Nightmare Russian History and Culture

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Nightmare Russian History and Culture Nightmare Russian History and Culture VOLUME 10 Editors-in-Chief Jeffrey P. Brooks The Johns Hopkins University Christina Lodder University of Edinburgh • The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rhc Nightmare From Literary Experiments to Cultural Projects By Dina Khapaeva Professor, School of Modern Languages, Georgia Tech Translated by Rosie Tweddle LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 The publication was effected under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature Translation by Rosie Tweddle. Cover illustration: Pavel Filonov, Два лица (Two Faces), 1940 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khapaeva, Dina. [Koshmar. English] Nightmare : from literary experiments to cultural projects / by Dina Khapaeva ; translated by Rosie Tweddle. pages ; cm. — (Russian history and culture ; v. 10) ISBN 978-90-04-22275-5 (hardback : alkaline paper) — ISBN (invalid) 978-90-04-23322-5 (e-book) 1. Russian lit- erature—History and criticism. 2. Nightmares in literature. 3. Gogol?, Nikolai Vasil?evich, 1809–1852—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Pelevin, Viktor—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips), 1890-1937—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Mann, Thomas, 1875–1955—Criticism and interpretation. I. Tweddle, Rosie, translator. II. Title. III. Series: Russian history and culture (Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 10. PG2987.N55K5313 2012 809’.93353—dc23 2012025022 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978-90-04-22275-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-23322-5 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Aulasaulalakaula ............................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ ix Part One The Nightmare of Literature ................................................. 1 Chapter One Sources ................................................................................. 9 Unfinished Experiments on the Reader: Nikolai Gogol. The Petersburg Tales ........................................................................... 9 “Nevsky Prospect”: The Gogol Code ..................................................... 12 Two “Portraits”: What Gogol’s Nightmare Is Made Of ................... 20 “The Nose”: An Experiment of Literature ........................................... 34 “Diary of a Madman”: The Tyranny of the Author .......................... 42 Gogol and the Devil: Materialization of a Nightmare .................... 47 Chapter Two The Nightmare Alphabet ................................................ 61 Victor Pelevin .............................................................................................. 61 Does Pelevin Fit Gogol’s Overcoat? ................................................ 61 The Philosophical Ink-well ............................................................... 67 The Nightmare Formula .................................................................... 72 Mozart’s Infernal Fugue ..................................................................... 75 Pursuits .................................................................................................... 76 The Void of Post-Soviet Selective Amnesia ................................. 79 Howard Phillips Lovecraft ....................................................................... 82 ‘Freezing Chatterings’ ......................................................................... 82 Bewitched ............................................................................................... 85 The Hedonism of Nightmares .......................................................... 87 Unholy and Paradoxical Laws .......................................................... 92 The Mutiny of the ‘Generator of Dreams’ ..................................... 95 Chapter Three The Muteness of Nightmares ..................................... 107 Experiments on the Hero: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double: A Petersburg Poem ........................................................ 107 The Scoundrel Hero ............................................................................ 107 The Gogolian Awakenings of Titular Councillor Golyadkin . 111 The Emotions of the Experimental Hero ..................................... 114 The ‘True Story’ of the Nightmare .................................................. 115 vi contents Lapses and Ruptures ........................................................................... 119 The Hypnotics of the “Petersburg Poem” ..................................... 122 The Seven Circles of The Double ..................................................... 125 Mr. Golyadkin’s Déjà Vu .................................................................... 127 Natasha Rostova’s Déjà Vu ................................................................ 131 Foresight and Presentiments ............................................................ 136 The Mumbling of Nightmares .......................................................... 137 Fyodor Dostoevsky. “The Landlady” and “Mr Prokharchin” ......... 145 The Mute Hero ..................................................................................... 146 Ivan Semyonovich Prokharchin’s Pursuit ..................................... 149 The Incantation .................................................................................... 151 Experiments on the Writer: Mikhail Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics .............................................................................. 156 Self-Consciousness and the Menippea .......................................... 156 The Double: A ‘Homophony of Decayed Self-Consciousness’? ... 163 Bakhtin’s Reading of “Bobok” ........................................................... 166 Recording the Nightmare Sounds ................................................... 171 Chapter Four Interpretation of the Nightmare: Thomas Mann. Joseph and His Brothers ............................................................................ 193 In the Jaws of History ............................................................................... 194 Gaps in the Eternal Present .................................................................... 199 The Nightmare Temporal Horizon ....................................................... 202 Chapter Five The Nightmare of Culture .............................................. 209 The History of Literature and the Nightmare ................................... 211 The Culture of Nightmare Consumption ........................................... 224 The Nightmare and the Subjectivity of Individual Time ............... 229 Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin as Proof of the Gothic Aesthetic ................................................................................................. 232 Pelevin’s Gothic Path .......................................................................... 232 Sorokin’s Madagascar ......................................................................... 236 References ......................................................................................................... 251 Index ................................................................................................................... 259 AULASAULALAKAULA High above my head, disintegrating into separate letters, some phrases hovered, but this did not disturb my reading—I knew this section of Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and His Brothers almost by heart: “These were holy fools possessed by God, who foamed at the mouth and made a living of their ability to prophesy in a slavering state—babblers of oracles, who roamed about or lived in caves vis- ited by clients and who pocketed foodstuffs and money in exchange for prognosticating all sorts of lucky days and hidden signs. Jacob did not like them because of his God, but in fact no one liked them, though people were very careful not to offend them. They were filthy men of disorderly and crazed habits; children ran after them calling out, “Aulasaulalakaula”—the sort of sound they made when
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