NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Resilient Revelations: Apocalyptic Fiction in the Soviet 1920s

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Slavic Languages and Literatures

By

Clairon C. Palmer

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

June 2007

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ABSTRACT

Resilient Revelations: Apocalyptic Fiction in the Soviet 1920s

Clairon C. Palmer

This dissertation investigates the nature of apocalyptic fiction in the first Soviet decade.

In my Introduction, I consider the secondary or underground status that apocalyptic thought

assumed during this period vis a vis the prevailing cultural ethos of utopianism. I assert that

Russian literary apocalyptic persisted as a genre by assuming highly dialogized, self-critical

forms that may be called “meta-apocalyptic.” A meta-apocalyptic fiction works in two

directions to (1) unmask the utopian pretensions of the new society and (2) comment on and

reconfigure its own, pre-Revolutionary shape. The meta-apocalypticist would restore to

eschatological myth its independence from both history and social life by proposing that the most

legitimate territory for cataclysmic ends and rebirth is the individual, creative consciousness.

The first work from this period that I discuss as an embodiment of the meta-apocalyptic

idea is Pil’nyak’s Mahogany. This novella’s subtle apocalyptic figuring contrasts sharply with the exclamatory end-thinking that characterizes the author’s more famous “Scythian” works.

The mature Pil’nyak dialogizes apocalyptic myth with byt, rediscovering what he depicts as that myth’s lost ontological function by relocating it in the everyday and redistributing the End across small and innumerable birth-death narratives.

The next chapter explores the clash of salvational mythologies that Olesha stages in Envy.

Modernist literary incarnations of the apocalypticist-schismatic tradition, Envy’s anti-heroes

assail utopian socialism by means of vulgarity and imperfection. Creation and creativity, this

novella vigorously proposes, are born of strife. Ultimately, Olesha presents the most viable 3 transcription of the apocalyptic promise of renewal and redemption as an aesthetic phenomenon that is personal and subjective and that invariably registers as failure in the objective world.

The topic of “aestheticized apocalypse” is developed further in my final chapter where I examine The Egyptian Stamp by Mandel’stam. Here I look closely at the apocalyptic threshold or limen which the poet translates into bold structural and thematic experiments. Further complicating this work is the idea that the apocalyptic possibility—the possibility in

Mandel’stam of the revelatory Word—suffers and languishes in contemporary socio-cultural conditions. In places, the novella’s delirious affirmation of “threshold poetics” more closely resembles a brave examination of poetic collapse.

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Table of Contents

I. Introduction 5

II. Everyday Ends: Meta-apocalypse in Pil’nyak’s Mahogany 28

III. Mythological Duels in Olesha's Envy: Apocalypticism as Challenger and Challenged 77

IV. Mandel’stam’s The Egyptian Stamp: The Warm Breath of Apocalypse and Threshold Creation 123

V. Conclusion 168

Works Cited 173

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Chapter One

Introduction

Many, many years ago, our teeth intact, our hair unfallen, our postures still upright, how we used to talk about the end of an age. (Vaginov, Goatsong)

Conflagrations and books: that is good. We shall still see, we shall read. (Mandel’stam, The Egyptian Stamp)

1.1 The Fate of Apocalypse After Revolution

The apocalyptic idea on Russian cultural soil reached its legendary proportions in the pre-

Revolutionary theurgical projects of the Symbolists and held its prominence through the Civil

War era before its presence in literature diminished sharply in the early twenties. Most accounts of the earliest Soviet era will explain that the eschatological expression of revolutionary zeal during these years assumed a distinctly utopian form, and apocalypticism as an urgent, informing cultural myth faded from view.1 In the following chapters, I endeavor to draw some conclusions about the underground fate of apocalyptic myth during the post-Revolutionary decade by identifying and exploring examples of apocalyptic fiction from these years. It is my assertion that, far from disappearing, apocalyptic fiction thrived on its secondary status, which actually enabled it to develop and to assume more--and potentially more original--forms than were available when it was a leading genre. Specifically, I examine how Russian literary apocalyptic endured by assuming highly dialogized, self-critical forms that comment not only on the

1 See James H. Billington's account of the apocalyptic fever that raged in Russia during the first two decades of the twentieth century (The Icon and the Axe, 504-518). See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, for an in-depth treatment of revolutionary utopianism in Russia and the Soviet Union, its historical sources, its many cultural expressions and its demise. See also Anthony Vanchu, "Jurij Olesha's Artistic Prose and Utopian Mythologies of the 1920s," 1-24, for a discussion of early Soviet-era utopian movements and their roots in Fyodorovian thought. 6 decade’s dominant utopianism but, most significantly, on apocalyptic fiction’s own, pre-

Revolutionary shape.

Opening or Closing Scene? Utopian vs. Apocalyptic

Eschatological terminology typically presents a difficulty because it is often subjected to vague or overlapping usage. In the most liberal instances of doomsday speak, the terms, apocalyptic and utopian, are used almost interchangeably to convey a general millenarian concern. However, despite the confusion, some fundamental distinctions between utopia and apocalypse are upheld in most critical usage and are essential to my project. The End that the apocalypticist envisions is divinely wrought and entails the end of history and a restoration or renewal that will occur beyond or outside of historical time. In contrast, the utopian dream typically describes a secular path to a world remade where the New Earth is accomplished or arrived at through human action and within history. On many points, in other words, the relationship between the two phenomena is deeply dichotomous, to include the crucial oppositions of divine intervention versus human volition, and an atemporal versus an historical end. Additionally, while apocalypse anticipates the End that will conclude a flawed present and concentrates on the Terrors that must accompany universal destruction, utopia typically takes shape after history’s cataclysmic juncture and concerns itself with the path to, the nature of, and/or the construction of the New. These distinctions are key to understanding each eschatological strain as discrete from the other, with divergent philosophical and ideological potentials in the days following the Revolution.

Again, while the apocalyptic strain has historically comprised one of the most pervasive mythical subtexts in Russian literature, its presence in the post-Revolutionary period diminished 7 abruptly. Meanwhile, the utopian strain experienced a cultural heyday during these years. The primary reasons for this shift from the plot of supernatural destruction to the plot of human achievement and a coming secular paradise are not particularly opaque. The latter was clearly more amenable to the constructive ideals of optimism and human volition that would build a new state and a new post-Revolutionary world. With the Revolution came the seeming completion of the myth of the End and an apparent close to prophecies of the old world's passing. A complete and closed system by definition, utopianism appealed to a nation still rocking from massive semiotic reversals. After the smoke cleared, what remained was the promise of total renewal— of history, society and even human nature—that sufficient exertion and imagination would accomplish. In Anthony Vanchu’s description of this period, one can see the metamorphosis of salvational mythologies: "Death of the old order through revolution (Apocalypse) allowed birth of a new order (Resurrection). Russia experienced a period of cultural and social ‘imitato

Christi’--the revolution and its aftermath were viewed as a cultural and social resurrection that allowed a new and fresh beginning" (Vanchu 89, his parentheses). Utopianism arose in the wake of the chaos and violence of revolution and civil war as a popular, spontaneous response that permeated Russian culture and society. Now that the New Time had begun, the dark tenor of pre-war apocalyptic themes did not reflect the prevailing ethos of edenic optimism that much of society was genuinely experiencing.

Nor were apocalyptic themes in step with the political needs of a fledgling state trying to make the transition from a revolutionary to a ruling power. The gospel of destruction, historically the beloved myth of the radical intelligentsia, perpetuated revolutionary fantasies and ran counter to the State’s centralist agenda. Historian Richard Stites captures the paradox of the 8

new regime's need to distance itself from the apocalyptic myth that was part and parcel of its

revolutionary identity:

The Bolsheviks [were] … delighted at the breakup of familiar forms and symbols

but frightened at the prospect of unending destruction, preaching freedom and

demanding order, shattering power edifices of the old order and designing newer

and bigger ones to house the perfect society, applauding Pugachev and emulating

Arakcheev. (Stites 6)

Apocalyptic and revolutionary thought were historically a dynamic duo2 whose expediency was suddenly passe. Now these favored sons of the recent past appeared patently inimical to the

Bolshevik initiatives of greater state control and bureaucratic institution building.

Generic Developments and a Quieter Foreboding

But the apocalyptic theme, a mainstay in Russian belle-lettres for two centuries, naturally did not disappear. It took instead a path similar to what Mirceau Eliade describes when he proposes that myth “as well as the symbols it brings into play never quite disappears from the present world of the psyche; it only changes its aspect and disguises its operations” (Eliade,

Myths, Dreams and Mysteries 27). The development of apocalyptic fiction as it fell from grace and prominence in the first Soviet decade--the mutations and additional layers of meaning that it acquired--recalls, to a degree, Tynianov’s model of literary evolution. In an amazingly short time, traditional generic elements became sources of parody, while other possibilities appeared in high relief.

2 The classic work devoted to this phenomenon is The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn’s study of medieval millennarian movements in Western Europe. As Cohn writes, the worlds of apocalyptic sectarianism and social unrest “did not coincide, but did overlap.” He provides an exhaustive look at millennarian movements among the medieval poor which were, he argues, “true precursors of some of the great revolutionary movements of the [20th] century” (16-17). 9

If the new, subterranean apocalypticism that this project explores is in some instances harder for the reader to recognize, this difficulty may be due in part to expectations established by pre-Revolutionary apocalyptic literature. In works produced before and immediately after the

Revolution, most famously in the examples of Blok, Belyi and Zamyatin, the myth of the

Scythian, a myth of independent origins, fused with and dominated Russian literary apocalyptic.

This fusion held through the Civil War years, when the face of apocalyptic doom continued to present an amalgam of the menacing-but-welcome Eastern threat and the elemental force, as epitomized in Pil’nyak’s The Naked Year. It is likely the very preponderance and subsequent waning of the Scythian-apocalyptic myth that has hindered the recognition and exploration of other, quieter avenues that the supple myth of apocalypse took in works of the post-Civil War years. My close readings begin with Pil’nyak’s Mahogany (1929), where we find a thoroughgoing departure from the defining “Scythian apocalypticism” of his earlier days.

Pil’nyak offers a case where one artist’s development, I suggest, synopsizes the shift that the apocalyptic encoding of literary fiction underwent during this period. I follow Mahogany with readings of Olesha’s Envy and Mandel’stam’s The Egyptian Stamp, both published in 1927. In these years, as my selected works make clear, apocalyptic fiction promises scant sound and fury.

It is populated rather with artists, poets, eccentrics, 20th century “little men,” modern holy fools and other social marginalia for whom the major locus of the destruction-renewal scenario is internal, for whom the redeeming Word is most “real” as an aesthetic concept, and for whom the prophetic act is, on the surface at least, a foregone failure.

Clearly, the application of the term, “apocalyptic,” to works in this study may initially be surprising to some readers and requires some preliminary definition and clarification. 10

1.2 “Apocalyptic fiction” defined and redefined

In the eschatologically-minded decade that produced the works I am considering, it may be argued that few ideas and ideological formulations did not clothe themselves in the language

(and authority) of myth. That said, I understand the danger of diluting the semantic value of

“apocalyptic” that may occur when the subtext is applied too broadly. It is my bias that apocalypticism is a foundational myth in Western culture that many works are reiterating at some level. However, while this bias may be reflected in my approach, I am not striving for clever excavations of semi-obscure subtexts. It is the nature and the context of the subtexts, not their sheer existence, that is meaningful, that narrows the field and allows us to perceive a unique phenomenon that is worth some critical attention. Several circumstances converge in the Soviet

1920s to produce, perhaps against logic, what may best be described as a dialogized apocalypticism. As a result, a myth that has operated historically as a popular, underground narrative, accustomed to opposing the status quo, steps naturally into its traditional role of criticism and dissent. In the process, it acquires additional functions in response to its particular enemy and, even more significantly, in response to its own crisis.

To begin with, my use of the term, “apocalyptic fiction,” is owed to David Bethea’s seminal treatment of the apocalyptic theme in specifically Russian fiction, which has not been bested as the authoritative word on a tradition that seems to have engendered more general acknowledgement than careful articulation. The works I have chosen to focus on are intended to expand, not compromise or enfeeble, the idea of an "apocalyptic fiction." While their mythological subtexts may take subtle, innovative and even parodic forms, they nonetheless adhere to a fully recognizable set of apocalyptic elements. Bethea’s salient points that qualify a 11 work as an apocalyptic fiction, and that I have no need to reinvent, are as follows: (1) a canonical subtext (here, Johannine) that plays an important role both thematically and structurally; (2) a living tradition with which the work enters into dialog; (3) an apocalyptic

“set,” meaning a predisposition to read current historical crisis through the prism of the

Johannine structures and figures; and (4) an apocalyptic plot whose mythological structure in modern novelistic terms is a recapitulation of the essential movement of the Johannine text

(Bethea 34).

In the works that I explore, the Johannine subtext frequently, though certainly not always, appears in ironized form, and I devote considerable space to these desacralizations and their potential function. To be sure, these texts uniformly experiment with displacements of the

Judeo-Christian myth into the territory of the consciousness, relying heavily on carnivalization and parodic devices. Yet none of them descends to parody for parody’s sake alone. In each case, irreverence masks and—what is more--actually enables a sober inquiry into the apocalyptic promises of renewal and timelessness. Additionally, these misquotations of the Book, I argue, show the Christian myth to accommodate a tremendous degree of deformation without losing its legitimacy or coherence. Translated into Tynianov-ian terms, parody in the context of dynamic, literary change ultimately reinforces the structure of the original text.

Next, I am clearly working in the tradition of literary, not literal, apocalypticism. I am exploring expressed or implied "attitudes of apocalyptic eschatology," to borrow from Robert

Galbreath's precautionary explanation of the same task. "Modern apocalyptic fictions," he writes,

"do not in fact conform at all points to the generic characteristics of ancient apocalyptic, not least of all in their self-conscious status as fiction rather than divine revelation" (Rabkin 56). This 12 study examines works that offer a contemporary Book of Revelation by transposing one of the most pervasive myths of Western culture into the realm of literary fiction. They make liberal use of Johannine typology, departing radically from literal or "naive" apocalyptic in their presentations yet continuing, in their own ways, the original unveiling or revelatory function of the original form.

To the question of whether these authors believe in the actual end of the world, the short, oversimplified answer is no. They believe, rather, that the world has ended or is in the process of ending, where “world” means values and social structures and culture. Mandel’stam believes that World Culture is on a doomed path that the Revolution has accelerated. Pil’nyak believed that Russia would be swept away in a violent but saving cleansing and is grappling with the defective realization of that idea. Olesha believes that one world, or way of life, has given way for another and identifies with what he views as the casualties of that exchange. These authors are twice removed from the literal apocalyptic beliefs that may be found, albeit in radically different formulations, in the works of other literary apocalypticists; for example in Gogol’ or

Dostoevsky, or Bely. They are employing and examining the apocalyptic myth, first, without formal religiosity or serious engagement with institutionalized Christianity and, second, in the aftermath of what they view as the Revolution’s failure to accomplish the apocalyptic promise of renewal even in secular terms. In other words, they do not directly belong to a revelatory apocalyptic tradition, and they relate to revolutionary apocalypticism with the utmost skepticism.

The practice of transposing the design of biblical history and prophecy into a different existential dimension constituted, of course, a major project among Romantic authors, and is the subject of M. H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism. Abrams not only gives an in-depth case 13 study of secularized apocalyptic thinking that the Romantics developed to an unprecedented degree but—particularly germane to this project—concentrates on the influence of the failed

French Revolution on their apocalyptic reconfigurations. Abram’s work acts as a constant point of reference for this study, which returns repeatedly to the aesthetic and spiritual kinship between

Romantic and Modernist apocalyptic and the parallels between two generations that each employ mythopoetic translation to process “the experience of partial or total disenchantment with the revolutionary promise” (Abrams 335).

As Abrams demonstrates, among Romantic authors, using apocalyptic tropes in a non- literal manner is not unremarkable. On the contrary, I assert that this “applied” apocalypticism reflects all the more intriguingly back on the master myth, which shows itself capable of a variety of distillations and retains its potency when historical events invalidate its literal construal. For apocalypticism is more than a metaphor for my authors: it is a myth. They are working out the role of myth in modernity where, as they approach it, myth may not be successfully mapped to history but it is also not a fiction. To a large degree, this position is an unstable one and I explore the significant amount of vacillation between the two theses that occurs in these works. That said, what may amount to a counterintuitive, even irrational, attraction to the possibility of mythical absolutes registers most prevailingly as authentic confrontation rather than compromise or equivocation. To recall Frank Kermode’s distinction:

"Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent” (Sense of an Ending 39). Put another way, an apocalyptic fiction presents a curious generic combination that brings together the conventions of the novel and the functions of myth. Bethea calls this union “logically (but not mythopoetically) impossible--the 14 incorporation of life's openness within the closure of God's plot" (Bethea xvii-xviii). I am interested in how this logical impossibility developed in the context of Soviet mythopoetics of the 1920s. Specifically, this context seems to have been particularly fitted to revealing and developing the potential openness of “God’s plot.”

1.3 Open-ended Determinism

Apocalypse and Dialog

[P]lurality and imperfection, diversity and the secondary, dispersal and concreteness, inconsistency and detail, variety, digression, and alienation. These things circumscribe the essence of existence and are closely related to it. (Virgil Nemoianu, A Theory of the Secondary xiv)

I see the confluence of three conditions--these authors’ post-Revolutionary historical position, their modernist aesthetics and orientation, and the period’s dominant and state- sponsored utopian culture—as transforming the apocalyptic subtext into a dialogic discourse.

To review, in the Soviet twenties when these works appear, the utopian myth was dominant and encapsulated a set of values hostile to my writers. At the most fundamental level, these author-apocalypticists, by definition locating themselves before, not after, the End, reject the secular, utopian reading of recent history in which the apocalyptic plot has been completed.

While these works uphold the view of the Revolution as the event of incontrovertible, irreversible, epochal upheaval in history and in each author’s consciousness, they simultaneously testify, often grimly, to the disconfirming aftermath of 1917 and the stark absence of the New

Jerusalem. Nineteen-seventeen was apocalyptic, but was not the Apocalypse. In their own ways, these works depict the apocalyptic battle as unfinished and, in most cases, unfinishable, or ongoing. They reject not only a specific reading of recent historical events, but are skeptical of any supposed historical fulfillment of the apocalyptic plot. This is the initial sense, the sense that 15

Zamiatin uses when he hyperbolically advocates unceasing revolution, in which apocalypticism

may be identified with openness and that first suggested to me that apocalyptic myth in this

period does not appear as the expected figure of closure or determinism.

One of the most striking unities to emerge from the readings that follow is my authors’

view of utopian socialism as a centralizing and dehumanizing vision that subordinates other

voices. Bakhtin’s categories of monologic and dialogic and his (often Aesopian) application of

those categories to extra-literary, as well as literary, contexts are clearly a guide to my thinking

here.

A provocative and oft-cited statement embedded in Bakhtin’s Problems with

Dostoevsky's Poetics reads: "These basic principles go far beyond the boundaries of artistic creativity alone; they are the principles behind the entire ideological culture of recent times"

(80). According to this assertion, the principles of monologization, first, are larger than aesthetics and, second, describe contemporary events.

For Bakhtin, language, correctly understood, is "ideologically saturated." It does not exist independently of social and political realms. Monologic language occurs as the outcome of

"forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbal-ideological world." The idiom, "verbal- ideological," conveys the metalinquistic scope that Bakhtin assigns to language and, derivatively, to the centripetal forces of monologism. Rather than existing as a lifeless, theoretical, reified system, language carries an opinion, a point of view. A mass monologic language, then, or a

"unitary language," evolves in tandem with large-scale, living social and cultural processes:

"Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of 16

sociopolitical and cultural centralization” (Discourse in the Novel 270-272, emphasis added). In this description, Bakhtin views the processes of unification and centralization as behaving symbiotically between the most practical and the most abstract realms of human activity.

Even the briefest perusal of the Soviet 1920s substantiates this last depiction of monologizing forces. The assault on dialog is apparent at both popular and official levels and it is discernible foremost in the era’s rampant utopianism and its ideological foundation of monologic truth that both captured the imagination of the general population and suited the needs of the Bolshevik regime. Bakhtin makes his own equations between utopianism and monologism, as when he writes with eerie acuity that "all of European utopianism was likewise built on this monologic principle. Here too belongs utopian socialism, with its faith in the omnipotence of the conviction. Semantic unity of any sort is everywhere represented by a single consciousness and a single point of view" (Problems 82). The new Soviet society, hailed in the projects—and even more famously, the dreams--of architects, artists, writers, social engineers and scientists, was in possession of the Truth. Heir to this brave new world was the new man, a

Cherneshevskian triumph of singlemindedness over ambivalence, future over past, machine over consciousness.

Additionally, this eruption of utopian ventures that permeated popular society coincided for a time with the Bolsheviks’ emerging cultural agenda. As historian Christopher Read has shown, the absence or ambiguity of an official Party line on culture during the twenties did not mean the absence of a clear, overall development toward rigid Party control.3 Ultimately, the

3 Read convincingly demonstrates that mechanisms were in place as early as 1922 that revealed an intent, if not a policy, of greater and increasingly systematic cultural intervention by the State and that led directly to the extreme actions of the cultural revolution at the decade's close. See Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia, especially pages 95, 142-143, 156, 168, 172. 17

monologic word would be mandated by an authoritative apparatus when utopian principles were

selectively absorbed into the doctrine of socialist realism, and idealism ceded, as it were, to

ideology.

That the utopian ethos was both spontaneously embraced and consciously contrived

during this period demonstrates the actual breadth and depth of the monologizing principle that

Bakhtin postulates. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, he calls monologism "a profound

structural characteristic of the creative ideological activity of modern times, determining all its

external and internal forms" (82). And yet, dialog, or "centrifugal forces," does not cease to

function and develop amid the louder matter of monologism. “Alongside the centripetal forces,”

he writes, “the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work” (Discourse

272).

Utopianism, often dubbed the emasculated double of apocalypse, has been criticized as

acknowledging only half of the "polyphonic reality" of the post-Revolutionary period, as Jurij

Streidter argues in his article, "Three Postrevolutionary Utopian Novels" (Garrard). 4

Specifically in the hostile conditions of Utopia, then, as my works portray it, apocalypticism

evolves to encompass all “centrifugal” forces—small and grand—that comprise a “polyphonic”

and humane reality. Some of these un-forces that would dialogize and save a society bent on

perfection include weakness and even vice (Olesha), fragmentation and marginality

(Mandel’stam), and everyday life or byt (Pil’nyak). Mobilized against the New Man who is the utopian Adam without duality, psychology or individuality, my writers capitalize on the

4 As concerns the artistic representation of this period, the utopian genre is a curious choice, writes Streidter. Critics agree on its dominance, but question its appropriateness and capacity for reflecting reality. He argues that its portrait of statis, isolation, abstraction and idealism is insufficient to the polyphonic reality of the decade.

18 apocalyptic myth’s “dissident” tradition as they employ it to epitomize the other. In particular, the messenger, or prophet-revelator, in each text invariably functions outside legitimate social structures: Ivan Ozhogov and his cronies emerge by turns from their fiery underground quarters at the edge of town to witness the iniquities of the corrupt elite who have betrayed the pure communism of 1917; Ivan Babichev roams the alleys, basements and bars of town, preaching his delightful conspiracy of forbidden/forgotten feelings to fellow marginalia; Mandel’stam’s narrator, who proclaims the death of the Word and the End of World Culture, hails from the underworld of “Judaic chaos” and differs only by degrees from his own, iconically insignificant protagonist. The apocalypticist as depicted in these works embodies (as much as advocates) other points of view, other truths, other possibilities, other consciousnesses. Thus the primary role of apocalyptic myth may be described as having shifted from the bearer of one metaphysical vision or truth to the voice of the repressed richness of experience.

Apocalypse, Dialog and Modernism

The argument for apocalyptic fiction as a purveyor of dialog, as a “centrifugal force,” as antipode to the dominant (creative) ideology, if not rooted in, then is significantly shaped by the close relationship between apocalyptic myth and modernism.

Of this relationship, Frank Kermode writes:

What we think of as truly Modern or Modernist is always relatively

apocalyptic…Novelists with their unique plots against time and reality, all are

apocalypticists and in their measure Joachimite. They honor the transitus, 19

announce new orders, restructure the world, utter their once-only but Everlasting

Gospels. (“Apocalypse and the Modern” in Friedlander, Visions of Apocalypse

101-102)

Whether or not one agrees that so problematical an idea as modernism is “always” apocalyptic

(though one must still answer for the “affinity between the Everlasting Gospel and the sacred

Book of the Modern” [99]), Kermode exquisitely articulates how, in modernist hands,

apocalyptic myth develops so that the "honored transitus" becomes its paramount feature which

evolves, for its part, into an interminable transitus.5 The modernist-apocalyptic myth as

described by Irving Howe, cultivated in a generation that feels trapped between two ages,

combines a sense of unprecedented catastrophe with a sense of historical impasse.6 One is

suspended indefinitely over the precipice as ends become immanent, rather than imminent.

It is this very play with the End—its displacement, its multiplication, all in the service of

its prolongation--that contradicts essential assumptions of the State co-opted teleological model

of history, threatening that model’s functions as both a popular and an official myth. To repeat,

the utopianism of the Soviet 1920s offers a specific reading of history, the end of the world and

the Revolution. The End is fixed in the past as 1917—a one-time, closed event that is contained

within history. By contrast, end-thinking as a modernist concept supplies a means of subverting

or escaping history, rather than a means of affirming it. The modernist’s immanent End—

apocalypticism, paradoxically, in time--leads to reconfigurations of the nature and location of the

5 This essay and Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending have comprised the fountainhead for my own thinking about the apocalyptic encoding of early Soviet-modernist works, as it does or should, in my view, for any study that addresses the topic of end-thinking and literary form.

6 See page 15 in Howe's introduction to The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts. 20

End or Ends (in Pil’nyak and Olesha) and, in some cases, of time, itself (in Mandel’stam and, to

a lesser degree, in Pil’nyak).

As a result of this altered chronotope, of the reformulation of the End’s where and when,

apocalyptic fictions become the purveyor of values that were "logical impossibilities" (Bethea)

within the closed fatalism of the traditional myth. The mythological subtext develops from a

“world already explained, a world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical

with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body” (Northrop Frye’s

characterization, Anatomy of Criticism 136) to a world that embodies the modernist values of incompleteness, vacillation of purpose, openness and ambiguity. Writing of late Russian moderns, Victor Erlich calls ambivalence a “leitmotif” of the decade. Certainly, apocalyptic fiction in the Soviet 1920s extols ambivalence.

“Meta-apocalypse”

But the developments in the conception and function of the apocalyptic idea in works of this period derive not just from an atmosphere of encroaching monologism that threatens certain values that may be considered modernist. Most importantly, these modernist-apocalypticists view their own camp as deeply flawed. Their works originate in disconfirmation--begin with the failure of the revolutionary apocalypticism that brought Russia to her knees. From the depths of this tragic assumption, they embark on a rehabilitative effort. Thus apocalyptic fiction in the

Soviet 1920s emerges as an intensely self-critical genre. This self-criticism is what propels these fictions, in all of their commentary, beyond the polemical function of dystopias and into their role as proponents of authentic dialogicity. As such, these apocalyptic works do not merely fight fire with fire, joining the fray of plurimillenarian battles for the final, authoritative word. Rather, 21

they demonstrate the dialogicity that they demand. Rife with travesty and parody, they are not

merely travesties or parodies. They comment on the insufficiencies of a beloved myth while

continuing to creatively and affirmatively employ that myth.

Edith Clowe’s treatment of the idea of meta-utopian literature in post-Stalinist works evokes my authors’ approach to the apocalyptic script in a post-Revolutionary world to such a degree that I am compelled to suggest the derivative term, “meta-apocalypse,” as a working generic label for their fictions. Most significant to our discussion is the notion that meta-utopia,

as Clowes proposes, is experimental fiction that questions a simple binary system of values,

opening a middle ground for greater ideological complexity (Clowes 10). Meta-utopia, she

elaborates, is skeptical, but it “goes beyond skepticism to sketch out a personal sphere that resists

the claims of all ideologies on one’s loyalty and defends as a broad social strategy the right of

personal moral integrity and choice” (24).

Similarly, my “meta-apocalyptic” works confront the ultimate mythical embodiment of

binary thought that is entrenched in the history of Russian social and cultural discourse, that is

particularly fixed in the nation’s recent past, and that has played out over the centuries as violent

rebellion, separatism, fiery self-immolation and revolutionary maximalism. Apocalypticism as a

narrative that situates, justifies and conquers Death is imperative to my writers’ art and

worldview, yet this narrative must be fundamentally reconfigured in terms that the counter-

evidence of history (and historical time) cannot devalue.

1.4 Selected Works

Mahogany is one of Pil’nyak’s quietest works. As mentioned above, the direction that

Pil’nyak’s corpus takes over the course of a decade demonstrates the development of the 22

apocalyptic subtext within a single author who channels his personal proclivity for archetypal

profusion away from Scythian commotion toward stiller, subtler and more complicated

expositions of that subtext. The portrait of stagnation and degeneration painted in Mahogany, composed during the peak of NEP-era malaise, depicts the essential movement of the apocalyptic myth—birth, death and promise of renewal—as stalled, terminally muted or literally mired in mud. In the insulting sameness of post-Revolutionary reality, the apocalyptic myth must either appear as a mad idea of the underground (e.g., the basement-dwelling, furnace-stoking, alcoholic prophet-fool, Ivan Ozhogov, and his mendicant, “sectarian” brothers) or must be radically reconstituted. In the latter case, Pil’nyak dialogizes apocalyptic myth with byt, rediscovering what he depicts as its “lost” ontological function by locating it in the everyday, in small and innumerable birth-death narratives. He shatters The End into thousands of ends and recompenses for the apparent loss of the absolute with the possibility of infinite microrenewals.

In Olesha’s Envy, I explore the clash of salvational mythologies that underlies the novella's central conflict, the struggle between the old and the new worlds. When Ivan Babichev petitions for the cast-off emotions of yesteryear, he is proposing to remedy an "emasculated" world. He would besmirch utopia with tragedy, darkness and death for the sake of reinstating dialog, or, the plurality of experience where experience has been whitewashed. But, on a more quintessentially meta-apocalyptic level, Olesha’s novelized apocalypticism challenges an ideological context and—because it propagates openness, risk and uncertainty—is challenged by that context in turn. Kavalerov, for example, does not condemn utopia as much as castigate himself for not thriving therein and Ivan’s apocalyptic plot ultimately disintegrates. In these two heroes, the double vision of the Old Testament apocalypticist has evolved into the dubitable 23

“double consciousness,” or anxious negotiations between belief and falsehood, that Michael Bell ascribes to modernist mythopoeia (Literature, Myth and Modernism 8, 16). Ultimately, Olesha presents the most viable transcription of the apocalyptic promise of renewal and redemption as an aesthetic one, a personal and subjective phenomenon that invariably registers as failure in the objective world.

“Aestheticized apocalypse” reaches its apogee in the apocalyptic aesthetics of

Mandel’stam’s The Egyptian Stamp. Framed by the archangel’s trump (in fact, a “rolled up manuscript”) and the locomotive (the new face of literature, or, “railroad prose”), Mandel’stam’s novella perfectly fuses the Christian and the poetic Word. He portrays the chronotope of “holy creativity” by suffusing his work with thresholds, which he represents as the space-time of the prophetic-poetic utterance. The Egyptian Stamp’s rhapsodic depictions—reflected extensively in its structure—of the apocalyptic limen include contemplations on the terror of the between, the ecstasy of disintegration and the suicidal component of creation. Where utopianism

(synonymous for the author with anathematic “progress”) would eradicate death, apocalypticism, in Mandel’stam, is the warming (“hellenizing,” “humanizing,” “Christian”) assurance of death.

However, such essential “teleological warmth” is fragile, endangered by dehumanizing social forms. At significant moments, The Egyptian Stamp’s delirious affirmation of “threshold poetics” more closely resembles a brave examination of poetic collapse, consonant with what

Mandel’stam considers the diminishing apocalyptic possibility—the possibility of the revelatory

Word--in contemporary socio-cultural conditions.

I have chosen works for close analysis based on their value both as types and exceptions.

To say that the three works which I examine in depth represent three major categories within 24

1920s apocalyptic fiction is to oversimplify the picture. My choice of works aims instead at demonstrating the prolific and enduring nature of the apocalyptic theme by pursuing the more complex variations of that theme. In foregrounding the apocalypticist in the ornamentalist, modernist or neo-classical poet, I hope to establish both the tenacity and the originality of literary apocalypticism during these years. The apocalyptic subtext in these novellas may initially seem obscure to the casual reader as it tends to develop in alternative, unreal, or decentralized realms, underscoring the “secondary” space(s) available to a dethroned genre. Most importantly, my selections exemplify the dialogized or “meta-” apocalypticism of this period precisely because they are--though profoundly--not stridently or loudly eschatological. They offer, rather, quiet negotiations for personal creativity, the individual, the subjective world, the imperfect present.

These three texts hold additional value as types. Mandel’stam, Pil’nyak and Olesha represent distinct responses to the ideological hegemony of the day, from an untenable apoliticism, to Party connections and prominence that blended fatally with incautious self- assertion, to a complex and complex-plagued enthusiasm for Marxism. I perceive these responses reflecting or reflected in (a case of the chicken and the egg) their poetics at an essential level that is the subject of this study: the hermaphroditic stratum of myth that possesses features of both history and literature yet belongs to neither.

