ON CLOSE REREADING
Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY
I have received a blessed legacy–
The wandering dreams of alien bards […]
And, perhaps, more than one treasure will,
Bypassing grandsons, go to great grandsons,
And again a skald will compose another’s song
And recite it as his own.
Mandelstam, Stone
I specifically advise everybody to take a piece of paper
and write “Spain” on it–it will come out “China.”
Gogol, “Diary of a Madman”
If all reading is not necessarily rereading, criticism for the most part is. On my first exposure to Harold Bloom’s theory of universal misprision bred by the anxiety of influence, I dismissed it as one bizarrely patterned on the mindset of faculty vying for tenure. Such a response was, of course,overdetermined by a “natural” privileging of literary art over literary scholarship and of symbolic reflection over contextual impact. But I was soon able to read the Bloomian schema itself as a cross between two influential narratives: Freud’s Oedipal myth and the Russian Formalist masterplot of literary evolution, according to which a “secondary, or junior, branch”achieves canonization by going over the heads of the “fathers” back to the “grandfathers.”1 I also gradually came to accept the essential kinship, where Formalism and Structuralism had taught me to see unbridgeable gaps, between artistic (poetic, prosaic, fictional) and non-artistic (ordinary, ideological, meta-poetic, scientific) modes of discourse. And I learned to live with a relativistic plurality of readings, first broached by Roland Barthes from within a structuralist framework.2 Incidentally, one corollary of such pluralism is that my later realizations need not erase the initial deconstruction of sorts that I had performed on Bloom’s theoretical posture.
Be that as it may, Bloom has been successful–certainly under his own, territorial definition. What terms does the book now before the reader propose for its fulfillment? Without waxing lyrical (and, therefore, speaking strictly in the third person), I would identify its tenor as a balancing act, in fact, a combination of several such acts. It is written about Russian literature for the English-speaking reader by somebody sandwiched between (or is it astraddle?) the two cultures. Moreover, inside each, he finds himself caught between opposites he tries to reconcile. In his native Russian context, the major rift is between independence and engagement, that is, between cherished scholarly “objectivity” and various “right” causes, moral and political, some of which he may consciously or unwittingly espouse. In his American afterlife, he is torn between a structuralist past and the reigning poststructuralism,which he has tried to internalize, adaptation being, after all, the stuff emigres are made on.3
Nor are these personal quandaries extraneous to the literary matters at hand. Roughly speaking, the book is about twentieth-century Russian literature rereading its classical era and pressing the past masters (and, on occasion, a master’s own past, as in the chapter on Pasternak) into the service of more recent–avant-gardist, revolutionary, post-revolutionary, dissident,emigre–needs. The twin projects of reaching back over a historical rupture and of adaptive (self-)hybridization, so characteristic of the literary process,especially the Russian/Soviet one, are also germane to the problems faced by this writer, professionally as well as existentially. They may have given an additional urgency to his interest both in such critically sanctioned topics as intertextuality, rereading, cultural hybrids, collaborationist ‘art of adaptation,’ etc. and in such high-and-low cultural phenomena as Gogol’s and Zoshchenko’s “bad writing” and Limonov’s self-centered bodily and verbal acrobatics. Indeed, what the book strives for is a reconciliation or at least a dynamic equilibrium of various opposing forces. As a result, it ends up halfway between the conservative and radical poles of today’s critical scene.
To begin with the book’s title, the contraposition of ‘text’ to ‘text’ is a departure from relating ‘texts’ to purportedly non-textual–because properly dessicated–‘themes,’ as practiced in my previous book (Themes and Texts. Towards a Poetics of Expressiveness, Ithaca, 1984). Yet, the shift is not all that radical. To be sure, the privileged meta-textual status of ‘themes’ has been effectively called into doubt by poststructuralism. Yet, ‘themes’ have retained some of their usefulness: intertextual counterpoints often have to be formulated in thematic terms. In fact, one section in the 1984 book treated the use of a Pushkin subtext by Pasternak as a particular case of the general rhetorical strategy whereby any found material is pressed into the service of the author’s (i. e., Pasternak’s) themes. Finally, even my double stress on ‘text,’ while deemphasizing ‘themes,’ is also meant to reconfirm a rather traditional allegiance to comprehensive textual coverage and a refusal to settle for a mere identification of writers’ ideological ‘gestures.’
