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The Nonhuman in Twenty-First Century Russian Literature

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The Nonhuman in Twenty-First Century Russian Literature After the Seraph: The Nonhuman in Twenty-First Century Russian Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Vassileva, Maria. 2019. After the Seraph: The Nonhuman in Twenty- First Century Russian Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42013096 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA After the Seraph: The Nonhuman in Twenty-First Century Russian Literature A dissertation presented by Maria Petrova Vassileva to The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Slavic Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2019 ! © 2019 – Maria Petrova Vassileva. All rights reserved. ! Dissertation Advisor: Professor Stephanie Sandler Maria Petrova Vassileva After the Seraph: The Nonhuman in Twenty-First Century Russian Literature Abstract This dissertation looks at works from the 2000s and 2010s by three Russian authors: Maria Stepanova, Fyodor Svarovsky, and Linor Goralik. The work of these three authors often stages encounters and transformations between human and nonhuman beings––animals, robots, supernatural creatures––whose presence in the text leads both to an examination of the uses of language and a deep consideration of how the social body can include otherness. The main inquiry of this dissertation is how the nonhuman allows these writers to frame their thinking about the present moment as a historical period with complex social and literary challenges. As Russian-speaking writers who were born before the fall of the Soviet Union and who started publishing in its aftermath, the three of them are attentive to how historical myth and narrative functions in multiple areas of speech: literary-poetic, political, everyday. The compounded historical traumas of the twentieth century (its wars, the dissolution of one world order, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent revival of its more oppressive rules and beliefs) and their continued presence in contemporary life are reflected in their writing. In their work, the nonhuman embodies an unresolved past as well as the potential for a future built around new ethical and affective communities. The difference of the language and body of the nonhuman serves as an occasion to imagine an alternative social, political, and emotional life. iii ! ! Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One: Maria Stepanova and the Voices of the Past Chapter Two: Fyodor Svarovsky’s Laws of Robotics Chapter Three: The Bestia Rasa of Linor Goralik Conclusion Bibliography iv ! ! Acknowledgements My wonderful committee offered wisdom, support, encouragement, as well as stories about animals, robots, and feelings: Stephanie Sandler, Daria Khitrova, and Justin Weir. They made my work better, and any mistakes in this dissertation are the result of not listening to them. My friends, readers, editors who helped every step of the way: Philip Redko, Ainsley Morse, Mihaela Pacurar, Sarah Vitali, Daniel Green, Abigail Weil, Alex Tullock, Ania Aizman, Dimiter Kenarov, Stefan Ivanov. Thank you for making this possible. I am grateful to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard for their support of my research. I am grateful to Novak Djokovic and Simona Halep for inspiring me with their Balkan excellence in the final stretch of the editing process. v ! Introduction The Horse and the Seraph How do the creatures who surround us make us aware of the limits of our language? Where can we find new words to describe our beautiful, sometimes terrifyingly complex world? The poet Nikolay Zabolotsky, whose countryside childhood shaped his interest in the natural world as a transcendent poetic space, made these questions central to his work as a member of OBERIU, a grouping of poets and artists often called the last Soviet avant-garde.1 While his fellow oberiuty Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky played with the foundations of language and logic, Zabolotsky remained close to a tradition of metaphysical natural poetry in the vein of Tyutchev. But in keeping with OBERIU’s more radical pursuits, Zabolotsky also examined the notion of a lyric subject (and the Russian tradition of verbal skepticism) from new angles. His 1926 poem “Лицо коня” (“The Face of a Horse”) presents a night scene in which the bodies of animals are as solid and eternal as the very landscape. They inhabit a kind of mythic time of the rural/natural world, filled with the sights and sounds of trees, birds, stones. Within that marvelous setting, the poem focuses on a horse — a handsome, magical animal that hears, sees, knows everything. Who can benefit from the horse’s wisdom? “И зная всё, кому ! 