Toward a Typology of the 1920s Apocalypticist

These three works are not isolated cases. Apocalyptically figured works in the 1920s appear in a range of authors. Vaginov, Babel’, Vsevolod Ivanov, Ehrenburg, Zamiatin, Lunts,

Bulgakov and Platonov, for example, are all participants in the tradition of apocalyptic fiction in the decade that is my focus. Prominent works by these writers from, roughly, the post- 25

Revolutionary decade that are significantly informed by the Judeo-Christian myth and that are

rich in meta-apocalyptic commentary include Kozlinaya Pesn’ (1928), Konarmiya (1926),

Bronepoezd 14-69 (1922), Julio Jurenito (1922), My (1927) and Navodnenie (1929), Rodina and

V pustine (1922), Rokovye yaitsa (1924), and Kotlovan (1930).

Clearly, to unite the authors I have named as proponents of apocalyptic myth in literature

is not to deny their significant ideological, stylistic and thematic differences. The above sample

list encompasses committed Marxist and dissident, ornamentalist and faithful descendant of 19th

C. realism, Civil war chronicler and fantastic satirist. The loose but serviceable label of fellow traveler describes a category sufficient to my ornamentalists, satirists, formalists in the Soviet sense--in a word, modernists--where apocalypticism as a form-shaping myth may be found thriving and developing during this decade. Thematically, these authors are typical of their era in their preoccupation with the cultural aftermath of the Revolution. What largely distinguishes this group from the eschatological “mainstream” of the decade is the direction in which they reach beyond the existing historical moment. They instinctively enlist the elegiac function of literary apocalypticism, looking to the past (as opposed to the future) for their ideal and meditating on death. Revolutionary idealism, pre-Petrine Russia, the pre-Revolutionary world, romantic values, youth, and culture are some of the subjects of mourning. These elegists, in fact, are inveterate idealists. In Ehrenburg’s unrelenting satire, Vaginov’s parodic romanticism,

Ivanov’s naturalism and Mandel’shtam’s esoteric lyricism, one hears the voice of the believer who is the peculiar (or perhaps not) bedfellow of the skeptic in the apocalyptic world. This world is the kingdom of pessimists, alarmists, naysayers, cynics and tragedians who believe in 26 edenic origins and paradisiacal promises and an extraterrestrial justice system that will eventually restore those conditions.

To establish, then, some points of affinity between the authors who produced apocalyptic fictions in the post-Revolutionary decade, it may be concluded that (1) they represent a variety of political positions amidst skepticism; (2) their poetics, however dissimilar, nevertheless demonstrate an attention to formal aspects that places them squarely in the mainstream of

European modernism; and (3) the apocalypticism that informs their fictions follows, as it were, naturally from these first two circumstances when one considers both the mythological plane that ideological battles occupied in this era and the enlarged role of myth typical of the modernist aesthetic.

1.5 My Approach

In pointing out the latent apocalyptic or demonic patterns in a literary work, we should not make the error of assuming that this latent content is the real content hypocritically disguised by a lying censor. It is simply one factor which is relevant to a full critical analysis. It is often, however, the factor which lifts a work of literature out of the category of the merely historical. (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 158, emphasis added)

The writers under scrutiny here belong to a generation that has been described as exhibiting a singular blend of revolutionary fervor and modernist inwardness (Victor Erlich).7

My approach echoes that precarious pairing as I combine contextual analysis with close readings.

By such a combination, I hope to avoid, or cancel out, two pitfalls: that of subjugating the poetics of the texts to social, political and historical concerns; and that of perpetuating the crime of modernist insularity by utterly neglecting social, political and historical implications.

7 See the chapter, "The Symbolist Ambiance," in Victor Erlich's Modernism and Revolution, for his description of Russian modernists at the threshold of the Soviet era, of their "ambivalent, guilt-ridden involvement with Russia's national destiny" that coexisted with their "esoteric fiddling." 27

Time and again, this investigation has found that the political and the poetic cannot be

convincingly separated in the Soviet 1920s. Rather, the symbiosis between the two took extreme

forms during this decade. Apocalyptic fiction, in particular, presents a crossroads between

politics and poetics. On the one hand, the literary portrayals of apocalypse as an unfulfilled

promise after 1917 posed an existential challenge to the State’s founding myth. On the other hand, the Revolution and its cultural fallout indelibly affected the genre of apocalyptic fiction, compelling it to seek new forms and, to a degree, redefine itself.

My authors’ fictions provide a site of exchange, not always amicable, between the human and divine provinces of history and myth, subverting the authority of the former yet allowing the mutability of the latter. History, for the modernist apocalypticist, wields an authentic but circumscribed influence on the myth of the End, which it may examine and reshape, but may not falsify, extinguish nor supplant. 28

Chapter Two

Everyday Ends: Meta-apocalypse in Pil’nyak’s Mahogany

2.1 Pil’nyak in 1928: Repentant Scythian

After the legendary leather jackets (kozhanye kurtki) of The Naked Year, the “dying” bells that rend the smalltown quiet of Mahogany1 may be Pil’nyak’s second most memorable

trope. At regular intervals, not unlike the repetitive intoning of a zvon, the narrator describes the bells’ violent end: “Bells were dying over the city,”2 he observes, and moaning, screaming,

whining, bellowing replace ringing as they crash to the earth. It is typical of Pil’nyak to record a

historical fact of the new Soviet age—the state’s sweeping requisition of church bells and

reclamation of their metal--and cast it as death throes, not birth pangs. In concentrating on the

moment of their fall, he fashions a stunning image of rupture, death and doom that constitutes

one of Mahogany’s most conspicuous, albeit complex, apocalyptic motifs.

“All of Pil’nyak’s works are allegories,” Robert Maguire summarizes in Red Virgin Soil.3

The question of genre has accompanied discussions of Pil’nyak from the beginning of his critical

1 Mahogany’s un-plot, to summarize, unfolds in 1928 in the Russian provinces. Stepan and Pavel Bezdetov, antique dealers and furniture restorers, travel to Uglich to buy mahogany pieces from desperate and disadvantaged country owners. They are hosted by Iakov Skudrin, dissipated patriarch and relative to most of the main characters in the novella. Skudrin’s estranged son, Akim, is a Trotskyite who returns to his hometown in the hope of making sense of the Revolution. Skudrin’s nemesis is his brother, Ivan “Ozhogov,” at one time the town’s first chairman of the Party’s executive committee who now madly agitates for a return to the pure days of War Communism. We meet Skudrin’s two sisters, the upright, old maid Kapitolina and the “ruined” but content Rimma (mother of two illegitimate children). We also meet Klavdia (Skudrin’s great-niece, Rimma’s daughter, Akim’s niece), young, single and pregnant and pleased with the “new morality” of the present. Not action, but place, connects Mahogany’s constellation of characters whose assorted circumstances reflect on the changes that the Revolution either has or has not brought to the provincial town.

2 Passages quoted in English from Mahogany are taken from Chinese Story and Other Tales, translated by Vera T. Reck and Michael Green, or are in some instances are my own translation.

3 Maguire’s balanced and perceptive gloss on Pil’nyak was one the first treatments the author received in the West. His analysis is distinct from much criticism that precedes it—and a fair amount that follows it--because it is not overgrown with extra-literary concerns.

29 recognition. With the goal of locating Pil’nyak in a tradition that might unlock some of the difficulties presented by his works, critics have investigated a variety of generic influences. In the main, his work has been treated from the overlapping and betimes competing perspectives of ornamentalism, revolutionary romanticism and modernism. Specific readings have reached in such disparate directions as his folkloric roots, his several possible correlations with Mennipean satire, or his candidacy for the canon of so-called cubist literature.4 It is in the critical tradition, then, of genre-spotting with regards to an obfuscating and changeable poetics that the present discussion considers Pil’nyak’s position within Russian apocalyptic fiction.

In Pil’nyak’s case, the developments that apocalyptic fiction underwent in the twenties can be observed over the course of a single author’s work. Both author and critics have mapped many lines of influence that are intended to illuminate a body of texts that can baffle with its eclecticism. Many critics, supported by statements by Pil’nyak, have concentrated on his symbolist heritage, particularly his stylistic debt to Bely (and Pil’nyak is wont to mention Blok in the same breath5). What may be called the “Scythian apocalypticism” that accompanied

Pil’nyak’s instantaneous fame at the close of the Civil War sprang from this inheritance.

From poetic notions of Russia’s Asiatic and pre-Christian influences, mingled with deep- rooted apocalyptic formulations of Russia’s destiny, Scythianism formed a kind of rapturous national fatalism that enveloped the intelligentsia for nearly two decades prior to the Revolution.

Scythianism—by no means an immutable concept over the two generations of Symbolists who

4 Jerome J. Rinkus, Rebecca Rawson, Mary A. Nicholas, respectively.

5 See Pil’nyak’s statements to N. N. Fatov quoted in Jensen from archival sources (Nature as Code 279). Pil’nyak references three of Russian literature’s most prominent apocalypticists when he speaks of his mentors in this moment: “Bely taught me (I also learned of Blok and Gogol’) . . .” He is referring to the method of setting down disjointed images, as they are actually encountered in life, with the purpose of producing meaning or emotion from the apparent disjunction. 30 appropriated and developed it as a principal metaphor—acquires additional nuances in Pil’nyak.

In the menacing, illusory kitai-gorod in The Naked Year or the primeval, monolithic fertility idol in Ryzanskiye yabloka, for example, he finds innovative and even concrete expressions for

Russia’s chaotic, savage, ancient “other” that the Revolution was felt to have released in full.

While Scythianism, as a Symbolist conception, is inherently apocalyptic, the reverse is not true. Here I perhaps draw attention to the obvious, yet the distinction has not always been grasped, inhibiting the critical recognition of forms that apocalyptic fiction took after the inevitable waning of Scythianism. As I have argued, it appears that “Scythian apocalyptic,” dominant in its day, outshouted quieter forms of literary apocalyptic that began to appear as the twenties progressed. It is understandable that the small scale and scope, the anti-heroes, the retrograde stillness of Mahogany would make it seem an unlikely successor to a myth that had lately assumed such thunderous and hyperbolic expositions.

A casualty of the same clamor, Pil’nyak’s literary reputation is largely circumscribed by his Scythian period; his few widely read pieces that lie outside of this parameter have been assessed more by the political scandals they provoked than by their literary merit. Exemplary of this attitude is Alexander Tulloch’s conclusion that Pil’nyak’s writings during the late twenties and thirties were “an attempt to obey the Social Command” and were “often feeble and unimaginative reflections of the powerful experimental prose of a decade earlier” (Tulloch 190).

Or, to the same end, Vera Reck does not hesitate to equate Pil’nyak with the ‘fools in

Communism’ that he depicts in Mahogany and remarks that he, like they, had “fallen out of step with life at the time when the romantic phase of the Revolution had come to an end” (Reck 62). 31

The reception of Pil’nyak’s later works would seem to have been more cursed than blessed by

his early successes.

In his monograph, Gary Browning sets down a periodization of Pil’nyak’s corpus that

other critics have echoed as they probe the nature of the author’s development over time. First,

Pil’nyak’s earliest works are, in light of what was to follow, remarkable for their simple

directness and absence of formal experimentation. Next, with the publication of The Naked Year in 1921, Pil’nyak burst on the scene as a fully-formed ornamentalist and became the movement’s defining author almost instantly. Then, just a few years later, in a shift that is of the most interest to this study, he moved away from the elaborate prose experiments that had made his name, as one critic aptly expresses it, a common noun6 in the literary press.

Pil’nyak’s prose undergoes changes on many fronts in the second half of the twenties,

though critics are quick to note that the works of this period are still distinctly Pil'nyakian.

Generally speaking, the author moves in the direction of realism. “Not that ornamental traits

entirely disappear,” writes Browning, “but Pilniak thereafter tends to combine fewer styles and

to permit less intentional obscurity and manipulation of point of view and structure within a

single work.” 7 Psychology and plot receive more attention. The metaliterary element is

subdued, though by no means forsaken. In many works, the theme of revolution fills the

background, as it were, rather than the foreground.

6 See Nature as Code, 64-65, for Jensen’s inventory of the many grammatical forms—mostly derogatory—in which Pil’nyak’s name appeared in the literary press.

7 Scythian at a Typewriter 93. Gorbachev and Bristol both look in detail at the ornamental cliches that Pil’nyak tones down. Works after 1925 exhibit less use of caricature and exaggeration, fewer inserted documents, less repetition, simplification of syntax, less exotic vocabulary and fewer rhetorical tonal extremes.

32

This study is concerned with the effect that this movement toward realism has on the

mythical plane of Pil’nyak’s works. Kenneth Brostrom considers this effect when he concludes

that, despite the “greater apparent autonomy of Pil’nyak’s characters as he used his

compositional methods with more restraint . . . their allegorical function remained the same.”8

The allegorical presence in “all” of Pil’nyak’s work that Maguire identifies compels sensitive

readers to seek statements of unity and immutability amidst changing depictions and depictions

of change. Notable critical treatments in this vein include Kenneth Brostrom’s structural

investigation of Pil’nyak’s use of allegory—developing from the simple parable to the complex

metaphor; Thomas Rogers’ treatment of Jungian archetypes in several of Pil’nyak’s major

works; Jerome Rinkus’ study of folkloric motifs in Mat’ syra-zemlya; and Mary Nicholas’

readings of Pil’nyak’s poetics as a coherent modernist statement. My own assertion—that

apocalypticism as an informing myth in Pil’nyak endures and develops in sophistication over

time--is emboldened by these efforts to identify universality amid multiplicity.

2.2 Apocalyptic Thaw: From Metel’ to Mud

As I intimated above, discovery of the apocalyptic in Mahogany begins with the

recognition of what it is not, or, more precisely, what it is dialogically reconfiguring. Images of

the end that rage and froth in the rabid Naked Year are almost systematically reworked in this

later piece where end-thinking presents instead as a different sickness, lingering and malingering.

Perhaps most symptomatic--and emblematic--is the absence of the Blokian snowstorm that

8 While they can be nuanced and complex, Pil’nyak’s characterizations do not strive for psychological realism in any traditional sense. Tulloch notes that the role of Pil’nyak’s “dramatis personae is largely taken over by symbolism and allegory” (The Naked Year 191). T.R.N. Edwards comments that “characters play archetypal and ritualized roles” and that, in place of psychological truth, Pil’nyak strives to evoke the primitive life-cycle and its rhythm and to reach back towards the world of myth (Three Russian Writers 92). 33

covers the landscape in The Naked Year. In Mahogany, Pil’nyak replaces the furious, cleansing

whiteness of the metel’ with mud and drizzle. On both formal (ornamentalism) and thematic

(Scythianism) fronts, Pil’nyak turns down the noise of what has gone before. Hyperbole is

supplanted and exposed by understatement. Mahogany is, through and through, an ironized

exegesis that comments mercilessly on the apocalyptic exclamations of the author’s recent

literary past—and by extension, of Russia’s recent history.

Faced with the task of unearthing archetypal undertones in a more or less realistic work, I

appeal to Northrop Frye’s work on myth and symbol. Particularly applicable to Mahogany is

the relationship he articulates between myth and irony. At one end of Frye’s system of modes

lies myth, the mode of pure metaphor where “we see the structural principles of literature

isolated” (Anatomy of Criticism 136). Farthest from myth lies realism, with its emphasis on

content, historicity and verisimilitude. Frye identifies a realistic work’s aim as plausibility. In

order to make a realistic work rooted in myth “plausible, symmetrical and morally acceptable,”

myth must be displaced, transformed beyond recognition. “Only after a lot of comparative

study,” he explains, “the metaphorical structure within [a realistic work] begins to emerge.”

Thus on the one hand we can expect Pil’nyak’s novella to eschew metaphor in its naïve form,

removing and deforming myth until it becomes plausible.

On the other hand, Mahogany is principally an ironic work and irony, in Frye’s system, brings the modes full circle. It is the meeting ground for the lowest and highest modes, the point at which verisimilitude relaxes and organizing plot-formulae become more apparent. “Irony,” he writes, “begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily 34

towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it” (42).9

According to this model that posits the intersection of irony and allegory, the seemingly

contradictory use of myth that occurs in Mahogany and that I will explore in depth below can be partially accounted for as a inherent generic attribute.

Mahogany is set in 1928, in the NEP years of disillusionment and compromise that followed the fires of revolution and civil war. Allegorically speaking, then, it is set after the

Burning, or the Terrors that accompanied the End of the old world. In a masterful, modernist handling of allegory, significant, again, for what it is not, the most conspicuous narrative of

Burning in Mahogany does not refer to the Revolution, but rather takes the form of offhand remarks about a literal fire that decimated the town center. The account of “the fire of 1920” is given in parentheses--code, in the subversive poetics of modernism, for added emphasis:

(Тогда, в двадцатом, здесь сгорела добрая и центральная половина города.

Занялся тогда пожар в уподкоме, -- надо было бы тушить пожар,--но стали

ловить буржуев и сажать их в тюрьму заложниками, -- буржуев ловили три

дня, ровно столько, сколько горел город, и перестали ловить, когда пожар

отгорел без вмешательства пожарных труб и населения). (24-25)10

((In that year a good half of the town—the central part—burned down. The fire

broke out in the District Food Committee headquarters—the townsfolk should

9 For more on allegory in the modern era see Beaty and Matchett, Poetry from Statement to Meaning, page 234. “Modern dissatisfaction with allegory,” they write, “has arisen, in large part, because some authors and many readers have been satisfied with the mere creation or identification of an allegorical framework rather than pushing on to an understanding of what can be done within that framework.”

10 Quotations in the original are taken from Krasnoe derevo i drugie (Chicago: Distr. by Russian Language Specialties, 1968).

35

have been fighting the fire, but instead they began hunting the burzhuis and

putting them in jail as hostages; they hunted the burzhuis for three days—exactly

as long as the town burned—and stopped hunting them when the fire had burned

itself out without any interference from firemen’s hoses or population.) (118))

Instead of depicting a myth of national conflagration as he had done in his earlier work, with its implied, if mysterious, teleological justification, Pil’nyak depicts a needless local tragedy, where ideological ends do not redeem, but rather worsen the loss. He retains the symbolic “three days”11 but deprives them of meaning when no rebirth occurs. In place of a narrative of crisis, he provides a narrative of neglect and ineptitude.

Commenting as it does on the insufficiencies of a beloved myth while continuing to creatively employ that myth, Mahogany forms a model “meta-apocalypse.” In its critique, it attempts to reconfigure a myth that insipid reality would seem to disprove. Part of the task of resuscitation that Pil’nyak undertakes in Mahogany involves divorcing apocalypticism from

Scythianism. The age of fire and ice has passed, an ill-suited narrative for the present age where mud mires the displaced citizen of the new regime (and his horse) up to his middle, thwarts his journey and drives him to tears. Mahogany casts a backwards glance at the myth of the snowstorm, of hysterics and histrionics, of a fearsome Eastern alter-ego and a fevered, racing train of time, and finds it a myth of total anticipation that loses its potency in the present. It opposes these passe formulations with depictions of mud, silence, stagnation and degeneracy, and searches for a myth that might be equal to the tired and traumatized “here and now.”

11 Kenneth Brostrom considers numerology to be a fundamental organizing device in Pil’nyak. In his article, “Pil’nyak’s Naked Year: The Problem of Faith,” he gives an extremely thorough analysis of symbolic numbers in Pil’nyak “whose connotations probably derived from the obvious sources during these years, the Apocalypse, particularly from the opening of the seven seals” (120-126). 36

2.3 Chronotopic Experiments

The chronotope of the Johannine Apocalypse has ever been a subject of debate and manipulation. Apocalyptic spacetime in the biblical text is articulated in terms of universality and finality, two sufficiently problematical concepts. And perhaps even more difficult is the puzzle of imminence that the Book of Revelation attaches to these ideas. Within the text, itself, the penultimate and ultimate unfoldings before “time shall be no more” are sufficiently ambiguous. Within history, there seems to be no end to the possible settings, to projections of the where and when, of the foretold End. The history of apocalyptic thought suggests paradoxically that Western culture’s masterplot of death and transfiguration refuses to accomplish either and is thereby kept alive.

In its transcriptions of a mythical plot into a concrete time and place, literary apocalypticism participates in the paradox . The apocalypticist-allegorist reaches in two directions; allegory preserves myth’s immunity from history in its affirmation of archetypes, and breeches that immunity in the correspondences it fixes. Two chronotopes are always present, and potentially in dialog: that of the presentational and that of the representational level.

Pil’nyak worked in a period of assault—enacted across all artforms—on traditional ways of perceiving and representing time and space. The urge to play with spatial and temporal representations has been identified as one of the unities of modernism, one of the common impulses among some of the most disparate aesthetics. The chronotopal assumptions of

Johannine spacetime—universality, finality and imminence—provide three arenas for this play.

For example, the post-Revolutionary apocalyptic works in this study, as distinguished from their 37

ur-text, manage to be both anticipative and retrospective, indicative of a profoundly counter-

intuitive approach to the task of plotting the End in space and time.

Meta-apocalyptic fiction, it follows, is punctuated with memorable chronotopal

statements. In Kozlennaya pesn’, for example, Vaginov draws from the apocalyptic Petersburgs

of Mandel’shtam, Blok, Bely, Dostoevsky, Gogol’ and Pushkin to create a setting for his satiric-

tragic homage to the collapse of the symbolic. A site brimful of spatio-temporal oppositions

since its founding, Petersburg is rendered in Vaginov as a post-Revolutionary battleground for

realoria vs. reality. A different type of chronotopic play is at work in V. Ivanov’s Bronnepoezd

14-69, where Ivanov accomplishes a remarkable renewal of literary apocalypticism’s most

familiar and potentially hackneyed symbol. The train (Avenging Horseman, Antichrist, master

metaphor for historical progress, for time moving through space, etc.) is trapped on a short

stretch of track, rushing back and forth, pendulum-like. Time and space are unnaturally

delimited, until they are “conquered” in a bloodbath.

The chronotope of a meta-apocalypse, because of the degree of commentary that the form

imparts to allegory, has the potential to be keenly dialogic. Such is the case with Mahogany, a work of multiple, symbolically rich settings that both uphold and unhinge the cliches of apocalyptic time and space.

Timetravel and Decentralization

Pil’nyak’s narrator does not directly name the provincial town in which he sets

Mahogany; he seems intent instead on asserting the universality of his “Russian Bruges and 38

Muscovite Kamakura”.12 He takes his reader, together with the brothers Bezdetovy, there from

Moscow by train. The imaginative account casts the routine journey as time travel. A time

warp, as well as two hundred versts, separates the Soviet capital from this small town on the

Volga.

The descriptive catalog is a familiar device in Pil’nyak. He tends toward surprising

combinations of the abstract and the concrete in his poetic condensations of a place or time. As

the train leaves Moscow, the narrator gives a pithy, metaphorical synopsis of Russia’s first city:

Москва громыхала грузовиками дел, начинаний, свершений. Автомобили

мчались вместе с домами – в пространства и ввысь. Плакаты кричали

горьковским ГИЗом, кино и съездами. Шумы трамваев, автобусов и такси

утверждали столицу вдоль и поперек. (22)

(Moscow rumbled with truckloads of actions, beginnings, achievements.

Automobiles and buildings hurtled into distances and into space. Posters shouted

Gorky’s State Publishing House, cinemas, and congresses. Noises of streetcars,

buses, and taxis affirmed the capital from one end to the other. (117))

Moscow, its essence extracted, enjoys a cameo appearance in Mahogany for the purpose of

contrast. “Actions, beginnings, achievements,” speed, light and noise suggest everything that is

not to be found in the provincial town of the story, which is distinguishable rather by its inaction,

endings, failures, slowness, darkness and quiet.

12 Pil’nyak departs somewhat from the 19th century convention of not naming his setting because the reader can easily construe that the town is Uglich from the references to Tsarevich Dmitri’s murder there three hundred years ago. He mentions Uglich by name, too, though only in passing: “Город—русский Брюгге и российская Камакура . . . Российские древности, российская провинция, верхний плес Волги, леса, болота, деревни, монастыри, помещичьи усадьбы, -- цепь городов – Тверь, Углич, Ярославль, Ростов Великий. Город – монастырский Брюгге российских уделов” (стр. 9). This blend of the particular and the universal serves to establish an atmosphere and a typology that is traceable--but not limited—to a specific historical place. 39

The narrator goes on to describe the experience of being carried away by train from a surreal cityscape that is bright and loud with motion, modernity and progress to a landscape of overpowering blackness and silence:

Поезд уходил из Москвы в ночь черную, как сажа. Лихорадка московских

завер и громов погибала и погибла очень быстро. Поля легли черной

тишиной, и тишина вселилась в вагон. . . . Поезд уволакивал время в черные

пространства полей. (22)

(The train was leaving Moscow to enter a night black as soot. The feverish glows

and thunders of Moscow were abating, and very quickly vanished. Fields

stretched out in black silence, and silence settled down in the car. . . .The train

was dragging time off into the black expanses of the fields. (117))

As glows and thunder cede to darkness and quiet, Moscow becomes ominous and chimerical.

From a distance—and the new perspective of a black world--the bright, futuristic commotion of the urban world is revealed in its full apocalyptic associations (pet Symbolist trope, e.g., Blok’s

Gorod [1904]). It acquires the associations of plague, burning and thunder, before disappearing altogether.

But Moscow, importantly, is not Pil’nyak’s setting. Replacing the gorod with the nameless (and numberless) provincial town(s), Pil’nyak comments on the traditional apocalyptic space by establishing his setting as a decentralized place, a no-place, away from the eye of the storm. He also qualifies the notion of apocalyptic universality to denote a concept closer to

“general” or “common,” instead of “total.” Instead of a global event, the destruction-renewal plot is located and reenacted in innumerable small places. 40

Anachronism as an Approach to the Present

When Pil’nyak evokes the cliché of the train of time, he prepares the reader-traveler for an encounter with a new temporality as well as a new place. One stock component of the timetravel narrative that Mahogany subtly rehearses is the loss or impairment of consciousness that accompanies transport to another age. Leaving Moscow and all that is contemporary, the traveler is first disoriented by the speed of the train. Disembarking, he then boards a steamer and encounters the “vast dark of the Volga.” The Lethean route erases millennia, and soon the steamer is passing through terrain “from some prehistoric century.” When the night of confusion, blindness, forgetfulness and sleep finally ends, the journey concludes and the steamer arrives at the “seventeenth-eighteenth century” of Our Town.

The seventeenth century is not the only former age evoked in Mahogany, though it does compose the narrator’s principal metaphor for life in the small town. The frequent references to this particular century, recalling a time before Peter, westernization, or progress, are typical sectarian-apocalyptic views, except that Pil’nyak’s untouched Russia is both untainted and unredeemed by modernity. But this fairly traditional topic of Russia’s enduringly pre-Petrine provinces forms only a part of Pil’nyak’s treatment of ages past in Mahogany. It represents one heavily weighted instance in a larger design that might be called a poetics of anachronism.

“There was something puzzling about their appearance,” says the narrator of the

Bezdetovs. They dress as merchants did eighty years ago, “in Ostrovsky’s time,” and their faces, though beardless, are ancient “Yaroslavl” faces. In Mahogany, people, as well as places and objects, are artifacts of particular times in history. The narrator affirms that the year is 1928, but the so-called present is actually a compilation of ages. The present, properly understood, 41 combines dialogically with the past, rather than replacing it. Pil’nyak embraces and emphasizes the “puzzling”(neponyatnyi) and affixes various eras, centuries, decades, or even specific years to his characters. Together, they appear like a collection of curios from times past: Barin

Karazin stands in breadlines dressed in “a greatcoat in the style of Nicholas I” (109); Maria

Klimova and the food she prepares hail from the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (115); the curator of the local historical museum dresses and grooms like a dandy from Pushkin’s time; the okhlomony are “people who had brought time to a standstill in the era of war communism” (123).

The present constitutes a cross-section of all ages. Linear time declares that the seventeenth century ended two hundred years ago, yet Maria Klimova and her pies suggest that the seventeenth century survives in the present day. Where the apocalyptic myth attempts to conquer linear time from without, by ending it, and an anti-apocalyptic formulation shows the failure and irrationalism of such attempts, a meta-apocalypse upholds the need for a time- conquering myth. But rather than deny the present (one of the apocalyptic myth’s principal crimes as it gallops towards the End), it reconceives that present.

Peter Jensen identifies what he calls a “historical mode of experience” in Pil’nyak’s manner of processing the present. Certainly the ability to relay with perspective and synthesis events that were currently in motion--still alive and unfinished, not yet “historical”--is part of what made Pil’nyak the “first” writer of the Revolution. “He experienced the present moment, contemporary life, as historical ,” writes Jensen, which “gave [him] his striking sense for what was topical: an abnormal sensitivity towards that which defined the moment, what one might call the language of the day, of the month” (Jensen 21). 42

Part of experiencing the present moment as historical, as Pil’nyak portrays it in

Mahogany, is articulating not only what will endure (of which Jensen is speaking), but what has

endured. Pil’nyak makes the present historical by literally finding the historical in the present.

This approach is implied in his somewhat vague declaration, “History is a poem for me” (in

“Riazan’ Apples”). In the imaginative compression and juxtaposition of different temporalities

in Mahogany, we see both the poetic processing of history and the historical processing of the

present.

2.4. Travesties of the Apocalyptic

I have claimed that, in Mahogany, Pil’nyak both undermines and endorses the apocalyptic plot. I will review the first process, the travesties, as a prelude to the more involved topic of the ways in which Mahogany reconfigures and furthers the tradition of apocalyptic fiction.

Myth in the Mouths of Anti-heroes

The equation between Revolution and Apocalypse that had held so long at both popular and official levels eliminated the possibility of any neutral treatment of the subject of apocalypticism. The dissenting position that Pil’nyak takes in Mahogany is his anti-heroic representation of “revolutionary apocalypticism.” First, by the late 1920s, the years of

Revolution and Civil War comprised a holy past. Pil’nyak intrudes on this sacred zone when he tarnishes the town’s revolutionary pedigree in his derisive revisionist history, as introduced earlier. “Dlya khudozhnika 1918-1921 godov, ne sushchestvuyet Krasnoi Armii! Kak tak?”

Trotsky exclaims (B. Pil’nyak 15). The offending absence of the Red Army in The Naked Year

(the work to which Trotsky is referring) applies as well to the later novella. In Mahogany, the 43

account of the “fire of 1920” is both detatched from revolutionary Purpose and devoid of

apocalyptic proportions. It is a parenthetical aside in which the life and death struggle is reduced

to a tale of bungling and inanity. Pil’nyak deprives the elements of myth—here, Terrors that

precede the End--of their mythical setting.

The same process of displacement, where the fires of revolution are similarly divested of

their apocalyptic monumentality, occurs with the character of Ivan Ozhogov.

“In nineteen twenty-one everything came to an end,” Ozhogov declares, preaching the

restoration of a paradise that was lost when War Communism ended. In the manner of the

apocalypticist-staroobriadets, he and his cave-dwelling brothers safeguard a privileged knowledge--the ideas of pure Communism--that they alone remember and practice. “Our ideas will not perish,” Ozhogov raves, “And what ideas they were! Now nobody remembers that except us, comrades” (124). The comrades’ new names (a ritual of God’s chosen, whether saints or communists) are simplistic declarations of cleansing and illumination through burning

(besides Ozhogov the narrator mentions Pozharov and Ognyov), evocative of the Old Believers’ history of masochistic protest. Even Ozhogov’s dwelling and pseudo-occupation—in the pit of a brickyard furnace, stoking its fires—are symbolically figured.

Ivan Ozhogov recalls another disenfranchised, alcoholic prophet-fool who made his literary debut in the same year. Olesha’s colorful Ivan Babichev, too, takes a tragic view of the present that employs apocalyptic rhetoric, preaches a retrogressive message that resonates among fellow inebriates and malcontents, and bedevils a powerful brother who would disclaim him.

Incidentally, a critical difference between the pair—Ozhogov is a madman and Babichev is a fraud—describes two responses to the dilemma of representing the prophetic in modern 44

conditions. In either case, the prophetic is approached as an irrational vestige of the pre-modern

world that requires irony to be made palatable to the modern reader. Ivan Babichev always

incorporates self-parody and is therefore permissible. Ivan Ozhogov, on the other hand, is

deadly serious and the narrator must therefore supply the information that he is mad. The

opening lines of Mahogany, in fact, with their mild irreverence, form a classic example of modern literature’s treatment of the irrational:

Нищие, провидоши, побироши, волочебники, лазари, странники, странници,

убогие, пустосвяты, калики, пророки, дуры, дураки, юродивые . . . О

блаженных мокали свои перья все русские историки, этнографы и писатели.

Эти сумасшедшие или жулики – побироши, пустосвятые, пророки –

считались красою церковною, христовою братиею, мольцами за мир, как

называли их в классической русской истории и литературе. (3)

(Paupers, soothsayers, beggars, mendicant chanters, lazars, wanderers from holy

place to holy place, male and female, cripples, bogus saints, blind Psalm singers,

prophets, idiots of both sexes, fools in Christ . . . All Russian historians,

ethnographers, and writers have dipped their quills to write about these holy fools.