‘Rereading’ is consciously used in several senses at once. The book’s principal thrust is to propose, as part of the ongoing cultural process, new interpretations of familiar texts. This study in rereading tends to take for granted an acquaintance with “the readings”: the primary texts and their received–“standard”–secondary appreciation. In other words, the essays that follow both claim novelty and assume a degree of specialized knowledge,bringing out in the prefix re- its challenging aspects. At the same time, ‘re-reading’ (as distinct from the defiant mis-…) is meant in the less startling sense of pleasurably revisiting a familiar text under different circumstances but with basically similar responses, sometimes reconfirmed in new ways. A measure of interpretive conservatism is also implied by the textbook connotations of “readings in” a subject. The rereadings are by no means offered as a new canon, yet they do presume to be detailed case studies in which innovation takes no precedence over thoroughness.
Such deliberate moderation stems, in part, from the inherent relativity of the very theories that have educated us as to the relativity of canons. A certain indeterminacy also haunts the identities of the ‘rereader’ and the ‘reread,’ which are defined, in the context of this book, by a somewhat untraditional combination of rereading perspectives. In different chapters, the focus may be on the way a writer deals with previous texts; on the way critical or theoretical texts are implicated in such processes and thus themselves become susceptible to reinterpretation; or on the way a writer can be reinterpreted in light of the current cultural climate rather than by comparison with a particular countertext.
All these cases share a common paradigm: the rereading of a text is undertaken from the point of view of another textual agency, which latter may vary from an actual text to a theoretical position or a generalized sensibility. Lurking behind this elusive textual agency is, of course, the scholar himself, who authors the rereading and should try to state as honestly as possible the perspective that underlies–and thereby problematizes–it.
As an illustration we can take Victor Shklovsky’s now textbook example of defamiliarization: the theater episode in War and Peace where the natural Natasha fails to follow the “wild and puzzling” conventions of the opera (Shklovsky 1965a [1917]). In addition to a remarkable conjunction of theoretical, critical, and prosaic discourses (the episode itself being a meta-interpretational one), Shklovsky’s 1917 reading of Tolstoy’s and his aristocratic, yet folksy, heroine’s reading of the operatic text itself had an intertextual dimension. It was paralleled by a drastic revision, in the work of such contemporary authors as Mikhail Zoshchenko, of the rules of prose-writing.Zoshchenko coopted and canonized, albeit in an ambiguous manner, the cultural habits of his characters, “natural” to a fault, as instanced by his “lady aristocrat,” whose reading of the institution of theater ignored the stage altogether, foregrounding the concessions stand instead. This case features an entire rereading paradigm, complete with a classical author and two modern rereaders–a theorist/critic and a prosaist, and offers an opportunity to correlate and historicize all three discourses. By the same token, it calls into question any presumed vantage point, e. g. Shklovsky’s, as well as my own, suggesting that utmost self-critical caution be exercised in the art of rereading.
The tension between the extremes of reader conservatism and reinterpretive innovation is legitimate, often ideological, and hardly resolvable; rather, it calls for mediation. Literature thrives on rereading, and Russian literary history has been particularly rich in instances of ideological constructions imposed on literary texts, as, for instance, in Belinsky’s reading of Gogol. In time, they are overturned and replaced with new interpretations, as in the rereading of Pushkin by Pisarev or of Gogol by the Symbolists, then reactivated, only to be shelved again, depending on the prevalent discourse of the time and the critics’ esthetic preferences.