1 A thorough account of Zabolotsky’s poetics and how they relate to the circumstances of his life, including his early years in Kazan, Kukmor and Sernur, is presented in Darra Goldstein’s Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Sarah Pratt’s Nikolai Zabolotsky, Enigma and Cultural Paradigm (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000) pays close attention to the metaphysical and religious strands in the poets work, including its indebtedness to the nineteenth century poetic tradition. For more on the different poetics and personalities within OBERIU, see Aleksandr Kobrinskii’s Poetika “OBERIU” v kontekste russkogo literaturnogo avangarda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo kul’turologicheskogo lytseia, 2000); and Graham Roberts’s The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU – Fact, Fiction, Metafiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ! ! расскажет он/ Свои чудесные виденья?” (“And knowing all, to whom may he recount/ his wondrous visions?”) The poem proposes the following solution: И если б человек увидел Лицо волшебное коня, Он вырвал бы язык бессильный свой И отдал бы коню. Поистине достоин Иметь язык волшебный конь! Мы услыхали бы слова. Слова большие, словно яблоки. Густые, Как мед или крутое молоко. Слова, которые вонзаются, как пламя, И, в душу залетев, как в хижину огонь, Убогое убранство освещают. Слова, которые не умирают И о которых песни мы поем.2 And should a man but see the horse’s magic face, he would tear out his own pathetic tongue and give it to the horse. In truth, this magic beast is worthy of it. Then we would hear words. Words, big like apples, thick, like honey or curds, words that penetrate like fire, and once within the soul, as in some hut, illuminate the wretched trappings, words that will not die, and which, in song, we celebrate.3 Surrounded by subjunctive clauses, the words “человек” and “слова” appear abstract and undefined amidst the concrete natural imagery, less real than the landscape and the animals. What is the relationship between this imagined “person” and the speaker of the poem; how does the poem relate to the “words” that would result from this sacrifice? The subjunctive, “what if” ! 2 Nikolai Zabolotskii, “Litso konia,” in N. A. Zabolotskii, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1965), 226-7. 3 Nikolai Zabolotskii, “The Face of a Horse,” translated by Daniel Weissbort, in Selected Poems: Translated from the Russian (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1999), 115-6. 2 ! ! framing puts distance between the poem and its meta-poetic meanings (after all, it is a poem that describes how poetry can come to be); to connect the two, we must consider the encounter that the title points us to. We must look at the face of the horse. But first, let us take one step back. Looking directly at an animal, considering its features, movements, or inner life and seeing a limited set of associations and interpretations, is a strategy continuously taught to readers within a human-centered framework: in alphabet books with alliterative poems about animals, in fables and myths that explore ethical questions on grander and smaller scales, in all kinds of works of “realism” where animals retreat into the natural background or in works of speculative fiction where they join the main cast. In each instance, the text asks us to recognize both similarity and otherness, and to read ourselves within the animal body. This strategy is very common, yet, as Zabolotsky knows, and Derrida discusses at length in The Animal that therefore I am, our imagination and our ethics suffer when we use the broad, generic concept “animal” and define it simply as animals who are not human.4 So, to go back to my previous point, let us not look at the animal; let us look at the horse. Looking at the horse happens on two different planes of the poem. There are two central encounters here (not counting the brief consideration of the less intelligent cow):5 the careful account of the poem in its wondrous entirety, and the “what if” possible encounter encapsulated within it, in which a person is moved to tear out his tongue and gift it to the horse. Let’s look at the latter more closely. The man, the poem seems to say, would certainly feel compelled to “tear ! 4 “This agreement concerning philosophical sense and common sense that allows one to speak blithely of the Animal in the general singular is perhaps one of the greatest and most symptomatic asinanities of those who call themselves humans.” Jacques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 41. 5 “Рогами гладкими шумит в соломе/ Покатая коровы голова./ Раздвинув скулы вековые,/ Ее притиснул каменистый лоб,/ И вот косноязычные глаза/ С трудом вращаются по кругу./ Лицо коня прекрасней и умней.” Some animals are more equal than others.
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