These madmen or frauds—beggars, bogus saints, prophets—were held to be the

Church’s brightest jewel, Christ’s own, intercessors for the world, as they have

been called in classical Russian history and literature. (103))

This extensive inventory—again, used by Pil’nyak to great advantage—juxtaposes the idealized

type, the vulgar reality and a dozen variations in between. 45

Modern depictions of the irrational, although—or, perhaps, because--they “must” appear in a deflated form, tend to harbor deadly serious ideas. This formula applies to both Ivans. In his study of Zamyatin, Pil’nyak and Bulgakov, T. R. N. Edwards addresses what he calls “the identification of Russian dissidence with an attachment to the irrational” (Three Russian Writers

1). He considers the Chernyshevsky-Dostoevsky debates of the 1860s and suggests that Notes from the Underground presents a “dislocated or debased form” of a phenomenon in Russian history that continues to take significant forms in the Soviet era:

This characteristically Russian pattern of ‘going underground’, a form of non-

resistance to evil, also occurs frequently in the literature of the [twenties and

thirties] and, as V. O. Kliuchevsky points out, was a feature of Muscovite life too:

those who disagreed with authority ‘wandered away.’ This is the conduct of the

beguny and stranniki, and is linked with the idea of seeking God, and oneself, in

the wilderness. (21)

Ivan Ozhogov dwells in a cave at the outskirts of town, another instance of the heavy-handed symbolism in Pil’nyak that the author seems to cultivate rather than avoid. On one hand we see the prophet-apocalypticist’s utter dysfunction in modern, anti-heroic conditions, where apocalypticism is an underground and insane business. Yet the stronger comment may run in the other direction. When the narrator concludes that the town reveres Ivan out of habitual, centuries-old respect for holy fools “through the mouths of whom Truth makes itself known to men” (142), the ironic “space” between speaker and subject thins perceptibly. As the revelatory

“other” who issues from a different time (1921) and place (literally, from underground),

Ozhogov clearly wields a certain moral authority in the work as well as the town. Historically, 46 his is the decentralized and decentralizing voice of the apocalyptic sectarian. Pil’nyak’s sardonic narrator ostensibly attacks the mythology that has grown up around such types. Yet his tender portrayal of Ivan—a tragic and improbable dissident—also demonstrates a subtle appreciation for, and endorsement of, the dialogizing function of Russia’s “madmen or frauds.”

Life Cycle in Dysfunction

The portrait of stagnation and degeneration painted in Mahogany, composed during the peak of NEP-era disenchantment, depicts the essential movement of the apocalyptic myth— birth, death and promise of renewal—as stalled, terminally muted or “mired in mud.” In the most unsympathetic characters, the life-death cycle that is for Pil’nyak humanity’s animating force is represented in various metaphorical ways as dysfunctional. One depiction of evil, therefore, in the novella takes the form of characters who neither procreate (Bezdetovy— childless) nor die (Skudrin) as they should.

The eighty-five year old Yakov Skudrin’s longevity is singularly devoid of virtue.

Several times, the narrator remarks that the “vile” man has lost his fear of both death and life, and implies that his “uneventful” existence is some unnatural combination of the two. Not only does Skudrin refuse to die, but his sleeping and waking patterns (day and night, a microcosm of existence) have not functioned “normally” for thirty years. Again, they are recombined unnaturally as he keeps vigil over the bible by night and sleeps by day. The narrator depicts

Skudrin’s family relations with similar oppressive reversals of the life cycle’s natural and healthy perpetuation. He has disowned his offspring, who revile him, and he continues to pester

(as she unmistakably views it) his wife for sex into his ninth decade. 47

The Bezdetovs are even more clearly allegorical. In place of propagating life— arguably

the favored form of redemption in Pil’nyak—they epitomize sterility, as their name suggests.

Barrenness and non-being emanate from their “vacant” eyes, “empty, like those of dead men . . .

utterly dead, dazedly unblinking” (119-120). The reptilian description evokes archetypal images

of evil. The moribund brothers are dark agents who act with baseness and subjugation toward

others weaker than they. In this modern counterpoint to Gogol’s poema, the Bezdetovs

themselves comprise dead souls. Their escapades in the unnamed small town, their dubious

business dealings, and their series of encounters with provincial types recall Chichikov, though

the tone of the vignettes is only semi-Gogolian. The depictions go beyond caricature and the list

of exploited or oppressed--young women, holy fools, widows, the poor and desperate—bears an

unmistakable Dostoevskian imprint.

Answering Gogol’s Epic Question

Despite divergences such as the one named above, it is worth noting the degree to which

Mahogany participates in the Gogolian tradition that pairs a style of fragmentation, plotlessness

and linguistic oddity with a concern for backwoods, “real” Russia. A classic treatment of the

Russian provinces and the magnum opus of ornamentalism’s designated progenitor, Dead Souls exerts a palpable influence in Pil’nyak’s novella.

Both works manifest a strong allegorical presence that is often coincident with highly stylized fiction. Gogol’ begins and ends his work with statements that demand an allegorical reading of the meandering, inconclusive, deflated narrative that stretches between. Donald

Fanger summarizes the effect of subtitling the novel a “poema:” 48

Dead Souls, Gogol thereby warns his reader, must be read as poetic in nature and

purpose, symbolic rather than realistic, and epic in intention. The novel, in other

words, is an artistic document . . . presented as a statement about Russia’s current

spiritual state, and about its ultimate destiny. (emphasis mine)

The injunction to perceive poetic, symbolic or epic organization in a fundamentally entropic narrative foreshadows the modernist obsession with discrediting, then reasserting, the organizing powers of myth. Pil’nyak is working on the other side of Realism and Mahogany aspires to neither the heights of a self-styled “poema” nor the depths of the Gogolian grotesque. Its kindred call for poetic, symbolic or epic readings—and simultaneous scrutiny of these readings—is more implicit and more equivocating, more “modern.”

Gogol’s apocalyptic ending, the other allegorical bookend for an unruly collection of anecdotes, is evoked in Mahogany with radical alterations. Pil’nyak’s misquotation is quintessentially meta-apocalyptic: it employs but travesties, disconfirms but does not abandon, the master source. To review, Dead Souls’ conclusion resorts, famously, to pure allegory. As

Chichikov races away down a country highway in a troika, the crudely satiric novel ascends suddenly to a prophetic denouement:

Не так ли ты, Русь, что бойкая необгонимая тройка несешься? Дымом

дымится под тобою дорога, гремят мосты, все отстает и остается позади.

Остановился пораженный Божьим чудом созерцатель: не молиния ли это,

сброшенная с неба? Что значит это новодящее ужас движение? И что са

неведомая сила заключена в сих неведомых светом конях? Эх, кони, кони,

что за кони! (PSS, tom shestoi) 49

(Russia, are you not speeding along like a fiery and matchless troika? Beneath

you the road is smoke, the bridges thunder, and everything is left far behind. At

your passage the onlooker stops amazed as by a divine miracle. ‘Was that not a

flash of lightning?’ he asks. What is this surge so full of terror? And what is this

force unknown impelling these horses never seen before? Ah, you horses,

horses—what horses! (270))13

Gogol’s narrator concludes with an epic simile thanks to which subsequent readings would permanently associate the speeding troika (indigenous, rough-hewn, dangerous, thrilling, fantastically fleet, on the brink of loosing control) with Russia’s apocalyptic destiny.

Pil’nyak’s variation controverts Gogol’s sublime finale at every turn. In the first place, his echo of the famed ending does not comprise the actual end of Mahogany. It occurs five

pages from the end as the novella--a tale of eventlessness that winds down, not up--feels its way

toward a conclusion. Pil’nyak’s Akim makes the same retreat from an unnamed provincial town

in the same Volga region through the same dark pine forests but the troika is tellingly absent.

Gogol’s high apocalypticism of terrible, galloping steeds is reconfigured here so that elegy

supplants prophecy. Akim journeys in the sumerki of day’s end, when “the west had long been

dying, the red sunset its mortal wound.”

Akim’s un-troika is a large, low-riding tarantass with a driver who, like the majority of

Pil’nyak’s characters, has been displaced, rather than made, by the Revolution. Pools from the

rainfall dot the country byways that were Chichikov’s racecourse and the horses proceed at a

labored walk until they are at last stuck in an impassable quag. The apocalyptic notion of swift,

13 Reavey translation. 50 divine destiny is flouted by the scene of misfortune and paralysis. In fact, the crowning apocalyptic symbol is abused, strongly reminiscent of a Dostoevskian moment, by a drunken driver:

Возница ударил лошадей кнутом, -- лошади дернулись и не сдвинулись с

места. Кругом была непролазная грязь, тарантас увязал посреди лужи, увяз

левым передним колесом выше чеки. Кучер изловчился на козлах и ударил

коренника в зад сапогом, -- лошадь дернулась и упала, подмяв под себя

оглоблю, лошадь ушла в тину по хомут. Кучер хлестал лошадей пока не

понял, что коренник встать не может, -- тогда он полез в грязь, чтобы

выпрячь лошадь. Он ступил, и нога ушла в грязь по колено, -- он ступил

второю ногой, -- и он завяз,-- он не мог бытащить ног, ноги былезли из

сапогов, сапоги оставались в грязи. Старик потерял равновесие и сел в

лужу. И старик – заплакал, -- заплакал горькими, истерическими,

бессильными слезами злобы и отчаяния . . . К поезду, как и к поезду

времени, троцкист Аким опоздал. (65)

(The driver struck the horses with his whip—the horses pulled but did not budge.

All around was deep mud; the tarantass was sinking deeper and deeper in the

middle of the pool—above the linchpin of the left front wheel. The driver braced

himself on the box and booted the shaft horse in the rump—the horse jerked and

fell on top of the shaft, then sank up to its collar into the mire. The driver lashed

the horses until he realized that the shaft horse could not get up; then he waded

into the mud to unharness the horse. He took a step and sank knee-deep into the 51

mud; he took another—and he was stuck; he could not pull his feet up, his feet

came out of his boots, his boots were left in the mud. The old man lost his

balance and sat down in the pool. And the old man burst into tears—bitter,

hysterical, helpless tears of rage and despair . . . The Trotskyite Akim missed the

train, as he had missed the train of time. (145))

Mahogany considers Russia’s destiny in the aftermath of, rather than in anticipation of, apocalypse (a perspective that can only signify disconfirmation). Again, the powerful prophetic mode is inverted and apocalypticism’s elegiac underbelly dominates in this scene of bereavement. The road to the future (literally, Akim takes the “Moscow road”) is obstructed with mud, and mud ensnares the biblical symbol of redemption. In this depiction of helplessness and mire, divine intervention and a cleansing rebirth are “present” as absent absurdities. Below,

I explore how these deflations, these failures of the prophetic, enrich rather than inhibit the novella’s allegorical function as Pil’nyak reconceives the shape of revelation and rebirth.

Pil’nyak’s Own Question: Where is the New?

Justice figures prominently in the Johannine plot, with its vivid portrayal of an avenging deity and a last judgment. However, Judeo-Christian apocalyptic entails a theodicy that far exceeds that of the archetypal revenge fantasy. The apocalyptic plot’s chief concern (and, arguably, most original contribution) is not justice, but redemption, the inexplicable and unmerited renewal of the world. Redemption, which expiates a Wrong whose scope and degree lies beyond the logic or power of justice, introduces the concept of sacrifice. Sacrifice entails voluntary and guiltless suffering and that suffering, it follows, is configured as both required and justified. Both the death of the individual and the end of the world are logical necessities in the 52 redemptive model. To modify the idiom, the end not only justifies, but requires, the extreme means.

The promise of renewal that would justify the apocalypse of revolution was an obsession in a society founded on an incalculable degree of self-sacrifice.14 The prevailing need of the times was, in one critic’s words, “to justify the losses and sufferings of the preceding years and to defend the privations still demanded in building the emergent Utopia…A reverence for novelty was implicit in these views: a new civilization was evolving, and with it a new morality and a new art” (Muchnic 36).

It could be said that Pil’nyak’s art strives instead to make new images and new events recognizable, or “old.” At least one critic has noted how much he differs conceptually in this regard from the formalists, who worshipped, in concert with the times, the new and who placed art’s highest purpose in making (old) things new.15 Pil’nyak’s work, on the other hand, manifests two minds about the New. Mary Nicholas describes him as “formally innovative but socially retrograde,” a combination that she suggests may be related to Shklovsky’s registered dislike for his contemporary.

The combined effect in Mahogany of the travesties discussed above—of portraying a present that bears no imprint of modernity and thereby resists assumptions of progress and even linear time: of associating Communist idealism with the rejected and displaced; of depicting petty demons who pervert the natural cycle of life and death; and of deflating the consummate

14 I acknowledge the irony inherent in speaking of self-sacrifice on a societal or mass level.

15 See Mary Nicholas’ article, “Formalist Theory Revisited: On Sklovskij’s ‘On Pil’njak’” for its excellent critique of formalism and its unadmitted, extra-textual concerns. She argues that Shklovsky’s antipathy for Pil’nyak in spite of the latter’s prolific formal experiments reveals a “concealed standard,” to mean a “revolutionary agenda, rejection of the status quo and byt, and disdain for tradition and ritual” (74-75). 53 cultural symbol of Russia’s divine destiny—is a devastating negation of the New. Vera Reck, who characterizes the underlying mood of Mahogany as one of indolence, resignation and passivity, describes the dim view that the novella takes of the Revolution’s capacity to effect a rebirth: “[L]ife barely moves, and its sleepy pace will not be broken by the accident of the

Revolution. In the end everything will be as before and the perturbances of the moment will die down, smothered by the “Voltairian darkness” of the Russian provinces, changeless and all- absorbing” (Reck 87). One is again struck by the difference between this view of the Revolution as a momentary wrinkle and the vision in The Naked Year of the Revolution as the definitive historical juncture. The traceable stylistic development—from volume and profusion to withering understatement—is no less a development in historical approach. When the myth of renewal is discredited, the idea of the Revolution as an “entirety,” in Trotsky’s words, “with the objective historic tasks which are the goal of its leading forces,” evaporates.

Trotsky is perhaps an unexpected source of insight into Pil’nyak’s works. His criticisms, if parted from his conclusions, contain some of the most astute observations about Pil’nyak’s writings made by a contemporary. As early as 1923, when Pil’nyak’s status as literary spokesman for the Revolution was on the ascendancy, Trotsky correctly identified the ideological impurity, so to speak, of his works. He accuses Pil’nyak of writing without a

“central, pivotal meaning,” or, of making himself, not the Revolution, that pivot (B. Pil’nyak 7,

10). Without that centralizing view, Trotsky accurately observes, “the pivot and the Revolution are gone.” He concludes quotably:

The [Revolution] disintegrates into episodes and anecdotes which are either

heroic or evil. It is possible to make rather clever pictures, but it is impossible to 54

recreate the Revolution, and it is, of course, impossible to reconcile oneself to it—

because, if there is no purpose in the unheard-of sacrifices and privations, then

history is a mad-house. (Literature and Revolution 90-91)

In Trotsky’s estimation, Pil’nyak depicts, in other words, the means without the end. “Znaet li

Pil’nyak, chto sobstvenno v revoliutsionnykh mukakh rozhdaetsia?” he exclaims. “Net, ne

znaet” (B. Pil’nyak 14). Arguing against it, Trotsky articulates the case of the modern condition

flawlessly: Apocalypticism without its redemptive function loses its symmetry and meaning, or

descends to the absurd.

The conclusion which Trotsky’s rejects figures prominently in fellow traveler works as a

thesis worthy of consideration. An “episodic,” “anecdotal” novella such as Mahogany rejects

Trotsky’s either/or formulation of the Revolution—teleology or senselessness--as compelling yet

debilitating. It searches rather for a constructive response to the crisis of what it portrays as the

End’s obvious failure. Instead of bringing reality in alignment with myth, it undertakes the much

more involved task of refitting myth to a difficult reality. When Pil’nyak writes brazenly “I do

not acknowledge that a writer ought to live ‘with a will not to see,’ or speaking simply, to be a

liar,”16 he assigns himself the chore of deriving new formulae instead of applying old. The

declaration, or the need for the declaration, implies that one may more easily reconfigure reality

than myth.

16 Extracted from Pil’nyak’s “Отрывки из дневника” that he submitted to the anthology, Писатели об искусстве и о себе: сборник статей, published in Moscow in 1924 (the article quoted at length in Jensen 81). It is the source of the oft-quoted statement, “I do not acknowledge that it is necessary to write with a gulp every time one mentions the Russian Communist Party.” The cavalier, oppositional piece must be read remembering that Pil’nyak’s politics were far from consistent and that many writers were issuing similar statements at the time. The article likely represents a position of neither uncompromising rebellion nor disingenuous bravado. I consider part of Pil’nyak’s originality to lie in the way he manifests both idealism and a sense of expediency.

55

2.5 Myth Under Reconstruction

If it is unwilling to either make over reality or to throw over myth, what constructive response, then, to the End’s failure does Mahogany posit? Pil’nyak’s attempts to combine the uncombinable suggest a curious and sophisticated approach to an apparent impasse on both aesthetic and ideological fronts. His solution underscores how literary apocalypticism as a genre has developed to contain its own antithesis. As I introduced at the beginning of this chapter, the result may be best understood as a meta-apocalypse.

Meta-apocalypse and Micro-renewals

Edith Clowes’ formulation of meta-utopia in post-Stalinist works that translates so extensively to my authors’ approach to apocalyptic myth in a post-Revolutionary world is a lofty concept. Meta-utopia shows a penchant for pluralistic discourse, asserts the inevitable relativism and interconnectedness of past, present and future, and channels its skepticism into a defense of individual moral freedom as a “broad social strategy” (Clowes 10, 24, 69). Perhaps the main schism between students of Pil’nyak has been over the potential ontological function of his difficult poetics. Two opinions dominate: One sees in Pil’nyak a stylistic virtuosity and fixation with binary oppositions that masquerade as profundity (Erlich, Muchnic, Eastman). Muchnic epitomizes this attitude when she writes that Pil’nyak’s “highly mannered structure…is not so much an appropriate design for intricate ideas as a substitute for understanding” that exhibits, if anything, “the complexity of confusion rather than any insight into complexity” (“Literature in the NEP Period” 32). The other opinion perceives in his challenging style and rampant dichotomies a purposeful aesthetic and philosophical system that sufficient study may discover

(Nicholas, Brostrom, Browning). Fully committed to the second position, I have no hesitation in 56 identifying an unmistakable kinship between Clowes’ elevated vision for utopian literature after

Stalin and the inventive approach to the apocalyptic script that occurs in Mahogany.

In this meta-apocalyptic work, Pil’nyak confronts not only the reigning mythical embodiment of binary thought in Russian culture, but one that he, personally, has used to great effect in previous works. Acting as a commentary on the apocalyptic setting of the recent past,

Mahogany shows the failures of that setting’s requisite maximalism and chiaroscuro. Yet it retains the essential elements of the apocalyptic plot—a narrative that situates, justifies and conquers Death. The novella’s most crucial modification is to render apocalypticism as a myth of timelessness rather than change. The absence of change, however, does not mean damnation.

As I will explore in depth below, life in Mahogany continues, i.e., renews, on a micro, rather than macro, level. Again, one can scarcely overstate how much this thesis differs from the tenor of The Naked Year, where the Revolution is celebrated ecstatically as a threshold moment of violent erasure: “Snowstorm. March.—Ahhh, what a snowstorm, when the wind eats the snow!

Shoyaa, Shoy-ayaa, Shoooyaaa! Gviiu…gu-vu-zz! Gu-vu-zz!...Gla-vbum!...How--g-o-o-d!”

(165). Mahogany is equally a story of doom and salvation but doom and salvation take petty and vulgar forms, whispered encounters in a silent night instead of unintelligible screams in a storm.

I have emphasized that Mahogany reconstructs what it deconstructs, a twin task that is the special capacity of a meta-apocalyptic fiction. Pil’nyak’s most radical, reconstructive response to myth’s failure, as he depicts it in his novella, is to separate apocalypticism from notions of linear time and progress. As suggested in the chronotope discussion above, his innovative apocalypticism conquers time from within history--not by ending history, but by discarding the “truth,” or asserting the relativity, of historical time, of the historical succession of 57 events. Personified grotesquely in the timeless Skudrin, who remembers “everything” but has

“lost count of years,” history accumulates rather than progresses.

Pil’nyak’s aesthetics impart this approach to history chiefly in the creation of narrative units that are not necessarily chronological and, in the same vein, not necessarily hierarchical.

The narrative structure exists outside of time and does not progress. Rather than narrative flow, the image, which traverses temporalities, functions as the organizational unit in a work. The role of images in Pil’nyak’s work, and especially the reader’s experience of receiving that work, has generated many comparisons with the visual arts, where perception is a non-temporal process.

Both icon-writing and cubism, aesthetic systems that not only lack a sequenced perceptual process (as does all painting), but that specifically assault perspective (crudely analogical to chronology in a text), have been evoked in attempts to translate Pil’nyak’s unusual poetics into a visual form that similarly resists hierarchical modes of perception.17 His anti-chronology shatters The End into thousands of ends, and recompenses for the loss of the absolute with the possibility of infinite microrenewals.

Byt Dialogizes Myth

Pil’nyak’s experiments reflect a pet modernist concern, that of developing a narrative style that more closely approximates the incoherent juxtapositions of human experience, as opposed to a so-called realistic narrative that is carefully plotted over time. It follows that meaning in Pil’nyak, rather than residing in the regular narrative flow, is found in (1) isolated utterances and (2) deep structures. Two ontological sources, the momentary and the mythical, are constantly in dialog. The discussion above of various apocalyptic travesties is, in essence, a

17 See Mary Nicholas, “Boris Pilniak’s Modernist Prose,” 36-37 and 106-107. Her defense of Pil’nyak’s modernism draws extensively on Wendy Steiner’s The Colors of Rhetoric. 58

discussion of the many ways in which the abstract or allegorical in Mahogany must answer to the

onslaughts of the particular. While some version of this dialog is by definition always present in

an “apocalyptic fiction,” Pil’nyak manifestly privileges the particular, asserting it as the only

defensible shape of the mythological in modernity.

In this work, one may say that Pil’nyak reconfigures myth by dialogizing it with byt.

Kundera speaks to this dialogizing effect of byt on myth when he discusses Janacek’s

“prosifying” influence on opera. He characterizes prose as the opposite of myth. It is the world of the concrete and everyday that the novelist discovers (Kundera 132). His analysis of how, and with what effect, the everyday intrudes on a formulaic, romantic plot in, for example,

Hemingway or Flaubert perfectly recalls Pil’nyak’s use of myth and byt in Mahogany:

[This antithetical combination] is not a matter of an artistic mannerism; it is a

matter of a discovery that might be termed ontological: the discovery of the

structure of the present moment: the discovery of the perpetual coexistence of the

banal and the dramatic that underlies our lives. (131, Kundera’s emphasis)

Pil’nyak captures this coexistence by locating apocalypticism in the everyday, which is composed of small and innumerable birth-death narratives. He will not relinquish the power of myth to organize experience, but myth vis a vis disconfirming reality is only viable when it is infinitely fragmented and infinitesimally reenacted.

It must be noted that, in his relationship toward byt, then, Pil’nyak differs by one hundred and eighty degrees from his “mythical” contemporary, Mayakovsky. Pil’nyak embraces byt as something that asserts, rather than effaces, the individual. Rather than oppress and insult, the inescapability of byt renders it a “sustaining source material for the artistic endeavor,” an 59

“absolut[e] from which art is made” (Nicholas Dissertation 15). Egotist though he reputedly

was, Pil’nyak depicts a self that is undiminished—and in fact enlarged--by a phenomenal world

that affirms, as he represents byt, a common humanity and life’s continuity.

Klavdia: Literal and Physical Embodiments of the Mythical

The character of Klavdia precisely captures how Pil’nyak situates the mythical in the

ordinary, or, effects a marriage between byt and larger patterns. The most straightforward exposition of Mahogany’s affirmative program may be found in Klavdia, who is one of the quieter variations of symbolic woman in Pil’nyak’s works. He typically situates the strongest counterargument to his nihilistic vision in woman, “the mother,” in one critic’s words, “the ancient symbol of assurance that the earth is not alien but feminine” (Brostrom “The Problem of

Faith” 119). Klavdia is a young, unattached, pregnant teacher. Supernatural rebirth on a cosmic scale shrinks considerably here, and plays out instead on a literal and individual level. Yet a single birth—ostensibly demythologized—in Pil’nyak is all the more a crossroads for the universal and the personal, and Pil’nyak’s Klava is—without being miraculous--a forcefully mythical character.

First, Klavdia’s remarkable beauty (she is “hideously beautiful,” “very beautiful”) contains an androgynous dimension. Though she is capable of feline softness and affection, she gesticulates “like a man” as she drinks and chain smokes, holds her alcohol better than her girlfriends, and exhibits a frank toughness and independence that, particularly for the time, evoke 60

cliches of masculinity. Pregnant and intentionally alone (“Who the father is I don’t know. . . .

But it’s of no importance to me”), she is a lifesource that plans to act as both father and mother.18

In addition to being simultaneously feminine and masculine, she has materialized ex nihilo, it would seem, in the way that she emerges from a degrading history and surroundings that do not touch or resemble her. Her actual origins are extensively recounted (in making

Klava, herself, the daughter of an unformalized and scandalous liaison, Pil’nyak also echoes the tradition, both pagan and Judeo-Christian, of chosen lineages that are perpetuated by illicit unions); however, she is in the present an utterly “new” creature. The narrator’s insistence on her beauty not only asserts her aesthetic advantage, but affirms her moral superiority, for she has somehow resisted the taint of her environment. In her beauty, health, strength, freedom, fertility and independence, she differs wholly from the rest of the town, from which she is mysteriously insulated, and from the presiding tone of the novella. Her communist cousin, Akim, just ten years her senior, views her unaccountable newness against the backdrop of her environment and feels both hopeful and puzzled at the mystery:

Аким не мог собрать мыслей. Перед глазами на полу лежали дорожки из

лоскутьев, путины бедности и мещанства. Клавдия была покойна, красива,

сильна, очень здоровая и очень красивая. За окнами моросил дождь. Аким-

коммунист – хотел знать, что идет новый быт, -- быт был древен. Но мораль

Клавдии для него была – и необыкновенна, и нова . . . Аким сказал: – Роди.

(56)

18 Thomas Rogers has given considerable critical attention to the “female principle” in Pil’nyak’s works. See Myth and Symbol in Soviet Fiction, 91-98 and 106-110, for his treatment of Great Mother symbolism. 61

(Akim was unable to collect his thoughts. On the floor in front of him lay rag

runners, the pathways of poverty and meanness of spirit. Kavdia was calm,

beautiful, strong—very healthy and very beautiful. It was drizzling outside the

windows. The Communist Akim wanted to hear that a new way of life was

coming; the old way of life was rooted in the ages. But Klavdia’s morality was

both new and strange to him . . . Akim said: ‘Have the child.’ (140))

With more reverence, it would seem, than satire, Pil’nyak contemporizes the Christian myth of untraditional virtue as a mysterious fountainhead of renewal and regeneration.

At this point, one will have noticed that Klavdia’s newness, presented with a minimum of irony, also correlates with a fair amount of Soviet mythology. That Pil’nyak uses several strata of myth in his works and, consequently, lacks a certain ideological or philosophical purity is one of the main complaints of his critics19 and, conversely, a point that a meta-apocalyptic analysis welcomes. Pil’nyak worked in a day dominated by exclusivist ideologies. His heedless borrowing, as it has been viewed, from “opponents”—mythological, ideological and aesthetic— registers now as an act of some innovation and independence. It would seem that Pil’nyak manifests, not a want of erudition or principles, bit rather an intuitive understanding of the interrelations of multiple mythologies, where they overlie and where they part. The mythological dialog that results, that Pil’nyak comprehends and manipulates, is one of the poetic hallmarks of the meta-apocalyptic form.

19 One does not have to resort to Trotsky for complaints about the allegorical profusion that Pil’nyak employs. T. R. N. Edwards, for example, even in his favorable analysis, attacks what he views as Pil’nyak’s “eclecticism in the field of religion which drew almost indiscriminately on both Christian and pagan forms and symbols” (See Edwards 123). 62

In keeping with this practice of mythical recombination, Pil’nyak’s Klava departs sharply

from the Soviet ideal in her embodiment of the instinctive and the irrational. The departure is

rooted in the un-Marxist foundations of Pil’nyak’s ideal, its combined Symbolist Scythianism

and neo-Slavophilism that give his apocalypticism an enormous pagan overlay. Pil’nyak

adulterates the new Absolutes—masculine strength, youth and beauty, non-traditional morality,

faith in the future—by providing them with an essentially Romantic, rather than rationalistic,

basis. Romanticism, of course, with its notions of individuality and subjectivity, was fast

becoming a pejorative term in Soviet culture. Unlike the Chernyshevskian prototype, Klavdia’s

enthusiasm for the changed world is emotional and visceral. “I’m very physical,” she tells Akim

as she cuddles up to him:

Я люблю есть, люблю мыться, люблю заниматься гимнастикой . . . А жизнь

– она большая, она кругом, я не разбираюсь в революции, -- но я верю им, и

жизни, и солнышку, и революции, и я спокойна. Я понимаю только то, что

касается меня. Остальное мне даже неинтересно. (56)

(I like to eat, I like to wash, I like to do exercises . . . But life—it’s big, it’s all

around me, I can’t make any sense of it, I can’t make any sense of the

Revolution—but I believe in them, in life, in the sun, in the Revolution, and I’m

at peace with myself. I understand only what touches me. As for the rest, I’m not

even interested. (140))

In Klavdia and for Klavdia, the mythical reveals itself through natural processes. ‘Life, the sun, and the Revolution’ form a telling assemblage, tellingly sequenced: The Revolution—if it is to be “believed”—amounts to no more and no less than an elemental force. 63

Akim: Failure as Mythical

Akim, in contrast to the peace and simplicity that his cousin claims, obsesses over the

meaning of the Revolution. Klavdia enjoys a child’s egotism, while Akim has aged prematurely

and senses in the decade between them an entire, unbridgeable generation gap. Though no

intelligent (he is a leather jacketed Communist, after all), he is a reflective man of ideas who

returns to his birthplace having “set aside this week for thought” (144). In a palpable reassertion

of the narrator’s Romantic prejudice, Akim’s intellect is portrayed as his Achilles' heel that

makes an intuitive understanding of the world more difficult. Toward the close of the Mahogany, in Nature and free to let his thoughts wander like the country roads, he is finally able to reach an anti-rational formulation of the Revolution’s meaning:

От мыслей о лесе, о проселках, которым тысячи верст, мысли Акима

пришли к теткам Капитоине и Римме, -- и в тысячный раз Аким оправдал

революцию. . . . И Аким поймал себя на мысли о том, что думая об отце, о

Клавдии, о тетках, -- он думал не о них, но о революции. Революция-ж для

него была и началом жизни, и жизнью – и концом ее. (63-64)

(Thoughts of forests, of country roads, stretching for thousands of versts, led

Akim to thoughts of his aunts Kapitolina and Rimma—and for the thousandth

time Akim justified the Revolution. . . . And Akim suddenly became aware that

his thoughts about his father, Klavdia, his aunts were really thoughts not about

them but about the Revolution. For him the Revolution was the beginning of life,

and life itself—and the end of life. (145)) 64

The Revolution as an apocalyptic totality that encompasses life and death is fathomable for Akim

(as it is believable for Klavdia) when he focuses on the natural, small, inconspicuous reiterations of that myth.

Natural and inconspicuous describe the modernist Christ type that Pil’nyak liberally appends to Akim. An evocation of another Dostoevskian idea, Akim presents as a doomed figure who is passively good in the tradition of a Christ who is either powerless to save or, more interestingly, who redefines salvation. When he arrives in town, Akim flouts “earthly” authority structures (“Akim did not go to see his father or his superiors” 138), keeps company with women, transgressors and outcasts, functions as laconic confessor for Klava, Ivan and the tarantass driver, and receives his mother Maria’s kiss in empathetic silence. When he glimpses the eccentric curator drinking vodka “with” a statue of the suffering Christ, the mock Passion seems alive for him, despite the absurdity of the moment that he fully grasps. Akim comprehends the scene with the wooden deity as ridiculous; yet he also comprehends it as profane, thereby preserving his sense of the sacred.

Pil’nyak specializes in such reverent irreverences. He shows Christian myth to accommodate a tremendous degree of deformation without losing its legitimacy or coherence.

Parody in the context of literary change, in other words, acts to reinforce, rather than deplete, the original text. Dragan Kujundzic discusses this idea, referencing both Bakhtin and Tynianov, in

The Returns of History: Russian Nietzscheans after Modernity. “Parody reveals the structure of repetition or historicity in the literary text,” he writes. “The more a text is parodied, the more its

‘content’ is displaced, allowing us to perceive the structure of repetition” (Kujundzic 4).

Tynianov locates parody in the “tension in a literary work [that] one need only enhance” 65

(Tynianov 1977, 539). This tension, or potential for parody and self-parody, is built into the

founding Judeo-Christian myths and the prominence of paradox and inversion there. Mahogany

maximizes this potential, exploits this core of irresolvability and openness with its uncanny,

meta-apocalyptic efforts to hold two worlds in one hand. Though Akim witnesses the dead ways

of Christian metaphysics, he nonetheless assumes the role of Intercessor with fallen women, the

poor and the needy.

Byt Reconceives Beauty

Part of this balancing act, to reiterate, involves combining Kundera’s “opposites,”

allegory and byt, such that neither thesis cancels the other. Pil’nyak’s treatment of byt has not

caught the direct attention of most critics. His chaotic narratives, rather, impel one first to run in

the other direction, seeking after a masterplot or design that can organize and interpret the

fragments. Yet, at the same time, critics will concede—or complain--that no myth can

satisfactorily contain Pil’nyak’s poetics; that, allegorically organized as a work may appear, the

so-called organization “teases and subverts meaning and frustrates the most basic theses it seems

to propose” (Nicholas). On one hand, then, Pil’nyak employs a contrived symbolism; on the

other hand, his systems are inconsistent, overflowing with surplus, comprised of categories that

are not categorical. This elusive excess again brings us back to the concept of byt, itself an

untidy and unsystematic idea.