The promptings of the current situation are contradictory. Poststructuralist schools favor ideological and power-conscious constructions, while at the same time advocating pluralist cohabitation of readings. Similarly, this critic may be engaged in a reinterpretive endeavor that is generationally and politically motivated (very roughly, that of dismantling Soviet-era mentality), while at the same time revering the ideal of poetics for poetics’s sake. The ensuing analyses try to combine probing with accuracy, ideological interest and perspectivism with structural completeness, integrative thematization with pluralistic reading.
A compromise is also pursued on the issue of ‘intertext vs. structure.’
According to intertextualists, no text is an immanent, closed entity; all discourse occurs in dialogue with some other, which precedes it chronologically and/or ontologically.
Thus, the lyrical format of “Monument”, so prestigious in Russian poetry until its subversion in Mayakovsky’s At the Top of My Voice, has a long pedigree. It goes back through Pushkin to Derzhavin, Lomonosov, and, by way of several European mediators (Shakespeare, Ronsard, Milton, Klopstock, a. o., see Alekseev 1967: 97-99), all the way to Horace’s Carmina (III, 30). Yet, Horace himself saw his highest achievement in having been the “first to transpose Aeolian song into Italian tunes,” i. e. in harking back to still further–Greek–predecessors.
The two principal versions of the anti-intrinsic argument maintain that all Judeo-Greco-Christian texts are (i) but notes in the margins of Plato and the Bible and thus syntagms of a vast single Text; (ii) related, like Leibnitzian monads, by common paradigms and thus mere variations on a single archetypal Text.
The syntagmatic (= genetic) argument is on the whole more graphic, while the paradigmatic (= typological) may seem more plausible on theoretical grounds. They are not irreconcilable.
For instance, Shklovsky (1972 [1919]) argued that affinities among texts from different traditions were due not to “wandering plots”, i. e. borrowings, but trather to immanent laws of literary form. He thus supplied the paradigmatic theory, traditionally theme-oriented, with a component responsible for syntactic narrative structures.
Similarly, the typological ‘laws’ touted by the Formalists had an important syntagmatic dimension, premised as they were on the defamiliarization of preceding textualities. Hence the Formalists’, especially Tynianov’s (beginning with 1977a [1921]), consistent interest in the theory of parody and the practical study of literary innovation in historical context.
The Russian/Slavist intertextualist heirs to the Formalist tradition4 have preferred to elaborate on the genetic argument, looking for concrete ‘subtexts’: quotes, allusions, etc. In this they differ consistently from Western scholars, who pursue ‘intertexts’ proper, that is, interactions of generalized entities and forces: topoi, masterplots, and textual strategies.Thus, Michael Riffaterre (1978) conceives of poetic structure as an expansion and conversion of a given ‘hypogram.’5The hypogram is envisioned as a stereotype (subtext, gnome, paradigm) that is present in the literary/cultural vocabulary and may or may not be instanced, as far the as analyzed text is concerned, by a specific verbal cliche. Thus, Riffaterre has the new text responding not so much to an actual previous text or writer but rather to a generalized discourse–to literature’s langue, not only its parole.6
One Russian counterpart to this fusion of genetic and typological intertexts can be found in Mikhail Gasparov’s studies on the ‘semantic haloes’ of verse meters. Proceeding from Kiril Taranovsky’s pioneering discovery of a specific seme inscribed in a meter’s signified by a particular poem, Gasparov redefined Taranovsky’s framework.7 He moved to a systematic analysis of all the texts written in a given meter, all its Russian and foreign sources, and all the stages of its evolution, in order to list all the thematic overtones imprinted on the meter. In practical terms, this means that in choosing a meter, the poet enters into a dialogue not only with a concrete predecessor but also with ‘the memory of the meter,’ i. e. the entire paradigm of formal and thematic options that can be now appropriated, expanded, con- or sub-verted.
