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 35, 5i

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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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