In Mahogany, Pil’nyak sets myth and byt in a contredanse that convincingly expresses how each without the other would constitute a debilitating position, Trotsky’s myth (“Purpose”) vs. madhouse. In Pil’nyak, byt is the anti-ideology that fastens one to the ground or, literally in 66

this novella, muddies myth. The narrator declares his allegiance to “everyday life” from the

story’s first paragraph, where he begins his creative list of variations on the yurodovye theme:

Эти однозначные имена кренделей быта святой Руси, нищие на святой

Руси, калики перехожие, убогие Христа ради, юродивые ради Христа Руси

святой, -- эти крендели украшали быт со дней возникновения Руси, от

первых царей Иванов, быт русского тысячелетья. (3, emphasis added)

(These names, so close in meaning, of the double-ring sugar cakes of the everyday

life of Holy Russia, paupers on the face of Holy Russia, wandering Psalm singers,

Christ’s cripples, fools in Christ of Holy Russia—these sugar cakes have adorned

everyday life from Russia’s very beginnings, from the time of the first Tsar Ivans,

the everyday life of Russia’s thousand years. (103, emphasis added))

The playful passage, with its delightful comparison between holy fools and “ringed sugar cakes,” is a manifesto of sorts for the pages that follow. The narrator’s imagination is captured not by the sacrosanct idea of Russia’s millennium of Christianity, but by the “everyday life” of those thousand years. It is byt that combats the erasure of history and, in the same vein, constitutes the means by which the present asserts itself. Byt, incidentally, is revolting to the revolutionary in its assertion of the present (rather than of the beginning or the end), in its statement of the mundane that involves no capital letter and no exclamation mark. Understood thus, byt is irreducible, the exception, independent and unruly, free from ideology. (Only the ideologue is enslaved by byt.)

It counteracts the tyranny of the abstract.20 The relationship between myth and byt that

20 Such a concern with symbolism to the point of emptiness occupies Vaginov’s Kozlennaya pesn’. Another “new apocalyptic” work of the same period, its depiction of myth-bound aesthetes-idealists (i.e., Symbolists) can be unsparing.

67

Pil’nyak’s allegorical prose embodies is anything but hostile. As it trivializes and complicates

archetypal categories of good and evil, byt makes myth possible, it may be interpreted, despite modernity.

In consequence of this approach, Pil’nyak tends to depict a pied beauty that is not satirical because it is not idealistic.21 Pil’nyak’s identification of the beautiful with the base that

many critics have noted may be viewed as the aesthetic transcription of the dynamic between

myth and byt. In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky refers to this blending of opposites as

the principle of “totality” or the “total image,” an irrational unity that only art can accomplish

and that the artist is obligated to seek. “A true artistic image,” he writes, “gives the beholder a

simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive

feelings. . . . We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to

express that totality" (Tarkovsky 108). Revelation, in other words, can occur when coarse details

combine with beauty.

In Mahogany, Pil’nyak portrays this paradoxical combination most keenly in the

ambivalent Bezdetovy brothers, degraded predators on the one hand, restorers of beauty on the

other. The unsympathetic, soulless restorers are strangely allied with the pitiable, shrinking

Ozhogov in what amounts to a rather original interpretation of the yurodovyi tradition. The

narrator names them all “chudaki” and fills his history of the art of Russian furniture making

with religious suggestion: The artisan belongs to a sacred tradition of “solitary men, of cellars in

21 Jensen attributes this attitude to Pil’nyak’s formative years on “the border area of the Zemstvo” and perceives a kind of intuitive comprehension of opposites that an immersion in folklore may engender: “He loves the countryside without idealizing it. A robust love of this kind, both cynical and naïve, pitiless in its perception of the tragicomedy of Russian life and, nevertheless, patriotic and devoted—this is the kind of love we meet in folklore, especially in its anecdotes” (Nature as Code 16). 68 towns, of cramped back rooms in servants’ huts on country estates” (106) that recalls a monastic brotherhood; and the artifact, as it outlives the living, enjoys a certain kind of immortality.

After the Bezdetovy and Ozhogov, the third class of chudaki described in Mahogany are

Russian china makers, who appear in the novella’s final paragraph. The passage on portselen has the appearance of an unmotivated and unrelated historical attachment, an informational appendage, apparently unanticipated by the rest of the novella, that the narrator concludes:

“Russian china is the most marvelous art adorning the Earthly Globe.” In fact, the story of master china craftsmen completes the trio of “strange fellows” that was begun somewhat dubiously with the dissimilar Ozhogov and Bezdetovs. The founding of Russian china, in this narrator’s account, is a tale of the fool and the charlatan that owes as much to aborted attempts as to the brilliant successes of its genuine inventor.

Это [Виноградов] построил дело русского порцеленного производства, --

таким образом, что русский фарфор ниоткуда не заимствован . . . но

родоначальниками русского фарфора, все-же, надо считать яранца Андрея

Курсина, кругом китайцами обманутого, и немца Христофора Гунгера,

кругом Европой обманывавшего. (72)

(It was [Vinogradov] who founded the craft of Russian portselen in such a way

that it owes nothing to anybody . . . [N]evertheless, Andrei Kursin, the man from

Yaransk, who was roundly duped by the Chinese, and Christopher Hunger, the

German, who duped everyone around, dangling Europe before their eyes, must be

considered the fathers of Russian portselen. (150)) 69

Like furniture makers, these craftsmen are degenerate characters; like yurodovye, they are either

idiots or counterfeits. The novella that devotes its final pages to “eccentrics [who] created

beautiful things” began not so differently with the account of Ivan Yakovlevich, Muscovite sham

prophet. The changeable Pil’nyak is consistent on the point that beauty—like belief—has its

origins in drunkards, fools and fakes, in accident, violence, idiosyncrasy and fraud.

This heedless mingling of high and low constitutes one more way in which Pil’nyak

anticipates Clowes’ “middle ground,” meaning her idea of the potential for increased ideological

complexity in non-dialectical discourse. The reader experiences this prejudice for pluralism over

purism, so to speak, when the narrator in Mahogany not only fails to fully distinguish, but

intentionally conflates, such apparently straightforward differences as holy or profane, innocent

or imposter, victim or victimizer.

2.6 Poetics and Ideology

In Vera Reck’s discussion of the apolitizm that was Pil’nyak’s crime, she elaborates on

the un-Soviet views of the Revolution with which he was affiliated from his earliest days.22

From his populist parents to his symbolist mentors, from his anarchist sympathies to his vague

associations with the smena vekh movement, he cobbled a

mystical and messianic, nationalistic and apocalyptic vision for Russia in which Communism

played little to no role. Reck’s conclusion, however, after the complexity that she attributes to

her subject, is particularly disappointing as it reflects the common prejudice about Pil’nyak in his

post-Scythian years: “When the drama ended,” she writes, “when the romantic cataclysm spent

itself without fulfilling its great promise, Pil’nyak lost interest” (Reck 103). The obsessive re-

22 See Vera Reck, Boris Pil’nyak—a Soviet Writer in Conflict with the State. See especially “Mahogany and the Dawn of the Reconstruction Period” (61-93) and “Pil’nyak and the Crime of Apolitizm” (94-103).

70 examination of revolutionary promises that occurs in Mahogany scarcely indicates a lack of interest.

Mahogany’s themes are uniformly heterodox. At the commencement of the reconstruction era, Pil’nyak conceives an elegiac novella that, taken in the context of the year

1928, the year of its publication, is a treasury of political incorrectness. The work depicts the highest ideals of the new regime as endangered and, worse, safeguarded by the regime’s rejected: a “member of a defeated faction” and a derelict. Akim, the work’s sole Communist, is a

Trotskyite. Ozhogov, the mouthpiece of revolutionary idealism, is a mad drunk who draws tragic comparisons between Lenin and the Wright brothers.23 The narrator even goes out of his way to criticize the regime’s agricultural reforms, arguably the new government’s most painful and problematic issue, in a boldly heretical defense of the kulak. In this stunningly ill-timed portrait of what can or cannot change, where the apparent upheaval of revolution disappears in the overpowering sameness of the centuries, Soviet initiatives are wrongheaded, foreign and injurious.

When Pil’nyak’s stylistic oddities combine with his untimely themes, the effect of subversive skepticism intensifies. Trotsky attacks Pil’nyak’s work as “episodic,” an ideological criticism that rightly senses the commentary inherent in the author’s formal method. As touched upon earlier in my discussion of Mahogany and chronotope, Pil’nyak practices what might be termed a “poetics of decentralization.” On both structural and thematic levels, from his

23 Ozhogov’s curious evocation of the Wright Brothers as icons of failed idealism appears at a time when the flight metaphor was still being used ubiquitously in Soviet culture as an image of optimism. On this subject, Elizabeth Beaujour compares the light, dynamic, airborn aesthetic in early Soviet works with what she calls the “earthbound cowardice of Socialist Realism,” and the “chernyshevskian aesthetic” of stability, limitation and monumentality that “killed modernism in the Soviet Union.” See her article “Architectural Discourse in Early Soviet Literature.”

71

resistance to organizing plot formulae to his preference for provincial settings, one may observe

a hostility toward centralization. It has been noted here that his works focus, insofar as they

focus at all, on cast-off minorities, on the socially stigmatized, on family units that are in

collapse. They depict rural places and societies for whom Petersburg and Moscow may as well

not exist. “Oktyaberskaya Revolyutsiya—eto gorod, Peterburg i Moskva,” Trotsky admonishes.

Pil’nyak clearly neglects these urban centers, a deselection that has the effect of questioning the

reality of their progress. Instead, he renders the Revolution from the perspective of the

peripheral and the pathological. In one quiet and telling comment in Mahogany, the bias rings of

a romantic, agrarian fantasy when his narrator, wrapping up an account of bureaucratic bungling

and graft, dreamily concludes: “The townsfolk were looking forward to the day when the town

would no longer be an administrative center, and they would live on their vegetable patches,

supplying one another’s needs” (112). This expressed and implied antipathy for centralization is

enclosed in a formal method that has been treated for its centrifugal tendency (Edwards), its

dislocated planes of expression (Jensen), its fragmentary, chaotic and ostensibly arbitrary

structure (Browning). Pil’nyak’s works do not merely lack a “revolutionary axis;” they are thoroughgoing, structural repudiations “forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization,” in Bakhtin’s words, “which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization” (Discourse 270-272).

2.7 Conclusion: Death (or not?) of the Death Knell

In his rendering of dying bells, Pil’nyak shows a historical reality to be maximally poetic, with a dark and complex apocalyptic dimension. “The year is 1928,” his narrator stresses. The ongoing “death” of the bells, arguably the novella’s most unforgettable metaphorical refrain and 72

most elaborate treatment of myth, is pinned to this historical year. The narrator introduces the

topic of the bells with solicitous detail that leaves no doubt as to his sympathies:

[В] 1928-ом году со многих церквей колокола поснимали для треста

Рудметаллторг. Блоками, бревнами и пеньковыми канатами в вышине на

колокольнях колокола вытаскивались со звонниц, повисали над землей,

тогда их бросали вниз. И пока ползли колокола на канатах, они пели

дремучим плачем, -- и этот плач стоял над дремучестями города. Падали

колокола с ревом и ухом, и уходили в землю при падении аршина на два. В

дни действия повести город стонал именно этими колоколами древностей.

(11-12)

([I]n 1928 the bells were taken down from many churches for the State Ore and

Metal Trust. High up in towers, with the aid of pulleys, beams, and hemp ropes,

bells were dragged from their belfries; they hung over the earth; then they were

cast down. As the bells crept along the ropes, they sang an ancient lament—and

this lament hung over the town’s closed-packed, ancient stones. The bells fell

with a roar and a great sigh and sank a good two arshins into the ground. In the

days of the events described in this story, the town was groaning with the groans

of these ancient bells. (109-110))

The anthropomorphized bell, singing, creeping, roaring, falling, sighing and groaning to its death, constitutes the novella’s most pitiable victim. Pil’nyak fashions a rich metaphor by choosing an object with a past (bellfounding flourished in the 17th century before it suffered 73 under Peter’s reforms24) that resonates with Mahogany’s historical prejudice (the typical apocalyptic reading of modern Russian history, where Peter’s reign constitutes the beginning of the End, or, of the Anti-Christ’s unbridled assault on Russia) and compounds this contemporary scene of persecution.

Historical broadcasters of mourning, warning and ritual akin to the horn trumpets of the

Old Testament, bells are, in this work, a polysemous image whose apocalyptic potential Pil’nyak exploits. The sound of the bells’ violent end contrasts with the stagnant stillness of the town and compasses each day with death. From early morning, their “howling and shattering” hangs over the city, engulfing it. At the end of the day, in a cluster of images that appears more than once, their “strange moan” is evoked in conjunction with darkness, rain, and jackdaws “tearing the day to pieces.”

Through this woeful image, Pil’nyak preserves and mythologizes an unrepeatable historical moment. The bells’ removal is, of course, not only a financially expedient, but a symbolically charged act in a time of virulent, organized, official, anti-religious propaganda. In a move that is more likely attributable to aesthetic sensibility than to political sense, Pil’nyak focuses his attention not on the plight of orthodoxy, nor of the clergy, nor of the lay believer, but of the bells. His narrator mourns the bells’ death and the centuries of culture that die with them: an artist’s lament for beauty and for history.

The image of the bells provides reality with the shape and proportions of myth, but that myth is deformed. In what constitutes a cruelly incomplete apocalyptic narrative that we have

24 In 1709 after the terrible defeat at the Battle of Narva, Peter ordered that one-third of the country’s bells be turned in for recasting into artillery pieces. See E.V. Williams, The Bells of Russia: History and Technology. 74 seen elsewhere in this novella, death is severed from its salvational ending. The simple account of artifacts of sonorous splendor, sounding their own death with tortured, disfigured noises and shrieking to permanent silence, editorializes by excluding any reference to the redeeming

Purpose of the destruction. Modernity, it must be observed, is as much to blame as Soviet power for Pil’nyak who is, after all, part retrogressive mystic. In its pragmatic haste and with no regard for the sanctity of myth, modernity would execute the death knell itself. And in a further dissolution of Absolutes, modernity fractures and multiplies the End. The townspeople must re- experience the hysteria of the End’s imminence time and again, incurring, the narrator reports, psychological damage.

However, in meta-apocalyptic fashion, Mahogany ultimately questions this gloomy thesis of myth’s defeat in its final account of the bells. It underscores the theme of the present as a collection of recurrences as it delves momentarily into the town’s medieval history. The narrator recounts an act—not exceptional--that occurred in retaliation for the murder of Tsarevich Dmitri three hundred years in the past:

Тогда Борис Годунов снял колокол со Спасской кремлевской церкви, тот

самый, в который ударил поп Огурец, возвествуя об убийстве. Борис

Годунов казнил колокол, вырвал ему ухо и язык, стегал его на площади

плетьми вместе с другими дратыми горожанами – и сослал в Сибирь, в

Тобольск. Ныне колокола над городом умирают. (70)

(It was then that Boris Godunov ordered the great bell of the Church of Our

Savior in the Kremlin to be taken down—the very bell that the priest Oguryets

had struck to cry the murder; Boris Godunov punished the bell, tore out its ear and 75

tongue, scourged it in the town square together with other tongueless and earless

citizens, and exiled it to Tobolsk, in Siberia. Today the bells are dying over the

town. (148-9))

1928 is not the first time in history that Russia’s bells have suffered symbolically for human

affairs. Tragically terminal though it is, the Soviet act reenacts a tradition as old as Kievian

Rus’, when bells functioned as prizes of war as soon as they began to appear. Myth precedes us,

Pil’nyak’s modest novella proposes. We perpetuate it when we think we are escaping it.

Repudiating its symbols in literature or in history—here again appears the idea of parody--

simultaneously reinforces its patterns.

Helen Muchnic summarizes the NEP period as a time when the “urgency of the debates

created an atmosphere of partisanship, of narrow, passionate commitments that made

independence difficult” (42). In this atmosphere, Mahogany presumes to reexamine the

founding myth of binary discourse. The title, itself, Krasnoe derevo, proclaims Clowe’s “middle ground.” At a time when the color red, ever identified in Orthodox Russia with Easter and resurrection, had been utterly appropriated as a Soviet symbol no less synonymous with blood

(of revolutionary martyrs) and rebirth (of a nation and humankind), Pil’nyak’s title removes the apocalyptic color, and the myth behind it, from both Christian and Soviet ownership. It concerns itself with another red, the red wood/tree, making a triptych of these two, antagonistic semantic fields by asserting a third association, the quasi-religious tradition of creating art and beauty.

Here one may perceive vestiges of the iconographic tradition, with its easy mingling of religious and aesthetic experience (preceding the Romantics’ kindred notions by centuries), that resonated deeply with so many of its modernist descendants. 76

Pil’nyak’s novella practices a mercurial poetics that configures myth as an instrument of both stability and change. Needless to say, for the dominant cultural forces of the decade, this type of configuration lay in the zone of compromise. It rejects the rhetorical extremism and the requisite single-mindedness employed alike by avant-gardists, by proletarian writers and by emergent state literary organs. Mahogany’s petty, fractured apocalyptic representations distill the life-death narrative to an essential minimum. Stripped of its conventional packaging,

Pil’nyak’s reconfigured apocalypticism manages to convey notions of indeterminateness, flux and transience consistent with the so-called modern experience without disallowing the place of tradition, familiarity, reoccurrence and ritual.

Mahogany, unpopularly, inclines sympathetically toward the past but, perhaps even more taboo in a utopia-bound society, depicts the present as the main site of myth’s unfolding.

Pil’nyak’s reconception of apocalypticism as a narrative for a salvaged-if-imperfect present occupies an intermediate position that his Scythian period could only intimate, not articulate.

The idea of triptych that figures so prominently but so vaguely in The Naked Year epitomizes such early intimations that Mahogany would readdress with added perspective and maturity, where the third possibility of the meta-apocalyptic middle ground emerges as a forceful idea, intricately imagined. Mahogany’s tale of provincial dreariness comprises a gently wrought meditation on aesthetic, Soviet and Christian redemption, where the battered apocalyptic steed and the whole, dilapidated town, rather than racing toward the future, are baptized into a present of both mud and chamomile, twofold gift of a cleansing rain. 77

Chapter Three

Mythological Duels in Olesha's Envy:

Apocalypticism as Challenger and Challenged

Мы тоже привыкли главенствовать там... у себя... Где у себя?.. Там, в тускнеющей эпохе. О, как прекрасен поднимающийся мир! (Ivan Babichev)1

We strained toward the future too impetuously and avidly to leave any past behind us. The connection of one period with another was broken. . . . We lost a sense of the present. (Roman Jakobson)2

Envy depicts an obsessively dualistic universe, inhabited by protagonists who are defined by their maximalism and yearning for transformation. Perhaps because Olesha would not qualify in any traditional sense as a metaphysical writer, critics have been slow to take up the clash of salvational mythologies that underlies the work’s warring ideologies. This chapter considers the function of the apocalyptic subtext that, in fact, informs Envy at every turn. By connecting the dots in this loose assemblage of prophet types, destruction plots, biblical imagery and salvational rhetoric, we are able to perceive the unifying task that myth, launched creatively, accomplishes in this multivalent novella. The tensions and ambiguities to which much of Envy’s critical reception is devoted originate in the self-criticism of Olesha’s meta-apocalyptic mythmaking.

Within this tragicomic tale of one eccentric’s failed revenge fantasy, we discover a narrative that is seriously engaged in both (1) exposing the mythological basis of the dominant cultural

1 “We too got accustomed to dominating there…in our place…Where’s our place? There, in the waning epoch. Oh, how beautiful the rising world!” The edition I have used for both Zavist’ and “Prorok” is Iurii Olesha, Izbrannoe (Moscow 1974). Translations are from T. S. Berczynski (Envy) and from Robert Payne (Love and Other Stories) . I have modified these translations in some cases.

2 From “On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets.”

78 ideology, which it answers in terms of a counter myth and (2) exploring that counter myth's original manifestations and problematic role in the modern age.

Western critical literature that has addressed the eschatological element in Envy has tended to treat the ways in which the work comments on state-sponsored utopia, never identifying the apocalyptic subtext as such. Milton Ehre, for instance, proposes that Envy be read as a "comic meditation on utopia" (Ehre 59) and focuses on the ambiguity that the "original comic creation" (60) of Andrei Babichev lends to the old-new dichotomy. Anthony Vanchu discusses the Fyordorovian sources for the utopian ethos of the 1920s and offers an unusual analysis in which Andrei Babichev represents the old world and Nikolai Kavalerov represents the new. Where Ehre concludes that "ideology's loss is art's gain" (59), Vanchu suggests that

Envy is a failure because of the ambivalence introduced by the novelistic genre (Vanchu 84).

In Janet Tucker’s highly politicized reading, Ivan Babichev and Kavalerov represent true revolutionaries inhabiting a state that is philosophically hostile to revolution. They are modern staroobriyadtsy, she writes, refugees of a proscribed myth that was "formerly central, now trapped in the subterranean, illicit realm of dreams, carnival, scandal, and the non-historic world of childhood" (Tucker 16). She sees the principal idea of Olesha's novella as a concern, a la

Zamiatin, for the demise of revolution (and procreation and art) in the new world. In her descriptions of a worldview that functions to deflate the utopian pretensions of the present society, Tucker comes the closest to treating--without naming--the work's apocalyptic subtext that I will explore in depth here. 79

3.1 Dialog: Uneasy Function of the Soviet Apocalypticist

As Soviet era schismatics, the characters of Ivan and Kavalerov recall a disenfranchised

and persecuted minority that is historically defined by its apocalypticism. Like the Old Believers

that they evoke, these modern guardians of original sacraments, too, inhabit a chronotope of

cataclysm. Ivan and Kavalerov are suspect voices of dissent and martyrdom. Together, they

form a category of "otherness" that attempts to introduce heterogeneity, complexity and flux into

a world of homogeneity, monism and rigidity. Envy, perhaps most of any work that this study

considers, foregrounds the dialogizing role, to turn now to Bakhtin, that the master myth of

apocalyptic fiction assumes in post-Revolutionary years.

Reading Envy’s mythological showdown in Bakhtinian terms involves reading Bakhtin’s

formulations in mythological terms. Michel Aucouturier concludes his article, “The Theory of

the Novel in Russia in the 1930s: Lukacs and Bakhtin,” with the following comparison:

The notion of narration that dominates the aesthetics of Lukacs expresses the

same need to dominate time—that is, to purify it of openness, uncertainty, and

risk. In this sense Bakhtin’s conception is more authentically “progressive,” to

the extent that it is based not on a dream of a perfect world (completed, closed,

immobilized once and for all) but on an attentive openness to the Other. (239)

As demonstrated in the references to the “perfect world” and the “Other,” Bakhtin’s ideas easily

assume the shape of eschatalogical discourse.3 Utopianism appears repeatedly in Bakhtin as both

concrete example (“all of European utopianism,” “utopian socialism”) and symbolic shorthand

(“the utopian pretension of the word”) for the oppressive semantic unity of the “monologic

3 It may also be noted how Aucouturier, after a rather balanced treatment, employs the discourse of one theorist to summarize, not without bias, the position of both. See his article in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak (Ed. Garrard). 80 principle.” The connection between monologism and utopianism, then, is well-established by the theorist. The equation between dialog and apocalypticism, on the other hand, two concepts bound together in “otherness,” is a period-specific inference that becomes overwhelmingly apparent when Bakhtin’s anti-theory is turned on the eschatological polemics of the twenties. It is part of my premise that literary apocalypticism’s dialogizing function constituted a new development or completed the development of dormant possibilites that were activated by the extraordinary cultural collisions and concurrences of the first Soviet decade. Within, but not limited to, the context of the Soviet twenties, then, apocalypticism as we find it in Olesha may be conceived as synonymous with dialog.

With the goal of reinstating dialog, or, the plurality of experience where experience has been whitewashed, Olesha’s Ivan would besmirch the monologic utopia of Soviet society with tragedy, darkness and death. On the levels of theme, characterization and structure, as we will see, Envy appeals to apocalyticism as the bearer of this plurality, as the original, intact myth from which insipid utopianism derives. In the apocalyptic world of Envy’s prejudices, life and death are necessary to each other. They coincide in the same moment. Unlike the requisite singlemindedness of utopianism, two equally imperative points of view form the apocalyptic myth, which describes two consciousnesses, as it were, engaged in dialogic interaction. The apocalyptic "truth" is "born at a point of contact" between consciousnesses (Bakhtin, Problems

81), between what Olesha depicts as the two worlds of life, or light, and death, or darkness.

Envy assaults contemporary cultural and political forms, then, on a mythological plane.

On this subject, Vanchu writes: "Olesha's use of biblical and other Christian pheno-texts brings into relief the mythological implications of the developing new order" (Vanchu 91). The assault 81

is indirect, however. A vital component of Olesha’s art derives from the author’s conflicted

relationship to his day. Fully committed to the ideals of the Revolution, he nonetheless struggled

to find his "theme" in the new society and, with fortunate artistic consequences, that struggle

became his theme. Lidya Ginzburg describes the form that "intelligentsia self-abnegation" took

in the days after the Revolution as a "tension between an intimate bond with the old world and a

traditional recoil from it" (Ginzburg 300). The Oleshian version of Ginzburg's formulation takes

the shape of new world marginalia who are at once sympathetic and culpable. Not surprisingly,

Envy’s ambiguous portraits of contemporary types raise many questions about the novella’s

author and context. The apparently dedicated Marxist consistently portrays the Bolshevik

realization of revolutionary dreams as crude yet desirable. To what extent does Envy’s satirical

depiction of languishing intellectuals and a comical bureaucrat equal disenchantment with the

revolutionary promise? Just as his forms are theological in spite of him,4 Olesha's themes are

political, for all of their apolitical, aesthetic packaging. Critics have tended to concentrate on one

or the other aspect of Olesha, on author-as-aesthete or author-as-socio-political-commentator.

This interpretive schizophrenia encompasses all of Olesha's work. No Day Without a Line, for example, a product of a different, vaster context, presents the same basic difficulties. While its pages provide some fascinating glimpses of changing Soviet society, the entries are encased in an intensely personal portrait of the artist as an old man. I would not suggest, in this guessing game of authorial intent, that socio-political commentary is absent from Olesha's Envy. Rather, it is implicit, as distinguished from subversive. It derives from a worldview, expressed in a

4 M.H. Abrams on this subject: "If we nonetheless remain unaware of the full extent to which characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are displaced theology, or else a secularized form of devotional experience, that is because we still live in what is essentially, although in derivative rather than direct manifestations, a Biblical culture" (Natural Supernaturalism 65-66). 82

generic choice whose ironic orientation (perogative of the novel) is programmed to exploit,

wittingly or no, the hermeneutical richness of apocalyptic myth in early Soviet culture.

3.2 Chetverdak and Retaliations of the Imagination

The unforgettable Andrei Babichev, one of fiction’s most blameless bureaucrats, personifies a new world system that embraces the future and is defined by the utopian values of optimism, constructive behavior and faith in human progress. Tragedy, fatalism and destruction, by contrast, comprise the essence of Ivan and Kavalerov’s apocalyptic world, a world rooted in the past. Chetverdak and Ophelia, the respective love offspring of the Babichev brothers, encapsulate the clash of mythologies. One is material; the other, supernatural. One is in process, pointing towards the future; the other is completed, a relic of a perfect and perfected past. One is, quite literally, a scene of construction; the other wields destruction.

Chetverdak functions as a final battleground in our hero-malcontents’ consciousnesses, as a place where the apocalyptic Have-nots take their last stand against the utopian Haves. Ivan and

Kavalerov both attack this towering, physical reminder of the opposition's strength in fantastical ways. Their imaginations appropriate the creation of their enemy and remake it into a site of apocalyptic encounters that play out a variety of retribution plots. Consistent with the underground status of the apocalyptic myth in this decade in particular, the three Chetverdak

scenarios that Olesha stages unfold in the realms of pseudo-reality, fiction and the subconscious.

The first Chetverdak encounter (Part One, Chapter X) is a real, not imagined, event

within the world of the novella, but it is fair to say that Kavalerov processes it into a surreal

experience. In a scene more than a little reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Underground Man,

Kavalerov embarks on a mission to confront Babichev. But the din and dust and mountains of 83

scaffolding at the Chetverdak building site wreak havoc on his artist's hypersensitive faculties.

In the end he only glimpses Babichev, who appears to him as a soaring monument with nostrils

that swoops down menacingly and then flies away. In this disorienting environment where the

future is being constructed, Babichev reigns with ease while Kavalerov crouches and stumbles, a

"clown," he finally calls himself.

Chetverdak next appears as the setting for Ivan's imaginative fiction, “The Tale of the

Meeting of Two Brothers” (Part Two, Chapter VI). Ivan expertly dramatizes his scene with

chiaroscuro, painting the evening as black, “deathly black,” “so black,” “black as slate,” against

which glaring white lights illumine persons like electric figurines. Additionally, the open, public

space, the odd appearance of actors, jesters, dancers and musicians, the master of ceremonies

who is brutally vanquished at the tale’s end, all lend an air of carnival.5 At the close of this

revenge fantasy, Chetverdak lies decimated by the supernatural Ophelia; and Babichev, would be

king of the demolished construction, delivers a full recant with his last breath.

The final, fantastical Chetverdak scenario occurs as Kavalerov’s dream (Part Two,

Chapters X-XI) in which the disciple’s subconscious has imbibed and altered Ivan’s fiction.6 In

this nightmare, Chetverdak comes off conqueror. Not Andrei Babichev, but Ivan, dies in the

end, impaled by his own Ophelia. The new world does not actively persecute the old world

loyalists, but rather allows them to destroy themselves.

5 The carnival features in Envy have provided a popular critical topic. Some of these features include free and familiar contact between layers of society; eccentric behavior; carnival alliances of opposites (high/low, wise/foolish); dvumirnost'--juxtoposition of official and non-official worlds; profanity, indecencies, blasphemy; opposition to finality. See Vanchu 119-122. Vanchu notes that many of these carnival features were part of everyday life in Russia in 1900-1930s. See also Peppard 56.

6 Typical of his handling of the fantastic, Olesha does not reveal that the scene is a dream until afterwards. The reader only fully suspects its illusory nature as the absurdity escalates. 84

The Chetverdak scenes highlight the alternative, unreal, decentralized realms in which apocalyptic fiction maneuvers in this period. Moreover, from the standpoint of our protagonist- apocalypticists, two of the three revenge fantasies fail. Only Ivan’s plot, the plot that inhabits the realm of conscious fiction that I will consider closely below, successfully manipulates the fantasy. The Chetverdak failures synopsize the novelistic, or self-critical, approach that defines

Olesha’s treatment of myth. The “meta-,” or “novelized,” apocalypticism of the Soviet 1920s challenges an ideological context and--because it propagates openness, risk and uncertainty—is challenged by that context in turn.

3.3 The “Double Consciousness” of the Modern Mythic

In this self-critical vein, apocalyptic fictions of this period uniformly demonstrate that myth is a complicated matter for modernists. In his study, Literature, Myth and Modernism,

Michael Bell discusses myth-making, or mythopoeia--the phenomenon of perceiving the world

in mythic terms--as both a foundational and an elusive component of the modern consciousness.

First, he explains, mythopoeia constitutes the "underlying metaphysic" in many modernist works

that are sustained--perhaps unintentionally--by mythic sources: "[I]nstead of myth being the

early stage out of which the sophisticated intellectual disciplines of modern culture developed,"

he writes, "it is rather the permanent ground on which they rest, or even the soil in which their

roots are invisibly nourished" (16). Second, in appealing to myth, modernist writers are

combining two antipodal views, archaic and modern, in what Bell refers to as a "simultaneous

reference to belief and falsehood" (8). Responding to this incongruity, modernism displaces 85 myth as it appropriates it. It novelizes,7 in a sense, an epic form, inserting skepticism and irony by virtue of the worldview in which the genre originated.

As Olesha’s case demonstrates, these displacements do not essentially challenge the modernist’s allegiance to myth as an indispensable and, indeed, inexorable, organizing principle.

Olesha’s habit of first displacing or deflating elements of the apocalyptic myth inevitably precedes the act of reinstating them on new terms. He brings together myth and fiction, then resolves the instability inherent in this union by subjecting myth to the process of deliteralization. Through the characters of Ivan and Kavalerov, Olesha portrays two potential incarnations of displaced myth: fiction and aesthetics. Below I explore the sharply divergent outcomes of these two incarnations, or the implications of what may be called rhetorical and aesthetic apocalypticism.

"The Prophet" and the Grounded Fantastic

Bell describes a condition "living a world view as a world view." This condition he calls the "double consciousness" that the modern mythic embodies. In a formulation of the modern dilemma that is not dissimilar to Bell's "double consciousness," Envy posits myth as (1) an essential manner of apperception, and (2) essentially a matter of perception. This precarious combination is perhaps one source of Olesha's own timelessness. First, it pleads the primacy of the personal vision. Second, it portrays the attendant instability of such a subjective system.

7 Bakhtin’s description of “novelization” encourages our view of new apocalyptic works as original and productive revitalizations of a genre in distress: “[Novelization] is not a matter of subordinating [other genres] to canons which are not theirs; on the contrary, it is a matter of liberating them from everything conventional, paralyzed, stilted, and lifeless that inhibits their own development—from everything that makes them appear, alongside the novel, as stylizations of outmoded forms” (see Epic and the Novel 482).

86

Olesha published the short story, "The Prophet," just after Envy appeared in print. This

lesser work, almost allegorical in nature, is worth recalling for the way in which it treats a

number of themes that occupy the more famous novella. In its protagonist, Kozlenkov, we meet

a typological cousin of Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev. All three characters constitute

secularized but fully recognizable embodiments of the prophetic. The parabolic starkness of the

shorter piece serves as a kind of template for understanding Olesha’s approach to biblical myth.

We see the same empirical explanations, the same inversions and deflations in both Envy and

“The Prophet.” Of most interest to my examination of myth and modernism in the first Soviet decade is the way in which “The Prophet” experiments boldly with the idea of Bell’s “double consciousness.”