The term ‘genre memory’ was coined in the Russian context by MikhailBakhtin8,and despite his anti-formalist stance, this concept, as well as that of dialogue, transcends the opposition between ‘genetic’ and ‘paradigmatic.’ A given genre (or a given dialogical situation) both unfolds in the actual history of literature and can be summed up as a structured set of possibilities. In this respect, the so-called formal entities, such as meters, are no different from more thematic ones, such as the historical novel, the “Monument” lyric, or the ‘canine’ story (as identified in Ziolkowski 1983).
Another analytical tool that straddles the boundary between syntagmatic and paradigmatic readings, as well as between closed structure and open-ended intertextuality, is the concept of ‘thematic invariance.’ Invariant motifs are a cross between Vladimir Propp’s narrative ‘functions,’ established as common denominators of a class of similar texts, and the traditional, as well as New Criticism’s, ‘recurrent themes,’ discovered by close reading as the text’s rhetorical backbone.9 Therefore, the invariants defining an author’s poetic world form a structure that is both intertextual (within the limits of the oeuvre) and, to a large extent, thematic. By setting up a structural/intertextual/thematic correlative of the authorial persona, invariance transcends the programmatic impersonality of Formalism’s “literature without writers.” Resurrected from complete diffusion in the Text, the Author again becomes the subject of biographical and psychoanalytic inquiry,–tempered, to be sure, by the hard-won distinction between the real and implied author. Roman Jakobson’s 1975 [1937] analysis of the ‘statue’ motif in Pushkin’s poetry and life in light of its mythological underpinnings is an early example of structuralism going thematic, intertextual (indeed, inter-codal), and archetypal.
The chasm between structuralism and poststructuralist schools seems overrated. When Derrida, de Man, and their followers10 expose the text’s inherent self-subversiveness, they develop the structuralist and, in fact, New Critical concepts of opposition, mediation, and ambiguity. In unmasking the text’s rhetoricity, i. e. its desire-driven tautological patterns of persuasion, they build on the concepts of semiotic codes, literary conventions, and expressive techniques, devised by structural poetics. Arrogating critical supremacy over literature proper, they actually proceed with the structuralist’s agenda of portraying writers’ worlds as systems of signification; as part of the deal, they also inherit the experimental scientist’s condescending attitude toward his guinea pigs. Even the questioning of criticism’s own discourse was prefigured by the structuralist preoccupation with metalanguage and the foundations of semiotics.
The move from modeling literature’s and literary scholarship’s arbitrary structures to denouncing them as ideologically suspect was both evolutionary and revolutionary. The accumulation of insights into the fundamental problems of discourse was accompanied by a startling rise in criticism’s political temperature. Having discovered the omnipresence of textuality, poststructuralism seems to have unlearned the very pleasure of the text it had proverbialized (in Barthes 1974b [1973]). Taking its own metaphors of subversion too literally, it virtually ceased liking art–as if, once demystified, fictions no longer held any attraction. To be sure, this, too, had originated in the structuralist era, when it was chic to voice the fear that under the cold stare of Science literature’s Beauty would wither. Ironically,the forecast is coming true just as the idea of scientific cognition of literature falls into disrepute. The desire that animates much of today’s critical practice suggests a hostile arrogance toward literature and a narcissist obsession with theory and the figure of the critic. The latest literary revolution has, as it were, brought about the canonization of the most secondary of genres–a virtual dictatorship of criticism, a. k. a. “secondary literature.”
In the rereadings that follow, I try to garner the best of both worlds,avoiding their malignant extremes. A middle course is apt to draw fire from both sides. So far, I have been protecting my conservative flank, which faces the theater of intense theoretical hostilities. The other, “innovative,” flank, facing Russian studies, may be no less vulnerable, as all rereading worthy of the name risks being. Here, however, the defense is less a matter of theory (once the general desirability of rereading has been accepted), than of producing cogent new readings. As such, it is best left to specific chapters.
