozanov, Remizov civic tradition in Russian literature, 8, 50-68 Conrad, Joseph, 228 contractualism, 38, 267^16

Index Coste, Didier, 14, 16 Culler, Jonathan, 227, 277^13 Dadaists, the, 227 Decadence, Russian, the Decadent movement, 5-6, 63, 67, n o see also, Merezhkovskii, Sologub deification, 30-33, 221, 24.on.55 devil, the, 39 in Gogol, 57 in Dostoyevsky, 57-58 see also, Sologub, gossip Domostroi, the, 38-39 Dostoyevsky, Fedor, 45, 68, 77 and the anti-aesthetic, 63-64 and The Brothers Karamazov, 64, 127 and Crime and Punishment, 64, 97

and the devil, 57-58, 62 and God, 58 and gossip, 62-64 and The Idiot, 62 and the ocherk, 63 and The Possessed, 62-63 and scandal, 60, 62, 64 and Sologub, 63 concept of type in, 52 dualism, 14, 33, 38 of art and life, 21, 51, 234 Body/Soul, 14, 28 of byt and zhizn', 69 Manichean, 26 semiotic, 75 of Subject and Object, 28 Ehre, Milton, i n , 117 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 100 Emerson, Caryl, 101, 248^13 epistemology, epistemological conflict, 1, 8, 42, 44, 65, 136, 220, 226 Erofeev, Viktor, 123, 255-56^38 eschatology, 14, 24-25, 28, 34, 36, 64, 133, 238n.3o see also, myth

ethics, the ethical, 8, 30, 37, 102 and aesthetics, 30, 78, 103, 135, 193 Eucharist, the, 34 everyday, the, everyday life, daily life, everyday reality, routine existence, daily routine, 1-10, 13-15, 18-20, 25, 38-40, 49, 75 and art, 20-24, 78> 106-08, 142 in Chernyshevskii, 51

291 and narrative representation, 15-24 and the private /public divide, 55, 62 in Saltykov-Shchedryn, 54-56 see also anti-narrative, byt, and throughout

Jilioque, 32

Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary, 1-2, 4, 13, 18, 20-21, 57 Florenskii, Pavel, 13, 28-30, 33, 35, 133 Formalism, 47, 116 framing, artistic, narrative, semiotic, 27-28, 40-42, 45, 53, 56, 230 and anti-plot, 171, 230, 242n.i2, 242-43^16 see also Chekhov, Sologub, Remizov Ginzburg, Lidiia, 23, 50 Gippius, Zinaida, 1 on Chekhov, 68-69, 83-84, 108, 269^53 as theorist of byt, 68-69, 71, 74, 83 God, 25-37,71,233 and the devil, 58 see also, Christ, Orthodoxy, the icon, image, deification, hypostasis, Dostoyevsky Gogol, N., 45, 52 and Dead Souls, 56-61 and the particular/universal relationship, 56—57 typification in, 56-58 Goncharov, Ivan, 45, 53, 243^29 Gor'kii, Maksim and anti-narrative, 70, 247^75 on Chekhov, 70, 231 and the %nanie school, 73 gossip, 42, 45, 64, 78, 172, 222, 257n.63 and the devil, 61 in Dostoyevsky, 61-62, 64 in Gogol, 59-61 see also, Sologub, Rozanov, Remizov grace, divine grace, 29-31, 36, 222, 23gn.42, 266n.8i Groys, Boris, 220, 233-34 Grygar, Mojmir, 226-27, 231, 277n.8 Gustafson, Richard, 66, 245^53 Hegel, 50 Hellenism, 168, 174, 267^18 Holy Spirit, the, Holy Ghost, 13, 29, > 35, 5i

292

Index

homoiosis, 29—30

Huysmans, J. K., 69-70, 228, 24611.70 hypostasis, 31-33, 36 icons, the icon, iconoclasm, iconic aesthetic, 29, 34, 37, 45, 75, 77, 221-23, 230-34, 24on.79, 275n.56 Christ as icon, 14, 34 see also, Christ, Chekhov, image, deification, Sologub, Belyi, Rozanov, Remizov image, the, 27-30, 37, 40, 42, 228-29, 233-34, 239^36 Christ as image, 14, 22, 25-26, 29 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 73, 253^78 Ivanov-Razumnik, R.V., 258n.68 Jackson, Robert Louis, 102, 255^55, n.61 Jakobson, Roman, 42, 46-48, 128, 170 Jensen, Peter Alberg, 211-12 Joyce, James Ulysses, 24, 225, 227-28 kenosis, 30