To summarize, "The Prophet" opens with a dream. As he does with fantastic episodes in

Envy, Olesha waits to identify the dream as such, conflating the real and the imagined worlds of his story for a time until he abruptly announces, "At that moment Kozlenkov woke up" (Payne

215). Prior to this sudden intrusion of reality, Kozlenkov dreams of an angel, red clad and regal, who approaches him with a vital commission. When he wakes, he feels impelled to accomplish a great act that will abolish all human suffering. "A miracle must be performed," he whispers to himself (217). He moves through the day, trancelike, and with dogged ineffectiveness. The story concludes after twenty-four hours and leaves Kozlenkov mocked, assaulted, ignored, and strangely content following another night of portentous dreams.

“The Prophet” is a simple story that contains a complex exploration of the miraculous vis

á vis the modern consciousness, a standoff that Olesha repeatedly restages in his works. Again, the general process that he follows is to first displace myth, or, specifically in this case, 87 demystify the miraculous. “Olesha does not write fantasy,” observes Elizabeth Beaujour when she notes that the word, “seems,” figures prominently in his works. “The shattering of normal structures in the world is a function of the perceiving sensibility in the work” (Beaujour 11). In the works examined here, we encounter this notion of the supremacy of the “perceiving sensibility” repeatedly. Olesha does not aspire to metaphysical wrestling, it may be concluded beforehand; the apparently transcendental ultimately serves aesthetic concerns. Northrope Frye would describe this position as typical of the ironic mode in which Olesha works. “Divine and spiritual beings,” Frye writes, “have little functional place in low mimetic fiction. In thematic writing they are often deliberately rediscovered or treated as aesthetic surrogates” (Anatomy

154). The tension-ridden, humanistic divinity that obtains in “The Prophet” derives from an artist’s self-conscious play with and acute abstraction of inherited forms.

Consistent with Beaujour’s observation, Olesha's version of the miraculous in “The

Prophet” is earthbound. The reader becomes aware of this fact from the moment the protagonist awakes. Kozlenkov's night visions, the narrator divulges, are actually dreams that arise from thirst and indigestion. His mission to abolish all suffering, so poignantly begun, fades temporarily from his consciousness until lunchtime. Through descriptions laced with mild irony,

Olesha inverts the religious tradition that his allusive text would profess, turning the so-called spiritual into a by-product of the physical: "As he was chewing on a sausage roll,” the narrator relays with some archness, “Kozlenkov remembered what had happened that morning. His eyes filled with tears. He restrained his grief but found it difficult to swallow" (217, emphasis added).

Kozlenkov may have heard a heavenly call, yet, in the profane timescape, forty days of fasting in 88 the wilderness have been diminished to a night of heartburn that one forgets until the next meal.

The flesh determines the spirit, rather than the reverse.

"The Prophet" subjects the concept of the miraculous to other deflations as well. In a typically carnivalesque upending, the prophet is in fact a fool. Kozlenkov moves through the day awkwardly and disruptively, knocking over chairs, uttering nonsensical statements, injuring himself and disturbing others. While Olesha is plainly working in a tradition when he pits God's fool against society, he deprives the tradition of one essential assumption, that of the ultimate, extra-textual rightness of the fool. Where the tradition of the yurodovyi assumes that incoherence and blundering are code for an uncommon measure of insight or purpose, Olesha's fool exhibits more delusion than clairvoyance. An epic bull in a modern china shop, Kozlenkov meets with misunderstanding and antagonism that the narrator declines to diffuse or interpret for the reader.

Compounding Kozlenkov's very human holiness, or his foolishness, is his failure. Olesha fashions an exaggerated, almost two-dimensional Prince Myshkin, consummate literary incarnation of goodness who fails, at least on the level of the novel's plot. By the close of the story, Kozlenkov fails to perform the miraculous or even to accomplish a single good act. This final deflating statement cements Kozlenkov’s identity as the anti-hero who mediates unsuccessfully between myth and modernity, and summarily trounces any lingering expectation that the powerless simpleton might in fact prove a contemporary salvational figure.

Metamorphosis of the Metaphysical: From Believe to Perceive

These deflations, of course, do not constitute an end in themselves for Olesha, whose story does much more than merely travesty the prophet archetype and its foundation myth of the 89 miraculous. With variations yet without exception, the heavy presence of parody in meta- apocalyptic works entails a salvaging mission. Olesha's deconstructions of an idea serve to reconfigure, and thereby reinstate, that idea afresh. In the case of "The Prophet," the parodies of the miraculous enclose a sophisticated exploration of the individual's perceiving consciousness.

The topic of perception as a matter of manipulation dominates famously in many of

Olesha’s stories. Transformed by love (Shuvalov in “Liubov’”), illness and imminent death

(Ponomarev in “Liompa”), or even the dream of socialism (“Vishnevaia kostochka”), his protagonists experience so-called reality as a fluid concept that may alter radically in accordance with the perceiving personality. As I have emphasized, this axiomatic modernist precept—that the importance of the individual’s vision of the world increases as the stability of that world decreases—implies an impossible, or at least irrational, position for myth. A compromised but not-yet-forsaken reality appeals to myth to satisfy the requirements of both stability and changeability. Both “The Prophet” and Envy test the “double consciousness” that this position produces in the individual.

Thus while it is noteworthy that “The Prophet’s” narrator carefully grounds his hero's vision in natural phenomena for the reader (a dream brought on by indigestion), it is more significant that the narrator’s hero, himself, fully realizes the source of his fantasies. Kozlenkov exercises a “double consciousness” as he wills, or chooses, to see beyond these naturally occurring phenomena. Within the territory of the text, as well as without, the fantastic does not go unexplained. The reader wakes together with Kozlenkov to discover that the angel was a dream, and Kozlenkov remains as informed as the reader about the limitations of reality. 90

While the reader looks on, the hero processes two choices at every turn: the real or mundane world versus the imagined or symbolic one. And time and again, though he fully comprehends the functioning of the physical world, Kozlenkov elects to perceive metaphysical significance: He exults when his co-workers bow their heads at his passing, though "he knew, of course, that it was all due to the draft" (218); he knows that his slightness, not divine intervention, buffers a stranger's blows; he knows that the folds in the cabbages and the apron, though they resemble scrolls, are natural features; he knows, too, that an onion gave him heartburn that affected his dreams and that the angel who appears in these dreams bears a striking resemblance to Fedora the washerwoman. Yet, as the narrator frankly states,

"Kozlenkov could give any meaning he liked" to events, as he also knows and does (218).

The theme of cognizantly choosing to perceive and heed an alternate reality, to prolong a dreamstate despite what one knows, appears with variations throughout Olesha's oeuvre and has produced a peculiar cast of Oleshian conscious-romantics. Awareness, if not always intention, accompanies these heroes' fanciful departures. In Envy, Ivan winks through his own diatribes.

Kavalerov painstakingly analyzes his own alternative modes of perception. Neither character departs fully from the quotidian reality against which he rebels. Beaujour has aptly noted that

Olesha, as concerns the scope of his romantic "I", is no Mayakovsky, and that "Olesha's

Kavalerov is no Don Quixote, convinced that windmills are giants. Kavalerov,” she expands,

“pretends he is fighting giants because he knows that they are really windmills."8 We may

8 Though Olesha “worshipped Mayakovsky,” Beaujour writes, he would not take this “I --or anything--so sacrificially far.” Beaujour views Olesha as limiting his art to a realm of inaction with the effect of avoiding responsibility. On this same idea, she contrasts him with Fedin, contrasting what she sees as Olesha’s “deliberate attempt to remain a child” with the “moral anger of an adult” that is felt in Fedin’s work (see “The Invisible Land;” see especially pages 146, 154, 196).

91 conclude that not faith, but disbelief, compels Olesha's heroes to follow their muses, plot their revolutions and heed their prophetic calls. Willful, creative, individual perception has replaced belief as a means to the miraculous.

Thus reconfigured and reinstated, this new formulation of the modern miraculous, i.e., myth, as a product of an individual's perception supplies "The Prophet" with a palpable tension.

“In modernism,” as Mary Nicholas summarizes the tension, “perspective is both paramount and relative.”9 A world in which perception is prime is an instable world. On one hand, Olesha's hero transcends the world by consciously transforming reality to reflect his personal vision. On the other hand, the awkward Kozlenkov shows the personal vision to incapacitate, isolate and fail. Each gain for the individual’s reality, or the reality of the moment, necessarily jeopardizes that reality’s general validity, or potential to be universally comprehensible.

3.4 The “Double Consciousness” on Trial: The Charlatan and the Artist

By itself reality isn’t worth a damn. It’s perception that promotes reality to meaning. (Brodsky)10

In Envy, the tragic task of reconfiguring the world to accord with a personal vision, a task that carries the assurance of failure, occupies both Ivan and Kavalerov. Each of these characters presents an additional trial of the modern dilemma where Olesha tests whether perceive can successfully replace believe. Ivan and Kavalerov show the two-term or double vision of the Old

9 See “Boris Pilniak and Modernism: Redefining the Self.” Slavic Review. 59 (1991). See especially pages 411 and 415. In these conditions, Nicholas writes, art risks losing its communicative function: “Art no longer represents reality as a whole . . . [and] can become too self-referential.”

10 Brodsky continues in a vein that Ivan Babichev and Nikolai Kavalerov would endorse: “And there is a hierarchy among perceptions (and, correspondingly, among meanings), with the ones acquired through the most refined and sensitive prisms sitting at the top.” See pages 152-153 in his essay, “Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980),” in Less than One. 92

Testament apocalypticist to have evolved into the dubitable “double consciousness” of the modern prophet who is, Envy would suggest, either a charlatan or an artist.

Of the many debts that Olesha owes to Dostoevsky, the most pronounced one may be the practice of placing beloved ideas in the mouths of protagonists whose moral stature within the work is unclear, if not reprehensible. In Envy, the hapless duo of Ivan Babichev and Nikolai

Kavalerov, a preacher-madman and an artist-derelict, espouse the idea of the old world and make an impassioned argument for dialog. Lonely apologists for the antiquated apocalyptic mode, their cause is sympathetic but their methods are questionable. They seek to insult the new world-

-a world in which they find no place--through art and rhetoric, subversion and conspiracy. I will consider Ivan first.

3.4.1 The Charlatan

Christianity Misquoted: Modernization or Desacralization?

"An epoch is ending," proclaims a portly, foppish drunk to anyone who will listen. "The wave is breaking against the rocks . . . The gates are closing" (Berczynski 64). Ivan Babichev's rhetoric of retribution and the end contains the most bald-faced apocalyptic moments in Olesha's novella. The character of Ivan presents a dubious blend of prophet, saint and Christ figure.

Olesha equips his "modest soviet magician" (64, 80) with a biography and an ideology laden with displaced religious references to create a classic modernist concoction that hovers between sincerity and travesty as it reconfigures the archetypal, Judeo-Christian apocalypticist.

In his article, "Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental Versions of the End," Robert

Galbreath discusses the practice of employing displaced religious references in terms of a “lack 93 of confidence in Christianity as a traditional framework of apocalyptic transcendence.” His explanation closely echoes Olesha’s handling of Christian symbols in Envy:

Most commonly, Christian elements are disconnected from the total belief-system

and used to further the sense of doubt, ambiguity or cynicism, etc. Examples of

unorthodox Messiahs, gospels, theologies, and Antichrists indicate a fundamental

ambivalence. On the one hand, there is the fascination for traditional images of

the End, both their continuing power and their accessibility as a familiar structure

of otherworldliness and discontinuity; on the other, there is the tendency to

disconnect these images from formal belief, to place them in context of

ambiguity, skepticism, heterodoxy. (67)

On one hand, by appealing to the "paradise of archetypes" (Eliade, Eternal Return 162), Olesha posits a modernity that is myth-entrenched. On the other hand, enclosing these references in the skeptical, secular world of modern fiction renders that myth as incomplete and doubt-ridden.

Meta-apocalyptic works embrace the dilemma. As Olesha demonstrates, myth emerges from this poetic play with its traditional Christian framework as a resilient—to mean both durable and pliant—form.

Rather than plot a careful, unified system of correspondences, modern literary apocalypse tends toward allegorical profusion. We have seen this tendency in Pil’nyak and a similar practice of allusive overflow characterizes Olesha’s treatment of Envy’s Ivan.

As soon as his hero enters the storyline, the narrator hastens to provide Ivan's biography in an account that plays with many of the conventions of the zhitiye. The account reconstructs

Ivan's precocious childhood, his persecuting parent, his early adherents and his first miracle. The 94 biography also appeals to the canon of secular saints. "He behaved like Galileo” (59), writes the narrator of little Vanya, whose martyr status apparently arises from his irrepressible creativity.

From his youth Ivan has been, in the narrator's words, a little inventor, a daydreamer, an improviser, a jack-of-all-trades, a creator of verses, songs, drawings and dances.

In the novella’s present tense, the reader meets an Ivan who has matured into a middle- aged sponger, estranged from his daughter and brother. The aging eccentric wears a bowler and carries a pillow and champions the romantic, “vulgar” values of a pre-Communist age. “Ivan

Babichev preached,” says the narrator of the spirited speechifying that his hero does in bars and on street corners (63). “The new preacher,” as he comes to be called, brings a message of apocalyptic martyrdom. He talks relentlessly of the dying epoch and of a final catastrophe that will accompany its demise. “We—humanity—hav[e] reached our last limit," he proclaims as he pounds a beer stein on the marble table “like a hoof.” He calls for one final, suicidal revolt of old-world feelings, to be led by himself and his fantastical destroying angel, Ophelia (64, 66).

Olesha echoes, alters and recombines canonic Christian moments such as the First

Miracle, the Sermon on the Mount, the Triumphal Entrance into Jerusalem, the Interrogation by

Pilate and the Crucifixion. In one parodic reversal, rumor reports that Ivan has turned wine into water at a wedding. “You don’t have to love one another,” he preaches perversely to the bride and groom. “There’s no need to be united.” At another moment in a bar, palm leaves lie at his feet—toppled by his own corpulent person in his clumsy ascent atop a table to preach. When

Ivan jumps in front of Andrei Babichev’s car, he is reported to have thrown wide his arms “as a scarecrow stands,” crucifix-like, or, the narrator adds as an apparent afterthought, “as one stops a stampeding horse.” And when he is arrested at his brother's behest, the ensuing inquisition 95 continues the pattern of liberal biblical quotation and misquotation. “Did you call yourself king?” questions the G.P.U. in response to the narrator’s allusive inquiry, “With what could they have incriminated him?" (68-70).

The Christ conceit that Olesha creates in Ivan is capricious and complex. The abundant allusions that I enumerate above are irreducible, and represent the line between modernization and desacralization as erratic and permeable. Most significantly, Olesha’s foundation of

Christian archetypes may be characterized as shifting but deep; the novella’s extensive and inexhaustible substructure is clearly apocalyptically figured.

Beloved Fictions: Ivan's Mythopoetics

An explanation of Envy’s two-part organization may be sought in the bipartite view of history that defined Olesha’s age and that comprises one of the novella’s main concerns. In their article on the Apocalypse and Victorian literature,11 Mary Wilson Carpenter and George P.

Landow describe the threshold view of history in the Victorian age that was precipitated by the

Protestant Reformation and that endowed the two-part structure of the Apocalypse, hitherto an

“interpretive commonplace,” with additional significance for that period:

[P]ost-Reformation historical interpretation endowed this division with a major

new meaning . . . Victorian expositors of the historical school merged this

interpretation of history with Joseph Mede’s division of the Apocalypse into ‘two

principal prophecies’ and interpreted all of history as dividing into two eras –

those of the Pre- and Post-Reformation world. (312)

11 See “Ambiguous revelations: the Apocalypse and Victorian literature” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Eds. Patrides and Wittreich). 96

Without diminishing considerable contextual differences, I believe, we may identify a familiar note in the above description. In a sense, the apocalyptic promise challenges each era to, quite literally, define itself by disrupting the imperturbable flow of history with the impress of an end and a beginning. In the Soviet 1920s, the pre and post-Revolutionary division of world history encapsulated the raison d’etre for an entire, traumatized, post-war generation. It follows that the vision-division that so suffuses Olesha’s thematics would inform his structure as well. While it may appear simplistic to suggest that Envy’s partition into two halves imitates the central division of Revelation, it is not inconceivable that the narrative structure in a work thematically preoccupied with binary oppositions should reflect an apocalyptic scheme of history as inscribed in the design of that scheme’s master text.

The juncture that Olesha imposes on his narrative, however, does not produce an unambiguous revolution in his poetics. In a mischievous modernist move that tempts with its interpretive possibilities, Olesha makes a radical formal shift that promises much but actually changes little. Chiefly, while Part Two begins with Olesha's curious choice to switch his narrative point of view from first to third person, the subjectivity established by Kavalerov’s point of view in Part One does not disperse.

From the beginning of Part Two, readers will immediately note that the voice in this second half shares most of the positions and idiosyncrasies that Kavalerov displays in Part One.

Among other points of coherence, the new, third person narrator exhibits the same limited 97

omniscience.12 Again, the switch from first to third person does not generate the expected sense

of objectivity.

The technique of narrating by rumor is partially responsible for the subjective feeling that

novella’s second half preserves. Olesha uses this Gogolian technique particularly in developing

Ivan’s character. Ivan’s dependence on the illicit channels of rumor and scandal reinforces the

idea of a secondary, underground zone as the available space for a dethroned genre. Not without

precedent, meta-apocalyptic fiction uses exile as a fountainhead for creativity, as Ivan

exemplifies.

In this paradoxical character, Olesha combines both the possibility of improbable stories

and the fact of their improbability. Ivan possesses a miraculous and astonishing biography and

(not but) reason questions the plausibility of that biography. His character personifies the essence of myth displaced cunningly into the modern age by embodying a logical—but not mythopoetic—impossibility.13 In Ivan, to recall Bell’s formula for modernist myth, Olesha

imprints a "simultaneous reference to belief and to falsehood.”

Olesha renders the oblique and convoluted course of rumor by injecting his text with

uncertainty in mounting increments. The narrator first relays unreliable information, then calls

attention to this unreliability, then implicates Ivan as the chief culprit of false information. For

every fact that the reader receives about Ivan, he relinquishes some of his confidence in the

history that is being constructed. As we will see below, the reader encounters a history that

shrinks in reliability as it increases in size.

12Kazimiera Ingdahl sees in the drafts for Envy “repeated, frustrated attempts to introduce an epic narrator (chronicler/historian)” that are invariably interrupted by the “lyrical voice of the self-perceiving ‘I’” (see Graveyard of Themes 19).

13 See Bethea’s formulation of this idea in Shape of Apocalypse xviii. 98

Ivan is a colorful personality who exists from scandal to scandal. The hearsay about him, expertly deployed, spreads infectiously. "Conversations went on about the new preacher," explains the narrator. "From the beer halls the rumor spread to apartments, crept along service entrances into communal kitchens...The rumor penetrated into offices, rest homes and markets"

(68). The narrator-rumormonger reports these conversations, calls them “marvelous, thought up stories,” peppers his retelling with the qualifying word, “apparently,” and concludes with Ivan’s questionable repudiation. In the spirit of some of his famous, scandalous forbears in fiction, Ivan in fact takes a detectable pleasure in the rumors he purports to discredit. “It’s good that legends are already being made up,” he reflects at one point. “The end of an epoch, a time of transition, needs its legends and tales. In any case, I’m fortunate that I’ll be the hero of one such tale” (70).

As suggested above, the reader ultimately realizes that the narrator's main source of information for the lengthy background on Ivan Babichev is most likely Ivan Babichev. As the narrative proceeds and Ivan’s unconventional approach to truth and fiction becomes clearer, the reader suspects the “little inventor,” himself, of concocting a good portion of his biography.

Predictably for Olesha, the formal choice of narrating through rumor, of marrying the possible and the improbable, resonates thematically. In fact, the narrator delivers a kind of a credo on the subject, coyly obscured in parentheses. He acknowledges that Ivan’s story does not square with “the facts," then makes this telltale observation: “(But if this is fiction, what of it!

Fiction is the beloved of reason)” ("No esli eto i vydumka--to chto zhe! Vydumka--eto vozliublennaia razuma”) (60/54, emphases added).

The word, "vydumka," translated approximately above as “fiction,” denotes an idea that hovers somewhere between falsehood and invention, a softer, lyrical, sympathetic cousin of 99

“lie,” most literally, “a little thought-up something.” These brief lines, disguised as an aside or an afterthought, divulge one of the novella’s key ideas. In the narrator’s view, reason not only tolerates but loves fiction. The narrator communicates a kind of pact with the reader to honor and uphold the “beloved fictions” that may find their way into Ivan’s—and his own--facts.

Ivan relies on this same pact with his listeners and winks, as it were, conspiratorially when he delivers his inflammatory pronouncements “with some playfulness in the corner of his eye.” The narrator notes this “playfulness” more than once, Olesha’s indication of the “double consciousness” in his character. “But was he ever an engineer?” the narrator also repeats (63,

65), making a leitmotif of Ivan’s dubiousness (as does Ivan himself) and licensing the reader to question any and all of the improbable biographical details that compose this slippery hero.

Intrigued and incredulous, the narrator exclaims:

Да был ли он когда-либо инженером? Да не врал ли он? Как не вязалось с

ним представление об инженерской душе, о близости к машинам, к металлу,

чертежам! Скорее его можно было принять за актера или попа-расстригу.

Он и сам понимал, что слушатели не верят ему. Он и сам говорил с

некоторым поигрыванием в уголке глаза. (Изб 57)

(But was he ever an engineer? But didn’t he lie? How the notion of an

engineer’s soul, of a closeness to machines, to metal, to blueprints, didn’t square

with him! One might sooner have taken him for an actor or an unfrocked priest.

He himself understood that the listener didn’t believe him. He himself even spoke

with some playfulness in the corner of his eye. (65)) 100

The engineer operates on facts. The actor operates on fiction. The unfrocked priest, Olesha's evocative next suggestion, carries the mixed notion of tragedy and comedy that accompanies the desacralized. This triplet of identities reiterates the categories of belief, falsity, and the uncanny combination of the two.

Fictive Prophet, Rhetorical Apocalypse

Through Ivan and the idea of a character who lives his fictions, Envy shows how effortlessly, and with what effect, one may conflate the spheres of fact and fiction. From the first paragraph of Part II, Ivan can be found operating in his fictitious mode. He laments the quick passage of time and other, supposedly serious, subjects with melancholic clichés and melodramatic gestures. “[H]is complaints were too light,” comments the narrator, “in all probability not even very sincere—complaints of a rhetorical character” (57, emphasis added).

According to the narrator, Ivan's essence--like the nature of his complaints--is “rhetorical.” His world privileges the vydumka: the rhetorical trumps the literal or the actual, and the creative supplants the factual.

The form of Ivan’s oratories echoes the content of his message. How he preaches, as much as what he preaches, is rooted in the creative moment. The delightful proposal of a conspiracy of feelings is a fiction for which Ivan needs an audience just as an author needs a reader. This patron saint of useless people and things needs followers, not to revolt, but to hear and believe him and propagandize his rhetoric. Not surprisingly, it is for the crime of disbelief in his supreme fiction, Ophelia, that Ivan charges at his brother in drunken anger:

Почему ты не веришь в существование Офелиея? Почему ты не веришь, что

я изобрел удивительную машину? . . . Не веришь? Не веришь? Андрей, 101

встань, когда с тобой говорит вождь многомиллионной армии. Ты смеешь

мне не верить? Ты говоришь, такой машины нет? Андрей, обещаю тебе—

ты погибнешь от этой машины. (Изб 58)

(Why don't you believe in the existence of Ophelia? Why don't you believe that

I've invented a marvelous machine?...You don't believe? You don't believe?

Andrei, stand up when the leader of an army of many millions is talking to you.

You dare not to believe me? You say there is no such machine? Andrei, I

promise you: you'll die from this machine. (66))

The apocalypticist pronounces prophecies of doom on unbelievers. Perhaps to offset the insult of his brother’s disbelief, Ivan repeatedly refers to the vast army that he leads, emphasizing the popular support so essential to his rhetorical revolution, or, in other words, his mythmaking.

True to his “rhetorical nature,” Ivan is the prophet of what may be called a “rhetorical apocalypse.” Refugee of a bygone age, adherent of a defeated worldview, proponent of the illegitimate, the forbidden, the non-existent, he is not ushering in a new order, but is rather spinning his own immortality in legend. He nurses the hope that his name and the name of his imaginative offspring, Ophelia, will echo in the "last couplets" of the dying age. "The epoch will die with my name on its lips," he foretells to the GPU interrogator. "I'm directing my efforts towards just that" (70).

Rhetoricized, or fictionalized, myth constitutes one of Olesha’s trial answers to the problem of reconciling myth and modernity, the dilemma of the “double consciousness.” Ivan’s final moments in the novella, where he proves the indisputable charlatan as he renounces his own myths, brings this trial to a dark conclusion. Up to this point, Kavalerov has detected chinks in 102

Ivan's armor, but this final debasing scene places his beloved mentor beyond rehabilitation’s

reach. Discovered in Anya Prokopovich's bed, Ivan delivers an irritable repudiation of his

glorious conspiracy of feelings that comprises the novella's final lines:

Быпьем, Кавалеров... Мы много говорили о чувствах... И главное, мой друг,

мы забыли... О равнодушии... Не правда ли? В самом деле... Я думаю, что

равнодушие есть лучшее из состаяний человеческого ума. Будем

равнодушны, Кавалеров! Взгляните! Мы обрели покой, мой милый. Пейте.

За равнодушие! (Изб 94, elipses in text, emphasis added)

(Let's drink, Kavalerov...We talked a lot about feelings...And the main thing, my

friend, we forgot...About indifference...Isn't it true? Indeed...I think that

indifference is the best of the states of the human mind. We'll be indifferent,

Kavalerov. Look! We've found peace, my dear. Drink. To indifference! (120,

emphasis added))

Ultimately, the champion of feelings champions indifference, or a lack of feeling. The glib

nihilism precisely echoes the ideas voiced by Russian literature’s patron saint of the irrational in

what Gary Saul Morson has called the “self-cancelling self-cancellations [that] reach a dizzying

apogee” in Notes From The Underground: “The long and short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia!” declares the Underground Man.14 Tragically, Ivan’s addressee is his most ardent disciple. When Kavalerov asks in shock, "What does this mean?," Ivan declares the death of rhetoric: "Well why harp on it? It means nothing" (115). Teacher, preacher, rhetorical apocalypticist asserts the absence of meaning. His rhetoric collapses, having proven,

14 See the beginning of Chapter XI, Part 1. “I swear to you gentlemen,” the Underground Man continues perversely, “that I do not really believe one thing, not even one word, of what I have just written.” Ivan’s habit of inserting uncertainty in his first-person narrative, of consciously blurring fact and fiction, is clearly inherited. 103 strangely, both too literal and too fictional for the delicate requirements of paradox that the modernist setting supposes.

3.4.2 The Artist

In Kavalerov, we encounter another possible course for the “double consciousness” with which Olesha afflicts his preferred protagonists. Here aesthetics, rather than fiction, serves as the modern conduit for myth.

Kavalerov uses aesthetics to subvert the world that alienates him. "I belong over there"

("Ya ottuda" 31/34), he pleads futilely from behind the barrier at the air show. It is a pitiable but iconic moment for the unlucky hero. His literal separation at this moment from the world of social weight and consequence acts out the pathological sense of exclusion that he experiences throughout the novel.

Predictably, superior poetic instincts accompany Kavalerov’s inferior social status. As unfortunate as he may seem, his identity as a non-belonging "other" lays claim, of course, to a select mythological pedigree. By developing the conceit of his protagonist's insignificance in contrast to Andrei Babichev's importance, Olesha engages the myth of the poet-seer. Ivan and

Kavalerov both constitute allegorical developments of the prophet-apocalypticist archetype.

Below I will consider the subtler and more abstract system of correspondences that informs

Kavalerov.

Poetry versus Sausages

As the reader learns from Kavalerov's point of view, Babichev occupies a world that seems reserved for matters--and persons--of weight. His corporeal presence appears in the novella's memorable opening line: "In the morning he sings in the john." The narrator/Kavalerov 104 continues, "You can imagine what an effervescent and physically-fit person this is." Kavalerov estimates Babichev's weight, calls him "bulky," a "glutton," a "grown-up fat boy," and describes his bodily functions, his morning routine, his washing, dressing, eating and exercise habits (3, 5).

Babichev is lord of the physical world, of sausages and construction sites, of the Soviet Marxist materialist universe where only the physical signifies. "Things like him," Kavalerov sums up

(4). In his material person and his social position, he carries weight.

In contrast to Babichev, a contrast that the narrator-malcontent seeks every opportunity to accentuate, Kavalerov functions poorly, or chooses to not function at all, in the physical world.

"He crushes me," he indicts his benefactor pathetically (11). Babichev's entire physical world is guilty of conspiracy. "Things don't like me," Kavalerov complains (4) in the first statement, incidentally, that he makes about himself.

Olesha’s dueling protagonists incarnate the new world/old world dichotomy that possessed Soviet-Russian culture in the 1920s. W. Warren Wagar, in a discussion (not specifically addressed to the Russian scene) on cyclical philosophies in modern literature, outlines "two families in Western thought" that perfectly describe our two heroes. The first family encompasses such forms as rationalist, positivist or materialist philosophy. It places trust in human effort, welcomes modernization, believes in the virtue and inevitability of progress and is personified by technocrats and tycoons. The second family lies at the heart of romanticism, intuitivism, idealism, and more conservative social philosophies. It is characterized by limited or 105

no faith in human effort and hostility towards the modernizing process and is personified by

aesthetes or counterculture gurus.15

Wagar’s summary attempts to chart some of the philosophical and social forms that the

utopian and apocalyptic mentalities have historically taken. The closeness of Wagar's

description to the characters of Babichev and Kavalerov highlights the strong eschatological

typology that underlies Envy’s conflict between old and new worlds. That the novella—

particularly in Kavalerov’s case--seems infinitely more concerned with perceiving than ending

the world suggests the considerable metamorphosis that myth has undergone in the conditions of

modernity.

As Wayne P. Wilson, among other critics, has observed, Kavalerov's consciousness

defines itself largely through vision.16 A peripheral social position bestows the capacity to perceive, either through literal observation or imaginative play, what few others can. While

Babichev acts, Kavalerov observes. These contrasting modes are established in the same opening scenes. Babichev moves noisily about the apartment as Kavalerov lies still, even pretends to be asleep, and describes the surrounding bustle. "My imagination follows him," he explains, whereas the man of action "has no imagination," he will say of Babichev four pages later (3, 7). While Babichev consumes an oversized snack, Kavalerov declines the invitation to

15 See page 84 in “Round Trips to Doomsday.” Wagar reads the appearance of cyclical theories in literature that coincided with late-industrial culture as an expression of anxiety. On a different but irresistible note, and most germane to our project, is his reflection that “cyclical philosophies of history are not popular in academia” because they “smell of dogmatism and metaphysical passion.” They tend instead to appeal, he continues, to the “non- specialists--politicians, clergymen, journalists, literary folk” (80).

16 Wilson notes that the etymological relationship between videt' (to see) and zavist' (to envy) suggests the notion of the evil eye in the latter. This notion is appropriate to Kavalerov, envier, seer and vengeful narrator (Wilson 31). 106

join in. "I amuse myself with observations," explains the man of inaction. Instead of

participating in the feast, he offers a lengthy, lyrical aside on what he observes:

Обращали ли вы внимание на то, что соль спадает с кончика ножа, не

оставляя никаких следов,--нож блещет, как нетронутый; что пенсне

переезжает переносицу, как велосипед; что человека окружают маленькие

надписи, разбредшийся муравейник маленьких надписей: на вилках,

ложках, тарелках, оправе пенсне, пуговицах, карандашах? Никто не

замечает их. Они ведут борьбу за существование. (Изб 15)

(Have you ever noticed how salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a

trace--the knife shines as if it were never touched; that a pince-nez runs over the

bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that a person is surrounded by little inscriptions, a

sprawling anthill of small inscriptions: on forks, spoons, plates, the rim of a

pince-nez, buttons, pencils? No one notices them. They struggle for existence.

(6))

Kavalerov describes trivia while Babichev indulges his appetite. Light and scattered in tone, the digression actually conveys much about its speaker. Kavalerov notices what no one else notices; he notices the marginal or insignificant and he champions these non-essentials. 'Have you ever noticed Kavalerov?' he asks in effect.

The topic of perception constitutes a familiar modern extrapolation of the ancient apocalypticist’s prophetic vision. Separating the Romantic modern and the modernist is the additional matter or degree of plays on perception that occupies Olesha in Envy and elsewhere.

As many readers have noted, it is no accident that Kavalerov and Ivan meet for the first time in 107 the reflection of a mirror, a space that manipulates reality. Kavalerov's musings on the charms of the street mirror form his apocalyptic manifesto for a new world:

Вы идете, ничего не предполагая, поднимаете глаза, и вдруг, на миг, вам

становится ясно: с миром, с правилами мира произошли небывалые

перемены. Нарушена оптика, геометрия . . . Так внезапно нарушение правил,

так невероятно изменение пропорций. Но вы радуетесь головокружению.

(Изб 48-49, emphasis mine)

(You walk along not surmising anything, raise your eyes and suddenly, in an

instant, it becomes clear to you: unprecedented changes have taken place with the

world, with the rules of the world. Destroyed are optics, geometry . . . So sudden

is the destruction of rules, so improbable the change of proportions. But you

rejoice at the dizziness. (51-52))

Kavalerov describes a world renewed by a revolutionary assault on visual perception. In a single stroke, the old world that lacked "miracles and visions" has given way, has "collapsed, changed" and become uncomfortable. Kavalerov requires swift transformations that leave the viewer reeling. Observing the world after a rain, through the wrong end of binoculars or in a mirror all comprise sudden means of re-rendering reality.