To put it bluntly, I still believe in literature’s primary realities–texts and authors, finding them of more lasting interest than readers’, critics’, or theorists’ responses to them, including my own. Accordingly, in the spirit of Hemingway’s matadors, I believe in “working close to the bull” and coming away with full-blooded (re)readings rather than mere illustrations of theoretical points. Or, to qualify these anti-theoretical overstatements, I still believe in literature’s very own layer of signification, defined by its structures–patterns, devices, motifs, invariants, clusters, masterplots. I consider these carriers of specific literary meanings much more deserving of our professional attention than various grand but hollow constructions put on literature by readers and critics fixated on ideology. And I find sophomoric the idea that lists, diagrams, and other explicit formulations somehow circumscribe the text’s freedom,monologizing and drying up the critical discourse.
Rereading’s interest lies in its very pursuit of different–newer, truer,or otherwise provocative and rewarding — readings. Proceeding from the general semiotic assumption that special inquiry is needed to make texts yield their hidden meanings, rereading enacts the conversion scenario inscribed, according to Riffaterre, in the literary text itself. A typical strategy adopted in this book is to read one text with, so to speak, an unexpected but significant other text in hand, bringing their structures and invariants to bear on each other.Prominent among the countertexts thus engaged are not only historically related works but also the “eternally relevant” psychoanalytical and archetypal paradigms.
Ideally, the process leads, in a sequence of conversions, to a deeper reading of the texts involved. The discovery procedure is both synchronic and diachronic, as it projects, onto the studied text, discourses from different times. The resulting interplay of meanings may produce an orderly hierarchy, a more or less harmonious chorus, or a set of incompatible alternatives. One major challenge, germane to the reconciliation of synchrony and diachrony, is learning to treat an author’s evolution as a special case of self-rereading–a dialogue with oneself and the historical context.
Speaking of history, much of the rereading undertaken here centers on the great cultural divides of the turn of the century and the 1917 revolution.Shklovsky’s discovery of defamiliarization is once again a pivotal concept and historically relevant guide to the book’s recurrent themes. Defamiliarization actually epitomizes rereading, revolutionary subversion of literary conventions, and the esthetic legitimation of plebeian “bad writing.”11 Updated as Riffaterrian conversion, defamiliarization also underlies another major link between intertextuality and the Soviet cultural situation. Conversion breeds such literary hybrids as the Aesopian art of adapting traditional literary patterns and authors’ idiosyncratic invariants to the dictates of political control, and the dystopian revision of utopias (and other classical models) in light of post-revolutionary realities.
Helpful as they prove in providing clues to the book’s problematic, these and other theoretical ideas are themselves not above reexamination. The Formalists’ kinship with the Avant-garde and the discourse of the Revolution makes their poetics all the more historicizable and rereadable; a case in point is the revision of the Formalist treatment of story, discourse, and framing in Chapter 4.12 Nor does Riffaterre’s version of the Formalist/intertextual approach remain sacrosanct; its rigorously binary design (expansion–conversion) proves on occasion too confining and is then modified to accommodate multihypogram and multistage transformations (e. g., in Chapters 5, 9, 10).
I have outlined the book’s major leitmotifs: structures, invariants,clusters; psychoanalytical and mythological archetypes; defamiliarization,conversion, hybrids, multiple reading; cultural and literary conventions, “bad” writing, Aesopian discourse, dystopias. These are accompanied by other research tools, which form the book’s theoretical background: the notions of power politics of literary discourse (Bakhtin; Foucault) and of the role of cultural institutions (Lotman, Ginzburg, and Uspenskii 1985; Todd 1986); the models of Socialist Realism as new Classicism ([Siniavsky-]Tertz 1982 [1959), ritualistic writing (Clark 1981), and Avant-garde run amok (Groys 1988); the problematic of the body and carnival (Bakhtin 1968 [1965]); the Proustian superposition of the unique and the recurrent (Genette 1970, 1980); the iconization of ideological stances via narrative structures (e. g., of Olesha’s ‘envy’ via a special ‘invidious optic’; see Ch. 7); a. o. All in all, the book can be said to aspire to an enlightened eclecticism with a structuralist and intertextualist base. The methods of various critical schools are enlisted in the same old search for strikingly new and yet compellingly plausible readings.