Lermontov, Mikhail, 49, 86 Likhachev, Dmitrii, 44, 56, 79, 107 Logos, the, 31-32, 36, 228-29 Lossky, Vladimir, 28-29, 32-33, 35, 37 Lotman, Iurii M., 13-17, 21, 24, 37-40, 135, 175, 185, 24i-42n.2 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, 46-47, 73, 193, 230 Malevich, Kasimir, 230, 232 Mandelker, Amy, 246^63, 262^34, 264^47 Mandelshtam, Osip, 168, 174 Mann, Thomas, 13, 23-24 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 67, 73, n o on beauty, 70 on Chekhov and byt, 69 and Decadence, 67 metatext, metatextual images, markers, 5, 21-22, 75, 78, 104, 142, 223, 238n.25 see also Chekhov, Sologub, Belyi, Remizov, Rozanov metonymy, metonymic displacement, 42-43 MeyendorfF, John, 28-29, 31, 33-34, 36 Mitchell, W.J.T., 26-27 modernism aestheticism in, 70

and the artistic sign, 226-29 and the civic tradition, 8 crisis of language in, 226-27 iconic impulse in, 77 Russian, 8-9, 69-70, 126, 134, 220, 225, 229-31 and Stalinism, 233-34 and the Subject/Object dichotomy, 229-30 as transformation of the civic tradition, 77, 222, 230-31 western, 225—30 Morson, Gary Saul, 42, 49-50, 64 on "narrative potential," 65, 102 on narrative "sideshadowing," 250^52 on prosaics and "final meanings," 108, 252n.72 on Russia's anti-aesthetic, 49, 242-43^16 on semiosis and prosaics, 88, 101-02 Mukafovsky, Jan, 20 myth, 10, 16-17, 22, 24, 27, 34, 223, 238n.3o, 240^55 see also, eschatology Nabokov, Vladimir, 88 narrativity, 5, 32, 91, 107 see also representation, transformation, framing Nietzsche, E, 97, 173, 177, 226 ocherk (the physiological sketch), 53-55 Orthodox church, Orthodox theology, 8-9, 13, 29-37, 50, 71, 160, 221, 222, 224, 229, 238n.3i, n.33, 263^37 see also, Christ, God, deification, icon, image Ouspensky, Leonid, 28-31, 34-36 Paperno, Irina, 44, 50-51, 236^14 perichoresis, 36-37, 161, 221-22, 229, Petty Demon, The, 5-6, 9-10 aesthetics and mendacity in, 131-34,137 anti-plot/anti-aesthetic in, i n , 114, 116, 123, 126, 134, 258n.7o artifice in, 116-20 autobiographical elements in, 134-35 bytin, i n , 121, 126-27, 132-34, 136 the carnivalesque in, 132 and Chekhov, i n , 112 the devil in, 133-36