Thus, while Kavalerov has no weight in the world, or in the poet-prophet cliché, because he has no weight in the world, he has vision. And, as Kavalerov controls the narrative, the reader understands that Babichev's weightiness is also euphemistic for his deficiencies. Babichev appears as an individual of size and clout rather than finesse, whose verbal abilities are boorish and whose highest affections rest on an economical sausage. In contrast, the lightweight 108

Kavalerov inhabits a world of nuances that he processes with acuity and originality; his language, suppressed in the world of weight but unchecked on paper and in his imagination, flows with entertaining abundance;17 and the object of his affections is Valya, indisputable paragon of youth and beauty.

The impasse between Kavalerov and Babichev that might be summarized as the impossible clash of poetry versus sausages (or, as it has been expressed more famously, Pushkin versus boots) is underscored in a scene at the close of Chapter VII. In this scene the two protagonists, whose ambiguous virtues have ignited debates since Envy first appeared, sit together and work a few feet from each other, a proximity that belies their different universes.

Reading silently, Kavalerov recoils from the account of slaughterhouse protocol that he reads. In the following moment, Babichev explodes with derisive laughter at the verses "some alcoholic"

(i.e., Kavalerov) has declaimed to Valya. First, the reader encounters the minutiae of meat production from the lover's sensitive and repulsed point of view. Next, the reader witnesses the realm of poetry and sentiment processed roughly through the industrialist's dull prism. Babichev thinks Kavalerov absurd. Kavalerov finds Babichev horrible.

Remaking the world: Aesthetics as Revelation, as Revolt, as Revenge

Through the development of extreme types,18 Olesha casts the familiar tension of art versus life in concentrated, hyperbolic form. He depicts two unsatisfactory solutions, two polarized positions that preserve a chasm of mutual misunderstanding. At no point do Kavalerov and Babichev "intersect one another in the unity of blame and responsibility," to read their

17 As Janet Tucker describes it, Olesha divides the linguistic usage in Envy into two warring camps: direct, open, non-imaginative communications vs. indirect, metaphorical, aestheticized speech (Tucker 102).

18 Rimgaila Salys has noted that in the development of the drafts for Envy, the characters become increasingly more one-dimensional and concentrated and evolve in more extreme directions (Salys 9). 109 differences in Bakhtinian terms. Bakhtin views the divide between art and life as natural but unacceptable categories, a division to be overcome. "The poet must remember that his poetry is guilty before the vulgar prose of life," he writes, "and the human being of life should know that his modest and simple tastes and the frivolity of his everyday questions are to blame for the barrenness of art. Personality must become responsible through and through (Art and

Answerability 5-6)." Following this line of thought, one of Olesha's strongest statements-- enclosed in a work that is not moralistic in any recognizable sense, unless that sense be confessional--may comprise an indictment of “irresponsible” aesthetics.19 Below, I will consider some of the negative implications that Olesha envisions for Kavalerov’s gospel of aestheticism.

Unlike his "teacher," Ivan, Kavalerov is not an apocalypticist by dogma as much as by nature, by his maximalism and his yearning to make over the world and himself. As he nurses an embattled relationship with the society that excludes him, he seeks for renewal and revenge through superior imaginative powers, or the abstract avenue of aesthetics.

Elizabeth Beaujour comments, "Olesha asks, where is the real value, in the experience of life itself or in the artistic re-experience?" At the base of this question, Beaujour points out, lies the "theoretical dichotomy between present and past, life and art" (Beaujour 185-186). As I began to establish above, Kavalerov clearly lives (revolts and triumphs) through artistic re- experience. At one point, he derides the scene before him by literally reinventing it as a painting:

Я отказался от участия в трапезе. С балкона я наблуюдал их . . . Новый

Тьеполо! Спеши сюда! Вот для тебя пирующие

19 For a fuller analysis of Bakhtin's unity of responsibility see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 182-184. In the authors' words, "The unity of art and life is not a given, Bakhtin argues, it is a project." 110

персонажи . . . Пиши их, новый Тьеполо, пиши “Пир у хозяйственника”! Я

вижу полотно твое в музее. Я вижу посетителей, стоящих перед картиной

твоей. (Изб 32)

(I refused participation in their repast. I observed them from the

balcony . . . New Tiepolo! Hurry here! Here are feasting personages for you! . . .

Paint them, new Tiepolo, paint "The Feast at the Industrial Executive's." I see

your canvas in a museum. I see the visitors standing before your picture. (29))

Here, the preference for abstractly conceptualizing reality approaches the pathological. Life must be reconceived as art for the protagonist, who cannot, by his own confession, speak

"normally." Kavalerov exercises authority and control by remaining apart from the particularizing stream of events, which he views from above (one of his favorite vantage points), at a distancing height.

Kavalerov's habit of artistic reconception, or aestheticization, takes both benign and hostile forms. In either scenario, it provides a form of self-assertion and power for the hero who finds himself at the periphery. As the narrator moves lightly and unexpectedly from image to image, the first impression that Kavalerov's seership imparts is that of a harmless, playful lyricism. A vase recalls a flamingo, a boat brings to mind a gigantic almond, a bird in flight resembles a pair of clippers. Yet Olesha's narrative is also fraught with morbid metaphors. It departs from the pleasant wistfulness that characterizes, for example, the story "Love'" and reveals a dark and vengeful dimension to Kavalerov's artistry. Olesha's hero "is never quite able to stabilize his perceptions of the external world," Wilson astutely notes, "since he wishes both to 111 emulate and to destroy it" (Wilson 31-32). True to its apocalyptic foundation myth, Kavalerov's aestheticism takes both creative and destructive paths.

In this vein, the same aesthetic play that would renew the world also functions as a weapon that Kavalerov uses to assail his enemies. The narrator-hero derogatorily likens Andrei

Babichev to a wild boar, a corpulent giant, a clay idol, a monument. Babichev’s face and torso enlarge frighteningly; his head turns on a screw or hangs, disembodied, in the window of a car.

Other dismembering glimpses depict only his trunk, his nostrils, or his face without eyes.

Kavalerov manipulates perspective with the effect of lampooning, disfiguring and ultimately dehumanizing his adversary.

Kavalerov's dark moments reach a threatening depth to which Ivan's rhetorical apocalypticism never descends. He presages committing a "disgusting, malicious crime" and even declares that he will kill Comrade Babichev (21, 49). Unlike Ivan's rhetoric, Kavalerov's apocalypticism is not an adopted fiction, mediated by the comedic, but forms rather a visceral part of his consciousness. "I'll prove that I'm not a comic," he fumes. "No one understands me.

The incomprehensible seems either funny or frightful; it will become frightful for all" (51).

With light-handed strokes, through a sympathetic anti-hero, Olesha depicts the potential for inhumane impulses embedded in the aesthete’s distance from humanity.

By Envy’s closing pages, Ivan and Kavalerov form a shaky confederation at best. The two wayfarers, as the narrator calls them, unite initially out of mutual exclusion. Barred from the world of the future, where youth, optimism, machines, white teeth, success, health and production prevail, they come together over a common offense, a common enemy, a common object of adoration. Olesha muddies this alliance bit by bit until, by the story’s dark ending, they 112 coincide only over their basest needs. Despite their common sleeping quarters in the widow

Prokopovich's bed, they emerge at the close of Envy more different than alike.

Each hero participates in a struggle for renewal that must be conducted in the underground channels of a deposed myth but the fundamental nature of that struggle is as different as their union is superficial. Wilson has expressed the dissimilarity memorably as "the difference between pathos and bathos.” Kavlerov's distortions, Wilson elaborates, indicate

“genuine conflict, whereas Ivan's sense of rejection and his call for revenge never quite escape the realm of the ridiculous" (Wilson 36). Though Wilson’s formula does not account for the earnest social critique that informs Ivan’s foolery, it does convey our heroes’ distinct reactions to the crisis of an oppressive new world and echoes our categories of artist and charlatan. Winking,

Ivan retaliates with unsustainable fictions. Admitting no wink, Kavalerov wages war in the serious but safely abstract realm of aesthetics, a successful saving place for myth since the

Romantics, as I will discuss more below.

3.5 Dialog Within Romantic Apocalypticism

I have hinted that Envy’s thematics pay homage to the apocalypticism of the Romantics in a number of ways. Two of the most prevalent romantic clichés that Olesha reworks with a modernist palette are the oneness of the creative and destructive impulses and the internalization of the apocalyptic struggle. Each of these clichés reinforces the relationship between dialog and apocalypticism that late Russian modernists exploited. 113

Creation and Crisis: A Matter of Life and Death

Olesha's depiction of the creative process resounds with echoes of the Romantic sublime.

The concept of the sublime originally described the mind's reaction to the experience of

beholding overwhelming natural phenomena.20 The human mind first experiences terror, which is then replaced by reverence or awe. As an articulation of the basic idea that terror is revelatory, the sublime may be viewed as a corollary of apocalypticism.

The violent swansong that Ivan would orchestrate for his so-called romantic values issues from the belief that an epoch's sublimity is most fully revealed in its demise. Searching for the spurned lover, the demonic woman, the madman, the dolt and the murderer, Ivan seeks forces for a final battle that is necessarily doomed. Were it not doomed, his tragic position--the significance bestowed by the sureness of failure (or death, or the End)--would collapse. "For the last time before they disappear," he speaks of his beloved, vulgar feelings, "let them be manifest in high tension" (72). In the myth of the apocalyptic "uncovering" (literal definition), last times, or ends, manifest, or reveal.

Ivan's predilection for the sublime, a prejudice for beauty born of crisis that Kavalerov shares,21 leads him to espouse eschatological images of calamity, inevitability and finality. His

extended metaphor of a dying tungsten bulb in particular conveys the oxymoronic coupling of

ecstasy and disaster (awe and terror) that the apocalyptic (sublime) myth entails. Ivan describes

20One major Romantic touchstone of what current scholarship calls the "conventional sublime" is Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Edmund Burke 1757).

21 Kavalerov's most lyrical flights seem activated by crisis. In the wake of a personal calamity (after the airshow debacle, for example, or after Babichev beats and evicts him), Kavalerov retreats to the world of metaphor, where he reasserts control over his environment by describing it in original ways. 114

the act of shaking and temporarily rekindling a burnt out bulb. "Inside the bulb a catastrophe is

taking place," he describes with obvious delight, warming to his image:

Вольфрамовы нити обламываются, и от соприкосновения обломков лампе

возвращается жизнь. Короткая, неестественная, нескрываемо обреченная

жизнь – лихорадка, слишком яркий накал, блеск. Затем наступит тьма,

жизнь не вернется, и во тьме лишь будут позванивать мертвые, обгоревшие

нити. Вы понимаете меня? Но короткий блеск прекрасен! (Изб 61)

(Tungsten filaments break off and through the contact of the fragments life returns

to the bulb. A short, unnatural, undisguisedly doomed life--a fever, an overly

bright incandescence, a brilliance. Then will come the darkness, life will not

return, and in the darkness the dead scorched filaments will only rattle. Do you

understand? But the brief brilliance is beautiful. (71))

The familiar metaphor is almost new in his artful hands. It is an utterly romantic expression, with the important substitution of a manmade for a natural phenomenon. "I want to shake the heart of the burned out epoch," he concludes, "the heart-bulb, so that the fragments would touch...and to bring about a momentary, beautiful brilliance."

In Ivan's oratories, in its depictions of the creative process, and particularly in the idea of

Ophelia, Envy returns again and again to the core apocalyptic tenet that the life and death-bearing forces exist in the same moment.

Ivan's fantastical offspring, "beautiful, noble...genie of mechanics," life-giving female and vessel of all romantic virtues, Ophelia is simultaneously a machine of destruction. An unsubtle reversal of contemporary cultural ideals, contemptuous of the New Man of machine- 115 like strengths, Ophelia is a machine tainted with the weaknesses of man. "I've corrupted the machine," confides Ivan. "On purpose. Out of spite" (94). Twice she appears in Ivan and

Kavalerov’s Chetverdak fantasies as a merciless angel of death. Ivan brandishes her name as he would a sword and threatens his brother, "You'll die from this machine" (67). At the same time, he himself enjoys no asylum as Ophelia's creator. "I'm afraid of her!" he repeats. "She hates me.

She's betrayed me. She'll kill me" (88). In a classic, mind-bending moment of “double consciousness,” Ivan professes a mortal fear of his most "beloved fiction."

A fiction within a fiction, Ophelia is doubly insulated as a vessel of heterodox doctrine, to mean the deadly serious ideas behind Ivan’s theatrics. Consistent with his fellow meta- apocalypticists, Olesha opposes the prevailing cultural ethos of monism, ideally prefigured by

Chernyshevsky as the “elimination” of “any thought of the duality of man,”22 with a defense of irrational principles, to include psychology, suffering and self-destruction (principles that

Polonius’s daughter epitomizes). Ivan’s Ophelia exposes the sterile and psychically shallow character of the utopian myth: emasculated by its rejection of reality’s vices, stupefied by its health (Dostoevsky is felt here) and singlemindedness.

Internal Apocalypse: Myth’s Final Resting Place?

M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, discusses the millennial mindset that persisted among Romantic thinkers after the French Revolution. He emphasizes that the site and means of transformation were now internal, not external:

Faith in an apocalypse by revelation had been replaced by faith in an apocalypse

by revolution, and this now gave way to faith in an apocalypse by imagination or

22 See page 223 in Anthropological Principle. 116

cognition. In the ruling two-term frame of Romantic thought, the mind of man

confronts the old heaven and earth and possesses within itself the power . . . to

transform them into a new heaven and new earth, by means of a total revolution

of consciousness. This, as we know, is the high Romantic argument, and it is no

accident that it took shape during the age of revolutions. (Abrams 334)

I have quoted Abrams at length because of the notable resemblance that his description bears to the position of Russian modernists in the post-Revolutionary decade. The analogy is not new, and modernism's reproduction of the romantic aesthetic can be oversimplified, but the difference is one of degree or intensity. As Michael Bell observes, "A general difference can be felt in the rhetorical aura of the appeal to myth in the modern period; it is often darker and more ambivalent; as in Yeats' 'rough beast' slouching 'towards Bethlehem'" (Bell 19). Olesha's most interesting handling of the inalienable mythic component of his literary modernism occurs precisely in the way Abrams describes: his chief protagonist internalizes the dialogic struggle of apocalypse.

While Ivan, who would contend against the world, itself, constitutes the novella's loudest voice, Kavalerov presents the more extraordinary case of a highly dialogized consciousness. To his credit or his blame, Kavalerov is not capable of taking either Babichev brother’s position. On this inability, Wilson notes, "[Kavalerov] cannot reconcile himself to the world of either

Babichev; they define the limits of his character while representing unsuccessful and successful transitions from the Old to the New" (37). Olesha has contrived a triptych of foils. Kavalerov's response to the icons of Old and New resonates with Abrams' description of the way in which the

Romantics salvaged their millennial hopes "by a turn both from political revolution and from 117 utopian social planning . . . from mass action to individual quietism, from outer revolution to a revolutionary mode of imaginative perception which accomplishes nothing less than the

'creation' of a new world" (Abrams 338).

In the novel's closing hours, the myth of cataclysm and rebirth is, for Kavalerov, harnessed in the service of a consuming desire to remake the self. While Ivan capitulates under the weight of the “double consciousness,” the reader glimpses a Kavalerov bound for probable failure,23 but not surrender. Kavalerov desires to believe, whereas Ivan desires to make others believe. By the close of the novel, the reader understands that Ophelia has become more real for

Kavalerov, her believer, than for Ivan, her creator and proponent. Ivan knows that she is a fiction, is his fiction, is himself. Kavalerov, on the other hand, continues to see her in his dreams. For him, again in contrast to his teacher, myth lies outside of his own construction, and is therefore beyond his own powers to destroy. Disconfirmation, in such circumstances, can only lead to reformulation. When Ivan, Ophelia and the great dream of revolution fail him, he turns his hope of redemption and renewal inward.

Intent on resurrection after "three full days" of sick delirium, Kavalerov formulates his position in a description rife with apocalyptic imagery. Characteristically, he experiences the moment as the ultimate juncture in his life:

В ту секунду он почувствовал, что вот наступил срок, что вот проведена

грань между двумя существованиями – срок катастрофы! Порвать, порвать

со всем, что было... сейчас, немедленно, в два сердечных толчка, не

23 Initially, Kavalerov discards his suspenders that the widow Prokopovich has mended, symbolically casting off the ties that bind him to his soon-to-be-former loathsome self. That his dream of rebirth will eventually fail seems ominously certain when he reattaches these suspenders, binding himself to old habits and habitual disappointments. 118

больше,-- нужно переступить грань, и жизнь, отвратительная, безобразная,

не его – чужая, насильственная жизнь – останется позади. (Изб 93)

(At that second he felt that now the time had arrived, that now the border between

two existences had been drawn--the time of catastrophe. To break, to break with

everything which was...right away, immediately, in two heartbeats, no more--it's

necessary to step over the border, and a life, repulsive, hideous, not his--an alien,

forced life--would be left behind. (114))

The final battle, as well as the enemy, no longer lies without. Incident to this relocation,

Kavalerov's attempt at rebirth requires that he decimate one self in order to usher in another.

"Just wait! I'll die and then I'll live!" writes Olesha autobiographically, thirty years later in No

Day Without a Line (12). The entry precisely reproduces both Kavalerov's incurable maximalism and his irrepressible apocalypticism. After three decades, Olesha is still internalizing the same tragedy, still formulating the self in terms of a myth that encompasses creativity and death. These lines are remarkable for the sense of personal apocalypse that they convey::

Меня слушает Пастернак, и, как замечаю я, с удовольствием. Он слушает

меня, автора не больше как каких-нибудь двухсот страниц прозы; причем он

розовеет, и глаза у него блестят! Это тот гений, поломанная статуя

ворочается во мне – в случайной своей оболочке, образуя вместе с ней

результат какого-то странного и страшного колдовства, какую-то деталь

мифа, из которого понять я смогу только одно – свою смерть. (170) 119

(Pasternak listens to me, and I notice, does so with pleasure. He listens to me, the

author of no more than two hundred or so pages of prose, and he flushes and his

eyes sparkle! It's the genius, the broken statue stirring within me, in its chance

envelope, expressing together with it the result of some strange and terrible

enchantment, some detail of a myth from which I can understand only one thing--

my own death. (180))

Victor Peppard has expressed that No Day Without a Line is characterized by the dialogic struggle of "disintegration versus regeneration" (Peppard 52).24 The struggle can be seen as a generic peculiarity of biographical and especially autobiographical forms, forms that move simultaneously in two chronological directions: the text labors to restore the life of the past through art, all the while moving towards death.

Envy, too, operates under the same organizing tension between disintegration and regeneration, as the individual consciousness experiences it. The clashes between

Kavalerov/Ivan and Andrei Babichev are to some degree merely preludes to the more profound concern, and greater artistic achievement, of the warring voices within Kavalerov. Whether or not Kavalerov's conflicted consciousness represents a "thoroughly dialogized interior monologue"25 (Problems 74), to appeal again to Bakhtin, is an open question. Given his preference for abstraction over reality, he is perhaps more defensible as a receptacle for other, rather than others', points of view.

24See page 111 in Peppard for more on this idea in No Day Without a Line. He observes that the narrative persona is trying to recapture his youth as well as to say goodbye to the world, explaining that "restoring life and parting with life are part of same process of making sense of life and death."

25 See Problems 74. In this situation, Bakhtin explains, all words are "double-voiced, and in each of them a conflict of voices takes place."

120

3.6 Conclusion: Beyond Dystopia

Envy's characterization of the early Soviet world in terms of warring mythologies works to expose a society that has been described as “bent on camouflaging its own myths."26 In The

Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade offers this interpretation on the function of myth in a modern state: "The reappearance of cyclical theories in contemporary thought is pregnant with meaning. .

. . [T]he formulation, in modern terms, of an archaic myth betrays at least the desire to find a meaning and a transhistorical justification for historical events" (147). In their reformulations of

"archaic myths," cultural factions within the new Soviet state competed for the definitive interpretation of the Revolution. Again, the utopian myth painted the Revolution as a successful and finalized event that hailed the arrival, or impending arrival, of a new world. Apocalyptic myth, utopianism's dark sister whose day had come and gone, was acceptable as a completed, structural model of the recent past. Meta- apocalyptic works balked at this literal and closed interpretation; they stalled at the terrors and chaos, emphasized the losses of Revolution and the confusion of its aftermath and--most objectionably--subverted the sacrosanct assumption of 1917 as the ultimate End by preserving a sense of impending doom.27

In the meta-apocalyptic manner, Envy’s complexity may be largely attributed to its refusal to settle for the predictable polemics of dystopia. Kavalerov, marooned and ill-equipped

26 Billington's phrase. The full idea, which contains a fundamental indictment of Marxism, is expressed in the course of his discussion on Lunacharsky's unfinished trilogy as a redemptive work: "Such talk was clearly dangerous in a society bent on camouflaging its own myths and absolutes with scientific terminology" (The Icon and the Axe 488).

27 In his remarkable witness to the age in question, Roman Jakobson calls this "sense of doom" the common, fatal feature among the literary martyrs of the 1920s: "And so it happened that during the third decade of this century, those who inspired a generation perished between the ages of thirty and forty, each of them sharing a sense of doom so vivid and sustained that it became unbearable" ("On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets" 140, emphasis mine).

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in a brave new world, does not condemn Utopia as much as castigate himself for not thriving

therein, as the title, "Envy," suggests. What may be called the “threshold mentality” of the

Soviet 1920s, common to writers of all political persuasions in this decade, appears in Olesha, as

it does in many fellow travellers’ works, as a tragic and irresolvable tension. Kavalerov in

particular, then, may be read as an historical type, and his bifurcated consciousness, as a

generational peculiarity. Roman Jakobson describes this generation, his generation, as "those

who, already fully matured, entered into the years of the Revolution not as unmolded clay, but

still not hardened, still capable of adapting to experience and change, still capable of taking a

dynamic rather than a static view of our lives" (Jakobson 138). Olesha formulates the same fate

with considerably less optimism--with a pronounced sympathy for those pre-Revolutionary souls

incapable of the adaptation and dynamism required for the atonement they keenly seek.28

Envy, I would posit, for all of its parody and hyperbole, explores this historical position

of its characters with a realism that translates their liminal fate into complex psychological

portraits. Olesha may be credited with exhibiting what Bakhtin has identified as the

Dostoevskian ability for "hearing the dialogue of his epoch, or, more precisely, for hearing his

epoch as a great dialogue" (Problems 90). Despite the binary oppositions, dualistic categories and doubles, Envy’s protagonists are drawn with sufficient complexity to keep critics quibbling over who, if anyone, wears the white hat in the end.

The problem of the end may comprise the most inescapable, form-shaping problem in fiction, in history, and in the myths that bridge the two. As concerns ends and Envy, Olesha

28On the subject of atonement, Ivan tells Kavalerov: “Вам повезло. Вы расплату за себя можете соединить с расплатой за эпоху, которая была вам матерью” (Изб 67) (“You’re fortunate. You can unite atonement for yourself with atonement for the epoch that was a mother to you”). 122 converts a pre-modern paradigm into a purveyor of modernist concerns, translating the myth of apocalypticism into a passionate defense of private subjectivity. 123

Chapter Four

Mandel’stam’s The Egyptian Stamp:

The Warm Breath of Apocalypse and Threshold Creation

Мне хочется бежать от моего порога. Куда? На улице темно И, словно сыплют соль мощеною дорогой, Белеет совесть предо мной. (from “1 Январья 1924”)1

Very broad allegories . . . are not at all incorporeal. For a poet and his epoch they are almost living persons, interlocutors. He discerns their features, feels their warm breath. (from “Remarks on Chenier”)2

The Egyptian Stamp presents the curious case of a world poised on the margin of epochs,

crying wolf. The narrative unfolds in a time:

. . . перед концом, когда температура эпохи вскочила на тридцать семь и

три, и жизнь пронеслась по обманному вызову, как грохочущий ночью

пожарный обоз по белому Невскому. (10)

( . . . just before the end, when the temperature of the age shot up to 37.3 and life

raced out on a false alarm like a fire brigade thundering through the night along

the luminous Nevskii Prospect. (II, 156))

As it recounts the misadventures of the unremarkable Parnok, Mandel’stam’s novella depicts a feverish age whose end is simultaneously an imminent reality and a false alarm. A work of

1 “I yearn to run from my threshold. / Where to? Outside, it is dark. / And like salt, sprinkled on the pavement / My conscience blanches before me.”

2 The essay, “Remarks on Chenier” (“Zametki o Shenie”), was published by Mandel’stam in 1928. For readability, I will quote Mandel’stam’s critical prose in translation, using Jane Gary Harris, Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Lengthy passages from The Egyptian Stamp appear first in the original (Sobranie Sochinenii v Trekh Tomax, Tom Vtoroi), followed by English translations by Clarence Brown from The Prose of Osip Mandelstam. 124

rampantly self-critical, apocalyptic encoding, The Egyptian Stamp proposes that the experience

of disintegration may be translated into an affirmative and even salvational form. This chapter is

an examination of what might be termed the poetics of penultimacy as it operates in this brief,

apparently chaotic, metaliterary testament.

3.1 Peculiarities of a Poet’s Apocalypse

Mandel’stam saturates The Egyptian Stamp in images of apocalypse from the first to the

last lines of the short work. In the epigraph, the archangel’s trump announces his latter-day

“revelation”; in the final sentence, the burning sun threatens earth’s incineration. “Mandel’stam

is to the eschaton what the Homeric bards were to the origins of our civilization,”3 writes Arthur

Cohen and, indeed, Mandel’stam’s apocalypticism has been taken as a given.4 Concerning The

Egyptian Stamp in particular, critics are inclined to make passing mention of its “apocalyptic

undercurrent” (Isenberg), its “obvious intertextual link” to the Book of Revelation or its

“pervasive but by no means overdetermining eschatological overtones” (Pavlov). They have

treated specific images (the epigraphic scroll, especially) within the apocalyptic subtext but not

considered the organic, determining nature of that subtext. My focus on these “obvious”

overtones, undercurrents, or intertextual links aims, then, at exploring the function, not the fact,

of the eschatological forebodings that shape, quite literally, The Egyptian Stamp.

3 Cohen’s short review, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam: An Essay in Antiphon, primarily treats Mandel’stam’s prose.

4 Anna Lisa Crone, for example, uses apocalypticism as a starting point for her comparison between the Weltanschauung represented in Rozanov’s Apocalypsis nashego vremeni and Mandel’stam’s critical essays and fictional prose (see “Mandel’stam’s Rozanov” in Stoletie Mandel’stama). For other criticism that deals principally with eschatology in Mandel’stam’s prose see Charles Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being and his article, “Egipetskaya Marka as a Work in Progress.” See also Evgeny Pavlov, “Memory and the Scene of Writing—Osip Mandel’stam’s Egipetskaya Marka: Unrolling the Manuscript.” 125

As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the reader may expect a complex,

dialogized formulation of eschatological myth from the meta-apocalypticists of the 1920s. Part

of my task in treating Mandel’stam’s novella will be to disentangle two levels of apocalypse that

are a constant presence in his work. The first apocalypse is immanent and ahistorical. Essential

to life and creation and the bearer of the saving Mandel’stamian values of Time, unity and

individuality, it must ideally—if paradoxically—never end. However, Mandel’stam’s “Christian

calendar” (the poet’s shorthand for this first apocalypse) is “frail,” “vulnerable,” “fragile,”

“threatened,” even “lost” at moments, in the hostile conditions and cultural poverty of modernity.

This imminent loss of apocalyptic “values” constitutes the second level of apocalypse. The

double-minded prose experiment of The Egyptian Stamp that depicts both positive and negative

forms of poetic collapse generates from the concept of a desired but endangered eschaton.

As was true in both Pil’nyak and Olesha, the end-thinking that informs Mandel’stam’s

thought is several times removed from literal or “naïve” apocalypticism. Together with other

Modernists, he displaces myth when he places the world’s—or, more correctly, the word’s--final battle between the forces of light and darkness in an aesthetic sphere. Yet, unlike the way in which Pil’nyak and Olesha and other “meta-apocalypticists” engage myth, the displacement in

Mandel’stam is so complete that it remains unacknowledged or even, I would argue, insignificant. In fact, to speak of Mandel’stam as “using myth” misrepresents the order of operations, and misunderstands the function of apocalypticism in the work of a thinker who refuses to circumscribe the sacred. “Secular life no longer means anything to us,” the poet writes in “The Word and Culture,” expounding, “We no longer eat a meal, we take a sacrament.” Myth in Mandel’stam is no less than an assumption, an Absolute that contains and legitimizes his 126 utterances. So while, like the other authors considered in this project, he is capable of ironizing and travestying archetypes, while he may depict salvation as taking radical and sometimes unrecognizable forms, he does not question either the primacy or the saving power of myth.

Undermining the Soviet Eschaton

Though many elements of The Egyptian Stamp--individualism, esotericism, sympathy for the old world and ambiguity or negativity towards the new, a conspicuous absence of constructive (or construction) themes--were clearly out of step with the values of the State in

1927, it may be argued that the novella’s eschatological foundation encloses the most subversive statement. The historicized Soviet reading of apocalypse is vigorously assaulted by

Mandel’stam’s intransigent ahistoricalness. The poet adheres to a radically different view of time that does not acknowledge chronology or hierarchy. I will discuss below how the novella’s fictional 1917, perhaps the clearest example of this view and its unorthodox ramifications, inherits all of the associations of rupture, loss and transition that attend the historical 1917, yet remains an open temporality, historically unfinished and indeterminable. Not only the promised point of timelessness but the entire apocalyptic problem of loss and recovery becomes an ahistorical problem. The End that can only occur once in history, and that has occurred in Soviet history, is fractured into a multitude of ends in the novella, in a narrative that depicts ends of individual lives, of objects, of seasons, ends that are cyclical or unique, personal or collective, accomplished in the past or prophesied for the future. And not only is the official Soviet plot for history countermanded, but the main heroes in that plot scarcely figure in the Mandel’stamian apocalypse. His eschatological forebodings, as his critical prose makes clear, concern the past, present and future of Culture, which has subsumed the salvational function of institutionalized 127 religion. “Culture has become the Church,” he proclaims in 1921 also in “The Word and

Culture.” The argument carries bold implications for the day, for the same faith in Culture denies contemporary social and political forces their authority. Mandel’stam continues in this heretical line of thought:

Social differences and class antagonisms pale before the new division of people

into friends and enemies of the word. Literally, sheep and goats. I sense an

almost physically unclean goat-breath emanating from the enemies of the word.

The hegemony of social forms is only apparent, he argues optimistically, and the struggle between socio-political Christs and Anti-Christs constitutes only a shadow of the poetic Word’s supreme battle against cultural eclipse.

The Word and Holy Creativity

The formulation of deity as the Divine Word that transmutes into a lush poetic topic and that comprises Mandel’stam’s essential salvational image is expressed best in the first lines of the Gospel of St. John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was

God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him;

and without him was not any thing made that was made.5

According to this symbolically rich passage, the transforming Logos is saving, creative and universal. It is also destructive, as when it appears in the Book of Revelation. There, John of Patmos sees a vision of an avenging deity, seated on a white horse, who “doth judge and make war. . . . and he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of

5 The Gospel According to St. John 1:1-3. Biblical quotations are taken from the King James translation. 128

God.”6 While many mythologies reflect a version of this creator-destroyer dichotomy, the

dimension of Mandel’stam’s living word that is comprised “of bread and flesh” and “suffering”

(“The Word and Culture”) is clearly Judeo-Christian in reference.

Mandel’stam’s time-defeating Word is one of many entries in a persistently religious

lexicon that references his most beloved aesthetic concepts, and Mandel’stam’s religious views

and the “reality” of his apocalypticism7 have engendered much discussion. “Mandel’stam

conquers time aesthetically, not mystically, through the word,” asserts Victor Terras. Similarly,

Boris Gasparov considers Mandel’stam “not metaphysical,” and certainly “not a Christian poet,

that is, not someone whose works’ very foundations are possessed of a Christian worldview.” At

the other end of the interpretive spectrum lie Nikita Struve, Iurii Ivask, Syney Monas and

Ryszard Przybylski,8 all of whom are anxious to privilege the religious—and specifically

Christian—impulse.9

If the young Mandel’stam had, in his own youthful words, “long striven for religion

hopelessly and platonically,”10 the mature Mandel’stam seems intentionally set against

distinguishing the religious from the aesthetic impulses, which appear in his work as two

6 The Revelation of St. John the Divine 19:11-14.

7 See “What is ‘real’ apocalyptic?” in Barry Brummett, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric. Brummet contends that most literary and historical apocalyptic studies suffer a “liberal embarrassment” in the face of literally minded apocalypticism.

8 See page 347 in Victor Terras, “On the time philosophy of Osip Mandel’shtam” ( in SEER 47 (1969)). See also Nikita Struve’s article, “Khristianskoe mirovozzrenie Mandel’shtama” (in Stoletie Mandel’stama).

9 I am not speaking specifically of the complex topic of Mandel’stam’s Jewish identity here, a topic that has been dealt with at length. On this subject, Arthur Cohen offers the description of Mandel’stam as a “Jewish seeker” learning of Judaism “through Christianity—so to speak, on the way back” (Cohen 39), a formulation that Clare Cavanagh has echoed.

10 In a 1908 letter to his teacher, V. V. Gipius, quoted in Cohen (36).

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(sometimes indistinguishable) halves of a whole. When he writes that “Culture has become the

Church,” we may perceive a chronology, but not a hierarchy in these two halves. Parting with the impulse to disentangle the metaphysical from the metaphorical, or vice versa, then, becomes intrinsic to approaching a poet whose gift is synonymous with his ability to hold two worlds in one hand. In Ryszard Przybylski’s (reformulation of Terras’) words, Mandel’stam is “concerned with the phenomenon of time both as a poet and as a religious man.” As in much of his poetry,

Mandel’stam so fuses these two concerns in The Egyptian Stamp that to trouble over which one leads the other is to ask the wrong question.