Two interrelated concerns guide this search: a theoretical exploration of intertextuality and a historical study of the Russian literary scene. They are additionally linked by the role played in the reinterpretive process by literary criticism.
The theoretical emphasis is on the types of intertextual contact. These are defined by
–the contact’s level: among individual texts, entire oeuvres, or structural entities;
–the nature of the contact: typological affinity or direct influence;
–its dynamics: influence, dialogue, evolution;
–the resulting complexity of interpretation: single, double, multiple; and
–the pragmatic factors at play: literary, institutional, political, archetypal.
The book consists of ten comparative analyses grouped into five pairs that represent major types of intertextual rereading. Most analyses concentrate on a few short texts (stories, poems, chapters of longer works), which are discussed as representative of their authors’ styles. Each essay forms something of a monographic whole that can be read independently of the rest.
Part I juxtaposes the sensibilities underlying entire poetic worlds. In its two chapters, the modernist and post-modernist writings of Mikhail Zoshchenko and Sasha Sokolov, respectively, are found to suggest new perspectives on their nineteenth-century “realist” counterparts. As a result,Gogol and Tolstoy emerge as inspirationally “bad” writers, unexpectedly relevant to recent and present-day problematic. Instrumental in these reinterpretations are various analytical models of “the Soviet phenomenon,” as well as psychoanalytic and poststructuralist insights into the dynamics of social conventions, the power of writing, and writers’ fragmented identities.
In the second part, intertextual linkage shifts to the level of more narrowly circumscribed thematic and structural constructs. One chapter recovers Tolstoy’s “After the Ball” from its automatized textbook limbo by discerning in it a conversion, along the lines of his late thinking, of an archetypal plot.The analysis then focuses on the changing uses to which the same hypogram is put by three authors–prerevolutionary (Leo Tosltoy), postrevolutionary (Mikhail Zoshchenko) and postStalin (Evgeniia Ginzburg)–uses that stem from their respective views of culture. The other essay examines the changes in the treatment, by a classic (Pushkin) and two modernists (Bunin and Nabokov), of narrative framing, and these changes, too, are found symptomatic of cultural shifts. In the process, a dialogue between two influential readings, of Pushkin by Mikhail Gershenzon (1919) and of Bunin by Lev Vygotsky (1971 [1925]), is established and put in historical perspective.
The next section is devoted to the derivation of a modern work from its textual prototype(s). The first chapter shows how a living poet (Brodsky)appropriates, under the guise of parody, a nineteenth-century masterpiece (by Pushkin) and the entire tradition of its rewriting to produce an epitome of his own poetics. Three sets of invariants (defining the two authorial oeuvres and the literary progeny of the original poem) are involved in this intercourse, which is shown to consist of several metamorphic transitions: from Pushkin’s original–to progeny–to parody–to Brodsky’s idiosyncrasies–to their ultimately Pushkinian base. The companion chapter features Brodsky’s lesser known and testily anticultural adversary, Eduard Limonov. The analyses of two of his texts, a lyric and a short story, establish their deep archetypal roots but also reveal no less strong a link to subtexts (from Derzhavin, Pushkin, as well as Mandelstam, whom the author professes to ignore) than in Brodsky the consummate intertextualist.
Part IV continues the close reading of subtexts with two studies of actual literary exchange and its role in literary evolution. The first (re)constructs a tripartite dialogue between Bulgakov and Olesha (Heart of a Dog–Envy–The Master and Margarita), in the course of which a common motif cluster is gradually recast, as carnivalesque discourse comes to the fore. The other chapter analyzes a metaliterary poem typical of Pasternak’s 1930s style, whose motifs and diction exhibit an Aesopian compromise between the poet’s invariants and the Soviet mythopoetics of the time. The adaptive dynamics takes shape in a dialogue with contemporaries (Briusov, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam), predecessors (Pushkin), and characteristic topoi of Russian poetry. Thus, in both chapters, internal and external dialogues are found at the very roots of creativity and evolution.