Index

293

and Dostoyevsky, i n , 136 history of, 48-67 nineteenth-century, 19, 40 eschatology in, 133 Russian, 48-49, 52-53, 230 the fantastic in, 122, 125-26 cult of the typical in, 19 forewards to, 119,122, 254x1.8 western, 48-49 and gossip, i n , 114, 116-17, 119-20, Remizov, Aleksei 129-30,137 gratuitousness/excess in, 111-12 116-17, Whirlwind Russia, 9-10, 78, 231-32 and the anti-aesthetic, 197, 202, 224 119-22, 128-29, 133-34, 137 as autobiographer, 211-12 iconic aesthetic in, 136 and Blok, 216, 272^27 metaphor in, i n , 128, 130-31,137 metatextual elements in, i n , 122-25, role of byt in, 196, 200-02 128-30,136 as Christ-figure, 216-17, 224 metonymic displacement in, i n , chronicle format in, 197-98, 201, 213 domestic chronotope in, 195 128-30 myth and legend in, 111-12, 131-32, 137 and Dostoyevsky, 214, 216, 276^74 narrative framing and viewpoints in, role of dreams in, 197-98, 216, I2 i n , 122-24, 6 nedotykomka in, i n , 125-26, 128, 133-36, emigration of, 195, 27m.5 the fantastic in, 202-03 254n-5> 257n-53 Peredonovshchina in, i n , 117, 126, 128, image of fire in, 214-19 and the folktale, 196, 204, 273 I3i> I33> I 3 6 and Gogol, 215 punning in, 130 role of gossip in, 207-09, 224, 274^44, and representational logic, 122, 133 n.45 and Russian realism, 111 and Heraclitus, 214 sacrifice and self-sacrifice in, 134-35 iconic elements in, 195, 212-13, 215-16, sensuality in, 121, 127-30 218 and symbolism, 123, 135 images of light in, 214, 218 transfiguration in, i n , 123, 135-36 metatext in, 212, 218 see also, Sologub image of Mother Earth in, 217 Picasso, 226 narrative framing in, 208 Plato, 15 participatory function of writer in, 209, plot, plotting, 2-7, 15, 19, 65, 140-41 213-14 and gossip, 64 revolution and the everyday in, as incarnation, 61, 65, 77, 136 196-207, 211, 213, 218, 220, 224 see also, anti-narrative revolution and the intellectual in, Popkin, Cathy, 3, 235^3, 248n.2, 274^53 203-05 postmodernism, 141, 228-29, 277n.i2 images of Russia in, 214-16 Protestant theology, 25, 220, 238^33 self and revolution in, 203-05 Propp, Vladimir, 113, 254^9 "shorn eyesight" in, 205, 273^40 Proust, Marcel, 228 and the Silver-age cultural elite, 206 provinciality, provincial life, 1-3, 6, 13 skaz narration in, 196, 207 provincial routine, 5, 17-18, 21, 54, image of stars in, 216-19 56-58, 60, 62, 113, 121, 130, 133-34, subject/object dichotomy in, 210-12 136 transfiguration in, 210, 212, 216 see also, everyday life, byt, and the Word, 195, 212, 214-15, 218 Saltykov-Shchedryn, Gogol, zhizri in, 201-02, 214 Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Sologub Renaissance, the, 27, 87 Pushkin, A. representation, 10, 15-17, 19, 27, 49, 61, Evgenii Onegin, 5, 49, 60 67, 99> 227-29, 230, 234 realism, 16, 22, 59 aesthetics of, 15 decline of, 23 and narrative, 15-17, 21-22

294

Index

representation (cont.) and the problem of particular and universal, 52-53 as representative example, 13-14, 18-19, 52, 54 and the typical, 19, 66 Ricoeur, Paul, 173 Romanticism, 22-23, 47> 49 Rozanov, Vasilii Solitaria and Fallen Leaves 1 and 11, 9-10, 78, 136, 230, 232 and the anti-aesthetic, anti-literature, 51-52, 169, 177, 187 and the aphorism, 171, 182, 185 autobiographical discourse in, 168, 172 on Christianity, 179 and civic culture, 175-76, 193 contaminated self in, 189-92 on death, 179, 185, 192 domestic chronotope in, 173-76, 187 a n d the Domostroi, 174

and the ethical, 169, 193 everyday minutiae as positive value in, 177, 187 relationship of general to particular in, 179-80 problem of genre in, 169-70 role of gossip in, 169, 172, 186 attitude to God in, 190 iconic elements in, 213 attitude to Jews and Judaism in, 179, 190-91 language and meaning in, 182-85 languages of self and other in, 185-92 concepts of literature in, 169-70, 176-77, 185-86, 190-91, 224 scholarship on, 194-95 self/other relationship in, 169, 171, 175, 181-84, 187-88 importance of sex in, 179 relationship to Symbolism of, 269^57 and temporal framing, 171 and (common-law) wife, Varvara Rudneva, 181, 188-89, 268^41 and the Word, 193 Saltykov-Shchedryn, M., 45, 60-62, 102 and anti-narrative as byt, 54-56 and the ocherk, 54-55 see also, anti-narrative