To a large degree, this combination of “faith and form” reflects modernism’s much- explored relationship with the resurgence of non-rational or intuitivist philosophy at the end of the 19th Century, and I will discuss some of Mandel’stam’s Bergsonian “borrowings” later. 11

Closer to home are this combination’s deep, national roots in the tradition of the icon, where the doctrine of an aesthetic image as revelatory and salvational, in conjunction with the mystical way in which the icon is “written,” has instilled Russian culture with a notion of “holy creativity” from medieval days.

Mandel’stam’s conception of the poetic word as icon is clearly present in “The Word and

Culture,” where he writes:

People are hungry. The State is even hungrier. But there is something still

hungrier: Time. Time wants to devour the State. The threat that Derahavin

scratched on his slate resounds like a clarion call. Whoever shall raise the word

11 See pages 12-20 in Hilary L. Fink’s Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900-1930 for a discussion of Russia’s anti-rationalist tradition as preparatory to the non-cognitive strain of modernist philosophy. She looks in particular at Kireevskii, Khomiakov, Belinskii, Tolstoy and Solovev when she traces proponents of “the notion of intuition as the special faculty for attaining absolute knowledge” through Russian 19th century thought. 130

on high and confront time with it, as the priest displays the Eucharist, will be a

second Joshua.

The only power to combat the threat of ravenous time and its power to efface culture falls to the hypostasized Judeo-Christian Word. The Son of Nun, successor to Moses, called on God to stop the sun. The modern believer appeals to the holy icon that is “raise[d] high” in processional settings. Like prophet and priest, Mandel’stam declares, the poet can arrest time. He can withstand time’s power to erase through the word-icon.

Published in 1927 during the author’s period of “poetic silence,” a decade after the

Revolution and in the wake of NEP disillusionment, The Egyptian Stamp was conceived in a

“hungry time” such as Mandel’stam descried at the beginning of the decade in “The Word and

Culture.” The novella’s epigraph evokes the earlier essay’s declarations, with some changes.

Before the beginning proper of the work, outside of narrated time, the epigraph encodes the shape of themes to come: “I do not like rolled-up manuscripts. Some of them are heavy and greasy with time, like the trumpet of the archangel.” The scroll-manuscript constitutes an iconographic fusion of aesthetic and salvational functions that continues Mandel’stam’s earlier formulations of holy creativity; yet hungry time, by 1927, has damaged both of these functions.

The fate of the compromised manuscript will emerge as one of the novella’s principal concerns.

3.2 The Apocalyptic Threshold

The most critical apocalyptic figuring that occurs in Mandel’stam’s text is the idea of the sacred threshold. The threshold encloses a “humanizing” approach to time and the present that contrasts with history’s annuling endlessness. It functions, in his work, as the site and shape of 131 creation. This modernist emphasis on the apocalyptic threshold derives, of course, from pre- modern origins that are worth reviewing briefly here.

Since the remarkable promise, “Behold, I come quickly,”12 the first Christians waited for the End, the “day of trumpet and alarm”13 that would conclude this world and begin a better one.

By Augustine’s day and with his advocacy, the scene of literal expectation had, officially, quite reversed and the Apocalypse was given a frankly allegorical exegesis in the doctrine that the

Kingdom of God had been realized in the Church. In the twelfth century, Joachim de Fiore

(1145-1202) reversed this reversal, this position of safety-in-allegory, with what Norm Cohn hails in The Pursuit of the Millennium as a “new prophetic system which was to be the most influential one known to Europe until the appearance of Marxism.” Joachim’s prophecy moves the Apocalypse from the contemplative-didactic realm back to a historicized interpretation. In brief, Joachim’s idea reshapes the Christian view of history into a tri-partite structure of (1) the

Father, or the Law, (2) the Son, or the Gospel and (3) the Spirit. The first and second ages are historical, mapped to the Old and New Testament periods. The third and final stage designates the forthcoming age of the Second Coming and New Jerusalem, of which the archangel “sware by him that liveth for ever and ever . . . that there should be time no longer,”14 This ahistorical

Age must be prepared for in this world by a leading elite. Joachim’s model has been credited with originating the far-reaching concept of progress within history, the notion of historical

12 Revelation 3:11

13 Zephaniah 1:16

14 Revelation 10:6

132 evolution culminating in a glorious third age that lies at the heart of such modern descendants as

German Idealist philosophy, Marxism and the Third Reich.15

The aspect of Joachim’s model that led to the most heterodox expressions, and that interests us most here because it reinstates the principality of the apocalyptic threshold, is his articulation of the present as a transitional state. The privileged present, as Joachim formulated it, lay in-between the second and final ages, its fortunate occupants inhabiting the end of an

“incubation period” that would conclude imminently, or at least sometime between the years

1200 and 1260.16 Embedded in Joachim’s model, then, is the clash of historical and mythical time, which carries the disturbing potential for centuries upon centuries of imminence. The

Egyptian Stamp applauds this clash, exploiting the logical difficulty—and rich poetic tensions-- of days “just before the end, when life raced out on a false alarm.”

As Mandel’stam demonstrates, this apocalyptic period of transition was in many respects appropriated by the modernists. Frank Kermode calls all modernists “apocalypticists and in their measure Joachimite” because “they honor the transitus” (Kermode “Apocalypse” 101). Looking at the generation to which Mandel’stam belonged, Historian Robert Wohl suggests that “the outstanding feature of this [the modernist] world was that it was in the process of disappearing”

(Wohl 68). To be sure, modernists drew their authority from this imminent end that history—in all of war-devastated Europe but, arguably, most extremely in Russia--seemed on the verge of confirming. In The Egyptian Stamp, Mandel’stam honors the apocalyptic transitus by suffusing

15 For more on Joachim and his influence in modern philosophies of history, see pages 108-110 in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium.

16 More than one critical summary of the Joachimite model omits the crucial incubation period that lies before each age and erroneously extends the Age of the Son into the present. Obviously the distinction, as outlined plainly in Cohn, is critical. 133

the work with thresholds, figurative and literal, formal and thematic. The threshold, the novella

demonstrates with the trademark self-criticism of 1920s apocalyptic fiction, is a provocative yet

problematic linchpin for an aesthetic system.

Honoring the Threshold: From Margin to Limen

Victor Turner’s concept of liminality provides a framework for initiating our discussion

of the varieties and functions of the thresholds that inform The Egyptian Stamp. Specifically,

Turner’s articulation of the potential of the limen (Latin for “threshold”) interests us here. The anthropological limen describes both (1) a taboo realm of ambivalence and negativity as well as

(2) an active, positive possibility, the liminal “instant of pure potentiality” that contains the

“seeds of cultural creativity” (Turner 28, 44). The Egyptian Stamp is particularly concerned with the relationship between the negative and positive capacities of the threshold. Anticipating

Turner’s limen, Mandel’stam’s threshold is where (and when) life and death forces are not only simultaneous but identical. Subsequent critics have formulated a distinction (not Turner’s) between the terms “margin” and “limen” that recalls the way in which Mandel’stam develops the threshold in his novella. In a discussion of liminality and literary discourse, Mihai I. Spariosu writes:

In my view, marginality refers to an agonistic relation (between the center and the

margins of a structure, system, subsystem, polysystem, or world), whereas

liminality refers to a neutral relation (between two or more structures, systems,

subsystems, polysystems, worlds, etc.), such as obtains, say, in a no-man’s land

between two or more state borders. Marginality cannot provide access to or 134

initiate new worlds, whereas liminality can do both. . . . In my view, therefore,

liminality can both subsume and transcend a dialectic of margin and center. (38,

emphasis added)

When we view The Egyptian Stamp in terms of Spariosu’s distinction, we may discern a work

engaged in transforming marginality into liminality. Beginning with depictions of pitiable

marginality, Mandel’stam’s narrator ultimately arrives at a psalm to the threshold that

“transcends the dialectic of margin and center,” promoting the margin from the disgraced

periphery to the “honored” transitus.

To begin with, both character and setting in The Egyptian Stamp arise conspicuously

from a literary lineage that has long emphasized margins. The narrator formally introduces his

hero in Chapter II: “There lived in Petersburg a little man with patent leather shoes, who was

despised by doormen and women. His name was Parnok.” (156). Parnok is a curious hero,

“devoted to whatever was useless” (157), “somehow hooked on to the present age sideways”

(160), heir of “Captain Goliadkin” and “all those people who were shown down the stairs,

publicly disgraced, insulted in the forties and fifties of the last century” (184). His is the little

man’s life on the social margin, where he is constantly threatened by expulsion and powerless to

prevent or repair injustices. In vain he tries to recover his stolen morning coat and best dress

shirts; in vain he tries to prevent a lynching. Each time Parnok tries to act, he is ignored,

rebuffed, sidelined into the excluded space of the poor declassee outsider with a rich literary

pedigree.17

17 See pages 37-45 in Clarence Brown, The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, for a discussion of 19th century influences. The most obvious ones that he reviews are Nos’, Shinel’, and Dvoinnik. 135

Parnok’s marginality begins to gain “transcendent,” liminal associations as the hero

identifies himself with Petersburg, which he experiences as a shifting, urban dreamscape that has

descended, like he has, from Gogol’, Dostoevsky, and Bely:

[Парнок] думал, что Петербург—его детская болезнь, и что стоит лишь

очухаться, очнуться—и наважение рассыплется: он выздоровеет, станет, как

все люди; пожалуй, женится даже...Тогда никто уже не посмеет называть его

«молодым человеком». (37)

([Parnok] thought of Petersburg as his infantile disease—one had only to regain

consciousness, to come to, and the hallucination would vanish: he would recover,

become like all other people, even—perhaps—get married…Then no one would

dare call him “young man.” (VIII, 183))

Mandel’stam renders the beloved city that became his “eschatological niche” (Brodsky) as an unfinished, threatening borderland between stable states. His hero finds himself suspended in a diseased delirium, a foggy, unreliable underworld that mysteriously protracts adolescence.

“Such people never feel themselves grown up,” remarks the narrator (II, 160).

Character in The Egyptian Stamp is in some respects a double, in some respects a symbiont, of setting. Both Parnok and Petersburg are associated with images of youth hovering between childhood and adulthood, and of fever raging between consciousness and unconsciousness. These images of the fleeting, afflicted “between” restructure Parnok’s marginality as an incubatory limen. 136

The Threshold and Terror

The present tense, completely isolated from both the future and the past, is conjugated like pure fear, like danger. (from “Conversation about Dante”)

Mandel’stam sets his action in 1917 during the transitional Kerenskoe Leto, the short summer months of the Provisional Government that presided between the February and October revolutions. This between time, severed from the old world but insufficient to the new, frightens by its indefiniteness. “It was the Kerenskoe Leto, and the lemonade government was in session,” says the narrator as he begins his idiosyncratic portrait of instability, flux, and growing unease:

Но уже волновались айсоры-чистильщики сапог, как вороны перед

затмением, и у зубных врачей начали исчезать штифтовые зубы. . . . То было

страшное время: портные отбирали визитки, а прачки глумились над

молодыми людьми, потерявшими записку. (15)

(The Assyrian bootblacks, like ravens before an eclipse, were already becoming

alarmed, and the dentists began to run out of false teeth. . . . It was a frightful

time: tailors took back morning coats and laundresses mocked young men who

had lost their ticket. (Ch. III, 161))

This list of trivial misdeeds as apocalyptic omens is deceptively playful. In the next chapter, the wryly recounted cases of panic and illegality transform grotesquely into a murderous mob scene that is made all the more dark because the disingenuous lyrical voice persists. The capricious

“lemonade” interim is a terrifying time.

Terror, in the Judeo-Christian eschatological tradition, is the first principle of the apocalyptic threshold. The Revelation of St. John the Divine makes graphic mention in 16 of its 137

22 chapters of the forthcoming terrors that will annihilate the dying world. Accordingly, the transitional world of The Egyptian Stamp is besieged by “that master cooper, Terror” (Ch.IV

164). Repeated references to criminality, disease, fire and death infuse nearly every page with the threat that “all must come to an abrupt end.”

Images of darkness and light render Parnok’s world almost cinematographically, in the black and white of expressionist horror. Darkness or blackness—of the night, smoke, the mob, blood—amasses the ominous associations of alarm, disappearance and death as the text progresses. Mervis steals Parnok’s vizitka in the veiling darkness of night (I, 152). Life races forward, burning with fever, “like a fire brigade thundering through the night” (II, 156). At one moment, “winged night” threatens to swallow life (IV, 169). The lynching mob, likened to a swarm of locusts, is a murderous human “eclipse” that “blacken[s] the banks of the Fontanka.”

The narrator’s pen “splinter[s] and squirt[s] its black blood” (V, 172). Even supposed sources of light produce blackness, as when the wayward lamp spews soot (“the thing that was most feared in our family”) and its wick requires “executing” (V 172).

Nor does whiteness, strangely, relieve the terror. White in the novella is the color of nightmare, burning and the supernatural that occurs as a disturbing deviation from blackness.

Most terrifying are Petersburg’s white nights:

Белая ночь . . . добрела до Царского Села. Дворцы стояли испуганно-белые,

как шелковые куколи. . . . Дальше белеть было некуда: казалось—еще

минутка и все наваждение расколется, как молодая простокваша. (29-30)

(The white night . . . arrived at Tsarskoe Selo. The palaces stood about, white

with fright, like silken cowls. . . . Any further whiteness was unthinkable; one 138

minute more, it seemed, and the entire hallucination would break into pieces like

fresh bonnyclabber. (VI, 176))

A night without darkness, a sun without day or warmth, frighten by their unnatural or supernatural appearance. The phenomenon of the white night, when the sun hangs above the horizon and illumines a world that resembles neither day nor night, exemplifies the threshold in all of its frightful indeterminacy.

In the interim, then, of the Kerenskoe Leto, in the city of Petersburg, and in the season of white nights, Mandel’stam creates a setting that is thrice liminal and thoroughly fraught with fear.

Liminal Conditions of Prophecy, of Poetry

In what has become a renowned case among metaliterary takeovers, Mandel’stam’s novella gradually shifts its focus from narration to narrator. Apocalyptic liminality characterizes this second focus, we will see, even more profoundly than the first. As a prelude to our discussion of The Egyptian Stamp’s obsession with the narrative act, it is worth reviewing how the idea of the threshold is traditionally inscribed in the prophetic act.

Suspending the prophet between heaven and earth, Judeo-Christian apocalyptic provides a model of creativity as a transcendental phenomenon that occurs outside of the creating self, or at least at the very edge of consciousness. Only in this liminal place of free association can the word find utterance. The cliche of the poet-revelator’s liminal position on the edge of this world, receiving secret knowledge from the world beyond, surely comprises one of most ineradicable

“theological” debts in secular, modern literature. In “meta-apocalyptic” works, thresholds of consciousness abound, usually with the addition of a palpable ironic dimension. One thinks 139

immediately, for example, of Vaginov’s stale Symbolists in Goatsong, particularly of the

Unknown Poet who seeks the between with the help of narcotics, or of Olesha’s Shuvalov

(“Love”) who revels in the moment just before falling asleep, between consciousness and

unconsciousness, when his perceptions become, he considers, revelatory.

If, to use anthropologist Edmund Leach’s words, “mediation between opposites is

precisely what religious thinking is all about,”18 it is also what poetic thinking is all about.

Mandel’stam reiterates this concept of the poet in his essay on Francois Villon:

The lyric poet is a hermaphrodite by nature, capable of limitless fissions in the

name of his inner dialogue. . . . What a varied selection of enchanting duets: the

aggrieved and the comforter, the mother and child, the judge and the judged.

Each of Mandel’stam’s “duets” named here carefully pairs a party that is in a position to act with

a party that is acted upon, echoing the archetypal duet of divine and human. The poet, himself,

belongs neither here nor there. He is a mediating non-being in a negative space where polarities

intersect. Anna Lisa Crone, in an eloquent discussion of the binarism that suffuses Petersburg

mythology and The Egyptian Stamp, gives this description of the intersection of opposites where

the poet resides and where creativity occurs:

In fact art exists only as a system in tension: the clear dominance of either pole

destroys itself and its opposite, because it needs its opposite to exist. At the crux

or center of these opposite forces will be a hollow point.19

18 From Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth, quoted by Bethea in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (46).

19 See “Echoes of Nietzsche and Mallarme in Mandel’stam’s Metapoetic ‘Petersburg.’” Crone analyzes post- Revolutionary Petersburg as it came to “stan[d] more and more for the work of art” and discusses its historical binariness as an analogue for art’s “fragile mode of existence.” 140

Crone’s “hollow point” at the intersection of opposites echoes Turner’s “interval” at the “limen,

when the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun,

an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (Turner 44).

The apocalypticist-artist, then, operates in spacetime, to borrow creatively here from the

quantum concept of a four-dimensional continuum that exists in no earthly recognizable space or

time.

The Attraction of Terror

It follows that “the coordinate of time and space,” according to the narrator in The

Egyptian Stamp, is “Terror” (VIII, 188). Like the threshold of the apocalyptic plot, the prophetic limen, too, is terrifying. Here, in the terror that must plague both visionary and vision, we witness the interpenetration of author and text at the archetypal level. The prophet-poet’s terrifying revelatory experience reiterates the masterplot of his prophecy: death occasions rebirth.

And the terror of spacetime (the beloved “void” or “abyss” of the romantics) is desirable

(the leading principle of the romantic sublime), for it is the authenticator of holy creativity. The would-be creator, in other words, hopes for its courtship. “Terror takes me by the hand and leads me,” Mandel’stam’s narrator exclaims deliriously in the work’s closing paragraphs. “I love terror, I respect it. I almost said, ‘With it, I’m not terrified!’” (188). Terror is the apocalypse that must afflict the imaginative consciousness, the stimulus of impending calamity, if the artist is to utter a new word. Put another way, by making crisis the source of creation, the apocalyptic plot not only justifies (rationalizes) but sanctifies (makes holy) terror—and, by extension, calamity and suffering. 141

We see this idea working in The Egyptian Stamp through references to death, the ultimate

terror, that invariably accompany images of art, creation and revelation. In one remarkable

passage, the allure of the horrifying is vividly depicted in the image of a queue that snakes

unhurriedly towards the thing that it fears. Here, the narrator summarizes his fatal attraction for

Petersburg in his guilty affinity for the theater that also terrifies him:

Ведь и я стоял в той страшной терпеливой очереди, которая подползает к

желтому окошечку театральной кассы . . . Ведь и театр мне страшен, как

курная избя, как деревенская банькя, где совершалось зверское убийство

ради полушубка и валеных сапог. Ведь и держусь я одним Петербургом—

концертным, желтым, зловещим, нахохленным, зимним. (25)

(I, too, have stood in that terrifying, patient line which creeps toward the yellow

window of the box office . . . And I am terrified by the theater as by a hut with no

chimney, as by a village bathhouse where a bestial murder was committed for the

sake of a half-length coat and a pair of felt boots. I, too, am sustained by

Petersburg alone--the Petersburg of concerts, yellow, ominous, sullen, and wintry.

(V, 171))

The site of artistic production recalls the scene of a crime for, in the Janus-like nature of apocalypse, creation does not occur without destruction. When Mandel’stam’s narrator takes up his pen “to remove the film from the Petersburg air,” it is with the consciousness that the unveiling (again, root meaning of “apocalypse”) act of writing is laced with mortal consequences: “The pen that removes this film is like a doctor’s teaspoon—contaminated with a touch of diptheria.” (VIII, 184). The image of lethal revelation employed here, in summary, 142 derives from a thoroughly reversible formula: Creation/revelation is deadly, and death is creative/revelatory. From Mandel’stam’s earliest critical essays, death appears as the “source” and the “teleological cause” of creativity and the artist’s death as the “supreme act of his creative activity” (“Pushkin and Scriabin” 90). Death animates—generates meaning—by closing or making a whole of life. It is essential to the three principles whose potential disappearance concerns Mandel’stam the most: unity, individuality and time. This triptych, to which I will return later, contains the three “Hellenizing” principles of “Christian art” that are under assault by “Buddhism and theosophy,” as Mandel’stam synthesizes his apocalyptic vision for Culture.

3.3 Beyond Theme: Threshold Poetics

Between Genres

The second half of The Egyptian Stamp becomes less and less describable by traditional generic definitions and boundaries as character, setting and plot devolve into the narrator’s concern for himself and his creative act. In the process, the apocalyptic threshold, expressed thematically up to this point (namely, through character, setting and plot), reveals itself as a potential structural principle. Gary Saul Morson discusses what he calls “threshold art” in relation to Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer in a way that closely describes the seemingly disintegrating poetics of The Egyptian Stamp. Mandel’stam’s highly experimental work requires that one, as Morson instructs in reference to Dostoevsky, “read between the genres” in order to approach it productively. Generic liminality constitutes one dimension of the threshold structure in The Egyptian Stamp. The novella sits not simply between prose and verse, but, more specifically, between autobiographical prose and verse. This combination brings together elements of a maximally open and a maximally closed genre. 143

Mandel’stam wrote The Egyptian Stamp, again, during a renowned five year stretch in which he ceased to write poetry. Completed three years after The Noise of Time, the novella has been commonly viewed as a logical continuation of the earlier, poetical autobiography.20 The

Egyptian Stamp is of course even less autobiographical, formally speaking, than the work it follows. It is, rather, an imaginative documentation of the assumption of the autobiographical mode, and of the poetic—and personal—effects of that achievement of self-consciousness.

As the narrator in The Egyptian Stamp begins more and more to assert his lyrical “I” over the story he would tell, he shows a diminished ability to differentiate life from art. “Everything seems to me a book,” he confesses. Along with this growing tendency to aestheticize reality is the decreased ability to differentiate himself from his hero. He feels himself merging with his character, drawing helplessly closer to the autobiographical mode. He raises a weak protest:

“Lord! Do not make me like Parnok! Give me the strength to distinguish myself from him,” cries a voice that oscillates between author and hero. The novella’s persistent liminal play continually violates the zone that separates creator and created, divine and human.

Apocalypse and Autobiography

The connection between apocalypse and autobiography, a fully modernist and metaliterary connection that Mandel’stam’s text asks one to consider, can in fact be found implicitly as early as Augustine. Not coincidentally, it appears, this father-of-sorts of autobiography was also responsible to a large degree for the tradition of applying apocalyptic prophecy to the individual spirit. Augustine, who had no interest in hastening the literal,

20 In her dissertation, Serafima Roll calls both works “poetic autobiographies” and cites Jane Gary Harris’ definition of autobiography as a “mode” that mediates between the sources (extra-textual context or the author’s experience) and the pattern (the new text) of meaning. See Harris, Autobiographical Statements in 20th Century Literature. See also The Unmediated Vision by Geoffrey Hartman (pages 172-173), which Harris cites. 144

historical end of time, preached a personalized, internalized apocalypse in City of God. In this

not insignificant shift in emphasis, a pattern for History becomes an analysis of the Self. And in

many respects it is the subject of the divided consciousness, specifically resulting from the

process of absorbing both Christ and Anti-christ into the self, that informs Augustine’s

Confessions.21 Thus literary apocalypse and autobiography have a long-standing relationship

that The Egyptian Stamp reiterates. 22

Modernists eager to “honor the transitus” embraced the liminality of the autobiographical

mode—the partial conversion of the self into art that Mandel’stam refers to as “the dual truth of

invention and memory” (“Literary Moscow”) and that Jane Gary Harris calls the “ultimate mode

of literary perception for this [the 20th] century.” And if art is destructive, risky or murderous, autobiography is frankly suicidal. Or, perhaps more perverse, suicide is autobiographical.

Mandel’stam’s narrator implies as much as he recounts his cultural coming-of-age:

Где различие между книгой и вещью? Я не знаю жизни: мне подменили ее

еще тогда, когда я узнал хруст мысьяка на зубах у черноволосой

французской любоницы, младшей сестры нашей гордой Анны. (34)

(Where is the difference between a book and a thing? I do not know life: they

switched it on me as long ago as the time when I recognized the crunch of arsenic

21 See M.H. Abrams’ article, “Apocalypse: Theme and Romantic Variations,” in The Revelation of St. John the Divine (Ed. Harold Bloom) for further discussion on Augustine and “other spiritualizers of biblical history and prophecy.”

22 The two strains of modern autobiography that critics generally identify are the confessional form (more psychological and subjective) and the memoir form (more concerned with external forces and with locating the self in history proper). Harris sees these two strains as merging more and more in the 20th century, “as confession blends with or develops into witness.” See pages 14-15 in Autobiographical Statements. For Harris’ own essay specifically on Mandel’stam, see Chapter 4, “Autobiography and History: Osip Mandelstam’s Noise of Time.” 145

between the teeth of the amorous French brunette, the younger sister of our proud

Anna. (VII, 180))

According to this richly allusive avowal, art and life began to blur from the time that the narrator

came to know the possibility of suicide. The self-inflicted deaths of Emma Bovary and Anna

Karenina introduced the possibility of actually crafting one’s own end, of autobiography.

Autobiography is potentially suicidal in Mandel’stam primarily for its intercessory

nature. The self is the mediator between life and art, experience and interpretation. In one of

The Egyptian Stamp’s most unforgettable passages, Mandel’stam’s narrator describes the self-

sacrifice of his intercessory act in euphoric tones:

Какое наслаждение для повествователя от третьего лица перейти к первому!

Это все равно, что после мелких и неудобных стаканчиков-наперстков вдруг

махнуть рукой, сообразить и быпить прямо из-под крана холодной сырой

воды. (41)

(What a pleasure for the narrator to switch from the third person to the first! It is

just as if, after having had to drink from tiny inconvenient thimble-sized glasses,

one were suddenly to say to the devil with them, to get hold of oneself, and drink

cold, unboiled water straight out of the faucet. (VIII, 188))

In a formulation that applies particularly well to Mandel’stam, Harris describes the moment of embarking on the “autobiographical act,” the moment that the narrator depicts above, as a juncture with immense moral potential. “It is at this juncture,” she writes, “that the writer’s choice of form may coincide with a moral or even prophetic act,” particularly in the case that

“the writer’s encounter with his culture or with his epoch is confrontational.” (Autobiographical 146

Statements 15). Just as Mandel’stam’s imagery is most emphatically not a “winking” symbolist

correspondence that denies reality in favor of realoria, “earmarked [in] advance for liturgical use

alone” (“On the Nature of the Word”), autobiography as the poet approaches it is not only a

fatal/fateful undertaking in an abstract, metaphorical or aesthetic realm. Mandel’stam turned to

the autobiographical form during the half decade of spiritual depression that somehow

suppressed his ability to make, or (closer to his conception) mediate the birth of, verses. It is

consonant with these biographical details that Nadezhda Mandel’stam takes a dim view of The

Egyptian Stamp, explaining it as a product of the poet’s period of self-doubt and accompanying psychological fragility, a prose “exercise” that failed “to clear the path for poetry.”

The Unapologetic Impress of Poetry

This idea of prose as a form of collapse and capitulation for the poet is a familiar and perhaps not indefensible prejudice. However, viewed from the position of more years and less intimacy, the loss of poetic confidence that may lie at the heart of The Egyptian Stamp is not so

clearly injurious or unproductive and, furthermore, not so clearly lost. The “switch” to prose that

occurs in The Egyptian Stamp, despite the great divide that Mandel’stam as theorist draws

between literary forms, cannot by any means be considered a complete departure. Combining

with the consummately self-referential, open and dialogized formal elements of autobiography in

The Egyptian Stamp is the ineffaceable poet’s voice. The verse aspect of the novella asserts

itself on every line. Poetry, Bakhtin defines negatively in contrast to novelistic discourse, is a

“unitary and monologically sealed-off utterance.” Mandel’stam strips the same idea of

authoritative poetic speech of its negative connotations when he defines poetry as the “precious

consciousness of one’s own rightness.” He repeats this definition three times in his early critical 147

essay, “On the Addressee,” where he censures Balmont for “seek[ing] to vindicate himself,

offering an apology,” which is “Unforgivable! Intolerable for a poet! The only thing which

cannot be forgiven.” To re-read Nadezhda Iakovlevna’s formulation only slightly, then,

“rightness” and self-doubt interact on the generic level in The Egyptian Stamp, which encases its

autobiographical prose in the “unapologetic” discourse of verse.23 Poetic prose,24 in

Mandel’stam, embodies an attempt to reflect the dual process of composition (verse) and

disintegration (narrative) that constitutes his apocalyptic vision for Culture.

Threshold as Form: The Shape of the Peripheral

The Egyptian Stamp emphasizes its generic liminality. “Threshold art foregrounds its

thresholds, makes the peripheries of the stories the work’s center,” Morson writes (Boundaries of

Genre 65). Threshold works of literature “dramatize the midpoint of the creative process” (68)

by drawing attention to the act of writing and, in some cases, paradoxically rendering the

completed text as an unfinished “work in progress” (67). 25 The text of The Egyptian Stamp is

gradually overtaken by the lyrical asides of its renegade narrator who eventually all but abandons

his original story. And in a logical, if disconcerting, development of such rampant

23I acknowledge that Bakhtin’s attitude toward poetry is more complex than the idea that poetry is merely a devalued foil for novelistic discourse. In his book, Ethics and Dialogue (2000), Michael Eskin looks closely at the ambiguities in Bakhtin’s apparently negative appraisal of poetry and makes an excellent case for dialogicity in Mandel’stam. Eskin employs Bakhtin’s own arguments to assert the polyphonic capacity (and therefore, he argues, metalinguistic superiority) of poetic language.

24 For detailed discussions on the verse aspects of The Egyptian Stamp see Dmitrii M. Segal’s article, “Voprosy poeticheskoi organizatsii semantiki v proze Mandel’shtama;” and Charles Isenberg, Substantial Proofs of Being, pages 84-86 and 106-120.

25 Isenberg also cites Morson’s relevance to Mandel’stam’s novella in his article, “Egipetskaya Marka as a Work in Progress,” suggesting that Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, “although a work on a vastly larger scale,” anticipates Mandel’stam’s work in “its emphasis on process, its variegation, and its apocalyptic undercurrent” (See page 229 in Substantial Proofs).

148 metaliterariness, the work proposes that these side comments on the creative process are the work of art. I have suggested that writers of apocalyptic fiction in the Soviet 1920s capitalize on the myth’s “dissident” tradition as they employ it to epitomize the other. Apocalyptic codes in these novels appear in ironized forms that derive from non-central sources such as, for example, the messenger or prophet-revelator who hails from and functions outside of legitimate social structures. The runaway narrative in The Egyptian Stamp experiments with the formal equivalent of the other.

The threshold, then, describes not only the site, but the very stuff of creation. Chapter

Five records the narrator’s cathartic confrontation with the margin-as-threshold. Would-be margins compose this series of fractive images, a paean to gaps, ruptures, fringe, drafts, scribbling, and seams:

Я не боюсь бессвязности и разрывов.

Стригу бумагу длинными ножницами.

Подклеиваю ленточки бахромкой.

Рукопись—всегда буря, истрепанная, исклеванная

Она—черновик сонаы.

Марать—лучше, чем писать.

Я не боюсь швов и желтизны клея. (25)

(I am not afraid of incoherence and gaps.

I shear the paper with long scissors.

I paste on ribbons as fringe.

A manuscript is always a storm, worn to rags, torn by beaks. 149

It is the first draft of a sonata.

Scribbling is better than writing.

I do not fear seams or the yellowness of the glue. (V, 172))

In this catechism of marginal creation, the narrator embraces the between of borders, digressions,

lacunae, the peripheral or non-essential creative ingredients. Ultimately, the reader is bluntly

directed to destroy the manuscript and to save the margin, with the final chapter’s promise that

“these secondary and involuntary creations of your fantasy will not be lost in the world” (VIII,

187). Proceeding from both the margin of consciousness and the margin of the artifact, the new

prose is doubly liminal.

In the same atmosphere, then, in which Bakhtin writes of the essential “centrifugal

[dialogizing] forces of language,” Mandel’stam’s narrator makes a case for the “secondary”

constituents of narrative. The Egyptian Stamp experiments with the premise of Mandel’stam’s

early essay “The End of the Novel.” Here, the poet calls for—but does not actually identify--a

new organizing principle for prose. He writes that the devalued status of human biography in

history has destabilized the traditional compositional center of the novel. Fabula and

psychology, the novel’s two key components, diminish together with the diminishing power of

the personality to act in time. Where the Parnoks of the 19th century inhabited merely the social margin, Mandel’shtam’s modern malen’kii chelovek also inhabits the compositional margin. So, indeed, do all the characters, as well as the “central” action, of his novella. Psychology and fabula disintegrate and the whole of the work forms itself from digressions, or from the threshold or between-space of composition. 150

The exceptional or secondary, in theorist Virgil Nemoianu’s words, “circumscribe[s] the

essence of existence” and is the closest means of approaching that essence (A Theory of the

Secondary xiv). In The Egyptian Stamp, the existential implications of Mandel’stam’s “new prose” frightens his narrator, as in this marvelous conflation of art and life:

Страшно подумать, что наша жизнь—это повесть вез фабулы и героя,

сделланная из пустоты и стекла, из горячего лепета одних отступлений, из

петербургского инфлуэнцного бреда. (40)

(It is terrifying to think that our life is a tale without a plot or hero, made up out of

desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions, out of the

delirium of the Petersburg influenza. (VIII 187))

The new organizing principle for fiction as well as for “our life” that The Egyptian Stamp proposes and demonstrates is a negative principle. And this anti-principle manifests itself through chance as well as through violence that the narrator is compelled to act out, no matter the self-inflicted cost: “I confess,” he writes, “I am unable to endure the quarantine and, smashing thermometers, through the contagious labyrinth I boldly stride, behung with subordinate clauses like happy bargain buys” (VIII, 187). What the narrator refers to as his “dear prosaic delirium,” the new mode and material of marginal creation that is born of the hectic modern condition diagnosed in “The End of the Novel,” may be characterized as chaotic, deadly and irresistible.