In the fifth section, the readings proceed according to several different codes at once, yielding manifold, but rather congruent, spectrums of meaning. In Chapter 9, an episode from I. Ilf and E. Petrov’s The Golden Calf (the story of the closet monarchist Khvorob’ev), is broken down into layers representing different kinds of literary discourse; especially instructive is the mediation between the traditional genre of nightmare and the masterplot of dystopia that hinges on a subtext from Dostoevsky. The tenth and last chapter,in its turn, involves a mythological archetype, a classical subtext, a modernist one, and the author’s invariants in the reading of a modern short story (Platonov’s “Fro”), yielding a polyphonic score of meanings.
The book coheres in more ways than are suggested by the above methodological sketch. Although the subject matter spans two centuries of Russian literature–featuring poets, prosaists (with Pushkin and Limonov in both capacities), and non-fiction writers, from classics to modernists to living authors,–the discussion clusters around several focal texts and issues. The chapter that presents Zoshchenko’s ambiguous primitivism as an extreme case of Tolstoyan defamiliarization has a sequel in the next section, where this correlation illuminates the two writers’ treatment of the ‘body’; a similar corporeal problematic reappears in the chapter on Limonov. Another thread links the references to Dostoevsky as a forerunner of modern dystopian discourse (and specifically to The Village of Stepanchikovo) in the context now of Gogol’s quasi-totalitarian delusions, now of Ilf and Petrov’s anti-totalitarian dreamer. The dystopian theme and the attendant problems of adaptation are taken up in connection with Pasternak’s self-harnessing to the Soviet Juggernaut. In another thematic grouping, Pushkin’s announced appearances in the chapters on Brodsky and on framing are supplemented by his subtextual habitation (especially, as the creator of the “Prophet” hypogram) of other texts, notably, the Pasternak poem. Finally, a common topical interest–in the issue of cultural heritage–correlates the three recent texts (by Evg. Ginzburg, Brodsky, and Limonov), however different their attitudes toward that problem.
Despite the continuity of presentation, the book’s genre remains halfway between a tight (“American”) monograph and a looser (“European”) collection of interrelated essays. An additional split–or polyphony–comes from the dual nature of writing in English about Russian literature. The book speaks, as it were, with a forked tongue as it addresses its mixed audience of Slavists and generalists. While the latter may be only interested in its position–rather conservative–on matters of theory, the former will probably see it primarily as a study in practical reinterpretation, rather unorthodox at times.
Rereading by definition claims novelty, and the recent upheavals in the Russian literary landscape are especially conducive to critical re-evaluation,consonant, to an extent, with the current deconstructive trends in the West. The rediscovery/canonization of entire strata of twentieth-century Russian literature (banned, emigre, dissident, or otherwise unofficial) has been accompanied by provocative reinterpretations of classics (e. g., of Pushkin and Gogol by Siniavsky-Tertz [1975a, b] and of Mayakovsky by Karabchievskii [1985]).Controversial as they are, they build on the scholarly tradition of tracing the changing fate of a writer’s discourse in criticism and later writing.13
The exercises in rereading that follow have been undertaken in a spirit of political and esthetic non-alignment, which, in the Russian context, may offend various sets of traditional values. The association of Zoshchenko with Tolstoy is completely new, as is the shadow of stylistic and ideological ambiguity it casts on both of them. More specifically, “After the Ball” has never been placed in such “odd” contexts as Zoshchenko’s “Lady with Flowers,” on one hand, and folkloric wedding-tests imagery, on the other. Somewhat risque is also the treatment of Selected Passages (for some, a sacred text, for others, reactionary nonsense) as a “regular” Gogolian–grotesquely unreliable and megalomaniacal–skaz narrative. Conventional decorum is also breached in the chapter on Ilf and Petrov, who make strange bedfellows for Dostoevsky, Zamyatin, and Orwell, as, for that matter, does Limonov for Derzhavin, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. Indeed, the semi-official 1930s’ satirists and the present-day enfant terrible of Russian letters and politics are hardly among the fashionable subjects of critical attention, largely because of their peculiar mix of dubious political credentials and wide popular appeal (and that despite the theoretical recognition of the intimate links between ‘high’ and ‘low’ in modern culture).