Sartre,J. P., no Schopenhauer, A., 135

see also, Sologub

Scott, Walter, 19 semiosis, 16, 25, 37-38, 49, 51, 102, 228, 233 as aesthetic/narrative signs, 14, 17, 20, 26-27, 41-42, 220, 231, 233-34 as relationship of signifier to signified, 14, 17, 26, 39, 227 Shklovskii, Viktor, 170 Silver Age, the, 7, 9, 13, 43, 79, 206, 222, 229,232 culture of, 73 fiction of, 41, 171, 230 metatextual images in, 75 place in European culture of, 225 relationship to Stalinism of, 233-34 Siniavskii, Andrei, 192, 273-74^42 sketch, the physiological, see ocherk Slobin, Greta, 273^37, n.39, 275^58, n.63 Sologub, Fedor, 5, 9-10, no, 157, 208, 231-32, 275n.63, n.64 theory of byt in, 73-76, 78, 126 and Dostoyevsky, 63, 127 and poshlost', 100

on symbolism, 253n.2 see also, Petty Demon, The

Solov'ev, Vladimir, 31, 46, 134 on art as transformation, 71-72 on evil, 71 on individuality and love, 230, 270^67 and the renewal of Orthodox thought, 7i symbolic consciousness, 38, 242n.i2 symbolism, symbolists, 9, 46 French, 72, 226 Russian, 47, 71-73, 75, 276^2 theories of, 68-77 taste, bad, 21, 68 see also poshlost'

Tatlin, Vladimir, 230, 232-33 theurgy, 71-73, 142 Todd III, William Mills, 44, 60, 244-45IM9 Todorov, Tzvetan, 41 Tolstoy, Lev, 5, 45, 50, 64 and Anna Karenina, 65-67

and and and and

anti-narrative, 65 the everyday, 66 representational semiosis, 66-67 What is Art, 67

Index transfiguration in Eastern Orthodoxy, 30-31, 36, 50 of the everyday, 75 and Stalinism, 234 see also, Chekhov, Sologub, Belyi, Rozanov, Remizov transformation, narrative, 41 Trinity, the Holy, 32-34, 234 Trollope, Anthony Barchester Towers, 23, 57

Tsvetaeva, Marina, 47 Tynianov, Iurii, 49 type, typicality, the typical, 45, 52-53, 66 see also, Belinskii, Saltykov-Shchedryn, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Sologub

295

Uspenskii, Boris, 28, 37, 256^41 Valery, Paul, 69, 228 Verlaine, 69, 226 Wilde, Oscar, 226 Woolf, Virginia, 225, 227 Word, the as theme in Russian modernism, 225, 276n.2 see also, Belyi, Christ, Logos, Orthodox theology, Remizov, Rozanov Zamiatin, Evgenii, 234 zhizn', see byt zhiznetvorchestvo, 4.7, 73

Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 48

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE General editor GATRIONA KELLY Editorial board: ANTHONY GROSS, GARYL EMERSON, HENRY GIFFORD, BARBARA HELDT, MALCOLM JONES, DONALD RAYFIELD, G. S. SMITH, VICTOR TERRAS

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Words and music in the novels ofAndrey Bely ADA STEINBERG

The Russian revolutionary novel RICHARD FREEBORN

Poets of modern Russia PETER FRANCE

Andrey Bely J. D. ELSWORTH

Nikolay Novikov W. GARETHJONES

Vladimir Nabokov DAVID RAMPTON

Portraits of early Russian liberals DEREK OFFORD

Marina Tsvetaeva SIMON KARLINSKY

Bulgakov's last decade J. A. E. CURTIS

Velimir Khlebikov RAYMOND GOOKE

Dostoyevsky and the process of literary creation JACQUES CATTEAU

The poetic imagination ofVyacheslav Ivanov PAMELA DAVIDSON

Joseph Brodsky VALENTINA POLUKHINA

Petrushka - the Russian carnival puppet theatre GATRIONA KELLY

Turgenev FRANK FRIEDEBERG SEELEY

From the idyll to the novel: Karamzin's sentimentalist prose GITTA HAMMARBERG

The Brothers Karamazov and the poetics of memory DIANE OENNING THOMPSON

Andrei Platonov THOMAS SEIFRID

Nabokov's early fiction JULIAN W. CONNOLLY

Iurii Trifonov DAVID GILLESPIE

Mikhail £oshchenko LINDA HART SCATTON

Andrei Bitov ELLEN CHANGES

Nikolai ^abolotsky DARRA GOLDSTEIN

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edited by BERNIGE GLATZER ROSENTHAL Wagner and Russia ROSAMUND BARTLETT

Russian literature and empire Conquest of the Caucasusfrom Pushkin to Tolstoy SUSAN LAYTON

Jews in Russian literature after the October Revolution Writers and artists between hope and apostasy EFRAIM SIGHER

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