It must also be noted that, in addition to its fatal attractiveness, threshold creation is a thing of lightness and ephemeral beauty that may be likened to the air that the deafmutes

“weave” into the “language of swallows and panhandlers” in Chapter V. Mandel’stam makes abundant connections between air, or space, and creativity—metaphors that describe three- 151 dimensional cousins of the manuscript’s margin. Even in his most pessimistic projections for the poetic word, “the air trembles with similes” (from “The Horseshoe Finder” 1923). The air is the kingdom of the blessed bees and wasps that frequently appear in lyrics as either ministers or actual incarnations of the word. “They say the cause of revolution is hunger in the interplanetary spaces,” Mandel’stam speculates in “The Word and Culture,” concluding enigmatically: “One has to sow wheat in the ether.”26 One staves off cosmic hunger by sowing, or scattering, wheat—the bread of life, the word--in the ether, the purest, uppermost layer of air in classical mythology, the conductive matter within and between all things in the science of the day.

Elsewhere in Mandel’stam, the “fortified ether” is “Christianity’s cold mountain air,” the

“wonder-struck empty spaces” from which “grace descends” (No. 106). Ether fills the seeming

“spaces” between hills and planets and composes a miraculous, fecund substance that hosts and cultivates the creative word.

The experimental Egyptian Stamp is anticipated in Mandel’stam, then, by a manifest affection for apparent negative space, the perception of which is crucial to understanding the unity of a work of art. Works must be “developed,” Mandel’stam prescribes in 1915 for

Chaadaev’s elliptical Philosophical Letters, “as if they were a negative photographic plate.” The missing passages will tell the true story. The Egyptian Stamp dramatizes this injunction. The missing parts that the poet would supply extra-textually for the Letters are included within and eventually dominate the narrative of his novella.

26 See page 240 in Omry Ronen’s An Approach to Mandel’stam for an inventory of the likely classical, Christian and modern-theosophical sources behind Mandel’stam’s image of sowing wheat. 152

3.4 Time vs. Progress in History and in Narrative

The centrifugal poetics of The Egyptian Stamp lead one to Mandel’stam’s somewhat esoteric formulations of unity and time. Unity for the poet is the birthright of the West; the determining attribute of “select minds”; history’s higher, synthesizing principle. Unity is antithetical to progress; does not require contiguity; and “cannot be created, invented, or learned.” The difficult, perhaps questionable, unity that obtains in The Egyptian Stamp is outlined and celebrated by Mandel’stam more than a decade earlier in the Chaadaev essay. In this document, the poet’s directive for correctly understanding the “form and spirit” of

Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters appears as a lyrical outburst identical in tone to passages in his later novella:

Precious scraps! Fragments that end precisely where continuity is most wanted . .

.what is this: the outline of a plan or its fulfillment? In vain the conscientious

researcher sighs over what is lost, over missing links: they, too, never existed,

they were never lost—the fragmentary form of the Philosophical Letters is

internally substantiated. (emphasis mine)

By the time he writes The Egyptian Stamp, Mandel’stam not only defends but privileges the apparently fragmentary form. This anti-form allows him to give full, experimental reign to the idea of an “internally substantiated” unity that he applies equally to narrative, history and time.

Mandel’stamian time, or time “correctly” conceived, is key to understanding

Mandel’stamian unity. The poet’s hostility toward linear time, a hostility that is a constant in all that he wrote, is formulated famously in “On the Nature of the Word.” Here, he echoes the leitmotif of many modernists when he expresses concern over an accelerating historical process 153

that brings ceaseless change. Linear time is also known as “progress,” a categorically negative

phenomenon in Mandel’stam that opposes unity. In the Chaadaev essay, published before 1917,

Mandel’stam summarily rejects the utopian dream on the basis of its philosophical attachment to

progress which, he maintains, occurs at the price of unity. “Neither the will alone nor good

intentions are sufficient to ‘begin’ history anew,” he writes rather astonishingly two years before

the Revolution. He derides the idea of beginning history as unthinkable because it lacks

continuity or unity. And “in [unity’s] absence one has,” he concludes witheringly, “not history

but ‘progress’—the mechanical movement of a clock hand and not the sacred bond and

succession of events.”27

Mandel’stam imagines this sacred bond that overcomes the crude causality of linear time as a “folding fan” of time, where an “inner bond” connects the phenomena of disparate ages.

Cultures will connect with spiritually like cultures, regardless of history’s timeline.

Mandel’stam’s debt to Bergson, particularly to the concepts of duree and intuition as they may be applied to time and the creative act, has interested many critics. The question of the extent to which Mandel’stam was actively attempting to model on the Bergsonian system, as opposed to merely overlaying his own ideas with an authoritative philosophical lexicon, may be best answered in the conciliatory opinion that the poet engaged in a “creative misreading” of the philosopher.28 In the above cited essay, “On the Nature of the Word,” Mandel’stam praises

Bergson for positing “a science based on the principle of connection rather than causality.” It

27 From the essay, “Chaadaev,” first published in Apollon in 1915.

28 See Chapter 2, “Post-Symbolism,” in Fink (Bergson and Russian Modernism). See also Victor Terras, “The Time Philosophy of Osip Mandel’shtam,” and Francis Nethercott, “Elements of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution in the Critical Prose of Osip Mandel’stam.”

154 falls, of course, to the modern poet-synthesizer to apprehend and represent this other, organic temporality.

In The Egyptian Stamp, the poet acts as synthesizer by blending at least three different ages into its fictional present. As mentioned already, Mandel’stam sets Parnok’s misadventures in the short summer months of 1917. Yet his guiltily bourgeois Petersburg, as well as many of its inhabitants, clearly derives from pre-Revolutionary, Imperial Russia. Yet again, the narrator mentions historical events and cultural artifacts that place him well into the Soviet 1920’s.29 The portrayal of multiple ages results in a slippery chronology unless it is read ahistorically--unless linear time is subordinated to Time.

Two different “times” battle here as they do elsewhere in Mandel’stam. The insidious passage of linear or historical time, often associated in the novella with images of the watch and always cast in a negative light, contrasts sharply with depictions of Time. True Time appears either as the fearsome but desired End/death, or it appears in gentle, feminine images, rendered in solicitous language, what one critic calls “the alloy of heaviness and tenderness which is the sign of art” in Mandel’stam.30 True Time appears suddenly the middle of the lynching account:

“Time--shy chrysalis, cabbage butterfly sprinkled with flour, a young Jewess pressed to the shop window of a watchmaker--you had better not look!” (164) Time must be protected from cruel, murderous history.

The text’s structural unity, like the conception of true Time, derives from linkages that are not based on adjacency. Over the course of the work, words “interact at a distance, often

29 See pages 77-87 in Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and his mythologies of self- presentation, for a more detailed treatment of this idea.

30 Ryszard Przybylski in An Essay on the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam: God’s Grateful Guest (page 157) 155

without a syntactic contiguity,” observes Lidiia Ginzburg. Poetically organized, as it may be

called, The Egyptian Stamp’s unity must be sought in the “sacred bond” of images rather than the progression of the narrative.

Linear or historical time is most threatening because of its ceaselessness. History preys on even the most redoubtable End mythology which, for modernists, was supposed to entail a crisis. In Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode speaks to this crisis when he evokes the concept of imminent versus immanent ends as a compensatory or salvaging formulation. “The end has lost its imminence for us,” he contends, “but it is still immanent in our fictions” (6). The impulse to seek meaning for present calamities in the apocalyptic model of crisis and rebirth, to relate the

“here” with the “beyond,” has remained, but the time frame of that expectant, crisis-ridden

“here” has been prolonged indefinitely. The Joachimite stage of transition is eternalized by the

Modernists. Even as The End is perpetually deferred by history, it continues to function as a structure for art. Kermode’s distinction reflects the familiar modernist gospel of aesthetic salvation, where the so-called consoling powers of myth are transferred to the realm of fiction.

Kermode’s formula approximates the shape, but not the scope, of the Mandel’stamian eschaton. In line with Kermode’s modernist prescription for the end, Mandel’stam blends

Augustinian immanence and Joachimite imminence. But where the critic privileges history (or historical time), the poet privileges myth (or Time). Fiction is not the safe place for a myth in retirement whose glory and strength lie in the past, whose current relevance is circumscribed to the unreal. The apocalypticism that is embedded in Mandel’stam fiction is the embodiment of true Time. The myth of the eschaton, like the poet’s other unities, acknowledges--but retains its independence from--history (and progress and linear time). 156

Ryszard Przybylski expresses this relationship between myth and history that takes the form of two “times” in Mandel’stam as “eternity in time” and “eternity beyond time.” Speaking tragically from the within the Christian point of view, he assesses the damage done to the eschaton, culture’s animating, first principle of faith, by what he calls “historicism’s” insistence on “eternity in time.”

With every succeeding compromise, the swift thought of the philosopher of

history set the absolute moment of history once more into the future, that it might

endure and beguile like a mirage and in this way separate man from

Transcendence. Historicism, floating eternity in historical time, made it

essentially unattainable. (164)

Conflating myth and history (no less the believer’s than the philosopher’s error) cancels the saving power of the first, Przybylski contends. The alternate inroads to Transcendence that modernists typically sought invariably involve some version of repudiating history’s mythical authority--require that one disbelieve, not history-as-fact, but history-as-myth.

What readers experience as a highly refined sense of presentness in Mandel’stam arises, however paradoxically, from the liberation of Time from history. The revolutionary apocalypticism of both Symbolists and Soviets impales the present on a two-edged sword: The present is meaningful because it is transitional, and it is not meaningful for the same reason. It has semantic value, in other words, only as a sacrifice and a symbol. Mandel’stam’s ahistorical apocalypticism that posits eternal transition and disallows progress means that the present will be neither supplanted nor lost. The so-called passing moment sheds its transience, he explains,

“endur[ing] the pressure of centuries . . . and remaining forever the same ‘here and now’” (in 157

“Villon”). Mandel’stam is, according to Brodsky, “all in the present—in this moment, which he

makes continue, linger beyond its own natural limit.”31 Nadezhda Mandel’stam writes that her

husband “was fond of retarded motion: a lumbering ox, the slow movement of Armenian

women, the long and sticky flow of honey.”32 Savoring the present is actually a temporal

translation of the poet’s most basic imperative, his celebration of the three-dimensional, physical

world. Only the present accesses this “God-given palace” (“Morning of Acmeism”).

3.5 Poetics of Penultimacy: Christianity as Hellenizing, Apocalypse as Humanizing

Apocalypticism, then, is revealed as a myth of the here and now, and performs a

humanizing role in Mandel’stam as it does in the other “meta-apocalypticists” that I have

considered. As Mandel’stam’s poetics emphasize, apocalypse concerns itself almost exclusively

with the penultimate, rather than the ultimate, moment in history. While it promises closure and

perfection in the next world, it elaborates on the terror, suffering, fears and injustice of this

world. A deeply human myth, it is the mirror image of utopian thought, which posits a paradise

on earth but describes a not-here or other/no-place. Where utopianism would eradicate death,

apocalypticism, in Mandel’stam, is the warming assurance of death.

“Teleological warmth” is a phrase Mandel’stam likes to use and “Hellenism” is his

master metaphor for warming the individual in this world. Hellenism33 denotes a relationship of

man to the physical world that acknowledges the concreteness and individuality of surrounding

objects. The world, thus reclaimed from Symbolism (where “nothing is real, genuine” but only a

31 See Brodsky’s essay, “The Child of Civilization” (published in his collection, Less Than One).

32 See page 178 in Hope Abandoned. Nadezhda Mandel’stam compares this slowness to the Futurists who, in her words,“with their cult of speed, clutched at split seconds.”

33 Mandel’stam’s most cohesive treatment of “Hellenism,” which I summarize and quote here, appears in his essay, “On the Nature of the Word” (first published in 1922). 158 likeness), is transformed by this consciousness of its inherent semantic value. Personalized objects become warm, or alive; and they warm, or bring to life, man in return. All of

Mandel’stam’s images for Hellenism reiterate this idea of warmth. Hellenism is “inner” and

“domestic”; “an earthenware pot, oven tongs, a milk jug, kitchen utensils (utvar’)”; “anything which surrounds the body”; “pelts placed over shoulders” in winter; “any kind of stove near which a man sits, treasuring its heat as something akin to his own internal body heat”; “a system which man unfolds around himself.” One of Mandel’stam’s most expressive images for

Hellenism is an Egyptian boat of the dead in which everything, down to minutiae, is placed “for the continuation of man’s earthly wanderings.” The funerary ship, poetically considered (not necessarily representative of Egyptian mythology), extols the individual and this world. In its version of death’s “immanence,” it denies the space (and maybe the difference) between this existence and the next. The so-called other world, or the sacred, (1) is here and (2) values the same utvar’. In this sense, incidentally, insofar as he rejects a Symbolist tradition of correspondences, it may be correct to say that Mandel’stam is “certainly not metaphysical.” For him, the conventional “meta” or the beyond is hopelessly hierarchical, superseding the here and now and reducing it to abstract or incorporeal (he proposes “disemboweled”) images. However, where the term denotes an affinity with non-rational, anti-positivist philosophy, an assumption of transcendental Absolutes, it certainly describes Mandel’stam, whose worldview, in contrast to the Marxist materialist universe that hemmed him in on all sides, is nothing if not

“metaphysical.” “The warmth of the hearth,” he propounds the Hellenizing principle, “is experienced as something sacred.” Mandel’stam views the physical world as the embodiment, not the replacement, of the spiritual world. 159

The apocalyptic subtext of warming, humanizing Hellenism is most strongly articulated by Mandel’stam in one oft-quoted passage from the fragmentary, unpublished “Pushkin and

Scriabin” essay. He begins by attacking the utopian argument: “You cannot Hellenize [instill with the values of humanism or save] the world once and for all the way you can paint a house,” he writes. As all modernist-apocalypticists argue in some fashion, the absence of death is barrenness or sterility, not life. Whereas the “Christian world,” writes Mandel’stam, or the fullness of what he considers the chalice of humanistic values, is “an organism, a living body” that is “renewed through death.” Death—ongoing death and immanent renewal--humanizes the world. The poet closes the loop this way: “As long as death exists in the world, Hellenism will exist, for Christianity Hellenizes death… Hellenism, impregnated with death, is Christianity.”

The Hellenized, or humanized, or Christianized world glorifies individuality and complexity

(“social Gothic”), builds for men and not out of man, is internally unified. And the humanized world’s three defining values, the bequeathal of [Judeo-]Christian apocalypse, are unity, individuality and time.

3.6 Apocalypse of Apocalypse

An inalienable component of this apocalyptic triumvirate is its endangered status in the present era. When Mandel’stam’s eschatology becomes foreboding, not celebratory, it entails an apocalypse of these apocalyptic values. “There is no unity! . . . individuality! . . . time!” he laments in “Pushkin and Scriabin,” naming off the telltale symptoms of the impending “end of

Christianity,” or collapse of human values. Teleological warmth is everywhere depicted as

“fragile.” The threshold poetics of The Egyptian Stamp foreground and develop this conflict between (1) the “rightness” and (2) the vulnerability of unity, individuality and time to a 160 remarkable degree. By the close of the work, the buoyant proposals for a new form acquire the heaviness of irony and the “new prose” actually makes its final appearance in an ominous, dehumanized context (see below 3.5.2).

Travesty as Eulogy of the Apocalyptic Possibility

I have discussed the tension deriving from the hybrid form of poetry and autobiographical prose that combines the voices of authority and unreliability. Mandel’stam depicts the “endangered Christian calendar” thematically as well through representations of the present epoch’s assault on apocalyptic absolutes. His literary apocalypse obtains a distinctly modernist pitch because the end that shapes his narrative simultaneously experiences frustration, even mockery.

This increase in irony that Mandel’stam would take with him when he returned to poetry was more the norm than the exception among all but the most politically orthodox writers during the NEP years. It has been interpreted within the usual modernist script of myth losing ground to disconfirming history, as when Gregory Freidin, for example, writes that Mandel’stam “added to the archetype of dying and reviving the principle of existential uncertainty, the ‘perhaps’” (185).

However, it is one of my key contentions that Mandel’stam does not view modern social and cultural conditions as disproving, but as disallowing, myth. Humanistic construction, “whose scale and measure is man,” may be dominated at present by monumental, “Egyptian” social forms. But subjugated does not mean extinguished, and never is the “warmth of teleology” cooled to any appreciable degree by the “perhaps.”

When key apocalyptic constituents such as the prophetic and the catastrophic are travestied in places in The Egyptian Stamp, they draw attention to the deflated status, not the 161

deflated possibility, of the prophetic (or poetic) word. Furthermore, it may be argued that

deflation, so to speak, is thoroughly written into the Christian myth and, consequently, does more

to endorse than to overturn a credo that declares “the last shall be first.” Such is the effect, for

example, of the irreverent prophet metaphors that accumulate in connection with Mervis, the

tailor. Speaking of Mervis in Chapter VII, the narrator aesopically identifies him with a prophet:

Я, признаться, люблю Мервиса, люблю его слепое лицо, изборожденное

зрячими морщинами. . . . [И]ногда опущенное веко видит больше, чем глаз,

и ярусы морщим на человеческом лице глядят, как скопище слепцов. (33)

(I must confess that I love Mervis—I love his blind face, furrowed by wrinkles

that see. . . . [S]ometimes a lowered lid sees more than an eye, and the tiers of

wrinkles on a human face peer like a gathering of blind men. (VII, 180))

Mervis is initially likened affectionately to a blind seer, archetypal embodiment of the disparity between sight and insight. In the next line, however, the seer suffers a series of ignominious comparisons. He hastens through the city with the spuriously repossessed morning coat, reminding the narrator of a convict, an overheated bath attendant, and finally “a thief in a bazaar, ready to shout his last irresistibly convincing word” (emphasis mine). The elevated, revelatory word of a prophet sinks to the frantic exclamation of a Dostoevskian thief.34 The narrator

continues his impious catalogue of similes, concluding with another unmistakable reference to

Dostoevsky:

В моем восприятии Мервиса просвечивают образы: греческого сатира,

несчастного певца кифареда, временами маска еврипидовского актера,

34 The thief and the poet arise from the same need to attain the unattainable, Mandel’stam writes in “Francois Villon.” 162

временами голая грудь и покрытое испариной тело растерзанного

каторжанина, русского ночлежника или епилептика. (33-34)

(In my perception of Mervis certain images gleam through: a Greek satyr, the

unhappy singer Kifared, at times the mask of an actor in a play by Euripides, at

times the naked breast and sweaty body of a flogged convict, of an inmate in a

Russian flop house, of an epileptic.)

Notions of illegitimacy, vagrancy, illness and lunacy are so sufficiently bound up with the tradition of prophet (and always present by implication, poet) that they may hardly be classified as ironic. While Dostoevsky’s derelict chosen may give rise to the question of existential uncertainty, to restrict them to that function (Ivan was only one of three/four brothers) is to ignore their potential as a multivoiced affirmation of divinity that has been dialogized, not dethroned.

On the other hand, catastrophe, so threatening throughout The Egyptian Stamp, makes an appearance in a diminished form that may more correctly be called ironic and that sounds a more formidably ambivalent note. In Chapter V, the narrator declares that catastrophe has atrophied into scandal. Scandal, a familiar topic in Russian prose, is a symptom of Culture in distress for the poet. “Scandal… is not catastrophe, though it apes it: a foul transformation by which a dog’s head sprouts from a man’s shoulders” (V, 173). If “poetic culture arises from the attempt to avert catastrophe,” as Mandel’stam writes in “Badger Hole,” the possibilities for poetry are not auspiciously configured in this depiction of catastrophe in devolution. When catastrophe languishes, the Hellenizing or humanizing power of the Parousia recedes. 163

Warm Breath versus The Iron Horse

“The frail chronology of our era draws to a close,” Mandel’stam writes in the poem, “The

Horseshoe Finder” (“Nashedshiy podkovy” 1923). His concern for the vanishing apocalyptic

possibility reaches its most profound—and darkest--poetic expression in this lyric that precedes

The Egyptian Stamp by four years. The seventh stanza contains this unforgettable rendering of

the expiring steed:

Звук еще звенит, хотя причина звука исчезла.

Конь лежит в пыли и храпит в мыле,

Но крутой поворот его шеи

Еще сохраняет воспоминанье о беге с разбросанными ногами--

(The sound still rings, although the sound’s cause is gone.

The horse lies in the dust and snorts in a lather,

But the sharp arch of its neck

Still holds the memory of racing with legs outstretched—)35

Of Culture’s Hellenistic and Hellenizing values, there remain only fossils that the poet feels

powerless to unearth. While Mandel’stam the essayist delights in the labor of extracting poetry

from the soil, here the poet regards the various “cultural coins” that lie in the earth and concludes

grimly: “Time / cuts me like a coin, / And there’s no longer enough of me for me.”36 The free verse form of the entire poem, exceptional in Mandel’stam, may be read as an expression of his depleted poetic powers. The present is a world of ossified remains that preserve the shape—the

35 Translation by Clare Cavanagh. For a stunning reading of this poem, see Chapter Five, “The Currency of the Past,” in her book, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition.

36 “Время / Срезает меня, как монету, / И мне уже не хватает меня самого” 164 elegant arc, suggestive of symbolic circularity --but not the living function of the past: the curve of the horse’s neck; the polished, found horseshoe on display; and rounded “Human lips which have nothing more to say.”

In jarring contrast to the arching silhouettes that describe the cultural currency, or humanistic values, of the past, the new prose in The Egyptian Stamp, in the narrator’s final assessment, “is divorced from any concern with beauty and that which is beautifully rounded”

(VIII, 188, emphasis mine). In the novella’s closing images, the “dear prosaic delirium” in the narrator’s head that has hitherto elicited celebration begins to resemble a train. The new, ambiguous “railroad prose” is swift, abrupt, randomly joined, abrasive, senseless, utilitarian, deceptive:

Железная дорога изменила все течение, все построение, весь такт нашей

прозы. Она . . . полна инструментами сцепщика, бредовыми частичками,

скобяными предлогами . . . Да, там где обливаются горячим маслом

мясистые рычаги паровозов, -- там дышит она, голубушка проза – вся

пущенная в длину – обмеривающая, бесстыдная, наматывающая на свой

живоглотский аршин. (41-42)

(The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole structure, the whole

rhythm of our prose. It . . . is full of the coupler’s tools, delirious particles,

grappling-iron prepositions . . .Yes, it is there where the beefy levers of

locomotives are covered in hot oil that this dear little prose breathes, stretched out

at its full length; it is there that it measures, shameless thing that it is, and winds

on its own fraudulent yardstick. (VIII, 188)) 165

The railroad has fundamentally altered prose because it has changed the face of the eschaton,

Culture’s essential myth. It exchanges nothing less than one civilization for another when it

replaces the living, breathing horse37 of “Hellas” with iron. And the railroad acts on the creative

consciousness by falsifying one’s perceptions through its unnatural speed. It epitomizes the

accelerating temporality of modernity (where time and space are quickly becoming unreliable

concepts) that is effacing “the frail chronology of our era,” the Absolute of “Christian time” that

the poet tries to recover in the slowness of honey, the ox, or an Armenian woman’s gait.

The gloomy description of railroad prose casts a dark shadow on the narrator’s positive

principle of liminal creation. While disintegration may describe the structure of a viable,

“systematically unlawful” system (Morson) that embodies the values of Time, unity and

individuality, it may also (not simultaneously) entail the loss of these values. In the second case,

The Egyptian Stamp becomes, not a convincing vision of threshold poetics, but a brave

examination of poetic collapse.

This pessimistic thesis reverberates in depictions of the fate of The Book that the

narrator’s contaminated pen would write. At different moments in the novella, the book melts,

freezes, turns black, hosts infectious diseases, hangs in mid air with its interior ripped out. Late

in the text, burning in particular threatens the book. Libraries are described as “wood yards,”

“literary lumber room[s],” unaided by the fire brigade that sits across the street “with

hermetically sealed gates” (VII, 181). A promise of sorts emerges from the flames: “You, wood

yards—black libraries of the city—we shall yet read, we shall still see. . . . Conflagrations and

books: that is good.” But the inescapably Blokian language prompts one to doubt either the

37 See pages 44-61 in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction for David Bethea’s overview of the treatment of the apocalyptic horse in Russian history and literature. 166

sincerity or the potency of the declaration. Certainly the sufferings of the anthropomorphized

book seem to counterbalance the final note of optimistic martyrdom.

3.7 Conclusion

Brodsky forges a literal and figurative memorial when he writes of Mandel’stam: “He

ran till there was space. When space ended, he hit time.” It is likely that Mandel’stam would

have hit time in any age, though it is difficult to imagine a more singularly unfit heir of the

Socialist Revolution. This tragic inaptness is certainly one source behind such fierce yearnings

after and profound formulations of Eternal Time, with which Mandel’stam had an intimacy that

required all five senses to convey.

The Egyptian Stamp appeared at a time when the poet felt the living, free poetic word,

animated now with Humanism’s warm breath, now with Christianity’s cold mountain air, to be

suffocating. The poet’s air had become thick and confining, “mixed as densely as the earth—

you can’t get out and it’s hard to enter.”38 Images of incarceration multiply with the increasing

sense that Humanizing Culture has grown difficult to access.

Arising from this oppressive atmosphere, The Egyptian Stamp may be, not

Mandel’stam’s darkest, but his most equivocal work, an apocalyptic fiction that is dialogized to a

disconcerting extreme. Two “Egypts” do battle in the prose of a poet who feels himself all but

“excommunicated” from the Word. “Everything,” Mandel’stam writes in anticipation of this

smutnoye vremya, “has become heavier and more massive” (“On the Nature of the Word”), more

“Egyptian,” to invoke his most consistently negative metaphor for contemporary social forms.

The “Egyptian” threat is inscribed in the novella’s title in the exotic postage stamp that is

38 “Воздух замешен так же густо, как земля: / Из него нельзя выйти, в него трудно войти.” From the fifth stanza in “Нашедший подкову” (“He who found a horseshoe”). 167

Parnok’s demoralizing, two-dimensional double. Before the text begins, it portends erasure--of the individual and, more devastating, of history’s accumulated cultural wealth. In its final pages,

The Egyptian Stamp’s last word, as it were, describes the subjugation of Culture’s saving values to the dehumanizing, railroad chronotope of modernity. And yet, the novella’s delirious prose experiments enclose vigorous affirmations of unity, Time and individuality. Here the other

Egypt in Mandel’stam, the Egypt that sets its dead to sail in funerary ships, resounds in a threshold poetics that proclaims disintegration or death as a form of creation or life’s continuation. 168

Conclusion

The first Soviet decade is astonishing for its buoyant cultural activity. The prevailing cultural record of these years testifies to an unofficial ideology that endeavored, not without success, to convert unprecedented social upheaval and human loss into glorious plans for regeneration. Next to the confident clarity of the utopian project, as much of society—to recall

Jacobson’s generational self-portrait—“strained toward the future” spontaneously, my authors’ depictions of decay and degeneracy, poetic decomposition and personal failure may register as cantankerous offerings. Yet the works I have considered, with their unwelcome apocalyptic plots, argue compellingly—some would say prophetically—against the injurious potential of fundamental utopian assumptions. What is more, in the process of challenging the dominant cultural ideology, my author-apocalypticist do not content themselves with unmasking the other.

Rather, they subject their own myth of the End to severe scrutiny and reinvention. Most strikingly, apocalypticism emerges from these fictions as a purveyor of openness and dialog.

Distrusting both the noisy construction of utopian dreams and the thunderous prophecies of revolutionary apocalypticism that had cleared the way for such a remarkable experiment, the works in this study speak softly of a “third way” that may be described as “meta-apocalyptic.”

Conceived in the uncertain aftermath of epochal struggle, 1920s apocalyptic fictions revere but reformulate essential eschatological components. Existence, not history, is end- determined, they propose as they assess the consequences of 1917 and reconsider the requirement of universal cataclysm and rebirth put forth by their master myth. Lifting the idea of the End from “the category of the merely historical” (Northrop Frye’s words), they portray

“universal” as continuous and infinite in a mythopoetical extrapolation of Christianity’s defining 169

event that combines the “once…[and] no more”1 of Christ’s resurrection with endless

reenactments of that resurrection. Pil’nyak’s understated depiction of cyclical sameness declares

that no rebirth effected by a revolution can compare to the regenerative power of mother earth

(evidenced in spring chamomile, or one expectant woman). Olesha privileges artistic perception

as the highest renovating or “revolutionizing” agent. And in Mandel’stam it is the poetic word

that struggles to perform the saving function of death and renewal. For each author, rebirth is a

phenomenon of the present and of this world. In a key reconception of eschatological thinking

(to include both utopian and apocalyptic), each writer approaches myth as a reclamation, rather

than a rejection, of the here and now. One needn’t hold one’s breath, in other words, when the

End exchanges imminence for immanence.

It follows that progress and its corollary, perfectibility, comprise two of the most

egregious utopian “pretensions” that apocalyptic fiction from the earliest Soviet period labors to

unmask, precisely because these ideas ultimately disallow the “warm assurance of death” that

characterizes this world. In the rational domain of historical progress, writes Virgil Nemoianu as he expounds what he calls a “theory of the secondary” in his book by the same name, “the supreme law is the law of subordination: details have to become parts of wholes, individuals parts of communities” (173). Nemoianu’s defense of a “secondary” realm characterized by concreteness, variety, digression, and alienation is expressed decades earlier by my authors who may claim to know something of the “law of subordination” firsthand and who view the scale and scope of massive social movements as subsuming the life-bearing details of existence.

Pil’nyak’s unexceptional, provincial byt, Olesha’s tiny inscriptions and Mandel’stam’s warming

1“For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dieth no more,” Augustine writes. See The City of God, XII. 13. 170

“utensils” all function to assert these endangered details and to counter centralizing (Bakhtin would say monologizing) forces.

In meta-apocalyptic accounts of socialist reality, then, progress is either conspicuously absent (Pil’nyak) or parodically present (Olesha) or openly denounced as the vulgar impersonator of true time (Mandel’stam). Time is “revealed” in these fictions as relative, or subjectively experienced, and progress, or time’s impress in history, as illusory. And the personality that acts in time, in contrast to notions of the new man or utopian saint, is forcefully imperfect. Personality is ruled by instinct and feeling rather than reason, conceived of as multiple rather than unitary, and more aptly conveyed by the retrogressive anti-hero than by socialism’s superhero. What the reader experiences in these stories as a concentration of pathologies and faint flavor of the grotesque comprises a philosophical position in defense of this world against dehumanizing visions of perfection (or wholeness or centralization). Creation and creativity, these works both show and tell, are born of strife.

At the same time, though meta-apocalyptic fiction as we have seen it in these works is a product of the “secondary,” dissenting voice and is populated by social marginalia and nonconformists, it engages the dissident tradition on its own terms. Its practitioners observe a world still bleeding from revolution and conclude that the centuries-old alliance between apocalypticism and social unrest is deeply suspect. Mandel’stam concisely articulates the heterodox position of distancing myth from social life when he contends that the true “sheep and goats” are friends and enemies of the word, next to which “social differences and class antagonisms pale.” In a state founded on the humanistic myth of revolutionary apocalypticism and steeped in the doctrine of social life as the highest (if not the only acceptable) form of 171 existence, these works subvert “sacred” assumptions when they quietly unravel apocalypticism’s role as a vehicle for social reform by admitting varying degrees of irony into their depictions of post-1917 society. Rejecting revolutionary configurations as callow and dangerous, apocalyptic fiction in these years reinvents itself with more maturity and complexity as it proposes that the most legitimate territory for cataclysmic ends and rebirth is the individual, creative consciousness. Its treatment of the End tends overwhelmingly to relocate the mythical to a place that human engineering cannot access, influence or claim.

It is not difficult to imagine how apocalyptic fiction in the Soviet 1920s may be perceived as sounding a sour, countercultural note amidst ebullient efforts to envision and construct utopia.

Beneath this pessimistic patina, however, one quickly discerns the hopeful dreams of not-so- ridiculous men who would wrest the vision of a new heaven and new earth from social planners and return it to, if not precisely its religious-mystical, then its irrational, foundations. Meta- apocalyptic works, particularly when considered against the Marxist materialist universe that was their backdrop, are insistently metaphysical in their assertions of a Beyond that resides in this world. Their apocalyptic transpositions are not secular repackagings intended to make the myth of the End intellectually acceptable. Rather, they evince the believer’s confidence in a myth that continues to function and hold meaning--sometimes enduring considerable alteration or taking unexpected forms--when disconfirmation has felled its secularized offshoots.

Perhaps meta-apocalyptic fiction surprises us most, then, with the sober declaration of

Absolutes that lies within its desacralizations and ironic upturnings. The self-critical “third way” is dialogic, not ambivalent. As it negotiates between millenarian extremes, it is uncompromising in its refusal to historicize myth or humanize myth’s processes. This world is the site of myth’s 172 unfolding, yet death and transfiguration (in nature, or the individual consciousness, or the poetic

Word) are transcendental phenomena. They are manifested in, but not manipulated by, the human. The works considered in this study unanimously assimilate the ruin, as their authors both depict and experience it, of a city, a state or a culture as affirmations of the Word’s eternal nature. “Conflagrations and books: that is good,” proclaims the narrator in The Egyptian Stamp, for the word (and its disciples) will survive this burning and “[w]e shall still see, we shall read.”

Mandel’stam’s words, which would soon sound again in another author’s flame-resistant manuscript, enclose and enact the most sublime, the most and least fathomable, of apocalyptic promises: that death enables, not merely birth, but immortality.

173

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