By the same token, my inquiry, objective to the point of cynical admiration, into the dynamics of Pasternak’s early 1930s’ “collaborationism” may run afoul of the established perceptions of that poet as either obliviously above the fray or in righteous opposition to the regime. Similar ideological pieties will probably be offended by the profane dissection of Evgeniia Ginzburg’s account of her truly heroic experience in the Gulag, the promotion of Olesha to the top literary-and-dissident rank (usually reserved for the likes of Bulgakov), and the general stamp of esthetic approval conferred on the ‘art of adaptation’ (Olesha’s, Pasternak’s, Ilf and Petrov’s, Platonov’s, Zoshchenko’s, and others’).
Potentially problematic are also some of my methodological positions. The rereading of Bunin’s “Gentle Breathing” revises, with all due respect, the story’s classical analysis by Vygotsky. The concepts of ‘cluster’ and ‘progeny,’ crucial to the intertextual placing of Brodsky’s sonnet derived from a Pushkin subtext, differ significantly from the “standard” Taranovsky-Gasparov approach, based on homometrical corpuses. The prominence accorded the author’s personality in the interpretation of Selected Passages is a departure from strictly textual analysis (admittedly excusable, though, in the case of Gogol, whom critics love to psychoanalyze). Finally, the idea of ‘bad writing’ may be seen by some as taken too far in order to promote “really bad” authors (i. e., depending on the critic, Chernyshevsky, Zoshchenko, Limonov,…) by lumping them together with the “greats” (Gogol, Tolstoy, Khlebnikov, Platonov,…).
But then, as has been said, rereadings can hardly be justified in abstracto–they will stand or fall on their merits.
2. Barthes’ S/Z (1974 [1970]) is remarkable for the way a minute and comprehensive multilevel analysis of the text was combined with its principled release from teleological control.
3. See my account of these oscillations in Zholkovsky 1992e.
4. See Taranovsky 1976, Ronen 1983, Smirnov 1985, and also Zholkovsky 1987f, 1988.
5. See also Culler 1981: 80-99.
6. This principle may prove useful in resolving a characteristic problem of intertextual reading. In establishing a ‘dialogue’ between two major writers, one is liable to unwittingly ignore their direct exchanges with their less-known contemporaries. Historically, i. e. genetically, this may be a distortion, and yet make typological sense.
7. See Taranovsky 1963 (where the Russian iambic pentameter was shown to have the semantic halo of ‘[life’s] journey,’ inherited from Lermontov’s “Vykhozhu odini a na dorogu…”) and M. Gasparov 1976, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1984a.
8. See Bakhtin 1984 [1963] and also Morson and Emerson 1990: 295-97.
9. See Propp 1971 [1928], Brooks 1975, Zholkovsky 1984a, Shcheglov and Zholkovsky 1987.
10. See Bloom, de Man et al. 1987, de Man 1986, and also Harari ed. 1979, Culler 1982, Leitch 1983.
11.On the striking affinities between the Formalists and Bakhtin as theoretical mouthpieces of the democratic masses’ advent to the cultural scene in the 1920s-1930s, see Mikhail Gasparov 1984b.
12. For a poststructuralist overview of Russian Formalism see Steiner 1984; for a revision of the theoretical heritage of the Avant-garde, with special reference to Eisenstein’ theory of art (and of my own earlier–generativist–reading of it, Zholkovsky 1984a [1964]: 35-52), see Zholkovsky 1992g; cf. also my rereading of Mayakovsky (Zholkovsky 1986c).
13. See, for instance, Jackson 1958, Debreczeny 1966, Maguire 1974.